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Not even noon yet and my body already dragged with the weight and looming exhaustion that a full day usually brought. Some... ten, fifteen minutes since I'd sent that message, and not only had I failed to get any more progress on my homework (come on, just a few more problems...), but neither had Tony gotten his response to me. I couldn't help but wonder if my message ever actually successfully sent, or if I'd worded it in a way he could understand, or if I was pushing a little too far with that question...

...but, then again, it wasn't really that invasive of a thing, wasn't it? Just - so I heard you like someone. Yeah. Okay. How are you handling it? That's all. Nothing more than that. Unless my other suspicions were right and I did, in fact, turn out to be the person that he likes. If that were the case, I could understand some hesitation or... well, I don't know. The word's escaping me. So much going on, so much to worry about, so many thoughts rolling around in my head. When the smell of Dad cooking breakfast - eggs and bacon, it smelled like - first wafted into my room, for a moment I had no idea what to think about it, until I remembered what time it was and what was going on outside my little bubble of existence here.

My little, personal space, where the single thought that my mind kept on circling back around to no matter how I tried to distract it, was yellow-gold fur speckled with shadow-black spots, and amber-orange eyes.

"Matt!" Dad called, all the way from downstairs. My ears perked. "Come eat!"

Hard choice. I half-pulled myself up out of my chair, glanced down at my phone still lying on the edge of the desk, reached for it, stopped, reached for it again, stopped again... and then tore myself away and left the room before I could put more thought into it. Would probably be better if I just let it come as it did.

And, then, talk about a disconnect. Dad gave me another good morning smile as soon as I'd made my way into the kitchen, and handed me a plate as if there were nothing going on, as if today was a totally normal day. Which I guess it still was, for a high school senior. Before I'd gotten over to the table to sit down, he'd started talking about some funny thing that happened to him at work the other day, usual dad stuff; and I tried to listen, tried to laugh with him, but... you know how it is.

Then, as if he could tell what I was thinking and really wanted to mess me up:

"So..." The older dingo pushed around his eggs with his fork. He'd put in that one kind of red seasoned salt with the special spices, so instead of yellow they looked more orange with little speckles of brown. "Who was this you hung out with this weekend? I don't think I asked."

Little chill went up my spine. Not a bad one, of course. All of a sudden, I felt a bit less hungry than I was just a few seconds ago, and I, too, pushed my eggs around. "Tony?"

"That his name?" He squinted, frowned, and raised a forkful to his mouth. "You might've mentioned that. I don't remember."

"Oh. Yeah. We have astronomy and history together. He's n..." Nice? New? Both true. Why was I stumbling over this? "...nice. New kid this semester. Cheetah?"

Dad nodded. "Oh, yeah, yeah. Hey, you know I dated a cheetah once?"

Oh God. Another dating story. Dad had a lot of those. Honestly, sometimes I didn't know whether he was telling the truth, or just wanted to see me smile and hear me laugh. Either way, though... "No?" I played along.

"Oh, yeah. First girl I actually asked out in college. Hot as - hot as hell, if you pardon my language."

"I don't." I waited 'til he looked at me before I lost my composure and grinned.

"Her name was... God, what was it? Marie? Maria? Something like that. She liked red Fanta and snapdragons. Only remember that because I got her a bunch for her birthday."

"Snapdragons?"

"It's a flower, Matt. What are they teaching you in school these days?"

"Not about flowers-"

"They're cute little things. Never heard of them before that, though, so..." Dad scooped another bunch of eggs up on his fork, and pointed at me with it. "I can see where you're coming from. Anyway. Our first date was at a movie theater - what's that look for? Yes, we had movies back then - and I remember, it wasn't even a scary one, but about halfway through she grabbed my paw..."

Goodness. "Okay, Dad. I get it."

"Yeah. Good times." Now, he reached for the glass of milk he'd poured himself. "Was a really good relationship. I thought so, at least."

"What happened? I mean - I'm not half-cheetah, so..."

Dad sat back in his chair, reaching up to scratch behind one of his ears. He avoided meeting my eyes. "Yeah. Uh. Funny thing about that. Turned out she was a lesbian."

"Oh boy."

"Oh - she knew that before! I didn't. She did. Explained it all to me afterwards. Really nice about it, said there was 'just something about you'... sure boosted my ego for a bit, lemme tell ya. Shame it had to end. Always is." Then, he spent a moment trying to tear a piece of bacon off between his fangs, and this time pointed at me with the other half of it. "Stayed friends, kept in contact with her for a good while after. 'Til I met your mom, actually. Well, 'til we got married." While chewing, he looked off to the distance in thought. "Wonder if I still have her on Facebook."

"Oh my god, Dad."

"Huh? Oh. Yeah. Well, it's good you're making new friends. Like, don't get me wrong, Tyler's nice and all, but... small doses, you know?"

"Yeah." I looked back over my shoulder after standing up, mostly-empty plate resting in my paws. "Tony's not like that, I don't think. It's nice hanging out with him."

"I would hope so. Invite him over for dinner sometime." Then... "Hey, is his mom single?"

Leave it to my dad to pull my mind out of its relentless cycle. The smiles and laughter that he'd left me with persisted in my heart until I'd gotten to the top of the stairs. Then, there was only the quiet of morning, the dim grey light in the hall that filtered out through the half-open bedroom doors, the cool stirring in the air from the AC vent right above... and, then, the distant bzz-bzz of my phone on my desk, receiving a text message.

How convenient. That sound made me actually double my pace, and before I could put another thought into it, I'd slid into my room and swiped it off my desk. 3 new messages.

Oh Lord.

Just like anything else. It can be hard to recognize at first, and it kind of takes you by surprise, but it is definitely there, and there is not much you can do about it. Other than let it stay there and grow. My mother said it is like a plant, like a cactus flower. Good to look at, nice to have, but you need to be careful about handling it, because doing something wrong can mess it up for both. But, since it is a cactus... you can usually let it stay still for a while, and not need to worry(1/3)

about it dying. And cactus flowers do not usually live long, yes? So imagine how nice it must feel to be able to keep that flower big and alive. And to know that it is alive because of your attention and your care. You cannot just decide, I want to grow a cactus. It will be beautiful. You need to think about it first, and plan it out. You need to decide what you are going to do and how you will handle it, especially if things go wrong. Sorry it is taking me a while to reply. I do not know s(2/3)

ome of the words in English. Does that help at all?(3/3)

Certainly sounded like he'd had some thorough discussions with his mother about this sort of thing. Wonder why that could be. After all, she did seem perfectly accepting and even encouraging of one of us having a - homosexual relationship, again recalling how she'd gone on to ask if I had a boyfriend, following my hesitation to her original question.

Instead of dragging things on further, though, and partially because I'd lost my nerve, I just typed a quick answer - "Yeah, that's good, thank you" - then sent it, and dropped my phone screen-down into my lap.

That word still sizzled in the back of my mind. Homosexual. Was that still okay to say these days? Too technical? Gay. A guy liking another guy. That was easier, felt less... bad wasn't quite the right word. It's just that all of this seemed a little too... well, a little bit... absurd, frankly. Wasn't something that had ever really crossed my mind before. Could I be blamed, though? I'd been with Sasha pretty much since I was first interested in being in a relationship, and nobody else really caught my interest outside of that.

Until...

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. And I wasn't sure how to feel about that. Calling my homework a lost cause for now, I stood up from my desk, phone in one paw, and then went over to my bed... and flopped face-down on it, eyes closed, breath slow and steady.

It's not like I went out of my way to spend a bunch of time with him this past week... even though we just met last Monday, and I don't think there's been a single day other than today so far where we haven't spent at least an hour or so together. It's just that... hanging out with him was what I naturally wanted to do. You know? Like when you get home from school one day, and you just can't be bothered to do your homework because there's a new video game out and you just, you just have to play some of it first. You already know what you want, and what you're going to do. And even if you were to try to do something else, you'd have to force yourself to keep up with it, because the interest and motivation wouldn't quite be there.

That's what I felt with Tony. Maybe a little muted, maybe not quite as intense, but that was definitely it. And that was... a bit weird. Especially just thinking about it like this, bringing it out, peering in close at it. I hadn't thought about it before, but... it kind of felt like the start of my relationship with Sasha. All the time we spend together, fun and enjoyable but pervaded by a constant, distant sense of... nervousness, almost. Not really a bad nervousness. Just nervousness about whether I was doing the right thing, saying what I should. Nervousness about...

...feelings, maybe? Like whether I was feeling the way I was supposed to, and whether I was making her - the other person - feel the right way, too. Something like that. Usually I just pushed it away.

It just kept on going back to him, though. Could be that it only seemed like this because I was worrying about it, and making it a bigger deal than it should be. Only way to stop worrying about it was to... well, to stop thinking about it, right?

New video game had come out recently. I lifted my head, rested my chin on my pillow, breathed a low sigh out beneath the weight of my own body. Maybe that would hold my attention.

Feeling a lot of "maybe"s today.

~ ~ ~

You know how it goes, though. Couldn't focus my mind, couldn't really think about anything else - not through my struggle to get through the first few levels, not through when Dad brought me out to the grocery store, not when we stopped by an electronics store after so he could get a new charger for his phone and also a replacement TV remote for when he inevitably lost ours. Wasn't until a while after we got home that I realized I'd gotten a few text messages, and just hadn't felt my phone vibrate. First two were from Tyler asking if I'd help him with his math homework tomorrow before class, and then the last one was from Tony.

Is everything okay?

Four or so hours later, and I was in exactly the same spot as I'd been this morning. And just like this morning, it took me a few tries before I figured out something acceptable to reply with.

"Yeah! I'm fine. :) Just doing some thinking." Then, I typed it and deleted it three times, before sending it anyway: "We can talk about it tomorrow."

The rest of the day sped by, quick enough to disorient me when I next looked up from my computer and saw that it'd gotten dark outside the window. A few moments later, Dad called me down to dinner - usually he had me help, so that also took me by surprise - and then next thing I knew, it was getting close to bedtime if I wanted to get my nine hours.

Which I wouldn't. Every time I closed my eyes and relaxed a bit, guess where my thoughts kept going? His face, his smile, that gentle scent that curled up off of him and tickled at my nose whenever he brushed by me in the hallway, or when he plopped down onto his bed beside me while we were taking a break... the way his fingers just barely traced across mine when he handed me a pile of clothing once, and the warmth of those fingerpads.

For now, for tonight, the one thing that escaped my focus and my worry was the beginnings of this little flickering warmth in the middle of my chest, like someone lightly running their claws in my fur, but just beneath the surface. A nice, giddy feeling. I think that was what ended up helping me get to sleep.

And then the next morning, though I'd gotten about two hours less sleep than I'd intended, I felt... refreshed, I guess. I felt good, which was pretty dang rare for early school mornings like this. The previous day I'd neglected to get my stuff together, so it took me an extra fifteen minutes or so to do that before I made my way out to the bus stop. Then, like usual, I almost fell right back asleep on the bus, lulled down by the heat of the engine and everyone else's bodies, the mixed scents, the rumbling rolling of the wheels.

Tony - or at least, my worries and thoughts about him - managed to stay at the edges of my consciousness, for the most part. Until I got inside the school building, that is, and started down towards where we hung out in the mornings. Tyler was already there, but instead of looking like he'd gotten out of bed only to go back asleep once he got here, he sat bent over a textbook with his notebook open to one side and a short stack of paper to the other.

His ears noticed my presence before the rest of him did, and he did a little jump when I dropped my backpack down beside him.

"Oh, thank God," he said, and straightened up a bit. "I didn't do too great on my test, man."

"No? Got the grade back already?"

When he shook his head, his ears kept going for a moment after. Jackals, man. "Nah. Can just feel it. Y'know? There's two ways to start a test: oh, I know this, and holy shit what the fuck is going on where am I. Guess which one this one was."

"Jeez. That bad?"

"You bet, that bad. Hey-" Here he pointed down to somewhere on his notes with the end of his pencil. I'll be honest, I've known him all these years and I still have trouble reading his handwriting sometime. "It goes sine, negative sine, negative cosine, cosine, right?"

"What? It's sine, cosine, negative sine, negative cosine. Wait - you're working with trig functions already?"

"Hell do you mean, already? This entire class just feels like an extension of geometry. But harder."

"You're in precal?"

"All year, man."

"Weird. We just barely started the trig functions. Uh - yeah, it's that, and then integration is the same thing but backwards..."

"Oh God." He rolled his eyes. "We haven't even started integrating yet. I hate math."

"That wasn't on the test, was it?"

"It was! I had a feeling I was doing something wrong. God, can't believe it... gonna have to repeat the class..."

"Come on, it's not that bad." Just out of habit, I kept my phone between my paws while I sat beside him, every now and then tapping the power button to see if a message had come in beneath my attention. Hadn't heard from Tony since yesterday; he didn't say goodnight to me, and it was only until after I'd woken up that I realized it.

"Yeah?" Tyler looked up at me. He hadn't slept much, either. "Mom said if I fail another class she's gonna start charging me rent. What could be worse? I mean - I could be dead, but at this rate, I'm starting to welcome that option..."

What could be worse? Well... as we sat there, as my thoughts stewed around among themselves, my heart had started to beat a little faster and I felt the familiar nervousness mixed with excitement. That'd be - a bit weird to mention to him, though. In our friendship in the past, he'd always been the one to come to me to talk and for advice, while I'd just gone on my merry way...

He lifted his book in his lap towards me. "Hey - derivative of this is... this squared, times four of that, right?"

"...Not quite. Look up the chain rule, and try to remember it. That'll really help you out."

...but... this was kind of something big, right? I cleared my throat, adjusted my position, looked down the hall one way, looked down the other. So many people, most of them I recognized, few I actually knew. High school kind of forces you to become acquainted with all the different levels of friendship: the people you grin and nod at whenever you pass in the hallway, but don't ever say anything to; the people you used to be friends with, but now it's too awkward to spark that back up for some reason; the few you actually like and actively hang out with and talk to. All of that.

Then I steadied myself, swallowed, did a quick run-through of what it was I planned to say-

"Wait. Hang on. Chapter eight?..." And Tyler bumped his head back against the lockers, sending a sharp rattle echoing down behind us. "Goddammit. I knew I shoulda stayed home today. Been doing chapter seven this whole time..."

-and lost it. Instead, what came out after a moment of mentally scolding myself: "Is... everything going okay for you? Something bothering you?"

"Huh?" The jackal dropped his brow into his palm, dragging one of his eyelids open. "Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Stayed up way too late all weekend, sleep schedule's fucked up." Then, he rotated his arm down so that he rested his chin in his paw, and his elbow on his knee. "How 'bout you? How're you doin', Matt?"

Sigh. "Wanna know the truth?"

"Hey, man, I wouldn't ask if I didn't."

"Yeah, you would."

"No, yeah, you're totally right. But, sure - what's up?" With that, he closed his textbook around his paper and leaned back against the lockers again, this time with considerably less force. "Anything to take my mind off precal."

"Okay. Well... there's this..." How to say it... "I think I like someone."

All of a sudden, Tyler's face lit up, and he threw his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in. Then there was his scent swirling around me, another one I'd gotten so used to and could identify without a second thought. But, it didn't have quite the same effect on me as Tony's. Far from it.

"Hell yeah, man! About time after that - other bitch. Well, what's her name? You have any classes with her? Wait - do I have any classes with her?"

"We have astronomy together. Actually - we're partners for the project due... in two weeks or so." Still had to check that. I think Ms. Langford said it was due in a month, but I could've sworn that something on the actual paper said we had to turn in a part by Friday. And - a second later, my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach: had me and Tony already mentioned to Ty that we're partners on that assignment? "...Um. I went over to... we hung out this weekend, and got some work done."

"Oh, yeah. I bet you did get some done, huh?" Eyebrow wiggle. I rolled my eyes, but Tyler kept on. "Stay for dinner?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, it was really good-"

"Eat in or - eat out?"

Like I already said. Jackals, man. Gotta say, though, it felt... good to tell someone else about this, to finally admit it not only to myself, but to someone else, too. Even if I was withholding part of the whole story. Rather big part.

"I'm just..." Breathe in, breathe out. This wasn't so bad. "Not sure about the whole thing. You know? Like-"

"Don't know whether you actually like her or not?"

"Yeah. Exactly. It's... not something I've really felt before."

That visibly caught him off-guard, and for a second I thought I'd let on too much. However, the only lasting result was that it seemed to erase at least most of his inclination to joke around. "What, really? That different?"

Even though I'd spent literally all of yesterday thinking through it, I still felt like I needed to work through it some more to be totally, absolutely certain. It just... happened so fast. I was doing fine on my own, and then all of a sudden-

Golden fur, a field of prairie grass speckled with the shadows of sparse trees. This time it felt like my heart rebounded from my stomach all the way up into my throat. Tony smiled as he approached, and lifted one of his paws in a little wave.

I lowered my voice a bit, and leaned in closer to Tyler. "Yeah. I think so. It's just - I didn't really realize it until yesterday, so..." Tony kept on getting stopped up by other people in the hallway, the crowds thickening as the first bell approached. "I don't know. I just - I don't know what to do about it, you know? Now, um, I'm gonna say hi to Tony and... walk him to class..."

Just as I was untangling myself from beneath the jackal's arm, though, he perked up, wagged his tail against the locker, and - probably in an attempt to embarrass me in front of everyone - barked in a noticeably louder voice:

"Wait! Does she like you back?"

Some people turned and looked, but then went back to their own bubbles. My heart dropped back down, and for a moment I struggled with getting my phone back into my pocket. Of course I wanted to look up through all the people, and see if Tony had heard, but then... the greater part of me didn't. Being himself, though, still Tyler went on.

"If you get a new girlfriend, I wanna be the first to hear about it, yeah? And you bet I'll tell Lex about it. Sandra too. You know, she should be getting off her suspension today or tomorrow..." ...and whatever else he said was drowned out by the bell, myself already on my feet and heading towards the cheetah a few feet away.

That warm, fluttering feeling I'd gotten in my chest late last night? Well, this was the opposite of that, like a cold chill crawling down my back, a little pinprick of ice starting right at the middle-left of my sternum and shocked through me. Just for a fraction of a second and then it was gone, but still the memory lingered. Tony's ears had dropped, he'd slowed down, his arm had dropped to his side... and he visibly attempted to change his facial expression as I came up to him, and avoided eye contact.

"Hey," I said, and gave my best attempt at a smile. "Ready for class? I'll - walk you. Like usual."

He swallowed. Honestly, if I hadn't really thought about and come to the strong suspicion that I was the one he liked, I... might not have noticed his change in temperament. Like everything else when it comes to crushing on someone, all the little things seemed magnified tenfold: he did not return my smile at first, but then gave his best attempt, too. It did a little to soothe my tension.

And when he spoke, everything else was gone. As if he hadn't overheard Ty's jabs at all. "Yes. That sounds good. It... is nice to see you today, Matt."