An Incomplete Interlude
by Waltzmatildah
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Mark's POV.
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When the only thing you have in common is the fact that no one has ever expected any better from you anyway, disappointment and loathing come as no surprise, and the bitter taste in your mouth matches the copper tang on his lips as you use your tongue to teach him a lesson he'll never forget.
Alex has these big, liquid brown eyes that are perpetually sad, no matter what the season, and you promise yourself that you'll never look too deeply into them, lest you happen to lose yourself completely. He is responsive when you fuck him, moulds his body to yours like you're the only goddamn thing keeping him together. You try not to dwell too long on the fact that you probably are. There's a certain degree of pressure that comes with knowing things like that and you never really were much good under pressure.
The first time follows an alcohol fuelled argument in the wake of a pair of funerals that neither of you can sober up enough to attend. The argument is about nothing, and everything. It's shouting and punching and kicking just for the sake of it, to bruise skin in the absence of feeling anything else. What happens next is equally vicious and blood is shed, both literally and figuratively, and when it's over he won't look at you and he won't speak to you but you already know that it's going to happen again. It's strangely inevitable.
The only people that ever expected either of you to be good, to be better, up and left without so much as a 'see you later' and, in the Earth shattering aftermath it's become so easy to forget who exactly it was that you were trying so damn hard to be. After a while you stop trying to remember.
Alex has this kicked puppy persona that makes you want to slap some sense into him with the palm of your hand but you know next to nothing about what horrors in his journey have made him that way, so you bite your tongue and jam your fists deep into your pockets and think about snowboarding and China and Queens of the Stone Age.
He fades and falls until his ribs are exposed and you bounce your index finger down them rhythmically without saying a word, because there are rules about what it is that the two of you are doing and talking is definitely against most of them. He responds by turning off the light so you know he's received the message anyway; loud and clear. What he chooses to do about it is his own damn business.
You're fairly sure that nobody else has got the two of you figured out, but that's more because there's less of them left to notice than anything else, and the ones that are left are so busy dissolving into and onto themselves that they don't have the peripheral vision required to catch you out. Either that or, they simply don't give a shit.
He's addictive, like you can't actually go to sleep until you've tasted him, and it's becoming harder and harder to ignore the panicked breaths he's trying and failing to mask when you take a few extra seconds to answer the goddamn door. He's an interlude, you tell yourself, your fingers tightly fisted in his hair and his saliva hot on your chest, nothing more. Just someone to fill the neverending gap between what happened before and whatever it is that's coming next.
And you figure you may as well pass the time together because no one else seems to hang around long enough to pass it with you.
