“What? It’s perfectly normal. We’re young, healthy dudes. Kit, wanna come over here, and we can set up an account? I call dibs on picking your profile picture.” He winks, pointer finger to thumb off to the side opposite Bowen, the universal a-okay gesture. Like he’s my wingman right now.
I sort of want to jump across the fire and smother him with my leftover mashed potatoes. He made it very clear the other night that my crush on Bowen was never a secret.
Dear God, if you’re listening. Shut him up.
Ian’s phone beeps, and he picks it up swiftly, fumbling the device that looks dwarfed in his hands. His face falls slightly, then he laughs and types something out before looking back up at me. “What was I saying?”
Like a dog, Bowen pulls out a bag from the cooler next to him, and Ian immediately perks up, focus diverted. “Are those what I think they are?”
Bowen shakes out a package of graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. Ian is up and off his chair before the sweet treats settle in the grass.
“I’ll get the sticks,” he calls over his shoulder.
Then it’s just two.
Bowen gathers the stuff in front of him into a neat pile. I wish I hadn’t picked a seat so far away. The fire is warm. The feeling of his eyes on me is warmer. But maybe there is a special kind of magic reserved for his pale eyes meeting mine through the flames.
Ian wasn’t wrong. I do feel hypnotized. Every time we lock eyes, the world around feels a little hazy. A little warmer. A little narrower. Until it’s him and I, the fires burning at the center of our little universe.
I could live in that world forever.
I almost forgot how right the world feels when Bowen Briggs smiles at me. Looks at me like I’m not a puzzle he can’t solve.
Maybe it wasn’t for me tonight, but I can pretend it was.
I can pretend that he’s the man, grown up from the boy that held my arms in the air to teach me how to catch fireflies. And I’m the boy that grew into the man who still loves him. That we don’t harbor hearts too heavy to hold whole.
Bowen stills across the fire, elbows on his knees, head bent. I can just make out the sound of a deep inhale, then his eyes snap back to mine. Like there was no other path they knew how to take. Just as tethered to me as I am to him.
His eyes look like they’re glowing from the reflection of the fire, and the look in their depths makes my stomach take flight. There is nothing guarded about the look.
It screams the same things my own body is screaming.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
I’m not so far gone that I think they mean the same. But I am Bowen’s all the same. I’m his best friend. The person that loves him differently than anyone else in the world. I hold his past in my hands, and I’ll be fucking damned if I ever forget it again.
“Did you forget the Reese’s?” I murmur softly as to not shake the walls of our bubble.
The fire crackles and pops. A perfect mirror of what my insides feel like when Bowen reaches back into the cooler and pulls out a package of the chocolate peanut butter candies. He dangles them between his bent knees, then gently tosses them on top of the pile. His silver rings clink, and I gulp, looking at his hands.
“I need you to stop looking at me like that, kitten.”
My stomach bottoms out somewhere between the depths of want and fucking hell.
Best friend. Best friend. Best friend.
“I got a big stick for you, Kit,” Ian calls through the dark. The outside world swirls around and back into focus.
An airy laugh escapes past my lips, less humor and more a need to expel some sound to keep from groaning. Or crying over a s’more and the fact thathe called me kitten.
Dear B,
Do you remember one of the last bonfires we had? We ate so many s’mores I thought I would puke. You pulled me to the hammock that night, groaning that the marshmallows took away your ability to move. We passed out under the stars. I went to sleep shoulder to shoulder with you and woke up wrapped in your brothers arms.
You had been too cold to sleep.
Bowen filled in without a word or complaint.
