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“That's him,” Niko says.
Thomas recognizes the pair of lake gray eyes across the room as if from a dream.
The man doesn't seem to be Thomas's normal type. He's never been one to go for the prim, posh, buttoned up types. Maybe for a hookup, here or there, but never for such a long-term relationship that Thomas pulled out a nuke after the relationship ended.
Well, to be perfectly frank, Thomas has never pulled out the nuke after the relationship ended. He was always more content to live in his heartbreak, in his grief, in the jagged edges that made him who he was.
And yet, for this one man, this one beautiful boy, Thomas went for the atomic option.
And now, looking at the man across a room, across so many missing months, Thomas thinks God, I must have loved you.
Thomas has to wonder what it was like to be in love with him. How deeply Thomas must have fallen that their relationship ending was so devastating that he could not live with the ache inside of his chest.
Hell, ache is probably too gentle a term to describe how he must have been feeling. Thomas has broken up with people before. He has been broken up with. He's been dumped so far down the ditch that it took him months to crawl back out.
But this? This had to have been different. This had to have felt like drowning, like there was no way out, like Thomas would never escape the crush of the fallout.
Because yes, Thomas looks at the man and he recognizes him from a dream. But that's all it ever could have been. All that it ever will be.
Because Thomas looks at the man in front of him, all lake grass eyes that sparkle like the sun hitting the surface of the water in the middle of summer, all pressed suits that must have been divine to take off, all stubborn tilts of the chin and perfect arches of the eyebrow, all another man's arm around the man's waist, and he doesn't remember a goddamn thing.
When Thomas had agreed to come to a friend's wedding, he'd been warned that he would see the man that made him press Clear All. Niko had said, gaze gentle, that he could stay home. That he didn’t need to see the man who broke his heart.
And yet, Thomas has never had the greatest sense of self-preservation in the world. It’s what led him into every relationship that has ever crashed and burned, led him into ache after ache, led him to fling himself into life like he’s a cat with nine lives that will bring him back after the breaking.
The dark-curled man that has an arm around Thomas’ ex- he supposes, if Niko isn't lying- taps on Thomas’ ex's arm, a finger of question pointing in Thomas’ direction.
Thomas barely has a moment to brace himself as Thomas’ ex turns around and-
Thomas’ breath catches in his throat as their eyes lock across the room.
Thomas doesn’t know what to expect from that gaze meeting his. He doesn’t know what to expect from his past looking right into him and him knowing that once upon a time, it must have sliced him right open, but right now, it does nothing but trigger a dull, distance ache.
The man looks at Thomas and there is a slight crease in his brow, a moment of confusion, as if he isn’t sure he recognizes Thomas-
And in an instant, Thomas has to wonder if the man had the same procedure done as Thomas. He has to wonder if he is as much a dream to the other man as the man is to Thomas. If when the man goes to bed with his boyfriend, he sometimes finds himself dreaming of amber eyes instead of brown.
(There is some vicious part of Thomas’ chest that knows that this man must have broken his heart that thinks god, I hope I haunt him.)
The man looks away first.
It's the sort of thing that most of Thomas's exes would have done, but there's something in him that thinks that this was not always the case. That at one point, the man looked back, and he never stopped looking.
And Thomas has to wonder what broke them up. What split them so far down the middle that Thomas is missing memories and the other man is missing his spirit.
Thomas turns to Niko, a blistering smile on his lips. “Doesn’t look like much,” he says, and he tastes the lie on his own tongue.
(Thomas goes home that night and dreams of meeting a man at a summer work retreat, lime on his tongue, sugar on his skin, summer in his heart. He dreams of a pair of soft lips on a sharp mouth, the pinprick-brightness of a nuclear explosion in his chest as summer slipped into fall and a fling turned into love and Thomas lost himself in Edwin Payne and the way that Edwin insisted on burying himself into Thomas’ chest, replacing his heart, and living in his ribs forever.
And then Thomas forgets it all before he wakes.)