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“So you’ve taken up smoking?” Raph raises his brow.
Casey scoffs while struggling to light the damned thing under the harsh push of the wind. It's nearly winter, and the first snow is rolling in on the harbor shores. “I’ve always smoked,” is all he says.
That’s not true. Raph knows the ins-and-outs of the dumb hockey player–whether either of them want to admit it or not. It’d be too easy to ignore the finer details; to not know which shirt is his favorite; or what time he wakes up for school; or how many days he can go without washing his hair before it becomes undeniably greasy. And here, to know that he’s never smoked in his life, not tobacco anyway, and furthermore, to know that the reason is because it reminds Casey too much of his dad.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be ‘too easy’ to overlook these things. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy at all.
“Christ, it’s freezin’ out here.” Raph shoves his hands into the pockets of his bomber jacket. “Can we go somewhere warmer to talk?”
“Nothin’ to talk about.” Casey lets out a puff of smoke. His gaze is fixated on a buoy bobbing in the water, a shape he can just barely make out in the dark. He’ll look anywhere but at Raph right now, and that irritates the hot-head to no end.
“Casey, man, please don’t be like this,” Raph says desperately. As if it were him who was hurt, as if it were he who was being blown off. Casey laughs.
“You wanna talk? Get to talkin’, then.” He takes another long drag at the cigarette.
He’s got all night. It’s Friday, he’d finished all his homework a day ago and didn’t have a shift these next few days. He’d wanted to spend them with Raph, and admittedly now he is, but this isn’t at all what he’d been anticipating. Casey had thought they were finally getting somewhere. Now it’s occurring to him how stupid that idea was.
So long as Raph is involved, they’d never go anywhere. Because he’s all masculinity and a rock-front, yet deep and scarred and soft core. Casey could break the facade down, and he had, and maybe that would’ve been fine but Raph can’t seem to even be vulnerable around himself, much less another person.
The truth is, there’s nothing Casey wants more than to talk right now. But that’s not what Raph is out here for, not really. He’s itching to give Casey a half-assed apology backed by an even lamer excuse, and then to drag him home and pretend nothing happened. And Casey would follow that dance any other night, just not this one.
Raph grabs the cigarette from where it lies between Casey's finger, and the boy lets him. He takes a drag for himself. “I’m sorry.”
Casey side-eyes him. “For?”
“For bein’ a lousy boyfriend.”
Casey startles at the word. “‘Boyfriend?’” he parrots in disbelief. Boyfriend. His blood boils as the word, soiled by Raph’s terrible excuse of a Brooklyn accent, tumbles round and round in his mind, each jab stinging worse than the prior. His blood starts to boil, and then he’s not cold anymore. “Boyfriend?” he barks.
Raph flinches at the laugh. “I came out here to apologize and you’re gonna-”
“Apologize? You? You’re going to apologize for being a ‘lousy boyfriend?’” Even as he spits it all out, Casey knows he ought to slow down. His mouth can’t keep up with his mind–it’s spinning, spinning, spinning–and he’s feeling all sorts of dizzy and out of shape; but also, crammed in between the sickness in his stomach and the headache climbing up his spine, he feels that rush of adrenaline that wraps itself around his core before every fight. God, he wants nothing more than to roll his fists, knuckles clenched and white, veins bulging, and refuse to pull his punches as he goes at Raph.
And maybe he’d kiss him after.
And maybe then he’d have to punch him a little softer.
Fuck.
He needs to slow down and process the bullshit he’s being presented with before he makes a fool of himself–even if that means shoving down his aching heart, or worse, exposing it to be bruised once again. “Fuck you,” Casey says. He never wanted to be put here. Never wanted it to be Raph to break him like this. “This is a new low, Raph. Even for you.”
Raph raises his brow. “I’m sorry?”
“No. No, you’re not.” Casey turns around, running his fingers through his hair. The moon is full tonight, and if either of them were a different man, that might hold some sort of weight. Beside it are constellations Casey doesn’t know the names of, but he stares at them anyway, and this time when he breathes, in sync with the ocean waves lapping below the dock, he feels a little steadier. “Do you know how many times we’ve kissed?”
“I dunno. A lot.”
“Seventeen. Give or take–I don’t really know what counts as the end of a kiss and start of another.” As Casey talks, Raph takes a hesitant step forward. He shoves his hands back in his pockets, feeling utterly restless and at a complete loss of what to do, where this is going, or how to handle it. He opts to stand silently, and listen, and his eyes seem to find the same cluster of stars that Casey’s are fixated on.
“You kept count?”
“Yeah. Not sure why. I guess I was just- waiting.”
“For?”
Casey looks down at him then. “For one of them to feel real.”
Raph swallows. “They were real,” he says around the lump in his throat.
The other boy shakes his head. “Raph, I can’t tell you how long I’ve been in love with you. And I kept trying to tell you, and you kept telling me ‘no,’ ‘we don’t gotta do that, Case,’ ‘it’s fine, Case,’ ‘not now, Case.’ If you don’t want me, that’s fine, but fuck , Raph–”
“I do want you.”
“No, you don’t!” Casey shouts. “Fuck you! This isn’t just a kissing thing. This is an ‘I hate myself for how much I want you’ thing. A ‘getting plastered to forget you’ thing. An ‘I'd do anything just for you to look at me’ thing. An ‘I fucking love you’ thing!”
“Case.” Raph extends his hand, but Casey’s already spun on his heels, back to facing the water, pacing closer towards the edge of the dock.
“I tried to bite my tongue, I tried to suppress this all but you kept coming at me. In the dark, in my room, in yours. You kissed me seventeen times. I’ve never been kissed in a way that meant a damn but that doesn’t mean I won’t recognize it when I see it.” The lamppost igniting their rendezvous flickers as Casey grabs a hold of its stem. His fingers grip into its ridges, and he leans forward to stare down into the foamy saltwater below.
“You’re too close to that edge, Casey,” Raph warns. He wonders if Casey’s been drinking again, if that’s why his lips are so loose and expressions so animated. But his breath smelled only of cigarettes, and this evening went south just shortly before they landed at this pier.
Casey ignores him, instead inching farther over the edge. “‘We don’t gotta do that, Case.’ I wanted to. I wanted you to know about this thing I’ve got for you. I just wanted you to know.”
“I do know!” Raph shouts in a trembling voice. “Can you just get away from the edge?”
“It won’t go away.” Casey murmurs. He takes one last drag at his cigarette before dropping it in the water. It’s a bad habit, anyway, and he tells himself that releasing into the ocean will thereby free him of its hold. He wants to know if he could do that with raph. He wants to know if he’d even want to.
He can’t recall a time when he felt this smitten, because there never was one. He was born to high school sweethearts who’s love never sobered until one party died. He spent his youth watching mommy kiss daddy on the cheek in a kitchen with flowers daddy brought home for her on an unassuming thursday. He didn’t have to wonder to know that he’d find his own love one day. And then she died, and his father fell into a pit of grief so deep that whatever came out of it was something else entirely, so in a way casey figures they both died. And in whatever succeeded ‘youth,’ Casey met a firecracker that made his heart explode.
Raph’s every love song and sad song and angry punk rock song molded together. He’s kissed Casey seventeen times. But not once in the way Casey would’ve liked him to.
He takes a small step away from the edge. And then another. And then as many as it takes until his back hits Raph’s plastron, and a muscled hand curls around his waist and intertwines its fingers with his own. A sigh of relief escapes the turtle, and Casey’s head hangs forward.
“I’m just so in love with you,'' Casey confesses, like it's the most heartbreaking thing in the world.
Raph rests his forehead against the nape of Casey’s neck. “I love you too.”
“Stop,” Casey hisses. He tries to pull away–tears are already lining his eyes and he can’t fucking take it anymore, it’s beyond the point of something that can be played off–but reaph tightens his grip, not even budging under Casey’s pressure.
“I mean it, Case. I love you too. I’m sorry. I meant it, the boyfriend thing.” He squeezes Casey’s hand in his. “I’m sorry I kept brushing you off before. I was just- scared. But I- I never thought of us as anything less than boyfriends.”
Raph’s gravelly voice is low enough to only be heard by Casey, but he still turns his ear to hear better so that raph has to tell it to him straight. He can’t lose these words to the night. Not for all its stars and waves and the buoy out in the distance, that has danced a steady waltz throughout their whole quarrel.
A shiver runs down Casey’s spine as Raph presses his lips to the crook of his neck. “I’m sorry, Case.”
“Fuck,” Casey gasps.
He all but comes undone like that, right there. Sagging back into Raph’s arms, arms that he allows to hold him, and who hold him happily. He leaves his mouth open, and Raph takes it, and this kiss isn’t eighteen, it’s something of its own, a feeling Casey can’t put into words, but can promise that he’ll chase for the rest of his life.
“Casey?” Raph asks. His lips brush the swollen pair before him, and Casey can’t help but smile against Raph’s–his boyfriend's –breath.
“Yeah?”
“Can we go anywhere warmer?”
Casey laughs, a relieved, shocking thing coming from a breathless core. “Yeah. Yeah, lead the way.”