AWAY FROM THE NORM

        post-kiss, her thoughts are left blank and bare like a fresh sheet of loose leaf notebook paper. lines of expression pressed into the material but altogether free of any blemished emotions   —   it’s pure fondness pouring so brightly from her demeanor that it may have been bleeding from her pores. weird imagery, she knows, but it works. she thinks.

        she inhales through her nose, his breath tickling the hairs that have dared to escape the clip digging into her scalp, and she nearly sways into him again. to steal another wistful kiss, leap into his arms, who knows   …. but instead her hands find the pockets of denim stitched carefully in her jacket and a stretch of a smile, her lips. 

        ❛   first of all, it’s  SUNDAY.  ❜  a brow arched.  ❛   and, interestingly enough, i thought i outranked you.  ❜

❛   —- sunday?  ❜  he mimics the same arched brow, mirrored images. like he’s kissing her from another dimension where they’d once been the same person. 

           ❛  did i really miss saturday?  ❜  he muses, like he’s only asking himself.

she sort of smells like she might’ve bathed in sunshine. maybe, sort of. she was kinda like lemon candy that wasn’t sour. at least. . . her lips were. and the breeze waves in to steal underneath the cuff of his jeans and cool his overheated skin. how stupidly quick she made him warm. maybe she was sunshine, who knows. 

he kisses her again, over the pink of her lips and his own part just enough to be inappropriate. this rebel’s gonna take a chance, ride his bike without a helmet, turn in a project late. kiss his girlfriend like she’s going on vacation and he won’t see her for a few days. despite the fact that he’s seen her everyday for the past week and they’ve got three classes together the next day. pathetic, and he laughs right into her mouth. smiles against their sidewalk kiss. 

         ❛  you don’t outrank me today, captain. today, i’m the commander.  ❜ 

ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO SAY ‘I LOVE YOU’.

no, him either. the same restlessness stayed around like a nasty smell, wafting in big circling waves that made his legs numb while he tried to sleep. left his hips aching, left a pain in his chest that tightened around his heart. one after the other, he counted. one, two. another. and another. realizing that maybe he shouldn’t count the bones that hurt. oh, god, they hurt. he wondered briefly if maybe it was the depression. a bitter chalky taste attempting to mask the coppery one when he was lucid. wow, poetic. mental illness sure did have it’s advantages. would anyone listen if he wrote it down? if he spoke it? that poetry that comes when you feel like drowning. 

she would. she would listen. maybe because he could smell that same nasty scent. feel the same, hopeless ache that you wish to god would disappear once you fell asleep. maybe that’s why he often found himself hoping he wouldn’t wake up the next morning. because sometimes… sometimes the idea of the sun hurt too much. hey, hannah. do you sometimes wish you’d fall asleep and never wake up? die in your sleep so it doesn’t hurt so much. 

christ, the sound of her voice eases the pain just a little. kinda like the fact that she hurts too somehow cancels his own like multiplying negatives. her pain matches his pain. recognizing it so vividly that it brings stinging tears to his eyes. and it’s all he has, her voice. the phone cradled by his shoulder, tightly pressed to his ear. he breathes out, the buzzing of the line loud in his head. you’re still there, still there because i can hear you breathing. voice like some stupid saving grace, a voice people write songs about.  ❛ —- i’ve been staring at this crack in the ceiling and it feels like it might swallow me up.  ❜ 

                  ❛  you ever feel that way?  ❜ 

ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO SAY ‘I LOVE YOU’. 

jesus, how many times had he dreamt of her? enough to know that maybe he shouldn’t bring it up. although, kissing her in his dreams was nothing compared to kissing her in real life. dream hannah paled in comparison. as if it were impossible for his own medicated, strung out mind to recreate how her fingers felt when they run through his hair. or how her eyelashes sweep the tops of her cheeks. it drove him crazy to wake up mid-dream and feel as if something were missing. 

so when she tells him she’s dreamt of him, it catches in his throat. wondering if she’d dreamt of him when he’s dreamt of her. feeding off each other’s dreams. a symbiotic hallucination ( wow, those are some big words, jensen ) where they’ve both stumbled into the other’s mind. did he play around in her dreams like she did with his?

        ❛    ---- did dream me at least do something cool? like, maybe, parkour across a highway to save you from some movie villain? because i think you’ve done that in my dreams... once or twice.    ❜ 

         ❛   pulled over? heaven forbid.   ❜   she finds herself wondering if one lieutenant standall’d let him off with a warning or slap some points on his license for careless and imprudent driving. if only she could convince him to get his license in the FIRST PLACE.  ❛  and here i thought i took you for the type for a good ole high speed chase.   ❜  

        she’ll tug her jacket, worn denim cool to the touch in the evening air settling about them in some overly-cliche romantic date movie kind of way, closer into her, tucked beneath her arms when she takes the stairs by twos until she’s encroaching on the stretch of cement sidewalk that separates them. 

        ❛  if i hop on those sweet, sweet handlebars, mr. jensen, you’ve got to promise, absolutely swear to me that you’ll avoid all the potholes.  ❜  though, now that she considers it, a skinned knee might be the perfect memento to remember the night in days to come. not because she’s a masochist or anything, but because even after it scabs over, she might smile. just might.  ❛  where are you taking me, anyway?   ❜  

❛  ---- high speed chases are only for friday nights. and today. . . is saturday.   ❜   his grin widens, creases the skin around his mouth and makes his cheeks hurt. it’s a sweet sort of pain. the dull ache after running, the cramps in your hand after you’ve finished homework. sometimes he’s so preoccupied with making her smile, he forgets how the mere mention of her name leaves him aching. nevermind the fact that she can make him nervous right in the pit of stomach, mouth dry, hands clammy. the whole nine yards. typical. a walking cliché of a teenage boy. break the stereotype, jensen! 

he watches her feet delicately land on each step, watches her land on the cement of the asphalt. he doesn’t quite listen to her talk, although the words mingle somewhere in his thoughts. and, somehow, his brain manages to tell his mouth to speak,  ❛   scout’s honor.   ❜ don’t make this awkward, man. don’t make it awkward as you slide a hand over her hip and pull her just close enough to kiss her. something soft and sweet, just a press of his lips over hers. so familiar, but altogether new enough to leave his skin feeling like it was made of clouds ready to thunder. 

after that kiss, he’s breathing the same air as her. the words swimming in his brain drowning, drowning and looking for the right way up. a single kiss he initiated and he’s left speechless as if she’d kissed him. what a sad existence you lead, clay jensen. ❛   ---- uh,   that’s top classified information and you just don’t have the clearance.   ❜ 

        she’s not sure which image she’s just seen remains the cutest   ——   the dopey smile on clay’s face as he rounds and narrowly misses the bumper of her parents’ jeep just adjacent from the stoop of her house where it rests parked in her driveway, or the look of sheer panic overcoming him all at once as he nearly ends up head first on the concrete beneath the wheels of his infamous, trusty steed. how ironic, the circumstances with which he nearly fatally injures himself only ten feet from her house   …   he is, for once, without that damn HELMET.

        ignore the lift in her cheeks when she SMILES. it’s something meant only for clay these days, especially when she can’t help but when she’s around him. and considering his timely arrival, it settles easily on her face, matches the light in her eyes, and even that in the lighthearted giggle escaping. 

        ❛ you make the worst uber driver ever, jensen. not even a confirmation text message? pretty SURE that’s apart of being the best-uber-driver-ever policy. ❜

❛   —- now, now, ms. baker. don’t you know it’s kinda illegal to text and drive?  you don’t want me getting pulled over before i even get the chance to impress you tonight.  ❜  her smile could quite literally bring the sun up in the morning. god, how cheesy do you have to be to come up with a metaphor like that? unbearably cheesy, apparently. he’s thankful she can’t read minds like some superhero. ( although, how cool would that be, huh? ) otherwise, it’d be impossible for her to stand a few seconds with him. his mind is a never ending stream of metaphors longer than a strand of dna. an extended poem you’re just begging the author to end already before you go insane.

❛   c’mon. you gonna stand over there and chastise me for not being a good uber driver or are you gonna get on these sweet handlebars?  ❜   she’d been smiling more. they seemed genuine this time around. like maybe she’d finally found something to smile about. part of his chauvinistic teenage inflated sense of self hoped it was because of him. hannah baker, smiling because he’d finally learned to kiss her. nah, still sounds a little bit too arrogant. but, god, he hoped.

❛  —- uh,  your uber has arrived.  ❜  guess the joke tumbles a little flat from his mouth now that embarrassment colors high on his cheeks.

well, that feels nice. kinda like drinking warm milk before bed and having dreams that taste like sugar. the forever spiraling direction dreams tend to take when you’ve got a full belly and a good reason to fall asleep that night. wonder if her words will ever find their way inside his dreams. oh, but remember, they feel so nice. so, why wouldn’t they? they’ve even managed to follow him into waking day.  

       ❛   —- hannah baker, did you just tell me that you loved me?   ❜   it’s sort of unspoken that maybe, just maybe, he loved her too.