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We didn’t even kiss.
The realisation is a fist to his ribs and he freezes, breath stolen by a glance of hope. Maybe this time, he will break.
You can heal broken things. The fault line of a fracture is a map for the repair required, the severity of the rupture cause enough for intervention. A broken thing is stark, apparent, cradled, mourned. It demands an action, a reaction, a decision, a fate. And in the after, it can be perfect again, the fix so absolute it can be a new source of strength.
Kintsugi; the creation of beauty.
A bent thing demands nothing. A bent thing does not become something else; it is simply what it was, only less. Something someone less precious, something that needs less care because carelessness has already passed through and left it lacking. Not entirely ruined, retaining enough of what once made it useful to make it wasteful to discard. Not useless but certainly something to use less, relegated to the realm of spare, begging to be stored within easy reach in the vain hope that maybe, sometimes, proximity might overcome preference.
You cannot create beauty out of something someone with too much give to know how to break. You cannot repair a stretch, cannot force the slackened length tight again. And you know where it he bends, now, know it will give for you in that place with increasing ease until it stops even attempting to return to the form it had before you asked more of it than it had and forced it to become a different shape forever. Weaker now, than before, but weaker in a way that makes it even more difficult to break, each bend a gradual loss of resistance rather than the hardening of one.
Tonight, he might break. And he longs for it, aches for the clarity of it, for the chance to finally have a pain worthy of witness, a pain you can point to and say ‘look, there it is’. And a break means a medic, a stretcher, a rescue, something more than the eternal play on of a bent man.
We didn’t even kiss.
His thumb hovered, waiting to detonate, I can I will I need to I need to I can’t I can’t I can’t. He was so close to the clean snap that he could taste it against his molars. He could hear the creaking, the groaning, of impending fracture. He wanted to sink his heel against it and push, wanted to send the text and get back… what? The thing that would finally spiral cracks through twisted glass?
He could feel the slackening coming even as he desperately tried to harden himself in lines that could still snap, even as the answer crested inside his chest.
There was nothing Ilya could do that he wouldn’t simply contort himself around.
He tried to conjure a single scenario that would be sharp enough to shatter. Indifferent silence? God, how he wished he still believed that would be enough. A caustic reply – no, because I didn’t want to; no, you didn’t deserve it; didn’t we, I didn’t notice – even as the sting of imagining them lands, he can feel himself shifting to accommodate the sharper angle.
Would dismissal be the worst? No, he realises. The worst would be to be summoned back, to be kissed, then to be fixed with those eyes and that smirk and asked ‘all better, Hollander? That what you needed?’ without even the decency of letting the amusement carry the weight of pity.
He pictures it, and he pictures how vanishingly small and desolate he would feel, and for a moment he allows himself to believe himself capable of splintering.
Those eyes.
A gasp of elasticity breaks the promise of silence after the snap.
There will be no break.
There will be no chance for recovery.
He slumps, misshapen. A thread that had been twisted and twisted and twisted and twisted and still refused to fucking fray, and now the tension was gone and all that remained was a shapelessness that looked like floating and felt like drowning. Strands that used to touch, used to form something with coherence and purpose, but surviving the stretch has created endless bands of space between the parts that once lived as a whole.
Not worthless, but unequivocally worth less.
We didn’t even kiss
We didn’t even kis
We didn’t even ki
We didn’t even k
We didn’t even
We didn’t eve
We didn’t ev
We didn’t e
We didn’t
We didn’
We didn
We did we fucking didn’t
We di
We d
We
W
He doesn’t scream as the bend deepens and burns.
The elevator doors slide open, and Shane Hollander will wait to be wanted again.