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Paulo was staring at the ceiling when his phone rang. The melancholic waters that drifted over his consciousness often left him in that position, hands crossed over his lap as he lay on his bed, eyes never fully focusing. The somali hadn’t felt like he had a second to breathe emotionally in years, whether his thoughts were on his job, taking care of himself and occasionally his father, or the continual disastrous spiral that was his love life. Pretty much everywhere Paulo’s mind turned left him with some form of dreary cloud over his head. One of the consequences of that growing fatigue was what caused his eyes to widen in surprise when he saw that the call was from David.
David had always been his best friend, since childhood they were inseparable, bonding over how they both had a missing parent. David was irradiant in his positivity and humor, and while that isn’t to say that David was always a positive influence, or funny for that matter, Paulo would never say he didn't want the brown labrador around.
Recently, however, he wasn’t sticking to that belief. Deep down he knew the issue didn't lie in anything related to David, instead, it was the growing aura of mental malaise that surrounded the orange cat causing the problem. His cloud of depression warped David’s positivity, made him harder to understand, made it harder for David to connect, and as a reaction, Paulo began to push away. He spoke with David less and less, and perhaps David eventually noticed this, because his interaction became sparcer as well. First, the change was small, David spoke a little less, then he would merely follow Paulo around, then without Paulo noticing, David wasn’t there at all.
The somali felt a pang of regret whenever he thought about the other boy now. They were still friends, David never seemed any less happy to see him, but there was something Paulo knew he wasn’t giving back. Perhaps that was what led his hand to fly so fast, quicker than if almost any girl had called him, to pick up the phone.
“Hello?” Paulo’s voice was neutral, or at least he tried to make it that way. It had been a little while since the two had talked on the phone, it had been a little while since they were in private together at all.
“Paulo!!!!” David shouted back, his voice slightly quieted as if he was calling to the phone from a collection of feet away.
“Y-... yeah?” Paulo responded, though in a way he was also asking a question. Why was David shouting? Why was David seemingly a yard away from the phone he just dialed Paulo’s number on?
“I need you!!!” David yelled back, causing a shiver of shock and homoromanticism to shoot up Paulo’s spine which he quickly repressed, the same could not be said about the burning of his face.
“The fuck!?” The boy snapped back aggressively, aggression was usually the way he got away from less heteronormative concepts and ideas. Even still this was a lot better than how he would have reacted a collection of months ago: instantly hanging up out of fear.
“I am in dire need of your assistance my chum!” David called, pulling a sharp exhale of amusement from Paulo, more out of bewilderment than anything else.
“Why are you yelling from across the room??”
“I’m tangled in vines!”
Pualo’s brow furrowed extremely, “What??”
“I’m tangled in vines!” David repeated as if that answered every question Paulo would have.
“Wh-, h-, how???”
“I dialed your number with my foot!” David completely and utterly dodged the question, his voice beaming with pride.
“David, how the fuck did you even find vines to get tangled in?” Without even thinking about it Paulo was already at his feet, pacing around the room with the sudden energy to do something, but none of the mental direction to know what.
“Tried to climb the big tree in the forest, you know the one at the edge of town?”
Paulo hung on to each of his words as his jaw slowly tightened, not realizing David was waiting for his interaction until they had shared about two seconds of complete silence. “O-oh, yeah I know the one. You’re still there?” Paulo was barely paying attention to his movements as he briskly threw on his jacket and grabbed a large enough-looking pocket knife.
“Uh, yeah? Because of the vine situation! Please Paulo dear do try to keep up.”
Paulo grunted with a clench of his teeth, right, yeah of course he would be in the same place, because of the vines you idiot! “Right, yeah the vines. How did that happen?”
“The tree!”
“How did one thing lead to another you idiot!” Paulo held his phone in the crook of his neck as he slid into his car, quickly turning it on with a sputter and then putting his companion on speakerphone. He only processed that he had shot out the door after he was halfway down the block, swiftly adding, “Also I’m on my way.” to the end of his sentence.
“Wellllll…” David began, twirling one of the vines he was trapped in with his finger, “I was trying to climb this treeeee but I feeelll and crashed through the canopy, so now I’m wrapped up in vines in the woods!! Anyway, what’s your day been like?”
Paulo didn't whine at the sudden change in conversation, he supposed he had gotten what he asked for anyway. “I’ve been fine, busy with work and shit you know how it is.” That was what he usually said when people asked how he was doing, in the brief stint he had with Daisy that was how he would always respond to her as well. He clenched his teeth slightly, he didn't like to think about it.
“I don't!” David chirped back, “But I’m proud of you for following your wage slave grindset!!!”
“What the hell does that even mean David..?” Paulo grunted, shaking his head slightly as he sped through town and rapidly approached the woods.
“You’re getting that bag! Milking what you can out of the ever-turning torture cogs of capitalism!”
Paulo was parking now, deciding that it was a better idea to just ignore whatever the hell David was talking about. “When are you gonna get a job anyway, we’ve almost graduated you kinda need to get on that.”
“I have a job.” David responded, surprisingly casually, “I’m an English tutor.”
Paulo’s eyes widened and the blast of pure shock stopped him right in his tracks at the edge of the woods, “You’re a fucking WHAT??”
“An English tutor! I help people write essays and shit, I know you don’t like to study much Paulo but you gotta know what a tutor is right??”
Of course, Paulo knew what a tutor was, he furrowed his brow in annoyance, “How the fuck did you become an English tutor?” He couldn't even imagine a universe in which David was good enough at English to even do well in class much less be a tutor for said class.
“I have many wonderful talents, my dear…” David responded wistfully, completely avoiding answering the question for what reason Paulo didn't know. The Somali’s blood ran hot beneath his face as he trudged through the woods, why did his best friend need to be so goddamn fruity all the time?
Before he could ask another question to his friend over the phone the rustling of the dog boy rang out through the forest, causing his ears to turn. “I think I know where you are. I'll call you back if I'm wrong.” Before David could respond Paulo hung up the phone, stuffing it into his jeans pocket and trying to shake the red off his face. Paulo couldn't lie and say this feeling wasn't part of what caused David to be pushed away. The orange cat had enough things to be confused about after all, and he had no plans to put the romantic advances of his best friend on that list.
“Hark! Traveler! I have a quest for you!!” Clearly, Paulo’s ears hadn't led him astray, and when he cast his eyes upward it was fairly effortless to see his tall brown friend hanging upside down from a tree, dangling from the vines constricting him.
“How did you even…” Paulo repeated under his breath, his eyes bouncing between David, the tree, and David's phone which was tangled a couple of feet away from him. Though he knew the question was useless, he couldn't help but ask it again anyway. “You're a clown, man.”
“God gives his goofiest battles to his silliest soldiers.” David responded with unbridled confidence, causing Paulo to chuckle; jumping up to grab the vines that bound his friend and pulling him down to cut them. “Be gentle dearest, it's my first time!”
“Oh my God dude I'm seriously going to leave you in this tree if you don't shut up.” Paulo grumbled through his clenched teeth, his face burned yet his smile couldn't fade. David snickered as Paulo whipped out his knife, being careful not to get too close to David as he sawed through the plant life. Though it wasn't very hard when David seemed so relaxed, so unbothered even with Paulo's knife grazing his fur.
“We just haven't talked in so long! I gotta make up for lost time!”
“I guess so.” Paulo returned, though he only partially heard David through the process of carving vines. He spaced out like this a lot, it was easy to avoid your thoughts when you could sink into your work. David fell silent for a moment, his eyes wandering somewhere beyond Paulo and into the forest, and then back to Paulo again as if he wouldn't want to look at anything else.
“Do you still like Hyper Space Cadets?” David asked eventually, breaking Paulo from his trance and causing him to look down at the other boy with a strange expression.
“What? No.”
“Why not?” Paulo hadn't considered the question, he assumed it was obvious.
“Cuz it's like… it's a kid's show.”
David raised an eyebrow, “So?”
“I'm not a kid anymore, I can't be watching that shit.”
David responded without missing a beat, “See that's the problem with you.” Paulo was totally snapped out of it now, though his hands kept moving, he was only looking at David.
“Huh? The fuck?” He responded incredulously, that was the last thing that he expected David to say.
“You're always running away from doing things you want because you're scared of being weird, but that's stupid and you know it's stupid!” Paulo legitimately couldn't believe what he was hearing, David speaking this directly was like an amnesiac having a sudden moment of perfect clarity. However David spoke the same way he always did, perhaps he was always better-spoken than Paulo had assumed.
“I'm not… scared of being weird.” Paulo defended, albeit weakly, which only caused David to be more emphatic in his speech.
“Yes you are man! Look me in the eyes and tell me you aren't scared of doing what you actually want to. Look me in the eyes and tell me you aren't scared of not being normal.” Paulo didn't do that, his heels sliding backward slightly in the mud.
“T-the hell is wrong with you man?”
“See? This is what I'm talking about! Even now you're running!” Paulo realized he had been backing up from his suspended friend and forcefully stopped himself, “You're avoiding my question so hard that you stopped cutting me down!”
Paulo shook his head as if to throw the thoughts swirling in his brain out of his skull through his ears, “Fuck! Okay okay fine! Just shut up about this until I can get you down okay?” He went back to cutting but David didn't stop speaking, he wasn't very good at not speaking once he had started.
“I won't! Because once I'm down you're gonna go back to not talking to me! I just want a chance to talk to you before I can't anymore!” Paulo gripped the blade harder, his hands were shaking now and his eyes were quickly becoming watery. What the hell was wrong with David, why was he like this?
Why was Paulo like this?
“That's… not true…” Paulo denied, once again weakly, because he knew it absolutely was.
“When you run from everything instead of dealing with it, it hurts you! It hurts other people too, people you wouldn't expect!”
“W- What are you talking about?” Paulo tilted his head downward to more accurately look at David. The more vines he cut the closer David's head got to touching the ground. “Like… Rachel?”
“LIKE ME DUMBASS!!” David hollered, as if the words had been bubbling in the back of his mind for years, and once released rocketed out of his throat against his will. If Paulo wasn't holding onto David he would have stumbled backward from the strength of the memory that flooded his mind. Oh my God, the beach, how could he have forgotten? How did he manage to put the memory so thoroughly away, how could he not have known that that thought would fester in the library of his mind until it would eventually come back to bite him? The somali wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words. His face was burning, and he wanted to run again, but the brown eyes of his best friend kept him rooted in place. Paulo couldn't remember if he had ever seen David cry, or even really sad, but the sight destroyed him. He couldn't believe that he had been the one to push David to that place.
“I… I'm sorry…” Paulo choked out, he felt so unused to apologizing to David, it wasn't something they often did with each other. “I thought…”
“I tried to ignore it too! Like I ignore it every other time something like this happens. But that's not how shit like this works, it eats at you like termites in your brain, little by little no matter how hard you stomp it down.” both of them sat in silence for a moment, the only sounds filling their ears being the cutting of the vines, and then eventually the sound of David falling to the ground. “You can go now.” David eventually spoke, shaking his emotions off to be replaced with indifference. “Sorry for bothering you, I know you think I'm weird for this and I don't really care about being weird I just… needed to get that off my chest I guess.”
However, seemingly surprisingly for David, Paulo didn't run. Instead, he collapsed down to David's level, falling into a sit in the dirt and staring down at his feet, water in his eyes. “You're right.” Paulo eventually muttered,
“Well, I mean… yeah.” David spoke bluntly, though Paulo was used to him saying blunt things out of nowhere, in fact, it was a little comforting to know David would always say whatever came to him.
“I shouldn't have ran from you like that man… and I wanted to talk to you about it but we just didn't…” David nodded solemnly, knowing at least part of that was of his own action. “I guess I was scared, and I didn't know how to respond, I didn't know how I felt.” he swallowed hard, a tear rolling down his cheek, “And… and I'm sorry for avoiding you… I just… I don't know…”
“Didn't want to look gay hanging out with a bi guy?” David finished for him, which caused shame to well up in the bottom of his throat. He was completely right, but it was stupid, Paulo knew damn well it was stupid.
“Yeah…” he admitted, which caused an incredulous chuckle to leave his friend's lips,
“See this is what I'm talking about when I say that you're running from yourself. You know you like dudes man, both of us know you like dudes. I mean fuck I've seen the way you look at James.” Paulo's face flushed a deeper red, he was so lost looking at David that he completely forgot about James. He curled his arms around his legs, tightening his whole body as he stared down into the dirt.
“I guess like… it's just so like…”
“Not normal enough for you?” David asked, almost teasingly as he leaned slightly toward the other boy. Saying it like that made Paulo feel so stupid, why would he care about what was normal? “You following all those expectations is what's making you so miserable, you know that right? There's nothing wrong with being a homo man, even if some fuckface on the news tells you so.” Paulo deep down obviously knew this, yet somehow it felt different when it was about him. Without even thinking he let himself loosen and fall forward, sinking his head into David's shoulder.
“I… I know it's just…” he paused for a moment, and David slowly wrapped his arms around the other boy, patting his back as Paulo's tears soaked his shoulder. “I don't know man… it's scary… I guess. It's a lot easier to just try to act like I just like girls, even though I don't…”
“Well, that's dumb dude. You know it's dumb.”
The somali waited for a second before responding. “It's dumb.” with shaking hands Paulo returned the hug, squeezing David tightly around the waist. He could feel David's smile return to him, bright as the sun and warming Paulo's fur.
“Did you ever figure it out?” David asked, his voice layered with a subtle level of softness underneath his carefree tone.
“Figure out what?”
“How you felt about what I said on the beach.” Paulo’s head swarmed with ideas, hundreds of thoughts and emotions blending into an indescribable mess. It would take him a moment to pick apart, and in those moments he clung to David tighter, burying his face in his best friend’s shoulder and thinking over everything David really was to him, everything David really meant to him.
“I think…” Paulo eventually let through his clenched throat, “I think I wanna be with you forever man.”
Paulo could feel David’s muscles relax and his heart race, and he could hear the dog’s smile widen exponentially as he spoke, brimming with emotion, “Bodacious…”
Paulo was entirely snapped out of it, snickering like an idiot at his goofy ass companion, “Bodacious?? Way to ruin the fuckin moment!”
David cackled, his mind already bouncing onto the next thing, though he still held Paulo tight, “And hey! We don't need to worry about any of those norms and shit now either!” he chirped, slowly bringing both him and Paulo to their feet without loosening his hold on him. Paulo felt like he would usually mind this, but David putting his issues into words so succinctly took a weight off his shoulders and made it far easier to be embraced by the labrador. Instead, he just turned his head slightly to face the other man, his cheek still resting on his surprisingly soft brown fur.
“Whaddya mean?”
David grinned at him, the sadness on his face disappearing as quickly as it came to be replaced with that bright-eyed optimism that Paulo liked so much, even when it messed with him. David was just trying to help as he always was. It was one of the things that Paulo liked about him most, and there was a soft wave of warmth that washed over him as he was able to enjoy that again. “We're in the woods! None of this stuff matters in the woods!”
Paulo huffed in amusement, his eyes flicking back toward the entrance of the forest. “Well like, not far, my car is right over there.”
“No dude.” David grabbed the sides of Paulo's head, causing the somali to nearly jump as his face was gently tilted to look into David's glimmering eyes. “Let's go get lost in the woods.”
“W-huh?” Paulo stuttered, partly because the offer took him by surprise, partly because they were so close now.
“All the shit that you're worrying about doesn't matter! None of it matters, and I'm gonna show you! C'mon Paulo, don't you wanna get lost in the woods with me?” Paulo could feel his breath getting slightly heavy, and his eyes shied away from David's unstoppable gaze.
“I-I mean… I guess I'm not doing anything else today.” He REALLY wanted to get lost in the woods with him. David seemed to know this by how his grin widened, and though he released Paulo from his hug he quickly made up for it with the swift grabbing of his hand.
Paulo felt that sinking weight that had held him for so long melt away as he squeezed David's hand, running into the woods to get lost. Together.