Knock On Wood (BoyxBoy)

chapter ten. kevin.

"So. How was your little date?" Nat asks as we walk into his house after school the next day.

I head right to the kitchen and open the fridge. "What?"

"I said," he repeats, getting a bag of Doritos from a pantry. "How was your little date?"

"You know how it went," I respond, looking at him from behind the fridge door.

"I mean, overall," he says, shutting the door and walking up to his bedroom.

I follow him up and sit down on one of the two bean bags that are in front of his television and open a can of Coca Cola. He turns on his gaming console and the TV and sits next to me, setting the bag of chips between us.

"Just tell me how your date went," he clarifies, handing me a controller.

I take it. "It wasn't a date."

He grabs one too, and puts in some zombie game. "Yes it was."

"We were studying," I say. "That's hardly a date."

"But you also came to the restaurant that I work at," Nat points out, smiling smugly.

"So, I treated him to dinner. It's what friends do."

Nat presses start on his controller, and the game we are playing begins. I walk around inside the game, barricading every window I can find and picking up guns.

"Sounds like a date, if you ask me," Nat says. He mimics what I'm doing in the game.

"Well, Nat, I didn't ask you, okay?" I say defensively, shooting at a zombie that came too close to the window I was at. "He took time out of his day to help me study, so I treated him to dinner. Are we finished with this little interrogation session?"

"Not where I'd like to be finished at, but," he says, sighing sadly. "I'll stop asking."

"Good," I sigh. "Finally."

Nat stuck to his word, surprisingly. We didn't talk about the "date" or Edd or anything that wasn't about the game we were playing. We talked about strategy, mostly. I'd cover the five windows that were upstairs, and he'd cover the three windows and the door that were downstairs. The house, I eventually figured out, wasn't much of a house at all. It was more like a mansion.

After a few solid hours of extremely hardcore video game playing--(yelling and everything; the full package)--we both decided to call it a night.

As Nat shut down the game system, I gathered the two empty chip bags and five soda cans that were scattered around the bean bags and headed downstairs.

His father--a tall man that looked exactly like Nat minus the green hair and piercings--greeted me in the kitchen, so I did the same and walked back upstairs.

"Want me to drive you home?" Nat asks when I step inside his bedroom.

"Nah, I'm only a few houses away," I reply. Nervously, I bite my lip and look at the ceiling.

"Hey, Nat? Remember when you were asking me all of those stupid questions about my study-thing with Edd?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I changed my mind," I inform, laying on Nat's bed the wrong way, with my feet touching the floor. "I'm giving you permission to ask away."

His face lights up almost as quickly as I regret my decision.

"What did you guys talk about?" he inquires.

"Chemistry."

"Seems appropriate," he winks. "Where did you guys study?"