Work Text:
“It’s cool,” John says, with the edge of his soft smile wilting a bit on one side. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
Dave is gaping at him still, so he tilts his head down and turned slightly away from him.
“He he, this isn’t going to change anything, right?” John has to ask. He adds a few more giggles in as a buffer. “We can just pretend this never even happened! I mean, wow, who cares? No one is going to know about it but us, right? Oh, and maybe some trolls? Whatever.”
He can’t really see Dave’s face anymore from this angle but he can hear the shifting and he can see the shift in the positioning of Dave’s legs on the bed beside him. The comforter moves and creases in on itself under them.
Dave speaks now, his voice kind of cracking around the words too, “You’re assuming a lot of things right now that are just straight up untrue.”
John hears him try to clear his throat after he says this, but he doesn’t seem like he is going to be saying anything more. John wishes he would, though, because it’s silent for an awfully long time. John doesn’t even know if he is breathing right now and he doesn’t think he can speak if he’s not breathing so it’s got to be up to Dave to keep this from getting more awkward than it has already become - than John has already made it.
Dave’s moving again and suddenly a finger taps his forehead and his face is being pushed back up. When he can finally see Dave’s face again, Dave clears his throat and says, “Yo.”
John watches Dave lips form that one word and sees them slightly pucker together for the “o” and he can remember how pliant they were under his just a moment again. John realizes he can breathe again because he thinks that maybe he is going to start hyperventilating now. He flings himself backwards onto the bed to avoid any further contact with Dave’s stupid finger which was still stupidly touching his forehead. And maybe he didn’t want to look at Dave’s lips anymore, too, but the only other things he could look at were the freckles speckled across Dave’s nose or Dave’s eyes, which were the worst option yet. It’s better to look at the ceiling than anything else at the moment. He could always scrunch his eyes shut, he guesses, but then that would probably just be weird.
Dave lets out a long, suffering sigh. He moves across the bed to lie down beside him. Once again, Dave’s face is within John’s field of vision, just on the periphery. John turns his head away.
“I really don’t know how else to tell you this,” Dave says. He lifts a hand and touches the tip of his index finger down onto John’s chest. John turns his head again and looks down at it, watching it with a frown. It rests just to the right of his zipper, nearly to the top of his chest. Dave then moves it up, while still touching the hoodie and pushing down on the chest beneath it. It curves around until it is trailing back down and curves around again, back up, and then finally back down and stops to rest where it all started. A heart.
“So there,” Dave says. He doesn’t move his hand, but when John looks at his face he can see bright red blotches blooming across his cheeks. He is also staring very intently at his finger.
Dave eventually catches him staring and suddenly sits up. He scrambles to reclaim his shades back from where he had left them on the bed before this whole mess begun. Thinking back on it, John figures it was an intimate enough gesture for them that it could’ve even been what started it to begin with. And now Dave was sliding them back onto his face and that was the end of it.
“So, uh, do we, like, go on dates now?” John asks, though the words keep getting caught in his throat and he keeps having to use a lot of force to get them all the way out.
Dave seems to think about it for a while. “I don’t know, dude, it depends on what kind of dates you have in mind. I’m not playing your shitty Ghostbusters game with you, bro.”
“You don’t play video games on dates, dumbass. Duh.” John can feel the grin that’s spreading across his face as he says this, and his heart is starting to feel all floaty.
“What are you talking about? Video games are fine. For dates. For us. But only the good ones.” Dave might be giving him an intense, judgmental stare but he can’t see it. All he sees are his nose and his lips and big, fat shades ridiculously covering up the top half of his face.
“Jeez, Dave. What ever happened to romance? I should take you to some fancy places, teach you about romance.” John props himself up on his elbows but his whole body is now feeling so light he feels like he has to actively restrain himself from rising any further up. John feels like if he’s not careful he might accidentally shoot up and try to kiss Dave again.
“I just drew a heart on your chest. You can’t get more sappy and romantic than that. I think it’s time we’ve cooled this romance down a bit and killed some pixels or else we’re going to end up suddenly married. With children, even,” Dave says. John lets out a quiet laugh and he knows he is not in any position to argue this anymore.
“Hey, Dave, guess what?” John says. He waits until he is sure Dave’s attention is completely on him before finally finishing with: “I love you.”
The change is immediate. It spreads all across Dave’s face, the parts John can see at least. Color is rapidly flooding in, making everything a bright pinkish hue. His lips part slightly in shock and his nostrils flare out in sheer embarrassment. John grins even wider, and it looks almost as if Dave’s head is going to implode.
It takes Dave a while to recover from it, but when he does, Dave tells him, “Yeah, sure. That’s okay.”