count the creased lines
The very nature of the relationship is most certainly selfish. It operates on your terms, it runs on his constant, knowing capitulation. MDNI!
ship: fetus!alex, alex turner x reader, alex turner x you, high school hook-ups
warnings: munching & fucking, undefined relationship, a LOT of internal suffering on alex's part here, teenage angst
word count: 6422
note: so i know he went to barnsley and that's in the city but 1. it doesnt work for the narrative 2. i dont care. this is very heavily normal people inspired btw. ummm also i didnt really edit this xoxo might edit later we'll see !
You always find Alex after school, waiting behind the fence marking the end of the campus and the start of the sprawling field that gently grows into rolling hills into the green countryside. It’s a hot summer this year. The tall grass is bleached, and the stones on the footpath you two have paved for yourselves are bone-dry.
Alex is always waiting after school. You never wait for him because he always takes the initiative to slip out of class as quickly as possible to wait for you. He doesn’t wait for you in the halls, and he tells himself that he prefers it that way, really, because he doesn’t much enjoy the noise and chatter of other people.
You walk up the path to the old sycamore tree. You can see Alex sitting on the fat bough, pressing his back against the bark and looking up at the sky.
“Hi,” you say. “You sure do look busy. Should I go? I don’t wanna bother.”
His head lolls to the side when he looks at you. “Hello to you too.”
Your playful attitude doesn’t earn a significant reaction, but he does decide to sit up and slip off the bough, landing on the ground with a thud. The spot where his feet land is nearly naked with flattened grass. This is his favourite place to wait. Alex looks around to see if anyone is watching, and when he is satisfied by his observation, he crosses the space between your bodies and kisses you.
“Hello, hello,” you say against his mouth. “We should probably go home.”
It’s a very good kiss, as it always is. Even better is the way you speak against his mouth, which makes Alex feel very warm—if you continue to do it while kissing for even longer, he almost begins to feel lightheaded with pleasure at the way your lips move against his lips.
“We could,” Alex says, and he kisses you again, his hand finding your hip, slipping under the hem of your dress-code-appropriate uniform blouse. The sun beams down through the trees, and Alex thinks you look like you’re literally glowing. “Did you find maths hard today?”
“No.”
“Of course not.”
You and Alex cut through the field, wading through the tall grass. He takes your bag and slings it over his shoulder. You take his hand and snap a stalk of wheatgrass and tickle the back of his neck with it, which he complains about for a little while until he takes it from your hand and kisses you very hard until you’re all out of breath and all you can do is look at him for a little bit after, blinking slowly. And when he does this, he always gives you a very smug, narrow-eyed sort of look, as if asking well? what now?
“My parents won’t be home ‘til Sunday afternoon,” you tell him once you two are back to walking and your hand is ensnared between his fingers so you can’t mess with him again, “So we can just stay at mine as long as you want, really.”
“Oh,” he says. “That’s convenient.”
There’s no matter of going out on dates between you two. What do you do, really? You go to either or’s house, and then you have sex, and you talk a lot—talk too much—and then you don’t say anything to each other at school the next day. It’s a very easy sort of situation. Alex justifies this to himself because he doesn’t really have the money to take you out anywhere you deserve and besides, you’re not complaining about this arrangement.
The sketched trajectory of this relationship has never gone past the bounds of last week, today, and tomorrow, even if it’s really been going on for months and months. By the time you two really thought about it (independently, of course), it felt a little too late to ask if either of you no longer wanted to keep it discreet. Besides, neither of you are particularly showy people. It works, doesn’t it? Alex thinks so. He hopes so in an attempt to convince himself just as much as he hopes it convinces you.
“I’m sure you could stand to show a little more enthusiasm.”
Alex looks at you, smiling. There is a slight breeze and a bit of his hair sticks up and you desperately want to smooth it down, to touch him. “I am enthusiastic. You know, later, I’ll show you.”
You stick your tongue out at him and you carry on walking, tugging on his arm jerkily. He yelps. “You’re unbelievable. You were waiting to say that, weren’t you?”
“It was easy, very easy...”
—
It’s utterly unbelievable to Alex that other people aren’t madly in love with you. Or at least completely infatuated, but he’s fairly certain that you don’t strip for anyone else like this, that you don’t strip for anyone else at all. It’s not even a big deal. Here you are, at the foot of your bed across him, tugging your skirt off for him—well, he is inclined to think it’s for him—and leaving the top half of the buttons of your school blouse undone. It’s really all you manage to do before Alex leaps up from his spot on the bed and says, “Come here.”
You merely smile and acquiesce, crawling on the bed over to him and letting him kiss you full on the mouth in the clumsy, eager way he does when he’s hard far too quickly and far too soon.
“I can’t believe you,” he says nonsensically.
“Can’t believe what?”
“You,” he repeats with an underlying tone of awe.
Alex is always fascinated by you, even when you begin to annoy him by your prodding and poking (only ever in private), your mellow takes on offences towards him by people at school (only ever in private), and your temperature pet peeve that has you refusing to set any thermostat to something that isn’t a multiple of five (only ever in private). He finds it odd that you keep these aspects of yourself so tightly compressed in yourself with everyone else when it is utterly fascinating, but he isn’t complaining. He sort of likes the privacy of it, that some things remain for him alone to witness, but he cannot fathom the idea that other people may find all this strange and distasteful. Strange, alright—but distasteful? Certainly not.
His hands wander into your shirt, slipping past the undone buttons as his mouth wanders from your mouth to your cheek, and then your jaw then he moves all day down to the middle of your neck and he licks a line from there up to your jaw again like a starving dog.
“That feels funny,” you say.
“You always say that,” Alex murmurs.
Sometimes he worries he’s crazy, or that there’s something wrong with him. He sometimes reflects on the possibility that it’s strange to want to lick or bite or taste other people, even if it’s the sort of thing his mates joke about. He wants it desperately with you, he cannot imagine wanting the tang of anyone’s skin or sweat in his mouth. The thought of anyone else’s dead skin cells in his mouth is disgusting, but yours seems okay. It almost feels like a shameful thing. When he is with you, there exists a persistent desire to unfold you like origami and count the creased lines as if to understand what makes you so terribly desirable when you are merely made of yourself and nothing else.
You straddle his lap and grind down onto his already very hard cock and the sensation of it is so extreme he feels like he might faint. “Fuck.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Amongst other things.”
He unbuttons the rest of your blouse and all but tears it off you and his mouth wanders lower to your breast. You can sense his temptation to bite over your bra. “Don’t,” you say warningly.
“In my defence,” he starts, muffled as he kisses your skin and slips one strap down your shoulder, and then the other, “I didn’t know I could ruin it by biting too hard. Last time.”
“Now you know, don’t do it again.”
“You always give me whatever attitude is left over from school,” he points out as he reaches back and tugs on the clasp. “Fuck, I still can’t get these bloody things off—”
You reach back to unclasp it while his mouth is still on your chest, and he nudges the top of the cup with his nose before taking your nipple between his lips, scraping it with his teeth. Your moan comes out as a whimper. Your hands tremble, and the bra falls to your lap, sitting between your bodies.
“You’re like an angel who does impossible things. I can’t believe you,” he says, and he touches your eyelids and your mouth, pinching your nipples with his fingers, “Even if you had eyes here, I’d probably still want you. You’d blind me, alright, but as long as I can touch you…”
You laugh and you grip his hair by the roots, leading his head to your breast. Obviously, he follows.
He always says the strangest, most unacceptable sort of things you’d slap someone else for. There is the obvious sex talk you’d report someone for if you weren’t having sex at all, but he says things like this that make you twitch with laughter and want because he always sounds so honest about it. Who else is going to call you a biblically-correct angel and want you anyway?
His cleverness comes with the territory of being disliked for it. He’s not universally hated or anything like that but most people at college avoid him if they can help it because he always looks away and purses his lips as soon as they start talking about something he finds utterly inane, which is kind of rude, really, but you’re an excessively nice person who makes a point of seeing past all that. He gets labelled as quiet anyway because he doesn’t speak up enough for many people to want to talk to him in the first place, only to find out he is like this.
It’s not like it’s a farce or a façade or anything, his distaste is genuine. It’s just that his attitude can get in the way of being socially acceptable if he isn’t practically trembling with excitement or dying of intrigue. He has always exercised a very subdued contempt for the people at school, but no one really notices it aside from his occasional expression of discomfort when asked to work in groups of more than three. Even then, it’s quite easy to mistake his dislike as a mere preference for working alone.
It's an odd thing you understand but could never do. You like the division of responsibility, not feeling like everything is set on your shoulders and that you have people you trust that might help you take care of the matter. But, well, you have friends. Proper ones who find you when the teacher says ‘work in groups.’ There’s the difference. There are many things different about you two.
You feel Alex groan against your chest. His grip is very tight on your hips. He’s never left bruises in places like that before but if he does, you think you won’t mind.
You know he wants it really badly now, the way he keeps sucking on your breast and the way his fingers are tugging on the waistband of the shorts you wear under your skirt. It’s only a very small matter of time until his hands are inside your underwear and then inside of you.
“What do you want to do?” You always ask him this question. It’s an act of generosity you try not to think about because it’s a little uncomfortable, but you can’t ever resist the urge to ask him what he wants. It’s as if the day hinges on his desires, and not on your terms of the relationship.
“I want to fuck you.”
“Yes, well, besides that?”
Alex thinks for a moment. “Let me try eating you out again.”
“Practising?” Getting eaten out isn’t your favourite, but you’re not sure if it’s your body’s fault or your general avoidance of the act that you can’t grow accustomed to it, or it’s because he’s bad at it (but that might also be your fault, because he says that it’s not like he can practise on anyone else).
He gives you a chiding look as he grasps your hips and lifts them so you’re kneeling over him and his mouth is licking around and under your navel. He tugs your cotton shorts off impatiently, taking your panties along with it and he sighs deeply as two of his fingers slide between your legs to find you wet.
“Alex,” you say, a whine edging into your voice.
“What?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—” you complain, and then his index finger is inside you and it feels like a lightning strike. Your hand finds his hair, grabbing him by the roots at the top of his head and he’s looking up at you, grinning.
“What was that?”
“Shut up.”
He only laughs and kisses the top of your pubic mound, and you can feel him inhale deeply against your skin, his eyes closed as his mouth opens to press a hot, wet kiss to your belly. You swallow thickly; he’s never looked sexier before, even if you think he always looks sexy (but in a boyish, summery kind of way, nothing like the way movie stars do)—he looks incredible now, seated between your legs, that terrible devotion on his face that makes your skin prickle with heat, that makes your joints ache with need.
When he’s like this, you feel so powerless, but in a way that validates your violent desire to be torn apart and examined like a bug under a microscope, the unusual shape of your veiled personality taken into question and dissected piece by piece. Alex manages that dissection well, in a languid sort of way that often has you deciding that no one else might be capable of it again. He looks at you like an object of captivation, which is better than as an object of sex or an object of some other nasty, bodily use. Like a book only he can read, a book that he reads over and over again as if it never ends.
Alex curls his fingers inside you and you moan, fingers tightening around his hair. “I want to eat you out.”
“Fine, fine,” you say, in the exact tone of voice that is easy to mistake for resignation (which is why you never use it around other people), but is really closer to a selfless, giving capitulation.
He removes his fingers and offers it up to your mouth, so you lower your head and suck on it, eyes closed. You can feel him twitch on your tongue through the sweet taste of your cunt (you can sort of understand why he likes eating you out) and the tang of his skin. Then he removes his hand and takes your hips, guiding you to his side as he turns to face you.
“My thanks,” he says in a mock serious voice, pulling your bottoms off further down your legs and flicking them away onto the floor.
“You’re picking that up later.”
Alex rolls his eyes. “I know.” He pushes your legs apart with a surprising amount of force and settles down there. He looks hungry.
“You’re not gonna tease, are you?” you say, placing your foot against his side and gently rubbing it. Accompanied with your words, it comes across as a playful threat.
“Well, it’s not like it works if I can’t get you off like this,” he says, placing his mouth above your clit. You smell sweet. He desperately wants to put his fingers inside you, and then he realises he can, because he doesn’t really have any intentions of teasing. “Yet.”
He groans low against your cunt as your hands find his hair and tug now that his fingers are inside you again. Once more, he lowers his mouth and this time, he flattens his tongue against your lips and licks a long, broad stripe up to your clit from where the inside of his palm meets your body.
“That’s really good.”
“Is it?” he asks. He does it again and you tug harder on his hair. “Ow.”
“Sorry.”
“No,” he says. “Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop either, not when you moan like that and you say his name like you've been surprised with something you never knew you wanted. He sucks on your clit, eyes closed and feeling like he’s chasing a high as your hips jerk under his hands. His head is spinning, he feels like his capacity for pleasure is far too small for something as good as this, and he’s hard, so fucking hard that he almost compulsively humps the bed like an idiot.
“Oh, fuck—” you gasp, your voice suddenly coming into focus. “I think I’m gonna—I might come, don’t stop, fuck, fuck—”
Then your voice is gone and muffled again to him again, but this time it’s because your soft thighs are clamping around his head. Momentarily, he thinks he might come on the spot.
Alex swallows hard for a hairbreadth of a second in an effort to compose himself and he fights the urge to go faster, or harder, because that shit doesn’t work. Instead he keeps going, counting multiples of five in his head, in your voice so he keeps his rhythm and so he can ignore the white-hot sparks of pleasure shooting through his spine and down his cock and then back up and down to his toes. His head is spinning and then he hears you cry out and, wow, everything is a lot wetter now—
Eyes still closed, he licks up from his fingers to your clit over and over again. He’s breathing really hard, like he’s just run a race, but you finished and it fills him with an obtusely inflated sense of pride.
“Did you just come?” he asks smugly.
“Didn’t know I would,” you say, panting.
He smirks and gets up to kiss you, but you intercept him by tugging on his hair and you lick his lips, the side of his mouth, under his wet nose. Alex yelps. “Ew, Jesus!”
“You just had your mouth by my pee and poo hole,” you retort, letting go of him as he jerks backwards, and you yelp this time when he loses his balance and lands on top of you.
“That’s still disg—”
“Your face was all wet, and you were gonna kiss me—”
Your bodies are all tangled together. He looks up at you. “It was, wasn’t it?”
You roll your eyes. “Yes.”
—
“I don’t want to go to the formal,” Alex tells you the next day over lunch. Making lunch was nearly a disaster because he managed to burn eggs, and he had complained about your hospitality after you relegated him to cleaning up as you finished cooking. His contempt is showing. “A suit for some stupid kids’ party.”
“It’s not a stupid kids’ party,” you say, talking with your mouth full. “It’s a night to celebrate that this is all finally going to be over. Are you just saying that because you have no one to take?”
He looks at you steadily when you say this. He feels a little sick, like his heart is in his throat and it won’t come out or go back down. Maybe he’s just choking on his sandwich and he hasn’t realised it yet.
“That’s not it. Could you close your mouth while eating? I don’t w—”
“C’mon, Gemma would go with you.” Your knife clinks on your plate.
Alex is unnerved by your dismissive attitude about this, even if he had come into this relationship knowing that this is the exact way it was meant to pan out. You have never expressed a desire to have him for yourself except for moments where there is no one else to have him but you. He wants to say something insane and sensationalist, like ‘I’d rather blow my mates on the dancefloor than go with her,’ because he knows it’ll make you laugh. His favourite fantasy isn’t you in bed under him or him in bed with you on top of him, but rather the imaginary sound of your laughter at some witticism or another. It soothes him when he feels like someone’s playing the violin with the muscles in his shoulders, except he feels like you're the one doing that now.
“I’m going with Rob, anyway,” you say. “You should really go. With someone, ideally. It’s hardly like you’re some horrible person to be around.”
Firstly, he might not be outright horrible or even the slightest bit horrible but the thought of spending an evening in formalwear without someone who can grasp his exact opinions on the evening (no more, no less) is utterly sickening. Secondly, he is humiliated by the fact that he is likely one of the last people you talk to to know about this. He is keenly aware of the fact of girls being incredibly prepared about these sorts of things. He doesn’t like the sudden, nauseating feeling of this very bitter kind of embarrassment so he employs a casual affectation to disguise this.
“Why Rob?”
“Well, he asked.”
The kitchen feels incredibly warm. Alex thinks he might walk out if you follow up with ‘and he’s good-looking’ or something else along those lines, so he’s grateful when you don’t do that and you say instead, “He’s not terrible. Well, he’s not brilliant either.”
You always mean brilliant as in clever. It always fills him with a significant amount of pleasure knowing this, because you regularly call him ‘too smart for his own good.’ It’s why he lets you tease his occasional stammers and stutters, because you say ‘that’s what happens when your brain is going too quick for your mouth to catch up.’
“He isn’t.”
The corner of your mouth turns up into a humourless half-smile that he doesn’t like. Sunlight through the open window falls in streams, illuminating your eyes. “He’s not you. Happy now?”
“That’s better.” He wants to run out of the kitchen, it’s too warm and bright. He doesn’t feel very happy at all.
—
At midnight, Alex wakes up in a cold sweat from a bad dream that slips from his mind as suddenly as it had come. He doesn’t feel nervous when he doesn’t immediately identify where he is because he can feel the warm weight of your boneless body next to him.
He looks down at you. You’re only stirring a little in your sleep.
You two don’t get to do this often—sleeping in the same bed. Your parents go on holiday only every once in a while, and it usually coincides with when his family goes on holiday too. This is a special occasion so instead of succumbing to sleep again, he decides to savour the moment.
Alex can hear his heart pounding in his ears as he examines your body. The two piercings on your ear, the ungroomed tail of your brow, the freckles on the side of your face. He knows very well you’re pretty, and even you are aware of this despite your expressions of disdain (only ever in private) for it. But this is different, observing someone who is asleep instead of someone who is breathing and busy and moving.
He places his hand on your arm. He’ll never stop marvelling at how soft your skin is. You always say it’s leaning on the dry side.
“I can’t believe you,” he breathes very softly, his hand cupping your elbow, squeezing very gently.
Your body is so warm and open, something for him to come back to over and over again. He knows he’ll never be able to explain this feeling to anyone if anyone ever found out about this. What is he supposed to say? That he thinks he is in love with you, in love with your body? That makes him sound desperate, and also kinda weird and perverted.
No, he’d have to say something along the lines of I feel like my body is in the right place when it’s next to her body, and I think she can read my mind when I’m inside her. And it’s alright to be bad at eating her out (I think I’m not anymore, but she says it might have been a fluke) and it’s alright to be unacceptable and occasionally say things that no one, absolutely no one else would ever look at me right for. And it’s alright to be shameful because she can be a right terror, too, because I don’t think she’s afraid I’ll get afraid, and nor do I think she’ll ever be afraid of me.
He imagines himself saying that he likes you for your mind instead. What an understatement, and what utter emptiness the fantasy carries; no one will ever ask him to explain because you are determined that no one ever finds out.
You stir and you open your eyes blearily. “Alex?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you watching me sleep?” Your voice is hoarse. He briefly closes his eyes and thinks of that one time you blew him and he came so hard he thought he died.
“A little.”
“Why are you awake?”
He says nothing about the nightmare he cannot remember nor the thoughts that are slipping away from him like sand. He gestures vaguely to where the sheets are pooled around his waist.
“Oh. Come here,” you murmur. “Fuck me.”
He bends down to kiss you, moving under the sheets to move over your body. “Are you wet?” His hand dips between your legs.
“Might be,” you murmur.
You’re not as wet as you normally are when you say fuck me but he doesn’t mind, his fingertips press on your clit and rub over it and he watches you squirm. Affection rises in his chest. He thinks he loves you, he knows he loves you. He recalls the conversation you had about the formal and he can’t help but wonder if you’ll kiss Robert at any point throughout night, if it’ll be one kiss goodbye or a full-blown make-out session. The thought makes him sick and he applies more pressure with his fingers.
You squirm and moan softly. Your body is open and bright to him in your dark bedroom.
He feels you grow slick and he can’t help it, he pushes two fingers inside, curling them hard. He feels a sadistic urge to keep fucking you with his fingers and then stop right before you come, and then go back to sleep. Then you arch your back and moan louder, your hand finding his bicep and your nails digging in. The sting makes the urge dissipate and then the pain recedes too as he pulls his fingers out.
He can’t help but feel like there’s something cinematic about this—the echoing sickness rising in him quelled by your rippling body. Stupid lines. Stupid poetry.
Alex exhales as he moves on top of you properly and your legs hook around his back eagerly despite the sleep stuck in your eyes. “Fantastic agility,” he finds himself saying.
“Shut up,” you mumble, then you suck in a sharp breath and your hand clutches the pillowcase as he gets inside you.
He likes to get inside very deep and slow, and he likes watching your brow furrow and your bleary eyes refocus on him like a camera. He feels caught like this, naked and exposed, and it is a heart-pounding feeling that feels almost like smoking a cigarette for the first time ever—except this is every time he does this with you.
There is a low, deeply gratifying ache in his body as he moves and his eyes shut as he presses his face into the crook of your neck. One of his hands is pinning your hip into the bed, the other one is grasping your shoulder. He lets his weight carry each downward stroke. The intimacy of this—him inside you, you two in the sheets, you two in your room—makes his head spin.
Alex thinks of a helter-skelter. Your body is the lighthouse. He wants to get on you and he wants his head to spin until he’s sick for the sheer thrill of it, the love of it. Maybe that’s why he sticks around like this, bound by the limitations of your relationship. There’s a joke there somewhere about how he’s always free to walk away but he’ll be so dizzy getting off that he’ll spin and walk right back.
He opens his mouth against your skin and sucks, throat closing tight and swallowing a breath that tastes like you. I’ll be anything you want me to be, I’ll be everything you want me to be, I’ll take it.
“I’m going to come,” he whispers. His voice is ragged. He suddenly feels like he’s in tatters.
Your response comes out with a whimper. “Don’t stop.”
He can’t help the groan that escapes him as he thrusts harder now in an attempt to remember his pace. I’ll take everything you’ll give me, anything you’ll give me if you let me have it. “Won’t.”
Your body is trembling under him, your hips twitch and meet his hips. He picks up the pace. He can feel the pleasure burning him from the inside out, he hopes it burns away whatever grief he carries and bitterly hides over this, over you.
Alex feels you arch your back, he hears you cry out and he feels your nails dig into his back as you fall apart. He likes the pain, how you cannot control yourself with him (only ever in private).
“Fuck,” he gasps softly. “I’m going to come, I mean it.”
Your answering whimper is enough and his body tenses as his hips stutter sharply. He fully understands why he keeps doing this to himself, why he cannot bring himself to hate it. His fingers tighten around your wrist as his breathing stalls and he comes, muttering fuck as he does so.
When his breathing starts up again, he looks at you. Your eyelids are heavy. Your smile is sated. He shakes his head at you a little bit. “I can’t believe you.”
“Sure you can,” you whisper. “You say that like I’m crazy about something.”
Alex examines your face. If this was origami, then he thinks it’s all unfolding right now. He wants to read the creased lines after, like the way those weird witch ladies read palms and say vague things that might apply to your life. He might read his regrets and he might come away feeling like he’s wasted his time, at least he knows that moment will have been the last time he’ll have done something like that. He might miss the original shape of the thing, though.
“I’m crazy, I think,” he says, and he kisses you firmly. The only problem is that he’s not done with you yet. He doesn't want you to be done with him for a while.
The way it’s turning out for him now is that he’s realising he doesn’t know which way the creased lines are meant to bend, and that means there was no point in counting them.
—
“Are you going to take your books with you to France?” Alex asks when he points at your bookshelf. He's doing the last of his homework. It’s due tomorrow and he's struggling with it.
“No,” you say. “There's too many of them, and I'm just getting a shit room in a shit flat. I hope.”
“Housing crisis?”
“Well, they're not calling it that,” you say with a roll of your eyes. “In any case, I can't bring these. Do you want borrow any while I’m away?”
He gets up, grateful for the distraction. He examines the books on your shelves. Dostoevsky, King, Nabokov, Neruda, Hugo, Verne, Baudelaire, Dumas. Many more Alex doesn't recognise. He doesn't think he can survive majoring in Literature. He prefers reading things he likes, not reading everything—especially not if it's in a language he doesn't understand. He still looks at your row of books in French, though.
There's no need to borrow any of your books because he knows what he likes and he has them stacked in a pile by his bed in the corner of his room. But the offer is tempting: he can return it to you. Make a solid excuse to see you over hols to someone if there's someone who needs an excuse from him over this.
“This one? La choot.”
“Don't ever say that again. Don't you know a chute is?”
“I do. I thought it'd annoy you if I said it that way.”
You roll your eyes at him and he grins as he takes the book from your shelf. La Chute. Camus. He likes Camus, he can't read French, but he can find an English copy somewhere and try to read it all until his eyes cross. He’s overtaken by a strange desire to impress you. For you to remember this, as if you wouldn't remember him.
“You can't read French.”
He shrugs. “Camus is okay.”
You smile and sit on your bed. The movement alone feels like an invitation, but you've washed your sheets and done it up so it looks neat, like you two haven't been sleeping and having sex in it all weekend. He resists the temptation and stays still by your bookshelf.
“I hate that book, actually, so you can keep it.”
“No thanks,” he says. “If you hate it then I'll probably hate it too, so you can keep this hateful book after I read it and decide it’s shite.”
Alex wants the excuse. Here you are denying him without even realising it, or maybe you do, which he finds emblematic of something he doesn’t want to describe to himself. Not during daylight hours, at least. You always said that after midnight was the time to make wishes because then whoever might make it come true would hear you better without the din of all the other voices. He decides that the evening is for materialising that wish from his grievances in the daytime.
You shrug. His gaze follows the movement of your bare shoulders. “I could collect people’s hatred with it.”
“What, no. This is our thing. I don’t want anyone else’s hate in it.”
He watches you roll your eyes. Compulsively, he thinks of how you do that in bed. He feels powerless just watching you breathe, talk, exist. Before all of this, he had established that he had no significant appreciation for young love as a romance genre. Now he thinks he might hate it because he feels like he is a sopping wet cloth gathering every handsome, young male lead’s tears for himself. None of those leads are even teenagers, really. They never manage to capture the urgency of each moment, rushed by the fact that he now feels like he’s at the age where careless words and small, stupid decisions precipitate monumental consequences, and all of those come chasing him whether he likes it or not.
Alex was, after all, the one to come to you. He was the one that had foolishly told you that you didn’t actually bother him when he made a face about being grouped into a thing with you and a few other people he is bothered by. Then he was the one that wanted the clarification when you told him you liked him. It was such a careless, casual thing. How? he had asked, and now he is here.
And he was also the one to suggest going to France if you cared about French Literature so much. Why don’t you just go there then? You’re smart enough to get in. He had said that, and again, he is now here.
Later you take him to the front door to say goodbye, because your parents are due to come home in an hour. “Well, bye then,” you say.
He kisses you as you two linger by the front door. You will see each other tomorrow. Neither of you will speak to each other unless strictly, absolutely necessary, on pain of death. He makes no mention of this and he doesn’t protest because you’re not complaining about this arrangement—and he’s not a fucking wuss or a sap or the whiny sort—so he doesn’t complain about it either. Someone’s gonna crack over this and he almost maliciously hopes it’s you. It would be pretty fucking shameful if it was him.
You’re a right terror too, even if no one else can see it. You would probably deserve it if you cracked.
He recalls what he thought last night: how he doesn’t think he’ll ever be afraid of you. How he knows that you know that. Nor does he think you’ll ever be afraid of him, and he knows that as much as he knows up is up and down is down. The problem here is that if you cracked it would inevitably come back right around to him as these things are wont to do when you are involved.
Besides, how could he ever feel this way for other people? He doesn’t rule out the possibility that someone else might try to do this sort of casual, secret thing to him again but you have ruined it for him completely. Its highs are things no one else will ever be able to reach and its lows are things he doesn’t think he’ll ever willing participate in a second time. You have a terrible sort of hold over him and he doesn’t want you to let go. He cannot imagine losing it. He’ll take it in any shape it comes in.
“Bye,” Alex says, pulling away and walking out the front door. He doesn’t look back to see you watching him. Everything feels temporary, because it is.
He can never have this wonderful, terrible weekend again. At least he knows it’ll lose its shine the next time he gets you alone.
