And the Moon Don't Give a Damn [All-American Rejects, Nick/Tyson]
Title: And the Moon Don't Give a Damn
Author: fizzyblogic
Fandom: The All-American Rejects RPS
Pairing: Nick/Tyson
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not true, don't know, don't own, plz don't sue.
Lyrics: But if I seem to act unkind // It's only me, it's not my mind // That is confusing things
Notes: Thanks to canciona for extending the deadline, and to decor_noctis for the beta.
T-Minus fifteen minutes and counting
It’s dark when Nick gets back to Stillwater. He follows the streetlights for a little way, but he knows the rest from memory, so when they peter out and he’s left in darkness, he just takes another swig of his coffee and drives on, watching in the headlights for anything he might run over.
He doesn’t want to go home, not just yet. His mom hadn’t exactly sounded thrilled when he’d called that morning and made it official. His sister had talked to both their parents, though, he could tell. She’d been the one who had heard, after all, about how much he hated it in college.
The only person he wants to see right now is Ty. But he can’t just show up on his doorstep, not after last week, not after - so here he is, because all he wants is Tyson but he needs some time to think. So he’s going to the place he and Ty found one summer, a small dip in a field still in a border negotiation between two farms. No one can see you there until they step right on your face, and sound seems to collect in the air right above it but go no further. It had been their favourite place to go, on long summer nights when they weren’t playing the bar and they just wanted it to be the two of them and a few bottles of beer stolen from Ty’s dad. Nick, at this point in time, needs a place to think. Their spot is the perfect one.
*
T-Minus four weeks and counting
It is Nick’s first day at college, and already he hates it.
He had had a somewhat mixed relationship with school. The assholes gave him shit and called him fag, which was possibly the most perceptive they would be in their lives, though he had always been fairly sure it was just a lucky guess based on his band geek status. (And possibly the earrings.) The girls, for the most part, ignored him, which he was fine with, and those who didn’t ignore him turned out to be good friends. The guys were either jocks, plain old assholes, nice guys he was friends with (there weren’t many, at least as a fraction of his grade’s population), annoyingly hot or Tyson. The classes were things that happened to him and got in the way of band practice. (His band, not Band.) This was, Nick has to admit, possibly why he got kicked out of so many classes.
It is as he is waking up in the frat house (no matter what happens, he is already sure he will not be joining this frat, but he doesn’t mind living here, for now) for the first time, hearing the sounds of the other guys getting up, and somebody in the next room either masturbating or having sex with a really quiet chick, that it hits Nick square in the chest: going to college was a bad idea.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and he already knows what his mom will say. Stick it out, you’ll get into the swing of things, lots of college students feel like dropping out at first. It will get better, I promise! Only Nick doesn’t think it will, because what he hates is partly the fact that he has to get up and go to class soon, but mostly the fact that he will not see Tyson.
At school, they were always saying hey in the corridors; they got their lockers reassigned last year so they were next to each other, and if Tyson was coming in on the bus in the morning and he wasn’t by his locker already, Nick would wait until he got there and they’d hang out before first period. It was why he’d got to school early most days for the past year, though his mom had taken it for enthusiasm and his sister had just given him tilty-head looks until he’d finally told her, in second semester, about Ty. (She’d just said it had taken him long enough to say it, she’d known he was gay forever, and Nick had decided that maybe older sisters were pretty cool things to have, if they kept your secrets for you.)
Nick is still lying in bed, light hitting his forehead from chinks in the curtains that aren’t so much chinks as huge gaps. This room isn’t exactly what it could be, with a little decoration, but Nick is on edge, aware that he is in a frat house and if he puts one foot wrong they’ll fall on him like bricks. Or maybe that’s just the lingering nightmares he’s had for the past three weeks. Either way, Nick jumps when something thuds against his door as someone goes past, and is relieved when he realises it wasn’t anybody knocking.
He has class at eleven. He tries not to listen to the dude next door, who hasn’t come yet but is making a good vocal effort at achieving it. Nick throws an arm across his face and then stuffs his head underneath the pillows. He finds it difficult to breathe properly, but at least the sound is muffled.
Tyson should be getting to school about now, he thinks. He’ll have a bunch of books in his backpack, he’s probably unloading them into his locker right this second. He’d be telling me about what his baby sister said if I was there, maybe showing me something he’d bought for his girlfriend at the weekend, if I wasn’t already there when he -
Nick really needs oxygen, so he takes his head out from under the pillow, just as the dude next door finally yelps and goes silent.
Somewhere a few hours north of here, Tyson will be shutting his locker and looking around the corridor. Nick wonders if Tyson misses him yet, and buries his face back in the pillow.
*
T-Minus ten minutes and counting
Nick parks his car and walks a little way down a dirt path. There’s no light except the moon, which is almost full and hangs, impassive, in a sky empty of clouds barring a few wisps. The stars are out.
He knows how to find the dip by touch, by counting his footsteps without really being aware of them, though he only drives here if he’s coming from home, or if he and Ty don’t want to walk the two miles from Ty’s place. As he gets close to it, he hears something.
He almost steps right into it, but pauses as he works out what the sound is. It’s sleepy snuffles, and Nick eases himself down carefully into half of the dip because the other half of it is being occupied by a sleeping Tyson.
Nick looks up at the moon and thinks, well, I did need to see him. He looks back at the silhouette of Ty’s nose and adds, I’ll just lie here quiet and think until he wakes up.
Tyson smiles in his sleep.
*
T-Minus five days and counting
“So hey, how’s the college life going? You still partying away down there?”
Tyson’s voice comes down a crackling line that Nick can’t shake off the feeling of being listened to on an extension somewhere on, despite each room having its own private line. “Yep. It’s a total blast, Ty, you’d love it.” His own voice is slightly slurred, but that’s just because he has been slowly imbibing alcohol for the past two days straight. He’s skipped all his classes and really, since he decided that if he did have to be here, he may as well get as blind drunk as possible and have a reason for flunking his classes as much as he is, besides really not caring, he has felt strangely liberated. Or at least, a temporary, hysterical kind of liberated, the type that comes right before a yawning gape of despair opens up right in front of your face.
But for now, Nick Wheeler is a very cheerful dude. He raises his bottle in greeting to the two guys walking past his door, just to prove it. “Yeah,” Tyson sighs, “I could do with some partying right about now.”
“How come? You okay, man?” Nick is hazily aware that he isn’t doing something right.
Tyson huffs out another breath. “Got dumped today,” is his reply, and suddenly, no matter how low Nick’s blood-to-alcohol ratio is at present, he is not nearly drunk enough.
“What? Shit, dude, I’m sorry. What happened?” Nick takes another swig from his bottle, but instead of making him feel drunker, he can’t stop rapidly sobering up. He gets up to close his door and feels steady on his feet for the first time in days. It’s a weird sensation.
“She,” Tyson starts. Then he laughs, and it sounds like he’s trying to push his voice into something light, like he’s trying not to give too much away. Nick holds his breath. “She gave me some bullshit about how I obviously would rather be with … someone else, but I guess all it really means is she doesn’t want to feel bad for cheating on me. Right?”
Nick blinked. His body was still making a valiant effort at sobriety, but all the same he was struggling to keep up with the conversation. “Wait, hold on, she cheated on you? The fuck, who with?”
“You know Scott Haddon, the linebacker last year?”
“No fucking way, dude.” Nick shakes his head. “That asshole.”
Tyson is smiling, Nick can hear it in his voice. “Thanks, man.”
“For what?” Nick puts the bottle down, then picks it up again and plays with the label, peeling the corner off just a little and then smoothing it down again. He needs something for his hands to do right now.
“A lot of things.” There’s a shrug in Tyson’s voice, and he might, maybe, from the sounds of it, be holding his breath a little. “Uh, Nick? There was - I mean, she kind of said some things, about how I was obviously into -” He pauses, and clears his throat. “Somebody else, and maybe I’d be better off with - with this person. Uhm.”
“That’s bullshit,” Nick explodes, but then stops. “Wait, is there someone? She can’t mean Sally, right? Because you know she’s not interested in you that way, and -”
“It’s not Sally,” Tyson says, and his voice is tight. “It’s - look, I think we’d better just forget it, right? She was just, I guess she was trying to blame me for shit because she went and slept with somebody else -”
“Woah, she slept with him? But I mean, you two haven-- uh. Have you?” Nick grips the handset with a sweaty palm and hopes his voice hadn’t cracked. He thinks it might have, but he can’t be sure; it’s hard to hear past the rushing in his ears.
“No,” Tyson says, quickly. “No, we never had sex, Nick, it wasn’t - no.”
“Okay.”
There is a silence for a minute, which feels like a lifetime to Nick. He spends it trying hard not to freak out, and think of what to say next. Because Tyson is pausing. And Nick has a bad feeling about this pause, about what could be on the other end of it, and he wants to think of something, anything, that will head Tyson off, that won’t lead him down a really dangerous route.
“You wanna come see me this weekend?” is what comes out. “I mean, if you’re free. We could get up to some thrilling illegal activities.” Five seconds after he says it, he wishes he could take it back. His face gets hot, really quickly, as if all the blood in his entire head has just rushed to the surface of his cheeks.
There is a sound on the other end of the line that could be Tyson dropping the phone and softly cursing or could just be somebody coming into the room wherever Tyson is, or it could be any number of things, but it takes Tyson a minute to reply, so maybe it was the phone being dropped. “I can’t,” Tyson says into the roaring silence between Nick’s ears, “I have to help my dad out, he needs me this weekend. But uh, soon.” And then he pauses again and Nick panics, because something is going to happen any second and it will end badly. He opens his mouth to say something, doesn’t matter what, just something, but before he can start Tyson says, like he can’t not say it, “I miss you.”
In the last few weeks of frequent phone calls and daily emails and one short visit when Tyson’s dad drove him over for an afternoon, they’ve said that they miss things. “I kinda miss my locker,” Nick had said one night, and Tyson had said “Drinking ain’t quite so fun tonight” once, and there had been silences and other words and all of them had said I miss you but never with the actual words. Nick swallows, his throat suddenly insanely dry, like he hasn’t had water in days (but hey, he hasn’t, he should get on that) and he wants to say I miss you too, he wants to say I hate it here because you’re so far away, he wants to say I fucking love you, you asshole, and if you dick me around any more about this mysterious person you may or may not be interested in I am going to fucking scream, goddammit. But he doesn’t say any of those things, he doesn’t say anything at all, and feeling as if he is above his own head watching himself do it, he hangs up.
He sits, for a minute, staring at the phone in his hand. He wonders what the fuck he did that for, except that he knows. He stares intently at the numbers on the phone, willing Tyson to call back so he can laugh and say he doesn’t know what happened but they got cut off and maybe one of the guys shorted out the phones again, and he didn’t hear that last thing Tyson said, what was it? And then Tyson could say never mind, and they’d go back to talking about what a bitch Tyson’s now-ex girlfriend is. Nick still can’t believe she fucking slept with Scott, when she’s been seeing Ty for two years and they never did anything more than fooling around some. (As far as he knows, but then, Tyson tells him that shit.)
Ten minutes pass, the phone doesn’t ring, and Nick starts to think that maybe somebody really did short them out. So he pushes the button and waits for the dial tone.
A low-humming buzz. The phone is working. But Tyson hasn’t called back.
Nick drops it onto the bedcovers like it burned him, and stares blinking at the wall for a minute. Tyson said he missed him. Then Nick hung up on him. And Tyson isn’t calling back.
*
Tyson doesn’t call or email for five days, and by the end of it, Nick finally snaps and calls his mom to tell her he’s dropping out of college and coming home. It takes him all day to pack, and then he gets in his car and drives.
*
T-Minus two minutes and counting
Nick is cold now. He thinks about going back to the car, and carefully, silently stands up. Tyson doesn’t move.
He returns in a few minutes with the rest of his coffee (now getting on for cold, but warm enough to not yet be gross) and a thick blanket his parents had given him for his college room. He throws this over Tyson and partly over himself and settles down again.
Tyson edges closer, his eyes still closed. He breathes in, a deep deliberate breath, and rolls over so that one arm flops over Nick’s chest. “Nicky?” he mumbles. He sounds mostly still asleep.
“Shh,” Nick murmurs, brushing the hair off Tyson’s forehead. He looks impossibly pretty in the moonlight, and Nick swallows down a soft sound. “It’s just a dream,” he whispers, moving his mouth closer to Tyson’s ear. “Just a dream.”
Tyson moves his mouth as if to smile, though the muscles are still too deeply relaxed to quite make it. “Dream?” he mumbles. He nuzzles closer. “So what are you waitin’ for?” he asks, voice slow and sleep-drenched and so quiet Nick goes entirely still and strains to hear it. “Gonna kiss me or what?”
Nick holds his breath and feels his heart thump against Tyson’s wrist. He wonders if Tyson can feel it too. “Do I usually kiss you in your dreams?” he whispers, hardly daring to exhale.
“All the time, stupid,” Tyson murmurs, sounding sleepier than ever. “’S what she was sayin’, miss you. Too much. An’ …” His voice trails off.
Nick leans over and gently catches Tyson’s bottom lip between his. Tyson’s too far asleep to press back, but he tries anyway, and Nick suppresses a groan. “I’m who she said you’d rather be with?”
Tyson nods a little, burying his face in Nick’s shirt. “Smell so good,” he mutters.
“And would you?” Nick asks, wondering how he has any breath left to speak. His heart is going really fast, and Tyson’s nuzzling against his side so the tingles are starting, and he has really missed those tingles.
“Wha’?” Tyson asks, mouth slack but beginning to sound just slightly more awake than before.
Nick swallows. “Rather be with me?”
“Yeah,” Tyson exhales, and nuzzles closer. Nick is suddenly aware of Tyson’s body, the way his legs are lying close to Nick’s, the way his arm is flung across him, and maybe, unless Nick is imagining things, Tyson is starting to get kind of hard.
Nick closes his eyes and swallows a few times, dizzy. He finds Tyson’s mouth without looking, and kisses him, Tyson responding slow, sleepy, and smiling. Nick cups the back of Tyson’s head with one palm and exhales against his cheek. “Ty?” he whispers.
“Yeah?” comes the answering murmur.
“This is not a dream.” He kisses him again, heart thumping, a roaring in his ears. “Not a dream, fuck, not a dream.”
Tyson suddenly pulls away, a hand pressed to Nick’s chest, and his eyes are flying open. “Shit, fuck, Nick?”
For three entire seconds, Nick’s world hangs in suspension somewhere between horror and relief. The only thought that echoes in the silence is At least I know what it’s like to kiss him now, for him to kiss back, and it is that thought, that Tyson had kissed back, that reminds Nick to breathe. “Uh.”
“You hung up on me,” Tyson says, avoiding Nick’s eyes. His hand is still on Nick’s chest, half a palm away from his heartbeat, so Nick is pretty sure Tyson can feel it racing.
“I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t - I panicked.”
“Wait, hold on - wait. What are you even doing here?” Tyson is waking up, and fast.
Nick thinks about shutting his eyes for this next part, but so much hangs on Tyson’s reaction that he forces himself to keep them open. “I quit college, Ty. I’m back.”
Tyson just stares at him, and Nick can’t read his expression. “Why?” he asks at last, sounding like it took a huge effort to speak.
Nick could say any number of things right now, about flunking out, about hating school, but all he can think of is nights curled up in his room memorising emails and willing the phone to ring and jerking off silently so he didn’t call out the right name, and when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “I fucking missed you, Ty. I fucking missed you.”
Tyson is still staring at him, but his gaze has shifted to his mouth. He touches his own lips absently for a second, and says, “Were you really kissing me just now, or did I dream that like always?”
Nick wants more than anything to sit up right now, to press closer and kiss him again, but he doesn’t know if he can risk it yet - he pauses for two point five seconds as Tyson’s breathing gets shaky, and then he thinks, fuck it, I’ve come this far, and he sits up, reaches, and presses his mouth to Tyson’s.
Tyson makes a surprised sound and then he’s kissing back, pressing closer, and Nick lets out a groan that he’s been suppressing for three years as the tip of Tyson’s tongue runs along his lower lip. Nick opens his mouth and Tyson eases his tongue into it, lapping a little against Nick’s tongue. They’re both breathing fast, and Nick’s hand is in Tyson’s hair again, and his whole body is tingling.
“Fuck,” Nick breathes when they break apart for air, minutes later, neither knows how many. Tyson keeps the contact by nuzzling their noses together, and something in Nick’s chest collapses. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’ve wanted this so long, so bad, fuck, Ty.”
Tyson just closes his eyes and whispers, “Wanted this always,” and crashes their mouths together again.
Patches of moonlight open up in the field, but none hit the dip where the two boys lie, exploring each other’s mouths breathlessly. No one is near to disturb them, not when Nick rolls them over and settles above Tyson’s body, not when Tyson breaks off to kiss along Nick’s shoulder, not when Nick rolls back over and they just lie, side by side, kissing slowly, both of them shaking, their heartbeats a symphony in the night.
Author: fizzyblogic
Fandom: The All-American Rejects RPS
Pairing: Nick/Tyson
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not true, don't know, don't own, plz don't sue.
Lyrics: But if I seem to act unkind // It's only me, it's not my mind // That is confusing things
Notes: Thanks to canciona for extending the deadline, and to decor_noctis for the beta.
T-Minus fifteen minutes and counting
It’s dark when Nick gets back to Stillwater. He follows the streetlights for a little way, but he knows the rest from memory, so when they peter out and he’s left in darkness, he just takes another swig of his coffee and drives on, watching in the headlights for anything he might run over.
He doesn’t want to go home, not just yet. His mom hadn’t exactly sounded thrilled when he’d called that morning and made it official. His sister had talked to both their parents, though, he could tell. She’d been the one who had heard, after all, about how much he hated it in college.
The only person he wants to see right now is Ty. But he can’t just show up on his doorstep, not after last week, not after - so here he is, because all he wants is Tyson but he needs some time to think. So he’s going to the place he and Ty found one summer, a small dip in a field still in a border negotiation between two farms. No one can see you there until they step right on your face, and sound seems to collect in the air right above it but go no further. It had been their favourite place to go, on long summer nights when they weren’t playing the bar and they just wanted it to be the two of them and a few bottles of beer stolen from Ty’s dad. Nick, at this point in time, needs a place to think. Their spot is the perfect one.
*
T-Minus four weeks and counting
It is Nick’s first day at college, and already he hates it.
He had had a somewhat mixed relationship with school. The assholes gave him shit and called him fag, which was possibly the most perceptive they would be in their lives, though he had always been fairly sure it was just a lucky guess based on his band geek status. (And possibly the earrings.) The girls, for the most part, ignored him, which he was fine with, and those who didn’t ignore him turned out to be good friends. The guys were either jocks, plain old assholes, nice guys he was friends with (there weren’t many, at least as a fraction of his grade’s population), annoyingly hot or Tyson. The classes were things that happened to him and got in the way of band practice. (His band, not Band.) This was, Nick has to admit, possibly why he got kicked out of so many classes.
It is as he is waking up in the frat house (no matter what happens, he is already sure he will not be joining this frat, but he doesn’t mind living here, for now) for the first time, hearing the sounds of the other guys getting up, and somebody in the next room either masturbating or having sex with a really quiet chick, that it hits Nick square in the chest: going to college was a bad idea.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and he already knows what his mom will say. Stick it out, you’ll get into the swing of things, lots of college students feel like dropping out at first. It will get better, I promise! Only Nick doesn’t think it will, because what he hates is partly the fact that he has to get up and go to class soon, but mostly the fact that he will not see Tyson.
At school, they were always saying hey in the corridors; they got their lockers reassigned last year so they were next to each other, and if Tyson was coming in on the bus in the morning and he wasn’t by his locker already, Nick would wait until he got there and they’d hang out before first period. It was why he’d got to school early most days for the past year, though his mom had taken it for enthusiasm and his sister had just given him tilty-head looks until he’d finally told her, in second semester, about Ty. (She’d just said it had taken him long enough to say it, she’d known he was gay forever, and Nick had decided that maybe older sisters were pretty cool things to have, if they kept your secrets for you.)
Nick is still lying in bed, light hitting his forehead from chinks in the curtains that aren’t so much chinks as huge gaps. This room isn’t exactly what it could be, with a little decoration, but Nick is on edge, aware that he is in a frat house and if he puts one foot wrong they’ll fall on him like bricks. Or maybe that’s just the lingering nightmares he’s had for the past three weeks. Either way, Nick jumps when something thuds against his door as someone goes past, and is relieved when he realises it wasn’t anybody knocking.
He has class at eleven. He tries not to listen to the dude next door, who hasn’t come yet but is making a good vocal effort at achieving it. Nick throws an arm across his face and then stuffs his head underneath the pillows. He finds it difficult to breathe properly, but at least the sound is muffled.
Tyson should be getting to school about now, he thinks. He’ll have a bunch of books in his backpack, he’s probably unloading them into his locker right this second. He’d be telling me about what his baby sister said if I was there, maybe showing me something he’d bought for his girlfriend at the weekend, if I wasn’t already there when he -
Nick really needs oxygen, so he takes his head out from under the pillow, just as the dude next door finally yelps and goes silent.
Somewhere a few hours north of here, Tyson will be shutting his locker and looking around the corridor. Nick wonders if Tyson misses him yet, and buries his face back in the pillow.
*
T-Minus ten minutes and counting
Nick parks his car and walks a little way down a dirt path. There’s no light except the moon, which is almost full and hangs, impassive, in a sky empty of clouds barring a few wisps. The stars are out.
He knows how to find the dip by touch, by counting his footsteps without really being aware of them, though he only drives here if he’s coming from home, or if he and Ty don’t want to walk the two miles from Ty’s place. As he gets close to it, he hears something.
He almost steps right into it, but pauses as he works out what the sound is. It’s sleepy snuffles, and Nick eases himself down carefully into half of the dip because the other half of it is being occupied by a sleeping Tyson.
Nick looks up at the moon and thinks, well, I did need to see him. He looks back at the silhouette of Ty’s nose and adds, I’ll just lie here quiet and think until he wakes up.
Tyson smiles in his sleep.
*
T-Minus five days and counting
“So hey, how’s the college life going? You still partying away down there?”
Tyson’s voice comes down a crackling line that Nick can’t shake off the feeling of being listened to on an extension somewhere on, despite each room having its own private line. “Yep. It’s a total blast, Ty, you’d love it.” His own voice is slightly slurred, but that’s just because he has been slowly imbibing alcohol for the past two days straight. He’s skipped all his classes and really, since he decided that if he did have to be here, he may as well get as blind drunk as possible and have a reason for flunking his classes as much as he is, besides really not caring, he has felt strangely liberated. Or at least, a temporary, hysterical kind of liberated, the type that comes right before a yawning gape of despair opens up right in front of your face.
But for now, Nick Wheeler is a very cheerful dude. He raises his bottle in greeting to the two guys walking past his door, just to prove it. “Yeah,” Tyson sighs, “I could do with some partying right about now.”
“How come? You okay, man?” Nick is hazily aware that he isn’t doing something right.
Tyson huffs out another breath. “Got dumped today,” is his reply, and suddenly, no matter how low Nick’s blood-to-alcohol ratio is at present, he is not nearly drunk enough.
“What? Shit, dude, I’m sorry. What happened?” Nick takes another swig from his bottle, but instead of making him feel drunker, he can’t stop rapidly sobering up. He gets up to close his door and feels steady on his feet for the first time in days. It’s a weird sensation.
“She,” Tyson starts. Then he laughs, and it sounds like he’s trying to push his voice into something light, like he’s trying not to give too much away. Nick holds his breath. “She gave me some bullshit about how I obviously would rather be with … someone else, but I guess all it really means is she doesn’t want to feel bad for cheating on me. Right?”
Nick blinked. His body was still making a valiant effort at sobriety, but all the same he was struggling to keep up with the conversation. “Wait, hold on, she cheated on you? The fuck, who with?”
“You know Scott Haddon, the linebacker last year?”
“No fucking way, dude.” Nick shakes his head. “That asshole.”
Tyson is smiling, Nick can hear it in his voice. “Thanks, man.”
“For what?” Nick puts the bottle down, then picks it up again and plays with the label, peeling the corner off just a little and then smoothing it down again. He needs something for his hands to do right now.
“A lot of things.” There’s a shrug in Tyson’s voice, and he might, maybe, from the sounds of it, be holding his breath a little. “Uh, Nick? There was - I mean, she kind of said some things, about how I was obviously into -” He pauses, and clears his throat. “Somebody else, and maybe I’d be better off with - with this person. Uhm.”
“That’s bullshit,” Nick explodes, but then stops. “Wait, is there someone? She can’t mean Sally, right? Because you know she’s not interested in you that way, and -”
“It’s not Sally,” Tyson says, and his voice is tight. “It’s - look, I think we’d better just forget it, right? She was just, I guess she was trying to blame me for shit because she went and slept with somebody else -”
“Woah, she slept with him? But I mean, you two haven-- uh. Have you?” Nick grips the handset with a sweaty palm and hopes his voice hadn’t cracked. He thinks it might have, but he can’t be sure; it’s hard to hear past the rushing in his ears.
“No,” Tyson says, quickly. “No, we never had sex, Nick, it wasn’t - no.”
“Okay.”
There is a silence for a minute, which feels like a lifetime to Nick. He spends it trying hard not to freak out, and think of what to say next. Because Tyson is pausing. And Nick has a bad feeling about this pause, about what could be on the other end of it, and he wants to think of something, anything, that will head Tyson off, that won’t lead him down a really dangerous route.
“You wanna come see me this weekend?” is what comes out. “I mean, if you’re free. We could get up to some thrilling illegal activities.” Five seconds after he says it, he wishes he could take it back. His face gets hot, really quickly, as if all the blood in his entire head has just rushed to the surface of his cheeks.
There is a sound on the other end of the line that could be Tyson dropping the phone and softly cursing or could just be somebody coming into the room wherever Tyson is, or it could be any number of things, but it takes Tyson a minute to reply, so maybe it was the phone being dropped. “I can’t,” Tyson says into the roaring silence between Nick’s ears, “I have to help my dad out, he needs me this weekend. But uh, soon.” And then he pauses again and Nick panics, because something is going to happen any second and it will end badly. He opens his mouth to say something, doesn’t matter what, just something, but before he can start Tyson says, like he can’t not say it, “I miss you.”
In the last few weeks of frequent phone calls and daily emails and one short visit when Tyson’s dad drove him over for an afternoon, they’ve said that they miss things. “I kinda miss my locker,” Nick had said one night, and Tyson had said “Drinking ain’t quite so fun tonight” once, and there had been silences and other words and all of them had said I miss you but never with the actual words. Nick swallows, his throat suddenly insanely dry, like he hasn’t had water in days (but hey, he hasn’t, he should get on that) and he wants to say I miss you too, he wants to say I hate it here because you’re so far away, he wants to say I fucking love you, you asshole, and if you dick me around any more about this mysterious person you may or may not be interested in I am going to fucking scream, goddammit. But he doesn’t say any of those things, he doesn’t say anything at all, and feeling as if he is above his own head watching himself do it, he hangs up.
He sits, for a minute, staring at the phone in his hand. He wonders what the fuck he did that for, except that he knows. He stares intently at the numbers on the phone, willing Tyson to call back so he can laugh and say he doesn’t know what happened but they got cut off and maybe one of the guys shorted out the phones again, and he didn’t hear that last thing Tyson said, what was it? And then Tyson could say never mind, and they’d go back to talking about what a bitch Tyson’s now-ex girlfriend is. Nick still can’t believe she fucking slept with Scott, when she’s been seeing Ty for two years and they never did anything more than fooling around some. (As far as he knows, but then, Tyson tells him that shit.)
Ten minutes pass, the phone doesn’t ring, and Nick starts to think that maybe somebody really did short them out. So he pushes the button and waits for the dial tone.
A low-humming buzz. The phone is working. But Tyson hasn’t called back.
Nick drops it onto the bedcovers like it burned him, and stares blinking at the wall for a minute. Tyson said he missed him. Then Nick hung up on him. And Tyson isn’t calling back.
*
Tyson doesn’t call or email for five days, and by the end of it, Nick finally snaps and calls his mom to tell her he’s dropping out of college and coming home. It takes him all day to pack, and then he gets in his car and drives.
*
T-Minus two minutes and counting
Nick is cold now. He thinks about going back to the car, and carefully, silently stands up. Tyson doesn’t move.
He returns in a few minutes with the rest of his coffee (now getting on for cold, but warm enough to not yet be gross) and a thick blanket his parents had given him for his college room. He throws this over Tyson and partly over himself and settles down again.
Tyson edges closer, his eyes still closed. He breathes in, a deep deliberate breath, and rolls over so that one arm flops over Nick’s chest. “Nicky?” he mumbles. He sounds mostly still asleep.
“Shh,” Nick murmurs, brushing the hair off Tyson’s forehead. He looks impossibly pretty in the moonlight, and Nick swallows down a soft sound. “It’s just a dream,” he whispers, moving his mouth closer to Tyson’s ear. “Just a dream.”
Tyson moves his mouth as if to smile, though the muscles are still too deeply relaxed to quite make it. “Dream?” he mumbles. He nuzzles closer. “So what are you waitin’ for?” he asks, voice slow and sleep-drenched and so quiet Nick goes entirely still and strains to hear it. “Gonna kiss me or what?”
Nick holds his breath and feels his heart thump against Tyson’s wrist. He wonders if Tyson can feel it too. “Do I usually kiss you in your dreams?” he whispers, hardly daring to exhale.
“All the time, stupid,” Tyson murmurs, sounding sleepier than ever. “’S what she was sayin’, miss you. Too much. An’ …” His voice trails off.
Nick leans over and gently catches Tyson’s bottom lip between his. Tyson’s too far asleep to press back, but he tries anyway, and Nick suppresses a groan. “I’m who she said you’d rather be with?”
Tyson nods a little, burying his face in Nick’s shirt. “Smell so good,” he mutters.
“And would you?” Nick asks, wondering how he has any breath left to speak. His heart is going really fast, and Tyson’s nuzzling against his side so the tingles are starting, and he has really missed those tingles.
“Wha’?” Tyson asks, mouth slack but beginning to sound just slightly more awake than before.
Nick swallows. “Rather be with me?”
“Yeah,” Tyson exhales, and nuzzles closer. Nick is suddenly aware of Tyson’s body, the way his legs are lying close to Nick’s, the way his arm is flung across him, and maybe, unless Nick is imagining things, Tyson is starting to get kind of hard.
Nick closes his eyes and swallows a few times, dizzy. He finds Tyson’s mouth without looking, and kisses him, Tyson responding slow, sleepy, and smiling. Nick cups the back of Tyson’s head with one palm and exhales against his cheek. “Ty?” he whispers.
“Yeah?” comes the answering murmur.
“This is not a dream.” He kisses him again, heart thumping, a roaring in his ears. “Not a dream, fuck, not a dream.”
Tyson suddenly pulls away, a hand pressed to Nick’s chest, and his eyes are flying open. “Shit, fuck, Nick?”
For three entire seconds, Nick’s world hangs in suspension somewhere between horror and relief. The only thought that echoes in the silence is At least I know what it’s like to kiss him now, for him to kiss back, and it is that thought, that Tyson had kissed back, that reminds Nick to breathe. “Uh.”
“You hung up on me,” Tyson says, avoiding Nick’s eyes. His hand is still on Nick’s chest, half a palm away from his heartbeat, so Nick is pretty sure Tyson can feel it racing.
“I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t - I panicked.”
“Wait, hold on - wait. What are you even doing here?” Tyson is waking up, and fast.
Nick thinks about shutting his eyes for this next part, but so much hangs on Tyson’s reaction that he forces himself to keep them open. “I quit college, Ty. I’m back.”
Tyson just stares at him, and Nick can’t read his expression. “Why?” he asks at last, sounding like it took a huge effort to speak.
Nick could say any number of things right now, about flunking out, about hating school, but all he can think of is nights curled up in his room memorising emails and willing the phone to ring and jerking off silently so he didn’t call out the right name, and when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “I fucking missed you, Ty. I fucking missed you.”
Tyson is still staring at him, but his gaze has shifted to his mouth. He touches his own lips absently for a second, and says, “Were you really kissing me just now, or did I dream that like always?”
Nick wants more than anything to sit up right now, to press closer and kiss him again, but he doesn’t know if he can risk it yet - he pauses for two point five seconds as Tyson’s breathing gets shaky, and then he thinks, fuck it, I’ve come this far, and he sits up, reaches, and presses his mouth to Tyson’s.
Tyson makes a surprised sound and then he’s kissing back, pressing closer, and Nick lets out a groan that he’s been suppressing for three years as the tip of Tyson’s tongue runs along his lower lip. Nick opens his mouth and Tyson eases his tongue into it, lapping a little against Nick’s tongue. They’re both breathing fast, and Nick’s hand is in Tyson’s hair again, and his whole body is tingling.
“Fuck,” Nick breathes when they break apart for air, minutes later, neither knows how many. Tyson keeps the contact by nuzzling their noses together, and something in Nick’s chest collapses. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’ve wanted this so long, so bad, fuck, Ty.”
Tyson just closes his eyes and whispers, “Wanted this always,” and crashes their mouths together again.
Patches of moonlight open up in the field, but none hit the dip where the two boys lie, exploring each other’s mouths breathlessly. No one is near to disturb them, not when Nick rolls them over and settles above Tyson’s body, not when Tyson breaks off to kiss along Nick’s shoulder, not when Nick rolls back over and they just lie, side by side, kissing slowly, both of them shaking, their heartbeats a symphony in the night.