Undress to Impress (Kellic)

Chapter 14

I rush upstairs and into my room, gently setting Kellin down on my bed. He seems to be pretty sound asleep, so I head back down, figuring I might as well answer the inevitable questions about why the hell I was carrying Kellin into the house and up to my room.

Luckily, Mike and Alysha have not yet resumed their make-out session. “Hi, I’m back,” I say, sitting in the nearby lounge chair. “Hit me with your burning questions.”

"Okay," Mike says. "May I ask why you were carrying Kellin? And why he appeared to be either asleep or unconscious?"

"Or dead," Alysha adds. "Also, may I ask who Kellin is?"

"He’s my boyfriend," I explain. "He was drunk, so I helped him, and then he passed out in the car, so I carried him."

Mike just looks at me. “Is that it? Is that all there is to the story? You kinda look like you’ve been…”

He trails off, but I quickly realize what he was going to say: crying. I probably look like I’ve been crying. Fuck. I wonder how obvious it is.

"Uh, yeah, that’s pretty much it," I say. "We, uh, we had some drama pertaining to recent events. We’re good now." I rub my eyes, suddenly feeling tired. "Anyways. I’ll leave now, if you two want to continue sucking each other’s faces off."

Alysha laughs, and Mike flips me off, sending me a warning look. He hates it when I’m around while he’s trying to impress a girl. Before I came out, he was afraid I’d steal them from him. Now he just doesn’t want me to embarrass him.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he says as I stand and head back up the stairs. "Also, Alysha may or may not be staying over tonight. Figured you wouldn’t care, since, y’know, Kellin practically lives here now."

Now it’s my turn to flip him off.

—

The next day, Kellin has a nasty hangover, spending the better part of the morning bent over the toilet. I offer to help him, but he tells me he doesn’t want to be a burden and eventually just asks me to drop him off at his house.

With all this going on, I don’t get a chance to talk to him about what he said last night…about how he might be in love with me. Maybe that’s for the best, though; I’m not quite sure how I’d respond if it ended up being true. What I am sure of is that I don’t want to lose him. I’m sure that I want him to be happy. I’m sure that I care about him more than I thought I would. Even before I knew about his job, it was just an innocent crush for the most part, and I didn’t expect much to ever come of it. Now here I am, remembering the terror that engulfed me when I saw him step out into the street. That terror meant something, just like all the other feelings I’ve been developing for him over the past month.

I’m not sure what to make of it.

I can’t remember the last time I was in love, or maybe I never was. I don’t think I was ever really in love with Beau, even while we dated; I was just in love with his drugs. I was in love with the chemistry we had while we were high. I was in love with the chemicals in my veins and his hands all over my body. I was in love with the beautiful distraction.

Being in love with an actual person, though…I think that’s new. I don’t know what it feels like; I don’t know how to identify it. But if I ever started to fall for Kellin, I can imagine that it would feel something like this.

—

Did you ever find Kellin? Gerard told me he left and you went after him.

Yeah I found him, I respond to Jaime’s late afternoon text. Everything’s good now.