Chapter Text
The end of the week was fast approaching. You couldn’t exactly find it in you to view it as overly dramatic. Time moving so swiftly was definitely a good sign, or so you told yourself. Time wasn’t dragging because you were more or less having the time of your life to begin with. Besides, it’s not like a single week is an uncommon timeframe for your meetings.
It brings an increasingly warm smile to your face to think of those days long past. There was something about thinking of that kid with the skinny legs and the bright mind, and to glance sideways to see him there with his confident posture and enticing expressions. It’s not that he’d changed. He was fundamentally the same person. However, it felt incredibly humbling to tell yourself that you’d witnessed his growth; no matter how fragmented this perception might have been.
He was currently telling you about this stunt he’d pulled at his school, only in response to your high number of stories of successful pranks you’d maneuvered over the years. You think he might be under the impression that what he was rambling about also qualified as a prank. You can’t bring yourself to agree. It’s probably the scientific jargon that’s thrown every which way, or the way he snorts instead of actually laughing in the pauses he took in his speech.
You’re sort of otherwise occupied anyway. With what? You should say that you are preoccupied with getting the two of you to destination. He’d asked you where was the absolute best place to photograph fallen slow, and you’d had to comply. It had excited you beyond belief when he’d pulled out the very same camera from forever ago. You’d fought down the urge to question him on just how he’d managed to preserve it. You’d also fought with the similar urge to ask him about his fascination with snow; he’d brought it up too many times during his stay, and you’re positive his campus’ location could offer him some snow.
You spend some time imagining him hopping around in snow storms, desperately photographing the sights. Maybe he was originally from the South then? You should definitely ask him, this should be vital information. You don’t like pushing him for information though, so you just keep it to yourself.
You’d decided you would drag him through the city’s heart to get to the destination you had in mind. You’d noticed that, for someone who was somewhat or very much introverted, he did seem to light up when in busy streets. Maybe it was his sense of observation, but maybe that too had to do with his upbringing. You figure you’d sort of gotten used to the city life over the years, but you can also safely say you did not compare to his ease. So really your mind should be set on leading him correctly.
Instead, your mind is bugging on just how, yes, you were right and that, yes, he lit up like no other in this environment. You try to flatter yourself by thinking it might have something to do with your presence, but mostly you concentrate on him. How his facial features were redder with the colder weather, how his scarf hugged the line of his neck, how his thin wrists poked out of his jacket’s pockets. Your right wrist keeps brushing against his left one too and your senses are flooded with the idea of holding his hand.
And he would let you. He’d let you hold his hand in the middle of the grocery store. And many other places, but that one still felt quite impressive. Definitely like a married couple. And you’d probably kissed his lips a hundred ways already. And you’d gotten him to laugh, to tear up, to raise his voice, to speak softly, to look you in the eye in the morning and smile at you as if you’d been the one thing he’d always been after. You felt more like a couple than you probably had the right to. But he did sleep in your bed and he did make sure to always be within reach from you, and... You think you could probably ask him to be your boyfriend.
He’d say yes. You’re positive.
Now he’s glancing your way, laughing squeakily at his own story. You don’t even have to force your smile, but it is certainly not directed towards whatever geeky tale he had weaved. You say that affectionately, of course. Maybe you should ask him right now. Because all you can really think about is holding his hand.
Your steps slowly come to a stop and he grins at you almost coyly as he synchronizes himself perfectly to you. You get the weird impression that he might automatically know where you’re going with this.
“So, hey.”
Incredibly eloquent. Apparently eloquent enough for him to lean towards you and to match your almost hushed tone of voice.
“Hey.”
You exhale with the slow rush of adoration and of admiration. If you secured him into your life, it might change everything, right? How much better would it make everything? How worthwhile will it all have been? The answers to those are exhilarating. So you don’t conjure them into thoughts.
A lot of things could have gone wrong. A lot was even an understatement in some ways. A lot, and quite a few things you could imagine vividly. What does go wrong was not up there with those things. It wasn’t anywhere. It wasn’t even a thing.
It’s a busy street. But to you, it’s only just David and yourself.
Still, you hear the shout of the name from outside of that connection. You hear the shout of the name because it is a name you have trained yourself to hold in dear esteem, and later on, to completely abandon. It’s a name that resonates with parts of you that feel dull and out of use. It’s not your name, but your head snaps up as if it was. David does the same.
With a glance over his shoulder, just about the most graceful of ways to turn to the sound of your name. Though the shout in this case had been “Strider!”
It does not, in any way, begin to make sense when the person who’d disturbed your small reality, marched up to the person you’d deemed, for a long time now, your significant other. It doesn’t either make sense to see David greeting him naturally.
The hoodie of the stranger reads that he is definitely of the same university as David. Their quick budding conversation and exchange of questions points to them being acquaintances. You hear a few things. You hear the newly arrived stranger ask the person you considered dearly to be your soul mate just why he wasn’t back home in Texas.
Your throat starts tightening up.
Even though David replies with kind words to your regard, presents you as his best friend, but that’s when bile definitely does rise to your mouth.
It’s a quick greeting, or so it feels like. When the guy does try to introduce himself, he meets your glare and that’s enough to help him scatter away. Though the other involved party does meet your glare too. He doesn’t look extremely used to the set of your jaw or the dark burn in your eyes. You do believe though, that he’s seen it many times before upon first meeting you that one summer.
You must have stood there like lunatics for much too long. But no one bumps into you. A few bump into David. It takes you more than a couple of moments to realize that really he isn’t returning your dark gaze in the least, instead returning it with a very guilty look. Which you’d been picking up on this whole week, but had never pinpointed quite like this.
“David Strider,” you say it with all of the finality you’re feeling. You have a hard time recognizing your voice. You nod your head once, pressing your lips together in a thin line, showing the gravity of your understanding. “Dave Strider.”
You recognize your voice even less now that it’s plunging towards hysterics.
It doesn’t help that there is full acceptance of the situation in the energy he’s displaying. He knows exactly what you mean. He is recognizing it as the truth.
“You have to be shitting me.”
You can’t even be bothered to still look at him. You might be causing a scene now, you’re not sure, but your voice had dangerously spiked upwards. You bring your hands up in pretext of pulling your hair. The hair pulling is really just a tactic to calm down your tears of panic.
“I’m sorry.”
“Well that’s the thing though, Dave, you’re always just sorry. That’s all you do.”
The name still felt right as ever. It instantly fills you with anger to know that some part of you had been constantly drumming on your nerves for you to clue this puzzle together. Of course it was Dave. Of course. You’d always known, hadn’t you?
“Words cannot convey how I’m feeling right now.” And when you bring your hands back down, you catch that he’s put his slightly up, as if ready to defend himself.
And he should. You have ample reasons to beat him to a pulp. He was simultaneously the last person you wanted to see... And the person you wanted to see the most.
“It’s ok, hey, I know how you’re feeling.” His voice, however, is still lingering in the realms of what had been before the circumstance that simply should not have existed had in fact occurred.
His voice was honey, his stance was careful. And when he put his hand out to grab yours, the true opposite of his movement was the way you immediately jerked backwards.
It’s a busy street. But to you, it’s only just Dave and yourself. It’s a busy street. But oh how you wish it were only you. How you wish he could let you escape from all of this.
“How could you possibly know what I’m feeling?”
It’s as if you’re feeling everything at once. It’s how you should complete the sentence, but you don’t do it.
Instead you acknowledge that he really does know what you’re feeling. There’s no strong base of evidence, but... You’re looking at him and he’s looking at you and you might as well recognize that you’re reflecting one another. Questions burst from every which place of your mind. When had he figured it out? Had he always known? He might have. He’d always been decently more intelligent than you. He might have known all along.
But his face speaks of having worked together that you were at the same time, the last person he wanted, as well as the very first.
It doesn’t seem that farfetched that he’d fallen for you at that last camp now. He must have known by then.
Your worst fears are a breath away from your lips. So you march off. You turn back towards where you’d come from. You needed to be home. You needed a shower. Or you needed to play. Or you needed to smash something to pieces.
The term emotional torture has never rung the way that it is ringing now.
You could not have realized that your pace was excessively high without the familiar pitter-patter of Dave’s feet. The word ‘familiar’ hurts you in ways you regret understanding.
You can imagine him dodging and weaving through the crowd to keep up with you. Thinking of him in the same way you always had hurts as well.
“You could have told me,” you state boldly, boldly enough that the wind will carry it to him despite your positioning.
He could have told you. Because he certainly knew you. He certainly knew your chumhandle, your full name, your hometown. He’d known.
It sinks in in the sort of steady way that has ways of awakening all of your emotional awareness at once. It sinks in that the moment you’d given a shred of yourself, must have been when he’d understood, and when he’d also fled. Not only from that building you both slept in every summer, but from your life back at home. He’d run, and when he’d come back, he’d made extra sure that you wouldn’t be able to recognize him.
The walk home is a lot shorter than expected. The only words you speak to him are when you reach the top floor. And by then, you’ve started to put every clue together and lamenting how idiotic you’d been to have missed the big picture.
You tell him, simply: “You should have told me.”
And when you look at him, it’s with a genuine sort of distress you know can’t leave him feeling innocent.
He’d really messed up this time.
But this was Dave.
And the revelation was putting you completely beside yourself.
------------------
The apartment is eerily calm.
The place was stunning, of course. You had a hard time describing John’s sense of décor, but it was something that incorporated classiness as well as the definite contemporary vibe. Like John had to be just about the coolest person of his day and age, and that his home just had to showcase that perfectly as well.
Of course, you’d always deemed that your own home aesthetics were strong. However, after nearly a week here, you’ve come to feel slightly ashamed of your own personal sense of fashion. You might be the sort of person who felt a deep sort of affection for belongings that called to your interests, but maybe your shelves were stacked just a bit too high. There was something pure in his home.
As there was something pure in his smile. And the way he kissed you. Just about everything related to him was basking in these soft nuances of things that were just a little ahead of you. You’d had no idea who he would have shaped up to be when you had made the grand exit out of his life. The realization that who he had become was someone so full of life and of kindness was more than reassuring.
You remember him, angry and frustrated and a little lost, you’d bet. You see him this week and he’s... Appreciative and intently listening and caring. That was until an hour or so ago.
An hour or so ago, you’d seen him exactly as you’d seen him on the very first day, when you were thirteen years old. It was the same, but it was different under the circumstance. A man now, who had you more or less wrapped around his finger, and who’d literally been seething at you. Of course, you feel absolutely trapped.
He’s escalated back up to how furious he’d been with you a long time ago. You’re dependent of him right now though. You sit rigidly on his sofa, the one shaped in an ‘L’, but you are sitting at the very edge, ready to bolt, ready to run for your life. You think you actually might.
You consider sleeping at the airport. That’s a thing that people do...
At the same time, you don’t really want to leave things the way they are right now.
It’s sort of tricky to make a move though. You’re stuck here, staring at the dark and flat television screen. You don’t really dare to turn the thing on, besides it’s not like you could concentrate on the images whatsoever.
When you’d arrived, he’d slammed as many doors as possible, and then had settled for taking a shower that was just a little too long. You’re also betting that it was a little too warm, because the steam that had billowed out of there when he’d exited the bathroom was impressive, and the red flush of his flesh was almost worrisome.
He’d gotten into pajamas right away, and that had reassured you at least a little bit. You were almost thinking that he might just be making himself comfortable so that he could address you properly and patch things up.
Instead, he slammed more doors. And you’d remained stock-still on the couch.
Eventually, he’d gotten around to preparing supper, but hadn’t requested your help. Every night before had been spent fighting over kitchen space and stealing kisses in between different steps of the recipe. Needless to say, you didn’t quite exactly feel welcomed to enter the kitchen. So you didn’t.
You guess you’d assumed he was only going to serve himself. However, he’d set a plate down onto the coffee table, and had retreated to the bedroom with his own plate.
You removed your shades before trying to eat. In that moment, you absolutely hated what they stood for, that vast part of your identity you’d poured into them felt artificial and repulsive. You really had messed up this time. You could have prevented this, you really could have. In a million different ways.
You ate with one fist pressed to your right eye. You felt like shit. To the point where the tears just weren’t coming. You could face the fact that you weren’t deserving of being the one in tears. He’d said it pretty plainly. You weren’t able to own up to yourself, you were only an apologetic mess.
Still, the food felt completely wrong in your gut and you felt overwhelmingly bad that he’d prepared some for you. Eating felt more like a punishment than it did a reward.
So you end the day laying on your side, an arm firmly wrapped over your stomach as you fought with digestion.
Of course, you understood that you’d be sleeping here... That is of course if he didn’t kick down his bedroom door and corner you with a shotgun. You had a fair idea where you could locate sheets and stuff. The thought of getting up though was extremely unpleasant.
It also dawned to you that you couldn’t get changed seeing as your suitcase was trapped in John’s room, but then again if you didn’t have enough energy to hop off the couch, you didn’t have enough energy to wiggle out of your clothes.
It wasn’t really that long before the sky completely sunk into nocturnal shades. There was a sentiment filling you that was strangely familiar, but all the same came as a foreign presence. Drifting to sleep still all dressed up, your tongue uncomfortable inside of your mouth knowing that you hadn’t brushed your teeth, and your stomach heavy with resentment and food you should not have wolfed down so miserably; it was possibly the first time you did not feel at home here.
You could not blame him. How had you reacted again when you’d been faced with the same sort of revelation? You had thrown him out of your life with minimal thought. He hadn’t gone there yet, but if he were to, there was no way you could judge or preach.
The thought of separation affected you more than it should, surely. Because you’d gone through it with your head held high for years. But...
When your eyes open up once more, there is no way for you to tell what time it is. Everything is dark, you are still fully clothed, your mouth now feels too wet, and the arm around your stomach has gone much too tight for comfort. You had a fair shot at sitting up and looking to the kitchen for the microwave’s take on time.
Though you do not once you start comprehending that it was the hand now on your shoulder that had woken you up.
You were wrong in establishing that everything was dark, now that your eyes were locked with his, you could pick up on the light from the hallway, his bedroom light surely. To you it seemed as if he hadn’t in fact slept. He was in pajamas, as earlier, his glasses were still on though and his hair wasn’t quite as catastrophically messy as it was when he rolled out of bed.
His voice was nothing but a rustle, a very deliberate but very faint call of your name. “Dave.” And you can feel it in the weight of it that it is no accident for once, it is the true recognition of who you were as a person and who you were to him.
You would have said he’d spoken it to wake you up, but your eyes are truly locked. Maybe that whisper was a reassurance he was handing to you. You should say you’re sorry, but after what he’d said back outside, it felt deeply inappropriate.
“The entire time we knew each other, at camp, I didn’t know either.” You match his tone and your voice summersaults with great effort as to not die off miserably.
His hand doesn’t move from your shoulder, and eventually, he brings his other hand up to cup your cheek. You shut your eyes. You’re still afraid of the impact, still afraid of what he will decide from what he’d just learned.
He surprises you.
“I should have just told you where I was going, that first year. I should have told you, as your best friend, what was going on.” He takes a deep breath, your hear it in the halt of his speech, so you open your eyes to watch his ribcage expand slowly. “There were so many times I could have found out, or let you know, and I didn’t.”
He surprises you by throwing in your face what just happened to be the exact same reasoning you had borrowed when you’d just found out as well. He was surprising you by matching your actions and, more than ever, the fear gripped you that he would pull the same disappearance trick that you had.
He didn’t really need to do anything as flashy as you had though. He’d just tell you to go, and that would be that. You’d leave because it had always been him who’d been gracing you with his presence, not the other way around. Reality wasn’t those summers spent together, reality wasn’t him chasing after you and longing for your attention. Reality was years of conversations in which you were well aware that he probably had dozens of better things to do, but was spoiling you with his friendship.
You’d pushed the friendship away. You knew, he knew, you both knew now. And yet he wasn’t shoving you away, or turning the other way either; his presence was soft. And his hands on you almost felt as if maybe they weren’t truly touching you, as if he needed a better show of your trust to finally make contact.
There is definitely something that contracts in your stomach and you feel your expression shift into one of pain as to keep you from vocalizing it instead. The arm you’d wrapped around your midsection tightened momentarily before relaxing entirely. Maybe your aim right now shouldn’t be to keep things in.
“There were just as many times I could have found out or let you know too, you know? And like, I’ve gone over all of them so many times.”
And as you speak, you recognize that no, he was not shoving you off or looking the other way, he was cornering you carefully, as if you were the one about to bolt.
As if you were the one who wanted to leave, and he the one who wanted you there. You finish what you were saying with an overwhelming sense of urgency, as if his attitude was in fact encouraging you to run away. “And I mean, they’re all meaningless. They mean nothing.”
His hands shy away imperceptibly so as you drag yourself up to a sitting position. You feel defeated, even though he’s crouched down at your level, even though his hands were careful and caring.
You believed in what you were saying. All of those what ifs were weightless, unrelated. There could have been a thousand clues more. It could have been flat out obvious. It wouldn’t have changed that the boy who’d been around for a week every year or so, was not the boy you’d grown up with.
Merging them together had been painful, though not impossible. But up to that defining moment, they simply were not one and the same.
Surely, this is how he must feel about you too.
“You were so mean.” You say it with conviction, and it was supposed to lead up to a lot more, to sharp and illuminated conclusions. But there was nothing more once you’d gotten that off your chest.
Hearing yourself say it is different to what you’d expected.
“You were just so mean,” you repeat as you try to angle your body away from him.
Maybe he’d been right about you. Because already, you feel the pressing need to dash out of this situation. You had not wanted to admit it to yourself when you’d met him, that someone could so purely loathe you. You certainly wouldn’t admit that it was your best friend who’d shown that dislike for you.
You’ve finally cycled through everything in between though, and now it’s simply the cold bland truth.
You see him kneel down and sit back on his heels. Just like that he’s lower than the level you’re at, his hands are returned, moving nervously over his lap. And you’re free to scoot back until you collide with the couch’s back, knees instinctively pulling in. You look away, you don’t really want to be here anymore.
“Yeah, I guess I was a bit of a mean kid. C’mon though, you already knew that before we met.”
His tone had dipped into casual and just as you were retreating in on yourself, you had the faint idea that he was mirroring it, backing up carefully to give you more space.
Your arms cross atop your knees and your face disappears as you shake your head insistently. John from online might have been a bit upfront, a bit careless at times, but he was kind. He was the good guy who sometimes slipped up, but was still somehow wholly good.
“Well, even if you didn’t see it, I was always at least a little bit mean with you.”
His voice sounds like nothing more than a sigh. You’d rather it be gone entirely. You do not want this conversation and you do not want the words he’s offering you. You could stand up for yourself, you could stop him plainly, but instead you shrink in on yourself, reveling in childishness.
“Oh come on, Dave, I made you feel bad about yourself plenty, even when we were little kids.” You haven’t stopped shaking your head, but your silence is accommodating enough that he can keep going. “But I still loved you, you know?”
And it’s automatic, despite the situation, despite the feeling in your gut, despite that he was sitting on the floor of his dark living room; you lift your chin up enough to meet his eyes with yours, and you say it back. You tell him, “I love you too, John.” And it does distinctively feel good to have made that clear, even after your grandiose betrayal had been put into play.
He smiles at you and you’re almost surprised at finding his expression to be so serene. After all the door slamming, you could not have anticipated his next move to be this one.
“Yeah, and I always wanted you to love me.” The two of you do nothing but watch each other for a few moments, until he speaks up again. “Say, where are your shades?”
You tilt your chin to indicate behind him, on the coffee table, next to the empty plate.
He gets up to go pick them up and when he sits back down, on the couch next to you instead, you almost let out a sob of relief. You unknot yourself from the anxious and frightened position to instead sit normally next to John, weight leaning slightly against him.
The shades are on his lap and he’s smiling at them with a fondness that makes you question why he hadn’t accepted them when you’d offered.
The facade of his expression breaks cleanly, and he’s glancing at you with tired and bitter amusement. “I was going to get you these for your thirteenth birthday.”
It’s unexpected. But it made you smile too, in a different way. Maybe those shades had always been destined to be yours? That was sort of cool. A really cool story, in fact. And when you try to line up the dates in your head, it makes sense and falls together quite nicely. It doesn’t seem as if he’s appreciating it in the same way. You’re left feeling as he has more bits and pieces to offer to that, and you’re not disappointed when he sighs heavily. He leans his head back onto the couch and you watch his eyes disappear behind dark lashes and fragile looking eyelids.
“Do you know how infuriating it was? Some kid our age, some pretty boy with cool clothes and a cool camera strap had your shades. It was the absolute worst.” One of his hands moves to ruffle through his hair almost aggressively. You could see it in the strain of his forearm that he was getting worked up. But you weren’t moving, you were waiting, trying to let him speak whatever else was still left. “When I didn’t win the auction, I don’t know, but... It felt like I ruined some important step in our friendship? Maybe that sounds dumb, but it was so disappointing that I couldn’t get my hands on them no matter what, even when they were right there in front of me.”
You still say nothing, and he says one more thing. “My entire life I’ve felt like I’ve been a poor friend to you, and these always felt like the catalyst to that.”
“Well, give them to me now.”
Your face is possibly reading as if you’d just spoken the most obvious of notions to some kid who wasn’t listening. And really, out of all the feelings he’d poured at, that was probably not the proper response. In fact, you had as steady a stream of feelings on all of these matters as he did; a lot more to say. It’s all that you say.
But he looks at you as if you were the most brilliant of all the beings he’d ever met. For the first time, you consider that resolving that both his childhood friend and his childhood flame were one and the same person could possibly be an asset, and not the push to help him fall out of love with you. Maybe, he loved you even more now.
He takes a deep breath and picks up the shades. “Dave. Last December you turned twenty-two. We talked on the day of your birthday, but I didn’t know that it was, because you were keeping it secret.”
There’s no malice when he glances at you with a smirk, only playful amusement. You’re increasingly surprised with how things are unfolding. You’re increasingly feeling happier and safer.
“It is my honor to bestow these shades upon you.” He bows his head as he unfolds the arms of your aviators and sets them atop your head, as if it were a tiara. You can’t miss his beaming smile. “Let them stand for our friendship. For the fact that all obstacles and crappy misunderstandings in the world cannot come in between us.”
His joking stance had quickly taken a dip for true dedicated love. So when he gathers your hands into his, you’ve already understood that the atmosphere had shifted.
“Can you forgive me?”
You think of telling him that you had already done so days, weeks, months ago. You simply nod your head and keep your eyes lowered when you ask it for yourself too. “Can you forgive me too?”
It’s clear to you that you’re only able to ask him about it because you’ve understood that he wasn’t going to say no. He was going to forgive you. The safety you feel here and now is one you’d almost forgotten.
“I’ll always forgive you, Dave.”
You bite your lower lip in a futile effort to keep your emotions from completely ravaging your current state. He brings a hand to the back of your head and kisses your forehead. Of course, as soon as you can, you smash your lips together. You do knock your forehead against his by accident, and it’s much the same to your first kiss, and you have to breathe out a quiet laugh before pouring those unmanageable emotions into the continuous kisses.
When his hands get under your clothes, you don’t think of him getting to places you’d kept everyone else out from. You don’t shake with the fear of him throwing you out after he’d gotten to your core. Instead, you realize that you really do fully trust him.
Finally, it does feel like you’ve gotten your best friend back.
You don’t make it off the couch. And when you wake up, the light had filtered in such a way that the entire apartment seemed alit. When you pass a hand through your hair, you find that your shades were still gloriously resting atop your head. Your stomach felt ok now, and somehow so did your mouth, and everything all at once felt a lot more than ok. John is sleeping with his cheek pressed to your shoulder and both his right arm and leg thrown over you. Your clothes are badly scattered at your feet and the floor. You think, were it any other day, that would bother you and you’d have to pick them back up. But instead you just rest a cheek to his hair and doze back off.
------------------
You try not to worry, you really do.
You still worry. Quite a bit.
Dave is just not talking to you as much as you’d like him to. He has a lot of studies, you know that. And he likes to keep his plate full; that’s a thing you thought back on, all those parties you’d assumed your best friend had been going to were probably volunteer work and whatever else a person like the one you’d gotten to know could get up to as a teen. He’s busy. But the more space grows in between the times you can catch him online, and the more that one sinking feeling settles on your shoulders.
You could recognize this behavior. Were you really going to ignore the pattern? But no, you weren’t going to smother him or anything. Or should you?
You just don’t know.
It’s not like he should be abandoning you again. He was basically your boyfriend. Well, you think. You’d never officially gone over it, but you’d been intimate and everything. More than once! And you’d spoken to him with everything that was on your heart, and he’d let you in, and... It just did not make sense.
Besides, everything was actually going great. There was no true purpose to your unease here. You’d even reunited with your old gang of friends after March. After a lot of flirtatious convincing, Dave had finally reactivated his old pesterchum account and... You swear that on that group chat, it was as if it was the happiest day of your lives. For everyone.
Dave was graduating too, and you were super proud. And these days, everything you were composing came in quick and grandiose flashes of inspiration, and life was so very good. But Dave didn’t come online all that much.
You couldn’t help yourself from taking it as a flash from the past. That was years ago though, and you’d both been hiding behind so much and things had been so complicated. Things shouldn’t be so complicated now. He wasn’t supposed to stray away from you like that. What was going on?
You hadn’t had anything like a real talk in what was about a week now. He seemed pretty dismissive to the idea that he was busier than usual too. This was not good for you. This was on your mind way too much. Maybe you should just try to be honest again, confront him with the reality that you were a bit fearful of him leaving you. There was probably nothing attractive about you being overly clingy, but... It was a lot better with Dave when you could express yourself freely and openly. It was better for the both of you. So you were going to do it.
Maybe not tonight.
Summer is upon you and your day of work had been heaps of fun, as usual. You’d gotten some pretty young kids today, and those were always the funnest flyers. But after a full day of that, you were tired, and with no longer frequently hopping into a tunnel of air, outside’s summer wrath wasn’t the best of companions.
You were tired. And after an entire day of upbeat attitude and enthusiastic leadership, you really had to cool it. Not that any of that had been fake throughout the day, but you had to pull it from deep within when things were going poorly at home. It was going pretty poorly at home. You mean, there isn’t really that much to complain about. Good job, good shelter, good food, good family, good friends, all of those wonderful things.
You just don’t want to be in that place again. That place where you are waiting for someone to come back even when you aren’t holding the hope any longer. Hopelessly waiting. Waiting because there was nothing else to do, but knowing that the day would never arrive.
Of course, the day had still arrived last time. But after how many hundreds of days? It had been more than one thousand days of wait, you think. It had come. But even if it had come, you had known that it wouldn’t. Even though it was falsified knowledge, it was incredibly challenging knowledge to drag with you. It hurt.
You could not be that person again.
So you head home, exhausted, and terrified at the idea of regressing into someone you’d never, ever asked to be.
You come home to Dave sitting on the third to last step leading up to the intercom locking your building. His shades are perched atop his head, and he smiles and waves at you immediately. There’s a bag of his belongings on the second to last step of the staircase.
There are many things that come to mind. The two strongest are a bit superficial you suppose, but they are filled with true endearment.
At first, it’s his eyes. His eyes; that had taken so long for you to see them, glimpses in the dark, and half formed guesses were all you had to go on. And there he was, his red eyed stare in broad daylight, directed at you so confidently, so trustingly.
The second is his aura. The same as the first day you had met. And all is well.
You try to downplay your smile as you skip up the first steps, it only breaks through once you shove at his shoulders.
“You gigantic ass! Do you know how much I was worrying?”
You don’t have to explain much more you think because he’s already laughing with you. Could have been that he’d been keeping quiet as to better surprise you. Maybe or maybe not, but in any case it had worked.
“Come on, stand up so I can kiss you.” Your hands move from their aggressing stance to a loving caress as they shift down his arms to take hold of his hands.
Once he’s up, you stand with him, foreheads resting together, as if it were already tradition.
“We need to talk,” he forms the words on your lips and you kiss his for every word of the sentence.
“About?” He kisses you once.
“Future stuff.”
So you kiss him twice, and you welcome him to actually get inside before you swoop him down into a more passionate kiss.
It’s a lot more kissing once you’re inside than it is talking. There’s not even time to ask for details on just why and how he was here and how amazing that it all was. It was just the shape of his lips and the touch of his tongue, and the palms of his hands pressed into yours.
He looks a lot less put together when you are through with him, but that’s more than alright, and the mess he’s in leaves him with a smile that is quite expressive for the person that he usually presented.
You finally get around to that future talk, but it turns out that he isn’t quite sure what to bring up with it.
So eventually you ask him: “What are your next steps in your NASA portfolio building?”
And he shrugs a lot more than you would expect him to, makes it a smaller deal than he always had ever since his childhood.
You push him until he tells you sincerely what it is on your mind. What that is catches you off guard.
“You know, I’ve always been chasing after that one feeling. That everything could just stop weighing on me for a while? I just hadn’t considered that I could feel that way simply by being around someone.”
You never really answer to that, and he doesn’t force you to either. You take it in as best as you can despite the rush of... The rush of everything.
You do spend hours though, talking about master’s and doctorates and things that really didn’t relate to your lifestyle at all. But even after hours, plans were sorted out as: those where you could be together passed, and those where you couldn’t failed.
By the end of the night, you’ve made it clear that he was welcomed to stay as long as he wanted, despite never having given you warning of his visit, and he’d made short work of making himself right at home with you. He’s throwing kicks at you while you both brush your teeth in front of your bathroom mirror when you bring his earlier statement up. You tell him:
“I got what you mean though, Dave. Out of everything, being with you is the most physics defying thing for me too!”
You snicker when he stammers, toothbrush still in his mouth. But you do settle down when he kisses you before bed. And maybe this really was being without gravity.