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“Do you think Isaac and Nick are doing it?” he asks Tanner, leaning into his room from their bathroom, talking around his toothbrush.
Thing is, Larry has been thinking about this a lot. As the “LGBT representation” (as the guys call him when they’re being fucking idiots) of the group, he feels he should have the best gaydar, but Nick and Isaac are those kinda guys where you can’t tell if it’s just so extremely heterosexual it starts looking like it’s bending the other way, or some kind of toeing of the line between socially acceptable touching between guy friends and something more tangibly romantic, or sexual. There are just moments when Nick and Isaac are looking at each other, or acting like they’re their parents, or playing gay chicken too seriously, that Larry just can’t get a read on.
Tanner spins in his desk chair, frowning somewhere between thoughtfulness and amusement. “Uh, I don’t know, man. That’s your area of expertise, right?”
He rolls his eyes, ducking back into the bathroom to spit toothpaste into the sink. “I’m serious,” he says, rinsing his mouth under the tap and then poking his head back into Tanner’s room, “do you think they’re fucking?”
Tanner laughs and then stops, frowning again. “Do you think they are?”
That’s the question, really, isn’t it. He sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” He comes in and perches on the edge of Tanner’s bed. “Just like… Okay, so I caught Nick sneaking out of Isaac’s room yesterday morning.”
“Define ‘sneaking’,” says Tanner. “Like he was doing some kinda Scooby Doo tiptoe walk shit?”
“I — Well, I guess so. More he just looked shifty, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Dude, they could have been doing anything. Planning a new discord challenge whatever, some kinda vlog idea, maybe they’ve got a prank they’re working on. Who knows.”
Larry bites his lip. “He was in his pyjamas. And he jumped when he saw me and was like… really weird about the whole thing. I dunno, if they are fucking, do you think they’d be scared to tell us?”
He knocks his head on one side. “I don’t see why. I mean, it’s not like we’re hate criming you every day.”
“Only every other day,” says Larry, grinning.
He snorts. “Obviously.”
“Okay, but maybe they’re worried if they break up and ruin the dynamic, or whatever. I mean, we’ve got a lot riding on this friendship working out.”
Tanner sighs. “Okay, but friends break up all the time, anyway. I’m not sure a relationship adds that much to it. And they’ve been acting like a couple since we all started hanging out, I don’t know why they’d think they’d need to hide it from us if it was for real for real, y’know?”
“I guess.”
“Anyway,” says Tanner, “I’m sure we would’ve heard them getting down and dirty by now, if they were fucking.”
“Yeah, but they do have a whole floor of the house to themselves,” Larry points out. He wriggles to sit cross-legged on Tanner’s bed, fiddling with his hands in his lap. “There’s weird noises in this house all the time, anyway. Whose to say that one time we thought someone was losing really bad on CS or whatever, it was really Isaac and Nick fucking.”
Tanner giggles, pulling up his feet into his chair and resting his chin on his knees. “I mean… sure.” He narrows his eyes. “Why do you care if Nick and Isaac are fucking?”
“I don’t know man. I’m curious. Also like, wanna know if someone’s getting in on my turf, being the only gay in the group. Could be bad for my image.”
He laughs again. “So rude of them.”
“Exactly.” He leans back far enough that he can press his back against the wall and looks up at Tanner’s ceiling. “I just… it would be nice to know, if they were.”
“Yeah… I get that.” He sighs. “Like… imagine the joke opportunities. It would add a whole new dimension to our bits. Like they’re our parents and they fuck, that would go crazy.”
Larry closes his eyes, thinking. “I… Do you remember when they used to meet up all the time? Back before we lived here. And they’d like… send us pictures of each other’s asses and they were all over each other all the time? I don’t know. They’ve just always… pinged something on my gaydar.”
He starts laughing again, quiet little wheezes. “Okay. Back then… yeah. I — I might have had some similar thoughts. They like… they do it now too, obviously, but… maybe we’re just desensitised now but it used to seem so intense.”
“They’ve been playing gay chicken at like, an Olympic level,” says Larry, “for literal years.”
“Let’s say they are fucking,” says Tanner, laughing and now obviously into the conversation by the excited tone of voice. “How long do you reckon they have been? Do you think it’s exclusive? Do they think they’re gay or is it a kind of ‘keep your socks on, homie’ sort of situation?”
Larry grins, wrinkling his nose. “Oh my God, I don’t know. Like… I reckon they were fooling around for a while back before we moved in, at least.”
“I can see that,” says Tanner, musingly.
“And definitely exclusive, no way is Isaac the kinda guy who likes open relationships. Nick’s ass is on lockdown, bro, hundred percent.”
Tanner snorts. “Oh, yeah, of course. Far too possessive.”
“Do you think they’re not telling us because it’s a ‘we’re not gay’ kinda deal?”
“Huh,” says Tanner, “maybe.”
“That would be sad, if it was true,” he mumbles.
“Yeah,” says Tanner quietly, “it would be. They don’t seem like the type though, not really. I mean, they make jokes about that kind of thing all the time, I don’t think they would if they were actually doing that themselves.”
“True,” says Larry, looking at Tanner across the room, thoughtfully. “You think they’ll ever tell us?”
“We seem to have veered very quickly into, like, they are definitely, actually, fucking territory,” says Tanner, meeting his gaze seriously, “this is all hypothetical, man. They might be just really, really comfortable with how straight they are.”
“I guess so.”
Tanner shrugs. “If they are, I reckon they will tell us.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I think they will. They’re hardly secret keepers about anything else,” says Tanner. “And I’m sure they know we love them, whatever.” He pauses and then grins, backlit by his computer screens. “Plus, we can always do a bit of snooping and see if we’re right. I bet those idiots leave evidence everywhere.”
Larry laughs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Yeah, we can snoop… just a little bit.”
*
After fucking around with Tanner for a bit and throwing things at him while he tried to top frag, Larry goes back to his room and collapses down on his bed.
He thinks about Nick and Isaac again, about the frozen little look on Nick’s face when he’d caught him sneaking out of Isaac’s room. He wonders what they were doing, he wonders if he’ll ever find out. The Texan night presses in warm on the house and he lies on top of his blankets, listening to Tanner laughing over Discord with someone. He wonders, if he listens hard enough, if he’ll hear Isaac and Nick talking to each other in low voices, the way they always do, pressed too close for comfort, so close it makes Larry flush with second-hand embarrassment.
He hopes they tell them. He really, really does. He wants to wish them congratulations and then bully them until they wish they hadn’t said a word, until the house is so loud with laughter it feels like the foundations might shake with it. He wants them happy, he wants them all happy.
He falls asleep wishing and hoping for it, dreams of it, and hopes the world is listening.