exhume:
1. to dig out of the earth, disinter
2. to revive or restore after neglect or a period of forgetting, bring to light.

When Nick was younger, it was easy for Howie to push that feeling away -- the desire to kiss Nick's too-red lips, the desire to do anything other than cuddle him -- because Nick was too young. Maybe if Howie were younger himself, he wouldn't feel so guilty about his thoughts. But he wasn't younger, so he drowned those thoughts out every night before he went to sleep, until eventually they were gone -- buried under girlfriends, boyfriends, one-night stands and weekend flings.

But then Nick got older, and eventually it wasn't going to matter that there were several years in between their ages. Except that Howie wasn't thinking of Nick in that way anymore. Nick, on the other hand, had never stopped thinking of Howie like that. When he was younger, it had been just a crush, but as he grew into his body, his feelings for Howie grew into something that he figured was probably love. Nick finally wanted to act on it, one afternoon, while the two of them were out to a movie.

It had become a ritual for Nick and Howie to catch a matinee -- on days off when they were on tour, and then on Saturdays when they weren't. They went nearly unnoticed most of the time, and always sat in the very back row of the theater. Howie always got Red Vines, Nick always got popcorn and a Coke. And they always ended up sharing.

This afternoon was their first time out in a while -- Howie had been in Toronto since they'd been off tour, and Nick knew that his Saturday afternoons hadn't quite felt right without Howie there. The movie they were watching wasn't particularly romantic, but there was a couple, a few rows ahead of them, who were more interested in each other than they were in the movie. Nick didn't want to watch, but he couldn't keep his eyes off them.

Maybe it was because he had been thinking of how he'd missed Howie, how he had laid in bed at night wishing that the pillow he clutched in his arms was Howie.

Three-fourths of the way through the movie, when the couple got up and left, that's when Nick decided he was going to kiss Howie. He couldn't do it in public though -- aside from the fact that someone could catch them, he wanted it to be intimate. Nick plotted how he was going to go about it through the rest of the movie. He hoped that Howie wasn't noticing how he tensed up each time their hands touched, or how he shivered when Howie placed his hand on Nick's lower back as they walked out of the theater.

Nick waited until they got back to his house. Until they were sitting on the couch watching the television. And then he did it -- pushed Howie down against the couch, pinning his shoulders, and kissed him. Howie squeaked, taken by the unexpectedness of Nick's mouth and body against him. But when Nick's tongue brushed across his lips, he relaxed. He relaxed and opened up, letting Nick's tongue discover places in his mouth that he had wanted Nick to find years ago.

That kiss was all it took for Howie to remember. He remembered how he used to want Nick to do this, to kiss him without warning. Back then, even though Howie constantly denied his feelings for Nick, he always wished that Nick secretly returned them. And now Nick was slowly exhuming that feeling, scraping away the built up layers of repression with each kiss, with each movement of his body. Howie wrapped his arms around Nick and kissed him back, hoping that Nick wanted to keep digging deeper.

End.

Originally posted here as a secret santa fic for don we now our gay apparel 2001.