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You ever have a thought so persistent that no matter what you do, you can't really ever get rid of it? Following my conversation with Sandra and Lexi, that was what happened to me. Same thoughts as had been hounding me the entire weekend, and that would then follow me over the course of the rest of the week - but now they were stronger, more forceful, harder to ignore.

And I could feel them changing the way I act, changing how I think and speak. Our conversation took place Tuesday during lunch... and since I hadn't spoken to Dad or one of my friends about setting up a ride home, I'd have to spend my free period on campus. Like with just about everything else having to do with this damn cheetah, I found myself stuck between wanting to go and hang out and spend more time with him, and wanting to instead stay away, work through my thoughts, figure out for certain what I wanted to do.

Though I guess Sandra kind of brought that out in me, and told it to me without needing any extra input from me. She'd sounded so forward, so confident, so sure of it. And that in turn gave me confidence. So after about fifteen minutes of prowling the halls and avoiding any teachers ("you're not supposed to be in the hallway during a free period, you have to be in a classroom or off campus, blah blah"), I turned on my heel, headed over to the library, kept my nose in my phone as I made my way over to our spot so I wouldn't second-guess myself... and then looked up to an empty seat.

That's right. He probably spent as much time as he could practicing, now that he'd made it into first orchestra. That sent a wave of sweet relief through me, and I sent a text to him asking if that was the case, and settled down to try to get some homework done.

The thing was, though, once I started actually interacting with him, when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket on the bus ride home and read over his message... all of that worry, all of that nervousness melted away, and in its place rose the same kind of warmth that I got from spending time with him over the weekend. As I'd learn over that afternoon and then Wednesday and Thursday following, though, it was kind of a slippery slope, easy to trip over the line of comfort into nervousness, doubt, self-questioning, tenuous wondering.

Just, like... how was I supposed to approach any of this? I'd heard stories and read a book once (on Sandra's recommendation) about high school kids who first question and then find out they they're gay, and it's, like... this whole thing with arguing with the family, with struggling with the church, with friends becoming estranged after the news gets out. All that kind of drama stuff.

And that's what kept me awake past my self-enforced bedtime Tuesday night, Wednesday night, especially Thursday night. Lexi said that Tyler's not so keen on it - so what the hell am I supposed to do about that? I'm not about to choose between my best friend and Tony. I don't want anything between Tyler and I to change, especially like that. And then there's Dad - he can't kick me out like always happens in the stories. I mean, I don't think he would, but... I also didn't think that Tyler might be against something like this. I always thought he and Sandra got along just fine.

She and I started talking more, too. Sometimes I could only handle her in... small doses, but she was a lot nicer, a lot funnier, a lot easier to be around than I remember. Maybe that's because I'd never actually gotten to know her in the past, but... she really was confident and bold, a lot more than me. Telling me to just tell Tony I like him, telling me to ask him out. Thursday night I actually had the message typed up - Hey, would you maybe wanna go out for ice cream or something? My treat - before my nerve failed me.

Then Sandra found out that I'd treated him to gelato when we hung out at the mall last weekend. Said something along the lines of holy shit, dude, that's super gay. Gelato? Really? I told her that he liked the bubble gum one, especially when it has the little bits of gum in it. She had a bit of trouble suppressing a laugh, and let out a strained ppffft that caused the pair of teachers talking down the hall to turn their heads and look.

I'd started splitting my time between friends at lunch, one day with Tony, then with Ty and Lexi, then with Tony again until he had to run off to a scheduled practice session with Ari and Ky, and then with Sandra for the rest of that day, during which we had our little conversation.

"So," she said once the bell rang, "you two're hangin' out again this weekend, right?"

"Yeah. Actually, we've got astronomy next period... have a project to work on, and it requires us being out at night to the sky, so I'll be at his place again..."

After I managed to get my bag over my shoulders, the possum grabbed my wrist and stopped my in my tracks. "You're gonna tell 'im, right?"

All of a sudden, it was tough to maintain eye contact. I could feel my cheeks and my ears start to warm up... "I mean-"

"Come on, Matthew. Spring break starts in pretty much two hours. You gotta."

Spring break... this year, for once, me and Dad didn't have anything planned. Just sit around at home and slack off. Play video games, probably. I would have a lot of time. "I mean..."

"And then there's prom coming up in about a month..."

Prom. I hadn't thought about that. "Look. One thing at a time-"

"Okay." She held her paws defensively in front of her. "One thing at a time. You know you want to, Matt, and I know you want to. He's not gonna ask himself out this weekend."

Even through our astronomy class with him sitting right near me, and occasionally leaning over to whisper something to me or sneak a peek at my paper - his stiff but soft whiskers tickled at my shoulder and upper arm - I still couldn't get it out of my head, still couldn't put those worries to rest. What stood out to me now was the concern that, hey, what if he doesn't like me back? What if he's just-

The bell rang, all the other students scrambled up out of their seats, Ms. Langford called for all of them to please get some work on your projects over spring break, and remember there's a meteor shower next Thursday,all the noise and commotion and movement... and when I turned to slide my stuff into my bag next to my chair, out of the corner of my eye I caught Tony sitting there in his desk next to me. It took a moment, but soon he realized I was looking at him, and our eyes met, and...

Whiskers came forward, relaxed, easy; his ears splayed apart, his eyes glittered in the white fluorescent light. And he gave me the softest, sweetest smile I've ever seen, not at all like the friendly smile he gave Ky and Ari back when I first approached on Monday. For a moment, I completely forgot what it was that worried me, and I think my first reaction was to return that sweet smile. I don't know. I didn't think about it; it just happened, a little moment of comfort and solace amid the chaos of spring break beginning.

He started to speak, and I could hear him just fine even beneath all that sound, with the smooth roughness of his timbre, like fine-grain sandpaper: "If you do not need to stop at home, ah... you could maybe come right on over with me and my mother?"

I'd have to clear it with Dad later, but, yeah, that should be fine. That little feeling that had burned to its peak in that moment still left a warm, tingling residue, after we'd gotten our stuff together and started down the hall, after we'd made it out of the building, after we spent a few minutes waiting for Ms. Amador to come on by and get us. The more time that went on, though, that same nervousness started creeping, creeping back, a cold finger of ice tickling at the back of my mind and base of my heart. Tony had decided to sit in the backseat of the car with me, and every now and then on the way to his place I could feel the end of his tail flick against my ankle.

I don't really know the tells and body language for cats, especially cheetahs. He seemed... relaxed, for the most part. Once we got to his place, he led me back into his bedroom - in the week since I'd last been over he'd put up a few posters, set some things out on the shelves, actually set up the stand for his electric keyboard. Looks like he'd made copies of his sheet music for school, too, pages of it spread out across the floor beneath his keyboard and at the end of his bed.

"You can... put your stuff anywhere..." he said, and motioned around the room.

"Looks good in here."

He perked up at that. "Yeah? I am sorry about the, ah - the music... it's a lot of things I have to practice, first orchestra is, ah... kind of... intense."

"Oh, yeah, I bet. Last year they had a killer violin soloist for the spring concert-"

"We do this year, too." A grin this time, and a different warmth bubbling in my chest. It wouldn't get dark outside for another two hours or so.

After resting my bag by the door, I strolled past the cheetah and sat down on the edge of his bed, leaning back a bit. After a moment he came up and sat down next to me, which... of course muddled my mind and made me have to scrabble around for whatever it was I'd wanted to talk about next.

"Um..."

Come on, Matthew. You gotta. Spring break. One thing at a time.

"Are you - making new friends? In orchestra?"

While I'd been working with my words, the cheetah had fished his phone out of his pocket and had started fiddling with it. I got a brief glimpse of his lockscreen, something that looked like a character from a webcomic. "Oh! Yes! Ari is really funny, and Ky is nice. They have been friends for years, and were kind of the first people I talked to after getting into first... there is a nice snow leopard, Kieran, he plays vibraphone, was the pianist in his middle school orchestra so we have some things we can talk about... and then also a, ah..." He raised his paws into the air and swirled his fingers around, like tracing a circle in fingerpaint. "Blotchy dog. Black and white and orange?"

"African wild dog?"

"Is that what they are called in English?

"What are they called in Spanish?"

"Perros salvajes. Which means..." His brow furrowed for a moment. "...wild... dogs..."

Quiet, giggling laughter from both of us, him with his phone clamped between his paws in his lap and me watching the way he rolled his fingers over the case. Once more his long tail flicked around, and briefly rested against my lower back.

"Anyway. Yes, there is a wild dog, second violin - he has a solo part behind Ky's, about two-thirds through the Tchaikovsky... he is nice, too. Pretty eyes. Um-"

Then, all of a sudden, his ears shot up, his whiskers flattened back against his short muzzle, and he turned his head away. The change in his demeanor actually physically startled me, and for a second, I didn't know what to do.

"Tony? What? What is it?"

"Um..."

Then, it clicked. I smiled a little. "What color are his eyes?"

It took him another moment, and when he next looked up at me, he did so for maybe a quarter of a second before looking back down between his feet. "His eyes are... um. Do not match."

"Don't match?"

Tony straightened up and turned to me. "Blue," he said, pointing to his left, "and brown," to his right.

"Oh, wow. I bet that is pretty."

Faintest of smiles, then, and he perked up a little more. This time when he looked at me, he took a second to look between my own eyes, and briefly flicked his little pink tongue out over his lips while preparing to go on.

One thing at a time. Come on, Matthew. He isn't going to ask himself out, right?

I swallowed, and gripped the edge of the bed. Seemed like Tony liked his mattress a little more firm than I did, and with noticeably fewer blankets piled up on top. By now he'd rested his phone in his lap and placed his paws on either side of him, the one closest to me - well, so close to me. Hell, with mine right there next to it, I could feel the warmth from his body, the soft little tickling of his short fur.

But, what was I supposed to say? I never really had to go through this with Sasha, and that was... kind of... my only real relationship, sort of. So I had no practice with asking someone out. Going into this blind. And - with a boy, nonetheless. So, like, was it just... "hey, I was wondering if you, and I, might-"

"Yes. It is pretty."

For a moment I thought I'd missed my chance, what with the feeling of my heart dropping down into my stomach. But then, seeing the way he kept his gaze on me, and that little half-smile of relief, of comfort... I swallowed. This was definitely one of those things where it's better to just go ahead and dive in, instead of spending time thinking about it.

I swallowed again, I licked my lips, I shifted uncomfortably. Tony had gone back to looking through his phone, though he didn't seem particularly put off by my silence. I pulled in a breath, held it, let it out; pulled in another one, held it-

"Hey Tony?"

First his little ears swivelled towards me, and then after tapping something on his screen, his muzzle followed. Those whiskers of his had returned to their forward, relaxed position. "Huh?"

"Um..." Oh God. Oh God. My heart thumped in my chest. I couldn't really believe I was doing this. Did my phone just vibrate? "You know, how... um, you know how there's someone I like?"

Ears flicked again. His phone screen dimmed and then went dark a second later. "Yes..."

"And it's not a girl."

The cheetah rested an elbow on his knee. "Mhmm."

"Um..." I looked away from him, just for a second, to order my thoughts. Sitting at the top of the shelf in the corner of his room was that little tattered wolf plush, the same I'd seen in his closet last weekend. Then, I looked back to him: his expression had changed a bit, turned into something closer to concern. I swallowed yet again. "It's you."

For a second it felt like time stopped, like my heart hung on one beat, like the smooth wind outside died, like his little nightstand analog clock caught up in its rhythm. There was the faintest twitch at the base of his whiskers, a little furrowing of his brow, a pursing of his lips... and he swallowed, and looked back down into his lap. Time continued then, and for a while I wished it hadn't.

"Matt..." His voice was quiet, low, steady. He looked down at the dark screen of his phone, then once more turned back up to me - and gave me a smile, forced. No teeth, short, whiskers still pinned partially back, ears half to the sides. A sad sort of smile. "I am going to go help Mamá with dinner. Would you... like to...?"

Took me a moment to find my voice after that, and even then, I wasn't sure that it didn't shake. What was that supposed to mean? Did I do it right? Was I... wrong about Tony? Me and Lexi and Sandra as well? I could feel my legs and my paws shaking slightly when I stood up to follow him, and felt glad that he made no real effort to keep pace with me. As he walked, his shoulders remained straight and his tail... lashed behind him. He kept one of his paws around his phone in his pocket and the other clenched at his side, fingers repeatedly rolling back and forth, back and forth against his palm.

Things remained quiet between us for a bit. Slowly, gradually, the nervousness faded a bit, but still hung around my neck and kept my heart pounding. Ms. Amador was her usual self, talking about all sorts of things that excited her, occasionally lapsing into smooth Spanish, a few of which Tony responded to just as easily. At one point his sunrise-amber eyes fell on me again, and I tried a smile, and... and after a moment of him holding my gaze and doing nothing, he returned it.

And it felt better. Felt easier, felt more genuine, felt right. The dinner was delicious, a bit spicy for me, a few flavors I've never experienced before, but all very good. Afterwards, Tony had me help him pick up the dishes and start cleaning them off, and then he left for a moment to get another sponge. That left me and the mama cheetah, side by side in the kitchen. Her shoulder came to a few inches above mine, and as she scrubbed the plate, the multiple rings up along the edge of her left ear jingled.

"So," she said, in that same smooth-as-sandpaper voice that her son had. I could feel her sly eyes watching me. "You will be visiting over spring break, yes?"

So many ways to answer that. After seeing that last smile of Tony's... "Yeah," I said, and breathed out. Relax. "I think so. You'll - be okay with it if I snatch Tony away from you to meet my dad, right?" Then, that relaxation was gone for a second. I hadn't thought about what I'd tell Dad.

"Si claro, cariño. Of course. You must introduce me, too, sometime."

"Oh. Uh." This was starting to sound like a sitcom. "Yeah, sure."

Silence between us for a moment, broken by the sound of Tony closing a door further back in the house. Ms Amador slowed in her scrubbing, then set the plate down halfway into the soapy water and looked up at the little window overlooking the sink: they had a cilantro plant in a squat little pot, the branches pouring out over the sides and hanging down, leaves angled back up towards the light. Me and Dad tried growing cilantro once. It died.

"Matt?"

"Yes ma'am?"

"Mi hijo... really likes you. You know that?"

That's what everyone was saying. If anything, that just highlighted the problem with things like this: no matter how much verification and confidence from other people I got, I just couldn't shake that what if. "Yeah. I know."

"No, no, I do not think you understand... I mean, he-"

"No, yeah." I looked up at her, up at her gently-lined muzzle, at the fire-orange eyes a little redder, a little darker than Tony's. Sunset to sunrise. I gave her the same soft smile that he'd given me over dinner just earlier. "I know. I... I like him too."

Those eyes flicked between mine for a moment, her whiskers twitched... and then she grinned, and got right back to scrubbing that plate. Her tail hung close to her body, relaxed, with the cotton-white tip lazily swaying around at her ankles. "Ah! ¿En serio? Well, then, what was I worried about? Eso es genial. 'Tonio is - shy, he gets... he gets scared easily..."

I swallowed, and briefly glanced behind us towards the hallway. Tony hadn't come back yet, and if I perked my ears, I could just barely hear some more noises coming from back there. Seemed like he was getting something else out of the garage. "Um. I just... actually, just told him I like him... before dinner..."

Clatter of a dropped plate into the sink, and when I next looked up, Ms. Amador stood with her paws braced against the counter and her ears and whiskers perked, bright eyes fixed on me. "You did? How did it go? ¿Qué dijo?"

"Excuse me?"

"What did he say?"

"Oh. He..." The warmth of the water had long since soaked into my fur and skin, with the soapy-slickness of the bubbles feeling like a kind of thin film. My fingerpads had a tendency to prune up really easily, so I tried to avoid doing water-related housework whenever I could. "I dunno. He kinda... froze up? For a second I thought I'd... said something wrong..."

Then, quiet tp, tp, tp of footsteps from down the hall. I don't know what it was about her, but I just felt comfortable talking to Ms. Amador like this. While I was starting to clam up and look for an end to the conversation, she just gave a low, smooth laugh, thick like honey, just as sweet.

"No, no, cariño, no worries about that. He is just a kitten. Startled easily... do not worry about it..."

I looked back over my shoulder to see what it was Tony had gotten, but he'd gone off into the living room out the side of the hallway. This was the last plate I had to do, so I scrubbed at it, double-checked to make sure it was clean, scrubbed again... then looked up at the older cheetah, and smiled.

'Thanks," I said, keeping my voice low. "I mean it. This is, um... this is all new for me, so..."

"Aah, yes." Warm, wet paws settled on my shoulders and gave a little squeeze. "It is not new for 'Tonio. He is... he likes to... ah..."

Both of us jumped a little at Tony's voice, so close past the wall: "Hey Matt?"

I gave Ms. Amador another smile, then turned my head that way. "Yeah?"

"Can you come here?"

"Thank you again," I whispered, and went off towards him. As soon as I turned the corner, though, I stopped in my tracks - and had to take a moment to just look. The younger cheetah looked like he wanted to smile, but was consciously holding himself back.

"I was... I was thinking..." he began, and nodded towards it. It was a pretty darn good-sized telescope, standing atop a solid tripod. "Maybe not tonight. Cannot see much here. But some night, you and I could... can go out a bit, and look at the stars together?"

That sounds- "That sounds fantastic," I said, and felt my honest grin returning. The nervousness continued to melt away, and this time, the lingering pounding of my heart went with it.

For the rest of the night he stayed a bit quiet, a bit distant, but... it was the kind of quiet that you get from someone who just woke up. Not a malicious quiet, not the silent treatment. Just... "getting my thoughts in order" quiet. After dinner, night fell pretty quickly, so we went and got our papers and went outside, positioned ourselves in the same places that we'd gotten into last time, and waited... and waited... and waited.

Honestly, I'm not really sure what Ms. Langford expects of this. The positions of the stars and constellations change over the course of the night, so no matter what, unless we go out at precisely the same time to mark our observations, we're gonna have different answers... maybe it'd turn out to be a completion grade or something? Just, like, one of those "I'm looking for your participation and willingness to work rather than the actual result of the work itself" assignments? I don't know. All that I knew right now was that the temperature out here had dropped a bit, not enough to require a jacket, but enough to be easily palpable; and the cool, short grass beneath my back as we lay there tickled up through my shirt and along the fur of the back of my neck; the ghostly whooshing of cars driving along the road, and then the highway a few streets over-

-and then a soft, firm warmth settling down on my paw beside me, the feeling of fingers curling in between mine, squeezing my palm, grip firm but relaxed, in a way. Hell, if I'd thought my heart beat fast before... I could hardly find the confidence to turn my head and look at Tony beside me, his arm resting against mine and the tip of his tail twitching against my side.

He kept his muzzle up towards the sky, dark blue-black with a few tiny pinpoints of white and flickering yellow and the dual red of an airplane. Whiskers twitched, eyes looked over at me for a fraction of a second and then looked back up. He licked his lips, he swallowed, he breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth...

"I am sorry, Matt," he said, quietly. "I am just... I was not expecting you to... ya sabes..."

I followed that plane as it swam by through the sky, smooth, slow. "I wasn't expecting myself to, either."

The grass rustled as he turned to look at me. "You weren't?"

I returned his gaze. "Nope."

"Is that bad?

The sound of the airplane fell to silence, or at least as close to silence as we had out here. "I... don't think it is. Do you?"

A pause. "No. I do not. Are you nervous?"

"Yeah." That one was easy. "Are you?"

Another pause, this one lasting a bit longer. "Yes. I am sorry about earlier, Matt-"

"It's okay. You said you weren't expecting it." I gave his paw a squeeze, and he squeezed back. And it felt... right.

"No, that is not all. It is... ah... I have not... have never..."

"...had a boyfriend before?" That word felt weird on my tongue.

Tony adjusted how he lay there, and rested his other paw across his chest. I watched the way it slowly rose and fell, rose and fell. "No." One word. Simple, fast.

"Well, hey. Neither have I."

Silence again. This project was stupid.

"Well..." Tony began after a while. Now I was glad for the warmth of his paw around mine; the longer we laid out here, the colder I got.

"Well?"

"I guess..." He turned to me again. "You cannot say that anymore."

"Huh? Can't say what?"

"That you have never had a boyfriend."

I blinked.

"Because I would... like to change that?" Little pink tongue flicked out over his lips again. "Um, if you want to, I mean."

"Yeah," I answered, and gave him a smile that suited the warmth in my heart, radiating straight up from his paw around mine. He easily returned it. "I would like that. You know, that means you can't say it anymore either, right?"

"Yes. I know."

The weird thing about shooting stars is that unless you're looking directly at them, you never notice them. It's not at all like what you see in the cartoons where it's a slow, visible trail across the sky, like the airplane that just passed by. It's - blink, and you miss it. Never know how many you miss until you take the time to actually see them.