#omorisuntan

They’re still about a half mile from home when they get ambushed by the most beautiful armchair Sunny’s ever seen. It’s rich black velvet with a gilded frame and it has paws, thick wooden legs carved into clawed, sturdy cat’s paws. Sunny closes his eyes. “Ohhh…”

“You need it, huh?”

“Kel,” he says pitifully, pawing at Kel’s arm. “Kel, can you please tilt it on its back legs. I’ll never ask for anything again.”

“Easy!!”

The bones of the chair must be solid teak. Kel has to throw his weight into it just to get the front paws off the ground. But when Sunny crouches down to get a look, another little moan creaks out of him. Oh, god. They do. They really do have toe beans.

So of course they have to drag the chair the whole way home, because Sunny is 100% certain that if he takes his eyes off it, it will walk away without him. But again, this chair is ungodly heavy. Kel can barely shift it, so Sunny actually has to help, instead of just pretending. He’s not used to doing manual labor, so they stop and rest maybe every twenty feet.

The armchair is big. It’s designed for one person, but it’s definitely big enough for two, if the two people in question are very comfortable with each other. Which they are. They always have been.

But Kel won’t sit down.

“It’s all you, dude!” he insists. “Don’t stress it! I’m barely even tired!”

Sunny’s forehead furrows. “We can both sit, though?”

“Seems a little crowded, haha!”

“I could just sit on you.”

“Aw, you don’t want that. I just came from the Y. I’m all sweaty.”

“...You could sit on me?”

Kel looks genuinely moved. “Aw, Sunny. Buddy. My best friend in the whole wide world. I would crush you like a bug.”

“I’m not fragile,” Sunny mutters. “You’d have to do a lot more to break me.”

And Kel, for no reason that Sunny can think of, turns beet red.

Stuff like that keeps happening. Kel is acting totally normal, and then suddenly he turns weird. At the party last night, Kel moved to sling an arm around him—like he always has, for the past twenty years—and then visibly stopped himself on at least four separate occasions.

“He won’t even sleep over anymore,” Sunny sulks. “Last night he slept on the couch. But Basil’s bed is big enough for all of us. If he wanted more space, my bed was empty.”

“Ohhhh,” Aubrey says. “Okay, yeah. I got it. —Oh, sorry, was that it? Or did you wanna give me a little more context?”

He turns away from his work for just long enough to glare. “Explain.”

“Yeah, it pretty much sounds like he likes you, dude.”

Sunny frowns. “As a—”

“No, not as a fucking friend. Are you an alien? Obviously I meant he’s, you know. Attracted to you, or whatever. ‘As a man.’ Lmao.” She actually says lmao, pronounced like, luh-mao.

Sunny looks down at himself. “...Are you sure?”

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short, kid. You’ve got that whole dark academia thing going. You know, the piercings, and the… sweaters, and all pale and malnourished and shit.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”