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“Cater?”
Cater looks up at the sound of his voice and smiles. He’s ladling out curry into bowls of rice that—well, Trey didn’t make it, so Cater must’ve. Trey feels an immense ocean of affection flood him for a moment.
“Hey-ho, Cutie.”
“Hi.” Trey leans his hip against the counter and exhales a little, crossing his arms over himself.
Cater leans over to peck him on the lips lightly, and looks smug when Trey follows him a little as he pulls away.
“What’s wrong, hm?” he asks with a gentle hum.
Trey stays silent for a long moment, watching Cater dump a frankly horrifying amount of shichimi into his curry. He lifts up the bottle to him in question and Trey shakes his head, so Cater shrugs and places it back down.
“I’m surprised you made food,” Trey tells him instead of answering his question, taking a spoon when it’s handed to him. “You didn’t have to.”
“I can stand to cook dinner every now and then,” Cater huffs with an eye roll. “It’s not gonna kill me.”
Laughing a little, Trey leans down so he can kiss him again before he eats something too spicy and makes it impossible to do so. Cater smiles into him, letting it happen, and pulls his besotted little boyfriend toward the table, magnetic.
(Trey has never once in his life known something so sweet as unbridled, unseeking and unselfish affection. Always, and he knows this because he maintains it himself, his relationships are transactional. Driven on favours, on owing each other things, on mutual benefit and image.
The way Cater puts his hands in Trey’s back pockets, leans into him like a vice and presses bruises to the base of his jaw, it’s disarmingly sweet. So absurdly, dizzyingly, unbelievably sweet, it’d drive anyone else insane to know that it was Cater doing it. The gentleness in his present touch, like he wants for nothing more than Trey to be happy. It makes him want to cry, sometimes, if he were to be horribly honest with himself.)
He watches Cater chew his food until an unimpressed frown is directed at him and Cater nudges his foot against his under the table.
“You haven’t even tried it,” he pouts. “You don’t think I’m that bad at cooking, do you?”
Trey grimaces his way through a smile and lifts some food to his mouth. It’s good, perfectly passable curry and even impressive for Cater to have made, but he doesn’t have it in him to push fantastic words through his teeth.
“It’s perfect, Cater,” he says to the food instead of the chef. The offending chef kicks his foot again.
“Seriously, what’s up with you?”
Cater’s eyes bore into him in complete, knowing sincerity, the kind Trey only sees when he’s brushing off others’ attention and Cater schemes to corner him later to make him understand without words how appreciated he is. It’s intense, and as attractive as it is, it makes his skin crawl a little.
Typically, he doesn’t mind being stared at by Cater especially with how unaffectionate the man tends to be, but currently everything makes him uncomfortable somehow. His own unclear thoughts cloud his sense of self and it unsettles him that he’s so utterly transparent to someone who knows him so well. He feels a pang of ironic sympathy towards Cater for all those times he’s done the exact same thing to him.
He understands how Cater operates well enough to understand how similar they are despite the glaring differences, how neither of them quite know what to do with being seen while they’re struggling. Then again, Trey is fairly certain that everyone has that to some degree.
“I don’t have infinite patience, baby, I’m not you,” Cater grumbles, dropping his spoon into his bowl with a light clatter and crossing his arms. Still, there’s nothing but concern in his tone.
Trey laughs uncomfortably, which only earns him another kick. It’s gentle, barely a kick.
(He’d confessed to Cater a while ago, something he’d never once voiced and will probably never voice again, that he’s afraid of confrontation. It’s a simple and familiar truth that he knows most people can relate to, given that they weren’t of the the slightly malicious like-minded and hot-headed variety that tend to attend NRC, and it’s not even something that someone could be that ashamed of.
It’s just that when he’d told Cater the fact, Cater had easily and even quicker responded with an ‘I know’ and cited the incident of when Riddle’s mother had come by to lecture him and his family for hours, something he’d only said to him once last year. It’s easy to forget how insightful he is, but when he saw Trey’s face after he’d said that, he smiled and backtracked, like he had also forgotten his own thoughtfulness, and credited a lucky guess.
Luck has nothing to do with either of them.)
“Don’t worry yourself—” he starts saying, and Cater rolls his eyes aggressively. He’s so much less cheerful when it’s just them, Trey finds it incredibly funny. Disarming too. Warm and sweet, mostly. Like hot cocoa.
“I’ll worry myself as much as I want, dick,” he spats at Trey’s amused smile. “You make me talk about my feelings all the time.”
When Trey starts laughing, Cater huffs pointedly and scoots his chair closer to the table so he can rest the side of his calf against his. “Stop that. I love you. Tell me what’s wrong. Dick.”
“I love you, too,” he sighs, leaning forward into a closed fist.
He’s used to the fact that any sign of closeness sees Cater’s investment in a conversation completely evaporated and his new all-consuming goal being a rush for the nearest diversion or hiding spot. It’s frustrating, yes, but convenient at times when he isn’t quite energetic or articulate enough to parse out his own turmoil. Now, though, even despite the fact that he can see the anxious way Cater taps his finger against his bicep, he doesn’t relent.
Still, Trey is only working in his best interest; he will do everything to distract his easily distractible boyfriend from himself.
“I’m so proud of you,” Trey murmurs, and relishes the pretty flush that blooms under his faint freckles. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
He does a weird squinty thing with his eyes and purses his lips, like he isn’t sure whether to frown or cover his face with his twitching hands. God, it’s heartstoppingly easy for Trey to forget every thought he’s ever had when Cater blushes. He wants to devour him whole.
(“You know,” Trey murmured into Cater’s summer-sweet hair, like apricots and oranges and other fruit that Cater wouldn’t be caught dead eating, “You’re kinder than you give yourself credit for.”
“I’m perfectly evil, thank you,” Cater quipped dismissively, swiping up again for the next Magicam post.
The two of them were lying in his bed after hours; he was slotted in between Trey’s legs and kept him from falling asleep with obnoxious reel after reel that Trey didn’t mind enough to make him turn off yet. When he eventually did, Cater called himself a menace and pointedly watched one more reel to substantiate it, before clicking it off and kissing Trey’s cheek like the dark would keep Trey from noticing.
He’s certain that Cater would resent the way he thought about him. The boy would never describe himself as sweet, not in earnest, and frequently jokes (only while they’re alone) about being ‘the only bitter little thing Trey likes as much as sugar’. He doesn’t argue because he knows Cater wouldn’t accept it, but every time he thinks privately to himself, you’re the sweetest I’ve ever tasted. Perhaps, Trey wonders, that’s why Cater dislikes sweetness so much.)
“You don’t,” Cater eventually decides, huffing a little. “Not unless you talk to me.”
When Trey doesn’t immediately regurgitate every emotion he’s felt in the last few hours, Cater tacks on a petulant “Now.”
He sighs faintly, leaning back and folding his hands on the table. Cater watches him with furrowed eyebrows.
“It’s… it’s a bit ridiculous. I’m just not as…” he trails off uselessly, flexing his hands. “I’m under no delusion that I’m a particularly kind or generous person, but I surprised myself today, I guess.”
He can see Cater’s jaw shift as he takes in the words, and feel under the table how his leg becomes bracketed by both of Cater’s in some far away plea for touch. Cater uncrosses his arms and reaches a hand out over their tiny little dinner table.
Trey smiles, which Cater tilts his head subtly forward at, expression serious and insistent. Something like You don’t need to smile for me. Something that knows him better than he knows himself. He takes his hand.
“Some kid, I… honestly don’t even remember her name, but she’s also interning. She’s nice but a bit overeager, and ended up putting herself in danger trying to do something for the supervisor, and I didn’t… feel like helping her. So I didn’t.”
Cater rubs his fingers over Trey’s pulse gently, running his thumb over his wrist.
“Sounds like she got what was coming to her,” Cater says almost to himself, and Trey laughs.
“I guess. Still, she didn’t deserve to get hurt because of it. I should’ve saved her.”
Cater bites his lip for a moment. “I don’t see how it’s your responsibility, though. This is what you’ve been pouting about? Not that—mn.”
Trey looks down at his curry for a moment, then back when Cater hums again, a little more decisively.
“Trey. I need you to know something.”
He raises an eyebrow. Cater places his other hand on top of their intertwined fingers. There’s molten sugar in those emerald eyes.
“You are the most good person I’ve ever met,” he promises, gripping his hand. “You’re so caring, and considerate, and yeah, maybe you’re not generous but generosity is overrated and you deserve—you don’t deserve to be relied on for everything.”
He’s so, so very sweet. Trey swallows, or tries to, but his mouth is suddenly very dry.
The words are almost uncharacteristic coming from Cater, but he’s staring at him with a meaningful intensity that makes it hard to pretend that he’s lying. Not that he would ever be tempted to.
“I wish you could, like,” Cater continues, subtly tugging Trey’s limbs closer to himself, “Notice. That you’re perfect. And you do so much bullshit that you don’t want to do, constantly, like your existence is a job that you’re just doing begrudgingly. I just—the only thing that I want, that I’ve literally ever wanted, is for you to only do things that you want to do.”
Oh.
Trey laughs a little, setting aside the pure shock that strikes him at the admittance. That couldn’t possibly be the entire truth, and Cater decorates his words all of the time to make them sound more pleasant, but there’s nothing in his tone that gives away insincerity. So he sets aside the revelation to think about later, maybe, while Cater isn’t staring at him like that.
“Cater, if I did that, all I would ever do is bake and kiss you.”
Cater grins, leaning forward to press his lips to Trey’s knuckles. “Good. That’s how it should be.”
(When third year was ending, there was a long and terrifying moment where he genuinely believed that Cater would slip through his fingers entirely. He’d gotten loud around him, evasive, overly cheerful. Took every excuse for other company and never sat with just Trey for longer than a moment.
Cater hadn’t expected Trey to be willing to talk about anything real in the presence of others, and he would’ve been right, except that Trey was desperate. He’d asked—begged, really—for Cater to stop running from him because he wasn’t going to leave unless he truly wanted him to, and the willingness to speak it aloud in a place where Lilia and Kalim could see it completely must have stunned Cater into reconsidering.
Trey would sacrifice so much of himself to love Cater; it’s almost staggeringly impossible to know that Cater only wants him to be complete and happy as he is without compromise.)
“Now eat your damn curry, you ungrateful little bitch,” Cater snaps for good measure, pulling away. His legs stay pressed against Trey’s, though, and his sneer is raw honey and cardamom.
“I love you,” Trey vows, apropos of nothing.
Cater’s eyebrow twitches and he puts a hand over his mouth like it’ll cover his blush (it doesn’t). “Okay.”
“Say it back?”
He scowls at him. “No.”
Trey chuckles, picking up his spoon. “Alright. Will you say it later? Tonight?”
“Fuck you,” Cater grumbles, other hand rising to more successfully hide his face.
(Trey presses a warm, open kiss to his jaw. “Cater?”
“Hmm? Baby?” he murmurs sweetly, blissed out, arms hooked around Trey’s neck.
“I love you. So, so much.”
“Yeah, okay, loser,” Cater mumbles, leaning up to sigh into his mouth. “I love you too.”)