“Hey.” Noah’s hand was on his knee. “Seriously. Are you okay?”
Eli took a deep breath. “I told you there was something I wanted to say. Something I should have told you when we first met. And keeping it from you feels unfair.”
“Unfair how?”
“You’ve been really honest with me,” Eli said. “About your ex, this town, how you feel about… us.” The word still felt new. Precious, even. “I don’t want to be the one holding back big things.” He slid his thumbs along the sketchbook’s edges. “This is from when I was fifteen. We’ve already established my teenage years were a mess, so that part won’t surprise you.”
“Very on brand,” Noah said with a smile.
Eli swallowed. “You know I went to Mapleford High. You were a couple years ahead. So when I was a baby gay disaster with too much time on my hands and not enough language for anything I was feeling… there was this one upperclassman.”
Noah went very still beside him, but Eli kept going.
The only way out was through.
“He was nice to people,” Eli said. “He carried things for teachers. Helped freshmen find their classes. Smiled a lot. Everyone liked him.” He didn’t look up. “And for a while there, I thought he was perfect, in a stupid, intense teenage way.”
His hands shook slightly as he opened the sketchbook, and he flipped to the page. The paper had yellowed a bit, and the pencil lines had faded in places, but the portrait was clear enough.
A seventeen-year-old boy, half turned, laughing at something outside the frame. His hair was long, curling over his forehead. A jawline Eli had tried very hard to get right. And then there were those eyes, drawn from memory, from imagination, from too many stolen glances.
Noah stared at the page in silence.
Eli forced himself to look too, first at the drawing, then at Noah, at the way his expression shifted, piece by piece, each emotion so easy to read: confusion, recognition, disbelief—and something else.
“Is that…” Noah’s voice came out hushed. “Is that… me?”
“Yes,” Eli said, his voice small but steady.
Noah blinked. “Whoa.”
Eli rushed to fill the silence. “I know, it’s weird. I was fifteen, closeted… I didn’t know you. We never talked. I sat in the back of the gym during pep rallies and doodled like a creep. I kept this because—” He stopped, his throat tight.
Because you were the first boy I ever let myself want.
Because this drawing felt like proof I hadn’t imagined you.
“Because?” Noah prompted.
“Because it felt…important,” Eli finished. “Youfelt important. And I didn’t know how to say that without…this.” He gestured at the page.
Noah was still staring at it.
Eli’s panic spiked. “If this freaks you out, I get it. If you need space, or to laugh, or to run screaming into the night?—”
“Eli,” Noah said.
“—or if you want to file this under ‘Eli’s Weird Art Crimes,’ that’s fair, I just?—”
“Eli,” Noah’s voice was firmer this time.
He shut up.
Noah tore his gaze from the drawing and looked at him.
Oh my God.
His eyes glistened.
