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Gordie’s sixteen when he finally decides to acknowledge that something is lastingly wrong with him. He’s been vaguely aware for about a year, somewhere in the back of his mind, but he hasn’t had to deal with it, and so he hasn’t dealt with it.
He’s kind of half-normal, and maybe that’s the issue. Maybe if he was all the way wrong, it’d be easier. He likes girls, and that part’s simple, but it doesn’t solve the rest of it.
The rest of it is that the problem is Chris, which he feels shitty about even thinking to himself, because he’s the one person who doesn’t see Chris as a problem. He could ignore anything he might notice a little too much about any other guy in the world. There isn’t much he likes about most of their personalities, so if something else catches his eye, it doesn’t really feel like it means anything, or doesn’t feel like it has to mean anything.
The problem starts with the way he has become very, very aware of Chris’ proximity, and he’s frequently in proximity. If they only saw each other in class it might be survivable, but it’s all the time: walking between classes, during most lunches, usually at least parts of weekends, and, most deadly, the almost-daily study sessions they’ve been having since junior high. These last ones have been the hardest to stand, Chris at his desk or on his bed or sometimes on the floor, depending on what they’re working on and how much space they need, but always within arm’s reach.
There are things Gordie’s always been aware of about Chris. He’s an easy, steady presence, he’s so much smarter than he and everyone else around him give him credit for, and he listens. He listens in a way that only Denny had ever matched, and sometimes when Gordie’s parents are in one of their more distant phases (it’s worse around Denny’s birthday and the day he died, although holidays or talk of their friends’ children’s college plans or the start of football season sometimes do it too), he thinks he might just disappear entirely if it weren’t for the way Chris pays attention to him.
These are all things he’s always known from the first point he’d ever really learned to quantify what he liked about another human being. They’ve been friends for a decade. If he finds himself thinking about those things a little bit differently now, that still doesn’t mean it’s crossed some kind of boundary. Even the fact that he doesn’t like the way a couple of the girls in their history class look at Chris is defensible; he doesn’t think they even like him for the right reasons, thinks they’re mostly into the odd kind of status that comes from being with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks when that’s not really who Chris actually is. And besides, he doesn’t want anything to come between them. Hypocritical, maybe, given that he’d dated a girl long enough to go to homecoming with her, but still excusable.
Maybe it’s not even entirely weird to notice your best friend getting handsome as he’s growing into himself. Gordie’s not blind. But there’s probably a certain amount of times he can find himself staring at the angles of that best friend’s hands and the line of his jaw, the way he moves and the habit he’s developed of running the edge of his thumb over his bottom lip. Probably only so many times he can wonder, even in a distant, analytical way, what it might be like to kiss him. No matter how quickly he brushes off the thought of joining him in the bed he’s sprawled out on as they discuss the structure of an English composition, experiences a phantom fleeting sensation of pressing up against the lines of him, that thought still existed in the first place. He’s not supposed to want anything to come of this. Maybe he doesn’t, really. Maybe he does.
He thinks he knows something about Chris. He’s not sure if Chris wants him to know or if he doesn’t.
It’s not what he looks at, it’s what he looks away from. He doesn’t watch girls the way most guys their age do, but he doesn’t really turn away either. It’s only the guys he turns away from.
It’s subtle, and probably no one else would notice, but Gordie knows the weight of that gaze like no one else, and the way it somehow feels heavier when it shifts away. It’s also easier to notice when he does it to Gordie most of all. It would be so easy to write it off as him moving on, not really wanting to engage anymore the way he did when they were kids. When he first sees it, that’s kind of what he figures, as much as the thought makes him feel like his bones have been filled with lead. But Chris keeps coming back, keeps seeking him out, keeps listening the same as he always has, and it doesn’t just feel like half-willing indulgence. He just breaks eye contact after about a second every time he even makes it to that point at all. If he’d always been like that, it’d be one thing, but it’s such a change from the way things used to be that it’s hard not to focus on it.
He shouldn’t assume anything. It’s not right to assume, not with everything that carries with it. It’s just that there are only so many possible answers, and he’s running out of them.
If he’s correct, he should feel repulsed by both of them, probably. He’s not entirely sure he doesn’t. He feels like the tiny motor they’d made in physics class a couple months ago: battery, magnets, coiled-together wire, attracting and repelling and attracting and repelling until it all blurs together into a barely-controlled spin. He’s not right, neither of them have ever been right, but there’s a difference between a little bit odd and this.
It all presses down, his own wrongness and the things he thinks Chris might be hiding, and the weight hidden in this odd distance, and finally, Gordie snaps under it.
It’s the first nice day in a while, so they’ve brought their books outside in hopes that the sunlight will restore some of the will to live that their math test tomorrow is sapping, but when their hands accidentally brush as Gordie reaches for a notes page and Chris practically flinches, he hits a breaking point.
“You’re being weird, Chris.”
“So?”
“So stop being weird.”
Chris looks at him, and then away. He always looks away, and Gordie just wants him to stop, because Chris is the only person who sees him at all, and he’s not sure he can live without that.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I just want—” Gordie starts, and then doesn’t know how to continue, because “I just want you to look at me” sounds fucking pathetic. “Never mind,” he says instead, and he scrambles to his feet, shoving his textbook and notebook and the couple free-floating pages into a pile that he snatches up.
“Gordie, wait,” Chris says, getting up to follow him, but the look Gordie gives him at least temporarily pins him in place. It’s not fair to leave him without answers like this, not Chris’ fault that everything he wants to say would sound childish or petty or far, far, too vulnerable out loud, and it’s not fair when he knows Chris can’t bear to have the people he cares about mad at him, but sometimes he’s not good enough for fair. Sometimes he just has to get away from a feeling he's too familiar with in a shade he’d never expected. He leaves Chris standing there in the sunlight, and the moment he’s out of sight, he wants to throw up. That feeling doesn’t go away.
It’s not fair to say Chris ignores him the next day, because you have to acknowledge someone in order to avoid them. It’s something other than complete dismissal, at least, but it’s still pretty fucking miserable, especially when Gordie only really has himself to blame. He thinks he knows what Chris is trying to deal with. He thinks he knows all the reasons it scares him, and it’s not his fault that Gordie’s too fucked up to tolerate it.
He finally catches up with him at the end of the school day, after Chris had left every class they shared the moment the bell had rung and vanished off to God knows where during lunch.
“I’m sorry,” he says, rushing to get the words out before Chris can disappear into the stream of other students, and when Chris says, “It’s fine,” it doesn’t sound angry, but Gordie can’t tell what it does sound like. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. He doesn’t think it’s only their inseparability that makes Chris easy to read most of the time, but even if it is, he’s not used to being so unable to tell exactly what he’s thinking.
“Can we go talk somewhere else?” he asks, and Chris shakes his head.
“I have to get home,” he says, which is at least easily decipherable in that they both know it’s bullshit, but Gordie lets him go. He’s not sure what he could say around so many other people that would convince Chris to stay. He goes home, and he half-asses his way through his homework, and then he mostly just stares at his ceiling, a little bit scraped out and all the more off-balance for the missing pieces.
Chris continues to avoid him for the next couple days, a thing Gordie can’t figure out how to take well, and both the absence and the resulting moodiness he can’t shake are visible enough that one of Gordie’s other friends (who doesn’t even particularly like hanging out when Chris is also around) asks if they’ve fought.
Gordie says, “Sort of. It’s complicated,” because he’s not going to say, “I accidentally kind of yelled at him because I didn’t like the way he was keeping his secrets, and now he probably thinks it’s the secrets themselves that are the problem, and it’s hard to fix any of that when he’s running away from me.”
It’s not the secrets. It should be. It’s not.
He goes home after school, and he tries to give Chris the space he seems to want, but there’s a point at which he fails. He eats dinner with his parents, and he gives them a vague excuse, and he sets off.
Chris has admitted that he’s taken to haunting their old treehouse some nights when he doesn’t want to go home earlier than he absolutely has to; it’s not often anymore, but it’s sometimes. Kids younger than them sometimes use it during the day now that even Teddy and Vern have mostly given it up, but they must have parents who give a shit if they come home on time. He goes there first, because he’s pretty sure he knows Chris well enough to know that he’ll want both a place to hide and a place to remember the way things used to make sense.
He catches a hint of cigarette smoke before he even reaches the bottom of the ladder but there’s no other noise accompanying it; there’s no radio on, or sound of kids talking or playing cards, or whatever shit they get up to now. It’s almost definitely one person up there alone, so he decides to take his chances.
He climbs up and knocks in the old, familiar pattern, and after a stretched-out moment of waiting, Chris’ voice says, “You can come up.”
Gordie does, emerging into the darkening space to find Chris on one of the bench seats, contemplating a lit cigarette between his fingers. Gordie sits down next to him, close enough that their shoulders touch, and he feels Chris’ muscles begin to shift like he’s going to push himself further away, like he’s going to put space between them that Gordie won’t be able to stand, but he doesn’t.
They sit in silence for a long, long moment. Gordie thinks about apologizing again, but he’s already done it once and it hadn’t gotten them anywhere, had maybe even worsened the distance when he hadn’t been able to categorize the response, so he just stays quiet.
Chris takes a drag from the cigarette, and then, after a second of uncertainty, he offers it to Gordie. There’s a question in it. Gordie takes it, their hands brushing, and brings it to his lips. He exhales the smoke and hands it back, and finally, Chris speaks.
“I think there’s something wrong with me, man,” he says softly, back to staring at the floor.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious,” Gordie says, and it comes out a little sharper than he’d intended. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“You only think that because—” Chris cuts himself off, but Gordie finishes the sentence.
“Because there’s something wrong with me too? Yeah. Maybe there is.” And maybe it’s not even what Chris had meant to say, but it’s the truth. It’s the best he can do.
Chris turns to look at him, and this time when he goes to turn away, Gordie doesn’t let him. He raises a hand to Chris’ cheek, keeping him there, half a breath away. For a second, there is only Chris’ face under his fingertips and the sound of his own heartbeat, louder than he’s ever heard it in his life.
He’s not sure who moves first. He thinks maybe it’s neither of them and both of them, thinks this moment would have shattered if what they wanted was even a little bit different or if they were slightly out of sync. They aren’t. When it matters most, they never really are. They meet in the center, and Gordie tips his head a little and brings his lips to Chris’.
The angle’s weird, and neither of them really know enough about what they’re doing to be good at it. He’s pretty sure this is Chris’ first kiss, or at least the first one that’s honest. None of that really matters, somehow. None of it stops the flicker in his lungs and in the space between, something warm, something bright.
They break just barely apart after a moment, foreheads pressed together, so close that he can hear the way Chris can’t quite get his breath to steady out. He thinks he could spend a lot of time chasing that sound.
“This is a terrible idea,” Chris says, and the hesitation in his voice sounds real, but when he pulls back it’s only by an inch or so, and he’s looking Gordie in the eyes for the first time in months. The sun has gone down enough that it’s hard to make out any details, blue irises washed out in the grey half-light, but it doesn’t really matter. He knows Chris’ face better than he knows his own.
It’s all almost enough to keep him from reality, but only almost. “I know.”
“If anyone finds out—”
“I know, Chris. I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’d have to be to not know it’s dangerous. And if you want to pretend none of this ever happened because of that, fine, but don’t try to make my decision for me.”
Chris hesitates again, and Gordie waits, because as much as Chris is right about this not being safe for either of them, he’s under no illusions about which of them stands to be in more danger, but also because Chris has waited a long time for him to catch up with his feelings. It seems like this is the least he can do.
Finally, Chris shakes his head. “I don’t want that.”
He leans back in, and Gordie kisses him again. This time the thing that sparks to life in his chest is unmistakably hungry, something that wants and wants and wants. The first kiss had been experimental, a little unsteady. This feels like, if he gives it enough air, it could devour them both if he lets it. He wants to let it.
They are right and wrong and right and wrong, magnetic field and electric current, lost together in the rotation. Maybe they’ll be able to spin forever.