Although a part of S immediately wants to protest the way J has phrased it, he's held back by the rest of what J says and how true it feels. For such a long time, it did just feel right. There's no other way to describe it. As with so many things, they may have taken somewhat different routes to the same place, but for S, while he may not have had the same early focus and dedication, something about it just always made sense to him — the notes and how they built upon each other, the movement of fingers over keys. He worked at it, but it also just clicked. The same could be said for when he decided as a teenager to try to pursue it seriously, and to write as well as play. He loved it already in his own right, but he doesn't know that he ever would have reached the same place if it weren't for J, if it hadn't already been theirs.

And then it wasn't anymore, and J was gone, and it hasn't been right in the same way since. That last night, he thought for a moment that it might be, only to be suddenly and painfully proved wrong. He doesn't know if it will ever be like that again. Certainly it won't be what it was for the pair of them, though that may not in itself be a bad thing, given how that all wound up. It would be nice, though, to get a little bit of that rightness back, to let himself have any real relationship again with the instrument he once used to be so passionate about.

"It did," he agrees, soft and sad, his fingers curling in J's shirt again. He still feels horribly foolish, but not enough to straighten up or pull away, too comforted by J's warm solidity for that. "I... I was relieved, too. That I didn't want it the way I did. That I could step away. I've had this, and that's enough, but it hurts that it is, too."