"You Say, 'Just Wait a Little Longer.'"

Matt glanced over at Josh and stared for a minute, watching as the older boy frowned down at the sheet music strewn across the floor and fought to keep his shaggy, too-long hair out of his face for even just a second. He smiled slightly to himself when Josh crinkled his nose, leaned down from his seated position next to Matt on the bed and picked up one of the pages, crumpling it into a ball in his hand and throwing it across the room. “Nope. That just isn’t gonna fuckin’ work, dude. I tried. It was a good idea, though. It just didn’t fit right.”
Matt shrugged his shoulders and let himself fall backwards on Josh’s bed, stretching his arms over his head and shivering when his shirt rode up, exposing his stomach. He pulled the bottom of his shirt back down to his belt and rested his hands there momentarily before sitting up again. “It’s fine. It was just a suggestion. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You have more experience there than I do.”
“Don’t be so fuckin’ hard on yourself! You’re good! You just need more practice.” Josh slid down off the bed and tucked his legs under him as he sat surrounded by the music. He picked up one sheet, then another, studying them intently, scrutinizing them as if his entire life hung on the possibility of one wrong note or a chord that didn’t sit quite right. But that was just Josh, and quite possibly, that’s how he really felt. When it came to music, he didn’t do anything halfway, and for that, Matt was grateful.
However, it also meant that Matt had to take the good with the bad. As set on perfection as Josh was with music, he was also just as obsessive about other things in his life. Those were things that he continued to keep to himself, but Matt still knew there was something there. Josh couldn’t fool the younger boy completely. Not when Matt showed up at Josh’s place and Josh looked like he hadn’t slept in days or his clothes had an odd smell that Matt just couldn’t place.
But still, Matt chose to wait until the older boy wanted to talk instead of insisting. They had just started to get close and Matt was afraid that saying the wrong thing would send them right back to square one, where Josh was a paranoid outcast, constantly questioning Matt’s motives for wanting to get to know him or asking if they could write music together. Eventually he had come to trust Matt and take him at face value, but it took Matt a good six months before Josh stopped blowing him off with lame excuses as to why he couldn’t hang out after the last bell rang or on weekends when homework was limited or all but forgotten. Matt was never sure if he had simply worn Josh down or if Josh had finally determined that Matt was worth getting to know. Either way, that lead them straight to the present, sitting on the floor of Josh’s basement bedroom in his parents’ two story home, surrounded by hand-written music charts that the two had been working on composing every day at school during their lunch hours and nearly every afternoon when school let out, as long as their schedules allowed, for the last three weeks.
Josh picked up another sheet of music and Matt tapped his foot along to the notes he could hear in his head as he read the song on the page over the older boy’s shoulder. Josh cast a quick glare in the brunet’s direction. “Distracting, dude…”
Matt grinned. “Oh, please. You’re fuckin’ distracted by everything,” he said, knowing that Josh’s attention span was nearly nonexistent, except when it came to all things musical. “The other day we had to stop working on our science midterm project because you heard the ice cream truck playing some song that sounded like something you wrote, so you spent the next two hours going through your notebooks to try to find it. That turned into a three hour music writing session! Which reminds me, man, we still have to finish that project. It’s due in a week.”
Josh laughed, leaning back against the bed and resting his hands, still holding pages of composition, on his knees. “Okay, so fuckin’ shoot me. I can’t spend all day on one subject. I’d go outta my fucking mind.” He bent his head back down to study the music again, then held the sheets in the opposite hands to see if reading them the other way around would sound better.
The smile on Matt’s face widened even more as he shoved Josh’s shoulder. “Yeah, just get back to doing the only thing you’re good at,” he joked.
“It would help if I had anything good to work with,” the older boy threw back, laughing again even harder.
Somewhere in all of that, the two became more dependent on one another. They weren’t quite best friends, not quite brothers, but they were closer than they had been even an hour ago when Matt first walked through Josh’s bedroom door carrying his guitar case in one hand and a green, worn backpack slung across the opposite shoulder.
Matt shoved himself off the bed and crossed his legs in front of him as he sat on the floor and picked up one of the pieces of music that had Josh’s lyrics scrawled across them in his own barely decipherable handwriting. “What’s this supposed to say?” he asked, holding it out for Josh to read.
He watched as the older boy squinted and tilted his head to the side slightly, trying to read his words. Josh dropped the papers he was holding and took the one Matt was questioning from his hands. “It’s nothing. It’s just, you know, kinda auto-biographical, kinda personal. Nothing that’ll ever see the light of day.” Josh folded that paper up as well and tossed it across the room where it bounced off the opposite wall and landed near the first balled up sheet.
Matt wanted to ask, but he promised himself he wouldn’t. Not today. Maybe not even next week, but someday. He could have sworn he was able to make out the words, “this is not an afterschool special,” but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes he wondered if Josh wrote as sloppily as he did because he knew that no one else could read his writing and it was just another way to keep his secrets to himself, but maybe that was Matt’s own paranoid thinking.
He didn’t realize it, but Josh was thinking too. “Hey, Matt…dude…?” Josh’s voice broke the younger man from his thoughts and he blinked once to clear his head, then turned to face Josh.
“Yeah?”
Josh frowned a little and stared at his hands as he tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves a bit – a habit that Matt had noticed him doing fairly often. “If…if anything happened to me, like, say…I just fuckin’ disappeared for a little bit, would you still be here when I got back?”
Matt was understandably confused. No one had ever asked him that before. Suddenly this seemed like too much of an adult conversation for two teenagers to be having and the brunet wasn’t sure how to respond, so he answered the only way he knew how. “Where would you go?”
“I dunno. It’s just a fuckin’ hypothetical question, dude. Just answer it. What if?” Josh looked up at Matt briefly before dropping his gaze back down to his hands.
“Ok,” Matt said, twisting his response slightly. “Where would I go?”
“You know…you could move on, find someone else to jam with.” Josh shrugged, still playing with the fraying edges of his shirt. “Or would you…I dunno…”
“Would I what?” Matt questioned, still confused, but also concerned.
Josh raised one shoulder slightly. “Would you, you know, wait around?”
“Man, if I knew you’d be back, I wouldn’t go anywhere.” Matt felt older than Josh at that moment. Somehow, the tables had turned and Josh was the vulnerable, shy, awkward one in the room. “Dude, what’re you getting at?” Matt felt the shift in Josh’s attitude and wondered if he might open up, even just a little bit.
“Nothing. I’m just talking.” Josh shook his head, letting his hair fall down into his eyes again, but not bothering to brush it back this time.
Lies. Matt knew that Josh never talked just to hear himself speak. He only opened his mouth when it was important, so Matt tried to read between the lines without much luck. “Okay, so if you do leave, I’ll still be here,” he answered Josh’s question truthfully.
“But what if you didn’t know whether or not I’d be back?” Josh pressed. “Then what?”
“Then I’d wait a little longer.” Matt wouldn’t know what those questions would mean until a year and a half later during his first visit with Josh after Josh had gotten home from a two month stay in a rehab and treatment center for a drug addiction and an eating disorder.
“Get anything written while I was gone?” Josh asked Matt, flashing him a smile and showing off a newly pierced tongue.
“Was all of that shit you were on actually making you smarter, man? What kind of stupid fucking question is that?” Matt teased back.
“Well, I thought maybe you’d have given up waiting around for me.” Josh dropped down onto the edge of his bed in exactly the same position as he had been eighteen months prior.
Matt set his guitar case down just inside the door and let his backpack slide from his shoulder and fall to the floor with a soft thud. “Nah, I knew you’d be back.” He reached into his bag and pulled out the notebook of lyrics he’d been working on since Josh had been away.
“I didn’t exactly fuckin’ keep in touch, dude,” Josh admitted.
Matt nodded in agreement, but took his place on the bed next to Josh. “I know. I just had to wait a little longer.”