it is here, in the dubious glory of their school gymnasium, that gold falls ever-more-wholly in love with crys.

modern au! high school au!

song inspiration: Peer Pressure, by James Bay, featuring Julia Michaels

The gym floor and bleachers are packed with students. In the center of them all is a make-do mosh-pit: a sweaty, overrated, glorious circle of kids who can't see watching kids who can't dance in a hollering, gyrating mass.

It's electrifying.

Normally, Gold would take a spin through it himself, dragging someone like Red — Red, the soccer captain for two years now who has no need for self-doubt — with him to drown in the frenzy.

But not tonight. Tonight is for a different type of vibrancy, and it is altogether much...well, much more different. Much less sweaty, for sure, and as much he applauds Red's impenetrable abs, much prettier.

One hand curled around Crys's, his eyes over and over again retracing her from head to shoulders, he finds that he doesn't miss his usual spotlight at all — even as the clubby soundtrack rains auto-tuned notes down on them like a thunderstorm from the old speakers usually used to report basketball scores.

He thinks that her hands have not left his body for the entirety of the night.

No. He knows that they have not.

They first touch during the initial pictures taken as soon as they arrive in a backyard of some parents and mostly barbecue; for a splendid ten minutes, there is nothing more than their sides aligned and their arms wrapped around. But then, in a line-up, Gold feels her hand on his back, feels her splayed fingers through his suit jacket and his vest and his shirt and he nearly bites his tongue in an effort to keep a sudden bouquet of compliments from exploding all over their friends or her dress or the dozen of cameras currently flashing. Which is probably for the best, because not all of said commentary is altogether age-appropriate for some of the siblings running about with bubble-blowers.

Or for Pearl, for that matter. And he's not sure Mom wants to hear any of it, either. He definitely doesn't want her to, and because neither of Crys's parents are here, Mom stays beside Crys the whole time, helping her with her hair and the two are grinning so widely he genuinely fears for his health.

So he keeps quiet, impatiently patient.

Said patience is sorely tested for the next hour of dining and of last-minute prepping and of Lady Berlitz's Entrance (with a capital letter E) and of the corsage give-aways.

Thus, admittedly, there is in fact a brief pause between dinner and Mom curling one finger around a long strand of Crys's hair where their hands do not touch. Although he spends it messing around with the rest of his friends, his gaze keeps flickering up to the second-floor where laughter and the occasional shriek flies out the window.

If Green catches him, the grumpy senior boy does not care enough to call attention to it.

But when Crys returns and comes towards him for even more pictures — and though he does not know it yet — this is the start of the unbroken contact, the physical connection that as good as sews them together. (Or velcros. Yeah, that sounds better.)

When Gold slips the corsage onto her wrist, she flicks this wink up at him, sweet yet audacious, like she can actually hear the comments still jumping on the tip of his tongue. Then her fingers, deft, pin on a matching boutonniere and he almost gives in right then and there to the combination of featherlight fingers gripping tightly to his jacket. Not knowing where to look, Gold just barely manages to swallow instead of do something inconceivably stupid — and even still, it is an audible sigh for certain. Very audible, in fact, but Mom says nothing. So that is good.

It's only when they're all finally down the street and on their way to the school — without parents, at last — that he leans down over the swing of their now-linked hands and tells her, quite simply, that he thinks her earrings are cool. Their friend group is massive and the sidewalk is skinny so they walk as duos and trios. He and Crys are near the front because she has always been a fast walker and his job tonight is to keep by her side.

She squeezes his hand in retribution — And? — and is about ten seconds shy of a snort of amusement before he adds in some more of his thoughts.

I love you, he says also, the promise tumbling on out.

(Crys does not wait until now — for there are fifty-two minutes that pass between him answering the door with a suit so hot she hadn't been able to blink for a minute — to tell him her own thoughts, the ones meant just for their ears. She had never before thought it was possible to feel this way, so full of emotion — her heart is swelling so impossibly huge in her chest, even though all the air had been sucked out of her lungs just an instant prior by pure thrill.

She catches him in the stairwell for that, just out of sight from the kitchen crowded with a buffet line of foodstuffs, and says the words directly into his ear and watches a smile curl on his lips, first one side then the other, and decides that, yeah, the stolen words are a better choice than a stolen kiss. They would make those up later.)

Now they're here, sans any supervision that's paying enough attention to matter. At the whims of a gym packed with high-schoolers, the music whiplashes from slow to fast to faster all throughout the night, but the two of them just sway, and it's nice.

And it's not like they're alone. He sees his friends running around and jumping, sweatier than they've ever been during their actual gym classes, and her friends drag the two of them into the absurd mosh-pit at least twice to act like the teenagers they are! And they do — Red, for one, might as well not be wearing a shirt, for the absolute waterfalls of sweat that pour down his face and his chest, and even Green has vacated, or been vacated from, his usual place on the bleachers — but Crys doesn't let go of him once.

In the brief moment when he passes the floor-level speaker and abruptly loses all hearing on that side of his body — and there is Emerald beside the DJ; one of his junior friends must have invited him — Gold's world zooms in to the way her hand fits with his. It's both natural and practiced now, after a summer of long days on park benches by the lake and under restaurant tables and on shared couches, as many of those spent fishing with Yellow and dining with Dia and watching movies with Silver as are just the two of them.

At one point, she mimes drinking and he nods; they duck outside for a breath of fresh air and a quick sip of blessedly icy water from the football team coolers. On the way, they watch as Ruby picks up Sapphire's fallen corsage and tucks it into his pocket because at this point he is holding all of her things — we're not dating, they both insist, and we're not going as dates, so it's not a real date or an almost-date or whatever, and would everyone stop saying that word, already!

I love you, Gold says over the rim of his paper water cup, and she pulls him in close before — with his heart hammering like the music that literally vibrates out of the gym and onto the fenced-in asphalt square left to them outside — kissing him soundly on the lips.

Mmm. She smells like...like something soft. He doesn't know, really. But they don't usually smell like anything but grass and city tossed together, and this is...something else entirely.

They get interrupted about two minutes later by a wild-eyed Red and Blue, who are holding hands also and yelling some very awkward encouragement. But perhaps that's a blessing in disguise, for it quickly sends Gold and Crys back inside during what is only the second slow dance of the night and now her hand is folded neatly over his shoulder and his sits on her waist. He rubs his thumb against the thick dress fabric and tries to keep his elbow elevated. They sway, as they have been all night, but now they're spinning, too.

Someone crashes into her just as he's trying to twirl her and their hands fly apart but she is already pressed against his chest and tripping over her own ankles and laughing because the person was Silver's date Lyra and maybe Blue had done it on purpose and maybe she hadn't, but it's impossible to tell. After their friends disappear again, Crys stays right there and Gold is very grateful that he and Blue had made a pact all those years ago not to keep score for favors earned.

They are face to face and hand to hand and toe to toe because he has better things to look at than their footwear and thinks he can feel her pulse. Their arms are rearranged now, their bodies closer, and her wrists rest and burn so wonderfully against the nape of his neck and he has both hands around her back and, oh, Gold is out of his mind with her.

Which is probably why there is confidence radiating off of her when she grins up at him and tilts her head towards the doors pointedly.

He blinks.

All around them, the mosh-pit has dissolved into the typical slow-dance scene. There are couples spinning innocently and couples making out sans remorse and couples awkwardly fading into their own respective groups and couples of platonic friends singing the words loud and proud to the rafters.

He can't even really claim to be dancing at this point; it is more like a hug that turns in circles. Yeah. That. He can feel her shoulder-blades in his palms, the fierce muscle flexing beneath soft skin, and her chin sits against his shoulder.

"Come with me," Crys bids, mouth brushing against the side of his throat and his eyes flutter closed, fast and without his say-so. Oh.

Vaguely, he hopes that his friends are not watching — or, for higher odds of success, he hopes that Blue's phone camera won't be able to catch the way his heart is reacting to the touches against the skin open above his shirt collar.

Gold opens his eyes again. Maybe it's the cheesy music, or the little shower of stars dripping from her earlobes, or the faint sparkles in her dress like lighthouse reflections in a dark sea, but he thinks if he looked long enough, he could find the answers to all the questions in the universe in those dark eyes. Or maybe the eyes are the answer. Or maybe he should stop offering his own metaphors. It's a mystery, because any sense of logic or reason — she would say that he doesn't have much of that, anyway, which is totally fair — took its leave-of-absence about three hours ago.

"Shouldn't we stay to the end?" he asks, voice hoarse and echoing strangely in his ears. On one hand, he thinks it would probably be fun to go out for fries with everybody after the teachers who were suckered into chaperone duty turn on the lights and shove them all out the doors.

But on the other, the thought of stargazing on the football field with Crys at two o'clock in the morning takes up every other sensation inside him.

So. It's not really a struggle, when he thinks of it like that, of curling his arm over her shoulders like they had for pictures, only this time their sole company is turf and clouds and old paint.

"You wanna stay?" Crys asks and presses closer. She drums her fingers lightly against his warm, flushed skin, and his breath shudders. Whatever control he might have tried to muster up abruptly falls away — it's more of a swan dive, really.

"No," he breathes.

She arches an eyebrow — his cheeks must be so pinked-out right now — and there is a smirk on her lips. He wants to kiss it, not to take it away, but to imprint it hard onto his own mouth and remember its teasing curve for the rest of the night. For the rest of his life.

For an instant, a teeny tiny worry of Commitment! knocks on the upstairs window of his brain. And a teeny tiny Gold slams the blinds down and drags the curtains shut and ties them together and knocks over a dresser in front of the glass and decides that for tonight, Crys is everything.

"You know," Gold says, gathering up his wits and his words off the ground the same way he saw Green scooping up Yellow's wildflowers and tucking them back into her braided hair. "I think it's time you and I headed out."

"Oh? What makes you so convinced?" she asks, still smirking — it's all the better because he's pretty sure he at least taught her some of that — and still teasing. And he tries to say something smooth, something up to his usual caliber of nonchalance, something that sounds cool.

"I love you."

i am obsessed with this song and this couple and so many things in between. :)