They leaned against the brick wall beside the bathroom door, just opposite where the dumpster sat haphazardly on the other side of the alley behind the building. Bailey pulled a joint out of the tin and lit it up, sending spirals of smoke around his face and filling the air between them with a flowery, almost citrusy scent. He blew each lungful of smoke in the opposite direction of Nate.

Usually, he was all about blowing smoke in Nate’s face, which used to rile him up like nothing else in high school because he had drug tests to pass for the boxing program. The sudden accommodation made Nate’s head spin.

“I never knew you were into boys.” Bailey gently tapped a pointer finger on the top of the blunt to knock off the ashes. He looked at his hand as he did so, uncharacteristically avoiding eye contact. Or perhaps it was perfectly within his character, but Nate knew diddly-squat about him outside of how to get on his nerves. This was an utterly novel situation, after all.

“I’m Bi.” Nate shrugged. “But, like I said before, I don’t make a big deal out of it. My parents don’t even know yet, although I’m sure they suspect.”

“That’s fair,” Bailey chuffed out a laugh and pressed the heel of his palm to his brow. “I cannot believe…I mean, we’ve been going at it for years…”

Nate hummed in agreement. He was not about to admit it to Bailey, but in the early morning hours, as he lay awake over the past week or so, panting over distressingly erotic dreams, he had quietly admitted to himself that Bailey was probably the point where he began to question his sexuality.

He had always been an irritating little brat. But he had also become an untouchably bright thing in Nate’s life, so full of life, confidence, and ire that Nate was unsure how to act around him except to throw a punch. It was the only way he knew how to be close. To touch him. Wrestling around on the ground with Bailey in his arms, his strained breath in his ear, his hands on his body. Boys will be boys.

As if he were thinking along the same lines, Bailey pointed out, “But you knew I was gay. Why didn’t you ever make a move?”

Because Bailey acted like he wanted nothing to do with Nate whenever he tried to be nice to him, spitting blood in his face and the like. Because by the time the rolling boil of anger about that settled into a routine simmer during late high school, he had been steadily dating Tanner.

Nate shrugged. “Thought you couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

“Well,” Bailey shook his head in disbelief and glanced over, “I thought you could not stand the sight of me.”

They stared into each other’s eyes. Then Bailey rolled his to the sky and sighed with a small smile. He lifted the blunt to his lips, took a long drag, held it in, and blew it toward the stars. Nate blinked up at the cloud of smoke as it dissipated into the air.

“I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this,” Bailey laughed at himself again, “but, fuck it. I used to have this fantasy that you would, like, really snap one day and…and, like, bend me over a desk or something and put me in my place for real.”

Nate swallowed, his throat suddenly parched. He thought about Bailey asking him to go rougher. About Tanner saying that Bailey was goading Nate into fights.  Perhaps that had been a little true, even if Bailey never expected anything to come out of it, just like how Nate enjoyed the thrill of subduing Bailey or being subdued by him for reasons less innocent than he had consciously understood at the time.

“You kept annoying me so much because you wanted me to spank your bratty little ass?”

Nate watched a blush bloom across Bailey’s cheeks, reaching the tips of his ears. He tried to play it off, casually taking another drag as he wrapped an arm around his middle and shrugged. An embarrassed smile played on his lips, which Nate liked the look of more than he probably should.

He liked seeing Bailey flustered. It was such a rare occurrence. And he liked being the one to fluster him.

He reached across the space between them to drag his thumb over the baby blue band-aid still plastered over the scrape on Bailey’s cheekbone from their scuffle at the snowball stand. The cut was certainly healed by now, but Bailey almost always wore the band-aids longer than necessary. Maybe to cover up the scabbing wound. Maybe because he liked the way they looked.

Bailey stilled under the touch and watched Nate out of the corner of his shiny, bloodshot eyes.

“You know,” Nate murmured, “I…this is going to sound fucked up…but I have always liked these band-aids that you wear. I like knowing that they are there because of me and that beneath them are the marks I put on you.”

Something that connected them. He thought about the blood on his knuckles that ran down Dream-Bailey’s mouth and the way it made him cum. A thrill of both dread and arousal fizzled white-hot through his veins.

“Yeah?” Bailey breathed, eyes wide and pupils blown open, “You like me wearing around your marks?”

“Yeah.”

“Possessive bastard.”

Nate pressed his lips together because, while he had no business being possessive over Bailey, in all reality, he always kind of had been. Nobody else was allowed to fuck with Bailey except him.

Even in elementary school, when their families still went caroling and trick-or-treating together, he was protective. Bailey used to come over to his house a lot while his parents were going through their divorce. But somewhere in middle school, things changed.

Nate started to gain the reputation of someone not to be messed with. The moment he could walk, he started learning to box. He eventually dabbled in other martial arts also. And then he got bigger more quickly than most other boys in his grade. There were kids who would shove you into lockers, and then there was Nate, who was rumored to be able to pop your shoulder out of its socket with a single look.

It did not help that he was an incurable introvert.

All of this together did not make him the most approachable kid at the lunch table. Jared and some other friends from his elementary school, except for Bailey, became the limited group he hung out with at school. Most of his time was spent at his mom’s gym with personal trainers, coaches, and kids in the boxing program who were from other schools.

Bailey, on the other hand, made friends as easily as breathing. Despite his catty attitude, he was one of the kindest people on the planet, as Jared constantly reminded Nate. He was the guy that everyone picked first for group projects. And he had friends in all of the social circles.

He was bright, kind, and beautiful to look at. He was at least peripherally involved in a mind-boggling number of after-school clubs and the president of at least the debate club, but probably others. He was one of those people who had been in a steady relationship with the same boyfriend for nearly half of high school—the baseball team captain, Tanner, who was not as fabulous as everyone thought he was at the time; Nate now knew.

But back before they gained their high school reputations, Bailey’s magnetism had attracted the attention of bullies. He had been small and pretty and gay. And the brightness about him acted like a beacon to some kids who wanted to snuff it out.

“You know,” Nate told him, “Our moms were worried about you being bullied back in the day. They asked me to watch out for you.”

And when he had done that, Bailey got angry and spat in his face. Now that the memory had dislodged from the recesses of his mind, it would not stop replaying. The blood seeping along the line of Bailey’s lips, his younger face red and pissed like Nate had never seen before. Nate was not sure if he had ever seen Bailey quite that angry since, except maybe during the altercation with Tanner the other night.

A pang of hurt echoed in his chest, something that his younger self must have felt much more keenly. When he tried to help, Bailey just got angry at him. Threw it back in his face. Told him to get the fuck away.

They had never been best friends or anything, but that moment had taught him that Bailey did not think of him as a friend at all. He was just some annoying kid his mom was always making him hang out with, who, even at school, was butting into his business where he was not welcome.

That incident in the bathroom was not the single motivator of their animosity, but it was probably the spark that started the inferno.

Present Bailey coughed up a lungful of smoke after Nate’s admission, apparently unaware that their moms had sicced Nate on him that way. He pressed a hand to his chest and said in a scratchy voice, “So you decided the best way to watch out for me was to become my personal bully?”

“Fuck you.” Nate turned his face away to hide his guilty smile. “Like you weren’t bullying me the whole time, too. Like damn, all I had to do was drop a pencil and if it rolled under your desk, you’d get all pissed off about me getting in your space.”

“Oh, please,” Bailey drew his words out, the eye roll prominent in their inflection. “Who is the one that literally flipped a desk when I accidentally spilled coffee on your books?”

“That was on purpose,” Nate shot back.

“It really wasn’t,” Bailey assured him, although a sparkle in his hazy eyes meant Nate should not believe him. Nate shook his head and looked away again.

“It worked, though, didn’t it?” he said after a couple of moments. “Nobody bothered you during high school.”

Bailey hummed noncommittally. This made Nate cut his gaze to his face and inspect for evidence that he had run into issues in high school. From what Nate knew, nobody dared touch a hair on Bailey’s head. Well, except Tanner, he supposed. That fucker. Nate rubbed a hand over his face and sighed.

Apparently, Bailey was also thinking about Tanner because a couple of seconds later, he asked, “Aren’t you going to ask what Tanner was going on about the other day?”

Nate frowned at him because the other day, Bailey appeared pretty hellbent on shutting Tanner up before he could keep rambling on. But now, he was bringing the subject up himself.

“You’re probably wondering why the hell I’m bringing it up,” Bailey said lazily, freaky in how accurate he was. He looked off with a put-upon sigh. “It’s because I’m a glutton for punishment.”

Nate waited, not exactly sure what to say in this situation.

“A masochist.” Bailey rolled his head against the wall so it was tilted toward Nate, and he could peer up from beneath his eyelashes. “Get it now?”

Nate shook his head, lost at sea.

Bailey sighed again, disappointed that he had to explain further. “I like having kinky sex. Tanner…”

He trailed off, lips still parted around his next word – frozen like a glitch. As though his brain finally caught up with what his mouth was saying and put a stop to it. None of this was Nate’s business, although they did just bang in the bathroom at the bar, which, for him, fell under the category of kinky sex. But that did not mean Bailey owed him any explanation or anything.

“Whatever sex you guys had,” Nate said slowly into the silence, “he shouldn’t be going around using it against you like that.”