Keep Me Close

Jeffrey and I made our relationship public about a month later, after a bit of a trial run on things. Our stupid friends had an absolute ball with that once they found out.

“That is why they share an apartment!” Evan laughed, clapping his hands together in pure amusement. “I knew it!”

“Oh, shut up, you,” I smiled, throwing a shoe at him. We were sitting in our living room, all sprawled out on the various couches and chairs we had. For some reason, Jeff and I owned a lot of furniture even when we didn’t often have company. It did make it convenient of course, when we did have people over.

“No, but seriously,” Avery started, chuckling. “When did you guys, like, get together or whatever?”

“The day we all met up in the park,” Jeffrey shrugged. “That night, actually. We got home and started watching TV and joking around with each other and one thing led to another, I suppose. We just decided that we wanted to give a relationship a try.”

“Why did you guys wait until now to tell us?” Todd piped up. “We obviously don’t care.”

“We wanted to give things a shot before letting anyone in on it,”

“It’s working out so far, so we decided to make it all more public,” I shrugged.

“Public, like you’re going to post cutesy pictures together on Facebook and write on each other’s walls about how much you love each other?” Avery asked, making a weird face as he gushed on about it.

“Whatever, you guys,” Jeffrey laughed.

Once everyone asked their questions and voiced their slightly obnoxious opinions about “how cute our relationship would be” and everything else of the likes, we had all decided to go skateboarding. It seems to be a bit of a pattern of ours to not really see much of each other for a month at a time and then get together on a weekend and do something either stupid or just pointless. That’s just how we roll, I guess.

Downtown, there was a small skate-park the guys and I always visited when we were in middle and high school, but at this point in our lives it wasn’t exactly in the greatest shape. It was on the verge of being run down and not many people visited it anymore because of the fact that some of the ramps and such weren’t super safe anymore. Of course, being the reckless young adults that we were, we decided that we wanted to go skating there.

“Come on you sissies! Who’s coming on the half-pipe with me?” Evan asked, slinging his skateboard over his back and holding it behind his head.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Jeffrey screeched. “Look at that thing; there’s a massive crack down the middle of it. You’ll kill yourself if you hit that wrong.”

“Then I won’t hit it wrong,” he shrugged.

“I'll join you Ev,” Todd said, placing his board on the ground, placing his foot on it and kicking off lightly so as to roll along slowly alongside Evan.

“Yeah, why not? I'll come,” Avery added, following them.

Jeff turned to me and asked, “Are we the only sane ones?”

“You know, I was actually thinking I would join them too,” I said, shrugging.

“Are you serious?”

“No,” I snorted. “I don’t have a death wish. I was just fucking with you.”

“Oh I bet you love that, don’t you?” Avery yelled over his shoulder.

“Shut your mouth!”

“You sure don’t, with all that sucking-dick and such!”

“You will be murdered in your sleep!” I screamed as he kept walking away from me, laughing his scrawny little ass off at my aggravation.

“Well, you do –“

“Don’t even start with me, Jeffrey,” I chuckled angrily.

“I was just going to say that you –“

“Oh, I know what you were going to say,”

“That you –“

“That I suck dick well?”

“Yeah, basically,” he smirked.

“Fuck you,” I hissed, leaning in close to him. I wasn’t really mad at him and he knew that, thus why he kept egging me on.

“Wait until we get home,” he whispered in my ear, sending shivers down my spine. “Then you can fuck me all you want.”

“Oh, you are so bad,” I breathed, my back still slightly rigid.

“If I was good, things wouldn’t be any fun, now would they?” he laughed. “But I'll be a good boy if you give me a kiss right now.”

“And what if I don’t?” I questioned, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Then I'll continue to tease you and make these next few hours at the park absolute torture for you,” he said slowly. He dropped his skateboard to the ground and began to circle me, dragging his hand across my torso as he did.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I'm doing?”

“Taunting me,”

“Exactly,” Jeffrey nodded, slinking his arms around my waist and pressing his body close against mine. He lowered his head so that our foreheads touched, his eyes never leaving mine. My lips moved unconsciously towards his, but as they came close, his head retreated. “No,” he breathed against my lips. “You wouldn’t kiss me, so now I'm being bad.” He let go of my torso and took a few steps back, grabbing his board off the ground and speeding away.

I groaned and stepped onto my board, following him across the skate park. The closer I got to him, the faster he sped away and for the next ten or so minutes, we were basically chasing each other around the park. Yeah, it was fun for a bit, but after a while I had started to get just a little annoyed. I knew I could pull off a little stunt that would make him stopping running from me, so as I saw him look back at me, I faked a wipeout.

I kicked my skateboard behind me and pretended to fall on my hands and knees. I stung a bit, just like any real fall would, but I was tired of chasing Jeff around. I cried out in fake-pain and tried to not smirk as he skidded to a stop and yelled after me.

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just, ah!” I hissed, shaking my hand in the air as if it really was hurting. “I just scrapped my hands and knees.”

“How’d you fall, man? You never fall.”

“I don’t know; I just lost control. Can you go to the bathroom and wet some paper towels for me, please? My hands are really killing me here,”

“Of course, babe,” he nodded, skating away towards the bathrooms. Oh, he was so easy to fool, it was almost unreal. I got up and retrieved my board, laying down on it like it was a pillow. When he skated back over, I was just lying there with a smirk on my face. “What are you doing?” he asked, holding his board in his hand.

“Lying down,”

“I thought your hands hurt,”

“They do. Did you get the towels?”

“Yeah, here,” he chuckled, holding out his other hand which was holding a handful of wet paper towels. He thought I would only take the paper towels and use them for my hands, but that’s not what I had in mind anyways. I grasped his hand hard and jerked him downwards. He gasped and landed on top on me. “Wh-what are you doing now?”

“Well I just pulled you down on top of me, so I suppose I'm just chillin’ here,” I chuckled, taking the paper from his hand and throwing it to the side.

“What about your hands?”

“Yeah, I lied,” I shrugged.

“About?”

“I didn’t fall,”

“But I saw you go down,”

“That doesn’t mean I fell on accident,”

“You fell on purpose?” he asked, furrowing his eyebrows. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I was tired of chasing you down,”

“You could have just told me that. I was only screwing with you by doing that,” he said, his voice growing softer. “And look, you did scuff up your hands. So you hurt yourself just to get me to stop, when in reality, you could have just called out and told me to stop.”

“Yes, but it’s fun watching you worry about me,”

“You’re a worrisome boyfriend,” he shrugged.

“You are too,” I reasoned, “but you start freaking out when yo get worried about me, whereas I only worry to myself. It’s fun to watch you squirm.”

“You’re mean,” Jeffrey pouted, sticking out his bottom lip.

“You better tuck that thing back in. Something might get it if it hangs out like that,” I laughed, shifting my arms so that they were wrapped around his waist, holding him tight against me.

“Nuh-uh.” He shook his head, still pouting, and his hair flew about his face

I leaned my head forward and took hold of the lip that was sticking out with my teeth. “Uh-huh,” I chuckled against his mouth. A smile attempted to make its way onto his face and he gave up any struggle he might have had. The bite turned into a kiss as I let go of his lip and his head pushed mine back down. I giggled into the kiss and slid my hands down to his back pockets. A minute or so later, Jeffrey pulled away slowly.

“We haven’t done a whole lot of skating today, have we?” he mused, smirking.

“Well, we chased each other for a while, but no, not really,” I shrugged.

“Maybe we ought to go see if the guys are alright. That half pipe scared me just by looking at it. I want to make sure they didn’t kill themselves,”

“Or each other,” I laughed, “Since they’re probably all on it at the same time.”

“Because they’re just that stupid,”

“Hey, we’re not stupid!” Evan called out. I looked over Jeffrey’s shoulder and saw the three idiots we call our friends skating or walking towards us.

“Now get your hands out of each other’s pants and come join us in the bowl,” Avery told us, skidding to a stop by our heads. He put his foot under my hands and fished them out of Jeffrey’s pockets, laughing. Jeff faked a groan and got off of me slowly as I giggled and pushed myself back up onto my feet.

“The bowl’s not busted all to pieces too, is it?” Jeffrey asked, laughing.

Todd sighed and shook his head, amused. “No, it’s actually in good shape. Come on, let’s go.”

“Alright, we’ll go,” I chuckled, stepping on my skateboard that was still lying on the ground and kicking off towards the large graphitized bowl.