3 / icky

Part of having feelings is this irksome inkling that what he did wasn't right.

At first, he could justify it. Let it roll off his shoulders like every other time he's done something like this. Hell knows there have been plenty of those times. Now he's sitting in her car, trying not to get chocolate on the seat, and whenever he looks over at her he relives the night, looking for ways not to feel icky about it.

He sees his hand hovering over the doorknob while the world is dark; letting himself in and moving, cloaked and soundless, into her dorm room; kneeling beside her bed and looking into her sleeping face, a face he's seen twisted in pain so many times it quite literally gives him a wrenching feeling down the center of his body as if his gut is trying to yank his heart down and punt it through his asshole. He sees himself gently taking her hand, feeling her soft fingers in his palm, holding his breath while he takes, and takes, and takes until he's certain it will be hours before her magic replenishes, enough time for the sun to rise, to buy her coffee, and return.

"Stop looking at me," she gripes, and he complies, still in disbelief that she agreed to this. Given their track record, she'll probably try to stab him. She's probably just pretending that she won't, so she has a chance to do it again. What will she use next? The shard of a broken CD? A plastic straw from her Subway soda? Anything is a weapon in Bonnie Bennett's hands.

But she wouldn't actually kill him, right? She knows the consequences. She has to know, too, that he'd do anything to protect his coven. Even if it means a showdown with her.

She doesn't like him, that much is clear. But he's never given her a reason to. Incidentally, she's never given him a reason to like her either. He just does. It gets him nowhere to question it. Obviously, she's hot. But so are tons of people, and he can't begin to tolerate the idea of feeling as interested in anyone else as he is in her.

What is it about her?

And who gave her the right?

Ever since he's had these things, these fucking feelings, he really can't fucking stop thinking about her. It isn't just guilt.

Examining his attraction to power, he's considered her strength a possible lure. When he first laid eyes on her, he didn't have to provoke her to know she was powerful. Her power is evident in the way she moves through the world. Any world. Even if her magic isn't "working." Provoking her anyway certainly helped pinch her cramped magic awake, and it kind of turns him on that seeing him was all it took for her to start a fire. It turned him on then, too. But he knows that she wouldn't have needed him. Eventually, she would have burned his whole world down finding her way out. She's resilient. Resilient people spell danger for him.

Jesus fuck, he thinks he might be into her. Like...into her. Is this what love feels like? Because it's horrible. He never understood the point of liking other people, putting your tongue in someone else's mouth, bumping uglies and doing the whole family thing. Yuck. But when he pictures doing those things with her...his skin feels fever hot and his heart flops around like a fish out of water and he gets this awful sensation of his head being filled up with poisonous air that makes him like it. And it makes him want her to want him. Which just makes his guilt all the heavier, and his crush the more painful, because she will never want him after everything he's done to her.

He finds himself gazing over at her again, and again she snaps at him to quit.

Knowing that he crossed a line at Whitmore doesn't seem to be bothering her as much as it is bothering him. He feels...creepy? But he guesses that's just what she expects from him. And he wants to change that. He wants her to raise her expectations of him so that he might raise them of himself. He wants to give her reasons to like him.

When they finally stop at a cheap motel, he keeps his distance from her, figuring she would prefer it. He even goes so far as to pretend he doesn't have to go when they both need to use the bathroom. In the morning, he lets her shower first and uses the room coffee maker to make her bad coffee she doesn't even want.

"Soooo not a black coffee person," he says. "Got it."

He pays for the room. He carries her bag. He warms up the car.

He is trying.

Still, he can't help but wonder what he would've done if he wasn't by her side now, counting the cows as they pass them by. If she had not, in fact, let him into this death trap thinly veiled as a chance to make things up to her, how would he have reacted to her rejection—again? The frustration was already building up in 1994; he'd given her multiple chances to get along with him; even now he could still feel some vague sense of disappointment, wasn't sure when it would go away. If she'd rejected him again, would he have followed anyway? Snapped and hurt her again? Snatched her wrists and sucked up the remainder of her magic in a fit? Or worse?

Because he's unpredictable, and he's obsessed. He doesn't know how to make her like him, but he knows himself. His old self. And he is terrified that what she thinks of him could turn out to be true: he can't change.