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Harley is fully aware that he sounds like a toddler, but that doesn’t stop him from jutting his lower lip out as far as it can go, slouching his shoulders, and whining, “But I don’t wanna.”
“Tough shit, goldilocks,” Tony says, not looking up from the Men’s Health magazine in his hand. His tone is a bit dull and bored, but his nose keeps crinkling, lips twitching downwards and brows knitting together, a general aura of disinterest and obviously less than impressed. Then, as if Harley isn’t in the middle of parting his lips (to, realistically, whine even more), Tony turns the magazine to show Harley an article within it titled Why the ‘Dad Bod’ is Bad. “Body shaming,” he says with a sigh. “Bad move.”
Harley glares at him, arms crossing over his chest as he slouches even further. “Tony.”
Turning the magazine back to himself, Tony goes on as if Harley hadn’t spoken at all. “Y’know, I already knew that body shaming and—and general judgement of bodies and different body types was a thing, right? But Pep made me watch this TED Talk the other day that pointed out how everywhere it really is, and now I can’t seem to stop noticing it. Like, it’s everywhere, everywhere. Really, it can’t be healthy to all of you guys, right? All the kids, growing up surrounded by all of this, building your expectations until you’re all trying to achieve these impossible and unrealistic beauty standards, and—”
“Harley?” a voice calls out—a nurse, standing in the door leading out of the office. “Harley Keener?”
Instantly, Tony tosses the magazine aside like he wasn’t just acting somewhat invested in the topic he had based off of it, getting to his feet and pulling a even poutier Harley up to his, as well. “Right here,” Tony calls back, flashing his billionaire smile as he leads Harley over by the elbow. “All ready to go.”
“Can’t I just keep them?” Harley tries—it’s a flimsy attempt, but it’s all he can think of now that there’s a mild panic numbing a majority of his functioning brain cells. “I can—I mean, I can, right? Keep them?”
“Give me a single good reason for why you would benefit from keeping your wisdom teeth.”
Harley parts his lips, instinctively relying on his quick wit to think of a clever response fast enough, but his throat closes up and not a single thing comes to mind. Slowly, he lifts his lowered jaw, presses his lips together, and sharpens his glare until he’s shooting daggers at Tony, who looks all too smug with himself. The nurse glances between them, brows raised in a confused sort of amusement, before glancing down at her tablet and clarifying, with a glance towards Harley, “So, you’re Harley Keener, then?”
With a grimace, Harley mutters a sour, “Unfortunately.”
Tony snorts. Doesn’t even try to smother it or anything, and his smile is more lopsided than usual, clearly loose and enjoying himself as he tells the nurse, “Ignore him. He gets grumpy without his breakfast.”
“Well, there’s probably a reason why it’s called the most important meal of the day,” the nurse muses, the ends of her lips twitching, just a bit, as her brows raised. “And I guess that answers my fasting question.”
“Breakfast has no more inherent value than any other meal,” Harley tells her, if only because he doesn’t like the fact that any of this is happening right now and he’d rather pluck his own nose hairs than actually do it. Postponing the inevitable isn’t really a viable tactic, but at least it gives him a little bit of time, maybe even enough to think of a way out of this entire thing. “That’s all capitalism’s fault, really. Same as orange juice—there’s no reason for it to be associated with breakfast. It’s a marketing strategy.”
The nurse looks at him, tilts her head, and says nothing.
Tony, of course, just laughs. “You’re not getting out of this, kid.”
“Not with that attitude,” Harley chirps, giving a painfully fake smile to go with his words.
“Look at it this way,” Tony offers, hands spreading out in front of him like he’s gesturing to some kind of whiteboard, something physically there that, quite obviously, is not actually there. “Either you can head on in and get this over with, like I know you can, or I can call Pep, or May, or Angie, and you can be the one to explain to them why you had to reschedule the surgery that you’re not gonna be able to back out of in the long run, and I can sit back with a nice bowl of popcorn and watch you get grounded for ten years.”
Harley’s bitterly fake smile stays on his face, like it’s stuck there, as he looks at Tony with bated breath, waiting, hoping, that he’ll say syke and laugh it off, but he already knows he won’t. It’s true—this is an inevitable thing that’s going to happen, and the longer he waits, the worse it’ll end up being.
Doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it, though.
“Fine,” he sighs, fake smile slipping off his face instantly. “I won’t put up a fight, but only if you don’t drop me off at the tower before going to get Pete and them from decathlon. Deal?”
Tony’s nose scrunches. “Them? How many teenagers am I getting?”
“All of ‘em,” Harley tells him simply, only to stop and correct, “Wait, no, not Harry, obviously, but the rest of them are coming over for a movie night. We told you that, didn’t we?”
“Probably, at some point,” Tony murmurs, head tilting back. He sighs, then says, “Fine. Deal.”
Harley smiles to himself proudly. The nurse, glancing between them with a pursed lipped smile, takes this as her cue to open the door wider and gesture down the hall. “If you’re ready,” she says. Harley falters, but lets out a sigh as he accepts his fate and steps through the door with a frown, only hearing when the nurse turns to Tony and tells him, “We’ll give you a call once the surgery’s done. Feel free to wait here, if you’d like, but it usually takes approximately an hour, hour and a half, so try to plan for that, if you can.”
“Not a problem,” Tony assures her, yet he stays standing even when she smiles and turns to walk away, sticking his foot in the door to keep it cracked. Harley doesn’t realize this at first, of course—only when he’s about to turn the corner that the nurse is leading him down and Tony calls out, “Hey, Harley!”
Coming to a stop, Harley looks over his shoulder—which is a bit tense, his hands curled up at his sides, a frown pulling at his lips and a certain look of quiet yet persistent uncertainty shining in his eyes.
Tony smiles—a real one, genuine and loving, preserved only for his family. “You’re gonna be fine, bud.”
Harley hesitates, before jutting his chin in a nod and offering a small smile. Then, with a deep breath that he lets out somewhat shakily, he turns back around and disappears around the corner.
Peter slams his palm down at the button before Michelle is even done asking the question. He parts his lips, about to exclaim the answer, only for Flash to jump to his feet at the other button and shout, “No!”
Mr. Harrington, likely running on instinct from three years of them constantly griping at each other and still not used to them being friends, instantly rises from his seat with a pinched, lowkey panicked sort of look, like he’s ready to interfere at any second, battling with the idea of whether he already should or not. Peter gets to his feet, too, rolling his eyes at Flash and telling him, “Sucks to suck,” before turning to Michelle and answering, “Herd immunity.”
Michelle looks thoroughly amused as she tips her head in a nod. “Peter got it.”
“Motherfucker!” Flash shouts, pointing an accusing finger towards Peter with a glare, though Peter can recognize the amusement in his eyes. “You’re cheating, aren’t you? She told you the questions beforehand, or something, didn’t she? Because there is no way in hell you knew the answer that fast!”
Peter leans back in his seat with a shrug, crossing his arms over his chest with a loose grin. Mr. Harrington glances between then, wary, before sinking back into his own seat and checking his watch with a puffed out breath. “What time is your ride getting here, again?”
From the seat across from Peter, Ned looks up from the rough draft of his current project for Robotics, something he’s putting all of his effort into due to it being their senior year and the last time he’ll get to compete with the club, and tells Mr. Harrington, “You don’t have to wait with us, Mr. Harrington. Flash and I are both eighteen already, so I think we’ll be okay waiting by ourselves for a little bit.”
Without hesitation, Mr. Harrington shakes his head, telling them, “Not a chance. It’s my own rule that I don’t leave until I know everyone else is on their way home. How much longer, do you think?”
“Any minute,” Peter answers, checking his phone with a slight frown. He hates the fact that he couldn’t go with them, at least to drop Harley off, provide a little bit of comfort towards the anxiety that he knows Harley is feeling towards this whole ordeal. Harley has never had surgery before, is the thing, and he had been telling Peter last night that he knows it isn’t a big deal, knows that he’ll be fine, but that knowing it, logically, hasn’t been helping the fact that he still feels scared. Tony and May both insisted that Peter not miss school for this, though, and Harley had been adamantly against it, too—promising Peter that he’d just see him afterwards and that it’d be alright. Still, Peter hasn’t gotten any updates other than a simple text from Tony letting him know that he had picked Harley up and was on his way to get the rest of them.
Really, Peter thought that they’d be here by now, but he supposes there’s probably still some after school traffic that could be slowing them down a bit, so he tries not to feel too worried about it.
“How out of it do you think Harley’s gonna be?” Ned asks, looking back down at his drafted ideas and sketched up blueprints as he does so. “When I got my wisdom teeth taken out, I was loopy for hours.”
“I hope he’s says something embarrassing,” Flash says, plopping back down in his seat casually, like he hadn’t jumped out of it shouting accusations only a minute or two ago. “Harry and I placed bets on it. I put five bucks on Harley saying something inappropriate to Pete, but Harry but fifteen on Harley telling some kind of secret or something. Honestly, I’m kind of hoping for both, ‘cause it’d be really funny.”
Peter slumps further and rolls his eyes. “Whatever he says, don’t laugh at him. He’ll be really out of it and I’ve seen too many videos of people crying over really small stuff to want to even risk it.”
Michelle shuffles her index cards and starts to put them away, apparently assuming that the quizzing portion of their waiting is over for the time being. “If he cries, I’m recording it,” she states simply.
“That’s so mean,” Ned says.
“His fault for inviting me to come over after having surgery,” Michelle shrugs.
Ned falters, then nods. “Actually, yeah, that’s fair.”
“Uh—” Peter leans forward, hand raised up slightly. “I’m the one that invited you guys, not Harley. And I invited you before they scheduled his appointment, and he told me not to cancel movie night for this.”
Michelle shrugs again, unbothered. “I can still blame him for that,” she says.
Peter rolls his eyes, but he can’t hold back the smile that pulls at the ends of his lips as he leans back in his seat again, glancing down at his phone once more, not expecting anything to be there yet—only to pause, frowning to himself, as he sees another text from Tony send mere seconds ago. It isn’t the we’re here text that he’s been expecting, is the thing—instead, all he’s got is two words, ominous and odd.
Uh oh.
Before he can move his thumbs to type a response, a noise catches his attention from down the hall, two sets of footsteps approaching, one kind of uneven and loud, the other hurried—and then, he hears Tony’s voice, exasperated as he says, “Harley, I swear to god, if you don’t go back to the car right this second—”
“Bu’ I wan’ see Pe’er!”
A grin tugs at Peter’s lips, completely out of his control, and he’s already on his feet and ready by the time the door is pushed open and Harley stumbles in, a very frantic and worried looking Tony right on his heel, though Peter only glances at him before focusing in on Harley, who is kind of a mess right now, in a very frazzled, rumpled, adorable kind of away. His eyes are all bleary, the first indicator that he’s definitely feeling the after effects of the surgery, sweatpants scrunched around his ankles and the Midtown sweatshirt that he stole from Peter shorty after he started attending all wrinkled. His hair is a tangle mess of curls that are sticking up randomly, like he just rolled out of his bed after a night of tossing and turning. And, of course, his face—cheeks puffed out and chipmunk like from the gauze in his mouth, a slightly paler complexion even as a dopey grin pulls at his lips.
Which causes a single drop of blood to roll from the corner of his mouth, not that Harley seems to be bothered by it—or aware of it at all, in the state that he’s in.
“There,” Tony says, gesturing at Peter with one hand and bringing the other to rest on Harley’s shoulder. “You saw Peter, who is coming home with us anyway, so you need to get back in the car and—oh my god, Harley, close your mouth, you’re making yourself bleed again, you—Jesus Christ—”
Harley doesn’t respond at all to Tony, likely not focusing enough on his voice to hear what he’s saying. Instead, he ambles forward, Tony’s hand falling from his shoulder as he does so, and almost trips right onto his face, if not for Peter’s Spidey sense warning him of it and giving him the ability to step forward and catch him before he can actually fall. Harley clutches onto his biceps as Peter’s hand quickly clutch onto his waist to keep him upright, though Harley seems to forget he tripped as soon as he realizes that Peter’s the one to catch him. His grin grows, which would be endearing—but it leads to another drop of blood to roll down his chin. Peter crinkles his nose, but his smile is still soft as he steadies Harley on his feet and tells him, “You’re in a good mood for someone who just got out of surgery.”
There’s a sigh that Harley lets out that seems to rattle in his chest a little bit, features even more dopey and relaxed, like just hearing Peter’s voice brings him peace. Peter brings up his sleeve, thankful that he chose to wear an old, dark grey sweatshirt as he uses it to wipe the drops of blood away. With them gone, Harley looks even more adorable, and Peter barely represses the urge to coo at him as his heart absolutely melts within his chest. “Pe’er,” Harley says, grinning, then suddenly tips forward and ducks his head, presses his nose against the side of Peter’s neck and half-hugs him, half falls into him. “Missed you.”
“That’s sappy,” Peter tells him, but snakes his arms around his waist to keep him up and return the embrace at the same time. “How are you feeling? Any pain? The bleeding makes me nervous.”
“Mm,” Harley hums, content and unbothered. “M’good. Just missed you.”
Peter rests his cheek against the top of Harley’s head. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get you in the car, alright? You need to get home and get some rest. I’ve heard that the healing process isn’t all that fun.”
From behind him, Peter hears Flash snicker, undoubtedly about to poke fun at how clingy Harley is acting, but before he’s able to utter a single syllable, Michelle is speaking up to tell him, “If you act like you and Osborn are even a fraction less disgustingly into each other, I’m going to tear your dick off.”
Tony snorts so hard that he starts coughing violently into his fist. Mr. Harrington just sighs.
“Oh my god,” Harry says, sounding horrified. “He’s growing a second head.”
Harley, with his entire duvet wrapped around him, glares from within the shadows of the blanket curled over his head and clutched tightly to his chest. “Fu’ ‘ff,” Harley murmurs, only to grimace, clear his throat, and slowly repeat, “Fuck. Off.” From within the blankets, his hand emerges just to flip Harry off, then retracts into his comfort burrito as he shuffles over to the love seat and collapses on top of Peter.
“That’s fine,” Peter says, wincing at the impact just slightly. “I don’t need my spleen. It’s all good.”
“You’re a superhero,” Harley grumbles, though his words are a bit garbled and slurred as he speaks around gauze and through slightly bloody gums. “I think you’ll be fine.”
Peter glances up, just slightly wary, but relaxes when it becomes clear that Flash and Harry are sitting on the opposite side of the living room, far enough away that Harley’s words were definitely too incomprehensible to understand. Looking back at his boyfriend, he offers a soft smile, hoping it doesn’t turn into a frown, and asks, “How was your nap? You seem less loopy than you were before.”
Though he’s undoubtedly grumpy, Harley is just as clingy now, if not more so, than he was during the car ride home—he shimmies just slightly, until his head is completely free from his duvet, and settles his forehead to rest against the curve of Peter’s collarbone. “Sucks,” he mumbles. “Mouth hurts. My fuckin’ teeth are gone. My face is sore. Gotta headache, too, on top of all that. Overall—” he huffs, burrows closer to Peter and lets his eyes flutter shut. “Not feeling the best, but, like—not dead, I guess.”
“The bar feels too low if you’re goal is just not dead,” Peter tells him, angling his chin down in a slightly uncomfortable way in order to get a better look at Harley’s face. His smile fades into the frown he was trying to fight off before, concern ebbing into the pit of his stomach. “Your face is pretty swollen, Harls.”
“No shit,” Harley says. “They ripped my teeth out of my mouth. What else were you expecting?”
The sarcasm makes Peter roll his eyes, but his focus isn’t deterred. “I just wanna make sure this is a normal amount of swelling,” he explains to Harley, if only to deter his grumpiness. It seems to work, as his features get a bit less pinched before he nods against Peter’s collarbone. Taking this as permission to make sure, Peter keeps his eyes trained on Harley’s features and calls out, “Friday? Any input?”
Instantly, Friday informs them, “As of now, there is no reason to be concerned. If the swelling persists, however, it would be worth it to reach out to Miss Cho and gather her input on the matter.”
Satisfied by that, Peter smooths back Harley’s hair with his fingers and presses a kiss to his forehead before smiling down at him again, no longer feeling the need to frown. “We stocked up on soft foods and stuff for you,” he reminds Harley. “Think you can stomach a milkshake or something?”
“Milkshake,” Harley repeats, sighing dreamily. “Yes, please.”
“On it,” Harry says, already pushing himself to his feet and ambling over to the kitchen. Peter sends him a grateful half-grin that only gets a vague hand wave of dismissal in response. Flash is pouting, bringing his knees up to his knees, though he immediately perks up when Harry adds, “You, too, Genie!”
Flash grins at him. Peter briefly basks in the fact that he’s never seen the guy look happier.
Good. It’s good. It makes him happy to see his friends happy.
Once Harry’s out of the room, Peter turns his full focus back to Harley, who looks mere moments away from falling back asleep, mouth parted to let out even breaths that puff against the side of Peter’s neck. Nudging him slightly, Peter asks, “You think you’re gonna need some pain killers? Tony left them out here with us for when you woke up, so if you think you need them, they’re on the coffee table.”
“Uh…” Harley’s features scrunch up slightly as he contemplates this, before puffing out a breath and saying, “Yeah, I think so. It doesn’t hurt super bad, but, like, it’s already gettin’ worse, so…”
Peter looks up, meeting eyes with Ned. “Hey, can you—?”
“Just use your web shooters,” Harley grumbles, burrowing into Peter with a grimace. “You’ll move too much if you reach for it and I’m too tired for that shit.”
“What’d he say?” Flash asks—thankfully, looking genuinely confused and not somewhat panicked, or shocked, or—well, Peter hasn’t put a lot of thought into what Flash’s reaction will be when he inevitably gets the courage to tel him (and Harry) about him being Spider-Man, but he has a feeling Flash would be doing more than blinking across the room in a rumpled movie night kind of confusion like he is right now.
“Dunno,” Peter manages to answer without sounding too suspicious, before ducking his head a bit and whispering, “Harley, I adore you, and I know you’re in pain right now, but could you not keep mentioning my secret identity in front of one of our two best friends who I haven’t told about it yet?”
Later, Harley won’t be able to come up with a proper excuse for why he does this—he’ll burn red with a look of embarrassment on his face, trying to stammer out a mixture of an apology and a reason that isn’t there, and Peter will think that it’s hilarious and adorable and he won’t actually be upset. Right now, though, he only feels a flare of frustration and pure shock as Harley raises his head, glares at Peter, and loudly states, “My boyfriend is a superhero,” for everyone in the living room to hear—clear, crisp, and there. Impossible to deny, or find a cover for, or wave off as something else.
Peter’s eyes go wide. He stares, unblinking, as Harley drops his head back down to rest against Peter’s chest, snuggling in as if he didn’t just announce that to the various ears in the room. Which, of course, isn’t too bad, considering the fact that only one of them didn’t already know, but still.
“What?” Flash says, laughing lightly, and—well, okay, maybe if Peter didn’t go so rigid and tense, they could have played it off as a Harley is still loopy and saying weird shit kind of thing, but when Flash glances around the room, he doesn’t see looks of amusement and the same fond giggly-ness that he’s feeling. Instead, he finds an indifferent Michelle, scrolling through her phone idly, a visibly nervous Ned that refuses to look anywhere than the ceiling, a possibly already asleep Harley that doesn’t seem to have a care in the world at the moment, and—and Peter. Who is pale, and frozen, and…
And he looks up, meets Flash’s gaze, and loses whatever little color in his face that may have been there before. Flash’s laughter trails off, his smile slips away. From the kitchen, a blender whirls to life.
Peter finds the blender to be a saving grace, as it guarantees that Harry doesn’t hear when Flash goes wide in the eyes and lurches into a ram-rod, back straight and jaw dropped position, exclaiming a strangled, “Wait, wait, hold the fucking—WHAT?!” When no one responds fast enough, outside of Peter flinching away and parting his lips in a silent panic, Flash jumps to his feet and shouts, “You’re a superhero?!”
“N-No,” Peter stammers, finally managing to de-tangle his tongue, though it still struggles to cooperate with him, still puts up a fight as he tries to speak. “No, I’m—I mean, I’m not—Flash—”
“You are,” Flash says, now pacing behind the big sofa with a breathlessness to his tone that wasn’t there before, tugging at his hair with both hands as his mind damn-near visibly spirals down a path, thinking back on how things have been since he joined the friend group, since before that, even—starts seeing all these signs that were always there but he never paid attention to. “Oh my god,” he breathes. “Oh my god, you are. It makes sense, doesn’t it? You were—no offense, Pete, but you were a twig when freshman year started, and then—then you just—you showed up one day with, like—like—biceps, dude. Biceps, that you didn’t have before, and—you’re always disappearing! Always! And you’re late, all the time, and no one ever seems worried about it when I bring it up, and—oh my god, everyone else knows, don’t they?!” Then, as if a specific wire has clicked into place, he gasps, clapping his hands over his mouth as he spins around to stare at Peter with wide eyes. Hands moving back, he whispers, “You’re Spider-Man!”
Apparently not as asleep as he looks, Harley holds out a thumbs up. “Astound observations, Eugene.”
“Harley—” Peter cuts himself off with a sharp inhale, clenching his jaw and giving himself a second to recover. Once he’s cooled down his frustrations, he looks back at Flash, eyes pleading for a chance to explain himself. “I was planning to tell you,” he says, foregoing the denial approach altogether, already knowing that it’ll be hopeless. “I just—it’s not easy, knowing all of this, and—and being in it all, and it’s dangerous to know it, to—to, y’know, to be involved in anything that happens. And—I mean, Ned and MJ know, and—and Harley, too, obviously, but—but Harry doesn’t know. Not yet. P-Please, don’t—”
“Not my secret to tell,” Flash murmurs, all the energy seemingly seeping out of him as he falls back into the corner of the couch that he had been sitting on before. “Jesus, I can’t—how didn’t I see it before?”
The blender turns off. Peter lowers his voice to match the sudden quiet, just to be safe, and tells Flash, “I didn’t want you to see it.” Then, after glancing towards the kitchen briefly to indicate why he’s saying what he’s saying, he promises Flash, “I’ll tell you everything later, okay? And I’ll explain it all. Just… don’t bring it up until after Harry’s out of the room or something? Please?”
Flash sinks his teeth into his lower lip, looking conflicted, but nods. “Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” Peter murmurs, just before Harry comes back into the room, two milkshakes in hand.
Around three in the morning, Peter wakes up to hands shaking his shoulder. He blearily blinks open his eyes, sleepy and confused as he squints through the darkness, only to find Flash standing over him with a disheveled appearance, his eyes wide and manic. “Dude,” he hisses. “You crashed my dad’s car!”
“Go away,” Harley murmurs into Peter’s shoulder, nose scrunched and face slightly less swollen.
Flash ignores him, shoving Peter’s shoulder again. “Do you have any idea how long I was grounded because of that?” he grumbles. “First time my dad paid attention to me in years and it was to yell at me for letting a vigilante take his car and total the damn thing.” He shakes his head, and Peter feels the need to apologize, but then Flash is beaming, looking like a kid on Christmas morning that’s just been handed the biggest present under the tree, and he says, “You better pay me back by letting me see the suit.”
Peter huffs a laugh, leans his head back and closes his eyes. “Sure,” he mumbles. “Yeah, whatever.”
“No, like—” Flash flicks him in the nose. “Now, Parker. Show me now, while Harry’s asleep.”
“It’s—” Peter stops, yawns, and tries again. “It’s three in the morning, Flash. I’m tired.”
Shrugging, Flash tells him, “Tough shit, man. I didn’t say anything in front of Harry, but my curiosity is keeping my dumbass awake, and you can sleep in tomorrow, so get your ass up and show me the cool Spider-Man shit before I start screaming. That’s not—I’m not bluffing, dude. I will scream.”
Harley swats at Flash weakly, curls into Peter’s side with a grumbled little, “Fuck off, Eugene.”
Letting out a sigh, Peter carefully nudges Harley off of him, ignoring the way he whines like a pitiful little puppy, though he quickly quiets when his cat hops onto the love seat to curl up with him, instead. “I’ll be back in a little bit,” he murmurs to Harley, who only snuffles in response before instantly letting out a soft little snore, idly scratching behind the cats ears even as he snoozes away. Peter shakes his head, a fond little smile pulling at the ends of his lips, before turning his focus back to Flash. “You’re lucky we became friends,” he tells him, though there’s no malice in his tone as he leads the way towards the elevator, which is already sliding open, thanks to Friday always being on top of things. “If I didn’t give a shit about you, I would be telling you to go fuck yourself right now.”
“Dude, I literally don’t give a shit what you’re saying, unless you’re telling me cool shit about being Spider-Man,” Flash tells him, stepping onto the elevator with a pep in his step.
“Fair enough,” Peter says. “Fri? Take us down to the lab, please.”
Flash is still grinning as the doors slide shut. “So cool,” he says. “So fucking cool.”