Shelbys POV:
"You're trying hard not to show it!" Bradley shouts from his room.
"But baby, baby, I know it!" I shout back the lyrics to some old Righteous Brothers song that my dad always played when I was younger. He once told me and Bradley a story of him and Goose singing it to my mom to try and impress her.
"You've lost that lovin feelin!" I sing with him from the kitchen where I'm currently cooking stir fry.
"Whoah that lovin feelin!" We sing from different sides of the apartment. "You've lost that lovin feelin, now it's gone, gone, gone, whoa-"
"AHHH!" I scream, noticing that the pan of food I had on the stove is flaming. I scramble around the kitchen, opening every cabinet trying to find our fire extinguisher.
"That was a little off key." Brad emerges from his room right as I look down and notice that my shirt is on fire. Well, Bradley's shirt is on fire.
"I'm on fire!" I yell in panic.
"Fuck!" He runs into the kitchen.
"Where's our fire extinguisher?" I ask, bunching all of my hair on top of my head to keep it from catching on fire. Priorities.
"We don't have one!" He shouts, racing towards the sink.
"What! Why don't we ha-" I'm cut off by a blast of cold water hitting me. I quickly turn around to see Bradley pointing the sink faucet at me, spraying me with water. "Thanks." I mumble, looking down at my charred, and now soaked shirt.
He also sprays the pan and turns off the stove, leaving our kitchen flooded with water and smoke. I look back down at what's left of the tee shirt. The fabric is barely hanging on me, pretty much revealing everything. My bra is still intact, luckily giving me some coverage. I finally let go of my hair, hoping none of it got burned. I run my fingers through the long locks, trying to see if all my ends are still intact.
"What the hell happened?" Bradley asks, still catching his breath.
"I don't know I just turned around, and then turned back around and the stove was on fire, so I looked for an extinguisher, and why don't we have one?"
"I don't know, I guess neither of us expected to start a fire..." He shrugs.
"Can you check my hair?" I turn around so that the back of my head is facing him.
"All good." He lightly brushes his fingers across the ends of my hair. "But the shirt is looking a little rough."
"It was either the shirt or the hair, and I can't lose the hair! It's a delicacy!"
He chuckles softly. "Wait a minute..." He takes a closer look at my shirt. Oh shit.
"Is this mine?" He asks, pulling at the distressed fabric.
"I know my entire bra is on display, but can you stop staring?" I give him attitude. I like to throw in jokes like these when I fuck something up so that he can't get mad.
"Mhm sorry." He grins flatly.
"Sorry about your shirt." I say. I guess he can win this one.
"Ehh, I think it looks better this way." He looks me up and down with no shame, not even trying to hide his obvious stare. Don't let him see that you're blushing. Is it hot in here? Or is that just the smoke?
"I think we might need to order dinner." I say, nodding my head towards my destroyed meal.
"I'll call in a pizza while you go get dressed." He decides.
Bradley goes to get his phone, so I pull his now destroyed tee shirt off my body and leave it on the kitchen counter before going to my room to find something else to wear. We can keep that in the kitchen for now. It'll be good to have the memory. I throw on a hoodie and head back to the kitchen half an hour later when I smell pizza.
"Wanna watch a movie?" Bradley asks me while opening the pizza box and getting two plates from the cabinet.
"Yeah. I'm in the mood for something funny. Ooh how about-"
"Step Brothers." He finishes my sentence, naming our favorite comedy at the same time as me.
"How did you know I was gonna say that?"
"I didn't, that was my idea!"
"No! It was my idea."
"Yeah well Step Brothers is always your idea. I don't think I've ever watched it without you." He says. It's just a fact that me and Bradley have loved that movie since we were kids. We discovered it one day on cable while my dad was on deployment. He didn't know about it. Bradley's mom worked, so we had a lot of time with just the two of us. By now, we can practically quote the entire movie word for word.
"Oh, you better not have. That's our movie. See how we're on the same brain wave?"
"Yeah yeah. We spend way too much time together." He hands me a plate with three slices of pizza on it.
"Are you sick of me yet?" I ask, grabbing the remote and searching for the movie on Prime Video.
"I could never get sick of you." He tells me. I was half joking when I asked him, but he was serious when he answered.
Bradley gets confusing when he says stuff like that. It's the kind of thing a boyfriend would say, but nothing about it is wrong. Nothing implies that we're more than friends, but friends don't care about each other the way me and him do.
We sat on the couch together with our pizza. Relatively close together, practically touching, but not close enough that we've crossed a line. Not close enough for the energy between us to change. This is how it normally is. We're always on the verge of doing something that friends don't do. We never actually cross that line.
We laugh at the movie together, and quote our favorite parts out loud. It feels like we're in Highschool again, back in his mom's living room. I finish my food and stack my plate on top of Bradley's on the coffee table. Tucking my legs under me, I pull a blanket over my cold body. By doing this, I've started to lean closer to Bradley without really noticing. I hope this isn't too close, or that I've accidentally made things weird. Then I feel him move his arm.
He lifts up his arm from in between us and drapes it over the back of my shoulders, slightly pulling me towards him. I don't hesitate to let him pull me closer, it's comforting. The movie plays on, and eventually we get closer and closer til I'm laying all the way on top of him on our couch. As the credits roll, I finally take in the way we're laying, and it occurs to me that this is not what friends do.
What the fuck do I do now?
YOU ARE READING
Through The Fire
Fanfiction"You said 'through the fire'" "And I meant it." Shelby "Mustang" Mitchell never knew what to think of her father pulling Bradley Bradshaw's papers from the Naval Academy. The two of them had been best friends their whole lives despite him being two...
