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While I’m awake, it’s perfectly clear you don’t want me.
But while I sleep, you tell me you’ve always loved me.
He lives in a dream.
He touches the sheets with his bare hands, the chill of the white cotton clinging to his warm skin as he shifts in and out of consciousness. He could stay here forever; he doesn't want to think about life or coming back down.
He closes his eyes even tighter as the unrelenting morning sun seeps through his window, burning into the back of his eyelids. Right now, all he wants is anything but to be awake. He buries his head into the pillow beneath him, inhaling the familiar salty scent of skin and hair and the world turns black once more.
In his dream, he is running. The summer wind whips across his face as he turns back to look, his chest heaving and the bottoms of his sneakers pounding hard against the pavement. He is happy, because he knows he will see him today. He runs until it feels as though his lungs will collapse, and even then, when he draws his last running breath (a ragged, forced thing that burns inside of him), it hurts when he pushes the air back out again.
He knows today will be the day he tells him. Today. No matter what.
When he spots his friend, he's right where he told him to be, loitering at the riverside, his slim figure casually leaning against the tree, wine bottle dangling from his hand.
For a moment, he thinks, it's as though he is barely there, a scarce shadow of a body framed in white skin--all legs and trembling hands. He can't help but notice that there is almost something broken about him, the way he stands there, with his too-long fingers, large nose, and unapologetically messy hair.
Yet he knows the boy doesn't care. He blatantly ignores how everyone stares at them when they're together, how they whisper about them in the hall behind their textbooks. He doesn't care that everyone thinks his best friend is a freak and queer, and that's that what keeps him from fitting in. He doesn't laugh at him when he tells him he wants to be an actor, that he wants to make it big, even though they both know it's terribly impractical. For the boy, these things don't exist; they don't matter.
He is thinner, paler up close. His black-framed glasses slide down his nose, and he pushes them back up again without thought. He is 16, quiet and unloved by the female of the species, but still utterly, and inexplicably perfect to him.
A demure smile lingers on the boy's lips as he notices him approaching. In their quietly shared glance, he sees everything he desires reflected back at him. And even though he is fully aware that this is his imagination superimposing eideic images of his own invention on a quiet boy who has betrayed very few of his thoughts, he can not help but allow his fantasies to seize him. He can not quell the fluttering in his stomach that he feels with such intensity each time he passes, hoping on the off-chance that somehow, this quiet boy will resemble the person he has created.
Their eyes meet for a brief moment, and with little thought, he pulls the boy's lean body close to his own. He buries his head in his shoulder, comforted in the knowledge that no one will see them here. No one will ask questions.
Between the both of them, the wine doesn't last long. Laughing, they look skyward, the grass at their backs as the warm, bubbly feeling of drunkeness slowly begins to seep into them.
His cheeks still red from laughing, he moves to sit on top of the boy, his legs straddling his friend's waist as he looks down at him from above. Playfully, he places his hands over the other boy's mouth to stop him from giggling, as though trying to assure him that what he's about to say is, indeed, very serious.
"Right. Now, are you going to listen?"
He removes his hands, and the boy beneath him smiles and nods, the sweetest smile he's ever seen, and he can't help but notice.
The question lingers at his tongue, tickling his palate, ready to be expelled at the slightest stimilation. In his head, he has rehearsed this very moment a million times. In the mirror, in his sleep, in the margins of his mathematics notebook as he waits for the class to end. Yet when he opens his mouth and the words fall out, his sentences falter, slipping off his tongue with inelegant uncertainty.
It is not an award-winning speech, by any stretch, and he knows this, but in his mind he hopes that the other boy will understand. Already, he has let his imagination run away with him, taking the young boy's innocent smile and his too-long fingers and conjuring up the perfect person, his internal complement.
He knows it's unhealthy, that it probably isn't true. That in reality, the shy and introverted boy he is sitting over is a million miles away from him on a distant planet. But he wants to believe it, he has to believe it. Because in his mind, he has already won him over. And despite himself, despite all of his logic and confusion and fantasies gnarled up inside of him, he can't help but feel that everything they are doing makes absolutely perfect sense.
Bending over, he kisses the boy. Not a small kiss, by any means, but a real kiss. At least one as authentic and meaningful as one he could possibly give being at their particular point in life, as young and inexperienced as they were. The boy's lips are soft, gentle, sweet. Almost like the first time he kissed a girl, but more exciting, more tangible.
After a moment, they part, a sort of hesitancy between the both of them, and look at one another. Placing his hands at his sides, Damon moves over him once again, his blonde bangs falling forward and out of place as he smiles down at the boy. Calmly, he searches his friend's eyes for an answer, and when he gets none, he asks again.
When he finally answers, the boy's lips part with a frail, rattling honesty. His words are not harsh and cutting, they are slow and precise, the very shining example of eloquence he had wished to have attained earlier. The boy answers beautifully, free of contempt and pity, he thinks, and for a moment he thinks he sees the person he is looking for, the one he has conjured up. At least up until the point that he sees it, when the boy's eyes betray him, and he sees the truth.
But he doesn't have to, because he knows that in the dream, he never says yes.
The moment fractures and breaks, like the glass in a mirror as the rays of sunlight begin to spill into his vision once again, where he is laying, his head resting on the pillow and the sheets swallowing his body underneath them.
He knows he will have to get up soon. That he can't stay here forever. He has to think about life, and about coming back down. He has to get up. Move on.
When he opens his eyes, Graham is sitting on the edge of the bed, tying his shoelaces. The room is unnervingly quiet, save for the monotonous buzz of traffic and bustle of the city outside.
Like appreciating fine art, he watches silently as Graham's shoulder muscles move underneath the pale freckled skin of his back, the curved and familiar ridges of his spine as they trail up to his neck, the ones his fingertips know so well. From there, the soft arc of his jawbone as it curves into his neck, the bowing line of his cheekbone, and then the corners of his eyes, which unlike all the other parts of him seemingly, finally betray his age.
Looking at him like this reminds him of things. Certain moments, recollections from his photographic memory. Like Graham looking down on him as they fucked for the first time, the uncertain fear in his eyes as he asked him if he was okay, if it was alright, and then asking him to kiss him. The look on his face as they slept next to each other afterward, his arm wrapped around the curve of his stomach and how it looked, the way they held on to each other. The way Graham avoided eye contact with him when they woke up the next morning, as though the very thought of them being together made him uneasy.
Still unnoticed, he looks at same boy in his dream, the one with all legs and trembling hands. The one with the large nose and pale skin and unapologetically messy hair. Quietly, he reaches forward, his hand stretching out to touch the back of his lover. But before he can reach him, the guitarist stands up, and he misses him.
He watches in silence as Graham pulls on his t-shirt and reaches for his crumpled jacket on the floor. Graham still hasn't decided whether to acknowledge him yet, and so he clears his throat, deciding to ask him, once again, the same question he's asked him a million times before. And unlike his dream, this time his words do not tremble, they do not slip.
His voice slices through the quiet room like a razor blade, and suddenly it feels as though the distance between them is that much more apparent. He knows that Graham can't help but hear him, even if he chooses to act as though he doesn't. But he can't blame him. After all, he knows Graham has heard the question a million times before, on a million different occasions, in a million different hotel rooms, and on a million different mornings.
He feels a warm hand on his cheek as Graham looks down on him, and their eyes meet, the corners of his lips upturned into a weak smile. And after a few strained moments, he mouths the same single two-lettered word Damon is so used to hearing.
Graham's rejection is always mildly patronizing, the way he says it. Each time he answers, there is less pain in his voice, less feeling. Like a parent talking to a child who's asked for the same expensive toy a thousand separate times, and knows they'll never buy it.
This is always how it is, the morning after. The subtle rejection. The awkward friendly smile. Still, he can't help but feel crushed when Graham barely makes eye contact with him as he kisses him goodbye.
He watches the door's reflection in the mirror for as long as he can, until his eyes begin to water and sting, but it stays shut. He closes his eyes, wrapping the cold sheets around his body and resenting the daylight outside. His body yearns for sleep and dreaming once again. He knows he shouldn't feel bad. After all, this is always how it's been. No surprises. Just another little hole in his heart every time Graham answers him, and the answer is always, always the same.
Resting his head against the pillow, he inhales the familiar, salty scent of his lover's skin and hair and the world turns black once again.
He lives in a dream.
In his dream, he is running. The summer wind whips across his face as he turns back to look, his chest heaving and the bottoms of his sneakers pounding hard against the pavement.
He is happy, because he knows he will see him today.