I'm not sure whether this is going to be a two-shot, or a series of one-shots about the Miss Mystic Falls episode, because I loved that dance and I want to write so much about it... I only just got into the TV series, even though I read the books years ago, and I love it!
I hope you all like this :) Please read and review if you do x
It's the simple intimacy of the near touch Carol Lockwood says and Elena restrains the urge to laugh when she puts it like that.
Because right now Damon is standing in for his brother, wherever Stefan is right now, and the electricity sizzling between them is almost visible to everyone around them.
Stefan is safe, comfortable. She knows she is safe in arms - or she was until recently. He is secure, which is exactly what she needed after the death of her parents and the turmoil that followed. He is what she'd needed to get herself living again, to go beyond being a zombie. He is exactly what she'd needed when she'd been first adjusting to the supernatural world and the realisation that things that go bump in the night really exist.
And she loves him for it. He is like a safety blanket, something to hold onto in the dark and someone who will protect her and shelter her, even if she doesn't actually like it.
But when she's with Damon it's like her heart is simmering with fire, a burning passion, and she knows that Damon feels the same. There is a connection there, a reason why she can always see behind the facade to the very best of him, even when his own brother fails. It's hard to imagine Damon softening his comments to spare someone else's feelings, but Elena knows he does, in his own way.
She doesn't know how she can always see the good in him, even after everything he's done to her. She remembers how he treated Caroline, the bite marks and bruises trailing up her back, and can't equate that with the man who kidnapped her and took her to Georgia simply because she and Stefan had run into relationship troubles and he thought she needed a break (and a drink).
When she thinks of Georgia she thinks of a different Damon, one who knows how to care, even if he won't admit to it. He might've had an ulterior motive, but Damon had done that for her.
No one had ever done something like before.
And she can see that man in the eyes of the man she's dancing with. Dancing with Damon shouldn't feel like this, more charged than when she dances with her boyfriend, but there is electricity in the air when the two of them stand in the same foot of space.
They look into each other's eyes and stare into each other's souls, seeing behind the facade the other puts up. It worries her slightly how comfortable she feels in his arms whilst her boyfriend is out there somewhere, with a hunger for human blood.
It worries her how little she cares.
Because right now, in Damon's arms, there's no place she'd rather be.
If Bonnie could read her mind right now she'd be horrified, and rightly so, but Elena doesn't really know what she's feeling, let alone how to stop it. Damon is like a tidal wave, pulling her in, and she's only along for the ride.
And, no matter how wrong it is, she thinks she's going to enjoy it.