The first time Chris ever saw him, he was high. That is to say, Chris was high, whereas he had probably never even seen pot in his life. Chris, however, saw it on a regular basis and was currently stoned out of his mind.
It was a sunny day, rare at this time of year, and so Chris's friend CJ had insisted on not only throwing every window wide open, but also on dragging Chris out of the small apartment the two of them shared. Upon emerging, Chris had flung his hands up to cover his eyes and yelped, "The light! It burns!" but CJ had just laughed, grabbed Chris's arm, and pulled him down the street.
Though Chris would never have admitted it, he was halfway glad to get out of the apartment. Even under the influence of pot, he could tell that his new painting was not going as well as he would have hoped; if CJ hadn't gotten him outside, he would have spent the whole day staring at the canvas, his high spiraling down into a rotten mood, glumly trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong and how to fix it.
After ten or fifteen minutes, though, Chris was starting to get tired. He hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, due to a sudden burst of creativity on a painting (not the one that was currently giving him trouble – Chris liked to have two or three paintings in progress at once; that way, if he got bored with one, he could switch to another and not feel as though he were starting over entirely). He began dragging his feet, and through his drug-induced haze, whined, "CJ, where are we going?"
CJ grinned at him, his eyes impish in a way that forever gave the lie to anyone who called Asians inscrutable. "The park. Not for too long," he quickly amended, seeing the pout that was about to form on Chris's face, "I promise. Just for long enough that the smell in our apartment starts to air out."
"What smell?"
"The pot," CJ said. "It's not a problem, Chris – I mean, I smoke up too, but lately, you've been… overdoing a bit, I think."
Chris blinked. Normally, he would have been annoyed by CJ's reasonable moralizing, but he was having a really nice high. "Oh," he replied mildly, with only the slightest trace of petulance in his voice. "And why the park?"
CJ's only reply was another mischievous grin. Brushing his blond hair out of his eyes, Chris frowned. Something was up. No matter how jovial CJ normally seemed, he never grinned like that for no reason, and it made Chris nervous – or would have, anyway, but damn if this wasn't a great high.
The two boys drew near to the park, and Chris sighed contentedly. It was a nice park: soft green grass, wide open spaces, and at the edges, low-hanging trees that afforded as much shade as a person could ever want. If Chris ever started painting outside, this would be the place to start.
Suddenly, a soccer ball flew through the hair, followed by boyish yelling. A large group of young men hot in pursuit of the ball followed it into view, presumably from a more secluded area of the park.
"Oh, well," Chris said, disappointed at how quickly the tranquility had vanished. "CJ, should we head back?" He paused. "CJ?" A sideways glance revealed that CJ had perched himself on the nearby stone wall and was watching the soccer players with rapt attention. Chris shook his head with a small grin; he should have known. It wasn't so much that CJ had a thing for soccer players in particular, or even athletes; CJ just liked guys, in all of their various incarnations.
Chris couldn't blame him much, but he did consider himself quite a bit pickier than CJ. In order to catch Chris's eye, a guy had to be… Well, Chris wasn't actually sure that such a man could ever exist outside of a work of art. But as guys went, this group wasn't too bad-looking, from what Chris could see; he had never been too fond of jocks, but they did have nice bodies, perhaps to make up for their lack of brains.
Shrugging, Chris hopped up onto the wall and settled himself next to CJ. "You did this on purpose, didn't you?" he commented.
CJ smirked. "They've been practicing every day at about the same time."
"Do you actually know anything about soccer?"
"Do you?"
"Touché." Chris let his eyes wander up from the guys, who seemed to have calmed down enough to actually kick the ball around in a relatively calm way. Sure, they looked nice, but how could they compare to the graceful sweep of the trees behind them? Or to the arcing firmament of the deepest blue? Or to the grass that was, in his pleasant trance, somehow a greener green than he'd ever seen before? Or to—
"Hey, guys, wait up for me!" came a yell from behind the trees, just before a newcomer charged out and easily swept the black-and-white checked ball out from under a teammate's feet.
Chris's dreamy thought process came crashing to a halt and his mouth fell open as he looked at the newest player… and kept on looking. The boy – probably around Chris's own age – was the most incredible-looking boy Chris had ever seen. His looks slowly assembled themselves in Chris's mind, coming to him in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle: shaggy black hair that seemed to catch and the sun in its sweat-tangled locks, smooth, golden skin, dazzling white teeth that flashed in a delighted grin, sloe eyes crinkling against the sun, and perhaps most dangerous of all, revealed when the boy stripped off his dampened shirt, a torso that could have been sculpted by Michelangelo.
It was the pot. It had to be the pot. No human being could actually look that perfect. Not in real life. Chris shook his head, trying to clear his mind of the vision that seemed to have seared itself onto his eyeballs.
The boy probably had greasy hair and terrible acne. His breath must be terrible, and Chris's dazed mind was probably transforming rolls of fat into rippling muscles.
"You okay, Chris?" CJ asked from next to him.
Chris licked his dry lips. "Can we go now?" he asked, hating how nervous his voice sounded.
"Why?" CJ asked, clearly disappointed. "You're not having fun?"
Across the field, the boy kicked the ball, and it traveled in an arc as perfect as the curve of the earth below them, landing right near CJ and Chris. Chris winced as the ball hit the ground, and stared at it as though it were some sort of alien.
"Hey!" the guy called out, and his voice was every bit as nice as the rest of him. "Can you toss that back?"
CJ elbowed Chris, but Chris couldn't move. He couldn't seem to stop looking at the boy who was now, God help him, smiling right at Chris and looking at him with those big, dark eyes.
Finally, CJ shrugged, hopped off of the wall, and picked up the ball. He threw it, and it landed neatly in the boy's outstretched arms. The vision of perfection smiled at them once more, calling, "Thanks!" and turned back to his game, seeming to shrug slightly.
"Chris," CJ said dryly, "quit gaping before a bug flies into your mouth." He folded his arms. "Why didn't you get that?"
"Huh?" Chris asked vaguely.
"He kicked it right over to you," CJ explained with only a hint of impatience and the slightest roll of his eyes. "He pretty obviously wanted you to toss it back."
Chris blinked, tearing his gaze from the dark-haired boy for the first time. "Me? You kidding?"
"Nope. He was looking at you, Chris, and you blew it."
With a self-conscious laugh, Chris pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. "Well, if he was looking at me, there's no way he's actually that good-looking," he mumbled to himself.
"What?"
"Nothing, CJ," Chris replied hastily. "Let's head home now. Sun's great and all, but I'm going to burn, and, uh, I don't think it's a good idea for me to be here right now."
"You all right?" CJ asked, a trace of genuine concern in his voice. "Pot doesn't usually make you paranoid."
"Uh, yeah, paranoid," Chris said. "Real paranoid. Let's go."
Their roles reversed, Chris grabbed CJ's arm and dragged him from the park, resisting all but the quickest backward glance at the boy, who was now bouncing the ball around on his knees. And he told himself that those knees were probably knobby.
CJ was starting to worry about Chris, not that worrying about Chris was terribly unusual. After all, this was the same guy who had once tried to convince CJ that they should go rafting down the Mississippi, pretending to be the ghosts of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer because "it'd be funny to freak people out" (CJ had quickly reminded him that they lived nowhere near the Mississippi), the same guy who, as a child, had tried to jump off of a fifth floor balcony because his big brother had promised to catch him, the same guy who had walked right up to some terrifying-looking bikers outside of a bar and asked them if they would model for his paintings. Chris had never really been completely 'with it,' but this was different.
Chris had been acting really strangely the last couple of days, ever since they'd gone on that walk. Once they'd gotten back to their apartment, Chris had immediately shut himself in his room and hadn't emerged since then for more than a couple minutes at a time, covered in paint. That, in and of itself, wasn't especially strange; when Chris got going on a painting, sometimes CJ wouldn't see him for days. The strange part was that when CJ had gone down on his hands and knees to sniff under Chris's door, there was no evidence of pot. Chris had always been a bit too generous with marijuana, and CJ couldn't remember a single time when Chris had painted without it, not in the last several years anyway.
So something was definitely up.
He'd been staring at Chris's door for several minutes now, willing Chris to emerge and act like his normal stoned self, but there was complete silence from behind the poster-adorned door. CJ knew there was no chance that Chris was asleep; he was like a vampire in more ways than just his avoidance of the sun.
Finally, unnerved by the complete silence, and annoyed by Chris's unusual behavior (seriously, he never painted sober), CJ marched right up to the door and hammered on it several times. "Chris!" he yelled. "Get out here!"
There was an annoyed grumbling from behind inside the room, but the door didn't open.
"Damnit, Chris!" CJ pounded on the door again. "I'm not kidding, get out here!"
There was a pounding in response, but it didn't come from inside Chris's room; it came from the apartment below CJ. "Hey, buddy!" a muffled voice floated up to him. "Shut up!"
CJ bit his lip. He was unsure whether to apologize, or to tell the man to go to hell, that he was worried about his friend. While he was puzzling over his response, Chris's door quietly opened and Chris stepped out.
"Chris!" CJ exclaimed. "What have you been doing all this time? What are you—" His words cut off in mid-sentence as he looked at Chris in disbelief.
Not only was Chris not covered in paint or reeking of pot, he was dressed in running shoes, shorts and a clean t-shirt. Gone were his usual baggy jeans, his t-shirt covered with unidentifiable stains, his ratty sandals. If CJ hadn't known much, much better, he would have thought that Chris was a normal person.
"Morning, CJ," Chris said into the gaping silence. The corner of his mouth twitched upwards into a nervous grin. "How'd you like to take a walk?"
"C-Chris?" CJ managed. "What the—"
"Let's go to the park," Chris said, and even his fingernails were clean, not encrusted with paint. He pulled his bedroom door closed behind him and patted CJ on the shoulder. "You all right, CJ? You're all pale."
"Did someone finally catch you and give you a lobotomy?" CJ asked.
"Lobotomy?" Chris laughed, pulling a pair of sunglasses from seemingly nowhere and setting them on his face. "Nah. C'mon, let's go." As he pulled CJ towards the door, he asked, "By the way, why were you out here shouting? Are you feeling okay?"
CJ furrowed his brow. His earlier thought had been that something was up. Now, however, he amended that thought. Something was very, very wrong.
For Chris's part, he seemed to be in high spirits. He laughed and chatted all the way to the park, betraying himself only with a slight wince when the two of them left the building and the sun hit them.
"Chris," CJ finally said, as they reached the park and Chris headed unerringly for the stone wall where they'd sat the other day, "you're acting really weird. You know that, right?"
Chris rolled his eyes – or at least, CJ thought he did; it was tough to tell behind those sunglasses (since when did Chris own sunglasses?) – and hopped up onto the wall. "I'm fine. I just got a really good night's sleep."
"And it changed your entire personality?"
"Well, uh, maybe I really needed a good night's sleep." Chris nodded firmly, scanning the horizon for something.
CJ joined him on the wall and folded his arms suspiciously. "You don't smell like pot."
"I took a shower."
"You—" CJ sniffed the air, and his eyes rounded in surprise. "You smell like sunscreen."
"Well, I knew I was going outside for a while, and I didn't want to burn."
"…You're a freak," CJ said, and really, it was all he could think of to say.
Chris looked like he was going to respond, but then the soccer players ran onto the field, and suddenly Chris looked as though he'd tasted something sour.
"Oh no," Chris mumbled under his breath, just loud enough for CJ to hear.
"What's wrong?" CJ tried to follow Chris's gaze, but with those sunglasses – those darn sunglasses! – it was hard to tell exactly where he was looking.
"N-nothing," Chris said.
CJ almost smiled. Chris might be acting like Bizarro Chris, but he was still a terrible liar.
"C'mon," he persisted. "Something's wrong. That little muscle next to your mouth is twitching."
Chris lifted the sunglasses to look at CJ, and his blue eyes looked dazed, the pupils shrunken to mere pinpricks. "It wasn't the pot," he said desperately, inexplicably.
"What?"
"I thought it was, but it wasn't."
"You're not making any sense."
But no matter how CJ pestered, Chris would say nothing more, and didn't even try to explain himself. He just stared at the soccer team from behind his sunglasses and mumbled to himself.
Finally, CJ grabbed Chris's arm and shook him a little bit. "Chris," he said, "you're scaring me, dude. I've known you for nearly twenty years, and you've never acted this way. What's going on?"
Chris turned his head and seemed to really look at CJ for the first time. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the soccer ball hit the wall mere inches below their feet. Both boys winced in surprise, and one of the players – the same one who'd kicked the ball over the other day – came jogging over.
"Sorry about that!" the boy said with a sheepish grin.
CJ quickly said, "Oh, it's no problem," seeing as how Chris had completely clammed up. Automatically appraising the player, CJ mentally shrugged. He wasn't bad-looking: dark hair, tan skin, nice smile, and all that, but he wasn't really CJ's type.
The player, having grabbed the ball and tucked it under his arm, didn't leave. "Weren't you two here the other day?" he asked curiously.
"Yeah," CJ said. "A day or two ago. It's a nice park, huh?" He elbowed Chris, hoping that Chris would emerge from his paralysis and say something or even nod, just so long as he wasn't sitting there a like a complete idiot. Chris didn't move.
"You guys like watching soccer?" the boy asked, wiping his hand across his damp forehead.
CJ nodded. It wasn't entirely a lie. He did like watching soccer, but probably not for the same reasons this guy was thinking of.
The player shifted his weight from foot to foot. "Well, hey, I don't suppose…" He coughed. "I don't suppose either of you two play soccer?"
"Not really," CJ said, shaking his head. He elbowed Chris again. Chris might as well have been a marionette for all the reaction he got.
"Oh, that's too bad…" the dark-haired boy replied. He glanced back at his teammates, some of whom were looking over curiously, but most of whom were just fooling around. "We're short a player," he explained. "Jack broke his leg the other day, and we need a new center forward. It's not a serious game – we split the team up into two sides, mostly just for practice – but it's fun." He shrugged almost apologetically. "On the off-chance that either of you could have been players, it was worth asking."
"It's no problem," CJ replied. "I'm sorry that we can't h—"
"I can do it."
CJ's head snapped around to stare at Chris, who seemed to have regained the ability to speak, even if it was only to say stupid things. Chris was looking at the player.
"I'll do it," Chris repeated calmly, and CJ stupidly noticed that Chris was pitching his voice lower than usual.
The player broke into a smile. "That's great," he said enthusiastically. "Thanks so much! Have you played center forward before?"
"'Have I played center forward?'" Chris repeated mockingly, but in a nice way. "When haven't I played center forward?"
"Chris—" CJ hissed, but Chris elbowed him in the side. Hard.
While CJ grimaced in pain and clutched his side, the player held out his hand for Chris to shake.
"Chris, is it?" he asked. "I'm Alejandro. Nice to meet you."
"Alejandro," Chris repeated, shaking his hand firmly. Still in pain, CJ noticed that Chris squeezed Alejandro's hand a bit too tightly while shaking. Only a brief spasm of discomfort passed over Alejandro's face. "Oh," Chris added, gesturing at CJ, "this is CJ. He's my roommate."
"Nice to meet you," Alejandro said with a friendly smile, still holding out his hand.
CJ managed a sickly grin and a weak handshake. "Yeah. Hi," he croaked.
"Well," Alejandro said, turning back to look at Chris, "I'd give you time to go and change, but it looks like you're already dressed for a game."
"I'll be right there," Chris said. "Just finishing up a little man talk with CJ here," he added, punching CJ in the shoulder.
CJ waited until Alejandro had nodded understandingly and jogged off before rounding on Chris. "What do you think you're doing?" he hissed, abandoning his aching side in favor of his newly-aching shoulder.
Chris hopped off the wall and shrugged disarmingly. "Playing soccer."
"Playing—" CJ shook his head in disbelief. "Have you ever played soccer in your whole life?"
Chris snorted. "You kick a ball around and try to get it in the goal. How hard could it be?" He paused. "By the way, what's a center forward?"
"You are so doomed," CJ said.
"Fine, don't tell me." Chris glanced over at the players. "I guess I'll be home later."
"Have, uh, fun."
Chris nodded and strolled away, heading oh-so-casually in the direction of the team. CJ just shook his head and started back to the apartment, puzzling the whole way.
By the time he stepped back into the apartment, though, he was no closer to figuring out Chris's weird behavior than he had been back at the park. He sat on the couch for a few minutes, still turning the whole thing over and over again in his head.
Finally, feeling only slightly guilty, he stood up, strode over to Chris's door, and threw it open. It was Chris's own fault for not locking it, he told himself, stepping inside. Chris's room was as messy as ever it was, which was something of a relief.
He looked around, trying to see what – if anything – had changed. There had to be something, something, anything to explain Chris's bizarre behavior. Something must have changed. Maybe there was asbestos in Chris's walls, or maybe –
It was then that he noticed the new, large canvas on Chris's easel. It was a rough-looking work, but it was very good and bore Chris's distinctive swirling signature in the lower left – It must have been what Chris had been working on for the last couple of days.
CJ scrutinized it, staring at it for a long moment.
"Oh," he said.
Chris limped home, his thoughts as dark as his body was exhausted – and his body felt like it had been battered with a wrecking ball. Today hadn't gone well at all. In fact, he thought gloomily, wishing that the sun would hurry up and set already, today had been pretty horrifyingly bad.
He'd started out with a sense of optimism. When he'd woken up, it had been with the idea of going back to the park; his last days had been wretched, obsessed, thinking of no one and nothing other than the gorgeous soccer player, but if he went to the park and saw, once and for all, that the young man's preternatural good looks weren't actually real, then he'd be able to stop thinking about him. It had seemed like the perfect plan (and he'd told himself sternly that he was only dressing nicely because he wanted to see CJ's eyes pop out).
Unfortunately for Chris's sanity, it hadn't turned out that way. In the full flush of sobriety, Chris could see that the soccer player was even better looking than he had been when Chris was stoned. At that point, Chris had been ready to give up, go home, and take a cold shower. After all, whoever the boy was, he was completely out of Chris's league. Chris was no jock, he was an artist; he had no idea how normal guys talked to each other.
But then the boy – Alejandro, Chris now knew – had kicked the ball in their direction and asked him and CJ if either of them wanted to play soccer. And in a flash of inspiration, Chris had seen what he should do. If he wanted to find out anything about Alejandro, to get to know him, even just to find out if he was interested in guys or not, there was only one thing he could do: play soccer.
So he'd volunteered and gone over to play. From that point on, things had gone downhill. The players had seemed to expect him to know what a center forward was, and what one did; he'd managed to worm his way out of that one by very quickly adopting a thick accent and asking, "This, how you say, 'center forward,' which position is?" They'd rolled their eyes and Alejandro had sent him a very strange look, but they'd explained very slowly and loudly that it was his job to score goals. Chris had nodded; surely he'd be able to kick a ball into the net. They'd then told him that he was the target man, and Alejandro was the link man. He'd had no idea what that meant, but from listening to the short conversation about strategy that had followed, he'd gleaned that Alejandro's job was to get the ball to him so that he could score.
His mind had filled with the scenario of how it was supposed to go: he'd wind up being a wonderful center forward and scoring numerous goals. Then, after the game, Alejandro would volunteer to walk him home, bat those big, brown eyes at him, and tell him how incredible he was. After that, well… Chris tried to keep the lascivious thoughts to a minimum. After all, he had a game to win!
It hadn't seemed so bad at first; mostly the guys just passed the ball back and forth, trying to keep it from the other team. Chris had started to relax a little. But then the ball had made its way to him for the first time, and his mind had immediately screamed at him that he had to score right now. Following his instincts, he'd turned and given the ball a kick in the direction of the goalie with as much power as he could manage.
It was hard to recall which had happened first. In some order, Chris had felt something in his leg pop, and the ball had gone wide of the net. Horribly wide. So wide, in fact, that it went straight up into the air and hit him on the head on the way down.
After that, the whole afternoon was something of a pain-filled blur. He remembered foul after foul for touching the ball with his hands (once had been on purpose; the ball had been about to smash him in the face, and he had to bat it away). He remembered trying to kick the ball to someone on his team whose name eluded him, and finding out only after the pass that the player was on the other side. He remembered tripping and falling several times as well as crashing into other guys and winding up on his back, blinking at the sky. He remembered the disbelieving laughter and head shaking that he'd caught out of the corner of his eye from the rest of the guys – except for Alejandro. Alejandro just stared at the ground.
Worst of all, when the torture was finally over, he remembered pasting a big smile on his face and saying, in a self-denigrating fashion (only barely remembering to adopt the fake accent), "Well, he asked me if I could play. He never asked me if I could play well."
Covered with sweat, he'd crouched down to re-tie his shoes, and when he'd stood up, Alejandro was standing in front of him, looking embarrassed.
"Hey, look," Alejandro said, "I wanted to say sorry for pressuring you into playing."
"You didn't pressure me," Chris protested, but weakly. His head was pounding and he felt like he was about to collapse.
"Well, it didn't really look like you, er, wanted to be playing."
"I did so," Chris replied, wiping his dirt-covered face.
"I… I don't want to sound insulting, but have you really ever played soccer before?"
Inwardly, Chris groaned. He didn't want to lie, but the truth would make him sound so stupid. "Yes and no," he said slowly.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that…" Chris shook his head. Wasn't he already humiliated enough? "Meaning that when I was a toddler, my brothers would play soccer in our backyard, put me in front of the net, and tell me to stop the ball if it came near me." He shrugged. "I was a little young to learn some of the finer nuances of the game."
The corner of Alejandro's mouth twitched, but the amusement faded from his face quickly. "Then why did you lie?"
"Huh?"
"You said you could play center forward." Alejandro crossed his arms. "We were kind of counting on that."
Chris could tell that Alejandro was trying to keep from sounding accusing, but it wasn't working too well. He sighed guiltily.
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"Why'd you do it?"
That was one explanation he really didn't want to give. "Because, I dunno, I like sports." He coughed and deepened his voice a bit, trying to sound tougher – Maybe it'd make his lies seem more feasible. "Yeah, sports are kind of my life, you know, and I play 'em whenever I get a chance. Fun to get out on the, uh, field of honor. And all that."
"Field of honor?" Alejandro repeated incredulously.
"Yup. The scent of sweat, and the, um, t-taste of blood," Chris continued, getting a little more into it. The least he could do was sound like a jock. If he did it well enough, maybe Alejandro would overlook his dismal performance during the game. "For real guys, know what I mean? Separates the boys and the cowards from the men." He raised up a clenched fist and pounded it against his chest, wincing involuntarily.
"What do you mean, the taste of blood?"
"Oh, you know." Chris waved a hand expansively. "Sometimes you're grappling during a fight and things get heated, and you know how we guys are… Well, sometimes you just gotta give into that urge to bite and rip and really go all…" He paused; what was that guy's name? "Go all Mike Tyson on a guy, right?" he finished triumphantly.
Alejandro paused. "You're nuts," he said finally.
Chris laughed loudly, though the muscle next to his mouth was twitching, and he had a sudden heavy feeling in his stomach. "No, not nuts. Just a normal guy."
"Right." Alejandro laughed too, clearly uncomfortably, and said, "Well, see you around." He nodded, turned, and ambled away.
Chris watched him go, knowing somehow that Alejandro hadn't been sorry to walk away from him. He let his head droop. He was tired and hurting and he'd wasted a whole afternoon, all for nothing. Alejandro didn't like him, not even a little.
"What does he want?' he muttered under his breath. "I played his damn game."
But there had been no answer, and Chris had stood up and trudged towards home.
The further he walked, the more embarrassed he got by the whole thing. The humiliation seemed to emanate from him in waves. It was so tangible by the time he got home that CJ didn't even try to talk to him, just looked at him knowingly. Chris glared back and slammed his door behind him.
Once inside his room, he couldn't look at any of his paintings, especially the one that sat prominently on his easel, overshadowing the entire room. Instead, he pulled open his socks drawer, rummaged through it, and pulled out a small plastic baggie filled with small green leaves. He'd tried to avoid pot the last couple of days, and look where it had gotten him. If ever he'd needed to get high, that time was now.
He wasn't quite sure why this whole thing was bothering him so much; after all, it wasn't as though he knew Alejandro or anything about him other than that he played soccer and was incredibly handsome. The number of words that had passed between them could very nearly fit through the eye of a needle. Hell, for all Chris knew, Alejandro could be a real jerk or a complete idiot. He probably thought that soccer was the be-all and end-all of life. He probably kicked puppies. And once he was done kicking the puppies, he burned down orphanages and danced on the ashes. All in all, the sort of guy that Chris would want nothing to do with.
And besides which, it wasn't as though he'd ever actually hit on Alejandro and been rejected – or as though he'd ever see Alejandro again, because there was no way he was going to go back to the park after this.
So why did he feel as depressed as though he'd actually lost something important?
"Could you believe that guy?" Jeremy laughed. "When he passed the ball to you, I almost died."
"You almost died?" Tony snickered in return. "How'd you think I felt?"
"Well, you must've gotten over it quickly, Tony, because you turned right around and scored on us," Ryan said lightly, stealing one of Tony's fries.
"That was hilarious!" Nick said.
"Yeah, speak for yourself, you were on the team that scored."
Alejandro leaned back with a small sigh as the guys around him laughed and talked. The topic of the day was, of course, Chris's disastrous playing. And it was kind of funny; Alejandro had never seen anyone play half as badly as Chris had that afternoon. He wanted to join in and laugh with the rest of the guys, but something stopped him, almost as if he felt some strange sort of loyalty to Chris.
He had no idea why that would be so, particularly as Chris seemed to be a certifiable crackpot. The first time Alejandro had seen him, he'd looked so laid-back, relaxing in grungy clothes, sitting on the wall with his roommate. But today? Alejandro whistled under his breath. He never would have guessed someone like Chris to be such a diehard sports and blood fan.
If he'd known that Chris was that kind of weird, he never would have approached him. Of course, if he'd known that Chris couldn't play soccer at all, he wouldn't have asked. And then he wouldn't have had to suffer through that terrible accent Chris had adopted rather than admit that he couldn't play and didn't know the rules.
It really was kind of a pity, Alejandro mused, picking up his water glass and taking a sip. There had been something about Chris that had caught his eye the first time, a sort of fey look, as though Chris was someone who didn't live entirely in this world. It hadn't hurt, either, that Chris was really cute, with those curious eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles and that soft, shaggy hair of a blinding color that he'd never before seen naturally (but which he'd just known was natural).
But then, as Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons had so succinctly put it, "Why are the pretty ones always insane?"
There was, however, something nagging at the back of his mind: a look on Chris's face that he'd worn only for a fraction of a second when he'd thought that no one was looking at him. Alejandro might not have even noticed it, except that it had been a really intense look. It had been a mix of desperation, determination, and humiliation so tangible that it had nearly stopped his heart in its tracks. But after that, Chris had resumed playing terribly and Alejandro had convinced himself that he'd just imagined the look.
Except that he knew he hadn't.
"…isn't that right, Alejandro?"
He shook his head to clear it and glanced up. Tony was looking at him expectantly.
"Sorry, Tony," he said, "What was that?"
"I was telling the guys that you had no idea that Blondie couldn't play."
"Oh," Alejandro said, glancing down at his hamburger, which had sounded good when he ordered it, but didn't seem so appetizing at the moment. "Yeah, I didn't know. He said he could play."
"And that accent," Jeremy chimed in. "Oh, god, that accent."
"This position, what is?" Ryan said innocently, in a nearly perfect imitation.
At that, the guys all dissolved into helpless laughter. Alejandro laughed too; he couldn't help it. And really, what was so bad about laughing? Chris was an over-the-top macho weirdo. People like that deserved to be mocked mercilessly.
Even Chris's hurt expression had probably just been because he hadn't played as well as the big, muscled, perfect Chris-inside-his-own-mind should have played. Nothing more.
There was absolutely no reason for this to bother Alejandro. He didn't know Chris, he didn't care about – or like – Chris, and it wasn't like any of the guys blamed him for Chris's not being able to play. It really wasn't a big deal.
All the same, he couldn't keep from grinning, imagining a little blond toddler sitting in the goal, staring with round blue eyes at the ball rolling towards him.
And so the next day, Alejandro kept an eye on the stone wall across the field from where they played, half-expecting Chris to show up and sit there. He didn't worry about it too much; it was a particularly exciting game, and with no target center forward, he was kept pretty busy.
The next day, though, the game was a bit slow, and Alejandro had plenty of time to glance over at the empty wall, wondering despite himself what Chris was doing. He was probably off drinking a glass of fresh blood or something, Alejandro thought with a grimace. Or biting off someone's ear. Either way, he didn't actually want to know.
On the day after that, Alejandro nearly got hit in the head with the ball because he was so busy staring at the wall that he didn't see it coming.
At the very last minute, he heard Jeremy shout out a warning and automatically dropped to the ground just as the ball whistled over his head. Slowly, he climbed back to his feet, disturbed. It wouldn't have been the first time that he'd been hit in the head with a ball – it came with the territory –but it would be the first time he would have been hit in the head because of not paying attention.
He didn't even know why he was thinking about Chris so much. It was probably for the same reason that drivers slowed down upon seeing an accident: morbid curiosity. That was totally normal, but he couldn't quite convince himself of that fact.
But whatever the reason, it was starting to get in the way of his concentration and focus. How could he play soccer if he kept staring at an empty stone wall?
"Alejandro!" Matt called from across the field. "You all right?"
"Yeah," he called back, though even to his own ears, he sounded less than convincing. "I'm fine. Guys, I'm going to sit out for a couple of minutes. Can we take a quick break?"
There was a general murmur of assent, so Alejandro ran a tired hand through his hair and headed for the wall. When he got there, he hoisted himself up onto the wall with only the slightest grunt of effort. It was surprisingly comfortable, so he sat there and looked around, bracing himself with his hands.
His little sister would love this view; she always bugged him to bring her to the park, but he always told her that she'd get bored just watching him play soccer, and that he wouldn't be able to keep an eye on her. Though she knew as well as he that she only wanted to go so she could spend time with her big brother, she pretended (not very convincingly) that she loved soccer and that she would sit there and watch quietly. The thought brought a smile to Alejandro's lips. It was really kind of sweet that she was willing to do something she didn't like in order to be near him.
Suddenly, he blinked. There was something in this train of thought that was nagging at him, something that felt important, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. While he was sitting there, gazing off into space, puzzling over it, there was movement next to him.
"Hey," came a voice next to his ear.
Startled, Alejandro winced and swung his head around to see a lanky Asian guy with spiky hair sitting next to him. He vaguely recognized the guy… Chris's roommate.
"Hi," he said. "You surprised me."
"Well, I was making plenty of noise, so you must be really out of it, huh?"
"It's CJ, right?"
"Yup, good memory." CJ smiled. "And you're Alejandro."
Alejandro nodded. "What brings you down here?"
"Not much." CJ looked in the direction of the team. "I like to watch."
"Watch what, exactly?" Alejandro asked with a sudden flash of understanding.
CJ glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes with an impish grin on his angular face. "You're a very smart guy. Can I help it if there are some impressive physiques on your team?"
Alejandro grinned. "I understand completely."
"You?" CJ asked, and he wasn't asking if Alejandro had an impressive physique.
"Yeah, me." They sat there in relatively comfortable silence for a moment before Alejandro asked the question that was really on his mind. "So what's up with Chris?"
"I was hoping you could tell me that," CJ said. "He's been really weird the last couple of days… ever since he played soccer with you guys. How'd that go, by the way?"
"You don't know?" Alejandro asked, surprised.
"Nope. He hasn't said a word to me since then, just lies on the couch and stares at the wall. He only even went out today because I pretended to be sick and asked him to get me some snacks at the grocery store, and he looked like I was sentencing him to death."
Alejandro sighed. "I guess he was really annoyed that he didn't play as well as he thought he could," he said diplomatically.
CJ shot him an unreadable glance.
"I mean," Alejandro hastened to explain, "he's just not very experienced, and I guess he was frustrated or…" He paused, unsure of how to word this. "Look, CJ, I know it's none of my business, but I think that Chris might need some professional help."
"No arguments there," CJ said, a trace of a grin on his face.
Alejandro blinked, surprised that CJ was so gung-ho about it. "Aren't you – ever worried? Living with someone like that? It can't be safe."
"Well, sometimes he goes a bit heavy on the pot, yeah, but I don't think my lungs have sustained any permanent damage."
Now Alejandro was really confused. "Pot? What are you talking about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, his violent tendencies," Alejandro said. How could CJ not know?
"His…violent…" CJ repeated slowly. Before he got to the final word, though, he snorted and broke down in helpless laughter. Alejandro stared at him, not understanding what was so funny. And CJ just kept laughing and laughing. He laughed so hard that he actually fell off of the wall and landed on the ground with a thud, something Alejandro hadn't known really happened in real life.
He hurriedly hopped off of the wall and crouched next to CJ, who was rolling around in the fetal position, hands clutched to his stomach, making choking noises.
"CJ!" he exclaimed in concern. "Are you all right? Are you hurt? CJ!"
"I'm… fine…" CJ gasped out, tears rolling down his face. "It's just… just… violent tendencies! That's rich!" That set him off again. As Alejandro hovered over him, slowly starting to feel slightly disgruntled, CJ fought for control of his helpless giggles.
It took a few minutes, but finally CJ seemed to calm down, with the exception of a random giggle here and there.
"Mind letting me in on the joke?" Alejandro asked, a bit peevishly.
"It's just the thought of… of Chris having violent tendencies," CJ explained, and for a moment, it looked like he was about to break down into hysterical laughter again, but managed to contain it. "I mean, he won't even let me kill bugs. He makes me take them outside and 'set them free,'" he demonstrated, waving his hands and wiggling his fingers. "And when he's stoned? Forget about it. He still cries during Free Willie, for God's sake."
"What about all that talking he did about how he loves the taste of blood and beating up on people?" Alejandro demanded. He couldn't believe what he was hearing, but why would CJ lie to him?
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
"He said that?"
"And how."
CJ looked solemnly at Alejandro for a moment, and then started laughing again.
"Cantamañanas," Alejandro cursed to himself, shaking his head in annoyance. Why wouldn't CJ just give him a straight answer? Was it that hard? He sat down on the ground, leaning against the wall.
This fit of laughter, thankfully, didn't last as long as the last one had. It only took a minute or two before CJ had stopped laughing. Alejandro sat there waiting, arms folded, eyebrow arched.
Apparently seeing that Alejandro was getting frustrated, CJ sighed. "Look," he said in a voice more intense than Alejandro had been expecting, given his recent hysterics, "do you have a few minutes?"
Alejandro looked over at his friends. A few were dozing under a tree, a couple were eating, and the rest seemed to be entertaining themselves relatively well.
"Yeah, I think so," he replied.
"Good. Come on," CJ said, struggling to his feet and holding out a hand to help Alejandro up. "I think there's something you should see."
"That'll be $19.82," the cashier said, holding out her hand for the money.
Chris sighed. Since when did potato chips, cookies, and soda cost so much? Everything was getting too expensive. And he'd only even gone to the grocery store because CJ was sick and had begged him for some snacks. Well, he'd insist that CJ pay him back, and then… He frowned as he pulled his wallet out and produced a crumpled twenty.
"Keep the change," he mumbled as he handed the money over and picked up the brown paper bag.
What would he do? What could he do? To his dismay, the last couple of times he'd smoked pot, all it had done was make him more depressed. So he had absolutely no desire to get stoned. He couldn't paint, because he couldn't work up any inspiration. And besides getting stoned and painting, what was there?
Stepping out of the grocery store, he turned his steps towards home, for once not caring that the setting sun in front of him sent a cascade of colors careening across the sky, or that the air smelled faintly of cinnamon. Maybe when he got home, he'd put a pillow over his face. It was about all he had the energy for.
Luckily for Chris, it was a fairly short walk… Only about fifteen minutes later, he was staring up at the apartment building, trying to work up the motivation to walk up the stairs to the third floor. It took a few minutes, but eventually he sighed and trudged up the stairs, one by one. An eternity later, he opened the door and closed it behind him, dropping the groceries on the small table next to the door.
CJ was nowhere in sight, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. He might be in his room or the bathroom. Chris kicked the door closed, then turned to go to his room, and paused. His door was open. He never left his door open. Annoyed, he turned towards CJ's room, whose door was closed.
"CJ? Why the hell did you go into my room!" he yelled through the door.
"CJ's not here."
Chris's head snapped up, adrenaline abruptly pumping through his veins. The quiet voice had come from within his room. His hands closing into fists, he sidled slowly over to his room, then peeked inside, ready (so he thought) for anything.
He could have handled it if it had been an intruder. He could have handled a bum or a thief, or even a knife-wielding maniac.
But what was waiting for him in his room was none of those, and was even less likely than any of those would have been.
"A-Alejandro?" he managed, leaning weakly against the doorframe. The dark-haired boy standing in the center of his room shot him a shy smile. Chris swallowed hard. "What are you d—" he started, then noticed what was right in front of Alejandro, what Alejandro had been looking at.
As Alejandro looked back at the painting, his eyes moving over it slowly, Chris saw it through his eyes: the rough pastoral scene, the swirling blue of the sky, the bold lines that traced the form of a dark-haired, golden-skinned soccer player running with the ball in front of him who bore a startling resemblance to Alejandro.
"Oh God," Chris said immediately. "It's not mine. I mean, I didn't do it."
Arching an eyebrow, Alejandro pointed at the signature in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas, the one that read simply, "Chris."
Chris stumbled away from his room and sat – nearly collapsed, really – onto the couch as Alejandro came to stand in the doorway.
"Fine," Chris said dully. "So you found out. I'm no athlete. I hate sports. I'm just a hack artist – a gay one, at that. What're you going to do, beat me up?"
"Why would I do that?" Alejandro asked.
"Because I'm – because – What are you doing here, anyway?" Chris ran a hand through his hair wildly. "I mean – Why are you here?"
Alejandro motioned towards CJ's closed door. "He brought me."
"I'll kill him," Chris muttered.
"Why?"
Chris looked up sharply at Alejandro, but Alejandro seemed to be genuinely confused. "What do you mean, why?" Chris snapped. "I didn't already screw up bad enough and – and humiliate myself, that he needs to bring you here to gawk at me?" He buried his head in his hands.
There was a long moment of silence, and suddenly Chris felt a gentle touch on his shoulder. He looked up, eyes full of misery, to find Alejandro sitting next to him on the couch.
"That wasn't why he brought me here," Alejandro stated. "He's your friend. He wouldn't do something like that."
"Then why?" Chris stared directly at Alejandro, finding no mockery in the soft brown eyes.
"Well, because," Alejandro said, for the first time sounding uncomfortable, "I think he wanted to clear up a couple of, uh, misunderstandings between the two of us." He paused. "Chris, why didn't you tell me the truth?"
"Which truth?"
"That you're not like you pretended to be."
"Because I wanted to be someone you would like," Chris said, more embarrassed and unhappy than ever. "That's all. I knew you wouldn't like who I am, so I thought I'd try to be more like a jock, and that you'd like that. But it didn't work."
Alejandro laughed softly. "You did come off as a little crazy."
"You're telling me," Chris mumbled. "But it's not as if you like who I actually am either."
"Says who?"
Chris blinked, taking a deep breath. "Well, I mean, I assume that, uh…"
"Is there a law that says jocks can't like artists?"
"No," Chris said slowly, afraid to believe what he was hearing.
"Because, Chris, I don't know you very well – or at all, really – but even after you left, I couldn't stop thinking about you," Alejandro confessed. "Of course, I was mostly thinking about how weird you were, but, well, it's something, right? And now you turn out to be an amazing artist who doesn't actually like Mike Tyson…"
"You were thinking about me?" Chris asked, amazed. "Really?"
"Really. And, um, unless you've decided that you don't like me anymore, well… The thing is, I can't concentrate on anything. I almost got my head ripped off by the soccer ball because I was too busy staring at the wall, wondering if you were going to show up, and that doesn't work for me at all. So you're either going to have to get out of my head and force me to get on with my life, or go out with me and put me out of my misery."
An astounded smile slowly spread across Chris's face. "Wow. I… Wow." He paused. "What were my choices again?"
Alejandro's head snapped up to stare at Chris, his face startled and almost panicked-looking until he saw the teasing smile on Chris's face.
"Jerk," Alejandro muttered, but the word was softened by the smile on his face as he reached out to grab Chris's hand.
Chris laughingly resisted, his heart pounding happily in his chest. "Hey, wait! I didn't say yes! What if I don't like jocks?"
The next thing he knew, Alejandro was kissing him and as his eyes fluttered closed and his lips softened into the kiss, he was sure that it was very clear to the both of them that even if Chris didn't like jocks, he certainly liked Alejandro.
When the kiss ended and Alejandro pulled away slightly, his lips curved into a smile. "I'll take it that's a yes?"
"That's a maybe," Chris protested.
"If that's a maybe, I'll eat a soccer ball."
"Garnished with paint?"
"Ew."
"Hey, it's better than blood, right?"
Alejandro paused. "The jury's still out on that one."
"Ew." Chris made a face.
But this time, he let Alejandro grab his hand and squeeze it. And this time, Chris leaned in to kiss him first, shutting out thoughts of soccer balls, paint, blood, pot, empty stone walls, groceries lying unused on the table, everything but the two of them.
And when CJ returned home later that afternoon to the unusual sight of two people on his couch, so involved with each other that they didn't even notice his presence, he only grinned, grabbed the cookies Chris had bought, and went into his room, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Asking Alejandro to introduce him to the cutie with the wavy brown hair who played goalie could wait till later.