(no subject)
Grant, as it turned out, was a pretty good driver so the trip home ran smoothly. Maggie thankfully saved throwing up until they were out of the car (her mom probably wouldn’t be so thankful about the garden in the morning). Darren took the liberty of half carrying her up the stairs, making sure she got inside fine. When he turned back Chris was thanking Grant quietly, his hand touching his arm gently, something inside of Darren felt awfully rude as if he was intruding on a moment entirely private.
So he turned away.
Chris followed them upstairs moments later, the sound of Grant’s car pulling out of the drive audible through the thin walls of the house. Chris helped Maggie into pyjamas while Darren got changed himself in the bathroom. When he returned, Chris was folding down Maggie’s bed sheets and helping her into bed.
“I was thinking we should just stay downstairs on the foldout couch as usual,” Chris told him. “Is that alright?”
Darren nodded, not thinking anything more of it until later, once they had finished getting Maggie into bed, gone downstairs, set up their sleeping arrangements, drunk some water and said their goodnights. It wasn’t until then that Darren realised he was in a bed, with Chris, just the two of them. They always slept here, but there was always Maggie between them, and now there wasn’t. Just a whole lot of air - that they were both breathing.
It was terrifying - and yet, Darren couldn’t quite explain why. They were just two friends. Just two friends sharing a bed.
But they were also two people who didn’t know each other very well, who found each other both peculiar and lovely and wanted to know each other more. Two people who hadn’t had a lot of time to themselves, who suddenly found them situated with excessive time with themselves and they weren’t sure if they could pass up the opportunity of that time for sleeping when their brains were alight with endless questions, though they could not decipher them for the cells that would not stop screaming.
You are sharing a bed.
Those cells might have been something to do with the hormones, heightened only by the warm effects of alcohol, settling in his veins. Of course, Darren had barely had anything, hardly enough to feel anything and even less to recognise it.
Still, he found himself restless, with the lights out, knowing that Chris was sleeping just an arms length away.
In fact, he barely slept at all that night.
--
The weeks fell by as weeks tended to do. Though the days lagged by in the drugged summer heat, lazily and rolling, hard to push through sometimes with the amount of work their teachers piled on too, with the added pressure of orchestra practice and being a writer for a magazine that people legitimately read. But it was nice being busy for a change, Darren thought. It took his mind off places where it tended to wander when he had nothing else to fill it - places minds should never go, if they can help it.
In retrospect, however, the weeks did go by quite quickly and some would say it was all too soon that school was over entirely. Chuck graduated as everyone expected him to - with flying colours, top of a few of his classes and his parent’s pride and joy.
Darren was happy for him, really.
Truly.
But honestly, he had better things to think about on that weekend of graduation - that Monday they were going home, if only for a while. Darren didn’t think he had been so excited about anything in his life.
On the Saturday night Chuck was at his senior prom and Darren was hanging out with Maggie and Chris for the last time before they saw each other at school. Darren knew he would miss them a whole lot, but their goodbye was pretty special.
Chris picked him up in his pickup truck as usual with Maggie in the front with him but neither of them would tell him where they were going till they actually arrived. The played Amy Winehouse over the speakers, Maggie tapping her feet along to the beat on the dashboard, all of them singing along, horrendously out of tune. When they arrived, Darren was excited to find them at the beach, the heavy tang of salt hanging on the air the second they stepped out of the car.
The night was stunning, the stars sweeping magnificently over the sky, the clouds rolling by above them. The air was cool and the sand smooth between their feet as they pulled off their shoes and walked down to the shore. Maggie insisted Darren tried one of her cigarettes and Darren ignored Chris’s disapproving stare as he inhaled too deeply, spluttering and coughing all over the place. They all cracked open a beer each and sat with their feet in the water, eyes up to the stars as they talked and laughed and joked about the past year, reliving their greatest moments.
“Favourite part of the whole year?” Darren was the first to ask.
“Getting the magazine up and running,” Chris said immediately.
“Getting my first kiss,” Maggie said shyly and Chris squealed before pressing for details. Maggie admitted that it happened at the start of the year with a guy at a party but he was from another school and she didn’t even know his name but he was an amazing dancer and definitely knew what he was doing. Chris rolled his eyes at that, Maggie’s laughter ringing like bells through the night's breeze.
“What about you, Dare?” Chris asked, turning to him once Maggie was done her story.
Smiling slowly, Darren ducked his head, a hint of shyness reddening his cheeks.
“Would you laugh at me if I said meeting you guys?”
They were silent for a moment, and Darren braced himself for their teasing - but it never came.
Instead, he felt two bodies wrap around him in a hug that sent warmth flowing right through him and pushed a smile from both edges of his mouth.
“Yeah I guess that was pretty good,” Maggie teased.
Yeah, Darren thought, it really, really was.
--
PART 6