Chapter Text
They don’t talk about the hand holding, just like they don’t talk about their meaningful looks and the fact that he once kind of fucked up her life.
He drives her home in silence, and they say goodbye as quickly as possible, and then she goes to her room and tries to think of anything but what happened.
She’s only a little successful.
The Monday after the party, their entire year is talking about it, discussing the shenanigans and craziness and who went home with whom. Cora spends all of their math class talking about her and her guy – Peter is his name – and it’s endearing seeing her like someone so much, being a little less cynical and a little more in love. She then goes on about him all through lunch, and if she notices Hero and John giving her odd looks, she doesn’t say anything. Hero’s sure she doesn’t notice (being too caught up in being in love and all), but again, she doesn’t say anything. None of them do.
(It feels awkward and weird, because it’s such a completely sweet thing in and of itself. They didn’t kiss or grope or even have sex, which Hero honestly feels in this moment would have been less weird. They freaking held hands, like a couple of second graders, or people actually in love. It was an intimate moment – Hero not going to deny that, at least to herself – but it was also a very specific kind of intimate. It wasn’t dirty or hot or whatever. It was sweet, it was comforting; it was something she had done before with someone else, but it hadn’t felt the same then.
It was all those things, and it felt like so much. It really meant something, and that’s the problem.)
“I didn’t see you guys for most of it,” she suddenly says. “Did you end up finding each other and fighting for the whole night?”
They catch each other’s eyes, staring a look for just a second before both mumbling replies. Cora is far too infatuated to notice anything weird.
The problem, of course, is that they can’t just backtrack now and go back to not knowing each other at all.
She kind of wants that. She also wants to go forward kind of, because teenager and hormones or whatever, but even more so she wants to slowly back away and hide and return to the beginning of the year when he was just the guy who kind of screwed her over the year before.
Hero hadn’t really liked him. She hadn’t hated him, but she hadn’t exactly liked him either. The only reason they ever got close or whatever was because of their stupid project, which forced them into close quarters and conversations and a weird level of intimacy that she really wasn’t into dealing with.
The problem, of course, was that said project wasn’t over. Said project wasn’t even half over yet, because it was just so big and huge and time consuming. Said project meant that the Monday after they got a little drunk and held hands at a party, she was going to be spending three to four hours sitting on his floor reciting a Shakespeare play with him.
The fact that this is highly problematic for her goal to ignore any John-related feelings she might have does not escape her.
They spend seven hours huddled up in his room trying to memorize their lines. They don’t talk about the hand-holding incident, but they do fight a little bit about costume choices (John says they just wear all black, and Hero thinks that not fair because that’s all he ever wears anyways, and that they should at least try for like peasant blouses; he then asks her why she would ever think he would own something like that, and she yells at him to stop being an ass), and they only settle by deciding to order a pizza and talk about it later.
And they don’t fight about the pizza, which she would think was a good sign, but it’s only because they’ve done it so many times by now that they don’t even need to argue. They’ve already got it figured out.
She leaves his house late, and tired. They know the scene like the back of their hands, but it still doesn’t feel completely right, a few things she feels they need to fix before the performance on Friday.
She thinks it wasn’t that awkward. It wasn’t, really. They did their same old thing, pretended to be a couple breaking up and it still wasn’t weird. They didn’t talk about the incident, and it makes her happy, because it means she doesn’t have to think about it anymore than she would have anyways. She doesn’t have to see him in the hallway and think, there’s John, who doesn’t talk to me anymore cause we once held hands and it was weird. Things can go back to how they were.
And then it hits her like a ton of bricks:
It should be awkward. The fact that it isn’t that awkward is strange. They had a moment of kind-of intimacy, and it hasn’t actually effected them that much.
Not because it didn’t matter. Because it doesn’t actually feel that out of the ordinary. It almost feels like the norm by this point.
(Change never tells you when it’s coming. Change doesn’t check to make sure you’re cool with what’s happening, it just does.
Change sometimes lets you know about it after the fact, but by that point it doesn’t mean anything. By that point the damage has already been done.)
Their performance is… kind of sad, kind of fantastic, but mostly kind of sad. Like there have definitely been sadder high school performances of William Shakespeare, Hero can be sure, but this is still pretty bad. This goes into the pathetic and hilarious and just all around terrible category.
They end up going with the black, because for all of Hero’s protesting she can’t think of a way to fight “it’s simple and we already own it”, and if anyone asks this is where it all started to go wrong, them going with John’s stupid costume choice. Not the fact that the entire class talks through the first portion of their performance. Not the fact that they both end up tripping multiple times. Not the fact that she ends up hitting him across the head at one point, and that he legit during the scene has to take a second to deal with the pain, all while reciting lines about laying his head between her legs.
Not even the fact that in the middle of their scene, the light above them goes out. Like they’re just going about their lines and then the light flickers, and then it’s gone, and there’s obviously lots of other light in the room (plus the fact that it’s the middle of the day), but still, that light goes. She still tries to blame John for the costumes, though it doesn’t really work. Their light bulb quite literally goes out.
And then it's around this point that he starts to give her this big smile, because the reality of all the shit going wrong is apparently too much for him. Like it’s seriously pretty freaking comical. And here is the thing about John's smiles: Hero can say a lot of things about him, but one of them, no matter if she hates or adores him, is that he has a great smile. Like, it's so rich and complete, and maybe it's because she went an awfully long time without seeing it at all, but Hero finds it impossible to deny that his smile is quite simply fantastic - better than probably any and all other smiles she has ever been witness to.
And they’re on stage (stage of course just being the front of their classroom), and it's gone pretty far south, and then he gives her this smile, his smile, and in like a second she's completely gone. He's telling her all these things in it - that they're going downhill, that things have gone so terribly wrong that he can't help laughing at it - Hero literally has no hope at all. She starts to smile herself, and then in a moment is laughing, and then he's laughing too. And then they're both onstage (in the front of their classmates, who are all of course laughing as well cause this is pretty pathetic), laughing but trying to contain themselves, giving the widest smiles they've probably ever had.
But the thing is, they know the text. Things can go as terribly as they want, but Hero and John practiced the text so much that it's ingrained into their brains forever, and it's not like it's just going to go away. And the grade isn't about other things going wrong or right - it's about performing the scene, full text intact. So that's what they do.
They stand in front of the class, laughing their asses off but trying desperately to stop (and failing spectacularly), reciting the break-up of Ophelia and Hamlet exactly as the Bard wrote it.
"Get thee to a nunnery," he says, practically spitting.
"Heavenly powers, restore him," she says, shaking her head laughing as if she can’t believe the reality of the situation, as if she really wants to stop but physically can’t.
They rest of the class laugh as well (which is understandable, because she's sure this is completely hilarious), but not nearly as much as the two of them, who are both trying so so hard to stop but are only falling deeper down the rabbit hole. He'll start to sound coherent for a second, and then she'll giggle really loudly and he'll crack up again. She will get through a line unscathed, and then he'll give her this look (one part smile, one part sneaky manipulator, one part we're fucked), and she'll fall down all over again, breaking out right in the middle of a line.
It's completely pathetic, really. Like it's legitimately sad that they've reached this point during the performance, their classmates giggling but also probably rolling their eyes, the teacher sighing as she writes on a little piece of paper that in all likelihood says they've failed.
"The rest shall keep as they are," he says, and he's trying to stop himself, because they've finally made it to the end of the scene, and actually being series for a little bit might be helpful. Not that they really have any control. "To a nunnery -- go!"
John sort of pauses for a second, then walks off stage/to the side of the classroom, waiting for Hero to do her reaction that they had planned out, mostly just an upset gasp. She stands there, just for a moment, laughing her ass up on the stage by herself, a hand covering her sad laughs.
"We hope you enjoyed our performance..."
They manage to make it out with a B, which Hero completely attributes to them knowing the text so well, as opposed to any acting skills they might (and clearly do not) have. She finds this out as they’re studying in his room one day, tossing around topics for their diagram and watching the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet (“There is no way it is going to take us less than four hours to decide what to do,” he’d argued. “And it’s sad and depressing that you haven’t seen it yet. Really, I’m doing you’re a favor”), him sitting in a chair watching the movie intensely, and her sprawled out on his bed, checking her e-mails because the movie has hit a lull.
When they find out, they celebrate accordingly, her sitting up in his bed so fast it makes him jump, and the two of them tossing the information back and forth like they can’t believe it at all, because they seriously cannot.
They’re hugging each other tightly a moment later, their sheer surprise at not completely failing a little too overpowering for their own good. She thinks it’s awkward, but only a little bit, not enough for it to matter and certainly not enough to make them stop. They’re flying high on success and relief and also the fact that they’ve just been laying around for the last few hours watching a movie, pretending to work on their project but actually not doing anything at all. This is honestly what she thinks winning the lottery must be like. Rushing into each other’s arms just seems natural.
And actually, it’s not really awkward at all. She just expected it to be.
“I vote Ophelia.”
“You always vote for Ophelia.”
“Because Ophelia is the best,” Hero says, taking a bite of her apple and offering him some chips. John takes one, albeit reluctantly. “And I actually do think she would make the most interesting subject piece.”
John sighs. “Hero, we cannot do our entire diagram on Ophelia. She’s one character.”
“You’re first suggestion was to do it on Hamlet. How is that any different?”
“The play is called Hamlet!” He exclaims, practically throwing his arms up. “I don’t think wanting to do a diagram on Hamlet focusing on Hamlet is that far-fetched an idea.”
“So why would it be any different to do it on Ophelia?”
“Because she’s not Hamlet!”
Hero raises an eyebrow, eating one of her chips very purposely, making sure to put a focus on the noise it makes when she bites it. “Hamlet is kind of whiny. And stupid. He’s really stupid.”
John doesn’t even bother arguing with her on that front, and Hero appreciates it. “Yeah well, it’s his play. He can be as stupid and whiny as he wants.”
“I’m still not doing the diagram on him.”
“Well, I’m not doing it on Ophelia. We did the performance on her.”
“The performance was on her and Hamlet together.”
“But the play is technically all about Hamlet,” he continues, taking another one of her chips. “Ophelia doesn’t even have a scene on her own. We only know about her in relation to her relationships with other people.”
“So? Are you saying that makes her any less of a character?”
John shakes his head, rubbing his temples. “No. I’m just saying I don’t want to do the diagram on her.”
“Fine, well, I don’t want to do the diagram on Hamlet.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“What are you nerds talking about now?” Cora says, walking up to their lunch table and sitting down.
“Hamlet,” they say in unison, each having a few chips and slugging back.
“That’s all you guys ever talk about,” she sighs, taking out her phone. Hero and John stare at each other, and John dips his head for a second, as if asking for a truce.
“We could just do it on the final scene.”
“And talk about… how everyone dies?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “It could work.”
She doesn’t love it, but she doesn’t exactly hate it either, and Cora is staring at them like they are a couple of idiots, and they also have been procrastinating actually starting this for a while now, and it’s at the point where decisions really should be made.
“Okay, but only if we get to have a little section on Ophelia. Her death is a big deal, after all.”
He sighs, but doesn’t protest. “Fine. Hero gets a picture and a blurb.” He takes another one of her chips, and Hero can’t help but smile a little at him.
“God, you two are a couple of nerds,” Cora mutters, scrolling through her phone. They ignore her.
It’s at this point that Hero starts to know things about John, the kind of things that you learn when you become reasonably close with someone.
These things are:
- His favorite food is strawberries, which he likes with just about anything, but he also adores cold pizza that they ordered a while back and are too lazy to heat up (and he makes a thing of it, like it’s really sad that they both just don’t have the drive or energy to walk to the microwave and wait the two minutes for it to heat, but Hero suspects that he actually prefers it that way)
- He has a fear of spiders, but it should really be called An Irrational Fear, because that’s what it is; he’s a fan of Harry Potter and he’s only seen Chamber of Secrets once. That’s how far it goes.
- Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare are his favorite writers, but he also really likes Dickens and the Brontë sisters. He absolutely detests Hemingway, and when Hero made him read Jane Austen, he found it impossible to protest her greatness.
- He’s funny. Like really, genuinely funny. It’s usually black-humor, because that’s just how his mind works, but Hero finds him hilarious on occasion (and if she’s being completely honest, it’s gotten to the point where black-humor is what gets her). He’d never want to be a class-clown or anything, because he’d never want to be showy and would also probably be too insecure for it, but a part of her thinks he could. He has this way of making her laugh for days.
- He feels a tremendous guilt about what happened the year before, but Hero thinks it’s mostly in relation to her. Him and Pedro still aren’t close. John doesn’t hate him anymore, and he no longer has any desire to ruin his life, but they definitely aren’t close-close. They talk on the phone sometimes, and she knows that John was the first person Pedro told when he figured out he was bi, but they also don’t have all that much in common, and they don’t really move on the same wavelength.
- John goes to therapy sometimes. He did it more before, his parent’s gut-reaction to everything that happened last year, but he still usually goes like once every few weeks, and Hero thinks he doesn’t hate it. He doesn’t seem depressed anymore but Hero thinks that may just be because he doesn’t have to deal with all of it quite so much, now that Pedro doesn’t live at home.
- (When he ran away, he ran to his mum’s brother, the uncle who he only sees every few years, who is the only connection he has to his life before now. John once told her after they had had too much wine that it was fine, but also just made him feel even lonelier. Because he wasn’t really connected to his uncle anymore, and he wasn’t connected to his family, and he didn’t really have too many friends, and it was just pretty awful. He also says that he thought about Hero a lot, and what he had done, and it was the first time that he really thought of her as a person who he had fucked over. He says that before be rationalized it by thinking that the only people who would believe Hero would cheat would have to be people who had been manipulated into thinking so; that’s what he told himself to make it okay, but when he’s with his uncle he realizes that that’s bullshit.)
- He loves his stepmom. He knows that she is a nice person. And a part of him can’t ever forgive his dad for cheating on her. He knows that she loves him immensely, but that it’s tainted, because he is the living proof of one of the worst parts of her life.
- He’s not as sad as everyone thinks. He’s not as cruel. He can be mean, but it’s usually with some kind of humor, and it’s never directed at the weak – he’s never mean towards people who he doesn’t perceive as already having everything. He’s funny. He’s whip smart, smarter than his grades probably show. Him and Cora became friends because they were both outcasts, but he really does love her in his own way. He cares about a lot of things.
Hero learns him. She begins to know him, in that way that you sometimes learn people really, really well, like the way that her and Bea can sometimes read which other’s minds, or how Ben has basically become her brother. There are people who you spend so much time with that you just know them, completely and utterly. She’s spent too much time collecting information not to know him like that.
And also it’s a two way thing. He knows her. She can tell because they have this wavelength thing, where whether or not they mean to they can always share a look and connect instantly. And it’s not like she’s hidden herself; Hero’s had too much wine before, Hero’s spilled info that takes a certain level of company. Hero’s told him things that she hasn’t told a ton of other people.
He knows her. They know each other. He probably has his own list of all the things he’s learned about her, and it’s probably long, and it probably has things she wouldn’t even think it would.
And it’s not intentional, it’s not like they planned it at all. She doesn’t suddenly feel like he’s her best friend, or that they have this special connection (which they maybe do have, but that’s not the point). They just know each other.
Really really really well.
There is a night where Cora wants them to hang out with her new boyfriend, but doesn’t want it to feel too weird or forced, so they all go see a movie and then drink at her house. It’s still a little awkward, because despite her protests Cora clearly wants them all to like each other, and it’s not hard to tell, and she ends up getting really drunk later on and then to no one’s surprise they end up disappearing for a while and leaving Hero and John alone in the living room, talking over Donnie Darko as they drink more.
Hero’s not sure how, but they get on the subject of firsts, which they promptly agree is completely pointless, because she already made a video recounting all her firsts (which they watch and that’s what is fucking awkward, watching her talk about Claudio and him being her first love or whatever; she spends most of it cringing), so it just turns to her asking him firsts, at rapid speeds because again: drunk.
“First pet?”
“A dog named Pudge when I lived with my mum.”
“First word?”
“I don’t know -- mum, I think,” he says, scratching his nose, taking a sip of his beer.
“First bestfriend?”
He thinks for a second. “This kid named Patrick, back when I was a kid.”
It’s mostly just been boring stuff thus far, the kind of weird information that no one actually needs to know (and the only stuff that honestly she doesn’t already know). He seems amused by it all, a little more sober than she is, though not by much. It’s basically a game for Hero at this point, learning as many random facts about him as humanly possible.
And maybe if she was a little soberer, she wouldn’t ask the next question, because it’s dangerous and takes them into murky waters. They don’t talk about things like this, because they always seem to be territory that they don’t want to deal with, that they’re not sure if they can handle. It’s definitely on that list of things they don’t talk about.
“First kiss?”
He pauses for a moment. She’s taken things to places that they don’t take things, but also they’re having fun, and Hero thinks he won’t want to ruin that. And it’s weird that this is weird for them. It shouldn’t be, she thinks.
“Julie Romstom, when we were in Year 9.”
She falls a little flat at that, but ignores it. Twists her face into something that looks sour and takes another big sip. She’s known Julie Romstom for years, and Hero honestly wouldn’t have picked her as John’s type. Julie Romstom is really pretty, not that that matters of course. It’s just a fact. “What happened?”
“A game of Truth or Dare at one of Pedro’s parties.”
This makes Hero feel something that seems an awful lot like relief, but not completely. “Oh. Did you like her?”
“Not really, but I went out with her friend Nancy the next year.” He says it all very calmly, and it makes Hero feel off. That she knows him so well but didn’t know any of this. “She was my first girlfriend, by the way. If you were planning on asking that.”
She wasn’t, but now it’s all she can think about. And she knows it isn’t fair, because he already knows all these things about her, but it’s how she feels.
She doesn’t even think about what comes out next. It just happens.
“Your first impression of me?”
“I…” he hovers, because this is almost stepping into the territory that they really don’t talk about – there are places they don’t go and then there are places they don’t go, and this is one of them. This is right at the edge of places they do not ever under any circumstances go. And he’s a little more sober, but not by much, and this is one of those things that can be officially pronounced as dangerous.
“Not much, I guess,” he says, and she can tell that he is going to take the easy route, the one where things don’t get blurry. It’s not completely honest, and a part of her doesn’t like it. “I thought you seemed nice and friendly, I think. Got good marks and all.” He pauses, and he’s looking at her weirdly, and in her head it feels like it’s leading up to something, but it probably isn’t. “And I thought you were pretty.”
The room feels very still. They’re sitting on Cora’s couch, watching Donnie Darko, and the room feels very, very still. The air has gone.
“What about me?” he mutters. “What did you think of me.”
Again, she doesn’t even think about it. It seems too late to be thinking about these things.
“I thought you seemed lonely and sad. But not bad.”
She figures it would be best to call them friends these days, though that doesn’t feel completely right. They talk in the hallways, always eat lunch together, and hang out almost every day (and like, she can admit that it isn’t just for the project now, that going to his house or having him come to hers just feels natural; they’ll usually touch on it a little bit, discuss a few things, maybe even watch a Shakespeare movie (because he decided she had to watch every version of Hamlet, and then she decided as payment he had to watch every Midsummer's Night's Dream adaptation, and then watching Bard films was suddenly a thing they did), but it’s hardly the focus, and it’s definitely not the only reason they’re there at all). On paper, he sounds just like a friend. On paper, she basically has the same relationship with him than she does with Cora.
But it feels different. It feels like a whole other entity. When she feels about her and John, and then compares it to her and Cora, it feels like they couldn’t have less in common.
She sees just as much of John as she does Cora – actually more, since Cora and her Peter are officially a thing now and Cora spends a good chunk of her time with him. They do a lot of the same things; hang out, watch movies, order food. When she thinks about it logically, it seems the same, but she knows it isn’t. And not because they hate each other or he accidentally fucked her over once or whatever. It just is.
(And a part of her thinks to compare it to her and Claudio, but that’s not right either, because her and Claudio didn’t ever really know each other as well as they thought they did. They knew the superficial things, but not really too many of the ins and outs, and she knows so many of John’s. They’re not comparable, but there’s definitely a piece of that.)
The thing though, is that it doesn’t feel any less close with John than it does with Cora; that’s not what she’s getting at. Just a different kind of closeness, something that can’t be compared to her and Cora or her and Ben or Bea or whoever. It’s not that she’s any less close with them or him or what have you. It’s just a different kind of close.
So yeah, Hero guesses calling them friends kind of fits. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t explain some things (like that one time they totally held hands for an extended period of time), but generally it fits. John is her friend, Hero supposes.
And then, of course, it’s around this time that they kiss. Hero and John kiss. Hero doesn’t kiss John, and John doesn’t kiss Hero – they kiss each other. Very mutual, very unexpected, very two-sided.
That happens.
It’s not even like there’s some big magical moment leading up to it, or that they’re drunk or whatever. After it happens, she’s surprised that it hadn’t before when they were drunk. Once it actually occurs, it’s like something about their relationship clicks for her, like the missing piece comes into play and she finally sees what they are, what their relationship actually is. And it’s with this knowledge that she’s surprised it hadn’t happened when they were drunk.
But the kiss itself, the one that actually happened as opposed to just happening in her mind –
They’re both huddled on his floor, cutting out things for their diagram-on-death, and they’re not talking much, in part because last night was the night of weird drunk questions, but more because they’re tired and have reached the point in their friendship where not talking is no longer awkward, where they feel comfortable enough to just sit and be silent and work, and that’s enough.
They’ve also reached the point where they can have weird almost-romantic moments and not have it feel awkward afterwards. She doesn’t know what this says about them – that they’ve had so many moments like that that they’ve worked out a system of handling them. She thinks this is maybe why it happens now, because they’ve used up all their get out of jail free cards, and they can’t have another moment like that go by and not have it mean anything at all.
But anyways –
They’re cutting and they’re silent, the 1967 Taming of the Shrew on in the background, and they kiss. John says something funny, and Hero looks up to laugh, and then they lock eyes for a second and then they kiss. Like it’s this routine thing that they do all the time, like they’re some married couple who just sometimes kiss without any pretense, cause they’re just so gosh darn in love. As though they’re running on some clock and it’s finally reached the time to makeout now point.
But the actual kiss-kiss part of the kissing –
They go in at the exact same time, or at least it’s exact enough that when Hero remembers it, it feels like it. Maybe one of them went first and the other followed, but they were both thinking the same thing, and it was going to happen no matter who went in first. So they go in at the same time, and then their lips meet, and it’s like good. Right, is how it feels. His mouth is hot on hers, and she opens her mouth first before he really has time to ask, and it’s the sloppiest kiss she’s ever had, but in the moment it seems like the only way it could possibly be.
It’s good. On her ranking of kisses she’s had, it definitely belongs at the very top (and Hero doesn’t think about this at the time, because she’s a little preoccupied, but it’s the complete opposite from her kisses with Claudio, who was always so sweet and gentle and kind, but also was just a little bit afraid to actually kiss her – like kiss her, kiss her, as opposed to a nice long closed mouth kiss, which they did a lot of.
John isn’t afraid. He doesn’t overstep his boundaries or move too fast, but he takes her signals and rolls with them. Hero isn’t afraid either, and maybe she was back then, but whatever. The point is that neither of them are afraid).
They kiss eagerly, like it’s something they’ve been waiting for, like they’ve been looking forward to it for some time. Which – maybe they have, she doesn’t know. This isn’t exactly some forbidden love waiting story or whatever, but they’re teenagers and they kind of like each other and they’re attracted to each other, and if she’s being completely honest it’s not like the idea never occurred to her. She’d thought about it before, mostly in passing but sometimes with a level of seriousness that she wasn’t quite sure how to handle, because yes her and John were friends, and she was pretty attracted to him and all that jazz, but he was also the guy who last year convinced the entire school that she cheated on her boyfriend, and you can’t just ignore that –
Or so she thought.
It turns out, ignoring isn’t quite so hard when you’re a horny teenager. It turns out that ignoring can be fairly easy when you’re making out on his bedroom floor and he’s cupping you face and you’re wrapping a leg around him and –
They kiss with the 1967 Taming of the Shrew on in the background. They kiss for a bit and then they makeout on his floor for a while, and then they hear the sound of Ann telling them that she’s home from the market, and then they break away and decide that they’ll work on the project more tomorrow. And then Hero drives home, and spends an inordinate amount of time sitting in the car just trying to catch her breath, and goes and Skypes with Bea and only mentions John once, casually informing her that they have a project together. Bea apologizes.
That happens.
She lays in her bed all night, thinking it over, weighing the situation and her feelings and whatever else there could possibly be. She thinks that John should really be off limits, that on the list of guys she could possibly be into John shouldn’t even be allowed, because it would be weird and destructive and also just plain unhealthy to even consider it.
Being friends with the guy who fucked you over is one thing, but dating him? Or at the very least making out with him seems like it shouldn’t be okay, right? Like that is probably something that will be frowned on.
But then she thinks about him, and the kiss, and days spent goofing off and watching movies and trying to understand Shakespeare. She likes him. Fuck. She likes him. She like likes him, and is pretty sure he like likes her, and ignoring has been swell and all but it’s also kind of frustrating.
Hero lays in her bed, and she thinks so many things, and they’re all about him and his mouth on her mouth and his words and the way he has this smile that he only ever seems to let her see and –
Fuck the rules. Fuck who she is and isn’t supposed to date. Everyone thought she should date Claudio, and he turned out to be kind of a douchbag. At least with John she already knows all his flaws.
At least with John she knows he likes her for her good and bad parts.
The next day in school is awkward, but only because they let it be. They stare at each other during class, and then all through lunch, and then for their next class. They stare and they think things and they don’t talk much, and then they go back to his house under the pretense of working on their project, and last two minutes before they’re making out again.
And just like that, it becomes a thing they’re doing.
It surprises her how little things change – how this big thing has happened in their relationship, and everything is basically the same. They still hang out for hours every day and argue about pizza and creative decisions, only now they also kiss a lot. It probably shouldn’t come as quite so much of a shock to her, that they’ve basically been in love or whatever for a while now, but it does.
They don’t tell anyone, of course, because judgmental eyebrows and comments on how they’re really fucking stupid do not seem all that appealing. They don’t even tell Cora, whose probably been expecting it for a while now, mostly because they don’t know what it is but also because complete secrecy seems right at the moment. It’s there thing, and it doesn’t get to belong to anyone else yet. It’s not like things are that different, anyways; everyone else will just think so. Why cause an uproar?
“I think it needs more lace.”
“That’s what you said before.” He sighs. They’re staring at their diagram at eleven-thirty the night before it is due.
“Well, I still think it needs more lace.”
“I think that’s plenty.”
“If you had things your way there wouldn’t be any lace at all.”
“That’s not entirely true,” he protests, though his voice isn’t exactly convincing. “I think some lace is good. It works with the dead flowers.”
“I thought they seemed thematic,” she mumbles. “You know, dead flowers for a piece on death.”
“They’re good.”
It’s late and they’re tired, and they have to be up by six-thirty in a few hours, so their conversation is hardly up to standard. But Hero isn’t sure about the diagram – it looks good and what-not, but she’s not sure if it’s as good as it possibly could be. And after their sad performance, she feels they need an almost-perfect grade if they want to get out with an A. Which she plans to.
“I just feel like there is something we’re missing.” She needs to be going home, and they both know this. She’d texted Mum that she was on her way a couple hours ago, so that Mum would just go to sleep and not wait up (this is a plan Hero knows will work because she’s done it on multiple occasions), but she really does need to be leaving. His parents think he’s asleep in his room alone; getting the proper amount of a sleep before a hard day’s work is always necessary; etc.
“Hero,” he says, turning her to face him, “I mean this in the nicest way possible, but: please get out.”
The little shit, pulling the you’re keeping me awake card. Really, he should know better.
“Don’t you want a good grade?”
“I want to fucking go to bed,” he mumbles. “So, unless you plan on sleeping here…”
Hero starts to grumble, turning to get her book bag. It’s actually not that unappealing an idea, and it’s not like she hasn’t slept there before… but she’s also sure parents would start noticing if she just didn’t come home. And they definitely don’t need the whole school seeing them arrive at the exact same time.
“If we get a sub-par grade on this, I’m blaming you.”
“Noted,” he says, handing Hero her car eyes and giving her a quick kiss.
This is a thing they do sometimes. They kiss when they part, as if they are in some long-term relationship with goals and plans and all that jazz, as opposed to two teenagers who don’t really know how to handle their feelings. It’s kind of comforting, in a way, and even without that: it feels right.
(They don’t really talk about the feelings part of them. Like, they’re definitely there and they definitely both know it, but it seems dangerous and weird and scary to mention them. It means that there’s more going on then they feel entirely comfortable with. Because once they bring it up, they have to bring up the other thing: I like you and I don’t think I’ve ever liked someone quite as much.
Hero’s not sure if she’s ready to feel all that about John Donaldson. At the very least, she’s hardly ready to admit to it.)
But then of course, just as Hero is about to leave, it hits her.
She turns around and eyes him. “Okay, I need you to hear me out: sparkles.”
They go on without actually acknowledging things for some time. It works for them. They’re pretty much best friends by this point, and like it’s gotten to where neither one of them really have the energy to deny that. On a recent Skype conversation, Hero casually mentioned that her and John had sort of become friends, and Bea was skeptical and judgy but she also wasn’t completely angry, so there’s that. They’d made some amount of progress, she thought; things weren’t like they used to be.
They just didn’t talk about the rest of it. How they make out all the time but also held hands sometimes, and also had really gotten into goodbye kisses when no one was around. That was the kind of stuff they didn’t mention – not to themselves, not to anybody. That felt like them breaking the rules.
But yeah, they go on like that for a while, doing what they’re doing and not talking about it and feeling things and pretending they don’t.
And then, sometime in the middle of June, Pedro comes to visit. And that just ruins all of that.
There is still a list of things they don’t talk about, though it been tilted and warped and doesn’t look quite the same anymore: the fact that they like-like each other; how Cora probably knows they’re doing something; the simple fact that they really don’t want any of their old friends to figure it out just yet; Hero not really having a relationship with her brother anymore; that one time he accidentally ruined her life.
These are the things they try to stray away from at all costs. Pedro is at the very top.
And it’s not like John still hates him, because he really doesn’t and he’s worked hard to make the relationship better. But it’s not really great; they love each other in that way that blood relatives normally do; they talk on the phone sometimes and, and they’re also definitely trying, but that’s really it, because it’s got to be hard to be honest with your brother about how he, without even trying to, fucked you up a little bit. About how he didn’t know it but he was treating you like crap for years. About how you have all this anger sometimes and you don’t know what to do with it.
And Hero knows John also doesn’t want to blame Pedro for what happened, because he doesn’t like pretending that he wasn’t a complete dick, and that it wasn’t pretty much all his fault. But then how do you talk about it? How do you say, I don’t blame you, but also you did kind of screw me up?
So Pedro and John don’t really talk about that stuff. And then Hero and John don’t talk about it either. Hero isn’t exactly Pedro’s biggest fan anyways; she wouldn’t really be able to wholeheartedly preach to him about forgiveness.
(Because, if Hero is honest with herself, she still isn’t sure if she knows the first thing about forgiveness; she gets it on paper, gets that it’s good and leads to positive things, and she doesn’t regret forgiving everyone after what happened. But she’s also not as good as letting go of her anger as she would like. It’s easy to say you forgive someone, but still feel anger towards them.
Then again, she doesn’t feel as angry with John, who made it all happen in the first place. So maybe she’s just subjective with forgiveness.
But she thinks that should be allowed. She should get to be subjective with who she personally forgives. She gets that right.)
He mentions at as casually as he can to her a few weeks before, slipping it out while they’re watching a movie, and it’s instantly established that she just won’t be coming over then at all.
(“So Pedro’s coming home next month,” he’d said, taking a sip of his Coke. “He’s staying for about a week.”
A beat passed. Onscreen, Inigo Montoya was telling Count Tyrone Rugen that he should prepare to die.
“I’ve actually been feeling pretty under the weather lately. I’m not how I’ll be feeling by then.” She hadn’t looked over at him, just watched as Inigo killed the Count. “I probably won’t be over that week.”
He sighed. “Sounds about right.)
But the thing is, they don’t actually know when-when he’s coming. Like, they obviously have a date, but Pedro being Pedro he doesn’t give a time, just says “I’ll be in on Saturday,” and leaves it at that. And they haven’t spent an extended period of time away from each other in a long time by this point, and the entire thing just seems a little weird. His mother will probably ask where Hero is, they’ll end up texting the entire time. It’s going to be really out-there.
So she comes over on Saturday, early in the morning, books in hand ready to work (which doesn’t even make much sense, because the next bit is an essay due in like a month, but it seems dangerous to go over without an alibi). The plan is that she stays until around one, one-thirty. Pedro is making the drive up from school, which’ll take at least three hours, and he probably won’t leave until at least eleven, so by the time he gets there she’ll have been gone for some time. They feel like they’re pretty safe.
(And like, obviously it’s a risk, they know. They make it sound foolproof in their heads, but logically it’s got issues, issues that they choose to ignore. Neither one of them comment on how this probably says something about their attachment to each other).
And it works for the most part. They do their normal thing, putting on a movie and pretending to study, and they hold off on the makeouts for obvious reasons. It seems fine. It seems like a good plan.
They miscalculate.
“God this is weird.”
“I don’t think changing the setting of As You Like It to Japan is that weird…”
“None of the primary characters are Japanese,” Hero says, scribbling down essay topics. “That’s kind of offensive, I think.”
John pauses for a second, taking a bite of pizza. “Okay, yeah. That’s weird.”
“Thank you.”
He looks over her shoulder, moving aside a piece of her hair. “So, what do you have?”
“Mostly topics about how Hamlet is whiny, and doesn’t know how to handle himself,” she says, highlighting the list between her doodles. “And Ophelia.”
“So nothing I couldn’t have guessed on my own?”
Hero shrugs. “It’s not like I’ve ever been known for my unpredictability.”
“Clearly.”
She smiles, hitting him across the shoulder. “You asshole…”
And then, as if on cue, the door flies open, Pedro bursting in like he’s some sort of grand surprise.
(It’s a surprise alright. She’d hardly call it grand, though).
“Hey -- yyyyy….” Pedro says, his giant surprise-smile fading away the second he spots her, this weird sort of deflation from overexcitement to something more like utter shock. Pedro looks at John. Hero looks at Pedro. John looks at Pedro. Pedro looks at Hero. John and Hero under no circumstances look at each other.
John speaks first. “Hi.”
“Heyyyyy, John,” Pedro says, slowly. “Hi Hero.”
“We’re partners on an assignment,” John blurts out.
“We were just working on it right now,” Hero says.
“And watching a movie – to help us learn about Shakespeare.”
“And I was just leaving,” Hero spats out, quickly standing up and getting her book bag.
Pedro stares at the two of them as Hero gets ready to leave, her and John avoiding eye contact like it’s the plague.
“So I’ll see you in class Monday?” Hero asks, making some weird thing out of them parting like partners or whatever.
“You’ll see me in class.” He doesn’t look her in the eye.
“Great,” she says, turning around towards the door and more or less dashing by Pedro. “Bye guys.”
She makes it out as the house just as Pedro is shouting, “Nice seeing you,” from John’s room. It doesn’t make her feel any better.
John doesn’t text her all weekend, which isn’t actually that surprising given everything. She can only imagine what it must be like, Pedro accusingly asking questions and John just awkwardly avoiding. It’s gotta be weird enough for them without all this, anyways. So she doesn’t text him either.
On Monday morning, as soon as Hero arrives at school, John pulls her into a closet.
“So I’m pretty sure he knows.”
He says it like it’s something they’ve been discussing all weekend, but this doesn’t really surprise her. She’s right there with him.
“How much, exactly?”
“I don’t know, but something,” he rubs his temples, flustered. “Like, he asked about you a lot right after you left, and he keeps on asking me about the project -- like how much time we’ve been spending together, and how long we’ve had it for and shit like that.”
“And you’ve told him nothing, I assume…”
“Well, I’ve tried.” Hero raises an eyebrow, and he shrugs a little. “I can’t not saying anything at all – that’ll seem weird. I have to answer his questions.”
Hero let’s out an annoyed breath, slumping on the wall. She hates this, like really, really does. Of all the people to discover that her and John might-be-kind-of-in-a-relationship, Pedro is at the bottom of the list, right next to Claudio. They don’t need that.
(And it’s not because they’re afraid, or because she actually cares what they think of it. It’s that they’re going to make it about them. They’re gonna see it as her picking sides or John trying to hurt them or whatever. They’re not going to see it as just John and Hero liking each other – they’re going to turn it into something else completely, and make it into a thing.
Hero and John don’t even know what it is they’re doing just yet. They don’t need Pedro and Claudio bursting in and making them declare alliances and feelings and shit.)
“He’ll tell Claudio immediately, you know,” she says, frowning.
“He might not.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
John pauses for a moment. “Pity.”
Hero sighs, upset, and John looks at her with the same face.
“Does Pedro actually know anything official?” she asks.
“No. Just that we have a big project, and that we see some of each other,” he says. “More than we used to, anyway.”
“Right.”
They stare at each other, doing the meaningful looks that they apparently do so well, and she knows they’re on the same wavelength – the one that knows it’s fucked and also doesn’t want to deal with this. She doesn’t rationally care of Claudio knows she kinda-maybe-is-with-John-a-little-bit, but she also really would prefer he doesn’t for a while. She doesn’t feel confident enough with as a couple quite yet to deal with his criticism.
Because the thing is (and this is her admitting this to herself for the first time; this is Hero realizing what she’s known for a while and has just been ignoring), Hero maybe really likes John. Like a lot, a lot. More than she has ever liked anyone romantically. More than she has ever liked a lot of people, period.
She likes being with him, despite herself. She likes spending time in his room and on his bed and stretched out on his floor, and she likes him to be in her space, too. Hero never feels like she’s had enough of him; it’s never like, “we’ve been together all day, let’s spend some time apart now”. That feeling never comes. She trusts him, maybe more than she should, but she does. Everything he does is amusing and amazing and even just interesting to her; even when he’s doing something dumb, it still has her complete attention. And she’s also pretty certain he feels the same.
And the thing is that, Hero sees why she maybe shouldn’t feel that way. She logically can see that he truly ruined her life for a little – that what he did was terrible, and that a part of her is still maybe a little angry about it, but with John she doesn’t really care. She hears him talk about Pedro and Claudio and his life, and even though she knows it’s a two-way street (like yeah, his life was crappy and he was depressed and no one noticed, but also: that does not excuse fucking up the life of someone who he didn’t even know that well, who he didn’t even give a shit about), but she can’t help but side with him a little bit. She can’t help see his perspective and take it seriously, and forgive Pedro and Claudio a little less. She still forgives them, of course, but it’s different: with them, she’s chosen to forgive – she’s made a decision to try to move on, and is sticking with it. With John there isn’t a choice – she just does.
When she called Claudio her first love, it was because she had never been in a relationship with anyone before, and he was sweet and made her happy and that seemed like it probably was what love was meant to be like. It’s not as though she had a sign, or that she felt any deep and powerful connection. She just didn’t have anything to compare it to, and didn’t have anything telling her that it wasn’t love.
With John, Hero has about a million reasons why she shouldn’t feel that way. She logically should be angrier – she should hate him a little bit, even. But he’s where she always wants to be; he’s who she feels a connection with, a kind of connection that Hero has truly never felt with anyone else, and that in her gut she knows is probably something like love.
So yeah. Hero probably likes John a lot. She isn’t sure and she isn’t positive, but it feels about right. Right now, she really doesn’t need her whole group of friends knowing – she really doesn’t need everyone questioning what the hell has been going on since they graduated.
“I don’t think anyone needs to know yet.”
She says it suddenly, briskly, because it means something and they don’t need to deal with that. (Yet means not forever. Yet means that down the line people probably will know. Yet implies that there’s something to know.)
He smiles at her, his great-amazing-John-smile that she’s liked forever, before she liked him at all. He conceals it a little, because this is technically a moment of panic, but it’s there all the same.
“Me neither. Not yet.”
He takes her hand.
Hero feels like this means something; she feels like she wants it to.
Pedro stays for the full week, showing up at school (because as former Student Leader he can do that?) and just kind of hanging around. Hero and John avoid each other at all costs, talking about the project whenever they’re together in Pedro’s vicinity. They don’t text, they don’t wink or smile, and Pedro seems to buy it, or at least he pretends to.
On Saturday when he leaves, John immediately texts her all round great guy has left the building, and she’s driving over in minutes. They’re reunion feels like something out of a long-lost-love-story.
They don’t bring up the project at all, don’t even pretend for a second that that could possibly be why she is over. This is a first that neither of them take note of.
(Change doesn’t announce itself. It just happens.
You can look at a situation at one point, and then flash forward and look at it again, and you can see how things were different, even if at the time it seemed like nothing at all.)
After all this, secrecy is hardly their strong suit.
They still put in some effort, of course. They don’t kiss in the hallways or hold hands or anything like that. If a person saw them together who didn’t know them, they wouldn’t immediately assume that they were a couple. They’re still careful with the old gang – Hero’s very good about watching what she says, especially since Pedro is suspicious now. They’re not exactly a couple-couple in the normal sense.
But still… it probably isn’t that hard to see. They make no secret of their friendship, which at this point is close enough that people probably suspect things anyways. They smile and laugh at moments when they probably shouldn’t, occasionally beam at each other with an amount of warmth that is usually only reserved for people you’re infatuated with.
And in the back of their heads, they know it isn’t smart. That they would hate for the old gang to find out, but then they’re completely obvious to anyone who is watching. It’s not exactly the most brilliant they’ve ever been.
“So, have you guys declared your love and skipped off into the sunset yet,” Cora asks her one day at lunch when it’s just the two of them, John off getting help with math. “Or are you still in the beginning stage?”
Hero’s eyes go wide. She almost drops the apple in her hand.
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
Cora raises an eyebrow. “Hero, you may be an okay liar, but I’m better.” She smiles a little bit, this sort of satisfied-loving smile kind of thing. “Now, how long have you and John been going on?”
“You make it sound like we’re actually a couple,” Hero grumbles, defeated, pushing aside her books.
“We’ll aren’t you?”
Hero sighs. “We’re… I don’t know, doing something I guess. I wouldn’t exactly call it official.”
“So you don’t want to get married and have his babies?”
“Oh, shut up.”
Cora just sits back, a satisfied smile on her face, the glory of being right. It makes Hero feel a little sick.
“Okay fine,” Cora starts, “so just answer me this: how would you feel if he suddenly got with someone else, then?”
She looks at Hero very purposely, an eyebrow quirked, and Hero knows she’s being tested – that Cora is baiting her with a question that both already know the answer to, even if she’s never considered it before. Hero has never been a jealous person; it’s one emotion that she can say she confidence that she really never feels, and she’s never had much sympathy for it anyways (Claudio obviously didn’t help with that). If you’re in a relationship with someone and you trust them, there should be no need to feel jealous. If you do, it says more yourself than anyone else.
But her and John aren’t in a relationship, technically speaking. And even if they were, Cora is talking completely in hypotheticals, which makes it easier to fall into. In her head, Hero can see it all – and she suddenly feels a weird pang of anger for the nonexistent girl John would be kissing instead of her.
“We’re not public,” she says, as if making an official statement. “But we are… we’re not dating other people.”
(In the back of her head, it occurs to her that they haven’t actually discussed exclusivity at all, and that for all she knows they would be dating others. But they’re not. Hero just knows this. She doesn’t need to ask John because she already knows that he’ll say the same thing.)
Cora gives her this joyous, successful smile, and Hero can tell this is exactly the kind of confirmation she was going for.
“Thanks for the clarification.”
In the middle of July, Will Carlson throws another one of his giant rager parties, because apparently three months is a long enough time to keep the people waiting, and John and Hero decide to go, as maybe a joke and maybe something genuine and also just as something to do on a Friday night. Cora will be there as well, of course, but she’ll probably just spend the entire night with her Peter, so they don’t expect much on that front anyway. They just – it seems like a thing to do. To go to a party and have a little too much to drink and make out on the bathroom floor. It doesn’t sound too unappealing to either of them.
(And of course, they take forever to decide if they actually want to go, going back and forth between what they call their pride and their actual desire. In Hero’s mind, she knows that logically she doesn’t really like parties like this, except with John, and then she usually really likes them. So they pretend that it’s something they have to do – out of boredom or obligation or whatever, and they act like that right up until the event; but the point is that whether or not they actually admit it, they’re still sitting on his front porch at midnight that Friday, so all their arguments are kind of stupid anyways.)
She’s wearing this cotton white dress and a leather jacket, sort of a sweet-but-badass look going for her, and he’s wearing one of his black sweaters and a pair of Chucks, and they’re sitting on Will’s porch, sipping a couple beers and watching everyone dance. (Will has got this giant house, and like two separate dance floors – one inside and out – and one of the signatures of his parties apparently is that all the doors are left open, and people move between.)
She thinks they probably look like a couple.
They are a couple, she supposes. It feels like they’re a couple – in terms of someone being your person and your partner and shit, and she only has Claudio to compare it to but this seems right. With Claudio it was always so official – she can specifically remember when they went from being friends to being in a relationship, as though he gave her his pin or something, and she knows exactly when they ended; with John it’s blurry, but she can see they’ve made it to a certain destination point. Hero can remember a period when she wasn’t infatuated with him, but she can’t remember the feeling of it. And she can’t pinpoint when he went from being nothing to everything.
She thinks you usually don’t notice change when it’s happening – or at least when it’s real. If something is so completely intense, you don’t get to just pick one moment and say, that is where it all began. You can pick a period and maybe something like, this move caused this which caused this which caused this, but there isn’t a set date or period or whatever. Things just happen, and then afterwards you realize that they have.
Still:
“Oh my god, Hero!” Bianca Rice says, coming up to Hero as she’s grabbing another beer. Hero and Bianca have known each other since they were kids, and they’ve never been friends but also never disliked each other. Bianca always seemed like a sweetheart, and right now she also seems pretty drunk. “You look soooo adorable! I’m so glad you came!”
“Thanks,” Hero says, smiling, because her and Bianca normally only speak when they’re paired together for projects, and she’s very sweet but also it’s a little abnormal for Hero. She likes it, though.
“Are you here with your boyfriend, what’s his name? -- Pedro’s younger brother--”
“Yes.”
It falls out before she has time to think, before she has time to rationalize what it is she is actually saying, which is ridiculous because she isn’t even the drunk one there, but still. It’s a reflex at this point; she’s never officially called him her boyfriend or whatever, maybe because that almost feels cheap (like, boyfriend seems like such a pointless term, and Hero is well aware that that is exactly what Bea used to say before she got with Ben, but she kind of gets it; Claudio was her boyfriend, and that didn’t actually hold too much weight emotionally), but it also feels right and appropriate, and really, Hero thinks she’s too young to be pretending that calling the guy she’s infatuated with her boyfriend is uncool.
She says yes. Someone asks her if John is her boyfriend, and Hero’s immediate reaction is yes.
She thinks that probably means something big.
Hero doesn’t watch the old videos anymore, because the period of her life is over, and it’s weird seeing things as they used to be, weird seeing memories that at the time felt so perfect and pure, and have now been kind of tainted. She wants to be objective – wants to look at a video and think, we were so happy then, it was all so great, this is lovely, but she can’t really, not yet. There are too many parts of the videos that ring false for her now – too many things that she knows aren’t true. Claudio is nothing but a sweet, charming guy. Pedro is an all around great guy. Beatrice and Benedick hate each other. Hero can’t really look at stuff like that and not think about the realities.
And then of course there’s John, who always looks so unhappy and depressed, who she remembers everyone just thinking he was a weirdo to be ignored. The way that Pedro talks about him, how everyone treats him so terribly – she can’t look at that and not get angry, even if the John in the videos is the same John who unknowingly is plotting to ruin her life for a bit. She honestly has more sympathy in real time, where she can look at it all with a clear head. The videos just make her fume.
So she doesn’t want much, but not never. She’ll occasionally watch some of her and Bea, and can enjoy them, even if they’re not really who they are now (Bea was a lot more snarky – and some of that snark has more or less been given to Hero). But she likes to watch the ones of Bea and Ben, since they usually don’t concern her or John or whoever, and they’re adorable and also she misses them and it helps.
Her favorite is the one of them in the bathtub, because it is so utterly dorky and cute and just… every single thing they both hated for so long. She used to watch it and roll her eyes, the sheer magnitude of their affection amusing to her. Now she understands it.
(Her and John kiss a lot. They hang around and joke and kiss and sometimes do a little bit more, and it feels like she’s got some sort of euphoria surrounding her – that she can’t be touched or whatever. They’re still rational beings, obviously, but they also sometimes do things without thinking, and then afterwards they don’t care. It’s pathetic how much they like each other, she thinks. They probably look just like some teen romantic comedy.
It’s maybe just lust, or passion or whatever. She wants every part of him, all the time. She thinks this is probably wrong for some reason – feeling so dependent and all – but she just doesn’t care.
She likes him far too much for her own good, but he seems to feel the same way. She’s pretty sure that makes it okay.)
They have sex for the first time on a rainy Saturday night when his parents are out of town.
They don’t really talk about it beforehand much, but it doesn’t come as surprise – they’ve wanted it, she thinks, for a while now. They have a chemical attraction. They have an emotional one. She feels safe and comfortable and she wants it, in this way that she hasn’t wanted a lot of things in her life.
“My parents are going to visit Pedro this weekend,” he’d mentioned over lunch at school. “We should hang out.”
She’d said yes, and maybe then she knew what she wanted to happen, and maybe he did to, but they dare not mention it, like if they do it’ll suddenly go away.
(It doesn’t. She goes over to his house and they dance around it for a bit, watching a movie and holding hands and cuddling, and then something happens and prolonged eye contacts occurs, and suddenly… they’re kissing, and they’re switching the movie off, and she wants it so badly it’s almost scary.)
After, they’re sitting on the ground next to his bed, side by side, and her head is swirling, and she feels happy but also doesn’t know what to think, and it felt right but also like such a complete big move. And doesn’t know if it was the right one.
And she wonders if he is thinking the same thing. Or if he’s about to tell her that he regrets it.
He doesn’t, though. He sits up and puts and arm around her, and even if he says nothing she knows that it means something. She knows that it means something good.
Right then, she knows that she feels the exact same way.
She Skypes Bea the night after it happens. They Skype, and Hero tells her everything – about their friendship and the sex and the fact that she can’t get him out of her head – and it feels like a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She hadn’t realized how not telling Bea about this giant part of her life was making her a little sad.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you would judge me. For falling for someone who was so terrible to me.”
“I wouldn’t judge you.”
“You’re judging me right now.”
Bea’s mouth twists a little bit, because she knows she’s been caught in the act. “I’m just wrapping my head around the whole thing. It’s weird.”
“The funny thing is that it’s actually not,” Hero says, but it’s not in a mean way; it’s in a, no really, this is odd, voice.
“You have to give me a little time to get used to it -- I mean, you’ve had months. It seems sudden.”
“It’s not,” she sighs, sitting back. “I thought you would think I was dumb or naïve or depressed or something. I don’t know. And I didn’t want our whole group judging me for falling into his arms, or whatever.”
Bea shakes her head, with something like sympathy. “No one is going to judge you, at least not any of us.” She tries giving Hero a comforting smile, but it doesn’t really work. “It’s not like any of us actually know him that well, aside from what happened… we never made the effort to.”
Hero nods at this, because this is something she did as well. They were all basically told by the way that Pedro treated John that they didn’t have to care about him, and they all listened.
“If you like him, then he’s gotta be pretty great.”
Hero raises an eyebrow. “My track record isn’t exactly stellar.”
“Yeah, well,” Bea starts, looking down and laughing just a little bit. “I feel like things couldn’t get much worse than before. So, John only has room to go up.”
About a week before her birthday, Cora asks her what she wants to do, and Hero answers like a reflex.
“Nothing at all would be nice.”
Cora gives her a face, but Hero just nods her head. It’s not that her birthday as a whole has been entirely tainted forever – she’s not going to let that happen – but there is a bit of lingering bitterness. Not just about the event itself, really, but the lead up, the anticipation. That’s what killed it so much for her, Hero thinks (well, aside from Claudio being a complete and utter fucking shit), the way that she had built it up in her head, how it was something she was excited for a month in advance. She had made it out to be this great, fun experience that was going to be so happy – and then it was the worst.
Hero doesn’t need that again. She doesn’t need to be excited, at least not this year. Her mums are going to take her out for a nice dinner, and then she’ll probably read and drink a bottle of wine in her room. It sounds like a good evening to her. She considers inviting John, but decides against it, and he seems to agree: they’re infatuated, but this part is weird and messy, and they maybe don’t want to take it head on just yet. They make plans to go out for lunch the next day, and he says he’s getting her a gift, but that’s it. Her actual birthday is going to be her own.
Well, that’s the plan anyway.
The thing about Cora is that she’s really good at fooling people. She can take you off your tracks without you even noticing. It’s not really a bad thing – not like, a lying thing really, at least anymore – but it’s there. The Cora that you see on the surface isn’t necessarily the Cora that is real (which, Hero supposes, is true for everyone: you can look at a person and see what they offer to the public, and you’re only getting half of them, not even that sometimes; it’s easy to form a concrete opinion of someone when you don’t actually know them that well).
Cora is sometimes the nicest person she knows. She likes to seem like she doesn’t give a shit, and that she’s mean, and that she enjoys manipulating people. And that’s all true, but it isn’t the whole picture. Cora can be giddy and kind and nice. She can care so much when she wants to. And she sometimes wants to a lot.
Which is to say: on Hero’s birthday, her mums take her out for a nice dinner, and then they all go back and Hero sits down with a book and a bottle of wine, and that’s how the night is going, and it seems fine and normal and whatever, and then she gets this text:
Dude, I think there’s like an ambulance outside your house. Better come to the front door and check it out.
The initial shock has her coming downstairs, more out of curiosity than anything else. Like she should have seen this coming, that Cora would do something for her. Because Hero knows all of Cora; she knows that she would do something like this.
But the this isn’t exactly what she was expecting either.
It’s Cora, and it’s John, and Cora’s Peter, but it’s also Verges and Dogberry, and Meg and Balthazar and Pedro, and Ursula, holding up a tablet where Bea and Ben are skyping. And they’re all smiling, and they’re all shouting surprise, and the girls are all running to hug Hero, and it actually feels really good, even if Hero can’t actually believe it, believe that Cora would get all these people to come down for this.
“You really didn’t have to,” she says when Cora comes over to hug her tightly, and she just smiles and shrugs.
“I thought we would take the anticipation out of it,” she says, beaming at Hero. “That way, you don’t have to worry and be freaked out at all. Is this okay?”
Hero laughs. “It’s actually kind of perfect.”
They end up having a little party on the beach, because it’s beautiful and kind of warm and also they’re a bunch of young people, and hanging out on the beach after dark with a couple of wine bottles seems pretty appealing. None of them actually go all the way in, but they dip their toes in and eat cake, and it’s all very lovely. It’s exactly the kind of thing she would want.
There are lots of hugs, lots of talking to people who she hasn’t seen and months and missed more than she thought she did. Hero thinks she sometimes feels like they aren’t as much a part of her life, because they all went off and did shit and she was stuck here, and in a way built her own new life. But they’re still her family, really. They did are so much of her. Hero is maybe starting to realize that just because their last year caused her so much pain doesn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful in some ways, because she got to spend it with her best friends, just like how this year was wonderful as well.
“How much did you know?” she asks John later on, when everyone else is dipping their toes in, and the two of them are hanging back by the picnic table.
“Bit and pieces,” he says, sitting down next to her. “I had actually wanted to do something before you said not to, but I thought I’d listen. Cora decided if she did something like this it would make you happy.”
“It did. I think I was just… I don’t know, afraid or something. Last year was kind of traumatizing, I guess.”
“Yeah.” He sighs a little bit, and she can tell he feels like shit. And god, it’s sometimes so weird to her. That he did that, and that a year ago he was that person (and that she was that person), and even more that it doesn’t bother her anymore. Or like, it does, but she’s still forgiven him. Because all of it… it was so toxic. They thought they were perfect, and actually there was stuff going around that was really bad, and she can look back and love parts and hate others.
And she knows that he never actually wanted to hurt her, even if he did a whole lot and even if she hated him for a while. And yes, there’s a bit of bitterness there – there’s always going to be bitterness there and a bit of anger and whatever else, but she doesn’t thinks that means that she can’t also love him. That she can’t see the darkness and know that it doesn’t make up all of him, and that he was in a terrible place then, and that he’s happier now. And maybe a part of her even likes the bad parts, because they make up part of who he is. And she doesn’t want half of John; she wants the whole package.
Hero shrugs her shoulders, looking out at the water. “I think I might love you.” They’ve never said those words, even if they’ve probably both known for a while that they’re true. I love you means a whole lot more, but Hero’s pretty sure she wants it.
And John looks, and he smiles just a little bit, and he puts an arm around her, and she feels like he’s her person right now. In this moment, for this period, her and John are a pair. And it might not last forever, and they might look at on this and think, we were young and naïve, but she doesn’t really care. For this period he is her person.
“I love you too.”
(Hero thinks she might be a fan of change.)
fin.