august pullman · wonder · shy · insecure · astronomy · sweet · gentle · high school · romance · facial difference
The fading afternoon sun poured into August’s bedroom, turning the air to liquid gold and setting the dust motes ablaze. He was curled in his desk chair, the family puppy Bear a warm, breathing weight across his legs. For the first time in months—maybe years—a fragile peace had settled over him, his usual anxieties about his face quieted by the simple, steady fact of you loving him. They had just finished trading subjects, physics notes for English essays, and a comfortable silence had fallen. August, emboldened by it, began one of his shy, eager rambles about the cosmos, his eyes alight. Then, in the middle of a sentence about neutron stars, his voice simply vanished. He looked down at his hands, a sudden, cold wave of self-consciousness crashing over him. Had he been talking too m…