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They’d met summers ago, a number of which he can’t remember now because he hadn’t bothered to keep count, assuming that they would simply stretch on, the same way a road yawns in front of a driver, long, limitless. It was a flurry of apple tree leaves drifting in the wind and the rumble of a moving truck in the driveway, and it was two boys who happened to live in adjacent houses with windows that faced each other.
Nights never seemed like nights, he remembers now. His curtains were dark blue and contrasted starkly against the paleness of the walls, and when he tugged them aside on his way to bed, he saw movement across the gap.
He was only eleven, then, and still riding that crescendo of curiosity. He nudged the curtains open and stared at the dark-haired boy on the other side and offered his name. That was how it started, the back and forth and give and return of whispers, the space between them growing smaller with each word.
No, nights never seemed like nights when those bright eyes were on him.
Anytime else, no one wanted to sit with the boy who spoke too loud and the boy who spoke too slow, so they sat next to each other. It was okay; they needed no better company.
The bus would pull away from the curb and in the mere space of seat number fourteen, they built, together, their own world with well-intentioned hands and furtive smiles and little jokes, little things, that made sense to them and only to them.
Some years after, he read something about a string of fate that twined between people and fastened them tight. He brought it up once, and he remembers standing in the January snow and looking down at their bare wrists. “Where is it,” had whispered the boy with eyes like spring grass, and they reckoned it must have been invisible.
“I feel it, though,” he had whispered back, and he was a whole year older but a whole inch shorter, and when he nudged closer, their shoulders bumped until one of them raised his arm and accepted the other into his side.
“So do I,” he had said. His breath came out like a puff of cloud, swirling up and eventually disappearing.
Love came slow.
Love stayed long.
In first period physics they liked to say that even the laws of science was even bringing them together, in fourth period economics he leaned over and whispered your benefits outweigh any of the costs, and in ninth period math he scribbled NH+HS on the corner of his notebook and it was an equation that, unlike textbooks of others, made sense.
His fingers found their niche in the six strings of a guitar and he’d spend countless afternoons sometimes mumbling the lyrics to some songs, sometimes mumbling his own. His lyrics painted images of eyes like sage and lips with the curve of a heart and hands, warm, and pinkies linked by the promise of something more.
The diner was a first date with chocolate milkshakes and footsie under the table; the record store was a first kiss with flushed cheeks and shy hands seeking each other out; his bedroom was a first time, sweet and slow and painful, briefly, but there were kisses raining down on his cheeks and his neck and if they were apologies, he accepted them by lacing their fingers together and murmuring, it’s okay, you can move.
The night was a first I love you, hearts thrumming in sync and adoration in each thread of the red ribbon that bound them, and he remembers catching a glimpse of the starless night outside, thinking that the boy next to him must have put them all to shame.
They were a far cry from the little boys who used to race to mailboxes and sneaked into each other’s back yards, but curiosity was an impulse that grew stronger still. They searched with their eyes and found with their hands, memorizing every inch of each other and then willfully forgetting just so they can discover all over again; it was routine and it wasn’t routine, it was familiar and it was new.
The school gymnasium was a first dance, arms around shoulders and hands on waists, swaying back and forth with the patience of lovers who knew they had time.
High school ended and they didn’t win crowns or yearbook superlatives, but they walked away from graduation with hands held tight and the future, vast, ahead of them. They won something more.
They picked the apartment together and then the furniture, sometimes arguing over the color of the couch (maroon) or how many coffee tables to get (two) or where to put the refrigerator (next to the sink). They said goodbye to the windows that faced each other and hello to a shared bed that welcomed them home every night.
A dream, he thinks. It was like a dream.
Sometimes he wishes he realized sooner that they were sand and they were slipping through his fingers.
It worked until it didn’t. It was enough until it wasn’t. They were happy until they weren’t, with smiles that fell a little flat and words that rang a little empty.
He still couldn’t see the ribbon, but he could feel it seared over his arm, tight and less secure than it was suffocating.
The October evening wasn’t their first fight, but it was the first to leave something ugly in his skin. That night, the door slammed shut and he slept with his eyes open, watching the ceiling and wondering if this is it, if they’re finally falling from the high.
High school romances never last, everyone used to say, but they weren’t just that. When they were younger, while nestled under the shade of an oak, they had planned everything. When they first moved in together, he had walked by a jewelry store and stopped to stare at something in the window, butterflies fluttering in his stomach.
Maybe it was stress: hours of bills and jobs and out and away from home and barely seconds of each other. That was it, he convinced himself, surely, and they’ve survived years together so they’ll survive this.
But this wasn’t the school bus anymore, this wasn’t English classrooms and desks pressed together in the back. There were cracks at the edges of the world they had so carefully crafted, and gravity was working against their favor and the costs were piling over the benefits and he wasn’t sure what they added up to anymore.
They started leaving early and coming back late. Sometimes he kissed those same lips and held those same hands and he swore he could feel traces of somebody else in them.
There were traces of alcohol on his own and roughened skin on his fingers from someone who tried to strum life away with a guitar.
Neither of them said anything, perhaps too afraid to deal the finishing blow to whatever was left between them. Yet it would have been a sweet mercy from touches that didn’t feel like anything anymore and I love yous that not even their own tongues believed.
“I do,” he’d said one night, voice chipped at the edges. They were lying together in bed for the first time in weeks, shoulders bumping, but no one raised their arm to accept the other into his side.
It was always night, nowadays. There were always stars.
“I really do.”
Love went fast.
Love left a hole in his heart shaped like summer days and eyes like green apples and little lacerations of promises they had made.
It’s been years.
He’s sitting on the stage with a guitar across his lap, strumming, singing, lyrics spilling from his mouth like truths because they are. He sings of something lost and there are couples in his audience, and he hopes the best for them.
His gaze shifts from a couple to a boy with hair of askew curls in the back, lips moving ever so slightly to the music, as if he knows what he’s going through.
Something tugs at his wrist, and he looks down but there’s nothing there.
He’s never seen the damned ribbon, even after all these years. He’s always thought that it fastened them too tightly, ran them out of air, never let them breathe, but now he’s thinking of the black velvet box he had stuffed to the bottom of his bag on the day he left and he’s wondering that maybe, the ribbon hadn’t held them together tight enough.
In the dark, Harry’s smiling. For Niall, it’s instinct to smile back. Whether either of them means it or not, he doesn’t know, and when he sees the figure leaving, maybe he never will.
He finishes the song.
Tonight, all the stars are out.