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You’re lying on top of his bunk bed – top bunk, as per your preference – and the fact that it’s not yours somehow feels more foreign than the fact that you’re lying across it the wrong way. Your hair is touching the part of the ladder people might use to get up it; you’re upside down, in other words, spreading yourself across the top bunk in the most childishly esoteric way possible. You also run the risk of falling and busting your head open on the floor below, as this loser keeps reminding you-
“-and your brains would fall out, and the worst part is that I wouldn’t even go get help, because by that point you’re basically fucked anyway, and plus hey, free brain.”
You’re both seventeen years old is the truly scary part here. Almost adults.
The thought chills you sometimes.
You met Sollux Captor at sleep-away camp when you were eight years old and you were assigned to him as a “camp buddy”, and since then you’ve been about the most antagonistic best friends you’ve never heard of. (Your real best friend, of course, is Feferi. The issue with Feferi is that her mother isn’t like your father in that she doesn’t hate her offspring enough to send them to a sleep-away camp.) Even barring Feferi, you’re not sure if “best friend” is an appropriate label for Sollux, seeing as how you aren’t sure if you can even stand being around him all that much, and in fact you wonder this on a semi-daily basis, still continuing to talk to him and only him.
Since that summer, where you still had your baby fat and didn’t know how to swim, your respective parents have continued to send you to this same sleep-away camp, and although you’re old enough not to require a “camp buddy”, the two of you still pretty much talk exclusively to each other, possibly because you’re both antisocial assholes. As a matter of fact, since you both just turned seventeen (you in February, him in May) this is the last summer either of you are allowed to come here. You’ve got no idea what you’ll do after that. Probably get around to installing Skype or something.
“Thanks for the fuckin’ intel,” you tell him kind of crossly. If either of you gave a good God damn about the camp schedule – and if any of the usually-high counselors gave a good God damn about enforcing the camp schedule – the two of you would be knocking kneecaps (criss-cross applesauce; nothing sexual, holy shit) at an exhilarating magic show, performed by one of the camp’s devoted lackeys. Like you and Sollux and a few of the counselors, he’s been here for much longer than he ought to, and has more or less outstayed his welcome. You vaguely remember looking forward to the magic shows, and then you turned fourteen and went through that emo phase and decided it was bullshit or something. Yeah, something like that.
“No problem,” Sollux tells you cheerfully, or at least as cheerful as he gets. While you recline upside-down across his top bunk, he’s sitting back in the shitty desk chair included with the shitty desk that you’re encouraged to write letters on. It’s one of those plasticky McSafety schoolkid chairs, with the little triangular window in the back for everyone to see if you’ve gotten a tramp stamp or whatever.
God, you can’t wait to graduate. You want it so bad you can taste it.
“You’re a dick,” you say back. “Think I might go see Mr. Midlife Crisis try to turn magic tricks in front of a bunch’a impressionable twelve year olds.” You’re getting kind of dizzy. The blood’s rushing to your head but you don’t quite have the energy to hoist yourself in an upright position, so you stay unlocked and loaded like an airline tray.
“Yeah, you do that,” he says. He snorts a little – Sollux has this really awful laugh that’s not only nasally but also interposed with sounds not unlike what you’ve heard from pigs. “The real trick is how he doesn’t cry himself to sleep every night when he thinks of how he’s been reduced to doing ridiculous illusion crap for summer-camp brats.”
“You don’t know that. He totally could.”
“Probably does.”
“Probably, yeah.”
The two of you are self-centered, cynical assholes and it’s no wonder the rest of camp hates you. While you’re not even sure if you’re that fond of him, you definitely couldn’t hate him as much as you hate everything else, and you know he feels the same way. The two of you have some kind of non-aggression pact; it allows you to do things like admit a non-ironic appreciation for satchels or come out of the closet without being totally railed on for being a predictable douche.
He is, you suppose, still your friend, after all.
Plus, also, you could have made fun of him all these years for all kinds of things. You could remind him that when you first met him he carried around this little stuffed bee rather relentlessly (and named it, inexplicably, Reginald) and you could also remind him that this is the first summer you’ve seen him without it. You could remind him of the year you were both about to start high school, where his face legitimately looked like some kind of horrible alien crash landing on account of all the acne that had sprouted up. You could remind him of last summer, where he brought condoms because he was under the impression that he’d be participating in some kind of shenanigans with one of the counselors (either Squint or Flatass, your derogatory nicknames for two counselors you just so happened to hate) and went home with the box and his virginity still intact. You could remind him of all kinds of things.
But you are, you suppose, still his friend, after all.
You and Sollux never care to talk about serious stuff anyway. He actually did kind of make fun of you when you came out to him, but not in the gross way – he just showed reluctance to believe that he would ever give a shit about who you wanted to bang, and you’d said well fuck you, too, and he’d said maybe in a few years or something, I want to keep my options open.
You were freshmen and you were stupid – fourteen and more than a little fucked up. Here and now you’re slightly less (or slightly more; hard to say) fucked up and you don’t examine it all too carefully. You’d rather just let it be. Again, you and Sollux don’t talk about serious stuff; when you do, you never talk about how you talked about the stuff either of you would rather keep locked away. (His brother’s accident; your parents’ divorce. It’s just boring stuff that your respective therapists make you bitch about ceaselessly anyway. Sometimes it helps to talk with a friend, at night sitting criss-cross-applesauce with your flashlights shining up at the ceiling. He always looks so somber then, illuminated by the still trueness of night.)
“Do you think Mel and his wife still do it?”
“God, gross, Sol, what the fuck-“
“No, I just want to know what you think, this is a perfectly open-ended question.”
“I do not. I think that anyone who hits fifty is celibate for the rest of their lives.”
“I hope you remember that when you’re fifty, you fucking selfish bastard. Old people aren’t allowed to get laid?” Sollux is smiling and it’s to this date one of the most surreal things you’ve ever seen; you’re upside down, and you could swear his sharklike grin lights up the cabin. You force yourself upward with an eerily sit-up like maneuver, before climbing down the precarious bunk bed ladder and choosing to sit on the bottom bunk instead. “Glad you could join me, ED. Now. I want to paint you a vivid mental picture-“
“I will slit your throat.”
“-don’t interrupt, you fucking brat. As I was saying, a vivid mental picture of your favorite camp admin Mel and his probably bombshell wife.”
“Sol, I’m gonna kill you. Right here, right now.”
“He lays her out under the stars, up on that hill where all the older kids make out. He kisses her tenderly on her liver-spotted skin-“
“Sollux Captor, I swear to the God I don’t believe in-“
“He pulls down his camp counselor short-shorts, which he’s worn just for this occasion-“
“Are you getting off on this?”
“-and reveals his magnificent throbbing member, for all the world to see.”
“You didn’t.” You stand up, properly outraged. (You stand a little too quickly, and for a second you’re blind, as all the blood rushes and leaves you momentarily handicapped. If he notices, he doesn’t say so.) “You didn’t just do that. You did not just “throbbing member” me.”
“I did. I absolutely did. What are you going to do about it?”
“What is there TO do, you’re tryin’ to get me to picture Mel’s wrinkly fuckin’ dick.”
“Is it working?”
“No, because I’m not a fuckin’ pervert like you. “ You give him a nice hard shove, which would have caused him to fall back on the floor had he been leaning back in the chair this time, but instead just scoots him rather awkwardly across it.
“Wow, that’s some upper-arm strength, there.”
“Fuck you!”
“Only if you take me to that hill.”
“Nuts to your hill.”
“Don’t belittle me, if you’re going to annihilate my virginity I’m gonna have to insist it be on that hill.”
“I’d rather eat shit and die.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
A lot of your conversations end up like this. Being teenagers and being boys, you talk about sex a lot, although not in a way you find particularly titillating. You’d be lying if you said you’d never thought about him like that; sure, he’s your friend, but he’s also your friend who’s shown an impeccable gift for reaching his tongue all the way to his nose, and that’s definitely someone you want to make out with just to say you have. It’s a strange thing. You don’t exactly find him handsome, but at the same time sometimes you look at him the wrong way and you forget who you’re seeing, and your chest does the dumb jerky thing it does when you look at someone and think, “now that is someone I would take to that hill where all of the stupid teenagers make out.”
You’re paraphrasing, but yeah, it’s pretty much that.
You’d never tell him because you just know it would fuck up the dynamic you two have. He’d either give you shit forever (“eheheheh you want my dick” – god, no thanks to that) or worse, he’d be uncomfortable, so you can’t risk riding all that money on something unlikely to produce favorable results. It’s not a big deal, anyway. You’ll probably find a boyfriend at college because apparently that’s where everyone meets their significant other, at least as far as you’ve read.
“That hill has to be disgusting,” you tell him. You’ve sat back down, now, on the creaky wood floors in the creaky wood cabin. “I don’t feel like the counselors clean anything on this property, let alone some tree-covered hill where everyone goes to bang.”
“Has anyone actually gotten laid up there?” He positions his chair so he’s somewhat facing you and you lean back against your hands, spread out behind you so your shoulders take all the weight. “I know people make out there, but I don’t think anyone’s gotten past second base.”
“Are we in middle school now, Sol? “Second base”, really? You are reducing the beautiful and soul-searching act of fondling genitals through someone’s clothes to a number, a fuckin’ baseball metaphor of all things.”
“Why are you offended? It’s not like you’ve gotten there.”
“Shows what you know!” He’s right, of course. You haven’t. You’ve kissed a girl before and found the experience lackluster, too much tongue and too much of trying to force something that clearly wasn’t going to happen; namely, a mutual attraction. Nevertheless, you get off the floor and go to your satchel, where you brought some of your clothes in case you wanted to crash here instead of at your cabin. In addition to that, you also packed marshmallows – a little bag of five-hundred on the dot. The mini kind. Marshmallows, they’re – well, they’re something of an inside joke between the two of you, one you’ve forgotten the origins of. You think it might have had something to do with the two of you throwing them at each other the summer before seventh grade, but you’re not sure if this was a cause or effect of the great-big-fucking marshmallow joke the two of you have been nursing for some ten years, give or take. Spotting the bag in your plain sight, you snatch it, and turn around. You present the bag to Sollux. “Think very carefully about your next words, Captor.”
“Oh, shit,” he says, holding his hands out in front of him defensively. “Now I fucked up.”
“Yes,” you agree. You walk over to him. “Imagine it, Sol. I could pour this bag open and unleash your personal hell. You could be bukkake’d by marshmallows.”
“I-“
“I’m not done. Imagine it. It’d be like a redwood forest of miniature marshmallows, surrounding you and standin’ at attention to smack you in the fuckin’ face.”
“Standing at attention? What, are they dicks? Are they dicks now?”
“Way to take it there, I clearly said they were marshmallows-“
“You also said ‘bukkake’, your argument means nothing. You’re pouring a bag of dicks on me, that’s what’s happening here.”
“You wish.”
“No, you wish.”
“Yeah, I fuckin’ wish!” You hit him with the bag the way you might smack someone with a pillow. “Count your goddamn blessings, Sollux Captor, not everyone gets a bag of grade-A dicks at their disposal.”
He grins at you – he actually doesn’t smile very often because he hates his teeth, since apparently his parents were either too poor or too apathetic or too unable to pay for any kind of dental work. When he does, it’s a masterpiece. His teeth are incredibly sharp and stick out at funny angles. It always goes right to your stomach when he smiles; you don’t know why, but your stomach just drops.
“Poor Eridan doesn’t have a bag of dicks. How unfortunate.” He laughs his piggy laugh again. “Your problem is actually pretty easy to fix, from where I stand.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Go to 4chan, or Omegle, or, I don’t know, any of the multitude of websites where guys are showing their dicks. Problem solved.”
“I said grade-A dicks, you fuckface.” You consider hitting him with the marshmallow bag and decide against it, if only because you actually really like marshmallows and it would be a waste for them to get everywhere. Never mind the fact that for maybe eight summers in a row, you did nothing but throw them at each other and then refuse to eat them once your counselors caught you. Suddenly you might have to pay for your own shit, maybe, someday, and so you decide not to be rampant with the fucking marshmallows.
God, growing up is scary.
“Who says the dicks on those websites aren’t “grade-A”, anyway? They could be.”
“Yeah, well, anyone who puts their dick on one’a those websites probably shouldn’t be showin’ it off in the first place.”
“Oh, so you’re a dick snob.”
“You know what? Yes, yes I am. I deserve the very best dicks this planet has to offer. Excuse the hell out of you, Sollux.”
He rolls his eyes at you, but smiles again. You feel as if you have to earn his smiles – you can’t shake the Pavlov-like giddiness you feel when he deigns to bestow them to you. “I thought about it. I briefly considered the idea of going on Omegle or ChatRoulette and showing my dick to strangers.” He looks you right in the eyes after this, and you’re not sure the gravity of which you ought to take it.
‘Cause damn.
“Why’s that?” you finally ask. “Didn’t want to run into someone else with their dick out?”
“No, not that,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s more like…” He frowns as he tries to think. Tongue protruded. Sollux always pokes out his tongue when he’s trying to think, like that’ll help or something. “It’s kind of like, any website that would take me and my dick, I didn’t want to be a part of. Does that make any kind of sense?”
“Yeah, it does.” You’ve never considered the idea of taking naked selfies or going on one of those websites, actually. You aren’t sure why, but you suspect it’s because you don’t quite feel safe enough in your home, expansive and encompassing as it is, to sit around with your thumb up your ass taking dick pics. Though the Ampora mansion is almost comical in its magnitude, you just know that the second you got your pants off one of the maids or God forbid your father would open your door without knocking, and then you’d probably die from the embarrassment alone.
“Do you ever wonder what makes someone want to?” Sollux asks you a few minutes later. Neither of you had been talking – one of the nice things about your friendship is that you both have a tendency to zone out, and so neither of you take it all that seriously when the other does. In this case it had been mutual; bonus.
“Want to, what?” you ask.
“Make out on a fucking hill. I mean, you’re outside, exposed to bugs and on an elevated surface where everyone can see you.”
“Ain’t there trees?”
“Sure, but didn’t you always know who was making out whenever someone was?”
“Well, yeah. Everyone knew.”
“That’s my point. So why would someone want to?”
“Maybe they want people to know. Like Chelsea and Matt.”
You both scoff at the memory of them. Chelsea and Matt had been there not last summer, but the one before, and they’d both spent an inordinate amount of time not only macking on the hill, but making sure everyone knew they were macking on the hill. They showed up to camp events with matching hickeys, made a conspicuous show of sneaking out; it was kind of a big, pretentious deal.
“God damn, Chelsea and Matt. It takes a special kind of conceited to go to all that.”
“Well, yeah, exactly. Like I get wantin’ to show off, but-“
“But that crosses a line.”
“Right, exactly. The fact that their sex-bruises matched was probably the worst part.”
“I don’t know,” he says. You arch your eyebrows at him with faux-reproach. “I mean, I wouldn’t personally want matching hickeys with someone I was kissing, but there is a certain symmetry to it, don’t you think?” He wiggles his eyebrows and you find yourself wishing you had something to throw at him.
“You’re terrible. You and your symmetry. Fuck symmetry.”
“Yes, exactly. Fuck symmetry.” He smirks again and doesn’t even actually thrust his hips, the way you’re supposed to when you make that joke, just jerks his arms back to give off the illusion that he’s actually doing anything. You decide to call him out on it.
“You lazy prick,” you tell him, “if you’re gonna make a sex joke and do that gesture you should actually do the gesture.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You should actually move your pelvis, if you’re gonna fake-hump you need to commit, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
“God, ED, you are so fucking picky.” He gets out of his chair and admonishes you from a standing position, which of course only draws you your feet as well. “First you bash my brilliant suggestion to fix your obvious sexual frustration, and then that same sexual frustration leads you to insult my equally brilliant pelvic thrusting gesture. What are you trying to say here?”
“Fuck you, I’m not sexually frustrated!”
“Then quit asking me to fuck you, it’s coming off as needy.”
“If I were asking you, I’m pretty sure you’d know it.”
“Yeah, because you’d probably court me. You’d lay little rose petals picked from the forest and play some Barry White and you’d make an affair of it.”
“You’ve given a lot of thought to this, Sollux, is there somethin’ you want to tell me?”
He laughs at that and you smile; in the end you pretty much always have the final say before he snips the joke off. It’s certainly not the first time this has happened; you’ve gotten this far with your joking before in different contexts. You sit back down, now, this time on the foam mattress of the bottom bunk. You decide to lay down against it, flat on your back, and again it is a while before either of you speak.
“This is our last summer here,” he says.
“Yeah, it is.”
“I’m not sure I’ll miss it. No offense.”
“Why would I be offended? Shit, I’m not sure I’ll miss it either – no offense.”
“Offense taken.” You turn your head to look at him; now, Sollux is the one sitting on the floor, legs crossed. He’s got his Serious Face on, which means you know for sure he’s fucking with you.
“Yeah, okay. Offense taken. ‘Cause that makes sense.”
“I am just kidding,” he says, “but in all seriousness, you could have taken offense since like, you’re basically responsible for every memory I have of this place.”
It might be the most sentimental thing he’s ever said to you. Not that Sollux does sentimental, but this is closely resembling that and you’re not quite sure what to make of it.
“Well,” you say. Hm. You scratch your head idly. “I mean, yeah. That’s true. I spend every day here with you.”
“Every hour.”
“Yes, Sollux, you shit, that’s what ‘every day’ means, it also includes the hours.”
“That’s not how days work, dipshit.”
“You are such a tool I think my head’s gonna explode.”
“Good. Can I have your brains?” He makes grabbing motions with his hands and you roll your eyes at him.
“Yep. My brain goes to you. My dearest friend, Sollux Captor – you may not have my heart, but you will always have my brains.”
“Like I care about your heart. Who gives a shit, now I have your brains.” He grins at you wickedly, all teeth showing, but the smile doesn’t quite make you smile this time. You can’t really picture being offended by something like that – of course it was a stupid sentiment on your part anyway, since you always kind of push the joke further than you ought. Still, you shift uncomfortably, and you realize you must be frowning because now Sollux is looking at you strangely.
“What’s your deal?” he asks. He raises his eyebrows.
“Nothin’. Like, literally. Nothing. Sorry, I was thinkin’ about something else.”
You don’t know what’s gotten into you.
Something terrible, though, you pretty much know that.
“Whatever,” he tells you, which is Sollux-speak for “conversation over” – no questions asked. You don’t really get to decide shit like that, because on some level you’re sure that he knows as well as you do that you need him more than he needs you.
No, not like that, okay? He just probably has friends (talks about friends) and you don’t really have any. Besides Fef, but lately you’ve sort of come to the conclusion that she doesn’t count. You think she might be your friend out of obligation, which is ludicrously paranoid, but still something that sticks to you like molasses.
“Sorry,” you tell him. You sit upright to the best of your ability; the top bunk, like most of the top bunks here, has started to cave in from usage – legitimate or otherwise. (As if anyone would fuck in a bunk bed. Now there’s a ridiculous mental image. For one thing, all of the bunks are older than God and have springs that make ridiculous seventies porno bed squeak sounds if you so much as move. Plus, also, girls and boys are always segregated. The camp’s attempt at decorum doesn’t take into account boys like you, although again, the point of the squalid bunk beds still stands. Even if the beds themselves probably won’t with a few years’ time.)
“Dude, holy shit, control center to Ampora. You keep zoning out. Like, more so than usual.”
It must be pretty bad if he’s noticed.
“I was thinking about these fuckin’ beds.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, and if anyone’s tried fucking in these fuckin’ beds.”
“You need to get laid.”
“It’s possible.”
You really do talk about sex a lot with him; curiously, this is done with a complete lack of detail, as the prospect of Sollux attempting intercourse with anyone kind of makes you laugh. (It also makes you picture him naked, and although you’ve totally seen him naked before, it’s not like it’s the same – pre-pubescent and changing into swim trunks is hardly the same thing as picturing your only guy friend making an honest effort at lovemaking with some unfortunate partner, clueless on how to escape this confusing and spit-laden experience. She tries to leave, but with no success. Her epitaph will say “died by listening to someone attempt lispy dirty talk”. Tragic. Tragically beautiful.)
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothin’.”
He looks at you like maybe you’re full of shit, but doesn’t actually have the follow through to call you out on it. Then he smiles, and you recognize it at once. Put on your helmets, ladies and gentlemen, Sollux Captor’s gotten an idea.
Gasp.
“Let’s go,” he says, grabbing the fallen bag of marshmallows for some inscrutable reason and looking at you expectantly. Naturally you’re already up and ready to go, if only because Sollux tends to know what he’s talking about when it comes to spontaneous adventures. How many years has this shit been going on now? One time he took you swimming in the lake at midnight; another, he showed you how to hitchhike and you abandoned camp cuisine in favor of 1:00 am McDonalds. You do this shit every year, so in a manner of speaking you had kind of been waiting for it.
“Do I need my wallet?” you ask him. He snorts, like that’s the most ridiculous proposition in the world. (As if you haven’t needed it before, because of course you have. Sollux probably could have afforded McDonalds on his own, but why bother when he’s friends with someone who has a credit card?)
“Don’t bother. I only brought the marshmallows for sentiment.”
And that, you guess, is good enough for you.
+++
You’re familiar enough with the camp’s layout after all this fucking time to realize that Sollux Captor is not taking you anywhere special in the slightest.
“Are you taking me hiking?” you ask incredulously. Careful to avoid the area illuminated by the campfire, lest you get caught, Sollux leads you out around the back, which takes longer but is a wholly necessary endeavor – at least, you’re pretty sure it’s necessary, until you realize he’s taken you to the fucking forest.
“Yeah, I’m taking you hiking, now shut up,” he says absently, like he’s distracted, so you don’t bother bitching and follow him through the stupid forest. The thing about Camp Thalia – an ambitious, if pretentious, name for a camp that barely even manages to stay running half of the time – is that a lot of its setup can come across as forced. For example, to your knowledge there used to be a swimming pool, but then apparently the upkeep got to be expensive, so now there’s a hollowed out hole where chlorinated water used to exist, and if you ever want to find a bunch of smokers concentrated in one place that’s more or less where you go. (It looks kind of spooky at night; the tile that used to surround the area has since been uprooted, and consequently the grass hasn’t quite grown back the same. Bits and pieces of the earth are bare, while in others the grass has grown comically tall and ill-kept, and combined with the smoke which rises up every other night, the effect is sort of surreal. You used to think it was haunted, although now you know it’s just a bunch of junkies looking for a place to be junkies in tandem. No real harm.)
Another example is the forest, which is not quite a forest so much as a heavy application of trees as if someone had just dropped them there with reckless abandon. The reason you don’t count it as a forest is because forests tend to have animals, and at Camp Thalia’s famous forest the only kind of wildlife you’re likely to find is a menagerie of insects. While bugs run rampant, the rest of the animals seem to sense that the place is sort of a façade, so walking through its depths tends to be an absolutely silent endeavor, save for the sub-aural hum of a million things waiting to bite you when you’re unaware.
You’ve never been fond of Camp Thalia’s superlative outdoors. In fact, you’re inclined to think it’s basically all bullshit.
“Shit, shit,” you mutter, slapping your thighs as mosquitos draw closer. “These bugs are like shit.” Sollux turns to look at you, and you almost feel admonished. Except not at all, since this is all his fucking fault.
“Almost there, princess.” He has the audacity to scoff and you want to slap him. “Want me to carry you?”
“As if you could. How come the bugs never get you?”
“Cause I’m so good.”
Yeah, that’s totally it.
In your intense, growing desire to avoid getting ambushed by bugs, you don’t notice where Sollux is taking you. Had you picked up on it sooner, you probably would have punched him in the mouth, because – God, it’s just so predictable, and so stupid, and so pointless on a massive scale. You’re probably overthinking this. In fact, you’re almost certain that’s what’s happening here. All the same, you can’t help but take a little bit of offense when it dawns on you that Sollux had marched you out from the fetid homeyness of his cabin just for the purposes of propelling you to the top of the hill where all the dumb teenagers make out.
“You didn’t,” you say flatly.
“Yeah, well, I try,” he says back. “Are you seeing the appeal yet, ED? Because I, for one, don’t see anything attractive about this set-up.” You look around. There are some trees. The dirt looks well-traversed. Some poison ivy lurks from underneath the roots of a tree, and you snicker a little bit, pointing but not speaking, and Sollux follows your gaze and laughs too.
“Well, doesn’t that just suck?” he asks.
“I guess.” You continue surveying, mostly to avoid speaking, primarily to avoid screaming at him because if this is his idea of a joke, it’s pretty fucking insensitive. (You don’t even want him. Much. Still, though, it’s rude to tease, especially the way your dumb “I would never” jokes have been creeping up from “occasional” to “every other sentence”. In other words, it’s kind of weird.) “Not seein’ the aphrodisiacal, no,” you admit.
“So you mean all this time teenagers were just coming up here to make out because they were horny? Not because of any magical aspects of some hill in the middle of nowhere? You don’t say.”
You could just punch him sometimes, but instead you give him a withering look.
“So, what, is this meant to be ironic?” You’re kind of pacing. “I mean, I guess I get it, like this is our last summer here and oh look, here we are on the hill where people make out, that’s so funny. Situational irony, that’s fuckin’ great!” You mean to stop talking, but you don’t. “I don’t really get why you’ve been driving that joke in the ground lately. It’s not like I’m offended on a moral level or anything, since you know I don’t care, but didn’t you ever think it might hurt my feelings a little? I know you’re capable of liking guys, and I get that we’re friends first and everything so whatever, but just making the joke every goddamn day where the punchline is ME.” You look at him kind of accusingly. “We’ll just be talking and you say “oh, that’d be like if we FUCKED” or whatever, and like, that’s it! That’s the joke! The joke is that it’s me! What the fuck, man?”
You say all of this at once, heated, and maybe just a little too quickly. You’re about convinced that he’s going to leave you there on the fucking hill, alone, which despite your outburst would be a really shitty thing for him to do.
He doesn’t say anything, and it’s hard to see for sure in the dark, but you can feel him looking at you.
You’re about to start backpeddling when he deigns to give you a response.
“Do you really think my sense of humor boils down to insulting your ego like that?”
“I-“
“Because as funny as it is when you get worked up about shit like that, holy FUCK do you have me misrepresented. I should be offended here. Your little self-fed rant about what you think my motives are was totally uncalled for.”
“You should be offended?” You look at him incredulously. “Really? Did you not-“
“Basically you think I would constantly bring up the idea of fucking around with you and then take you to a place where we both know people do that in the name of a joke. Yeah. I’m offended. Like my sense of humor is that shitty.”
At this point you really aren’t sure how the fuck you’re meant to deal with him. How do you deal with him? He’s your only friend and your only enemy; precariously a piece of shit at all hours of the day; the bane of your existence and easily your favorite person to never get sick of. You can’t stand him but you’re nursing a huge crush on him. Half the time you hate him, but half the time.
Yeah.
“I don’t understand,” you tell him.
“Well, of course you don’t.” You’re not imagining things – you know you aren’t – but you’re almost positive, in that moment, that his broken, busted smile illuminates the night. “For fuck’s sake, Eridan, I don’t know what I could have done to get the idea across more. Unfortunately I don’t have a sign handy that says “I want to fucking kiss you”, but I thought taking you here would convey more or less the same thing.”
He sounds as exasperated as you feel. The fact that he’s smiling makes you hopelessly angry – but, again, it also goes right to your stomach. It’s not an unpleasant feeling.
You don’t quite know if he kissed you or if you kissed him because it was kind of clumsy and ill-timed and it might have been the both of you at once. It’s downright eponymous, the way he kisses you. Fated and dizzy and he tastes like soda that you know he smuggled in; the two of you are not better than anybody, you realize, because at the same time you also realize the appeal of giving into something as cliché as kissing someone in a place where everyone goes to do it.
There’s a reason why everyone goes to do it.
The bugs leave you alone, or maybe you just don’t notice. Failing that you suppose it’s possible Sollux might have leant you some of his good fortune and maybe that’s why you go undisturbed by the presence of parasites. He goes for tongue a little too soon, which is okay because you open your mouth a little too soon, and so more or less it ends up that you’re both a little too well-timed. (Maybe you know each other too fucking well. Who can say?) He runs up a hand to mess up your hair, probably because he knows you get finicky about it, and maybe also because he knows you aren’t going to bitch at him about it now. He groans and you feel it in your mouth. You never thought you’d be turned on by something he was doing.
Except, of course, for all the times you’d thought about it.
It’s too hot (try August) for kissing to be something any logically minded person might attempt, and in all fairness you retain the sense of mind to realize that yes, it is fucking hot. The air is sticky and it’s just about midnight, although it had been some time ago since you’d bothered to check the time. You’re not sure why he bothered bringing the marshmallows, if he’d planned on making some kind of move on you, and then you realize that maybe he’d brought them in the event that you were capable of turning him down, which for the record you don’t think you are.
What a sentimental piece of shit you are.
You’re angry that he’s grinning at you sometime after – because it’s not like the movies, where you kiss feverishly and then get to disrobing, shit’s different out here. Instead you just kind of end up sitting atop the hill, thinking too much and trying to covertly wipe your mouth, and you look over at some point and realize he’s smiling.
“Hey, Eridan,” he says. He uses your real name. That’s intrieguing.
“What?”
“Can I still have your brains?”
Fucking weirdo.
“Are you sure you want ‘em? Since they possessed me to follow you here? Gotta keep that in mind.”
“You make a good point.” His hand is next to yours, flat on the ground, and you decide to be a real piece of shit and inch your fingers toward it.
“So you’ll just have to settle for one of my other organs. Like my fuckin’ gall bladder or something.”
“You’re the best.”
“Aren’t I, though?”
“Yeah, I guess.” You’re about to inch your hand closer when his overlaps yours, in one fell swoop. What an asshole, taking away your gesture like that. Sometimes you think you could kill him.
And then you notice – for the first time, in your entire relationship, in the span of time you’ve known him, Sollux has acknowledged one of your aggressively arrogant statements and had the nerve to actually agree. You’re almost flattered. In fact, you kind of are.
“Thanks.” You sneak a furtive glance at him. He makes this noise that sounds like the first syllable of self-depricating laughter, a quick exhalation and not much else.
“Yeah, don’t make it weird.”
“Too late for that.”
“Fuck you.”
“Who’s desperate now?”
Sollux’s hand on top of yours is warm in the way that’s not unpleasant, a little bit sweaty since you’re both outside in the oppressive heat and all, and you’re a little disconcerted by how okay you are with it being there. You lace some of your fingers with his. He reciprocates.
Maybe you will get around to installing Skype.