Keegan tried to pull back, his hands slamming against Ashton’s chest to shove him away.
But Ashton didn’t let him go.
His fingers tightened hard against the nape of Keegan’s neck, pulling him deeper into the kiss, his lips moving against Keegan’s with an urgent, desperate intensity that made Keegan’s head spin out of control.
The heat, the taste of beer and Ashton’s , the overwhelming shock of it—it hit Keegan like a physical blow.
Panicking, Keegan dug his fingers into Ashton’s t-shirt and shoved back with everything he had, forcefully breaking the contact.
Keegan scrambled backward off Ashton, his bare feet sliding over the duvet until his back slammed hard against the wooden headboard.
His chest heaved violently, his lungs burning as he aggressively dragged the back of his wrist across his lips, wiping away the lingering warmth of the kiss as if trying to erase the reality of what had just happened.
His dark eyes were wide, trembling with a volatile mix of panic and utter disbelief as he stared down at his best friend.
“Ash…
wh—what the fuck are you doing?” Keegan rasped out, his voice shaking so hard it barely carried across the bed.
“What are you doing?!”
Ashton sat up slowly on the mattress, his own breathing ragged, his hand instinctively rising to run through his messy hair.
The unblinking intensity in his hazel eyes instantly fractured into a mess of total, disoriented shock, as if his brain was only just catching up to what his body had done on pure impulse.
He stared at Keegan—at his best friend’s trembling lips, his flushed, terrified face, and the posture of someone ready to leap out of his own skin.
“I…
I don’t know,” Ashton stammered out, his voice dropping into a rough, breathless whisper.
“I uh…
I just…
Jesus, Keegs, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?!” Keegan repeated, a sharp, hysterical edge cutting through his ruined voice.
He pulled his knees up against his chest, his knuckles turning white where he gripped the sheets.
“You don’t just kiss me, Ashton!
You’re with Chloe!
You’re with Chloe, you came up here acting like nothing happened, and then you just—”
“I wasn’t thinking, okay?!” Ashton blurted out defensively, though his voice cracked under the sudden, heavy weight of his own guilt.
He shifted on the mattress, instinctively reaching a hand out toward Keegan before catching himself and pulling it right back.
“I was just looking at you, and…
and everything today felt so messed up, and then you were finally laughing with me, and I just—I lost my head for a second.”
“You lost your head?” Keegan let out a harsh, bitter laugh, shaking his head as a fresh, agonizing heat burned behind his eyes.
“This isn’t a game, Ash.
You can’t just…
you can’t do shit like that to me when you feel like it and then just say you lost your head!”
Ashton looked up at him, his brow pulled down in a deep, agonized frown, his hazel eyes wide and swimming with a sudden, terrified realization.
“Keegs, please…” Ashton murmured softly, his voice trembling as he looked at the raw wreckage in Keegan’s expression.
“Don’t look at me like that.
Please.”
“Like what?” Keegan whispered, his voice cracking violently in the dark, quiet room.
“Like you just ruined everything?”
Ashton blinked, recoiling as if the word itself had hit him in the chest.
“Wait…
ruin?
Ruined everything?” Ashton let out a breathless, nervous chuckle, his voice tilting upward in a desperate, panicked attempt to defuse the terrifying weight hanging in the room.
He raised his hands in defense, shaking his head.
“How, Keegs?
It—it was just a kiss.”
He swallowed hard, searching Keegan’s face for any sign of backdown.
“I don’t know what happened, I just…
I’m—I’m sorry if I frightened you, but nothing’s ruined, man.
It was just a kiss…
after all.”
Keegan slowly raised his head, staring at Ashton through the dark, heavy silence.
A quiet, broken laugh scraped out of Keegan’s throat—dry, sharp, and dripping with pure, agonizing bitterness.
“Mmh…” Keegan rasped out, his voice trembling so violently it barely sounded like his own.
“Just a kiss.
It was just a kiss.
To you…
it was just a fucking kiss, mm?”
Before he could stop them, hot tears spilled over Keegan’s lashes, trailing burning tracks down his flushed cheeks.
Panicking at his own weakness, Keegan frantically shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to scrub the moisture away as he violently swung his legs over the side of the mattress.
His feet hit the floor, his knees nearly buckling under him as he stumbled to his feet, completely done with being in the same space as Ashton.
“Just a fucking kiss…” Keegan whispered under his breath, his chest heaving with choked, silent sobs as he turned toward the en-suite.
“God…
just a fucking kiss…”
Seeing Keegan head straight for the door, Ashton snapped out of his daze.
“Keegs, wait!”
Ashton launched himself off the bed, his long legs crossing the room in two strides.
He sprinted past Keegan and threw his shoulder against the bathroom door, blocking the entrance completely with his body before Keegan could reach for the handle.
“Get out of my way, Ash,” Keegan choked out, stopping inches short of Ashton’s chest.
He refused to look up, aggressively wiping his face with his sleeve while his whole frame shuddered with suppressed tears.
“Move.”
“No!
I’m not letting you lock yourself in there again!” Ashton insisted frantically, planting his hands flat against the wooden frame on either side of his shoulders, trapping Keegan in front of him.
“Look at me, Keegs!
Please—just talk to me!”
“Talk to you about what?!” Keegan snapped, his dark eyes flashing up to clash with Ashton’s in raw, tear-soaked fury.
“About how funny it is that you can just mess with me whenever you feel like it?!
Move your fucking arms, Montgomery!”
“I’m not messing with you!” Ashton yelled back, his own voice cracking under the sheer panic of seeing his best friend completely fall apart right in front of him.
“I don’t know why I did it, okay?!
I swear to God I don’t!
But you’re acting like I just tore out your god-damn heart!”
“Because you did!” Keegan screamed into the narrow space between them, the raw, suffocating truth finally tearing out of his throat before he could stop it.
“Because to you it’s just some stupid fucking mistake you can laugh off, but to me—”
Keegan choked on his own breath, the words cutting off sharply as his jaw clamped shut, his eyes widening in horror at how close he had just come to giving everything away.
The sudden, suffocating silence in the room was deafening.
Ashton stared down at him, his chest heaving, his hazel eyes wide and searching as he processed the jagged edge of Keegan’s unfinished sentence.
“But to you…” Ashton breathed out, his voice dropping into a rough, trembling whisper.
“But to you…
what?”
Panic seized Keegan’s throat in an iron grip.
He frantically shook his head, looking away and aggressively swiping at his wet cheeks with the back of his hand.
“Nothing,” Keegan choked out, his voice thin and desperate.
“Ash, it’s late.
Let it go.
We…
we have to go back early tomorrow, it’s a long drive.
Just move so we can get some sleep—”
“No.” Ashton’s hands clamped down hard on both of Keegan’s shoulders, his long fingers digging into the fabric of Keegan’s shirt, refusing to let him retreat.
“No way.
Not this time.
Keegan, look at me and tell me what you were just about to say.”
“I said nothing!” Keegan gasped, trying to wrench his shoulders out of Ashton’s grip, but Ashton’s hold was unyielding.
“You said it was just a mistake I could laugh off!”
Ashton’s voice rose, a desperate, raw edge bleeding into his tone as he gave Keegan a slight, frantic shake.
“But to you—to you what, Keegs?!
Tell me!”
“Let me go!”
“Tell me what I did!” Ashton yelled back, his eyes blazing with a mixture of terror and fierce determination.
“Tell me why a stupid kiss ruined everything!”
“BECAUSE I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU!”
The scream tore out of Keegan’s throat, raw, violent, and absolute.
It echoed off the walls of the bedroom, shattering the remaining air between them.
Keegan stopped struggling, his hands dropping limply to his sides as the dam completely, irreversibly broke.
Ashton froze, his entire body going terrifyingly rigid against the doorframe, his breath catching audibly in the quiet room.
But Keegan couldn’t stop.
Now that the words were out, they came flooding forward in a massive, agonizing wave of years of suppressed emotions.
“Because to me, it’s everything!” Keegan sobbed out, his voice rising to its absolute limit, cracking and breaking with every syllable.
“I have loved you since we were in middle school, Ashton!
Since we were fucking kids!
Do you know what that’s like?!
Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit next to you every single day and know I can never have you?!”
Ashton’s face completely drained of color, his hands going slack on Keegan’s shoulders, but Keegan didn’t let him pull away.
He grabbed the front of Ashton’s shirt, his knuckles white, his dark eyes overflowing with hot, devastated tears.
“When we got to high school, all I wanted was to be yours!” Keegan cried out, his voice wrecked and hyperventilating.
“I wanted to be the one you’d be with after our games!
I wanted to be the one you held in the hallways!
And I sat there, pretending I was fine being your ‘Bro’, being your best friend, while I died inside every time you looked at someone else!”
Keegan let out a broken, agonizing sound, his grip on Ashton’s shirt trembling violently.
“And then you brought Chloe around,” Keegan rasped, his voice dropping into a shredded, devastated whisper, tears pouring freely down his face.
“You brought her in, and you looked at her the exact way I’ve been begging you to look at me for years.
And it tore my fucking heart out, Ash.
Every day.
Every single day.”
Keegan let go of Ashton’s shirt, his arms falling to his sides as he looked down at his own trembling hands.
“So yeah,” Keegan choked out, his chest shuddering with a violent sob.
“To you, it was just a mistake.
Just a funny little impulse.
But to me…
it was a reminder of everything I am never going to have.”
The heavy, suffocating silence slammed back down into the room, leaving nothing but the sound of Keegan’s ragged breathing and the devastating, unfixable truth hanging in the space between them.