#ykms

ii.

i wanted to kiss you before. it wasn’t a secret, just a fact, just a feeling there so long i knew it would never go away.

i wanted to kiss you when we were nine and i blurted out i might like boys. i worried you might laugh or run or pretend you already fell asleep in that shitty tent we set up in the backyard. but you just said “i know” and moved your sleeping bag closer to mine.

i wanted to kiss you when we were twelve and you carefully cleaned the gravel out of a brutal knee scrape - the annoying evidence i failed at impressing you with my new skateboard. your tongue stuck out a little between your lips and i fell even harder.

i wanted to kiss you when we were fourteen and my pills kept finding their way into my pocket instead of my mouth. i mumbled that i was sick of being defined by the bad stuff. you held my face in your hands and whispered, “hey, you look good to me.”

i wanted to kiss you when we were sixteen and you held my hand through a funeral so devastating i didn’t even cry until a week later. i felt numb to everything except the drag of your thumb over my skin. i kept you close and you? you kept me alive.

i hope we never stop kissing. i think it’s why i’m still here.

iii.

“you’re not broken.” it’s a lie you whisper like a promise and you repeat it like a chorus, voice soft and hands shaky underneath the blankets pulled over our heads. “you’re not broken, okay? please don’t say that.”

your fingers thread through my hair and your lips find mine in the dark but i don’t feel the love you’re so desperate to give me. i’m too tired to talk. too scared to lose you. too sure i can’t give you what you want.

“dude, say something.”  my heart breaks knowing what i do to us. how it keeps you awake at night when you try to breathe life into me and all i can do is exhale tears. “c’mon,” you beg, pressing a kiss to my temple and i can’t take it anymore.

“i’m not broken,” i whisper back and you relax so quickly it’s like your body melts into mine, relieved we’re finding our way back to being whole again. “i’m sorry, i didn’t mean it.”

it’s a lie.

iv.

i woke up alone and feeling like there’s no way i could ever be good enough for you. i started writing a letter in my head, an apology for putting you through all this, for needing too much from someone who’s only eighteen.

but when i rolled over, i found a note on your pillow, like you could see the insecurity while i slept beside you.

“it’s easy to be enough when you’re everything. don’t forget.”

your heart will always win the battle with my head.

v.

we’re trying to build a shelf for my records when i hear it.

“marry me,” you say in the middle of an empty apartment, surrounded by unpacked boxes of our past and the promise of a future we’ve both wanted for so long we know it’s not going away.

“okay,” i say, still staring at the ikea instructions in my hand. “let’s get married.”

it’s nothing like any of those elaborate proposal stories but it’s ours. it’s us.

it’s you weak over how i look wearing your clothes that don’t fit but you swear they look better on me anyway. it’s me knowing that this is real and you’ve meant every word you’ve ever said to me, even the ones i still find hard to believe.

“shit,” you mumble, scrunching your nose when i finally look up. “we should’ve done the bed first.”

“it’s not fine,” he argued, cross his arms but stepping slowly toward the door, desperate for comfort but too afraid to ask for it. how could the affection he ached for be what drove him away in the first place? “i make things hard and you deserve better. like, there’s no way you don’t know that.”

in stevie’s head, it was so fucking obvious. everybody had to see it, too.

brady brought light and laughter into every room - an energy that rattled out of him and bounced off the walls. he worried very little about consequences and saw the world with a kind of childlike wonder his friends envied. being around him felt like hearing some ridiculously catchy pop song you loved as a kid. you know, this sudden burst of happiness possibly drowning in nostalgia but somehow nothing matters but that moment and how carefree you feel. the wind might as well be blowing through your hair on a drive with ice cream before dinner. brady barton smiles and the word “impossible” vanishes from the dictionary. poof! gone. just like that.

but stevie couldn’t imagine anyone thinking about him that way. people worried about stevie, questioned if he could even talk or just forgot he existed. hardly poetic. nowhere near deserving of somebody who burned with bright intensity and endless optimism.

and yet…

“i can’t know shit that’s not true,” brady said, twisting the door knob with no luck and growing frustration. “but i know that i’ve never wanted to kiss anyone as much as i want to kiss you and i don’t need some lame countdown to tell me when it’s the right time… i just need you, dude. please.”

stevie exhaled slowly and turned the lock to step out of the bathroom. he kept his eyes on his shoes, determined to ignore stacey and her drunk friends just a bit longer. otherwise he might lose his nerve. “hey, i wasn’t going to, like, spill my guts in a freakin’ bathroom so…”

“so?” jesus, brady looked so hopeful that stevie thought his chest might burst. maybe he lit up every room but stevie knew there was a certain spark in his best friend’s eyes that was always just for him.

“so… right outside the bathroom seems less crazy?” he laughed soft and nervous, threading his fingers through the hair at the base of his neck. “i kinda freaked out before and it’s definitely not because i don’t want you to kiss me. it’s more like being with you is the only thing i’ve ever wanted this bad. but you’re, like, the only person who actually understands me at all and i can’t lose that.”

“you could never lose me,” brady insisted, leaning in to press a kiss to stevie’s forehead, fingertips tracing along his jaw to tilt his chin upward. “we can do this. you can do this.’

“i can’t,” he murmured, squeezing his eyes shut. “it’s impossible. i’ll mess it up. you’ll be perfect and i’ll be me and it’ll get bad.”

“not true,” brady whispered, nudging in closer until stevie’s back pressed against the door behind him. “and i can see you when you do that, you know, but it’s still fucking cute.”

stevie held onto brady’s hips and lifting up on his toes to speak soft with only a breath between their lips. “‘i’m not hiding,” he said and in that tiny space, a whole lifetime of possibilities existed, a future he couldn’t stand to run away from anymore.

a fate they sealed with a kiss better than a daydream. he pulled away slowly, cheeks flushed in an all too familiar rush of panic until he saw brady looking right back at him, grinning like he could hear the song playing in stevie’s head and taste ice cream with extra sprinkles on his tongue.

“i still feel lucky i found you.”