LEMONS / 𝗺𝗹𝗺 (✓)

5: where they match

CHAPTER FIVE
where they match

Sometimes, Kalen allowed himself to forget that Lucas had ever been more to him than a man in a bar who tipped well and liked to ask for drinks more than necessary.

Lucas was someone Kalen had known from the first day he started working as bartender at the age of twenty-one. As one of the first customers he had served, Lucas had never shied away from offering the bartender flirty looks and words dipped in honey, promising him things Kalen had never imagined being put into words.

And Kalen had naturally fallen for the beaming smile and everything else, Lucas had to offer him.

Maybe, deep down, Kalen had known that the relationship he had with Lucas, wasn't something that was going to last an eternity, no matter how much they liked to whisper so in each other's ears at night. And maybe, deep down, Kalen didn't care. Because Lucas was handsome and charming and filled with humorless stories Kalen loved hearing late at night in the apartment of his.

When Kalen thought back to him and Lucas' days, hanging out in their apartments and lying in bed, he wondered how he could've ever thought he was in love with him.

Because, yes, Lucas had stories Kalen loved hearing and a voice he loved falling asleep to, but he also kept smoking in Kalen's apartment after he had told him to stop doing so. He called him nicknames based of the clothes he wore, and he'd sigh whenever Kalen went out to shop in the clothes he usually only wore at home. He also kept rolling his eyes at Kalen's green pants.

And they fought over things Kalen got embarrassed thinking back on.

A fight—Kalen didn't even remember how it started but he knew exactly how it evolved—ended with Kalen telling Lucas to get out of his apartment and to not talk to him again, to act like the two of them didn't know what the other person looked like under their clothes, and what scent they carried when they woke up in the morning.

Kalen didn't know if it was out of spite or just to annoy him, but Lucas had never really taken his words serious. Now, they were in a state where every time Lucas showed up at the bar, Kalen wished he had the power to throw him out without any reason but Lucas glancing his way.

Sometimes, Kalen let himself forget that he had ever been with Lucas in an intimate way and his mother loved reminding him, that he, in fact, had.

"So, how's Lucas doing?" Kalen absently heard through the phone, that was being held in between his ear and his shoulder, finding himself more focused on the shelf he was examining, than the conversation between him and his mother.

And maybe it was stupid how annoyed Kalen got whenever his mother asked about the Italian man—as if he was one of her children—but he just couldn't help it. He rolled his eyes to no one in particular, trying to decide what shampoo it was Ria had told him to buy.

Was it the one with the red lid or blue—

"Baby, are you there?" He distantly heard again and Kalen suppressed the need to sigh.

"Yes, Mom, I am." He put down the red shampoo, as he threw the blue one in his basket. "I guess? Probably. I don't know. You know we broke up."

"Yes, that's right, baby, but you didn't stop talking completely, did you now?"

Kalen wished they had.

And he wished his mother would stop acting like the two of them were still together.

Kalen hadn't even meant for his mother to know about Lucas. She had a thing with getting attached to people she had no say in would stay or not, which he had realized when his younger sister had brought home a girlfriend and his mother had invited her to celebrate Christmas with them the winter after. The relationship had been intact for three months where they then broke up, and his mother had a hard time understanding that, no, Karla was not going to join them Christmas night.