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One of the benefits to being in a relationship with someone who he had been friends with since kindergarten that Spider found himself savouring in the weeks since he and Ant had started going out, though that phrase still made him uncomfortable, was that he could have Ant over any time he liked and his mum didn’t suspect a thing. They never really spent time over at Ant’s anyway, since his house was always busy, packed with siblings poking their noses in their business, which often included hash and beer, and threatening to tell their parents, but since they started doing a little more than that, Spider’s house became doubly attractive. His mum never really bothered to come up to Spider’s room and harass the two the way she did whenever Spider brought someone else home, he supposed because she had had to put up with the two of them for over a decade already, and their ‘toxic male energy was draining to be around’. Plus, Ant would take any excuse he could to nose around Spider’s vast, modern house, fitted with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and framed art that probably came from an artist who Ant was supposed to recognise, if the tone Cait White had told him the name of them was anything to go by.
Spider’s mum was happy to amuse herself with a bottle of wine and a talk show she wouldn’t remember come morning whilst her son and his, well, friend did whatever teenage boys did when they were alone in a bedroom. In all fairness, she probably would be pathetically supportive of them if she found out the truth of their hangouts, if only because it kept Spider away from all the women he was going to hurt in the future or had already hurt.
Whatever, it wasn’t the time to be thinking of that, because it was eleven p.m. and he was sat in bed whilst Ant was right there, say, a metre and a half away from him, and how could he be thinking of his mum when Ant was grinning at him across the room? He hated being soft; it really wasn’t him one bit. He had carefully curated his persona over years of picking sides in his parents’ yelling matches, of swallowing the barbs his mum threw at him at any given chance once his dad left and she became even more bitter, and of pointing out other kids' flaws at school before they had the chance to point out his. When it came to Anthony Vaughn, however, he couldn’t help it. Inwardly, at least. They still hadn’t gotten to the point of being all lovey-dovey with each other, even in the privacy of Spider’s room in his gated outer suburb house, at least not without a blood alcohol content of point nought eight percent.
Ant was supposed to be staying over tonight, which was in no way an irregular occurrence for them, but there was a sort of charge in the air between them now, a kind of tense adolescent awkwardness that they were dancing around as if they were on hot coals. No, it wasn’t that bad. Spider was just permanently a little red in the face, and Ant didn’t seem anywhere near as affected, slipping into this role with the same sang-froid he did everything. Infuriating, yet equally admirable. Ant had slept over at Spider’s more times than he could reliably count, and vice versa, so how come it was this odd? They kept breaking into low nervous laughter whenever things got quiet and they were just staring at each other, Spider often ending it with a ‘fuck off’ and being the first to break the eye contact. He had never thought himself a reserved kind of bloke in relationships. Though he struggled with certain aspects of physical intimacy with his past roster of girls, eye contact was certainly not one of them. Perhaps it was because looking at Ant too long reminded him of their growing up in parallel, and that made him uncomfortable because it confronted him too directly with the morality of it all, of being with someone who was a boy when he was, who tried beer for the first time from the same can he did and has wrapped his lips around countless joints after Spider had pulled from them and, more recently, his dick.
The sun had gone down around two and a half hours ago; it was the peak of summer in Sydney, and Spider’s room was hot because his mum insisted that he would catch a cold or some other excuse for tight-fistedness if they kept the air-con on low all night. They were talking lightly, Ant moseying around Spider’s room even though he knew it as well as he knew his own,
working up to the actual sleep part of the sleepover.
It happened, rather inconsequentially, when Ant was talking about their upcoming basketball match against a rival school. It being, of course, Ant hooking his fingers under the hem of his washed-out purple graphic tee and tugging it up over his chest. The shirt got caught under his chin as he struggled with contorting elbows, and Spider chuckled, leaning back with his hands clasped at his abdomen. Ant swore at him, muffled beneath printed cotton, and Spider stared, unashamed without the weight of Ant’s glossy black-brown eyes boring down on him. One corner of his smile was pulled up higher than the other, dimpling his pale pink cheek, and he ran his tongue over his top teeth. Ant’s torso was tan, with slight lines of muscle at his abdomen from basketball and whatever weightlifting regime he stuck to for a week and a half at a time. It was nice. That was the only thing Spider could really think to say about it. Nice, just like Ant as a person, something Spider felt was foreign to himself and his own attitude towards the world.
Ant managed to wrestle himself out of the shirt and threw it on the floor, laughing with Spider now, his chest expanding and falling.
“Staring, were ya?” Ant said, still across the room.
“Shut up, cunt,” Spider responded, as always with a small, private smile on his lips. The kind of smile he subconsciously reserved for his best friend.
Ant leant forward with laughter again, delighted. In just his athletic shorts, he covered the ground between them in a few leaping strides and propelled himself onto the bed with an undulating bounce, landing stomach down. He propped himself up on his forearms and looked up at Spider through his lashes.
“Such a bad liar,” Ant goaded. “As if I haven’t known you since kindy.”
Spider gave him a weak smack about the head, to which Ant dramatically flopped sideways onto Spider’s stomach.
“Stop tryna piss me off,” Spider said, light-heartedly pushing at the other man’s shoulder but not discouraging anything.
“You were staring though, I know it.”
“Yeah, whatever, mate.”
“Why don’t you wanna admit you were looking at my abs?”
“What abs?” Spider smirked down at Ant, trying to hold back the larger smile that was fighting so hard to break through. He was attempting to be very serious, but he couldn’t do so when he was looking down at Ant’s tousled hair lying against his really inconveniently unbreathable t-shirt.
“Shut up,”
“No, what abs, bro?”
“I’m gonna—”
“What abs, Ant?”
Ant pushed himself up on his palms and planted a clumsy kiss on Spider’s lips. Spider could feel his cheeks flushing a deeper pinkish beige, and the smile was really trying to come out now. Annoying how spending your entire school career with someone could teach you exactly how to disarm them best.
“Let’s see your abs then, if you’re so cocky.”
It wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen each other shirtless before. For one, being in the same PE class as each other through high school lent itself to seeing each other in various states of undress, alongside living in Sydney in the summer months in general. The air in the room was sticky and oppressive, mirroring that of their time outside earlier that day. It was, for some reason, much more intimidating when Ant was millimetres away from him and had just placed an actual kiss on his lips, again not something they had never done before.
“Never said I was more built than you,” Spider responded. Though he did spend more time at the school gym than Ant did, he still thought himself too skinny. Spider had been in the same shirt all day, and the concept of removing it did sound vaguely appealing in some distant way.
Ant shifted his weight to one of his arms, twisting to face Spider’s profile, and slipped one of his hands, almost questioningly, under Spider’s tank. He pushed up the hem slightly, though it was already quite form-fitting, and exposed Spider’s stomach. Spider was just watching him, a somewhat fond feeling that he didn’t often allow himself to dwell on burning beneath his sternum. One-handed still, Ant pushed the white tank top up further, Spider’s overshirt already abandoned when they got in that evening, his thick, sun-kissed fingers gripping it now to get better purchase as he went to pull it over Spider’s head. He was more successful than when he attempted to do it to himself, and the top came off in one clean tug. That made Spider’s grin break through, and his abdomen moved up and down with a quiet, contained laugh. That was rare for him.
“Good job,”
Ant returned the smile and positioned himself more directly over Spider, planting his knees either side of Spider’s reclined form. Spider didn’t know why he was having such a hard time with this. Out of the two of them, Ant was the one with the real family issues. So what if Spider’s mum was a little mean to him? Ant’s mum hadn’t let him out of the house for a good while after the shit about him and Darren came out, had made him go to church and confess his sins and take up his sibling’s chores for a month, yet Ant was perfectly comfortable with all of this stuff. And so many people at Hartley were too. Spider knew that Dusty dabbled in that gay shit and heard stuff about Malakai and Ca$h and any number of other boys at school. Everything was stacked in his favour, but it was taking everything in him to not push Ant away and laugh it off when Ant placed his hand on his chest.
“You’re red,” Ant says, simply.
“That’s useful,” Spider responded, forcing himself to look into Ant’s eyes. They were so earnest. Ant had always had a hard time trying to hide his emotions. One of the ways in which they complemented each other.
Ant spread his hand fully over one of Spider’s pecs. “Nah, like, your chest is red. How does that even happen?”
“Piss off. I’m pale, you arsehole."
“Oh, yeah, oui oui baguette,”
There he went, disarming Spider again. Spider hated it, but he reckoned that Ant could probably tell he was withdrawing into himself again, but the teasing, the overtired joke he had heard over years from various people in various places and had never thought was funny or original, made him crack a smile. Or maybe it was the person saying it.
“Oh, you’re so funny,” Spider drawled out, pursing his lips slightly to try and quell the smile.
“I can literally see you smiling,” Ant retorted, leaving Spider barely any time to breathe after his dig.
“Oh, yeah, can you?”
“Yeah,” Ant said. He reached up one of his hands and pushed his thumb into the corner of Spider’s pale pink lips. “Right here.”
“Right there?”
“Mhm,” Ant nodded. He looked up from where he placed his thumb and caught Spider’s gaze, watery blue eyes full of something he tried to hold back from so often. He kept their eyes locked for a few beats before Spider reached up one of his thin, bony hands to cup Ant’s cheek and gently usher him down to meet his lips again.
Ant tilted his head to the side without much hesitation, his fuller lips sliding over Spider’s slimmer ones and deepening the kiss. The hand at Ant’s cheek slides to the back of his neck, fingertips grazing the hair there, and Ant’s hands come to grip at Spider’s bare shoulders. Their bodies pressed closer, skin to skin, sharing warmth, sharing contact, sharing years of circling each other with no payoff. Spider’s free hand slid up Ant’s thigh, the way it would if he was kissing a girl at a party who smelt like roses and bergamot instead of sea salt spray and asphalt, and came to rest at his waist, greedily absorbing the softness, the heat.
Ant’s kisses begin to stray from Spider’s lips, trailing down to his jaw, then to that spot below his ear that made Spider exhale and squeeze at his sides, almost telling him to carry on. He did, of course, because it pleased him to see Spider being Spencer, smiling against the skin there as he laid down his feelings onto his neck, pausing just above his collarbone where his shoulder met his neck to focus his efforts onto that patch of skin.
“Don’t fuckin—” Spider started, glancing down at Ant. “Don’t give me a hickey, you dick.”
“I’m not going to, I’m not going to,”
“Nah, I don’t trust you to know your limits."
“Shh,” Ant waved him off, moving away from the spot that was clearly already angry, or maybe loved; Spider couldn’t tell. Ant looked up at him, pushing his knees into the mattress until he was eye level with Spider again. “You can show off to everyone at school now. Doin’ you a favour.”
“Yeah, okay,” and there was that smile again that had spent more time on his lips than it had off of them that night. That was the tricky thing about it all. If Ant wasn’t so likeable, didn’t know exactly what to say and do to make Spider feel more himself, if he didn’t keep looking at Spider with those now glossy, dilated eyes, it would be so much easier to pretend this all had never happened. But he found that he didn’t want to do that and that he instead wanted to spend the night with his mate, who was now more than a mate and had been for longer than either of them had fully acknowledged, in his way too posh double bed together, taking the piss out of each other and talking about things that didn’t matter to anyone else and kissing in the dark—innocent fun that he had never really gauged the importance of when he had tried it with girls he knew. He decided, now, with his best friend sitting on his lap, that it wasn’t his fault that the spark had never really lit with all of those girls in the past, but instead theirs, because of one simple reason:
They weren’t Ant.