Bonus Content: Don't Tell My Brother

I Wanna Be Yours

A/N: Hey guys, this is another Damien POV, set after Chapter 37. Highly recommend listening to Arctic Monkeys' I Wanna Be Yours before, during or after reading it, because a) it fits the mood and b) it's just a banger of a song in my opinion

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

As soon as Damien got home, he went to his room. Most of the guests had cleared out by then, which was good, because right now he didn't feel like talking to anyone. He slammed the door shut, ignoring the scolding his mother called after him as he threw himself down onto his bed.

Fuck.

Automatically, he reached for his headphones. Music helped. It wasn't a secret he didn't deal with emotions well, so with music he could at least drown them out. He hit play. Arctic Monkeys' I Wanna Be Yours started to play, and Damien realised that sometimes, music made things so much worse.

So he lay there, listening to a song about wanting to belong to someone, even if it was in the smallest, most unimportant way possible, and he felt so, so angry. Actually, he felt hurt and sad and lost as well, but it was far easier to be angry than to be sad. Hadn't he done the right thing? He'd been told time and time again, by his mother and his siblings and even goddamn Mallory, on the night they'd broken up, that he needed to open up and express how he felt if he ever wanted someone to love him.

Secrets I have held in my heart

Are harder to hide than I thought

And he'd done that, hadn't he? It'd been getting hard not to tell him. Sometimes it felt like it burned inside of him, like he needed to shout it down the quiet suburban streets, tell someone, anyone. He just liked Lucas so fucking much, liked him when he laughed and did that stupid little thinking frown and when he was awkward and knew too much about the most niche topics imaginable. He liked his glasses and the way his voice rose when he got excited and he liked the way he kissed, clumsy and inexperienced but so earnest, like he'd really meant it. He liked him so much he'd started to worry it was the other 'L' word, which was also four letters long but far, far scarier.

Maybe I just wanna be yours

Not that any of it mattered. Damien could like Lucas as much as he wanted, like him until he'd borrowed every book he'd ever heard Lucas mention from the library, until they stopped working together, until the chances of them crossing paths got slimmer and slimmer, until they hit zero, and it wouldn't matter. Because Lucas didn't like him. Or, if he did, not enough. Not nearly as much as Damien did. It was so infuriating, so profoundly unfair. Damien was used to people liking him, had had people practically throw themselves at him, but finally when he really, really wanted someone, they didn't like him back. Lucas wasn't even hot, for fuck's sake. He was nerdy and socially inept and too uptight and plain. And still Damien had this ache in his chest, like he'd been physically wounded. He fought the urge to scream into a pillow.

I wanna be yours

The really infuriating (and painful, God, so painful) thing was that Damien had tried so hard to do it right this time. He wasn't used to trying with people, which, he now realised, made him kind of an asshole. But he'd apologised and actually thought about his actions and how they affected people, and he'd tried to fix it. For fuck's sake, Damien thought he had fixed it. Lucas had met his friends, and his family, and things had been going so well. And then he'd kissed him.

Wanna be yours

Lucas had actually chosen to kiss him. And Damien had thought it'd meant something. He thought Lucas had changed his mind. So he'd done what everyone said you were supposed to do, opened up, put all his cards on the table. I know exactly how I feel. And it'd been a terrible mistake. How stupid of him. For fuck's sake, Lucas had only thought he wanted to kiss him, had only been testing a theory, trying to use him to figure out his confusion.

Wanna be yours

Damien reached up to press the heels of his hands against his eyes. Not because he was crying, no way. He hadn't cried in years. He was angry, after all. Everyone who said you had to confess, to share your feelings, was full of shit. It hurt far, far worse when you actually cared.

Wanna be yours