An Assortment of Boys (Part 1: Dean)

Note: All names have been changed for privacy purposes.

Dean and I met our freshman year of high school, but didn't really get to talking until around junior year when we became fast friends over a shared love of Neon Genesis Evangelion and King Krule. Our relationship became more complicated when, during finals week, Dean took me to the woods to smoke and confessed that he was suicidal. He then told me that he wanted to kiss me.

I was jolted, not by his suicidal thoughts but by the "kiss me" thing. Dean has had a girlfriend for over six years now, and she's absolutely beautiful. They opened up their relationship about a week prior because they'd been having issues, and I'd actually spent much of finals week trying to set Dean up with another cute girl in our class. When he told me how he'd attempted suicide multiple times, and that he'd been suffering from depression since middle school, I thanked him for being honest with me and told him that I'd also been diagnosed with depression a few months back. But I didn't know what to say about the "kiss me" part because I didn't know he even saw me that way. I wasn't ugly, but I wasn't always pretty, and I certainly wasn't like his girlfriend. She was skinny and tan and had this gorgeous, long brown hair. I was soft and slightly awkward, with a flat nose and bushy eyebrows. I knew that I didn't measure up, and I was shocked that he even considered me someone he'd want to kiss.

And so, quite awkwardly, I told him I would eventually kiss him, but not there in the woods. "Maybe later," I said, and he looked disappointed but also very, very vulnerable. So I hugged him and told him I loved him, and we walked back to the school. We've been best friends ever since.

We kissed first at his friend Blaze's house, in the dark. He had me pressed up against the wall, and then later in his lap, and there was something very urgent about it all. He said it was like a release for him. He said he'd wanted to do that to me for months. I kept my phone in my hand the entire time we were kissing, almost absentmindedly, and he was almost pissed off when he felt it digging into his back. "Are you serious?" he asked me as he pulled away, brows raised, and I couldn't keep myself from laughing.

We kissed later that month in my room, on my bed, with the lights on. We were both naked. We did some things then, things that I don't think I can describe on a youth forum, but it was good. Really good. We climbed up onto my roof afterwards and lit some cigarettes and talked about our lives, and I remember relishing in the normalcy of it all. We were so comfortable with each other.

My friends think I'm falling for him, and when I tell them I'm not, and I mean it very honestly. I don't think I'm capable of loving him, because we're just too similar. We're both so fucked up, and angry, and miserable. Where we are right now, we have nothing to fight about, and no one to offend. And we can't afford to ruin something good like this when everything else is going to shit.