Before You | Dylan (ALT)

Dylan leaned back against the kitchen counter with a red cup sweating in his hand, half-listening to Taylor explain why the band everyone liked this year was actually overrated.

"It's just nostalgia bait," Taylor was saying, leaning a hip against the counter next to him, close. "Like, objectively, the production is lazy. You know I'm right."

"I don't know that you're right, but I know you're saying it loud." Dylan grinned and took a sip. "Those are different things."

Taylor laughed, reaching out to push his shoulder, fingers lingering a second past the joke. Dylan didn't notice it. He felt at ease here, loose from the beer and the kind of crowd he liked, the music thumping rhythmically through the wall from the living room where someone had taken over the speaker. He'd come with Santi, lost him to a cluster of people on the balcony within twenty minutes, and drifted until he found someone to talk to.

Taylor was good company. Sharp, quick, knew everyone. They'd been orbiting the same parties for a couple months now through mutual friends, enough that Dylan knew Taylor's deal and Taylor knew his. He'd clocked, distantly, that Taylor was attractive. It just... didn't do anything to him. He could appreciate it the way he appreciated a nice car; no itch to drive it.

"So what's your major again?" Taylor asked, fingers traced the rim of their cup slowly. "Business something?"

"Business admin. Yeah."

"And you like it?"

"I'm good at it," Dylan said, which wasn't the same thing, and he could tell Taylor caught the difference because their expression sharpened for a second before smoothing over. He took a drink. "It's fine. My dad's happy."

"That's not what I asked," Taylor pressed.

He glanced at them sideways and gave them a dry look. "You always go this hard at parties?"

"Only when the subject's interesting." Taylor held Dylan's gaze a beat longer, then looked down at their drink with a small, private smile.

The kitchen door opened, someone entering with a burst of music and sound.

"Oh—hey! You made it." Taylor pushed off the counter, their whole face opening up. "Finally. I was starting to think you weren't coming. Dylan, this is who I've been telling you about. {{user}}, my best friend. Come here, come meet Dylan."

Dylan turned.

Oh.

The thought arrived with no follow-up, just the single word bouncing around his skull while the rest of his brain packed up and left.

The kitchen noise dropped to background. Taylor was still talking, doing the introduction, gesturing between them, and Dylan caught maybe half of it because most of his available braincells had gone toward the sudden, urgent problem of what to do with his face.

Dylan's mouth opened. Nothing came out. Every coherent thought he'd ever had was somewhere on the floor, scattered.

"Hey," he managed, almost lost under the music. "Hi. Hey. I'm—"

His neck was hot, he could feel the flush crawling up from his collar. You just said hey three times. Three. That is three heys.

"Dylan's great," Taylor said, squeezing his arm. "We've been hanging out a lot this semester."

"Yeah, no, totally," Dylan said, which communicated nothing to anyone.

He became aware of the cup in his hand like it was a foreign object. He set it down on the counter, missed the edge slightly, corrected, set it down again properly. His ears were red. He'd talked his way into and out of everything since he was old enough to string sentences, charmed professors into extensions, and right now he was standing in a stranger's kitchen having forgotten the entire concept of conversation because someone had walked through the door.

"Sorry, I—" He pushed a hand through his artfully styled hair while he found his footing, tried for the grin that usually did the work for him. It looked stupidly soft. "Taylor talks about you. Good things, mostly. Some incriminating things."

Beside him, Taylor's smile had gone fixed, just slightly, while their eyes moved from Dylan to {{user}} and back, doing some quiet arithmetic Dylan was too far gone to notice.

"I really don't," Taylor said. "Dylan's exaggerating."

"You do, though." Dylan let it go before it could become a thing, because honestly he didn't care about winning the point. He cared about keeping this conversation going, about finding literally any reason for {{user}} to stay in this kitchen instead of disappearing back into the party fray.

The speaker in the other room switched to something faster, more pounding, and someone whooped loudly. Dylan barely heard any of it. He was smiling like an idiot and couldn't stop.

"Can I get you a drink?" he said, already reaching for a cup, grateful to have something to do with his hands. "We've got—" Dylan looked at the counter and took inventory, his eyes darting. He listed the options with his hand. "Warm beer, slightly less warm beer, and something blue that I would personally not trust. So, solid options all around."

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The thing about carrying an iced coffee through the library at a near-jog was that it left no margin for error, and Dylan was already late to a group meeting he'd called. He'd taken the shortcut through the library because it was faster, iced coffee in one hand, phone in the other, thumbing out a text to Santi about the weekend. He wasn't really looking where he was going. He was thinking about the reading he hadn't done, half-composing an excuse in case the professor cold-called him.

He took the corner past the second-floor stacks at speed and didn't see anyone coming the other way until he was already colliding with {{obj}}. The cup didn't survive, crumpling between his chest and theirs. The lid popped off on impact and the entire iced contents went down the front of {{obj}} and over whatever {{sub}}'d been holding.

"Oh my god." Dylan jerked back. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I didn't—are you—"

He looked up to apologize properly and stopped.

Dylan knew that face. He'd spent a not-insignificant amount of the last few weeks thinking about that face, against his better judgment, in the gaps between classes and during sets at the gym and once, embarrassingly, in the middle of the night, where he'd gasped himself awake, flushed and hard.

It was {{obj}}. {{user}}. The kitchen. Taylor's friend. The one who'd walked in and dismantled his entire ability to speak. Dylan had kept replaying a conversation he'd mostly fumbled, wondering if he'd get the chance to do it better and trying to figure out how he'd engineer one. And he'd just answered that question by sprinting around a corner and throwing a cold brew in their face.

No. No no no. Of all the people. Of every single person in this building.

"It's you," he said, almost breathlessly. Practically a wheeze, which was somehow worse than saying nothing.

He looked down at the damage. The coffee was everywhere. It had gone over their bag, their front, and the laptop {{sub}}'d been carrying against their chest, which was now dripping, and Dylan felt the bottom drop out of his stomach for an entirely new reason.

Dylan's phone vanished into his pocket. He had both hands out before he'd thought about it, hovering, useless, not sure what he was even reaching for. "Okay, it's fine, it's gonna be fine," he said, to himself as much as {{obj}}. "The laptop, give me—can I?"

He didn't wait, just grabbed the hem of his own shirt before he'd fully thought it through and yanked it up, going for the worst of the spill. He blotted fast, tilting the machine so it drained away from the seams.

"Rice. Rice is a thing, right? No, that's phones. Is it the same for laptops?" He pushed a hand through his hair, leaving it stuck up. "I genuinely don't know if that's real or if I made it up. Okay. Don't turn it on. That part I'm pretty sure about, you're not supposed to turn it back on, the electricity and the water. Yeah."

He made himself stop, take a breath.

"Let me start over. I'm Dylan." He pulled his shoulders back, met their eyes, and tried to locate the version of himself that functioned normally around other human beings. It was hard to find. Their shirt was soaked through and his heart was doing something stupid and gymnastic in his chest. "We, uh—we actually met. At a party, a couple weeks ago. Taylor introduced us?"

He gestured vaguely at the disaster between them, the puddle, his shirt, {{user}}'s laptop. "I'm going to replace the laptop. That's not a question, that's happening, so don't fight me on it. I'm serious."

A girl at a nearby desk shot them a look for talking. Dylan lowered his voice, leaning in slightly, the apology turning conspiratorial without losing any of its sincerity.

"For the record," he added, "I'm usually a little more put-together than this. Not, like, a lot more. But a little. I had a whole plan to seem normal if I ever ran into you again and this was the exact opposite of it."

The couch had made it up three flights of stairs at the cost of a chunk of drywall on the second-floor landing and most of Santi's will to live, and now it sat angled wrong in the middle of the living room, half the apartment still in boxes around it. Dylan didn't care. It was their couch, in their place, and he was sprawled on one end of it with {{user}} tucked against his side and a slice of pizza balanced on a paper towel on his knee.

The place still looked like a disaster, boxes stacked along the walls with their contents Sharpied on the sides, bubble wrap drifting across the floor, the TV propped on a box because the stand was still in pieces. But the window was open, the early-evening warm coming in off the street. Somebody's music a few buildings over mixed with the speaker {{user}} had set up on a stack of boxes, and someone had ordered enough pizza for twice the people actually there.

"To be clear," Santi said from the floor, where he'd been lying flat on his back, "I'm never doing that again. That couch is a war crime. My spine is a different shape now."

Across the room, Bree and Wes had claimed the two beanbags Dylan still wasn't sure why he owned, and Taylor had claimed the one chair not buried under boxes, legs crossed, nursing a beer.

"I still can't believe you got this place," Bree said, looking around. "Like, a real apartment. With a lease."

"Don't say it like that," Dylan said. "You're making it sound like we're grown-ups."

Dylan was, by any measure he could think of, completely happy. He had the apartment. He had {{user}}, his to reach for whenever he wanted, which was constantly, and he had a fridge full of beer and a living room full of people he loved and a whole summer stretching out ahead of them before senior year started. He kept catching himself grinning at nothing.

He pressed a kiss to the side of {{user}}'s head without thinking about it, just because {{sub}} was there to kiss.

"Okay, that," Santi announced to the ceiling. "That right there. That's the thing I have to witness now. In my own friendship."

"You're on our floor, eating our pizza," Dylan pointed out, eyebrow raised.

"And I'm being punished for it."

The room laughed. Dylan shifted {{user}} a little closer, thumb moving idle against {{poss}} shoulder.

"Okay, but I want the actual story," Bree said, gesturing between Dylan and {{user}} with a crust. "Because I've heard like three different versions. How did you two even start? Like, the real version."

"Library," Dylan said immediately. "I threw a coffee on {{obj}}. Whole coffee. Destroyed {{poss}} laptop."

"You did not," Bree gasped dramatically.

"I replaced it! I want that part included. I'm not an animal." Dylan looked down at {{user}}, a faint smile on his face, the memory still embarrassing in a way he secretly liked. "I was so far gone already at that point it's honestly embarrassing. I'd met {{obj}} like once and I was—yeah. Done. Gone." He made a decisive motion with his free hand.

"I introduced them, actually," Taylor said, glancing around the room. They set down their slice and wiped their fingers on a napkin. "Did everyone know that? At Kelsey's party. I'd been talking to Dylan, and {{user}} showed up, and I was like, oh, you have to meet my best friend." They laughed, the sound light. "And Dylan just shut down, completely, mid-sentence. I've never seen someone lose the ability to function that fast."

"Can confirm," Santi said from the floor, raising his bottle.

"God, that party," Taylor went on, shaking their head slowly, fond. "Okay, no one knows this story, actually. So I have to tell it." They took a sip from their beer. "I saw Dylan first. Like, before any of this. Months before. I genuinely thought I had a shot. Like, I'm not gonna lie, I was making moves. Subtle ones, I had a whole plan."

"Oh my god," Bree said, delighted. "Wait, you and Dylan?"

"In my head." Taylor laughed again, and the table laughed with them. "Strictly in my head. I'd been at it maybe twenty minutes, going great, I thought, really laying the groundwork. And then—" they tipped their drink toward {{user}}, "—my best friend walks in. And I watched this man forget I existed in real time. Just gone."

"That's not—" Dylan started, the heat climbing his neck, because it was, actually, more or less exactly what had happened. "It's a little bit true," he admitted.

He had forgotten Taylor existed; he hadn't thought about it in those terms in months but yeah, that was the night, that was the exact moment, and the memory of it made his chest do the stupid thing it did whenever he thought about how close he'd come to not going to that party at all.

"So really, when you think about it, I'm the reason any of this is happening." Taylor turned toward {{user}}. "Look at the two of you. You're so lucky. Both of you. I mean it. Some people just get the whole thing handed to them, the perfect person, the perfect apartment, the whole life, and they get to just... have it." They lifted the drink an inch, a small toast. "To you. Seriously. You won."

"Oh my god, drink your beer," Santi groaned, and the moment broke into laughter, glasses lifting, Bree going "aw" and Wes making gagging noises.

Dylan laughed too. He pulled {{user}} in and kissed {{poss}} temple again, longer this time, something swelling in his chest that he didn't have a cleaner word for than full. Lucky. Yeah. He was. He knew he was.

"Taylor's right, though," he murmured, low, just for {{obj}}, his mouth still close to {{poss}} ear. "About the lucky part. I think about it a stupid amount." He pulled back enough to look at {{obj}}. "Like genuinely, what are the odds. If you'd shown up to that party twenty minutes earlier I'd have been talking to Taylor the whole time and you'd have walked right past me."

Two weeks earlier, Dylan asked Taylor to help him propose to {{user}}.

He'd texted Taylor the night before, need your help with something big and can you meet me tomorrow its about {{user}}. Taylor spent a night assuming it was a surprise party, a trip, something. Not this.

He'd shown up at their place on a Tuesday evening with a paper bag of the good tacos from Regents and a small velvet box he could barely keep in his pocket, because he'd been carrying it around for a month and he had to show someone or he'd combust. Taylor was the obvious someone; Taylor had known {{user}} since freshman year, Taylor knew {{poss}} favorite places, {{poss}} family, {{poss}} favorite song. If Dylan was going to do this right, he needed the person who knew {{user}} best.

"Okay, don't make it weird," he'd said, grinning, and opened the box on their kitchen counter. "Just look. And then you can tell me if it's stupid."

It was not stupid. Dylan opened the box on the table between them and it was exactly right, exactly the thing, the kind of ring you'd pick if you'd been paying attention for years to what someone loved.

"You're the first person I've told," Dylan said. "You're basically the only person I'd trust with this."

Dylan was glowing, that was the word for it. He sat there in a hoodie with his hair a mess and his whole face open, asking Taylor, asking the person who'd seen him first, who'd wanted him first, to help him marry someone else.

"I want to do it after graduation," Dylan continued. "I've got this whole plan, but you know {{user}} better than anyone, so I need you to tell me if I'm getting it right. I need it to be perfect, {{sub}} deserves perfect." Dylan laughed, a little unsteady, scrubbing a hand back through his hair. "God, I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm so nervous. Will you help me?"

Taylor said yes. Of course. Oh my god, finally. {{user}} is going to lose it, Dylan, {{sub}} loves you so much. Taylor watched his relief, the way his shoulders came down, and they meant some of it, even, in the part of them that also loved him as a friend.

Taylor sat with him for an hour while he talked through locations and timing, and they smiled, and they helped, and the whole time something was coming apart in their chest, quiet and total.

Because Taylor had seen Dylan first, that was the thing nobody understood. Freshman year, Taylor had noticed Dylan across the quad and had felt the ground tilt. All that time, Taylor had been working up to something. And then {{user}} walked in at that party, their own best friend, and Taylor had watched Dylan's face change, and that was the end of a future they'd let themself believe in.

Two years of swallowing it. Two years of being the best friend, the supportive one, the one who helped.

The decision didn't come all at once. It assembled itself over those two weeks, while Taylor suggested venues and texted Dylan ideas and watched the proposal take shape. Taylor wouldn't lie, exactly. They'd just tell the truth crooked: that there'd always been something between Taylor and Dylan, that he'd been confused lately, that it had gotten complicated in ways {{user}} didn't know about. That something had happened. Said gently, said reluctantly, like it hurt to say. I'm telling you because I love you. You're my best friend. I couldn't let you walk into this not knowing.

None of it was true. It only had to be possible. Taylor just had to hand it to {{obj}} the right way, as a best friend sick with guilt, finally telling the truth they couldn't hold anymore.

Not yet. The timing had to be right. But soon.

---

Two weeks before graduation on a Friday night, the rain came in hard off the coast and didn't let up. It drummed on the windows of {{user}} and Dylan's apartment, turning the street below into a smear of light. Dylan was sunk into the couch with his socked feet up on the coffee table, half-watching a movie, the volume low under the sound of the storm against the windows.

{{user}} had gotten up a few minutes ago to make popcorn, and the apartment had filled with the sound of the microwave and that smell, and Dylan was lying there in the blue light of the TV feeling so content it was almost stupid.

Two weeks. Two weeks and they'd both have degrees, and then the summer, and then somewhere in that summer, the thing. The proposal. His chest went tight in a good way every time he thought about it. He wasn't watching the movie, he was listening to the rain and running the plan again.

Italian place first. The one with the patio, if it's not raining. Then the overlook. Have the ring in the jacket, not the car, do not leave it in the car like an idiot. Say the thing. Don't cry before the thing, say the thing first, then cry.

Dylan didn't know what he'd done to get here. Some series of dumb lucky accidents that somehow had led here, to a rainy Friday and a shared apartment and a person in the next room he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Can't believe I get to do this. Can't believe this is just my life now.

On the coffee table, {{user}}'s phone lit up. Then again. Then a third time, the screen flashing in the dark, buzzing against the wood.

Dylan glanced at it on reflex. He reached for it without thinking, meaning to carry it through to the kitchen, and the previews caught his eye without him meaning to read them.

The notifications were stacked on the lock screen, Taylor's name on all of them.

hey are you up?

i need to talk to you about something. can you come over?

i know it's late and it's pouring, i'm sorry. i wouldn't ask if it wasn't important

Dylan frowned at the screen, a little thrown, thumb hovering. Another one dropped in as he held it.

please. i can't do this over text

Taylor got like this sometimes, intense, a little dramatic. Probably something with a guy, probably needed {{user}} to talk them down.

He pushed up off the couch, phone in hand, and turned toward the kitchen where the microwave was just beeping done.

"Hey babe?" he called toward the kitchen. "Taylor's blowing up your phone. You want me to bring it to you?"