The silence was my fault; it was only fair that I was the one to break it.

"Come right in," I said with a laboured sigh, glare fixed on Caleb. "Make yourself at home."

He remained stationary by the door, eyes blown wide and chest heaving, as Aaron peeled himself off the bed to stand defensively with his arms crossed. I watched for the moment Caleb's eyes settled on Zsa Zsa. He thawed out of his frozen state immediately, falling forwards with his mouth in a slack, horrified O.

"Are you alright?"

Zsa Zsa looked to me for help, leaning back on the bed in obvious discomfort. We'd promised him some semblance of privacy despite the party raging outside, and Caleb's presence directly contradicted that.

"Who are you?" his question was in reference to Caleb but directed at me.

My first instinct was to shove at Caleb's side until he left the room, but I put that out of my mind quickly. I glanced across to Aaron, who was still standing vigil with his arms crossed and answered carefully, "This is Caleb. He's leaving."

I turned expectantly, but Caleb didn't take my easy excuse to leave. He stepped forward again, patting down his pockets for god knew what. "What happened? Did you call the police?"

"Caleb..." I started desperately, but surprisingly, Zsa Zsa interrupted me. There was a bead of blood sitting on the crest of his split lip, which burst as he spoke.

"Ran into some trouble with an old flame," he said simply. "We were just about to head to the hospital."

"You knew the person who did this to you?" When Zsa Zsa nodded, he looked crestfallen. "Fuck. I'm so sorry."

Zsa Zsa warily accepted his sympathy. "Do I know you?"

Caleb shook his head fervently. His vehemence made his lying more obvious to me, but his overacting could have easily been blamed on his blood-alcohol levels. Evidently, Zsa Zsa didn't buy it either.

"I swear, I've seen you around somewhere," he sustained. "Your face... isn't that forgettable."

Caleb raised his fingers to his cheek immediately, as if he was preparing to tear chunks out of it for betraying his identity. Alternatively, he could have been struggling to stay on his feet. He was swaying dangerously. "I don't think so."

Zsa Zsa looked baffled. "But I know you. Oh fuck, we haven't slept together, have we?"

"Zsa!" I yelped, horrified.

Zsa Zsa shrugged innocuously. The cogs in Caleb's brain were visibly turning, and I saw the moment something clicked.

"Zsa," he echoed. "Zsa Zsa? That guy... Miles, that guy's boyfriend. Peter?"

I hissed at him to stay quiet, but Zsa Zsa didn't miss anything. "You know Peter?"

I fought the urge to curl into a ball with my head in my hands, but Caleb, whether it was the alcohol or just his own outrage at Zsa Zsa's physical state, continued. "Did he hurt you? Was it my fault?"

I exhaled forcefully. Zsa Zsa looked baffled. "No. No, why would it be..."

Realisation dawned on him at the same time Caleb seemed to recognise he'd said too much. Aaron stood off to the side, catching my eye occasionally. He mouthed to me, What the fuck is going on? Or maybe it was, What the fuck is taking so long? My focus was split, to say the least.

"Did you sleep with him?" Zsa Zsa asked harshly.

Caleb startled, but didn't immediately rush to his own defence; he stood with his back against the door, eye drifting in and out of focus.

Perhaps to my own detriment, I spoke up, shaking my head to Zsa Zsa. "I told you that wasn't how it happened."

Zsa Zsa did his best to glare through his throbbing bruised eyes. "You also told me he was a stranger. You also also told me you were twenty-two. Forgive me for fact-checking."

Caleb looked like a cornered animal, eyes wide, breathing shallow. I was almost tempted to tell him to calm down, but I sensed it wouldn't have been appreciated. Surprisingly, Aaron was the first one to speak.

"Is the best time for this?" he asked bluntly, moving to sit beside Zsa Zsa. "We need to get you to the hospital."

His words went in one ear and out the other. Zsa Zsa's was still narrowed in on Caleb, hands clenched on his knees. "Just so you know, I don't blame you. I'm just warning you because evidently, he's a fucking psycho, in more ways than one. For the record, I'm clean, and we never had unprotected sex, but God knows who else he was screwing, so you should probably get yourself tested..."

"Stop," Caleb snapped, and I was taken aback by his severe tone. Zsa Zsa also flinched back, averting his eyes, and caging his ribs with his hands automatically. Caleb glanced at Aaron, then back at me, and when he spoke next, he sounded defeated. "We never did anything like that. Miles let me know what was up, mentioned your name. I'm sorry."

Zsa Zsa made a noncommittal noise, but it seemed to be directed out to the universe more than anything. "I should probably thank you."

"Please don't," Caleb said gravelly.

I glanced at Aaron. He was staring at Caleb as if he'd begun to glow blue. He was clearly seeing him in a different light. Thankfully, he didn't look mad. He just looked perplexed, one side of his upper lip pulled up and eyebrows scrunched together.

"Please don't tell anyone," Caleb's gaze moved to Aaron as he sagged against the closed door.

Aaron immediately straightened, shaking his head ardently. "Of course not! No. I would never... it's none of my business."

"Thanks, Max," Caleb murmured. Aaron immediately spluttered on an impulsive laugh and shot me an expectant look.

"How drunk is he?"

"Blitzed," I assured him. Caleb murmured a few denials, but he was visibly struggling to stay upright. Aaron looked relieved.

"Well... that's probably for the best." As Aaron searched for somewhere else to look, he found the Ibuprofen packet in my hand. He gestured for it, and it got passed, in a roundabout way, to Zsa Zsa, who swallowed two of them dry. He grimaced upon raising his head, and the split on his lip opened as he pursed his lips. "We need to go."

I nodded in agreement and moved to help Zsa Zsa stand. He staggered up, leaning heavily on Aaron's side, and clenching my wrist. I interlaced our fingers and squeezed his, reassuringly.

"Can we go through the house?" I asked him. Zsa Zsa touched his bruised face apprehensively. "People aren't going to take any notice. We shouldn't be heaving you through windows in your condition."

He thought it over before nodding. I gave them both a wide berth, circling back to the bed as Aaron helped him to the door, pausing before opening the door into the dissonance of the party. He turned back to me with his hand on the doorknob. "Coming?"

I nodded encouragingly. "I'll be right behind you."

He looked between Caleb, who was standing off to the side with his chin on his chest, and I, and stuck me with a wary glare. "You've got five minutes."

"Got it," I assured him. He finally gave me the heartening smile I'd been craving all night and slipped through the door with Zsa Zsa pressed to his side. Watching him hobbling out into the hallway set my internal alarm, and I vowed to myself that five minutes would be five minutes and nothing more.

When the door clicked, and I turned around, Caleb was standing by Aaron's desk. He had his head in his hands. I approached with my walls fully erected.

"Caleb?"

He dropped his arms and turned his head towards me. He looked almost asleep standing up, eyelids heavy and pink lips open. The tendrils of his hair cast spidery shadows across his eyes. I longed to push it back off his face.

"Are you alright?"

He took a step towards me, staggered, and one of his legs went out from underneath him. He landed heavily on his side, on Aaron's bed.

"Jesus," I muttered, immediately moving to crouch near him. I rested my elbows on my knees, close enough to hear through his mumbling. "You need to go home."

"Can't. Drove," he managed.

"Why'd you do that? Didn't you think you were going to drink tonight?"

His eyes didn't fixate me in the same way they usually did, likely because they were flicking all over the place like he was tracking dust particles in the air. "My parents think I'm with Steph. And I guess I kind of am. Thank you for keeping me honest."

I sighed through my fingers. "How long are you planning on keeping this up?"

He shrugged, in an attempt at indifference. "It's convenient."

"Yeah, but it must feel wrong," I pressed. "Your family is super chill."

He scrubbed his face with both hands, combing back his bangs harshly. They fell back across his eyes the moment he dropped his hand. "Is that why you stopped with Lauren? Because it felt wrong?"

I hunched my shoulders to my ears. "Yeah."

"Even though it wasn't real?"

"Especially because it wasn't real," I emphasised. "I'm not ready to come out to everyone. But I never pretended to be something I wasn't before everything started with you. I never had fake crushes or girlfriends or talk about stuff I didn't watch or feel. If Aidan McCaffrey wants to spit slurs at me for that, fuck him. But conforming to make the people around me more comfortable? That's what feels wrong."

His eyes were fixed on mine. I opened out my chest to get more air to my lungs.

"Besides, we both know I didn't keep it going for the reasons I told her," I murmured.

"What do you mean?"

I gave him the driest, most cynical tilt of my head and raise of my eyebrow I could. "Come on."

"Miles, I'm super drunk," he admitted. "Can you not do that vague elusive thing you do right now?"

"I'm not vague," I argued. "Or elusive. I'm as straight up as they come."

He snorted. I smacked his knee.

My hand stayed there.

"You were mad at me," he reaffirmed his earlier statement. "I didn't imagine that."

I ran my fingers along a restitched patch of fabric on his knees, waiting for him to brush me off. He never did. "I recently had a hard reminder. From a couple of people. Including you."

His frown deepened. "What did I say?"

"Nothing." And that was exactly it.

He looked confounded. "And again with the vague elusiveness."

"You can't talk," I argued. "You're a breathing contradiction. A walking talking pile of unreadable expressions and mixed signals. Ambiguity in the flesh. Your fake girlfriend must hate you."

"Does she?"

I hadn't realised, in my rambling how close Caleb had moved his face to mine. I could make out the faded outline of the bruise Aidan had given him the week before, which had disappeared quicker than mine thanks to the tone of his flawless skin. We were a hair's breadth apart, and his eyes were so obnoxiously blue that I felt physically restrained by them.

I moved my hand from his knee, only to push back the loose strands of his hair. Because the hair in his eyes was annoying me, and he didn't stop me from doing it. I let my fingers linger on the crown of his head, keeping his bangs from barring his view of me.

I wanted him to look at me, bare, slightly red from the harsh scrubbing of makeup wipes and hair coarse from the rain. The last time he'd been that close to me, I had been hidden behind Sephora. He'd called me spectacular. And for that moment in time, I'd felt it. Right to my core.

I didn't feel spectacular under the weight of his gaze. I felt something else entirely. Something far more deep and primal and scary.

No envy green to hide beneath. Caleb was seeing everything. And he wasn't pulling away.

"Have I got something on my face?" I breathed, in the hope it would lighten the tense bubble of air packaging up in so tightly in the room. Aaron's room. Aaron's bed. Aaron who was outside with Zsa Zsa waiting for me as I struggled to control the most basic functions of my body.

"Ambiguity in the flesh?" he echoed. He struggled a little on the first word, which reminded me of just how drunk he was.

I nodded, still starstruck.

Caleb seemed to consider this for a second. One second. It only took a quarter of that for him to lean forwards, just a touch, so our lips could meet.

It was as gentle as a whisper. I wasn't even sure if our bottom lips touched, but there no ambiguity about his intention. When I didn't pull away – because how could I – he tilted his head to the side and pressed harder, unmoving until I opened my lips to breath. He followed my lead, closing his mouth around my bottom lip for a split second, before pulling back half an inch.

"Any question?" he asked. I shook my head dumbly.

It was if something snapped in both of us; a spring coiled between us for weeks, keeping us a safe distance apart finally sprung free and our charged bodies clashed together, wild and uninhibited. I nearly toppled backward from the sheer force of the kiss; Caleb caught my shoulders and moved his hands slowly up to cup my face, and then clench the back of my head as he moved his to the side, prying my lips open with his own. I gasped out loud, which only encouraged him further. I got my first brush of tongue, and almost blacked out.

It wasn't particularly romantic, although it still felt amazing. The intoxication came from my period of withdrawal, after our kiss in the club. I didn't know how I'd lasted so long. I'd gotten little tastes here and there; our awkward half-kiss in the cab, his fingers on my leg in Reece's car, footsies until his family dining table. The kiss felt like overindulgence after a long month of sobriety. Although it was funny I made that comparison, because in that moment I would have sworn off alcohol for the rest of my life as long as I got Caleb as a substitute.

It was intense, and wet, and lusty, but the one thing it wasn't on Caleb's part was insecure. There was no hesitation now that our mouths were sealed, and every second I didn't – couldn't – pull away, his confidence grew. I was jerked forwards and up until I was all but sitting in his lap, his hands now on my thighs and slowly working their way around my hips. I pulled back for a second to breathe, and he didn't let up, pressing kisses along my jawline up to the sensitive hollow behind my ear. He pressed a contrastingly feathery kiss to the apple of my cheek.

My heart just about burst.

But when he ducked to my lips again, I managed to get a hand between us and stop him with my fingers splayed in his chest. Beneath the material of his shirt, I could feel his heart hammering.

He gazed at me with his pupils dilating relentlessly in the pools of his eyes. I could feel his hand on the small of my back, almost scorching my skin, "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine." A cardiologist might have disagreed with my statement, but I didn't want him to regret anything. "We need to stop."

His eyes sunk in dismay. "You don't want to?"

I huffed out a laugh. It came out more than a little strangled. "You've got to be kidding me."

He seemed confused but took his hands off me so I could stumble to my feet, adjusting my pants accordingly. He remained seated, staring up at me with the kind of expression I would have killed for. A mixture of desire and intrigue and longing. Adoration might have been the word I'd used if I hadn't known better. He wrung his hands together in an apparent attempt to keep them busy, and I struggled against the overwhelming part of my brain and body that wanted to throw myself on Aaron's bed and pull him down on top of me.

It was a mental image I struggled to shake after conjuring it up. Hormones were the bane of my existence.

"I don't understand," Caleb popped our bubble of silence, reaching for my hand. I let him interlace our fingers but forced myself to keep a fair distance between the rest of our heaving bodies.

"I need to go," I told him. "If we don't stop, I won't be able to leave."

He pulled at my hand gently, beckoning me gradually back to him. "Don't leave then."

I dug in my heels and repeated myself firmly. "Caleb. I need to go."

He stopped pulling; dropped my hand. His shoulders slouched into a dejected slump. My first instinct was to reiterate all the reasons I couldn't stay, primarily that Aaron was waiting for me in the car with my injured friend, and secondarily, that he was so drunk I could taste it on my tingling lips.

But I reminded myself that I wasn't the selfish one for needing to leave. His timing beyond abysmal.

"Okay," he murmured.

I took a step back, quickly gather my sparse belongings off Aaron's desk. Both Grayson and I's drag lay in intermittent piles around his bed, intermixing with one another. Among them was also balled up tissues, stained red from Zsa Zsa mopping up his own blood.

It strengthened my resolve, but I still paused on my way to the door. Caleb remained hunched on the bed, eyes on the floor, and fingers twisted into the bedsheets.

"For the record," I called, "I've been trying to forget how good you were at that for more than a month."

He glanced up. His cheeks were splotched with pink. "Sorry."

"Yeah, you should be," I snarked back automatically. Caleb pushed to his feet, walking slowly over to me. My hand came off the door handle as I drifted automatically back to him as if a magnet in his chest had caught the iron in my roaring veins. His eyes dropped from mine to do a quick sweep of my body. The look he was giving made me feel like I was still in a wig and heels, all legs and bare skin. It was difficult to believe that I was in sweats, with my eyes puffy from Maya's alcohol-based makeup wipes and my hair unkempt from being trapped under a hair net.

I had to remind myself that Caleb was very, very drunk to keep my knees from collapsing under the weight of my own ego boost. No one had ever looked at me as I was in that way. Least of all, someone who looked like Caleb Proust.

He reached for me and placed his thumb on the corner of my lip. I felt my bones go rubbery at the touch. There were calluses on the pad of his thumb which I felt as it swiped my lower lip before he preserved the sensation with a quick, parting kiss. It lasted all of second, firm, determined, and assured. It was the kind of kiss exchanged between long-time partners, not two people who struggled with the label 'friends' at the best of times and threatened one another's most closely guarded secrets at worst.

"Remember it," he told me. "And come back here after you've sorted everything. Come back to me."

I was pretty sure my organs were blushing. It was the only potential explanation for the intense heat searing through my torso. My breathing had reverted to manual, and I had to remind myself to take in air every few seconds.

Caleb's eyes were everywhere, enchanting blue all wide and vulnerable, as he waited for my response.

"Yes," I stammered. What else could I say? "Yes. I'll... I'll come back."

"And stay with me?"

I nodded instinctively. Caleb smiled, satisfied with my response to the point of conceit, and took a step back, allowing me to break out of the bear trap of his gaze. With a final strenuous breath, I managed to leave the bedroom, hands fumbling with the door handle and heart beating against the bars of my ribcage.

Caleb Proust had kissed me as if I'd held that last pool of water on a scorched earth under my tongue.

And I had to push it all aside, to make it out of Aaron's house – still alive with the shouts and cackles of drunk teenagers, dancing in ways that might have looked lewd if I hadn't spent most nights bumping around club dance floors – and to his car on the curb, for fear that if I didn't, I wouldn't have been able to leave.

When I crawling into Aaron's backseat a full five minutes later than I'd promised, he started the engine without saying a word. Zsa Zsa turned in his seat as we pulled out into the street, looking me up and down probingly. "What the hell happened to you?"

I sunk back into the backseat, mouth open in a gape I couldn't seem to fix. Zsa Zsa seemed to get the idea that it wasn't something I could yet put into words and turned back to Aaron.

"I know that face. Surprise hand-job."

Aaron didn't look half as horrified as he ought to have been, in my opinion. "He was only there for ten minutes."

"It must have been a half-way decent one then," Zsa Zsa clarified.

I broke out of my shell-shocked state to bury my blush in my jacket. "I am appalled by you. And I will not satisfy that with a response."

Zsa Zsa mimed digging himself into a hole with one hand, grinning minutely. I, in turn, mimed slapping him over the head. I wasn't about to actually hit him, in his condition.

Silence filled the cabin, until Aaron asked, "So. Caleb...?"

"Let's not go there," I suggested. He nodded, visibly relieved.

"Ah, the folly of high school," Zsa Zsa mused in a mockery of reminiscence. "I don't miss it."

"One more year," Aaron matched his unenthused tone.

"Oh, you guys will love it on the outside," Zsa Zsa assured us. "It's insane how the world stops ending the second you graduate."

My lips could still feel the firm pressure of Caleb's against them, and my body was dangerous levels of hot. It was probably for the best we were headed to the hospital. Maybe I could have the insane dopamine hit that came from being close to him checked out. It couldn't have been healthy for my brain.

Come back to me.

So earnest. It was as if he wanted my heart to give out. If Caleb's radiance killed me, I wanted my body donated to science. Maybe they could have created some kind of medication to counteract the biological warfare of the insanely hot.

But I knew the basis of my attraction went beyond that now. That was the scariest part. Once upon a time, he'd been a pretty face in my early teen fantasies, far out of my reach. But the impossible gymnastic feats of my heart were no longer because Caleb Proust had kissed me, but because Caleb had; Caleb who ate dinner with his family every night and talked me through my panic attack and picked me up off the side of the road despite my petulance because, well, that was Caleb.

That just seemed to be who he was.

Behind the mask of performed heteronormativity at Truman, Caleb was just good – if not a little tired. I wondered if that could have been attributed to his roleplaying. It had to wear him down as it did me. He might have believed he was in the presence of a stranger the first time we'd really met, but it was one of two times I'd seen him truly comfortable, unapologetically so.

The second time being five minutes before, too drunk to know any better.

"Miles," Aaron snapped me out of my daze. 

I looked up, bottom lip between my teeth.

"Are you alright?" he asked, genuinely worried.

I nodded. And really, I was. Zsa Zsa was not wrong in his implication that teenagers thought everything was the end of the world; I tended to catastrophise. I thought it was fair to do so when my veteran answer to the question 'What's the worst that can happen?' was 'Mum could die.'

Although I supposed that could only happen once. So really, I must have been fine.

The pit of dread in my stomach, sucking up the blissful butterflies like a black hole, remained. I did my best to put it out of my mind as we drove through the early hours of the morning. My anxieties over Caleb, and why the kiss I'd been craving for weeks was making me feel anything other than pure ecstasy, weren't allowed to be my top priority when Zsa Zsa was hurt.

I would have plenty of time to fret over it in the ER.

Come back to me. 

a/n: hey'a! what a chapter, what a night (on miles's end, but also it's nearly eleven in australia and i only just finished. i'm about to watch the platform and from what my friend warns me, i won't be doing much sleep afterwards. thinking about the injustice of the class system and all. also cannibalism). 

leave me your thoughts, and vote if you enjoyed! ~