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You know I used to be shy, right?
And not in the, oh, he’s the shy one sense. Because literally anyone is the shy one next to Olly Spring. I swear, he’d win an extroversion contest against a bonobo.
No, I was shy shy. When I was five, my mum brought me to see doctors about it. They gave the usual, oh he’ll grow out of it, don’t worry, he’ll find friends at school, put him in activities and he’ll be fine.
Smash cut to year 6, when I was struck by the sudden epiphany that I had no friends.
I remember it distinctly. I was sitting at the table at lunch, alone, and saw two guys from my year at the next table. A third one sat down, and they absolutely beamed to see him, so thrilled to be joined by their friend.
I had never. Never. Had someone even crack a smile when I sat down at their table.
And, up to that point, it wasn’t even from bullying. I just couldn’t make friends, couldn’t interact with people above ten decibels, couldn’t dare to speak to someone more than once in the same calendar month. Of course, there was a little bit of bullying later, but you know about Charlie stopping it and all that.
I don’t want you to think I was unhappy. I was really, really happy, when I was alone. At home, with books or video games or a few colouring pencils, I’d be fine and dandy all day. Hell, my mum could bring me somewhere and just set me up in the corner with some library book about plants, and I’d be entertained for hours.
(I understand that you were an “indoor child” too. Sometimes I wonder how we didn’t develop rickets from the lack of vitamin D.)
Around other people, not so much. I hated to be looked at, even worse to be heard. Even with the advent of the Pride club, I only really made acquaintances. I got to know a bit about the other kids who came every week, but then we wouldn’t have overlapping classes, or the same lunch slot, and so there just wasn’t ever the chance to connect enough to let my walls down more than a single brick. And they never invited me round, or asked me much of anything about me at all.
I was like a very useful desk, a piece of furniture that helped organise the club meetings and was always reliably there, but you talked over rather than to.
Charlie was so nice but he was always so busy, and he was older and hot so the intimidation level was over nine thousand. Mr Ajayi was lovely, and he let me come sit in the art room to eat lunch sometimes, as long as I didn’t make a mess, but even I knew it’s weird to call your teacher a friend.
So the second day in a row, when Olly sat down next to me in form, opened his big, brown eyes wide, and spoke to me, I almost fainted.
“You look surprised I’m here, Alfie,” is what he said. “You know we’re sat next to each other all year.”
“Yeah.”
“Well then we might as well be friends!”
I think I nodded, or blinked or something. And, as he does, he took that as assent to be his best, and dearest, and most trusted friend, until the earth grows cold and the stars blink out.
It was only a week in when he asked me to come round.
“I don’t- What does that entail?” I asked.
“You use great words, you know,” was his reply. “Entail! I’m gonna borrow that one.”
He had told me so much about himself in those first few days, more than anybody ever told me about anything.
(Before that, I mostly learned from books. I loved books, so much, because they would tell me things without needing to be asked.)
So I already knew all about how his house felt so empty for him, now that his brother and sister were off being adults (he said it like that, adults, as though turning eighteen was a treasonous act). His parents still wouldn’t let him get a dog, so things were always too quiet for him.
Over the summer, he tried asking his friends over. Some seemed to have moved on to other social groups as they shifted to new schools, or were left behind at the old one, and for the rest, there would often be something up, some obligation or travel or scheduling conflict that meant he was stuck by himself. He’d spent the summer going for runs around the park, burning off his endless energy until it was time to go home and collapse.
It turned out, despite being everyone’s friend, he didn’t have that many true friends either.
I want to be clear, he asked me things too. He peppered me with more questions about me in a week than I’d answered in a decade. Nearly all of them I didn’t have the answer to - how does someone who has never eaten sugary cereal name their favorite one? - and for the ones that I did, I think I mostly stammered or lied, saying “I don’t know.”
(Do you prefer cats or dogs? I prefer plants, I said.
Who’s your favorite actor? I don’t watch a lot of movies or tv, I said, not wanting to have to explain why I rewatched Bridgerton so many times.
What’s your greatest fear? Scorpions, I said, and that was true, but Being perceived, the way you’re trying to perceive me right now, was probably a close second.
What do you love more than anything in the world? I don’t know how to answer that, I said, though my true answer was already well on its way to being, You.)
He called me “a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” and I told him it was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” at least the way Churchill said it originally. Then he called me “so smart and so cool,” his voice lightly bouncing, and I thought, that’s it, my time on earth is done, let’s go coffin shopping because I’m about to pass away.
When I somehow survived, and said yes, I’d get my mum to drop me off round his on Saturday, his smile was so big, so bright, so brilliant, I thought I’d need sunscreen.
His smile was the same when I showed up at his doorstep. It was still summery warm out, and he asked why I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, the first person ever to notice that. I tried to play it off, but the truth never stays hidden long around Olly. Within ten minutes, he had me telling him how, though it was better than a few years earlier, I still didn’t love my body, gangly and not yet grown in.
He hugged me, hard but kind, like he could push my confidence back into myself with the sheer force of his arms.
(I don’t think I’d been hugged like that in years. Maybe ever.)
He was such a ball of sunshine, I kind of felt like I was putting a damper on him. I couldn’t imagine not dragging him down. If he spent too much time around me, I might blot him out like an eclipse, dimming the light that shone in his too-big, too-brown eyes.
I think a piece of me feared, even more, that his radiance might somehow strike me, pierce me through, or, yet worse, bounce right off.
We played video games that morning, and he crushed me at Mario Kart - he said his brother had put him through serious training, and I believed him. Then he declared it was too nice of a day to stay inside. “I don’t really like the outdoors,” I said, and he looked like I’d just told him that happiness wasn’t quite my thing.
So I found myself there, in the park, walking with him, as he pointed out every little thing, and glowed at me when I told him the Latin names for the plants, quercus robur, trifolium repens, taraxacum officinale. He hummed, literally hummed, with joy.
It was warm, and I was warm. I rolled up my sleeves.
He saw something, across the park, grabbed my hand, said “Let’s go!” and pulled. And I found myself running, dragged along, after this boy, who laughed and laughed, hand clasping mine, wild hair blowing in the breeze.
I guess I never let go.
Don’t forget, during all of this I was losing my mind at how adorable he is. Not in like, a lustful way, not yet at least-
(-okay, I get it, you don’t want to hear it, I’ll restrain myself!)
But he was just this ball of energy, housed in a perfectly imperfect shell. He was always a mess, his stuff was everywhere all the time, and you know his hair, his gorgeous, untameable hair.
He told me that one friend had come over the year prior, and he accidentally bumped her, she tripped on some of the scattered stuff on his floor, and fell out the window and broke her foot. (I never quite understood the physics of that one, the way he explained it.) After her leg got out of the cast, she never came back.
It makes sense. Nobody’s ever entered his orbit and come out unscathed.
He was agitating.
Not in a bad way (well, maybe with the exception of that girl’s foot). But he was inescapably disruptive. My life before was like a pond - placid, serene, probably something scary lurking under the surface that you could ignore if you tried hard enough - and he was a motorboat filled with holidaymakers, churning it up, its wake causing ripples across the whole surface. And noisy enough that the parks department would file a complaint.
My mum hated him. When I asked him round to mine the first time, a few weeks after our day at the park, he broke a vase, scuffed the carpets, and sang his jam of the moment - it was Cosmic Love, I still remember his voice, not yet settled in to its adult range - so loudly that she could hear it in the sitting room. She sat me down after he left and told me I had to think about what kind of friends I was making.
That’s the first time I ever talked back to her, you know. “At least I’ve made a friend for once,” I said, and stormed to my room. I even slammed my door.
(Okay, I closed it audibly. I’ve never been a door-slammer.)
I think that shocked her system enough, she decided it was fine, as long as Olly was an outdoor friend, and when he came round thereafter she’d shuffle us out into the garden as fast as she could.
She hated him the whole way through, though. She really hated him when I told her we were dating, and even more when I started staying at the Spring house one night a week, then three, then seven.
I did my best to convince her it was because I was young and in love. Like a plant, I’d wither and die if I didn’t get as much of his sunlight as possible, so I could photosynthesize. But she still caught on that she was really the overhang, the looming, limiting force, that had been keeping me in the shade.
(I should remember to thank Jane and Julio tomorrow, and Charlie too, for letting me live in his old room for two years.)
She hated and hated until his first hit song. Then, once he was on television and at Glastonbury and all that, suddenly she was so proud and wasn’t it amazing and she couldn’t wait for him and his money and fame to be part of the family.
I’m glad we’re doing this here, in Menorca, keeping it small. So that she isn’t here. (I’ll have to thank Nick, too.)
Yes, I know that eighty-five people in attendance isn’t “small.” But she thinks that it’s just Olly, me, his siblings, and Sahar, “to avoid the paparazzi.”
What can I say. Being quiet for so many years makes for a good liar.
He disrupted me, so wildly, back then, but I like to think I disrupted him too.
I was the one who encouraged him to run track, a few months after we met. He loved to run, and I could never keep up, so it only made sense that he find a way to burn his energy out. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he kept it up, if he didn’t shift his all-consuming passion to music.
Maybe I’d be marrying a world-class marathoner tomorrow.
He claims I was his first kiss, but I don’t know if that’s quite true. He kissed everyone, on the cheek, on the hand, wherever someone would let him show that he loved them. And those who didn’t want a kiss, he’d hug, squeezing and clinging like a monkey, like if he let go at all for one single second, you might vanish into the night.
Still, when he talks about our first kiss, he says, that’s the first kiss that changed my life.
It’s weird to think I changed his life, there in the park, when he’d already revolutionised mine. I had made him a picnic lunch, and wore my nicest white shirt (I wanted to look my best!), and we sat under the quercus robur.
My mistake was how I phrased things, too honest too early. I had meant to prepare a whole statement, thanking him, for being my friend.
I remember thinking, he looks like Apollo. You know, everyone today pictures Apollo as this blond, masculine hunk, but the Greeks described him with dark, curly hair, the picture of youthful beauty. And Apollo is the god of the prophetic truth. I saw his face, his radiant face, and that truth just spilled out.
It didn’t take much truth, to be fair. “Olly, I want to say some things. You’ve been so kind to me these past couple years, and I adore you-”
“You adore me?” he yelled, and I swore I heard it echo around the park. When I nodded, he flew towards me (his knee hitting the fruit salad bowl, sending it flying), and tackled me backwards into a huge hug. “I adore YOU so, so much, Alfie you’re the best person ever, I’ve been trying to keep myself restrained because I know it’s a lot and I have a lot of feelings but you’re AMAZING and I’ve wanted to tell you that but I also haven’t wanted to overwhelm you and-”
When he paused to take a breath, he hovered over me, the sunlight streaming through the quercus above him and his hair and his pores. And it just happened. I craned my neck up, and kissed him.
For a moment, he looked stunned, his big brown eyes like two planets, taking over his whole visage. Then, ever so slowly, he cracked into a smile, like I’d handed him the key to a hoard of treasure, or like I’d hung the moon.
He kissed me, and we kissed, my shirt stained with grass, picnic blanket stained with fruit salad, and his face stained with how much I adored him, adore him.
All I’d meant to say was thank you for being my friend, but by the time the picnic was over, we weren’t just friends anymore.
And I was the one who he came out to first, officially. I think everybody knew, probably long before I met him, that Oliver Spring was never destined to be a regular, box-fitting, cisheteronormative member of proper society.
And we’d already been making out for a while by then, so I for sure knew he wasn’t straight.
(Okay, okay, no more making out talk, I swear.)
But I remember when he asked me, in the privacy of his messy room, to try out different pronouns, different labels, talking about him in third person, as though he wasn’t there. “He’s so beautiful,” I said. “They’re the most loving person I’ve ever met. Xe’s brilliant, and creative, in ways I can’t describe. She’s everything to me.”
Today, he’s a man, but I’m not afraid if he comes to me, in a week or seventy years, and says that’s changed. His gender is Olly, and that’s who I love.
And as for his sexuality - when he settled, tentatively, on pan, I stupidly made a joke about pan troglodytes, the scientific name of a chimpanzee. Quick as always, he called me his homo sapien, “wise man,” incredibly, inexorably, inexcusably homo for him.
Things weren’t sunshine and bad jokes and grass-stained kisses all the time, of course. I mean, I was there, when he got the letter from Casey.
I know you were away then, off supporting your own wild love, so you didn’t get the full experience of what that summer was like.
She was his best friend.
(Everyone was a best friend to him, but he adored Casey especially, I think because she was always a little aloof. He liked a challenge, a tough nut to crack, what can I say.)
School had just let out - they were done with year eleven, and she was moving away to Wales for sixth form. And he got a letter from her. He was so excited to open it, he practically bounced off the ceiling when I handed it to him. I think he was looking forward to being pen pals.
Dear Olly, it said. I don’t want to be friends anymore.
And then it proceeded to list every petty grievance, every quirk of his personality, every time he’d said or done something too loud or too inappropriate or too Olly, in eight years of friendship. A friendship break-up letter like no other.
Before I realised what was happening, it was too late, and he’d finished the whole thing.
He cried, and cried, and cried.
I thought he was going to dehydrate, so I brought him water, then Lucozade, then Jane and Julio. We each read the letter, silently, as the other two hugged him and told him she was cruel, she was just jealous, what she said didn’t make sense, didn’t reflect the Olly we knew, she didn’t understand the real him, she wasn’t worth his time, none of which had one iota of effect.
I think the Springs were better about things with Olly than with their older children. Charlie told me that one time, Jane tried to forbid him from seeing Nick until his exams were done - as if that were possible in this universe. A few years later, they were letting Olly’s boyfriend move in to escape his toxic, oppressive mother. (Though Jane was definitely glad when I showed her that, living with them, my grades didn’t dip.)
But in some ways, they were still used to their first two, who were sad quietly, internally, not like this one, who was so vigorously inconsolable that I thought he might burst a lung and we’d have to dial triple-nine.
He begged to call you, you know, but I think you two were in a cabin on Svalbard at the time, and they couldn’t get ahold of you. He talked and cried to both Charlie and Nick on the phone for four hours that night, and even longer when they quickly came home from London the next day.
That letter is what he based Dear Love Goodbye on, you know. I wonder if Casey’s ever heard it, wherever she is. I know it got a lot of radio play.
Oh, yeah, I cried too. I cried while I held him, in his bed, once he had passed out from exhaustion. I cried because seeing Olly cry was the worst, most horrible thing I could possibly imagine. Worse than scorpions, it was my greatest fear come true. And here it was happening, and there was nothing I could do but be there. Seeing him cry like that, it was like watching someone turn off the sun.
I spent that whole summer with him. He basically enclosed himself in his room. He wouldn’t see any of his other friends, then convinced himself they didn’t want to see him either. Some days, all I could do was open the curtains and sit on the bed with him, tissues at hand, reading to him or rewatching Bridgerton yet again.
(Yes, by then, I’d admitted I found Jonathan Bailey hot, but nowhere near as hot as Oliver Spring, who burned so hot, hotter than the summer sun he refused to let in.)
He knew I needed my alone time, even from the most amazing human being I’d ever encountered. But I told him it didn’t matter, we could be joined at the hip until he learned that he was incredible again.
Towards the end of summer, once he started feeling better, I still stayed glued to him, so I could get enough of a dose of Olly-osity to see me through when I started uni that autumn.
I bought him the ukulele then, as my going-away gift. He needed something to distract him, and he spent hours a day learning chords, practicing Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Poker Face and Creep (a song that sounds truly odd on such an instrument).
He’d send me clips of him in his bedroom, playing that ukulele and singing whatever song he’d sounded out on it. When I made him a playlist, I was stunned how fast he turned it around, sent me back a full self-taped-on-a-phone-mic album, covering every song on it. And then, once he started to write, he’d send me little snippets, wanting feedback on the lyrics or how to shift smoothly from the chorus into the verse.
At first he said the songs he wrote were just for me, because I was the one who was there for him, his favorite homo sapien of all. He wanted to give me something back. When he wrote a song based on my time at Truham, about coming out and finding community - the song that later became Chocolate Chip, yeah - I told him he’d already given me everything, everything I could ever, ever want.
Eventually I convinced him to send a few of the more finished songs to Charlie, and almost immediately he put him in touch with Sahar. It worked out perfectly that she was back in Rochester at the time, and looking to move in a new direction after her solo career started to stall. And Nick was the one who paid for them to rent the studio time to record an indie EP, get it properly produced, but still with that rough edge that new artists deserve to enjoy.
And a year later, it was like everything had changed. I never thought I’d be dating a star.
I told him I’d drop out of uni, to support him and tour with him and do whatever he needed. But he insisted I stay on, that I not skip my exams to see him play.
(I would watch every concert video, every shaky-camera-phone clip uploaded by a new fan to youtube or bluesky, over and over and over.)
We’d stay up late on discord calls, me studying plants or audio production, while he practiced guitar riffs, or peppered me with questions about what such-and-such meant in the next venue contract, or re-dyed his hair, or slept.
He could only keep me there for the three years til graduation, though, and he couldn’t stop me from switching my course from botany to music management. Nor could he stop me, after that, from being there, at every one of his shows, behind the scene where I like to be, but basking in the warmth of his star.
Recently, one of the backup dancers (sworn to secrecy, of course) asked me, at an after-show: is it weird for someone like me, not shy but still quiet, to be getting married to the Olly Spring?
I said no, it’s not weird for me. It’s the only marriage I’d ever want.
You don’t have to have a white dress and a certificate to be made for each other. You told me that once, when I came to you, worried I was doing something wrong, after he asked to open things up and my heart didn’t immediately scream no.
By then, I knew he was the most trustworthy, the most dedicated and loyal, a pan sapien could be. He could never cheat, or deceive, even for a single second. He wasn’t like me - he’d never had a lying bone in his body.
But at the same time, he also burst forth with so much sunshine and adoration for everyone around him, he was bound to need more than just one love.
In hindsight, I’m amazed he waited until he was twenty to ask. He has so much love to give, I don’t think it could ever be contained in one relationship. I think it’d set him on fire.
He’s careful, of course. He screens potential partners really intensely, to avoid leaks or rumors or anything compromising. Anybody who’s potentially long-term has to meet me, and anyone who’s given me a hint of a bad vibe is an immediate hell no from him.
But yes, being poly and famous isn’t an easy combo.
From the outside, our relationship doesn’t look like Nick and Charlie’s, that’s for sure. They’re, like, made for the media - romantic in a way that’s public but demure, no questions about anything nontraditional or unsanitised. (I know that’s not the half of it, in reality, but they’re great at projecting that image, especially to all of Nick’s rugby fans.)
Our relationship is a lot more like you and Michael’s, in a way, unique and not lining up with the neat boundaries that romance movies lay out.
Sometimes I think we’re more like best friends, sometimes lovers, sometimes allies, sometimes partners in crime. Sometimes it’s like we’re different species, me as Jane Goodall and Olly my beloved chimpanzee, as I try to tease apart what simian behaviour he might display next.
I guess, maybe, we’re most like the sun and the moon. Your brother radiates and illuminates everything, and I lurk in his shadow, but shine brightest when I’m facing towards him. We move through the sky separately, sometimes aligning and sometimes apart. But we’re in sync, in a way that feels bigger and more slow-moving than homo sapiens can comprehend.
So no, I don’t think much will be different after tomorrow. It’s just a ceremony and a piece of paper, after all. It doesn’t change anything.
Yeah, our lives don’t look like what they did when he sat down next to me, that first day, leaning in close and asking if I was okay.
But to me, he’ll always be that spark of sunshine, pulling me along by the hand, running free in the breeze.