Shaped by Clearest Blue

Chapter Two- Crush

After Nick ate dinner he remembered the message Charlie had sent him earlier that day. He runs up to his room with Nellie and lays on his bed.

He opens Instagram and goes to Charlie's account. He started looking at his profile picture, his posts, and his captions. He scrolled through Charlie's posts slowly looking at all of them with a small smile. His smile grows as he comes across one of the pictures. "90% of scientists can't tell the difference between this boy and this cat!!!", the caption read. He laughed a bit to himself before continuing to scroll.

He stopped when he saw a picture of the hallway into the locker room with a caption saying, "hate this place". He paused after looking at it for a bit and looked up from his screen, his smile dropping from his face.

Suddenly he remembered all the comments he had heard people say last year. "Did you hear some year 9 is gay?", "he sort of asked for it", "this is an all-boys school what did he expect", he remembered the bitter laughs as they started playing in his head.

"God. Why did I not do anything then?", he says to himself feeling his heart sink into his stomach picturing all the things Charlie had gone through. He didn't deserve that.

He then started thinking, would this happen to me if people found out I was bi? He quickly backtracked and waved the thought away. This isn't about him right now... this was about Charlie.

He opened the Instagram message Charlie had sent a few hours ago. What should he say?

"It's okay!!", no. He deletes the message and thinks for a second. "That seems like a kinda serious situation", he hovers over send then deletes it. "Please don't talk to Ben anymore lol", he looks at it and deletes it. Nick breathes out impatiently, how is he so bad at this?

It takes him a bit of thinking before just sending a simple "Are you feeling okay?"

He stays on the Chat for a bit anxiously waiting for a reply after he sees the "seen" pop up under his message. It shows Charlie typing, not long after the message comes through. "yeah, I'm fine, don't worry" with a blushing smiley face after.

Nick stares for a bit confused before slowly starting to ask "You sure??" How could anyone be 'fine' after the events that happened earlier that day?

"seen just now", he waits for an answer and watches as the typing icon appears, disappears, appears again, only to disappear completely.

Nick stops for a moment, sets down his phone, and starts petting Nellie as she lays next to him. He places a kiss on her forehead for comfort and continues petting her a bit before retreating back to his phone, where there is still no answer.

"Seen 10m ago", he starts to get worried and decides to say more so Charlie knows he cares.

"You can talk to me if you want", "Sounds like a pretty serious situation", "But you don't have to", "If you don't want to", "But I am your friend and I do care".

Was that too much double texting? He thought as he cringed at how many messages he had sent, but the point was to make sure Charlie knew he was there for him if he wanted to talk.

His overthinking came to a halt when he saw the typing icon pop back up. "Well it all started last September", he started.

Nick slowly read through the messages as they came through, trying his hardest to process and hear every detail about it.

"Everyone at school had found out I was gay by then. The bullying had mostly stopped I guess and people had started to be nice to me (there was a group of Sixth Formers who stopped the bullies) but everyone in the school knew I was gay."