watchful eyes (tronnor)

thirty five; as if the prophet were a tsunami and we were the trees

i just finished writing the rest of the book lol my sister screamed when i told her and then got hit by a ping pong ball to the throat so that happened

tyler's problem was this:

his two best friends could not look each other in the eye.

eye contact, he thinks, is a strange thing. when presenting projects, teachers like to tell students to remember eye contact. but when you are slouched in the front of the room with forty eyes in front of you, who do you make eye contact with? when telling a lie, people like to use eye contact to prove that it is the truth. when telling the truth, people like to use eye contact to ensure that it is the truth.

when two people cannot look each other in the eye, it is many things. it is the truth and it is a lie and it means nothing and it means everything.

troye is avoiding connor's eyes.

they are too much like the sun that keeps him alive and the hell that haunts him. they are everything he has always wanted, yet they are everything troye does not know. connor kissed him and troye cannot navigate the ocean when he does not know that he's on a boat. he cannot understand a boy, in love, when he has spent years learning that they will only ever be friends.

(friends who sing endless definitions of each other and paint each other sunsets out of hurricanes and who love each other like the sun and the moon.)

(friends. noun. "a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.")

(synonyms: soulmate.)

connor is avoiding troye's eyes.

he cannot look without seeing the ocean, staring back. there are the waves, breaking the shore and sending castles to the ground and throwing the sun back to the sky in a glittering reflection. there is the sea, endless and boundless and beautiful and powerful. there is troye, hidden and secretive and careful and terrified.

connor sent a message in a bottle to the waves.

(do you love me?)

and the waves have yet to respond.

(i love you.?)

while he waits to read the seashells on the shore he cannot (will not) send another message. there are only so many empty bottles. he can hear the wind and the fog echo through the glass but he cannot drain them and he cannot hold all the ocean in the palm of his hand while he waits for a boy who drowned too long ago.

tyler feels like the glass.

he is shattering against the almost gaze of troye and the hopeless fear of connor and he has a message that seems like it will never be received.

"why can you not just talk to him?" he asks troye. tyler understands so many things but some of the ocean is unknowable.

"i think that i - i'm scared," troye confesses. (the fog rolls in over the shore and tyler hears the sound of the fog horns.)

"he loves you," tyler tells him. "you love him, right?"

(the stars shine through the fog, but they are blurry.)

"yes," troye says. "but i think that maybe he is not 100% sure he loves me."

tyler says, "i think that he really does love you. it just took him until too late to realize it."

"too late?" troye asks. (tick tock, drip drop)

"it will be, if you keep ignoring him."

"i am not ignoring him," troye protests. "i just - i need time to think."

tyler says, "no. you just need to time to not be scared of what you will be, once you have what you have been chasing after your whole life. but there's no reason to be scared. not while you are troye and he is connor."

"i really do love him," troye says.

"but he does not know that."

(the stars shine brighter and tyler tosses the paper messages to the water. they can drown and the bottles will become treasures. one day.)