fic: Rowdy Days
Last fic for a while!
Rowdy Days
Ensemble gen, Johnny/Stéphane, Mao/Yu-Na
PG-13
2751 words
The title of the word document for this was ‘skaters do geeky shit’. And thus -- skaters do geeky shit: a high school AU! Many thanks to perculious for betaing.
Meryl was on the debate team. In the year above her there had been a sad dearth of people interested in it, so the upperclassmen let her actually be on the team on the team. She was first speaker because that was where the new kids went: the easiest role.
The stars of the debate club were Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto. Ben was tall and aloof on first meeting, but kind. He wore black turtlenecks and knew a lot - he was practically a walking encyclopedia, but off the floor he didn’t speak much. Whereas Tanith chattered brightly the same way she spoke during competitions, madcap and articulate. She liked working random references into her conversation, but never failed to explain them the way she would in competitions if Meryl didn’t get it.
She and Ben were quite the team. As third speaker, Ben was used to picking up all the points of contention Tanith dropped for lack of time without her having to tell him what she’d missed. When they were on the opposition, Ben would bombard Meryl with all the rebuttals he could come up with within the three minutes’ space of the first proposition speaker’s (inevitably a weedy little freshman, whom Meryl always felt the most profound empathy towards) faltering speech, hissing them into Tanith’s ear so she could funnel them towards Meryl.
“Ben’s a little overwhelming, sorry about that,” Tanith said, as they were on the bus back to school after their first interschool debate. They’d won, which Meryl had soon learnt was par for the course when Tanith & Ben spoke together. They always won.
“It’s okay,” Meryl said, still a little shy. She was already dreading the next round, the impromptu one. She liked it when they got to do research first - that, she was pretty good at. “You guys work well together.”
Ben was a senior. According to Tanith the debate team needed new blood, freshmen who weren’t total dumbasses - she’d urged Meryl to recruit more kids, but Meryl hadn’t made many friends she thought might fit Tanith and Ben’s high standards yet. She had an eye on the blond mop-hair guy in her algebra class, though. Didn’t he go out for Model UN?
“We do,” Tanith agreed. She leaned over and pressed Meryl’s hands, and Meryl couldn’t help blushing. “And now you’re part of the team.”
---
If her life were a television show, Mao was pretty sure it would be called “Everyone Loves Yu-Na”, and she’d be a supporting character.
Because they kind of did - the teachers, their peers, the school custodian - hell, even Mao liked Yu-Na, if only for the fact that she’d be hard-pressed to find a reason not to. Yu-Na was intimidatingly clever, beautiful, charismatic, and kind. She had a rock-steady personality and never had meltdowns, even when she had ample reason to. As president of student council, she always had ample reason to. Such as today, when their art director had gone missing-in-action, and they had five huge banners to paint before the end of the day. Yu-Na was the queen, the captain of the school, and Mao was just her vice-.
Yu-Na stretched and smiled. “We’re nearly done,” she said to Mao, looking up from their last banner. Even though Yu-Na remembered to put on an oversized T-shirt in case of paint spatters, it had remained alarmingly stain-free. Only a dab of paint on her nose hinted at the fact that she’d been painting for the last three hours. Everyone else besides her and Mao had gone home. Amidst the fading light of the evening, they had painted steadily on.
Grudgingly, Mao had to admit that Yu-Na was a good president: good at rallying everyone else, and good at taking the fall when needed. When Yu-Na was elected earlier in the year Mao had cried, a fact she wasn’t proud of now. She’d been so fixated on being elected that being vice-president seemed like a poor consolation prize.
Now? Mao wasn’t so sure. She liked working alongside Yu-Na - Yu-Na made her smile, and they kept each other awake through the 1 AM online conversations they had while settling council stuff. Yu-Na was also a good study buddy, and more than that - she was a good friend, charming and gregarious to other people where Mao felt awkward, never saying the wrong thing. Mao wasn’t sure any more, and that uncertainty, it sometimes seemed, was seeping into the rest of her life - she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be valedictorian at the end of the year, and that in itself also had something to do with Yu-Na, even if she couldn’t articulate it yet.
“Mao-chan?” Yu-Na asked, frowning and squinting at her. “Are you okay? Tired?”
Mao blinked out of her daze and smiled. “I’m fine,” she said. “The banner looks good, like, even better than if Daisuke hadn’t flaked on us.” She was only half-joking, too. It was true - everything Yu-Na did turned out infuriatingly perfect.
Yu-Na grinned. “You’re sweet,” she said, and put down her paintbrush carefully to hug Mao. Mao felt her heart lurch in her chest and thought oh, to herself.
---
Mirai had heard that they didn’t take girls, but she was pretty sure that that was just a rumour. Just because the chess club was one hundred percent geeky boys didn’t mean that they couldn’t make space for her. She planned on being so great that they didn’t have a choice, anyway.
She shoved back the sleeves of her oversized hoodie to her elbows and knocked at the door. A teacher with sparse white hair arranged carefully in a combover (Mirai could tell, and that made her want to giggle) opened it, and looked down at her bemusedly. “Yes?”
“I’m Mirai Nagasu,” she said brightly. “Is this the chess club?” Actually it was a question she didn’t need to ask. Straining to see past the teacher’s shoulder, she saw rows and row of (yup, nerdy) boys bent over chessboards, although some of them looked up and were staring at her with the same confused expression on their faces.
“I’m Mr Carroll,” the teacher said. “You - you want to join the chess club?” he said it almost like he couldn’t quite believe it.
Mirai frowned and cocked her head to the side. “Is that okay?” she asked.
“Perfectly fine,” Mr Carroll said. His voice was grim as ever but Mirai was starting to think that was just him. “Come in, come in! Join the woodpushers.” He ushered her in and took her name and homeroom number down, and Mirai followed gladly. High school was going to be so great.
“How much experience do you have?” Mr Carroll asked.
“Well - not a lot?” To tell the truth, Mirai hadn’t played at all until the summer before high school, when she’d watched Hikaru no Go for the first time. She blew through all seventy-five episodes of the series, then tried to procure a Go board and someone who knew how to play it. When that had failed, she taught herself chess instead and played it on her computer until she got through all the levels. Only then had she made her dad sit down and play a game with her. He’d lost. “I know all the rules, though.”
Mr Carroll set out a board and said, “The easiest way for me to find out is by playing a game with you.” He made it so Mirai’s side was black; she liked that, that he didn’t give her chances. As the game went on his moves increasingly trickier - at least, that’s what it felt like. He didn’t seem to want to talk much so Mirai didn’t really know what was going on.
At the end she lost, but she was pretty proud of herself anyway. She’d managed to capture a whole bunch of his strategic pieces, and had gotten a pawn all the way across the board.
“Was that okay?”
Mr Carroll sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. The other boys played on, although one near the front kept sneaking glances at her like he thought she wouldn’t be able to tell. “How do you feel about state play?”
---
Caroline was having kind of a disappointing day; it wasn’t her fault her body suddenly seemed so much less controllable than it had been a year ago - heck, than it’d been even six months ago. Stupid growth spurts.
Caroline tried not to show it, but she was worried: the Cechetti exam this year was the big one, the tough one, and Caroline really wanted to move up into Intermediate only this was starting to seem less and less likely, with the way ballet class was going lately. Today Mirai hadn’t even been around to look at her sympathetically and run through the allegro exercises with her again after class. When she got home she poured herself a glass of juice and flopped down on her bed, no strength for anything. And that was when the phone started ringing.
“Oh my god, Caroline, oh my god, I made the team,” Mirai shrieked into the receiver as soon as Caroline picked up.
Caroline couldn’t help smiling at Mirai’s exuberance, and didn’t ask Mirai where she’d been instead of at class today. It was pretty obvious anyway. “Congratulations,” she said. “That’s really great! I can tell you’re really excited about that.”
“It’s going to be so great,” Mirai told her. “Mr Carroll didn’t say much, but I think he thinks I’m really awesome, which is really great - I actually asked him, you know, ‘Do you think I’m good?’ and he kind of pursed his lips and was like, ‘It depends.’ But I think that means yes.”
“Congratulations,” Caroline said again. She knew how good it felt to be really great at something, even if she hadn’t felt like that for a long time.
“He wants me to train really hard for the state tournaments, the chess club’s meeting three times a week, and I was like, ‘Three times a week?’ and he was like, ‘Yes, young lady,’ and you know what, this is going to sound so dumb, but I’m looking forward to it.”
Mirai nattered on at her for a bit more, and after a while Caroline said, “What about ballet?”
“Um!” Mirai said, sounding shifty. “Oh, aha, um, yes.”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t know if I can make all the classes any more,” Mirai said, a little guiltily. “Chess is Monday, Wednesday and Friday - so I don’t know if I can make Wednesdays any more, I mean, I don’t know if Miss Kavenagh’s going to allow me to attend just once a week, but I’m going to ask.”
“That sucks,” Caroline said finally.
“It does!” Mirai said. She sounded kind of relieved, like Caroline had just let her off the hook or something. Maybe she had, Caroline didn’t know. “I’ll miss seeing you all the time.”
“I’ll see you around anyway,” Caroline said. “And anyway, she’ll probably let you come just Saturdays,” even if she wasn’t really sure that their teacher would.
“Yeah!” Mirai said, sounding chipper again. “We will. We totally will.”
When they hung up Caroline sighed and remained where she was, cross-legged on her bed. Mechanically she reached out to her desk and played Vienna Teng’s Gravity without getting off her perch. She listened to it about five more times before switching to her practice music and standing up to do her barre exercises against the wall in her room.
---
“Are you excited to graduate?” Stéphane asked Johnny. Even after years of going to an American high school he’d retained a lot of his Swiss accent. For the millionth time Johnny tried not to find it really endearing, and for the millionth time he failed. When they’d first met in drama club, Johnny had thought Stéphane’s eyebrows funny and his hand motions weird - the accent was the only thing he liked about Stéphane, but over the years they’d grown used to each other.
Johnny sat down at the edge of the stage and sighed. “Not really,” he told Stéphane. “Even though you know my feelings about high school.”
Stéphane nodded. He did. It was hard not to know when Johnny was so vocal -- Stéphane knew that Johnny loathed high school, even though he probably couldn’t quite understand the feeling - he was supposed to be the outsider, the child of Swiss expatriates, but he’d taken to high school like a swan to water, or something equally clichéd. Everyone loved Stéphane, and they loved him right back.
“I should think you’re going to a better place,” Stéphane said, his expression quizzical. Johnny couldn’t stop laughing. The red velvet curtains fluttered gently behind them - they were supposed to be taking down the stage set right then, but they had the whole afternoon.
“You make it sound like I’m dying,” he said. Stéphane made a shocked sound in his throat, and shook his head, grinning.
“I would be most devastated if you died,” Stéphane said very seriously, and inexplicably looked down, worrying his lower lip with his teeth. He was wearing that stupid black turtleneck, the one Johnny tried telling himself made Stéphane look like his uncle, or something. It actually didn’t.
“You would?” Johnny said teasingly - at least, that’s what he’d intended for it to sound like. Instead it came out weirdly solemn, low with a bass note of tension running through.
“Very much,” Stéphane said, raising his eyes to look at Johnny again. “I would be very, very sad.”
Johnny’s heart was thumping very loudly all of a sudden. The hall was desolate, cavernous in its silence - and he wondered if Stéphane could tell. “How sad would you be,” he said, wondering if this was it, if they’d finally pushed it too far. He smiled invitingly. “Would you, hm -”
“Yes?” Stéphane’s voice was so soft it practically counted as a whisper.
At some point they’d leaned in so close to each other that Stéphane’s face was right in Johnny’s. He didn’t take his gaze away from Stéphane’s as he licked his lips invitingly.
Suddenly, Stéphane’s mouth was on his, and Johnny could swear his heart stopped beating for a moment. Then there it was, back again, racing so fast it was all he could do to sigh into the kiss, lifting his hand to put it on Stéphane’s shoulder. Stéphane’s mouth was soft and warm and perfect, and when he opened his mouth Johnny did the same, so Stéphane’s tongue swiped wetly across Johnny’s lip, igniting that extra spark of want in him.
Johnny groaned into the kiss and tugged softly at the hair at the base of Stéphane’s neck with left hand, his right bracing himself against the wooden floorboards of the stage. It wasn’t the sexiest move ever, but it seemed to work for Stéphane, because he put his hand on the base of Johnny’s spine through his t-shirt, as all the while their tongues glided against each other, soft and slow and sure.
Finally they broke away. Johnny would be embarrassed about how ragged his breaths were coming if not for the fact that Stéphane, too, was panting, almost harshly. He drew a hand across his mouth and said, “Well, that was nice.”
Stéphane looked affronted. “Just nice?” he asked plaintively.
Johnny rolled his eyes. “No, you’re the best kisser in all the land.” Privately he determined not to tell Stéphane, but actually it was pretty close to the truth. Johnny hadn’t kissed enough people to be really sure.
Stéphane raised his eyebrows, then smiled smugly. “I knew it.” It was so ridiculous that Johnny couldn’t help snorting, then leaning in again to press a quick kiss against his jaw. It had nothing to do with the fact that Stéphane’s hair was all askew, and that his lips were red and swollen, of course. Nothing at all.
“I really - I,” Stéphane said, before looking down again. “I liked kissing you.” Then he met Johnny’s eyes again, and burst into the biggest smile Johnny had ever seen on Stéphane’s face, which was saying a lot.
“We should do it again,” Johnny said, shifting a little in the hopes of adjusting his (unreasonably tight, all of a sudden) pants without being too obvious about it. He paused. “Unless you, um. Don’t want to.”
“No, of course I - I do,” Stéphane said. He paused delicately. “Although I do not know what will happen after we graduate and go to college… ”
“We don’t have to worry about that now,” Johnny declared, although his stomach was twisting a little already at the prospect. “We still have graduation to go. And there’s always the summer.”
“There’s always the summer,” Stéphane agreed, and leaned in to kiss Johnny again.
Rowdy Days
Ensemble gen, Johnny/Stéphane, Mao/Yu-Na
PG-13
2751 words
The title of the word document for this was ‘skaters do geeky shit’. And thus -- skaters do geeky shit: a high school AU! Many thanks to perculious for betaing.
Meryl was on the debate team. In the year above her there had been a sad dearth of people interested in it, so the upperclassmen let her actually be on the team on the team. She was first speaker because that was where the new kids went: the easiest role.
The stars of the debate club were Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto. Ben was tall and aloof on first meeting, but kind. He wore black turtlenecks and knew a lot - he was practically a walking encyclopedia, but off the floor he didn’t speak much. Whereas Tanith chattered brightly the same way she spoke during competitions, madcap and articulate. She liked working random references into her conversation, but never failed to explain them the way she would in competitions if Meryl didn’t get it.
She and Ben were quite the team. As third speaker, Ben was used to picking up all the points of contention Tanith dropped for lack of time without her having to tell him what she’d missed. When they were on the opposition, Ben would bombard Meryl with all the rebuttals he could come up with within the three minutes’ space of the first proposition speaker’s (inevitably a weedy little freshman, whom Meryl always felt the most profound empathy towards) faltering speech, hissing them into Tanith’s ear so she could funnel them towards Meryl.
“Ben’s a little overwhelming, sorry about that,” Tanith said, as they were on the bus back to school after their first interschool debate. They’d won, which Meryl had soon learnt was par for the course when Tanith & Ben spoke together. They always won.
“It’s okay,” Meryl said, still a little shy. She was already dreading the next round, the impromptu one. She liked it when they got to do research first - that, she was pretty good at. “You guys work well together.”
Ben was a senior. According to Tanith the debate team needed new blood, freshmen who weren’t total dumbasses - she’d urged Meryl to recruit more kids, but Meryl hadn’t made many friends she thought might fit Tanith and Ben’s high standards yet. She had an eye on the blond mop-hair guy in her algebra class, though. Didn’t he go out for Model UN?
“We do,” Tanith agreed. She leaned over and pressed Meryl’s hands, and Meryl couldn’t help blushing. “And now you’re part of the team.”
---
If her life were a television show, Mao was pretty sure it would be called “Everyone Loves Yu-Na”, and she’d be a supporting character.
Because they kind of did - the teachers, their peers, the school custodian - hell, even Mao liked Yu-Na, if only for the fact that she’d be hard-pressed to find a reason not to. Yu-Na was intimidatingly clever, beautiful, charismatic, and kind. She had a rock-steady personality and never had meltdowns, even when she had ample reason to. As president of student council, she always had ample reason to. Such as today, when their art director had gone missing-in-action, and they had five huge banners to paint before the end of the day. Yu-Na was the queen, the captain of the school, and Mao was just her vice-.
Yu-Na stretched and smiled. “We’re nearly done,” she said to Mao, looking up from their last banner. Even though Yu-Na remembered to put on an oversized T-shirt in case of paint spatters, it had remained alarmingly stain-free. Only a dab of paint on her nose hinted at the fact that she’d been painting for the last three hours. Everyone else besides her and Mao had gone home. Amidst the fading light of the evening, they had painted steadily on.
Grudgingly, Mao had to admit that Yu-Na was a good president: good at rallying everyone else, and good at taking the fall when needed. When Yu-Na was elected earlier in the year Mao had cried, a fact she wasn’t proud of now. She’d been so fixated on being elected that being vice-president seemed like a poor consolation prize.
Now? Mao wasn’t so sure. She liked working alongside Yu-Na - Yu-Na made her smile, and they kept each other awake through the 1 AM online conversations they had while settling council stuff. Yu-Na was also a good study buddy, and more than that - she was a good friend, charming and gregarious to other people where Mao felt awkward, never saying the wrong thing. Mao wasn’t sure any more, and that uncertainty, it sometimes seemed, was seeping into the rest of her life - she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be valedictorian at the end of the year, and that in itself also had something to do with Yu-Na, even if she couldn’t articulate it yet.
“Mao-chan?” Yu-Na asked, frowning and squinting at her. “Are you okay? Tired?”
Mao blinked out of her daze and smiled. “I’m fine,” she said. “The banner looks good, like, even better than if Daisuke hadn’t flaked on us.” She was only half-joking, too. It was true - everything Yu-Na did turned out infuriatingly perfect.
Yu-Na grinned. “You’re sweet,” she said, and put down her paintbrush carefully to hug Mao. Mao felt her heart lurch in her chest and thought oh, to herself.
---
Mirai had heard that they didn’t take girls, but she was pretty sure that that was just a rumour. Just because the chess club was one hundred percent geeky boys didn’t mean that they couldn’t make space for her. She planned on being so great that they didn’t have a choice, anyway.
She shoved back the sleeves of her oversized hoodie to her elbows and knocked at the door. A teacher with sparse white hair arranged carefully in a combover (Mirai could tell, and that made her want to giggle) opened it, and looked down at her bemusedly. “Yes?”
“I’m Mirai Nagasu,” she said brightly. “Is this the chess club?” Actually it was a question she didn’t need to ask. Straining to see past the teacher’s shoulder, she saw rows and row of (yup, nerdy) boys bent over chessboards, although some of them looked up and were staring at her with the same confused expression on their faces.
“I’m Mr Carroll,” the teacher said. “You - you want to join the chess club?” he said it almost like he couldn’t quite believe it.
Mirai frowned and cocked her head to the side. “Is that okay?” she asked.
“Perfectly fine,” Mr Carroll said. His voice was grim as ever but Mirai was starting to think that was just him. “Come in, come in! Join the woodpushers.” He ushered her in and took her name and homeroom number down, and Mirai followed gladly. High school was going to be so great.
“How much experience do you have?” Mr Carroll asked.
“Well - not a lot?” To tell the truth, Mirai hadn’t played at all until the summer before high school, when she’d watched Hikaru no Go for the first time. She blew through all seventy-five episodes of the series, then tried to procure a Go board and someone who knew how to play it. When that had failed, she taught herself chess instead and played it on her computer until she got through all the levels. Only then had she made her dad sit down and play a game with her. He’d lost. “I know all the rules, though.”
Mr Carroll set out a board and said, “The easiest way for me to find out is by playing a game with you.” He made it so Mirai’s side was black; she liked that, that he didn’t give her chances. As the game went on his moves increasingly trickier - at least, that’s what it felt like. He didn’t seem to want to talk much so Mirai didn’t really know what was going on.
At the end she lost, but she was pretty proud of herself anyway. She’d managed to capture a whole bunch of his strategic pieces, and had gotten a pawn all the way across the board.
“Was that okay?”
Mr Carroll sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. The other boys played on, although one near the front kept sneaking glances at her like he thought she wouldn’t be able to tell. “How do you feel about state play?”
---
Caroline was having kind of a disappointing day; it wasn’t her fault her body suddenly seemed so much less controllable than it had been a year ago - heck, than it’d been even six months ago. Stupid growth spurts.
Caroline tried not to show it, but she was worried: the Cechetti exam this year was the big one, the tough one, and Caroline really wanted to move up into Intermediate only this was starting to seem less and less likely, with the way ballet class was going lately. Today Mirai hadn’t even been around to look at her sympathetically and run through the allegro exercises with her again after class. When she got home she poured herself a glass of juice and flopped down on her bed, no strength for anything. And that was when the phone started ringing.
“Oh my god, Caroline, oh my god, I made the team,” Mirai shrieked into the receiver as soon as Caroline picked up.
Caroline couldn’t help smiling at Mirai’s exuberance, and didn’t ask Mirai where she’d been instead of at class today. It was pretty obvious anyway. “Congratulations,” she said. “That’s really great! I can tell you’re really excited about that.”
“It’s going to be so great,” Mirai told her. “Mr Carroll didn’t say much, but I think he thinks I’m really awesome, which is really great - I actually asked him, you know, ‘Do you think I’m good?’ and he kind of pursed his lips and was like, ‘It depends.’ But I think that means yes.”
“Congratulations,” Caroline said again. She knew how good it felt to be really great at something, even if she hadn’t felt like that for a long time.
“He wants me to train really hard for the state tournaments, the chess club’s meeting three times a week, and I was like, ‘Three times a week?’ and he was like, ‘Yes, young lady,’ and you know what, this is going to sound so dumb, but I’m looking forward to it.”
Mirai nattered on at her for a bit more, and after a while Caroline said, “What about ballet?”
“Um!” Mirai said, sounding shifty. “Oh, aha, um, yes.”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t know if I can make all the classes any more,” Mirai said, a little guiltily. “Chess is Monday, Wednesday and Friday - so I don’t know if I can make Wednesdays any more, I mean, I don’t know if Miss Kavenagh’s going to allow me to attend just once a week, but I’m going to ask.”
“That sucks,” Caroline said finally.
“It does!” Mirai said. She sounded kind of relieved, like Caroline had just let her off the hook or something. Maybe she had, Caroline didn’t know. “I’ll miss seeing you all the time.”
“I’ll see you around anyway,” Caroline said. “And anyway, she’ll probably let you come just Saturdays,” even if she wasn’t really sure that their teacher would.
“Yeah!” Mirai said, sounding chipper again. “We will. We totally will.”
When they hung up Caroline sighed and remained where she was, cross-legged on her bed. Mechanically she reached out to her desk and played Vienna Teng’s Gravity without getting off her perch. She listened to it about five more times before switching to her practice music and standing up to do her barre exercises against the wall in her room.
---
“Are you excited to graduate?” Stéphane asked Johnny. Even after years of going to an American high school he’d retained a lot of his Swiss accent. For the millionth time Johnny tried not to find it really endearing, and for the millionth time he failed. When they’d first met in drama club, Johnny had thought Stéphane’s eyebrows funny and his hand motions weird - the accent was the only thing he liked about Stéphane, but over the years they’d grown used to each other.
Johnny sat down at the edge of the stage and sighed. “Not really,” he told Stéphane. “Even though you know my feelings about high school.”
Stéphane nodded. He did. It was hard not to know when Johnny was so vocal -- Stéphane knew that Johnny loathed high school, even though he probably couldn’t quite understand the feeling - he was supposed to be the outsider, the child of Swiss expatriates, but he’d taken to high school like a swan to water, or something equally clichéd. Everyone loved Stéphane, and they loved him right back.
“I should think you’re going to a better place,” Stéphane said, his expression quizzical. Johnny couldn’t stop laughing. The red velvet curtains fluttered gently behind them - they were supposed to be taking down the stage set right then, but they had the whole afternoon.
“You make it sound like I’m dying,” he said. Stéphane made a shocked sound in his throat, and shook his head, grinning.
“I would be most devastated if you died,” Stéphane said very seriously, and inexplicably looked down, worrying his lower lip with his teeth. He was wearing that stupid black turtleneck, the one Johnny tried telling himself made Stéphane look like his uncle, or something. It actually didn’t.
“You would?” Johnny said teasingly - at least, that’s what he’d intended for it to sound like. Instead it came out weirdly solemn, low with a bass note of tension running through.
“Very much,” Stéphane said, raising his eyes to look at Johnny again. “I would be very, very sad.”
Johnny’s heart was thumping very loudly all of a sudden. The hall was desolate, cavernous in its silence - and he wondered if Stéphane could tell. “How sad would you be,” he said, wondering if this was it, if they’d finally pushed it too far. He smiled invitingly. “Would you, hm -”
“Yes?” Stéphane’s voice was so soft it practically counted as a whisper.
At some point they’d leaned in so close to each other that Stéphane’s face was right in Johnny’s. He didn’t take his gaze away from Stéphane’s as he licked his lips invitingly.
Suddenly, Stéphane’s mouth was on his, and Johnny could swear his heart stopped beating for a moment. Then there it was, back again, racing so fast it was all he could do to sigh into the kiss, lifting his hand to put it on Stéphane’s shoulder. Stéphane’s mouth was soft and warm and perfect, and when he opened his mouth Johnny did the same, so Stéphane’s tongue swiped wetly across Johnny’s lip, igniting that extra spark of want in him.
Johnny groaned into the kiss and tugged softly at the hair at the base of Stéphane’s neck with left hand, his right bracing himself against the wooden floorboards of the stage. It wasn’t the sexiest move ever, but it seemed to work for Stéphane, because he put his hand on the base of Johnny’s spine through his t-shirt, as all the while their tongues glided against each other, soft and slow and sure.
Finally they broke away. Johnny would be embarrassed about how ragged his breaths were coming if not for the fact that Stéphane, too, was panting, almost harshly. He drew a hand across his mouth and said, “Well, that was nice.”
Stéphane looked affronted. “Just nice?” he asked plaintively.
Johnny rolled his eyes. “No, you’re the best kisser in all the land.” Privately he determined not to tell Stéphane, but actually it was pretty close to the truth. Johnny hadn’t kissed enough people to be really sure.
Stéphane raised his eyebrows, then smiled smugly. “I knew it.” It was so ridiculous that Johnny couldn’t help snorting, then leaning in again to press a quick kiss against his jaw. It had nothing to do with the fact that Stéphane’s hair was all askew, and that his lips were red and swollen, of course. Nothing at all.
“I really - I,” Stéphane said, before looking down again. “I liked kissing you.” Then he met Johnny’s eyes again, and burst into the biggest smile Johnny had ever seen on Stéphane’s face, which was saying a lot.
“We should do it again,” Johnny said, shifting a little in the hopes of adjusting his (unreasonably tight, all of a sudden) pants without being too obvious about it. He paused. “Unless you, um. Don’t want to.”
“No, of course I - I do,” Stéphane said. He paused delicately. “Although I do not know what will happen after we graduate and go to college… ”
“We don’t have to worry about that now,” Johnny declared, although his stomach was twisting a little already at the prospect. “We still have graduation to go. And there’s always the summer.”
“There’s always the summer,” Stéphane agreed, and leaned in to kiss Johnny again.