#1 BL classic || When Johnny and Jason, the high school football team's two star players, come out on Facebook as gay lovers, all hell breaks loose in the small Appalachian town of Kenton. Their lives, and those of some of their teammates who come o...
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PHOTO above - Ted Sands
Special thanks to @mephistoland for his magic touch on this chapter!
**
I didn't tell Johnny that I'd been having terrible anxiety dreams. There'd been three of them that I vividly remembered, each like an epic movie. One was filled with with big battles involving armies of soldier knights. In another we were trapped on an out-of-control spaceship from an exploratory star fleet as it ravaged through space. And in the third a devastating natural disaster was destroying the entire world around us. They were all vividly cinematic and three-dimensional, and delivered in ear-splitting stereophonic surround sound somewhere deep down in my fucked-up troubled mind.
It was always the same, me and Johnny. We were medieval knights in armor, or intergalactic astronauts, or just the everyday guys we really were, caught up in a bloody Holy Crusade, a mind-boggling space war, or an end-of-the-world apocalypse of blazing destruction.
And I'd die.
Whether on the battlefield, in the spaceship, or on the edge of an abyss in the inferno that Earth became, I'd die in Johnny's arms.
And then he'd be alone.
I'd see him there without me, wide-eyed and horrified, calling out my name, begging me to come back to him. And then ...
... I'd awaken, trembling and sweating in the hot humid night, holding onto Johnny so tight I'd be amazed he didn't wake up. And it'd take me forever to calm down, to stop the frantic banging of my heart. I'd bury my face in his neck and hold on till the anxiety ran its course, till the fear lessened, and till the trembling eased.
I knew they were just anxiety dreams. My mom often had them throughout the years. So many times I'd seen her walking the halls late at night until her meds kicked in. I knew I needed to go home and get some of her 'little helpers'. Maybe just a couple, or maybe a handful, would help and stop this insanity.
Those dreams scared the hell out of me. Not because I died in them, but because Johnny was alone after I died. Alone in a chaotic world intent on destroying him too.
Yes ... I fucking knew it ... something terrible was going to happen to me. But I really didn't give a flying fuck about that. I just didn't want Johnny to be alone after it happened ...
That's why I hooked him up with Channing. I knew in my heart that Channing was the one for him if I wasn't here anymore. I was sure of it. The way he'd sent his picture and his message to me the very morning after I'd had the worst of those dreams, the apocalypse one.
Ohmygod, it was worse than The Hunger Games and Divergent put together. Fiery and explosive, the whole world had turned into the crumbling pits of hell. Even Katniss, Tris, Gale, Peeta, and Four, all together striving to prevail, couldn't have survived it.
But Johnny did ...
... and without me.
**
It was later and we were driving out to the country club on the Athens Road. The club and golf course were located near the old drive-in movies just outside of Athens itself. Johnny's uncle had sent him a text to meet him there at seven. He'd had a late start getting on the road in Pittsburgh and he didn't want to bother going home first to Kenton then doubling back to the country club.
