#68. Day
Sometimes (case in point: last chapter) it's nice to see Toph and Sokka be kids. And other times...
Disclaimer: Don't own A:tLA.
It's cold, when she wakes that morning, and not quite light yet. He's sprawled next to her, half-mummified in blankets with his hair loose around his face. The sheets, settled in white hills and valleys that dip into pools of shadow, remind her of the snow outside. Why does it seem so freezing inside? All the laws of science say body heat—she should be warm. It's not the case, somehow.
She should go.
She doesn't want to, though. Not when she's so comfortable. She knows that she wouldn't be cold any more if she were to shift just a foot or two left, because then she'd be curled up against him. He hugs, when he's sleeping. It's sort of cute.
More to the point, it's why, once he fell asleep last night—he was out like a light; he'd drunk more (still not that much)—she untangled herself from him and curled up on the edge of the bed. She took the blankets with her, actually. He must have taken them back.
She craves heat suddenly, for a sharp, convulsive instant, and every part of her curls: her head to her collarbone, her hands up around her stomach, her knees to her chest and toes against the soles of her feet. Bare skin, all over, and she's still cold.
This won't do. She's going to get up now.
She throws off the sheet, and as it crumples back to the mattress she climbs up to her feet, wishing she wasn't naked. It makes her feel so effing vulnerable, and there isn't anything she hates more than that. She glances around to find her clothes. At least there's not a lot of floor space in his small bedroom; it narrows down the amount of places they could be strewn. She picks herself up, smooths her hair with halfhearted fingers. He barely stirs through all of it—only once, rolling over towards her and pulling the blankets tighter. For a second she's scared to hell that he'll open heavy-lidded morning eyes—worse, that she'll hear a quiet where are you going?, one that would slice like a knife through the curtain she's trying to draw over last night.
He doesn't. It didn't. She wills herself to be relieved. That's a good thing.
But there's a tiny part of her that cringes. She wishes he'd woken, because she'll never have the guts to wake him. It's a mess she can't face, and the cleanest solution is buggering off before he opens his eyes.
It's been a year, chides her mind. A year's a long time to have been avoiding this.
Screw you, thinks Toph, who is never at her most eloquent before eight in the morning, and pulls on her shirt.
But it has. Last New Year, she remembers, it started—at a party last New Year's Eve when the clock chimed five, four, three, two… and then on zero she turned and his lips that tasted like beer collided with hers. A shiver went through all of her, like the moment where a circuit joins up and the light goes on, or maybe the shudder that passes through a train veering off its tracks. Time's going to tell on that one. Eventually.
And it's been a year, now, too long, a year of waking up at his house and shutting the front door softly behind her as she leaves. A year, and this time they maybe weren't drunk at all, and they both know it.
What's it going to do to bring it up, though? They can't deal with this; they're not rational enough. Friends with benefits is the wrong term; she doesn't feel anything like friendly, not to him.
Spirits, this could be the dictionary definition of effed-up. It's freaking puppy-love that got her into this, a crush (well, okay, and a fair bit of alcohol) making her impulsive, but she has to do something. A year's too long to be in limbo—too long to pretend not to know something's changed.
And yet she can't wake him up, not even as she remembers kisses trailing down her neck and as heat pools in her stomach. A shiver runs through her that has nothing to do with being cold. If he wakes up then they have no choice but to acknowledge it did happen, it is there, and they can't pretend it's okay if they're just friends. Friends don't sleep together and sneak out in the morning, and friends don't go home and deliver screaming rants to the bathroom mirror after it happens. They're not friends, and if she's perfectly honest, she's never wanted to be, but this is—
Screw it. With effort, she stops. She knows she's not going to wake him, so she's going home. Now.
He watches her leave through the crack between his eyelids. This isn't the first time he's seen this. He's not as heavy a sleeper as she gives him credit for.
His tongue aches with the need to speak, but he holds himself from calling after her. She doesn't want to hear it; she's made that clear enough. Goddammit, and he wants so badly to say something, but he's terrified, and then she shuts the bedroom door.
The moment she's gone, he falls sideways onto his back, all the breath pouring out of him in a whoosh of air. It's so freaking cold in here, on his own, especially with last night still etched into his head.
Last night. The memory swells inside him, and he squeezes his eyes shut. He feels dirty, wrong in his own body. It's as though his nerves themselves itch, and it makes him want to scrub the inside of his skin. It's not okay to do this, not with a girl three years younger than him, not with Toph. It's supposed to be that he can be a kid with her, not that she has to be an adult with him.
This is why he can't talk to her. There's nothing she's done wrong. With a clinical interest, he examines the clash of emotion in his stomach: nausea, sure, discomfort that tastes like guilt, but the flickering, unrepentant recollection burning all the same. That's wrong. He should feel guilty. It's all his fault: he kissed her, and he's older, and he was smashed, and—
And it doesn't escape him how he's been getting steadily more sober over the year, on the nights he spends with her. But that's why he can't bring it up, isn't it? If he does then it's concrete, and everyone will see just how screwed up he really is, and he'll know that he and Toph really aren't friends and maybe they can't ever be now.
It's not right. He likes Suki. Suki is hot, isn't she? But Spirits, as soon as he lets himself forget that it's Suki he wants, then it's always Toph he needs. Deep down, he sees he's been fixing an addiction for a year.
But what if it didn't go wrong?
He groans and presses his hands to his face. Go away, he thinks. Stop it—not this. Not now, which means 'not ever'.
He asks himself that, every time. What if he asked her to stay for breakfast? She might say yes. Maybe they don't have to suck at being friends; maybe instead, they can be something else—maybe they'd even be good at that. All he has to do is say it, a stinking handful of words, and you know, what if she did agree with him, what if she—
A world away, the front door slams behind her.
He tenses and then sinks limply back into the mattress, a puppet with its strings snipped. Dammit, he thinks, and, Next time. Next time I'll say it.
But of course there shouldn't be a next time. Next time he won't do this at all, right?
He knows that's a lie, and as he curls up in bed, startlingly cold, it's beyond him to feel sorry for it.
Okay. Seriously. I do love New Year's and staying up and being all 'OMG 2011!'—what teenager doesn't? But this year I spent it in Vermont sans Internet, and we went to bed at ten o'clock. Which is sad. Unfortunately, the only thing sadder would have been staying up on my own... *sigh*. Still... it was midnight in Bermuda (or something... that's my parents' logic.)
Anyhow. Happy 2011, everyone—hope your 2010 was awesome, and that you had an awesome New Year's!
Reviews are always appreciated!
