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It was Knox whom they had to convince to sneak in the alcohol. He had been adamant from the start; afraid he’d get caught. Neil had assured him otherwise.
“All you have to do is get it to the cave,” he said, a confident hand on his shoulder, which quickly turned menacing after Knox’s repeated refusal. “A piece of cake.”
“Look, lover boy,” Charlie interjected after several minutes of unfruitful begging. “You got your girl. You got your goddamned qualifications. You're going to Law School, for Christ's sake! Carpe fucking Diem,” he shoved him back a little, taunting him.
“Look, we’ll distract ‘em,” Neil proposed, “I’ll punch Cameron in the face or something.”
“Why me?” The red-haired boy had raised his hands in complaint.
The poets laughed.
Knox now convinced, Neil had to perform another miracle and get a certain reluctant someone to attend that night’s meeting.
The breeze of spring blew in from the open window and into the small room Todd and Neil shared. The crickets and cicadas were calling to them, to the poets within them, out into the night. The sky had cleared after a series of rains from weeks past, yet the smell of it still clung the trees, the marble stairs, the brick walls, and blades of grass. The moon, along with its stars companions, lit the way to the cave Todd refused to go to.
“Why not?” Neil asked for what felt like the tenth time in five minutes.
“Because,” Todd replied, curled up in a corner of his bed, knees pressed to his chest, “I don’t feel like babysitting.”
Neil let out a hearty laugh, despite the late hours. “There’s one simple solution to that,” he said in that cheeky manner of his, “You have to get as drunk as the rest of us.”
Todd looked flabbergasted. “N-no!” He stuttered; then added, quieter than before, “I don’t really drink.”
“You think all of them drink? Not a chance. Meeks tried whiskey once at a family dinner and puked on his brother-in-law.” It was meant to be reassuring, but it only led Todd to believe the meeting would go downhill very quickly. "Tomorrow's graduation, Todd."
“I’m not going, Neil,” Todd whispered, unable to look his friend in the eye.
“Come on, it’ll be fun! It’ll be a new experience. You don’t wanna get to college not having gotten drunk before, do you?”
Todd shot him a look, “You know I don’t like being peer pressured into things.”
Neil’s expression fell just as his body collided with Todd’s mattress. He sat beside him and took a few seconds before speaking up, “I know. I’m sorry.” He smiled at him weakly.
They were silent for a few moments, averting each other's eyes before Neil scrambled to his feet and began getting ready for the meeting. He put on his rubber boots and his cape over his thin pajamas. The weather was suited for only light layers. He tucked Five Centuries of Verse under his arm and shot a look back at Todd before inching the door open.
“I wanna apologize in advance if I make a mess when I come back.” He smiled at Todd, who’d been pretending to read over a book Keating had lent him.
Todd could only look up and catch the slightest glimpse of Neil’s eyes before he was left alone in the room.
Credit was to be given to Todd, who for the first two minutes after Neil had left actually tried to keep reading. His eyes scanned across the words, however, and none of them stuck. He found he'd read an entire page by accident and not paid attention to a single letter. Their meaning was lost, now only a clump of slightly-different shapes that together held no importance at all. His thoughts had drifted entirely. They had gone out the door with Neil and there was no reigning them back into his own head.
The boy threw the paperback aside and got dressed as quickly as he could, fingers struggling to fasten his cape. On instinct, he reached on top of the wardrobe for the flashlight before remembering Neil had taken it with him.
Except he hadn't. It was there, just in the corner, cold to his touch. Neil—the smart, annoying bastard—had left it there on purpose. He knew Todd would follow.
He opened the door as quietly as he could, stuck between wanting to throttle Neil for the gesture or let himself be strangely flattered by it.
The feeling remained there, low in his stomach, until he’d stepped out of the building and looked out into the gloomy gardens. He dashed off in the all-too-familiar direction of the Indian Cave; ran as fast as his legs would carry him, hoping to catch up with the rest of the group before they entered the forest.
The darkness had always creeped Todd out. He’d always been a scaredy little thing, but the dark had a tendency to unsettle him like nothing else. It was safe to say that running across an open field at night, directly into the claws of a thick, gloomy forest was beyond what his plans for a quiet night of reading had promised.
Fortunately for his racing heart, it wasn’t long until he spotted a huddle of flashing lights only just crossing the treeline.
“Guys!” He yelled, feeling it was safe to do so, being so far from the imposing building that was Wellton.
He saw the lights pause for a second, and he yelled again.
“Todd?” Someone exclaimed, and the beams all pointed in his direction as he rushed to meet them.
“Look who it is!” Charlie exclaimed, throwing an arm around Todd’s shoulders.
Amidst the congratulatory pats on the back Todd received for his change of heart, he caught sight of Neil, who smiled smugly at him but didn’t make to touch him. Todd held his eyes and flushed red in the face. It was always unpleasant for Todd to admit another's perception of him was correct, simply because he knew he was so much more than their assumptions. But for reasons beyond his comprehension, the fact that Neil knew him down to his bones made his chest flutter foolishly.
After his arrival, the hooded figures were truly underway. They walked to the cave following the path they knew by heart. Their conversation mixed with the sounds of the woods formed a symphony Todd wasn't sure even poetry could describe. Knowing it was likely to be the last time he heard it had his throat in a knot. Experiencing this quiet shift in reality they'd occupied for the last several months, where words meant profound things, and no thought was ever to be mocked or ridiculed, had quite literally saved him. And not just him. Thinking back to the winter hurt, but the pain was eased by the sight of Neil ahead of him, catching Meeks by the neck in a friendly chokehold and laughing his lungs out.
Todd fell quickly behind, not because he wasn’t fast enough, but because he wanted to take this last night in. Neil matched his pace when he saw him missing from the concentration of pledges, and looked at him sweetly, no pity in his eyes. Todd hated pity.
“You didn’t have to come, you know,” Neil told him, though he already knew it.
“Oh, yeah? And who else is going to stop you from waking up the entire school when we go back?” He didn't specify whether 'you' meant the entire group or just Neil, but they both knew the answer.
Neil laughed at his leisure now that there was no one around to chastise him for it.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Neil said when his fit subsided. “We need you.”
Todd’s ears flushed red and his heart gave a tug.
Neil wasn’t the first boy Todd had ever liked. He would have been far more conflicted about it if that had been the case. The first boy had taken Todd by surprise, but after meeting Neil for the first time, he had gone into a state of quiet acceptance; a sort of numb feeling of ease. He’d felt an unusual warmth spread from his stomach to every corner of his being, and a content thought appear in his mind: oh, there he is, it had whispered. Falling for Neil had felt familiar and right, like coming home.
A series of loud yelps and whoops came from ahead of them, and when they took in their surroundings, they realized just how close they were to their destination, and that the rest had probably already found the treasure hidden in the cave. Neil broke into a sprint then and Todd followed, as he always did.
“Shit, Knox, you really Carped the hell out of your Diem.” Someone said upon seeing the booty of scotch and whiskey.
The several bottles Knox had procured had been taken from their hiding place behind some rocks at the very back of the cave and laid out on the ground in a symmetrical display. The flashlights beamed on the glass bottles and reflected pretty hues of amber-colored light on the cave walls. For a second, the sight felt to Todd like being underwater. It was an image taken from a dream, surreal in its warmth and its beauty. The poets fell silent, taking the moment in before they rushed inside.
Settled in their usual places, Neil stood up among them and the cave settled into its usual muttered quietness. Todd had always marveled at Neil’s ability to command the attention of a room so easily. The brown-haired boy smirked down at the book of poems and then shot Todd a wink.
“Let us have a first drink of initiation, to commence this, our last meeting,” Neil announced, followed by the barbaric exclamations of his fellow pledges. He chuckled and reached for the open bottle Pitts extended toward him.
He took a long swig, head tilted back, a little liquid dribbling down his chin. The whiskey burnt its way down Neil’s throat, making him grimace when he brought it back down. He glanced at Todd, gesturing to pass him the bottle, but it only took a slight widening of the boy’s eyes for Neil to instead pass it to Charlie.
The meeting went as all of them did, with the exception of the sinking realization that this would be the last time they did this. The ever-emptier bottles and the progressively dumber jokes that elicited progressively louder reactions were only a veil to distract from the ugly truth of the matter: after tonight, they would all go their separate ways. They would be spread across the country, all of them too busy to remember the times spent with each other.
Meeks and Todd shared sad looks every once in a while, the two remotely sober ones left after only an hour of reading.
A particularly dramatic delivery of Annabel Lee by Knox, whose state of inebriation had his words stumbling over his passion for them, came to an end without half the poets noticing. The bottles lay empty on the floor, and there was hardly anyone who paid attention to the poetry anymore.
Next to Todd, Neil sat up straight from his laid-back position and clapped heartily, giving Knox an enthusiastic thumbs-up and a dashing smile before he fell back down.
“You’re drunk,” Todd pointed out quietly, although secrecy was hardly a necessity when everyone was talking over each other, engaged in conversations they would forget come sunrise.
Neil frowned at him, “Am not.” He pouted when Todd crossed his arms, unimpressed by his lie, “Okay, maybe a little.”
The blond boy flashed him a shy smile and rested against the rock wall next to him.
Silence felt comfortable between them. After months of sharing a room, Todd knew Neil both in silence and in sound. He knew the way his breath hitched when he read a particularly beautiful poem, and knew of the annoyed sighs when he struggled against trigonometry. Todd knew to the last of the inflections of his voice, all of them matched to Neil's infinite moods. He knew him smiling, sighing, crying, laughing, screaming, angry, tired; knew him singing and trying and even, on the rare occasion, giving up. And in his absences, those times when winter came back, even in the middle of spring, and Neil's eyes would go vacant and the few words he spoke had no inflection at all, Todd knew him still.
“I remember reading this Shakespeare thing,” Neil blurted out, turning to look at Todd. “It reminded me of you.” There was a lopsided smile on his mouth, and his eyelids were halfway shut.
The fact that he was probably only saying so because he was drunk was lost on Todd, whose cheeks burned so red and hot he had to take in a deep breath to steady himself. Why would Shakespeare remind Neil of him?
“Where was it from?” Todd asked, unable to keep his curiosity on a leash.
Neil frowned and looked to the floor as if conjuring up the name took considerable effort. He remained still for a few seconds, frown growing deeper until he laughed. “I don’t remember.”
Todd clicked his tongue and reprimanded him with a look that quickly dissolved into one of dumbfounded adoration when Neil leaned his head on his hand and stared sweetly at him.
“What are you looking at?” He wondered, heart picking up a faster beat.
“Hm?” Neil hummed, leaning closer, head tilted to the side to hear Todd better.
The closeness made Todd still. He could hear the blood pumping in his ears, deafening. Suddenly his mouth tasted of sawdust and his jaw tightened. Only after his chest began aching did he realize he’d stopped breathing.
“Nothing,” he croaked out, eyes wider as Neil looked up at him again.
“Okay,” the other slurred, and after a pause, “I’m gonna go pee.”
Neil gestured to get up, but in his state, the simple affair of standing became exponentially more difficult. He held on tightly to Todd’s shoulders for support as he tried to find his footing, and the blond’s hands came to rest on his hips without a second thought. There would be plenty of time for thought later, when Neil’s foot caught on a rock and he stumbled forward, directly into Todd’s arms.
Although the cave remained as busy as it had been since the first round of whiskey, it wasn’t how Todd perceived it. For him, time went into a halt. He could hear nothing but the shameful sound of his shaky breath ghosting over Neil’s face. Their eyes found each other and did not look away.
Nobody noticed them. The cave was too dark and the poets too loud for anyone to witness the scene.
He could lean in. He wanted to lean in. But he knew it wouldn’t be fair: not to Neil, who was in no capacity to consent, nor to himself, who would just suffer in silence when Neil forgot all about it the next morning.
The spell of the moment broke when Neil inevitably went into a fit of drunken giggles. “Sorry,” he said, oblivious to the conflict inside Todd. He pushed himself upright and stood once and for all, swaying in place.
In only a moment, he’d gone out the cave opening and into the woods.
Todd sighed and leaned back on the rock wall, the red in his cheeks slow to vanish. At that moment, alone even when surrounded by friends, he allowed himself to wonder if something would happen between him and Neil before this last night was over. He hoped it would, ached for fate to be on his side, but he couldn’t be sure. Despite all his knowing him, Neil didn’t seem to treat him any differently than he did Meeks or Charlie or the rest of the poets, so why should he think he would return his feelings?
Disappointment rushed through him and made his mouth taste of broken hope.
After several minutes of absence, Todd began to worry that something had happened to Neil. He thought of the creek and how they didn’t know how deep it was. They’d challenged each other in the winter to jump inside and swim, but nobody had dared. Even if the weather was warmer than back then, swimming in the murky waters still wasn’t a good idea. And it was most definitely a horrible idea for someone in Neil’s state of capacity to swim in it, no matter how willingly.
Todd did the only thing he could do.
He found him some yards from the cave opening, his back to the gathering. He was leaning on a tree, forehead pressed to the bark, doing what he’d set out to do, contrary to Todd’s fear that he’d gone for a midnight swim.
“You alright?” Todd called after him.
The boy’s head turned to look at him. His expression told Todd he’d caught him by surprise, but the shock gave way to a drunken grin not a second later.
“Yup,” Neil replied, popping the p at the end. He zipped up his pants before he faced his friend entirely. “Wanna go for a walk?”
“In the dark?” Todd felt his limbs freeze at the idea of wandering the woods at that hour.
“Well, if I could make the sun shine at will for you, I would.” The easiness with which the words came out had Todd blushing in the dark, “Unfortunately, my hands aren’t that big, so a walk under the moonlight will have to suffice.”
Neil couldn’t be so oblivious as to how it sounded. Him most of all. The boy all but recited poetry in his sleep. Never would the words ‘walk under the moonlight’ leave his lips in reference to anything other than a romantic situation. But Todd still wondered: what if they would?
He laughed, hoping it would mask his utter bashfulness, “We’ll get lost,” Todd argued.
“Oh, come on! Where’s your sense of adventure, Anderson?” He never called him Anderson. “We can follow the stream and come back the same way.” He seemed determined, which only made Todd panic further. A determined Neil Perry was already a liability when sober; Todd trembled at the thought of that determination going unchecked in his inebriation.
“You’re gonna murder me, aren’t you?” Todd said, eyeing the path Neil had pointed out.
Neil rolled his eyes and barrelled toward Todd. He grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a good shake, “Carpe Noctem, Anderson!” He blurted out, and before the other had even time to process what was happening, Neil took him by the wrist and tugged him forward.
Todd’s heart was beating too fast inside his chest to offer any resistance. His pulse knocked at his chest from the inside and felt Neil’s tight grip on his wrist like a red-hot shackle that for some reason, he didn’t want to be rid of.
The further they walked from the cave, the tighter Todd’s chest became. It was hard to discern if it was his fear of the dark or Neil’s strange attitude that had him restless. Whatever it was, Todd could not stop his thoughts from running a thousand miles per hour.
“Wait, Neil,” he croaked out when he thought his heart would give out.
The boy stopped on his tracks and turned to Todd with a concerned frown, “Are you okay?”
“Where are you taking me?” Todd asked, his eyes only daring to meet Neil’s because he knew he was in no state to intimidate him.
Neil stared at him, “I don’t know,” he admitted, “Just… let’s walk, Anderson.” He turned on his heels to continue on their way, but Todd held him back.
“Why do you keep calling me Anderson?” Neil had never seen Todd so serious.
“I— don’t know.” Todd had never seen Neil so at a loss for words.
It was so dark in the dense woods that the light of the moon shone only in patches. In Neil’s unprompted hurry to get away, they hadn’t brought a flashlight, so deciphering each other’s expressions was an arduous task.
“You’ve drunk too much,” Todd stated, twisting his wrist away from Neil’s grasp. Even in the dark, his crestfallen expression was impossible to miss.
It was quiet for a while. As quiet as woods at night can be, anyway. The water ran downstream, its flow a sound that assured Todd he was still awake. An owl hooted in the distance, a sound that would have frozen him to the bone had he not been so intensely focused on his friend's face.
Neil took a step toward him. And then another. And with his third step, Todd took one back, to keep some semblance of distance between them. Neil sighed, a little tired of the game, and held Todd by his shoulders. Steady.
He took his last step forward.
“Todd,” he said, softer than he’d ever said his name before.
“What?” The other asked, trying to appear disinterested, but everything about him gave him away. There was no way to be still when blood ran through his veins like it was running a race.
“I remembered the Shakespeare I read,” he told him.
“You did?” Todd replied in the smallest of voices.
And when Neil recited it, unlike all the other times he’d heard him recite Shakespeare, be it in class or as Puck, this time he did it very quietly. Very much not how it was intended to be recited, without being dramatic or theatrical in the least.
Neil spoke the words like a secret. Like something only Todd and the forest were meant to hear.
“For where thou art, there is the world itself, And where thou art not, desolation.”
“Henry VI,” Todd breathed out, unable to do anything but breathe. And even that became increasingly difficult as the meaning of the words settled in. And the closeness. That maddening closeness, so sudden yet welcome. So welcome yet foreign. Foreign yet familiar.
“Henry VI,” Neil agreed, a question in the eyes that Todd didn’t know to look up to, his gaze on their feet. “Todd, look at me.”
Todd was used to doing what he was told. It was second nature to him, like not voicing his discomfort or apologizing. But this time, unlike the countless other orders he’d mindlessly abided, Todd Anderson did as he was told because he wanted to. Because in him bloomed the desire, the need, to see the expression in Neil’s eyes. To see if the tenderness of his voice matched the color of his irises, to make sure he wasn’t fooling himself again.
He wasn’t entirely sure what to make of what he found. There was confusion, and a whole lot of doubt, but it was as if he was waiting for something. Expectant.
“What?” Todd prodded in a small voice. He could feel Neil’s ever-present confidence falter, his determination stumbling with it. It was a rare and ugly sight.
He frowned, but his dark eyes cleared. “Promise you’re not going to hate me?”
Todd’s first instinct was to push him playfully away, but he found himself frozen in place. He let out a breathy chuckle and whispered, “I could never hate you.”
And that was exactly the right thing to say.
The most beautiful smile spread across Neil’s features, and the certainty returned to his face in full force. Its brightness left Todd more paralyzed than before.
Because Neil knew Todd, and knew that given too much time to think, the boy was prone to self-sabotage and quick changes of heart, there was barely a second between Todd’s answer and the sloppy first introduction of their lips.
Getting caught by surprise was about the worst thing that could happen to Todd Anderson. Except this hadn’t caught him by surprise. All the hoping he hadn’t allowed himself had prepared him for this. It had given him the hours to ponder about this very thing, these very lips, pressed firmly against his own. The wishful non-thinking had ran every single scenario thorough his head, but this wasn’t in his repertoire of scenes.
Reality betrayed the poet’s imagination.
Neil had bitten at his lips a lot lately, Todd could feel the bumps of injury under the light pressure of his own mouth, but that was about all he could feel before the weight of them disappeared.
Todd hadn’t thought it possible for Neil Perry to be chaste. Passion ran through his veins, how could he hold himself back now?
There was reproach in the way Todd leaned forward, chasing Neil’s mouth, which now displayed a sort of disbelieving grin. He looked into Neil's eyes, and thought he would say something, breathe out a quip to reassure himself of Todd’s feelings, but he only stood there, smiling.
“Neil,” Todd urged, eager for his heart to stop sparking and burst into flames already. “Neil, I could never hate you.”
He found those words to be enough.
The hands came first, to the back of his neck and around his waist, then their strong pull forward, and then it was all Neil. His body, pressed completely against Todd’s, his mouth against his, warm with a smile and a breath exhaled in relief. The hands roamed, and the bitten lips, too. They explored, discovered, rejoiced in the found treasure of Todd’s responses.
His heart finally caught fire.
It was blazing heat Todd had never known before. It wasn’t the uncomfortable warmth of a summer day, nor the agony of a fever. It was something entirely different, something pleasant that fluttered inside him, like tongues of fire licking at his muscles, causing him to move.
His body knew what to do before his mind understood what was happening. His feet caught him before too much of his weight could lean on Neil. His hands, once shy, now curious, reached for places they had never before dared to graze. Neil’s collarbone, the small of Neil’s back, the bend of Neil’s jaw, Neil’s trim waist, his firm chest, his shoulders, his face. Cheeks, neck, arms; everything above his waist. Not an inch of him went unexplored.
Their mouths moved like they knew what they were doing. And maybe they did. Maybe they had imagined this for so long their lips knew the steps by heart. Maybe they wanted it so bad all mistakes were overlooked.
It was the sound of one of the poets yelling Neil’s name at the top of his lungs what broke them apart.
“Shiiiiit,” Neil spoke, without breaking contact between their lips.
“Five more minutes,” Todd groaned, pulling on the collar of the other boy’s shirt.
Neil inched his face away to frown at Todd. He’d only heard those words in the morning, when their alarm clock went off and neither of the two felt like getting up. This context was entirely different. It changed so much.
“Who are you?” He asked, eyes getting smaller as his grin got bigger.
“What do you mean?”
“I just—I thought you’d freak out. I had a whole speech planned about how it’s okay if you don’t feel the same, it’s okay if you hate me, just… I only wanted you to know that I like you, but I didn’t know how to do it, or when, and—”
“Neil.”
“—I wanted to tell you on Monday, after Keating’s class, because you know how I get after Keating’s class, but then Charlie started talking about some girl, and you were nodding along like you understood, and I got scared, but then—”
“Neil,” Todd repeated forcefully.
“—then you laughed at one of my jokes the other day, and I thought: I can’t not tell him, because I really can’t, there are things I can keep to myself, but there’s nothing I can keep from you, so I made up my mind. But—but….” He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, but the movement got cut off halfway.
Todd kissed him again, more determined than eager, and didn’t stop until he felt the tight grasp of Neil’s hands on his shoulders give.
“You are so stupid for someone so smart,” Todd told him.
“Oh, leave me alone.” Neil laughed but didn’t make to get away from him.
They held each other for a few more seconds, taking the other in properly.
“Your lips are all red,” Neil said, his thumb caressing Todd’s lower lips as though he was touching a rose petal.
“Your hair is a mess.” Todd ran his hands through it, trying to untangle the knots his own hands had twisted.
“Your cheeks are flushed.”
“Your neck is, too.”
“That’s because I’m hot,” Neil said defensively, tucking in his chin so Todd might stop staring.
Todd thought that was a very fair statement.
It was a while before the others found them. They’d chosen not to reply to the poets’ incessant calls, choosing instead to sit by the water and talk.
It felt like hours before Meeks finally fought his way through a particularly tough set of entangled branches, and stumbled into the clearing where a confession had taken place only minutes before.
“There you are!” He almost yelled, relief flooding his features. “I’ve been looking for you for hours! Where have you been?”
The sitting pair looked at each other, then at their friend, and then they laughed.
Meek’s shoulders fell visibly, his gaze fixated on the floor. “You have to help me calm the others down. They want to go into Nolan’s office and tear the place apart.”
“Shit,” Neil said, and got to his feet in a second.
Seeing the warmth of the boy’s body next to his gone made Todd pout, but he extended his hands in Neil’s direction and he helped him to his feet. A breath caught in his throat when he went to release Neil’s fingers where they laced with his own, but found only one hand dropped limp at his side. The other, the one hidden from Meeks’ poor view, remained tightly gripped by Neil's.
He pulled him along as they followed the curly-haired boy through the trees back to the cave.
“What were you guys doing, anyway?” Meeks asked, a little ahead of the pair.
“Neil needed some air,” Todd lied with ease, courage afforded by the entangled hands.
He wanted to exclaim this new discovery to the top of his lungs. He wanted to hold and kiss Neil in front of whoever stood still long enough to see. He wanted to tell Meeks, who was just a few feet away, about the stars that shone behind the boy’s eyes and the stray locks of hair that fell over those eyes, and about the freckles one had to be very close to notice. He wanted to grab Keating by the collar of his shirt and recite from memory a poem about the curve of Neil’s cupid’s bow, or the slope of his nose, or the stray eyelash that clung onto his sharp cheekbone. He wanted to break into Nolan’s office and write Neil a love letter with the principal's stationery.
Rounding up a herd of drunk poets was like trying to reign cows in during a hurricane. They scattered about, the chase more game than emergency, yelling at the top of their lungs ‘carpe noctem!’ like a broken record.
It was tedious at first. The running and the yelling nearly ruined whatever semblance of romance Todd had been desperately clinging to. Quite a first date, Neil would later tell Todd, running around the woods chasing a half-naked Charlie Dalton riding on the back of a fully-naked Knox Overstreet.
But then they began to enjoy themselves. In the dark and the midst of the pledges’ drunkness, no one could remark on their joint hands. They were only two more dark, blurry shapes among the trees, galloping like the rest.
They laughed until they couldn’t breathe, and ran until they couldn’t stand.
By the time their watches struck three, most of them had exhausted the intoxication out of their systems. Pitts, followed by Cameron and Charlie, had dunked their heads in the creek in an attempt to sober up. Knox had had Neil slap him in the face to achieve the same result. It worked only halfway.
“Remind me again why I thought this was a good idea,” Neil groaned from where he sat, legs draped over Todd’s lap—not the most foreign of poses to be seen in, not even uncommon.
“Beats me,” Todd said, brushing his hair away from where it stuck to his sweaty forehead. Most coats had been discarded and thrown in a pile inside the cave. The poets sat at its opening, panting.
“Shouldn’t we be heading back?” Meeks called from the other side of the circle, squished under the weight of a yawning Gerard. The tone of the suggestion was somber. Time did not slow for emotional goodbyes.
The broken pieces of sky they could make out through the trees had faded from black to dark blue.
Todd and Neil looked at each other. There was an eagerness to the widening of the brunette’s eyes that pinched at Todd’s stomach. He was torn between calling it unease and calling it anticipation.
“Okay,” Neil agreed, too fast. His legs swung up from Todd’s lap and dropped to the ground with a thud. “Let’s go.”
There was no ritualistic adieu. As they ducked into the cave to grab their coats, each of the pledges said a silent word to what had become their sanctuary. Charlie kissed the god of the cave in the mouth and placed him carefully back in place. Knox shed a tear in the damp darkness. Neil grabbed a leaf from the ground and placed it inside the pages of Five Centuries. Todd ran a hand along the rock wall and spoke a quiet thank you.
Not one of the pledges was reluctant in their leaving. They knew the society would not die with their absence, and that the lessons it had taught them would stay with them far beyond their times in university. Their lives had collectively shifted paths in this very cave; the place and the words had changed them in more ways than they could understand.
Half-sober poets were more dangerous than non-functioning ones, so on their way back, Neil didn’t keep hold of his hands. The fact would have disappointed Todd, had his mind not been reeling with thoughts of the impending privacy he was about to share with Neil. In the familiarity of their room, he worried whatever small magic had kept the dream of kissing Neil alive would vanish. That in the harsh light of the lamplight, the shadows would shift, and everything would go back to the way it had been, without leaving trace of the kisses shared by the creek.
He was drawn out of his thoughts by a pair of snapping fingers an inch away from his face.
“You alright?” asked Neil, concern twisting his lips.
Todd blinked, “Yeah,” he sighed, calmed by the overwhelming tenderness in the boy’s eyes. How could he ever have missed it?
“Alright, then.” He smiled wide and threw an arm around Todd’s shoulders like he’d done so many times before.
This time, the touch scorched. The proximity burned, almost unbearable, were it not for the fact that Todd really, really wanted it.
He realized he’d been stifling this feeling so long that his hopes and dreams rushing back into his body actually ached. Not because loving Neil was painful, or a struggle, but because he could have had this so much earlier if he’d only asked.
The pledges walked together though the pre-dawn stillness of a Hellton spring. Dew dampened their feet and the hems of their capes. The fresh smell of grass rose up to meet their stuffy noses. Perhaps running around half-naked in what had not been a warm night by any account, had been a bad idea by all of them.
Conversations quieted as they approached the dorms. All suggestions of storming into Nolan’s office and unleashing mayhem had ceased when met with daylight, or perhaps had only been postponed.
They entered the building two at a time so that the noise of a stampede of poets wasn’t so loud. When Meeks and Pitts disappeared behind the door, leaving only Todd and Neil behind, the air between them changed. It became charged with something unnamable, unmentionable. It set Todd’s cheeks aflame; it sent his heart into a hammering gallop.
“Todd.” His name on his mouth sounded like a promise.
“Hm,” he hummed, eyes drilling holes into the solid steps of the building.
When Neil took his hand, he realized it was shaking. “Are you scared?”
“N-No.” He hated the way his voice trembled. He willed it not to when he next spoke, “I’m nervous.”
“You aren’t sure about this?” The fear in his voice sent a pang of guilt through Todd’s heart.
The squeeze Todd gave Neil’s hand was more a warning than encouragement.
“Don’t ever think that.” His tone was stable; stern, even. “I’ve wanted this for so long,” he almost whispered. A confession, quiet amongst the waking birds.
The words took Neil by surprise. He stilled, his hand slack in Todd’s grip, and could only breathe. His eyes searched in Todd’s for something. A lie, maybe. A trick. Something that would prove his suspicions that the words were fake.
“What?” Neil brought himself to ask.
Todd’s shy demeanor swiftly changed for one of absolute tenderness. “Neil, I’ve liked you for so long you couldn’t possibly imagine.”
“Wait, hold on, what does that mean? Since when?” The words tripped over each other.
“Practically since I first met you,” Todd confessed. “You made me feel special. Like I mattered. It went against everything that I believed—that I’d been taught to believe about myself.” He smiled a sad little smile, “I found myself staring at you a lot. Hoping you’d look up and catch me, but also dreading it. And when you would, my heart wouldn’t settle for the rest of the day. I kept thinking, ‘What if he finds out? What if I disgust him? What if—if I’m not as special as his smiles make me feel?’ I wasn’t stupid, Neil, I knew you treated all your friends like you treated me. You’re a very physically affectionate person, have you noticed that?” He chuckled, embarrassed of the jealousy he might have once had about Neil’s arms slung across another poet’s shoulders, or his head resting on someone’s lap.
The brown-haired boy seemed to regain his motor skills then.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak so much in all the time I’ve known you,” Neil spoke, his hand again holding Todd’s. “And I think we should go up and I should show you just how wrong some of those assumptions were.” With his free hand, he took hold of Todd’s chin and tipped his face up. “And since we’re at it, I can also show you just how much of an affectionate person I can be when it really matters.”
"I'd like that," Todd confessed.