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The spray tickles their forearms as they lean on the rails of the boardwalk, and Conrad’s not too sure how he got here, but he’ll give anything not to leave.
Conrad hasn’t seen the sun for longer than he’d like, but the man in front of him is close enough. The way the streetlight haloes his head, rested sideways on his palm, turns Hanna’s curls into little licks of golden fire. A glow of warmth against the dark waves, the man is something he’d never thought he’d have: A beacon, a flashing signal he follows when he can’t tell where to go. Come here, he’ll be shelter.
“I dunno,” he’s saying. “I just thought, like…maybe I can get him to smile again if I try really hard? I really missed seeing it, man.”
Conrad’s smile falters. There it is, the intense urge to get rid of the evidence. But he wants it? Doesn’t think it’s silly, how it raises so unevenly on one side, always seems unwilling, always is unwilling? It struggles on his face, halted, and he makes it quirk back into something vaguely resembling what it once was.
“I guess I don’t often,” he replies. Then, muttered private like the sea can hear them: “But I'll try more, if it makes you happy?”
It might as well be a physical click, the lock of something into place. Hanna’s frame tightens, and his does too, waiting for the downward crash. The sudden ending. The nervous shift backward, the brow twitch of uncertainty followed by some verbal scramble, saying loud and clear that, whoah, that was weird dude do you mean it like that? He doesn’t want to lie, but maybe it’ll sound true this time, and maybe Hanna will believe it.
A second ago Hanna’s grin barely touched his lips. Impossibly, it creeps brighter like light on the horizon, reflecting off Conrad’s eye like a flint spark in the calm night. It doesn’t dissipate. His smile’s a mess of peeking teeth and deep dimples, with a laugh tumbling out discordant and beautiful, and all of a sudden Conrad is nothing but a kid with a crush being swallowed by the feeling’s enormity. It’s a reacquaintance that crashes harder than the waves, biting sharper than the saltwater wind. Its teeth feast on the metal tang of his heart, he can feel them sinking, but instead of feeling blinding pain it sort of tickles. Huh.
“You care about that?” Hanna asks, disbelieving.
“That can’t be a real question.” But it sounded genuine.
The ocean in front of them is alive and rippling, carrying a sparkle that dances on the very top of each crest. It’s wonderful. Conrad turns away from it, hip pressed against the railing, because what’s to his left is more captivating.
He watches Hanna believe him, setting soft into his facial features. He’s stupid, always has been, but he’ll watch the dots connect as slowly as he needs him to, one and the same. Hanna shifts, pulls his hoodie sleeve down over his arm, trails back upward to play with the string. He peers down at it like it’s so interesting, and that grin’s still going, halo’s still burning, taste of iron’s in Conrad’s own mouth from his bleeding out.
A blink. And in that time, a solid collision: There’s a head buried into his sweater, and Hanna clings harder than anyone ever has before, fingers spidery but strong against his back. One curls midway up the column of his spine, the other further up, tucked between his shoulderblades. His laugh is muffled, but it’s as sweet as sugar water, and he can’t believe he’s here to hear it. It’s the thing that Conrad doesn’t deserve, can’t even state why, as obvious as it is inconceivable. Wide dark eyes, deer in the headlights, a streak runs through his body of pure giddy adrenaline and his hands shake when they raise to touch Hanna. They find the fabric of the smaller man’s hoodie, rest like it’s home, and Conrad tells himself that just for tonight let's pretend that he’s worthy.
He tucks his face into the crook of the other man’s shoulder.
It takes a while for their lungs to get into rhythm. But eventually, they follow the slowness of the tide.
When they let go Hanna will be a red face and flighty departure. Conrad himself will be stiff short words and fingers fixing his shirt to get out the wrinkles. Desperate composures, neither really put together with more than cheap wood and rusty nails. The material bends at the slightest touch, water-rotted. But they’ll keep them up until another night, meeting at the threshold of emotion and toeing just a little past the doorway, one and the same, twin sputtering flames. Maybe then they could be fingertips hooked together and noses brushing, shy like schoolboys scared of getting caught.
Instead, tonight, Conrad listens to the other man’s own pierced heart sputter something he knows the meaning of, and his arms fit snug around him with tender urgency. And instead, tonight, Hanna nudges free, head lowered like the vampire won’t see that splash of violent scarlet across his freckled face.
“Wow, uhhh, it’s super late, I gotta go before Gallahad gets nervous, super cool we got to talk. Sooo. Okay. Bye!”
“Yeah. Totally. Good talk, no problem.”
Conrad’s body is clenched with the fear levels of a man awaiting the death sentence, still and straight like a statue. The other man skitters down the boardwalk like he’ll be punished for violating curfew. Hanna exits the stage while the vampire still stands in the spotlight, clinging to the scene even though it has to end, that's just now things go, the natural balance. The sodium light buzz sets into his nocturnal eyes, no longer framing the man he views as ridiculously cherubic but instead burning his vampiric retinas, and he sighs his annoyance into the cool air. What else might Conrad do, grab the edge of his hoodie, beg him to forget the matters he's made up to attend to because he wants to bask in his presence, a cat on his lap? Yeah. Right. No.
Not tonight.
“Goodnight, Hanna.”
Smell of seawater knit into his sweater, Conrad walks home alone.