This is actually a brand new, kill-me-please, level of soreness, this the first thing his mind can lucidly think as he starts waking up.
There is an unnatural light behind his closed eyelids and he can feel a heavy, heated sensation in the middle of his chest making it more difficult to breathe. He generally feels like death warmed over. He'd smirk at his own joke if he didn't feel so crappy, he thinks as he opens his eyes.
There's something dark coming into his blurred vision, possibly a chest-buster moment is about to take place like in Ridley Scott's movie, because he's half expecting an alien to appear in his line of vision. It takes him a moment to put into focus the pretty head resting on his chest. He unknowingly smiles at that, observing her nose half buried in his t-shirt and her fingers loosely gripping the fabric of it. He tries not to breathe in too deeply so that she won't move from there.
It's a little bit like a revelation to understand how a perfect awakening feels like, to realize how romance writers actually do know their shit when they write of these kind of moments: the sunlight creeping in, and the pretty bare faces made of swollen eyes and questionable breath but still so beautiful. Aside from the fact that he cannot really see much of her face in this position, that there's no sunlight because the curtains are pulled and the yellowish light of the lamp on the nightstand doesn't exactly compliment her honey-like skin; aside from the fact that he should be thinking all of this only when he's waking up with Elena. Aside from this, everything is beautiful.
It's the fever, he justifies, angling his head on top of the pillow so that he can watch her better. The fever and the fact that Bonnie Bennett is the best person he knows.
Actually, thinking about it, the weight on his chest is not so bad at all. It's comforting, and warm, and this is the reason he's decided to become human again, to have this comfort – generally speaking, and this warmth, – and just die when it's over so he doesn't have to survive it and miss it. And he's not thinking about one particular comfort, one particular source of warmth here because that would be so wrong. He means it in the most generic way it is possible to mean it, which is why he can cup the back of Bonnie's head, and let his fingers slip between her soft, fresh hair without feeling guilty at all.
She brushes her cheek over his chest, moving in her sleep, and he tries to hold his breath so that the movement of his chest won't wake her up. Damon cocks his head to the side to spy on her face, her eyelids squeeze before awakening start to slip into her brain, and he's left trying to fixate this brief moment into his brain before he'll need to move on.
Bonnie moans painfully, as she wakes up into this awkward position, half curled on his chest, and bringing her own hand up to the base of the neck to loosen up the contracted muscles so that she'll be able to move without breaking her tiny bones. Her nose crinkles, her wandering eyes fly up and find his own. He sees her blinking once and because he's feeling strangely self-conscious in the silence – like she'll know something he doesn't need to know himself if he lets her watch him like this any longer – he just says "'Morning" and suddenly she pulls back in surprise, almost falling off the bed as the troublesome lightness over his chest makes him feel like someone has hollowed his heart out with a spoon during the night and he only now noticed because Bonnie's weight was giving him balance.
"Morning," she says, with her hoarse voice and her large, swollen eyes, brushing the back of her hand over the corner of her mouth to make sure she hasn't drooled during the night. Again, romance writers and their shit.
But he shouldn't be thinking that in relation to his best friend. If she knew – if she only vaguely suspected – how he gets confused sometimes, she'd be disappointed in him and out of his life and under a rock in a remote corner of the world, like she already tried to do once, faster than he could provide a half-assed, lousy apology; so, he chooses to focus on something else instead.
"Have you been crying?" he asks genuinely curious, as he notices her red eyes, and egoistically excited at the prospect "Were you that worried about your bestie?" he inquires feeling both proud and guilty. Yeah, she'll take in any stray, flea-ridden dog that she meets but that doesn't mean she'll hug them in the night and cry over their furry bodies, so he matters to Bonnie. Not that it is a new information. He is her best friend. He's so proud about it one of his favorite hobbies is to rub it into Caroline's face and have a smoke after, but still gets a kick out of it. And yes, considering the occasional itch of his finger and the way his brain clings to her, maybe he should have strayed from the subject entirely but he's bad at not giving in to temptation. His old pal Oscar Wilde would totally agree with him.
"What?" she asks, grimacing, "No, I just-"
"Seized this unique opportunity to sleep with me?" he fills in, taunting her with a dulled smirk.
"I think most of the women in this hemisphere seized this opportunity so I would hardly call it unique," she mutters, checking the shirt of her pajama for wrinkles.
"So, are you jealous?" he asks, not missing a beat.
"You're delirious, again," she deadpan, standing from the bed to walk away.
Damon reaches out with one hand but his speed it's not at all what it once was, and when he can't effectively stop her he groans painfully, freely exaggerating the soreness he feels and falling back on the bed when she turns around to look at him.
He coughs, once, twice, looking away from her like he's embarrassed of being so weak. He's a manly man, and manly men know when to milk their sickness.
"You need some water?" she asks, torn between taking care of him like she was supposed to be doing, and running away like she's tempted to do.
"No, I'm fine," he says with a thin voice, giving her a hint of a miserably comforting smile, and then coughing again, for good measure. He can picture the wheels turning into her cute, little head as she tries to resist her first instinct. Which is, luckily for him, the second and the third too, when it comes to Bonnie.
She sighs in resignation, walking back to his nightstand to fill a glass of water and help him drinking it; the gesture brings back to her eyes broken memories from the night before, and she tries to shake them off. It was hours ago, and she was tired and overwhelmed and at the end of the day they are still friends, best buddies, only pals and she's totally fine with it.
"Thanks," he says, once his head is back on the pillow. She doesn't reply, just get up from the bed again and he rushes to think of a manner to stop her from going away. He feels a slight surge of panic at the idea of her leaving him, though it's stupid because she wouldn't go far, not when he's human and sick and needy. He knows how to be needy, he's a master at being needy, he could write a manual about it, especially when Bonnie is not around, especially when Bonnie is around.
"Where are you going?" he asks in a rush, chastising himself for letting his voice be so loud. He's very ill, he's on the verge of death, she should not doubt it for a single instant.
"To open the curtains," she says, as she pulls them back to open the window and let some fresh air in.
"And kill me in the process" he murmurs, covering his eyes with a raised hand. There's a stabbing pain into his brain and in the back of his head a scheming voice is suggesting him that it will only help his performance when it comes to playing the infirm.
"Hopefully" she declares, turning on the heels of her bare feet to give him a challenging look.
"Sweet," he replies, absentmindedly.
It is all so familiar, he can feel a shiver that he ascribes to the fever and he catches the opportunity for the Act Two. He looks away, rubbing one hand over his chest, making a noise as he breathes in, like it's actually physically hard to do so. And she's there again, next to him, hovering over his body, helping him sit so that she can add another couple of pillows behind his back.
"Better?" Bonnie asks, pushing back the hair from his forehead to feel his temperature, in a familiar, tender gesture that sparks a light, diffused tingling over his feverish skin.
"Much better" he says, offering a strained smile so that she'll thing he's just putting on a brave front so that she won't worry.
"I think the fever went down," she says, looking at him with still a slight worry in her eyes.
"Possibly," Damon nods, making sure to look a bit nauseous at the motion. She smells really good, and the skin of her hand is soft, and fresh, it makes for a painful contrast considering that he kind of stinks of sweat and feels generally clammy. That would make anyone nauseous.
Bonnie is still not entirely convinced with his response so she drags her hands down to his wrist, tapping a vein with her fingertip to feel the heartbeat under the thin skin. Damon stops breathing, looking at her hands around his wrist, suddenly regretting how much he's taken advantage of her generous nature because this might turn really, really bad.
He can feel his own heartbeat into his ears.
"Your pulse is accelerated," she says, voice slightly muffled over the sound of his palpitations.
"I-… clearly I must be still ill," he tells himself, because it's a perfectly logical explanation for his malfunctioning heartbeat. For the blood flowing down so fast he wants to pass out and be done with it. For the way the scent of her is making the muscles of his lower abdomen pull, halfway between anticipation and apprehension. Yeah, that's the reason.
"I think so, too," she says, her pretty lips turning down as he stares at them openly.
"You look a bit green-ish," she notices, unmercifully. He deserves it.
"That's good. I rock green", he replies finally looking away from her mouth, feeling a sheer of cold sweat covering him. What is he even doing? He asks himself lowering his head. He feels like shit.
"Are you about to throw up?" she asks, bending towards his face to look at him in the eyes. He can't avoid her, and she's so close.
"That's one possibility," he says, his breath slightly erratic. That would be the best one, because there are a pile of emotions in his stomach and he doesn't know how to put them in order, how to get rid of the wrong ones. And sometimes there seems to be so many of them.
"Okay, hold on," she orders, standing from the bed to rush to the adjoined bathroom "I'll be back right away" she yells from the other room, already walking back with the antique washbasin that they keep on top of a wrought iron European piece. It's the closest thing she can use without going downstairs to retrieve a bucket, though the washbasin is quite heavy for her, and she puts it next to him on the bed not with little effort, studying his face to catch the moment when he'll start heaving up. Damon, on his part, just takes slow breaths like he's trying to calm himself down.
He knows what this mess means. He's having cold feet. He's having cold feet and it's totally normal. Right?
"Are you about to vomit?" Bonnie asks, her voice covering the question in his mind.
"Don't think so," he says, "though I stink so bad I don't know how you are not" he admits, dishing a little of charming self-deprecation just to humor her, to bring back the conversation to a neutral topic.
He needs neutrality now, he needs Switzerland.
"My little flower has an upset stomach?" she teases him. And though she's kind of adorable when she does so, it makes him wonder if she sees him as a childish kid instead of a man. The sudden doubt, the possibility to be her dumb brother in the scenario, is upsetting his stomach more than anything else and when she reaches out to cup his cheek like she would with a capricious child, his long, pale fingers wrap possessively around the thin bones of her small wrist, swaying her off her feet.
His eyes fly up to hers wondering if she felt it too, the electricity. She did, maybe. Maybe not. He doesn't know, can't tell apart his wishful thinking and the truth in her eyes so he tries downplaying it, because otherwise he's going to lose his last shred of pride and his best friend both at the same time.
Damon looks away, for the longest moment he can't help but stare at her stretched fingers, his dry mouth itches to kiss them, only because he is grateful to her, for being his friend, for understanding, for caring, for being back even though he knows very well she didn't want to and he's forced her hand because that's what he does.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" he asks, outraged "I'm sick and you're trying to beat my ego, too" he laments, only half joking.
"Your ego is the only undying thing left about you, Damon," she mocks him, rolling her eyes. Bonnie is endearing, and Bonnie never looked at him with the lustful intensity other women did, not fucking once, and now he wonders – out of pure, encyclopedic curiosity - what men she looks at that way. She's been away for months wandering a vast continent all alone and being so pretty. He can hardly imagine her going unnoticed, he hardly wants to imagine anything, really. Maybe she's picked a dark, bearded, mysterious man in one place, and a tall, statuesque ebony one in another, and lived a boundless sex life while he checked his mailbox every damn day; which would be totally fine and dandy with him. After all he's lived in the eighties, the decade of sexual liberation – and the decades before that, and the ones after – and she's young and beautiful and she's supposed to make the most of it, if she wants to, so he's got zero problems with that. Or maybe she's secretly pining for someone who sweet talked his way into her head and now she's fantasizing about him appearing on her doorstep, which is accidentally his doorstep, and he's got no problem whatsoever with that. Like, none. And if she really likes the dark-skinned type, a pale white man could always tan, if the pale white man asked him for a shortcut to her favors and he deemed him worthy of such honor.
Truly, Damon's got ninety-nine problems and who Bonnie Bennett bangs with it ain't one of them.
"Anyway," she begins, "Your girlfriend checked on you last night and told me to update her about your temperature, so I'm going to get a thermometer and something for you to eat."
His immediate reaction to her words is to stiffen up, and she instantly reconnects it to the mention of food.
"You can't take your medicine on an empty stomach, so toughen up."
He can't help but wonder what he would have felt waking up with Elena curled up on his chest. Vampire Elena was not one for cuddling. She generally liked to be sprawled on the bed after a good fuck, basking in the afterglow of the orgasm he provided, stretching out like a satisfied cat. Other times she held on to him with her bony fingers, sinking her nails possessively into his flesh. It reminded him of the stories about the Empusa, daughter of Hecate, a demonic creature with bronze feet that turned into a woman to seduce men and drink of their blood. That attitude, that kind of parasitic allure, was a turn on. It lead them to some pretty kinky action, but he had never woken up to the tenderness of simple companionship, had never tasted the comfort that a domestic habit could give. Whenever they broke up, it was never waking up with her that he missed. It was the sex, and the wildness, and that feeling of turning around a century's worth of rejection and humiliation, that feeling of power.
Now Damon can't help but wonder what it would feel like to wake up next to Elena. Now a part of him, which he shushes, immediately can't help but wonder how it would hold up against his best friend, looking at him with red, swollen eyes, mumbling her 'morning' because it takes her ages to communicate like a human being after waking up.
But Elena is the proclaimed love of his life, the girl he is going to marry and spend his whole life with, and it should be beyond doubt that anything she does, anything they will share, will be beautiful.
Bonnie comes back a few minutes later, kicking the door open with her foot as she keeps her cellphone pressed between her propped shoulder and her ear while balancing a tray in her hands.
"Right," she says, "mmm-mmm," she agrees, "Okay," she offers, and her answers are so perfectly timed with the same exact pause that he has no doubt she's not listening to a single word that is said to her. She puts the tray on his legs, takes the phone away from her ear, leaving it on the duvet to whisper, "Com'on, no fuss," when he looks at the sliced banana on the plate, and the toasted bread. "They're easy on the stomach when you're nauseated," she reassures him before taking the phone and bringing it to her mouth for a "mmm-mmm, yeah," and putting it back again.
"And there's some ginger tea," she explains, with her hushed tone. "I know it's not your favorite but it's good for you right now." She sits on the bed and resumes her one-sided phone conversation.
"Yes, Caroline," she says, taking the fork from the tray and handing it to Damon, gesturing for him to go on and eat.
He obediently carries out his task, chewing every bite very, very slowly, so that she'll just give up on having him eat everything. Bonnie doesn't bat a lash and just watches him.
"I understand," she says to her interlocutor. "Don't be a baby," she reproaches him, with a murmur, "No, of course not," she answers in a normal tone, "We don't wanna waste time."
Bonnie presses the phone to her chest as she tells him, "You know, with infants under three months old, they take a rectal temperature." The stark look on her face perfectly delivers the veiled threat.
"Savage," he hisses in awe, biting the air to mock her, like he's sexually aroused by the prospect.
Bonnie just shakes her head, bringing the phone back to her ear.
"Good," she just replies, keeping her conversation neutral to fit anything Caroline has actually told her before ending the call.
"What did she want?" Damon asks, playing with his food just to spite her.
"I don't know…" she admits, reluctantly, "I stopped listening when she started her breathing exercises."
"You gotta understand, she panicked because she was worried about my well-bei—," he says, ironically, barely managing to get the words out before Bonnie stuffs his mouth with a piece of toasted bread.
#
The medication makes him doze off, though he valiantly tries to keep his eyes open, waiting for Bonnie to come and keep him company so they can pick up where they left off – 27 across – but every time he opens his eyes she's not there and he doesn't like it. He feels set aside. He's sick and his best friend is ignoring him, and his girlfriend did not even visit him – not that he has truly noticed up to now – and there's a dull thud-thud-thud in his brain that could totally be his ego stomping its feet. Only the thud-thud-thud becomes more and more clear every minute and he stands from the bed with poor grace to the stairs and down towards the ground floor.
The sounds are muffled, but he wants to know what's happening and where Bonnie is. She's more than capable of taking care of herself, he knows that. In fact he's actually the weak one between them now, but he can't help but listen to that voice that suggests the worst case scenario, the new villain that came into town looking for the doppelganger or a powerful witch to mess with, maybe to get revenge for something stupid or cruel or both that he did a couple of decades back, and she's getting the shortest end of the stick, as per usual.
Instead, when he reached the sliding windowed door that opens to the garden at the back of the house, he finds her handing a mug of coffee to a young, shirtless, manual laborer with a rosary around his neck and the kind of rippling muscles you'd see in a Jennifer Lopez music video, as his colleague is taking off his helmet to dry the sweat off his forehead with a bandana.
Damon stares at the scene through the glass, before sliding the door open.
"I think we'll probably be done tomorrow," the eye-candy says, with a shy smile as his abs do all the deep talking while the hammer sits at his feet.
Damon coughs to get their attention and luckily it seems to break the spell Bonnie is under, making her turn towards him though she's clearly surprised to see him.
"Damon, what are you doing here?" she asks him.
"I live here, remember?" She didn't actually forget that he lives in the house, of course, and her surprise was only sparked by the fact that hours ago he was playing the moribund in his king-sized bed, but her words still rubbed him the wrong way just because.
"Just a minute," she gently offers to the bashful guy. He nods and his pectorals darken with the melancholy of parting from her.
"What are you doing up, and outside no less?" she asks, irritated.
"Accidentally interrupting your social life, it seems," he replies between his teeth so that the Calvin Klein underwear model won't hear him and think too much of his chances of winning Bonnie's favour.
"What does that…" she stops, deciding she won't indulge him, not while they are outside and he can catch his death. Instead, she grabs him by the arm and drags him inside. Mostly he follows and lets her manhandle him, because he might be sick and human but she's still pint-sized even for Lilliputian standards, so it's kinda the gentlemanly thing to collaborate. Bonnie pushes him towards the table as she goes to make him something warm to drink.
"The guys seemed enthusiastic about the coffee. I can have that too," he says when he realizes she's making him tea. Tea is boring. It's what introspective people drink as they sit and ponder. He really isn't that kind of person. And mostly he still wants to talk about the inflatable male-doll in his garden.
"You can barely eat a piece of toasted bread before turning all shades of green, let alone drink coffee…so you'll have to settle for tea. Sorry." She doesn't sound that sorry, at all, but he doesn't protest. If she's busy making tea she can't go outside and stare at the muscular lover of Lady Chatterley; still, that is a task that will take her just a few minutes, and he doesn't want to be abandoned to boredom.
"I thought we were going to finish our crosswords…" he begins, dragging the chair away from the table, to sit.
"You needed to rest," she replies, cutting a slice of fresh ginger on the chopping board, "and I had to see someone."
"Is that why the guy over there is shirtless?" he piques, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, "So you could see him better?"
"Idiot," she admonishes him without passion as she pours hot water into the mug. "I went visiting Matt. I haven't seen him since I was back. In the meantime, Caroline has been directing those two poor guys like a lion tamer…" she adds, letting him feel a little pang of displeasure for the men's fate. "So, I made them coffee. And I tried to be nice." The pang disappears immediately, and he wants to ask where her niceness ends; but if he does, she'll kill him.
Bonnie brings the mug to the table and sits quietly in front of him as he studies the steam rising up from the amber tinged liquid. "Remember the call I got this morning?"
"Yeah," he answers, holding the handle of the mug and relaxing his arms over the table's surface.
"Well, turns out—"
"Sleeping beauty has woken up, finally!" Caroline cries out, entering the kitchen with no regard for his headache while holding a phone and a notepad.
"You just ruin everything," she decides, pointing her fists on her sides and looking at him like he's a midge on the windshield of her new, shiny convertible.
"Thanks, sis," he replies sarcastically. That makes her shut up for a second, torn between distancing herself from such an evil creature that would fall ill just to mess with her perfectly timed schedule, and the bond that inevitably reminds her of Stefan, making her heart falter. Damon is an ass, but he's actually her family, and the concept sometimes sinks in like it's the first time she conjures up the notion.
"Ugh, you could could've gotten the flu any other time…" she begins, trying to sound sympathetic.
"Yeah, but it was fifty percent off so I thought, how can I miss the opportunity…" he jokes, taking a sip from his mug, eyeing Bonnie in a shared moment of Forbes-induced despair.
"But it's okay," she says, marching over to the table with a warmongering expression, which incidentally is her default expression, "We can still make the most of it."
"I'll monitor the construction of the stage in the garden—"
"Good." Damon readily approves, happy to have someone else watching sweaty Magic Mike do the handiwork. "I don't want anyone to mess with my garden," he adds for good measure, so no one will think he's being jealous because he's not.
"While Bonnie will keep an eye on you, as you take advantage of this moment of loneliness and reflection to write down your vows."
"What am I? A prison guard?"
"Yes," the girl replies without missing a beat.
"Basically," Damon agrees at the same time the blonde does.
Caroline doesn't let the question sway her, picking back where she left off, "And they will be romantic and beautiful and with the right touch of vulnerability that will remind Elena why she decided to marry you all the many times you will fuck up in the foreseeable future."
"Well, how can I disappoint your firm belief in me," Damon dead-pans. He should have stayed in bed.
#
"This is all your fault," he accuses Bonnie, as soon as they are in the sitting room. The lazy sound of his slippers on the parquet accompanies as he walks past the connecting door and towards the sofa.
She fixes a cushion behind his back so that he'll be more comfortable and then proceeds to make him stretch his legs over the sofa, but he just takes them off again.
"You won't have space to sit," he explains, his tone much gentler as he puts aside his accusation.
"I'll just sit in the armchair," she replies.
"But I need the emotional support, and maybe a suggestion or two." She rolls her eyes and sits in the armchair, armed with a book.
"Anyway…why is that?" she amuses him, going back to his previous accusation.
"Because I thought that a serial killer was trying to nail you to my picket fence and I came to your rescue," he plots out, readily.
"You don't have a picket fence," she notes.
"That's an insignificant detail," Damon rebuts with a grimace.
"Were you planning to fight him in your pajamas and slippers?" she asks, turning the pages to find the last one she's read.
"Slippers can serve as a weapon," he retorts, stealing a glance at her read.
"I know, I think about throwing them at you at least once a day," she informs flatly.
"Can you read aloud?" he asks, hands resting on the notepad over his lap.
"Nope. Caroline will have my guts for garters if you don't move your ass and start writing something." The British expression she used reminds him of Enzo. It leaves him wondering how often she thinks of him, how much she still loves him though he's been gone for months. Bonnie is the most loyal person he knows, and maybe she still holds a torch for the asshole, even though he still thinks he wasn't worthy of licking her boots.
The space between them is suddenly more than the couple of feet between the sofa and the armchair, and he feels an irrational anger at that. It's like she can't humanly wait to think about something else, be it the guy with the cultured pectorals, the dead guy with the lame accent, or the overrated book she's currently reading.
"Chop, chop," she reminds him raising her pretty green eyes on him for a flickering moment.
He wants to tell her to look at him, really look at him. But he doesn't. Instead he draws squiggles on the pages of the block notes Caroline has provided while his mind wanders and he tries not to think of anything, because it's too tiring to do otherwise.
"Is it going well?" Bonnie asks at some point, without bothering to look at him.
"I'm a proper Neruda," he piques, sitting between crumpled pages torn off from his plucked block notes. Bonnie, he remembers, likes Salinas better. When they were stuck on the other side, he used to read his poems to her, mostly to soothe her when he had screwed up. There's a passage that suddenly comes back to his mind: I came upon you in the storm, I knew you, abruptly, in that brutal tearing apart of dusk and light, in which the depth that escapes from day and night is revealed.
"Thought so," she replies with no interest in pursuing the topic.
Sometimes, thinking back on the moment they found themselves on the other side, hand in hand in a world so silent and so private, the memory of it seems more real than reality itself. Back then, there was nothing better to do than discover all that Bonnie was, and watch all that she could be, and find the ways she could fit into his sick soul so that it wouldn't rot away and turn to ashes.
Damon kicks a balled-up page resting at his feet on the floor, nervously trying to detangle himself from that strange melancholy, like he's desperately missing something he hasn't lost in the first place, something he never had in the first place.
He's read a lot in his many lifetimes, so writing down some sappy stuff for his bride to be should not be a problem. Caroline wants him to write, Bonnie wants him to write so that he'll get her off the hook, and he wants to feed his brain something else so that it will stop trying to remember the rest of that poem.
Words come more easily that he would have thought, lifting his mood. It's like a slap on the shoulder, like: congratulation man, you've picked the right girl. His hand slides along the page, from left to right, leaving a shade of blue on the skin as it brushes along the paper. He's too wrapped up in the moment to notice as Bonnie lifts her eyes to see his mouth curving into the lightest grin.
They've never been as further away from each other than right now, she thinks. They'll never be as far away from each other as right now, even once he's married and she's on the other side of the planet, she thinks, lowering her eyes on the page, unable to distinguish the words she's trying to read.
There was only you, he reads the words inside his mind, thinking back to the first time he saw her, thinking of her name that didn't mean anything to him because there was only Katherine, maybe not right from the start, maybe not with that enlightened awareness of every male lead inside a romance novel, but in a way, there was only you, always. I'm not exactly a nit-picker, but I suspect that wanting to make you suffer was my psychotic way of singling you out, of recognizing you, because I didn't think I was good enough to be anything else but your persecutor, and I will always take anything I can get.
He wanted to torment Stefan for what he had taken from him, wanted to hurt Elena because of the girl that she wasn't, and he thought the only choice he got was between being bad and being worse.
I'll take the morsels of you when it's all you can give, and I'll steal the rest when you aren't watching, when you're still drowsy and you don't know any better. He tries to think of the mornings with Elena and he can't remember any of that, but it's nice enough that he thinks they can do all that, one day. I'm not the good guy you deserve, but I'll keep my promises to you, the quixotic ones that make you look at me like I'm crazy, and even the stupidest ones. Because even when you weren't the only person in the world, and I didn't know that your sleep-talking was all that I needed to get me though the night, there was always only you.
But Elena doesn't talk in her sleep, he thinks. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. It's a dreadful feeling, like the earth opened up under his ass and swallowed him. He tears the page away so violently that Bonnie looks at him puzzled.
"Way too sappy," he justifies himself, balling up the page and throwing it to the ground with all the others. "The diabetic coma would be guaranteed," he adds, wide eyed as he stares at her perplexed face and asks himself what's fucking wrong with me. Maybe it's cold feet, maybe he wants to sabotage himself by putting his foot in his mouth. Maybe he just can't see the forest for the trees. And ironically he wants to ask Bonnie, because she's the one that can always detangle his twisted thoughts, the one he can trust with the darkest parts of himself and know that she can handle that, that it won't scare her away nor it will pollute her clean soul. He wants to tell her: Hear this: I'm about to marry Elena but sometimes it feels like I'm marrying you, isn't that silly? He wants to ask her: It's just cold feet, isn't it? He wants to say: We would be just about the worst couple in the history of this universe, wouldn't we? And laugh about it like it's bad joke. But maybe to see her laugh at that would break his heart a little, so he doesn't say anything.
"You're such a romantic," she says, going back to her book. And he thinks she should know that he actually is. Maybe in a gory way, on occasion, during his old days, but he is a romantic. He is husband material. He wants her to see that so badly, it actually makes him dizzy.
"So," Caroline says, breaking off his thoughts as she enters the sitting room. "What have we go—" she interrupts herself when she sees the balled pages all around the floor, and a paper plane on top of the liquor cabinet. "I hope the deforestation is not the only thing you managed to do in the last couple of hours," she says walking towards the sofa to steal a glance to the block notes. He just closes it, before she can check it out.
"I'm almost done," he lies, nonchalantly.
"You want an ear?" she asks, "I mean, I can help refining the—"
"No thanks," he cuts her off, "I think I need to lay down, rest a bit. I feel like shit." And he means it. Bonnie looks at him but he feels like he wants her to look at him in another way. He wants to see his struggle on her face, wants to read his agony in her eyes, wants to know that she knows, she understands, she's there with him.
Caroline sighs loudly, "Fine. Whatever. You know, for someone that used to smooth-talk his way out of anything, you'd think you'd be able do this with your hands tied behind your back," she proclaims, so that he'll hear her as he walks up the stairs ignoring her. She shakes her head and falls heavily on the sofa, sitting in his place.
"He's so cranky when he's sick, how can you stand him?" she asks Bonnie, crossing her arms under her breasts, but her friend just grins at that as the cell phone start ringing.
Caroline answers readily, "Oh, hello, yes, as I told you in my message, I'd like to fix an appointment to hear about the proposed selection, and of course to see the band." She covers the receiver with one hand to ask Bonnie, "Can you please get me a pen?" but as soon as her friend has disappeared behind the door, she realizes Damon has taken away the block notes too, and she has left her planner in the bag, in the kitchen.
"Mmmm-mmm" she nods, though the speaker on the other side can't actually see her, and picks a crumpled page from the floor, trying to smooth it with her hands. One side of the page is written, so she turns it around to use the black side to write down what her interlocutor tells her.
"Thanks," she mouths to Bonnie as she comes back and hands her the pen.
"I don't think we want a secular selection for the ceremony. In that case, do you think you have anything to propose that would be good for us?" There is a pause, "Oh, by year, you mean?" she asks "Well, I suppose the age difference between the groom and bride depends on how you see it," she answers, grimacing.
"Yeah, I think it would be better to have a discussion face to face, too," she agrees. "I'm ready," she adds, before starting to write down the address and hour of the appointment on the crumpled page, and a few of the better options the speaker has provided.
Once she has hung up she folds the page, ready to put it into her planner, for reference.
"Well," she says with a satisfied expression, "I can just feel it," she decides "This wedding will be amazing."
#
Note: I'm back at work, so I don't know when I'll be able to sit down and write again. In the meanwhile I hope you can enjoy this chapter and leave me a review. If you can, consider buying me a coffee. As usual, you can kind the link to my ko-fi page in my profile or over my tumblr.