Be Mine

"underneath the sunrise // show me where your love lies"

This chapter's lyric is from "Love Lies" by Khalid and Normani.

Read as you see fit here- small warning for coming-out reactions in a school environment.

Enjoy!

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HARLEY POV

The rest of the weekend before back to school was chaos. Bram and Simon met us at the park on Abby's street, where we all gave hugs and tossed words around. Simon relayed his coming out experience to us and how his parents were okay, pushing through the slight discomfort and fidgety-ness. According to Simon's story, telling his sister was "fine," telling his mom was "hard," and telling his dad was "annoying," even though it was all done in one go. (As we listened to Simon, I thought Peter was breathing so hard from second-hand fright that they'd pass out. Abby and I had to get him a coconut water from the pool's otherwise deserted ice cream bar.) Simon seemed to have had a bearable morning and was coming down from the climax of it, however, now he and Bram were bracing themselves for the entire student body. So, at their request, the rest of the time at the park was spent pretending nothing was wrong.

We sat around the jungle gym and gave gifts in the New York cold we'd all adapted to. It felt a little awkward doing personal S.O. gift-giving with Peter in front of the others, but it wasn't so bad. The seven of us had arranged a secret santa from a hat drawing, but on top of that, there were couple's gifts and white elephant crap. Simon took the Pottermore house test for everybody, and we compared our results (I was pretty content with my Gryffindor/Slytherin.) Plus, I'm pretty sure I caught Leah slide Abby a drawing of some sort.

From Bram to Simon was a signed vinyl; from Simon to Bram was homemade oreos- which were pretty cool considering Simon's MO was barely being capable of heating ramen on a good day. I gave Peter a Star Wars novel that had drawings of fight scenes across the pages I'd watched 10,000 hours worth of tutorials to create. My Christmas present from him was lots of sweets in a bag and a tiny, silver, ringed key to the Parker's apartment.

"With full permission from May," Peter said, blushing. "I mean, she figured it was for when a bro needed somewhere to crash, but whatever. You spend half of your mornings and evenings at our place, anyway."

Five minutes later, we were still sitting in thick silence, mulling over gifts and enjoying each other's company. Probably sensing that the lot of us were starting to feel emotional- no big surprise- Nick insisted we all play Grounders to shake off heavy feelings.

"Rookie mistake, Eisner. Grounders makes me full of rage and competitive with a passion," Leah teased, and we all roughhoused around for hours until heading back to our own family festivities.

We got on an RTA bus to drop us off at our respective destinations. We took up two back rows; not like it was busy Christmas day. Simon and Bram were shoulder to shoulder, Bram swatting Simon with raised eyebrows whenever he attempted to sneak on to socials. Peter and I played semi-hacky-sack with the plastic coconut water bottle, the smaller boy's head on my knee, leg bouncing in the air. Leah, Nick, and Abby were in front of us, chilling on a bench, Nick's arms draped over the girls' shoulders. We made a ridiculous game of yelling out profanities- which delved into yelling out profanities in other languages when the bus driver got ticked off- whenever Simon opened his mouth to say something self-deprecating. I could tell he was starting to feel worn out, starting to worry. We tried to keep the mood alight, jostling each other around and laughing, and I even heard the bus driver grumble something about "crazy kids on crack these days," which made me snort at the assumption.