I woke up early on the day Jethro was coming over and cleaned my room. Not that it was super messy, but if I was going to be so far beneath his level when it came to aesthetics I might as well be clean about it.

I even made my bed, which I hadn’t done… maybe ever? I didn’t really see the point. I was only going to mess it up again the next time I slept in it, and I was usually the only person who went into my room. 

I couldn’t even remember if Jethro’s bed had been made, which only further highlighted the fact that it didn’t fucking matter. But I did it anyway. I did it for him.

And then I gave Pippi a bath and brushed her fur and cut her nails, because she did matter. She was my perfect baby and I wanted her to be at her best when she met my boyfriend.

Unfortunately, it was still not time for Jethro to arrive yet. I hated just sitting around and waiting for things. Anticipation, even for good things, was really just another form of anxiety.

I messed with my hair, brushed my teeth again, and then I messed with my hair some more.

The buzz of the doorbell startled me and I glanced at the clock on my wall. He was four minutes early. I’d been so focused on the countdown that I’d forgotten being anything but precisely on time was even an option.

Pippi dashed out ahead of me when I opened my bedroom door. By the time I was within view of the front door, Jethro was already sitting on the floor with Pippi jumping on his chest and trying to lick his face. I’d known they’d get along.

My mum, who had answered the door, was smiling down at him. “She really likes you. Maybe she’s smelled you on Cas before.”

“Probably,” Jethro agreed, then looked up and gave me a smile. “Hey, Cas!”

“Hey…” I said back, though it came out less enthusiastic than I felt because I was distracted by my mum mouthing something that I was pretty sure was ‘he’s cute’.

She gave me a beaming smile. I gave her a scowl. 

But she wasn’t wrong. He was cute. Especially right now, cuddling my dog on the floor.

“Come on, Jethro,” I told him. “Let’s go to my room.”

My mum managed not to embarrass me in the few seconds more they were in contact, and then I had Jethro and Pippi in my bedroom and my door shut. Perfect.

Jethro flopped down on my bed with Pippi and she pressed herself against him and wriggled around on her back. She settled as he started rubbing her belly. I lay down next to Jethro and stroked her too and she let out a contented sigh.

“This isn’t too much, is it?” Jethro asked, and for a moment I thought he was talking about, like… life, and present events, and I genuinely had to ponder the question. But then I noticed he was plucking at the purple tights he was wearing and I realised he was just talking about his outfit.

“No?” I said. He was wearing purple tights, black shorts, and a long sleeved black and purple striped shirt. He looked good, as always, but it was hardly more extravagant than what he wore any other day.

“I was wondering if maybe I should tone it down to make a good impression on your mum, but you know…” He shrugged. “What’s the point, right? If she only likes a version of me that isn’t me, where does that get me?”

It was weird to me that he even cared, though I wasn’t sure why. I cared what his parents thought of me.

“How could anyone not like you?”

He shot me a smile. “It happens. Shocking, I know.”

My hand found its way to his thigh and stroked over the stretchy material of his tights. “I like these.”

And that was, of course, when my dad burst into the room without knocking.

“Hey, when do you—” He stopped and took in the scene. Pippi was still between us so we weren’t exactly all up on one another, but we were laying on the bed together and my hand was on Jethro’s thigh. It was enough to act as a reminder of what he could have walked in on. “I should probably knock, huh?”

“I’m glad you recognise that,” I told him. It was hard to be too mad when he did genuinely look embarrassed. And also Jethro was trying not to laugh. “Is the house at least on fire or something?”

“No, I just wanted to know when you guys wanted pizza.”

“We’ll let you know.”

“Okay, you two have fun! But not too much fun. Or, you know, you’re sixteen, so just—”

“Bye, dad.”

“Bye!”

After he shut the door behind him, I got up and locked it and then returned to my spot on the bed. “Sorry about him.”

Jethro shook his head. He was still laughing a little. “No, I love him.”

“He has actual genuine problems with impulse control sometimes. It can be frustrating, but I always just end up feeling bad if I get angry at him because he never means to be inconsiderate. And… I know how that feels. Sometimes I’m rude when I don’t mean to be, and I just feel shitty about it when I realise.”

Jethro wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in closer beside him. “Mm. Manners are a social construct anyway.”

He smelled nice. I buried my face in his hair and inhaled. “Strawberries?”

“Yup.” He rubbed the side of his head against mine. “So… what do you want to do?”

I sat up. “Hmm… I think I have some Uno cards around here somewhere?”

He smiled. “Sounds good.”

It was forty five minutes and several games of Uno later that it occurred to me that when he’d asked what I wanted to do at that particular moment, Uno hadn’t been what he’d had in mind. 

Well, I hoped he’d learned a valuable lesson about not expecting me to pick up on things like subtext and context clues. Unfortunately I doubted he’d suffered enough to learn anything as we were both having too much fun playing Uno. But, like, sincerely. It was actually great.

“I’m hungry,” Jethro announced after he’d won our latest game.

“Yeah, me too. Guess we should go tell my dad we can order pizza now.” 

I looked around for the Uno box, only to find it in several more pieces than it had been last time I’d checked. Pippi wagged her tail at me as she swallowed the piece of cardboard she’d been chewing.

Jethro pulled a hair tie out of his pocket and offered it to me. As I used it to bound the cards, I made a mental note to sniff it later to find out if it smelled of strawberries.

#

“Pizza time,” I announced as I led Jethro back out into the living room.

“Yay!” My dad grabbed for the laptop on the coffee table. “What do you guys want? I’ve already put in my order and your mum’s.”

“Oh, sorry! Did we keep you waiting?” Jethro asked.

“Jethro, my boy, I’ve been waiting all week,” my dad told him as he passed him the laptop.

“Oh,” Jethro said. “Why didn’t you just have pizza another day?”

“Have you ever heard anyone say that when you’re an adult, you make your own rules?” my dad asked, and Jethro nodded. “Well, they make that sound freeing and exciting, but half the time it just means you have to be your own parent and say no to yourself when you want pizza every day. I find it helps to imagine people judging me harshly if I break these rules.”

My mum perched next to my dad on the arm of the sofa and gave his ear a gentle tug. “Brian, that’s terrible advice.”

“I never said it was advice. Besides, isn’t it just sort of implied that you shouldn’t take advice from me?”

My mum shook her head and turned her attention to Jethro. “So, Jethro, I heard you got the lead in your school play.”

He gave her a smile. “Yup! Peter Pan. Just a few more weeks before we start shows. I’m nervous, but excited.”

“Think you could score us tickets to one of these shows?” my dad asked.

Jethro laughed. “Yeah, I’m going to get you some for opening night. I meant to ask, actually. Are you going to that regional meeting for work? My mum is, so she’ll be away that night.”

“Fuck.” My dad frowned. “Yeah.”

“Well, if you really do want to come and see it I can get you tickets for another night as well, but I want Cas to be there for the first one. Moral support and all.”

I accepted the laptop as he passed it over to me. “I’ll be there.”

“You know, Cas was in a school play once,” my mum said.

“The one in preschool?” I asked. “I don’t think that counts, mum.”

“It was a play! It was for school! It counts!” my mum insisted.

“You were so angry about it,” my dad said, but he was smiling. “You were on stage for less than a minute and you only had two lines, but you didn’t speak a single word to anyone for a full day afterwards.”

“In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that was just sensory overload,” I said. “You always thought I was sulking. That was not the case.”

“Yes, there were a lot of things we didn’t understand about you back then,” my mum said. “We later found out that you’d memorised the entire script of the play. Everyone’s lines. We didn’t know how or why, but you did that.”

“I think I was confused about the concept of understudies and thought they might ask me to do someone else’s part without any warning. I was ready for anything that day.”

“He did that sort of thing a lot, by the way,” my mum added to Jethro. “And he’d never tell us about any of it. He’d just suddenly get so, so upset and half the time we’d never figure out what it had all been about.”

That had been a conscious choice. Even when I’d been little, I’d been aware that the things I worried about weren’t sensible. I knew that because every time I did tell someone why I was upset, that was essentially what they told me. As I’d grown up, I’d become increasingly good at suppressing my emotional responses so that nobody even had to know that I was upset about something. Which was good, because the older I got the stupider I felt about the sorts of things that upset me.

Or maybe it was bad. I was self aware enough to know that if I ever said that shit out loud to my psychiatrist he wouldn’t be like, yes, Casper, that’s a great way to deal with your emotions and you should totally keep it up. But hell, it felt better than being treated like I was making some kind of intentional fucking choice to be childish by getting upset by dumb things.

“Cas?” Jethro asked quietly, his shoulder bumping against mine, and I realised I’d mentally withdrawn from the conversation while it was still ongoing. Everyone was looking at me.

I refused to make eye contact with any of them or acknowledge the situation. “I would like cheese pizza.”

My dad nodded and pretended like he was adding that to our order, even though it was already on there because I’d been getting the exact same thing every time we ordered pizza for as long as I could remember. “Jethro?”

“Oh, uh…” Jethro said. “I’ll just have the same, thanks.”

My dad nodded and went to add another cheese pizza to the order.

I gave Jethro’s sleeve a gentle tug and when he moved towards me without hesitance I turned and led the way back to my room. I wanted to be alone with him again.

We lay back down on my bed and this time he was close, right up against me. He was warm and sweet smelling.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Huh?” I asked. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been thinking about maybe kissing him.

“You seemed… I don’t know. Like maybe you weren’t enjoying that conversation so much.”

“Ah,” I said. “I think you have an extremely skewed view of how much I enjoy conversations in general because I like talking to you. What just happened is fairly representative of how much social interaction I can endure before remembering why I avoid it.”

“They seem to care about you, at least. Sorry if you weren’t comfortable with them talking about that kind of stuff in front of me. Parents can be embarrassing.”

“They can be, but I’m not embarrassed. I was just thinking about how I’m still a sensitive baby, I’m just better at hiding it these days. Though apparently not good enough at hiding it that you don’t notice.”

“I don’t think you’re a sensitive baby or anything like that. But, uh, would it have been better if I didn’t say anything? I mean I guess if you’re trying to hide it, you don’t want me to bring it up.”

I had to really think about that one because yeah, that had been the goal, and it wasn’t just for my parents. But… now that he was actually talking to me about it, I didn’t really mind. Maybe because he wasn’t reacting how I always feared people would. He wasn’t annoyed at me for having emotions.

Not that my parents ever had been, exactly. That wasn’t a fair characterisation. There was nothing exceptionally bad about anything they’d done. They just hadn’t understood me.

That’s just how people treat children, really. There are contexts and degrees when it comes to what emotional behaviour is accepted. Step outside of those bounds, and you will be met with disapproval. For many kids, that was probably even the right strategy. It just wasn’t what I, a child struggling to express his difficulty dealing with a world he didn’t fit into, had needed.

“Cas?” Jethro said, and I realised I hadn’t actually responded to him. He sounded worried.

“Can I kiss you?”

When I looked at Jethro, he was smiling. “Yeah. You don’t have to ask.”

I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at him. “Yes I do. Because consent.”

“I hereby grant you blanket, ongoing consent to kiss me whenever you want.”

“That’s not how consent works. I know because I have a master’s degree from sex school that I got from that nurse.”

“Kissing isn’t sex.”

“No, but it still requires consent. Ongoing, enthusiastic consent.”

“I’m enthusiastically consenting. You know, if you want…”

So I kissed him. I probably wasn’t very good at kissing, but it felt good. I slipped my tongue just past his lips experimentally and it tasted like I’d expect the inside of someone else’s mouth to taste, which was kind of weird but far hotter and not nearly as gross as I’d been expecting. I did it again, deeper this time, and he made a sound in the back of his throat that went straight to my cock and raked his fingers through my hair.

When I finally pulled away, Jethro’s face was flushed and his pupils were blown. He smiled at me. “That was good. I liked that.”

“I like you.”

“Pfft,” he said, his teeth digging into his wet, pink lips. “I like you too, Casper.”