Chapter Text
The goffice was forty degrees colder than the rest of the house and smelled exclusively of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and ozone.
It was Monday, 2:15 AM.
Hanbon sat cross-legged in a mesh chair, looking over the cut before anyone posted it. Two bright monitors washed the goffice in cold light.
On the left monitor, the editing timeline displayed four video tracks and eight audio tracks, spanning the seventy-two hours of footage.
On the right monitor, a clip titled day2-fireplace-raw-4.mov was paused at timestamp 00:1:32:18.
Hanbon reached for her mug of peppermint tea, took a sip, and pressed the spacebar.
On the screen, Anthony was sitting on the rug between Coy’s legs, looking up into Coy's face. The audio waveform spiked as Anthony said: “And who fell harder? Still me. I think, every single day since I gave him a couch to sleep on.”
Hanbon tapped the J and K keys, scrubbing backwards frame by frame.
She didn't watch Anthony's face. She had edited enough of Anthony's footage to know every theatrical smirk, every calibrated eye-roll, every vlog-ready vocal inflection he possessed.
She watched Coy.
In the sharp footage, Coy’s pupils widened the second Anthony’s hand touched his knuckles. She watched the involuntary tremor in Coy's throat as he swallowed. She watched Coy’s thumb twitch against his jeans, wanting to touch Anthony’s hair and stopping itself at the last second.
And then she scrubbed forward to the moment Anthony thought the clip was over.
Anthony hadn't hit stop on the remote. The camera kept rolling after the line ended, the fire crackling in the silence. Anthony didn't get up. He didn't break character. He leaned his forehead back against Coy's knee, closed his eyes, and exhaled like someone who had just put down a seventy-pound weight.
And Coy’s hand had come up, rested on Anthony’s shoulder, and stayed there.
Hanbon leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling.
"Idiots," she said to the empty goffice. "Absolute, unmitigated, catastrophic idiots."
The goffice door creaked open.
Will appeared in grey sweatpants and an oversized university hoodie, holding an empty bowl. He crossed the room without making a sound, stopped behind Hanbon’s chair, and looked at the dual screens.
"How bad is it?" Will asked.
Hanbon clicked a different clip: the Target produce aisle. Anthony's hand buried halfway into Coy's back jeans pocket while they debated honeycrisp apples.
Will stared at the screen for four seconds. He slowly reached into his hoodie pocket, pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and tossed it onto Hanbon’s keyboard.
"I hate them," Will said conversationally.
"I know," Hanbon said.
"They walked through the front door four hours ago and Anthony couldn't even look at the toaster without blushing."
"Did they talk to you?"
"Anthony mumbled something about checking the oil in the van and went outside," Will said, leaning against the desk. "Coy went straight to his room, closed the door, and hasn't come out since seven o'clock."
Hanbon picked up the twenty-dollar bill, smoothed it out against her knee, and slipped it into her desk drawer next to the other sixty dollars she had won from Will since moving into the house.
"What are you going to cut?" Will asked.
Hanbon looked at the timeline. There were hours of footage that were supposed to be just a massive channel bit for the weekend. And underneath it, running like a live electrical wire through every single frame, was the undeniable, suffocating truth of two people who had run out of excuses.
"I'm going to cut the comedy," Hanbon said softly. "And I'm going to leave the truth."
◇◇
At 3:30 AM, the knock on Coy’s bedroom door was so soft he almost thought it was the wind against the siding.
Coy was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed in the dark, staring at his phone screen. He hadn't turned on the lights since he came home.
"Come in," he said.
The door clicked open. Hanbon slipped into the room carrying two steaming mugs of chamomile tea. She walked over, set one on his bedside table, and sat down cross-legged on the floor by his laundry hamper.
"You're not sleeping," Hanbon said.
"Neither are you."
"I was watching the footage."
Coy felt a cold spike of panic shoot straight through his chest. He looked down at his socks. "Hanbon..."
"The Target clip," Hanbon said, her voice quiet, conversational, stripping away all of her usual sharp humor. "The fireplace Q&A. The forty minutes on Sunday morning where you two made pancakes and forgot the camera was running on the microwave."
Coy closed his eyes. "Tell me you're not uploading it."
"I can cut whatever you want me to cut, Coy," Hanbon said gently. "I can edit it so you look like two roommates doing a bit for thirty thousand dollars. I can put goofy sound effects over the Target aisle. I can bury the fireplace scene in the bloopers."
Coy didn't say anything.
Hanbon leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "Or I can edit it honest. Because I have spent long enough cutting around the way he looks at you when you’re not paying attention. And I have spent years watching you swallow every single sentence you actually wanted to say to him."
"Hanbon, if this goes on the internet—"
"Forget the internet for ten seconds," Hanbon interrupted, her voice firm. "The internet doesn’t live here. Anthony does. Will does. You do. I’m still the one cutting around all three of you."
She stood up, walked over to the bed, and put a warm hand on Coy’s shoulder, giving it a fierce squeeze.
"He's sitting on the back porch in the freezing cold right now," Hanbon said softly. "Go talk to him before I upload this video and let two million strangers tell him what you're too terrified to say yourself."
◇◇
The back porch was forty-four degrees, smelling of wet cedar and November pine.
Anthony was sitting on the third wooden step from the bottom, wearing a faded black hoodie with the hood pulled up over his messy hair, holding a ceramic mug between his palms to keep his fingers warm. His breath rose in pale, thin clouds against the dark yard.
The screen door gave a quiet squeak as Coy pushed it open.
Anthony didn't turn around, but his shoulders dropped half an inch. "You're supposed to be asleep."
"You're supposed to be wearing a jacket," Coy said. He walked down the steps in his flannel and wool socks, sitting down on the wooden step directly beside Anthony.
Their shoulders bumped. Neither of them moved away.
For two full minutes, they sat in the quiet dark, watching the red taillights of a car move slowly along the distant highway through the bare trees.
"Hanbon watched the cards," Coy said quietly.
Anthony took a slow sip from his mug. "I know. She came out here twenty minutes ago, called me an emotional coward, and threatened to delete my main channel."
A laugh slipped out of Coy before he could stop it; short, breathless, and sharp in the cold air. "Sounds like her."
"Coy."
"Yeah?"
Anthony set the mug down on the wooden step between his sneakers. He turned sideways on the stair, pulling his knees up, looking at Coy with an expression so bare and undefended that Coy felt his entire chest tighten.
"The pitch wasn't about the views," Anthony said.
The words hung in the night air between them, stark and undeniable.
"I know," Coy whispered.
"I didn't care about the two million clicks," Anthony pressed, his voice dropping into that raw, unpolished register that had never once touched a microphone. "I didn't care about the comments. I spent three months trying to find a way to hold your hand in a grocery store without terrifying you. I spent the last two years trying to figure out how to wake up next to you without losing the only person in the world I can't live without."
Coy looked down at Anthony's hands. His knuckles were red from the cold, resting on his denim knees.
"You're an idiot," Coy said, his voice trembling despite every effort to keep it level.
Anthony offered a weak, self-deprecating smile. "I know."
"You could have just told me."
"Could I?" Anthony looked up, his pale blue eyes searching Coy's face in the moonlight. "Would you have believed me? Or would you have thought it was another bit?"
Without hesitating or searching for a punchline, Coy reached out into the cold air and slid his fingers between Anthony's cold knuckles, locking their hands together, his thumb stroking across the back of Anthony's hand exactly the way Anthony had done at the kitchen counter six days ago.
"I would have believed you," Coy said softly.
Anthony let out a ragged breath that caught in his throat.
He leaned in.
There was no red tally light. There was no camera on a tripod, no ring light casting artificial halos across the wood, no two million strangers waiting to analyze the frames in the comments section. There was just the cold mountain air, the smell of woodsmoke, and Anthony sliding his hand up to the nape of Coy's neck, his fingers tangling in the soft hair behind Coy's ear.
Their mouths met with a quiet, breathless desperation, years of swallowed words and withheld glances finally collapsing into the warm, solid reality of Anthony's lips against his.
Coy leaned his entire weight into the kiss, his hand gripping the front of Anthony's hoodie, pulling him closer until there was no cold left anywhere in the world.
When Anthony finally pulled back an inch, his forehead rested against Coy's, his breath coming quick and warm in the dark.
"So," Anthony murmured, his thumb stroking Coy's cheekbone, a brilliant, genuine grin spreading across his mouth. "What do we tell Hanbon about the video?"
Coy smiled against his lips. "Tell her to post the bloopers. We're keeping the rest."
◇◇
Pinned by @BunchofFriendsYT
@anthpo
we failed the challenge on day one. also, coy's boyfriend says hi.
↳ @coypiso
he is still an idiot. like n subscribe gays, sorry, gays, sorry, gays, omg guys..