Summer for Suckers

9.)

Shawn swallows his pride and knocks on the front door, feeling both nervous and confident having seen that only Gabe's car sits in the driveway.

He can hear footsteps approach as the light behind the peephole changes, and as the door flies open Shawn braces his face for impact.

"Shawn." Gabe says, tone unreadable. "What are you doing here?" And then, Gabe's eyes narrow, and he closes the door, blocking Shawn's view of the house. "My sister isn't here."

Shawn shakes his head. "No, I uh...I came to talk to you, actually."

"You can't come in." Gabe says, closing the door a little more.

"I don't have to. We can go somewhere else? Maybe the high school?"

At that, Gabe's face softens a little.

Whenever Gabe or Shawn needed to speak to one another as best friends, as brothers, they would meet at the outdoor track at their high school and sit on the bleachers and talk, and sometimes, if it was bad or really serious, the boys would run laps around the track and exhaust themselves until they were calm enough to talk. As they entered college, they did sort of the same, but lately they'd taken to running down Commonwealth and back up again, sometimes running from Agganis to Fenway and finding their way to the MFA before circling back.

Gabe remembers his first breakup with Diana at fifteen and how he was so torn up because he'd never experienced a pain like that, didn't know how to deal with it, he ran just about two dozen laps before he could stop crying, another dozen before he calmed down, and by the time he actually stopped running he felt like his heart was ready to leap out of his chest. Shawn ran right next to him the entire time, step for step and when Gabe poured his heart out, Shawn was there, and he listened, giving Gabe his best advice despite never going through heartbreak before.

He remembers when Shawn got dumped for the first time at seventeen, how he had never seen Shawn cry before that, but how much he sobbed for Lauren, how Shawn believed in love at first sight and wanted something long term but it just didn't work. Shawn ran and ran and ran and ran and Gabe felt bad for not being able to keep up with him, so he sat on the bleachers after about lap twenty and waited for Shawn till he was ready to talk. And when Shawn was ready, he just cried.

Through any bad situation in their lives, Shawn and Gabe would lean on each other, run it out, talk it out, and do their best to support the other.

And of course, for Shawn, this was a situation that qualified. It technically did for Gabe, too.

So despite the anger in his body, Gabe nods, says "I've gotta get changed, but you go ahead. I'll meet you at the tracks in like ten minutes."

-

Shawn's waiting in the driver's seat of his Jeep, soaking in the AC and readying his body to run laps in the summer sun, dealing with the heat of the rubber track and his varying degrees of emotion.

He's picking at his workout shorts, his shirt resting in his backseat - figures he'd get rid of it after the first lap anyway. He's also running down the list of things in his head that he wants to say to Gabe that won't earn him a punch in the face, but none of it sounds right, so it looks like he's just going to have to wing it.

Gabe's car pulls up next to his about a minute later, and they nod at each other, getting out of their cars and onto the track. Shawn takes off running, figures he could use the adrenaline to hype himself up, and Gabe meets him step for step. The sun is strong today, so it doesn't take much for either boy to start sweating - Shawn can feel it on his scalp, affecting his curls and Gabe's dark hair begins to stick to his forehead.