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Despite everything, Johnny’s never been afraid before like he is now. For the past month, there’s been an ache in his chest that just won’t leave. If anything, the happier he is, the worse it seems to get.
He’s lying down on their couch, arm thrown over his head and whole body wrung with exhaustion from the day’s double shift. Pony sits on the other side, Johnny’s feet in his lap, holding a notebook to his chest and doing some kind of math homework in it. Johnny knows he’s doing math because of the stilted way his pencil moves, and the distressed way in which his eyebrows come together that doesn’t appear when he’s writing or drawing. Ponyboy sighs, smacks the eraser at the page, and starts rubbing something out.
They’re sitting together in their shared one-bedroom apartment (they couldn’t realistically afford anything better, and they take turns on the couch). It’s a tiny duplex in Oklahoma City that they moved into when Pony received an almost full ride scholarship to Oklahoma State University.
Sometimes, Johnny can’t believed how this all worked out. He made it past sixteen, and seventeen, and managed to pass high school.
Somewhere along the line, he turned eighteen, and moved out of his parents’ house before he even graduated, hopping from the Curtis’s to Two-Bit’s to Dally’s to the lot until he was finally able to get a job stable enough for a place of his own.
Somewhere along the line, he got happier. That feeling of wanting nothing more than to fall asleep and never wake up still crept up on him, sometimes, but it wasn’t so constant like it was when he was still a kid. He was able to celebrate Pony getting accepted to every damn college he applied to, becoming the second person in their gang to graduate from high school.
Somewhere along the line, he and Pony had grown impossibly close after Windrixville. Even years later, when Pony started preparing to move out, something sad had tweaked in his heart when he realized how soon he would be leaving.
Somewhere along the line, they grew up. Moved past the murder, the church, the hospitalization, the hard times.
Somewhere along the line, they got out of Tulsa, when Pony, hanging with Johnny one night late in the lot, told him in that small voice that he used when he was ashamed or scared that he wasn’t so sure he could handle college, and figured he was going to crash and burn. Johnny had said, “Aw, shoot, man, just shove me in a duffel and I’ll go, too,” as a joke at first. Later, he realized how much he actually wanted to, and so he did.
Somewhere along the line, their pipe dream about running away from Tulsa and settling in somewhere new became something of a reality. They certainly worked hard for it - Johnny waiting tables full time at a bar a few streets over, and Pony with his schoolwork and track and a part-time job at the university gift shop. They worked hard and then they got to have nights like these, Johnny home after closing by 11 P.M., Ponyboy sitting at the opposite end of the couch, doing calculus or whatever. It was moments like these that made Johnny’s chest hurt the most - because for the first time in his life, he figured he was fucking happy and he knew he would crumble to the ground like an old statue if he lost it.
Across from him, Pony sighs, and Johnny hears him toss the notebook on their coffee table (a plank of wood, nailed into two other planks of wood). He doesn’t need to open his eyes to see how Pony’s stretched his legs out, put his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and laid back on their couch, eyes closed like he’s mediating - a sure signal that he wants to go to bed. They don’t need to talk, but Johnny removes his feet from Pony’s lap and sits up. He’s about to get up, shower, and go sleep in the bedroom because of their unofficial schedule that says whenever Johnny works a double, he gets the bed, and whenever Pony has a class, track practice, then work in the same day, he gets it.
He goes to acknowledge Pony, say goodnight or something. Maybe ask how his day was. He puts a hand on Pony’s closest shoulder and leans in a bit.
Pony turns and looks at him with those clear, bright eyes of his. Green, to their owner’s own dismay but to Johnny’s enjoyment, if he’s being honest. Nothing wrong with admiring the pretty eyes of your best buddy if they look like that, he’s told himself for years. He nods. Johnny nods, and that’s all the goodnights the two of them need.
Johnny leaves his hand there, though, and after a second, Pony leans his head down so it’s resting against the hand on his shoulder. His cheek brushes the backs of Johnny’s knuckles.
Johnny goes stock still, and for some reason, even though there is no reason for it, his heart starts hammering like he’s running a million miles an hour. They sit like that for a few seconds (or is it minutes?), Pony’s face touching his hand gently. And then Pony moves his head back up, lifts his legs from the coffee table so that Johnny can pass through to the bedroom, and whispers “‘night,” to him.
“Yeah, g’night,” Johnny whispers back, walking to the bedroom in a daze.
-
The thing is, Pony and Johnny have always been close, because for a week they were all each other had in the middle of a horrible storm of awful things (blood, murder, drowning, guilt, crying, fire, hurting). They weathered through it, though. They relied on each other, and the gang, and when it was done it was done. The day after Johnny was discharged from the hospital, he and Pony went to the lot where that day had begun, sat, and talked. About life, about family, about having bad parents and good parents and no parents and good brothers and no brothers. When they started talking about friends, Pony did that thing he did when he was scared - held his breath for just a moment, eyes widened a little then back to normal - and then, all of a sudden, Pony was fully in his space, not quite hugging him because of the still-healing burns on his back, but they were chest to chest and Pony was clutching his shirt close, face buried in his shoulder. Johnny brought up his arms around Pony’s shoulders, holding him tight.
“I really don’t know what I would’a done without you, Johnny Cade,” Pony said, laughing a bit, although the sniffle at the end told Johnny that he was crying. And for a moment there, Johnny felt like he was holding the whole goddamn sun in his arms, because he couldn’t imagine ever losing this boy who watched sunsets and drew them in a notebook he thought no one ever really looked at (but he was wrong, because Johnny had been incredibly nosy one day and flipped through the whole thing, cover to cover, staring a bit too hard at Pony’s drawings of him), who read books and liked to talk about them and would talk about them to the wall if he had to (but he didn’t, because Johnny liked to listen), who was horrible at poker and rummy but was always ready to play anyhow, who asked Johnny how he was doing if a new bruise appeared on his face (not in the way everyone else asked, but with a tilt of his eyebrows and a promise in those beautiful shining eyes of his that they could talk about it later if Johnny wanted), who read Gone with the Wind (thousand pages and all) with him and Johnny hated reading, but he didn’t mind it so much with Ponyboy.
Johnny couldn’t have said all that though, so, feeling the possibility of tears press at his own eyes, he mumbled “me, neither,” and hugged Pony tighter.
-
So, Johnny cares about Ponyboy Curtis, he thinks, flipping down the chairs at the start of his opening shift at Dave’s. It’s a known fact. He reckons Pony must give more than a damn about him, too, on account of how he’d acted when Johnny was near his deathbed at the hospital. He’d talked about it with Dally when he was camping out on the floor in his room at Buck’s, one night. (Dally was a little bit drunk, otherwise Johnny probably never would’ve heard anything about it.)
“I don’t know if I’d’a been able to keep it together, Johnnycake,” he’d said, frowning and struggling to light a cigarette.
“How’s that?” Johnny had asked, throwing the pillow Dally had given him on the ground and taking off his jean jacket to use as a blanket.
Dally had shrugged, from where he was lying on his bed, fully clothed, one foot dangling to the floor. He’d managed to light his smoke. “Dunno. When the… when we almost lost you, felt something in me snap. Me and… and Pony, we prob’ly wouldn’t’a done too good if you had died,” he’d said, words slurring a bit. “He was… sittin’ on the floor outside your room, cryin’, when all those docs came in to save your life.” Dally frowned. “Kept saying it should’a been him.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. Somethin’ Two-Bit said.”
That image of Dally, usually so collected, ready to break down at the thought of him dying, and Pony, sitting on the floor outside the room where Johnny lay, dead to the world, crying and wishing it was him who’d been struck in the back with a beam instead, put a bad taste in his mouth, so he’d said, “Night, Dal,” and shut his eyes.
Johnny’s shift goes by painfully slowly. He hates opening—the tips are usually shit and the place is empty half the time. He ends up getting cut an hour before his shift ends, so he gives a wave to the other member of the waitstaff and clears out.
Walking back to the apartment, jacket pulled tight against the November chill, he finds his thoughts drifting to Ponyboy.
Johnny cares about him. A lot.
Images flash in his mind of his friend - those dazzling green eyes. His voice, reading aloud to Johnny as they sit in the main room of their apartment. How he kicks or elbows Johnny in the ribs, lightly, whenever he loses to him at cards (often). How he’s always gently touching Johnny, and how Johnny tries to reciprocate it - a hand on a shoulder here, a hug after a bad day or when bad memories surface there. How Pony’s face had felt against Johnny’s hand last night.
He almost walks into traffic twice on the way home, understanding exactly what everyone always said about Ponyboy having his head in the clouds when they were kids.
He doesn’t really know how to feel about these random thoughts he’s been having. He wonders if he should maybe tell someone about it. Pony himself would be his first choice, if not for the obvious.
Are these thoughts really all that random?
He stops short when this thought occurs to him, at the top of the stairs right outside their door, with the keys in his hand.
He’s cared about Ponyboy Curtis for damn near ten years, at this point. And they’ve always had something special. Always been in their own world, sometimes. They’ve never had to talk to each other to get each other. (Although, Pony is Johnny’s favorite person to talk to. Ever. No question about it.)
Isn’t this a little bit queer?
He twists the keys into the lock and opens the door. Pony’s out—probably won’t be back from track practice until at least 6:30, so Johnny has the place to himself for a while.
He flops down onto his usual place on the couch, toeing his shoes off and running a hand down his face.
Maybe these feeling aren’t so new, he thinks. When he was dying in the hospital at sixteen, the only person he’d really wanted to see was Ponyboy. The only person he’d written to was Pony. The only person he’d been thinking of was Pony.
At the time, he’d probably passed it off as some trauma bonding thing. They’d been jumped together. They’d been through a week of hell together. They’d run into that fire together. It made sense on Johnny’s confused, hurt, scared, younger brain that the only person he could think of would be the one person who had been with him through all of that.
But even after the hospital, he realizes, nothing had really changed. They’d still hung together. Still been in their own little world—more so, maybe. Still talked about everything and anything—more so, definitely. Hell, he’d moved to fucking Oklahoma City for Ponyboy.
Johnny realizes with a start that he cares about Ponyboy Curtis a whole lot. Maybe, he thinks, almost getting hit by another car, maybe a bit too much, actually.
I love him, he admits to himself.
-
Ponyboy walks into the apartment at 6:32, bag making a thud on the floor and shoes making a scratching sound as Pony kicks them off and leaves them at the door. Johnny’s making a dinner of spaghetti, because he’d never cooked a day in his life before moving here and Pony doesn’t trust him with anything else. (He doesn’t trust himself either, honestly.)
“Hey, Johns,” Pony says, walking into their shoebox of a kitchen. He squeezes behind Johnny, placing a hand on his back as he does so. Johnny goes completely still.
I am nineteen years old, he reminds himself, stirring the pasta around in the water. It’s almost fully cooked. I can’t be a sissy about this. This is pathetic.
He hasn’t really unpacked the way in which he loves Ponyboy, but he’s concluded to himself that he does. He thinks Pony is funny and sweet and stupid, sometimes, and endearing as hell, and his eyes are agonizingly pretty and the way his hair curls on his forehead when it’s just dried from showering is really nice. Johnny can be normal about that.
He’s never liked anyone in his life—not like this. Not enough to be heartbroken, not enough to pursue anything, not even enough for an on-again, off-again relationship like some of the guys always had. He’s also never had a pal as good as Ponyboy, and he’s discovered that telling the difference between the two feelings is actually kind of difficult.
(The gay thing, honestly, is not as shocking or horrifying as he would’ve thought. He’s spent most of his life barely even caring about romance. At this point he’s just surprised.)
“Food’s almost ready,” he calls out to Ponyboy, carefully pouring water out of the pot.
“Okay,” Pony says back. Johnny hears the draw of the shower curtain open, then close. He sighs. The idiot has wonderful timing, showering literally right as dinner is ready. He serves himself a plate and starts eating, because fuck living on Pony’s schedule, and is halfway through when Pony reappears, freshly showered, wearing sweatpants and a hand me down flannel.
“How’d you do today?” Pony asks, scooping pasta onto his plate and sitting down at their tiny table, tucked to the side of the room.
Johnny sighs. “Slow. No tips. I dunno why they even made me go in,” he says.
Had a crisis. Almost walked into traffic. Thought about you. I think I’m in love with you and I have been for years, he thinks. But he sure can’t say that, so he gives Pony a nod. How ‘bout you? goes unspoken.
Pony shrugs. “That awful fuckin’ math class is gonna kill me, I swear. I never feel so dumb as when I do math,” he says. “Wanna read tonight? Or play cards. Or… anything, I dunno.”
“Sure. What’re we readin’?” Johnny asks, because they’d finished Frankenstein last week. It gave him the heebie-jeebies, to be honest.
Pony hums. “Somethin’ happier, I reckon.
Saw someone readin’ The Fellowship of the Ring. I asked her about it, and it sounded interestin’. Thought we could start it,” he suggests, standing up and starting on doing the dishes.
“Yeah. Sounds good.”
Pony grins, dopily. Johnny nods at him.
His chests hurts, suddenly. He really, really doesn’t want to lose this. Any of it.
-
Johnny really only makes it a few days acting inconspicuously. It’s difficult, and he doesn’t know how he ever managed to not notice how truly obsessed he is with Ponyboy.
To start, he’s up before Pony, as usual, and he makes his way to the main room and stares at him sleeping. (This is routine for him. He always does this. He struggles to rationalize why he’s felt the need to stare at his friend’s sleeping face. To look so hard and so long at his arm, outstretched and falling off the couch, that Pony wakes up, asks him for the time, and rises, with Johnny still staring at the place he’d occupied at the couch.)
The way he behaves around Pony just makes so much more sense now, like a camera coming into focus. He reaches out to touch him when he can, hand on shoulder, feet crossed under the table. They start The Lord of the Rings, and Johnny finds himself doing whatever he can to get closer to him on their couch.
“‘’You ought to go quietly, and you ought to go soon,’ said Gandalf. Two or three weeks had passed, and still Frodo made no sign of getting ready to go.’”
Pony pauses in his reading. “Y’know, it’s kind of like us,” he says. “I bet we could’a gone and returned the ring.”
Johnny snorts, from where he’s leaning his head against the back of the couch. Their default reading position is this: Pony on one end, knees tucked in, back against the armrest, and Johnny somewhere in the middle, drinking in every word.
“Yeah? You callin’ me short, Pony-child?”
“Maybe I am, little buddy,” Pony says, scooting towards him. “Move them hands. My back hurts,” he says, and suddenly Johnny’s lap has Pony’s head in it, and he can’t even find it in himself to be bothered by the jab at his height.
This isn’t even an unusual pose for the two of them, but over the past few days casual touch like this has started to mess with Johnny’s head a little bit. And Pony is always in his personal space. As he continues to read, Johnny finds that he literally can’t tear his eyes away from him, legs bent, hands holding the book in the air above his face, eyes moving fast across the page. Johnny doesn’t absorb a word he says, too preoccupied staring at the mouth forming them. He sure doesn’t notice when Pony stops.
“I got somethin’ in my teeth?” Pony asks, snapping him out of… of whatever.
“No. Sorry. Must’ve… spaced out, I guess. Keep goin’.”
He doesn’t, though, folding one corner of the page down and laying the book on his chest. “Nah. You’ve been weird for a few days. Head in the clouds and such. Heck, you’re actin’ like me. What gives?” He asks, and Johnny feels very caught. Damn Pony’s selective perceptiveness. He swears, he could paint their walls green one day and Pony wouldn’t notice, but he’ll notice this. Of course he will.
Having Pony look up at him from his lap, expecting an answer, gives him a funny feeling in his chest, so he puts a hand on his shoulder and resolves to try and get him off of his legs.
“Glory, Pony, we hafta do this while you’re usin’ me as a pillow?”
He needs to get him upright and a little further away, because he knows he won’t be able to act like he’s completely normal around Pony and hasn’t at all been having any “more than friends” thoughts about him when Pony insists on closeness all the time. Pony grabs the back of the couch and pulls himself upright, then spins around to face Johnny.
“This better?” he asks with a huff. “More serious-like?”
Johnny actually thinks that it may be worse, because Pony did not move far enough away, and their faces are only a foot apart. Pony starts talking, saying something about how he saw Johnny put his shoes on the wrong feet the other day because he’s been so distracted, but Johnny’s just trying to keep his eyes off his lips and at his eyes.
No place on Pony’s face is safe, though. If he’s not looking at his lips, it’s at his eyes. If not at his eyes, his constantly changing eyebrows. They look soft, which is a weird idea to be having about someone’s eyebrows, he thinks. His nose, but Johnny suddenly has a violent image of gently kissing his nose, and for some reason it makes him want to start yelling. His cheeks, but then he thinks about holding Pony’s face in his hands, maybe tracing his fingers along the soft lines of his smile, and it makes him want to turn his face into a pillow and screech.
“-re not even listening now! Hey. Hey. Johnnycake?”
Johnny almost jumps out of his seat, and realizes with mortification that he’s been slowly leaning closer to Ponyboy. Their faces are now inches apart, eyes locked. Pony’s got a hand on his chest, almost as if to stop from going closer. His eyes are wide, and his pupils almost swallow the green with how big they are.
Keep looking at those eyes. Don’t look anywhere else, idiot.
Johnny looks down, quickly, at his lips. (He can’t help it. The eyes are a path to desire, after all.)
Pony’s hand fists in his shirt, and for a moment Johnny wonders if he’s gonna be shoved away, but Pony pulls him closer and kisses him.
Johnny doesn’t even have time to react, just pure shock coursing through his body. He blinks, and closes his eyes, and then Pony lets go and actually does shove him away.
“My, uh, fuck, sorry, I, I didn’t, wasn’t thinking, I never think, holy hell, why-“
He starts to get up from the couch, still babbling out apologies. Johnny grabs his arm and pulls him back down.
“I’d, uh, just been thinking… about, uh, my hand slipped. Accident.”
Pony’s usually a flawless liar, but Johnny knows him. He knows how red his ears get when he’s flustered. He looks into his eyes and sees how wide they are. How the pupils have nearly erased the greenish-gray that Johnny loves to stare at. If the kiss had been an accident, Pony would be more put together than this—not a red, stammering mess like he is now.
“No it wasn’t,” Johnny says, leaning in and kissing him. He hears Pony breathe in, sharply, and feels a fist in his shirt again, bringing him impossibly closer.
It’s no fireworks, or anything, but it’s like Johnny can barely think. They break for air, but he sees Pony lick his lips and they pull right back together again. A hand works its way into his hair, and the grip on his shirt releases as another hand joins it, and Johnny swears he feels his heart stutter.
They pull apart after a few seconds, and it’s like the whole world is fuzzy. He can only focus on Pony, breathing hard, face dusted with pink, and those damn pretty eyes, looking straight into his own. His lips are tingling, and he feels like if he doesn’t get to kiss him again he’ll have a heart attack or something. Pony nods, and Johnny nods back.
Pony’s hands find their way to his shoulders, and suddenly he’s being shoved sideways, pushed so he sits upright against the back of the couch, and Pony swings one leg over to sit on top of him and starts kissing him senseless again. Johnny, embarrassingly, cannot think any thoughts other than Sweet Jesus, oh my God, glory what the Fuck, but one hand moves to Pony’s cheek and the other moves to rest on his waist. He feels teeth nick at his lips, but he doesn’t give a damn that it kinda hurts because Pony’s pressing even closer, elbows on his shoulders and hands tangled behind his head in his hair.
They kiss, although idly Johnny thinks it’s more of a heated makeout, on and on. It feels like minutes, it feels like hours. It feels like Pony pulling his head back and ducking to kiss down his jaw and neck, and Johnny letting out an embarrassingly loud gasp at the sensation. It feels like Johnny tugging him back up by his hair, and Pony letting out an honest-to-god whine when he pulls at it. His hands wander up and down, from his head to his waist, sliding a few inches under his shirt and running his hands over warm bare skin. He moves them back up, back to Pony’s hair, where he curls them all through his soft red-brown hair and pulls at it again. Ponyboy damn near moans, mouth opening up and deepening the kiss. Someone’s tongue is in someone’s mouth and he’s not sure whose or where. Pony takes his bottom lip between his teeth and bites down, and Johnny’s so far gone that it doesn’t even hurt.
Slowly, the sloppy, desperate kisses and bites and gasps and noises cede. They kiss slowly, gentle sighs rolling off each other in waves. Johnny wanders, kissing Pony’s cheek, then the underside of his jaw, then his neck. It’s easy to reach, sitting under him like he is. He moves back up, pressing his lips to his cheek, his mouth, his nose, his forehead. Even brushes against his eyelids, which remain closed through all of it.
He breaks away after an impossibly short-long span of time. Pony rests his forehead against Johnny’s, eyes closed, chest heaving. His hands are resting under Johnny’s shirt (when did they get there, he wonders), and Johnny’s are on the back of Pony’s head. He moves them to his face, which is flushed bright pink. His eyelids flutter, just a bit, still closed, and his lips, slightly parted, are swollen and red.
Beautiful, he thinks, brushing a thumb over his cheekbone. Pony smiles, lifts his forehead off of Johnny’s, and opens his eyes. “Thanks,” he whispers, sliding gently off of his lap. He doesn’t go far, and keeps his legs slung over Johnny’s, head resting against his shoulder.
“Said that out loud, didn’t I.”
“Mmm. Yeah,” Pony mumbles, squeezing his shoulder. Johnny brings an arm around his back, holding him closer. It’s a bit awkward, considering Pony has a good four inches on Johnny, but it works.
“I think I’m in love with you,” Johnny blurts out, and freezes.
Pony looks up at him, gorgeous eyes unblinking. “Yeah?”
Johnny hesitates, then nods. Pony shuts his eyes and lays his head down against his shoulder. His left hand moves upwards and presses against the left side of Johnny’s chest. Right above his heart.
“Love you too, Johnnycake.”
Johnny’s never wanted to lose something less.