"You read Tuesdays with Morrie?" Jon smacks Cory's shoulder lightly, and despite the Vitruvian sculpture of their melded lips still engraved on his mind, Lee can't see them as anything other than best friends. Maybe it's the smokescreen of his own obliviousness, dancing in front of his blind eyes like a charcoal veil. Or maybe they're just better at hiding things than Lee could ever be. "Dude, we've got to keep him. He read freaking Tuesdays with Morrie."

After accidentally walking in on their romance movie recreation yesterday, Lee had honestly expected them to avoid him like the plague. What he hadn't anticipated was the way Jon McArthur had stopped in front of his table, all crooked glasses and outstretched palms and soft, soft smiles, with a hopelessly genuine, "Want to sit with us at lunch?" and he'd wondered if he should have realised that Jon is actually really fucking cute a whole lot longer ago.

(Lee knows he's not for sale---not even in the display case anymore---but he likes to look. It makes him feel better about the fact that he's ridiculously single, lonely as fuck, and crushes on a stone-faced enforcer with a massive stick up his ass.)

"Yeah." Lee laughs, tossing his hair back with a cheeky grin. "Mom is---" was "---an English teacher. It was assigned reading for her eleventh graders. She made me read it too."

"No way," Jon says, eyes wide behind his blocky lenses. "How old were you?"

Lee shrugs as casually as possible, but he knows the pride swelling up in his chest's written all over his face. "Thirteen, maybe? Give or take a year."

"You're so clever," his mother had cooed, all whisky-dripping lips and amber-quartz eyes, dotting kisses over Lee's forehead as he'd carefully enunciated every hard word. He'd run his nails over the red borders of the cover and let his hands indent the soft white pages. An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson, the text on the front had declared, and Lee had never quite been able to figure out what life's grand, elusive, greatest lesson was, because his mother had left before she'd been able to teach it to him."My darling, clever boy."

(Lee hates how he can remember the tone of her voice and the flush of her cheeks and every word she'd ever said, but some days, it gets hard to recall even the colour of her hair.)

"You're kidding." Jon's halfway across the table now, staring at Lee with stars in his eyes. Cory's gone quiet---he doesn't talk half as much as Jon does, but he's not usually completely silent. Lee briefly contemplates letting Jon know that his secret boyfriend is obviously feeling rather neglected. "Did you like it?"

Lee had liked it, mainly because it had been his mother's favourite book, and no matter how hard he wishes on full moons for the will to let go, he finds himself clinging on to the mosaic of his mother's memory like a lifeline in the sea. His mother had loved it---an awakening, she'd called it. A genius, she'd remarked, and even though she had a habit of calling everyone geniuses, Lee had nodded his head and thought of the author as a genius too.

Except she'd hated one thing---just one thing, and so Lee had hated it as well. "I'd never let people see me die," his mother had remarked, casually tossing her dark curls back with a haughty snort. "They'd cry over me. I couldn't bear that."

"Then what would you do?" Lee had questioned, perched on the armrest of her favourite chair.

His mother had grinned, bright and proud, a sunflower rising from a field of cornstalks. "I'll hide myself away like Peter did and pretend I was never sick in the first place." And of course Lee had completely forgotten who Peter was, so his mother had explained it to him, over and over again, her neverending patience stretching across the universe like a tarpaulin of faith.

(He remembers him well now---the main character's notoriously underappreciated younger brother, as his mother had dubbed him. "Poor thing," she'd always said, shaking her head sympathetically, and Lee had never been sure whether she was talking about his badly-concealed pancreatic cancer or the fact that no one seemed to recall who he was. He'd been her favourite character in the novel, despite having about two lines throughout the whole thing.)

"Yeah." Lee smiles prettily. "Loved it."

Jon elbows Cory lightly. "See? He gets it. Unlike you."

Cory rolls his eyes and continues doodling in his notebook with yet another one of his endless coloured pens. "It was boring."

"It was not boring. You're just uncultured."

It hadn't been boring---not in the slightest. In fact, the withering of Morrie Schwartz had prepared Lee for the endless eternity after the divorce, when his own father had begun to wither too.

Did you know that it takes a person approximately ten minutes to drown?

It hadn't taken ten minutes. It had taken ten hours, ten days, ten months. It had taken weeks of unshaven stubble and a couch surrounded with filthy beer bottles and a sportscar that just kept wrapping itself around lamp posts. It hadn't been the particular brand of withering Lee had expected, but it had been there---in gaunt cheeks and red eyes and a back that wouldn't stop cracking. He'd shrivelled, and he'd worked, and he'd died, and he'd worked more, and Lee had watched it all. He'd studied every nook and cranny of his father---or at least, what used to be him. The drowning man, whirling into the abyss of the unknown.

As time had gone by, Lee had started to think of himself as a drowning man too, pulled under by his father's pale-faced despondency. And even as his father grabbed the buoy of his job and clung on to it, Lee had found himself flailing still, the tides squeezing every drop of oxygen from his lungs.

(Sometimes, Lee wonders if he ever stopped drowning.)

"It was boring," Yumeko butts in, unceremoniously dropping into the empty chair next to Lee. He'd forced her to read it when they'd first become friends. She'd hated every single page, but the fact that she'd finished it anyway had shot Lee right in the heart and forever bound his overabundant affection to the devastatingly droll existence of Yumeko Mori. She lifts her hand in a listless wave. "Hi. I'm the emotional baggage."

Lee gives his best friend's shoulder a light whack. "You are not. She's the wifey."

Yumeko wrinkles her nose. "We've been married for two seconds and I already feel like I'm going to throw up."

"Love you too." Lee leans over the table, dramatically gesturing to Yumeko. "Jon, Cory...meet Yumeko. I call her Yu. She follows me everywhere."

"I do not," Yumeko insists, like she hasn't just tracked him through a ridiculously crowded canteen despite hating crowds with every fibre of her being. The idea makes Lee grin. He reaches over to slip his palm into Yumeko's own, and her fingers instinctively run themselves over the scar on his knuckles.

Cory raises an eyebrow.

Lee throws his head back in a chuckle. "Not what you think, Cory. We're both gay. And she's a bitch." And I'm not going to steal your secret boyfriend, so you can stop silently worrying about it. Not that I'd ever say that, because that would be outing you, and I'd be a dick if I outed you, and I don't want to be a dick, although I lowkey want Jack's dick, and---yeah, I should probably stop thinking now.

"And he's a bigger bitch." Yumeko dips her head into the crook of Lee's neck. Her chubby cheek presses against his shoulder, soft flesh against taut muscle. Lee tries to forget about the leftover brawn lining the space beneath his skin, but it sticks to him like superglue, hard and lean and tight over his ivory bones. A wasteland of ice-cold defiance, atrophying the fossils of his past. Cruel nostalgia, so much like the burn on his elbow. A tattoo he can't quite scrub off.

Silence settles over the table for a moment, with Jon tucking into his lunch and Cory continuing his hapless doodles. Lee wonders why he never realised the quiet could be so comfortable before, and then---oh. Because there are people surrounding him now. Because the warmth he so desperately craves stings his skin, wrapping around his chest as Jon tries to sneak a peek at Cory's notebook and his secret boyfriend promptly throws a fry at him. Because Yumeko rests on his shoulder, her heavy, rhythmic breathing perfectly matching the thump of his own pulse.

(Soulmate shit, Lee calls it. Heart arrhythmia, Yumeko shoots back.)

Because it's quiet, but for once, Lee's not alone.

٩( ᐛ )و

"I saw you sitting with Jon today."

Lee can sense the disdain in Jack's voice, layered with curiosity and something else he can't quite decipher, and he supposes he can't really blame him. It's an odd table. Jon, the social butterfly, the literature nerd, the classic hipster with the glasses to match. Cory, who loves tennis and glitter pens and bites his lip when he gets jealous (he's been biting it a lot since Jon's started talking to Lee). Yumeko, the quintessential rain cloud, doomsday in a bottle. And Lee---never and always, yesterday and tomorrow, everything and nothing.

"Yeah." Lee chuckles. "Surprised? I know I haven't had friends other than Yumeko in a while." He waits with baited breath---for what, he's not sure. Maybe for Jack to tell him he's his friend too. Maybe for a clipped word of encouragement and a patronising blush. Maybe for the impossible.

Jack doesn't miss a beat in unknowingly dissolving Lee's dreams of the unattainable with a decisive snort. "I was pretty surprised. Yumeko, I know, but I didn't really expect you to hang out with those two."

"Why? Are you jealous?"

In Lee's dreams, Jack says yes. He says yes, and Lee tells him about his crush, and Jack admits he feels the same. Then he pulls Lee close and their lips meet and their foreheads touch and the world explodes in screaming colour and Lee is floating instead of drowning and no one gives a flying fuck about crooked collars.

Reality is a little more cruel.

"You wish." Jack tilts his nose up in a smarting scoff, and Lee wonders how he'd managed to get the bridge so straight even after breaking it twice. "They're just different from your usual company, that's all."

"Because they bother to smile once in a while. You should try it sometime." Lee reaches for the corner of Jack's mouth, taps it lightly---once, twice, three times. He soaks in the way Jack doesn't flinch away anymore, and maybe it's just Lee's imagination, but he swears Jack leans into his touch ever so slightly. And then it's gone, fleeting as the fluttering, disapproving twitch of Jack's lips as he pulls back---so close, and yet so far, a rocky wave bumping along the seashore. Lee can't help the way his own face falls, or the way the torrid skip, skip, skip of his heart quickens in pace, because damn it, crushes are hard.

Jack looks away, a hint of red tinting his face. "Don't touch me like that," he says.

"I'm sorry."

"And I don't like smiling."

"I know you don't."

"So why do you keep asking me to?"

"Because..." Lee flashes the boy in front of him his best grin, praying it makes him look like some rakishly handsome rake instead of a constipated idiot. "I like you better when you smile."

"I don't want you to like me."

"Yeah, me neither." Lee reaches for Jack's palm, swiftly recoiling once he remembers Jack's order for him to stop. He smiles wider---sweetly, softly, burning and curling and floating in the sea. "I'd rather love you."

(In Lee's dreams, he doesn't mean it. In real life, he almost does.)

To Lee's delight, Jack's cheeks flush hotly. He turns away, the back of his neck blazing. "Shut up."

"No, I don't think I will." Lee rests his chin on the palm of his own hand, playfully tilting his head. "I like making you blush."

"You like a lot of things you shouldn't like."

"Like you?"

The following silence pastes itself over every molecule of oxygen in the air, overlapping each word with clouded doubt. Lee feels his heart jump in his chest, an anxious thud that rattles his bones to the core.

This time, he's the first time to draw back, to jerk away, dragging himself out of the tension with a falsely exasperated, "I'm joking." And then, because every good joke needs a chuckle to go with it, he throws his head back and laughs, a tinny noise that reverberates through his ribs and lungs and head. "Don't be weird. You are so not my type."

"The feeling's mutual."

"I'd assume your type has tits," Lee remarks blithely. (I could have tits too, he thinks, almost bitterly, if I pushed my chest up really hard.)

Jack briefly glances towards the front---wondering why their Maths teacher hasn't arrived yet, no doubt. "You talk too much."

"Stop changing the subject, dumbass," Lee says, chucking an eraser at the back of Jack's head. When the rubbery projectile successfully hits its target, he's met with a dirty glare. "What are you doing after school?"

"I saw Danny and his gang smoking again at lunch. I'm going to talk to them after school."

Lee blinks. "You know, there are better ways to kill yourself."

"Smoking on school premises is against the rules."

"Fuck the rules."

Jack fiddles with his already-perfectly-straight tie. "It's my duty."

"Shit duty if you're risking your life for it. Don't do it."

"I have to."

Lee leans back in his chair, exhaling loudly. "You get beat up at least once a week for that damn job of yours. Remind me why you do this to yourself, again?"

Jack's cold glare cuts through him like a knife. "The scholarship, Lee." And before Lee can even try mumbling out a sheepish, Oh, yeah, Jack's turned to the front again, and just like that, their conversation's over, except for the boiling in his gut and the prickling of his skin and the tiny, tiny leaps of the pulsing thing in his chest.

(It takes a person approximately ten minutes to drown, but it doesn't even take ten seconds for Lee's impossible feelings to engulf him whole.)

٩( ᐛ )و

It's nearly five in the afternoon, a whole hour after school's supposed to end, and Lee's on his way to the back of the school for cleanup duty, as he thinks of it in his head---though he knows Jack would never speak to him again if he called it that to his face. Because that's what it really is---scraping trash off the floor after it's been pummelled into the ground once, twice, a thousand times.

(Not that Jack's trash. He's a better person than Lee'll ever be.)

It's the same routine every time Jack decides to exercise his misplaced nobility on the resident school smokers---he talks, he gets punched out, and Lee swoops in to sweep both his pieces and his pride off the pavement. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So it's a shock when Lee hears the actual talking for the first time, the distinctive, banjo-like twang of Danny's sharp timbre cutting through the afterschool gloom in blank white sheets. "Can't you just shut the fuck up and leave us alone?"

Jack's reply is wavery, shaking, blood-laced. "Danny, come on, you don't need to give me a hard time---just trying to do my job---" He's panting, each word punctuated with a wheezing pause---a clear sign they've already rained physical hell on him.

"Looks like someone needs to be taught a lesson." There's acid in Danny's voice, something harsh and jarring and so sour Lee feels chills dance over his spine. He hears the unforgettable click. The sound that pounds through his senses whenever Yumeko fumbles with her lighter. The sound that had rattled in the space next to his open ears, right before his elbow had exploded in excruciating pain.

No, he wants to shout, but his mouth's too dry to yell. Some part of him knows it's too late. There's nothing he can do anymore.

"Maybe you'll finally learn to keep your fucking mouth shut now, fag!" Danny exclaims, and the echoing cackles of his two lackeys barely covers the piercing scream that rips itself free from Jack's throat. It's so high it's almost a sob, a haunting noise that would sound less out of place on the tongue of some poor, mangled wild beast. It punctures Lee's skin and cleaves right through his bones. It kills him as much as he knows it's killing Jack.

The smell of burning flesh slices through the air.

dedicated to the boy i've known for over 10 years but never liked this way until now

also i find it amusing that my social skills have evolved from "literally zero non-toxic friends" to "i just met this guy for the first time like an hour ago but we've already graduated to the level of smacking the sh!t out of each other (with love)"

like legit my BFF's friend (different guy from the previously mentioned guy) joined our lunch table and met me for the first time and my BFF (who is the person the friend came to the table for in the first place) ended up third-wheeling us after like ten minutes because apparently i'm a better conversationalist than i give myself credit for 💀

we literally went on a 'date' (jkjk) for like ten minutes because my BFF conveniently dISAPPEARED (the dumb hoe) and his friend (who is now my friend too, I suppose) sat opposite me and we ate and talked and he seems to have decided he prefers my company to my BFF's 💀

NO BUT LIKE I LEFT OUR REGULAR TABLE AND SAT WITH MY OTHER FRIENDS ONE TIME AND THIS GUY JUST LEFT OUR REGULAR TABLE TOO EVEN THOUGH MY BFF WAS STILL THERE AHAHHAHA

also my gosh why are the boys so cute this year like i'm dumb and gay and apparently going through my revolving door of crushes again because i've had like,,,three,,,in the past,,,two weeks,,, (crushed on the guy i mentioned in the previous chapter, then crushed on another guy, THEN went back to crushing on the first guy. also his sister is one of my adopted children which is something i Did Not Know)

ANYGAYS we are!!! finally!!! picking up the slow as sh!t pace of this stupid book!!! the reason why i don't like writing single-character-centric books is because LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS. like. i'm sure everyone's hated CB up til now because it's boring asf. BUT!!! IT'S FINALLY!!! GETTING SOME ACTION!!! SO YAY!!! also enjoy the cliffhanger yuh 💅

lmk what you think of this chapter! i'm in the middle of a FIVE-WEEK-LONG EXAM (fml) (this was also why y'alls didn't get an update last week I'M SORRY) so i didn't have time to edit T_T sorry if it's super sh!tty, i was doing Maths while writing 😭 your feedback and criticism is much appreciated 💕

love y'alls smmm <333 take care, stay safe, and stay healthy! i promise i'll try to reply to comments if my exams don't kill me T_T

xoxo, Alex