Innocent

Seven

We pass a couple hours before dinner playing horror games on my laptop. Lance is painfully fun to be around. Even when he's trying to hard to be funny, I'm laughing. We decide to eat leftover pizza and take it back up to my room.

"Do you like scary movies?" He asks with a mouthful of hot cheese and bread.

I nod, swallowing my own bite before speaking, "They usually terrify me but I love them. You want to find one?"

He smiles wildly and grabs my laptop off my desk before climbing back onto the bed. His sits closer than before. Our sides touch and I can feel the warmth of his skin through our clothes. We finish our pizza and I stack our plates on the floor while Lance spreads a blanket over us and turns off the light.

The movie starts but it's hard to watch. I can't look away from his face in the flickering light of the screen. His eyes widen and he lifts the blanket to his face with every jumpscare.

He looks at me, "How are you not scared?"

"Oh," I say, slipping from my trance, "I'm totally scared." I look back at the screen with a smile on my face that only grows wider when grabs my hand after another scare.

1:38 am. How'd it get so late so fast? I mean we did watch the entire Insidious series in one sitting but after one I didn't want to stop. Sitting close to him like this. Holding his hand. I could get high off it. He sits up and checks the time himself.

"Oh man, it's late." He says yawning and sitting back again, looking at me. "Anyway, could I crash here tonight? My mom has this rule on the weekend that if I'm going to be home after midnight I should try to crash somewhere else."

All I can do is agree. My mom came home a couple hours ago but she went straight to bed without even much of a hello. It's the weekend anyway, I doubt she'd care.

I toss Lance a big t-shirt and reach for pajama bottoms before he stops me. "I can't sleep in pants, they wrap around my legs and I get all sweaty. That cool?"

I just nod and grab some PJs for myself, "Yeah, that's cool."

Lance looks really fucking good in my shirt. He looks even better climbing into bed next to me. We lay in the darkness, in silence, for a long time. I listen to the sound of his breathing and he is probably listening to mine. I can't think of anything to say. I don't think he's asleep because every so often he'll roll over or take in a deep breath. Laying next to him is like laying next to a campfire. But the campfire is in the form of a soft, warm skinned boy with pretty eyes. At some point he finds my hand again under the blankets and I drift to sleep.