Work Text:
Michael wishes he never fell in love.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s entirely selfish for wishing he were incapable of loving. There are people out there who will never know how to love the way he can. They wish they could feel it the same way he wishes he couldn’t.
It’s special, Mama always says. Michael loves in a way no one else does. His love knows no bounds. It’ll send him on strings of impulsive, dauntless behavior. It’ll have him sneaking backstage to disrupt high school auditorium debuts, visiting cold hospital rooms day after day, anxiously tapping his feet in hopes it’ll wake up his best friend, falling asleep at hospital bedsides, and granting earnest forgiveness. It’ll make him do all the things he feels that the people who harmed him never deserved, because god, he’s just so fucking full of love, why should anyone that isn’t him hurt?
Love can be good, he thinks, until it tears him apart. It’s good until it eats at him, until he can’t hold a conversation without having to bite back a confession, until he can’t gaze into brown eyes without wanting to kiss lonely-looking lips. All of this desire is entirely selfish and unrequited.
Being Jeremy’s friend is amazing. Seriously. Despite jokes and past disputes, Michael wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world. He wouldn’t change their ups and downs; that’s what made them them, after all. Without Jeremy, Michael wouldn’t be himself.
Michael wishes he could be himself without his love immolating him from the inside.
He is love. He is self-destruction. He is everything and nothing all at once.
He wants to be looked at the same way he looks at Jeremy. He wants intimacy and tenderness to rattle his core, to feel clumsy fingers card through his hair, to hear a quiet, soft voice stammer out a shy confession of love in the warmth of his bedroom, settling between the sheets beneath them. Incessantly, he craves the love he’s never felt returned, and he wants it all.
He wants to continue keeping it all a secret. He’d do anything to keep his best friendship stable and lasting. But having to lie to Jeremy and tell him it’s someone else he loves, that it always has been…
Michael wishes he wasn’t a fucking liar.
Jeremy deserves to know the truth. But he doesn’t deserve to know how much of an obsessive freak Michael feels he’s become. He doesn’t deserve to be weighed down by the discomfort and secondhand humiliation that comes with knowing his best friend has had a freaky gay crush on him for god knows how long. He deserves the good kind of person he always falls for, the ones entirely worthy of his attention and affection—not a lowlife like Michael. Never Michael.
He can wish on every 11:11 and any airplane that passes through the night sky, but it won’t give him the one thing he wants in return: reciprocation.
Maybe it’s just what he deserves for wearing his heart on his sleeve and expecting Jeremy to take it.