Chapter Text
Ray didn’t know it was possible to fall in love with the back of someone’s head until he was twelve and sat down in History class on the first day of school. In front of him sat a boy with a head full of curls that looped in delicate swirls all the way down to the back of a neck littered with freckles. Ray had never seen this kid before. Or at least, he had never seen the back of this kid’s head before.
The bell rang, signaling the beginning of class, and the teacher began roll call. She didn’t even make it halfway through the list before she spoke his name:
Michael Jones.
It was the most beautiful name Ray had ever heard in his life. When Michael raised his hand and said “present” with the voice of a goddamn angel, Ray gripped his pencil so hard it nearly splintered between his fingers and he felt his face heat up. He was so focused on replaying the sound of that voice in his head over and over again that he nearly missed hearing the teacher call his own name. Ray answered quickly and his own voice cracked terribly, but the snickers of his classmates didn’t even faze him because Ray was too busy planning out how to start a conversation with Michael Jones.
Now, Ray was not known for his tact. At all. He was quiet for the most part, but once you got to know him, got past that initial shy barrier, the kid became a real chatterbox. And while Ray’s mother called him “plainspoken” while she patted his head and told him to think before he spoke, everyone else called him what he was: annoying. And Michael was about to learn that firsthand.
The first time Ray spoke to Michael was on the third day of class when they were paired up together to work on an inane worksheet the teacher had assigned. Ray didn’t even look at the paper in front of him, he propped his chin in his hands, bit back a sigh and said “hi”. He had been working on the perfect opening line for the better part of fifteen minutes and that was the best he had come up with. He thought it was brilliant.
Michael just said hi back and immediately set to work on their assignment.
Ray took a moment to watch the way Michael’s curls fell over his eyes and wondered what color their children’s hair would be.
“I’m Ray,” he said, still staring dreamily at his partner’s hunched form.
Michael grunted and scribbled something on his paper, “Michael.” He sat up straight and scratched his head with the eraser end of his pencil, “Hey, you got an answer for number 4?” His eyes were still on the sheet in front of him and Ray wanted to count the frown lines on his face.
“Nope,” Ray hadn’t even started his worksheet yet. He didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing because he had stopped paying attention after he learned he was being partnered with the greatest boy in the world. “Wanna hear something cool though?”
Michael finally looked up and Ray tried not to drown in his gaze, “Depends, is it more interesting than this shit?”
Ray nodded. He’d do anything to keep those beautiful eyes focused on him. So Ray started talking. He told Michael about the time he tried to jump from the fire escape outside of his bedroom window to the balcony next door only to screw it up and break his elbow so bad that the bone jutted out at a weird angle. Ray told him about how they had to go to the ER and when the doctor set his arm, he didn’t even cry. That was a big fat lie because Ray definitely screamed for a good twenty minutes, but what was a little white lie when Michael’s face lit up the way it did as he asked to see the scar?
The bell rang to signal the end of class and they got no work done but Ray figured it was worth it. He had gotten to talk to Michael Jones and had even made the guy laugh, and that was worth more than some dumb classwork grade.
After that conversation, Ray tried to talk to Michael every chance he got. He was probably being really obnoxious about it, always in Michael’s face and telling him elaborate stories that may or may not have been true, but it was just because he wanted Michael to think he was cool, to think that Ray was worth his time.
When Ray wasn’t talking to Michael, he was talking to other people about Michael. It had gotten to the point that his family and his friends kept telling him to shut up about it as they tried to change the subject.
“Didn’t anything else happen today, Ray?” His mother would ask with a strained smile, “Something…not about Michael?” Ray would put a hand to his chin and think about it, actually think about it, but his efforts would come up nil. Anything that happened that day was absolutely nothing compared to Michael.
“So when are you guys getting married?” Miles giggled from behind his book once while they were supposed to be studying in the library. “Spring, right? Am I invited?” Ray threw his highlighter at Miles’s head and told him to shut up. They would have a fall wedding, obviously.
“Can’t we talk about something else for once?” Kerry whined during lunch one afternoon. He made a volcano out of his mashed potatoes and watched peas and gravy roll down the sides. “Can’t lunchtime be a Michael-free zone or something?” There was no such thing as a Michael-free zone as far as Ray was concerned. He had a great big crush on the guy and he would obsess over him however he so chose.
Ray drew hearts on the front of his trapper keeper. He scribbled their initials in the margins of his papers. He wrote Michael’s name in bubble letters and borrowed Barbara’s gel pens to make the whole thing as bright and happy as Michael made him feel. He wrote a poem. Well, he wrote several poems, but there was one that was his favorite. The one that compared Michael’s freckles to stars and spanned the two pages where his math notes should have been.
Ray even dreamed about Michael. He daydreamed about him in every other class besides the one they had together – the one time when conversations became less about Michael and more about how Ray could impress Michael – and the daydreams sometimes got…intense. There was one scenario where Ray was Batman and Michael was Superman that he was particularly fond of and would replay in his head constantly. Thinking about Michael in spandex was way more interesting than learning about cognates and introduction paragraphs.
Ray once spent an entire night trying to smash their names together in some sort of cute portmanteau, but the results were hardly successful. It was really difficult when Ray’s first name was only three letters. He eventually settled on scrawling “Ray Narvaez Jones” in scratchy handwriting on a blank page in his notebook. He liked the way it looked. His initials would still be the same, but now the “J” stood for something cooler, something better. He wrote the name a few more times for good measure. He drew a heart where the “o” was meant to be.
Yeah, definitely better.
He penned in a few more hearts and, after rifling through his desk and finding some stray markers, decorated every inch of white space on the page. He went to bed that night with a smile on his face and Technicolor dreams of perfect relationships and happy endings.
Ray completely forgot about the doodles the next day; he had spent so many days and nights scribbling on spare pages that the actions sort of blurred together. His own love-induced forgetfulness came back to bite him in the butt when he lent his notebook to a classmate to compare notes.
They were standing in the hall when the guy, Kevin, flipped to the page that Ray spent so hard working on the previous night. Bright red hearts and colorful block letters beamed up from the paper. Kevin stared at the page for a while with a weird look while Ray internally panicked. He thought about reaching out and snatching the book away, laughing it off as some joke, but his hands wouldn’t move and his mouth didn’t work.
“Uh,” He tried.
“The hell is this?” The kid asked, looking up at Ray.
Ray was wide eyed and suddenly realized that his crush on Michael was seconds away from getting him beaten up in the hallway. He reached for the notebook, “It’s nothing, give it back.” Kevin lifted the book out of his reach and damn puberty for taking its sweet time when it came to Ray. He leaned up on his toes and tried to go for the notebook again, “Give it back, man. If you don’t want to use my notes, fine. Just give it back.”
Kevin placed his hand on Ray’s forehead and shoved him aside. Ray stumbled back. He readjusted his hold on the books in his arms and glared. The boy was flipping through the other pages of the notebook and, oh God no, Ray really hadn’t planned for this. It was when he got to the last few pages that Kevin’s eyes lit up like he’d won the lottery.
“Oh check this out! Is this poetry? Oh shit, little Ray’s got the hots for the Jones kid!”
And then he started reading Ray’s writing aloud and it was probably the worst moment of Ray’s young life. “Dude, stop! Give it back!” Ray moved for the notebook again.
He didn’t even know when Kevin’s friends flanked him, but Ray’s books were knocked out of his arms as he was shoved against a wall. Pinned by two kids nearly twice his size, he could only watch on in horror as his shitty poetic about his huge raging boner for Michael Vincent Jones was being read in a weird falsetto voice in the middle of the hallway.
“With a voice like honey and a laugh just as sweet, I swear I hear bells chime whenever he speaks,” Kevin swooned and sighed dreamily before he continued reading, “He's a clear summer night in the middle of June, when the world falls silent to watch beauty bloom.”
Ray was trying not to cry, because crying would only make it worse, but his voice cracked every time he yelled at Kevin to stop.
Kevin plowed on, wicked smile spreading across his face as he moved on to the next stanza, “Sometimes I wonder in the middle of the night, how his bright red lips would feel against mine.”
It was right before he reached the juicy part – the verse about trembling hands and heated breaths – that everything stopped. The notebook was plucked from Kevin’s hands and the recital abruptly ended. Kevin stared at his now empty hands, blinked once, twice before looking around to figure out what just happened.
Michael was standing there with Ray’s notebook and gave Kevin a stern look. “What the fuck are you doing, Kev? Bullying some kid?” Kevin stood there open-mouthed and Michael didn’t wait for an answer as he flipped through the notebook. Ray’s face couldn’t possibly get any redder. When Michael got to the page with the hearts and the names, he tilted his head and looked up at Ray. He walked over, closing the notebook with a snap. “Ray, right? You sit behind me in History?” Ray felt himself being lowered to the ground as the two bullies let go. He nodded slowly. Michael smiled and angels sang. He handed Ray his notebook back. “You’re the Chatty Cathy with the shitton of stories.”
Ray nodded again and accepted the notebook. It was warm where Michael’s fingers were. Michael bent down and began to pick up the scattered books. “I can walk you to homeroom so these assholes leave you alone.” He picked up the last book with a grunt, shifted them in his arms, and looked at Ray with a raised eyebrow.
Ray could only nod once more; damn his tongue for quitting on him now. They walked to Ray’s classroom and nothing felt real because Michael Jones was walking Ray to class and carrying his books for him and this would have been so much more perfect if Michael hadn’t seen the tangible embarrassment scrawled across the pages of Ray’s notebook.
When they arrived at the correct room, Michael handed Ray his books back. Ray took them with fumbling hands. Michael leaned against the doorway and crossed his arms. His face was serious and Ray feared that his heart was about to be broken.
“Look,” Michael started and, yep, that was the sound of glass shattering in Ray’s ears, “You’re a sweet kid. Really. But I don’t really…swing that way. So, uh,” Ray pushed up his glasses, hands shaking so badly that he accidentally rubbed a greasy finger to the lens. If Michael didn’t ever want to talk to him, he would totally understand. Michael sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, “We could still be friends though I guess.”
Ray nearly dropped his books right then and there. Surely he wasn’t hearing that right. “You serious?”
Michael shrugged. He pushed himself off the wall, “Yeah, I mean as long as you just cut that out,” he gestured to the notebook, “We’re cool.”
Ray nodded furiously; his smudged glasses nearly fell off his face. He could do that. That was small potatoes to being able to call Michael a friend. Yeah. He could do that. No problem.
Michael chuckled and ruffled Ray’s hair. Ray was sure his heart was going to burst right out of his chest. “Cool. See you in class then.”
Ray stood in the doorway, books pulled close to his chest and bells ringing in his ears. Michael Jones was his friend, and while that wasn’t as good as husband, it was a start.
That afternoon in History, Michael actually turned around and initiated a conversation with Ray. It was the highlight of Ray’s week and totally made up for that mess of a morning. Ray didn’t even remember what the conversation was about, he was too busy watching Michael’s rosy lips curve into a smile as he talked.
Later, when Ray got home, he ripped out every heart riddled and initials strewn page from his school notebooks and shoved them all in a box. The notebooks dedicated to his poetry got thrown in right along with them. Every trace of his raging crush on Michael Jones was stuffed into a small cardboard box that Ray taped up and shoved under his bed. Yeah it sucked that he would probably never get to kiss Michael, but being his friend was going to be so much better because at least he talked to Ray with something resembling enthusiasm now. One day the fluttering in his chest would stop, right?
The house phone rang just as Ray crawled out from under his bed, the box crammed in some faraway corner. His mother called him into the kitchen; the phone was for him. It was Michael. Ray raced to the kitchen and scrambled to answer it, nearly barreling his mother over in the process. She shook her head with a smile as he pressed the receiver to his ear.
“Hello?” He hoped he didn’t sound too out of breath.
“Hey, Ray?” Michael sounded nervous, like he wasn’t sure he had the right number. Ray hadn’t thought Michael was serious when he had asked for his phone number after class. “You free on Friday?”
Ray whirled around and looked at the calendar on the fridge. Friday was wide open, not a single note jotted on the day. “Yeah. Why?”
“Wanna come to my place and play video games? You said you game right?”
Ray nodded, forgetting that Michael couldn’t see him, “Yeah!” He winced and realized he should probably play it cool. He twirled the phone cord around his fingers. “Yes, I mean. Yes to both. Gaming’s cool. Gaming sounds good.”
“Cool,” Michael said.
“Cool,” Ray repeated.
They let the static silence settle between them and Ray counted Michael’s breaths. He spun in a circle and looked at the clock, biting his lip. He really didn’t want to hang up, but he did have homework to get to.
Michael seemed to be reading his mind and spoke up first. “Well, I’ve got shit to do. See you later I guess.”
“Yeah,” Ray was hopelessly tangled in the phone cord at this point but he didn’t care because he was going to play video games with Michael on Friday and they were friends. “Yeah. See ya.”
When the line went dead, Ray let the dial tone drone in his ear and fought down the absolute elation that threatened to bubble up. This was the start of something beautiful. Maybe not exactly what he wanted, but it was sure to be something pretty fucking fantastic. Friendships were good. Friendships were great. Crushes were temporary for the most part anyway.
It turned out Michael only lived a few blocks down the road from Ray. His house was nice, an idyllic home with a driveway and a porch and even a flower garden out front, but Ray didn’t get a chance to really admire it before he was dragged into the living room by Michael. They spent the rest of the afternoon talking about pointless stuff and playing some violent game that Ray’s mother would have never approved of. Michael was even a decent gamer when Ray didn’t try too hard. They had pizza for dinner, stuffing slices in their mouths in between loading screens and lag. They laughed about a lot of things, dumb shit that only middle school boys really found funny, and as the night moved on Michael slowly became less of a perfect, unattainable romantic conquest and more of a dorky boy with a terrible sense of humor and the best laugh in the world. Ray might have still had to fight for control over his beating heart a few times throughout the night, but it was a start.
He had fun, Ray decided when the sun had set and he was sitting on the porch waiting for his mother to pick him up. He had fun and was pretty hopeful about his newfound friendship.
It only took two weeks for the crush to fade out. Michael made a better friend than he would a boyfriend anyway. Plus Ray liked the way Michael laughed at his jokes too much to ruin what they had going for them.
The months passed by. Friday rolled around again and Ray found himself in Michael’s living room like he had every Friday since their first game night. It was comfortable, what he and Michael had, and when Michael punched Ray in the arm after losing yet another match it was all in good fun and Ray shoved Michael’s shoulder while calling him a sore loser.
It was the beginning of the weekend, the beginning of something great and Ray had pretty much forgotten about the cardboard box stuffed with bygone infatuation gathering dust somewhere under his bed.