A/N: Heeeeere we go. One-shot. Disjointed. Angst. Slash. All that good stuff.

This is not my usual style of writing. I don't usually jump around like a Tarantino film and use two tenses and all the crazy stuff you'll see here. But this was my Enya-inspired plot-bunny, and I wrote it like this. I'm interested to see what people think.

Title: Seven

Author: Alyn Drasil

Rating: PG-13 (for one scene)

Disclaimer: Mienen.

Warnings: m/m slash, shounen ai...and I think there is a total of two swear words. :P

SEVEN

His name is Charles, and although he hates the name, he doesn’t let anyone call him Charlie. Only I get to call him that.

            We’ve been friends our entire lives, we know each other better than our own siblings. At seven years old we were cleaning each others cuts and scrapes with antiseptic when our parents weren’t home. At fourteen we were awkwardly taking girls to our first school dance. And at twenty-one…well, I don’t know what we’ll do at twenty-one. It’s just happened.

            I’m sitting on the curb in front of my house. It’s spring, and everything is a strange white-balance of color and light. Surreal, maybe. I’m waiting for Charlie.

            I’m always waiting for Charlie. He’s never made it on time to one thing in his entire life. Of course, that isn’t the only thing I’m waiting for. But it’s the only thing I know will always come.

            Charlie is suddenly sitting on the curb next to me. His hair is blond and straight and always in his eyes. He smiles at me—that shy, awkwardness of a boy that becomes so oddly endearing on a twenty-one year old man. That’s what we are now—somehow, without either of us realizing it, we became men. We’re twenty-one, we’re in college. We can drink now, legally. Not that Charlie ever would.

            There’s something different about his smile today. There’s a pain behind it, a stretched quality about his demeanor. We can’t hide things from each other, and Charlie is barely trying. Something is wrong, and deeply so.

            I don’t need to say anything about it. He knows, just by looking at me.

            “Sean,” he says softly. “I…I need to talk to you.”

            Charlie came from a dysfunctional family. That was what my mother always told me; “dysfunctional family”. I never knew what it meant when I was little. I knew his father was never around and his mother worked at odd hours and odd jobs. He had a brother, a much older one, who sometimes came and crashed in their house for a while. Relatives streamed in and out like a railway station. His parents were in a constant state of separation/divorce.

            I’m sure it affected Charlie. It never affected me, I didn’t really know what was going on. We were seven years old, catching frogs at the creek and climbing trees in the park. Always dirty clothes, always scraped knees and grungy faces, flyaway hair and gap-toothed smiles. My mom, your model American mother, took a lot of pictures. They’re in a scrapbook now, tucked away in some bookcase, covered in dust.

            We’re twenty-one. It was fourteen years ago.

            I fell out of a tree at the park and cut a deep gash in my knee. We ran all the way home, me hobbling and my face damp with tears, while Charlie held me up, helped me walk. None of our parents were home, nor any of Charlie’s haphazard family, and Charlie had to play doctor for me.

            We sat in the upstairs bathroom of my house. I was perched on the cold porcelain lip of the tub, Charlie kneeling at my feet. Band-Aids and antiseptics lay scattered around like the casualties of a war. He had the clumsy fingers and hands of a seven-year old, but he patched me knee up as best he could.

            There was dried blood all down my leg, and Charlie sat next to me on the edge of the tub and held my hand, because my knee stung from the antiseptic and ached from the fall, and I was feeling dumb in that little-boy way you do when you should be able to stop crying but you can’t.

            And that was the beginning of everything, really. How everything’s come to what it is now, and how I couldn’t seem to stop it. But I’ll get to that later.

            Charlie put his arms around me and kissed my cheek. I was surprised, I turned to look at him and something happened in that moment, a simultaneous unspoken agreement. Whatever it was or however it happened, there was a sharp moment of  silence, and then I leant forward and kissed Charlie on the mouth.

            It was strange and it was awkward, we bumped noses and our lips mashed uncomfortably, because were seven and didn’t know about this stuff, and after one long unmoving moment, Charlie finally pulled away. He put his hands on his knees and looked around at the paper-littered floor of the bathroom.

            “Maybe we should clean up before your mom gets back,” he said, and I nodded.

            We never talked about that kiss again.

            I recognize the desperateness in Charlie’s voice, match it with the strained ache in his eyes, and I know this has something to do with Lydia. And no matter how much I don’t want to hear about this, I always make sure I’m there for Charlie. And he needs me now.

            “Okay,” I say. “I’m listening.”

            “Lydia is….” Charlie stops and swallows awkwardly. The fingers of his right hand are twisting at the ends of his hair, and I know now that not only is he hurting, he’s also scared. Of what, I can’t tell.

            “Charlie,” I say, and I touch his shoulder. He leans into me, unconsciously, and as always I want to take him into my arms, hold him against me and stop letting the world hurt him. But it’s not my place, and I can’t.

            “Lydia is…she’s pregnant,” Charlie finally gets out, and I freeze. I can feel the slow horror washing through me as the statement hits home, and for a moment I almost can’t breath.

            “Charlie.” This time a rush of air, a whispered plea. I don’t want it to be true.

            He’s staring at the pavement at my feet, at the dead cricket in the gutter, bleached transparent by the sun.

            “No, it’s…it’s not mine,” he says. “Lydia and I…we never…it can’t be.”

            I understand instantly. Charlie is Charlie, always has been and always will be. He will never drink, he will never do drugs, and he won’t have sex before marriage. Even though everyone who knows Lydia and Charlie expected them to be engaged long before this time, Charlie still wouldn’t. He’s too good.

            “Then, who…”

            “Someone else.” For the first time, there’s anger in Charlie’s voice. “Someone else.”

­­­­­­­

            I’ve loved Charlie for a long time now. Maybe even before I knew the concept of love. He’s always been in my life, in the good times, the sad times, the bad times, the terrible times, and the wonderful times. We were neighbors, playmates, friends, schoolmates, anything and everything we could be.

            And that one thing we could never be. I wanted it so desperately, so badly…but for myself. I wanted Charlie for me, and I knew that wasn’t the way it should be. Charlie was a good person, better than I could ever be or even try to be. He deserved a happiness far beyond my own. I wanted for him what would make him happy. And if it wasn’t being with me, then that wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t be. Not like that.

            What made him happy was being with Lydia. And it was hard, nearly impossible, but I accepted it.

            He met her sometime in the summer between our freshman and sophomore years of college. We were back home, back in the old neighborhood for the summer, the old stomping grounds. We even went and caught frogs by the creek one day. The little trickle of water seemed so much smaller now then when we’d been fourteen. Seven. The years in between.

            We were meeting in a downtown restaurant, a hamburger shack with an outdoor eating area. I don’t know why we chose there, we still lived four houses down from each other. It was our first time seeing each other since the winter vacation. We’d never gone so long without seeing each other. It had done a number on me—I’d missed him horribly.

            The first thing, after the hi’s and the how-are-you’s and the wow-you-look-different’s, was Charlie’s sudden effervesce about a girl. How they met, how well they clicked, where they were and what it was like, what she looked like and everything he possibly could think about her. I can’t remember now if they were actually dating yet when he was telling me this, but if not it wasn’t long away.

            “This girl is amazing, Sean.” Charlie was all brilliant, giddy smiles. I couldn’t remember seeing him so purely happy. And I was glad—glad that someone could make him feel like this, that this is what he wants and what he deserves—and deeply, deeply bitter. I want to be the person who can make him feel this.

            And I hate that our first time seeing each other in over six months is taken up by her. I want Charlie to be glad to see me, not thinking about a girl. Again, I’m thinking selfishly.

            “What’s her name?” I asked, interested for his sake. In his excitement he’d never mentioned her name. And inside, a part of me was dying silently. Charlie couldn’t tell, I was hiding it too well. There are some things I’ve been able to keep from him.

            “Lydia,” Charlie said, another beautiful smile transforming his face. “Her name is Lydia.”

            Seventeen and in high school. A girl, Rachel Masters, is throwing a party. She throws a party almost constantly. I know about them because of a sort-of acquaintance. There’s always drugs at Rachel’s parties, and alcohol, loud music and usually sex. Sex who whoever wants it, drugs and alcohol for whoever wants that too. It’s lunchtime, Friday, and the party is later tonight.

            Charlie and I are sitting under the shade of some trees by the basketball courts. It’s where we normally sit during lunch. Much quieter than the roaring buzz of the quad, and not as rigidly silent as the library.

            He’s afraid he bombed a math test. Impossible, because Charlie is brilliant and anyway, he studies as regularly as he breathes, but he’s always worried.

            “I really did fail it this time,” he says, locking his arms around his knees.

            Bullshit, I want to tell him, but Charlie doesn’t swear and doesn’t like it when I do, although he never actually tells me that. I just know, and I try not to, at least around him.

            “You didn’t,” I tell him. Charlie rolls his eyes.

            “You weren’t there. I blanked. And I knew the stuff so well, too.”

            It’s no use telling him that he’s never gotten less than a B+ on a math test. So I change the subject.

            “Rachel’s party is tonight.”

Charlie just rests his chin on his knees. “And?.”

            “Are you…do you want to go?”

            “It’s Rachel,” Charlie said, continuing to stare straight ahead.

            “Meaning?”

            “There’s…you know. Alcohol and stuff. Drugs. I don’t like that.”

            “You don’t have to do it.”

            “But that’s why everybody goes.”

            He has a point. Charlie never comes to these parties although I always try and get him there. And it isn’t like I’m a perfect holy teenager—I’ve done drugs and I’ve been drunk. I don’t like it, but I have done it. I don’t know what Charlie would think of me if he knew I did. He might suspect, simply because I even just go to these kinds of things, but I’ve never just out and told him. He wouldn’t be terribly pleased at the idea.

            “If you change your mind…” I said. “Just swing by my house at seven. We’ll go together. Okay?”

            “Okay,” Charlie repeats, but I know he won’t come.

            Privately, I’m glad he never comes. There’s always something I can do at these parties, something Charlie will never know about, and neither will anyone else, if I can help it. In a dark, semi-twisted way, it relieves the agony of loving Charlie so much.

It’s almost too much—the knowledge that Lydia is pregnant and that it’s not Charlie’s—and I’m not sure what to say. Charlie isn’t either. We sit in silence on the curb, that odd white-balance of the day harsh against our eyes.

            “What will happen?” I break the silence.

            “I can’t be with her anymore,” Charlie murmurs. “I just….I can’t. You understand, Sean?”

            He thinks I’m condemning him silently. For running out on his pregnant girlfriend. Who cheated on him and got herself knocked up. How could I condemn him for that?

            “Of course not,” I say. Don’t be stupid, I really mean, and Charlie knows that too. He smiles weakly.

            “She’s going back to live with her mother. This guy….the other guy…he didn’t stay around.”

            Lydia’s mother lives in Idaho. Her parents split up when she was seven. Another thing she and Charlie had in common.

            “Do they ever?”

“I suppose not.” Charlie stares at his knees. “Sean, I….I thought she loved me. I know I loved her. She said she’s been seeing this guy for….months.”

            “God.” What can I say to make this better? Nothing. Nothing anyone says will make it better. The situation is shit. Charlie knows it. It’s only a matter of time before everything really hits him, and he understands. When it happens, I’ll be here for him.

            Charlie never noticed that I didn’t date. After that freshman dance, that one experience with Hanna Carr, I knew I couldn’t. What was the point of a relationship if I already knew it would go nowhere? I wasn’t searching for a girl, the girl, that One Girl. I wasn’t searching for a girl at all. And what I was looking for, I’d already found. I just could never have it.

            At that freshman danced, I kissed Hanna. I kissed her because it was expected, she expected it, it was an assumed event that came with Asking Girls To Dances. I also did it because I wanted to forget, earlier in the evening, even before the dance…there was something that I never wanted to remember.

            I wanted to forget because it was a spotlight on what I’d tried so hard to cover up, to hide, push away, bury, lock up, and ignore for more years than I even knew. I didn’t even know what Charlie thought. He’d passed it aside, waved it on, continued smoothly on while I was hung up and stalled on the twisted mistake I had made.

            Kissing Hanna was like kissing the back of my own hand—dry, soft and smooth enough, but it didn’t feel like I was kissing anything important. It was my first kiss, hers too, and I felt in that young teenage boy way that something like this should matter. A first kiss, a cute girl….what everyone can always remember.

            Instead, I drifted back seven years in time, to a hazy spring afternoon in which I sat on the cold porcelain of a bathtub and kissed my best friend. That was my first kiss, that was the one I would remember, forever and always. I could remember every detail of that day, of that moment, that instant that was such a beloved memory of mine but seemed to hold no importance to the other participant. It was just another ache of unrequited love that I had forced myself to swallow and accept.

            Back at my house after the night was over, my morbid curiosity got the better of me. I nudged Charlie. “You kiss Sophie?” I asked him. I knew he had, but I had to hear the confirmation from his own mouth.

            He smiled slightly. “Yeah,” he said, “I did.”

            “How was it?” Charlie tilted his head, considering. “Wet,” he finally said, and the bluntness of it made us both laugh. We giggled at each other, both slightly giddy, wondering if this was It, this was Experiencing Life and maybe we were doing it right.

            Charlie might have been. I wasn’t. My detour off the beaten path had gotten me lost in the dark woods, and I didn’t know when I’d be coming out again. If I ever did.

            Rachel’s party is dark and crowded, smells of smoke and sweat and cheap beer spilled over cushions. There’s dope and alcohol for those who want it, and even for those who don’t. Don’t drink that punch, you’ll get more than you bargained for.

            I wasn’t drunk. I was painfully lucid. I couldn’t say the same for him.

            Shoved away in a back corner, my hands fisted in blond hair, his slender body pressed to the wall beneath mine. I can do this, hold him and grip him and kiss him and pretend, and know it’s not real and will never be.

            I kiss him, and he tastes of cheap beer and salted pretzels. His hands in my hair, pulling sharply and I crush him firmly to the wall, shoving my hands under his shirt. Oh God, I want this so badly, I want him so badly—I can never pretend enough.

            His leg hooks around mine, our bodies arching tightly together. No one notices us, hidden away in this corner, and even if they did they’d figure we were drunk and oblivious. Rachel’s party….why did I come here? I came here for this? For the smell of marijuana and pounding, pulsing music and the chance of cops coming to break it up as the party delves more deeply into late hours?

            No. I came here for him. And if not him, someone else just like him. There’s always someone willing. I grip his hair, so soft and coarse at the same time, pull him against me and kiss him fiercely, wishing and craving and inwardly sobbing at just how black and twisted I’m becoming.

            “Charlie…” I moan against him, for what has to be the fifth time. I just can’t help it anymore. If only he knew…

            I feel his fingers at my belt, at the buttons of my jeans.

            “Why do you keep calling me that?” he breathes back into my mouth. I only shake my head. Words cannot explain or condone this, what I am doing, what I have been doing, what I can’t stop doing. It will never be right.

            Lydia and Charlie were together all the time. Even I had to admit that I liked her. She was energetic, sweet and intelligent, a perfect fit for Charlie. They were so good for each other that it made me wonder how I ever thought I could fill that place in Charlie’s life. It was a silly, pointless dream.

            Everyone liked Lydia. Charlie loved her. It seemed to happen so fast, but in actuality it was over a year. I think I mentally blocked it, not wanting to accept that this was real and this was Charlie, this was who I loved loving someone else, and being utterly happy with it.

            If only I could have hated Lydia. Maybe that would have made it easier. But she was hard to hate. She was kind and cooperative and giving, and what she gave to Charlie was the part of myself I had always wanted to give, but been to terrified to. So terrified, except for those two times.

            Every seven years I make a slip. I kissed him when we were seven. I told him I loved him at fourteen. I’m terrified of what I might do now, now that we’re twenty-one.

Our first high school dance. We were the freshman, the froshes, the ones whose previous dances had been festooned with cheap crepe paper and wilting balloon arches. But high school was different, and special, and by some miracle we both had dates.

            Sophia Carlow was the girl going with Charlie. He asked her on the basketball courts during PE, the most unromantic or thoughtful place it could have possibly been done. But because he was Charlie, because he was sweet and cute and all the girls loved him, Sophia would have said yes if he’d asked her while dumpster-diving for her lost retainer.

            I had cheated slightly. The girl I was going with, Hanna Carr, had an older sister who was best friends with my older sister. I didn’t have Charlie’s schoolboy appeal, small and slender and blond, with clear hazel eyes and soft features. Even at fourteen, the girls all knew he was a catch.

            I was gangly, tall for my age, with far too much dark red hair. It was that Irish blood—our family name was O’Leary, although we’d lost the O somewhere along the line, and were now just the Learys. Didn’t stop the entire family from becoming the epitome of extremely Irish-Looking People. Girls didn’t think I was a catch, they thought I was weird-looking.

            Hanna went with me because she’d been out of school for two weeks before the dance and hadn’t had a chance to be asked. Luckily, she was one of those girls who tolerated me fairly well, although I knew she was ragingly jealous of Sophie for going with Charlie. I suppose she was satisfied enough to tag along with me and be able to say she sort of went to the dance with him.

            We were at my house before the dance, getting ready and psyching each other up. We’d never had real dates to a dance before—not the silly seventh and eighth grade events with bad DJs and grape punch in Dixie cups. We were fourteen and still scared f girls, although not willing to admit it and certainly not willing to show it.

            Charlie was using my full-length mirror to straighten his clothes out, and had started talking vaguely about why people dated.  He couldn’t understand it, which was later highly ironic, considering he dated a lot in high school and I never did.

            “What’s the point of dating, anyway?” he’d said. “Do people really think they’ll find their soul-mate at fourteen?”

            “Some people might,” I said, not sure whether I meant that people thought that, or that it actually happened.

            “I think it’s stupid,” Charlie said firmly. “I just want to go to the dance and have fun. But you look stupid without a date. I don’t want to think about girls and dating and whether or not you’re in love or not. You can’t say you’re in love at fourteen. You don’t know enough.”

            “I do,” I said, not thinking. I wasn’t even sure I’d said it aloud until I saw Charlie frown in the mirror. I was only half-paying attention, I was lost in my own thoughts.

            “You do what?”

            “I love you,” I said. I didn’t even realize I had until Charlie turned and looked at me, his hands pausing on his shirt buttons, obviously trying to figure out whether I was joking or serious.

And I realized what I had just said, and nearly stopped breathing. It was what I got for not paying attention, for letting my mind drift but my mouth continue to speak when Charlie was talking about something as dangerous as love. I was too stunned by what I had just said to even try and look like I’d been joking, and I don’t know what made Charlie finally laugh and turn back to the mirror.

            “Love you too,” he said, but with a lighthearted casualness that made the way I’d said it sound like a Shakespeare sonnet.

            I could have died. I was fourteen and going to my first high school dance with a fairly pretty and popular girl, and all I wanted was my best friend to tell me that he loved me back. I would have given anything. But what I had wasn’t good enough.

            I’m holding Charlie now, just like I wanted to when this conversation first started. He’s limp in my arms, head pressed against my shoulder. He isn’t really crying, but his face is wet and he’s shaking. I hate Lydia in that moment, I will hate her from now on. I hate everyone who’s ever done this to Charlie, who’s made him unhappy or upset, who smashes his beautiful naïveté.

            “I really though she was the one, Sean,” he murmurs into my shirt collar. “God, I just wanted her to love me….wanted someone to love me…”

            I can throw it all away now. I can stay safe, I can take a chance. Unlike at fourteen, this can’t be misunderstood. It can’t be shelved away, overlooked, passed by.

            I tighten my arms around him. I’m afraid of him running. I’m afraid of myself running. I’ve been doing it for so long.

            “I love you, Charlie,” I whisper against his soft hair. Instantly, I feel him shift inside my arms. So I can’t go back. I might as well go forward.

            “I only want you to be happy,” I tell him. “I wanted to be the one who could, but there was Lydia and….she seemed to make you so happy. But I always wanted to be the one for you. I know that I can’t, but I also can’t hold this in anymore. I love you, Charlie, and I always have. I always will, no matter what you think of me now. I’m sorry.”

            I’m crying. I can’t help it. It’s such a relief, after all this time….he finally knows. And all I can feel now is a defeated relief. I don’t know what will happen. I never thought about it.

            Charlie looks up at me, his face equal parts surprise and confusion.

            “Sean…” he says, and now I feel that tinge of fear. Have I just thrown away our entire friendship? It’s too late now.

            “I love you, Charlie,” I tell him again. It’s a dark, deep hole, and I’m falling mindlessly into it. “I love you.”

            Maybe because it feels so good to finally say it, or for some other reason of my poor twisted psyche, I can’t stop telling him. I whisper the three condemning words over and over again, hiding my face against Charlie’s shoulder and reversing our roles—suddenly he’s the comforter and I’m the one in distress. Though, we are technically both in distress.

            “Sean,” Charlie says again, and his voice is wondering and faint. I feel his fingers on my face, in my hair, trying to lift my face from his shoulder. I don’t want to look at him, I can’t face him, and I refuse to look up.

            “Damn it, Sean!” Charlie never swears. “Look at me!”

             I do look up now, mostly out of surprise. I’ve never heard Charlie sound like this. His eyes are bright with threatening tears, and his mouth is a tight, worried line. I’ve never seen him look so scared.

            “Sean,” he says again, and his fingers clutch at my hair. “So you really mean this?”

            “What? What do you mean? Of course I mean—“

            Charlie puts his fingers over my mouth. He’s watching me, intently, a seriousness in his eyes that I’ve never seen before.

            “Like when we were fourteen?” he says, his voice quiet and clear. “Like when we were seven?”

            I feel my breath catch harshly in my throat. What?

            “You…what do…” I can’t speak. I can hardly think. This isn’t what I expected. Charlie is so calm, so gentle. I expected him to be stunned. Shocked. Horrified. Anything than what he is now.

            “Sean, you kissed me when we were seven. You told me you loved me when we were fourteen. I never knew if it was real. You never did anything else to tell me. I was so lost…I still am lost. I tried to find whatever it was I was missing through other people. Through Lydia. But it wasn’t…it was never you.”

            “Charlie…” God, I’m spinning. My head, my heart, everything. I can’t hold on and I can’t slow down, nothing is what is should be anymore and what Charlie’s saying is….

            “Tell me again,” he whispers, and the first bright tear breaks over the barrier of his eyelashes, winds its way down his cheek. “Sean, please.”

            My heart shudders and my mind is numb and buzzing, but my mouth opens on its own and tells Charlie the thing he wants to hear.

            “I love you, Charlie.” It’s like a catharsis, a release of everything that’s been held in and bottled up for so long. I’m being pulled forward suddenly, and when Charlie’s mouth presses gently to mine I can only let go of everything else and accept than an impossibility has somehow happened.

            My hand rests against Charlie’s chest; I can feel his heartbeat beneath my fingers. His hair brushes my skin and his fingers hold my face gently, his lips are warm and soft and nothing like kissing the back of a hand—this is kissing Charlie, the most important person in my life and the only one I could ever love. And we’re sitting on the curb in front of my house in the late spring, a white-gold sun bleaching the pale blue sky.

A little girl rides past on a pink bicycle, streamers fluttering from the handlebars, completely impartial to the two boys who are kissing on the curb. We’re lost in one another, that after seven years, fourteen years, twenty-one years…we finally found what both of us knew we had, but were too terrified to take.

When Charlie pulls gently back, there are more tears on his cheeks. He smiles at me, hesitant and awkward and beautiful.

“I love you too, Sean,” he whispers. “I’m just sorry it took so long.”

I’ve stopped caring about how long it took. All that matters is now. I pull him back against me and kiss him again, hands in his soft hair and hearts beating as one.

I still don’t know what will happen to us at twenty-one. But now, I have a better idea. And I can live with that.

And…..fin. THE ENDING IS CORNY I KNOW AND IT SUCKS SO STFU ALREADY.

So that was a bit of a weird one anyway. From the two examples of my writing that I have here on fictionpress, neither of them is really my normal writing style. Holy crap, how did that happen? I’ll just have to correct that later.

I don’t know if I like one-shots much. Hmm.