Disclaimer: I do not own Honeydew Syndrome. I do not have those kinds of skills.

Author's Note: I actually like lime fishnets. Fishnets in general are sort of spiff.

Evolution

It's a fine line between amiable torment and full-blown torture. You're pretty sure the line's exact location is the inner seam of Jay's jeans. You lean towards him on the pretense of checking his essay-which you are. A misplaced modifier there, an incorrect tense here, and "That's affect, not effect. Are you sure you're in the right English class?"

Jay sticks his tongue at you for the comment. Another slash of the pen and you've marked another spelling error. Jay's on the edge of frustration, but it's not all for the essay. It's for your nails grazing the inside of his thigh, the barest of pressure to be felt through the denim. If you pressed any harder, sped up the movement, it might cause a wardrobe malfunction in Jay's already too-tight pants. Someone could notice. You wouldn't want that. It's driving the boy some sort of crazy, and you bask in it.

You're in the middle of the cafeteria. Metis is sitting across from you blowing bubbles in his chocolate milk. You and Jay have been more than friends for more than a month, and even your best friend doesn't know. Jay doesn't press the issue, and you both kind of like how it is anyway. There's something exhilarating about sneaking around. The thrill of not getting caught and all that jazz.

Beyond that, there's something exhilarating knowing that the relationship you have-whatever insignificant term you attach to it-is yours and his and no one else has a piece of it. Selfish, and it suits you.

Jay calls you a sadist. He says this as he takes another bite out of your ice cream. Normally, you'd ward him off your food. The peanut butter fudge cone isn't even important: it's the principle of the thing. Jay threatens to buy and eat a popsicle. You raise your eyebrow, give that little curl of the lip.

Jay grins. "Trust me. It's not your kind of threat-but it's my kind."

You can't help your amusement when another two bites in, he gets brain freeze. He assures you it's not that funny.

"Yes, it is."

It's more for your own satisfaction that you massage circles into his temple. You like his shampoo. Hair fetishes never hurt anyone. Unlike ice cream. He glares but presses closer.

"Seriously. Sadist. Schadenfreude."

"I'm surprised you know that word."

This is the first time Jay's been to your house. It's an average home on the edge of suburbia. Jay stares suspiciously at the lawn gnomes. Your dad collects them.

Jay had expected your parents to be, as he put it, "a dash of cracking kneecaps with baseball bats piled on a heap of sarcasm." Your dad is a gardening-addicted dentist and your mom is a nurse with a penchant for smiley face scrubs.

Just to get Jay to stop gaping, you assure him your dad sabotages other people's gardens in time for the annual competition, and that your mom once made a meter maid cry. You actually don't want to go into that.

Your mom takes a moment to fuss over you bringing someone home that's not Metis. Once her inspection is over, you shove Jay down the hall to your room and lock the door. Standard procedure since you learned "privacy" and "teenager" could go unquestioned in the same sentence. At the moment, you're not even planning to do anything, but it warms your (malevolent) heart to see Jay almost nervous.

"What, not evil lair enough for you?" you ask. You like your mattress; it doesn't creak when you sit on it. Fragile Things is put onto the shelf. An English worksheet marks your place midway through The Monarch of the Glen. If it were Metis in your room, you'd go ahead and read. For the moment, you let Jay try to prove himself more interesting than Shadow.

He mostly stares at every innocuous object, like he's visiting a foreign country, or a theme park.

Come to Charles World. Bring your kids and ride the country's most humiliation-inducing roller coaster at half price.

He sits beside you, weight dipping the mattress but not shifting you. Mostly, he looks at your crammed bookshelf.

"That's one of my favorites," he says. He's pointing to Good Omens. Damn. "But I thought American Gods was better." Yes. Much better. He pulls out your first volume of The Absolute Sandman.

You're being hypocritical for all the times you've ridiculed Metis about his Marvel obsessions, since you and Jay get into a deep and philosophical discussion on the forms of Desire, whom you agree is the best of the Endless. Which is probably just so you have a convenient segue into something involving a lot less talking, just as much mouth, and a reason to be glad your mattress doesn't squeak.

He doesn't really mind that you really hate the scene kids. As in, really hate them. Loathe, even, in the case of that one diminutive boy with blue hair. Blue-hair boy, Jay informs you, still has a morbid green bean phobia-a phobia you are proudly responsible for.

See, with some people ("couple" is too sentimental a word), one person hating the other's friends would be a cause of confrontation.

"So, all of them?"

"No, there are a few," you say. "Kristin's okay. She did pretty well in the play, considering everyone else forgot their lines. Yeah. That's it. I hate the scene kids. Except Kristin."

"And me," he tells you. You don't give any more affirmation than a shrug. His fingers have been threaded through yours for the past five minutes. His eyes look more gray than blue in this light. "So I'm guessing you don't want to go to the movie with us?"

"Tempting, but I have squirrels in the park to set on fire."

"You're kidding?" The cute (fine, you'll admit that word) thing is, you're pretty sure he still can't tell when you're serious or not.

"No, Jay, I'm an arsonist wanted in five states, including Alaska. It's pretty damn hard to light snow, but once you get enough kerosene anything burns." You could probably make millions with that poker face.

Jay pulls up your hand and his, still together, and looks at them. "Dave doesn't know it was you who put the plastic spider in the green beans. Want to meet us for lunch later?"

You smile.

Jay takes it upon himself to barge into your room on an otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoon. You briefly wonder if your pants are secretly labeled "stripper" as he throws two fives and a ten into your lap. Ah, well, at least he knows you're not cheap. If he had thrown ones, you would have been insulted.

He sits on the foot of your bed (funny, he got accustomed to that really quickly) and twitches like someone dropped spiders into his shirt (spiders you cannot be held accountable for on this occasion).

He rubs at his eyes. "Do you have bleach?"

You consider either targeting Jay's dye job or May's refusal to believe you don't bleach your own near-white hair. The latter would make you look bad, and good cynics never laugh at themselves. The former, well, you have a thing for Jay's hair and would actually be disappointed if he changed it. (You'll leave it at that.)

Silence is the best option, since Jay explains of his own free will: "Metis. Josh. No pants. No pants or boxers. Except Josh wears briefs and I did not need to know that and you win the bet."

You place the twenty dollars into your pocket.

"My eyes. My retinas. I think I'm scarred for life."

"I told you, by the end of the month," you say.

It's really hard not to laugh. At him. Not with him. But laughing at Jay to his face would be too cruel after what he had to see, so you sling an arm around him and snicker into his shoulder. He pushes at you and groans.

You check your phone and realize it's been off. You turn it on and wait for it to ring. Metis will probably be calling you as soon as he and Josh are done with the act that just earned you twenty dollars. You're sure of this, because in accordance with your version of Charles' Law, you have a sixth sense for when someone is about to act asinine.

The phone rings.

A distressed voice squawks at you from the other side. You "uh-huh" for a few minutes as May rambles like a drunken chipmunk, cramming in how he just lost his virginity and to a guy and to Josh and god Jay was supposed to come over and he thought he heard a door open but anyway now he's hiding in the bathroom calling you on the phone.

"May," you finally say, and the rambling shuts itself off. "As much as I love listening to you making a fool of yourself, I have to ask: is Josh still there?"

A door creaking. The sound of frantic scrambling. "Josh I was just-" and the call ends. You're always right.

Have you ever mentioned you really hate the scene kids? Blue hair boy and a lime fishnets stockings girl and Kristin chat with you while you're waiting for Jay to get out of the art room. Actually, you're just talking with Kristin. The other two are butting in.

Jay's getting back some CDs somebody borrowed. You tell this to Kristin. The girl with lime fishnets likes to pretend you're talking to her. She rambles about how she never buys any music anymore unless it's from indie bands at a concert because, like, "Major labels and all their pop shit sucks. Fucking corporations."

This is where the girl really gets on your nerves, especially since she's wearing a Hot Topic-bought Barbie shirt. You try not to twitch.

You and Kristin try to talk about the next play. Dali's probably going to be short on stage crew again, but Kristin's looking forward to tryouts for Cinderella's evil stepmother.

"Evil Stepmothers! That's, like, my favorite band. They're not sellouts or anything. And they have the best myspace ever." You really hate fishnets girl. Loathe, more like it.

"We tried to get a group up for the concert Saturday, but everyone was so freaking buusssyy." If blue hair boy does not stop whining, you might commit murder. You're already thinking there might be piano wire in your basement.

It's about that time Jay comes out of the art room. The door behind him slams shut. The school usually seems like its about to fall apart, much like your patience.

Jay's got his arm slung over the shoulder of that one guy who got suspended for painting a remake of The Birth of Venus starring the school principal. Jay smiles and waves to blue hair boy and lime fishnets and Kristin. He takes his arm from art boy and moves over to you.

"Sorry about the wait."

You shrug, and say goodbye to Kristin.

"Hey, wait, you guys want to go to the Mass Tray Suicide show this weekend?" asks blue hair boy.

"Next time," says Jay. Smartly, he's got an arm around your shoulder, leading you to the parking lot.

You reach his car and cross your arms.

"So, we meet Metis in what, another hour?" he says. He knows you narrowly escaped chewing blue hair and fishnets out. (You don't bruise egos; you mutilate them.) "Thank you for not killing Dave and Sierra."

"I thought I'd use your car to move the bodies."

"You've seen everything piled in my trunk. We'd never be able to fit them in there."

"We? And here I thought you liked them."

Jay tightens his hold on your shoulder. The things you put up with for him.

You're touchy in personality, but not really that physical.

Knees touching when you're sitting, or curling your hand against the back of his neck, or finding some way to slip your hand into his pants in a public place for your own entertainment at his discomfort. That's your kind of physical. The kind you initiate.

The other day in the movies? You have successfully ensured Jay will never have innocent thoughts seeing you reach for popcorn again.

Jay, on the other hand, isn't really physical. In public. Which is probably the reason no one knows you're dating. See, the thing is, you're not even trying to hide it anymore. You thought that maybe, especially since you and Jay have been going out not just weeks, but months, that maybe your best friend might have noticed something.

Then again, May and his behemoth of a boyfriend had about five wits between them, but now that they hang all over each other, it's gone down to one. It took them long enough to set their own disgustingly sweet infatuations straight, and only with your, ahem, help. So yeah, you might expect too much from Metis. He and Josh are actively trying to hide their own relationship, which is sort of like two hormone-boggled penguins trying to hide in a flock of flamingos. (Jay's words, not yours.)

Conspicuous does not begin to cover it. You started a new bet on how long it will be before one of the other football players realizes their teammate has switched teams.

If someone knows or someone does not know that you and Jay are dating (whatever term you want to use), it doesn't change your relationship. Really. Because you're not any different in public than you are alone. Except for the physical contact.

You and Jay are mirrors. You love to tease him if other people are around. But when you're alone, it's Jay who is the first to grab and touch and strip and say things that you don't really mind but you don't say back and you don't think too hard about. Everything he doesn't do in front of other people. This bothers you.

It bothers you because it doesn't bother you. It bothers you because it's too damn easy.

You can explain all the things that your relationship is not. It is not an overwhelming whirlwind of passionate puppy love, or a dirty little secret you will take to your grave, or even a downward spiral into apathy. It's the last one you were thinking about. You were wondering how long it would take before you or he got bored and just... quit. Walk away, not think about, not remember it.

You and Jay are here, lying in his bed, with no intent of running out. You or he could get up, get a towel, maybe get clothes on. That would require moving, which you're really not inclined to do at the moment. Jay moves a little, shifts so that you're halfway facing each other.

It shouldn't be this easy to lie here, breathing each other's breath. It unsettles you. Just a little. Not that anyone can unsettle you. No, not at all.

Jay's half-shut eyes look more green than blue in this light. You don't bother curbing the impulse to brush his hair off his face and leave your hand entwined there.

"You know," Jay says, "I'm really glad you're not a girl."

"The hell?" you snort. Your eyes narrow. "You better know I'm not."

"Seriously," Jay says. "Every girl I've ever known wants me to, at some point, read their minds. I think they can read ours. Which is pretty scary, actually."

"Is there a point to this conversation, or am I just that good that I reduced you to mindless babble?"

"I'd really hate trying to read your mind. I'd have no effing idea what you're thinking."

"If you ask me what I'm thinking, I swear to God I'll leave right now."

Jay hooks his leg across yours. "Aw, but you're warm." He drapes an arm over your waist for emphasis. You're not actually sure what he's emphasizing, except maybe the fact that where you are, it's pretty damn comfortable.

"Charles, is Metis your best friend?"

Jay asks this while slumped over your kitchen table. He flicks a paper football and cheers when it hit's the gnome cookie jar on the high shelf.

"Well, yeah," you answer. You flashback to Jay's conversation about not being a girl. It seems just a little more intelligent at this moment. You're pretty sure Jay won't get weepy about why he's not labeled as your best friend. (You look over your shoulder, just in case your mom is ready to give you a lecture on how not to be condescending to women.)

"Are you sure?" he asks.

"Is this a trick question? Did your sister leave out her Cosmo or something?"

Jay slams down a hand. "Hey, I only read that one issue on dye tips and-don't change the subject! Seriously, May is supposed to know you pretty well. Right?"

"I suppose."

"He and Josh were talking about whether they needed to set you up with someone. May suggested me. Josh said you hate me. And they told me to set you up with one of my friends. Dave was mentioned."

You sit in the chair across from Jay and stare. No blinking. Just staring, until you and he are having a staring contest. You and Jay burst into laughter at the same time. Eventually, you help him up after he falls to the floor.

May has an irrevocably damaged brain. It must be so, or he would not call you at the unholy hour of six in the morning to scream like a child because "There's a snow day, Charles! Have you looked outside? Everything's just covered."

Of course everything is covered, moron; that's why there's a snow day. Saying this would require too much energy, so you snap you're phone shut and wonder how long it will take for May to realize he's talking to himself.

A few hours of sleep later, you brave the half-foot of white to walk to May's door. Jay's beside you, still grumbling about how the weather and his car don't mix. But you cut your eyes at him because you know he'll smile almost foolishly. Maybe you do have a hidden love for foolish things.

Josh is here-of course. He doesn't trust you. You, however, trust him. Now that you didn't expect, but you'll admit that he's not the worst possible choice of a thick-headed jock May could have chosen. You have admitted this to Jay, once, and now lie if he ever brings it up.

Josh is Josh, though, an easy and favorite target, so you still edge a little too close to May for his comfort and your own private chuckles. Honestly, how could you taking a drink from May's cup of hot chocolate ever be misconstrued as affectionate? Jay rolls his eyes and runs a foot against your leg under the table.

Despite Metis's best efforts, you never played in the snow with him. No freezing snow forts and snowball fights and colds for you. See, you're fairly intelligent. Unlike May. Unlike Josh. Both confined to their houses for at least the entire weekend. Fools do catch colds, apparently.

Jay stifles a sneeze. "Hey, I was smart enough to quit when I realized I couldn't feel my fingers. They were in it for another half an hour."

You answer, "I know. I was there. Inside the house. Unlike you." Jay tosses the tissue box at your head.

He's not as sick as the other two, but he's sick enough that he can't go out today. You refuse to get within three feet of him, which he considers cruel and unusual punishment. You don't stay there very long, but it's not like he really expected you to. And it's okay.

You answer your cell at three in the morning. Jay slept most of the day after you left, so now he's awake. Wanting to talk. You consider snapping your phone shut.

"Drop the call and I wake up your entire neighborhood. Don't think I won't blare the horn."

You wonder how that might be achieved. Looking out your window, you see a familiar car, exhaust billowing from the tailpipe and melting some of the snow. Looks like Jay got over that cold pretty quick. It's not the most original blackmail ever, but it's endearing that he'd try.

"Two minutes," you tell him. You shut your phone on his laughter.

OK Go blares from his speakers. Jay sings along to "Bye Bye Baby" and plants a kiss on your jaw line.

It's really quite stupid, out at three in the morning because Jay's sleeping schedule is messed up. It's a stupid you don't mind too much. You grab cups of coffee from a gas station, handing over your money to a cashier named Sunshine who has a labret and fake orange nails that almost impale your hands. All you end up doing is watching the snow keep falling while Jay drives because nothing else is going on. The night's not a bad one.

"You know, we don't know that much about each other."

Jay says this as his sister runs out of the house screaming something about a mall and a python. You and he are on his couch, leaning back to back, discovering the evils of Reconstruction-and of Reconstruction essays. You stretch out your legs and layer your notes.

"I mean, we know each other," Jay continues, shifting against your back, "but not details. Like, your worst memory of kindergarten. Or you know, what would you want to take with you on a deserted island. I'm pretty sure I don't even know your favorite color."

"The class hamster dying, the novels on my top bookshelf, and green. Anything else? I don't think it really matters. Are you sure you are not reading your sister's magazines?"

"I don't! And no, it's not really important. I was just thinking about it."

He hands you his essay so you can mark out every little mistake. Grammar Nazi.

"You have a misplaced modifier here."

"I think I sort of love you," Jay says.

"And here." You point with your pen. "You wrote that Congress failed to impeach Johnson. They impeached him. They just didn't convict him."

"Charles, I just said I love you." Jay crosses his arms, half-waves one hand. He wants you to speak, wants an answer. He fidgets.

You lean in so close your eyes go out of focus. The muscle in his thigh shudders under your hand. "I love you, too," you finally say, and draw back as he leans forward, "but it doesn't change the fact that your grammar is horrible. You're the reason English classes never need to stop having spelling tests." Your pen is marking up his paper again.

Jay gapes for a moment before shoving his history paper out of your hands and sprawling on top of you. No one's as good as you, really, but Jay does kiss better than a whelk.

It's one week later when you're in your room with Jay without Jay's clothes. Your phone is turned off. You turn it on because you have a feeling you're about to get a phone call. You're always right.

"Charles what the hell we were supposed to study calculus what were you and Jay and I knew he couldn't fit underwear under those leather pants and I need Josh to hurry and find the bleach and why the hell didn't you tell me anything how long have you-"

You snap your phone shut. (Honestly, you will not admit that you literally forgot May was supposed to come over. You'll just pretend it was some form of payback for Jay.)

"Well, that was one way to tell him," Jay says.

Jay makes you smile.