You are sitting in a car with a beautiful boy, and he tells you he loves you, but you don’t love him at all. You are frozen in time. It should not be happening this way. It’s too soon. You are sitting in a car with a beautiful boy, and he tells you he loves you, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You kiss him instead, passionate and trembling and wanting, needing him to understand that you cannot love him, no matter how much he wants you to. He looks at you as if you are his god. When he drives you home, he tells you his parents won’t be home next week, that he’ll have the house all to himself. You know what that means, know it’s not love. Still, that sick feeling grows in your stomach, crawls up to your throat when he kisses you goodnight and smiles so earnestly, a perfect gentleman.
~
The trees blur past you, all happy greens and yellows, formless in a way you have always secretly wished for. A means of existence with no skin or skeleton or brain, no way to understand the complications that swirl around you and settle with the seasons. You crane your head out the window, stretching it as far as you can, watching the colors disappear behind you and trying to commit the blurs to memory. It’s fruitless, but you still try. He laughs at this, tells you it reminds him of when dogs stick their heads out of windows, tongues out and panting, enjoying their reprieve from life at home. You scoff, but pull your head back into the car with a slight blush on your cheeks, embarrassed and windswept. He thinks this blush is for him, reaches over and puts his hand on your knee. You count the veins of his forearm, trace them with the tip of your pinky finger and wonder what would happen if you drew blood. If he would bleed gold like the old gods did, ichor dripping down his wrist, finally showing you if he was someone worth all the devotion he craved. If he would bleed out all the blue inside of him, human, the light catching and staining everything red.
You think of these things when he’s not around, when you can wear your thoughts freely on your face, your confusion and limerence the artists of all your expressions.
~
He spears the worms with careful consideration, almost tender with each creature he flings to its demise. Not tender for too long, though. He dangles them in your face after he watches you squirm, not wanting to see their little deaths, not wanting to see the deaths he always promises you are beautiful. When he casts his line, you watch the ripples appear on the water’s surface. Peering down into the lake’s depth makes you wish it would swallow you both whole. It ripples outward, morphing us both into somethings that break and come back together until you no longer know where he begins and you end. That soothes you, somehow, makes everything less. You toss the silt hidden in the cracks of the boat into the water, little by little, creating endless ripples and endless possibilities; the dust gathers underneath your fingernails and you only stop when he tells you it will scare the fish. You want to tell him that his face probably scares the fish, but don’t want to start a fight. Instead, you watch him over your book, cataloging his reactions with each catch and naming the fish before he reluctantly releases them back to their homes. You want to ask him if sometimes he wishes he could hook a finger in your mouth and pull, pull, pull until you bleed, his finger piercing through your cheek. You would be one being then, connected and finally hooked onto his brand of violence. That would be his gentle. The pain may even be soothing; he tells you the fish never feel it.
~
He brought you to the lake so you two could talk. You told him how ominous that sounded; he promised you everything would be fine, that he just wanted to spend some time together. Summer was winding to a close and he had that soft look in his eyes you could never resist, so here you are.
It’s quiet on the lake; all the fish have gone to sleep. The stars are trying their hardest to talk to you right now, and he doesn’t understand this. He interrupts your conversation with Their Brightness to ask a question, your head on his chest. Do you love me? You were just talking about this very subject with Their Brightness, but you know he doesn’t want that answer. If you tell him yes, he backtracks on what he said in the car that night, the night you found out that love may always have a price. If you tell him no, he turns his words into knives and hurls them at you, each point hitting their target perfectly and digging into insecurities you don’t even remember sharing with him. The ones he knows only because he loves you. You can’t really fathom why he would, what you have done to lure him in, how he trusts that what exists between you in this borrowed time could fully be love. You don’t even have a name for what you are to each other. Why would there be a word for love?
The pause lasts for too long; you both know this. You plead with Their Brightness for more time and they try to speed it up instead, cooing down at these little humans on their little boat on their little planet. They don’t understand that everyone’s already on borrowed time, that you would just be the first to harness it correctly. You sit up, pull his jacket tighter around you, and smile down at him, sad and soft. No answer is also an answer, just not one he expected. Their Brightness dims, disappointed, and now you sit in complete darkness with only breaths synced together. The sick feeling returns, and you embrace it this time. You don’t really know how to do anything else.
~
Sometimes you feel that love is the kind of thing you have to get good at.
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