Needle and Thread

15

"Aw, look!" Mina squeals, hopping from foot to foot with excitement where she stands by the trunk of an aged tree. "This is so cute!"

"What is it?" Jj asks, digging into the ground with his makeshift shovel- an old spoon Harry found in the junk drawer in his grandmother's kitchen.

"It's a carving!" Mina shouts. Harry can hear the smile in her voice. "I think it must have been left behind by a couple or something. It says H and J forever. How sweet!"

The air stills. Jj stops digging. Harry stops breathing. Mina stops smiling. Everything stops.

Harry's chest ties itself into that tight knot. It's becoming a frequent feeling these days, horrible in all of its familiarity. He hates it. Why can't everything just go back to the way it was? Before Jj. Before their kiss. Before Harry had made all of his friends hate him. Why?

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" Mina asks warily, her pretty face twisted with concern.

"What? No! No, not at all," Jj says, scrambling to come up with a response while Harry sits on the forest floor and tries to remember how to breathe. "We just thought we saw a spider, that's all."

"Oh," Mina blanches, her face turning pale. "Oh dear. I think I'll stay over here if you don't mind."

Jj smiles at her. From afar it probably looks comforting, but from up close, Harry can't help but notice the tremble of Jj's lower lip.

"Not a fan of spiders?"

Mina visibly shudders. "God no. I'm completely terrified of them."

After that, Mina returns to her detailed inspection of the trees, umming and awing to herself with each miniscule discovery. Jj picks up his abandoned spoon, but he doesn't resume digging.

"Hey, is everything okay?" His voice is soft as silk and tender as nimble fingers brushing through hair. It makes Harry's broken heart ache.

"I'm not sure," Harry confesses breathlessly. The anxiety has dissipated a little, the knot in his chest loosening, but he still feels worse for wear. His hands shake and his stomach churns and everything feels wrong. Wrong and odd and ugly.

***

Harry has a dream that night.

It's the kind of dream that has him waking at midnight, drenched in sweat and embarrassingly hot all over. His skin burns like it's on fire; burns with shame; burns with want; burns with the need for something he can't have.

It started unassumingly. Dream Harry was sitting on a sun warmed rock, his feet paddling in the cool waters of an unfamiliar river. It felt like summer and looked like summer, but something within himself told him that it wasn't summer at all. It didn't surprise him, just like the sudden appearance of Jj didn't shake him.

"Don't you want to kiss me?" Dream Jj asked, his mouth prettier than it has ever been in real life, even after Harry kissed him the first time.

"Yes," Dream Harry breathed. "I want to kiss you."

And then - shock horror - Dream Harry kissed Dream Jj. He can't remember how it went after that, but he distinctly recalls a flash of bare skin that was not his own and the sensation of a mouth against parts of his body that have only ever felt the touch of Harry's own hands.

Now, in the inky darkness of night, Harry sits against his headboard and wallows in his shame.

None of this is right. It's not supposed to be like this. He's not supposed to want to be friends with Jj again. He's not supposed to want whatever his dreams are showing him. The past should remain as just that; the past. It shouldn't haunt him like this. It shouldn't have brought Jj back to him. It shouldn't make him feel like this.

Everything is so confusing. Harry has no idea what he wants from his life. Good friends? A successful future? Love? There's too much and not enough all at once, and Harry can't decide how to proceed.

He thinks about apologising to Brandon, but only momentarily. He was never a very good friend to Harry, not really. It's not that he's a bad person. He's just a silly teenage boy with silly teenage boy thoughts that he'll grow out of eventually.

Harry thinks about his university applications, sent away on one forgetful day in December. English literature. That's what he's got waiting for him. It's not much, but it's something. Something to do. Something to pass the time. Something that could always get him somewhere should he need it.

Harry thinks about his relationships; past, present and future. Mina was his first kiss, Jj was his last, and somewhere in between lies countless others, none of them as noteworthy as the other two.

It's not that Harry has a crush on Mina. He never did. Not seriously. One day, when they were sixteen years old and did the things sixteen year olds tend to do, they kissed on the swing set of a local park. That's where she had planned on taking their group to set their traps. Harry knows that, just as he knows Mina wants him to ask her to prom. He'll probably have to because, really, what other choices does Harry have?

The image of him and Jj dressed in matching suits comes to mind. Harry immediately banishes the thought, cheeks burning. Sooner or later, he'll need to stop thinking about these things - about Jj. It isn't healthy and it's not right. All of this thinking about boys and girls and kissing.

Harry feels like he has been picked apart at the seams, stitch by stitch, and it's getting too late to sew him back together. He's running out of thread.