10 | morphine

THE ROOM FELL silent, and even though he’d expected the question to come up again Wesley was unprepared.

“Do I have bad breath?” Wyatt continued when the silence stretched uncomfortably. “Or is it because my lips are weirdly shaped―”

“What the―? No,” Wesley protested, cutting him off. “Why the fuck would you even think shit like that?”

“But it’s true though,” he continued, unfazed. “My lips are ugly”―he grabbed his upper lip harshly, and Wesley slapped his fingers away―“and I disgust you.”

He’d met people like this, who deliberately talked down on their perfectly good features to fish for compliments, but from the way Wyatt uttered those words, Wesley could tell that he genuinely found his features lacking. He felt a pang in his chest at the thought that he was the reason behind this particular flaw, and decided to settle on a version of the truth.

“I’ve never had it easy, dude,” he began slowly, shakily, “I mean, yeah sure there are people who’ve had it worse, but I don’t like to think about myself if I can help it.”

The silence on Wyatt’s part encouraged him to continue, and he did.

“For me, drugs and sex were coping mechanisms, until I dropped drugs after I saw how badly they fucked people over, and took up smoking. Now it’s cigarettes and sex.”

“How many people are we talking about here, body-count wise?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

He watched Wyatt’s silhouette nod thoughtfully, and paused to let him have this new piece of information sink in.

“So you get why I don’t wanna get physical with you, because then I may not be able to stop and that scares the shit out of me. Until I know that this is for the long run, I don’t wanna get intimate.”

“I really like you though,” he added, because it was the truth.

“And until then what’s gonna happen?” Wyatt asked scoffing after a few moments had gone by.

“Until when?”

“Until you decide the duration of our relationship status, you won’t have sex?”

Wesley paused, because his mind had never gone in that direction. There was the whole world then there was Wyatt, and it had never occurred to him that depriving himself of one would mean depriving himself of the other.

“Jesus Christ Wesley, I really like you, but nothing is guaranteed. Tomorrow I may be held hostage in an amazon jungle, and you may be getting married.”

This time it was Wesley who scoffed.

“I’m serious, OK?” he murmured, punching the other boy’s shoulder as they turned to face each other. “I just wanna live in the moment; exist now so I can have no regrets―or many of them―later.”

There were a lot of things he obsessed over all the time: climate change, the beauty of small things like words scrawled on bathroom stalls in forgotten places, and maybe even death from time to time, but in that moment all he could imagine was himself and Wyatt, lips pressed against the other in a dance so complicated and instinctual, the thought of it alone was enough to make him want to cry.

The world was ending and he was a horny motherfucker who couldn’t bring himself to kiss a guy he really liked, because it would make it real. That would make him like his mother and the way she chased after men who only saw her as a way to pass the time and nothing more.

If Wyatt Carter left him he would survive. He would be torn up about it, but he would survive. There were no rose tainted glasses that he would use to see things through, but he only feared the falling part of everything, because what happened when you hit the ground and realized you weren’t cut out for it.

Wyatt put a hand on his shoulder and he instantly felt himself go hard, which made him pull away, or try to at least.

“Hey, hey,” the other boy murmured in a tone that suggested he watched a lot of NatGeo Wild, as if he was calming an animal. “It’s alright, here’s no rush. Don’t overthink it, OK?”

But he couldn’t stop the spiral of his thoughts as they fleeted from the hand on his shoulder, to his penis which now strained against the fabric of jeans, and finally, how it almost physically hurt from wanting him so badly.

His gaze was leveled as he turned to look at the other boy, who stared at him through eyes that he couldn’t see in the gloom, but felt the intensity of.

There were no guarantees for tomorrow and he would never willingly intend to lead another person on, but with Wyatt things felt solid, immediate and true. With him he got the sense that he could stop running and just rest.

These thoughts circled through his head as he leaned over and pressed his lips to Wyatt’s face in a series of feather light kisses that went from his forehead, to both cheeks, and then his chin.

Both boys held their breath, with Wesley using a finger to trace along the outline of Wyatt’s lips.

“Nothing about you is disgusting,” he murmured, leaning over to press their lips against each other with a reverence that surprised the both of them, because this, he surmised, was what people prayed to, prayed for.

It was a kiss that managed to convey enough without words, in the same way a painting of people dancing till their feet bloodied and they died from exhaustion managed to. However, the words would come to his mind in fits and starts, arranging themselves into the usual haiku.

imagine this: you

kiss me and i cry then you

leave me and i die.

The world was ending, constantly titillating, everything in and out of focus—but at three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, two boys found heaven, or better yet, a still point.