let them boys be

("after all this time?" "always.")

Summary: He had many chances to tell him, but he never did. Until the very last day.
Themes/Tags: unrequited love. best friends. school. splashes of angst.
Warnings: unrequited love. cheesy, cliched lines. (yes, i love harry potter.) i-don't-even ending.

("after all this time?"    "always.")   -

Kyler was my best friend. Still is, I guess. It's been like this ever since I could remember. You didn't go anywhere without hearing his name tacked onto my own, or vice versa. As far as everyone who knew us were concerned, it was KylerandRiley. 

We did everything together. Went to school together. Learned how to swim together. Celebrated birthdays together (his was a month before mine). Slept over under the stars together. Went firefly catching together. Bought clothes together. Went to the movies together. Made friends together. Studied together. We even ran away for a day once together. 

Sure, we had our fights. We're boys, after all. I got jealous easily, and he was very fussy about certain things. He got quiet when he was mad. I got brattier than usual. He liked boundaries and rules and clear lines. I liked loudness and freedom and my possessions separate from others. We both lived on the same street, went into the same class, met the same people. Sometimes we had differing opinions, which was fine; I mean, things would get boring if we agreed on everything like we agreed on food. I punched him in the face once, and he punched me back in the gut. I think it was over some girl in our class that liked to wear her hair in pigtails. 

The point is, we'd known each other our whole lives. I knew no different, and I didn't care to. Yeah, I could go a few days without him. In sixth grade, we had a field trip to the next city and he got sick. Of course I wasn't going to pass up the chance to go the amusement park just to stay home and watch him sleep. There was that time when he flew across the ocean because some cousin of his was getting married and I didn't see him for two weeks. We were fine. Bored, but fine.

We spent practically our whole lives together. Was it wrong for me to expect that we were going to spend the rest of them together as well?

~*~

"Hey Riley." 

There was a thump as he threw himself on top of me where I laid on my bed, battling it out on screen. I huffed, shifting beneath his weight. "Shut up, I need to beat this boss."

He watched me dancing around the troll for a while, quieter than usual. I couldn't take it anymore, and I paused the game, turning to look him squarely. "What's up?"

He widened his eyes at me innocently, but I knew him, of course I knew him, and the way that he wasn't meeting my eyes head on like he always did speaks volumes. "The ceiling, for one."

"What did you do?" I asked, leaning back. "Did you send the wrong text to your sister again? Did you eat my cake in the fridge again?" I narrowed my eyes at that one. "I put my name on that."

"No," he rolled his eyes. He hummed for a second, eyes on the screen where my avatar was doing some weird dance as it waited for me to come back and fight trolls with it. "So I met this girl."

"What about her?" I sighed to myself, because honestly if he came all this way to interrupt me beating this boss just because he had girl troubles, I was going to hit him. He was always wishy washy about relationships and dating and hand holding and oh gods, we just came out of that cootie-infested hellhole they called junior high, I wished he would just find a dark corner and make out with some girl already. Honestly, his face wasn't even that bad and he was smart and he was nice and yeah, girls liked him so why was he such an old man on this.