Page 10 of Heartstring

“That’s an unfair race.”

He shrugs. “Life isn’t fair.”

No, it isn’t,I think. It’s unfair that he has the blondest hair and lightest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.

It’s unfair how my heart jolts every time he rolls down the window of his parents’ car when he picks me up for school.

Maybe his parents would think it’s unfair that he makes their driver take a daily detour through the less up-and-coming areas of Port Haven just so we can ride to school together. But they don’t know. His kind driver, Mr. Stevens, swore he’d never tell.

It would be unfair if he got fired over it.

The world is definitely an unfair place. But when I’m with Mik, nothing else matters. Just us and the music we love making together.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

That your light-blue polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers make you look like an all-American boy next door or a Swedish exchange student.

That I know you’d rather wear all black, but your mom would go nuts.

That I can’t stop thinking about your lips since I saw you chew on your pencil in Mrs. Roberts’s math class.

“How I’m going to dunk you in the pool until you’re begging for mercy,” I say instead as I grab his head in a chokehold under my arm.

“It’ll never happen.” He brings his arms around my waist and tickles me until I have to let go of him because it wouldn’t be cool to get a boner for my best friend outside the school gates.

It’s been happening for a while, but since I turned sixteen a few months ago and accepted that I am most definitely one hundred percent gay, it’s like my dick can’t stop being hard for him. All. The. Fucking. Time.

He smiles? Boner.

He breathes? Boner.

Mik’s face is flushed when I release him, and for a moment, we stand there staring at each other, smiling.

“Just kiss already. The sexual tension is killing me,” Bernadette, one of the girls in our class, says as she walks past us.

“I’ll kiss you,” I tease, puckering my lips in her direction.

“Ew, no way.”

When I look back at Mik, his face is still flushed red, but he’s staring at the floor.

“We should go if we want to practice our songs after we swim,” he says.

It’s still early, but he’s right. I don’t want to get home late anyway.

“Did you mean it?” he asks.

“Huh? Mean what?”

“You’d kiss her?”

I shake my head. “No fucking way. Bernadette?” I laugh.

“Why not? She’s pretty.”

Because I want to kiss you.“Because she’s had her tongue down the mouths of every guy in our class, and my tonsils are a delicate instrument.”

He rolls his eyes. “Tonsils aren’t an instrument, dumbass.”