FRIDAY. 17. DECEMBER. 21. (semi-edited lol)
MAX'S name was tattooed over the heart of the most beautiful thing in the universe and that felt like something to be proud of.
It was a funny thing and it made him feel giddy all the time— but it never made him feel stupid, which was kind of an even funnier thing.
"I don't know how anyone could say that," Cole remarked, lying on Max's bed with pillows propped up behind him so that lying against the headboard wasn't so uncomfortable.
He was flickering through Max's copy of The Great Gatsby and reading random passages while he ignored phone calls from his dad, the phone occasionally buzzing beside him, muffled by the white bedsheets, and nodded his head in time to some obscure indie rock song that Max was playing from his laptop as he typed up an essay for his history class.
Beams of December sun were streaming across the bedroom and embellishing Cole's midnight eyelashes with specks of gold, softening the angles and edges of his cheekbones, his jawline, his knuckles with a hazy white glow.
"Well, they do," Max smiled, slightly slouched in his desk chair and typing on the laptop that was resting in his lap, pushed close enough to the bed that he could prop his feet up on the end of it.
"Then they're idiots," Cole replied swiftly, eyes like cerulean skies flickering down a page in the middle of the book. He must've read something he liked because his lips quirked in a funny sort of smile, almost like he was trying not to show that he was interested in what he was reading. The longer Max observed, the clearer it became to him that he had never wanted to kiss someone more in his life.
"Very dismissive of you," Max tutted, shaking his head and flickering through his half-typed essay, a terribly revealing smile on his face, "and it's totally unlike you to be dismissive of something that you don't like."
"I'm serious," he said, even though he was making no effort to hide the fact that he smiling. He lowered the book and looked back at Max, a glint of sunlight in his eyes; sun beams in every single sky. One sky for the world, two inside Max's bedroom— how lucky was he? "It can't all be for nothing."
"I'm not saying I agree with it," Max shrugged, reflecting on the question that had been posed in a class discussion during his last period, the same question that they were now considering in the peace of each other, "but that's what some people think."
School had ended over an hour ago now and Max didn't know where any of the others were— he didn't care either— because what mattered now was that Cole was sitting pretty in his bedroom and had been since they'd gotten here.
There was a honesty about him, a kind of silent vulnerability in his presence, that made Max feel like their bodies were transparent, see-through vessels spilling stories of scarred souls in the warmth of winter sun. He recognised parts of himself in the space inside Cole, he recognised some of the stars in that sky belonged to him and felt, too, that some of the stars inside his sky belonged to Cole. It made him smile.
"Fuck those people," Cole murmured, shaking his head. "It does mean something. It has to mean something."
Max agreed with him, but he still loved how adamantly Cole was arguing his point, as though Max was actually in direct opposition to him.
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Cause for Concern ✓
Teen Fiction[BXB / unedited ] Saying that Max Oran is a disaster would be an understatement: he got himself kicked out of school, his dad has sent him to live with his emotionally distant mother and his friends don't want anything to do with him. When Max start...
