Take This To Heart |Stan X Kyle|

20: Act Your Age

Kyle's POV

The fire crackles, and I'm stunned into silence. Gregory must've interpreted this as a gesture to continue, as he moves one of his hands up the length of my thigh and rests the other on the small of my back. His soft blonde locks move with the rest of his head as he adjusts himself to deepen the kiss, causing me to come to my senses.

I pull away, slowly.

The boy in front of me smiles, ear to ear. "Did that make it any clearer?" He still has yet to remove his hand from my thigh.

"This whole time..." My voice breaks on the last syllable, and the piercing quietness is interrupted by my desperate attempt to clear the knot in my throat. "This whole time... you lied to me about dating Christophe? about loving Christophe?" I trail off, line of sight glued to the soft perusal of Gregory's thumb over my inner thigh.

Gregory sighs. "Kyle, Kyle, Kyle... this is really how you find out, isn't it?" If it wasn't for the look of introspect washed over his face his tone could've been mistaken for one tinted with subtle humour. "Do forgive me, as I don't intend for my next comment to come off as offensive; however, I was truly under the impression you would have come to this conclusion a lot sooner." He responds. "After all, you were always very intelligent."

He removes his hand from my thigh, the burning warmth lingering beneath my jeans as he relocates his hands to support his weight behind him.

"Sooner? How much sooner?" I blurt, not taking the chance to think over any of my thoughts before openly vocalising them. Why am I going along with his line of thinking? Why can't I... think of anything to say. I don't know what I possible could say.

The fire crackles once again, and invites the subsequent sound of thundering rain onto the tin rooftop above us.

"Kyle, did you not ever take a moment to just think about it? Think about us? Think about everything we're doing?" Gregory asks, grazing curiously pass making eye contact.

Think? Yeah. I thought lots about how much this was meant to fix my friendship with Stan.

"Think? Yeah. I thought lots about how much this was meant to fix my friendship with Stan." I mumble aloud.

Gregory nods his head. "Well, it did work in a way, didn't it?"

Before Gregory came along, I was too stunned by all the shitty rumours to so much as be seen within a twelve foot radius of Stan, let alone go out of my way to talk or hang out with him. Not only didn't I want people to continue making up those stupid rumours, but I didn't want Stan believing that they were real, either. I tried to convince myself I would be content with Stan pitying me for being gossiped, and lied about, as long as he belived exactly that; that they were all lies, and I didn't actually have a fat massive gay crush on him. That was infinitely better to past me than having him realise the rumours were true. The concept of rebuilding our friendship and everything we used to have felt a thousand light years away before Gregroy came along. I didn't care if people-, I didn't care if Stan knew I was gay, I only cared if he thought I was into him. If he thought I was in a relationship... then I thought there'd be no way he'd think I'm into him. So...

"So... yeah. You're right, it did work. Better than I ever could have imagined. I haven't felt this close to Stan in a year." I admit, turning away to peer at the excessive raindrops hitting the full-length window.

Gregory may not be smiling, but there's something indicative in this room's atmosphere that's telling me he's swelling with an overarching sense of contentment.

He clears his throat. "So I did uphold your end of the deal afterall."

"All while lying to me about what your end of the deal was." I add. "All while lying to me about even having an end of the deal in the first place? After all this, what was possibly in it for you?" My head slowly swings back over to Gregory's direction, where I'm now making direct eye-contact with his melancholic gaze.

"I'll take that as an answer to my question, then," he nods again, "that you didn't stop to think about the implications." Gregory readjusts his posture, clasping his hands on top of his lap and he hunches over the end of his burgundy quilt.

While our shared gaze breaks, he angles his head to demonstrate a more implicit sense of directness with me. "Think about all the books you've ever read. All the movies you've ever watched, and all the series you've ever binged. Across all of them, whether they are romantic comedies, coming of age, or simply an irrelevant B-plot, when have two characters ever pretended to be in a relationship and not ended up in a legitimate one together themselves?" He cocks his head to the side.

"Kyle. Did you really not stop to think for one moment about where this-," he motions towards the two of us, "-would end up? About what would happen between the two of us?"

I shake my head on instinct. "Y-you told me where it would end up. With you in a relationship with Christophe and me having a fixed friendship with Stan." I respond, voice laced with hesitation. "Although, I guess it's only my end that matters anymore now."

"Well in that case, we're here," he states, "you said it yourself; you friendship has never been better with Stan. That's why I told him when he asked. We didn't need to fake being in a relationship anymore seeing you got exactly what you wanted."

He seems way, way, way too calm to be discussing this in the manner he currently is.

"That wasn't your place to tell him, Gregory!" I exclaim. "Why... I'm so confused! He wasn't supposed to know it was fake! You should've denied it! This is gonna bring us all the way back to where we started, goddammit!"

"You missed something crucial in my ramblings, Kyle." He interrupts, now fully facing me again. "Stan likes you, not Wendy, and not anyone else. I would have been doing you a disservice to have told him at that point that you genuinely liked me! Because you... you don't." With the most emotion I've ever heard ring out of Gregory's mouth, his voice breaks.

"I... I know you said your intention was to become just friends with Stan again, and not become... something more, but I knew explicitly from you that wasn't where you wanted to remain with him. You thought you did not have a chance with him, and I was willing to support you in your endeavour to keep your friendship where you desired it. But now that I know beyond fact that he requites your feelings and would be more that acclimated to wanting a relationship with you it felt wrong to prioritise my... frankly irrelevent feelings before all that."

Gregory finally meets my gaze again.

"I really do like you, Kyle. I will not admit to some grand cliche and claim that I've been in love with you since childhood or something akin, but I've always been fond of everything about you. Before contemplating my sexual preferences, I thought I viewed you as a role model, as someone I admired deeply. Now that I'm older, I recognise these feelings for what they are, and that I experience a romantic inclination towards you. But I also like you for so much more than that. I enjoy being your friend, and being in this manufactured relationship with you where we limited our explicit romantic interactions-, our explicit physical interactions and prioritised developing an emotional and mental understanding of eachother, made me fall more and more further within my feelings for you."

At last, a sad, sad smile wears thin across his lips. He quivers.

"I care for you so much that I'm willing to let you go. I want you to be happy; afterall, this is what our plan was meant to be about this whole time. I lost sight of what we were meant to be achieving, of what I was meant to be helping you achieve, and I cannot apologise significantly enough for that." He swallows back what could have almost been identified as a sob.

"So... Kyle, I am officially "breaking up" with you in our unofficial facade of a relationship." He smiles wider. "Please, go see Stan. Go get what you've waited this entire time for."

Without a single mere second passing, something small, something ever so tiny and inconsequential resting inside of me begins to build. It begins to grow larger and larger inside the pit of my stomach until it blooms into the most important, and life-changing sentence I could possible say in this situation.

"Wait. I... I... can do something with this. We can do something with this. I think."