Confessions and Grass-Touching
Originally written on June 12, 2021
He smiles, and the world stops a little, except it doesn’t, really, because Kieran’s never thought such tooth-rottingly cheesy thoughts in his life, and he is maybe going to bash his head against the counter a couple of times.
“It’s pretty fun,” Jayce admits, absentmindedly swirling his drink, “going out and socializing for once. After a while I just kind of realized that everyone’s fumbling in the dark just as much as I am. Socially, I mean. A line or a quip isn’t so hard to get out, now that I have that internalized.” He tilts his head a fraction and snorts. “I have no clue how you go at it for so long, though. It’s been an hour; I already want to forsake humanity.”
Kieran suppresses a grin and runs a hand through his hair, forcibly calming his nerves. “Pressure, and a lot of practice. You grow into it after a while.”
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“A bit of both.”
Jayce turns his head away, lifting his glass to his lips and tipping it back. It comes back down to the counter with a soft thud, and Kieran is still staring at the halo of pepsi left at the bottom when he hears Jayce speak. “What about with me?”
Time
stops,
and a brilliant flush (could just be the lighting, really,) is blooming across Jayce’s cheeks, and his hand is loosely covering the bottom half of his face (probably to wipe his mouth, all things considered), and if Kieran looks closely enough, which he absolutely irrevocably is, Jayce’s pupils have widened in the slant of his gaze on the table (he really can’t justify this one can he).
Kieran swallows and says, “I never don’t want to talk to you.”
Jayce makes a strangled noise. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Even if it’s about some dumb League thing?”
Despite himself, Kieran cracks a smile. “Especially then.”
“Kieran,” Jayce takes a shuddering breath, and it sounds like honey and ambrosia and a dozen other things Kieran’s going to have to vehemently wring out of his system later, “I’ve wanted to date you since October of last year. God, I- can I- will you have me?”
Kieran blushes with the violence and carnage of a train wreck. Jayce’s eyes are scrunched shut, as if in disbelief at what he just said, hands curled into involuntary fists against the counter. His expression is somewhere between embarrassment and fervently intense pain. Kieran, wholly detached from his being at this point and trying desperately to reel himself back in, wills himself to speak.
“Jayce, you are-” He starts, and then abruptly stops, because Jayce bolts from the counter with the finesse of a madman.
“JAYCE YOU MOTHERFUCKER,” Kieran shouts between heaving breaths of air, sprinting like his life depends on it, “COME THE FUCK BACK HERE.”
Jayce, the bastard, is inexplicably still ahead of him despite Kieran’s standing as the ace of the fucking baseball team. He’s running like a demon straight out of hell, arms whipping back and forth with enough force to cleave them clean off. Kieran takes brief solace in the fact that he at least sounds frantically winded. “ARE YOU,” a gulp, “INSANE, YOU’RE, GOING TO KILL ME!”
“C’MERE AND GET IT OVER WITH THEN!” They’re both well away from the banquet venue at this point, the dewed grass whipping against their ankles as they hurtle through a nearby field for absolutely no sensible reason.
“I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE!” Jayce wails, and hysteria rises like yeast in Kieran’s chest, except he scarcely has the breath to laugh. He funnels all his energy into running instead, mind zeroed in on reaching the limits of his physicality, all in order to catch up to the scrawniest son of a bitch he’s ever met. It works, because suddenly he’s crashed into another mass. They sprawl messily onto the grass, limbs flinging in every other direction.
