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It was over, Shawn thought numbly, his eyes sweeping over the room full of Matthews and Matthews-adjacents. Jack wasn’t there, hadn’t been able to take time off from his big important New York City business job, which Shawn was pretty sure still involved mostly getting coffees and making copies even though he’d been there almost two years.
Still, it was better than any prospects Shawn had. The grim realization had come over him a few weeks earlier, when the quiet thrill he’d found in going to class every day was suddenly pulled out from under him. He hadn’t realized how the stable structure of classes and essays and assignments had made it so easy to get up in the morning until it had all suddenly evaporated in a post-graduation haze.
His eyes fell on Cory. Cory, who was focused on Topanga, who hardly ever looked at Shawn the way he used to anymore. It put a lump in his throat and he hated himself for it, hated Cory for growing up enough to be able to untangle himself from Shawn without it devastating him.
“We’re all so proud of you, Shawn.” Amy’s hand had appeared on the awkward limbo between his back and his neck. He swallowed tightly and tried to light up his eyes before he looked at her.
“I wouldn’t be here without you guys.” His voice sounded steady, easy. She squeezed his shoulder.
“I know Chet would be proud of you, too.”
Shawn searched for anything else to focus on, which happened to be Angela. She gave him a small smile from across the room, but the look turned a touch concerned when he forgot to smile back. He managed to get his lips to move before turning back to Amy.
“Thanks.” It was sincere enough that Amy pulled him into a one armed hug before going to mingle with some of the extended Matthews clan, and Shawn once again felt out of place in a house he’d always considered to practically be his.
He didn’t have too much time to dwell on it, since Angela left her conversation with Cory and Topanga to head over to Shawn.
“You okay?” she asked, half-grinning. Shawn couldn’t help but smile back at her. He’d lost a girlfriend but gained a real friend in Angela, and she remained annoyingly perceptive to his moods.
“I’m good,” he said quietly, and he could tell it was enough to assuage her. She rested a hand on his arm.
“You’re handling things really well, Shawn. I’m proud of you.”
Shawn almost blanched at that, the way it felt so close to being an insult, but he brushed it off. She took her hand off his arm.
“Do you know if they’re gonna move in with Jack yet?”
Shawn felt like he’d spaced out for half a conversation. “What do you mean?”
“When Cory and Topanga move to New York.” Cory chose just that moment to catch Shawn’s eyes and grin, and Shawn wasn’t sure he heard Angela right.
“I don’t—” have any idea what you’re talking about, he meant to say, but the words died a pathetic death as Cory’s adoring eyes fell back onto Topanga. “—know.”
Angela looked at him a little longer than she had to. “It’s alright if you’re sad about it, Shawn, it’s a big change.”
A big change Cory hasn’t said a word to me about, Shawn thought, but his brain still seemed to be severed from his mouth. He nodded numbly. He needed to leave.
“I’m gonna go grab something from the car,” he managed, and then dashed off before she could say anything to stop him. He managed to avoid anyone else as he made his way to the kitchen door, and the warm May air burned his eyes and lungs as he stepped out onto the patio. He tried to catch his breath.
Before he could decide whether to sit down or bolt, Shawn heard a muffled scraping sound from across the yard. He looked up and caught a flash of blond hair inside the treehouse he could barely believe was still standing. As much as he wanted to run in the other direction of the stupid Matthews and their perfect department-store-window lives and get drunk enough to forget that everyone he cared about had abandoned him for brighter horizons, he couldn’t pull himself out of their gravity. He swiped his hand over his face and made his way over to the weathered boards, where he was 90% sure the second-youngest of the lot had sequestered herself.
“Morgan?” As soon as he poked his head in he regretted it, because it was in fact Morgan Matthews in the treehouse, looking absolutely fucking miserable. His eyebrows furrowed in concern. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fucking fantastic,” she muttered sarcastically. Shawn’s eyes drifted to the bottle sitting at her side and then back onto her red-rimmed eyes. Her fingernails dug into her jeans.
Shawn gingerly adjusted his shaky grip on the lip of the floor. “Not that I have any right to say this, but do you think it’s a good idea for you to be drinking?” he asked awkwardly, and she raised her eyebrows at him.
“The fuck do you know about anything?” Two fucks in one conversation with Morgan Matthews seemed serious. Shawn debated it for a few seconds, then pulled the rest of his body into the treehouse and sat up against the wall across from her. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Spill.” She stared at him like he’d grown another head. He stared right back, feeling self-conscious. “Clearly something’s bothering you.”
“You’re one to talk,” Morgan muttered, but she seemed to deflate even as she said it. Shawn stayed quiet as she took another swig from the bottle of whiskey, trying to push away the itchy feeling in his fingers. The pit opening inside him. Morgan looked at her lap and wrung her hands together, clenching and unclenching her fists.
“A guy at school asked me to prom so my mom and I went to look at dresses yesterday.”
“Could you not find a dress?” Shawn asked weakly, not sure how much he was joking and how much he was genuinely asking. He didn’t know how to do this. He glanced at the bottle of whiskey again. But then Morgan turned her head away and tried to subtly wipe at her cheeks, and then he just felt like an asshole.
“She was saying all this stuff to me in the car about how excited she was when she found out she was gonna have a daughter. And how she would get to see me fall in love and go shopping for prom dresses and wedding dresses and someday baby clothes and nursery wallpaper.”
Shawn wasn’t sure what to say. “That sounds—”
“And I’m pretty sure I’m gay.” A weird fluttery feeling seemed to swallow Shawn up. He watched her as she swiped at her cheeks again and shifted his position like it might dispel the buzzing under his skin. “I don’t feel a fucking thing for Bobby Dover. I just said yes because what else was I supposed to do?”
“Tell them the truth?” It sounded stupid as soon as Shawn said it, but at least it made Morgan laugh.
“There’s one girl in my class, and everyone—she doesn’t try to hide it or anything, everyone knows she’s a lesbian, and they treat her like she’s a total freak. I can’t deal with that. I can’t.”
“If you’re a freak, it’s because you’re a Matthews, not because you’re gay,” Shawn tried to assure her, and she grinned brutally again.
“The perfect all-American apple pie Matthews? Please. I’m a fuck-up.”
“Being gay doesn’t make you a fuck-up.”
“It sure doesn’t help!” Morgan snapped, then closed her eyes for a moment. “My mom’s gonna be so fuckingdisappointed.”
“They’ll come around. You are who you are and they’re just gonna have to deal with it.” He tried to look as reassuring as he could. “And if they don’t come around, Feeny’ll lecture them ‘til they do.”
“Feeny?” Morgan asked him with raised eyebrows. “I can’t exactly see him going all gay rights on my parents.”
“You didn’t hear this from me, but Feeny’s sister’s a lesbian. He can go pretty gay rights when he wants to.” For the first time since he’d started talking to her, the distress on Morgan’s face lifted a little.
“How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“Since when do you and Feeny talk about his gay sister?” she asked skeptically.
“Since I came out to him a couple years ago,” Shawn replied, his own eyebrows raised, and as he watched the sadness on her face crumble just a tiny bit more, he almost found himself wondering what it would have been like to grow up with a sister of his own.
“You’re into guys?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you into Cory?” His face wrinkled and he was once again perfectly satisfied to have grown up alone.
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
The conversation was suddenly going in a dangerous direction. His fingers curled against the wooden floor. “Seriously, I’m not.”
“I don’t believe you,” Morgan said, looking like she wasn’t afraid to do damage, and Shawn tried to relax his tightening expression.
“He’s my best friend.”
“That you totally wanna bang.”
“I can’t believe I came in here trying to be helpful and supportive and you’ve already turned on me.”
Morgan seemed happy for the distraction. “If you think you’re not into my brother, you’re lying to yourself.”
“I promise, I’m not.” They stared at each other again, but this time, the slight antagonism killed any awkwardness there had been between them. But Morgan had grown up with two older brothers and had practice at this. Shawn knew he’d lost before it had even begun.
“Fine, just—I swear to god, Morgan, you have to take this to the grave, okay?” She nodded, the distress fully gone from her face and replaced with evil sister intrigue. Shawn already regretted this.
“It’s never been like that. But for a little while I wondered if maybe it should have been.”
Morgan practically rolled her eyes. “What does that even mean?”
As if Shawn had any fucking idea what that meant either. He thought back to the months before the wedding, back when Cory couldn’t sleep without dreaming of killing Shawn, and there was a tiny part of Shawn that wondered whether Cory understood what the dreams meant better than he was letting on. Whether that nebulous best-friend boundary between them was less nebulous than Shawn had always assumed.
Morgan was still waiting for him to answer. He cleared his throat.
“It means it was never in the cards, and I’m okay with that.” So okay with it he was hiding in a treehouse with Cory’s little sister, seriously considering whether the whole sobriety thing was as beneficial as he’d been telling himself it was.
Morgan hummed, sounding kind of amused. “Have you ever talked to Topanga about it?”
“What? God, no.”
“I think she’d be willing to share.”
Shawn could feel his face reddening at the idea and shifted from his awkwardly cramped position to a slightly less awkward position. It didn’t make him feel any better. Morgan gave him a devilish look.
“You’re totally still into him.”
Shawn wasn’t sure how this whole conversation got turned around onto him, but the crushing weight of graduation and the apparent imminent departure of Cory Matthews from Philadelphia landed on his chest again. He picked at his fingers to avoid reaching for the bottle of whiskey by Morgan’s side.
“It’s more complicated than that.” He knew his voice sounded rough, and apparently Morgan clocked it too because she seemed to take a little pity on him. She sighed.
“Your taste is questionable, but straight people suck.” It was weird to hear Morgan say it and to sort of agree. Shawn didn’t think too much about the fact that he wasn’t straight, even when he was hanging around with guys more than girls, and it made his chest tighten and relax all at once to hear Morgan explicitly lump him in with the non-straight people. He took a long breath.
“You got your eye on any girls?”
The twist of Morgan’s mouth said it all. Shawn nodded sympathetically and pinched at his jeans. “Anyone else know you’re gay?”
“Just you,” Morgan admitted, running the back of her hand across her face with a sniff despite the fact that she’d stopped crying a few minutes earlier. It felt like a wall had gone back up between them. Shawn nodded again.
“I’m not really the best at this kind of shit, but if you ever wanna talk about it, or whatever—“
“Thanks,” Morgan interrupted, looking both less outrageously sad and more sullen than she had at the beginning of the conversation. Shawn nodded a third time and unfolded his legs. Morgan didn’t look at him again as he started to make his way back out of the treehouse.
“See you around, Morgan,” he said, pausing on the ladder, and then reached out and took the bottle almost as an afterthought. She gave him a look but didn’t protest, and Shawn headed back inside the house.
Cory was just entering the kitchen as Shawn gently closed the door behind him. His eyes immediately went to the bottle in Shawn’s hand.
“Are you okay?” Shawn reveled in the half-cloaked urgency of Cory’s words. He couldn’t figure out whether to smile or grit his teeth.
“I’m officially a college graduate. I beat the odds, Cor, I’m great.”
“Have you been drinking?” Shawn pressed his lips together tightly at the question. It almost hurt that Cory would ask him that, but in the back of Shawn’s mind he knew it was fully deserved. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been heavily considering the option.
“No.” The bottle was pretty incriminating, based on the way Cory was staring at it. Despite everything, Cory’s nervous energy almost was enough to make Shawn smile. He set the bottle down on the counter and folded his arms over his chest, eyebrows raised. “What, you wanna check?”
It was satisfying to watch Cory’s ears redden at that. Shawn suddenly felt just better enough that the end of his world seemed less imminent. His lips twitched up at the corners.
“I confiscated it from Morgan.”
“Morgan was drinking?” Cory asked, bewildered. Shawn shrugged, unwilling to give away too much, but Cory had a look in his eye. “Is she okay?”
“We talked through some stuff. She’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” Cory said sincerely, then cleared his throat. “Do you wanna go for a drive?”
“In the middle of our graduation party?”
Cory’s eyes drifted back towards the living room before landing back on Shawn. “They won’t miss us.” Shawn fucking adored him.
“Okay, sure.” I’m gonna miss you when you go to New York, Shawn would have said if he were brave, but he wasn’t brave. Cory looked relieved.
“I’ll go find my keys,” he said and headed back towards the hallway, leaving Shawn alone with his hollowed out chest and a bottle of whiskey. He grimaced and let himself out though the backyard instead.
It took five minutes for Cory to make it out to the car. If Shawn were just a little bit more insecure, he might’ve started to think Cory was never coming back. But then Cory got within spitting distance and smiled, and Shawn forgot how to be mad.
“You wanna drive?”
Shawn wasn’t really in the mood to make decisions. “Nah,” he said lightly, ignoring the way Cory’s smile faded into something a little more glassy. Shawn went around to the passenger’s side and slipped into the seat, feeling small and far away.
How many more drives was he gonna get?
Eventually, Cory pulled into a parking lot and turned off the ignition. His hands dropped into his lap. Shawn waited for him to say something.
“Topanga—” Cory cut himself off barely after starting. Shawn swallowed tightly, bracing himself for the blow that was coming. He watched a woman get out of her car and head towards the pet store at the end of the strip mall. The car started to feel like a cage.
“Topanga got a job in New York.” Cory’s voice was only shaking a little. Shawn tried to hide the great pathetic crumbling of everything inside him. He pressed his shoe into the floormat.
“I heard.” He felt like Pinocchio turning back into wood, or however the story went. “That’s really exciting.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Shawnie,” Cory said, his voice sounding wet. It was like every trace of joy from the party had been snatched away from him. Shawn had enough of the pieces to understand what Cory hadn’t said yet.
“She thinks this is a good chance for a fresh start.” It still hurt to hear Cory say it anyway. “To be on our own, and everything.”
“Yeah,” Shawn said, because he couldn’t say anything else. He could barely look Cory in the eyes.
“I wanted you to come with us.”
“Nothing’s stopping me from moving to New York, Cor.” It was the kind of lie they could both see, but couldn’t articulate. “I mean, besides the fact I have no money or job prospects.” Cory almost laughed.
“Jack’s in New York.” That almost made Shawn laugh.
“Yeah, I don’t think he’d appreciate me showing up on his doorstep.”
“If it were up to me—”
“I know, Cor.” Shawn watched the woman at the pet shop poke at bags of bird seed stacked outside the door.
“I don’t wanna go without you.” Cory’s voice had gone unsteady again. He sniffed, then sort of laughed again. “I wonder if this is how Topanga felt when she moved to Pittsburg.” The comparison seemed pointed to Shawn, but he also might have just been losing his mind.
“I don’t think she’ll be too happy if you run back to me in the rain.”
“She used to get it. Sometimes I look at her and I don’t understand where she went.”
“I fought you at the altar during your wedding, Cory. I’m surprised her patience lasted as long as it did.”
“She always says you love me more than she does.” The conversation suddenly felt like it was on its way towards some very dangerous territory. Shawn laughed to try to brush it off, but Cory wasn’t laughing. There was a rare, self-reflective glint in his damp eyes. “Do you think she’s right?”
If anyone else asked Shawn a question like that, he would’ve immediately written them off as an asshole. But Cory looked so agonized, so sincere in asking that he couldn’t help but feel softened by it.
“Does it matter?”
Cory stared at him so intently that Shawn had to look away. Pet store lady was pointing out something in the bird seed bin to a guy in a purple vest and a ponytail. When Shawn looked back at Cory, it was almost an icy shock to realize that they were adults now, with prospects and wives and no more room for all the games that existed between them.
“At the wedding, you asked if I was sure. Why did you ask if I was sure?”
Because you didn’t seem sure. “Because I’m selfish. This is all old shit, Cory, can we just—” Shawn’s face tried to contort itself into something pained, but he fought it back. “We should get back to the party.”
“I just wanna be with you right now.” The admission made Shawn’s chest hurt.
“You can’t always get what you want.” It was the closest Shawn had ever come to admitting anything out loud, but he tried to play it off by keeping his eyes level with Cory’s. And maybe he was going absolutely fucking insane, because he could’ve sworn he could hear a tiny piece of Cory’s heart break.
“Are you gonna be okay?”
“Me? Please, Cor, I’ll be fine.”
“At least that makes one of us,” Cory said, his voice getting tight again, and he put the key back in the ignition. Shawn watched the birdseed lady dragging a bag back to her car, leaving a sad trail behind her. The man in the purple vest watched from the sidewalk.
He impulsively put his hand on the shifter before Cory could get the car out of park. Cory’s hand covered his for a second before he removed it neatly, waiting for Shawn to say whatever he was going to say.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he settled on after an excruciatingly long time passed. He knew Cory could hear how little he meant it.
“What if we just didn’t go back?” Cory asked, his voice thick and sad and trying to be funny but just sounding sincere.
“Let’s go home, Cor,” Shawn said quietly, and it felt like a lifetime before Cory acquiesced.
As soon as they walked back into the Matthew’s living room, Shawn felt Topanga’s appraising smile land on him. He looked away only to find Morgan raising her eyebrows at him, which was almost worse.
“I hear congratulations are in order?” he said with an easy smile, heading over to pull Topanga into a loose hug. The nervousness on her face melted as he put on the most relaxed air he could, and for a second, he felt almost sorry for her. For all of them.
“It’s exciting,” she agreed. “Have you had any luck around here?”
“A few leads,” he said. “You’re gonna do great.”
When Shawn looked up at Cory again, leaning against the couch a few feet away, his excited smile seemed a lot more hollow than it had earlier. Or maybe he’d just been too far away to notice.