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They were both red in the face and breathing hard. Their eyes were narrowed at each other, glaring. The argument bounced around the otherwise empty room with the weight of each clipped and hurtful word.
Dylan can hardly remember what they were even fighting about. At some point, the goal changed from arguing their points to just trying their damnedest to hurt the other. His throat is raw. He’s not sure he could say anything more if he wanted to. There’s a salty taste in his mouth and he wonders at what point he started crying. He swipes roughly at his face, annoyed and embarrassed.
“Whatever,” he grumbles. His voice cracks and warbles—he wants to cringe at the sound of it. “I’m…I think I’m just gonna go home.”
He snatches his backpack from where it sits on the floor, swinging it up and over his shoulder with all the force he can muster. He’s angry and hurt, but, most of all, he’s…exhausted. He’d always avoided conflict where he could, but he knew this was bound to happen eventually. Couples fight, it’s normal, but damn if he doesn’t hate it. He’s been dreading their first ‘big fight’ and here it was—more painful than any of his nightmares and ten times worse than anything his anxiety had conjured up.
His shoulder slams into Ajay’s as he passes, shoving the other off-balance. Dylan makes a point of keeping his head down, of not looking Ajay in the eye, or giving a proper goodbye.
“Dylan, wait—” Ajay starts but Dylan doesn’t stop walking. Instead he just calls over his shoulder.
“I’ll…see you Monday, I guess.”
--//--
They don’t talk the rest of that weekend.
Well, more accurately, Dylan doesn’t talk to Ajay. He’s received a handful of texts—a mix of ‘sorry’s and ‘please talk to me’s and ‘you can’t ignore me forever’s. He almost feels bad for not responding, but then he remembers why he isn’t responding and that just makes him angry all over again.
Dylan rolled onto his side and grabbed his phone just as it buzzed with a new text.
AJAY <3
I know you don’t want to talk to me
I just needed to say sorry again
I shouldn’t have said what I did
I hope you can forgive me
<3
He turned his phone off and rolled onto his other side.
--//--
Dylan told Rory he wanted to walk to school on Monday. Rory looked like he was going to protest until Stevie stepped in, election rivalry put aside, and quietly told him not to worry about it, which was all the sophomore needed to know that something serious had happened and Dylan wouldn’t be changing his mind.
On any normal day, the walk from his house to the school building wasn’t a very long one. But today wasn’t a normal day—Dylan had a lot on his mind, his thoughts loud as they banged around in his brain, which caused him to walk slower.
Much to his surprise, however, he managed to get to the school before Ajay arrived, so he decided to put his things in his locker and go sit in his homeroom until the bell rang.
But the minutes felt as if they dragged on for hours, and Dylan couldn’t stop his thoughts from drifting back to Ajay—what it will feel like to see him in person again after their fight, why Ajay hadn’t been at school when he usually was, was he sick, oh god what if he was dying and the last thing he’ll remember of him was being ignored—
“Sup?”
Dylan snapped his head up, heart in his throat and holding his breath. Skye stood in front of his desk, stoic expression collapsing into concern once their eyes met.
“Holy shit, Dylan, are you…feeling okay?”
He started to shake his head—his tongue felt too heavy for words—but jumped in his seat as his phone vibrated on the desktop, making an obnoxiously loud rattling sound. Slowly, mindlessly, a hand picked it up and turned it over to see:
AJAY <3
Lunch in the courtyard?
So we can talk, just us?
“Oh, thank god, he’s alive,” Dylan sighed quietly, tongue released in his relief.
“Uh, what?” Skye asked, looking at Dylan like he’d grown a second head. He bit his lip and counted to five before replying.
DYLAN
Yes
--//--
It was still as cold outside as it had been that morning—warm enough that the ice had melted but cold enough that a thin layer of snow dusted the ground—so it wasn’t hard to find an empty table in the courtyard that felt relatively private despite its public setting.
Dylan sat, fingers tapping on the table and one leg bouncing. He had skipped the line for lunch, feeling so tightly wound that the thought of eating made him nauseous. He took in his surroundings—the handful of people sitting around a couple of tables and laughing, the tiny patches where the snow was thin enough that the tips of the grass poked through, and the uncomfortably wet seat beneath him. He pulled his jacket tighter around him as the breeze picked up and a fresh chill befell the courtyard.
The door to the cafeteria squeaked on its hinges as it was pushed open.
Ajay had arrived.
Relief and anxiousness warred within him as Ajay approached the table where he sat. He bit the inside of his cheek as the muscles in his face twitched to smile or frown or make some strange combination of the two. He tried to keep his eyes on the table as Ajay slid onto the bench, but he couldn’t keep his gaze from flickering over.
He tried not to be hurt by the amount of space between them that had been carefully and intentionally placed. He understood why it was there—they were fighting, Ajay didn’t know what was going on in his head, and Dylan didn’t know what was going on in his—yet stinging pain in his chest did not lessen.
“I’m sorry,” a whisper broke the silence hanging heavy between them.
Ajay looked confused, brows furrowing and the edges of his lips curving down ever so slightly.
“Sorry? Dylan, I should be the one apologizing. I was stressed with the campaign, and homework, and my parents…and instead of just talking about it like I should have, I lashed out at you. That’s not fair. All I can do now is apologize and do my damnedest to be better and not let it happen again. So, I’m sorry.”
“But I knew you were stressed out. I wanted to help you relax but I went about in a way that made you more stressed and upset, and I overreacted when everything went to hell. Then I ignored you the rest of the weekend…that’s just running away instead of facing the issue. That’s not how I was raised. I should definitely be apologizing too.”
“You just wanted to help and I yelled at you for it,” Ajay said softly as he placed a hand over one of Dylan’s.
“It didn’t help though. It just made it worse. And I yelled back, so, there.”
They stared resolutely at each other for a few seconds before Ajay snorted and Dylan started to giggle.
“Are we…fighting over who’s to blame?” Ajay asked.
Dylan hummed thoughtfully, playful smile on his lips as he relaxed. “A little bit, yeah.”
“Compromise: we both take some of the blame,” Ajay said, pausing just long enough for Dylan to agree before continuing, “but I take most of it because I started it.”
Dylan sputtered words of protest and huffed a laugh. He scootched over on the bench so he was now sitting right up against Ajay and rest his head on the older boy’s shoulders.
“I don’t want to keep fighting, so, I guess I’ll have to live with that,” he sighed.
“Ya know, there is something I haven’t been able to do that you could help me with.”
“Really?” Dylan looked up at his boyfriend’s face, eyes alight with hope.
“Yup. We’ll have to take a little walk first though.”
“…are we going to go make out in the abandoned building?”
“We’re going to go make out in the abandoned building.”