Author's Note: So, Josephine this morning planted this idea in my head. Write Brad/Mike slash exploring their sexuality when they were just sweet 16. I was like, hmm, I wonder if I could do that. It has a notable lack of Chester in it, it could be kinda difficult. But I tried, and it's taken me all day (stupid lack of Chester is to blame), but I have written... something? I dunno how good it is, or how truly awful. But I wrote it. If you enjoy it, leave a review. If you don't, still leave a review and tell me that I suck. Everyone else, just enjoy the show, right? I tried for cliched and sweet, but instead you got FyrMaiden angst. I have no defence or excuse. Gothic fretwork is my forte...

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We have been friends for how long?

I can’t remember exact dates. Exact dates are not my natural forte. I’m not a dictionary or a diary; I am not a wall calendar. I know that I have known him for a while now and that he has always been there for me. I have always felt myself to be his polar opposite, but that didn’t seem to matter too much when we were kids and it matters less now that we are grown ups. We always managed to share a laugh, a joke. We were a secular partnership, an exclusive club. We were closer than mere friends. We shared with one another our hopes and our dreams…

When we were split apart to go to college, he would ring me in tears to tell me how hard it was for him. I was a rock for him, stone. I listened and whilst it tore me apart to hear him tell me how much it hurt to have random strangers laying into his work with tools made of words, I never let him know. I told him that I knew he was stronger than this, I told him that no matter what people said we both knew that he was a talented person… He would ask me how my course was going, and I told him about a new friend I had made. He told me about his friends. He told me he missed me and that he dreamt of me. I smiled at his words and told him casually that I loved him…

Love…

When did love enter into this?

We were… I don’t remember, I don’t suppose it matters. We were in high school, I think. Our exclusive gang of two was eating lunch. He glanced at me with that mischievous grin on his face, a big smile that makes his eyes light up, and he leant back on his elbows. He stared up at the cloudless sky and squinted. I remember the stupid details. It was late June. The grass was dry. The endless babble of people as they walked past completely passed over us. It was just the two of us – him and me. The rest of the school might as well not have existed. He sat up slowly and pushed his hair – can you imagine him with a centre parting? – out of his eyes. He gazed at me and chewed his bottom lip. He grabbed his bag and hugged it against his chest as he tried to form a sentence that just would not leave his mouth.

‘Mike…?’ I asked and he glanced at me, frowning.

‘Huh?’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Something’s changed,’ he murmured, hauling himself to his feet.

And that was how it began. Late June – he was 16 (I remember this now) and I was 15. He didn’t give me a chance to respond before he was heading back inside again.

He had sport last period on a Friday. He had this weird thing about having to shower with other guys. Last period on a Friday, he never did. He skulked in corners and out of the way until the locker room had emptied so that he could be completely alone. If he wasn’t waiting for me, I knew where he would be. I pushed open the door and poked my head around it, listening for the sound of water running. His words raced around in my mind like blow flies.

‘What do you mean, something’s changed?’ I asked, sitting down on a bench and laying my bag and my books down beside me. I listened to the thunder of water against tiles and Mike’s total silence for a minute, two minutes, onwards. ‘Mike?’

His head appeared around the corner and slowly his whole body, his pristine white towel tied around his waist as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it,’ he whispered and I gazed at him. I tried to meet his eyes, but they kept slipping away from mine and my eyes skittered across the half formed muscles of his abdomen. He looked so young, in retrospect, but he seemed so perfect to me then. He was all awkward angles and lanky, disproportionate lengths but he just seemed so wonderful, so exquisite that I never wanted to let him out of my sight.

I shrugged at him, noncommittal and unable to trust my voice not to waver. ‘I guess,’ I mumbled, staring at the water pooling around his feet. I watched his feet pad away towards his bags in the corner of the room. I turned to face him and found him staring back at me.

‘You guess? Brad, this isn’t…’

‘…Isn’t right,’ I whispered and he nodded. I knew what he meant. He was my best friend and that was all. Outside of the worst kind of adult romance novel, you don’t just fall in love with your best friend. It’s not that simple. It can’t be that simple or everyone would do it.

‘So you have felt something?’

I nodded slowly and slung my bag onto my back. ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed. We’re not… I guess we’re a little different to other kids.’

‘A little different…? Who the hell are you kidding?’

He seemed unnecessarily harsh in my eyes for that instant and I moved away from him. I pressed my books to my chest as a barrier between myself and him, and I studied myself as I stared at the floor. Scared, I realised – I was so scared. Scared of everything, yes, but primarily I was terrified of losing him. He was not the only friend I had. I knew plenty of people, friends who shared my music (which Mike never did – there was no winning, he’d rather listen to Public Enemy than anything I suggested) and my other interests. I knew so many people, he could not be everything in my life. And yet as I studied myself and my feelings in the damp, musty surroundings of the locker room, I knew that without Mike, nothing would ever have much point again. He was right. Something had changed irreversibly between us and there was no turning back.

I said nothing. I simply stared at the floor as I listened to his clothes glide against his skin and the strap of his bag graze across his shirt. Body spray hung on the air in a fine mist and I could feel his eyes on me.

‘Brad?’

‘No one,’ I whispered, answering his earlier question finally. ‘I am kidding nobody. But there’s no turning back now, is there?’

I risked glancing at him. I expected to see revulsion stamped on his face but there was only pity and a rapidly fading adolescent confusion. ‘No turning back,’ he whispered and covered his face with his hands.

When did I first tell Mike that I loved him?

It must have been two months later at least. It must have been August. We had never really spoken about what had happened in the locker room, the unveiling of that secret, that what we felt for one another was something more than mere friendship. We let it slide and pretended we were normal kids. We pretended the hardest for one another, because neither one of us wanted to be the first to give up and admit that we were almost lovers without the touching.

It was August. We were indoors because uncharacteristic rain beat down upon the roof like thunder. The day was still warm, but that did not mean that the rain was not wet. We were in Mike’s bedroom lying flat out on his bed. He had gotten his mom’s copy of Love Story and we were watching that on the VCR in his bedroom. He had, and continues to have, the weirdest thing for that movie. By the time Ali MacGraw dies, Mike is in tears and I can’t tell you how many times he must have seen it now. What does she die of? I can’t remember. Mike would be able to tell you without missing a beat. All I know is that at the moment where they are in that hospital, Mike curled himself up against my chest and quoted Ryan O’Neal at me. ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’

‘Pardon?’

‘What?’ He turned those eyes on my face and a smile etched itself on his lips. I grinned back at him, feeling infinitely young and so afraid. Love is a huge word and its implications vast.

Times change, don’t they? Now he curls up against me and quotes White Oleander. Love humiliates you. I can honestly say he scares me when he says that, but he says humiliation is worth it, that the degradation is worth it to be loved by me. Humiliation? I whisper, and he nods. Mhm, you can see the pity in people’s eyes, Brad, because we’re gay. I smack his hands now and kiss his lips, brushing away the tears that glitter on his cheeks still, ten or more years later. Pity? It’s not pity, it’s envy. He nods and smiles before patting my hand reassuringly. Of course it is, my bad.

August, lying on his bed, his head pillowed against my chest and I ran my fingers tenderly though his hair. He turned those eyes on my face, those fat tears pooling in the black depths. ‘I love you,’ I whispered without even pausing to think.

‘Love you too,’ he murmured sleepily.

And as his eyes closed, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d really heard or whether his mind was still awash with the sappiness of Love Story. I continued to stroke his hair and his arms wrapped around me. His body, young, supple and beautiful, pressed against me, his warmth seeping into mine until I snuggled down against him. When I awoke, a cover had been pulled across us and I have never found out by whom.

When did love become real? When did it cease to be a terrifying four letter word and start to be something I understood as palpable?

It was… my birthday. I had a party and Mike stayed the night at my house when everybody else had left. He sat beside me on the sofa and sipped on a Coke he found in the fridge. I glanced at him and he smiled exhaustedly. He tucked his knees up under his chin and pressed the small of his back against the arm. I turned to face him and did the same with my back, leaving a seat between us as we stared at one another. We had played with the word love, on and off, but it had rarely meant as much as it had the first time we used it. Why was this day so much more important?

I was a year older. We were on the same metaphorical page and Mike was so close to turning seventeen. I felt like he was forgetting me, leaving me behind, growing up so much faster than I was. I could not have known or imagined that he felt I was holding back from him. I felt like I was giving him everything I could. I had accepted we were more than friends, I had told him that I loved him. I didn’t know what else I could give him to satisfy him.

He moved across the sofa towards me and caught his lip between his teeth. ‘I have something,’ he whispered. ‘A gift…’

I frowned. ‘You already gave me…’

And he stopped me with a kiss that only brushed my lips but my eyes snap closed, my words stopped flowing.

‘Something more than a present,’ he whispered as he kissed me once more. ‘I have me.’

As his lips caught mine properly, my hand snaked around his neck and suddenly, being with Mike felt natural. To have him pressed against me, kissing me – it felt like there should be no place in the world this magical again, nothing so perfect.

I reiterate, we were sixteen years old sitting on my parents’ couch on my birthday. I had my arms around his neck and he felt solid, unshakeable. He was everything I dreamt about and then a little bit more. He was beautiful in my eyes, filling my senses. And he used that word, that tired cliché. ‘I love you, Brad,’ he whispered against my ear. I smiled softly and nodded, catching his soft face between my rough palms.

‘I love you more,’ because I had to avoid the trap of the thoughtless, emotionless I love you too. Did anything ever seem more crass? He smiled again and pressed his forehead against mine.

‘I don’t want to lose you…’

And that… seriously this time, that is how we began. Six simple words but they tugged at something inside of me, because I knew that I couldn’t lose him either.

And he spoke eight words to me tonight as we sat on our veranda watching the sun sink in the Pacific. ‘I still don’t want to lose you, Brad,’ he murmured, squeezing my hand. I turned my head to face him and lay a delicate, butterfly kiss on his cheek.

‘Not a chance,’ I whispered, and we listened to the wind as it blew through the house…

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End Notes: Did you see? I was kind enough to credit you with the intelligence to know this is fiction. Disclaimer in my bio if you care that much, meh. I haven't read this through, if it sucks, I still claim copyright, capiche? Pfft. I suck like Hoover after its been serviced...