Dreams were a scary thing.

They held our deepest darkest secrets, and told us things about ourselves and our feelings that we tended to hide from the world. Freud, under my assumption, stated that dreams always had a sexual undertone or in better terms were our inner most desires. My other assumption was that Sigmund Freud just had an unhealthy obsession with sex; something I couldn’t relate to. Unlike Sigmund, my dreams were dangerous things, plaguing my mind with anxiety and what ifs. I always believed that my dreams were constantly trying to tell me something or were some sort of self-reflection, a reflection I was too scared to look into. Dreams held the power to mean anything and nothing at the same time, an ability that, in retrospect, also worried me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a dream. 

The weight on my stomach was very real, so real that I was scared to look down at the soft tendrils of hair my fingers were interlaced in. I ran my hand through the silky locks, my vision being filled with nothing but strawberry blonde hair as I tilted my head down. The sounds of soft breathing filled my ears, my chest moved the head in front of me up and down with each inhale and exhale of my lungs. Nerves got the best of me as my heart started to beat a little faster, anxiety creeping from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. A phrase repeated silently within my head like a mantra, something I wanted to say out loud, but it would have disturbed the boy resting on the lower half of my body.

Gage is my best friend

Gage is my best friend

GAGE. IS. MY. BEST. FRIEND.

The chanting in my head felt all too real, the words silently screamed over and over in my head reminding me that the body on top of mine was very real. The fact, in the back of my mind, that no matter how hard I tried, the scene in front of me was not a dream. I wasn’t going to miraculously wake up and pretend it was all a joke between friends. 

This was real. 

Looking down at the soft locks of hair held gently between my fingers, I watched as my best friend unconsciously snuggled into my stomach releasing a satisfied exhale, my cheeks warming up at the sight. The urge to spring up from the bed settled deeply into my bones, but I knew that if I did it would shed a light on the current situation we were both in. Was I ready to address Gage’s changes in his actions towards me? To address that what we were doing were not the actions of two male best friends? Everything in my life, that had included Gage, had become so confusing yet so exhilarating at the same time. For the first time in my entire existence someone had

touched me so gently that the feeling of Gage wrapping his arms around me, and telling me that he would never leave me, brought silent tears to my eyes.

His actions over the course of the summer, before our senior year, had thrown me for a loop, warping the image of the boy that had become my first and only friend when we had started our freshman year. Walking through the halls of our high school had been the most anxiety riddled experience of my young life, a smile touched my face at the life changing memory. 

Three years ago, I had carried all of my things in my arms to my new locker, so that I could seal the fact that I had finally entered high school, quickly moving into another stage of my life; another chapter of my story. A junior had run by, probably on a dare, and knocked all of my supplies out of my arms, my first time setting foot in  Brindlewood High and all of my locker stuff was spread all over the hallway. 

All I could do in that moment was just stare in defeat at my things sprawled across the floor, my hands clenching into fist as my eyes threatened to spill tears of frustration and embarrassment. But it was high school and you didn’t cry on your first day, so I had fallen to my knees slowly picking up what was left of my dignity from that white tile floor. My face burned brightly at the feeling of the eyes of each student that passed by the supplies sprawled out before me, the feeling of wanting to disappear coming to the forefront of my mind.

Blue filled my glassy eyes. 

A stray notebook that had travelled farther than the rest now hung in front of my face, the shock of its sudden appearance causing the entirety of my attention to focus on it. Someone had taken the time to stop and help me with my things, better yet, someone had felt an ounce of pity for me as they stood now presenting my notebook to me. I had frozen in place. My eyes not knowing where to place themselves as my attention transitioned to the hand holding the blue spiral. 

“Hey, is this yours?” A warm voice asked, breaking my focus from the hand holding my notebook, my eyes snapping up to meet the person connected to it. 

I was greeted by the warmest brown eyes I had ever seen. 

A guy kneeled down before me, a soft smile grazing his features as he looked at me. He looked to be taller than me by several inches or even a whole head higher than me with a controlled mess of strawberry blonde hair sticking in many directions, yet the hairstyle looked fitted just for him. My heart pounded inside my chest, my cheeks burning at the thought of him hearing it beating against my ribcage as I continued to stare at him like a gaping fish. Like a tidal wave, feelings flooded into my mind that were so foreign to me at that moment, I had been too young to understand why. To me this boy, who had kneeled down before me presenting my notebook to me, looked like a statue carved from the hands of Michaelangelo, was the most handsome guy I had ever seen. And yet, to me, those foreign feelings felt natural, and it scared me. 

“Hey, you alright there bud?” That warm voice came out once more. 

I had snapped out of my spell and panicked, “Oh, I’m sorry! Yeah that’s my notebook.”

I reached out, taking the notebook back into my possession, putting it back amongst the chaos that was my school supplies, my face feeling as if it was going to burn off from embarrassment. I tried to gather as much of my supplies, quickly moving so that I would no longer have to sit in the middle of the hallway like some defeated kid. The sight of strawberry blonde hair moved within my peripherals, the guy that I had spoken to earlier wandering around the outer edges of my mess, diligently grabbing my stuff as he picked them up for me. A determined look on his face held me in place, my body freezing at the sight of some stranger helping me when none of the other frantic freshmen bothered to lend a hand.

I had stared at him for a few minutes before I noticed that he was talking to me, “I’m sorry, what?”

He graced me with a soft smile once more, my face setting a new world record for the amount of times I had blushed in that moment. 

“I had said that it was unfortunate that just because we’re the new fish in the pond, we are the at the mercy of our seniors” He said, organizing the supplies in his hands, “I’m sure you’re not the first innocent victim of that guy, the one that smacked the stuff out of your hands.”

“Oh… I mean… isn’t this part of high school?” My eyes looked down from his warm smile, trying to keep my words and blushing in check, “not saying that I was expecting this, but isn’t this a part of high school in the sense that we’re going to experience new and different things? You know, kind of like a new chapter in a book where the main character gets thrown into a new situation and he has to figure out how to overcome it.” 

The guy stared at me for a moment, a look of disbelief that I had made that analogy very evident on his face. He started shaking as he was overcome with laughter, his eyes watering as he held his sides, my embarrassment burned my face once more watching him bend forward from laughing. In that moment I had felt like I had said something out of the ordinary or just plain stupid, before feeling a even bigger need to disappear into the floor.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry” he continued to chuckle between words, “But I’ve never met someone that sees the world in the way that you do. Honestly I wasn’t expecting you to say that, in that way I mean.” 

“Why, was it weird what I said?” I asked, feeling guarded.

“Nope,” He answered, giving me a friendly grin, “More so like it was…refreshing.”

My face felt like it had been set on fire, my eyes never leaving his as he just stood before me with the same softness in his face like before. I felt so nervous in that moment, so thrown off balance by his words, I never wanted it to stop. 

I felt addicted. 

Addicted to how he made me feel, even though I had just met the guy.