Aaron was back on Wednesday. I spotted him the second he pulled into the parking lot, but he'd deliberately arrived just as the bell began calling us to class, so I didn't have the time to ambush him. I tapped my foot all through my first two periods, irritating everyone within earshot, and dashed straight out the door when the bell sounded for lunch.

I camped out at his locker until I caught a glimpse of his hunched figure, weaving through the hallway crowd. I leaned back against the adjacent door, waiting for him to spot me.

His reaction when he did was underwhelming. He gave me a half-hearted smile and brushed me aside to get into his locker. There was a picture of us on the inside of the door from years ago, arms slung around each other on a grassy hill at an all-ages music festival. I was bright red from a sunburn I vividly remembered, to that day. I also looked a lot healthier. Less hollowed out, maybe even a bit chubby. Aaron was also shorter than me. We'd come a long way since the photo had been snapped, and seeing it made me yearn to fall back in time to middle school; acne and insufferable hormones be damned.

I'd lost a lot over the years, mum, weight, my voice, my security. I was determined not to lose the one thing that had kept me together, hand in hand with Sephora.

I held out a folder to him, and he took it tentatively as if it might bite.

"... thanks?"

"Notes. Biology and Maths," I told him. He flicked through them silently. "Mid-year exams are coming up. I wouldn't want you falling behind."

His eyebrows lifted as he reached the end of them. "These are... illegible."

"You should see my copy," I countered, and leaned over the folder. "I drew diagrams for you."

He sighed, audibly exasperated, but not unhappy. It was a very Aaron sound. "Thank you."

The silence between us lasted longer than any uncomfortable silence ever had. I shrunk against the locker, unsure how to break the new tension between us. Brushing off the longest argument – could we even call it that, considering? – we'd ever had with jokes felt wrong, but I didn't know how to open up a conversation which teetered so close to the truth.

"Do you want to ditch school?" I blurted out.

He raised an eyebrow. While that statement might have worked on his brother, Aaron didn't ditch school, ever; he considered it the equivalent of cutting off your own legs to spite the system. I'd tempted him all through the year before when I was wagging more than I was showing up, but he'd never taken the bait.

"Don't you have a session with Alba today?"

I nodded slowly, internally smacking myself for forgetting. "I think it's... more important to talk to you right now."

His locker door slammed, making me jump almost out of my skin.

"I think you should see her," he snapped.

Jesus. That was new. Apparently, Aaron had been taken over by the spirit of Lauren Proust.

He turned to leave, but I refused to let our argument linger any longer than necessary. "Just let me apologise."

He paused, glancing back over his shoulder. "You didn't do anything to me that needs apologising for. You're projecting the apologies you need to make onto me because I'm obviously going to forgive you."

Ouch. Another needle straight through the heart, making my chest deflate pathetically. "Look, I know what you think is going on between Lauren and me, but it's not what it looks like. I'm not that guy, Aaron, I wouldn't do that to her."

He bought up his arms to fold them over his chest. "If it's not what it looks like, what is it?"

Such a simple question; and like that, I was out of answers, mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Aaron huffed and dropped his arms limp by his sides.

"I don't want to do this here."

"Then let's ditch," I implored. "My house is empty. Or we could go to the park, or..."

I trailed off. Aaron looked completely unconvinced.

"Look, I'm fine with only half the story," he sighed. "I'm never going to make you tell me something, even if I think it's killing you not to. Your secrets are your secrets and you have a right to keep them. But I cannot watch you hurt someone else knowing what I know. It's against everything I stand for and honestly? It kind of disgusts me. And I hate feeling that way about you because I like to believe you aren't that guy, but what am I supposed to believe if you won't tell me what's going on?"

I rocked back on my heels, absorbing his words slowly. Tasting them out, all the battery acid of betrayal sticking in my mouth and burning holes through me once I managed to swallow.

"I'll go back to being blindly supportive once you break it off with Lauren," he finished, turning on his heel and walking back the same way he'd come.

I had to jog to keep up with him; his legs were the perfect length for quick getaways. "Lauren and I aren't dating. She knows I'm..." as if the school grounds were cursed, the word caught in my throat and wouldn't slip out, not so close to my peers. "... she knows. We're just pretending."

"Why?"

I hadn't prepared myself for the bluntness of his questioning, and my silence answered unwillingly for me. He huffed again and kept walking.

"Aaron, wait."

He didn't, so I continued to jog to stay in line with him. I nearly bowled into a group of middle schoolers in my haste and received a myriad of dirty looks.

"If they were my secrets to tell, I'd tell them in a heartbeat," I pleaded. "But it's... someone else. I can't tell you who, and I can't tell you what's going on with Lauren because it goes beyond me."

He snorted. "So it's not just because you're carrying a torch for her brother and want a reason to be around him?"

My jaw instantly dropped, and I did a quick three-sixty swivel to make sure no keen ears had picked up on his suspicions. No one was paying us a modicum of attention.

"That's... no," I said bluntly, perhaps a little too defensively. "I'm not that desperate."

"You're a terrible liar," he informed me.

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh?" Aaron reached the doors before me, and spun around to lean on them, teetering between being inside and outside the school building. "I'd say I've spotted you staring, but that would be giving me too much credit. You're not subtle, Miles. At all. I'm surprised he hasn't noticed it yet. You should be more careful."

I felt my whole body tense. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, he's not going to look as cute when he shoves you into a locker and calls you creepy," he said, unflinchingly. "And before you tell me he's not like that, I'm going to have to remind you who his best friend is."

"Are you kidding me?" I gaped at him. "Aidan punched him in the face!"

"And now he's the captain of the soccer team. Convenient," Aaron snapped. "Listen; Caleb will never like you. He's straight, he let Aidan get away with way too much to be an ally and maybe he comes off as sweet but that's only because he's usually playing good cop to Aidan. He might be cool driving you around and having you at his soccer games now, but that won't last if he figures out you're only with his kid sister to be close to him. If it comes down to his reputation or yours, he'll always put himself first."

My mouth was dry and sticky, and my stomach was churning. Aaron seemed pleased with his lecture, pleased enough to wait around and hear my answer.

"You don't know that," I said weakly.

"Yeah? Try talking to him at school, in front of his friends," he immediately said. "I guarantee you'll see a side of him you haven't yet. He's not your friend, Miles. He'll certainly never be anything more. You'll only make things worse for yourself by dragging things out with Lauren."

I flinched and tried to cover it by directing my eye to the floor. Aaron must have noticed because when he spoke again, his tone was softer.

"I don't want you getting hurt," he admitted. "Whatever arrangement you've made with Lauren, you should break it off. For your sake, not mine."

I had no response to that. I stood there with my eyes on the floor, feet turned in, unable to fabricate a response worthy of his barrage of truth. Aaron was in full bloodhound mode, and he'd smell bullshit from a mile off. I kept my mouth shut.

"I will," was all I could say, and I didn't clarify when, because any time period he would be okay with would be a lie. Aaron gave me a tight-lipped, sceptical smile and pushed through the door. He let it fall closed behind him, a clear indication he didn't want me to follow.

I zombie-walked to the lunchroom alone, somehow managing to feel invisible and exposed at the same time; like every eye was on me, but I could vanish into thin air and nobody would blink. There were no free tables left since I'd given up my chances of snagging one to chase after Aaron.

My eyes lingered on one of the back-most tables, swarming with the soccer team and their girlfriends. Caleb was shoulder to shoulder with two of his teammates, not speaking. He was so clearly the defining fixture of the table that he didn't need to. Max was among the crowd, with his back turned to me. I hadn't spoken to him since biting his head off on Monday; Max generally didn't hold grudges, but he was obviously keeping his distance, tempting me to make the first move.

Before I could psyche myself out, I approached the table, invading their bubble of noise. A few glances were thrown my way, but no one paid me much attention as I shuffled up behind Max. Least of all Caleb. I saw him glance up from his tray, and I felt his eyes pass through me like glass. He lowered his head a second later, hands tensing into fists on the tabletop.

I guarantee you'll see a side of him you haven't yet.

I set my jaw and tapped Max defiantly on the shoulder. He spun around, teeth buried in an apple. His eyes lit up with recognition.

"Maals!" he managed around the apple, quickly swallowing it down as he staggered out from behind the table. I backed up as he tripped over the seat, catching his balance before beamed at me. "What's up?"

I didn't deserve how pleased he seemed to be that I was speaking to him. I'd been an asshole. "Nothing much. I just wanted to say sorry for the other day."

He waved my apology aside like he was batting flies. "No big deal, man. I kind of got the impression it wasn't about me."

"You're not wrong," I admitted. Calling him out on dating a girl with ulterior motives would be like throwing stones from a glass tower, despite the vastly different sub-contexts.

"Are you and..." Max glanced over his shoulder and found Caleb distracted. He lowered his volume anyway. "Are you and Lauren doing alright? I'm sorry I didn't have better advice to give. I'm not exactly a beacon of functional relationships."

"We're fine," I grimaced. Caleb was very obviously listening, despite looking anywhere that wasn't going to place me in his peripherals. "You're right, it's just high school. I shouldn't have gone off at you."

"No, you were right," he admitted. "It made me think about what I was really doing with Georgia. But turns out I didn't need to humble myself because she dumped me last night. Said it was too hard with everything going on between our families."

An appropriate end to their lover's tryst; I would have found it easier to feel sorry for him if he hadn't said it so breezily, with a smile on his face and not an ounce of longing or regret in his voice. "That sucks."

"Nah. It wasn't messy, which is more than I can say for all the girls who came before," he mused. "She's a great chick. If I hadn't been so fixated on using her as a body shield, and if her brother wasn't a psychopath, we might have lasted."

"If only," I patted his shoulder sympathetically.

"But hey, newly single just in time for the festa em casa," he grinned devilishly. "Are you and Aaron planning on making an appearance?"

It was official; I was the worst best friend in the world. Aaron had reminded me that his birthday was coming up, and yet it still took me a good few seconds of vacant staring for Max's statement to click. Right. Max was throwing a teen kegger for his eighteenth, that coming weekend, and I was supposed to be saving Aaron by taking him out somewhere that night. I hadn't even thought about it since he'd made the request, despite assuring him I would throw him the best two-person introvert-united eighteenth he could ever imagine.

With the tense conversation we'd just had haunting my mind, I wasn't sure he would even want to spend his birthday with me.

"We might drop by when it slows down. Help you herd out the drunkards and hide the evidence," I sighed, hoping my blatant self-loathing didn't come across in my tone. "Are you alright with that?"

"Dude, I'm turning eighteen. I probably won't remember anything from seven pm onwards," he smirked, slapping my shoulder. "Just show Aaron a good time, alright? He's been crankier than usual."

I swallowed down my pessimism and gave him a reassuring smile. Max immediately turned around to the table, smacking the people either side of his place aside. "Hey, make some room. Miles, sit."

I immediately went to stop him, but Aaron's words lingered in my brain. I let my arms fall, watching Caleb with intrigue. He immediately lifted his head, lips parting in obvious protest. I knew it from the look in his eyes; finally focus on me, blue crystal freezing over in a way I hadn't seen since he'd cornered me outside the club and threatened my livelihood to keep my mouth shut. They widened slightly in panic, the whites fully surrounding the blue islands of his irises, and he shook his head microscopically, potentially unconsciously. His jaw was set and his non-verbal cues were clear. Don't. Not here. Not in front of these people, whose opinions of me I value more than yours.

I stayed fixed in place as all my poise slipped away. The air around me turned tepid, and I was sure I looked like I was having some kind of episode. Frozen, breathless, lost in the maze of my affections and insecurities.

The feel of Caleb's finger's brushing my forehead, which had lingered so long after he'd dropped me home the night before, burned in my memory like a brand. The smiles, the perilous caressing in Reece's pickup, the gentle touches and the more thrilling ones, the in-jokes and the forgiving and the truth-telling and I never hated you, Miles and I could never do that to you were lost in the elongated shadow of everything he'd ever said to dissuade me.

We're not friends.

Max isn't playing this weekend.

Can you imagine what would happen if I started talking to you at school?

You were drunk. You probably don't remember much of that night, right?

The Caleb who had kissed me in the club, who didn't want his family to hate me and who had so generously revoked his blanket ban on spending a night in proximity to one another, was an idealised version of the hot jock every woman at Truman had drooled over at some point. The fact he knew everything about me had endeared me to his side. I hadn't considered that vice versa, he saw me as a threat. A ticking time bomb. A hook-up outside school hours, nothing more. Except with far more heartache and none of the fun stuff.

"I'm alright," I told Max shortly. His brow instantly furrowed in concern. "Wouldn't want to cramp your style."

I didn't take my eyes off Caleb as I said it. He ducked his head in a mockery of shame.

"You're not cramping anyone's style," Max insisted. "Aidan isn't going to bust through a wall the second you sit at his table."

I shook my head firmly. I saw Caleb's shoulder heave with a sigh.

"I think I'm going to head off, actually," I told him, already backing up.

"Heading off? Heading home?" Max deduced. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Peachy," I gave him a sardonic thumbs up before turning my back and escaping the lunchroom. I shouldered through the door, jerking my bag out of the gap when it caught in the closing door and drastically reduced the drama of my escape. It seemed I would never perfect the storm out. It only added to my frustrations as I slunk down the hall, a rain cloud on legs. I kept walking straight out of the school, down the steps and out of the school's perimeter.

I hadn't skipped a school day since the year before. A truancy officer knocking on my door, and a high-and-mighty speech from Reece about responsibility had put me on the straight and narrow when it came to attendance.

I felt I had earned a singular escape.

There was nothing at that school for me.

a/n: the end of pride month is rapidly approaching! i'll use this opportunity to say: support queer writers! support POC writers! get out there and promote their work. lets get some deserving lgbt+ writers some rep on this platform ~