Him and I feeling so distant from everything except each other.

I wanted that again, so desperately.

“Wow,” he said.

“Don’t you dare make a joke,” I told him.

“It’s so tempting.”

“Clockblocker is rubbing off on you.”

He reached through the railing, and put a hand on the side of my face. His thumb wiped at a bead of moisture.

“You really did look constipated, though,” he told me.

“Wow, Dean. Really?” I asked. “Here I am, I don’t think you could even comprehend the shit I went through in the course of getting here, and I really am tapping into some genuine feelings, to the point I’m teary-eyed, you jerk, and that’s what you’ve got?”

“In my defense, I’m seventeen, and Clockblocker really is a bad influence.”

“Not a defense. Nope, my mom’s a lawyer, I know being a teenager isn’t a defense.”

“You look beautiful,” he told me.

“Too late,” I told him. I grabbed his ankle again, and I lifted it, transferring my grip between my hands so I could navigate the horizontal bars that extended along the decorative part of the balcony railing. He started off trying to keep himself vertical, then shifted his grip to trying to ensure he had something to hold onto.

After he was completely upside-down for a couple of seconds, I set him down. He gripped the railing not just with his hands, but both arms, hugging it, even after his feet touched the balcony.

It took him another second to laugh, quiet.

“You’re totally a teenager too,” he told me. “Whooooo.”

“I wouldn’t have let you fall,” I told him.

“I know. If I thought there was a chance, I would have screamed.”

I put a hand on the railing, and ‘vaulted’ over. My boots met the concrete pad of the balcony.

Dean, for his part, straightened up. Just a little taller than me, but ‘me’… I was only sixteen or so.

“I like the way your hair gets messy when you’ve been flying hard,” he told me. He reached over to the side of my head and plucked at a strand, repositioning it.

I reached up for his hand and pressed it against the side of my head, just to have it closer to me. Then, as an extension of the same thought, I drew a bit closer to him, covering half the distance before I hesitated.

He hugged me, tight, one hand now at the back of my head, fingers in my messy hair.

“What’s up with you?” he asked.

“It’s felt very lonely out there for a long time,” I mumbled the words.

“We can’t have that.”

I shook my head.

“Tough day?” he asked me.