The last time Jamari was at the movie theater, he'd cried his way through Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse. 

That was over a year ago now. This time, he was walking up to the building with butterflies in his stomach that Jamari absolutely planned to pretend didn't exist. They fluttered almost blithely around his intestines, his brain running a hundred miles an hour as the outside of the theater came into view, a figure outside of the entry way.

Lucas.

Jamari saw him outside of school more than most, but he didn't usually look like… this.

Hoop earrings in his piercings, baggy jeans and a slightly cropped shirt that showed the waistband of his Calvin Klein boxers, a chain around his neck and, if Jamari was right, the tiniest smudge of eyeliner on his waterline.

He looked, in a word, hot as fuck.

Jamari audibly gulped.

The butterflies in his stomach picked up speed. 

Lucas's eyes crinkled into a smile when he saw him, almost disappearing into his cheeks, and Jamari shivered.

Suddenly, he felt really underdressed.

He'd had Jazaiah and Apollo help him put together his outfit — a Derrick Henry jersey (alternate colors, black), Apollo’s jean shorts, and Timbs. He'd even put an earring in, to his sister's ecstatic delight.

She'd let him clip one of her Kuromi keyring plushies to his beltloop with his keys for good luck, even though she teased him about going on a “date” like her stupid life depended on it.

It wasn't a date.

It wouldn't be a date.

Lucas was his tutor who wanted him to watch Romeo and Juliet, because that's what they were studying. It didn't matter how goddamn edible he looked, it didn't matter that Jamari had been unable to think about anything else since they decided to do it, it didn't matter that he angsted for three days over what he was gonna wear, it was not a date.

“Jamari, hey,” Lucas said when Jamari got close, his voice somehow even deeper than usual. “I’m so glad you came!”

“...You invited me?” Jamari looked at the pensive expression that worried Lucas's brows with confusion. Why did he think he wouldn't show? “Of course I was gonna come.”

Lucas broke into a nervous, but disbelieving smile, laughing. “You were fifteen solid minutes late, man, forgive me if I got a little doubtful.”

Fifteen?! Man, Jamari’d thought it was only ten.

"God forbid a guy only has his legs as transport.”

Lucas laughed again, this time a little exhale through his nose as he shook his head. He looked at Jamari out of the corner of his eye, and even though it was clearly a sort of stink eye situation, the angle makes it look almost seductive, and it was definitely certain now that Jamari’s heart was beating out of his fucking chest.

Jesus Christ Almighty.

Jamari might just be finished.

“And, so, this is probably the best adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to ever exist,” Lucas continued, clearly excited. Jamari liked movies — Jamari loved movies — but he didn't think he'd ever match the passion that Lucas had for basically anything he did.  This was probably the most he'd heard the guy talk, non-sleep deprived at least, giving Jamari fun facts about the movie they're about to watch.

The hallway on the way to the screening was dimly lit, and nobody should look nearly as good as Lucas did in this setting. The rare pockets of light caught on the hoops in his ears and on the slope of his nose, exaggerating the gleam in his eye to animated proportions. Jamari might be biased though, because he couldn’t remember a time Lucas didn't look like some character in a Tiktok edit.

They'd got one massive bucket of extra-butter popcorn to share between them, because the cost of confectionery was too high to get something both individual and worth their money. Lucas  had strong opinions on popcorn, and so Jamari was happy to have more butter on his popcorn than he honestly thinks was necessary (it was a lot of extra butter, to the point where Jamari was concerned about Lucas's cholesterol) to at the very least prevent any more heated debates with a server.

(Honestly, though, the guy was definitely wrong.)

Jamari had the bucket cradled in the crook of his arm, and it was probably the biggest bucket of popcorn he'd ever actually seen. It was practically a full gallon and a half almost. Lucas's five ten, lean frame could probably pack it in, but he wasn't actually sure if it was possible to have it finished by the end of the movie.

The previews were already showing by the time they found their seats, some new Avengers movie he was unlikely to watch and a white people romcom he was even less likely to watch. The trailer of animated movie about what he assumed were K-pop stars who fought demons, based on the title of the movie, didn't interest him nearly at all, but he caught Lucas's eyes glued to the screen for every moment of it, popcorn halfway to his mouth the entire time it played.

“You liked that movie, huh?” Jamari teased after it switched to an ad for something he was sure nobody in this theater cared about, catching Lucas's eyes in the illuminated gloom. 

“It was… interesting,” Lucas responded, looking decisively at the screen in a way that made Jamari chuckle at his embarrassment.

A small smile lingered on Jamari’s lips at the way Lucas’ faux stoicism was betrayed by the blush on the tips of his ears, illuminated by the shifting lights on the screen that Jamari could wait to look at.

He rarely saw Lucas from this angle. Even when they walked next to each other, he didn't notice  the way he seemed to now — the gentle slope of Lucas’s plush lips, the way his eyelashes were way longer than Jamari originally thought. He drank it in the way… Juliet drank her poison.

Except less lethal.

And also somehow less stupid.

“...Lights turning down for real this time,” Lucas said somewhat incoherently. Jamari blinked his way back into reality, where the movie he’d paid to watch was about to start and the guy he was supposed to be watching it with was talking to him. Fuck. “...Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Zoned out, I guess,” Jamari’s laugh was sheepish, his hand instinctively coming up to rub at the nape of his neck where his fade ends. “What’d you say?”

“I said that the movie’s about to start.” Lucas responded, a smile pulling at his lips as his eyebrows furrow. His face relaxed after a second, his smile flattening to a conspiratorial smirk. “You better pay attention — I’m gonna test you after.”

Jamari felt his expression go soft. He's so cute…

He tried to save the image in his memory like a Polaroid: Lucas in the dark of the theater, a grin pushing at his features like they were sharing a secret.

By the time he blinked back into the present, the movie'd started, and the first thing he noticed was…

Guns?

“Wait,” he whispered to Lucas as the characters start to speak, “You ain't tell me they had guns?! I thought this was Shakespeare?”

Lucas just grinned in an expression that was somehow sharp and full of glee at the same time, and Jamari could see him rubbing his hands together like a super villain in his mind’s eye. “Just watch.”

And watch Jamari did.

The movie was unlike anything he’d imagined when he’d read Romeo and Juliet. 

The dialogue was still a little difficult to decipher, since it was true to the play, but seeing it visually helped in ways Jamari hadn’t thought it would.

Seeing Tybalt’s anger as he discovered Romeo’s affair with his sister, watching Romeo and Juliet pine for each other, and simply seeing Mercutio, who was probably the sexiest man in the play, even with a young Leo DiCaprio right there — it brought the events to life.

As words on a page, they were virtually nothing. They were just names and dialogue — stupid decisions narrated in a version of English Jamari struggled to recognize. 

On the screen, its alive. The swords were guns, sure, and it was way more modern than Jamari had imagined, but he felt and saw what Shakespeare was actually trying to say more than he ever had before.

And maybe he didn't catch some lines because the light caught on Lucas's hair just right, or the sensation of their legs touching sent lightning through his veins, or their fingers somehow touched in the insanely large popcorn bucket, but the speed of his heartbeat was just as much the movie's fault as it was the fault of Lucas's presence.

The visuals were breathtaking, bold and loud and beautiful. Each sentence dripped with emotion. Jamari's heart squeezed and his eyes began to fill when Mercutio died, in a scene he’d read a hundred times before.

In fact, the movie made Jamari even more pissed off at Romeo.

It was that dumbass’s fault his friend died, just because he couldn't wait to fuck on a girl way too young for him. 

He thought about the symbolism of it, that Romeo managed to kill both Mercutio and Tybalt with his own stupidity, one for another.

He thought then, about Juliet. 

She was a side character in her own love story, stuck between duty and the person she could be, her parents breathing down her neck to be someone she hates. Paris represented a life she rejected, and Romeo represented freedom, but the difference in pressure causes her to explode: the moment she felt as if her parents’ thumb was off of her, she was marrying Romeo in four days.

She was the smart one of the two of them, working with Friar Laurence to figure out a way to be with Romeo for as long as possible.

And she was still trapped.

She was the victim in the story from every angle. In neither of her relationships did she have narrative agency, held back by her parents and beholden to Romeo's whims and indecision. And even in death, her choices were at the expense of someone else: she never gets to live for herself.

And, boy, can Jamari relate.

Fuck. 

He was crying.

Not full body sobbing the way he was when Miles was being chased by Spider Society, but there were tears running down his cheeks that he knew for a fact were visible. His cheeks burned with the embarrassment and he couldn’t really see the screen, but Juliet was dying and it hurt like he was losing a friend.

Fuck, Juliet lost everything. Actually, she had everything taken from her. 

Free my girl Juliet, Jamari thought, shoulders shaking as he pressed his lips together so he didn't outright sob, Fly high, queen.

A warm hand settled itself on Jamari’s shoulder, and he leaned into the strong arm at his back, letting himself relax into Lucas as he cried. It was against his better judgement, but Lucas’s eyes were fixed firmly and purposefully on the screen, and Jamari couldn’t help but feel… safe.

And even when the film ended and the credits rolled and people started to leave, they didn’t move, Jamari’s head resting on Lucas’s shoulder as he hiccupped his tears away.

“Damn, I didn’t think Juliet’s death would hit me that hard,” Jamari laughed as he pulled away, rubbing at his eyes as tried hard not to bring attention to the empty theater and the wet spot on Lucas’ collarbone. They were still close enough that their legs pressed into each other, and Jamari somehow hadn’t even noticed that Lucas had moved the somehow empty bucket to his lap to make room for him.

It made his heart flutter in a way he definitely couldn’t blame on Mercutio in drag. 

“Yeah… The two of them dying like that gets me too.” Lucas’s face was soft. His plush lips parted and stretched around a breathy chuckle, his face relaxed as he looks at Jamari through his eyelashes in a way Jamari knew he’d be thinking about for the rest of the day. 

The world seemed to still, like that brief second of silence before the quarterback snapped the ball. 

They were swaying into each other’s orbit.

With his heart pounding in his ears, Jamari wondered if this was what it felt like for Juliet to see Romeo for the first time.

If they got any closer, Jamari’s heart might literally jump out of his chest. 

If they got any closer, Jamari would know what it felt like to have another man’s mouth on his own.

If they got any closer, Jamari’s world would be changed forever—

“Uh, guys?” The white dude from the front desk peeked at them from behind the doors of the theatre, waving to get their attention. “I’m gonna have to ask you to leave? The next screening starts in like ten minutes and we gotta clean this place before it starts.”

The moment shattered.

Lucas looked— his face contorted and relaxed at a speed Jamari’d never seen his face move, and it was difficult to decipher what’d just happened with the way his face neatly shaped itself into a slightly embarrassed smile that Jamari found hard to believe.

“Sorry, dude. We got a little distracted,” Lucas looked past Jamari at the front desk guy, hand pulling through his hair like it did when he was nervous or frustrated. His laugh was fake, but Jamari knew Front Desk Guy wouldn’t be able to tell. 

Front Desk Guy just chuckled back, “Nah, you’re all good. If you want a couple more minutes, I can come back. Me and my girlfriend used to do shit like this all the time, don’t worry about it.”

He flashes a sort of conspiratorial smile, and before Lucas can get out his denial of “Oh, we’re not—,” Jamari grabs his hand to pull him up, shaking his head at Front Desk Guy with a smile he wasn’t sure he meant. “You good. We were heading out anyway. Thanks, man.”

Front Desk Guy just nods, dipping out just as quickly as he turned up. 

Quiet stretched between them as they walked out of the theatre, the lights of the hall making Jamari blink. It wasn't an awkward silence, like Jamari was expecting, Lucas’s hand enveloped in his.

Jamari chanced a look, and Lucas’s face was a pretty shade of red, just the way he’d imagined.

He still hadn’t pulled his hand way yet.

They’d almost kissed.

And that movie? Was really fucking good.

So maybe… it might all work out, Jamari thought, a smile inching its way across his face.

Just the way he imagined.