Hearts of Azure (boyxboy)

Part Two

I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Will even if I tried. I was beginning to worry myself by how much I paid attention to him. If I kept this up, everybody in my school would know I was in love with a boy I had never even had the balls to speak to.

My behaviour was out of my control, though. He wasn’t supposed to be here. It was the third week of my Junior year in high school. It was what should have been a typical Tuesday morning. It wasn’t, though. Because the guy I’d been thinking about almost nonstop for nearly three years was standing only across the hall from me. It was maybe twenty feet in distance, but for all I knew, I could have been watching a live feed from Mars; that was how out of it I was.

At the end of swimming season last year after I barely scraped by with bronze after bronze at the State Championships, I’d learned the boy’s name. It was Willam Edmundson. And I’d be damned if that wasn’t the most amazing name I’d ever heard. Sure, it was only so spectacular to me because I was utterly infatuated with the owner of it, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was finding out everything I could about him--all the while trying not to give my secret away.

Will’s cousin that he always showed up to watch swim was a guy in my grade named Micah. It was under the most controlled behaviour that I had finally gotten the courage last year to casually ask Micah who that guy was in the bleachers. I feigned innocence like the best of them and got the name. From there it was easy.

Will was an active social media user and not very picky about what he kept private or public. I knew his dislikes, his favourites, his birthday and how old he was--April 17th, sixteen years old--and all kinds of other random things nobody cared about. But I wouldn’t have known any of it if it weren’t thanks to the internet. So I cared about it all.

If there was one thing I did know for a fact about him, though, it was that his sexuality in his bio was set to straight, and that he didn’t go to my school. So I stood there, completely shell-shocked and staring, when I walked up to my locker during that third week of school and saw Will standing next to Micah. A handful of his cousin’s close friends that weren’t on the swim team surrounded them, and he wasn’t even facing me.

I could only see the side of his face, but that was enough for me to know exactly who he was. His black t-shirt fit his slightly-bulky muscles well, and his jeans were the perfect combination of loose and snug in their respective places. He had a faded red bag on his back, and his hands in his pockets, showing off how at ease he was.

And I was just gaping. My mouth was slightly ajar, hand stilled in mid-air--poised to put the combination into my lock--and I wasn’t breathing. Or blinking. I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare in wonder.

Why was he here? Had he seen me? Would he even care if he had? Did he ever think about me? Better yet, did he ever think about me the way I thought about him?

My mind was whirring with questions, but my brain was either working too fast on other things or too slowly to come up with an answer for any of them.

Trace, my best friend and fellow top-swimmer, snapped a finger in front of my face and I flinched away from the offending sound. I tore my eyes from the tall brunette across the hall, and I looked over at the blonde boy standing a foot away from me. I had myself composed before I’d even made eye contact with my friend.

My voice held its usual tone--calm and cool--when I spoke. “What’s up, dude?”

Trace gave me a funny look. “You were staring off into space.” He smirked. “Forget your combo again?”

He laughed and I easily joined in. I glanced down and undid the lock in less than ten seconds. I looked back up and gave a smirk of my own. “Not anymore,” I said.