It's not really what he meant, S thinks, though it's no surprise that he didn't manage to get the words out right. Even at the best of times, he often inadvertently twists his words, makes things sound like he didn't intend them to. In this case, it makes no real difference, anyway. All of it leads back to the same thing, the various pieces of this all woven together. Physically speaking, he's fine. He has these appointments once or twice a year, but none have come back with anything concerning so far. If he thought there were even a chance of that no longer being the case, he would have found a way to bring it up ahead of time, not wanting J to be blindsided. Instead, it just seemed unimportant, and that's how they've wound up here. This specific appointment simply didn't feel worth bringing up; the very fact of his needing these continued check-ins, that seemed like a reminder of something too painful, too likely to set J off the way the scars did back then, too present a sign of what could have happened to him and what did happen.

The scars, the surgery, the recovery — none of it was as bad as what he woke up to, the news that J was dead. Of course he wouldn't have wanted to bring this up. Most of the time, he really doesn't worry about J becoming suicidal again, at least trusting that he would pick up on signs of something being wrong beforehand if J were going to go down that road. Every single day since that first time he found J out on the sidewalk here, though, he's had to think about how J reacted to the sight of him without a shirt. Doing so is inevitable, given how he has to go out of his way to keep them covered. He really doesn't mind doing so — would do far more than that for J's sake — but it still hurts to think about that response, and the fact that he caused it with simply the state of his existence.

"I know you are," he murmurs, back curving a little under J's touch, gently pressing into his hand. "I do. If I were worried about it, I would have told you that." He doesn't know how he would begin to bring it up, but that much, he still can say for certain. If he thought J was anywhere near that point, he would try to intervene. That first afternoon, he told J that he couldn't ask him to stay, agonizing as that was for him, but he meant it. He couldn't in good conscience ask that. That doesn't mean he could just sit back and let it happen. He's much too stubborn for that.

Sighing, his shoulders rising and falling with it, he shuts his eyes for a moment. Even though he's breathing a little better now, he still can't stop tears from coming, and that makes it difficult to try to say very much at once without getting himself all worked up again, still perilously on the edge of it. However clueless he may be, though, he has to try to fumble through this somehow, to fix what he's fucked up.

"I just..." He swallows hard. "I don't want to be what pushes you toward that again."