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“I feel like that’s a little too fancy to be eating dinner at a Bojangles.”
Devin, holding a sage green turtleneck in one hand and a beige one in the other, looks up at his partner with an unamused expression.
“I was asking which one you thought looked better with these jeans, Alvin.”
“Well, neither. Why can’t you just put on a T-shirt and call it a day?” He asks, leaning against the doorway in a clear attempt to act cool. “I’m hungry.”
“Some of us have standards,” Devin mumbles, but he shakes his head fondly. “I’m going to go with the beige one, since you clearly lack the expertise I have with the subject.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alvin asks defensively.
“It means that you dress like a teenage boy,” Devin replies. He hooks the sidelined turtleneck back on its coathanger and returns it to its proper spot in his closet, and then pulls the beige one on over his shirt. When he turns back around to find Alvin giving him an incredulous look, he smiles. “Don’t worry, I love you even though you dress the same way you did in high school.”
“I do not dress like a high schooler!” Alvin squeaks. “No way! You just have a superiority complex because you say you know the difference between tan and beige. Which, by the way, is pretentious as hell.”
Devin gives the statement a little bit of time to marinate in the air between them before he replies.
“One: you wear the same jacket every day, and it has the letter ‘A’ on it because your name is Alvin. Two: if they were the same color, they wouldn’t have different names.”
Alvin sputters at this, taking about ten seconds before any coherent words can actually come out of his mouth.
“I–you—just—they’re the same color!” Alvin shouts, stomping his foot on the ground in a childish display. Devin tries not to smile too hard at the gesture, no matter how adorable it is.
“Well, anyway,” Devin starts, smiling despite this. “I should be ready in about five minutes. Make sure you have your phone and your wallet. And your keys. You said you’re driving, remember?”
After a moment more of seething in faux anger—Alvin knows he’s only teasing, but it’s fun to be mad sometimes—he gives Devin a double thumbs-up.
Devin watches as he scurries off to his own room, probably to grab all three of those things. Once they both emerge from their rooms, Devin gives his partner a scrutinizing look.
“What? Is there something on my face?” Alvin asks, strained. They’ve been together long enough for Devin to know his tells like the back of his hand. Based on the way his brows are pinched and how he’s biting his lip, Alvin is in pain somewhere.
“What’s wrong?” Devin asks, skipping any and all social expectations of subtlety or tact that might draw out this conversation longer than necessary. Getting to the root of the problem is far more important than trying to be polite.
Alvin looks away for a split second, then looks up at Devin. “My head hurts,” he says quietly, then shakes said head. He keeps talking, a little louder than he was before. “B-but it’s not that bad. You don’t need to worry about it,” he says, putting on a false smile that twists Devin’s insides.
“Why don’t you go take some Tylenol before we leave?” Devin asks carefully. “That way you won’t be distracted while we eat. I wanted to hear about how your week went.”
Alvin looks off to the side again and then nods once.
“Right, right, you’re right. Modern medicine amazes me,” he says, carrying on the conversation as he walks away to the bathroom as if Devin can hear him while he’s in there. There’s still some muffled talking, which is briefly interrupted when the bathroom faucet comes on for about five seconds, and then Alvin comes back out of the bathroom a few moments later and keeps talking like nothing happened. “But it’s weird that we have things like AI girlfriends before we have a cure for cancer.”
“...Uh huh,” Devin says. “Right. Did you take the meds?”
“Yep!” Alvin replies, chipper as always, although something seems off about it tonight. “I took it with the sink water.”
“Alright. Let’s go, then. Do you remember how to get there?” Devin asks, grabbing his satchel from the coat rack and pulling it over his shoulder. He frowns at the slight grimace still in Alvin’s expression, taking a note to check in on him as the evening goes on.
“Uh, yeah,” Alvin replies, and Devin can already tell he’s lying his ass off. “We head left out of the neighborhood and turn right onto Route 7—”
“Nope. It’s a left onto Croft Street, then a right at the third light, then cruising on 2nd Street for about ten minutes until we hit Abbey Lane. Then it’ll be the second right.”
“Ohhh. Right, right,” Alvin says, biting his lip. “I gotcha.”
They have an unspoken conversation with their eyes when Alvin looks up at him, and Devin softens his gaze.
“Do you want me to tell you the directions while we drive?” Devin asks, sympathetic to his lover’s permanent scatterbrain.
“...Yeah,” Alvin says begrudgingly. Devin nudges Alvin’s hand with his own and grabs it, squeezing it once reassuringly.
“It’s okay. You’ll get it someday,” he says gently. Alvin nods, but Devin can tell his heart’s not in it.
“Hey. Really, it’s fine,” Devin reiterates, squeezing his hand again. “We all have our faults. I’m a shallow, judgy motherfucker as you put it,” he says, imitating Alvin’s voice as he speaks. After successfully completing his goal of drawing a smile out of his partner, he leads the two of them out of the front door.
It’s the little things, Devin reflects. It’s always the little things that mean the most.
Alvin knows he loves to go out on dates. Even though he can’t sit still for the life of him, especially not in a scratchy suit, he still makes the effort to take them out anyway. It means a lot to Devin, even if some of the places he chooses are… unorthodox. He cringes at the table beside them, seeing the abandoned crumbs of its last guests, paired with rings of what he can only assume are dried sweet tea plastered to various places on the tabletop.
There’s the small gestures that make him feel loved, too. It’s when Alvin goes out of his way to open doors for Devin, to act like a true gentleman, as he puts it. It’s him somehow remembering exactly what Devin likes to order at their go-to takeout spots, despite not being able to remember what he ate for breakfast that morning. It’s even down to Alvin knowing just when Devin needs to feel his hands around his own to calm down.
So when all the little things mean so much to him, how can Devin not possibly notice the little things about Alvin when they’re off?
First and foremost, there’s some silence between them—even while eating, no matter how many times Devin’s told him to eat with his mouth closed, Alvin inevitably remembers something he wanted to say just before he took a bite, and just has to say it then, or he’ll forget. There’s none of that right now, which is a major red flag.
Along with this, he’s just been pushing his mac and cheese around in the little cup they gave him, only eating a bite every now and then between the sentences he seems to force himself to get out. There’s this light rasp to Alvin’s voice that he seems to be ignoring entirely, even when his voice gives out and he has to clear his throat three separate times to recover it fully.
Above all, the thing that makes Devin say something is the constant look of mild discomfort on his face even when he does talk, as if he’s holding something back.
“—And then Sunny asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, and—”
“Are you alright?” Devin interrupts, looking at his partner thoughtfully from across the table.
Alvin stutters the ending to his sentence, blinks twice, and bites his lip.
“Uhh… yeah! Never been better. Why?” He asks, donning a smile that’s clearly forced, and Devin clocks that he’s overselling it immediately.
“You seem uncomfortable.”
Alvin looks off to the side and offers a strained chuckle.
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about?” He half-asks, and Devin furrows his brows.
“Hon, you know you can be honest with me, right? There’s nobody else here,” Devin says, gesturing to the room that has two elderly couples eating at tables on the other end of the restaurant. “Clearly something’s bothering you.”
Without looking back up at him, Alvin lets out a small, defeated sigh.
“My head hurts. Like, really hurts. Like, jackhammer-to-the-skull-on-steroids hurts. And, I don’t… I don’t feel right,” he mumbles.
When Devin reaches his hand across the table to gently caress his face, Alvin leans into it in a way that wrenches his heart with how vulnerable it feels. The warmth of his face against Devin’s gloved hand tells him everything he needs to know about his lover’s state, and his gaze softens.
“...If you weren’t feeling good, we didn’t have to come out tonight,” he says quietly, rubbing his thumb back and forth across Alvin’s cheek. He places his hand over Devin’s, still not meeting his eyes.
“I… I just know you like going out for dinner together, and I didn’t wanna ruin it,” he says, voice watery, and he buries his face in Devin’s hand.
“It’s okay,” Devin starts, but when he hears a sniffle from Alvin, he knows they’ve got to pack it up and head home now. He stands up and leans down, close to Alvin’s ear.
“Hey. It’s okay,” he repeats, softly but reassuringly. “I’m going to pack dinner up, and we’ll take it home and finish it later. Right now all I’d like to do is make sure you’re okay,” Devin says. Alvin replies with nothing but another sniff, so Devin slowly withdraws his hand, earning a slight whimper from the man.
“You must be feeling pretty bad, huh?” Devin says, brows pinched together. Alvin gives a non-committal hum, and Devin can only imagine how hard he was working to hide his condition if he’s reduced to this after a little bit of questioning. Quickly, he packs up the food on the table into one box and then nudges Alvin’s shoulder.
“We’re gonna head home, okay? I can drive,” he says. Alvin sniffs again and wipes at his eyes, nodding once.
When they’re settled in the car, Alvin faces the window and leans his face against it with a huff. Devin switches the radio off as soon as the car starts up; he knows what it’s like to have to listen to someone else’s music when you have a headache, thanks to Alvin himself, and he’d rather not put his partner through it right now. As he starts the drive, he shoots Alvin a concerned glance.
“You okay?” He asks, frowning.
“Yeah,” Alvin replies, in a way that indicates the very opposite of being okay.
“...Hmm. We’ll be home soon,” Devin replies simply. Slowly, deliberately, he reaches his right hand off of the wheel, over the gearshift, and intertwines his fingers with Alvin’s.
He feels Alvin’s fingers shift in surprise, and then he reciprocates the gesture, giving Devin's hand a hearty squeeze.
“Thank you,” Alvin says, voice quavering. “Really, I mean it.”
“Of course,” Devin replies, squeezing his hand twice. “I mean it too.”