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George having gotten his license has not stopped him from opting for the passenger seat whenever he and Dream go somewhere. This time, it’s on the way back from their favorite hot pot place; a twenty minute drive away from their house.
Naturally, Dream doesn’t mind. He likes driving enough to want to drive, and he likes George enough to let him have his way.
“Let me see what you have in here.”
In his periphery, Dream sees George reach into the compartment between them and grab Dream’s wallet.
Dream smiles. “Don’t.”
“No, I’m doing it. Oh, look, your credit card. I’m saving this number to my photographic memory.”
“As if you haven’t already.”
“I only remember the first like, four digits,” George says, which doesn’t come as a surprise in the slightest. Dream doesn’t even remember his own credit card number, let alone anyone else’s.
“Wait,” George lets out a huff of laughter. He holds something up to his face, “Oh my god.”
He’s laughing now, and Dream can only frown in confusion. What in his wallet warrants a reaction like that? He racks his brain for what it could, but comes up short. Surely his Costco card isn’t that funny.
“George,” he says, suppressing a smile. “You can’t just laugh like that and not tell me what it is.”
He reaches over blindly to try and get whatever it is out of George’s hands while still keeping his eyes on the road, but George twists it out of his grip. “No, stop!”
Dream laughs. “You are so annoying. Tell me what it is.”
“You kept these?”
There’s no follow-up, which makes Dream frown again. He glances over, but they’re on the highway and he can’t get a good enough look to make out what’s in his hands. It better not be his driver’s license.
“Kept what?” He asks.
“These,” George says again, unhelpfully and Dream rolls his eyes.
“George, you idiot. I can’t see what you’re talking about.”
Then, for a flash they are right in front of his face; the photobooth pictures of him and George from… forever ago. The ones they never posted because—well, they couldn’t have posted these.
They’re kissing in both of them, at least of the ones Dream kept. He’s kept them in his wallet since that day to make sure they don’t fall in the wrong hands. And so he can keep them safe and look at them whenever he wants. Mostly the first thing, though.
There are four squares, each of which has them moving more and more to the right. In the last one, they’re both smiling and George is almost cut out. You’re an idiot, Dream remembers him saying afterwards. I’m pretty sure you just like, kissed me out of frame.
“Oh, those,” he smiles. “Yeah, of course I kept them. Why wouldn’t I?”
Geoorge doesn’t say anything right away, still studying the photos. To be fair, they’re probably the only pictures that exist of them together like that. It’s not exactly a genre of photo they try to keep a lot of in easily accessible places.
“I actually can’t believe we did this,” George says after a while, his smile audible.
Dream smiles, too. He can believe it.
“Do you want them?”
George looks over. “What?”
Dream shrugs. “You can have them, if you want. They could go on your shelf.”
Better that than to keep them hidden away between his credit cards. Plus, they’d be just as safe there, if not safer. George would make sure they never saw the light of day – or more specifically, stream .
“Okay,” George says with a nod. “Remind me when we get home.”
“You’re more sentimental than me, you know that?”
“Well, that’s not very hard.”
Dream physically starts at that. “What? I’m sentimental. I’m like, so sentimental.”
George laughs, a light, bouncy sound inside the sunlit car. “I was joking, of course you are. You’re the most sentimental OAT, even.”
Damn right, Dream thinks, shaking his head. “Don’t even try me.”
“What is this, a competition?”
“Everything’s a competition,” Dream counters with a teasing smile. “I may have kept the photos, but you wanna like, put them on display on your shelf.”
George snorts. “That was literally your idea.”
“Fine, I guess I win, then. I take it back, I’m the most sentimental. I’m the GOAT.”
George shakes his head, but he’s laughing in that quiet way that means he means it. “The SOAT, you mean,” he says.
Something cool and soft touches Dream’s free hand where it rests in his lap, and he looks down to see George sliding his hand into his. Without a word, Dream twines their fingers together.
The key with George is to refrain from commenting when he does things like this, that way he won’t overthink it and pull away. He’d hate it if Dream compared him to a scared animal, but privately Dream thinks it’s a pretty good comparison.
He sneaks a glance at him, at how the afternoon sun shines golden on his face and his hair. It’s not bright enough to be blinding, but enough to make Dream think of summer and childhood. And George; he remembers going on drives this time of year, the sun warming his face just like it’s doing now, and being on the phone with him the whole time.
“George,” he says randomly, just to say his name.
“Mhm?”
“Can I have some gum?” Dream asks.
The smile George gives him tells him that he somehow knows those words popped into Dream’s head less than a second before he said them. He's never been a gum lover.
“You can have mine, from my mouth,” George says, rooting around for the packet in the compartment between them. In order to keep his left hand holding Dream’s, he has to lean over kind of awkwardly, but Dream smiles at his lack of complaining.
He chuckles. “Okay, no thanks.”
George clicks his tongue. “That’s not very sentimental of you, is it.”
Dream laughs. “I don’t want your diseases—”
He’s cut off by a strip of gum getting prodded at his lips with unnecessary pressure. Dream takes it between his teeth and pulls his head back with a laugh.
“Stop, idiot. Do you want me to crash?”
George sits back, clearly pleased with himself.
“Wait, give me your hand again?”
“No,” comes the automatic, skeptical George-response. Then, more suspicious, “Why?”
Dream can’t hold back his laugh, even if it only makes it sound more like he’s up to something. “Just do it, okay? Hold it out in front of me.”
It only takes a second for George’s curiosity to get the better of him. His hand slips from Dream’s and comes to hover in front of him. Before he can pull away, Dream leans in and kisses it with a loud smack. It lands on the inside of his fingers, right in the space where they meet his palm.
To Dream’s delight, George doesn’t do the typical George-thing and snatch his head back like he was burned. Instead he just huffs and takes Dream’s hand again.
“Okay,” George says, failing to suppress his flustered laugh. Dream is happy to see that he still has the ability to catch George off guard—it’s his favorite thing to do. “You realize you just gave me your diseases.”
“My ‘I love you’ diseases,” Dream says.
He looks over at George, catching the way he rolls his eyes, and lets out a laugh at the mellowness of his reaction. Maybe it’s not so shocking for Dream to kiss his hand or say I love you , anymore. But it clearly still has the effect of rendering George a little speechless.
“Now you’re just being an idiot,” George says eventually.
Dream grins. “I’ll take that.”
Winner of the SOAT competition: undecided.