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There’s a lot of things Pete can recall adults telling him to do over and over again growing up.
Adults are insufferably bossy and Pete had been a relatively obedient child regardless. He blames the ever growing weight of anxiety for that, but there’s just always been a part of him that’s eager to please. When he gets told to do something, especially by an adult in his life, he listens. That’s the way it is.
Every rule has an exception.
The first time he meets Gary Smith, he doesn’t know who he is, which makes him about the only person in Bullworth. Gary doesn’t know who he is either but that doesn’t stop him from making the instantaneous decision that he’s in love with Pete.
It’s overwhelming. Pete’s only been alive for six short years. He’s not yet made to be loved with the full intensity of Gary’s attentions. Gary doesn’t yet know how not to flood the people around him. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
It takes all of five minutes before Pete’s in tears, knee bloody and caked in sand. He leaves the first day of first grade convinced the Smith boy hates him. Gary watches his parents lead him away owlishly, the last to be retrieved.
Pete’s not sure how long Gary sits there waiting for his own parents but the anxious impatience expected of a first grader last to be picked up is absent entirely.
He remembers coming in the next day to teachers whispering, distracting him from his own uneasiness. Pete is early but Gary is already sitting alone. Pete wonders if he even went home from the day before but his polo is a different color so he must have.
He’s staring dazed at seemingly nothing with his hands under his butt the way Pete has to when he gets in trouble.
Gary, Pete eventually learns, is almost always in trouble.
His teacher pulls away from her whispered conversation, smiling brightly. Pete offers his own little nervous smile back. Most of Pete’s smiles are nervous. “Maybe we stay away from him, okay?” she suggests and Pete turns his head to find Gary staring at them now.
It wasn’t a whisper; she’s not discreet about her thoughts at all. Gary makes no sound of protest, just stares. Waiting. There is something in Gary’s eyes that makes his decision for him. He turns back to look up at her, face determined.
“I’m going to sit down,” he declares, turning to walk steadily to the group of tables in the center of the room. Each table he passes quickens the beat of his heart, or maybe it’s Gary’s he hears. It’s so loud; almost as loud as Gary’s stare.
Pete pauses at the little plastic chair next to Gary’s own, no hesitation as he slides in, facing forward even as Gary turns to continue looking at him, hands still firmly under him. Gary is silent and even though they’ve known each other for no time at all, it feels wrong.
He can feel the teacher’s eyes on them but it’s impossible to look up when he knows he’ll see a look of disappointment. Pete’s never disobeyed before. He turns to Gary but says nothing because he’s six and what’s there to say?
“I like your dress,” Gary says, breaking the silence.
“Because of the cat?” Pete asks, remembering Gary’s tangent during circle time the day before. It’d been almost impossible to follow, incredibly off topic and spoken at an unintelligible speed, but remembers the look in Gary’s eyes.
Even if he’s not sure what Gary’s saying, his eyes always give away what he means.
“Because I like you,” Gary corrects, facing forward again as more kids arrive, eying the two of them as they take their own seats at the surrounding tables. No one fills the remaining seats of their table. “But I like the cat too.”
Pete also pulls himself forward. Like he suspected, the teacher still has a concerned look on her face. He wonders if his disobedience is going to be noted. If the principle will know, or the president, or worse yet, his parents.
When adults tell him to do something, he listens.
It’s not the last time Gary makes him cry that year.
—-
By the time they reach mid-elementary, the school doesn’t put them in the same class anymore. If they can’t be made to separate entirely, the school will at least reduce the opportunities for contact. It’s chaos for months and months, tantrums that Pete can hear through the walls in his own classroom, but eventually the hurricane in Gary dies out.
Pete is almost disappointed, buried under the relief. It’s a selfish feeling. Gary suffers through his rage and Pete can’t stand for someone suffering in his honor.
The time away only makes him more forceful when they come back together, aggressive and Too Much. Recess and the minutes before pickup end in tears more often than not. Sometimes it’s physical; mostly it’s just Gary himself.
“You stay away from that boy, sweetheart. He’s trouble,” his dad tells him over and over, pacing the hallway outside the bathroom while his mom rubs peroxide into the angry cut on his elbow. A casualty from being pulled too close to the brick wall by the library.
Gary had wanted to show him something.
It’s not the first injury. It’s not the first lecture. They’re so sure Gary is harassing him. Hunting him down with the sole purpose to hurt.
“Do you understand?” his dad asks finally, desperately as a pink bandaid is gently smoothed over the wound. His mother remains silent the whole time but Pete can tell she has unvoiced thoughts on the matter as well. Pete flexes, testing the pain. He blinks, looking up at the expectant look from his father.
He nods, because his dad asked him a question and Pete always listens.
The next morning at school, Gary slides out of his line in front of the classroom next door to stand next to Pete. With the usual morning excitement, none of the teachers pay them any mind and Gary takes this as permission to move closer until their hands are almost touching.
There’s silence between them even in the buzz of excited elementary kids around them.
“There’s bunnies on your bandaid,” Gary notes, their pinkies bumping together.
“Uh-huh,” Pete agrees, looking down as Gary hooks their pinkies together and then up at the smile being offered, more of a blinding grin if Pete had to describe it.
“They’re cute like you,” Gary insists, swinging their hands gently between them. To someone else, the comment would seem out of place. Pete accepts the compliment with a silent flush which Gary knowingly interprets as thanks.
The rest of the morning period is spent this way until the bell rings and Gary is ushered by his frazzled teacher into his own classroom. It feels like Gary takes all the warmth of the world with him.
When Pete’s dad asks about school at dinner, Pete tells him about the caterpillar Gary put down the back of his shirt at recess and ignores the easily-identifiable look his parents share.
—-
Eventually, his mother stops trying to uphold his father’s insistence that Pete stay away from Gary unless absolutely necessary when Pete starts interpreting necessary as ‘Gary wants’.
They start spending a lot more time outside of school together. By the beach and in the park and Gary’s impossibly giant house that Pete’s terrified he’s going to get lost in and even Pete’s own house which is embarrassingly small by comparison.
The first time Gary comes over, it’s because he refuses to stop following Pete home. Now that they walk home, usually hand in hand until they have to part ways at the road leading into the Vale, it’s impossible to force Gary home before dark without Pete.
Pete finds he doesn’t put up much of a fight as Gary tangles their fingers back together, chattering about something stupid Derby Harrington said. Gary, Pete thinks with the faintest inkling of annoyance, is a little obsessed with Derby.
The chattering only stops when they finally arrive at Pete’s house and suddenly Pete can’t stop noticing all the little imperfections. The paint is peeling and some of the shutters on the windows are missing cause his dad hasn’t gotten around to fixing them yet.
There’s a little garden peeking from the side of the house that Pete tends with his mom but suddenly it looks like an ugly patch of dirt scarring already subpar landscaping.
Pete tugs Gary’s hand insistently, trying to force him into the house quicker but Gary is bigger if only by a little and refuses to be budged. He’s staring wide-eyed, focus flickering quicker than Pete can keep up with and Pete can feel embarrassment settle in his cheeks.
“Gary,” he says, tugging again.
“It’s like a fairytale,” Gary whispers quietly and Pete’s stomach drops, annoyance reemerging to tangle messily with the embarrassment.
Gary’s house is like a fairytale; tall and intimidating and beautiful like a castle. Pete’s house is just a house. Everything good about it comes from the people inside and Gary is being ridiculous. Pete is sure he must be being made fun of.
“If you’re going to just stand outside, you can go home,” Pete says shortly.
If Gary takes note of Pete’s attitude, he doesn’t say anything. He becomes the one tugging Pete into the house, as if Pete could actually suddenly make him leave. Pete wonders if Gary really would, if Pete looked him in the eyes and told him to.
Somehow, they manage to slip to the entrance to Pete’s room without running into either of his parents. It’s a blessing; Pete isn’t ready to witness Gary’s first real confrontation with his dad. He’s not sure who would come out on top but he knows for certain he himself will be the loser.
Gary’s back to rambling about Derby. What he did. Why he’s stupid. How much Gary hates him. Pete wants to snap at him. If Gary hates him so much, why’s he always talking about him? But it doesn’t normally bother him and he’s not sure why it does now, so instead he fumes silently as he reaches for the cord that brings down the ladder to his room.
Pete hadn’t told Gary his room was in the attic. That’s probably why it happens.
In the split second between Pete pulling the cord and the ladder coming down, Gary makes a move towards Pete.
It doesn’t happen in slow motion like they say in the movies. Instead, it’s impossibly quick. One moment, Gary’s smiling while Pete’s stomach bubbles in unspoken anger and the next, Gary’s on the ground. Everything is still for a moment and then Gary’s making horrible gasping noises like he’s trying not to cry and Pete realizes his face is covered in blood.
And like that, the anger is gone and he feels only panic and crushing guilt. It was an accident but Pete feels like he’s possibly the worst person on earth. Gary didn’t deserve it; he didn’t mean to hurt him. In the back of his mind, he wonders if Gary feels this constantly or if he’s become accustomed to accidentally hurting Pete.
He squeaks, words escaping him for only a moment before he’s shrieking for his mom like his life depends on it. Her footsteps thunder through the house so frantically, he can tell she’s running for him but all his brain can process is that he needs help and so he keeps screaming for her through sobs even when she comes into view.
At this point, he’s crying harder than Gary who sounds like he’s trying to remind himself how to breath and he’s not sure what it looks like, but he hopes she understands. She does, as always, because she’s scooping Gary up and leading Pete gently but firmly to the car.
Pete can’t stop crying, even when she buckles them next to each other in the front seat and presses a dish towel into his hand. He can’t quite listen so well right now but when she guides his hand to hold the towel near Gary’s eye, he leaves it there.
Gary’s quiet the whole ride and he keeps trying to grab for Pete’s free hand but Pete is shaking too much and avoids every attempt. When he looks back on this day, he’s going to wonder if that was possibly the meanest thing he’s ever done to Gary, meaner than dropping the ladder on him in the first place.
By the time they get to the hospital, Gary has calmed down considerably and the nurses are whispering about a possible concussion. Pete’s not really sure what that means but it’s probably bad and it’s definitely his fault. There are no more tears so he wrings his hands nervously instead.
Gary ends up needing stitches and the doctor assures him there’s going to be a pretty prominent scar. Pete’s not sure why he’s surprised but Gary is thrilled, laughing for the first time since the incident a couple hours ago.
In the future, he’ll feel terrible about how hot he finds Gary’s scar but right now, he just feels terrible.
Pete’s mother drops Gary off after, a quick chat with Gary’s mother on the front step that Pete can’t overhear as he stays in the car. He doesn’t know if he could stand having to look Gary’s mother in the face.
She wouldn’t blame him, not the way Pete’s parents blame Gary and Gary’s never sent Pete to the hospital so the hypocrisy of it would kill him.
For the first time that day, Gary looks truly upset as he waves to Pete through the window, all confused sadness when Pete ignores him in favor of looking down at his lap miserably. Still, Gary tries until Pete’s mom is driving them away. Maybe long after; he wouldn’t be surprised.
His dad looks disgustingly smug at dinner as his mom explains what had happened and Pete, for the first time, wishes he’d get another lecture about staying away from that boy.
–––
“I’m gay,” he blurts one night in the middle of dinner.
It’s late into their final year of middle school and they’ve been dorming at the academy for nearly three years now so being away from home is nothing new. Most nights he spends at school, sneaking into Gary’s dorm long after curfew even though he keeps telling him that it’s the last time.
Midweek dinners are their thing now, Pete’s mom picking him up after the bell rings and dropping him back off just before curfew. It’s a time suck and not always the most fun but he misses his parents regardless of how close they are.
They feel so far away, always, and Pete tries not to think of how much truer that is across the table from them.
The conversation halts immediately and they both stare at him wide-eyed in a rare show of shock. Their silence is threatening and he averts his eyes down towards his plate, scraping against the worn porcelain with his fork.
The old grandfather clock in the hall chimes, matching the thudding of his heart against his ribs.
Ominous.
The weight of their eyes disappears which means they must be doing that terrifying thing they do where they have whole conversations without speaking. When Pete was younger, he’d wanted to find someone he could do that with but he thinks, maybe, a relationship built on consistent verbal communication is better.
“Honey,” his mother starts finally, breaking the silence. “Even if you like girls, we-”
“I don’t like girls,” he corrects, looking up. His eyes meet confusion. He didn’t practice enough for this.
“But you just said-“ his dad tries.
“I don’t like girls,” he repeats, eyes flicking between them. He sees his mother realize first, of course, always in tune with him. She desperately looks for words that seem to catch on her tongue. He stares back unhelpfully, unsure of what to say.
His mother always has the right thing to say; how could Pete possibly have anything if she’s at a loss.
His father looks between them, frustration building as he fails to catch on. He never was very good at understanding Pete, trusting him to fall back in line. Trusting him to listen; something the man’s not very good at himself.
“Would someone like to tell me what exactly is going on here?” he demands, placing his palms firmly against the table. It’s a show of dominance, practically nothing, and Pete feels so, so small. He hates to think it but he wonders if that’s his intention.
“Hun, what B-” she stops, considers. It’s small but it’s everything. More than he expected. “…what he’s trying to say is-”
“He?” his dad repeats quietly to himself under his breath and Pete can tell immediately that he still doesn’t get it. He makes his own conclusions though. Pete watches the switch flip, the full force of his father’s anger as it builds before him in seconds.
He barely prepares himself before the man, usually calm and intimidating, explodes. “This has to do with that fucking boy, doesn’t it?” he demands, dishes rattling as he shoves at the table. “I’m sick of this shit! I told you!” He turns his attention to Pete’s mom, as if she should have done something to prevent it.
“No,” Pete argues meekly, shrinking under the intensity of his father’s gaze as its returned to him. He sinks into his chair, curling in until he’s as small as he feels.
“Excuse me?” he demands, almost a hiss. Pete’s never seen his dad so angry, and definitely never directed at him. Pete’s never spoken back before either. Never felt like he was making himself heard, a two-way street in terms of listening.
It’s always just been him.
“No!” Pete repeats, slamming his own hands into the table. He stands with the screech of his chair against the dining room floor. His mother looks so overwhelmed and he feels horrible but mostly, he’s tired. He’s tired of feeling so small. He’s tired, and he’s angry, and he wants it to stop.
“It doesn’t have to do with that boy.” A half lie. Everything comes back to Gary with Pete. Everything will always have to do with Gary because Pete is…but this isn’t about him. It’s about Pete. “It has to do with this boy. Me. I’m the boy we’re talking about right now.”
“Sit down. I told you to stay away from that boy and now look-”
“You’re not listening!” Pete yells, nails biting into the wood of the table. He’s ruining it. He doesn’t care. Nothing, nothing, nothing in this house is perfect.
“Sit. Down.”
If he were six, if this was about anything else, he’d be back in his seat. What other option could there be? Pete knows now that there are so many other options, difficult as they may be, and that’s enough for him.
He’s tired of worrying and feeling small. Tired of listening. Listening got him to where he is and it isn’t getting any better. The sight of his house puts his stomach in knots. His parents are strangers, or maybe it’s him that is someone different, but he has options.
Turning on his heels, he doesn’t wait to hear if either of them call for him. The walk back to the academy is so much longer than the car ride but he’ll be fucked if he’s going to grovel for something he can manage himself.
It’s raining.
By the time he gets back to Bullworth, it’s way past curfew and he’s soaked through to his underwear. He’s been dissatisfied with his hair for a while now but it’s so much worse now, hanging heavy in clumps from the water except where it’s sticking pathetically to his forehead.
It’s almost funny. He looks the way he feels on the inside most days.
The boys dorm smells like mold and boy sweat, familiar and safe in the most disgusting way possible. More disgusting is how much better he feels just from the comfort of it.
Gary’s door is unlocked, as it always is because Pete is a person and Gary doesn’t like making him crawl through the window like they’re locked in some sort of sordid affair. Or maybe he knows Pete isn’t likely to make the effort if it were like that.
He can make out the sound of soft mumbling as his entrance stirs Gary from his sleep. Gary could sleep through a hurricane though so it’s likely he ended up dozing while he waited for Pete rather than falling asleep completely.
Pete strips quickly, the weight falling off literally and emotionally. He feels around the floor blindly until he finds a pair of Gary’s boxers and a shirt that doesn’t smell quite so much like gross boy (although Pete’s embarrassed to admit he sorta likes it when the gross boy is Gary.)
His own soaked clothes take their place, puddling the floor beneath them.
Barely making himself decent before Gary wakes completely, he collects his hair into a bun that will be a tangled mess come morning and crawls into the bed beside him. Gary mumbles something unintelligible softly as Pete presses close.
“Peter,” he whispers back.
“Wha?” Gary asks, squinting against the light coming in through the window. Gary had lucked out in getting a single because of the uneven number of boys but had compromised with a room that faced the front of the dorm where the porch lights shined too bright all night.
It’s a terrible room. Pete thinks it could be vastly improved with some blackout curtains and all his things neatly organized on the other side.
He buries himself in Gary’s chest, not quite yet solid like the romance novels he’d definitely never read promised but still comforting.
“My name,” he clarifies.
“Like the rabbit?” Gary asks, eyebrows knitting together in confusion. Pete feels laughter bubble up out of his chest in time with his tears soaking through Gary’s shirt. He wonders in that moment if there’s ever going to be a time where Gary doesn’t bring him to tears, one way or another.
“Yeah,” Pete croaks, squeezing his eyes shut tight until it starts to burn.
“Cute,” Gary mumbles, tired but sounding pleased despite the fact. He pulls Pete in tighter, settling back down.
He considers reminding Gary that this is the last time but the other boy is already asleep and Pete thinks this is the night he’s going to stop lying to himself. Surrounded by Gary, he lets his breathing bury his own sniffling. By the time morning comes, both Gary’s shirt and Pete’s eyes will be dry and that means it never happened.
The coffee Gary pushes into his hands the next morning tastes of cinnamon and has the word ‘Petey’ scribbled on the side of the cup. It’s very official feeling and it almost makes up for the bruise on his collarbone from getting hipchecked into a locker the week before.
“Petey is a lame nickname,” he grumbles, pressing the cup to his mouth to hide the smile. Gary’s fingers tangle with his own, his attention on some game he’s put on Pete’s phone. They’re getting too old to hold hands but Pete won’t be the one pulling away.
“You’re a pretty lame boy though,” Gary answers back absently and Pete figures that’s pretty accurate.
—-
“You should stay away from him, Pete,” Jimmy says for the hundredth time since Gary stopped hanging around and Pete begins to question the validity of Jimmy Hopkins’ rule of Bullworth. Jimmy’s not an adult but he talks to Pete like he’s some sort of authority figure even though Pete’s older than him by a good couple of months.
The entirety of freshmen year is a clusterfuck and Pete’s playing it entirely by ear. He’d thought maybe, with the way the year before had ended, he’d finally be able to get a grip on things but Jimmy’s presence only brings renewed chaos.
Gary’s not the same, barely even reminiscent of the person Pete knows by the end, and something is so so wrong but Pete doesn’t know what to do. In the entirety of their friendship, they’ve gotten by on Pete’s iron patience and Gary’s unbudging self-assurance that everything would end up fine one way or another.
This is not going to end up fine. They both know that.
Gary doesn’t call him cute once, calls him a whole bunch of other horrible things, but he doesn’t push Pete away either. Pete has become all too good at picking the affection out of Gary’s harshness but it’s become so muddled lately, even he realizes he should stay away from the other boy.
Watching him fall feels like having his heart ripped from his chest and he prays to a god he stopped believing in a long time ago that choosing not to stay away from that boy stays an option.
—-
He goes every day for three weeks before he manages to force himself into the building. Despite his efforts, he shows up a humiliating two minutes past the end of visiting hours and his anxiety only allows for a feeble attempt at changing her mind before he’s directed out of the building with a written reminder of the facility’s visiting hours over the week.
It stays folded neatly in his pocket as if he hasn’t memorized the times forwards and backwards.
After that comes his family’s annual summer vacation to visit his cousins halfway across the country and while Pete normally enjoys the quiet chaos of so many children running around and aunts gossiping without concern for discretion, it’s hard to stay focused.
His mother is worried and shows her support through solid corrections when the wrong name comes out of his family’s mouths. Pete has hid the damage Gary’s absence has done as well as he hides everything from his parents: surprisingly and concerningly well. She simply thinks he’s nervous about being around family for the first time since starting his transition.
He is, of course, but it’s hardly at the forefront of his mind. Partially he’s relieved for the reprieve. At a different time, it’d be all he can think about, clawing at his chest and making him eager to leave. As it stands, he’s anxious to get home for an entirely different reason.
Gary surely hates him. He thinks about it at night, every night since the first he realized Gary wasn’t within arms reach anymore, eyes trained on the cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that Gary helped him stick to his ceiling too many summers ago after he hit his first growth spurt. Pete hates himself so it stands to reason that Gary would hate him tenfold.
Still, he needs to know that Gary is okay.
“I know the past year has been hard on you,” his dad mentions out of the blue in the middle of the car ride home. His parents hands are linked on the center armrest but his mother’s attention is somewhere very far away outside the window. “But I’m proud of how strong you’ve been. And it’s certainly a blessing that that boy is out of the picture.”
He watches his mother tense but no words get exchanged. Pete meets his dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror and he stares blankly back.
“I love you, Peter.”
It’s sickening how heavy and dark the statement is despite the sincere feeling his dad puts behind it.
It takes two more days once they’re home before he even tries again. The first because it would look suspicious if he went running off. His parents are very aware of his friendship status, namely that he has none. The second is because he ends up sleeping all day, the exhaustion of a week spent with family catching up with him.
But finally, a little over two months since the last time he saw Gary, he finds himself seated in a hard plastic chair. There’s a second empty chair besides him and one on the other side of the table, equally as empty.
He’s nervous, he realizes, but excited. Because no matter what happens or how Gary feels, Pete wants to see him. And that’s been the reason all along, why they were ever friends at all. Because everyone has always thought Gary the selfish one in their relationship but the truth is that despite Gary’s aggression and embarrassing lack of social understanding, Pete wants Gary whether it’s good for him or not.
Gary’s pouting when they bring him in, not quite the innocent action of their youth but the softest Pete has seen Gary’s face in over a year. That is until Gary catches sight of Pete and then he’s all softness and blinding smiles and everything Pete remembers.
He almost bursts into tears.
“I thought it was my mom again cause she already visited this week and I can only take her crying once weekly,” Gary explains in answer to a question Pete didn’t ask.
“Your mom doesn’t cry,” Pete says, uncertain in the way everything slots into place. There should be some sort of awkwardness surely. The rightness of it feels so fragile.
Gary laughs, a little shrug but there is the tiniest glint of sadness in his eyes. He loves his mom, Pete knows. Regardless of what he’d said to Jimmy at the beginning of the year, Gary is a mama’s boy and it must kill him to know he brings her to tears on a weekly basis.
“How…are you?” he cautions after a minute too long of silence.
“Whatever I’m on right now hates me and I’ve been puking a lot but my doctor says he thinks we’re close to finding something that works,” Gary answers casually like he’s always been comfortable discussing his medication with Pete.
That’s never been the case. Regardless of how close they’ve been, Gary’s kept quiet about this kind of thing.
“It wasn’t working,” Gary continues when Pete fails to respond.
“You stopped taking them,” Pete corrects, unsure if it’s his place or not. But Gary is telling him all this for whatever reason and Pete won’t dismiss it just because he’s uncomfortable. They’re friends, more than probably, but Gary isn’t open the way he expects Pete to be.
When it comes to taking care of each other, it’s been fairly one sided. Pete sees the ugliness of Gary’s anger but he’s never been allowed the other boy’s sadness. Known of it, like that second day of first grade or after the hospital, but he’s never been given the opportunity to be part of it with Gary.
“Because it stopped working. Or wasn’t working to begin with. I don’t know. I’d never…it wasn’t bad like that before I started taking medication. The doctor said it was probably because I started meds so early, I’d never been through a full-blown manic episode on or off of them.”
Pete is listening but he doesn’t really understand what’s being said.
“Is it going to be bad like that forever?” he asks, swallowing down the guilt.
He expects Gary to look away or change the topic. Maybe even lash out like he’d been prone to do freshmen year. Instead, he maintains eye contact and Pete realizes that this isn’t the same Gary from a year ago or before that even. This Gary is someone completely different than either of those two people.
“Not bad like that but…it’s not going to be good all of the time.”
It’s so very honest. He feels tears despite his best efforts.
“Pete-”
“I love you,” he interrupts, solidly despite the overwhelming mess that is his stomach. “I love you and I know I don’t tell you very often. I never said it back when we were little and I didn’t tell you any of the times I wanted to in middle school but you have to know I love you.”
Gary is the one speechless this time and Pete rubs aggressively at his eyes.
“Gary Smith, if you’re going to keep breaking my heart, the least you can do is keep me in the loop.” He tries for stern but he can’t keep any of the affection out of his voice. When it came to dealing with Gary, he’s always been aloof but it’s never been without love.
He stares down hard at the table, heat in his cheeks. A chair scraping against the floor cuts through the air and Pete’s stomach drops. Of course. Gary should leave. Pete has never given 100% so how could he ask the same of Gary.
The chair beside him moves and Gary slips in, facing forward. When Pete chances a side glance, Gary’s head turns to offer him a very familiar grin. It feels like first grade all over again. Scary and promising.
It’s not good for Pete all the time either. He thinks they can probably work with that.
—-
“You smell like week old boy sweat,” Pete complains, his face buried in Gary’s armpit. Pete can admit freely now that he definitely likes it when the gross boy is Gary but a week is pushing it.
Gary groans, shoving him further into what Pete can only describe as a swamp. He squeals, wriggling in a futile attempt to escape. In a moment of mercy, Gary releases him and he falls back, gasping for air. It’s a little dramatic but he has a point to make.
“It’s summer,” Gary complains as if that’s a reasonable excuse for an almost nineteen year old boy to not shower for a week.
“If you think I’m going to have sex with you-”
Gary grins, cocky and ill intentioned. “Oh, is that what this is about? Is someone feeling needy?” His fingers find Pete’s stomach, inching down until they reach the hem of Pete’s shorts with no intention of stopping. He slaps Gary’s hand away.
“You’re gross,” he grumbles, staying planted in his spot on the bed.
Gary laughs, moving to strip off his shirt, hopefully with the thought of actually taking a shower.
“Stay away from me then,” he suggests playfully, yelping and darting out of the room as Pete pelts a pillow at him.
As if he could ever.