‘Aww…’ Jaimie pouted, tail swishing languidly behind him. He turned from the sign by the door to meet Simon’s eye. ‘And you got me all excited for hot chocolate too…’

‘Sorry,’ Simon replied, inwardly suppressing a rising panic as he watched his plans thwarted at such an early hurdle. ‘They’re… usually open on weekdays. I didn’t think to check…’

Nestled in a cosy clearing by the side of the footpath and built in the style of an extended log cabin, the café was even quieter than Simon had been hoping for. So quiet, in fact, that a charmingly festive “Closed” sign was hanging in the window just beside the door.

‘Guess we’re gonna have to head back into town after all, huh,’ Jaimie said, scratching awkwardly at the back of his hat, just behind his ear.

‘Uhh…’ Simon grimaced, feeling a dull apprehension blossom in his chest alongside the restrained panic. He’d only just about managed to pluck up the courage to do this where things were quiet, and they weren’t going to be overheard. It was more… comfortable out here than in the city…

And more romantic, if he could even dare to think of it in those terms.

There was a long, awkward silence as he struggled to think of how best to salvage things.

‘Actually,’ Jaimie remarked, ears steadily rising as his face broke into a conspiratorial grin, ‘I just remembered: I have a backup plan, hehe!’

‘You… You do…?’ Simon blinked, apprehensive as to what Jaimie might be about to propose. He watched his friend warily as the shorter boy reached a hand into the school blazer hidden under his coat.

‘I do,’ Jaimie chuckled, producing a small, unusually flat glass bottle full of a clear amber liquid. ‘It’s not quite hot chocolate,’ he added, giving the bottle a demonstrative shake, ‘but it’s seasonal, at least!’

Simon blinked again.

‘Brandy?’ he asked, gesturing for Jaimie to pass him the bottle, and reading the label once it was in his hands. ‘Why’re you carrying this around…?’

‘Found it in Mister Lynwood’s desk,’ the other boy grinned, golden eyes alight with mischief, ‘along with a bunch of other crap that wasn’t his. Must’ve confiscated it off someone.’

‘So…’ Simon replied, lifting the bottle up to the light. ‘You double confiscated it then, “Mister Winters”?’

‘Hey,’ Jaimie shrugged, taking the bottle back from his friend and unscrewing the lid, ‘they weren’t paying me to be there, and it’s not like whoever it originally belonged to was ever gonna get it back anyway.’

‘I guess…’ Simon nodded, watching as his room-mate took a quick sniff of the bottle’s contents before offering it his way to do the same.

Quite a strong smell. Rough. Probably not all that expensive, not that Simon was by any means a connoisseur.

‘So… day saved!’ Jaimie chirped, screwing the top back on the bottle as he took a few steps away from the café and back towards the footpath. ‘C’mon! This path’s gotta lead somewhere, right? Maybe we’ll see some starflies!’

‘Uhh, r-right!’ Simon replied, taking a second to let his nascent panic fully die back away before hurrying to follow along.

Internally, the boy winced as he noted Jaimie’s phrasing. Had his room-mate noticed his worry at the thought of having to head somewhere more crowded…? Ugh, he really needed to keep it together. Who would want to be asked out by a nervous, floundering idiot, after all?

The two boys walked along the path through the snow-smothered boughs of pine for several minutes of what Jaimie probably saw as relaxing, companionable silence. Simon, on the other hand, could only see it as both awkward and entirely of his own making.

The taller boy was, in fact, so caught up in himself that he very nearly missed where the path subtly branched off to their left. His stomach lurched as he remembered what he’d found down that less-well-trodden path the last time he’d been out here, and he hurriedly made to steer Jaimie towards it.

‘Huh?’ the other boy blinked, stirred from his own inner thoughts by Simon’s sudden change of course, before giving his friend a wry smirk. ‘Is this you leading me off into the woods where no one can hear me scream or something~?’

‘Heh, no,’ Simon chuckled, trying not to let his face flush at the teasing tone of Jaimie’s question. ‘Just remembered a good place to hang out for a bit, is all. C’mon, just over that ridge.’

The taller boy led his more naturally surefooted friend up and over the rocky outcropping to the sparser patch of pines on the other side. Once back on firmer ground, he adopted his most confident smile—a smile he’d learned from Jaimie, as it happened—and parted the the last of the snowy branches before the tree line.

Fat, icy clumps fell to the ground with soft thuds as Simon gestured his room-mate out onto the frozen lake shore beyond.

‘Not quite a warm, cosy café,’ he explained as casually as he could, ‘but I can think of worse places to stop for a drink.’

‘Whoa!’ Jaimie exclaimed, eyes wide as he stepped free from the forest and took in the wintry vista over the icebound waters. Peaks that would remain snowy even after the thaw of spring loomed high above, framing the gentle winter sun almost perfectly over the secluded plateau. A vast forest of innumerable pine trees carpeted the shallow slope at the base of the peaks, surrounding the lake on all sides and keeping both it and its visitors entirely hidden from prying eyes.

‘I didn’t pack my skates…’ the feline boy quipped, gaze still fixed on their surroundings as his friend led him over to a snow-covered log of driftwood near the water’s edge.

‘Probably for the best,’ Simon chuckled in reply, sweeping the snow from the age-worn bark with his boot and motioning for Jaimie to take a seat. ‘Since we’ve swapped out the hot chocolate for brandy, hehe.’

‘Good point…’ Jaimie nodded, reaching back into his coat for the brandy in question and unscrewing the lid as Simon sat down next to him.

Too close…? No, they were friends. Best friends, even: he was just overthinking things.

Simon’s heart beat out an anxious ba-dum as he saw movement from the corner of his eye, and realised it was his friend’s tail curling around behind him. Its tip draped itself over the log at his side whilst its length came to rest on the snowy ground below.

‘Isn’t your tail like… freezing…?’ Simon asked as Jaimie took a quick swig from the bottle and handed it his way. ‘It’s like seeing a guy wearing shorts in a rainstorm.’

‘Not really,’ Jaimie shrugged, sighing contentedly as he relaxed atop his makeshift seat. ‘I mean, it’s covered in fur. I could say the same about you not wearing a hat, but, y’know. Hair.’

‘Fair enough…’ Simon nodded, although he didn’t really feel it was a fair comparison, given his ears were quite a lot colder right now than he would have preferred.

The two sat and drank for a while, trading the occasional comment about school or recent news stories until Simon finally felt there was enough cheap brandy in his system to broach the topic he’d brought his friend here to address.

‘Uhh… Jai…’ he started, tapping a nervous nail against the half-depleted bottle in his hand.

‘Mhm?’

‘I was… kinda wanting to ask you something.’ Okay, deep breath. How hard could this be?

‘Sure, what’s up?’ Jaimie replied, glancing Simon’s way and immediately shattering his friend’s confidence with with a warm, effortless smile.

‘U-Uhh…’ Already faltering, Simon hurriedly decided to change tack. Maybe this would be easier if he approached the idea with a run-up…

‘You know that guy from the bar the other week…?’ he asked. ‘The one from Tudor College?’

‘Oh, Niles?’ Jaimie’s ear tilted at a quizzical angle. ‘Yeah, sure. What about him?’ His ears slowly lowered into a flatter orientation to match his increasingly sheepish smirk as he thought back.

‘Ah…’ he winced. ‘Yeeeaaah, in hindsight I kinda ditched you, didn’t I… Heh, ehh… I’m sorry, Si. We just kinda hit it off, and…’ He shifted guiltily on his perch. ‘Yeah. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.’

‘Huh? Oh, no,’ Simon shook his head, lips thinning as he tried to find a natural way to his point. ‘It’s not that. I actually think Lex was more pissed off about that than I was. Just umm…’ He tilted his head and frowned to himself. ‘The guy. Going home with him. You uhh… you do that sort of thing kinda often, huh.’

Simon closed his eyes in silent frustration. What the hell was he doing? Trying to imply Jaimie was easy or something?! Ugh. Way to win him over…

‘Heh, well,’ Jaimie chuckled, leaning his head back and absently crossing one of his snow-caked school shoes over the other. ‘I wouldn’t say often exactly, but…’ He thought for another moment or two before nodding his concession. ‘Yeah, sometimes, I guess. Why?’ He turned his head to glance Simon’s way. ‘Does it bother you?’

Simon shook his head, lifting the brandy back up to his lips.

‘Nah,’ he lied. ‘Just… noticing, I guess.’

The two boys sat in what felt to Simon like a profoundly awkward silence for what felt like a profoundly long time. Inwardly, it was all the boy could do to chastise himself for being such a miserable coward. If some random guy from another school could find the balls to ask Jaimie to head home with him, then why the hell couldn’t he?

Well, because he didn’t want Jaimie to head home with him, he admitted, shrinking physically in on himself as he ruminated. It wasn’t like that at all…

What he really wanted was to mean enough to his friend that the other boy wouldn’t even consider heading home with anyone else.

‘Hey, um,’ Jaimie said, speaking up after the silence finally became too uncomfortable, ‘you’ve seemed kinda down since I got here… Is…’ The other boy sighed, tilting his head and giving Simon a quietly supportive look. ‘Is everything all right, man…?’

Simon glanced up to meet his friend’s gaze. The way the retreating sunlight cradled the smooth skin of his face. How it accented the fluffiness of his hair. Shone across the gold of his eyes.

Everything about him was… captivating.

Ever since he’d started noticing all the perfect little details that made up the boy sat beside him, some part of Simon had always known that he’d never be able to truly see past them again.

‘Yeah,’ he smiled, turning away again so his eyes were back down on the bottle in his hands, ‘no, it’s fine. Don’t worry—it’s…’ He sighed, finally resigning himself to his cowardice. He’d just have to keep his deeper feelings to himself, no matter how much it hurt. ‘It’s nothing. Honest.’

Jaimie’s ears dipped in concern, and the silence resumed.

A minute or two later, Simon felt a reassuring hand pat his shoulder before Jaimie stood up and stepped away from the log, his footsteps retreating unhurriedly back towards the tree line.

Assuming Jaimie had just gone to take a leak, and still very much mired in his own self-loathing, Simon went to take another sip of the comfortingly fiery brandy before letting out a sharp yelp as something cold exploded across the back of his head.

Spinning around where he sat, he quickly spotted Jaimie standing up from behind a fallen tree, innocently moulding a second snowball between his gloves as if nothing were amiss.

‘Don’t you dare…!’ Simon protested, putting a hand up to emphasise his point before quickly repositioning it to guard his face as Jaimie assumed his best pitcher’s stance and launched his creation. The second snowball whipped through the air with just as much enthusiasm behind it as had the first.

‘Gah!’ Simon exclaimed, smiling despite himself as the second strike atomised against his forearm. ‘You little shit!’

Jaimie sniggered to himself, quickly ducking for cover as Simon slammed the bottle down in the snow and leapt to his feet to prepare his counterattack.

‘Next one’s between your eyes, Caradon!’ Jaimie laughed as he just barely dodged Simon’s first snowball.

‘Oh,’ Simon grinned, quickly balling up a second as he crouched down behind the deadwood log, ‘you wish your aim was that good, nerd!’

In the exchanged flurry of snowballs that followed, all of Simon’s worries melted away in favour of trying to outmanoeuvre his friend. Laughter and the spray of displaced ice crystals filled the air, and, for a short while, the two of them were twelve again, caught up playing tag so far beyond the limits of the Academy grounds that they completely missed the bell.

That was, at least, until their little skirmish ended with a defeated yelp and a rising plume of powder snow.

Simon grinned widely, panting where he’d finally managed to tackle Jaimie and pin him to the ground on his back.

‘Gotcha!’ he chuckled, leveraging his superior body mass to keep the boy under him from squirming free.

‘Hey, no fair!’ Jaimie laughed, finally relenting when it became clear he didn’t have the raw strength needed to break loose. ‘I was only throwing snow…!’

Simon just sniggered to himself, leaning forward to let Jaimie up before, all at once, realising just how close their faces were.

Ba-dum.

Whether it was the adrenaline, the brandy, or the sudden proximity, Simon couldn’t be sure. But, whatever it was, it urged him to lean closer when he’d meant to lean back away.

Before, as they’d playfought, he had only seen Jaimie’s breath fogging in the frigid air, but now he could feel it against his skin too. Heavy. Rapid… Warm.

After more than a year of living with the other boy, he was almost as used to his unique, subtle blend of scents as he was his own. But never this close and potent. Never this… intoxicating.

Swallowing as he felt his mouth go dry, it occurred to Simon that maybe he didn’t have to tell the other boy how he felt. Maybe he could just…

Lean forward.

It was clear enough when Jaimie finally noticed the closeness that Simon had already decided to act on. His breath hitched, his body tensed, and his ears audibly flicked up against the snow, standing at full alert as Simon’s nose hesitantly slid past his own.

Simon paused when their lips were so close that even the barest motion would have brought them together. He waited for Jaimie to pull back, to push him away, to play it off with a laugh… But rejection never came.

Instead, Simon felt the other boy relax again underneath him, and watched as he gently tilted his head to better make room for their overlapping noses.

Simon’s heart fluttered as he read Jaimie’s subtle cues for what they were. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and leaned forward one last time.

Warm lips.

Soft skin.

A hand on his arm.

Gloved fingers intertwining with his own.

Jaimie’s mouth parted, and Simon felt his own reflexively doing the same.

Their tongues met. Hot. Wet… Unexpectedly coarse.

Shakily leaning down on one elbow, Simon pressed his face a little more firmly against his friend’s, and only met with reaction in kind.

The sky was slowly dimming behind him, and the cold of the ground was biting at his knees, but Simon didn’t notice either.

In that moment, all he could feel was the boy below him, the lips against his own, and a sense of elation so strong that it would have taken nothing less than the stopping of his heart to steer his attention almost anywhere else.