Nothing Between Us

Happy Friday folks! 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, as I'm considering it for a full length series. Let me know if it ticks your boxes! 

All characters are 18+

He was cool.

I could have used a million words to describe him, but that seemed most apt. Everything he did; every move he made, every word he spoke, every smile he smiled, it was all cool. The flick he did with his hand to the mail man, with his index finger up and the rest hanging loose. The lazy nod he gave my parents when they’d pass by each other. The occasional sup he threw my way when I’d return home from school. If there was a cooler person on this planet, I was yet to meet them.

Tyler lived alone, too. Which was also quite cool. Our houses were separated only by a white fence, but they were the exact same inside, and I knew that because up until a couple of months ago, my best friend had lived there. I should have been bitter that they were gone, and I was until the day he moved in.

He pulled up in a car and nothing else. He didn’t bring furniture, beds, televisions, nothing. He simply stepped out of the old Ford, stretched his magnificent body, and yawned as he looked around, and then he went inside, and that was that.

I don’t know if that was the day I fell in love with him, or if it happened on one of the days that followed. Maybe it was when I looked out to find him shirtless in his yard, lounging on a blanket with a pair of yellow shorts and sunglasses, and nothing more. The sun blazed down for the entire day, and Tyler lay in it until his skin had turned a dark shade of bronze, and his body glistened with beads of sweat.

Maybe it was when I’d watched him every single day after school as he sat on his porch with his bare feet hanging over the edge, tapping away on his laptop, with half his body in the shade, and the other half being toasted. When, much to my delight, he changed his long, loose shorts for shorter, tighter ones that accentuated the most mouthwatering bulge I had ever laid eyes on.

Maybe it was when he began to fix part of the fence that had been broken for years. Which, unbeknownst to him, my parents and everyone else in the area, had been broken by my old best friend and I, so that we had unfettered access to each other’s backyards. When, realising he didn’t have the tools for the job, he sauntered to our front door, and I ran so fast down the stairs that I tripped on the bottom step, and had to listen whilst holding my foot and groaning, as my older sister Melody began to sweet talk him, and instead of returning the gesture, Tyler said “is your dad there?”

Maybe I never fell in love with him at all. Maybe I fell in love with the idea of him, because from that moment on, Tyler became a household name. Dad lent him the tools he needed, and thanked him with coffee and sandwiches that Mom had made. “I would have done it myself, but my back has been acting up”, was the excuse that he gave, and when Tyler said “don’t worry about it” and gave that little hand flick, maybe Dad fell in love with him, too.

Melody, not one for being rejected, decided that her college work was best done in the front yard after that, something which was utterly un-Melody-like, up until that point. She wore bikinis whenever possible, and splayed herself on the lawn like some sort of dehydrated starfish. Much to her bitter disappointment, Tyler ignored her for the most part.

Perhaps I fell in love with Tyler when he finally acknowledged my existence as I slugged home from school with my backpack on my front instead of my back, and sweat making my blond hair stick to my forehead. When he looked up from his laptop, with his bare feet still hanging over the edge of his porch, and, without spending too much time actually looking at me, said “sup”.

Sup. An awfully cool word for an awfully cool guy. “Sup”, I said in my mirror, inside my bedroom, wearing nothing more than a look of profound curiosity. “Sup”. It made me hard. The word, the meaning, the person whose lips the word had departed. Too cool to say what’s up? Too cool indeed, to say what is up? So sup it was, and from that moment on, sup became my word, too.

Mom loved him, as well. She spoke about him like he was a secret that only we were privy too. “What is it that he does?” She had asked, as if any of us knew him better than the other. “He must be very well off if he can afford that entire place to himself. I haven’t seen him actually leave for work, though, have you?”

“This isn’t the eighteen hundreds, mom” Melody chimed, with a harshness to her voice that said don’t speak about him. Only I can speak about him. “He probably works remotely”.

“Remotely?” The word had confused her.

“From home” she replied with a roll of her eyes, and what she actually wanted to say was “you’re such a boomer, mom!”.

Truth be told, I don’t know when I fell in love with Tyler, but I do know that I wasn’t the only one who did. Melody, who was four years my senior, and much more suited in age to Tyler, began a campaign of seduction against the poor young man, which saw her timing his exact movements, and accidentally bumping into him each day.

One such day, Tyler made the terrible mistake of straying too far from his backdoor, so when Melody rushed him, he had no way of escaping. I sat on the other side of the fence with my book, though I hadn’t digested a single word on the page as I listened to her painful attempt at swooning him.

“You must get very bored in there all by yourself” she said, and I had to imagine the scene, and was certain that she was twirling her mousy brown hair around her finger.

“I prefer my own company” came the response, that was neither harsh nor sweet, but somewhere in the middle. Most people would have realised in that moment that Tyler was politely telling her to go away, but not Melody.

“Do you work out? You’re very big”.

He didn’t answer, so I pretended that he ignored her completely, and smiled to myself, but when she giggled, I guessed that he had made a different type of gesture, and my smile vanished.

“How old are you?” She pressed, “I’m twenty two”.

“As am I” he said, and the way in which he spoke, even though he was cool, sounded like something from an old movie. In most cases, speaking like someone from a Shakespearian play would have made the person entirely uncool, yet Tyler was so cool that he made Shakespeare cool, and that, was the coolest thing of all.

“I’ve got to get back to this” he said eventually, and Melody was out of reasons to stay and irritate him, so she hurried back to the house, and I returned to sitting with my back against the fence, just listening to the sounds that he made when he did whatever it was that he was doing.

Of course, it took only a short amount of time before my incessant sister invited her even more incessant friends over, and showed them Tyler as though he were a prized pig which she had purchased. They even barged into my room, which had the best view of Tyler’s backyard, and spied out at him whilst whispering frantically and laughing excitedly.

Maybe he knew that they all adored him, or maybe he didn’t, but Tyler seemed entirely nonplussed by the attention, and continued as though he hadn’t just become the most sought after young man on the street. When the girls finally left, I sat down with my book, and watched him. When the sun began to set behind the trees, Tyler called it a day and peeled off a t-shirt that was grey to begin with, but had turned black with the dampness of his muscular body. He wasn’t huge in that sense, but perfectly proportioned and devilishly handsome. He rubbed his face with it, then hung it over his shoulders, and then his eyes travelled up the side of my house, too quickly for me to do anything about it, and we looked at each other until my heart did something that hearts aren’t supposed to do, and my mouth became dry. Then, with something that, if I squinted my eyes enough, looked as though it could be a smile, Tyler lifted his hand, raised his finger, left the other ones loose and gave me that cool flick.

Sup.