#dasher

“Come on,” David sighed, propping his elbow on the couch and leaning his head on his palm. “What else went so wrong that you're denouncing romance forever?”

Asher faltered, the tender skin at the sides of his nails suddenly becoming an increasingly distracting sight.

“Did he say something?” David's tone dropped into a warning grind. “Did he insult you? Make you uncomfortable? Try to do something you didn't want–”

“No, no.” he rushed to assuage him. “Nothing like that.”

“Oh.”

David settled back, though only slightly, his posture still tensed in anticipation of something yet unrealized.

“Then what was the problem?”

Asher didn't say anything for a long while, weighing the pros and cons of spilling his guts. He ultimately came to the conclusion that he owed nothing short of complete and utter transparency with the man who gave as much to him.

“He wasn't you.”

The apartment went deathly still, the hum of the air conditioning the only thing left to accompany the unsteady breaths echoing in his head.

“What does that mean, exactly?” David's voice was practiced, composed, and a dead giveaway for the lack of balance he was currently experiencing.

“He wasn't you.” Asher repeated, not letting himself indulge in the humiliating desire to meet his eyes. “He kept telling me things about himself, about his work, about his friends, about his life, and I just…I didn't care. I know how awful that sounds, and I felt how awful it was, but I checked out ten minutes in. All I could think about was coming home to you and forgetting that I had gone out in the first place.”

More quiet followed, and Asher had just mustered the courage to get up and go to his room when David spoke.

“It wouldn't work.”

And how pathetically telling it was that Asher elated at the idea that he wasn't dismissing his feelings outright, that a sensible explanation was at hand, even as something deep within his sternum began to wilt.

“I'm going to be the Alpha.” he continued. “After my dad. And you…you're going to be my Beta. I'm sure of it. And the politics of it…it just invites too many issues.”

He couldn't help the petulance that snaked its way into his tone. “That's why? Pack dynamics? That's bullshit, and you know it. It's not like a marriage, not the way most people think of it as, anyway. Plenty of Alphas and Betas are mates, David–”

At the word ‘mates,’ David flinched, sending a lance of something cold and bitterly sharp through his fingertips.

“It wouldn't work.” David repeated, before he added on, at a devastatingly diminished volume, “For me.”

A lifetime of carefully constructed scaffolding came crashing down in a barreling heap, a dam bound with nothing but the wisps of a faraway want crumbling to splinters and ruin.

It wasn't like Asher had expected a fairytale ending. Nothing of the sort. But it didn't have to be so abruptly finite, the candle snuffing itself out from both ends the instant the wick caught. His lungs were turning rotten, pulpy ephemera catching in his bronchial tubes and urging him to act.

“Can we act like it would?” he whispered. “Like it would work? Just for a moment?”

“Asher.” David rumbled, his eyes soft and tender. “That's not a good idea.”

“I don't care.” Asher bit back, fully aware of how his tone began to border on the pitiful holler of a struck dog. “It wasn't a good idea to tell you in the first place. I want to act like it would work. Please.”

David's face took on a brief but powerful conflict, his expression clouding over with a stormy internal reckoning before he sighed, long and ragged.

“Come here.” he rasped, and Asher scrambled to his feet and over to his best friend. David's hands, so large and capable, gently guided him to straddle his lap, the contact eliciting a shaky exhale from both of their chests.

The first brush of their lips was hesitant, lacking commitment, giving both parties ample time to retreat, to escape.

Neither took the grace period.

The next impact was a collision of flesh and heat, stubble rasping over skin and the flow of oxygen halting in service of something better. Asher's hands fluttered up to David's chest, curling into the fabric of his shirt and pulling him closer, closer, closer.

Something feral and righteous burned at the points of his canines and the hinges of his jaw, indignant and fierce. It was so unfair, so lacking in justice, to be kept apart by something so simple and yet ao destructive as power.

The absence of understanding threatened to rend him from the inside out, his innards curdling with a base, primal strain of anguished rage. Why couldn't it work? Why shouldn't it work? The sense of rightness that coursed through his veins nearly brought tears to his eyes.

He remembered, of all things in this moment, being a child, making friends with all manner of kith and kin. Spending nights on floors and every so often, spending a bleary-eyed Sunday morning in a rock-hard pew, listening to a man in an overstarched shirt drone about edicts and dire warnings he couldn't care less about.

But one thing that always stuck was the story of creation. How one was taken from the rib of another, destined to be at their side for all eternity, for the eternal machine to chug on the pumps of two pistons. As he got older, he had scoffed at the idea, casting it aside as demeaning and derogatory. Everyone was their own person, plain and simple.

But when David's palms swept a branding trail from his shoulders to his waist, his body hummed with a contentment as yet unheard of. Blunt fingers crosshatched with callouses slotted perfectly into a skeletal framework that practically whined with their own intrinsic craving, embedded to the marrow.

He panted into David's mouth, an electric thrill arcing up his spine at the resulting groan that poured onto his tongue. He could feel his phone digging into his thigh through his pocket, his shirt's tag scratching along the nape of his neck, and the fuzzed tang of coffee-tinged aftertaste on his cheeks. But he didn't care. Life could make a worthless martyr out of him, his trials consisted of the most inconsequential annoyances, and he would triumph with a ferocity unmatched.

Anything for this to go on endlessly. His pyre would be the discomfiture of pleasure, the inconvenience of hedony.

David's teeth nipped at his lower lip, soothing the sting with the flat of his tongue, sucking at the inflamed tissue until it throbbed in the best possible way. His fingers dug in ever tighter, and Asher sent up a desperate plea to anything with ears to hear that he would wake up to his best friend's handprints seared onto his skin.

Minutes, or hours, or perhaps days passed, neither one quite ready to end the bubble of bliss so fretfully erected, both sensing their impending arrival to the other side of heaven.

But they did it anyway. They broke apart, staring at each other, saying words that had no need of voice. They got off the couch. They went to their rooms. They laid on their beds and stared at their ceilings, wondering when the ache would dim.

David became the Alpha. Asher became his Beta.