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Peter drifts awake sprawled on top of Harley. A sledgehammer swings into his chest.
He freezes.
Harley’s still asleep. Don’t wake him up.
Morning light breaks thinly through the windows. Dawn, then. He can barely recall what the hell happened last night. Drawing? ASMR? Oh, a nightmare. Of course he remembers the nightmare.
He remembers flopping on top of Harley on this very couch.
Oh, man.
Slowly, very slowly, he peels himself off of Harley’s languid body, teeth clenched all the while. Once he’s off the couch, he hurries away to his own room. He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t think about it.
---
“Gaines, Hunter?”
“Friar, Alexander?”
“I prefer Alex.”
“Alexander, like the Great?”
“If you say so,” Peter says.
Harley reads the cue between lines: “Alex crosses the room, flinging aside a jacket, and sits sultry at Hunter’s side. In Hunter’s eyes, we see his heart jackhammering.”
“I get the feeling you’re not exactly a seasoned expert at this kind of arrangement.”
“Maybe you feel wrong. Ugh. I don’t like that,” Harley interjects. “Not the reading. You’re doing great. It just seems… it seems like a rom-com, right? It feels like that moment in a rom-com when you realise, yup, I’m watching a rom-com. And this isn’t a rom-com.”
“Not a rom-com,” huffs Peter. He is blessedly ignorant of the evident struggle of screenwriting, if Harley’s frowning and sighing and huffing and puffing and scribbling at the script is anything to go by. He’s got a comfy seat by Harley on his bed, ‘his’ lines highlighted in a draft copy of Harley’s script for his end-of-term short film, and a hot chocolate that’s mostly just making him sleepy. Sleepy enough to forgo entertaining the thought of mentioning to Harley that he’s just over a week from the deadline yet still obsessing over his screenplay. Harley always figures it out in the end.
“You’d be surprised,” Peter continues, doing his best sultry-male-escort-with-a-dark-past impression.
Harley flashes him a smile. It knocks him off-kilter, the crooked pride of it.
“Now,” he continues, “I don’t want anything to worry about. No chickening out at the last minute, nothing like that.”
“He crawls close to Hunter,” reads Harley, and Peter, high on the thrill of Alexander the escort, sets aside the hot chocolate and shuffles towards Harley. Harley fights a grin.
When Harley says, “Nothing at all, darling,” Peter is knocked out of the window and onto the street.
Darling.
Darling.
Darling.
All at once, he wants to be an inch away from Harley’s face and a planet away. Help.
What is happening?
Peter’s hot and prickly and hammering rain and a watercolour lit on fire.
“Your line,” Harley reminds him, and there is that stupid smile, that paper-bag rip across the plane of his jaw, his jaw--
“Um. Uh-- if you’ll shut up, I’m going to kiss you now,” mumbles Peter.
His very toes are burning red. Heat isn’t a good look on him. Oh, God. Get him out of here.
He downs his hot chocolate, waves it frantically in front of Harley. “Gonna put it in the wash-disher,” he rushes. “Dish-er. The--the-- you know what I mean!”
Harley just lays back on the bed and cackles Peter out of the bedroom.
What. What. What. Peter is a fucked-up cat’s cradle and can’t untangle himself.
---
It should have been obvious.
It should have been obvious when his camera roll started to run out of storage and suggest he delete the shittiest of his photos of Harley Keener. He starts to find his hands fumbling for his phone before his brain can catch up, whenever Harley does something of note--which is pretty much all the time.
They’re playing around with Kobol in the park and when Harley starts play-wrestling the dog, Peter snaps a picture. And it’s good. Here’s the thing: his photos are infamously bad. They range from mediocre to were you being torn to shreds by a wolf as you took that? In pitch darkness? While having a seizure?
But this one caught Harley in the middle of a bright peal of laughter, Kobol trampling over his chest enthusiastically, Harley’s legs flailing, his jacket akimbo.
Peter flops down beside the wheezing mess of limbs that is Harley--not really in tune with his brain, which is currently panicking a little, but whatever, he’s gotta roll with it now--and sticks the phone under his nose.
“Isn’t that perfect,” he says, not really asking.
And he gets something he wasn’t aware he’d hoped for: a return of those crinkles around Harley’s eyes when he grins.
“Adorable! Hey, let’s get him in a selfie.” Harley scoops Kobol up and plonks him down between them, motioning for Peter to bring back up the camera.
Looking back at the photo late that night, Peter sees a happily panting Kobol, an ever-grinning Harley, and his own face, taut and unsure and utterly terrified.
---
It should have been obvious when Peter started to obsess over just what dinner would put a smile on Harley’s face after therapy.
“Hey,” wafts into the apartment.
Peter had been in a peaceful haze as he flipped burgers in a pan. “Hi!” he says, and it comes out over-enthusiastic. He hears a distant chuckle grow closer.
He catches Harley with an arm and pulls him into his side. Again, his body jumping ahead of his thoughts. Harley hums, digs his face into Peter’s shoulder.
“Good session? Deep shit?” Peter asks him.
“Very deep shit. Family shit, actually.”
This is big. Peter knows it’s big. He also knows Harley prefers to pretend it isn’t big, so he just nudges his hip against Harley’s, trying to wring out all his daunted pride and cover the gesture in it.
Then he says, “I’m making cheeseburgers.”
Harley makes an mmm sound into his collarbone. Peter feels his mouth curl into a smile against his skin. That smile.
---
It should have been obvious when Peter started to spend all the time he wasn’t with Harley thinking about him, puzzling over him, feeding the hungry pit of dread in his stomach with the image of his lips.
“You look stressed-out,” Tony says to him on summer break, surprising him in the doorway of his room.
“Oh,” Peter breathes, tossing aside the selfie with Harley and Kobol he was staring intently at on his phone. What to say? “Thinking about MJ,” he says eventually, guilt resting fuzzy on his tongue at the lie.
Tony comes over, sits beside where he’s sprawled out on the bed, lays a hand on his arm and squeezes, all in his patented Dad Tony way. The familiarity of it is comforting.
“That’s a tough one,” he says. “Breakups suck. It was an intense one, too. How are you feeling about it? Should we eat ice cream and watch a stupid movie? How about a heart-to-heart? A wander around in the woods?”
“I just… think I need to be alone.”
Tony’s jaw shuts. “Right.”
“That all sounds good,” amends Peter. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“Whenever you want.” Tony smiles with his mouth. He squeezes Peter’s arm once more, looking stranded all of a sudden.
Peter grabs the hand. “I didn’t mean I didn’t want to--”
“No, you don’t have to spill all your secrets. It’s not like it used to be. I know.” He says it as if he’s said it time and time before, as if he’s reminding himself. “You’re your own man, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” He shakes his head fondly. “I guess I just still remember being the person you’d run to.”
“I still…”
“Don’t worry.” The smile Tony offers this time seems genuine. Amused, too. “You don’t have to, kid.”
Peter sighs. He offers a half-truth: “I have to figure out some things. That’s all.”
“Alright.” Yet another arm squeeze, then a pat. “If you ever want help figuring them out, you can…”
“Talk to you. I will. I will.” Peter nods, nods, probably too much nodding, so he stops.
With an awkward little spring, Tony vacates the bed. He jerks a thumb down the corridor. “I’ll feed the dog.”
---
Dr. Brenner is the world’s biggest dick.
It’s not enough that he keeps Eleven in a windowless, soulless lab, isolated from a life, from a childhood. He has to put on this pretense of fatherhood too, stroking her hair, speaking softly to her, feeding his lies to her with honey. It’s sick. It makes Peter feel sick.
“There’s more stuff with Brenner in this episode,” Harley forewarns him, “So we can always skip out on that stuff. Or just watch something else if you’re not in the mood…”
But Peter says it’s fine. It’s just TV.
“Eleven.” Brenner cradles her face as if he has the right to do it. But he’s got her held tight, too tight for her to break away as she blinks woozily awake. “Eleven, can you hear me?”
Cut to Mike thrashing in the grip of an officer, screaming, “Let her go, you bastard!”
Peter’s hand curls instinctively into the couch.
“You’re sick,” Brenner is telling her. More lies.
Only now does Peter realise his hand isn’t digging into the couch--it’s holding Harley’s.
Eleven sounds wrecked. “Mike.” She pushes Brenner’s hand from her face, struggles weakly away, but he grips her tighter, tighter.
Peter hides his face in Harley’s shirt.
As if the gesture is wired into him, Harley’s hand settles around Peter’s back. A thought occurs to Peter that he’d never even considered before: does he like me back?
Peter’s heart veers up a gear.
Eleven is still crying out fruitlessly for Mike when Harley slips his hand out of Peter’s.
Oh.
Okay.
Peter crushes away his heart into a tiny corner.
---
Peter’s search history fills with his bafflement:
How to know if you’re gay
Sexuality scale
Bisexuality
Am i gay quiz
Sexuality quiz
What is gay panic????
How to stop liking a boy that doesn’t like you back
What if i liked a girl but like a boy but don’t think i’m bi because i don’t want to be with a boy
The last is his most pressing, but yields no answers.
The answers he does get are terrifying. Sounds like you could be bisexual! You may be pansexual! You are 54% gay...
So he shuts his laptop.
---
“Harley,” he says as they wander through an aquarium, past a tank teeming with glowing fish. “How did you figure out you were gay?”
Harley pauses. One little guy is flopped against the floor of the tank in front of them, glowing violently, brighter than all the rest but left alone. Harley presses his thumb against the glass as if trying to show him that’s not the case.
“A lot of time and pain,” he says at last, quietly but darkly. “A lot of hating myself. When I first labelled myself, it was like defeat more than anything. It was something reprehensible in me that I couldn’t deny any longer. Wow. Big words.”
Peter can’t stand to watch his blown-open face lit up in the water’s rippling blue any longer, so he ends up squishing his face against the glass like a sticky-palmed toddler. He seeks the little fish with his gaze, willing it to chill out and get up.
“I mean… it was always boys. From the first movie crush I can remember. It was actually that fox version of Robin Hood. That guy. He was great.” Harley laughs a little. “I realised other people didn’t see girls like I did. I love girls, but they weren’t… they just weren’t it. Somewhere within those years of confusion, I came out. Out of the shadows, the isolation, the closet, whatever.”
A reflection of Harley’s squished face throws itself across the glass against Peter’s eyes. Peter turns to the side; Harley’s watching the fish too, the lone fish that shines brighter than the rest. Its tail beats against the rock it’s slumped against, halfheartedly.
Hesitantly, Harley says, “I never really asked about you.”
About me.
Peter rips his face off the glass. His eyebrows peel clean off his face. “Me? Straight. Heterosexual. Always--always been straight. Ha.”
He wishes he could be that fish. If he was suspended in water, nobody would need to hear when he talked.
“Yeah, I know,” Harley says like he’s surrendering. Like a dagger through the chest.
No, here’s what Peter really wants: to reel time back around his little finger, pull it at will, and try again. Try it all again.
---
Peter and MJ have been mostly avoiding each other all summer, and it seems like they’ll go on avoiding each other for the ensuing semester, much to Ned’s chagrin, until it all changes with the arrival of a luminous yellow bird through the window of the art studio.
Class has ended, but Peter stays perched on a stool by the windowsill where this little bird has sat still for a miraculous half an hour in the spilt light of the summer sunset. Inquisitive black eyes. A stout white beak. A few dark streaks through the feathers of its wings, dirty forest green.
“That must be someone’s pet bird.”
Peter knows that voice.
He doesn’t turn, wary of disturbing the bird--which he’s nicknamed Egg Yolk because, duh, yellow--but he lets his head tilt just slightly in recognition.
MJ goes on. “That’s a yellow canary. Pretty rare in the United States. They’re native to the Canary Islands and western and central Africa. Here, people typically only have them as pets. This one must have flown the coop.”
“I didn’t know you knew so much about birds,” Peter says. She’s crept into his field of vision to watch Egg Yolk; Peter can just faintly make out the cloud of her ponytail. He remembers running reverent fingers through that hair. Misses it.
“Yeah,” she says with a shrug. “I was a real bird nerd as a little kid. Used to read those National Geographic guides cover to cover.”
Peter smiles at the image. Egg Yolk is drooping in the sun, looking like she’s falling asleep, and something compels Peter to reach out a finger and stroke it ever so gently across the top of her tiny head. Miraculously, she doesn’t startle at the touch, just batting her eyes.
“I’ve called her Egg Yolk,” he whispers to MJ.
MJ chuckles.
Egg Yolk shakes herself out, fluffing her feathers, but doesn’t raise her wings to fly away. One is held at a crooked angle.
“Why do you think she ended up here and won’t fly back?” Peter asks MJ.
“Maybe she just likes you.”
Egg Yolk chirps a little as if in confirmation.
MJ steps closer again, kneeling in front of the bird with eyes narrowed in observation. The expression is painfully familiar to Peter. “But I think that wing is injured. Maybe she needs help.”
Peter takes a closer look at the wing, which definitely looks crooked, and feels a surprising pang of sympathy for this little injured bird in his care.
“Maybe she does,” he says, and then something jolts within him. “Maybe she doesn’t want to fly back. She doesn’t feel like she can. She doesn’t know how to say that she’s broken.”
It had been fear, he realises, not wariness of disturbing Egg Yolk, that had kept him from meeting her gaze. Now, at last, he looks up at her. She was already watching him. Her eyes understand him.
“She won’t be broken forever,” she says. “We can help fix her. We might not know how to, but somebody does.”
---
Professor Hayes tells Peter to paint something happy for once.
It means nothing, of course, that Peter’s first idea is to paint Harley.
He does a modern take on a traditional, moodily-lit portrait, having Harley draped lazily across the couch in the studio and playing with a fidget cube, wearing his pastel pink pencil skirt, a cropped hoodie, and strings and strings of pearls cascading across his chest. He’s like an explosion of individuality.
Peter didn’t factor in the sheer volume of feelings that explosion would stir up in him.
He thinks he could mix the oils for this painting with his eyes shut. He almost does, eyes fixed on Harley instead.
Harley snorts. “This is great,” he says. “Your undivided attention for hours on end. Although you’re gonna have to say something soon, otherwise I might end up imploding. Compacting into a little Harley trash cube. We don’t want that, right? That’s, like, the worst place to be in if we’re talking WALL-E.”
“We’re talking that one string of pearls, the skinniest one,” Peter interjects, driving a decisive stake through his tirade, “That’s off-kilter.”
“Off-kilter from what?”
“My artistic vision,” says Peter pretentiously.
“Where does your artistic vision want me to scooch the skinny pearls to?”
Peter moves his index finger just slightly to indicate how Harley will shift the very precariously arranged pearls. And, miracle of miracles, Harley actually manages to nudge it back into its artfully tumbling path without sending the whole ensemble into disarray.
The first brushstroke on Peter’s broad canvas is in light brown, blocking out the negative space around Harley.
Harley bats his eyelids, grins devilishly. “How gay do I look right now?”
“On a scale of...?”
“1 to Ru Paul.”
“Who?”
“Jesus,” Harley says, screwing up his mouth like he’s looking at a piece of very uncool street decor. “It’s a good job I love you, Parker.”
Peter swallows.
“What? What was that? That was like a cartoon gulp.”
“I didn’t gulp.”
“You went, gulp.”
“Just figuring out how to fit your ogre feet inside the canvas.”
Harley’s jaw drops. “Bitch.”
“Shouldn’t have modelled for me,” Peter teases, glad to have averted that emotion-excavating crisis. “I have all the power.”
“Who told you that?” Harley says with a single quirked brow. He oozes Harley, emits it from his pores in an all-new signature scent Peter would pay thousands for. “You’re watching me, yes, but I’m watching you too. You’re painting me, and I’m making a movie in my head.”
“A movie? What about?”
“I saw a thing on social media,” Harley tells him with eyes alight, twirling a string of pearls around his finger that Peter hasn’t the heart to scold him for, “About a guy who could draw people’s soulmates.”
Peter washes the negative space around Harley in a shadowy umber. “Like, one of those Facebook videos with royalty-free music? I don’t trust them.”
“I don’t care if they’re trustworthy. Isn’t that such a cool idea? In my movie, you’re the guy who draws people’s soulmates. You’ve always known how to. But you, you’re searching for your own soulmate. All that soulmate-drawing is making you feel lonely.”
“Who’s my soulmate, then?” Peter asks before he can think.
Harley halts, and Peter’s screwed up, he must have screwed up, because something sad is happening on Harley’s face.
He has to stop talking about soulmates in front of Harley. What if he’s making it obvious?
“I didn’t get to that part,” Harley says with a tight mouth. “Maybe it’s, like…”
Peter tries to help him out. “If I paint a self-portrait, will the soulmate thing kick in for me?”
“Yes.” Any trace of discomfort flees Harley’s countenance as he lays back like a Greek god and starts to run with his idea aloud. “The face of this mysterious girl emerges and you don’t know her, but yet you do, somehow.” Girl. Suddenly, Peter doesn’t want him to say girl. “You swear you’ve seen her face before. So you scour the Internet and stuff, looking at celebrities, asking about family friends, but… but it turns out to be this quiet girl at the back of class.” Peter rushes to paint the precise look of passionate introspection that crosses his face just then. Like he’s glowing from the inside out, bioluminescent. “And to test the theory, you ask if you can draw her. As you start to draw, you see your own face looking back at you. Isn’t that such a cool idea?”
Peter sits back on his stool and is confronted with his own painting: an explosion of Harley, Harley, Harley. The light and colour amid a swathe of darkness.
---
Peter can’t like Harley. He can’t.
Would he like Harley if it weren’t for Larry?
Do his feelings for Harley mean he liked it? The creaking, grunting, whimpering? The daily torture? The frantic pain, the slow withering?
He can’t have liked it.
But what if, deep down, some part of him--
Some part of him that put his own dampness on the sheets, the part that felt unconscious and animal, the part that hijacked his body--
What if that part of him did like it?
If he did like it, Larry wasn’t a bad man, and Peter is a bad, bad person. He has no right to be traumatised. If he liked it, he deserves to have stayed in the Room for the rest of his life.
And he most certainly doesn’t deserve Harley.
Harley is good and sweet and awesome and beautiful. And Harley just wants to be his friend. So Peter won’t like him. That’s what he decides.
---
They go dancing: Peter, Harley, and Ned.
Harley suggested a gay club, but laughed when he said it. So.
In the end, they settle for a low-key not-gay place which, in some ironic twist of fate, is still called The Rainbow. Peter hopes the name isn’t an omen.
He forgoes his hoodies for once and wears an actual shirt--plain grey. Harley wears tight tapered pants and a dark, flower-printed shirt and a slim silver necklace and makes his hair all tousled because he likes to torture Peter, clearly. Ned dons his lucky hat, that legendary dark fedora--one of many.
And they actually have a good time. It’s much less traumatising than Kyle Price’s frat party. Peter pays for the drinks, because Ned and Harley are both normal broke college students who deserve a few lemonades out of Peter’s neverending allowance. They hoover their way through pizza at a table, and then Ned’s dragging them both towards the dance floor.
On the floor, lights and blaring music put time through a blender until the very air around Peter is fluid. Bass rumbles in his ears and thunders up through his feet on the floor. Ned and Harley’s faces weave around him. Then Ned’s off with some girl, smiling at her in a way Peter’s never seen Ned smile, doubling over laughing. It’s just Peter and Harley. Harley bobs up and down in front of Peter, buoyant, floating almost. He’s a terrible dancer. Peter wants to capture his waist and feel it undulate around his arm.
He feels drunk. He stumbles closer to Harley, probably looking drunk too with pure disorientation, with pure confusion, with pure feeling , and takes his hand and spins him round. Like they’re a couple. Like Peter feels things for him.
But before he can stop, Harley pulls him closer. Close enough he can smell the sharp sweetness of lemonade on Harley’s breath. The whispering of hair on his upper lip is in high definition. He says something to Peter, laughs, but Peter’s ears are static and his eyes are busy seeing every atom of colour in Harley’s eyes, like a kaleidoscope. The music slows a little, the bass a purr through Peter’s shins, and his hips bump Harley’s as they sway in opposite directions. They’re both trash dancers.
And Peter feels something happening--
He flushes, his face and his groin--
He can’t look down or it’d be obvious. He fixes his gaze on a spot on the wall instead as Harley wiggles them back and forth clumsily, their thighs brushing, oh God, their thighs brushing. Peter needs to calm down. He needs a bucket of ice water down his pants. He needs his cold back already. What’s with all this raging heat?
Harley’s gonna notice. He has to.
At last, he sneaks a glance down; he’s tenting his pants mortifyingly.
He bolts. “Need the bathroom,” he yells at Harley’s shoes. Pushes through the crowd. Locks himself in a stall. Paces the tiny space, trying to conjure his most effective boner-busters. Trying not to think about how the boner came about. That it was a boy. That it was Harley.
Fluffy ducks. Overcooked mushrooms. Chainsaw massacres.
“Peter?”
Peter freezes.
“Peter, I saw you come in here.”
“I’m, uh… I’m pooping, Ned,” he blurts. Then resists the urge to hammer his head against the wall.
“Really?”
Peter sighs. “No.”
“Something’s up, Peter, I can tell. You ran off so fast there were basically lines coming off you.” Rapping on his door, Ned asks, “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Are you having a panic attack? Was it because of the lights and music and stuff? It was really stuffy in there.”
“No. I’m--I’m… it’s not about that.”
“What’s it about? Look, can you just let me in? Or, like, come out and stop being barricaded inside the stall?”
Peter yanks the lock out and Ned comes tumbling into the stall with him.
As if he’s got a radar for these sorts of things, Ned looks straight down at Peter’s pants. Peter covers the tent protectively with his hands, watching Ned, feeling red-hot again.
“Oh,” says Ned like he half-understands. Then, “Oh?” Then, finally, “Oh.”
“It’s Harley,” Peter whispers. He thinks he’s going to explode, him and all the Harley inside him that wants out. His eyes flood. “I’m not… straight.”
Ned’s hands come up to grip Peter, holding him up. He holds Peter in that cramped, dingy space, and holds him, and holds him. He softens, brow dipping sympathetically.
He says, “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t know.” Peter wipes away his tears with a jolt. He’s crying with Ned in a bathroom stall at The Rainbow. “I was scared. Am. And Harley’s… Harley.”
“Peter,” Ned points out, “Harley is literally gay.”
“And doesn’t like me.”
“Have you asked him?”
“No. It’s just that he’s obviously uncomfortable whenever I talk about romantic stuff. He’s--he’s just not--no.”
“Talk to him!”
“How do you get rid of boners?” Peter asks him tremulously.
Ned splutters, wheezes, and starts to cry along with him. Only he’s laughing too.
“Ned,” hisses Peter, “My tent is so big it’s a marquee and Harley’s gonna get suspicious in a minute. What do I do?”
“If you like Harley, tell him. If you’re not sure, figure it out.”
“I don’t...know…”
“Then figure it out. I’m cool with helping you. And for what it’s worth, I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, am I the first person you’ve come out to?”
“You are.”
“Crowding into the bathroom was so totally worth it!” Ned cries, shaking Peter excitedly. Peter, for all the tears still leaking from his eyes and the snot clogging him up and his sledgehammer heart, laughs like a maniac.
Leaning close, Ned confides in him: “I always think about sharks tearing people limb from limb. Like in Jaws.”
---
When the portrait of Harley is completed, Peter doesn’t show it to him. Doesn’t even hand it in. He tells everyone it just didn’t work out.
Because, looking at it, it’s painfully obvious how Peter feels about him.
He keeps it under his bed. Pushes away whatever traitorous heat had been encroaching on him. Keeps his cold close to his chest. The cold is him. That’s what he tells himself.
It’s what he deserves.