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It’s like clockwork, the way he looks at you, but not in the traditional sense. Never, because while you’re a man of tradition (or rather, a boy, you guess), he is anything but, as he keeps on ticking and the clock ticks with him, he lives in the moment and in the now, unlike you.
He looks at you, and you can feel his gaze like a brand inside of you, you can almost smell smoke in the air and if he would take off his shades, you’re sure you would see gears churning, oiled and slick, in the bright red irises you so rarely get to see. When his eyes are shielded, he thinks you can’t tell, but somehow, you always know.
Sometimes, when he knows you’ve caught him, he’ll smile and he’ll shrug and you’ll do the same, and he’ll go back to whatever he’s doing. Sometimes he’ll pretend he was trying to get your attention and he’ll call out your name, and he’ll spout out the first thing that comes to mind. You know you’ll always laugh at whatever comes out of his mouth.
He plays it cool because that’s all he knows how to do, and you end up acting goofy because it’s all you know how to do.
But you always notice, and you never say, and while you don’t care if he sees you raise a brow or ask him what the hell is on your face, you don’t think you’ll ever stop pretending not to notice the way he looks at you, the way he sneaks glances at your face almost obsessively, the way his lips part sometimes and his head tips down and you think he’s lost, you don’t understand or maybe you just don’t want to.
You think it should be weird. It isn’t. Even when he stays over and the tension hangs thick in the air before one of you ends up sleeping on the floor, it rarely feels anything more than comfortable. Because he’s your friend, and it’s always nice to have him within arm’s length.
You’re scared, but never of him. You feel like he’s a time bomb, and he’s gotten you all tied up with him. You don’t know which of you will blow first but you somehow both encourage and shudder in the face of it.
You suppose all you want is for him to be in your life, and you suppose all he wants is the same. You can live with that. You’re going to have to.
Still, when he gets lost in your eyes, you want to pull him out, pull him to safety, pull him to sense, if you even know what that is anymore.
The days go by and they’re always the same. Steady, clockwork, normality as it slowly unfolds into something so much bigger and so much more heart-stopping.
You are not a homosexual, you think.
You didn’t think he was either, you think, again.
But he’s the same old kid he always was, with his shades and his bro and his dumb comics, and you’re the same old kid you always were, with your movies and nostalgia and games and everything that compliments him perfectly. The same old two kids, the same old best friends who can’t stop growing up.
You think again.
You do an awful lot of that.
It’s summer, when he and his bro go traveling. He tells you he’ll send you a postcard everywhere he stops, and it becomes the highlight of your day, a cheesy photo of a landscape scrawled on with red sharpie, something ironically dumb like “wow john its BEATUIFUL” or “wish u were here xoxo,” and it is only when you find yourself lying in bed at two in the morning trailing a finger over the red script and longing for something of what you don’t know, that you realize how deep you’re in, and how impossible it’ll be to get out.
You fall asleep with a heavy heart, dreaming of red filling your vision and smoke filling your lungs.
Your favorite is a picture of him striking a “sexy” pose on the hood of what must be his bro’s car; he’s written on it, “i HAVE the car”. It makes you laugh, every night when you look at it, and you come to notice little things like his brow raised ever so slightly, peeking out from his glasses, or his favorite shirt stretched just a bit too tight across his chest, finally getting too small.
The postcards keep coming and you stack them neatly on your desk, careful not to lose a single one, so that when you miss him you can thumb through them, run your fingers across them, touch them and look at them and hold them and have them, if not forever then for the time it takes to have him back.
You don’t go a day without at least a moment of your heart pounding, thumping like a ticking of a heavy handed clock, twisted up and hurting, and you think more than you have in your entire life.
You think about everything and sometimes nothing. You think about him. You think so much and so often about him, but most of all, you think about yourself.
His gaze is the hottest thing you’ve ever felt, even through the shades you got him years ago. You wonder briefly if he wears them not to protect his own eyes or even for the irony, he wears them to protect everyone else’s. You feel like a marshmallow in his fire, you’re gooey and dripping and you can’t get yourself together. He’s like a sauna, and you feel stuffy, like you’re wearing entirely too much clothing.
It’s been almost a month since you’ve seen him, and you think you’ve forgotten how to talk to him. You stand awkwardly in front of him, he does the same.
Without eyes to lock onto, you fear you’ve forgotten how to look at him, as your eyes drift down to his lips, his jaw, his neck. Like floating down a river, you can’t stop them. His collar, the shadow it casts upon the creamy, pale skin underneath.
You feel a lump in your throat.
“Hi.”
“Hey bro.”
He smirks, and you let out a nervous giggle, causing his lips to twitch up into a full-blown grin.
Your heart flutters and your stomach drops and, god, when did your life get so confusing?
Where in hell did you go wrong?
You play video games and you can’t keep your eyes off the way is slim fingers tweak the controller. You try to swallow and you lick your lips, they feel perpetually dry. Your heart pounds in your chest and his voice pounds in your ears, his little grunts as he plays, shouts and mumbles things like “Fuck!” and “Hell yeah!” whenever he wins or loses or beats you or kills you, and you feel like his mere presence is going to kill you for real.
You lick your lips for the millionth time, and your tongue is heavy, your chest is heavy.
You watch one of the movies you’ve long outgrown, one of your favorites that he used to make fun of you for liking so much.
You sit with him on the living room couch, your dad isn’t home. You sit on one side of the couch and he sits on the other, simultaneously too close and too far away.
You’re not sure exactly when you stop leaning on the armrest and sitting up straighter, but you’re pretty sure he does the same, and you don’t know when you end up sitting so close together but you do. You know he’s looking at you and you turn your head tentatively to look at him, and you don’t have a clue how long that lasts because you lips are on the corner of his mouth and, oh god, you’ve miscalculated and this isn’t right, this isn’t how you do it, you wish a black hole would open up right in the couch cushion beneath you and swallow you down—but he rights it, and his mouth is so warm, his tongue is so soft when he slips it past your lips. You wonder how he got so good at it but the thought doesn’t hold for long; every thought slips away and he’s the only thing that exists, the only thing that matters.
He pulls away, making little gasps for air just like you are, and you take off his shades and fold them on your lap. You look into his fiery eyes and your heart leaps, and you think you love him.