19 Love Songs by David Levithan

Author:David Levithan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Ryan had glimpsed Avery’s room the last time he’d been over, but now he had a chance to study it. The posters on the wall were of artists, not bands. The bookshelves had been arranged in stripes of color—blue then red then blue then red then green then red then green then yellow then green, and so on. The bed was in the corner, the room’s single window at its head.

Ryan walked over there and looked out. In a few minutes, it would be too dark to see the snow, but now it could still be traced and tracked. Avery joined him, and together they watched the snowflakes traveling like raindrops, punctuation marks to let them know where the gravity belonged.

Avery sat down on the floor, his back against the bed. Ryan followed, sat right next to him so their legs touched and their arms overlapped. It was weird, Avery thought, how this worked. When someone stared at you, you could feel so much like a body, with all your flaws blaring like bad advertisements. But when someone was next to you, when someone was as much of a body to you as you were to them, it became more comfortable, more valuable. Feeling Ryan’s skin and knowing that at the very same time Ryan was feeling his skin. Knowing they were different, but maybe the sensation of it was the same, just like breathing was the same, like a heartbeat was the same. Avery leaned into that. Felt.

“So how was your day?” Ryan asked, and for the next few minutes, they talked about school, about friends, about the snow first appearing in the sky. This was part of what they needed, too—to be like everyone else, to have the time to lean like this and recount the time since they’d last spoken. There were no revelations here, nothing out of the ordinary. There was just the ordinary being spelled out, the truth left between the letters. The most exciting part of their day had been anticipating this, being excited about this very thing.

“Is that a yearbook?” Ryan asked, looking at the bottom of Avery’s bookshelf. He moved to pull it over.

“No!” Avery said. “No you don’t!”

Ryan made an exaggerated grab for it. Avery made an exaggerated tackle. Conceding with a playful lack of resistance, Ryan stretched out on the ground. Avery pinned him anyway.

This is where it can turn from playfulness. This is where heat can subsume warmth. But neither Ryan nor Avery wanted that—not now, not yet, not this early in the date. So instead they kept it playful—Avery leaning down for a kiss, then pulling back right at the moment their lips should have met. Laughing. Then going down for a real kiss, Ryan arching up to meet it.

Avery loosened his grip. They kissed some more. Ryan reached out, as if he were about to rustle Avery’s pink hair or trace the curve of his shoulder. But it was another fake-out—Ryan’s arm extended just long enough to get to the yearbook, to take it from the shelf.

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