“Love you, see you soon honey”
“Come home in one piece sweet”
“I’m alive, love”
“That’s a year I can add back to my life dear”
Phrases dropped like inconsequential little pieces of forever but meant a lot more than (inconsequence means nothing; we’re not nothing) that to two boys who were content to rest on the borderline of friendship and something more in public. It was a game that had started without them being aware, and now was just something to lighten the mood from time to time when the other heroes got too melodramatic and neither could see the point of the melodrama.
There was also the LEGO contest that Ganke had enrolled in, just for the hell of it. This meant when people were over at the apartment he worked on it and at his computers and kindly asked (more like demanded with a maddened glint in his eyes) that Tony Stark not touch anything on the coffee table lest he lose or pocket one of the precious pieces because Ganke didn’t have the money to replace a single piece in his project of the S.S. Enterprise crashing into the Statue of Liberty. It was halfway done and it looked absolutely awesome. He didn’t think he would place, but he fact that he was in the finals and had a shot at at least a year’s worth of LEGOs if he got in at least the top twenty was more than enough incentive to keep him working and keep him dangerously protective of his project.
At night, if there was a quiet night, they sat together and drank the cheap wine they could afford on college student budgets as Genke worked on it and they talked strategy. Maybe they sat a bit closer together than was possible. Maybe their speech was more intimate and flirtatious. Maybe hands fell in places hands should only fall in intimate relationships. But for all anyone’s efforts, nobody knew their nightlife and nobody knew for sure except the two boys themselves.
Sure, there were two bedrooms in the tiny apartment, but that never proved anything. Especially given that the young Spiderman often joked that one of the rooms was the sick bay, where Genke helped him recover from whatever Doc Oct. Or Venom or whoever had knocked him through. Once it was a water tank and it took some quick thinking to keep him alive, plus him being almost scalped was just more gray hairs Genke was claiming to have gained through all the years Miles had been the active and alive Spiderman.
“Love you baby”
“Love you too, sweet”
Maybe nobody knew for sure if they were together or not. It didn’t matter; they knew, and that did.