Not Who You Thought (BxB Drama-Romance)

Magic Mushrooms and Queer-baiting

Now

Trigger warning: brief mention of sexual violence and drug use 

Out of all my friends, Cayden is my favorite.

Okay, I know favoritism is sort of a shitty thing to have in terms of actual humans. The thing is that out of all three of my best friends, Cayden is the nicest. His jokes are more stupid than cruel, and I can actually spur deeper conversations out of him when we're alone. He isn't wealthy like Jacob and Benji, which puts us on an even playing field. The fact that he's Korean probably helps him be more empathetic because we both have the whole minority in a white-ass town thing going on.

Two years ago when Cayden was fifteen, his little sister died in a car accident with her best friend. She was only thirteen. The accident happened when they were coming home from the mall in the car that her friend's mom was driving. They swerved to avoid a drunk driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel and ended up side-swiping a freight truck from Florida.

I won't forget the night it happened. Cayden came over to my house. It was a crappy night for me because I was home alone catching up on difficult Algebra homework. I was deep in my homework when someone started banging on my door, causing me to almost jump out of my skin.

Yeah, it was Cayden. At the age of fifteen, he was already super tall and trying to get swole. So basically there was a huge dude on my doorstep, balling his eyes out. I'd never seen any of my friends cry; it wasn't something we did.

He told me his sister was dead, and that was all I got out of him. I didn't try to get him to tell me details; the horror was setting in on me like rigor mortis. The first scary thing was seeing Cayden cry, which was a shocking thing to witness. The second was knowing his little sister was deceased. The third scary thing was that when I finally got him to sit down on the couch and brought him a glass of water, he asked me to hold him.

We never talked about that night again. I don't know why he ran to my house, but it was probably because he knew I wasn't going to turn him away. Nothing nefarious happened; I sat beside him and opened my arms and then there was a whole grown guy there in my arms. I remember he laid his head on my chest, I rested my chin on his head, and that he was crying hard enough that his whole body was convulsing. No matter how tightly I squeezed my arms around him, I couldn't stop his shaking.

I let him cry until he'd cried so hard that he was making these frightening choking sounds instead of sobbing, a noise that finally tapered down into something close to a whimper.

That was the first and last time I saw a teenage boy cry until I met Charlie.

"Are you feeling it?" Cayden sits on the other end of the plush couch, squinting at me.

"Uh." I stare at my hands, which swim before my eyes. I flip them to see my smooth palms, and then back over so I can see the back of them. My skin ripples, which is most likely an indicator that I am feeling it. "I don't know."

He starts to laugh, guffawing.

"What's funny?" I demand.

We're in his furnished basement, sitting on the sofa that faces a flatscreen television. College football blares through the speakers, and the sound floods the room. The cement walls are painted white, in the corner of the basement is a set of weights and a squat rack, and to absorb some of the cold emitting from the cement there is wall-to-wall carpet. As the drugs hit my system I start thinking about going over to use Cayden's weights, which if I pumped enough would maybe make me as fit as one of the college football players.

I smile, and the sensation of my skin stretching around my mouth is strange. Cayden is still laughing, bent over in half while he makes no attempt to contain his manic laughter. I like that he's happy, it makes me happy.