It's different, S thinks, though he has the sense not to say so. It probably isn't true, really. He just can't shake the feeling that it is, like J's reasons for being upset are more reasonable than his own, even if he knows J wouldn't agree. He should have said something sooner, though. He should at least have realized how much this subject had come to weigh on him, when it's not as if it's something he could ever keep from his mind for very long. He's thought about it every day, after all, each time he's turned away to change his shirt or stayed half-dressed in the shower.

If nothing else, it will be nice if they don't have to worry about that anymore, even if he never winds up shirtless in any other context. At least just a glimpse of him isn't going to send J down the same dark path it did that first day he spent here. Even now, S has to resist the instinct to button his shirt again. Their current position, one he's in no hurry to move from, makes it easier not to give into it, when J probably can't see all that much of him right now anyway.

"I shouldn't have either," he points out, not about to let all of this rest on J's shoulders, even though he knows, too, that he really couldn't have brought it up unprompted. Still, he's not sure he would have even if he could, and that's enough to be worth apologizing for, enough to leave him feeling horribly stupid. He really thought it would be better just not to mention it, but he thought wrong. The same goes for that stupid doctor's appointment. If he'd just told J about it in the first place, they could have avoided all of this fuss, but he wouldn't have had the first idea how to broach that subject. "And of course it's not stupid when you've fallen apart." Tired and self-deprecating, he rolls his eyes at himself. "It only feels like it when I do."