A/N: Pansexual people are not attracted to everyone on earth, and they are not slutty. Don't be ignorant ugh.
And I understand that somewhere in the shitty start of this shitty book, I said that Tyler moved in the middle of the year. Well, no he did not. It's like the beginning of their junior year, because I said so. I don't feel they're old enough to be seniors yet oh god no.
Also, I know I've never really specified the whereabouts of Josh's dad, but he's currently deployed, because he's in the army. ((And, no, I did not just make that up. I meant to include it somewhere but I literally totally forgot lol sorry))
Oh, and I don't know shit about Josh regarding small facts. Like, I'm making this up based on his personality in the story. If you get pissed off in the comments (which I know you all won't because you're all incredible) than I will get pissed back :-)) you know this, yeah?
***
"I could pick you up," he offered, voice slow and inviting. "If you'd like me to."
"I hate putting this all on you," I breathed silently, biting on the skin of my thumb. "I don't-I don't want you to, like, worry."
"Tyler, understand that I am going to worry, because I care about you." He explained, sighing. But I didn't want him to sigh. I didn't want any negative emotion to tag along with what was already there, and my head fell into my hands as I struggled to hold onto the phone in my hand.
"Well, I wish you didn't care." I groaned, slamming the toes of my shoe against the table leg in front of me. My legs were crossed under the table, and I was gnawing on my lip like there was no tomorrow. I was a proper mess if I thought about it fully, and I shook my head at myself. "Honestly, Josh. This is a waste of time."
"Unless you want me to speed all the way there and risk getting in a potential car crash, which helps absolutely no one, I suggest you shut your mouth, unless you have something amazing and wonderful to say about yourself."
Seeing as I didn't, I moved my knuckles against the scratched wood subconsciously, leaning back in my chair lightly. I felt like some sort of depressed business man, with my cold eyes and tough knuckles, and tried to control the feeling in my chest as I looked out of the window. The sky was in that state that looked like the beginning of a stew, like we were inside of a pot. But I just moved my eyes away from the glass, and my hand back down in my lap.
"I'm outside," he informed slowly. "It's your choice, you know. But I really don't want you to walk."
On one hand, I could be completely and totally selfless and tell him I was going to walk to school in order to keep any more concern for me from growing inside of him. Or, I could get in car and act like nothing was happening, and like I was sane and happy and great. Both of them seemed like bad choices, but I didn't give myself much more of an option before I walked out towards the window, taking a deep breath, and leaving my bag on the chair, now that I had my house keys in my pocket. Besides, selflessness never looked decent on me. Always wrong and oddly shaped and uncomfortable.
"'S that him?" My mom asked me suddenly, causing me to jump ten feet into the air and shimmy away from her with fear and anxiety in my throat. I didn't want to respond to her, and now that most of the anger had subsided, it was all despondency. This entire situation made me want to cry, and I power walked as quickly as I could to the door, and slammed it behind me before she could even think about trailing behind. My eyes hadn't landed on her once since last night, and I could tell she was mad. Angry. Hungover. Remorseful. All the things she really had no right to be.
He was standing outside of the car, leant against it, with that perpetual crease between his eyebrows and a patient look on his face. His legs looked nice, and he was wearing a blue shirt that had faded print on it, so much that it was basically wordless. I knew he couldn't have heard me coming, and I took him by surpise when I wrapped my arms around his shoulders as tight as I could, shoving my face into his collarbone and trying to control my breathing. It was suffocating really, and I wanted to tell him everything I was feeling and why I wanted to cry and how much I wanted to relapse, but I just pushed my tears down and focused on the feeling of his arms around my waist.
"I'm sorry," he muttered into my hair. "I don't-"
Furiously, I shook my head against his skin, before turning away from him and opening the passenger side of his car. My lips brushed his shoulder when I spun around, and he reluctantly peeled his hand from my hip. "Ready?" He asked, after I sat down. His voice was airy and light despite the atmosphere I had put the both of us in, and I knew it didn't have anything to do with his mood, seeing as he wasn't particularly giddy. The thought made my heart jump, but then it just staggered back into its slow and steady rhythm.
He walked around to the other side after a second of just standing, before opening his door and sticking the keys in the ignition, firing up the engine, and starting down the driveway. My feet were up on his dashboard, my knees pulled to my chest. The flesh of my cheeks was scrunched up against my legs, and I wondered if me doing this bothered him. I hoped I wasn't scuffing anything up.
Suddenly, I could feel his cold fingertips on the skin of my arm, and he moved it down to my hand as slow as possible. The anticipation was a deep ache in my stomach, and I thought looking at him would ruin the moment. So I stared directly out of the window again as we drove towards the school, his fingers entwined in mine and the desire to pull myself together rocking me so hard I thought I was going to fall apart.
~~~
"So, you and Josh are fucking now?" Someone asked me as I tried to throw my flimsy French book on the top shelf of my locker, knowing I didn't really need it for class. I still remember all of the French I had taught myself, and I ignored the small beads of sweat breaking out on forehead over the exertion. My arm started to ache, as soon as I got it up there, and I turned around, knowing they were talking to me, and smoothed down my shirt that was already void of wrinkles, before raising my eyebrows and shaking my head. "You're not the only one, I've heard," he laughed, and I didn't even know who this was. Why was he speaking to me? And why did that sentence send off a very small, yet loud, alarm inside of my brain? It made questions bubble under my skin, and a tight feeling wind itself in my chest.
I stared at the locker so intently, before answering, that I knew I was going to visualize the red paint when I shut my eyes.
"What?" I asked, staring down the boy who was slightly shorter than me, and stood a few feet away from me with a blue Gatorade in his hand. "Josh and I aren't-"
"You sure about that?" He laughed again, and the sound was bitter and rough, like gargling glass. "He's Josh Dun. And...now I know why he likes you. You're naive as hell."
Naive? That's a new one.
"Well, Josh and I aren't doing anything of the sort, and I appreciate your concern. Or whatever." I rolled my eyes, shaking my head.
~~~
The thing was, I didn't even know who he was, but I knew he was one of those faces that are always in the crowd, nothing but a skull covered in eyes and a nose, and a mouth that agrees with most of the things that are wrong. Dennis is always with him, and so I'm guessing I didn't recognize him as an individual whenever Dennis wasn't here.
"You okay?" Josh asked me, poking his finger into the skin of my arm during French, when neither one of us were listening. I was drawing various lines on the back of my notes paper, trying to keep my thoughts at a minimum, and attempting to make this paper look worse than my actual skin.
"Mhm," I mumbled, shrugging. "Yep."
"Tyler."
"Josh?"
I looked at him, trying to figure out what he was asking me, and what he was thinking. I was fully aware of the fact that I owed him more than a half answered question, but I wasn't going to talk about anything here. I couldn't really afford to.
~~~
And suddenly, Josh and I were in a supply closet, and my arm was touching a broom, and he was leaning against the opposite wall with his arms folded. Neither of us were speaking, and I didn't want to be the first one to break the silence. Sadly, a sneeze built up in my throat and in my nose at all of the dust in here, and I, of course, sneezed, causing him to snort in an obnoxiously cute manner.
"I'm missing free period for you," he said slowly, moving towards me in fluid and soft motions. He looked nice in skinny jeans, and I was glad to be around him whenever he wore them. And then his arms moved around my waist again, and the will to lie to him was shrinking. "So, tell me what's up." He persuaded. "What happened last night, Ty?"
I shrugged again, letting myself relax in his hold. "Nothing," I replied, shaking my head. "I just got really emotional."
"And what caused that?"
"That would be my my mother."
"I know that much," he said, looking down at me.
"Watch the attitude," I replied, narrowing my eyes up at him. "But, seriously, don't worry about it."
He groaned. "What did I tell you earlier?"
"You told me a lot of things," I laughed, rolling my eyes. "Be specific." Of course I knew exactly what he was referring to, and I puffed my cheeks up slightly.
"Ty-ler."
"Okay, fine. God, she found out I was gay, and then cried about it."
He pressed his lips into a thin line that pushed most of the color from the bottom half of his face, and shook his head, laughing in the way that didn't signify anything was funny. It made me nervous, and the skin of my neck jumped up when his fingers brushed it. "She aggravates me," he admitted, his voice sounding strained and annoyed. "She cried?"
"Yep. Saw it as a personal failure she's made as a parent. And then proceeded to get drunk."
He shook his head, leaning his forehead against mine. "Well, I can tell you she made a lot of errors in the parenting department," he remarked, smiling sarcastically. "I wanna meet her."
"And I'm sure she'd love to meet you." My words were bitter and sharp, and he smiled down at me, disbelief in his eyes. "She seemed pretty curious this morning."
"Did she?" He asked, raising his eyebrows. "Well, I am a mystery, aren't I? That's what I'm going for, at least." He joked.
"You've succeeded."
~~~
Honestly, it wasn't my place to want to know more about Josh. It wasn't my place to demand anything from him, and it wasn't my place to know everything about him. But it would be nice to be less in the dark. I still have no idea what's going on with his current status regarding Dennis, or why everyone treats him like a walking machine gun, or why his mom looks at him in a concerned and stolen way, or why he still talks to me, and I wanted to know. The curiosity was literally burning me at this point, every single time I looked at him, and I kept trying to ignore it. Sometimes, pushing it down makes more sense, even though it was the option that hurt the most.
So, maybe the secretive part of him deeply bothered me, and I tried not to bring it up. Really, I did. But I was in a majorly unstable place as of the afternoon, in his car, and we all know that this is a recipe for disaster, and a recipe for whatever else causes things to collapse.
A vehicle with locked doors, a handful of poorly thought out words, and eyes that said too much. Simple, and ridiculously effective when it comes down to it.
And that Seahaven song was playing in the back. Andreas, I think. I tried to turn that into one of the nice things about what I was about to imply.
"I know nothing about you," I introduced slowly, trying to come across as calm and composed as possible. My arms were wrapped around my knees again, because I found it to comfort me a minuscule amount. "So I'm going to ask you questions."
I sounded rude and commanding, which was not my intent, but he laughed anyway, and nodded. "Sounds fair to me. Shoot," he agreed.
"Favorite color?"
"Blue. Like, the color of ice in movies."
"Favorite food?"
"These are kinda basic, if I do say so myself," he chuckled, pouting when I aimed my hand at his shoulder and slapped it weakly. "I don't know, though. Any energy drink."
"That," I said, shaking my head, "is not a food."
"Darn," he sniffed, pretending to wipe his eyes, as if tears had miraculously formed. When, in reality, I've never seen Josh cry. Chicken, then. Or spaghetti. Or cake."
Rolling my eyes, I smiled. "Favorite song?"
"I'm leaving this car." He said simply.
"Most overrated drug?"
"Heroin."
"Where's the furthest you've been out of Ohio?"
"Pittsburgh."
"Favorite relative?"
"My uncle, the one that doesn't suck, is pretty cool." He smiled. "He was the person who taught me how to shoot paintballs at police cars when I was fourteen. And I used to help roll his cigarettes on his kitchen floor. Actually, I still do that."
"He sounds," I struggled, trying to figure out what word I wanted to use, "entertaining."
"He moved to Indianapolis when I was fifteen, but I still see him all the time."
And then, I dropped it. I didn't even have full control before it landed, and his body tensed up as soon as the words left my mouth and stained the air of the car, the sentence bouncing back and forth in between us. "Who's the sucky uncle?"
"He is," he huffed, and I literally didn't know his face could get as red as it was. "Very, very, very unimportant. And not someone you should worry about. Or ask about."
I know I should have been concerned with his sudden attitude, but I couldn't find myself to be as annoyed as I should have been. Knowing that's the way I want to respond whenever people decided to speak about things I didn't want to talk about it, I let it go. And the air was dark and heavy around him, but he wasn't and that confused me more than anything.
He confused me more than anything.
"Sorry," he breathed. "I just don't like talking about him."
The word wanted to escape so badly that I had to physically think about keeping my mouth shut, trying to focus on the fact that it was rude of me to ask. It would probably cause something I didn't want to cause, and would probably make him mad. A simple why? could turn things very crappy in less than three seconds.
"Don't apologize," I muttered, shifting around again. "I shouldn't have asked."
"Seeing as it's human nature to be curious," he responded, taking his eyes off the road to kiss my cheekbone, only for them to return. It made my cheeks flush all over again. "I'm not mad. At you."
I didn't catch the actual meaning of his words and the sentence structure and the hidden emotions, and maybe I wouldn't have had to find out the hard way if I had.
It was honestly a game of when and why and how with him, and I knew he was hiding something significant, either from me, or everyone. And the first one was very obviously worse.
***
A/N: Shits going down in the next few chapters so ily please love me :-))
Just brace yourself. Can't stress that enough lmao. I'll edit later c: