I don't wanna be your friend

Chapter 19

Hello everyone. So yeah, I just disappeared for around 4 months— it's just that these few months have not been that good for me.

So sorry for pausing the story. But I can tell you one thing, that I'm determined to complete this story.

Also, thanks for 4k reads. All your comments in between these months have always made me happy.

So here is chapter 19, and I hope you guys like it. Do vote and comment☺️💜

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Cedric had to admit what he had been trying to deny the whole night— that he was, indeed, on a DATE WITH DAMIEN.

How had Damien managed to get him here?

2 days back

Enough was enough. Cedric had had a lot of it now. It wasn't possible anymore to just sit around, see and observe everything while not choosing to do anything. But it did seem like he was supposed to change that choice now, no matter how much it went against everything he told himself to be.

His observations were shedding new light on everything he thought he knew about Damien— only to learn that everything he knew was something akin to a peeling scab over a healed wound. In a few ways, that comparison was accurate: The impression Damien's personality made was a thin shield protecting him, just like a scab protecting a wound.
And Damien is the wound.

Cedric didn't know what to do with this knowledge— just like he didn't know much of anything about the turns his life was taking these days. But this, he could see— how Damien was hiding in plain sight. For a long time in everybody's eyes, Cedric was a person who had his shit together— except for one certain person, everybody still thought that— but that was far from the truth. So maybe that is why he could see it with such intimate clarity— that Damien Frost didn't have his shit together.

At least after reading Damien's childhood diary Cedric could now acknowledge that; whereas everytime he had thought about it in the past, he had chalked up to his imagination.

There was something wrong with Damien, or at least, there was something constantly troubling him. It always had been there. Cedric only wondered if anybody else saw it too, or if they did something about it. For a week he wondered just that and did nothing. But now he just might as well get done with doing something about it, or he'd probably end up doing something uncharacteristically violent.

He thought that as he started at Damien in the cafeteria, sitting a few tables across him. Damien was laughing at something Miles was saying. And Cedric wanted to eliminate their distance by somehow magically transporting both of them to somewhere alone with just the two of them, slip his hands through Damien's lustrous raven hair and hold them in a tight grip between his fingers just to see that convincing smile slip off him. Maybe then Cedric could see something real exposed on Damien's face, that something that is lurking under his scabs.

That was wild, Cedric's mind judged his imagination. That was what he meant by uncharacteristically violent behavior, so he better talked to Damien before he did something like that.

Why had Damien taken charge of looking after everyone and everything? Cedric wanted to scream it out loud. This confusion was killing him.

So as soon as the lunch break ended, Cedric caught up to Damien and stopped him by tapping him on his shoulder before he could exit the cafeteria.

Damien turned back with a lingering smile which soon turned to a confused expression with dipped eyebrows— clearly, he hadn't expected to find Cedric when he turned back. They had not spoken much to each other since that visit to San Francisco, they couldn't.