S doesn't know if that's true or not. That, too, is something he's heard before, or at least something close to it, but it's hard to know what to say, the hypothetical impossible to play out. Maybe there would always have been something, but maybe it wouldn't have been as bad if there weren't something pitting them directly against each other, if the professor hadn't been pouring poison into J's ear. If J hadn't used his piece as inspiration for the fucking Gloria Artis. Regardless, he refuses to see it the way J does, as something wrong in him. There's nothing wrong or broken or anything like that. There just is, perhaps, something neither of them has figured out how to care for yet. He's better at it now than he was back then, but that has less to do with having an actual understanding, and more to do with having a better idea now of what not to do. Like so much else, there are no easy answers here. If he wanted easy, though, he never would have been with J in the first place, and actually being with him is easy, as natural as breathing and just as vital.
"It felt like it was," he says, a gentle amendment to his own words. It seems like the best middle ground, leaving neither of them right and neither of them wrong. He doesn't know if it's true that there would always have been something, but he doesn't know that it's not true, either. He just knows the way it did play out, with the thing that once brought them together driving an ever-growing wedge between them, their shared love of music ultimately a breeding ground for resentment. Of course he couldn't love music anymore when his playing and composing only seemed to make things worse. Of course he could barely bring himself, after J left, to sit at the piano where they shared their first kiss and so much else besides.
His thumb strokes the back of J's hand, soft and reassuring, contact just for the sake of it. It's definitely past the end of his shift, but he doubts anyone is going to come wandering in when they would usually be closed right now, and he can quickly send them away if they do. As much as he would rather be at home right now, he's not going to cut this conversation off in the middle. It's taken them too long to discuss this in any depth at all. "It was part of it. The only part I really knew about then."
no subject
"It felt like it was," he says, a gentle amendment to his own words. It seems like the best middle ground, leaving neither of them right and neither of them wrong. He doesn't know if it's true that there would always have been something, but he doesn't know that it's not true, either. He just knows the way it did play out, with the thing that once brought them together driving an ever-growing wedge between them, their shared love of music ultimately a breeding ground for resentment. Of course he couldn't love music anymore when his playing and composing only seemed to make things worse. Of course he could barely bring himself, after J left, to sit at the piano where they shared their first kiss and so much else besides.
His thumb strokes the back of J's hand, soft and reassuring, contact just for the sake of it. It's definitely past the end of his shift, but he doubts anyone is going to come wandering in when they would usually be closed right now, and he can quickly send them away if they do. As much as he would rather be at home right now, he's not going to cut this conversation off in the middle. It's taken them too long to discuss this in any depth at all. "It was part of it. The only part I really knew about then."