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Peter discovers Harry’s secret by accident, not having the tenacity nor willpower to seek out such things willingly at this time of life.
He and Harry had been trying out for varsity basketball, which had been its own fiasco: Harry’s idea, Peter’s congenital inability to say no...
“When have I ever steered you wrong?” he grins as they cross the threshold into the gym, passing the proverbial point of no return, “Better yet, don’t answer.”
Peter folds his arms, “I wasn’t gonna say anything bad.”
“Yeah, I know,” he shrugs easily, “You never do.”
They embarrass themselves at tryouts (it takes a week for Peter’s ankles to recover), to the amusement of the meathead commentariat, who snicker and jeer with their usual low condescension. Peter, sprawled out on the polished wood surface, braces himself for a pummeling, but none comes. Harry gives him a hand to help him to his feet, whispering, “Let’s get out of here.”
Peter doesn’t thank him for the service his presence provides. It feels like acknowledging it would just be more mortifying and, anyway, it’s not like it would be news to either of them.
In the locker room afterward, Peter is in a hurry to throw on his clothes and get out. He can shower at home; better than giving Flash and the goons another chance to gawk at Puny Parker.
“You sure you don’t wanna shower?” Harry asks as he towels himself off, which does nothing for Peter’s languishing self-image.
“Pretty sure, Harry.”
“Because you stink.”
“Thanks.”
“And I think, maybe, it would be like a health hazard to smell that bad on the subway.”
“Says the guy who doesn’t take the subway.”
“Look, do I have to punch a guy out?” he flexes self-importantly, “Because I can do that.”
“Yeah, well, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
Harry pulls on his shirt, at the same time raising his arms in a mock gesture of surrender, “Right, sorry. Didn’t mean to poke your morals in the unmentionables.”
“Ew.”
“My place after school?” he asks in a lighter tone, “It has a shower and my Dad’s in Prague.”
“Why don’t you want me to meet your Dad?”
Harry makes this face like Peter just asked him why he wasn’t eating his own fingers, “Because he’s my Dad ?”
“You’ve met my aunt and uncle.”
“Your aunt and uncle are human beings. My Dad is a komodo dragon in Armani.”
“Komodo dragons are cool .”
“’Till they eat you.”
“Okay, well, komodo dragons don’t eat people, so...”
They go on like this for an interminable amount of time. Peter never agrees to go to Harry’s place (not in so many words), but he doesn’t need to. They always end up at one of their places or the other.
Peter does end up showering at Harry’s place, and he feels better for it. The shower at the Osborn penthouse has about as many settings as a thermoconductor, but Peter still manages to attain only clammy lukewarmness, which he chalks up to a lifetime of low expectations.
He examines himself in the mirror as he attempts to run a comb through his hair, trying to like what he sees, but the gawky, pasty wraith that looks back at him through his glasses (or, he supposes, the reflection of his glasses) doesn’t inspire much in the way of gratification, so he abandons the sport.
He dresses hastily, wanting to get to his homework before Harry conveniently dusts off his PlayStation to coincide with a casual observation that Tony Hawk is almost like Physics.
In this haste, Peter gets stuck inside his shirt, knocking his glasses (why had he put them on just to stare at himself?) to the floor, leading to a mad scramble on hands and knees in which he upends the contents of a trestle table that hopefully isn’t too expensive, sending various articles, including his bookbag to the floor.
“Hey, Pete!” Harry enters the room, smiling obliviously, “So I was thinking, while you’re here: you, me, Tony Haw...uh,” which is Peter’s indication he’s noticed his distress, “You okay?”
“Fine! I’m fine!” Peter says desperately, putting his glasses back on, crookedly, as he rights himself, “Just, uh, tripped.”
“I can see that,” he sniffs, “You smell better.”
“That’s a real relief. Can you help me with this table before your Dad charges me for the damages and my Uncle Ben sells me to make up the cost?”
“Your Uncle’s not gonna sell you and that table’s a knockoff,” Harry stands it upright in a second, “But thanks for caring.”
Peter chuckles humorlessly, “Yeah, that’s me. Caring and considerate. Also, no, we aren’t playing video games, we are gonna study for this test, because it’s a big test and you ...” he points in accusatory fashion at an area just next to Harry (glasses still crooked, oh the humanity, etc.), “Can’t afford to fail it.”
“Sure I can. Pass or fail, I’ll still end up sitting behind a desk in the building with my name on it.”
“Which would be unfair.”
“Did I say I was happy about it?” and, indeed, Peter has never heard him sound anything but resigned about his prospects.
“Well...” he looks for something uplifting and constructive, but comes up short and resorts to austere practicality instead, “ I want to do homework, so...”
With this unconvincing pronouncement, he picks up a disorganized sheaf of papers from the pile that have tumbled from the fallen backpack, “Let’s get into...” he narrows his eyes to read through still-uneven lenses, “ A Love Not Forgotten ?”
In retrospect, he’ll remember Harry muttering a grim, “Oh shit,” at this. At the moment, however, he is too focused on the byline, “... by Harry Osborn .”
He next realizes that the bag he’d knocked from the table...the bag this bundle of papers had fallen from...wasn’t his, but Harry’s; a realization that hits him as Harry appears to be willing himself into a spontaneous stroke.
“You wrote this?” Peter asks unnecessarily.
Harry makes a noise that sounds like a goat being smothered.
“Is it like a book or a movie or...” but he stops himself, “Um, I mean, if you don’t want me to look at it, that’s fine...”
“ Issaplae. ”
Peter blinks, “Wha-what?”
“It’s a, um...” Harry grabs the papers back, “It’s a play.”
“That you wrote?”
“I might have,” he pauses, “I did.”
“Well, that’s pretty cool.”
“Uh-huh, yeah, really cool.”
“Is it finished?”
“Yeah, it’s finished,” in a determinedly casual tone of voice. Peter frowns, “Are you embarrassed?”
“No!”
“You sound embarrassed.”
“Peter, I am not embarrassed. Can you just...forget it, please?”
“That’s something an embarrassed person would say!” he points, actually at him this time. Harry rolls his eyes, “Look, it’s just...yeah, it’s a play. I wrote it.”
“And never showed it to anyone, I guess.”
Harry sinks onto the sofa, “Don’t we have homework to do?”
Peter isn’t so socially challenged not to recognize this as very cheap deflection, “Look, Harry, I’ll drop it if you want me to.”
“So why isn’t it dropped yet?”
They sit beside each other on the couch and attempt to get into their schoolwork. This lasts 30 monotonous minutes spent in an awkward near-silence. Bernard enters once with a tray of Capri-Suns in little whiskey tumblers, which would be funny if it wasn’t so ominous.
Harry remains stony faced and frighteningly determined throughout. At one point, he asks Peter a clarifying question about thermodynamics, which is when he knows something is really wrong.
“Look, Harry, if you don’t want to talk about it...”
“Yes! No, I don’t want to talk about it,” he puts his pencil aside, “So why are we talking about it, Pete?”
“Because...I don’t know. What, do you think I’m gonna make fun of you? Me ?” it occurs to him as he asks that the thought honestly hurts, “Harry, I’m a giant loser and you’ve never made fun of me once, so I don’t know why you think...”
“Right,” he stops, “Right, I-I’m sorry. That’s not why...look, it’s just a silly thing I did. And don’t tell anybody I said ‘silly’.”
“Or that you wrote a play?” he smiles and Harry smiles back, which gives Peter silent incentive to continue, “I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing.”
“Who said I am? Maybe it’s a shitty play.”
“Well, I mean, the title’s a little dramatic...”
“It’s a working title, Peter,” he leans back, “Look, it’s just a thing I started doing a few years ago.”
“Writing plays?”
“Writing,” he says shortly, “When I was a kid, I used to, like, scribble down the stories I made up. In my head.”
“Okay,” Peter, realizing Harry needs some sort of push, adds (helpfully), “That’s cool.”
“I’d act out scenes with my, um...action figures.”
“Right.”
“And I’d write them down with, like, crayons.”
“Did the characters all have different colored dialogue?”
“Wait, did you do this too?”
“...no, but if I did, that’s how I’d have done it.”
“Right, because it’s a pain in the ass to write ‘He said’ and then ‘he said’ again and...”
“There weren’t any girls in these?”
“Not until later,” he was smiling brightly, evidently warming to the subject, “But yeah, I wrote things down a lot back then. Then I stopped for a while, but, uh, well, that play is, um...” he shrugs, “It keeps me busy.”
Peter nods, “So you like writing?”
Harry looks like a deer in headlights, “What?”
“Do you like writing? I mean, since you wrote this, I think the answer is...”
“I like writing some things.”
“...do you think you want to do it? Like, for a job?”
“And be crucified? No thank you, bud, I think I’ll take the cushy life sentence at the family business.”
Peter frowns, “Okay...but no.”
“No what?”
“Harry, if you’re good at something, you should do it.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“I’m a giant geek.”
“With a crap-ton of marketable skills! Do you think my fa...” he clumsily corrects, “ People would be cool with Harry the Playwright?”
Peter is tempted to tell Harry that things like that don’t matter but, not having a father of his own (or a family business, or any sort of family legacy besides the boll weevil colony propagating in Aunt May’s runner beans), realizes he would sound disingenuous.
But he doesn’t want to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand. It doesn’t feel right and, if the shoe were on the other foot, Harry would no doubt bother him to speak up until he finally did, so why shouldn’t he do the same?
“What’s it about?” he asks at last.
Harry looks at him, surprised, “You mean the play?”
“Well, I’ve given up asking about the homework, so yeah.”
Harry sighs, “Well, um...it’s about a guy.”
“That’s awesome.”
“And a girl.”
“Okay.”
“And, uh...” but here he seems to lose his courage, “I dunno. Stuff happens.”
There is a long silence. Peter moistens his lips, “...can I read it?”
“What?”
“Has anyone read it?”
“No, nobody has.”
“Because you don’t want anybody to read it, or because nobody’s ever come along to read it?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
Peter shrugs as if to prompt, “ Well? ”
Harry crosses his legs, “So, if I tell you this, you won’t tell anyone else?”
“Who am I gonna tell? Aunt May?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“But you get it? Harry, as far as you and me...it’s just you.”
Harry’s lips twitch, “I meant for someone to read it. Like, when it was finished. After I rewrote the bad stuff.”
“How much was bad stuff?”
“Most of it.”
“You know, this is really weird: I’ve never heard you be this modest.”
Harry cocks an eyebrow, “That a problem?”
“Well, it must mean this means something to you,” he bit his lip, “Who’d you write it for?”
“Oh, uh...” his fingers tie themselves in knots, “A girl. I had this, uh, idea she could be in it,” he pauses, “Which is weird, I know.”
“I think it’s kinda nice.”
“Well, Pete, you would , but I will tell you that it’s weird.”
“Then I guess you must be pretty weird,” he points out, admittedly boldly, but he isn’t afraid of being bold with Harry. It occurs to him that Harry’s moments of vulnerability are few and far between. How much has he unloaded on Harry in the comparatively short time they’ve known each other?
“Well, go ahead,” Harry says abruptly.
“Go ahead what?” he begins to ask, only for Harry to drop the whole script in his lap.
“Go ahead. Read it.”
“Are you serious?”
“What? You don’t want to read it now?”
“What about the girl?”
“If the girl ever reads it, I might as well castrate myself with a spoon.”
“And I guess I’m not gonna castrate you with a spoon?”
“Well, I might be able to reason with you first.”
Peter snorts, “Must be some girl,” which is wretchedly disingenuous since, as far as he’s concerned, all girls are ‘some girl’: nebulous and unreachable and always better than he can ever hope.
Assuming a position slightly more conducive to reading, Peter begins to read. Harry sits there, hanging off the edge of the sofa, despite there being ample room for him. Peter keeps looking at him furtively, “You gonna keep watching?”
“Um...yeah?”
“It’s kinda distracting.”
“You read all the time! You read more than me.”
“Yeah, well, Hermann Minkowski isn’t going to appear in my living room to give commentary on his relativity theories.”
This seems to have gone directly over Harry’s head.
“You know, I get it though,” Peter continues, “I remember I once put together this big model of a proton...”
“Like life size?”
Peter looks at Harry to assess whether or not he’s attempting a joke and realizes he is almost certainly being sincere, “Yeah, Harry, life size. And I, uh, got embarrassed whenever Uncle Ben came in and asked what I was doing.”
“You were, what, like, 10?”
“Last year.”
“Right.”
“The point is, I get feeling weird about...sharing stuff. Science or art or...whatever.”
“I’m not an artist.”
“Well, I’m not a scientist.”
“Yet.”
“ Yet ,” Peter throws it back, “Look, let’s make it easier, why don’t I read it aloud? Like, you can be...” he scanned the first page for the names prefacing the lines of dialogue, “Harold.”
“Oh God.”
“Good name. And I can be...” he stopped at the one other name on the page, “Jean-Marie.”
They look at each other for a while. Peter, clearing his throat noisily, flips through some more pages, “Well, maybe nobody can be Jean-Marie and she can be her own woman and I can read somebody else in the...” but he quickly realizes there are no other characters, “Oh.”
“It’s a one act play,” says Harry.
“Ah,” he nods, “Well, then I’ll be Jean-Marie and then we can read it and then I can go home and we can take the Physics test blind tomorrow...”
“And then I can fail and keep writing plays that nobody will read and nobody will castrate me with a spoon.”
“ SCENE: THE LIVING ROOM. ..” Peter pauses, “Whose living room?”
“Don’t be punchy, Pete.”
“ Jean-Marie is sitting on the couch... ” he looks around at the couch, “Check.”
“Don’t read the stage directions.”
“Do you wanna read the stage directions?”
“Nobody has to read the stage directions.”
Peter hesitates, wondering if he’s toeing too finely on a line, “You know what, if you don’t want me to read it, I won’t...”
“No,” Harry shakes his head, “No, you can read it. I made up my mind. Someone might as well read it, and it might as well be you. It’s stupid to write a play and then nobody reads it. So read it.”
Peter reads it, beginning with Jean-Marie’s first line, “ Some party, right? ” in a high falsetto that he stops once Harry gives him a look, “ Glad we got a chance to get away. ”
Harry is quiet for a short time before realizing Peter is waiting for him to read for ‘Harold’, “It’s not like I have it memorized.”
“You wrote it! Also, it’s not that long, so...”
“Let me see,” he leans forward to grab the script, “ To be honest, I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk to me. ”
“That was a good reading. I believed it.”
Harry thwacks him on the head, but he smiles as he does. They each have a hand on the script, leaning over it from opposite ends the way they’ve often huddled over Peter’s comicbooks.
“ Self-deprecation fits you funny ,” Peter almost laughs at this one, but Harry seems aware that the line is awful and he doesn’t want to rub it in, because it’s not like he could do much better, “ You were always good to talk to. ”
“ To laugh at, you mean ,” Harry-as-Harold is rakish and charming, smirking with one side of his mouth.
“ Or with. Don’t you think I may have missed you? ”
The play calls for a silence, and Harry provides one, going suddenly shifty-eyed and fidgety, “This is weird, right?”
“That’s not in the script. You’re supposed to say...”
“ When you weren’t coming up with creative new curses for me. ”
“That’s better.”
“Peter, it’s kind of occuring to me that maybe this isn’t gonna work out the way...”
“ I was mad that you left... ” Peter pauses, “Oh, wait, is this like a love story?”
Harry blinks, “Well, it says in the title.”
“Well, it says ‘ A Love Not Forgotten ’, so I thought maybe they’d forgotten.”
“Well...” Harry gestures spasmodically with his free hand, “They remember. That’s why it’s not forgotten.”
“Did you just spoil the ending to your own play?”
“I just figured you ought to know, because if we kept going on like this, it would get really weird really fast.”
Peter considers briefly, “You mean it would look gay?”
Harry spasms as if afflicted with apoplexy. Peter shrugs, “But it wouldn’t be gay, really, because we’re just doing a play. You know, in Shakespeare’s time, they didn’t let women on the stage, so all the girl parts were played by men in drag.”
“Please don’t get in drag, Pete.”
Peter is prepared to concede that this is just some pointless self-inflicted agony. Probably if he was an at-all properly socialized teenaged boy, he could understand why the appearance of homosexual activity between two non-homosexual teenage boys in a decidedly private setting would cause extraordinary distress.
But he isn’t properly socialized.
“Maybe I just don’t get the theater,” he tries to make a joke of it, “Maybe this would work better if we got Mary-Jane.”
“Mary- what ?”
Peter blinks, “...you called her Jean-Marie, Harry: it isn’t that hard.”
“God, I am such an asshole.”
“Why didn’t you ever say you had a crush on my neighbor?”
“I don’t have a crush! I don’t have crushes, Pete...”
“Oh,” he nods, “Good.”
Harry is mercifully too absorbed in his own emotional distress to notice the tinge of possessiveness in Peter’s voice, which he will come to find very embarrassing himself once the ardor of the moment has cooled.
“She wants to be an actress, you know,” says Harry.
“I know,” says Peter, “I saw her in Anything Goes .”
“Anything went, alright,” Harry chuckles hollowly, “I thought I’d write a play for her to be in. Which is fucking psychotic the more I think about it.”
“I mean, it might’ve been a weird present for the first date.”
Harry screams, or more like brays, burying his head in the arm of the sofa, “What was I thinking? I’d have gotten my ass kicked. By a girl .”
Peter has a brief image of Mary-Jane kicking Harry’s ass, which proves to be a little more fun than he’d expected. He scoots a little way down the couch.
“You know,” he says, across the sizable upholstered chasm between them, “I always thought you were pretty good with girls.”
“Why? Because I’m hot?” Harry doesn’t seem to be thinking as he says this.
Peter, caught off guard but not wanting to imply Harry is ugly, which would be rich coming from him, stumbles out, “...yes. But also you have a great personality.”
“That’s a lie. I’m hot, and you have a great personality.”
“That also sounds like a lie.”
“I don’t know,” Harry flips through the script, “I thought I was good with girls. M.J. is...she’s different.”
“Yeah,” says Peter with an undertone that, with foresight, should be punishable by stockade.
“I thought I had to do something to impress her, and it sort of just popped into my head that I’d never tried to impress anybody before.”
“... never ?”
“I never had to.”
Here was another of those moments where Peter very badly wanted to resent Harry, but found he could feel nothing other than a sad pity. For everything Harry had (and had in abundance, at that), he seemed congenitally unable to actually enjoy it.
“It’s not a bad play,” he says at last, having idly skimmed the drama of several pages, as Harold and Jean-Marie reminisced on a prior soured relationship.
“Thanks, Pete.”
“ I don’t regret any of it, ” he finds himself reading Jean-Marie again, aloud. Harry doubletakes, but he doesn’t stop him this time.
“ Even all the trouble I caused you? ” he picks up with Harold, not putting much into the performance, but lazily, almost resignedly going along with the part.
“ I consider it a necessary lesson. ”
“ I really blew it. I know that ,” why had Harry written his self-insert protagonist to be a philanderous screwup? Was it more of Mary-Jane’s undeniable effect or just some heretofore unnoticed defect of Harry’s own that could only imagine a future of failures?
For the first time (certainly not the last, given the adventures of coming months and years), Peter considers that Harry needs to imagine failure, because he doesn’t want anything to do with the version of success that’s been dangled before him his whole life.
“ There will always be a part of me that wonders about us, ” Peter says, this nascent thought rattling around in the back of his mind and, he suspects, informing his delivery, which must be what acting is like, “ If our moment never got cut short. ”
“ It was a nice moment, huh? ” Harry smiles.
“ Some people wait a lifetime, ” Peter read, “ For moments like... ”
“Ugh,” Harry winced, his voice weirdly husky, “I forgot I did that.”
“What?”
“‘Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this’?” he is a remarkable shade of red, “I cribbed it from a Kelly Clarkson song.”
“Oh, see, I wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t said. I thought it was a very nice piece of writing.”
“Flattery, Pete.”
“I don’t know how to flatter people,” he smiles, “Remember? I’m an awful liar.”
Harry runs a hand through his hair, “You think it’s good, though? The whole play?”
“Well, you keep stopping me from getting to the ending, so I can’t give a full review, can I?” he smiles cheekily, “But I do think you should keep doing this. Writing stuff.”
Harry averts his eyes, “Thanks, Peter. Means a lot,” he sounds weirdly emotional, which is something Peter has no idea how to deal with, “But you’d better be in that audience opening night, yeah? I’m not going to all the trouble just to play to an empty house.”
“I was never that good in crowds anyway,” Peter shrugs.
“ Look me up the next time you’re in town, alright? ” Harry is Harold again. Peter had thought they’d given up with the attempt, but maybe Harry just wanted to see his play performed, however haphazardly, at least once.
“Um...” he struggles to find his place in the script, “ You won’t mind the surprise? ”
“ I’ll live for it, ” Harry laughs at himself, “Wow, that’s...”
Peter knows it’s bad, but he’s tired of Harry’s self-deprecation, so he barrels on, “ Then I’ll see you when I see you. ”
“ Don’t keep me waiting too long. ”
“ Just long enough for it to mean something when I show up ...” Peter clears his throat, feeling suddenly quite stuffy, “And then it says we kiss and the play ends.”
“Right,” Harry nods, “I remember writing something like that.”
A short, stiff silence, “We, um, aren’t following the stage directions, so I guess we don’t have to worry about that.”
“Right,” Harry nods again.
“Which is good, because we wouldn’t want to look gay or anything, in case Bernard comes back with Doritos and caviar.”
“I’m sorry I said that before, by the way,” Harry blurts.
“Said what?”
“You know, bitched about looking gay. It wasn’t cool. I didn’t mean to sound like an asshole or something.”
“Well, I get called gay on an almost hourly basis, Harry, so it’s no problem, really,” he honestly had already forgotten Harry mentioning that; so much seemed to have happened since then, to the point he was surprised Harry had even thought twice about it, “But, uh, you’re forgiven, if you need that.”
“I guess I’m just as big a gorilla as Flash sometimes.”
“Gorillas don’t write plays. And gay gorillas don’t write plays to give to girls they have crushes on. So...”
“We can do the scene, if you want.”
Peter blinks, “...what?”
“You know...finish the play.”
“You mean...” Peter sounds out the words carefully, as if to misspeak would kill him on the spot, “Kiss?”
“If you want.”
Peter finds himself pondering Harry’s motives and can only come up with one plausible reason Harry would have suddenly changed his mind about this, “I’m not gay, Harry. Like, just so you know.”
“Well, neither am I.”
“Okay.”
“It’s acting, Pete.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, when I wrote this, I was imagining me kissing Mary-Jane.”
“I gathered.”
“And that’s weird.”
“Okay.”
“And inappropriate.”
“Well, yeah, I guess...”
“And I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Who knows?”
“No one knows, man!” Harry throws his arms up.
“No one knows,” Peter concurs.
“But I don’t hate this embarrassing thing that I wrote.”
“That’s great, Harry.”
“Maybe I’ll write some more stuff! Who cares what people think, right?”
“Right?” posed as an uncertain question.
“And you helped me not be embarrassed of the stupid thing I wrote.”
“I should tip more tables over.”
“And I wrote that stupid kiss at the end of that stupid play, so maybe it would be cool and... fulfilling , even...”
“Fulfilling?” Peter acts as though this word is a tremendous step in Harry’s intellectual evolution, despite the fact that the word ‘effervescent’ somehow found its way into the pages of A Love Not Forgotten .
“...to finish the play.”
Peter considers this for a while, “Harry...do you want to kiss me?”
There is an agonizing silence before Harry manages, “Not particularly. But, yanno, it’s in the script.”
“Right.”
“No hard feelings if you don’t, by the way.”
“Harry, I...” he fidgets, “Harry, I’ve never been...kissed.”
“Yeah, I figured that,” he says very frankly, “And this would be an acting kiss. So good practice for real kisses. With girls.”
“With girls,” Peter echoes.
“Or guys, if it turns out you’re into that.”
“...if it turns out, yeah.”
“I love you, Pete,” his voice has an almost squeaky frankness, “You’re my best friend. Best one I ever had. And...I love you.”
At which point, Peter realizes Harry needs this much more than him. He has so much more than Peter ever had...money and looks and good attention. But one thing he lacks (and Peter will eventually appreciate he possesses in abundance) is love.
“I love you too, Harry,” he says softly, “And, uh, if you want to kiss me...to finish the scene...”
“Okay,” Harry nods.
“Okay,” Peter agrees, and neither of them say anything for a while. They sit beside each other on the sofa, separated by inches and a few tons of confused teenage feelings. Harry reaches up slowly and plies his fingers through Peter’s hair.
“Should I take off my glasses?” he asks huskily, and immediately feels stupid for it.
But Harry smiles, “You’re such a nerd,” and he kisses him, glasses be damned.
Peter doesn’t know what he’s supposed to expect from a kiss, but he’s in no position to complain. Harry is gentle and almost tender. He keeps his fingers in Peter’s hair, holding fast as if to keep from falling. Peter finds himself doing the same, half because he assumes this is the correct thing to do and half because his breath has been quite literally taken away, which is a type of irritating poetic license he, as a Science guy, is irked to learn exists in nature.
He’s no expert on male beauty, having never possessed much himself that he’d ever been told, but Harry, eyes shut and brow brushing against his own, is almost painfully beautiful. He’s often been jealous of Harry’s looks. Now, though, the primary emotion is a kind of peace. He isn’t sure what just happened between the two of them. But judging by the way Harry’s shoulders relax as they pull apart and the bright spark in his eyes when they open to look at him, he can tell it was something that needed to happen.
And he’s glad.
“You okay?” he asks hoarsely.
Harry nods, “Yeah, Pete. I’m okay.”
His hands move down to Peter’s shoulders and he’s no longer able to stop himself from throwing his arms around his friend, enclosing him in an embrace, because something tells him Harry hasn’t gotten many in his life and he may benefit from a few now.
Harry lets out a little gasp, but says nothing as he slowly puts his own arms around Peter. They sit there for an unknowable stretch of time, as shadows lengthen across the parquet tiles. Neither of them seems willing to be the first to move.
“You’re staying the night, right?” Harry asks at one point, after enough time has passed that Peter knows Aunt May would have a conniption at the thought of him taking the train, and Uncle Ben would suffer unreasonable traffic on the bridge coming to pick him up.
“I guess I am.”
“Sorry we didn’t get much studying done.”
“Eh,” Peter shrugs, “We’ll be alright,” which is a handy little phrase that checks off a bunch of meanings at once.
They doze off on the sofa, like two little kids tuckered out after a playdate, their odd adventure of the afternoon consigned to the dust of memory, a relic of an adolescence they both know is coming to an end, even if neither of them can yet understand just how radical that ending will be.
Neither of them ever speaks a word about the ‘rehearsal’ to anyone else, not out of shame or guilt, but of a certain boyish solidarity. It had, after all, been their moment, their lapse, or mistake, or own lost chance.
Neither ever forgets.
And Bernard, if he ever glimpsed anything from the passage just outside the lounge, has kept considerably uglier secrets, and so can afford to keep one more.