Griffin felt like he was floating through the next few weeks.

Time seemed to anchor on Charlie so that when they were apart it passed quickly and lightly, but their time spent together felt dense and rich like a drop of molasses making its way down the neck of a bottle.

Charlie would find Griffin in the mornings and walk him to his first period. They’d eat lunch together, outside away from the bustle and bluster of the cafeteria. They’d begun trading rapidly in books and films now – like Paradise Highway and their not-date beneath the night stars had given them permission to speak more freely again. They were no longer worried that the unspoken layers of meaning would be missed.

Neither one of them acknowledged the shift – or that fact that they traded most frequently in narratives about men in love with other men.

Griffin read insatiably, just to find snippets of text to message to Charlie. And Charlie, in turn, replied with clips and screenshots of films with hand-drawn annotations scrawled over them.

This one reminds me of their beach, one message read. Griffin didn’t need to ask who he was referring to. The beach in Dip, home to budding adolescent love, occupied his mind as well.

When they drove at night – now graduated further to the main streets and roads of their town – they theorized about romance and love, or at least their distant, foreign concepts as presented in the narratives they consumed.

It was much easier that way – to speak in parable and puppets. To muse on the bubbling desire embodied in a sequence of ocean waves cut between the furtive glances of two strangers. To wonder about an author’s intentions when she described a friendship as ‘loving, tender, and everlasting’. To read words aloud to one another pretending they spoke of characters and not each other.

Their language was a dance of meanings and intents. Every line, every shot, every ruminating thought was both a notch towards their project and a flirtatious taunt – daring the other to be the first to lift the thinning veil. For every step forward, a mirrored step back. And in that way, they danced happily together.

But it wasn’t long before the music stopped, and one misstep sent them toppling to the ground.

Griffin only wished it hadn’t come so soon.