Chapter Text
Charles is at a party. The room pulses with energy. His vision hazed as people swarmed around the dance floor in a blur of bodies, lost in the faintly rhythmic reggaeton beat that thumped like a heartbeat.
But despite all of that, his vision seems to be fixated on one boy. He isn’t a part of the haze. He is standing in the corner of the room, not glued to anyone. A red cup sits uselessly in his grip, completely untouched. He stands next to a girl with platinum hair in a vibrant neon jumpsuit, who clearly has been partying. His expression was blank, and his outfit was prim and fitted.
Charles made two assumptions:
- He’s here to prove a point
- He’s here for a dare
“Charles?” Crystal pulls him out of his haze, brows furrowed in genuine concern. “You good? You’ve been standing completely still for like, five whole minutes.”
There is a beat of silence.
“Shit. Have I really?” He blinked, slowly coming back to reality.
“Yeah, dude. You look like you saw a ghost…Or whatever. What’s got you so… distracted?” She asks, with a faint smirk painted across her soft features.
“Dunno…Maybe I had too much to drink?”
Crystal smacks her lips and crosses her arms.
“Charles. You’ve had two cups, and the last one, you didn’t even drink all the way. You threw it at the dude that threw an entire roll of fucking toilet paper at your head, remember?”
Charles rolled his eyes.
“There's clearly something else on your mind that you’re not telling me about,” Crystal said with that no-bullshit expression. Charles knew that he couldn’t lie to Crystal.
“M’ just–thinking, is all.” He says, waving it away.
Crystal stands there for a moment, taking a few sips of her drink. She can feel the taste on her tongue before it rolls down her throat with a fizz. She can practically feel it destroying her internal organs, but she still follows Charles’s lingering gaze.
That’s when she notices. Charles isn’t thinking; he’s looking at someone, and the raw passion raging right before his eyes is undeniable.
“Someone caught your eye?” She asks smugly, her voice an entire octave higher than last time, which means she knew something.
“Nah. Just…Observing. Doing what blokes do at parties.” Charles says, his gaze still lingering. It was as if he wasn’t even trying to hide it.
“You’re clearly checking that guy out!” She says, gesturing toward the boy, who was now conversing with a shorter man with a fur coat and sunglasses. Clearly, some kind of creep.
And truth be told, he absolutely was distracted .
This wasn’t even the first time that he had seen this boy in public.
The campus was small. All people did was throw parties, get in trouble, go to class, and repeat, except this boy was completely different.
Sometimes Charles would sneak off to the library to draw dicks in the books or skateboard across the desks, but the boy would be sitting there, reading. Eyes glued to the words, emerald eyes focused and brows furrowed. He was admittedly captivating and proper attractive to anyone with a working set of eyes.
Edwin Payne. His teachers go on and on about him for hours. Proper intellectual, but super antisocial. And the truth was, the best thing that you’d want to do was be antisocial in this school, or you’d probably wake up somewhere hungover in a random alleyway in Chicago.
“Okay–and…Maybe I am. Not a big deal. Blokes check other blokes out occasionally. Trying to see if he’s fit enough,”
“Oh my god ,” She says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “One day, I have to stop being your therapist. Go talk to him. ”
She says, nudging him so hard that his cup nearly falls out of his hands.
“No. He’s clearly occupied. Don’t wanna go ruining that, do I?”
“Are you talking about Thomas King? By how that boy looks, Thomas is the last boy that he’d want to be involved with,”
Charles scoffs.
“All I’m saying is that you have a shot here, loverboy. Go shoot your shot!”
Crystal said, pushing Charles farther out onto the dance floor, just for him to retreat slowly.
“No. S’not the right time. Maybe when I’m sober, yeah?”
And there was no telling when that would be.