𝒟𝐸𝒞𝒪𝒟𝐸: ɪ.
ᵖᵃʳⁱⁿᵍ: reader x vampire!cullen!hollis, reader x wearwolf!black!roman
ˢʸⁿᵒᵖˢⁱˢ: When you move to Forks to live with your dad, the last thing you expect is to fall for the strangest boy in school. Hollis Cullen is beautiful, unreadable, and seems to keep his distance— until an accident he shouldn’t have been able to prevent pulls you into his orbit instead. As the pieces click into place— his family’s odd habits, Roman's cryptic warnings, the impossible things he can do— you’re forced to decide whether the truth scares you enough to walk away. It doesn’t. Some things you can’t help falling into, even when every part of them was built to end you.
the first time you saw hollis cullen, it was raining, which in forks meant nothing at all— it was always raining, the sky always always the color of a bruise in its healing stage— except that this particular rain seemed to matter more, because you were new, and everyone in the cafeteria was looking at you the way people look at things they’ve never seen before.
your friend ella had appointed herself as your tour guide within the first ten minutes of first period, which was how you learned that forks high school had exactly one hundred and eighteen new things to tell you about itself, and that most of them she considered urgent. by lunch she’d covered the football team, the two good teachers, and a boy named nate who apparently had a crush on her— a fact she clearly knew and just as clearly thought he didn’t know she knew.
“and that,” ella said. lowering her voice the way people do right before they say something devious, “is the cullen family. don’t stare.”
you stared.
there were five of them at a table by the window, and none of them were eating. that was the first strange thing. the second strange thing was that they were the most beautiful group of people you had ever seen gathered in one place that wasn’t a magazine— a big dark-haired boy who looked like he could put his fist through a wall without trying, a blonde girl built like she’d stepped of a runway and was faintly insulted by the cafeteria’s existence, a small pixie-ish girl who was talking with her hands in quick, delighted bursts, and beside her a boy who looked like he was only there because someone had asked him to be.
and then there was hollis.
he wasn’t looking at you. that was the thing you noticed first, before you noticed the copper-brown hair or the sharp clean kind of his jaw or the stillness that hung around him like a held breath— he wasn’t looking at you, when everyone else at least glanced. he was looking at nothing, or at least the middle distance, or maybe at whatever thoughts lived behind eyes that particular shade of gold, and it needled at you in a way you didn’t examine too closely.
“hollis cullen,” ella supplied, following your gaze. “don’t bother. he’s never dated anyone. sirena tried for like two years and he barely learned her name.”
“i wasn’t—” you started.
“sure,” ella said, and went back to her fries.
he was in your biology class, sixth period. you found this out by walking in, scanning the room for one open lab table, and discovering there was an open spot beside him.
the reaction he had was immediate and strange. his whole body went rigid the second you sat down, like you’d brought something into the room that only he could smell, and his jaw tightened into a hard line he held for the entire fifty minutes. he didn’t speak. he didn’t look at you, not once, though you caught— twice— the flicker of his eyes toward you and away so fast you almost thought you’d imagined it. when the bell rang he was out of his seat and through the door before you’d finished zipping you bag, moving in a way that didn’t seem entirely like walking.
“what was that about?” you asked ella after school, still turning it over.
“what was what?”
“hollis. in bio. he looked at me like i’d insulted his whole family.”
ella considered this with real interest. “huh. he’s never like that. maybe you smell bad.” she grinned and laughed, ducking the swat you aimed at her, and that, for the moment , was that.
except it wasn’t, because he was absent the next day. and the day after that. and when he came back, five days later, he was assigned the same seat beside you, and this time— this time he actually looked at you.
“sorry,” he said, before you’d even sat down. “about before. i wasn’t— i had a rough week.”
his voice was low and careful, like he was testing the words before he let them out, and up close the gold of his eyes had a warmth to it that you hadn’t caught from across the cafeteria. you said something back, something forgettable about it being fine, and he almost smiled, and you spent the rest of the period intensely aware of the eight inches of table between your elbow and his.
it went like that for weeks— small collisions. he carried a strange, old-fashioned formality, opening doors, standing when you approached a table, and an equally strange watchfulness, like he was cataloguing you. once, in the school parking lot, a van skidded on the ice toward you, and hollis was suddenly there, one hand flat against its side, stopping two tons of metal like it was a shopping cart. you never got a straight answer for how. he said “adrenaline.” you didn’t believe him, and something in the set of his mouth told you he knew you didn’t, and was relieved you weren’t asking harder.
roman didn’t like any of it. you’d known roman since you were nine, back when your dads used to go fishing together, and he’d grown into someone easy and warm, all crooked grins and terrible jokes, the kind of friend who felt like a light on a dark road. when you mentioned hollis to him— carefully, testing the shape of the name out loud— roman’s whole face changed.
“cullens don’t come around here,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t quite his own, older, borrowed from somewhere else. “my dad says to stay away from them.”
“that’s not an answer.”
“it’s the only one i’ve got for you.” he looked, for a second, like he wanted to say more, and didn’t. you let it go, because you didn’t know it was a thread that would eventually unravel everything.
the day he finally told you was gray and ordinary, no different from the hundred other gloomy, gray ordinary days, except that he’d asked you to walk with him after school, out past the tree line where the trailhead started, and you’d said yes without really deciding to.
“you should be more afraid of me than you are,” he said. he wasn’t looking at you now either, but it was a different kind of not-looking— like he was bracing for something.
“why?”
“because i’ve spent two months trying to stay away from you and i keep failing, and i don’t entirely know what that means for you.” he turned then, and the look on his face was something between hunger and grief. “i want to tell you something, and i need you to not run when i do.”
you didn’t run.
he told you— haltingly, in pieces, watching your face after every sentence like it might crack— and the forest went very quiet around the two of you while he did, the rain holding off for once, weak sun breaking through the cloud cover in thin gray bars. when he finished, he was watching you with the particular stillness of someone waiting to be told to leave.
“say something,” he said finally.
“i’m not scared,” you told him, and you found, testing the words, that they were true. “i don’t know what i am. but it’s not that.”
something in his shoulders let go, some tension you hadn’t clocked as tension until it was gone, and when he reached for your hand it was slow, giving you every chance to pull away. you didn’t. his skin was cold and hard as stone and his fingers curled around yours like they’d been waiting a hundred years to do it.
“i’ve been alive for a long time,” he said quietly, “and i have never wanted anything the way i want to stay standing here.”
the forest was very green and very wet and completely ordinary, and you thought, absurdly, that you would remember the smell of it— pine and rain and him— for the rest of you life, however long that turned out to be, and whatever shape it took from here.
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