Archive of Our Own

When I was twelve years old, my sister joined the football team. However, when it happened, her name was Yadesh, not Ymir, and there was nothing unusual about her joining the football team, except that she was so good at everything else too.

When I was fourteen, my sister stayed on the football team and this time it was weird because this time everyone knew she was a girl and everyone was still kind of getting used to that.

Ymir was the best quarterback our school had ever had.

But that wasn’t it, she got straight As too. She’d always been in the honor roll.

Before we found out she was a girl, she already had a girlfriend. That seemed to be my parents only concern when she came out. My mom was mostly enthused she wasn’t the only girl in the house anymore and my dad said he was just happy he had a daughter that wouldn’t get pregnant and wouldn’t ever deal with an abusive boyfriend. Since they realized I wasn’t going to have a girlfriend, and Ymir still wasn’t “girly” enough to wear a dress, my mom’s main concern was that she wanted to buy “at least one fucking wedding saree,” in her life, and Ymir’s girlfriend Christa agreed if they got married she’d wear one. In any case, her girlfriend was beautiful, and popular, and smart too.

So, my sister was the dream child.

The harder I worked, the better she did. At least, it seemed that way.

I had joined several sports. Baseball, lacrosse, football, you name it, I probably participated in at least one season at one point or another. My problem wasn’t that I couldn’t play well, or that I was always benched, it was that I didn’t have any desire to do it. I did it for my parents, because I loved them. And because my parents loved me, when they realized I didn’t like sports, they stopped asking at the end of each summer which ones I would join that year.

Then there were my grades. They weren’t awful either. They just weren’t the four-point-O my sister had. My parents never said anything about it, but they didn’t need to. Because it wasn’t just about doing well in school, my parents knew. They weren’t mad if I didn’t do well on a test, they would try to help me understand what I got wrong. They weren’t upset when I stayed home on days I couldn’t handle facing school either. Hell, they got mental health days too, right? They weren’t even mad when I didn’t finish homework, because, hey, homework couldn’t truly reflect how smart I was or how much I had learned. Points didn’t matter to them, percentages didn’t either.

It wasn’t about grades at all. It was about something else entirely. What concerned them, although they’d never specifically said so, was that I had no passion. I had nothing that motivated me. No ambition. Nothing I was dying to do. Ymir already knew what she was going to do. She was going to be a plastic surgeon, like my dad, and help women like her get the surgeries they needed. She’d make a living, and she’d love what she did. But what about me? What was I going to do? I had no idea.

And finally, I had no boyfriend. I had feelings for a boy named Jean, who played on the team with Ymir. He came around here at least once a week to see my sister, and if I didn’t see him here, I probably saw him at games. I’d liked him for so long, and I thought everyone in my family knew, although they’d never bring it up.

My parents reassured me over and over again that having a boyfriend wasn’t what I should be worried about right now anyway. “Have you heard about HIV?” my parents would ask, and I would say, “Yeah, everyone has. Especially me. You bring it up all the time.”

They tried, anyways. They really tried to not make me feel bad about it, and I thought they even probably believed themselves. Having two gay children hadn’t made it easier on them or on us, and we didn’t need any more gossiping about how Indian mothers or Italian fathers didn’t know how to raise their kids from all our fucking neighbors.

The real reason they were worried about my relationship status was that I didn’t have any friends either. I had Ymir, and she was my best friend in the world. The only friend I needed. But it was May, and she was graduating in June. By August, she’d be out of the house and moving to California where she was going to school.

I’d have no one. No boyfriend, not even a crush that came by the house. No friends either.

Oh right, and the weight thing.

Funny how I could rethink my entire life in a few moments, everything I’d ever done wrong to disappoint my most-of-the-time-exactly-what-a-parent-should-be parents, and forget the one thing they believed somehow caused all of my problems.

It wasn’t being uninterested in sports, that made me a half-ass athlete.

It wasn’t being uninterested in my classes, that made me a half-ass student.

It wasn’t being uninterested in girls, that made me a full-fledged loner.

It was because I was chubby.

I mentioned, that my dad was a plastic surgeon?

Yeah.

Anyway, the reason I brought all this up was because it was Friday night and my sister just came home with almost the whole football team and a keg. My parents were visiting my grandparents in India, and she was planning to take advantage of their absence.

When she first came home, I heard the stampede that was the Jaguars stomp through the kitchen hardwood and head toward our basement. Ymir had knocked on my door. I had set my book down.

“Marco? You there?” she had asked.

“Yeah, don’t worry. I won’t tell mom and dad,” I had said.

My doorknob had turned, and she stepped in. Her brown hair was pulled back into a pony-tail that was a little ruffled. Her eyes were hazel like my dad’s, and her skin brown, not as dark as my mom’s, not as white as his. She was covered in freckles. I looked a lot like my sister, except I got black hair and brown eyes from my mom.

Her jeans had grass stains on the knees and tears at the hems that went nicely with a blue, collared shirt covered in bleach stains. She somehow made the stains look intentional, and really cool, but in reality it was just a huge accident. She’d ruined our laundry that day.

“Oh, I don’t give a shit if mom and dad find out. What are they going to do? Ground me?” she had said, grinning. “I’m fucking eighteen.”

“Doesn’t mean you can destroy their house,” I had replied, picking my book up again and trying to find my spot.

“Hey, I didn’t come up here for a lecture.”

I had glanced at her. “What did you need?”

“You should come down. You should say hi to people. I made a bet with them that I have a brother and none of them believed me.”

I had sighed. “Not funny.”

She had laughed. “To you.”

I had sat up in my bed, shaking my head. I caught a glance of myself in the mirror on my dresser. My undercut was a little messy and not quite parted down the middle as it should be. I could fix that easily enough, I supposed. But all I wore was a sweatshirt and sweatpants, and was about to tell her I really wasn’t dressed for it, when I remembered what she had deemed suitable.

No, I couldn’t use that as an excuse. And I had waited too long now for her to not notice that I was trying to find an excuse.

“You could meet a guy,” she had said, arching an eyebrow at me. I had sighed.

“I could get called names or locked in the pantry by a guy, too,” I had replied. If we were at school that was the kind of shit that they would do and she knew it.

“Come on, Marco. I’m not gonna let them screw with you.”

“Aren’t they all seniors?”

“Who cares if they are?”

I had rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t think so. Not tonight.”

“If not tonight, then when?”

That was the question, wasn’t it?

I had shrugged.

She had sighed too, and left my bedroom, closing the door behind her.

Now I was in my room, still sitting on my bed. More people had arrived. The doorbell was constantly ringing. The floor was vibrating with how loud the music was coming from the basement. My blinds rattled. People yelled at each other and it echoed up through the floor vents.

I was wearing Jeans, a button down black shirt, and tapping my feet. My mirror was right across from me. My hair had been combed, and looked the way it usually did now. From the outside, I almost looked normal. Almost comfortable with the idea of attending a party. But my eyes were pinched up, and examining every part of me that was visible in the mirror.

I didn’t want to go, but even more than I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to be alone.

Ymir was leaving in a few months. School was ending in a few weeks. This would be a lonely summer, followed by an even lonelier junior year if I didn’t do something. Maybe I’d meet a guy that could help me get over my embarrassing crush on Jean. Maybe I wouldn’t have to watch him go through four girlfriends next year. Maybe I wouldn’t have to care, because maybe I’d find someone who wasn’t a hopeless cause.

But even if I didn’t meet someone who made me get over Jean – because even though he was straight, and even though he’d never like me back, I kind of liked liking him for some stupid reason – I could still meet others. I didn’t have to become anyone’s best friend tonight, but it couldn’t hurt to talk to people. It couldn’t hurt nearly as much to make a couple of acquaintances tonight as it would hurt to see Ymir go.

Right?

I swallowed. Sweat dripped down the side of my forehead. My heartbeat sped up.

Right?

I sighed, standing from the bed. I looked in the mirror one final time. I considered whether or not I looked like someone I would want to talk to, if I were one of the people partying downstairs, and I thought I would. I liked what I saw, and one thing I’d learned throughout my years of being comforted for a weight-insecurity I didn’t have, was that everyone seemed to think liking how I looked was the key to looking good.

‘Cause apparently, how I looked wasn’t the key to looking good.

I shook my head.

This wouldn’t work if I was thinking about that.

I exhaled, counted to ten, and then stepped out of my bedroom.

Before even taking a step toward the staircase at the end of the hall, I heard gagging. My sister’s music taste might have been awful, but it hadn’t stooped to the sounds of throwing up yet. So I tilted my head, and concentrated. Over the sound of house music, and the screeches and cursing of drunk students, I could tell that the gagging noise was coming from the bathroom.

Well, at least this time no one had thrown up on one of the beds.

I walked down the hall toward the bathroom. The door was shut, but it didn’t quite touch the bathroom tile and light streamed out from underneath it.

I knocked on the door. “Hey… are you okay?”

He cursed, and then the toilet was flushing

The door swung open, and in its place stood Jean. “Marco? Did you uh…shit, um.”

I couldn’t find any words either. The closest I’d ever stood to him was when he accidentally bumped into me in the hallway on his way to Ymir’s bedroom. Other than that, I always glanced at him from the other side of the living room or heard him through the walls on the nights he hung out with Ymir. We didn’t have any classes at school together either, but once in a while I saw him in the crowds of students, leaning against a locker.

And of course at games, when he’d run out onto the field, ready to catch Ymir’s pass, in that fucking uniform and –

“Marco?” Jean’s golden eyes searched mine. They weren’t hazel like Ymir’s. They were hazel like candlelight in a windowless room, and when they flicked back and forth like that I thought I felt the same warmth and caution I did whenever I was near fire.

“Huh? Oh uh…sorry,” I replied, “I just uh…I thought I heard someone throwing up. But you don’t seem uh…you don’t seem drunk?”

Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t smell the alcohol either. Normally when one of Ymir’s friends ended up throwing up somewhere all I could smell on them was beer. Sometimes, if my sister was feeling particularly daring with my parents supply, vodka. But there was none on his breath. Oh, there was vomit, and that was awful enough, but no alcohol.

Jean’s eyes widened as his pupils shrunk. He was scared?

I stepped back from him. Despite being a year younger, I was an inch or so taller and definitely wider. I couldn’t understand why he’d be afraid of me, but maybe he thought I was mad he got sick at my house.

“Yeah, uh…you won’t…won’t say anything to anyone will you?” he asked, threading both his hands through his blond undercut, and tugging a bit. He did the same thing whenever he was on the sidelines during a game and there was only a few minutes left to make a touchdown in time. He did that whenever Ymir tried to help him with his homework at the kitchen table. I took another step away from him. He was too on edge for me to be leaning into him like I was.

I shrugged. “I’m used to people getting drunk here, it’s not a big deal.”

“No, not that. I don’t drink. I mean, you won’t tell anyone I threw up?” he asked, as he turned away from me. His expression was intense, with furrowed eyebrows and a taut jawline. He splayed his hands out on the granite countertop. His eyes flicked back and forth until they narrowed in on the mouthwash. He slid open the cap and took a swig. As he did, his eyes looked at me.

“I guess not.” I shrugged. It wasn’t really the type of story worth telling. “But do you need some, like, Pepto-Bismol?”

He swished the mouthwash around in his mouth for a second, before leaning over the sink and spitting it out. He wetted his hands and wiped down his face and nose, which was a bit reddened and chapped. “No, I’m not sick.”

“Then…why’d you throw up?”

Jean’s body stiffened, his broad shoulders pulling back in a way that made him look like he was ready to get tackled on the field. “Not that kind of sick.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, okay? God. Why do you care?”

I looked away from him then, so that he couldn’t see the undoubtedly hurt expression I’d been unable to hold back. I rubbed my neck again and turned away from him. “Sorry. Just thought…I didn’t…whatever.”

I stepped away from the bathroom. This was why I didn’t socialize, I reminded myself. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to talk to others, but because they didn’t want to talk to me. The sting of Jean’s rejection – rejection of my concern, let alone a date or a friendship – was too discouraging for one night.

I headed back to my room, and closed the door behind me.

I sat against my headboard and faced my wall, so that even in the mirror I couldn’t see myself cry. It was quiet, and quick. I wiped away the tears, and with it the emotions.

I picked up my book, more than ready to repress the memory of tonight in between the letters on my page, when there was a knock at my door. I shoved my face into my book.

“Go away, Ymir. I’m trying to sleep,” I groaned.

“It’s…do you really think it’s Ymir, dude? It’s me,” Jean said.

“What do you want?”

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“Why?”

He swore. “Look, I don’t do this a lot. I’m shitty at it. But I’m trying to say sorry and you’re making it very hard.”

I pulled my book away from my face and set it on my nightstand. “It’s okay.”

“Can I come in?”

I contemplated the reasons I shouldn’t let him. To have some self-respect. To not make it so fucking easy for him to be an asshole to people and get away with it. To make sure I wouldn’t let this boy hurt me more than he already had.

Good reasons.

Reasons I was going to ignore because no matter how badly I wanted to, and no matter how much I should, I couldn’t hold something like this against someone. I wasn’t going to never forgive him. People deserved second chances, and Jean of all people seemed like he was the type of person that often needed them.

During my deliberation, Jean’s feet had shifted on the hardwood, but he’d made no move to walk away. He was serious about this then, whatever this was.

“Okay, you can come in.”

He opened my door, stepped in, and closed it behind him. Then he leaned against the wall. His eyes scanned my room. There was nothing on my nightstand except my book, lamp, alarm clock, and phone. My lamp was turned on, and it spread a halo of light across my bed. The light wasn’t bright enough to seep into the darker corners of my room, or reach to the ceiling, so it was still dim. One half of Jean’s face was shaded.

My floor was cluttered with video games, comic books, and movies. My walls had family photos on them I’d taken in India, and book shelves with trophies on them from my days in sports, next to all my favorite books. My closet door was open. All my clean clothes were hung, and my dirty ones were piled up on the floor inside of it. If Jean thought anything of my room, his face didn’t show it. The look in his eyes made it seem like he wasn’t really even seeing my room at all.

I sat up in bed, running my fingers through my hair and hoping I hadn’t messed it up. I tugged on the collar of my shirt, and checked to see if any of the buttons had come undone.

“I’m sorry I got mad,” he mumbled.

His fingers were tapping against my door, out of beat with the lulled music of the party. He kept shifting, like he couldn’t get comfortable in his skin, and put his hand in his jean pockets. He looked toward my window, even though the blinds were shut.

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have pushed it.”

He shook his head. “It was nice of you to…to notice. Wait, no. Not notice. I think some people do. But uh, it was nice that you cared. I guess I’m just not used to it.”

His eyes met mine. They were red-rimmed, like mine had to be. I wondered if they could possibly be red for the same reason mine were.

Then I processed his words, and my breath was stolen from my lungs.

“What do you mean? What do people not care about?” I asked. My voice cracked. I covered it, in embarrassment, and then looked away.

He took one step toward my bed, and sat down.

“Do you uh…I guess, I don’t know if you come to the games or –”

“I do,” I interrupted.

“So you know I didn’t play last year?”

I nodded. It had been the dullest season of all the dull seasons I’d sat through for Ymir. Not even seeing Jean in his uniform was enough to make a cold wooden bench, and the sight of violent tackling exciting. Without him, it was like staring at static.

He swallowed, and ran his hand through his hair before tucking both his hands in his pockets again. Jean was slouching, and his face was calm. If it weren’t for his eyes avoiding my gaze, I would have thought he was relaxed. He was so handsome, and now I knew exactly what he looked like sitting on my bed. I’d never sat close enough to him to feel how warm he was before.

“Well um, I missed school too. I was in the hospital and –”

“Oh my God,” I blurted, “You don’t like – like have cancer, or something, do you?”

He smiled despite the pinch in his cheeks that told me he had tried to fight it. “No, it’s not cancer. I uh…look, you just can’t tell anyone okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered, afraid my walls might hear his secret.

“And I’m – I’m getting better, so don’t give me shit.”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“And it’s only ‘cause it’s you…so…just don’t tell anyone.”

I stared at him for a moment confused by his words, but I nodded.

He took a deep breath. “I uh…I was taken out of school so I could get treatment for an eating disorder. And that uh…that’s why I got kinda mad. I’m still not…not used to like…talking about it, or whatever.”

My jaw dropped and I slid away from him on the bed, as if he were a bright light that I was seeing for the first time. He looked no different, and yet knowing he was…that kind of sick, made him a completely different person. He was supposed to be the fucking best receiver on the team, the guy at every party, who’d dated half a dozen of the cheerleaders. He was supposed to be a handsome heartbreaker not…

Not this. Not heart-breaking.

“But you’re so thin!" I blurted.

“Yeah. I know. I had an eating disorder,” Jean deadpanned.

My cheeks heated. I wanted to pack my bags and follow Ymir to California. I never wanted him to see me again.

“I mean – I meant…you’ve always been thin. As long as I can remember,” I mumbled, trying to remedy the situation while praying he didn’t think it was creepy that I still had memories of him from three or more years ago.

Jean frowned and shook his head. “That’s not – not really the point. I mean…I wasn’t when I was younger. I was pretty fat when I was a kid and I guess as I got older I kinda…I don’t know. I never stopped feeling fat and I hated looking like a –”

Jean cut himself off. His mouth hung open, and his eyes darted toward me. His entire body froze.

I held in my sigh. I recognized that face. It looked ugliest on him.

It was the face skinny people wore when they caught themselves insulting fat people in front of me.

It happened all the time. And then they would try to cover themselves up, tripping over their words. They either tried to tell me I wasn’t fat, making it worse because I never told them I was fat, and by reassuring me I wasn’t, they realized they wouldn’t think to reassure me I wasn’t fat if they didn’t think I was.

Or, they tried to pretend they weren’t about to say something awful about fat people. They would make it about lazy people or they would try to over-compensate by saying “I mean obese people. Really big people. Like ones that can’t walk,” and I would feel the need to break something because I couldn’t fathom how they possibly thought that had made the situation better.

Oh, okay. So only certain fat people were wrong? The others were just on their way? Or what?

“Hey man,” Jean said, as he read my expression. He even leaned into me. His shoulder pressed against mine. “That was me then. I get it now.”

“Do you, though? You get that when skinny people have frizzy hair, they cut it. When they have acne, they grow out of it, or get a prescription, or whatever. When they have crooked teeth, they get braces. They look in the mirror, and they hate their flaws, but they know how easily they can be fixed. And if they think they’re ugly, they look in the mirror and think, ‘at least I’m not fat’. Because it doesn’t matter how good-looking you are, if you have every beautiful trait in the world, you’re ugly the second you’re fat.”

When I finally gained the courage to look Jean in the eye again, he looked so angry with me I had to look away again. I hunched my shoulders, leaning away, ready for another onslaught of rejection.

“Of course I get it. Just because I’m thin now doesn’t mean I forgot what it’s like. You think I spent a year of my life throwing up because I didn’t know how much better my life would be if I was skinny? I might not have been as big as you, and I might have been young, but that didn’t stop every adult I knew, every friend I had, and every doctor I went to see from telling me I needed to lose weight and how attractive I’d be if I gained some muscle. You wanna know what the worst fucking part of being bulimic was?”

He let the question hang, and I knew he wasn’t going to answer me until I asked. He let it sit in the hair between us, until I turned to face him. “What?”

“I got thin. So thin. Less-than-a-hundred-pounds thin, and when I was that skinny I looked in the mirror and didn’t see what I was supposed to. Most people with eating disorders look in the mirror and see a fat person. I didn’t. I saw a thin person, and I thought ‘what the fuck? I’m thin, I’m supposed to be happy now. I’m supposed to like myself’ but I fucking didn’t. And that was when I realized I had starved myself for a year to make all the people who couldn’t see past my weight happy and they fucking were. I wasn’t happy, but they were.”

Jean had gotten so close to me, I could feel his breath on my neck. His eyes smoldered and his teeth clenched.

“Really?” I asked.

He nodded, and his eyes softened at the edges. “Yeah. I checked myself into a hospital the next day.”

We were quiet. The music and the sounds of the guest whirred around us, but I felt like my bedroom was separate from that world. Like Jean and I were in our own world, stuck facing our own truths with nothing but each other.

Both of us had spilled our guts to the other. We hardly knew each other, and yet I couldn’t help feeling like it was entirely natural for us to do that. I had no friends to talk to, and I certainly couldn’t say this stuff to my parents, who would both completely deny that they thought I was chubby at all. Maybe Ymir wouldn’t, but she still wasn’t the person I could talk to about this.

Jean didn’t have anyone either, it seemed. He wasn’t in denial of his eating disorder but he wasn’t ready to broadcast it either. I couldn’t imagine what a high school football team would think of a guy getting an eating disorder. The bullying he’d go through wouldn’t be worth admitting it to anyone.

“Jean,” I started, when I finally understood the significance of all this. “If you went to treatment…why are you still, ya’ know, uh –”

He shrugged. “It just…just happens sometimes. I don’t do it as often as I used to. I’m a lot better than I was. But when I get around a whole bunch of people and…I hate talking to people. I hate not knowing what they think of me and always trying to be the person they want me to be and I guess…it’s kind of a nervous habit now, more than anything.”

We were silent for a moment. I’d never heard someone so concisely sum up exactly how I felt about being around other people and trying to make friends.

“That’s why I like you, Marco,” Jean whispered, “It’s never hard to talk to you, cause you…you don’t want people to be anybody they’re not. It’s why I uh…didn’t mind telling you about this. I can be honest with you.”

My whole body felt like it had been shocked, and my heart had been jump-started. Me? He was saying this to me? When had we ever…

But we had talked. Never much. Only for a few minutes whenever he came over to see Ymir. Only before or after a game when he had gotten a ride with us. Only here and there, but it was just enough to be a lot for someone who had trouble talking to others. It was just enough to not be too much.

I smiled and blushed, and felt like my body had lost all its bones.

Jean ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry if I just…made that weird.”

“Why would it be weird?” I asked, forgetting for a moment that he was straight. Oh right, that was why. Guys weren’t supposed to feel these things, let alone talk about it. I wished he hadn’t apologized.

He shrugged. Then he shook his head. His mouth opened. It closed. He stood. And then he sat back down.

“Okay, I didn’t just throw up because I was nervous about the party.” His hands trembled as he spoke.

I arched an eyebrow. “Okay?”

“I came up here for a different reason…and on my way I –I got too nervous. And then you found me and it just like – like, ruined any hope I had of not fucking this up and making an ass out of myself.”

My eyebrows furrowed. My heart was sputtering. I rubbed my neck, and I was blushing so strongly I thought I’d light up. “What do you mean?”

He couldn’t mean what I thought he meant.

Jean bit his lip. His eyes met mine, and I could see right through them. He was torn about whether or not to say what he was going to say.

“Fuck it,” he finally said, “I think it’s too late to try to hold shit back. I like you, more than I’ve ever liked anyone before.”

I stared at him, turning the words over in my head a dozen times and trying them out.

But he was straight. Over the years I’d seen him date a dozen different girls. He’d never so much as looked at me like that. Not like he’d looked at them. Or at least, I didn't think he did. Maybe I had missed something.

Jean looked like he was paralyzed, staring at me and waiting for a response. He had meant what he had said and now it wasn’t just his hands that were shaking. His eyes were flicking back and forth all over but the fire in them was dwindling.

“I thought you liked girls?” I asked after a minute passed.

His face became confused, but relieved too. “I do. I mean, I like both.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“And you like me?” I squeaked.

“Uh, yeah…that’s what I said.” He looked like he couldn’t remember now whether or not he actually had. “I know I – I’ve probably fucked up everything. I probably made you think that – that, like, I don’t like how you look or something. But it’s – I’m different now. Or I’m…I’m getting there. Or something. And I would never want you to feel –”

“Shh. I know."

He clamped his teeth shut, blushed, and smiled. He shoved his hands back in his pockets again, and his eyes kept flicking between me and anywhere else in the room.

“I like you too.” I grinned.

His eyes glowed again, with excitement and hope I couldn’t believe. “Even though I have – uh, had, an eating disorder?”

I shook my head, confused again. “Why would that matter?”

“It’s…I don’t know. My parents seem to think it’s really exhausting to be around.”

My brows furrowed, and as bravely and protectively as I could, I placed my hands on either side of his face. I hoped it looked like I’d done it a thousand times before, but it probably didn’t.

“I would never think it’s exhausting. If anything…I want to help. It took me a long time to – to accept myself. To like myself, and I want…I want that for you. It’s a good feeling,” I whispered, and my thumb trailed over his lip. His eyes shut for a moment. I didn’t think he realized he did it.

When he opened them they were all glassy and big. “Really?”

“Of course.”

Jean swallowed. His eyes darted bashfully away for a second, and then he was leaning in.

He kissed me, gently, and slowly, so that I could capture every second of that moment in my mind.

When he pulled away, we both looked at each other to give each other permission, and then he was kissing me again. His passion came in waves, slowly kissing me and building up until we were wrapping ourselves around each other and sinking on to my bed. His lips roamed other places, and I shivered at how amazing it felt.

Jean came over top of me, easing in between my legs, and that too made me shudder. I was high on the feeling of his skin brushing against mine. His fingertips trailing over my cheekbones and my neck and my collarbones. The feeling of another person’s weight on top of mine, feeling so safe because of it.

His hands on me, the sound of his breathing, and my heart beat in my ears, drowned out the sounds of the music and the loud partiers.

Jean’s fingers spread over my stomach, my hips, my thighs, unable to find anywhere they wanted to rest.

But then his fingers sunk into the sheets, and he tore himself from me. “You’re sixteen right?”

I nodded.

“Have you ever done this with anyone?”

I shook my head. He was just a year older than me, but I knew he must have done this and then some.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do anything else.”

I grinned and covered my smile with my hand. I’d been told all my life that no one would want me because of my weight, and now Jean had to hold himself back.

I placed my hands on his shoulders. His chest fell and rose with labored breath. His lips were swollen from our kissing. I ran my fingers through his hair. “Why not?”

“Well…because we only just got together – I mean, fuck - we are together, right? Like, I’m not uh…not, like, missing a hint, right?"

I laughed. “We can be.”

“I want to be.”

“I do too.”

He grinned. My hands slid down over his chest and stomach. He did the same to me, and his eyes devoured me.

“Not all the way tonight, okay?”

He perked his head up at my words, and it took a moment for his thoughts to buffer. “Huh? You uh…you want to do more?”

I chuckled and nodded. I didn’t see why we shouldn’t. The same people who told me that it was wrong to be intimate with someone right away were the same people who thought you had to lose weight to get that kind of attention anyway. I wasn’t going to take advice from them.

Jean smiled, and bit his lip to try to hide it.

He sat up long enough to take his shirt off. Naturally, what my eyes noticed first was how defined he was. How his muscles tensed and shifted as he threw his shirt onto my cluttered floor. How sharp, and wiry and gorgeous he was. I saw all the muscle he had in his shoulders and chest he wouldn’t be able to have if he was still throwing up all of the time. He wasn’t thin anymore, not in that sense. He was strong, and healthy.

That was what my eyes noticed first.

What my eyes had put on the backburner, were the stretch marks along his armpits.

I stared at them, ran my fingers over them, and then looked into Jean’s eyes for an explanation. If they had been from his childhood, they would have been white by now, like his skin. But they weren’t. They were reds and purples. They were deep jagged lines.

“What?” he asked.

“You have stretch marks.”

“Is that a problem?” He looked terrified that I was rejecting him. I placed my hand on one side of his face so he would know I wasn’t. I didn’t care about them at all.

“I’m just surprised you have them…”

He looked at me like he was amused. He wore a cocky grin. Then he pulled himself off of me and sat up in the bed. He twisted around so that I was looking at his back. It too, was defined from his shoulders down and it kind of made my mouth water. But there were more stretch marks. More along his armpits, and huge, long ones that ran horizontally across his back.

“I got them all over the damn place,” he replied.

“But, why?”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “Are you serious?”

I nodded as I sat up behind him to get a better look. I traced them with my fingers. Goosebumps rose on his skin.

“Well…because of weightlifting? I get new ones every football season.”

“You can get stretch marks from weightlifting?”

“Dude, you can get them from growing. What, you thought you had to be fat to get these things? Yeah, right.”

I smiled. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

He swiveled around now completely. His hands reached for the collar of my shirt, and he unbuttoned the first button while looking me in the eye. When I didn’t deny him, he unbuttoned the rest in quick succession and slid the shirt off my shoulders. He tossed it on my floor with his shirt.

His eyes took in the sight of me, and I couldn’t help the urge to cover my stomach with my arms, even though I wasn’t ashamed. I swore, I wasn’t. But that didn’t mean I loved seeing people disgusted with me.

But Jean didn’t look disgusted. He looked fascinated, more than anything. His fingers grazed my chest hair and happy trail, and then he traced the vertical stretch marks curving across my stomach. There were dozens of them and his fingers walked each one of their paths.

“You have so much more than me.” My arms rose to cover my stomach, when he added, “They look so fucking bad ass. Mine aren’t half as long as yours.”

He was fucking jealous of all things. I wanted to call him a liar. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to say shit like that to make me feel better, I didn’t need his pity.

But I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was telling the truth. Jean didn’t see stretch marks the way I did. For me, they came with being heavier. It was a package deal. For him it was something he worked hard for in the gym every day after school to get for years. Of course he wished his were bigger or longer, it was a sign of strength for him.

I wished I had worked for mine.

I covered my stomach.

Jean studied my expression when I did. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Just, I guess, uh…I mean you got yours because you’re in shape and I uh…didn’t.” I laughed, awkwardly, trying to cover up how suddenly difficult it was for me to overcome my insecurities. It was an everyday process for me. One thing I’d learned about accepting myself was that I had to continually make an effort to do it. There was no magical moment in time where I had realized I was okay with my body. I had to decide to be okay with it every day, and some days were harder than others.

“So? They still look cool.”

“On you.”

“Why not on you?” Jean’s hands rested on my arms, although he didn’t try to pull them away from me.

I rolled my eyes. “You know why. You have stretch marks because you’re strong.”

He huffed out a humorless laugh and shook his head. “I’m not strong. Not yet. And besides, people don’t give me shit for them. But I bet they give you shit, don’t they?”

I nodded. I never went swimming or took my shirt off if I didn’t have to, but I still had gym class. I still had to change in the locker room. I got shit in there for being gay and for being fat. One of the easiest things to give me shit for was my stretch marks.

“Exactly. And you know what’s so fucked up about that? The people who give you shit for having stretch marks couldn’t handle having stretch marks for a day. They would hate themselves. I hated myself, and that’s why I got sick. But now I want to be like you, because you don’t hate yourself. You don’t change for anyone and you don’t let what they think get to you the way it would to everyone else.”

I smiled, even though I felt like I might cry, and looked at him. This time he placed his hands on my cheeks. He pressed his forehead into mine before kissing me.

When he tilted his head back– just a couple inches, just enough to make sure I was looking at him and listening to him – he added, “That’s pretty fucking strong to me.”

I grinned then, and Jean looked surprised he’d made me feel better. His eyebrows rose, and then he smiled too.

I wiped that smile off his face with my lips. Jean barely managed to flick my lamp off without tipping it on the ground, as he eased me onto my back.

We kissed until the party cleared out. We pressed our chests together. I traced all the hard lines and angles of him with my fingers. He used his hands to make sure every curve of me, every span of skin from my shoulders, to my lower back, to my stomach, to my ass and thighs hadn’t gone un-touched or underappreciated. His hands only ever greedily touched me, they only ever wanted more. The more he touched me, the heavier his breathing was, and the more his heart panicked.

When the sun turned my blinds pale blue with coming daylight, Jean and I were both so desperate for each other, so wound up from kissing so long that we both let our hands slide under each other’s boxers. Our hands weren’t slow on each other. We were too desperate. We kept kissing, moaning into each other and shivering in the other’s grasp. Until Jean was saying my name and telling me how fucking sexy I was and how bad he wanted me and how fucking good it felt. He came with my name on his lips, and I grinned then – I had done that to him, I had made him feel like that – as I let myself succumb to the pleasure.

When we had cleaned up, and we were in nothing but our boxers, I curled up with Jean. We were both fighting sleep, but we had agreed to let the sun rise before we dozed off. Jean had his head tucked under my neck, and his fingers were tracing the stretch marks on my thighs again.

“Jean?”

“Hmmm.”

“When you were sick…did you have anyone to talk to? Like a uh…a counselor, or anything?”

He hummed, and placed a kiss against my chest. “Not until I was already hospitalized. I wanted to talk to someone before that, but I didn’t…I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone. I didn’t know who to go to. Why?”

I buried my nose in his hair. “Just think I know what I want to do after high school.”

He tilted his head up to kiss me. The sun rose high and sunlight peeked through my blinds, illuminating my room in orange and yellow stripes. Particles glittered in the air and Jean’s eyes sparkled golden.

He smiled, and kissed me before rolling over so I could spoon him. We were both asleep in seconds.