Monster: Werewolf
Prompt: Childhood friends to lovers?
I can't drabble, apparently. Also there's some angst with a hopeful ending. :3
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Gods, it hurts to look at him now. It shouldn't, but it does.
You've seen him skin his knees falling off the new bike his parents bought him. He'd been showing off and trying to do a wheelie. You've seen him crying after he put his palm down on a wasp while the two of you were splashing in the blow-up swimming pool when you were six. You've seen him with ice cream all round his face on a sleepover where you watched a movie that was too scary for the both of you and you both cried and curled up under the blankets together to sleep that night.
And then you went to high school together and he broke the hearts of everyone who had one to lose in the first place. Tall, athletic, handsome, he grew into his body in a way you didn't think you ever would.
He went to college and you moved across the country, and you used to call each other and talk late into the night.
Then he went silent.
At first you'd been worried enough to call his parents, but they just told you he was going through something and it would be best if you didn't call again.
Gods, that had hurt. You'd thought that was the worst pain, but now, seeing him in some bar in the city, with his sleeves cuffed up to his elbows and a whisky glinting in a cut glass tumbler between his lax fingers... He looks incredible and you feel like shit.
You whisper his name, and there's no way he should have heard it over the live band in the corner, but he jolts like he's been electrocuted and turns around with a wild look in his eyes, and the glass slips from his fingers onto the bar with a clunk.
You see his mouth form the shape of your name and he's half risen from the stool before he staggers a little. He's not drunk; he's shocked. He says your name again and the music steals it away again.
You cross to him and he looks down at you, his breathing shallow and fast. The light catches his eyes and flares them gold like the toss of a coin.
He says your name again and reaches for your shoulders as if to check you're real; that you're really standing there.
"Fuck," he whispers. "Fuck, I've missed you so much."
"What happened?" you breathe back, looking up at him.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he exhales as he sits down heavily on that stool again and takes a deep draw from the whisky.
"I always believed you," you said. "Until you told me we'd talk soon. That was four years ago."
He screws his eyes shut. "I'm sorry."
"Try me," you say again and there's fire in your voice now. He hears it, and when he looks back at you, his eyes really are glowing gold.
"Alright..." he says. "Here goes nothing."
@rivalriotrenegade and @wishingstarworld here's why:
"Here goes what?" you ask, scowling at him, heart thudding.
Fuck, it hurts to see him in front of you - so real and so... solid. In your memories, he'd taken on a kind of golden aura, but now in the lights of the city bar, you can see the pores in his skin and the scruff around his jaw and the scar where he fell off his skateboard showing off for those girls at school and the way his brows pinch together in the middle just the way the did when you were children and he didn't want to admit something.
"You might want to sit down," he says, voice gritty as the dregs of a bottle of expensive red, and he shunts his now-empty whisky tumbler away from him across the bar.
It's filled by an astute bartender, and he takes a more measured sip while you slide into the bar stool next to him on shaky legs.
"You know how we always told those spooky stories to each other?" he asks without looking at you. He's staring into the whisky like he can divine the outcome of this conversation from the patterns flashing in the amber liquid as it sloshes round its confines of cut-glass, and you swallow, nervous and unsettled by the out of place question.
"Yeah?"
He huffs a little sigh, the air high in his chest as though his lungs won't fill all the way; as if they're already full of nerves and cobwebs. "You remember all the ones about vampires and witches and..." his breath catches and he makes an aborted attempt at swallowing. "...and werewolves?"
"Yeah."
Licking his dry lips, he takes a swig of the whisky, and as he sets it down heavily on the wood, he looks up at you and you startle backwards in your seat.
