Page 17 of I've Walked Where You've Been
It gave him hope that the college experience was going to be a lot more normal than he’d expected. With his basketball scholarship in his pocket, it might even turn out to be fuckinggreat.
“You wanna go to the club fair together?” Ethan asked, back turned towards Matty, searching for something in his bedside drawer.
Matty didn’t need the bond to know that Ethan still felt awkward asking Matty to hang out when they didn’t need to.
“Yeah! I was gonna ask you the same thing.”
Ethan turned to look at him with a smile, ending his search and closing the drawer. “Cool.”
Matty wasn’t gonna call Ethan out for not being able to look him in the face while asking him to hang—it wasn’t like Matty was much better.
The fair was absolute mayhem, a winding labyrinth of stalls trying to lure students in. They had everything from the Wine and Painting club to Archaeology to Juggling.
Matty didn’t really mind sticking close to Ethan, grabbing his shirt when they were in danger of being jostled apart. “Why does the Japanese group have only white people?” Matty pointed out.
“Ew, why is that so creepy?”
Matty snorted. “Okay, see anything you like?”
They ended up signing up for a couple of clubs each, though none coincided. Ethan joined a book club—something Matty definitely didn’t tease him about, even though he wanted to rib him a little—as well as some sort of meditation yoga thing that Matty would absolutely rip all his hair off if he were forced to attend. Matty signed up for the Hiking and Camping club, which looked totally awesome, as well as the squash one.
“Have you ever even played squash?” Ethan looked at him skeptically.
“No, but it looks fun. Slamming a ball at a wall? What’s not to like?”
Ethan snorted. “Okay, let’s get out of here. If one more person squishes me, I’m going to lose it.”
Matty grabbed the hem of Ethan’s shirt and dragged him out, body-checking a few people on the way.
“Okay,” Ethan laughed. “That was a little more aggressive than I planned.”
Matty shrugged, grinning. “Effective, though.”
“I mean, I’m not arguing with that. Should we grab lunch or something?”
“Hell, yes. I’m fucking starving.”
Whatever Matty had thought about rooming with Ethan again, this was a much more auspicious start than ever before.
**********
Turned out, it was a little hard to build a normal friendship with someone you had that much history with. The truth was that Matty knewa lotabout Ethan—way more than he would ever know about someone he was just trying to be friends with.
It wasn’t just Ethan’s likes and dislikes that Matty was familiar with, but his little everyday habits and quirks. He knew that Ethan wet his toothbrush after putting paste on it, knew that he hated the smell of cooking cauliflower and would leave the house if he caught a whiff of it. Knew he made his bed every day and liked it being tucked tight even when he went to sleep. Knew it took him a while to get out of bed, but once he was standing, he was wide awake.
Matty knew that Ethan was a lot kinder than Matty had ever given him credit for. Knew that he thought about other people, worried about them, considered their needs before acting. Knew that, unless it came to Matty, he didn’t tend to put himself first. And even that was changing—Matty found himself more and more caught in Ethan’s orbit.
Matty knew Ethan’s ambitions—how he wanted to be a conservation biologist, was learning about the complex relationship between animals, climate, and habitat, in order to better protect them.
Matty had been walking beside Ethan practically his whole life, and it was only now that he was starting to realise they had trodden the same paths, gone through the same things, and had each done it pretending the other wasn’t there with them.
It was strange how lonely Matty’s experience had been when, looking back on it, Ethan had been there all along.
There was a lot yet to discover about Ethan, too. Little details he’d been ignoring—how alive Ethan became when he talked about something he loved. How bright his smile could be. How it felt when it was directed at him.
Ethan, too, showed every day how much attention he paid to Matty. He always made sure there were electrolyte drinks in their mini-fridge and that Matty didn’t just collapse in bed after basketball practice, ushering him to the showers. He somehow managed to find the raisin-nut chocolate Matty loved and gave it to him after tests, no matter how well he had done.
Matty talked to Carly, Jess, and Josh often on Skype, and Ethan would pop up in the background with a shy expression that did Matty in, asking them questions so specific that Matty sometimes wondered if Ethan remembered more things about them than Matty did.
