He’s going to say no, isn’t he?

Shit. Fuck.

This can’t be happening.

Conor’s head was still pressed into my chest, and I didn’t know what to do. Should I keep on holding him? Push him away? Just wait and listen until he crushes me? Wait. Is this his revenge? But no. He wouldn’t do that, would he? This can’t be. It’s Connor, dammit! He wouldn’t go so far as to hurt me on purpose! He wouldn’t…

“Do you know why I stopped playing football and joined the theater group?”

I didn’t want to say anything not to give away what was going on in my head, how scared I was for what was about to happen. But I also couldn’t just ignore him.

“Because… you associated football with… me?"

“I wanted to be somebody else.”

He raised his hand and ran it over my chest as if it would calm his nerves.

“I was so far away. I knew nobody. And I wanted to push that bitter taste of losing you guys into the deepest parts of my soul. After we moved, whenever Milo or Will wrote to me, I left their messages unanswered for a couple of days. And when I found the strength to read what they wrote and write something back, it was only a couple of words. So when the new school year finally kicked off, I thought I should just not give a fuck about anything. Because everything had become meaningless anyway. I lightheartedly sat with the theater kids and thought: Why not try acting? This will let you be anyone in the world. Anyone but me.”

Conor stopped moving his hand, and I could feel he was trying hard to keep his breath steady.

“I think I really hated myself back then. I regretted that I wasn’t strong enough to tell you sooner that I was about to leave. That I couldn’t answer Will’s or Milo’s messages. I hated that I told you I was gay. And… I even cursed myself for being gay because, at that moment, I thought that otherwise, you might have still been my friend.”

I wanted to say something. But I knew that I had enough chances to speak up already. It was his turn. And I have to endure whatever he says to me. No matter how hard it might be to hear.

“I went to the acting classes, and at first, it was fun. Playing pretend. To be happy, to be sad, to feel anything at all besides self-hatred. Through all the acting games we played, I grew closer to my classmates and stopped hating myself. I opened up about how we’d left things off. And they showed me so much understanding that I learned to love who I was thanks to them. And I started hating you instead.”

That was hard to hear. And I would have thought Conor wouldn’t want to lean on my chest when he says heavy stuff like this, but he didn’t move away.

”But acting throws you back onto yourself way more than you would think. Because, as I was about to discover, the feelings you feel aren’t someone else's. They’re still yours. So when I was asked to prepare a monologue about a kid that ran away from home but now started to miss the silliest little things, I couldn’t… I tried to act, but everything felt wrong. Unreal, yet more real than anything I had ever experienced before. I resented that challenge. Argued about how I was unfit for a role like that. Yet, my teacher pushed me through it until I cried on stage. And those tears weren’t the ones of the character. They were my own. Those were the tears I had to cry about leaving but couldn’t before.”

Conor was shivering as if he was afraid to continue. And I had to contain myself because I was probably even more fearful of what was coming next.

“Man, at that moment, I wished I would have tried out for the football team instead. I never cried because of any sport,” he laughed. “I totally underestimated what this acting thing would do to me. After that session, my teacher took me to the side, and I told her what had happened. She patted my shoulder and explained that acting brings us close to ourselves, to our deep inner emotional truth.” 

I looked down the vast, empty hall, searching for every door as if I could escape through them. But I can’t. I have to endure this. And as Conor pressed his head deeper into my chest, it almost felt like he had just done that, so I had to stay with him until he was finished.

“That was when I realized I didn’t hate you. I just wanted to hate you. But it was so wrong. What I really felt was grief.”

He rushed his hand down my chest and wrapped it around my back.

”I missed you terribly—all those small things, just like the boy in the monologue. I missed seeing your stupid face during lunch, sleeping next to you on the weekends, and arguing about which NFL team is the best. I didn’t even care anymore that you outed me. Let’s face it. I would have told the others anyway. I understood that some fuse blew in your head because you didn’t know how to handle everything, just like I didn’t know. And… I missed that warm, secure feeling I always had when you were around.”

Conor gasped, and my chest suddenly felt warm and wet. I looked down and saw tears running down his face. I felt the need to hold him tighter, but I didn’t know if I could just do that in a moment like this. Ugh, fuck it. I budged in order to get my arms around him even better.

He gasped again.

And he reciprocated.

It almost felt like he was clinging to me for his life.

”This didn't stop at all in the time we spent apart,” he sobbed. "Not when I found new friends and a new passion. Not when my parents and I kept on moving to yet another apartment. And not when I had that fling with some guy at school.”

He took a deep breath, which helped him get his grip together.

“But thanks to acting, I learned to live with it. To accept that we would never be together again, all things considered. So I guess, at first, choosing acting was my way of running away from my feelings. But it actually helped me get closer to them. I learned not to resent them. And not to see our past as something that must be locked away but cherished as we had such a good time, even when it came to this sudden cruel end.”

Silence took over for a moment as we both tried to process all of this. We could hear a door closing in the distance, but it didn’t make us budge even an inch.

“I reconnected with Will, Milo, and Leo. I started visiting them during school breaks, and you may not believe me, but we didn’t talk much about you. It just didn’t feel right. I mean, there was also so much new stuff going on and… I just wanted to let it stay in the past. Our story was over, after all. But then, at that airport, without warning, you were right in front of me. You didn’t even take any notice of me. And I thought it would be fun to tease you a bit. But as you turned around, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Boy, you looked like shit. Angry at everything. It was so fucked up. Nothing as I remembered you. But then we talked in that diner, and it didn’t take me long to understand that while I had moved on, you had maneuvered yourself so deep into your regret that you didn’t see any way out of it anymore. It was hard to watch because it was so obvious that you couldn’t find closure. That what had happened had destroyed you. And that I wasn’t the only one who had missed us. And,” he took a deep breath, “I felt guilty because I realized… this was my fault.”

“Conor, stop.”

I wanted to shove him away, to shake him, so he would wake up and stop blaming everything on himself while I was clearly the one in the wrong. But he clung to me even harder, so I could not get my hands between us.

“I won’t!”

“But this is not true! You weren’t going berserk!”

How can I get him to stop thinking this bullshit? It wasn’t his fault! What can I do? Is there anything I can say? But no matter how hard I thought about that, I felt hopeless.

“Ash! I fucking didn’t have the guts to tell you I was going to leave! I even outed myself because I was so afraid of saying what I actually had to say. If only I had told you sooner, we could have worked through that together. But I took that chance away from us. And you’re not at fault for me being a coward!”

His words echoed through the corridor.

“Conor, I—you’re no coward.”

“Yes, I was! And I still am, more than you want to see right now. Because if I weren’t a coward, I would have been the one who would have asked you today if you wanted to be my boyfriend.”

“What did you just say? Does that mean…?”

“Of course I do! Because I fell in love with you that night. And I knew you were, too, when you ran right into that snowstorm. You were so fucking scared of hurting me again by giving in to these feelings that you would rather hurt yourself. At that moment, you would have rather frozen to death lonely than risk me being unhappy again because you would sneak back into my life.”

“That’s not…"

“The first thing you yelled at me when I followed you into the cold was to get back inside, so I wouldn’t get hurt! Yesterday, you fled the moment you thought you might ruin my time with Milo. And I know that you did this so I could be happy. But I’m not happy without you. I’m not!”

This pushed me over the edge, too. I couldn’t hold back the tears that wanted to burst out of me—concluding with more tears on Conor’s part.

We just stood there, arm in arm, in my school. Crying about all the shit we had to endure, the stupid stuff we told ourselves to somehow get through the day, and all the time we missed when in reality, everything we both ever wanted was to be together.

“When we kissed,” Conor said after a while, "no, that’s not right when you kissed me because I was too scared to go for it… That was when I understood everything. What if our story was so far from being over that we couldn’t see it? What if our story was only even beginning? And when you kissed me for the second time shortly before that power outage, I made a decision. I decided to love you on purpose. Because you deserve to be loved. You made wrong choices and didn’t know how to handle all those emotions. And yes, those choices will always be a part of our story, as will my cowardliness and the fact that I also ran away from clearing this up. But… don’t all good love stories have some bumps in them?”

And for the first time in what felt like forever, Conor raised his head to look at me. His eyes were all red, and his face was wet. And the reflection of his glasses revealed that I didn’t look any different. But a smile spread over his face, and it was contagious.

“And therefore, it is a very easy decision for me, Asher Blakely,” he pronounced my full name just like I did with his earlier. “My answer is yes. I do want to be your boyfriend.”

His words hit me like a baseball. As if a peal of thunder struck through my whole body, everything started to tingle,  and I could feel another burst of tears rushing out of my head.

“And I have to ask you this. Do you want to be mine too?"

“What kind of question is that? Of course!”

“Just checking,” Conor laughed.

I pressed his head again on my chest and held him with all my strength as if I wanted to absorb him into me so we could be one for all eternity.

And we stood there for a couple more moments, crying and just enjoying that we were together.