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Janna sighs in her sleep and snuggles closer to Marco. He collects her in the curl of his arm and watches his breath ruffle in the dark forest of her short, shaggy hair. They've been making out--sometimes much more--a lot, lately. It hasn't been, like, magical or anything. They always make a big deal out of that, that your first time ought to be magical. Their first time was too swift fumbling on the couch in her living room while her parents weren't home. It hadn't really been magical at all. Neither the second nor third proved much better but her lithe brown body was warm, present, yielding and everything grew better through practice or simple habituation.
Simple habituation. That was... super romantic. Yeah. He feels more than a trifle guilty for thinking that way. She's his friend, after all, and he cares for her deeply in a queer, distracted way that cannot hold his attention span for much longer than she holds him. They always use protection, of course, provided by his dad during a supremely awkward conversation about how growing boys needed... things. That grew. Or something. Sometimes it really sucked having cool parents, he reflected, even if he wouldn't trade either of them for the whole world.
Janna? The girl vulnerable and sleeping beside him? Don't ask that question. He doesn't know the answer, hopes it would be one thing, isn't sure he wouldn't hate himself if it wasn't.
Their lovemaking is usually slow, gentle, even casual. This is how it should be between friends, isn't it? Once or twice she has cried out for him to push harder, treat her more roughly, even slap her. He acquiesced to all but the last, doesn't have it in his nature, and left her most pleased on those occasions. She left him with a back slashed to bloody rags by her nails and marks of sharp, white, even teeth pressed into the flesh of his shoulder. "I don't really have fangs," he remembers her saying, "unless you want me to, that is..."
Marco really prefers blondes. Perhaps it would be wrong to even broach the subject with her but he does wonder how Janna would look with blonde highlights. He'll bring it up at some point, know he should feel guilty about it, end up doing it anyway. One day he'll wish upon a star to treat her as well, to love her as well, as she deserves. He can feel of late, while she moves beneath him, that she's gotten more into this than he could ever be. The lead weight of it sits in his stomach, difficult to carry or reconcile.
She stirs beside him, halfway out of sleep. "Are you awake, babe?"
"Um, yeah. Yeah. I guess."
"Something on your mind?"
"Nothing. Maybe? Well, it's kind of silly. You'll laugh at me."
"A spider with a top hat, like that little guy you keep doodling all over stuff, is silly. If I didn't laugh at you over that I probably won't over anything."
"Uh, Janna... you did sorta laugh at me over that."
"I did? Well, it wasn't mean laughing. And we had a lot of fun afterwards." A little growl creeps into her voice at the last.
"We did, didn't we?"
"Totally. So..." She props on one elbow, eyes hug and dark in moonlight that streams through the window, "What you got that's gonna seem sillier than a spider in a top hat?"
"Have you ever thought about dying your hair?"
"Something bitchin like purple or green? That'd be about as punk rock as a freakin vampire, dude."
He doesn't point out that this is a nonsensical analogy, doesn't really see the reason. He says, instead, "I was thinking you could, er, maybe... dye your hair blonde?"
"Blonde?"
"Yeah."
She scowls. "Are you still having Jackie issues? Cause I swear you calling out to her that one time was super not cool. I let it go but--"
"No Jackie issues," he says. "No Jackie issues. I just think you'd look good blonde."
"Really?"
"Y'know, something like a skunk stripe, right up front. That'd be really sexy."
"Y'think?"
"Totally."
"Oh, okay." She settles against him again. "I'll go get the stuff tomorrow. Probably look pretty cool."
"Yeah." He lies beside her silently for a moment before saying, "Do you think this is the only place out there?"
"I'm pretty sure there are other places," she says, and then lists them on her fingers. "Bakersfield, El Segundo, Saint Babs, that weird Gravity Falls place where your pen pal lives..."
"No," he says, "on a larger scale. I mean, like, dimensionally."
"He can feel her snorted laughter in the dark in the way her belly tightens against him. "Go, gunslinger, there are other worlds than these."
"Huh?"
"Just something from a book. Sounded pretty, I dunno, wise, though. Or something."
"It just seems wise because it's cryptic."
"You say potato, I say edible tuber from the nightshade family. It's all in where you're standing, bae." She fiddles silently with a strand of his hair before asking, "Is this about your dreams?"
"Yeah," he says. "The other places, the fiery one and the beautiful one, and something like a dragon, something with wings."
"Don't dwell on it," she says. "It's gonna make you crazy--and I know from crazy."
"I guess."
"I'll help you. I'll help."
She does. It works for a while but when they are finished and she has fallen asleep, again, the thoughts return. They are more vivid than dreams, than the girl beside him, and he could never begin to call this a nightmare. The face, an exquisite face with wide, cornflower blue eyes and coruscantly blushing cheeks, hangs ghostly above him.
He really might go mad if he keeps worrying at this in his mind, turning it over and again. He cannot help it, though, and so if madness comes then it must come. There are some fates you don't escape even if the whole universe is shaked to its core and flipped. That face, her face, the face seems to be one of them. He closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep on a cloud of what cannot be regret because one cannot regret what has never been, a life never lived... can he? He prays, before consciousness leaves him, for answers that brush at the edges of his fingertips but remain forever out of reach.