Chapter Text
“Hey, bro, can I nick your calculator?”
It wasn’t like it was the first thing Pedro had ever said to Balthazar and there was a coup de foudre or whatever but Balthazar remembered these words for a while.
Because everyone who was going through puberty and was interested in guys at all was interested in Pedro.
And Balthazar’s friend, Karah, slid him a note that read something along the lines of:Pedro is so hhoootttt <3 <3 He’s going to melt that calculator!! which had made Balthazar smirk.
And Balthazar had looked across at Pedro to find he was holding the calculator upside down with the number 07734 typed in. He had this adorable grin on his face.
That was when Balthazar realised that aside from being good at football, smart and good looking, Pedro Donaldson was also a complete dork.
There was another moment a few weeks later that was possibly more significant. During that time, Pedro and Balthazar had started a casual sort of friendship that began with brief conversations in the corridor and had progressed to occasionally sitting together in class and eventually swopping numbers.
“Dude! Dude!” Pedro had come pelting down the Humanities block stairs two at a time and pushed Balthazar full in the chest and backwards through the door at the bottom. Thankfully the classroom was empty and Balthazar was only slightly winded.
“Wh – what?”
But Pedro pulled him away from the door and stood with his back against the wall as if they were evading police capture. “Hush!”
“What did you do?”
“Shhhhh…”
Pedro put one hand over Balthazar’s mouth and leaned forwards to peek through the glass in the doorway. “Shit!” he laughed and staggered backwards. “She saw me! Get down!” He grabbed Balthazar’s arm and tugged him down under a desk.
“Um… this is hide-and-seek, isn’t it,” Balthazar clarified in a whisper when they were both under the desk. “We’re playing hide-and-seek.”
“Sshhh…”
Perhaps Pedro didn’t notice that their hands were slightly touching in their crouched position but, oh boy, did Balthazar. When Meg came bursting into the room like a raptor in a Jurassic Park kitchen, Balthazar’s mind was completely preoccupied with how fantastic Pedro smelt and how thrilling it was to have a centimetre of their skin pressed together.
I am definitely not straight… Bathazar mused as he watched Pedro attempt to stifle his giggles, his mouth turned down comically, his eyes squinting closed, a lock of his hair dangling low over his forehead.
Meg was stalking around the desks and called, “I know you’re in here, Donaldson!”
Balthazar had never really gone in for the Pedro Donaldson hype in the past but right now he couldn’t help thinking that there was no one he’d prefer to be under a desk with.
A crush on the cool guy, Balthazar’s inner monologue sarcastically intoned, How original.