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“Do you think he’s your soulmate?”
Ever since Nick first grasped the concept of a soulmate, he’s been unsure he really believes in them. He liked the thought of having a partner, sure, someone who would love him and that he could love with his whole being, but having one person out of the billions of people on the planet he’s meant to be with forever always seemed far-fetched. There’s no system to ensure that he knows his soulmate when he meets them, or even if he were to go out with them, and no one can really explain what knowing a soulmate feels like. To him, it just sounds like what they all say about falling in love. He wants to spend his life being genuine and connecting with people, not waiting and waiting for a (not-so) unique sensation that no one can put into words. If it turns out he misses his soulmate because he’s committed to someone else, someone he loves, at the end of the day, he’s happy. He wouldn’t have to worry that his real true love is still somewhere else. Hopefully his partner would be happy too, and maybe his soulmate would find who makes them happy, and everything would be okay.
He isn’t cynical. He believes in love, true, deep, pure love, just… maybe not soulmates.
Not the exclusivity. Not closing yourself off to opportunities for the sake of preserving a relationship you’ll never really know if you’ve achieved.
“I don’t know.”
When a boy sits next to him in his new form the first day back from break, he doesn’t think much of it. He smiles at him, and the boy’s eyes narrow in the corners when he smiles back. Dimples carve into his cheeks. It’s a wide smile— bright.
Charlie, Nick learns, sets into his work almost immediately after they exchange names, and all he can do in response is kind of laugh and dig out his textbook and chicken-scratch history notes. They don’t talk nearly the whole class, not unusual in the slightest, working side by side in companionable silence. It almost doesn’t feel like they’re complete strangers until Nick turns a page of his book and accidentally knocks his knuckles into Charlie’s wrist. The resulting shock catches him off guard, and Charlie drops the pencil he’s holding.
“Sorry,” Nick says at the same time Charlie does. He flexes his fingers, but the static electricity has already faded. “All good,” he says as Charlie’s face burns red. They settle back into their work, though he shifts noticeably away from Nick as if he’d been taking up more than a third of the table already. When the bell rings, Nick bids him goodbye, and he looks back like he’s surprised to hear anyone address him. Nick smiles and shoulders his bag, and Charlie smiles back. It’s nice.
The next day, Charlie’s pencil rolls off the desk, so Nick leans over in his seat to pick it up. This time, the shock makes them both jump, but only Charlie apologizes. Nick just passes him the pencil without touching his hand this time, in case the weird current still runs through them.
By the third shock on the third day, Nick just laughs.
“This carpet is no joke,” he says immediately, mainly to keep Charlie from apologizing again. He shuffles his feet back and forth and extends his pointer finger toward Charlie’s hand. He pulls away but laughs, so Nick jabs his finger into his arm instead. Nothing happens. He scrunches his nose.
“Serves you right for trying to shock me on purpose,” Charlie pokes back. Nick considers trying again, considers shocking his cheek this time instead, but for a moment, he gets lost just beaming. Light from the window behind them illuminates Charlie’s eyes, and it transfixes him a little. The electricity he must have gathered from all the shoe shuffling shoots down his spine, leaving him antsy.
As Charlie tries to wrestle his homework from his hands, the brush of their skin feels like striking a match, and Nick misses the feeling the second it’s gone. Like he’s a flame, but there’s no wick to attach to, so he just burns until he runs out of oxygen. He grabs Charlie’s hand to draw two dots above the crooked line his pen made, and something blazes beneath his fingertips even after the contact breaks. Somehow, their hands conduct a current, and touch completes the circuit. The lightbulb turns on.
He’s probably just glad to have such a good friend. All his other friends would act like this kind of touch stings them. He can still feel where his skin touched Charlie’s when he gets home, and even burying his fingers in Nellie’s fur feels different.
He convinces Charlie to join the rugby team. Teaching him how to play means tackling, which means their legs end up in a heap, and Nick’s hair stands on end for a little too long afterward. It means huddling up next to him, arms around each other's backs, and knocking their knees together in the locker room as they tie their boots.
It’s nothing less than a gravitational pull that brings him along to hear Charlie and Ben talk. When he pulls at the back of Ben’s jacket, Nick feels nothing but white hot anger. He wants to take Charlie’s face in his hands and make sure he’s really alright, make him hold eye contact, but he doesn’t want to push whatever boundaries they’ve set up, nor do the same type of thing Ben had done. Not only would Nick never forgive himself for crossing boundaries, he’d scare Charlie off, and then he’d have nothing. He keeps his distance as they walk out together, only lifting his hand to wave before they part ways.
He’s known Charlie for more than a month. They talk every morning in form, they smile and greet each other in the hallways every time, and they walk to maths together more often than not. Still, when Charlie sits next to him the day after Ben, the morning after they’d stayed up far too late talking about less and less relevant things, he thinks he understands him better. Deeper. Not just because he knows the whole Ben story, but that Charlie trusted Nick on a new level and allowed him to be supportive.
So he invites him over. And when Charlie puts his palm over Nick’s mouth and tackles him down, Nick feels wires sparking in his cheeks like firecrackers. He brushes snow out of the hair hanging over Charlie’s forehead; he pulls him close to take pictures. Their hands knock into each other as they make snow angels, and the warmth that spreads up his arm and wraps around his stomach negates the chill of the snow on the back of his head. Nellie climbs on top of him, and he hears Charlie laugh beside him in glee. He wishes he could snapshot everything about this moment, from the abandoned game of Mario Kart to the chill that blooms on his face every time a snowflake drifts down to the way Charlie coos when Nellie visits him instead, dissatisfied with the amount of affection Nick gave her.
He sits up suddenly and watches his dog and his best friend— that’s what Charlie is now— immersed in each other, a grin splitting his face clean in two. When he helps Charlie stand, he doesn’t think anything of how he pulls him back into the house hand-in-hand, how it feels like his muscles wouldn’t listen if he told them to let go.
In what feels like no time at all, over weeks of spending all of their free time together to the point where it’s unusual for him to walk home by himself, he winds up at Charlie’s, in his kitchen and his bedroom and his living room, aww ing over framed pictures on the walls and asking his sister Tori for any and all embarrassing stories while the subject in question desperately tries to separate the two of them. Charlie holds his hands over the drumsticks, and the static fills his brain again, but his whole side is pressed up against Charlie’s too and for some reason his lungs won’t inflate. He can hardly hear the drums over the hi-hat of his heart. When the touch is taken away, the left half of his body feels significantly colder.
They settle under blankets on the couch to watch some movie Charlie swears is the best he’s ever seen, and Nick can feel every millimeter of space between them like it’s a canyon. He’s hyper aware of it for some reason, so he focuses all of his attention on the screen in hope that the urge to close those four inches closer and press their shoulders together will fade as he gets sucked into the plot.
It does not.
He stares forward at the tv with glazed over eyes. Nothing registers in him except the swirling, category five hurricane of twisting emotions and the warmth that seems to radiate off of Charlie at all times, even though he always complains about being cold. It reaches for him, drawing him closer like a space heater in the dead of winter. When he finally can’t help a glance over at Charlie, his head is tipped back against the couch, dead asleep. What’s worse, one hand lays palm up between them, just waiting for Nick to reach out and lace their fingers.
Except, it’s definitely not. That definitely wasn’t the intention, and Nick shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Charlie wants him to hold his hand.
But he thinks he wants to. For a moment, he looks between the hand and Charlie’s face and back again, his gaze always zeroing in on the slight part between his lips. He runs his hands over his legs to wipe off the sweat suddenly accumulated in his palms, finding it increasingly difficult to swallow correctly. His hand lifts and moves toward Charlie’s, half without his permission. Thinking of every time their hands have touched, all the zaps of electricity and warmth and lingering sensation like his whole arm fell asleep, he glances to make sure Charlie’s eyes are still closed and moves his hand closer.
Only centimeters remain between their fingertips when he feels it: energy pouring out for him, like tendrils of light beaming from Charlie’s hand and wrapping snug around his wrist. His heart pounds into his head, and his ears pop and ring. All the energy in the room, all the light and heat and sound gets sucked into the space between their hands, building up potential on potential until he’s sure the pressure will make a window crack. The frequency blaring in his ears like feedback on a microphone rises in pitch until he snaps his hand away. The bands of light fall from his wrist and disintegrate into the air, and the world no longer feels like it’s being squeezed around them.
Heat pools in his face and ears and drains again in an instant. He pulls his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them like some kind of buffer keeping him from the earth-shattering proximity to Charlie. He tries to tune back into the movie, but he really can’t see around the elephant between him and the screen.
He wants to spend all of his time around Charlie. Something within him seems to slot into place whenever they’re together, and when they’re not, the world seems duller. Meaner. He’d never noticed the biting tone behind 90% of Harry’s words until he poked fun at Charlie in the locker room and Nick’s chest swelled with disgust. Harry’s been his friend for years, but now he’s distinctly aware of how he treats people. He wonders if he’s been like that all along, or how he never noticed before. What else about the world has he missed behind the smoke screen of life before Charlie?
And why does being close to Charlie feel so monumental?
It’s instinct to wrap his arms around Charlie before he leaves, but the air gets sucked from his lungs nonetheless. His cheek brushes the side of Charlie’s neck, and he nearly sobs. He just squeezes a little tighter, tries to hold him a little closer to his chest and maybe get him stuck there. When arms wrap, although hesitantly, around his middle, he sinks into the sensation and closes his eyes. Breathes it all in— the softness of the blanket, the softness of Charlie, the sense of pure, sweet bliss he feels holding him so close.
Until he realizes it’s probably been too long, and he should let go.
“Bye, then,” he croaks, putting himself on the other side of the door as quickly as humanly possible. He doesn’t want to run away, but he needs to before he does something he hasn’t thought out yet.
When he gets home, he closes the door of his room even to Nellie. He sits in the middle of the floor, staring blankly at a wall. He shivers, so he wraps his arms around himself, but their placement only reminds him of where Charlie had held him not twenty minutes ago. Instead, he looks at his hand, stretching out his fingers and trying to recreate the buzzing in his blood when he’d held it close to Charlie’s. Like maybe it wasn’t from the proximity, maybe he’s developing superpowers instead of a crush on his best friend.
At least, that’s what it feels like, like a really massive crush that sends his whole brain reeling at any contact. But he’s never… He doesn’t… He’s liked girls, he knows he has. He’s turned a violent shade of red because a girl called him cute. He’s kissed girls (well, one girl), and he’s liked it. Does he want to kiss Charlie?
Yes, his mind supplies, he really does. And he might have, if he stayed at Charlie’s any longer. The warmth that envelops him at all times had beckoned Nick closer, the same way he’d felt the urge to talk to him every morning and greet him in the hallway and ask him about rugby and invite him over. It scares him a little, how much his chest constricts at the thought of touching Charlie’s cheek, pulling him closer, closing his eyes… like there’s a snake wrapped around his torso. He gasps for air and bolts down the hall to the bathroom just to see if he still looks like himself. As if suddenly there would be some change, like big, dark letters would display across his forehead, proclaiming that he likes a boy. But as he peers into the mirror, he thinks he looks like the same Nick Nelson he’s always been.
Except, maybe he’s not, not entirely. The same Nick Nelson may cringe when Harry says his asshole things, but he’s never bothered enough to say anything against it, at least not in the moment, and especially not at Harry’s party. He just can’t get the articles he read out of his mind, violence and mistreatment and discrimination, and all Charlie’s told him about last year echoes in his ears, and maybe he’d be able to push it aside normally, but it’s Charlie.
“That’s homophobic, Harry,” he says, squaring his shoulders even as the smirks turn to frowns. He doubles down. “And I really don’t like you.”
He needs to find Charlie. Hoping to god he hasn’t left already, Nick ducks from room to room, looking for curly hair or a soft jumper, then weaves through the crowd on the dance floor until he sees Tara and her girlfriend. Seeing them dance together, find pure joy just being with each other, fills his chest with a strange sense of pride; he lifts his chin a little higher, a dumb grin on his face. It lifts some of the weight from his shoulders. They’re happy, and they didn’t tell people right away, and they’re not afraid of it. If Tara Jones is gay, there’s nothing saying he can’t be too. He’s not alone.
When he grips Charlie’s wrist to pull him up the twisting staircase away from the thumping music, something sparks. He knows he’ll tell him how he feels soon. If he gets an urge when they’re together to admit he likes him, he’ll do it.
But when the question stares him straight in the face not two minutes later— “Would you go out with someone who wasn’t a girl?”— he finds he’s not so brave. The yes sits at the edge of his tongue, the you waiting not far behind in his throat, but on instinct, he swallows them down.
“I don’t know.” He just wants to spit it out, just wants to understand his own feelings for once. “Maybe.”
If the energy was palpable that day he’d almost touched his hand, now they might as well be at the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of the sun. The gravitational center of the earth seems to have moved from the core of the planet to the space between the two of them. Staying apart requires some level of grit that only his swirling sexuality crisis is strong enough to keep. The terrified part of him is being dragged along by this gravity kicking and screaming, clawing at the ground to hold on for just a moment longer, to make him rethink what following his heart would change in his life, and if he wants change at all.
“Would you… kiss someone who wasn’t a girl?”
Maybe he isn’t strong enough. His every instinct draws him closer and closer; his heart thuds louder than the shut away music, pounding at his chest to burst out through his ribs and leap into Charlie’s to beat right beside his. His blood pumps through his head, a steady drum beat of Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Every breath fills his lungs with just how close they are. He feels relaxed enough to sleep for a day and energetic enough to run a mile in four minutes.
“Would you kiss me?” He doesn’t have to look down to know Charlie’s pinkie is touching his; he feels the fire lighting along his arm and setting every one of his cells ablaze from the inside out. He must be running a seriously dangerous fever at this point.
His response flows out as easy as breathing. “Yeah.”
He hopes Charlie can see every inch of desperation in his expression, every ounce of longing in his eyes. It’s all he can do not to leap for joy or gasp when he realizes that this is all real: he’s leaning in; he’s closing his eyes.
Time slows around them, he’s absolutely positive, and the pull of their lips is more intoxicating than any of the drinks hidden around this party. Not that he’s entirely sure they’re still at the party, that they’re even on the same plane of existence that they used to be. There’s no way this ecstasy can inhabit the same world as so much hate.
And then it’s over, and the world goes back to normal. If there will ever be another normal.
He can’t stand it. This time, he fully holds his hand, their palms pressed flush and shaking together, and he inhales sharply when Charlie touches the side of his face.
It’s heavenly.
They both lean into it more this time, like they’re more confident the other won’t back off. It aches deep in his chest. He grasps Charlie’s shoulder, and he holds on for dear life. For a moment, he considers the future. He’ll have to sit next to Charlie every morning after this, see him at rugby, and not kiss him any chance he gets. It suddenly seems an insurmountable task.
And when he leaves, he thinks he tears out a chunk of his soul and leaves it behind. It’s how he knows Charlie’s already gone, even as he searches for him again. Every part of him that Charlie touched, his lips, his cheek, his nose, his forehead, all scream with electricity that longs to be a part of its circuit again.
He tries for about three minutes to rejoin the party, but he can’t meet anyone’s eyes, and he feels that part of his soul get further and further away. It makes him nauseous. All of the music seems too loud, suffocating him in the immersion in the expectations of all of these people. They all see him as something, someone he’ll never be again. But he doesn’t regret anything, except maybe letting Charlie think for even a moment that he didn’t mean it.
Maybe he should text him, he realizes, to explain that he hadn’t left because he wanted to.
Maybe he should just go home.
It’s barely nine. His mum responds to his text to ask if everything’s okay.
It’s not. He might be (definitely) gay, and he sort of hates all of his friends, and he kissed Charlie and wants to keep kissing Charlie, but Charlie thinks that he doesn’t, and Nick doesn’t want to force him into anything if running away is what he wanted.
He texts back that it’s fine. He’s just tired.
He doesn’t sleep that night, not for a second. For an hour, he tries, then he tries to play a video game with the tv muted, then watch something on his laptop, but nothing lasts longer than twenty minutes.
He can still feel the press of Charlie’s lips against his, lingering like the grey clouds that hung over the sky yesterday. Charlie’s curls had brushed his forehead, and he’d gripped Nick’s hand like it kept him tied to the ground. It’s all so fresh in his mind and beneath his skin that it feels like it’s all still happening, as if he never really left that moment.
Nellie, who fell asleep in her bed in the corner of his room as soon as he got home, wakes up around midnight to find him pacing back and forth, his bedside lamp on and both tv and computer screens flashing with attempted distractions. She weaves herself between his legs, and he crouches to rub her ears and scratch absentmindedly over her head. Eventually, when the lack of movement catches up with his brain, he buries his face in her fur and cries.
“It’s all a mess, Nel,” he whispers. To her credit, she whines and prods his chest with her nose, so he wraps his arms around her. “What if he hates me?”
Together, they check his phone to see if Charlie has been active on Instagram, which he hasn’t, then scroll through people’s posts about the party. From the look of some stories, it’s still ongoing. He doesn’t know what they all could do for the five hours since the party began. Maybe he would have found somewhere to hide out with Charlie regardless of raging feelings, and they would have watched a movie on one of their phones or just talked the way that they tended to. His mum was right, he feels more himself around Charlie than any of the other rugby guys, and now he’s not sure he wants to go back.
Can he really leave the people who have been his friends for years behind? If he cuts his ties with them, what happens to the team? If they’re all in disarray, they’ll never play together well.
He stews over everything as he tosses a mini rugby ball across the room for Nellie to chase, propping himself up on his bed. If this were any other situation, he’d go wake his mum up and talk to her about it, but that would involve… coming out… to her, and the thought makes his muscles seize in fear. Not that he’d even know what to come out as if he could. For the first time in his life, he might have to figure this out without his mother’s guidance.
Around three, Nellie is dozing again, her head propped on his leg like she’s afraid to leave him even the five feet between him and her bed, and he scrolls through his and Charlie’s messages, just reading them, smiling to himself.
By four, he’s dead asleep on the rug, his head tipped back against his mattress, the playlist Charlie made for him playing quietly from his phone.
Darcy looks at him expectantly, blinking a few times and peeling an orange at the same time. Tara has gone to throw away the trash from her lunch, leaving him alone on the court with her girlfriend, who Nick is taking to quickly. Still, the question catches him off guard.
“I don’t know,” he answers, because that’s the truth. He hasn’t really thought about it, at least not seriously. Maybe he hasn’t let himself think about it. He opens his mouth to say more, but he catches himself. Usually, when he explains how he feels about soulmates, people think he’s some pessimistic, angsty jerk, when that’s not why at all. It’s almost the opposite.
“What did you say?” Tara asks, clearly clocking his pale face and gaping mouth. She kicks Darcy’s leg lightly before sitting down again and glaring at her.
“Nothing!” Darcy says. “I only asked him if he thinks Charlie is his soulmate.”
Tara’s mouth falls open. She swats Darcy’s arm, harder than the kick had been. “What did you do that for?”
“I think it’s a fair question.”
“Don’t listen to her, Nick, she’s really stupid sometimes.”
“No, it’s alright,” he says, his mouth still slightly drier than usual. “I told her I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t think I’d know how to tell in the first place.”
“And that’s perfectly okay!” Tara says. Darcy shoves an orange slice into her mouth.
“It’s weird at first,” she remarks around the orange. “I figured, I guess, but I wasn’t really sure until I knew she felt the same way. Then it was rather obvious.”
He blinks for a second, processing the words, then his brow creases. “You two are soulmates?”
“We think so,” Tara says. “It’s like you said, though, it’s never a sure thing.”
“Well… how do you two… feel? Why do you… you know, think that?”
Tara looks at Darcy, who squints for a second, tilts her head, and swallows the next piece of orange before answering. “For one, I just kept wondering why no one had ever written anything that felt like what I was feeling. I thought maybe it was just because there’s, like, no genuine stuff about lesbians, and I wasn’t sure if straight people feel things the same way as we do. But it just felt like… I don’t know, like… like there was a period of time before and there’s one since, and they’re different. Not better, necessarily, just different.” She pauses, oblivious to the absolutely dreamy look Tara is giving her, and Nick just smiles. “And even if we’re wrong, and we’re not really soulmates, we like being together. And that’s enough for right now.”
The sun beams down on the two of them, so bright in his face that Nick just shuts his eyes. It’s been months since they came here for the first time, since he waded out into the waves with Charlie in his arms and yelled out his feelings for all to hear. It’s nearing the end of summer. Soon, they’ll return to Truham again, and he’ll get his license after his birthday, and he’ll sit with his friends for lunch and try not to feel bad when Harry and most of his old friends pass them and sneer. They’ll all meet up with Elle, Tara, and Darcy after school, or he and Charlie will go to one of their houses, and everything will be okay.
He’s happy.
Charlie is his boyfriend. People know about it. They can hold hands in public and go on real dates like a real couple, and he doesn’t have to carry some sense of shame.
Something blocks the sun, and when he opens his eyes, he sees it’s the boyfriend in question. He grins. Bits of light peek out from behind Charlie’s hair, making him look like a god, or an angel sent from heaven, which can’t be too far off. At least not to Nick.
“What?” Charlie asks, his own smile cracking across his face. It just makes him all the more beautiful. Sometimes, Nick really can’t believe that this is his life.
“What?” he repeats. “You’re the one looking at me.”
“But you’re smiling.” He pokes Nick’s cheek, just for the sake of zapping him. Static electricity seems to follow them wherever they go. Nick catches his wrist before he can pull it away.
“Can I not just smile at you?” When he brings Charlie’s hand to his lips and litters his palm with kisses, Charlie ducks his head. Nick just sits up enough to kiss him for real, because how could he not? They pull apart just a little, and Nick leans on his elbow to stay close to Charlie’s face.
“Do you think we’re soulmates?” Charlie blurts, immediately turning a bright shade of pink the second his voice lilts up to pose the question. “No, forget that, just forget it. Please. Forget I said anything.”
“Charlie,” he says, the smile on his face never wavering. “Charlie.” He keeps saying it until Charlie stops rambling and meets his eyes again. It takes some prodding, and even once he’s looking, he still spits out one last apology. “Yeah. I think you’re my soulmate.”
And if the way Charlie’s reaction— that same beaming smile, having only grown brighter and wider since the first time he saw it— makes him feel is any indication, he thinks he’s telling the truth.
After all, there’s no harm in loving, or being loved, this deeply. He’s happy, and he loves, and pure, golden energy binds them together. He doesn’t see it changing any time soon.
At the end of the day, that’s all that having a soulmate is meant to be.