#it's looooooong but i hope it'll be worth your time 🥺

[theflyingfeeling]

24 and Joonas/Olli, huh?

Childhood friends-to-lovers with mutual pining! My time to shine!! 🍀

24. you always give me your four-leaf clovers (4160 words)

~

The first time Olli did it, Joonas wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

(In his defence, Joonas was seven years old at the time and not quite sure what a lot of things meant.)

“Isn’t it cool?” Olli had asked him, twirling the clover between his thumb and index finger. “My mom says they bring good luck.”

“You’re so lucky you found one!” Joonas marvelled at the small, green plant. “Imagine if you had had it yesterday when you fell on your bike.”

“Yeah,” Olli laughed and they both looked at the clover, as if it was a magic talisman or a secret treasure only they knew about.

“It’s super cool.” Joonas’ eyes were almost glistening as he observed the clover.  He felt a twinge of jealousy, but only for half a second; his clumsy friend needed the good-luck charm far more than he did.

That was why he was stunned when Olli handed the clover to him. 

“Do you want it?”

Joonas’ eyes abandoned the small plant and looked into Olli’s eyes instead.

“But…it’s yours!”

Olli shrugged. “I don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?” Joonas thought back to how his friend had cried helplessly on the ground just the day before, a bruise on his knee and a cone of ice cream upside down on the pavement after he had noticed a frost heave on the asphalt a little too late. Olli had still been sniffling when Joonas returned to him with bandaids, having biked home and back faster than he ever had in his life. Olli had loved the Spider-Man pattern on them, and the new ice cream Joonas had brought him from his mother’s freezer had Olli smiling once more.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Olli nodded and shoved the clover to Joonas. “I’ll keep the next one I find.”

But he didn’t, Joonas learned years later. Nor the one after that.

~

“Waaaaaaaah, what am I gonna do, Olli?” Joonas whined, rubbing his face. The sun was beaming at them from a cloudless sky as they lay on the grass behind their school, which only made his misery more drastic; the weather was perfect for practising tricks on his new skateboard or fishing by the river, not for worrying about his spring term grades.

“Mmpf,” Olli mumbled next to him. His legs were dangling in the air in an almost carefree way as he lay on his stomach, but the grim pout on his lips told Joonas otherwise.

“I don’t think you’re gonna flunk the whole grade just because of one failed exam, though,” Tommi, ever the voice of reason, offered his five cents. Joonas hated how rational his tall friend could sometimes be, even at the ripe age of thirteen. 

“But I’m not gonna fail in just one exam, I’m gonna fail in maths!” Joonas exclaimed dramatically, throwing his arms above his head against the grass, almost whacking the back of Olli’s head as he did. “Aargh, mom’s gonna kill me, there’s no way she’s gonna let me go to Helsinki if I get a 4. I don’t want to come back to school in June, ugh!”

“You won’t fail, Joonas,” Olli then said, and Joonas turned his head to look at the boy.

“I don’t understand anything about polynomials, Olli. I will fail,” Joonas argued and shot a sullen glance at Tommi, who undoubtedly, although two years younger than him, knew all about the nomials.

“No, you won’t. I promise,” Olli instisted. Joonas could hear a hint of a smile in his voice. 

“How could you possibly promise that?” Joonas grumbled, turning away from his friend again; he was convinced that whatever Olli said or did would be of little comfort to him in his current agony.

That was until he felt something fall on his chest – light as a feather, but still very much there.

A single four-leaf clover.

Just as Olli had promised, Joonas did not fail the exam, he did not need to return to school after the end of the semester, and his mother did let him go to Helsinki to spend two weeks with his cousins. It most likely wasn’t because of the clover, but Joonas carried it with him anyway for as long as it was still green.

~

The most memorable and obvious occurrence, one Joonas held close to his heart, had been when they had both still been in high school. Even years later, Joonas didn’t understand how on earth he had missed all the signs.

(Perhaps he had been too preoccupied with his own hopeless crush on Olli to see any farther than his own nose.)

They were spread on Joonas’ twin bed after school, the back of Olli’s head resting on Joonas’ tummy. Olli was absorbed in the textbook he was reading, Joonas in the silky smooth feeling of Olli’s hair as his fingers played with it absentmindedly.

It was a rainy Friday afternoon in May, and Olli was studying for the last exam week of the semester. Joonas, in turn, should have been preparing for the entrance exam he’d have on Monday.

And he maybe would have, had the softness of Olli’s hair and the weight of Olli’s head on his stomach not been the only earthly things Joonas could bring his mind to focus on at the time.

(Since everything else about Olli was completely stellar.)

“Are you nervous?” Olli suddenly asked him without moving his gaze from the book.

“About the exam?”

“No, about the evening news airing on time tonight,” Olli said dryly. “Yes, the exam.”

“Mmh. I don’t know,” he said, then took a deep breath to build up enough courage to spill out what he was about to confess. “I may not be going, actually.”

Olli set down his book. The hair in between Joonas’ fingers slipped away when Olli rose to lean on his elbow, facing Joonas with eyebrows crunched.

“What do you mean you’re not going?”

“I said ‘may’. But, like… I haven’t studied much because of the cold I had, and anyway I… Yeah, I don’t know.” With no fluffy tufts of hair to fondle, Joonas started braiding the strings of his hoodie instead.

“Well… what would you do then? A gap year?”

Joonas pouted and shrugged, avoiding Olli’s gaze.

“Maybe. Or just, like, see if the band thing works out.”

“And what if it doesn’t”?

“There’ll be new entrance exams,” Joonas said quietly and shifted his position on the bed; Olli’s query was starting to make him feel as uncomfortable as his mother’s questioning look the other night when they had been watching TV together and Joonas had, rather unthinkingly, agreed with a sigh similar to his mother’s that Jason Momoa was quite dreamy.

“I suppose…” At last Olli’s eyes drifted from Joonas’ face (thank heavens), and Joonas let his chest sink as he exhaled with the relief of Olli dropping the topic.

“It’s a tempting option, not gonna lie,” Olli said and ran his palm on Joonas’ bedcover. “I’m not smart enough for med school anyway, so why bother.”

“Hey! Don’t you dare use that tone of voice when speaking of my best friend! You’re smart enough for anything.”

“I’m not, Joonas, and you know that,” Olli insisted, a melancholic smile forming on his lips.

More than anything in the entire world, Joonas wanted to lean over and kiss it away.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a fact. Now shut your mouth about it before I shut it for you.” Joonas felt his heartbeat quicken when he realised what he had said.

To his relief, Olli seemed to dismiss his slip of tongue with a short giggle and a roll of his eyes. However, Joonas’ heart did not get the rest it so needed when Olli lay his cheek back on Joonas’ upper body, a little further up this time, just at the lower part of Joonas’ rib cage, dangerously close to his poor, shivering ticker which had not been quite the same ever since Joonas had understood he had fallen for his oldest childhood friend. 

(It had happened the previous autumn; Joonas couldn’t pinpoint when exactly, but he did remember the way Olli had looked lying next to him in the morning after Joonas’ 18th birthday, his lips just inches away from Joonas’, and for the first time he had wondered what it would be like to kiss them without the confidence boost alcohol usually gave him.)

“Whatever,” Olli sighed then. His fingers were scratching the fabric of Joonas’ hoodie slowly while nuzzling his cheek against it. 

Joonas tried not to let himself enjoy their closeness too much; Olli had always been a cuddly creature, constantly sneaking into any of his friends’ immediate proximity for hugs and snuggles for no reason in particular.

That’s just the way he is, Joonas had to keep convincing himself whenever his imagination tried to tell him otherwise.

This time there was no need for that, though, as the tug he felt on one of the drawstrings of his hoodie brought him back to reality like a plane crashing down. 

“I’ll shut up, but on one condition.”

Joonas raised his eyebrow. Something inside his chest tightened its grip.

“I want you to go to the entrance exam.”

“Aaargh!” Joonas groaned and threw his head back. His eyes fixed on the ceiling and focused on the ominous black spot which had been there right above his bed since they had moved in the house and which Joonas still always thought was a spider. The view became blurry, but somehow Joonas could fight back the tears that threatened to escape down his cheeks.

“Please, Joonas.”

“I told you, I have barely looked at the materials.”

“Just give it a shot. Please.”

When Joonas was somewhat positive his eyes would not give away his distressed state, he looked down at Olli again and saw a pair of dark eyes looking into his pleadingly. 

“Fine. But you better go find me a four-leaf clover for it.”

Olli’s eyes largened in a wicked expression that took over the boy’s face whenever he could not believe his ears.

“Have you not seen the weather forecast? It’s gonna be pouring until Tuesday!”

“Your point being?” Joonas grinned and wiggled his eyebrows.

“If you think I’m going out there just to find you a four-leaf clover, you’re being delirious.”

“Oh, so you want me to do badly in the exam you’re forcing me to take? Some friend you are.” Joonas reached his hand to pinch Olli’s cheek, but just in time the other boy dodged his touch with a giggle. Joonas was prepared, however, and used his other hand to slide under Olli’s t-shirt and attack the ticklish skin below his armpit, and soon the room was filled with Olli’s loud laughter, a sound that Joonas had always adored, a  melody he wished to hear every day, a song that felt like home.

“Okay, okay,” Olli said in between giggles. “Fine, I’ll get you your damn clover, if that’s what it takes. Wait here.” He was slightly out of breath and his hair was sticking up when he got off the bed, and Joonas had to suppress a longing sigh as he watched Olli straighten his shirt and fix his hair, his darkened eyes still gleaming with amusement.

Joonas’ gaze followed Olli who walked to Joonas’ desk covered with used coffee mugs, empty plastic bottles, candy wrappers and other junk “normal people usually keep in the rubbish bin��, as Joel had once grumbled when he had been over for a song-writing session. But before Joonas could point out Olli would not find any clovers there, the boy picked up something from the table and turned around, hiding whatever he had taken behind his back. 

“Sit up and, umm, unbutton your shirt a little,” Olli said, his voice falling quiet towards the end. His eyes wandered around the room as he scratched his temple.

“W-why?” Joonas wanted to know, although his fingers were already touching the collar of his striped dress shirt, like some sort of instinct had guided them there.

“Just do it, Porko.”

With trembling fingers Joonas did as he was told, the symbol of good luck long forgotten when Olli climbed back on the bed and faced him, his expression having lost most of its earlier playfulness. 

He felt Olli’s warm fingertips brush his chest when Olli moved away the piece of cloth to reveal more of Joonas’ skin. The touch, albeit faint and brief, took Joonas’ breath away so completely that he almost didn’t notice what Olli was holding in his right hand: a thin black marker. 

“Stay still,” Olli whispered, and in the next moment Joonas felt the tip of the pen on his skin. 

He felt Olli’s hair tickle his nose when his friend leaned in closer for a better view at his makeshift canvas.

He felt Olli’s calm breathing on his bare chest, and by god, Joonas could not have moved even if the fire brigade would have stormed in through his bedroom door, urging them outside to save themselves from the raging fire in the next room.

But the only fire in the house was the one he felt on his skin where Olli had touched when he finally leaned back, putting a cap on the marker again. 

“There,” he said with a hoarse voice and ran a hand through his hair. “That ought to do the trick.”

Joonas tipped his head down to see what had been scribbled down on his chest, but from his angle he couldn’t quite make it out.

“What is it”?

“It’s a clover! With four whole-ass leaves, just like you requested.” Olli poked at his artwork with a finger. Joonas looked up to see Olli avert his eyes in turn, focusing on the pen he was still holding. 

“Thanks. I can’t see it from there, though.”

Or hold it, or bring it to my lips, like I did with the one you brought me from your vacation in Australia during Christmas break.

“No, but there it’s close to your heart. I thought maybe it would be more effective,” Olli replied but didn’t look at Joonas while he spoke.

“Thanks,” Joonas repeated in a whisper. He held his mouth open, held his breath to say something more; what, neither of them ever found out, as in that exact moment Joonas’ mother called them for dinner. 

Olli’s theory about the placement of the good luck token was proven wrong a few days later, but more than that, Joonas’ failed exam had been due to two days spent in lovesick agony instead of in study mode, his mind constantly wandering to Olli’s gentle fingers touching his chest and his dark eyelashes fluttering as he concentrated on drawing.

(Weeks later, the exam long gone and forgotten, Joonas could still make out the traces of the clover when he looked at himself in the mirror in the morning, and traced his finger over the shaky lines, careful not to smudge them away just yet.)

~

Olli had given Joonas a four-leaf clover the day before Joonas came out to his mother.

He had planned to do so one of those days anyway, but Olli’s gesture had been the final push, even if he hadn’t known Joonas had needed one.

“What did she say?” Olli asked him. They were sitting against the brick wall of Olli’s apartment building, the one he had moved into a week after he had turned eighteen.

“That she loves me and that she’s happy I told her,” Joonas shrugged. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure what he had been so nervous about; his mother was the kind of person who, if Joonas knocked on her door at 3 AM with the police after him, would hide him in the basement and charm the officers away with no further questions asked about why he was being chased by the cops in the first place. 

“She’s the coolest,” Olli smiled and nudged Joonas’ head with his own.

“I know,” Joonas agreed, a fond smile tugging at his own lips. 

“Hey, umm,” Olli began and looked down at his phone, his thumb smoothening the crack on the screen, “how…how did you tell her?”

Joonas’ mind wandered back to the day before, when his mother and he had been cleaning the table after dinner.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?” his mother answered while loading the dishwasher.

“Remember that one time we were watching Game of Thrones and you said Jason Momoa was handsome and I agreed?”

His mother closed the dishwasher door and straightened her back, appearing to be thinking for a while.

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“Yeah, that was because I’m gay.”

His mother smiled and reached her hands towards Joonas.

“Come here, baby boy.”

“I just… told her,” Joonas shrugged. He didn’t care to go into too much detail.

“Uh-huh,” Olli said quietly beside him. He kept staring at the broken screen of his phone, his eyes becoming sort of glassy, Joonas noticed. 

“Why?”

You can tell me, Olli.

Please, tell me.

He saw Olli’s chest inflate and then sink again, and then he heard a quiet voice speak:

“‘Cause… I could use some tips, I guess.”

When Olli finally looked up at him, his eyes were watery and his upper front teeth were (barely) keeping his lower lip still.

“Oh, Olli,” Joonas tilted his head and reached his hand to dry Olli’s cheek.

Olli didn’t sob or sniffle as he hid his face on Joonas shoulder, but Joonas felt the fabric of his shirt dampen on the spot he had laid his head.

“You’ll get there,” he whispered in Olli’s ear. “I promise you will.”

After a while he felt Olli relax against him and a hand sliding on his palm, interlacing their fingers.

“Have you told your dad yet?” Olli’s voice was soft and quiet, but Joonas would have heard it from a mile away, he was sure of it.

“That prick? I guess I could text him,” Joonas grumbled, not in the mood to think about the man that had left his and his mother’s lives years ago because he had suddenly changed his mind about wanting to be a loving husband and a supportive father.

(Now he was a loving husband and a supporting father to some other people in another city, and Joonas was only a little bitter about it.)

Nevertheless, he was happy to feel Olli’s body shake with silent laughter. 

“Should I find you a clover for the occasion?”

Joonas wrapped his arms around Olli tighter. 

“Oh, please do. Better safe than sorry, eh?”

~

Joonas leaned against his car and closed his eyes. The sun was hotter than it had been so far that spring, and he wanted to bathe in its every ray before he would close himself in the small, dark room where their band practice was to take place. A Sunday evening was an unusual time for them to be running through tour rehearsals, but he supposed it had something to do with Joel and Aleksi travelling to Berlin for promotional affairs the next day and Niko wanting to take his girlfriend on a vacation before the tour would start, so he had agreed to meet the others at 5 pm. 

He suspected nothing when he entered the room to find no one else but their bassist sitting on the sofa, strumming on Joonas’ acoustic guitar he had forgotten there earlier that week.

“Hey,” Olli looked up when he noticed Joonas.

“Hi. The others are not here yet?” Joonas asked, despite the fact he could well see the others were very much not there yet.

“They…are not coming, actually,” Olli said and set the guitar carefully on the sofa.

“Oh? I thought we were gonna run through the set once more.” 

The serious look on Olli’s beautiful face gave him the chills.

“Has something happened?”

“No! I mean… Well, yeah. Kinda. NOT the way you’re probably thinking, though. The others are fine.”

Olli’s blabbering only confused Joonas more.

“Where are they, then?”

“I don’t know. At home, probably?”

“But…why are they not here? You told me we have practice today!”

“Well, we don’t!” Olli was standing up now, furrowing his brows as he combed his hair with his hand.

“Then what are we here for?”

It was either the world’s most boring and poorly executed prank, or Olli had not been in his right mind when he had texted Joonas in the morning, ordering him to attend band practice late in the afternoon.

“Oh, god, you are thick…” he heard Olli mutter under his breath, rolling his eyes. “We’re here because I’m trying to tell you something.”

“You couldn’t have texted it?” Joonas glanced longingly at the birch trees swaying in the wind in front of the only window in the room.

“Not really.”

“Well, spill it, then? I don’t know about you but I’m sort of keen on going for a beer before they close the deck terrace.”

Olli sighed and picked up Joonas’ guitar again. 

“Here,” he said and pushed it towards Joonas.

Joonas looked at the guitar, then at Olli.

“Huh?”

Olli inhaled and exhaled shakily.

“Look inside.”

Joonas shot another sceptical look at Olli before taking the six-string from his hands. Then he peeped in through the sound hole. At first he couldn’t see anything at all, but when he was about to put the instrument down, he saw something sweep past the hole. He then lifted the guitar close to his face again and gave it a shake, and finally he saw what was hidden inside it. 

Dozens of four-leaf clovers, in varying sizes and shades of green. 

“Olli, what is this?”

Olli looked defeated as he shook his head.

“What do you think it is, Joonas?”

He heard Olli sigh quietly as they stared at each other.

…Oh.

“Olli–”

“I… I didn’t know how else to tell you.”

“Olli–”

“And I’m not expecting you to feel the same, I’m not expecting anything from you, just so you know.”

“Olli–”

“So we can just forget about this, you know, if that’s what you want. I don’t know how to get those out of there, though, sorry for ruining your guitar, I guess.” 

“Olli!”

“What?!”

Joonas didn’t tell him ‘what’.

He didn’t have the words at that moment.

Instead, he kissed him.

He placed his hands on Olli’s neck, where they had wandered so many times before on the pretext of the silliest things, and pressed his lips on Olli’s and just held him there, afraid to move or breathe or think, afraid it might all be just another one of his hopeless daydreams in which he built up the courage and snogged Olli’s stupid face in the middle of a gig.

When they finally did break apart, Joonas felt lightheaded, like he was about to pass out from the intoxicating chemical reactions blowing up his brain. Olli, on the other hand, breathed heavily against his mouth and placed a hand on Joonas’ chest, right where he had painted a scrubby four-leaf clover when they had been just clueless teenagers. 

The drawing had faded long ago, but the imprint had stayed in Joonas’ heart all these years.

Joonas pressed his nose on the top of Olli’s head. His lips moved against his hair as he spoke.

“Where did you even find that many four-leafs?”

Olli chuckled and nuzzled Joonas’ shoulder.

“It took me the whole spring to find even a handful.”

Joonas closed his eyes, picturing Olli at the task, sweeping through freshly-grown grass for four-leaf clovers.

“And there might be a few regular clovers. I wasn’t so picky towards the end.”

“Cheater!” Joonas smiled and planted a kiss on Olli’s temple when the man giggled. “Trying to woo me with deception and lies!”

“But it worked, did it not?”

“Yes,” Joonas admitted, “although a simple ‘I love you’ would have worked just the same.”

Olli lifted his head off Joonas shoulder and looked at him, his eyes wandering back and forth between Joonas’ eyes and his mouth.

“Is it too late to try that now?”

Joonas shook his head. “Never.”

“Good. Because I love you, Joonas. A lot.”

The delighted sound that escaped Olli’s mouth when Joonas booped his nose with his was enough to add at least twenty years to Joonas’ life.

“I love you too. I love you like crazy.”

Joonas had had many kinds of tattoos drawn all over his body, but he had sworn to himself that he would never get a tattoo in honour of a lover; tattoos might have been forever, but love? Who knows.

And yet, on their first official anniversary, on a hot afternoon in May, Joonas and Olli stepped out of a tattoo parlour hand in hand with fresh, matching tattoos representing four-leaf clovers: Olli on the inside of his wrist, Joonas over his heart.