e l e v e n

in full swing when Oliver stepped out into the crowded hallway, the walls shaking with the force of speakers built into them. Oliver thought he could feel Post Malone being drummed into his heart from how loud the music was being played.

He shoved through the drunken gatherings of people into the kitchen, bypassing the witch snorting a line of questionable white powder off the very counter where food was prepared and the werewolf puking into the sink. He couldn't spot Reed's pale hair or the green tie he was wearing anywhere. Trying to work his way towards the back door to get out into the garden, Oliver realised he was more drunk than he had thought. He stumbled into a table twice and almost walked straight into the glass patio door, eliciting giggles from a group of girls dressed as M&Ms standing nearby. He braced a hand against the wall, took a deep breath, and walked outside.

The air was bitterly cold, and the chill sobered him up enough to at least walk in a straight line. The only people crazy enough to venture outside were those having a cig. Oliver wandered past them, the acrid scent of smoke and weed wafting over him, and saw a dark figure at the end of the garden. He thought it might be Reed until he drew closer and the shadows consolidated to reveal two people, huddled together against the shed. Oliver realised with a start he recognised them.

"Adam?" Oliver asked. "Oh, Clair — "

"Oliver!" Clair detached herself from Adam's side to wander towards him, a dreamy smile on her lips as she pulled him into a tight embrace. "Have I ever told you I love you? Like, really love you? Wow, I just love you sooo – "

"He gets it," Adam said, but he was laughing, which surprised Oliver more than anything. It took a lot to make Adam laugh like that and he never would have guessed his girlfriend professing her love to another guy would cause it. "She's right, though. You may have fucked off to London for a bit – "

Clair hugged him a little tighter, as if he might suddenly fuck off to London again.

" – but you were always a good friend. A best friend," Adam continued, growing sentimental in a way he had literally never done before. Oliver couldn't believe Adam was an emotional drunk...except he didn't really seem drunk, neither of them did. They eyes weren't glazed over at all and they appeared to be in complete control of their bodies. "Maybe I was never a best friend to you the way Reed was, but I wished I was, you know? You and Reed were always so close. I could never have been a part of that. Not until you left, anyway. Then Reed didn't exactly have a choice."

Oliver was still too drunk to process the barrage of feelings he was receiving from Adam but managed to figure out that something was up. "Are you guys okay?" he asked. "How much have you had to drink?"

Clair finally pulled away from Oliver and exchanged a look with Adam. "None at all," Clair giggled. "We don't need alcohol to have fun. Just a little..." She mimed popping something in her mouth.

Realisation dawned on Oliver. "You took drugs?"

"Yeah. Just a bit of MD," Adam shrugged. "It's not a big deal."

A slight defensive edge had crept into his voice and Oliver just said, "Okay," because there was nothing else to say. Drug culture was common at Woodway, rich kids cutting up lines with daddy's credit card and sneaking out behind the languages block to smoke weed during free periods, so he could hardly be surprised that Adam did them too. Oliver suspected half the people here were high as a kite and it wasn't really his business what people did in their free time. He had more pressing issues to deal with than their recreational past-times.

Which reminded him why he had come out here in the first place. "Have you guys seen Reed?"

"Not for a while," Clair said, slipping back into the circle of Adam's arm. She must have been freezing in her tiny police officer dress even with an oversized jacket, probably Adam's, on but she didn't show it. "Why, lovers spat?"

Oliver felt himself tense only to see her wide grin and realise she was joking. "I need to talk to him about something," he said, already glancing back at the house. "I should go find him. I'll see you guys later."

They barely seemed to hear him, already turning their attention back to each other, and Oliver allowed himself a moment of relief as he left them to kiss in the shadows of the garden. His final problem, the one involving Reed, may have increased by tenfold over the course of that bloody Never Have I Ever game, but at least the Clair problem had resolved. He must have just been reading into what he had assumed were Clair flirting with him when she was clearly happy with Adam. They'd practically spent the whole party together after all. Oliver made a mental note to not be so arrogantly presumptuous in thinking girls were making moves on him.

It took him a while to find Reed. He scoured the whole house, which was no mean feat considering its size, and while he walked on countless couples in compromising positions and various stages of undress, none of the rooms contained Reed. He did glimpse Brooks and Hale on his scan of the living the room. They were curled together at one end of the sofa, sharing warm smiles and speaking in soft tones, the rest of the party forgotten to their own world. Oliver almost felt like he was intruding on an intimate scene and moved on quickly. It seemed as if they'd made up over whatever had been the cause of disagreement earlier.

Oliver finally found Reed outside the front of the house. He'd cracked open the front door to sweep a cursory glance, more to check it off than expecting him to be out there, and spotted him sat a few steps down. Oliver slipped outside and let the door shut soundlessly behind him. Reed didn't seem to have noticed him, or pretended not to, glaring resolutely at the towering black gates forming the entrance to the grounds.

"What are you doing out here?" Oliver asked.

Reed started, twisting around only to scowl at the sight of Oliver and turn back around. "Leave me alone. You're literally the last person I want to talk to."

Oliver was undeterred by the frosty welcome. He had been expecting as much and wasn't giving up so easily. "It's freezing," Oliver said. "You could at least hate me inside."

"What are you, my mother?" Reed sneered.

Oliver came forward and sank down on the top step, a couple of steps above Reed, making sure to leave a considerable amount of space between the two of them. He may have sobered up by now, but he'd learnt the hard way just how badly it messed with his head being so close to Reed, drunk or not. He needed to keep his wits about him if he wanted to have this conversation. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, Reed's scowl slowly fading away to something more melancholy and Oliver wondering how to break the silence.

"I don't hate you," Reed muttered, grudgingly, as if Oliver had dragged the words out of him. "For the record."

"I know."

"That's the problem," Reed said, so quietly Oliver wasn't sure if he had heard him properly.

"I never asked you," Oliver said, reminded by Reed's earlier taunting comment. "How is your mum? It's not that I ever forgot, I just...I wasn't sure you'd appreciate me asking. At least not until we were properly friends again."

"And we're properly friends now?"

"I hope so," Oliver said, with a small smile. "Plus, I'm still a bit drunk. Easier to ask the things you're scared to when you're drunk."

Reed blew out a sigh that condensed in the cold air. "Easier to do things you're scared of, too. She's okay," he answered, staring down at his long slim fingers. "They think they finally found medication to manage the symptoms, so...yeah. Been out of hospital for a while now."

Reed's mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was eight. Even though it had been nearly ten years ago, Oliver could remember the exact day he found out clearly. Reed had come into school with red eyes and when another kid taunted him about the fact he had clearly been crying, Reed punched him in the face. He'd been ordered to the headteacher's office and the teacher was too busy dealing with the wailing kid who had just been punched to notice Oliver slip out of the classroom. He found Reed not outside the headteacher's office but by the small fishpond in the playground, angrily tearing his sandwich for lunch into pieces and tossing it to the fish. His blue eyes were bright with tears that hadn't fallen, maybe out of sheer willpower not to cry.

Oliver had crept cautiously up beside him. "Are you okay?"

"You should ask Sammy Goldberg that." Reed flung a piece of crust into the water and they both watched the fish, tiny silver minnows, dart to the surface to attack it. "He's the one who was just punched in the face. I hope I broke his nose."

"I think you did," Oliver said, not because it was true but because he knew it was what Reed wanted to hear. "Where did you learn to punch?"

"I didn't. I just curled my hand into a fist and hit him as hard as possible."

Oliver had been impressed. In hindsight, it probably wasn't something he should have been impressed by, but he was an eight-year-old boy. Violence was always appealing to boys that age. Oliver didn't say anything for a while, just watching as Reed finished shredding his sandwich apart and moved on to his pack of crackers, crushing them into tiny crumbs in his fist before sprinkling them across the pond. They weren't supposed to feed the fish but Oliver didn't think Reed really cared.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Oliver had eventually ventured.

"They put mum in hospital yesterday. She was acting weird. Weirder than usual," Reed said, pulverising yet another cracker into dust. "Whispering to the walls, staring at the air as if she could see something we couldn't, hiding all the keys so we couldn't leave the house. She spent one night sleeping in the car and wouldn't tell us why. It was making Elsie cry. Finally, I think dad convinced her to see a doctor. They put her in hospital yesterday and I wasn't allowed to see her. I just had to go to school, as if nothing bad had happened."

Reed had said all of this as calmly as if reading from a book but as he spoke, the tears filling his eyes finally spilled free and slipped down his cheeks. He hastily wiped at them and glanced away, as if angry at himself for allowing the tears to fall. Oliver remembered wishing there was some magical cure to make everything better, to stop Reed from being sad, but it wasn't ever that simple.

"Did they find out what's wrong with her?" Oliver asked quietly.

"I know they did, but no one will tell me. They think I'm too young," Reed said angrily. "I think...I think there's something wrong with her head. With her brain."

Oliver hadn't really understood what that meant at the time but, of course, they were later given a name for the illness: schizophrenia. The years following Beverley Bishop's diagnosis weren't easy. It wasn't a matter of recovery, but management – some months she would be coping well and almost leading a normal life, then others she would deteriorate to the point she required hospitalisation. Most antipsychotics didn't work while some worked but with terrible side effects that weren't sustainable for the long-term, and it was a constant cycling of medication in an attempt to find something that would work. Then there was the genetic component to it and Oliver knew Reed wondered, worried, whether there would ever come a time when he couldn't trust his own mind.

Now, sitting in the frosty November air as a party raged on inside the house, Oliver smiled. "I'm glad," he said. "Lots of people with schizophrenia go on to lead normal lives, you know. Once they find the right treatment plan – "

"Why did you do it?"

Oliver blinked, confused by the sudden question. "Do what?"

"Take a fucking drink." Reed was looking at him in a way that made Oliver feel drunk all over again. "For his never have I ever, you took a drink. Why?"

Oliver didn't have to ask which one he meant. "So did you," he said slowly.

"Only after you did."

"Is that supposed to make a difference?"

"You're not answering the question," Reed snapped.

"You know the rules of the game, Reed," Oliver said, beginning to grow a little irritated himself. He didn't know why they were both still tiptoeing around the obvious. "Why do you think I took a drink?"

Reed turned away, but not before Oliver saw the conflict in his expression. "I'm not gay," he muttered.

It was such a random comment to make that Oliver rolled his eyes. "Noted," he said drily. "Neither am I."

"You're not?"

"No. I'm bi," Oliver said. "Is that a problem?"

"I don't care. It doesn't affect me either way."

"Good."

"Great."

Cue another delightfully stifling silence. They seemed to be following Oliver everywhere today. Or maybe it was the result of combining Reed and Oliver, throwing them into social situations together.

"I know you don't want to talk about it," Oliver began, and Reed seemed to already sense where this conversation was going judging by the scowl on his lips, "but that night on my roof – "

"You're right," Reed interjected. "I don't want to."

"But – "

"No," Reed said sharply.

"Fine. Then let's talk about you and Brooks."

That managed to throw Reed off-guard, even if it was only for a moment. "What – "

"Specifically, what happened there to make things so strained between the two of you. You're stubborn and I'm persistent," Oliver said, trying to ignore the chill that was seeping through his skin and settling in his bones. It was far too cold to be sat outside in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. "Let's see who gives in first."

Seconds stretched into minutes as Oliver was willing to wait him out. Every so often, voices would rise from the house as people passed the front door and the windows flashed with lights, on and off. Most of the time, though, the music from the party faded away into the night and it felt as if it was just the two of them, frozen in time beneath the dark sky. Reed's hair was bleached to bone-white under the moonlight and he looked like a pale spectre in his black robes, one that had haunted Oliver all the way to London.

"Do you know why I hated Brooks so much in the first place?" Reed finally asked.

"I didn't know you hated him at all," Oliver said, puzzled.

"Exactly. It was only after you'd left that his presence even bothered me," Reed admitted, looking as if this was the last story he ever wanted to tell. "Brooks always preferred you out of the two of us, because you were so similar in some ways, and it wasn't anything he did, exactly...he just reminded me of you. Not in appearance, obviously, but in personality. He reminded me of you when I was trying to forget you, and when forgetting you clearly didn't work, hating you was the next best thing. Hating him was almost too easy – he made it easy to hate him, because he never fought back. Until recently, anyway."

"You took out your anger at me on Brooks," Oliver said, appalled. "That's not fair."

"You think I don't know that?" Reed snapped. "It was childish and selfish, I was an asshole, fine. Knowing I was being a shitty person didn't exactly make me want to stop doing it because it felt so good to let my anger out somewhere. I know that makes me fundamentally fucked up, okay? You don't have to tell me. I've always known I was a terrible, fucked up person."

He was speeding up a little as he talked, almost tripping over his words in his haste to get them out, as if worried Oliver would beat him to it if he didn't. There was a matter-of-fact sense of self-loathing to his tone that made Oliver frown because it had always run deep in Reed even when they were kids. He got angry, he made bad choices, and instead of letting that remorse out by apologising he'd bury it deep down, where it hardened into something hateful and cold he believed about himself. Oliver had never thought Reed was fundamentally fucked up, just a flawed human like everyone else, but he knew Reed would only dismiss anything he tried to say.

"You hated Brooks for reminding you of me. Fine," Oliver said. "That doesn't explain how you ended up kissing."

Reed grimaced. "I got drunk at a party, Brooks was there, I made a mistake. End of."

"Something tells me there's more to it than that."

Reed spent a few moments considering how to phrase it. "Earlier, during the game...I drank for that never have I ever. The one...you know, the one Brooks said," Reed said, struggling so badly with his words that Oliver almost stepped in to rescue him. Almost. He wanted to see how badly in denial Reed was. "I didn't mean to, I certainly didn't want to, but...but I may have thought I liked you, you know, as more than – "

"You were attracted to me," Oliver said flatly. "Or you thought you were. Is that what you're trying to spit out?"

Reed looked unimpressed by the interjection. "Fine, yes. I was confused about my feelings for you, and because Brooks reminded me of you...it only made me dislike him more. The crueller I was to him, the more I could convince myself that there wasn't any confusion. There wasn't any attraction."

"And how did that work out for you?"

Reed glared at him. "Like I said, I was drunk and made a mistake."

"How much easier it would have been to repress your sexuality once I was out of the picture, if Brooks hadn't been there," Oliver said. "Right?"

"There's nothing to repress. I'm not gay," Reed repeated.

"You sound like a broken record. Repetition doesn't make something true."

Reed's blue eyes flashed. "What the fuck makes you think you know so much more about my sexuality than I do?"

Because Oliver had been in that same position once. Convinced that it was just a phase, that passing thoughts about your own gender were totally normal, that he definitely liked girls and he could work with that. It had been easy at first, dating girls and holding their hands, progressing to kissing them at parties as he grew older. It was only when he was fifteen that he considered whether that thing with Reed hadbeen more than a phase and his appreciation for boys was more than just appreciation. It had taken a year of experimenting and fooling around before he could come to the firm conclusion that he was, in fact, bisexual.

Reed was still in the denial stage. Oliver wondered whether he could help him figure it out sooner because repressing your sexuality could be self-destructive, he knew that from experience.

"If I kissed you now, would you hate it?" Oliver asked.

Reed's eyes widened in surprise before he jerked back, as of Oliver had actually made any move to kiss him. "Don't," he warned.

"Please, Reed. I have more self-respect than that," Oliver said derisively, as if kissing him hadn't crossed once or a hundred times just over the course of the night. "It was hypothetical."

After a moment of hesitation, Reed said, "Yes. I'd hate it."

"You hesitated."

"I didn't," Reed snapped, instantly defensive. "I'm not drunk anymore, and I know I'd hate it."

"I don't believe you."