There is a boy who tastes like lavender and old books at the end of the street. He is in love with the sweet boy next door who smells like leather and firewood.
They see each other at the bus stop almost every morning and imagine what it would be like to kiss under that tiny shelter they both know so well. They have each spent many a half-asleep moment under its familiar grimy arch, and yet every day they sit alongside one another they feel they experience it anew.
The firewood boy likes to imagine the pair kissing and the grime all of a sudden disappearing, everything becoming clearer and brighter and more beautiful. He wonders if the whole town would rejoice at the existence of these teenage boys who could make such magic of the world with just a simple kiss.
The lavender boy sees flowers blooming from open chests when he imagines the moment, raindrops made of honey pouring from summer skies and butterflies landing on sun-darkened and exposed flesh—an ankle, a wrist, the gentle curve of a neck.
These moments of contemplation are self-indulgent and hopelessly romantic, of this the two boys are aware, but they have that reckless abandon of teenagers in love, albeit silently. Neither has confessed the anxious stirring in their stomachs when they stand too close to one another, and neither has discussed the way their arm hairs stand to attention when their legs accidentally touch. It’s almost as if they can’t help but subtly reach for one another a little more, no matter how undetectable that touch would be to the other person.
Despite this silence though, they are happy. There is no pining or heartache. They are happy because this silence doesn’t really feel like silence, it feels like anticipation. It feels like the gasp of breath before the rollercoaster plummets towards the ground.
They are happy because they are in love and it is summer and nothing seems impossible. A kiss between two boys with soft hearts under a sweltering sun seems plausible, inevitable even, when they consider it – for how could they pretend indifference much longer when the two could already taste just how beautiful their first kiss would be? How could they resist touching one another any longer when they could already almost feel the soft skin at the nape of the other’s neck, the angle of his collarbone, the roughness of his stubbled cheek?
Today is not the day they kiss. They look at one another for a moment between mindless conversation and they feel something pass between them – a spark, a buzz, a whisper of something more behind their words about the weather and last night’s television. But the bus arrives and the moment passes.
Maybe tomorrow, each boy thinks as he finds his usual seat. Maybe tomorrow.
They smile at one another as they make their way to their usual seats. Tomorrow, definitely.
—By Meg B., 18, Gloucester