It's Not A Side Effect Of The Cocaine, I Am Thinking It Must Be Love

chapter twelve- fine, great

October seemed to fly by. Somewhere along the line, Pancho made it back to his usual self again, and I was so relieved. I still felt awful about that day at the laundromat. God, that whole thing had been so fucked up. After that, I spent a lot of time wondering about what he and Mandy had been like as a couple, how often she belittled him like that, why she had even stuck with him so long if she hated him so much, how she had been able to just throw away that kind of relationship with him. Pancho was like the goddamn sun sometimes, I swear. He tried to toss Smarties in my mouth and ended up wasting an entire roll of candy because I couldn't catch any of them, and laughed when I tried to apologize. Another time, he had insisted on watching another horror movie because "it's October, it's just time to be spooky," and held onto me the whole time, even before the scary things started happening. It was impossible to not smile around him, and I spent all the time I could with him.

By the time the thirtieth rolled around, I was driving myself fucking crazy noticing every little thing about him that was cute, and not being able to do anything about it except try not to blush. There were so many times I wanted nothing more in the world than to hold him close and kiss him, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had to remind myself that Pancho and I could never be anything outside of friends, as much as I wished that wasn't the case. It was, at the least, frustrating to think about. I was trying to not set myself up for future disappointment, but it wasn't working very well.

It was just the same things he'd already been doing; staring at me while I made eggs, leaning his head on my shoulder when we watched movies, calling me "pretty boy," ruffling his hair, his smirk. Fuck, almost everything he did made it hard for me focus on anything but him. And to add on to everything he'd already been doing, he started sleeping without a shirt at all some nights. As if it wasn't killing me enough already to sleep in the same bed with him, I could hardly even look at him when he was wearing nothing but his boxers. When I was at work, I missed him like crazy. I was stupidly, ridiculously attached to him, and I hated it.

I couldn't even talk to anyone about it. Pancho? Fuck no. Never. People at work? Of course not, they asked enough questions already. Clients? That would just be weird. The only person left that I could talk to was Bad Twin, and I almost never talked to him about anything anymore besides grocery shopping and what was on TV. We hadn't had an actual conversation in years, not since he flunked out of high school after one bad grade in his senior year. He was so close to graduating, too, and he threw it all away for a grade that didn't even matter. After that, he sat on the couch and ate shitty food, occasionally disappearing in his suit to god-knows-where. Bad Twin was more of a weird man-child that lived with me than my brother. He'd become unapproachable and distant, and I couldn't imagine ever talking to him about my feelings for Pancho.

On the night before Halloween, we were out of milk. Most of the time when we were "out of milk," we had two or more half-opened cartons in the fridge that everyone had forgotten about, but we had actually run out. I was exhausted from working all week and didn't feel like going to the store, and Bad Twin sure as hell wouldn't get off his ass, so Pancho volunteered to go pick up milk. I didn't want him to go for my own selfish reasons of wanting to be around him all the time, but I'd never say that to him. He went to the store, leaving Bad Twin and me alone together in the living room.

I was planning on going to my room to get some much-needed knitting time in while Pancho was gone, but as soon as we heard the door close, Bad Twin switched the TV off, lowered his sunglasses, and demanded, "Talk to me."

"Uh. What?" I raised my eyebrows at him. He never turned the TV off, hardly ever lowered his sunglasses, and he never wanted to fucking talk to me. The whole thing was weird as hell.

"Come on, man. What's up with you? What's happening?" he drawled, shifting into a more upright position. "We don't talk anymore, you're always gone, y'know?"