FicWad

Joey and I kept the same class all the way through the year, and by the arrival of summer, the two of us spent far more time in the quiet place. We would go over there after lunchtime and hang out—and prior to then, I would write a couple of lines of letter to Lars. I made a promise to him: I had to keep it. Joey sort of knew about Lars even though I never gave away his name.
The trees around us spread a blanket of shade over our legs and our hips—he once wore a shirt with a high waistline so the sun shone down on that bare stripe of his little belly. He looked at me as if he had just eaten a lot of pasta beforehand. A little twinkle in his eye and a shy little smirk on his face: it was that moment he told me something interesting.
“Remember that bracelet I lost?” he recalled. “The one my aunt gave me?”
“Of course.”
“I told her about it and she was not happy about it—but she said it was alright, though, because it wasn’t my fault. But then she called me sassy.”
“Sassy?”
“Yeah, I’m a brat, apparently.” And just the flat way he said it made me laugh. I reached over to my right to touch his tummy and he squirmed.
“Ticklish?” I teased him, to which he shook his head at me. I squinted at him and he held still for a second but then I lunged for him. He scrambled away from me, still grinning at me, and it took him a few moments to crawl on back to me. And even when he returned next to me, he still had a slight grin on his face.
I was gonna get that tummy whether or not he liked it.
School started that Tuesday after Labor Day, and that year, our classes were down the hall from each other, and so seeing him afterwards in the walk home was the best part of the day for me.
In the meantime, it was as if his black curls grew even more every single day. I watched them take the form of tight corkscrews atop his head. They seemed to grow longer and longer with every passing day. Longer, thicker, richer, and blacker. He became more svelte and slim as he lost the baby fat from his waist and his hips. Within time I was looking at a slender and very beautiful boy with lovely, shapely hips and thighs. Shapely from his increased interest in playing ice hockey some days.
He watched my chest poke out and sprout breasts, and my hips fill out. We listened to each other’s voices mature and enrich. The more he sang the Beatles to me, the tighter and more melodic his voice became. We watched each other grow up even as the shadows grew long every day on us.
And yet, there wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t think of Lars, and I wondered how he was faring back home in Copenhagen.
Joey sang a different song for me one oddly crisp day in the middle of January, one I didn’t recognize, and it helped that he had leaned his back to the largest branch of the bush behind us and stretched out his legs for the full extent of his voice. His shirt raised up from the belt of his jeans and the hems of his jeans rose from the tops of his Chuck Taylors.
He reached the chorus with “my woman from Cali” and showed me a little grin.
“D’you write that for me?” I asked him, stunned.
“Oh, no. That’s Deep Purple’s new song, ‘Woman from Tokyo.’ I just changed it up for you.”
“Aww—“ I glanced down at that little sliver of a tummy peeking out from under his shirt.
“I know what you’re thinkin,” he started. “And no.”
I nibbled on my bottom lip at the sight of his skin. It looked so soft and delicate, like it’d be so lovely to touch. I couldn’t resist the grin on my face. We were both looking at a new phase of life together. It only made sense for us to walk right into it together.
“Can I at least touch you?” I offered him.
“I’m ticklish, though,” he confessed.
“I’ll be gentle,” I promised him. He shifted his weight and looked down at his waist. He then swallowed and raised his arms over his head to show me some more skin. Some of that skin had been kissed by the sun while some of it underneath his belly button had a soft healthy glow to it. I moved in closer to him and held my fingers to the waist of his jeans. He held still for me.
I brought my fingers to his belly button and stroked the skin there. Soft and smooth like melted chocolate.
I was gentle with him, and he let me touch him, like a cat allowing some touches there. I gazed into his eyes and lowered my hand onto that stripe of skin. He was so soft and the fact he let me touch him only let me run my hand over him.
Less touch, more feel. How did I ever know I would feel so close with a boy as soft and beautiful as him. I wanted to feel some more of him, to better figure him out. He already showed me the softest part of himself for me—it only made sense to look inside of him some more.
I could feel us coming even closer to each other with every moment there in the quiet place. He let me touch him and I let him touch me: he ran his fingers through my hair, from my scalp and my roots and all the way outwards to the ends. He was gentle with me, too, so much that he put his arm around me and felt the small of my back. It was an odd feeling but I trusted him with those soft touches.
So soft for such a funky little boy.
The last time we saw each other, he put his hand right above the waist of my jeans as if he was going to touch my butt. It was the last few weeks of the summer before seventh grade, and sometime in between then, I received a letter telling me I had been accepted into a brand new art school over in Rochester, which meant my parents and I would have to move.
I confessed it to him a month before I had to go with a look right into his face. I even took out the letter to show him.
"It's middle school only, though," I assured him. "So I could come back by the time high school starts up."
"But that's three years without you, though," he remarked. "Who am I going to hang out with until then? Who's gonna put up with how much of an asshole I am?"
I couldn’t answer that, but I wanted to relish the time I had left with him there in the quiet place. He brought his fingers to the bottom of the page.
“It says here you’re going—forward?”
To which I nodded.
“Yeah, I didn’t tell you but while I was in Denmark, we traveled through time to come here. I’m having to go three years forward in time.”
“Three years,” he muttered.
“Three years,” I echoed.
Once the shadows grew long, we stood to our feet and made our way to the other side of the bushes. I put my arms around him to feel him one last time: even though he had grown slim and toned, he kept that nice soft feeling to him.
Soft and sweet.
He held me in his slender arms, right up against his deepening chest. I rested my chin on his shoulder. I never wanted to let go of him. I was saying goodbye to my best friend and yet I always wanted to stay with his softness and his gentleness. I gazed into his face.
“I’ll tell you this, though, Joey,” I added. “And I want you to always know this, too, even as our timelines slip apart.”
“What’s that?” he asked me in a hushed voice.
“I love the way you are,” I told him. “All soft and sassy. I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
“In a big way no less,” he teased me. I buried the side of my head in his chest. I didn’t want to let him go. Three years would come to feel like an eternity for me.