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“Craig, can I ask you a question?” Tweek asked. Craig looked over to him, his steady trembles illuminated only by the streetlights that hit them both from under them. Around them, the night settled in a wonderfully silent bliss, no birds cawing, cars running, or extraterrestrial beings threatening to abduct and probe citizens of their small mountain town. Craig tried to meet Tweek’s eyes, but he was staring off to the world below.
“Go for it,” Craig said, readjusting himself to pick up the bottle of Coca-Cola they had brought with them. They had long since dropped their two plastic cups over the edge of the community building, so had resorted to chugging mouthfuls at a time. It was lukewarm, but still nice, and Craig had no complaints about anything that tonight had offered them.
It had been a spur of the moment decision, a hasty idea made over text and sloppily arranged within the next ten minutes. Craig had snuck out of his window, not risking braving going through the living room lest his mother caught him going out this late again. He had been grounded one too many times for that, and would prefer to not to play with fate like that. He’d stopped by the only open store to buy the drinks and snacks, unaware that Tweek had stolen some of the unsold cakes from his dad’s shop.
Tweek finally looked at Craig and smiled at him, his yellowed teeth distinct even in this dull light. Craig felt his chest lighten as he did, unable to keep his usual disinterested look flattened on his face. He smiled back and offered the pop to Tweek, who politely shook his head, though it twitched to the side slightly as he did. He set it down again, instead placing his hands in one another, just to fill the weird weightlessness in his palms.
“Okay, alright, what are we?”
“What? You’re my friend, dude.”
“I know, but… agh! Craig, with everything going on, and the whole- the ‘dating’ thing, are we - agh! - are we still friends?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Craig asked. Tweek just opened his mouth and closed it again, looking away quickly, back to the snow coated roads below. Craig followed his eyes, chewing on the inside of his mouth. His thumbs fought each other in his lap. He found himself growing bored of the places he walked by almost every day, and instead looked at Tweek. Because when he looked at Tweek, his stomach felt empty in a way that was intoxicating.
He had only noticed the feeling a few weeks ago, while everyone was over at Stan’s playing the newest shooter game that he was convinced was the ‘best game ever’. Craig had settled on the couch, not enticed by mowing down hoards of zombies with the same mechanics in every other game they had swarmed a TV to play. But Tweek gave it a go, and when he got past a level everyone else was stuck on, he had grinned brighter than an overloaded spotlight.
It was a beacon of pride, and though the controller was then pulled out of his hands for someone else to play, he had remained with a smug little smile the rest of the day. And Craig, for whatever reason, couldn’t find himself looking at anything else but Tweek. He thought, at first, that because of the fake dating to save their backwards town, that they had just become better friends, and this was him revelling in his buddy’s joy. But he found himself insulted when the same smugness later radiated from Kyle.
Perhaps it was because it was Tweek, who didn’t particularly have much of an ego. If anything, the guy needed to have a bit of a self esteem boost, and Craig was happy to see him find it. He didn’t quite know why he was so fascinated by him all of a sudden, so happy, so free in that moment. Whatever the reason was, the way it brought along the feathery feeling was something he was not complaining about, even if he had no solid idea on what that feeling could actually be called. He liked it, the nerves that Tweek brought on.
“It’s just,” Tweek continued, and Craig fell out of his spell, “I didn’t know if you felt any, well, different? Y’know, towards me?”
“Not really. Why, do you feel something different towards me?” Craig asked. Tweek just blinked rapidly and shrugged, looking at the space above Craig’s eyes. Tweek’s eyes had a wonderful erraticness to them, they were wide, a wonderful shade of hazel that never looked the same. Craig had always liked Tweek’s eyes, or maybe he only really started noticing them since looking at Tweek became something more than simply paying a friend attention.
Tweek bit his lip as his head jerked slightly to the side. His mess of hair kept getting blown across his face in the timid winds, and Craig only just realised that Tweek had really, really nice hair. It probably was knotted and didn’t get washed properly or regularly, but the odd way it fell was so utterly Tweek that it made Craig’s lips quirk upwards. And it was that thought that gave him a very, very slight hint that maybe the way he had once perceived Tweek was different to how he saw him these days.
“Wait, hang on,” Craig said and Tweek’s eyes darted to his own with urgency and fear, “I think there is a change. I don"t know what, or why, but I do see you differently, I guess, maybe?”
“Huh! Is it - agh! - is it a good change?”
“Yeah.”
Because it was. It was a great change, really. Craig remembered early on in their friendship, around and after their big fight, that he only just tolerated him enough to hang around with him. And now, whether it was because they had some sort of obligation, or because they had grown so much over such a short space of time, he loved every minute he spent with Tweek. He didn’t even care if it was something he had trained himself to feel in order to pass their act off as believable, because he enjoyed Tweek’s company.
He enjoyed Tweek.
Maybe there was a reason for that.
Craig grabbed the drink again, taking a long swig from it, willing Tweek to continue the conversation. Instead he just gazed at Craig with a small, hopeful smile and something warm in the way he rubbed the back of his neck. Craig once again offered the drink to Tweek, and he took it this time. He took a small sip of it before he set it down, his shaking hands taking a while to fasten the lid onto the bottle.
So Craig swooped in, their fingers brushing against each other as he did. He tightened the cap, looking up afterwards to see Tweek a brilliant shade of crimson. Touching his own cheeks, he could feel the heat emanating from his face. Ah, great. He tried to shake it off and open his mouth again, the urge to move on before things got too embarrassing was overwhelming and rather appealing. But as Tweek started playing with his hands in the way Craig was doing, he realised what the conversation was about.
“Oh. You, uh… it’s not fake for you anymore, is it?” Craig asked, bluntly. Tweek said nothing. “It’s okay, dude, I’m not gonna judge you.”
Tweek remained silent as Craig was left to dwell on it. He looked away from Tweek and at the sky above. Stars, one or two here and there, obstructed by distance and his own blurry eyesight. When he was much younger, he memorised every constellation and would draw them everywhere he could. His dad bought him a telescope, his mom a big book of astronomy, and he had never once grown out of that phase. He tried to make out any constellations in the sky tonight. Cassiopeia shone brightly.
It couldn’t be more than friendship, could it? The things he felt whenever he caught sight of Tweek? No, he just liked him, and his hair, his eyes, his laugh, oh Craig hadn’t even gotten started on how hard and loud he laughed. And Craig loved to make him laugh, to get his nose to scrunch and his eyes to crinkle. To see him look like he wasn’t terrified to be wherever it was he stood. His laugh was fantastic, and maybe going on about how much he liked about Tweek wasn’t really helping his case.
He laid it out behind his eyes, how he felt, why he could possibly feel it. The harder Craig focused on specific things, moments, and the like, the less he could convince himself that it was entirely platonic. He liked Tweek, sure, of course he did. Did he like like Tweek, though? Still turned away, he mouthed the words to himself, to see how it felt on his lips and in his head. Because truly, it lined up. And if he was being entirely honest, he had no idea why it had taken him this long to come to that conclusion.
He liked Tweek. He liked Tweek as something different than a friend. And every fake nickname and fake date, and every time they held hands to keep spirit up, and every prolonged glance begged to be something real, more tangible than some performance to keep a bunch of people Craig barely cared about happy. His stomach twisted as the thought exploded in every part of his mind, and much like the emptiness, he had no objections to this feeling.
Craig looked back at Tweek, who had lost a sense of worry that he held earlier. He had been looking at him in the way that Craig had been looking at him for a while now. His eyes showed the same thoughts, the same conclusions, that he was only now just reaching. There was some icing on the corner of Tweek’s lips from some of the lemon cakes he had brought with him. Craig quickly snapped his eyes away from Tweek’s mouth.
“Okay, well, I think I like you too,” Craig said.
“I kinda - agh! - I kinda knew.”
“What? You knew? How?”
“No offence, but you’re not exactly discreet.” Tweek smiled as his eye got caught in a rapid twitch. “But fuck, you’re oblivious.”
“Am not! I just had to see how you felt first, that’s all.” Craig offered him the most convincingly unconvincing grin he could muster. Tweek laughed slightly, and shuffled a bit closer to Craig, as if there was much distance between them in the first place.
“No, I win this one, I said it first.”
“You didn’t, I figured out what you were saying first, so that’s two to me.”
Tweek shook his head softly, and turned to watch the sky as Craig had. Craig did the same, closing the gap between them even more as he did so. Their arms fell against each other, and if Craig’s face warmed when their fingers touched, it exploded in heat now. He could only imagine Tweek’s face being the same shade of red.
“So,” Tweek said.
“So,” Craig said.
Somewhere along the line, their hands found each other, so close to one another, it wasn’t all that surprising. But unlike all the other times, unlike every other day in the past two and a bit months, the prospect of holding Tweek’s hand was exciting, and it left Craig as giddy as he could allow himself to be. His legs were vibrating with how much they shook, and he could feel the entirety of Tweek shaking with a similar feeling by his side. Their fingers interlocked, and Craig grinned to himself.
This was good. He liked Tweek too much for this to not have started, and would have probably hated both him and himself if they hadn’t had this conversation. The outcome was nice, too, he supposed, as he looked at Tweek with what he was happy to now call ‘butterflies’ fluttering in his stomach as he did.
“Will you still call me ‘honey’?” Tweek asked, tentative. Craig pondered on it longer than he should, until Tweek elbowed him to get a response.
“Of course I will, honey,” Craig said, and Tweek’s shoulders drooped. He leant to rest his head on the one next to him, giving his hand a squeeze. Tweek squeezed back, and they fought to squeeze the other’s hand the hardest. Right now, in this moment, above everything hand in hand with Tweek, the world below them looked much nicer than it had done half an hour ago.