Strawberry

(by Mondie)

(February 1, 2005)

Disclaimer: Newsies Disney's.

The boy walked like he had a secret. The duck of his head, the way that his mouth was speckled with the incandescence of a shy smirk, the twisting of his fingers into ribbon candy, the question mark curve of his hunched-over shoulders: all of these uncharacteristic traits pointed to the fact that he was harboring a dark, deep, forbidden piece of news. His pace, usually calm and prim, was all of a sudden gangly and strutting. His eyebrows arched so high that they disappeared beneath the brim of his hat, as though their laborious task of keeping a beaming grin under concealment was difficult enough to cause them to pass from existence.

Someone had uttered The Words to him just that morning. The Words were ones that could make another person's life as unlivable as they could make it worth living; The Words could freeze a soul as much as make it burn like red-hot coals; The Words could set a body to weeping just as easily as make him grin outright. The Words gasped within, yearning to be spoken; The Words just as easily wished to stay inside, hidden in the depths of years of pain.

"I love you." A hasty whisper made up of The Words, hissed into his ear like steam escaping a spout. A grip so fierce, so gruesome that he would have bruises lacing his ribcage in the morning. Ten fingers tangled in his hair, a knee jarring into the warm flesh of his slight stomach, keeping him pinned to the alley wall. "You hear me?" He could only nod, transfixed, staring deeply into the eye, the one blue, watery eye which was all he could make out of his assailant when his head throbbed like this. Then the eye came closer, until it was practically swallowing his face, staring with its truth and honesty and god-awful pain. Followed by what the boy thought must be a kiss, although it was too rough to really be a kiss, because both pairs of lips were chapped and bleeding from the cold, and it caused shivers of pain or maybe excitement through his body, which kisses had never done to him before.

The boy smirked, because he wasn't sure what else to do. He supposed he could grin. It wasn't every day that someone told a street kid like himself that he was loved. But the grin was too slow in coming to his face, so instead he smirked. After all, he reasoned, it wasn't like it was the right kind of love. It was the bad kind of love, the love that all the older boys had experienced but hated to talk about, the love that kept Specs awake at night and the love that forced Cowboy to have one of the little boys watch guard over his bed while he slept. The bad love that was forbidden and evil and hated, the bad love that was almost worse than no love at all.

Mush raised his fumbling fingers, the ones that nervously kept picking at each other, and hesitantly touched his lips. They were still bloody from the cold, but even when he experimentally pushed on them as hard as he could with his calloused fingertips, he couldn't recreate the feeling that had accompanied that rough, awful Kiss. There was no surge of shock and heat and pain and ecstasy and wrongness and rightness and excitement and danger and that pounding of his heart that he could hear in his ears as though his heart had leapt up right into his earlobes. All he felt when he applied pressure was discomfort, and that wasn't at all what he'd felt before, so he let his fingers fall back down to twisting themselves in knots.

It wasn't the first time he hadn't known the cause of his feelings. Once, last month, he had seen Kid Blink rise up from his bed in the middle of the night and stumble into the washroom. He had been wearing the old pajamas, because he hadn't been able to save up enough money that week to buy new ones. They had gotten ripped when he was in a wrestling match with Snoddy, and the fabric flapped open upon his right thigh. The sight of Kid Blink's hair tousled from thrashing on the mattress, mixed with his slothful exit from the bedroom and that tear, showing the slight bulge of muscle adorned with pale, china-white flesh, had made Mush's stomach seize up. He had lain doubled-over in pain, unsure of why his body was suddenly filled with this new foreign tightness, unable to sleep until long after Kid Blink's snores had rejoined the anthem of mumblings chorusing through the bunkroom.

And now. The Kiss.

Mush had kissed girls before. He had the least dirty face out of all of his friends, because he didn't have to shave yet but he still washed his face every morning with a bit of the lather that the older boys used while smoothing off their stubble with a razor. Girls liked clean faces. They also liked accompanying manners and a bright smile and boys who bowed their heads in politeness before speaking to them. And Mush owned all of these particular virtues. He could find a date on nights when even the oldest of the older boys sat at home alone, and sometimes, if he got lucky, the girls would turn up their little moon-round faces to his and purse their lips, and that would be his cue to take them in his arms and press his cracked lips to their dolled-up, smooth ones. So he knew what kissing was like. Kissing was calm and rhythmic and long and clean and had the taste of the first strawberry in June, when the fruit was still a little too green and blandly sour. Kissing was a little bit like girls, Mush realized. They too were like the first strawberries in June.

Remembering The Words, and how they were followed by The Kiss, Mush's pace sped up a little. He rounded a corner, and walked right into another fast-walking individual. Usually this would horrify Mush, who liked decorum above all other things, but this time he smiled.

The other boy had waited to see Mush's reaction, and when he saw the smile, his face sagged in relief. He jerked his head violently to the left, signaling to Mush to follow him into the alley there. Watching his friend's dark-blond hair swing through the air, Mush was hypnotized and found himself following Kid Blink into the alley without seeming to move his feet at all.

Blink had grabbed some boxes and stacked them on top of each other, leaning against the alley wall and then built another stack a few feet away, also leaning against the dark red bricks. Without speaking, he roughly grabbed Mush by the shoulders and pushed him in between the two stacks, so that they were hidden from view by either way of entrance into the alley.

"Did you tell anyone about earlier?" Blink asked, his hands still on Mush's shoulders, pushing down. Mush could feel the warmth from Blink's hands shooting fireworks through his body, just like those really great fireworks that Cowboy bought every fourth of July for a nickel a stick. The ones that worked so well that they were actually worth a nickel apiece. And not just anything was worth an entire nickel.

The feeling that had come from The Kiss? That was worth an entire nickel.

"Did you really mean it?" Mush asked in return, not an answer at all. Kid Blink scowled at him, pushing him further into the bricks. Mush's insides squirmed from a combination of danger and a sense of perfection. He could feel the tightness again, the one from that late night in the bunkroom. It spread through his body starting just below his navel, and he could feel the blood pumping through every vein in his body, and was dangerously aware of his pirouetting heartbeat. He thought about The Words. "Did you really mean that you loved me?"

"Cheese it, someone will hear you!" Blink shouted back. His eye – that one, stormy blue eye only inches away from Mush's face again – indented its glare into Mush's face. "Did you tell anyone?"

Mush shook his head, secretly thrilled by the excitement of the situation, feigning submission when all he really was waiting for was the terrible-wonderful press of those horrible-magnificent lips upon his, and the accompanying jerk of his stomach and the surging pain of rough lips sandpapering his mouth. That kiss, the kiss from Blink, was real strawberry, the mid-August version of the fruit that was full and red and meaty and dribbled juice down his chin.

And Blink himself was like an August strawberry to Mush, just like the girls were June strawberries. Life was more full when Mush was with Blink: it was sparkling and perilous and full and slightly dangerous but always sweet. Mush had always assumed that this was how it was for everyone. Surely none of the other boys liked being with their girls as much as they liked being with their friends.

But, really, Mush thought to himself, what then was the point of having a girl? He didn't need them for excitement and adventures during the day, and he really didn't enjoy them at night either, at least not half as much as he liked this, the forbidden, bad love which was so much sweeter and more fulfilling than any of the "good" love he had ever known.

He held up a hand between their faces just before Kid Blink did the exciting swoop of a kiss, and lowered it only when he was sure that Blink was going to listen to him. He cleared his throat. This was a scary thing to say, but he had to, because Mush believed an important part of politeness was honesty. And if Mush was anything, it was polite.

"Blink, I love you too."

And he turned his moon-round face upward and pursed his lips, and Blink thought for one second how it looked just like a strawberry in mid-August, and proceeded to lean forward toward the sweet prize.

(if you review, I'll write more of abt! BWAHAHAHA)