Chapter Text
They met in June.
It was hot, sinfully hot. Sweat rolling down your back hot. Hot instruments scalding skin hot. And yet there they were, sitting on the curb in front of their school. Waiting for the chronically late bus driver with a bad smoking habit. There was a pretty girl involved, just a fleeting subject of teenage fancy, and when the bus pulled away from the school, headed to a critically underfunded band camp, they found each other. Sam, a December child with a shitty fashion sense, and Colby, a wannabe emo born in January. They sat together on that bus, talking and laughing like they hadn't in so long, and then, well, that was history. They were everything to each other within a few months, and they liked it that way, despite the things their classmates whispered behind their backs.
Colby was sixteen when he came to terms with what he was. He saw it now, the way he felt for certain boys in his life as well as certain girls. He acknowledged that made him bisexual. But that didn't mean he had to like it. As he sat on the roof of his home, just outside his bedroom window, he cried. He cried for fear that if he told a soul, it would spread like wildfire and everyone would hate him. What would his mother think? His mother, who kept a bible on the bookshelf in her bedroom. Or his father, who skipped past pride commercials when they watched TV? Or his brother, who had once, admittedly very long ago, told Colby that one of his classmates was a... well. You get the picture. But worst of all, the most painful anxiety, was his fear that Sam would think he was disgusting. They had been teased, since they became friends, because people thought they were gay, and every single time, Sam winced and yelled. Yelled at them not to be assholes and spat at their feet. What was so horrible about that? What did he truly think if his best friend was queer? He was afraid, so afraid, and he pushed that part of him so deep down inside of him that it hurt. No one would know, he decided. No one.
They ran off together when they were eighteen, in a shitty red corolla, trading shifts so the other could sleep. A car zoomed past them as Colby drove, Sam asleep in the passenger seat, passing them on the right and nearly pushing them into the path of an oncoming semi. Their car screeched and jolted as Colby pulled the wheel until they were back within the confines of their side of the road. And once his heart stopped beating in his ears, he realized his arm was thrown across Sam's chest. Sam, who was still fast asleep. It was then, going seventy five miles per hour on the highway, that reality hit Colby like the semi truck would have. Reality that pitted in his stomach and had him screeching to the side of the road and throwing up on the pavement, cars zooming by and Sam, now awake, asking him what was wrong.
Colby had fallen in love with his best friend.
That too, he pushed down, cramming into a crevice next to his sexuality. Locking it up and never thinking about it, or at least trying not to. When Sam got a girlfriend, beautiful and fun, Colby was almost grateful. Grateful for a reason not to risk it all. But at the same time, as he watched his best friend kiss her on the cheek, jealousy and sadness tugged at his heart like a knife twisting in his chest. Sam couldn't know, Colby would lose him. And he would die without Sam by his side. So he forced a smile as Sam came home one night, foolish and high off of cheap beer and adrenaline, rambling about how beautiful Katrina was. He smiled, and he told his best friend how happy he was for him. Even though it was a lie.
He only cried sometimes, when his depression made itself fully known and he curled up on his side, crying into his pillow and desperately wished it was Sam's shoulder. It killed him, like his heart was rotting and blackening in his chest, but he pushed it away. He was straight, he most definitely did not love his best friend, and both of those things are lies. But he smiled. He smiled, like dopey old Colby, the clown of the friend group. As his friends teased him for being single, he laughed along like it wasn't Sam's fault. He tried, he really tried to find someone. Dated around, used every dating site out there, drinking himself silly at bars. It wasn't that people didn't want him; there were many that did. But unless they were blond and blue-eyed, he couldn't even think of them that way.
And even then, their eyes just weren't the right shade of blue.