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"I can't believe we scored an invite to this party!" Benny crowed, whipping his shirt off and lobbing it at Ethan's head.
Ethan scowled. "We didn't really. We're only going because Sarah told us about it. On accident."
"Doesn't matter. Still going." Benny grabbed his shirt from Ethan's bed and started to button it up. "Don't wear a belt."
"What, why? Never mind, I have to. My pants won't stay up otherwise."
"Then don't tuck in your shirt."
"Thanks, Mom," Ethan scoffed.
"Dude," Benny said placatingly, if slightly annoyed, "just trying to help you out."
"I can't believe we are gate-crashing this party."
Benny smirked. "It's going to be awesome." He sprayed cologne on them both and shoved Ethan down the stairs and out the door. "We'll be back later!"
"See you, boys," Ethan's dad yelled. "Have fun at the party."
The party was at an upperclassman's house. His parents were busy every night of the week, and he got lucky enough that both of them had overnight trips come up on the same weekend. The news had gotten out quickly, and whether he wanted it or not, the greater population of their school was there.
"Oh, this is going wicked," Benny squealed, manfully. The press of bodies in the house was overwhelming and the music was loud, but not deafening, which Ethan was glad about.
"Work the room, Casanova," Ethan laughed, watching his friend smooth his shirt out and check his breath.
"How are my eyebrows? Looking good?"
"Real sexy, man."
"Go find Sarah," Benny pushed him into the crowd. "No buts, just go find her and talk to her."
"Cry over my corpse when she kills me."
"You know I'll throw myself on the casket for you. Now, go."
It took Ethan an awkward half hour of avoiding all the kids he knew (Rory, mostly) and squeezing in between the ones he didn't in his fruitless search for the vampire. He saw Benny leaning on the wall next to Erica, his eyebrows waggling as he tried to flirt and she mostly ignored him. He gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up which Benny returned with a wink.
"Ethan?"
He turned around to see Sarah smiling, her fangs hidden from sight. "Hey!"
"How do you like the party?"
He smiled. "Oh, it's great."
There was an awkward pause before they both quickly said, "Benny and Erica are over there-" They laughed.
"Want to go there?"
She nodded shrewdly. "I think we should stop Benny from embarrassing himself."
Ethan drug Benny away from the blonde, just as Sarah hooked her arm in her friend's and did the same. "Dude! You interrupted my game!"
"This is a disaster. Can we go home now?" he pleaded.
"Nope." Ethan's face fell. "I'm going to get a kiss from her tonight. That one with the love potion so did not count, according to Grandma-"
"I could have told you that."
"So I'm going to get one. Somehow."
Ethan groaned in the back of his throat. "No magic, Benny. Please."
"No, no magic. Just going to wait it out and you'll see."
Benny's version of "Wait it out" was to stalk the girls subtly, dragging Ethan behind him. He saw Benny whisper in someone's ear, some pretty redheaded girl Ethan didn't know, who blushed and nodded. She emptied her soda, one of those specialty orange creme sodas that came in glass bottles, and yelled, "SPIN THE BOTTLE."
"Dude!" Ethan said when Benny smirked. "This is your master plan?"
"Watch and learn, young one."
The redhead and her friends drug all the girls into the middle of the room and boys quickly filled in the gaps between them before they all sat down in a circle. Ethan and Benny inserted themselves into the circle, almost directly across from each other. Ethan was next to Erica and, on the other side, Benny was smiling smugly next to Sarah.
"I hate you," Ethan mouthed across the circle when Sarah was looking away, and Benny patted his heart sarcastically.
"Rules!" the girl announced, having taken seriously to her role as gamekeeper. "You have to kiss who you spin. If you don't, you are out of the game." Ethan heard the unspoken, and laughed at behind your back for weeks. "There are no do-overs. If you spin someone twice, well, let's just say the game gets more interesting the longer it goes on." She motioned to the boy beside her to start and Ethan had to swallow back the lump in his throat that had been growing since they'd sat down.
The thing about playing Spin the Bottle, Ethan realized, was that it left people oddly vulnerable. Often, as two people would pull away, you could see everything they were feeling in their eyes and getting ribbed by their friends for being so breathless. There were always those couples who spun each other and made things plenty interesting all on their own. They would often get up and leave the game, to catcalls and fake retching sounds.
As the circle got smaller, Benny got more and more excited, seeing his chances of getting to kiss Erica go up and up. Ethan just hoped he didn't somehow break the bottle with nerves when it was his turn. Erica spun the pretty redheaded girl, whose name was Susie, as Ethan learned over the course of the game, and they puckered their lips really big and kissed with an exaggerated "mwah", drawing laughs from the kids left. Ethan spun the bottle, too nervous to look at it as it spun, and giggled at a bad joke Susie was telling.
"Ethan," Sarah said, drawing his attention. "You spun Benny."
"Oh," he said, looking up at his friend.
Benny laughed, got up on his knees and crawled playfully closer to Ethan. "Give it to me, baby."
Ethan knows this could be so much worse because it could have been someone else. It could have been someone who hadn't already seen all his embarrassing moments, and knew everything about him, and whom he knew so well in return. He laughed, reached out and curled a hand around his friend's neck, said, "You're such an idiot," before smashing their lips together.
It was a chaste press of lips, just a little moist from where they'd wet their lips before the kiss, and Ethan could feel the barely there curves of Benny's smile. He let him loose, watched him settled back into his seat.
"I've had better," Ethan joked.
Benny passed an absent hand over his lips and laughed. "But have you had worse?"
"Wait," Sarah said, breaking the silence from the rest of the players.
"What just happened?" Erica finished for her.
"What?" Benny said, completely clueless. Ethan looked around the circle to various fidgety, nervous looks. Benny took them all in with a quick look. "You people are ridiculous."
Susie spun the bottle with a flick of her wrist. "I've never seen two guys go at it without at least a token protest."
"We were just playing by the rules," Ethan said and they both shrugged their shoulders.
"Well, I guess we shouldn't be too surprised," Erica said sarcastically as Susie kissed a freshman boy with asthma, if the inhaler ready in his hand was any indication. "We did catch you cuddling."
"Hey, that was once! And we were cold."
"And there was only one chair."
"It was the logical thing to do."
Feeling properly defended, the boys settled back as a few absent kisses were exchanged between disinterested parties, including Sarah with Susie's asthma boy. Ethan was worried what would happen if anyone else landed on him tonight.
Benny cracked his neck theatrically and spun the bottle for his turn. The circle went quiet again when it landed on-
"Really?" Ethan sighed.
"Dude," Benny intoned, with feeling. "What are the chances?"
"Well," Susie said with a bright glint in her eyes that scared Ethan, "since you two are so bent up on playing by the rules, you know what happens on the second spin, right?" They both shook their heads no, all the bravado of earlier leaking out. "Three minutes," she said, tapping the face of her watch. "And believe me, I will actually time you."
"You're a wicked woman, Susie," Benny said, his voice a little more strained than it had been before. She quirked an eyebrow that said, "this was your idea" and clicked her fingernails on her watch again.
"Tick-tock."
Ethan crawled across the circle and settled down in front of his friend. "Hi," he said lamely.
"Hi."
"This is not awkward," he said forcefully.
"This is completely a non-issue," Benny agreed, but he couldn't look Ethan in the eyes and that made his stomach knot more than anything else. Ethan didn't know this Benny, who was shy and scared, or one who had something to hide from him. Ethan had enough of this, surged forward just like before, and pressed his lips to Benny's again.
Benny relaxed, breathed out his nose in a warm puff on Ethan's face, and his eyelashes fluttered against his cheek. Ethan knew they couldn't just sit there, not moving and unsure of where to put their hands, for three minutes so he moved his lips slightly, sucked at Benny's bottom lip. This must have brought Benny back to life because he opened his mouth under Ethan's, leaned forward and rested his hands on Ethan's thighs, and took control of the kiss.
Ethan hooked his hands around Benny's arms, pulled him closer until he was almost on his knees again, all of weight pushing down on Ethan's thighs. Ethan broke the kiss, gasping for air, and Benny took the chance to pull him upright on his knees too, sucked kisses to his jaw and neck. Ethan pressed their faces together, blushes burning on both cheeks, and did everything in his power to keep quiet as Benny bit and sucked on his throat. He pulled back enough, and slit his eyes open just enough, to see Benny and the way his lips glowed pink and moist made Ethan bunch his collar in his hands and pull them together once again. Ethan loved the heat and swirl of air between them, the brush of tongues, and the nip of sharp teeth. Benny had hooked his fingers in his belt loops but Ethan could still feel the brush of his knuckles on the front of his thighs and he thought about how easy it would be to use this leverage to lean back and pull Benny to the floor with him.
It was the sudden realization that they still had an audience that stopped him, though, just bare seconds before he heard Susie count down the last seconds and say, "Errrnt! Time's up."
Ethan let go of Benny's collar quickly, both of them falling back on their haunches from the abrupt separation. Benny's eyes were bright and glassy, like they got that time they'd both had a fever, and he wondered if he looked the same. Ethan smiled, weakly, in reassurance, before be sat back in his seat across from Benny, half-hard in his jeans and hoping no one could see.
Benny cleared his throat, didn't looked up at Ethan at all, and said, "So, your turn, Megan," to the girl next to him. Ethan glanced up at the other kids, saw that a lot of them had left while they'd- but Sarah and Erica were still there, twin expressions of something Ethan couldn't identify on their faces.
Megan just shook her head, pushed herself outside of the circle, and was followed by most everyone else.
"I guess this means we won," Benny said, the joke lacking his usual bite.
Susie looked at him blankly and said, "We thought you guys would drop out. I was kind of joking when I said that."
Ethan felt the blush flare back up in his cheeks and he rubbed the back of his neck nervously. He flashed his eyes up at Sarah and she smiled, just as weakly, before she got up and left the circle too.
"You got to be careful." He hooked a thumb over at Ethan, "this one takes everything literally."
Ethan snorted through his nose and, at the press of eyes on him again, he decided to get up and leave too. He ducked up the stairs without waiting for Benny, grabbed his coat from the bannister, and started the walk home. He shoved his hands in his pockets, and was glad to be out of that room and back into fresh air.
He heard Benny jogging up behind him, didn't make a move to avoid him. "Hey," Benny said quietly, catching his breath as he fell into step with him.
"Hey."
They were quiet for a few blocks, Benny chewing on his thumbnail absently. "So," he said as they stopped in front of Ethan's house, "it's not the weirdest thing to happen to us. I mean, your babysitter was a vampire."
Ethan laughed, shuffled his foot against the grass. "Yeah, and you have magic."
"And you're a Seer!"
"We just made out at a party in front of most of our classmates."
"In the grand schemes of things, it's not so bad." They both failed to laugh, too busy looking everywhere but at each other.
"We did cuddle that one time," Ethan said bravely.
"Survival technique." It was like the way they used to be, joking and free, until Benny reached up and touched his chilled fingertips to the bruise he'd left on Ethan's neck. "Going to be hard to explain that to your dad."
Ethan's breath caught in his chest at the serious expression on Benny's face. "We ought to get inside."
"I think-" Benny's hand dropped to his side. "Maybe I ought to go home."
Ethan frowned. "No, I really don't think you should." He grabbed his wrist and drug him into the house. "We're home!" he yelled to his parents in the living room. "Going upstairs for bed."
"Night, kids!"
"Ethan," Benny panted as he pushed him into his room and slammed the door behind him. He pushed Benny against the wall and wrapped his hands in his collar again. "Oh, thank God. I thought it was just me."
Ethan smiled, let Benny push him backwards towards the bed they still sometimes shared even after they'd outgrown it, and said, "never."
This time, it was Benny that kissed him first.