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It had been several weeks since Jeremy and Fritz had started dating, and they hadn’t shared a single kiss since their first two. It wasn’t that Jeremy particularly minded - after all, he had promised to take things at Fritz’s own pace, and he was fully prepared to uphold that promise for as long as it took for him to be comfortable. He was just worried. Worried he’d already pushed too far, worried he’d made him uncomfortable, worried that he’d misread the whole situation and Fritz only liked him as a friend and was just too scared to correct him - the list went on. And on. And further on still. And it was killing him.
There had been times when Jeremy and Fritz had been alone together, and there’d been a natural lull in the conversation, and he’d felt himself drawn to Fritz as a moth to a flame, and Fritz had stared at him with those ridiculously trippy doe eyes and slightly parted lips, and the urge to kiss him had been so overwhelmingly strong that Jeremy would blurt out the first mangled up excuse that came to him and dart out the room, face red and fingers shaking.
This all came to a head one Saturday evening towards the end of July. Jeremy had invited himself over to Fritz’s to watch some shitty romcom series - one that Jeremy had described as “the greatest romcom trilogy of all time, a cinematic masterpiece, really” to an oblivious and blindly trusting Fritz - and Fritz had agreed with what Jeremy hoped was a nervous but excited grin, and not a terrified grimace; he never had been very good at reading facial expressions.
Jeremy took the steps up to Fritz’s front door two at a time, whistling to himself and juggling three VHS tapes and an assortment of snacks in his hands. Imagine having three hands, he mused to himself as he took a bag of popcorn between his teeth and held everything else to his chest with one arm so that he could rap his knuckles on the door. Or four. That would be cool. I’d be like an ant. His leg bobbed in anticipation as he saw someone approach through the frosted glass of the door, and heard the clicking of several locks being unlocked. Or a beetle. After a good minute or two of this, the door swung open, revealing a very frazzled looking and pink-cheeked Fritz.
“Hey!” Jeremy grinned, bag still held firmly between his teeth. “I come bearing gifts.”
Fritz took the popcorn and a bag of Doritos from him and stepped back to let him inside, smiling. “Wow, this is… a lot.”
“We’ve got a long night ahead of us, Fritzie, we need as much sustenance as possible,” Jeremy sang, marching into the living room and dumping his “gifts” onto a coffee table. He turned to watch Fritz lock and double check every lock on his door - Jeremy counted at least 8. His eyebrows jerked upwards slightly in surprise, but didn’t say anything as Fritz turned back to him and stopped short, wringing his hands nervously as he realised Jeremy had been watching him.
“I, uh… I get a little paranoid.” Fritz ducked his head slightly, deliberately avoiding eye contact. “Sorry.”
“No worries Fritzie, I understand why you wouldn’t want anyone breaking in and seeing us watch the brilliant trilogy I am about to show you.” Jeremy winked, and Fritz’s shoulders seemed to sag in relief at the tactful change of subject.
Jeremy took the first of the tapes and went to load it into the VHS player whilst Fritz disappeared into the kitchen and returned moments later with several bowls to distribute snacks into, along with a very cosy looking blanket, Jeremy noted.
By the time the two boys had gotten comfortable on the couch, with Jeremy leaning against the arm and Fritz sat in the middle, the movie had started. They lapsed into a comfortable almost-silence, only interrupted by Fritz making several incredulous and scathing comments, and Jeremy shushing him after each one with remarks of “this is the best bit!”
All throughout the first movie, Jeremy had been painfully aware of his and Fritz’s hands lying only millimetres apart from each other’s, and he had to restrain himself from breathing too heavily, lest their fingers brushed together and Fritz flinched away, as had happened before. He exhaled a hopefully discreet sigh of relief when the movie finally drew to a close, and he turned to Fritz with a grin. “Ready for the greatest sequel ever?”
Fritz groaned and shook his head, a pained smile on his face. “Respectfully, that was the biggest pile of dogshit I have ever witnessed. And I don’t believe the sequel will be any better.”
Jeremy gasped in mock offence, holding a hand across his heart. “You wound me, Fritzie. How could you say this? I thought I could trust you.”
“Sorry Fitzgerald, it’s just the truth,” Fritz shrugged with a smirk.
“Well I guess it’s too bad I have the tape, and I’m so much stronger and faster than you!” Jeremy grabbed the second of the movies and held it triumphantly in the air. “Aha- Oof!”
Fritz pounced out of nowhere, tackling him from where they were both sitting and reaching for the tape, pinning Jeremy down under him. He didn’t fight back. He was frozen, staring up at the boy on top of him, tape held loosely in his arm dangling over the arm of the sofa. Fritz finally seemed to notice Jeremy wasn’t even struggling and turned his gaze to his face instead. “Oh,” he exhaled quietly.
Their faces were mere centimetres away from each other, both boys panting with a pinkish glow across their cheeks. Jeremy’s eyes darted to Fritz’s slightly parted lips, and back up to his eyes - eyes that glimmered with a nervous kind of yearning.
“Can I kiss you?” The words left Jeremy’s mouth before he could stop himself. Fritz simply nodded.
Jeremy leant up and met Fritz’s lips with his own, and when he felt the other sigh and sink into it, his heart stopped and he thought he would never recover. The tape in his hand fell to the floor with a muted thud, forgotten, and Jeremy carefully sat the two of them up, his lips not leaving Fritz’s once. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before; the way Fritz allowed him access with no resistance, the hand that had found its way onto Jeremy’s thigh, his own hand that had at some point travelled to tenderly play with the loose curls that lay at the nape of Fritz’s neck.
Fritz sighed once again into his mouth, and Jeremy could’ve died right then and there and been perfectly content, it was such a wonderful feeling. A blinding euphoria filled Jeremy and touched every one of his senses. His eagerness took over him and he began to push Fritz down onto the couch. Fritz froze, and Jeremy sat up as quickly as he’d moved down.
“Do you want to stop?”
Fritz nodded minutely and shuffled out from under Jeremy, pressing his back up against the arm of the couch and drawing his knees up to his chest. “I’m sorry.” Fritz’s voice was barely more than a whisper; so small, so scared, Jeremy was convinced his heart was going to shatter into a million pieces.
“Hey, you don’t need to be sorry,” Jeremy murmured, rocking back on his heels to put some space between them. “I’m sorry if I pushed you too far.”
Fritz shook his head adamantly, and Jeremy was acutely aware that his hugely dilated pupils refused to meet Jeremy’s. “You didn’t, I’m just- I’m not used to this. Being touched like… like this.” His fingers shook as he wrapped his too skinny arms around his knees, holding them to his chest tighter. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Jeremy sensed that wasn’t the whole truth, given how he had flinched away from Jeremy’s touches in the past, but accepted this for now and nodded. He didn’t need to say it, but the implications of his past, of what his father had been like, were there. “That’s okay, Fritz. We’ll figure this out together, okay?”
Fritz nodded, finally meeting Jeremy’s eyes, and Jeremy was relieved to see that his pupils had shrunk to their usual size, the blue of his irises back to their usual calm rather than the storm that had raged in them only moments before. Jeremy held out a steady hand to Fritz, and waited with bated breath as Fritz hesitated, before taking it in a shaking, tentative one of his own. Rubbing circles on Fritz’s hand with his thumb, they sat in silence for several minutes until the shaking ceased. Once it had, Fritz got up and took the second movie over to the VHS player and inserted it.
When he returned to the couch again, rather than sitting beside Jeremy as he had before, he instead lay across the sofa, having to tuck his legs up a bit to accommodate the sheer lankiness of them, and rested his head on Jeremy’s lap.
As the movie started, and Fritz began making equally as scorching comments as before, Jeremy felt his lips quirk up into a smile at the beautifully messed up boy lying across him.
He’d meant every single word he’d said. They would figure it out together. And Jeremy didn’t care how long it took; for Fritz, he would wait until the day he died for him to be ready.