Only to Feel This Fully [Completed]

Ch. 16: Here In My Arms

That weekend was a dream. School, hockey, friends, everything fell by the wayside for us. We both had Sunday off and spent the day mostly in my bed, as my parents were out of town for the day visiting my mom's parents. I had elided this obligation by making it seem, though not outrightly lying, that I would have to be at the bookshop all day. Theo and I were both the youngest children and effectively only children as my siblings and his brother were all either in college or working already. This meant the house was all ours for the day once my parents left. The topic of defining the relationship must have been forgotten, or it had never occurred to Theo in the first place because it never came up.

We'd gone to get breakfast at Sal's to make it appear like we were heading into work. Theo had stayed over the night before and the impression was given that he would be sleeping on the air mattress in my room. We made only minimal attempts at feigning this charade. Sunday was spent entirely in bed once we got back from Sal's, save for the twenty minutes I spent making quesadillas and grilled cheese for lunch, the extent of my cooking capabilities.

Movies were put on my laptop, mostly as a pretext for spending so much time in bed. Choice of what was watched alternated between us, but followed a bit of a theme. The first set was first celebrity crushes, the third Mighty Ducks movie for Theo and Prisoner of Azkaban for me. Draco Malfoy had preoccupied my preadolescent imagination for a solid two years and was the reason I was the only kid I knew who willingly labeled themselves as a Slytherin. As these were children's movies and movies that we'd each seen dozens of times, we spent that time more focused on each other than the plots.

The next strand was favorite movies, Demolition for Theo and Little Men for me. These films drew our attention towards the screen and away from each other more than not. I mostly contented myself with playing with Theo's hair while we watched these. Our third and final set didn't really have a theme and we didn't have that much time left, so Theo picked an episode of Skins (the British version, not the American remake) and then we watched Big Mouth for me.

Towards the end of Big Mouth, we heard the garage door going up and scrambled to fully dress ourselves and make it seem like we hadn't been kissing, pawing and groping each other for the past ten hours. By the time footsteps we heard coming up the stairs, Theo was lounging on the air mattress while I reclined on my bed and we tossed a baseball from my little league days back and forth. That was how mom found us. She'd popped her head in and suggested that Theo go home because it was a school night and I'd almost certainly not done any of my homework yet. She wasn't wrong.

Monday morning had me in a bad mood from the start. I'd quickly grown accustomed to Theo's presence beside mine, but I wouldn't get a chance to see him again for a few days now. I had also completely forgotten about what had transpired at the game until I walked into school that morning. Patrick hadn't been on the bus, so I believed he had just walked to school, which was not uncommon for him. He liked the solitude of it or something, he'd told me when I'd asked out of confusion once.

By the time I entered the sophomore wing, there was already a large crowd at the end of the hallway. I couldn't make out what was happening, but Mr. Phillips and Mr. Collins pushed back out through the crowd towards me. Phillips was walking Patrick past me to the main office and Collins was doing the same with Scott, who was much more reluctant to comply. They were yelling at the rest of the students to get into their homeroom classrooms as handled the two.

Eva found me and stopped following her boyfriend, knowing that she wouldn't be allowed in the main office. She pulled me into one of the empty classrooms that wasn't used as a homeroom and filled me in. Patrick had confronted Scott and Kirk about Friday night. Things became heated, words became screaming, which in turn became shoving, but it hadn't gotten much beyond that.