He doesn't love you. So what. He doesn't love Sylvia, either, so you don't care about him screwing her on the side— ain't like you're boyfriends or something. If his two-sizes-too-small heart was already at maximum capacity with himself, well, you could live with that. You don't fucking love him either. Shit, most of the time, you don't even like him, unless you've got him bent over and screaming your name.
The problem is, he does love Johnny Cade, and whenever you take a break from aggressively not caring and see the way Dallas smiles at him, you want to carve another line into the little bastard's forehead.
"I didn't know you were into that kinda thing," you say spitefully, bitterly. You're leaning against the side of Buck's house, huffing on a joint as cicadas screech around you and the sun beats down; it's summer; you're eighteen and you're restless.
Dallas's hair is mussed, his eyes glazed from a noxious mix of weed and benzos and cheap whiskey; he's been a hot mess since he was last in the pen, high or drunk more often than he's sober. He doesn't really see you when he looks in your direction. "You're gonna have to be a bit more specific, Timmy. I'm into a lot of things."
"The submissive type," you sneer, hating yourself for the poison spewing from your mouth but unable to stop. It's like that, with him, he turned you into this. Things never happen halfway. "Do you pull Cade's hair when he sucks your cock? Call him a little whore? Does that get you real hard, Dal?"
You brace yourself for a punch to the jaw, kidneys, stomach. If he punched you, then you could punch him back, and you could finally settle this rivalry like men and not with yet another queer catfight. Instead his mouth grows razor-thin, and he drapes a casual hand over your throat before you have time to move away. You refuse to flinch.
"Jealous?" He gets close to your face, pressing his body tight against yours. "You want me to slap you around, Shepard? Make you my bitch? You really should've said something sooner."
"Are you fucking him?"
"No," he says, so plainly that you're left with no choice except to believe it. His hand tightens (that's not why you're out of breath.) "But I don't let anyone fuck with him. Understood?"
His bloodlust frightens you— makes you regret ever getting involved in this shitshow, not for the first time. Winston's a skinny, dirty, barely seventeen-year-old kid, but there's a streak of madness splitting his brain like jagged lightning, something that'll let him rip your heart out and enjoy devouring it. So you do the sensible thing and grip the front of his pants, feel him stiffen instinctively beneath your touch. That's where the playing field levels; he can't resist you any more than you can resist him, and he knows it. "Then get inside," you mutter, "and let me screw you until you puke. You owe me that much."
He isn't great with debts and he doesn't love you, but you do go up to one of Buck's empty bedrooms and throw off your clothes and he bites his climax into your shoulder and you paint his hips purple and blue, and while you will never be first you have marked your place, and for now that is enough with his skin against your fingertips and your come splattered on his thighs. You don't need his smiles when you can have his moans instead, right. It doesn't matter.