Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tweek has a problem, and this problem is six-foot-something and likes chai lattes.

The problem has a name (Craig), is an athlete (hockey), and says he only drinks coffee in the morning because it never tastes as good as it smells (sacrilege, but forgiven because he has a cute face). He comes to the shop probably three times a week and has been for about a year and some change, and Tweek is never prepared. He wasn’t aware he had a type until Craig showed up and he realized that was his type.

It’s getting really bad. Sometimes whatever hoodie Craig’s wearing has slipped to the side like he rolled out of bed and came straight here, and then he can see a hint of bare shoulder, which makes him feel Victorian, and then pathetic for thinking about it so much. He doesn’t even like visibly muscular guys, or he didn’t until Craig started coming around. It’s ruining his life. Like, suddenly he cares what a guy’s traps look like. That’s a factor now. It’s humiliating.

He didn’t even know that was what those muscles were called last week—he had to ask Wendy’s baseball-player boyfriend, Stan, about it, and Stan laughed at him (loudly, in real life) as soon as he found out why he needed to know.

So he’s pretty much done talking to people about Craig or asking Craig-relevant questions. It’s a lot easier (and less mortifying!) to wrack his brain quietly and eventually turn to Google with questions like what is hockey even about or why do they still make wired headphones if no one is putting headphone jacks in devices anymore.

He’s lucky this is the most exciting thing in his life. Seriously, if it wasn’t so contained he’s pretty sure his heart would give out one of these days from the sheer stress of it all—even when there’s nothing to stress about, he’s stressed out. His classes are okay, all of the drama in his friend groups somehow manages to miss him every time, and his job is easy. For the most part. Drama-free, at least.

According to Wendy and anyone else who’ll listen to her, it’s misogyny if he makes one of his many female coworkers do the runs from the walk-in in the basement to the fridges under the counter upstairs, and he doesn’t know enough about it to dispute it so he just lets it happen. He doesn’t point out that Red could probably bench press his entire body weight, especially because questioning a woman is probably also misogyny, somehow.

He’s uncomfortably out of breath with his arms hurting in such a way that makes him regret quitting marching band after high school when the worst possible thing ever happens.

He usually sees Craig coming in, but even without looking, he almost always knows. It’s not innate—like, he’s not locked on to Craig’s energy or something, he’s not that bad—there are just signs.

Real, tangible signs. Like Wendy putting on her playlist of Taylor Swift love songs every time he shows up because she thinks there “could be something worth pursuing”. With a random customer. Coming to the shop to get a drink and maybe do homework (which is especially rare!) is probably pretty much the least remarkable thing in Craig’s life.

He’s putting the milk away when he flags, somewhere in the back of his mind, that the music just changed in the middle of a song. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Wendy putting her phone down innocently.

Except that she’s never innocent. She’s evil. She has bad intentions regarding him probably ninety percent of the time, and that number only goes up when his love life is involved.

He takes a second to listen and freezes. Is that—

It is.

Wendy’s put Taylor Swift on again. And now she looks busy.

Intentionally busy, brewing gallons of tea to chill and taking extra steps. He knows what actually-busy Wendy looks like and this is not it.

This is like thirty-six 9/11s happening simultaneously. Again with his heart giving out. This is bad enough, any more stress in his life and he would keel over and die.

“Hi, Craig!” Wendy says in her chipper service-job tone, which sounds nothing like how she normally talks, which always freaks him out even though he knows he kind of does the same thing. It just sounds sinister when she does it, or maybe that’s just because it’s Craig and he knows her intentions regarding Craig. Particularly that those intentions involve him.

He stows the last carton of oat milk away and slaps a smile on his face before he turns around. He doesn’t want Craig to think he doesn’t want to help him, because he definitely does, but it’s nerve-wracking!

“Hey,” Craig says, only when he sees Tweek, which, yes, he has read into at length. He’s the only person Craig actually greets verbally. Everyone else gets a half-hearted sort-of-wave-ish hand motion. But he would be flexing that anyway, not just because he likes him.

“Hi.” Jesus, he’s nervous. It’s an order, not a piano recital. “Did you just want your usual?” He feels like a shaking chihuahua.

“Yeah. Please.”

Craig never talks a lot, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because stressing about what to say to him would be a fast-track to an early grave, but it’s a curse because he’s curious. If the stress of small talk wouldn’t take him out the curiosity from not knowing anything real about him will. Taylor Swift’s yearning-lyric influence is not helping.

Craig pays, and he makes his drink and smiles and watches him walk away and acts totally normal.

He keeps it up until Craig is sitting and distracted by something on his phone with his headphones firmly on his head, which is a miracle in itself and he applauds his resolve. Then, he grabs Wendy by her bicep and drags her down the hall by the counter.

He jumps about a foot in the air when he opens the door to the back room and locks eyes with Henrietta, who started her 15 five minutes ago. He’d forgotten she was even here.

Wendy shuffles in and pulls her arm away while he’s still recovering. She rubs it, frowning exaggeratedly. Henrietta doesn’t even look up from her phone. Maybe that should call into question how often this happens. “Stop battering women.”

“Battering?!”

“I don’t know why you’d batter women,” Henrietta says. Her thumbs move rapidly over her phone keyboard. He has no idea who she could possibly be texting with such urgency. “I prefer them grilled.”

“What?” Wendy replies, smiling. Henrietta declines to acknowledge her confusion.

“It doesn’t matter!” he shrieks. Doesn’t Wendy understand the gravity of the situation?! If he pulled something like this every time her boyfriend was in the drive-thru she would have his head on a stick by now! “You can’t keep playing that blonde woman’s music every time he comes in here, he’s gonna notice something is up when he’s trying to drink his stupid chai and Sparks Fly is on for the millionth fucking time! Everywhere else is playing Christmas music! Why are we listening to Taylor Swift?!”

Wendy lets out one of those little sighs she does when she thinks he’s acting insane but also thinks it’s kind of cute, like how hyperactive baby bunnies are cute. He hates those sighs. They never make him want to shake some sense into her any less. “It’s just music, Tweek, I don’t think he’s really paying attention to it. Doesn’t he usually have headphones on anyway?”

“Yeah but he has to take them off to order!”

“Yes, honey, and then he puts them back on. Not playing Christmas music is inclusive, anyway. I think—”

She continues her line of reasoning, but he’s not listening anymore. He’s wondering what kind of music is playing from those god damn headphones.

Craig has been getting shit for his crush on a barista for months, and today in particular feels like standing in front of a firing squad.

Clyde demanded their group presence at a basketball game—not that he’s playing, literally just to watch—and also volun-told Craig to drive, which wasn’t unusual in itself.

What was unusual was that they were watching their school get shut out by the Iowa Cyclones, and all anyone wanted to talk about was Craig and his crush. It’s not like it’s new. He has no idea what it is about today that has them so fixed on it. It was all he heard the whole game. It was all he heard on the walk in, and the drive there, and the walk back to his car after. It’s all he’s hearing on the drive to Token’s to drop him off.

Today, Jimmy’s taken to calling Coffee Boy the latte hotte, a moniker he’s sure was stolen from some shitty old sitcom or a musical or something, but he can’t prove it.

And it’s not untrue, in his humble opinion, so he leaves it alone.

“Good game,” Token says, like they didn’t get totally destroyed.

“I wonder if the latte hotte likes b-basketball.”

“Yeah, when do we finally get to meet this mystery man?” Clyde asks, wiggling his eyebrows. “’Cause I could kinda go for a drink right now.”

Agreements chorus from the back. It clicks immediately—that this was a setup. The second Jimmy brought Coffee Boy up he should have known something was wrong. Jimmy never asks about his love life, he’s usually the one telling the others to leave him the hell alone.

“No. Never. Ever.”

“Why not?” Jimmy asks.

“’Cause you guys are gonna make me look stupid. On purpose.”

Clyde cries, “I would never!” It’s actually probably true. Clyde doesn’t have to try to make him look stupid, it just sort of happens as a natural consequence of being around him. He keeps trying to stop hanging out with him because they don’t even have much in common anymore and it keeps not working.

“Don’t care.”

Token cuffs his shoulder from the back seat. “Come on, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“I just said—” He sighs. He’s gonna get badgered about this for weeks if he doesn’t get it over with now. “Are you gonna be normal?”

“Yes,” Clyde whines, at the same time Token says, “I’m always normal.”

Jimmy adds, “No promises.” But he always knows when not to make somebody the butt of the joke, so Craig writes that off as him trying to be funny.

“We can go to Tweek Bros. but if you guys start acting stupid, I don’t know you.”

He really hates the way they all get so excited. Clyde still hasn’t gotten over the novelty of him having a proper, honest-to-god crush on somebody, which would be nice if he wasn’t constantly trying to give him pointers on how to get Coffee Boy to “let him hit”. Most of Clyde’s so-called advice includes leaning on walls and acting sleazy, and he’s missing the point anyway. Token and Jimmy at least have the grace to stick to the standard, oooh, you like him, shit.

He reiterates his point one last time at the front door, just in case it didn’t stick any of the three times he told them in the car to act fucking normal.

The worst part is that he actually expects them to.

Luck seems to be on his side. He doesn’t immediately see Coffee Boy behind the counter, just some curly-headed blonde girl working the drive-thru who looks like she could be Coffee Boy and Clyde’s girlfriend’s missing link. Either he left already, he hasn’t come in yet, or—Craig’s personal favorite—today is one of his days off. Those are rare.

He’s just starting to thank his lucky stars when the door down the hall by the counter swings open and Coffee Boy comes out with more flavor syrup bottles than is probably responsible to carry at one time.

Which is perfect. Just what he wanted. His soul is still in his body and not escaping through the ceiling right now.

Clyde nudges him while Coffee Boy is abandoning the syrups on the nearest counter. “Thanks for saving my grandma from that burning building last week.”

“What.”

“And for p-paying off my student loans!” Jimmy adds.

He frowns. What the fuck? “I didn’t.”

Token pats his shoulder like a benevolent god. “Y’know, I really appreciate you driving us all here in your Benz.”

Oh no.

They really are trying to make him look stupid in front of Coffee Boy. That or they somehow actually think they’re being helpful. He wouldn’t put it past Clyde, but Jimmy? Token? He wants to disappear.

And Coffee Boy, logging on to the register computer, looks increasingly vacant with every new fake detail his stupid friends tack on.

He turns and hisses, “Shut the fuck up.” He doesn’t want—or need—their help. If it can even be considered help anymore. Besides, what happens when Coffee Boy figures out he hasn’t actually done any of that shit? Or figures out why they’re talking him up so much? He grabs Clyde’s arm and yanks him forward. “Order. Now.”

Clyde starts, obnoxiously loud and side-eyeing a group of girls in the corner, “I’ll have a venti iced vanilla matcha—”

Craig tunes him out immediately. And Jimmy when he orders what sounds like the most complicated thing on the whole menu. He’s grateful when Token orders a plain latte—otherwise they would all be dead to him. He stares down their table after Token pays, and then, it’s his turn.

He can feel how embarrassed he is immediately. He’s never bringing his friends here again. Ever again. “Sorry about them.”

Coffee Boy smiles—nervously, but then, Craig’s been noticing he always seems kind of nervous. Maybe that’s just his default. “Oh, it’s okay. They were—”

“They suck.” They don’t deserve whatever charitable assessment Coffee Boy probably would have given them. They suck. “That shit’s not even true.”

“I know.” For a second, he wants to ask how he knew, and then he remembers what exactly they’re talking about and promptly feels like an idiot. It’s starting to get bad. Being in close proximity to Coffee Boy is destroying the few brain cells his multiple sport-related concussions had spared. He doesn’t have much time to mull it over, because Coffee Boy adds, “You drive a Civic.”

This time, it just comes out. “Okay, how the fuck did you know that?”

Coffee Boy blinks at him, turns slowly to look at the drive-thru window, and then turns back with a deer-in-headlights look. “Um?”

“Yeah. Yup.”

When he finally gets to his seat, he informs Clyde, “You’re walking home.”

Ever since the fiasco with Craig’s friends, it’s been a lot less scary for Tweek to talk to him.

It was humanizing. Like, Craig is just a guy with loser friends who like joking at his expense, which really isn’t all that different from what Wendy and the other girls that know about the Craig situation do to him.

Except Henrietta, who knows and doesn’t care. She sort of just watches and doesn’t say anything, ever. It’s a nice break from being put on trial about new developments at least four times a week. There hadn’t even been anything to report until a couple weeks ago when Craig opened up, even if him opening up was just him bitching about his friends. It broke the seal. And it seems to have gone both ways.

For example: when Craig pulls his headphones down around his neck to order today, he looks up at the speaker. “The music’s better today.”

Immediately, he wants to die. He knew it. He knew Craig was gonna notice Wendy meddling somehow. Nothing like the sharp contrast of darkwave compared to bright pop to do it.

“It’s mine,” Henrietta drones.

Tweek thanks god that Wendy has the week off, partly because this way he gets a break from her tyranny and partly because she would accuse him of hating women (and her, specifically, like she’s not probably his best friend) if she heard him talking like this. “It’s a good change of pace.”

“Yeah. I feel like you’re always listening to Taylor Swift in here.”

He feels his smile turn plastic and strained, and his eye twitches. “Almost, huh?” Henrietta snorts behind him but otherwise keeps weighing coffee grounds into filters to be brewed another day, minding her own business. Sometimes he thinks she’s nicer to him than Wendy is, or at least kinder. Most of the jewelry he’s ever worn in his entire life was given to him by her in the span of the last two years, unprompted, and all made of genuine crystals. Either she likes making bracelets or she just likes giving them to him.

He fidgets with them a lot. Like, a lot, under any possible circumstance. The cord on the amethyst bracelet is strong and can handle some serious pulling, so that’s his usual victim when he’s stressing or scared or bored out of his mind. He barely even realizes he’s doing it anymore. It’s gone completely subconscious.

Well, completely subconscious until he notices Craig staring, transfixed, at which point he stops. But then his hands feel restless so he ends up picking at the finish on the counter. “You believe in that stuff?” Craig asks. Not meanly. Just curious.

“No, it’s probably bullshit. Just, what if it’s not?” The paranoia about not wearing them, he could have done without. Like, if it’s real and he takes them off is he just fucked? He already takes them off to shower. Is the universe gonna teach him a lesson or something? He didn’t think to ask Henrietta at the time and it’s been so long now that it would be weirder to bring it up out of nowhere, and Google can’t help with this one because apparently the answer to most spiritual stuff is it depends. “I mean, I’m not even really superstitious or spiritual or anything, I’m just—” He shrugs.

“They’re pretty.”

He nods and punches in his register code. He can hear Henrietta steaming milk behind him. “I like them. I’d rather have them and not need them.”

“Yeah.”

Craig is still staring when he grabs a Sharpie to put the order in. The touch screen doesn’t respond otherwise. “Just your chai today?”

“Huh?” He’s not even opening his mouth to repeat himself yet when Craig’s brain catches up and he snaps out of whatever stupor he was in. “Yeah. Sorry.”

Craig does that sometimes. Just kind of goes somewhere for a second, usually staring at something he’s doing or wearing, and then comes back like nothing happened. He’s not in a position to talk on that front—he gets kind of spacey sometimes too, or, rather, very spacey most of the time—so he never says anything about it. He’s just curious about where it is he goes. “It’s okay,” he says.

By the time he’s done ringing Craig up, Henrietta’s already finished making his drink and brought it to the front.

The second Craig reaches up to pull his headphones back over his ears, he says, “Wait—” And then sort of feels like an idiot when Craig looks at him all curious. It’s just that this has been burning a hole in his head for months. “What do you usually listen to?”

“Oh.” Craig shrugs. “Just whatever. Old rock. I like Fall Out Boy.”

Fall Out Boy? “But not Taylor Swift,” he says.

And Craig agrees, “No. Not Taylor Swift.”

Fall Out Boy—he feels like he should know Fall Out Boy for some reason. Doesn’t Wendy’s boyfriend listen to Fall Out Boy? Or something like that? “Cool,” he says, and Craig cocks his head. “Just—was wondering. You wear those all the time, so.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”

Craig goes to sit down, and Tweek commits his findings to memory. Old rock. Fall Out Boy.

Another thing he commits to memory: either he’s starting to see things, or Craig was smiling. Just a little bit.

It’s not that Craig doesn’t like seeing Coffee Boy so much, it’s just that he sees him so much that he’s starting to worry about the guy.

It’s like he’s working constantly. He’s always at the shop when he comes—he’s maybe been missing once or twice, but Craig has been coming here for a long time now and he doubts their schedules line up that well. Especially, as he found out last week, when both of their schedules change every four months.

He’d always assumed Coffee Boy was a student, because he looks around the same age as all his friends and has the strung-out countenance of someone in a tough major, like music or one of the pre-meds. But last week they got to talking about basketball of all things, which is going to haunt Craig forever now as this is the second time there’s been a connection between that stupid sport and Coffee Boy, and he found out vital information: Coffee Boy goes to games with his ex-roommate. They sit in the student section. So they’re students.

If he’d seen Coffee Boy at a game, he would have remembered it. Even if he didn’t recognize him outside the shop at first he would have noticed him. It’s his eyes that do it. He’s never seen anybody with eyes as big and green as Coffee Boy’s.

It’s ruining his life.

He pulls up to the drive-thru window at Tweek Bros. and there he is. “You’re always here.”

Coffee Boy shrugs. “It’s my parents’ shop, I pretty much live here.” He buffers for a second, and then adds, “I mean, I don’t literally live here, that would be—I just work a lot. Well, less soon, ‘cause... School.”

He blinks. Damn it, that’s next week, isn’t it? He was definitely supposed to prepare for an online class over break and he definitely put it off because he was busy with hockey and the holidays. And also because he didn’t want to do it.

Coffee Boy must notice his mood shift because he asks, “You okay?”

“Yeah, just—forgot something. It’s fine.”

It’s probably crammable, right? It’s just an online class, nothing crazy. It’s not like high school where teachers would do heinous shit like assign a book report over the holidays.

“Winter class?” Coffee Boy asks.

“No. For next semester. It’s fine, I just don’t wanna do it.”

“I hate it when they do that. Like, it’s not even time for school yet, stop making me do school—oh, here.” He turns, and when he turns back he has Craig’s chai in his hand. Their fingers brushing when he takes the cup makes him feel like a teenage girl. He’s so done for. “But good luck, I hope it’s not too much!”

He swallows hard. Jesus. “Yeah, thanks.”

He opens the class page when he gets home to find only a single video. Is it 45 minutes long? Yes. But it’s just the one thing.

Thank god.

It’s either very lucky or very unlucky that Tweek walks into his philosophy gen-ed on the first day of the Spring semester and immediately spots Craig’s familiar face in the back row.

School is not a Craig place to be. Craig places to be include the inside of the coffee shop and the drive-thru, and nowhere else, because that’s the routine. That’s where Craig is supposed to exist. He’s supposed to not be a real person with his own life doing his own things and showing up around campus at the university Tweek logically knew they both go to. He was counting on Craig being an occasional side character he could sigh wistfully about and then go back to normal, real life, not someone who does unpredictable things like accidentally sign up for the same gen-ed!

It’s probably a miracle he didn’t see him outside the shop sooner. Or literally run into him, like out of nowhere on a sidewalk. Scary.

His immediate plan is to sit somewhere inconspicuous, like the middle. Actually, his immediate plan is to turn around and leave and come up with some excuse about not being able to find the building and then drop the class and never show his face here ever again, but his second immediate plan is to sit somewhere inconspicuous. Like the middle. Except that Craig’s immediate plan seems to have been to recognize him and wave with this vaguely surprised look on his face, like maybe he wasn’t expecting Tweek to exist outside the shop either.

And now it would be rude to not wave back, and if he sits somewhere else he doesn’t want Craig to think he doesn’t want to sit with him, because he kind of does but that’s terrifying to think about—being next to Craig without a counter between them, he might literally die, like, explode—is imminent explosion grounds for dropping a class? It doesn’t matter. He waves and starts up the awkwardly-deep steps even though he would really rather sit in the middle, where it’s safe and Craig-less.

Small victories, though: the seat directly adjacent to Craig isn’t the only open seat, so he can leave it as a buffer in case something goes horribly wrong, and Craig’s backpack is in that chair anyway so it won’t even look suspicious.

“I forgot you go here,” Craig says, instead of dooming him to an awkward greeting, and thank god for that because he was about to start weighing the infinite pros and cons of greeting him by name like they’re already friends or something.

He shrugs, nonchalant. He’s so nonchalant. He’s never been chalant in his life—he doesn’t feel chalant about talking to Craig. “I’ve never really seen you around, so—”

He realizes he has no idea where he’s actually going with that, so he just stops, but Craig makes a face like it makes some kind of sense to him so he’s at least not completely hopeless. Just mostly. Like, 90%-ish.

“How did you end up in a philosophy class? Don’t you have one of the animal majors?” It’s somewhere in the back of his mind. Craig mentioned it once, probably months ago now. Maybe a year ago. Animal something.

Craig shrugs. “I needed the hours.” Animal... Science? No, that’s not it. “Are you—you’re not a philosophy major, are you?”

Animal psychology? “No, there just weren’t any good core classes open.” Oh, god, it’s gonna bother him until he figures it out.

“What is your major?” It’s not zoology, he knows that. Definitely animal something. Animal is in the name.

“Aerospace engineering, it sounds cool but it’s mostly math—”

He distantly notices that Craig’s eyes have gotten big, but he can’t think about that right now. He’s busy. Animal nutrition? “Space math?”

“Yeah, kind of, but, like, hard.” Animal health? Animal ecology? Biology. Animal training. Ag science?

“But it’s space math. That’s—”

“Animal behavior!” That’s it. He knew it was something weird like that, something you never hear about. You hear about animal science and biology all the time, but animal behavior is rare.

Craig blinks at him. “What about it?”

“Your major.”

“Oh. Yeah. I was just gonna say the engineering stuff is really—”

The lecture hall speakers crackle when the professor turns her mic on, and he jumps. He kind of forgot the whole point of being in a classroom was that at some point there would be a class.

“Cool,” Craig finishes, digging a pencil out of the front pocket of his backpack. “It’s cool.”

The concept of Craig finding him cool and not a total dork throws him so bad that he misses about half the class just from thinking about it. People don’t usually receive that information this well, and even when they do, half the time they think he’s joking. But not Craig. Craig thinks it’s cool.

He may have it worse than he thought. If Craig was gonna be nice to look at and a good person, couldn’t he have warned him first?

Aside from Craig’s presence, the class is uneventful. The professor introduces herself, they all get copies of the syllabus and go through it, they watch a “short” video as an introduction to philosophy that actually takes up almost half an hour, and then it’s over. Painless. He was kind of expecting this to be one of those classes where the professor expects a lot from you from the get-go, so it’s actually kind of a nice surprise.

He’s putting his stuff away when Craig says, “Okay, see you Wednesday,” and then stops. Like a cliffhanger.

He looks around. What is happening? “See you Wednesday, too?”

“No, I—” Craig stops again, and then looks down, and Tweek realizes with mild horror that he’s embarrassed. And blushing a little. And it’s cute, and it’s making him want to squeeze him until his eyes pop out which is a totally normal way to feel about it. “I don’t know your name.”

Oh.

He takes a deep breath. He knew this would have to happen eventually, but Jesus. So much for small mercies. He stops with his binder halfway in his bag and grimaces. “Tweek?”

Craig blinks, and then his eyebrows pull together, confused. “Wait. Your name is Tweek? Like the coffee shop?”

“Yeah.” He thinks about changing it sometimes, just because this happens every time, but he doesn’t know what he’d change it to—there are so many names in the world and what if he picks one that doesn’t fit? Or it has some meaning he doesn’t know about? Or what if it’s lame and overdone?

“So your parents named the shop after you?”

“No—” He sighs. He always feels silly trying to explain this to people. He picks at the edge of his notebook. “They got it from my grandparents. The shop is named after our last name.”

“Your last name is also Tweek?” Craig already looks lost.

It’s a shame he has to make it worse. “But, like, with an A. Like the word. And then I’m named after the shop.”

He can tell Craig’s kind of struggling to make the pieces fit together with all the back-and-forth of it. Every time. Maybe it would have been easier with a diagram. “So the Tweeker muffin—”

“That’s named after me.” He came up with the recipe when he was twelve, but he couldn’t decide on a name, so he asked his dad, which turned out to be the mistake of the decade. His dad trying to name things is also exactly how he’s ended up in this situation where he has to explain the extended lore behind him and the shop. Someday, people will learn Richard Tweak should never be allowed to make decisions.

Craig stares at him for a second, and then another, and then, he says, “What the fuck?”

He’s struck with the distinct urge to put his head on the wall. Multiple times. With force. “I know.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know!” He’s been wondering why his family does this shit for years with no answer, and it’s not gonna get better now. He kind of gave up on making sense of any of it in middle school.

“Okay,” Craig says, after a few seconds. “Well. See you Wednesday, Tweek.”

He’s dying.

He’s definitely dying. Craig knowing his name shouldn’t be a big deal but it is, and he’s dying about it. Gruesomely.

He swallows hard. “Yeah, see you Wednesday.”

Either someone is looking out for Craig in a pretty serious way or he has better luck than he thought.

“Coffee Boy” is no more. It’s Tweek now. Tweek who fidgets in class and keeps him entertained and gave him his phone number in case one of them is ever sick and always shares his sticky notes, and who now has removed the single-seat barrier that was keeping them apart as of this afternoon.

He was kind of thinking maybe he was screwed when Tweek didn’t take the seat next to him—like maybe this was, in hindsight, sort of one-sided and he was just sitting near him at all out of courtesy. But no. They’ve upgraded. He just has Tweek’s phone number, now. He gets to have Tweek right by him now.

Well, not right now.

The lunch hour rush at Tweek Bros. died down to about 2 customers per hour at one o’clock, and at one-thirty, Tweek texted him (because he has his phone number, he’s not gonna get over that) while he was hanging out with Token that he was literally dying of boredom, I might drip espresso into my eyes at this point just to feel something, which sounded pretty serious.

He was planning on just calling it with Token early and ditching to keep Tweek from committing suicide via milk steamer or something, but as soon as Token found out where he was going, he wanted to go, too. Apparently Tweek Bros. has the best Americano he’s ever had, whatever the fuck that means. He’s pretty sure that’s just espresso and water so it can’t possibly be that good, but whatever.

So, now, he’s sitting by Token, in a booth, with Tweek across from them and no way of telling Token he’s getting in the way of progress without Tweek figuring something out.

Awesome.

He keeps subtly trying to get Token to go to the bathroom or order something from Tweek’s redheaded coworker (who he’s pretty sure is actually named Red) just so he can have a second alone with Tweek, and it keeps not working. Probably on purpose. Token is probably enjoying watching him struggle and make a fool of himself. Sick fuck.

Eventually, the phone rings, and Red or whatever her name really is has vanished to the back room.

Tweek groans and puts his head down. “We’re closed,” he whines, and gets up two seconds later.

Token looks at him, and he looks at Token, and neither of them mention to Tweek that the shop doesn’t actually close for another few hours. He’s pretty sure Tweek already knows that, anyway, and it would just make it worse to bring it up.

Pretty sure.

He just about loses his shit when Tweek’s answering the phone and his face stays completely neutral—annoyed, even—but his bright customer service voice comes out of his mouth.

Token watches Tweek punch in the order using the butt end of a Sharpie, the landline phone tucked between his ear and one bony shoulder. Something in Token’s eyes makes his guard fly up. He knows why he’s watching Tweek like that—why is Token watching Tweek like that? “If you don’t ask him out, I might,” Token says, quiet, without even bothering to look at him.

A pit opens up in his stomach.

A big one.

Token’s a good guy. Smart, attractive, kind and caring. Steady. The kind of guy you don’t have to be scared of introducing to your parents because there’s no question about it—they’ll love him. He’d be good for someone like Tweek, who seems like he might just always be in a low- or mid-level freakout over something.

It’s a problem. He puffs up like an aggravated cat. “Don’t.”

For a second, Token looks impressed, as if he wasn’t expecting any pushback. As if Craig hasn’t been pining over Tweek since last year, as if this doesn’t break, like, fifty rules about who is or isn’t off limits. “What? I’m just saying. He’s pretty.”

“Yeah, I know.” He’s scowling, he knows—it’s one of the few expressions his face actually moves to make on its own, according to Clyde, and he can feel it. Token’s an asshole and pretty’s an understatement. Does Token get haunted by Tweek’s eyes in the middle of the night? He doubts it. “I’m working on it.”

If laying awake at night imagining all the ways it could go wrong counts as working on it, then he’s making great progress. His nightly routine for the past two months has included at least twenty minutes of stare-at-the-ceiling-and-think-about-Tweek time, which sort of happened sometimes before but has gotten exponentially worse ever since the semester started and they talk now. Outside of the coffee shop. Tweek sits right by him in class now. Adjacent.

He was bored for a long time, before him and Tweek started actually talking. Everything just felt lukewarm. He wasn’t depressed, exactly, just—unhappy. And then Tweek happened.

It wouldn’t be so bad if every new tidbit about Tweek’s life didn’t make him want him more, like learning about his parents being Buddhist a couple weeks ago and having the sudden urge to do a Wikipedia deep dive. He still hasn’t, but only because he keeps forgetting to.

Token shrugs at him, sliding out of his chair with empty cup in hand. “If he’s still single at the end of the month I can’t make any promises.” He tosses—literally tosses from the middle of the room, show-off prick—his cup in the trash and calls over his shoulder to have a good night when he gets to the door.

He considers telling Token to go fuck himself. By the time he decides he wants to, the door is already closed behind him, and by the time Tweek comes back, he still hasn’t fixed his face.

Tweek stayed up way too late for someone who had to be up as early as he did, and now he’s paying the price. Maybe going to bed at one in the morning was a mistake, but it wasn’t entirely on purpose and it would have been fine if he didn’t have to cover opening the shop this morning.

By some miracle, he makes it through his shift without fucking any orders up unsalvageably, and he doesn’t burn any of his baked goods, so it’s a net positive but it can never happen again. Ever. By the time his one class of the day rolls around he feels like a zombie, and he’s pretty sure he can’t look much better. He was half asleep in the mirror when he was getting ready and he’s confident that it shows.

Craig frowns at him when he collapses—like, kind of literally collapses—into his chair. “Are you sick?”

“No. I’ve been up since 3:30.”

“What the fuck? On purpose?”

He shrugs, feeling like the me after my 12 hour shift meme, even though he was only working for eight. “The manager that usually opens had family shit. And I had to bake.”

It would be funny, if he wasn’t so tired and if his head wasn’t kind of killing him, how Craig’s face has scrunched up. It’s the most emotion he’s ever seen from him. “Why did they make you do it?”

“’Cause I’m also a manager. Technically.”

“You’re a manager?”

“Technically.”

“What does that mean?”

He groans and curls forward to put his head on his desk. Too much. “I can’t get into it right now.” Blocking the light out with his arms helps, but only a little. If he survives a whole hour and fifteen minutes of thinking or talking about thinking and comes out the other side functional, it’ll be a miracle.

“Sorry,” Craig says, quiet.

“It’s okay. I’m gonna die here, I think. Therefore I am or whatever.”

“Why didn’t you just go home?”

He doesn’t have a good, Craig-friendly answer for that, because Craig is exactly why he didn’t just go home. He has no idea how to put that in a way that doesn’t totally blow his cover and he’s past the point of being able to figure it out. “I didn’t wanna use a sick day,” he lies. “One of my coworkers had this last year and she said she’s really strict about those.”

Actually, what Nichole had told him about this professor is that she’s very lax about sick time, but Craig doesn’t need to know that.

What he doesn’t know can’t keep him up at night.

“That sucks. If you wanna sleep I can take notes.”

“I feel like it’d be worse that way than if I just didn’t show up.” That, at least, is true. He’s seen TikToks of professors with bullhorns getting all up in their sleeping students’ faces and singing or yelling or something to wake them up, and he’s not looking to become a victim of it. And it’s not like he’d be able to sleep anyway. He usually has to have the perfect conditions or he’s just gonna be in bed pissed off because he can’t sleep, but he can never figure out what those conditions even are. “It’s okay. I’m good.”

Craig eyes him dubiously. He can’t imagine he looks okay or good, so it’s probably warranted. “Okay.”

He only dozes off in class once, and Craig shakes him awake and slides over his notes to copy and nudges his ankle every few minutes after to make sure he’s still awake. Or living.

At the end, when they’re packing up their stuff, Craig sees him picking up his keys and freezes. “You’re driving?”

“Uh, fuck no? I was gonna walk, I’m not stupid.” Driving in this condition would be the worst idea, maybe ever—right up there with the likes of driving drunk or signing up for morning classes.

“I could drive you home,” Craig offers.

Which is a novel concept. He’s seen Craig’s car a lot, in the drive-thru and now in the parking lot outside the philosophy building when they walk out together after class. But he’s never been in it. “It’s okay, it’s not far—”

“You’re just gonna get more tired.”

He opens his mouth, and then closes it. That’s true. God damn it.

“And you just said it’s not far, so.”

He squints at him. “You’re kind of an asshole.”

Craig shrugs. “That’s fine. Can I drive you home?”

It’s so ridiculous an answer that he just blinks, says, “Okay,” and follows Craig to the parking lot.

Like most of Craig’s other belongings, his Civic is navy blue, and as a sedan he knew it would feel close to the ground but when he actually gets in it, he’s surprised by how much. But it’s comfortable, and Craig turns his heated seat on, so he can pretty much ignore how scary it is to be able to see the road so clearly.

Craig hands him his phone. “I need your address.”

“Or I can just give you directions.”

“Put your address in, you’re resting.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t realize he’s falling asleep until he wakes up to the feeling of Craig turning onto his street, and then he feels so out of it that he just kind of stares, confused, until he recognizes the parking lot.

“God, what the fuck,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “Do you have sedatives in your air filters?”

“No,” Craig says, bluntly. He’s distantly aware of the fact that Craig is watching him, but he’s sleepy enough that he doesn’t really care.

“Well, thanks.”

“Yeah.”

Craig watches him get out of the car, and get his backpack from the back seat, and go to close the door before he leans over the center console and stops him.

“You’re sure you’re fine,” Craig confirms, one more time. He nods, but he’s pretty sure he’s still sleeping, because then, Craig says, “Here,” turns off the car, and gets out. “Let me walk you in.”

“What? No, you don’t have to—”

He makes a grabbing motion at his backpack. “Gimme that.”

“Craig, no.”

“You look like you’re gonna trip on the stairs and die, what do you mean, ‘no’?”

“There’s an elevator,” he whines. “Come on.”

“Give me your backpack or I’m carrying you and your backpack.”

He stares. The idea of Craig carrying him is not one he’s acquainted with yet, and he’s gonna need to be at least 50% more awake to unpack it. He really can’t right now. He doesn’t have the resources. “Fine,” he mumbles, and lifts his backpack to Craig’s waiting hand. The pale green looks funny with his color palette, all the dark, moody blues. Out of place.

“Okay. Where am I going?”

He volunteers his apartment number and lets Craig lead even though he probably has no idea where to start, and he does not think about it. The carrying thing. He doesn’t think about it! He’s not thinking about it. It’s not something he can think about right now.

...But, like, he’s pretty sure Craig could carry him, hypothetically. Probably pretty easily. If the situation presented itself. And Craig didn’t really sound like he was joking, so he’s probably confident in his hypothetical ability to hypothetically carry Tweek at some point for potentially a long period of time. Like he’s thought about it or something.

Which is another thing Tweek has to think about not thinking about until they reach his door, and Craig sets his backpack by his feet.

“Thanks,” he says, again, because it’s polite and because he does appreciate Craig going out of his way, and Craig shakes his head. “I mean it.”

“Yeah, whatever. You’re gonna sleep?”

He shifts around. Like, obviously, but he doesn’t know when it’s gonna happen. “Yeah, at some point?”

Craig gives him a flat stare. “At some point,” he repeats.

“Well it’s probably not gonna happen right away, just—at some point.” He looks at his door, because it’s easier than dealing with Craig’s narrowed eyes.

“”Kay,” Craig says, eventually, even though he still doesn’t look satisfied. When it’s been five seconds and Craig is still staring at him, he starts to wonder if he’ll ever look satisfied.

He pulls at the amethyst bracelet. He doesn’t really want to go in, or want Craig to leave, but he really needs to get to bed. It’s not like Craig can stay and watch him sleep. Would Craig even want to stay and watch him sleep? “Um. ’Kay, well—”

“Can I—”

They’re back to staring, and he caves, “You first.”

“Just—can I—”

The funniest thing happens. Craig gives up on words, and when he does that, he holds his arms out—the universal signal for, can I have a hug?

A hug. Craig. All six-feet-and-change of him, asking for a hug.

Tweek wants to hug him so fucking bad. He goes immediately.

Craig smells like laundry detergent and Axe body wash, and as far as he’s concerned, Craig is the only person who can get away with that. With Axe body wash. Normally it would trigger middle school bus flashbacks, but not when it’s Craig, who’s warm and solid and comfortable and—pulling away after a few seconds.

He means to say something—just “no”, a single word—but all that comes out is a noise that sounds kind of like “no”, and Craig freezes where he is and then wraps around him again. He’s already starting to think he’s dying, but then Craig puts his chin on the top of his head and he goes from starting to think to pretty sure. He becomes suspicious that he might be thinking out loud when one of Craig’s hands starts taking a lazy path up and down his spine.

He doesn’t drag himself away until he starts falling asleep standing up.

“I should really go to bed.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Craig says, hands falling back to his sides. “See you next week?”

“Yeah! Yeah, see you next week."

He watches Craig disappear down the stairs and when he gets in his apartment, he locks the door behind him with a little more force than necessary. What is happening? What is his life?

He faceplants on his couch, and then grabs a pillow, and then screams into it. He’s losing it. What are the odds he made all of that up in his head and it didn’t actually happen? He doesn’t have a history of that kind of thing, and it doesn’t run in his family. But he doesn’t want to bring it up at some point and find out he, like, hallucinated it! And if he brought it up what would he even say? “That was really nice and you should do it again one billion times and/or forever”?

He does the one and only thing he can think to do in this kind of crisis.

He picks his head up, picks up his phone, and calls Wendy.

The second time ever Craig ends up at Tweek’s apartment, it’s to work on a partner project for their philosophy class.

Tweek texted him earlier that the door would be unlocked and to just come in, so he did. The only problem was that Tweek was nowhere. Not in any rooms with open doors anyway—and there are actually a couple of those, because he used to have a roommate, the mythical Kyle who he’s heard a lot about but doesn’t think he’d get along with on principle. Tweek’s pretty hard to miss. He’s the brightest thing in any room he’s in.

He’s about to text and ask where he is when he hears music coming from the room at the end of the hall—some classical bullshit. He doesn’t get how anyone listens to that and stays engaged. It’s pretty, just... Boring.

He knocks, and it doesn’t stop, so he cracks the door open and wanders in.

And it’s not a recording.

It’s Tweek, playing piano, following along with a recording on YouTube. He can tell by the headphones.

Just when he was starting to think Tweek couldn’t get any cooler.

As soon as there’s a single discordant note, Tweek mashes down a bunch of keys at once, and then starts playing something completely different like nothing happened. After about ten seconds, he finally stops, sighs, and starts rewinding the YouTube video.

“I didn’t know you could play.”

Tweek startles so hard he almost expects the headphones to jump right off his head. “I don’t!” He yanks them off and puts them on the flat part at the top of the piano, half standing up while he shuffles the sheet music together. “I don’t, that was—it was nothing, I don’t play. What time is it?”

He blinks. “You just did.”

“Definitely not. What time is it?”

Instead of answering, he just stares at the piano. The piano Tweek was definitely playing.

“I mean, not—” Tweek sighs, pointedly looking anywhere else. “Not in front of people. I had an alarm and everything—”

“Why not? That was awesome.”

Tweek makes an almost-pained sound and sidesteps the piano bench. “I’m rusty. That actually kind of sucked. Bad.”

“Is that why you were beating the piano up?”

“Shut up.”

He’s always found music interesting, in a mechanical sense. He never got into it as a kid, or he never got the opportunity, because his dad was more of a sports-and-model-planes kind of guy, and if his mom felt any different he never heard anything about it. But it’s cool how the pieces go together—how everything connects, how songs have a structure like a story. He just doesn’t really know anything about it. “Can I see?”

Tweek blinks, stopping in the middle of the room. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, I guess. I mean it’s kind of a mess, but—”

He turns and spreads the papers out again, and Craig goes to look.

He’s seen sheet music before in passing, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen piano sheet music before. He wasn’t expecting it to be so dense, and aside from what’s printed, there are little notes penciled in everywhere, figures drawn, things crossed out. This is like a whole second language to Tweek, he realizes. Everything foreign on the page makes perfect sense to him. He understands the music to the point that he’s playing it differently.

“Did you wanna try something?” Tweek asks.

It’s kind of mesmerizing to look at, so he sits. “Sure.”

Tweek circles a note in the middle of the page. “That’s C.” He presses a key down—the first white key before two black ones. “D, E, F... It stops at G and goes back to A.”

“How do you keep track of this shit?”

“Practice. Here,” Tweek says. He takes his hand and spreads Craig’s fingers out evenly on five white keys, his own fingers trembling faintly. He’s noticed that—that Tweek is always shaking at least a little bit. He’d been operating off the assumption that his shaking was mostly caused by the caffeine, since he always has some kind of drink going, but there are no mugs in sight, empty or otherwise, or even energy drink cans. Tweek presses his fingers in order, one at a time, and then every other. “See? It’s not that hard.”

On paper, no—it’s not hard. But when he goes to press the keys on his own, like typing, he’s surprised by how much force it takes. Every time he sees someone playing piano, it does look easy, but that’s probably the point. It’s probably the years of practice. He wouldn’t expect someone to make manning a goal look easy unless they’d been doing it their whole life.

Tweek makes a little noise of displeasure and lifts up on his wrist with one hand, holding his hand in place with the other. “It’s not a computer, man, Jesus! You don’t want carpal tunnel.”

He absorbs pretty much none of the reasoning. He’s a little preoccupied with Tweek touching him, and how pretty Tweek’s hands are. Pale and slender. They fit him, and they look comically different next to Craig’s own hands, broad and beat up from over a decade of football and hockey. He commits the look of Tweek’s hand on his to memory in case it never happens again.

It feels weird to have his wrist up so high. Like he’s doing too much. But Tweek’s the expert, so he holds it there and tries again, and it does feel a little better. He’s practically a natural. Who says instruments are hard to learn in adulthood?

“Do you wanna see something?”

Tweek could ask him to do anything right now and he’d say yes. “Yeah.”

“Here.”

Tweek takes his hand again, the same as before, and presses his fingers in order—up, and then down—then his thumb, middle, and pinky at the same time. Then, he rearranges it and moves each finger up one key, gentle, only to repeat it over and over until he’s back to the same notes he started on but a foot further down the keyboard.

He feels like an exposed wire, like a speck of dust hitting him just the right way could send a whole house up in flames. His palms itch. Tweek’s hands retreat and he has to make a conscious effort not to clench his own into fists. He swallows hard and puts his hands in his lap where they can’t get him in trouble. “That was cool.”

Tweek turns pink immediately. “It’s just a warm-up, it’s nothing special—”

“It’s cool.” He bumps him with his shoulder. “Thanks.”

“Yeah! I mean, you’re welcome.”

“Yeah.”

Everything he can think to say now would be a mistake, so he just keeps his mouth shut. He really doesn’t like this thing Tweek does where he’ll mention something really impressive and write it off as nothing special, like talking about his classes or showing him old science projects he did in high school. If he was half as cool as Tweek is he’d never shut the fuck up about it. But he doesn’t really know how to put any of that without scaring Tweek off.

He doesn’t get more time to dwell on it. He sees it happening before it happens—Tweek’s head tilts to the side and settles on the spot where his arm meets his shoulder, light at first like it could be unintentional, and then heavier.

This might be the driest his mouth has ever been.

Is that a move? That might be a move. Or it might not be—sometimes when it’s slow at the shop and Tweek and Wendy are both working, he’ll put his head on her shoulder and they’ll watch TikToks together. Friendly. It could be friendly. Or it might not be.

He might really be losing it now. He’s about 90% sure Tweek is the only person who’s ever gotten him to spiral.

After a moment of indecision, he slouches down so he won’t be straining the shit out of his neck and leans his head against Tweek’s.

Tweek’s side is warm, and so is the top of his head, and his hair is soft and ticklish under his cheek. He can feel Tweek’s arm moving as he fidgets with his bracelets and hear the quiet clacking of beads knocking together.

He can also hear his own heart beating fast.

He hopes Tweek can’t.

But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if he found out. It would be easier than telling him, and he keeps digging the hole he’s in deeper and deeper because every time he sees a couple holding hands he has to consciously turn his brain off. He can’t get around it anymore. It plagues his daily life, how much he likes Tweek. The only time it doesn’t is when Tweek’s in front of him, but it’s starting to bleed into that, too, and the longer he spends dragging his feet, the more likely it is that someone like Token will lock on to what a cool person Tweek really is and swoop in like he never had a chance.

“Hey,” he says, before he can second-guess his way out of it. “Do you wanna see the new Spiderman with me?” That’s neutral, right? Not glaringly I think I’m starting to really, really like you and if you don’t like me back I might never ask anyone out again? Superhero movies are always neutral and everyone loves Spiderman. At least, everyone he knows. It’s better than asking him to see some corny rom-com.

“Sure,” Tweek replies. Neutral.

He frowns. Did Tweek hear him right? Or has he just gotten that obvious? Fuck, does he already know? “Like, with me.”

“Yeah, with you. I got that when you asked if I wanted to see it with you.”

“No—” He picks his head up, and Tweek sits up from his shoulder, eyebrows pinched in confusion. Being able to see his face makes it worse. He kind of feels like he might be sick. “Tweek, c’mon.”

“We go to the movies all the time, why are you being weird?”

...

Oh.

Huh.

Maybe he shouldn’t have tried starting something by asking Tweek to do something they probably would have done anyway.

“Do you wanna see the new Spiderman with me as a date,” he corrects. His neck feels hot, and the sides of his head.

Tweek blinks, and then takes a breath like he’s about to talk, and then stops. “Oh.” His eyes get huge—which is an accomplishment, because they’re big in the first place—and a band from his cheeks, across the bridge of his nose, all the way to the tips of his ears turns bright pink, flaring up more than before. Maybe it’s that easy to make him blush. Maybe he’s just that pale. “Oh! Tonight? ‘Cause I can’t do tonight, I have to—we have the—”

“Not tonight. It’s not out yet.” He allows Tweek about three seconds to catch up, watching the gears turn. He likes watching Tweek think. “It’s out Friday.”

“Friday?”

Tweek’s really staring at him, now. He must be the luckiest guy in the world.

He nods, and Tweek says, “Okay, Friday,” which sends his good mood screeching to a halt.

“I thought you were busy Friday.” There was something with Tweek's dad he was supposed to work on—he's sure of it.

“Well not anymore.”

“Oh.” He notices it, then—that he’s smiling, and that Tweek is still staring. That that may be why Tweek is staring. “Cool.”

Tweek ducks his head like he’s noticed it too and knocks his head against his shoulder. “Cool.”

After a little bit, he remembers why he’s even here. “Hey, we have to—”

“Right! Right.”

Their project doesn’t end up getting started for another ten minutes.

Tweek didn’t realize how long it had been since he worked with Wendy until it was just the two of them, alone to cover the afternoon slump after Nichole clocked out.

There was a lot to catch up on. She asked about his classes—which are good, and hers are too. His parents—which are good, and hers are too. Whether he’s caught up on The Great British Baking Show—which he hasn’t been caught up on in years, but apparently she spent most of her break watching it.

(“So you’re gonna take over baking in the morning now, obviously,” he said when she told him, and she tapped him with one of the long-handled stirring spoons.

“Absolutely not, but I love your confidence!”)

Eventually, she asked about Craig. Because of course she would. She staked her claim on a horse in this race a long, long time ago.

“There might—”

It’s the first time he’s had to say it out loud to anyone. It’s been his best-kept-secret since Tuesday, and sharing it makes it real and ruin-able. He hasn’t spoken it into existence yet in case of misunderstanding or rain check. Or nuclear apocalypse.

But it’s in three hours, so there probably won’t be a nuke before then. “There might be a date?”

Wendy drops the ice scoop. And the cup she was endeavoring to scoop the ice into. “What?!”

“Careful with—”

“Shut up. Don’t say anything.”

“...Okay.”

He waits until she’s handed the finished lemonade out the window and told the customer to have an amazing day before he bothers trying to open his mouth again, and even then, he doesn’t get a word in. She starts in on him immediately. “There might be a what?!”

“A date?”

“When?”

“Tonight?” She grabs his arms. “In theory? Wendy if you’re gonna beat me can you wait until after, please—”

She shakes him. “When did you know?”

“Huh?”

“When did you know there would be a date?”

He frowns. Does that matter? Maybe it does to girls. He can’t pretend to understand them. “Earlier this week, I just—”

“Tweek. Oh my god.”

He looks off to the side. “What?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“After.”

“After?!”

“Just—in case.” He likes Wendy. Really, he does. But she can be a little commanding sometimes, and it’s kind of stressing him out, and trying to explain any of it in detail is just going to stress him out even more. “Y’know.”

She studies him for a second. This is another Wendy thing that stresses him out—it’s like she can always tell exactly what’s going on with him just by looking. It’s weird. And scary. “You’re expecting it to go badly.”

“I’m not.” He wiggles out of her evil grasp and goes to make himself busy, rinsing the blender. “I think I’m being realistic.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Lots of things could happen and it going badly is definitely one of them, I don’t really think it’s fair for you to say that ‘cause you don’t know—”

“Tweek—” She draws up next to him and turns the faucet off, and when she pulls the pitcher away he lets her. “You’re over-preparing for the worst.”

He doesn’t have anything intelligent to say to that, so he just shrugs. He has a tendency to do that—he has for his entire life. It came free with his anxiety disorder.

“What are you going to do if it goes well?”

“I don’t know, cry? What do people usually do?”

She smiles as if he's utterly hopeless. Sometimes he thinks he might be. “Plan a second date.”

Maybe the coffee shop his date works at—is clocked in at, right now—isn’t the best place to debrief what happened last Friday, but it’s where Craig’s friends choose to interrogate him.

He doesn’t really know what to tell them without sounding like a loser. The second he mentions Tweek putting his head on his shoulder during the movie as something significant that happened, he’s pretty sure he’s gonna get flamed, so he’s electing to not even bring it up. Talking about holding hands is gonna get him laughed at, too. And he doesn’t feel like describing Tweek kissing his cheek, or the kiss by Tweek’s front door that honestly barely even qualifies as such that followed.

“It was good,” he ends up saying. The cup is warm in his hands, but not hot. He told Tweek about that weeks ago—that he hates it when he gets a drink somewhere and it’s way too hot to drink right away. He didn’t even make a big deal out of it, just mentioned it, offhand. “It was really good.”

It still doesn’t feel real. He’s never been interested in anybody the way he’s interested in Tweek. It’s all very novel, still. People in general pretty much suck, in his experience, so to meet somebody so—not perfect, but perfect for him—it just hasn’t sunk in yet. That it’s happened. That it’s happening. That it’s going well.

“Well, dude,” Clyde says, patting his back in a way he thinks is probably supposed to be supportive but really just makes him lean as far as he can in the opposite direction. He doesn’t want Clyde thinking he can touch him. “Just be careful. You know what they say: never stick your dick in crazy.”

He gives Clyde a look, dead-eyed, and drones, “What.”

“Y’know, like—” With obvious effort, Clyde attempts to articulate further. Craig watches and tries not to think it’s at least a little bit funny. But it is. He can practically smell the smoke. “Just don’t stick your dick in crazy! What doesn’t make sense about that?”

“Maybe the fact that Tweek isn’t crazy,” Token points out, eyes flicking toward the counter. If he hadn’t been feeling prickly towards Token ever since he hinted that he might be competition, he would have appreciated the help. Instead it just pisses him off.

There’s a thump under the table when Jimmy whacks Clyde with his crutch. “You’re just m-mad that you’re not getting any.”

“Nuh-uh! For your information, me and Bebe aren’t broken up, we’re on a break.”

Craig scoffs. “Because that’s so different.”

Wendy practically dropping Clyde’s matcha in front of him with an icy, “Enjoy,” reminds him there are other people in the world. Like, behind the counter. And that because no other customers are in the shop at 3:30 on a Tuesday, those people probably heard everything.

Tweek, stationed at the register, probably heard everything.

“Move.”

He says it to Clyde before he even really notices that he’s talking out loud, and Clyde blinks at him. “What?”

“Move, asswipe.”

“Jesus, o-kay!”

When he’s halfway to the counter, he hears Clyde saying it must be that time of the month, and the silence that follows when nobody agrees with him.

“Tweek,” he starts, but he doesn’t really know where to begin. Tweek puts his register code in on the number pad and starts tapping around on the touchscreen with his Sharpie. “I don’t even like Clyde. We were just neighbors growing up and now I can’t get rid of him. He’s a jackass and he doesn’t know what he’s—”

“Seven forty-four.”

“What?”

“Seven dollars and forty-four cents. For your drink, I know you know that.”

He frowns. “I’m not ordering.” He barely even got to the drink he already has, let alone getting another one.

“Then what are you doing?”

He buffers completely. What is he doing? He’s not apologizing, exactly, because he doesn’t have anything to apologize for. But he’s not just talking, either.

Saying nothing turns out to be just as bad as, or potentially worse than, saying the wrong thing. Before he can throw his thoughts together into something coherent, something that could make sense to somebody who doesn’t live in his brain, Tweek takes in a shaky breath and says, “Actually, I think I’m supposed to be on break, Henrietta could you—”

It’s scary how quickly she materializes behind him, and how quickly Tweek vanishes to the back room afterwards.

He becomes dimly aware of the fact that Token is currently chewing Clyde out, which is honestly better than he deserves—what he deserves is Craig kicking his ass into next year, but he can’t really do that when he’s trying to figure out how to put this fire out.

He never thought he’d see the day he got into a stare-down with a goth girl about whether or not it’s worth it to enter an employees only area, but he’s more surprised that he actually feels intimidated by her. She must be almost a foot shorter than him, but it’s something about her flat stare and the way she keeps chewing her gum like this is just another day. And her nails, long and pointed like claws. She could take his eye out, easy, and she probably wouldn’t feel any remorse.

“I really like him.” He’s not expecting it to change anything, especially because it’s not a lot. It sounds especially pathetic when he says it out loud, because Tweek isn’t even his boyfriend or anything, just a guy he likes. It’s the best he has, and it’ll keep being the best he has at least until he gets a second date.

Henrietta doesn’t really seem like a boombox-in-the-rain, let’s-hug-it-out kind of girl, more like a cannibalism-as-a-metaphor-for-love type, but she rolls her eyes and retreats behind the counter to go back to what looks to be restocking cups. “He really likes you, too. It’s lame.”

It doesn’t seem like she would care if he thanked her, so he doesn’t. Just takes off down the hall and slips in to the back room.

He just catches the tail end of Tweek wiping his face, judging by how his head is tucked down so he can only really see the back of his head and his hands moving. “I’m really not feeling up to it right now, sorry,” Tweek says.

He shifts back and forth on his feet. Tweek probably doesn’t even want him here, especially in what looks to be a storage-ish room, but he can’t just leave knowing he could have fixed something. And it’s not like he can really back out now, anyway. He stares between the floor and a shelf on the far side. “It’s me.”

Tweek sits up straight and twists to look at him immediately.

“Oh, motherfucker, did she seriously let you back here?!”

He shrugs. “She didn’t really try to stop me.” It would be kind of interesting to see it all—the spare air-pots, the ice machine, the background-stuff—if there wasn’t something much bigger for him to worry about. Maybe Tweek would let him look around someday, under better circumstances.

“If my dad catches that on the cameras I’m never gonna hear the end of it, he’s gonna try to install a fucking child lock and then—”

“Are you okay?”

Tweek pauses, and then shrugs like his eyes don’t still look wet. “I kinda figured something was gonna—I mean, eventually. But I really don’t feel like talking about it, it’s fine.”

He frowns. “Eventually?” He watches Tweek for a long time. He can see him thinking about it, putting the pieces together and rearranging them for different outcomes, like making a dialogue tree in a game. Looking at every possible route.

None of the options must sound good to him, so when Tweek finds his way out of his head, he says, “I’m not talking about it. It’s fine.”

“It’s not. He’s a douchebag.”

“He’s your friend.”

“Not anymore.”

“What? Craig, come on—”

“No. I don’t like him.” He pulls the chair next to Tweek out and it makes an ugly screeching sound that has both of them grimacing. “I’m serious.”

Tweek shrinks in on himself a little, looking at him like he still thinks he’s lying. Which is fine, because he’ll realize he’s not when he blocks Clyde’s number as soon as this is over. “Okay. But that doesn’t change anything.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I’m still—because that doesn’t make it less true?”

He frowns. “But it’s not.”

“No, really, it’s nothing new, I know I can be a lot, I’m just—” Tweek wipes stray moisture from his face, almost hiding behind his hands. “I just forgot. You made me forget.”

He feels like he strangled a baby bunny. Actually, he feels like Clyde strangled a baby bunny and handed him its mangled corpse. He never knew his chest could hurt so much over something that’s not happening directly to him, but it’s kind of becoming Tweek’s modus operandi to make him feel things he’s never felt before.

“See?! You can’t even tell me I’m not, you know he’s right.”

“I like that, though.” He only says it like it’s obvious because to him, it is. It’s not like Tweek hides his muchness particularly well, if he’s even trying. For the longest time he’s sort of reminded Craig of a cartoon character with how vivid he is.

“Right,” Tweek snips, still sort of wiping at his eyes. “Duh. Jesus, Craig.”

“But I do. My life was really boring before I started talking to you.”

“But you have hockey. And your friends, and—”

He grabs Tweek’s arm, then his hand, just to get him to stop talking. He squeezes harder when he feels the shaking. “My friends are fine. Hockey’s fine. School’s fine. Just fine. Do you get it?” Tweek shakes his head, slow at first and then faster. “Tweek. You’re the only thing that makes me happy.”

Now he feels like he ran over a strangled baby bunny with his car, because Tweek looks horrified, and his eyes get glassy again, and he says, “No, you should be happy all the time—”

He takes Tweek’s other hand, too, and squeezes. “I am when I’m with you. So I don’t care that you’re a lot. I knew you were when I started liking you and it didn’t change anything. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He grabs the back of Tweek’s chair and the leg nearest to him and pulls him closer, and closer, until he can get his hands on Tweek’s waist and hold him close. He’s never really wanted someone’s touch before, but he always wants Tweek’s now.

He can feel Tweek’s breathing slowing down against his chest, even when he inhales so he can pull back and say, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Tweek resolutely avoids looking at him, so he lifts his head with a hand on his jaw. “Tweek, it’s okay.”

“Okay.”

“Dude, fuck Clyde,” he says, and Tweek gives him a watery laugh and leans against him again.

“Fuck Clyde.”

For a little while, they just sit. He didn’t think it could be so nice to just hold somebody. He doesn’t even like hugs from his parents, or god forbid his sister, but Tweek’s arms feel nice around the back of his neck and his shoulders and he thinks he wouldn’t mind doing this all the time. Maybe he’ll get to. Kind of depends on if Tweek wants a second date, but it would be insane to ask now.

Eventually, Tweek pulls away and checks the time. “Think they’re still out there?”

He shrugs. “Token, probably. And he might force Clyde to apologize to you. And Jimmy rode with Token, so...”

Tweek takes a breath. “Great! Okay.”

“I can tell them to fuck off.”

“You don’t have to—”

“What if I want to?”

“I was just gonna leave early. They have enough cover here and I was off in twenty minutes anyway, so—”

“Where are you going?”

Tweek blinks at him. “Just. Home?"

“Can we go somewhere?”

Tweek isn’t entirely sure how he got coaxed into Craig’s car.

Actually, yes, he is—because Craig asked him to go somewhere and it was Craig asking, so he said yes. If Craig jumped off a bridge he’d probably jump too. A kidnapper could lure him into his van by saying Craig was in there. Craig even ran interference against Clyde being held at Token-point while he grabbed his stuff and clocked out.

But this was a terrible idea. He hates crying. Like, seriously. It was bad enough when it happened earlier, but now he feels like it could happen any second and he has no control over it, which is just the worst, and Craig’s probably gonna end up deciding he’s a total pussy or a mess or an emotional wreck and not worth the trouble—

“You don’t have to come in. You can stay here and I can bring them out, I just thought—” Craig shrugs, looking out the window at his apartment complex. He sort of recognizes the street. “I don’t know. It’s actually probably better if you stay, room’s a fuckin’ mess—” He makes for the handle, and he’s halfway out the door when Tweek catches it.

“Wait, them?”

Craig doesn’t answer—just bends down to look in and says, “Stay,” and then he’s alone in Craig’s Civic.

With his thoughts and the radio. Perfect. He already felt like an idiot and now he’s sitting in a boy’s car by himself, staring at an apartment complex and feeling even stupider. What is he even doing here? He should have just gone home. He could have just said no and if he did, he’d be in bed with his pajamas on by now. Happier. It all feels very immediate, still. It doesn’t feel over.

When Craig reappears, he has his hoodie on backwards, and the hood hangs down close to the middle of his chest, weighed down by... something. Whatever it is, it’s small enough that he can’t really tell. It's actually kind of driving him nuts with curiosity that there's absolutely nothing distinct about the shape in Craig's hood. What the fuck is he bringing him?

It's not until Craig is opening the door and ducking back into the car that he notices the shape is moving on its own. Which poses more questions than it answers.

“I don’t really know if this is gonna do anything,” Craig says, reaching into the hood. “But they always make me feel—”

“Holy shit, is that a baby capybara?!”

Craig blinks, and looks down at the small, brown creature he’s produced. “Oh.” Its nose twitches as it sniffs and makes little honking noises. “No. He’s a guinea pig.”

“Oh.” In hindsight, that maybe makes a lot more sense. But he’s never seen a guinea pig in person before, only pictures on Instagram sometimes, and on Wonder Pets when he was, like, five.

“This one’s Spot. Here.” Craig holds him in front of him, all fuzzy fur and giant, glossy eyes.

He leans back immediately. “I don’t know how to hold a guinea pig, I don’t wanna drop him.”

“Tweek. Put your hands out.”

“No, seriously, if I dropped him and he got hurt I think I’d, like, kill myself or something or—”

“Tweek.”

A pained noise escapes him before he can stop it, and when he looks down, he has his hands cupped in front of him. He has no idea when that happened.

Craig sets Spot in his hands and strokes down the big, white splotch on his back, maddeningly gentle. For a second—one second of delusion, before reality crashes back in—he’s jealous of a god damn guinea pig.

“He might be a little scared at first,” Craig says, quietly. He never noticed it before—how nice Craig’s voice is. “Just ‘cause he doesn’t know you yet. But he should be okay since I’m here. You got him?”

He can’t tell if Spot is standing on his hands or if he’s laying down and he just so happens to be able to feel his feet, but he’s not trying to get away, at least. “I think so?”

“Good.” The second guinea pig Craig pulls out of his hood has colors in bands, like neapolitan ice cream. “This is Spot’s brother, Stripe.” When he goes to hand the second one over, Tweek blinks down at his Spot-full hands.

“I don’t think Stripe’s gonna fit.”

“Probably not,” Craig says, holding Stripe in one hand and scooping Spot up again with the other. “Cross your arms.” He crosses his arms like he’s pretending to be mad, and Craig snorts. “Not like that, like you’re holding a baby.”

“Oh.” He untucks his hands and turns them out, and Craig balances the guinea pigs in the crooks of his arms.

“There.”

They squirm around a little, getting comfortable, and he watches. They’re weird creatures. He likes the honking noises they make, and they’re warm when they settle and lay down.

“Are they—” Craig starts, looking lost. Out of his element and awkward. It makes him want to squeeze his head or bite him or something, but he can’t because he’s holding guinea pigs. “Do you feel better?”

He blinks.

Huh. He does feel better. He doesn’t even feel stuck anymore.

It must be a miracle. “Yeah.”

Craig watches him, and he watches the guinea pigs, and after a while, Craig says, “I kinda—wanna be with you. I think. Is that too soon?”

“Really?” Craig nods. Jesus must be feeling particularly kind today, two miracles in a row? “Well—I kinda wanna be with you, too, I think, so if it’s too soon we’re both screwed.”

“Any other hobbies I should know about?”

“I paint sometimes.”

“Jesus Christ, you do everything.”

Craig has no idea whose house he’s in, but it’s fucking huge and perfect for the end-of-the-year party Token and Jimmy dragged him to, so he doesn’t really care.

He was supposed to go find Token, because Tweek wanted to ask him something, but now he can’t remember what that was or what they were even talking about that led to him getting up. He’s been exploring the house for what feels like twenty minutes, but maybe he just feels that way because he got up by himself.

He’s walked past every closed door, and he really hopes Token isn’t behind any of them because he doesn’t wanna see that, and he checked the kitchen, and the living room, and at least one coat closet.

He finally finds Token in the basement talking to—Tweek?

He squints, putting his hand on the wall to steady himself.

Not Tweek. Definitely not Tweek. Just some tiny blonde guy with a scar. Token must have a type or something. The second the guy’s arms are around Token’s neck he turns and gets the fuck out of there—he doesn’t need to know, it’s none of his business, and now he has something to get to the bottom of.

He retraces his steps back to the couch upstairs, where Tweek is still curled up with his back against the arm, and drops like a sack of flour. The floor doesn’t feel real. Nothing feels real with the music so loud, and feeling Tweek’s eyes on him doesn’t help. Six months ago he would have never believed any of this would happen.

He lets his head loll to the side. “Hey. If Token asked you out before I did, would you have said yes?”

Tweek blinks at him, then sits up a little. “Huh?”

“If Token—”

“Craig, I can’t hear you.”

“Oh.” He leans in, close to Tweek’s ear, and asks a little louder, and Tweek jerks back with his face all scrunched up.

“Fuck no.” He must realize how that sounds immediately, because he backtracks while Craig laughs. “I mean—not fuck no, Token’s nice or whatever—stop laughing at me!”

He melts into Tweek’s body like a weighted blanket, rubbing his face against his shoulder. Tweek is so warm. And he smells good. It’s making him sleepy, or maybe it was the alcohol that did that. “Sorry. You’re funny.”

“He’s nice, and, like, he’s not not attractive and I like him fine—” Craig stiffens up a bit at that, that is not what he wants to hear and now he wants to kick Token’s ass for not even doing anything— “But he’s not you.”

It’s a good answer. It’s a very good answer. He hums and exhales his contentment into the soft skin of Tweek’s neck. “’Kay. G’night.”

“’Goodnight’, what do you mean ‘good’—Craig, you’re not sleeping here.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m doing it right now.”

“I’m not letting you sleep on top of me in Brad Biggle’s basement.”

“’S that where we are?”

“Craig.”