Chapter Text
It had been a week since Seussical closed, and Coy was finally going on his date with Anthony. He had spent the past week counting the days, crossing the dates off his calendar like some cliche coming-of-age movie.
Even without going on the date yet, the two of them had been in history’s most insufferable new couple honeymoon stage. They were holding hands in the back of Will’s car in the mornings, sneaking small kisses between classes, and had been texting far more than they were before.
However, they had quickly found an issue: The two of them couldn’t agree on which one of them should plan their first date.
“Planning our date is the least I could do after the emotional damage of yelling at you at an Applebees. Or yelling at you in the middle of the lunchroom. Or when I—”
“You can’t hold all of that over yourself, Coy. Besides, when was the last time you went on a date you didn’t plan?”
“When was the last time YOU did?”
After expressing this concern to their friends, they decided to take over, planning a blind date for them.
So, that’s why Coy was currently blindfolded in the back of Will’s car.
“Where are we going?” Coy asked loudly.
“You’re blind, not deaf. There’s no need to yell,” Will complained.
Coy heard Anthony snicker next to him. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was blindfolded too. Rather than just asking, Coy reached out his hand in the direction of the laughter, blindly feeling the side of Anthony until he found his face. Yup, blindfolded.
“That tickled!” Anthony said as he retaliated, both of his hands grabbing at him now. Coy squeaked and flailed his arms around, trying to fight him off.
Coy found Anthony’s arms and held them still. “Ha, got you! Now you’ll never torment me ever again.”
“Careful Coy, you don’t want to get on my bad side,” Anthony said, deepening his voice. Coy wished he hated it more, but somehow it was still charming.
“Oh man, what will the mean and bad Anthony do if I get on his bad side?”
“He’ll turn into…” Anthony paused for suspense. “The tickle monster!”
Anthony pulled his arms from Coy’s grasp and blindly started tickling him. Coy screeched as he tried to squirm away. He couldn’t see them, but Coy was pretty confident their third and fourth wheel were not amused with their antics. This was affirmed immediately.
“I’m so glad we’re just the chauffeurs, Bon. They’re sickening.” Will joked. Coy knew he didn’t mean it. There was no one on this earth he felt safer acting dumb and lovesick around than his best friend.
“Agreed,” Hanbon said, and Coy was positive she didn’t mean it either.
Coy felt the car jolt as it was put into park. Hanbon opened up his door and carefully led him out while Will undoubtedly did the same for Anthony.
They were led through a door into a building then walked through another door. With no preamble, the blindfold was being taken off his face.
Coy didn’t register his surroundings at all when his vision returned to him. Because, standing next to him, Anthony Po was wearing glasses. Coy didn’t even know that he had them. Why in the hell wasn’t he wearing them every day, especially when they made him look like that?
He had been so distracted by Anthony that he hadn’t even registered where they were. When he finally did, he turned to Will.
“The distance between my house and Anthony’s house was NOT as long as the distance you had to have been driving,” Coy accused.
Will explained himself. “I drove around longer to build suspense.”
“In this economy?” Anthony questioned, and Hanbon just shushed him and guided him over onto the couch.
Coy sat down beside him. He felt Anthony’s pinky finger brush against his hesitantly before committing, taking Coy’s hand into his own. Coy tried his best to remain calm about it, but Anthony’s smirk in the corner of his vision let him know he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
“Psst, Hanbon, start your speech!” Will stage-whispered from behind them.
“Right, right! Hello!” Hanbon started then stopped, looking intently at Will. After a second, the monitor in front of them turned on with a slideshow. “Welcome to your first date!”
Coy and Anthony gave her confused applause.
The slide changed to a photo of the two of them kissing on stage during Seussical. After the opening night revelations, Coy agreed to let the stage kiss play out. They did it every night after that.
“So, you two are finally trying to get your shit together, but you couldn’t decide on who should plan the first date. And rather than just, like, planning it together like normal people, you called—” she paused again, waiting for the slide to update. Photoshopped poorly over the kissing photo were Hanbon and Will’s faces. “—Us!”
The slide changed again, and a stock image of a man thinking appeared on screen. “But that puts us in a dilemma. The future of your first date, and the rest of your relationship, is now sitting in our hands…” Hanbon explained, shaking her head at the floor. “How could we possibly navigate such a scenario, Will?”
“Easily! In order to avoid liability if you have a horrible first date and not like each other anymore and have a massive blowup and break up and tear apart our friend group, we have decided to alleviate ourselves from the responsibility of choice!” Will exclaimed.
The next slide came on screen and all it said was “Behind You.”
They turned around and found Will standing with an object covered with a sheet. He dramatically pulled it away, revealing a colored wheel under it. In each section of the wheel is a different date idea.
“When and how did you get that into my garage???” Anthony asked, baffled.
“Your mom let me in to set it up while Will was blindfolding you!” Hanbon explained.
Coy read through some of the date ideas on the wheel.
Bake a cake together!
Play with a pebble!
Eat the hottest pepper in the world!
Get married!
Handcuff yourselves to one another and let Will hide the key somewhere in town!
Wait, what—
“Okay, who is ready to SPIN! THAT! WHEEL!?” They tried to say it together, but they couldn’t get it quite in sync. Anthony and Coy laughed as they reached over the back of the couch to spin it together.
Go ice skating!
Hanbon and Will cheered and clapped around them. Coy was relieved it was a normal date. He turned to Anthony and asked “Have you ever done ice skating before?”
“No, have you?”
“Nope.”
“This is perfect!” Will interjected. “An activity you’re both bad at!”
“Yeah!” Hanbon tacked on, crossing her arms and nodding her head like she was a cool kid on some children’s show.
“You’re not going to blindfold us again when you take us there, are you?” Coy felt the need to ask.
“No, no, Anthony is going to drive you guys. I’m not third wheeling in my own car again. The rest of this date is on y’all,” Will stated. “Unless you want us to blindfold you guys again. I don’t know how Anthony would drive though.”
Anthony grabbed Coy’s hand and started dragging him to the door. “No blindfolds needed! We will be making it to the ice rink in one piece!”
“You better!” Hanbon called after them.
---
Ice skating was harder than either of them anticipated. It was only after about 20 minutes of clinging to the wall that Coy had felt comfortable enough to start skating freely. He skated slowly alongside Anthony, trying to get comfortable with it.
Anthony wasn’t quite there yet, so Coy was trying to help him. “You’ve just gotta point your feet right, like this.”
In Coy’s right hand, Anthony's hand was holding onto him tightly.
“Why is this so hard?!”
“Bend your knees a little.” Coy instructed. When Anthony tried to follow the instruction he overdid it, practically squatting. Coy had to cover his laugh.
“I’m bored of the wall.” Anthony complained, then looked contemplative. “I have an idea. I’m going to cling to your back, and you’re going to move us around.”
“We’re going to fall if we do that!” Coy panicked as he felt Anthony against his back. Two arms wrapped around his middle, latching onto him from behind.
They were definitely going to fall.
“No we won’t, you’re an expert now!”
Coy sighed dramatically as he slowly started pushing himself forward, dragging Anthony along with him. Anthony nuzzled his chin into Coy’s neck as he shuffled behind him, trying to keep up.
“You are so touchy!” Coy laughed at Anthony’s antics.
“Is that a problem—”
Anthony's sentence was cut short when a little kid that had darted in front of them cut them off. Coy stopped, but because of their momentum, Anthony knocked into Coy, causing them both to tumble down to the ground.
“Wow, Coy. Why’d you let that happen? I thought you were the expert!” Anthony teased. Coy could only laugh in response. They pulled themselves up from the ice against the wall, giggling between themselves.
Now, Anthony looked more determined than he had when they’d begun.
“Here’s the plan, Coy,” Anthony started as he pushed off the wall, gliding further into the rink. “My goal before our skate hour is up is to get around the ice without my hands touching the wall, you, or the floor.”
“I believe in you,” Coy assured him. Whether or not he really believed that he would do this in less than their allotted hour was up for interpretation. But he believed in Anthony nonetheless.
They had gotten maybe 50 feet before Anthony started to lose his balance. Coy quickly reached out and tried to stabilize him by his shoulders without falling over himself. Fortunately for both of them, he succeeded.
“Damn, now I have to reset the challenge because you helped me.”
“No, the challenge was that you couldn’t use your hands to touch me. That had nothing to do with me helping you.” Coy countered. He emphasized this by ruffling Anthony’s hair
“Who’s the touchy one now?”
“I’ll push you.”
“No no no!” Anthony sped up, trying to get away from Coy.
After a little longer time spent skating, they were cut off by the intercom telling them their hour session was over.
While Coy was ducked down to untie his laces, Anthony slid onto the bench beside him. Coy felt his heavy gaze on the side of his face.
“What?” Coy asked. Not bothering to give a real response, Anthony brushed Coy’s hair out of his face and pecked him on the cheek. He quickly looked away, pretending nothing had happened as he pulled at the laces of his own skates. “You’re so annoying,” Coy complained with a laugh, watching Anthony suppress a smile.
He pinched Anthony’s chin between his finger and his thumb, forcing his gaze back on him before giving him a short kiss on the lips. He marveled at the way redness spread across his face.
“We can’t keep kissing in public like this,” Anthony commented.
“Yeah, we can.” Coy said stubbornly as he leaned in for another kiss.
Anthony put a hand on his face, his palm resting over Coy’s mouth, blocking the kiss. “Can we at least save the make out session for the car?”
The mere concept of getting to make out with Anthony Po in the back of his car was making his head spin, but he didn’t want to show him that. He made a show of rolling his eyes, then licked Anthony’s palm. The hand was immediately removed from his mouth with a yelp.
“Gross, Coy!” Anthony exclaimed as he wiped the spit from his hand onto Coy’s jeans.
“You started it!”
“Well— you, uh. Whatever!”
They held eye contact, neither willing to look away. Coy did his best to make himself look cute, pouting at him and fluttering his eyelashes before asking “One more kiss? Just one more?”
Anthony folded immediately, pressing another kiss to Coy’s lips.
He loved Anthony, he realized then.
Coy held that thought close to his heart, letting it warm him. A first date was not the time to tell someone you’re in love with them.
But he felt it. He acknowledged it. And he couldn’t wait to tell him someday.
---
Coy didn’t always have a bunch of friends. That was fine. Coy was content with this. He loved the ones he had deeply.
He had Will Wahony. His best friend. His anchor. The one who put up with all of his bullshit and loved him through it. Will had never once wavered on Coy, never once let him think that he wasn’t worth the time. Coy didn’t know what he would be without him in his life.
He also had Hanbon Hanbon. Basically his sister, nowadays. Hanbon carried a joy for life that he used to have a problem finding, and she spread that joy to everyone she encountered. There was a reason she was their senior class president and their homecoming queen. She was radiant. He felt so lucky that she had fallen into detention with them back then, and that she had stuck around.
So, now he had two friends. That’s double the amount of friends he had in September.
There was also someone else just as important in Coy’s life. His boyfriend, Anthony Po. The boy who had annoyed him for years, who he could never seem to understand enough to connect to. Who had one day decided he needed Coy to be a piece of his life. Who had been so scared of hurting Coy that he’d tried to keep his own feelings under wraps. Who, once exposed, openly expressed his affections, unafraid to be associated with him.
The boy who he loved. And who he was certain loved him back just as much.
So, maybe Coy didn’t have a bunch of friends. But that didn’t matter to him in the slightest. He still had a bunch of love and support being sent his way by the people who really care about him.
That meant more to Coy than anything else in the entire world.