This is the fifth summer you’ve spent working as a camp counselor alongside Dick Grayson.
Since you were seventeen, old enough to know better, too young to care: you’ve been hopelessly, pathetically, deeply in love with your coworker.
It’s muscle memory at this point, you realize, sitting with a group of campers, teaching them the ways of the friendship bracelet, that you look for him when he’s not right next to you. It’s muscle memory, that every year, the woven, embroidery thread bracelet you make is blue and black. The color of his stupid eyes and the color of his even stupider, ridiculously thick hair.
“Okay, now make the two sections into a four again and loop the top part through, like I showed you.”
It’s muscle memory, serious training, that’s gone into not flinching when he touches you.
Pulls you in for a tight hug, bumps his shoulder with yours in the breakfast line, (“Look alive, sunshine, those kids wait for no one!”) or holds you close despite your struggling, his laugh echoing in your ears, as he jumps into the lake with you. “When are you gonna learn that you can’t outrun me?”
You’ve learned not to ogle, when his shirt’s off, exposing his hard-earned physique. The biceps you think a little too much about, the V-line that points its way down into his shorts, and the power behind his movements as he plays three-flags-up with his cabin. “You got this, dude, that’s two!”
The squint of your eyes is because of the sun, you’ve misplaced your sunglasses. You look around so much because you’re trying to make sure all the kids are doing what they’re supposed to.
You try your best to ignore the chatter that plays on repeat every year: “You two would make a good couple,” “Does he have somebody back home?” “Maybe I’ll make a move!”
Like a glacier that sits on your shoulders, the ice slowly melting its way down your spine, the thought of his love life is so much more worth not thinking about that you’ve never talked about it with him. It feels better that way.
Sure, you’re his best friend, but—he’s never asked about your love life.
And ultimately, there’s nothing, nothing, like the way it all makes you feel.
It’s a deep ache. One that starts about two weeks before camp starts, and a week and a half before it ends (continuing, of course, well into fall.)
An ache that pounds throughout your circulatory system, chanting not yours, not yours, not yours.
It’s a Dick Grayson specific strand of FOMO: clinical, chronic, and untreatable.
One that reminds you: you only get his summers. And not even really that, since he has absolutely no idea.
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