Boys Like Us

By e rathke

Couldn’t deny the way the sky lit up with fire made me fall in love with you. With our masks filtering the smoke smothering the stars, no one saw the way I smiled when you took my hand.

Didn’t know it could be this way. Didn’t know boys who loved girls could be boys who loved each other.

You took me home, the bombs punctuating the night grown bright as dawn, and though we carried pickets and signs, it all washed away with your touch, with the spice of you, with the burning inside me. My blood coursing electric as we exchanged the bombs for the pulsing beat and the burning night for strobing lights.

Our masks came off, despite all the warnings.

Hands and sweat and mouth and touch. Surrounded by bodies, swallowed by sound, but there was only ever you for me, at least that night. At least for that song. At least until the sun rose and turned me back to the me I’d been before.

Stumbling back into the street, gunshots and cheering, screaming and dying, you said, “Is this permanent?”

And I wanted—needed—to say yes.

e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure and recipient of the Diverse Worlds Grant, he is the author of Glossolalia, the lofi cyberpunk series Howl, and the space opera series The Shattered Stars. His short fiction appears in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere.