Chapter Text
No, it wasn't any surprise to Gris that Enjin was avoiding him like the plague. That was his whole thing, after all—running away. It's the only thing he ever knew when it came to things romantic.
It was bittersweet, more bitter than sweet to Gris, because of the fact he was right there. He was about to be Enjin's. All it resulted in was bringing them further apart. Every time Gris tries to approach Enjin, or glances his way, he's given the cold shoulder.
But at the very least, they cleared some air, and Gris could take a hint of what goes on in Enjin's head with a small peek through a crack that was opened just for him. And after getting one singular, interrupted taste of what it would be like to feel love from the man he couldn't resist, he felt like he'd have a lifelong addiction that he'd never be able to get over. Except one thing still haunted the labyrinth of lovesickness in his troubled mind regarding Enjin's behavior.
Did Enjin decide that Gris wasn't enough?
It's possible he confirmed his tastes in romantic partners, and Gris just didn't seem to fit the criteria for it. Enjin couldn't imagine them together after being given more time to think, because what they had was something that was more in the moment instead of something that could finalize whatever relationship they had with each other.
Maybe Gris just jumped to conclusions, and what they had wasn't going to be entirely what he had in mind. Thinking about it, he wouldn't spare any thoughts if Enjin only wanted him in bed, as a friend, as an acquaintance. All that mattered is that he wanted him as something, and he could live off of the scraps thrown on the floor all because he just wants a singular interaction to satisfy himself. A reassurance that Enjin knows he still exists. Otherwise, he doesn't think he could bear another second of seeing Enjin's face. It'd be a cruel reminder of what he couldn't have, and failed to win over.
Even if every negative thought that crossed Gris' mind was unrealistic, overdramatic, he didn't want to rule out any situation so he could brace for the impact it'd have on him if they actually turned out to be true. He wanted to be prepared for anything that could cut into him deeper than the scar on his face.
He did want to give Enjin his space, time to process, he really did, but he could only have so much patience. After an interaction like that, he wants answers more than anything. It was easier before because he could live with the fact it was more direct, that he could think that Enjin saw him as a friend, with no emotional complexities in the way. Gris doesn't think he could deal with his bullshit anymore, anyway.
Enjin needs to face him, and tell him what he wants out of him. Out of them.
Gris made up his mind, and decided to go out of his way to walk up to Enjin, and demand they talk whenever the opportunity arises. He's sick of it.
But of course, there's always something convenient for Enjin to slip away, and that's when Gris falters, letting him escape every single fucking time. The resolve he thought he once had always crumbles, like Enjin has him wrapped around his finger. No, he definitely has Gris completely at his mercy. He hates the way Enjin makes him.
All Gris has been doing was convincing himself that after every attempt he was going to do it eventually. He will. He will.
Today, he will. Gris rises up from his bed at his usual 6 am, and soaks in the dull light from his window before he goes to take a moment in the bathroom mirror to look at himself. This is the guy that's going to confront Enjin, and it's going to be today. This is the guy that's going to do it.
Freshening himself up with a neat shave and a clean loose collar shirt, he approaches the door to go to the cafeteria and eat his first meal of the day. It wasn't until he noticed a ripped, crinkled paper beneath his foot right in front of the door.
It wasn't here the night before, so he inspects it and finds messy, familiar handwriting that's cowered and shrunken to the torn edge of it, like it was nervous to take up the rest of the space.
You know where to find me, it reads, and Gris exhales an amused laugh through his nose.
It's folded neatly and kept it tightly in his hand, like he wanted the words to seep into his palm and find their way through his nerves to reach his brain, but without harming it despite the damage it's already endured. It's telling him to skip breakfast for something he considers vastly more important. He doesn't hesitate to listen to it.
"Mind telling me why you decided to use a little love letter?" Gris holds up the neatly folded paper inbetween his pointer and middle fingers, facing the sender's back as he leans on the window frame with his arms.
Enjin doesn't even so much as look behind him, and his entire body stills for a moment, before his arms are moving again. Gris can't really make out what he's doing, so he sighs at the defeat of having to squeeze himself through onto the balcony.
Leaning on the fence next to him, despite the faint smell of nicotine, Enjin doens't have any cigarettes he's smoking. From studying how Enjin has his hair down comboed with significant eyebags under his eyes, he's probably been waiting here for hours without a wink of sleep. All he's doing is fidgeting with his fingers, keeping his eyes zoned onto the view in front of them.
Gris is okay with it. He follows where Enjin is looking, to meet their eyes without actual eye contact, and avoid any sort of look that could make him feel unsettled. Enjin doesn't normally communicate unless it's to complain, so he's allowing time for him to soak in being emotionally vulnerable. It's not easy, so he can sympathize. It never is.
Enjin's eyelids lower after a few minutes of silence, and he exhales a quiet sigh. "Gris."
He hums in response, and he could feel Enjin shuffle on his left. Around this point, Gris thinks he probably can't comprehend how uncomfortable Enjin is.
"…Want a cig?"
Enjin's offering the entire pack, and it looks like he hasn't pulled out any more than two. Both, he thinks, were used on top of his balcony. If he didn't know any better, he'd think Enjin was a Giver of the cigarette pack from how much he values it. He could only hope the reason was because it was from him, and not because it was a perfectly clean pack.
"Only if you share this one with me."
Enjin nods and shifts to light it where it's snug in between Gris' lips, but all he could focus on was the uncertainty in Enjin's eyes. He didn't look like he was even trying to hide whatever he was feeling like he usually was. He notices Gris and they meet gazes, pausing for a moment before he lights it up and hurriedly turns back to the railing.
It still felt a bit unfamiliar in Gris' mouth, so he took to taking small inhales and just sharing it with Enjin. It was just them, the balcony, and the smoke that kept them connected.
"Can you give me the piece of paper?"
Gris unfolds his hand where it sits in the middle of his palm, and Enjin takes out his lighter again. He closes it back up and reels it in behind him to where Enjin can't reach.
Enjin's face contorts into what could only be annoyed, his fingers gesturing towards himself. "Gris. Give it."
"I want to keep it."
"It's a shitty piece of paper. I need to burn the evidence of my shame."
"I happen to have grown attached to this 'shitty piece of paper.'" He turns to look at it, where it still finds a home in his hand. "If you didn't want evidence, maybe you shouldn't have used a paper and pen."
Enjin scoffs and puts his lighter back in his pocket, his face returning to be more relaxed. "It's probably the only way I coulda asked you to talk."
Gris lowers himself to Enjin's level on the fence, and his elbows spread out where they bump to meet Enjin's. "What do you mean?"
The cigarette in Enjin's hand crumples a little, as the embarrassment grows evident through the redness spreading on his cheeks. "I spent, like, a good thirty minutes outside your bedroom door in the middle of the night trying to hype myself up to talk to you." His face buries itself into his forearm, as he mumbles, "and then I didn't want to ask face to face 'cause I kept chickening out. At least if it was paper it could be something I couldn't take back."
All it took was a small chuckle from Gris for Enjin to get up and shoot a pissed off look, which only resulted in him laughing more from how red his face is.
Gris settles himself to cut him some slack before he makes anything worse. "Sorry—sorry. It's…i'd never expect something like this, especially from you."
Enjin nudges him a bit with his elbow. "I didn't either, yet here we are. I'd also like you to shut up about it, if possible." He takes a slow drag like it'd ground himself from the fluster that's all over his face, and his hand with the cigarette hovers in front of Gris.
He doesn't really like the taste of it, but he's known for years how much it means to Enjin. So, he delicately plucks it, takes a quick and quiet inhale, and passes it back.
Like Enjin finally read the atmosphere of what they were there for, he sighs the smoke out and decides to get to the point. "This whole thing is…" his eyes move to different spots and arm wavers back and forth for a bit, looking like he was digging for the words in mangled thoughts, "…a lot." Glancing at Gris, he offers another smoke, which was taken. "A lot to figure out. I dunno."
Gris stares at him, and his gaze moves down to their elbows, their only physical form of connection that wasn't the cigarette. Instead of responding, he anticipates more words from Enjin, who's trying to lure the shy words out of his throat.
Enjin looks him dead in the eye. "You're a hypocrite."
Gris chokes on the smoke, and nearly drops it before he passes it back to Enjin, who's wearing a stupid smirk on his face. "A hypocrite?" he asks, after regaining his composure.
"All that talk about being a loyal partner when you cheated on your own for me, a scumbag who doesn't even know what he wants."
He sighs, and cautiously slides a hand over to rest on Enjin's forearm. Enjin turns to look at him, where he's trying to place the warmest smile on his face. "She wasn't real."
Gris watches Enjin cycle through a few emotions, before he retreats to looking at the view again. "Hmm," he hums, "I kinda figured. Halfway."
Lightly chuckling, he rests his forehead on Enjin's shoulder. "Did you?"
"I was having a hard time deciphering if I was in denial. But it was probably because you're sort of a bad liar." Gris focuses on the roll of shoulder muscles beneath his forehead as Enjin raises his arm to inhale another hit, and he snickers. "What was the point of her, then, to make me jealous? Sure, it kinda sucked to hear after I realized I would maybe groove with getting in your pants—"
"Enjin."
"Not sorry."
Gris sighs into his sleeve, and looks up with tired eyes. When he watches Enjin register the expression he was studying, his face seems to shadow into something more subdued.
He shies his face away, with his cheek now resting on the side of Enjin's bicep. "I didn't wanna scare you away with my whole thing about liking men." Another thought formulates into his head, and he raises where Enjin is looking up at him because of their height difference. "I thought you weren't even interested in me at that time?"
Keeping the somber expression on his face, he puts out the cigarette on the fence's surface and looks through Gris' pupils with weary eyes. "I didn't want to be."
Every bone, muscle, component of his body weakens with the shame that Enjin's displaying. This was a side of him no one else saw, not even Gris until now, and it aches his heart thinking about how many times he's probably faced this alone. He starts to blame himself for not being there for Enjin, and being the cause for all of his suffering even if he couldn't help it.
Enjin starts to massage his eyes with his fingers, like he was trying to pluck out the frustration in them. His lips form a weak grin, and starts quietly laughing in disbelief of himself. "I seriously thought I could replace you with some club ladies. I figured out it was a pretty ridiculous notion way too late, all because I completely refused even thinking about fucking a dude." Enjin uncovers his eyes, and motions his gaze to Gris. "Y'know how stupid that is?"
Gris' first thought was to hold Enjin in a gentle embrace, to give him a place of security with his own arms. One of his hands are carding through Enjin's hair, to sooth him and relieve the thoughts that were circulating in his mind. All the ones that were making him feel miserable.
Enjin chuckles into his shoulder. "Especially when you do things like this, it doesn't get any easier." Gris hums in response, and buries his nose in Enjin's hair. "Yeah, you're basically a diamond in the rough type of deal. Like—" they move back from their hold from each other, and Gris suddenly has inked fingers exploring his face as if they were marking each important landmark. His thumbs brushing his cheekbones, "—your stupidly pretty eyes, dude. I could imagine this being the color of the damn sky. Every single time you look at me with these when you're mad, I try not to get a boner." Gris' eyebrows pinch together, and Enjin innocently continues talking. "Man, and your badass scar. I still need you to tell the tale of how you got this nasty thing, and without damaging your eye."
Gris' mind fizzes out a bit of Enjin's talking, because he himself is also admiring the face in front of him. In this sense, it's one that he's going to be allowed to hold, to kiss whenever he wants, and familiarize every expression in his head that everyone else doesn't get to see. He's snapped out of his own head when Enjin slightly backs away, planting both of his hands on each of Gris' pecs.
"And your ginormous jugs, like do you seriously carry these huge knockers around—"
"I get the point." Gris' hands move from Enjin's head and waist to intertwine them together, bringing one of the back of Enjin's hands to place a tender kiss. He savors the way Enjin gets flustered.
"Quit with that gay stuff."
"Enjin," he sighs in endeared annoyance.
"My bad. Couldn't help it." His forehead bumps into Gris' shoulder, squeezing their connected hands. "Still. All of this is really outta my league."
"We can take it slow."
"…Man, you're way too good for me. I don't know how you even stuck with me considering all the bullshit I pulled."
Gris exhales a light chuckle and kisses the top of his head. "I don't either."
Blatant lie, but Gris would never admit it.
He has Enjin in his arms, feeling safe enough to open himself up and share every vulnerability that he's ever faced for Gris. The only thing he feels is the relief that he could finally be the security that Enjin needs, so that he doesn't have to turn tail and reject every bit of love that Gris tries so hard to send.
What Gris wishes for the most is for Enjin to belong to him. But he knows those things take one step at a time. And Enjin still has yet to unravel so many things about himself that Gris won't know until later, even if it could cause conflicts between the two of them.
But they could figure it out.