Sometimes in the middle of the night, the three of them will lie together—in someone's bed, on the living room floor, in the she-lair, and take turns telling secrets.
"I like boys," Maz says one of those nights, and it's like a punch to Guy's gut. "G-girls too. Everyone, I guess. But that's not the secret, the girl part."
Guy's afraid to break the sanctity of their secret-sharing time, so he doesn't say a word, doesn't move. Kelly smiles at Maz.
"I've only had one crush on another girl," Kelly says. "She moved, though. Last year." She reveals who it was by that piece of information, but Guy and Maz say nothing. Maz half-smiles. Guy already knew, kind of.
After a moment, Kelly says, "Your turn, Guy."
Guy pauses. He looks down at his knees. "Um. I guess I've never, uh. You know, really felt like that toward anyone before. Like I know I've tried with girls, but I think it's because I felt like I had to for some reason."
Kelly nods. Maz breaths a little too hard, like an accidental sigh.
"I like you two, though," he says, and he's not sure what that means yet.
x
"I've always wanted a sibling. Or, you know, siblings."
It's such an opportune moment for Maz to say something like that, because Kelly has Guy's hand in her own, half to admire the ridiculous hot pink she'd just painted onto his fingernails and half just to hold his hand. She smiles. Guy's half asleep, but he smiles, too.
"I mean, like, I know you guys drive each other crazy, but you're always there for each other. I don't know. I wish I had something like that."
Kelly runs a hand through Guy's hair, switching from a tender gesture to trying to muss it up halfway through. Guy jumps a little, and when Kelly's hand is defeated, he gives Maz a groggy grin and said, "Hey, we're pretty much your siblings."
"Yeah, you're like a slightly older, much less annoying brother to me." Mid-sentence, Kelly goes for Guy's hair again. Guy doesn't have much fight left in him tonight, but he shoves his hands up her shirt and starts tickling her sides. Maz doesn't intervene until she squeals his name, and he saves her by going for the undersides of Guy's bruised knees.
They all ignore the fact that everything on Maz's face had screamed that he wasn't so sure he wanted them to think of him as something as limited and confined as a flesh-and-blood brother.
x
"Guy, have you told Maz about the wedding thing? When we were little?"
Maz raises a brow. "Wedding thing?"
Guy shakes his head, a smile quirking at his lips. "You tell. It's your turn."
"Okay, well when Guy and I were little, we used to play, like, hardcore house. We'd have pretty legit weddings all the time, with witnesses and streamers and sometimes Mom would let us throw a little rice around. We'd kiss, too." She waves that last bit away with her hand.
Anyway, then we'd like have this hardcore house thing, like I said. I usually made Guy be the stay-at-home dad to all of my dolls. We had like ten kids, but it was a pretty loveless marriage. We had some intense divorces. Anyway, one day Guy murdered one of our babies and we called it quits for good."
"Murdered?" Maz just looks curious, smiling a little.
"It was one of those plastic baby dolls. I ripped her head off. I wasn't built for the married life, I guess."
"Yeah, well, neither was I. I was a really bad mother, leaving my kids with some maniac and then driving him over the edge."
"I kept the head," Guy says, a bit suddenly.
"What? I thought you threw it out!"
"Nah, I kept it. I used to write letters to you and stuff them into the head hide it in your room but I guess you never found it."
"What? Where is it now?"
"Like I said, in your room."
"You still did it after we moved in here? After—"
"Yeah, after that. It's still in there somewhere."
Kelly clamors to get up. Guy calls a "Hey!" behind her, but she waves him off. "My room is pristine, you couldn't've possibly—"
Guy grins and sits back. Kelly, after a moment, squeals Guy's name. Maz shakes his head.
"You two are weird."
x
"You know, your eyes are really pretty."
Maz's words sound vapid and silly to himself once he speaks them, like something a desperate boy would say to a girl to try to get her to go out with him.
But he really means it. Guy had a really rough night and ended up curled up between him and Kelly, grabbing at them periodically but mostly shaking and groaning whenever he has to move a little. Kelly was looking at the ceiling thoughtfully, and Maz noticed how absolutely gorgeous her eyes were.
Kelly laughs very quietly and says, "Who, me?" She turns her to head face him and smiles, but there's still that sort of intensity he'd noticed when she was just looking up.
"Yeah, you."
"Hey, what about my eyes?" Guy croaks, and they're both surprised to hear him talk.
"Your eyes are like beautiful oceans, Guy," Kelly says, joking on impulse, but then she looks like she's thinking about it. She looks like she's thinking about something all the time – not just thinking about it, but analyzing it and judging and cataloging.
Guy moves a little, so he's not nuzzled against Maz's arm so much, and opens his eyes.
He looks – a bit distressingly, in the back of Maz's mind – only a little more tired than usual, even though he's utterly exhausted. He looks worried, too, like he always does. There are things buzzing in his head but at the front of it all is a layer of laid-back laziness, then a thick layer of exhaustion.
They both have twin pairs of icy blue eyes, but Kelly's are like an intricate melting ice sculpture left on the table after all the wedding guests have gone home and Guy's are like a frozen lake in the afternoon, with weird exotic fish swimming around under the ice. Maz doesn't say that, though. He just smiles and gives Guy probably the gentlest noogie known to man.
"Yeah bro, your eyes are pretty too."
x
They paint each other's nails and cook each other's food and take care of each other when someone's sick or hurting.
Maz practically lives in their house and Guy and Kelly's bedrooms meld together strangely until one is "the red room with the bigger bed" and the other is "the purple room with the comfier bed and plush carpet."
They build impossible standards around each other's best qualities and suitors get shot down almost before they can think to intrude on their little circle. They talk about things like whatever the other two agree on is the most important thing in the world.
They're all getting closer but for some reason people notice Kelly and Maz getting closer the most. Friends tease them and their parents are happy.
People give Guy knowing looks. His mother tries to prod him into confessing he feels left out or some other nonsense.
If anyone elbows him and says anything about his best bro hooking up with his sister, he just smiles, half-appeasingly, because if he's a third wheel their relationship is a tricycle or a three-legged rolling stool.
x
"I want my first kiss to be with one of you," Maz says, and even though Guy halfway blanches he can't help but smile, because it's just like Maz to say that.
Kelly elbows Guy in the ribs. "I'll kiss you, Maz. Guy's too much of a baby; he'll wreck it for you."
"Hey!"
"You know it's true."
Guy rolls his eyes. Kelly laughs, but Maz is clearly too nervous or embarrassed, or whatever's causing the dark blush growing on his face, to join her.
Kelly holds Maz's head still with her hands, and smiles at him until he grins back. The way Kelly pulls them together and the way their heads tilt just right and the way Maz's hands flutter helplessly in search of a proper place to be seems too right and sweet to be real.
Guy breaks his own nervousness by whining, "Eeew!"
Maz and Kelly break away from each other, Kelly to glare at Guy with a smile sliding up the corners of her mouth, and Maz to laugh. Kelly jumps on Guy and blows raspberries into his neck until he squeals.
x
Guy says he feels more confident when he's SheZow. He says he's terrified of his own body, how he wishes he could have stunted his growth years ago and remained a child, small and solid and just girlish enough but still feel completely like a boy.
He says he's only really comfortable and confident when he's SheZow, when he's fighting, but at the same time he constantly wishes he could just take a break. He wishes he could go to bed without worrying about the She-S-P or some other shemergency-related alert system waking him up at odd hours, or not worry so much that he's missing something important, that he's not there for someone who needs him.
Maz and Kelly see and know. They clean up his cuts and bruises and stay with him when he can't sleep and kiss his cheeks and make him laugh. Guy says Kelly and Maz's laughter mingling together is his favorite sound, even when it's at his expense.
x
Sometimes Maz and Kelly end up alone, usually while Guy is off saving the day. They're free to talk about Guy and Kelly is free to make fun of Maz without Guy's interjections and they're free to worry.
They don't talk about that, really, the worry. It was just the way Kelly holds herself, how she sighs and how she jokes less. It was the way Maz lets out sudden bursts of nervousness, groaning and muttering about how he should go find Guy, how he probably needs his help.
They both find out Maz likes doing Kelly's nails just a little bit better than Guy's because she's not so fidgety or distractingly talkative. They both find out their favorite sounds are the little sounds Guy makes when he's happy. They find out Maz fits just right in Kelly's lap and her head fits just right nuzzled into the crook of his neck.
And they both find out they have their share of secrets they'd been keeping from Guy, mostly based around how they both love him a little too much.
x
Kelly scoots closer to Guy, reaching behind her to grab Maz's hand. Guy can't remember a time when his sister looked so scared and vulnerable. He thinks of what a strong person she is, how she takes sadness and pain with wry smiles and cutting jokes, how solid she's always seemed.
"Guy?" she says, and her voice quakes around his short name. "I really— I want— Can I kiss you?"
She says the last four words, her true request, almost too quietly and quickly for him to hear, and he had not been expecting anything like that. He pauses for a moment too long, processing, and Kelly's face brakes into a grimace, trying to stop herself from crying already.
"I— Yeah! Of course!"
It's her turn to pause for just a bit too long, to clearly not believe her ears. Guy takes the opportunity to sit up, trying to pull her up with him. He sees Maz out of the corner of his eye, looking happily cautious and afraid to move, as though any sound or sudden movement from him would frighten his nervous friends beyond repair.
The old Kelly is back when she joins him in sitting up. "You don't have to if you don't want to, you know. I'm not forcing you."
"I know, I want to."
"You want to? Like—just now, or—"
"I've wanted to for a while," he admits, and it's so strange to not really feel ashamed or sick when it's out there, even though it shouldn't be strange at all. They know everything about each other, absolutely everything, and this isn't even that big of a deal.
They both pause much longer than Kelly had when she kissed Maz. Guy takes her hand, gently at first and then a bit more sure, and strength and certainty grows between them. Kelly looks almost too serious, and Guy would probably laugh if his own nervousness wasn't almost choking him.
Kelly puts a hand along his jaw and leans forward. At the very last moment, Guy moves his head to the side, just a bit, but enough that Kelly only catches the corner of his mouth with her own. She stays there for a moment. They're kissing just like they had when they put on fake weddings when they were little.
She moves, just enough so she's lined up with Guy's lips again. Guy thinks for a moment she might try again, but after a few seconds she nestles her face in Guy's neck. He can feel her smiling against his skin, and he knows it had been enough.
Maz is there, then. He climbs over legs and takes hands until he's as close as he can be without disturbing them too much.
"I think I'm in love with both of you," he says, and it's like the last tiny puzzle piece is put in place.