A/N: WARNIING: SLASH!
This is kind off a prequel for my fic "Family" but can stand alone.
When did this happen? When did I stop seeing my best friend and started to see something… more?
Or was there ever a time when I saw him as just my best friend? There is that one semi-humiliating memory Sharon felt necessary to share with me. According to her I announced after my first week in preschool and one week of knowing a certain Richie Foley that I very much loved my new friend and therefore was going to marry him when we grew up.
Speak of foreshadowing.
It's strange. No matter how much I flirted with girls, dated and all the other things you expect of a teenaged boy, it was Richie who was always part of my visions of the future. Whenever I tried to imagine myself twenty or thirty years from now Richie would be there, would be part of my life in that far-away future.
Even at the times when I envisioned my own future in the darkest shades – the times when I started to get caught up between the gangs and all that – Richie had still been there. Not as part of the gangs and the life of crime I saw myself rapidly sliding into, but as my anchor. As the one who would believe in me and keep me from becoming someone I would hate to know.
It should have been my first freaking clue. Other people imagine their perfect future with a spouse (of the other gender), a house in the suburbs and kids. I always thought about my best friend.
For a long time I thought it was just what best friends did. Keeping together through thick and thin.
Then puberty hit full force and complicated everything. Hit with hormones and disturbing dreams that didn't feature Miss July but a certain best friend.
It was just too weird.
Other Teens sneaked Playboy-issues, I hid the flyers from Dad's centre about gay-children under my bed.
And then came the biggest mistake of them all. The point of no return:
I started to watch Richie.
Like I said, point of no return.
The dreams grew more intense and suddenly where haunting me into my waking hours.
When did I stop seeing my best friend and started to see a potential lay? And how the hell am I ever going to tell him?
Homosexuality isn't a topic Rich and me ever talked about. How do you ask your friend what he thinks about queers? So I observed (as if I hadn't been doing that the whole time) and have come up with nothing.
I know that Richie's Dad hasn't such a high opinion of those people. He isn't shy about telling the world just that whenever he has the opportunity to. Actually, Black people are above those people in his worldview.
Lucky me.
But I also know for a fact that Richie does not share many of his Dad's opinions.
If I say something – If I do something – I might destroy our friendship, but I don't know how much longer I will last before I do something that'll clue Richie in – super genius that he is.
Damn, I sound like one of those soap-opera-teens; all that angst.
It's a nice hobby, Richie Watching. It never gets boring… and I don't mean it in the sappy, mushy way it came out. I do not go all starry-eyed and mush-brained when I see Rich. It's just interesting to watch him tinkering on his newest invention, thinking, laughing, brooding, daydreaming.
Yeah, I got it bad. Want to make something of it?
So, at the very last I am in lust with my best friend. I think it's more that I am in love with that male best friend.
Now, how the hell am I going to do something about that?