Chapter Text
“Fuck!” Gordie exclaimed under his breath, tearing a full page from his notebook and scrunching it up into a ball, tossing it into the bucket that they had stolen from the scrapyard and had been using as a bin in the corner of the treehouse. It was full of cigarette butts, empty juice boxes and now there were ten or more discarded, crumpled pages that he just couldn’t seem to get right piling up too.
It was easy for Gordie to write stories, to write what he was feeling through characters he made up. That way it wasn’t really him that was saying it, but to write his feelings into his own words, for Chris to read, from himself and not from a character.. that was near impossible. He had been trying for hours now, and he was starting to get more and more frustrated at his own inability to word what he wanted to say.
He sighed as he tried to concentrate, flattening the next page in the notebook. “Dear Chris,” he began writing as he searched for the right words to say. The harder he tried to focus, the more his thoughts ran. Chris was all he could think about, yet he couldn’t put his thoughts or his feelings for him onto the page, it’s almost like he was scared to write them.
Gordie wanted to tell Chris how he felt, that’s the whole reason that he was in the treehouse, trying so desperately to say what he wanted to say, yet no combination of words felt as strong as how he felt towards him. He needed Chris to know how much he cared about him, how much he thought about him, but he was terrified it would drive him away or change things between them. Losing Chris Chambers would be like losing a limb to him and he liked things the way they were.
For a long time he sat, gawking at the paper with his pencil and hand, thinking about how Chris had been the only one to stay with him after they had found Ray Brower’s body. Hell, Chris even stayed after Teddy told everyone that he was a queer, he denied it but that didn’t stop Teddy and Vern from distancing themselves from him.. But not Chris, he always stayed. He was the only one that really understood Gordie, always. The one he told everything to, even the things he couldn’t tell his brother.
Normally, he would have worried that Chris would have snuck up on him, or worried that Teddy or Vern would have showed up, not that they had seen them in the treehouse since that summer. That day, Gordie had skipped school, so he knew he wouldn’t have been interrupted. It’s not like his parents would have found out or even cared anyway and Denny was on a camping trip with Ace Merrill, so anyone who could have come up was busy, nothing to worry about.
He felt ashamed, trying to show these feelings. Those feelings had been bottled over and over, reserved for his secret notebook and the back of his mind, he had never spoken it before. He anxiously bit the skin around his nails, staring blankly at the page. He hadn’t told anyone. Not Denny, not Vern, definitely not Teddy and he had never felt quite yet brave enough to tell Chris. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself, he was terrified that he’d make Chris see him in a different way. But he couldn’t stand keeping secrets from him and it was driving him crazy.
He remembered how Chris had always told him that he could be a real writer someday. Everything he had written and showed to Chris was applauded by him. He wasn’t sure of himself but Chris had never lied to him, that was for sure. That was enough for him to pick the pencil back up and get to it. “I’ve been trying to think of the right words to say for hours now,” he continued. “I guess I just can’t think of words as important as I feel you are.” Everything he wrote felt insignificant compared to who he was writing them about, but if Chris believed he could do it, then so did he.
“I don’t know what’s going on with me, all I seem to know is you. I look for you everywhere I go, I look for you in everything. You’re all I can think about.” He felt his cheeks warming, and his furrowed eyebrows resting as his face relaxed at the thought of him. Everything was okay as long as he had Chris. “I’m thinking about you right now writing this, I think about you hundreds of times every day, It’s been that way for 5 years now.” He felt weak, embarrassed even, writing these words but he meant them to be true and Chris deserved to know the truth.
He smiled sweetly at the paper as he wrote, feeling the same way he feels when he’s by his side, giddy and bashful. “You’re the only one who really knows me, the only one who is gentle with me, the only one who listens and cares and always understands me.” He wanted to be braver, to be more clear in what he wanted to say. His eyes were fixated on the page as he tried to make an end to the letter, to just get to the point. “I don’t think I’d ever want anything like this with anyone else, only you.” He wasn’t entirely sure what “anything like this” would exactly mean to Chris, but he hoped he would understand.
Feeling satisfied enough, he signed “Gordie” at the bottom of the page before folding it in half twice and marking the front with “For Chris.” He checked his watch for the time, 2.30. He couldn’t go home because school hadn’t finished yet and he didn’t want anybody spotting him on the way home, so he sat back and read one of the comics that Teddy had left in the treehouse, presumably ages ago, keeping the note in view on the table so that he didn’t lose it.