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You sit on the colony walls with Dys, watching the phosphorescent jungle below in silence.
Dys kills a great deal of time up here during Glow, barred from expeditions. Sometimes, when you feel like blowing off work, you join him. He lets you, most days.
Sometimes the two of you talk, usually about the kinds of things that feel meaningful and deep and important to teenagers. Most of the time, you sit in comfortable silence. Today, he’s restless. It’s not so out-of-the-ordinary for him to not feel like talking, but you know him well enough to know when something is bothering him. You also know him well enough to know he doesn’t want you to ask; whatever it is, he’ll tell you whenever he decides he needs to.
Maybe half-an-hour passes. He’s in constant motion. He shifts his sitting position; he picks at his clothes, drums his fingers against the concrete, shakes his leg. He shifts his position again, and again, and again. You say nothing.
You’re starting to wonder if he wants you to leave when he finally speaks up. “Um, Sol? Do you mind if… Can I ask you something, um, something kinda specific?”
You hum affirmative and he takes a deep, slow breath. He still doesn’t look at you. “Um, h-hypothetically speaking,” he starts, “what would you do if you, you know… liked someone?” He shifts again, bringing one knee up close to his chest. “And you’ve liked them for a really long time. A-and you thought you were fine with not… with not doing anything or saying anything about it because there’s just so much that could go wrong and you don’t wanna mess things up and you’re probably better off alone anyway.” He starts toeing some loose gravel with his extended foot. You watch a pebble ricochet off the parapet and bounce towards you. “Um, but you really like this person, and you keep waiting for it to pass but it never does. And you just feel like… like the longer you sit on it, the harder it gets to keep sitting on it.” He pauses to take a long, sharp inhale. “Like, you’ve never had a problem keeping secrets before, so you thought it would be fine, but it feels like this one is expanding in your chest and it’s going to keep expanding until either you let it out or it kills you. Or something like that. What would you do?”
“Hm.” You take a moment to think, rolling the pebble he had kicked earlier under your index finger. “Well, I think you have to decide what’s worse, between the vulnerability of, y’know, telling someone you like them, or the suffocation of not telling them and carrying that around with you.” You turn to face Dys. “I think there’s some comfort to be found in telling the person, because then it’s out there, the ball is on their pitch, and that takes some pressure off of you, if you’re asking me, personally, what I would do. But I don’t think anyone can make that call for you. I think you have to make it for yourself.”
Abruptly, Dys turns to look back at you. It’s the first time he’s looked at you the entire time you’ve been hanging out today, you think, and there’s a strange intensity in his wide eyes, like he’s trying to communicate with you telepathically, like he wants you to understand something he doesn’t want to say aloud, and suddenly you think you do.
You notice now how close together your faces are, how easy it would be for you to kiss him. If you’re reading this right, you could assuage his anxieties right now, assure him you’ve always felt the same way, make it all better. Did you not just say you’d prefer to have your feelings be known, rather than hold them close to your chest?
But this is different, and you know better than that. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?
Too-much-too-fast will push Dys away. He gets uncomfortable easily, and it’s clear to you that he’s not yet ready for confessions.
In your dream-memories, you let him come to you. You know he will, when he’s ready.
Slowly, and then all at once , you think. You read that in an old Earth romance novel.
In the meantime, you’ll settle for a less-showy means to get your message across.
He turns away, and in what little light surrounds the two of you, you believe you can see a blush starting to form across his cheeks. “Um, thanks, I guess. That was for, um, T-Tangent. She needed to know.” It’s a weak lie, and his quiet tone of voice confirms that he’s well aware of that.
His hand lies between the two of you, supporting his weight. As you turn your body back to face the jungle, you gently bring your hand to rest on his.
You hear his breath hitch as he startles in your periphery. He starts to move again, and for a second you think he’s going to pull away.
Instead, he shifts his weight so that it isn’t supported by his hand anymore, and flips his hand over so that it lies palm-to-palm against yours. His fingers curl inward ever-so-slightly, just enough to still give him the grace of plausible deniability.
You know the two of you won’t speak about it for some time, at least a month. But you’re holding hands as you look out into the wilderness, and the air between you is charged with the weight of words unspoken, with potential , and it’s enough to make your heart increase it’s tempo inside your chest.
Good things come to those who wait.