I don't wanna be your friend

Chapter 22

I literally overthought every single word that I wrote in this chapter.

And I'm not sure how it all turned out.

So if you like it, do vote and comment💜
————————————————————

Damien and Cedric were more similar than they were different. It would take a little more time for Cedric to realize that— maybe he already did— but the more time Damien spent with Cedric, the more that statement seemed to be affirmed to Damien. If it weren't true, then they wouldn't have known and figured out each other the way they did, they wouldn't have disliked each other the way they did.

Dislike wasn't the precise word, Damien thought. It was something else. He often thought back to the time he first saw Cedric, and ever since, there had always been an inevitable pull that Damien felt in Cedric's direction— like aligning in the direction of a magnetic field. But they weren't magnets and metals, they were humans, and it was peculiar to human nature to over criticize their reflection and everything else they represented.

And maybe that is what they did, over criticize each other because they both made each other see for what they really were— it was their similarities and not the disimilarities that separated them. 

For the first time last night, Damien understood why Cedric preferred to maintain a distance from him. For the first time, he faced how it felt when somebody else's actions forced him to face his insecurities, how it felt to face the truth that made a person feel less than they were worth.

Those were the conclusions Damien had drawn after a whole sleepless night of navigating through a million thoughts. And he didn't know if he was relieved or anxious when the next day he realized that Cedric had missed school. But that confusion didn't stop Damien from looking every other minute at the seat diagonally front to his right— which a certain dark-blond haired boy was supposed to be occupying— and feeling like something vital was missing by his side.

It was about time Damien faced a few things he had been ignoring all along— he was impatient, he pushed people beyond their boundaries sometimes, and sometimes, maybe he didn't do it because he had their best interests in his mind, but because of his need to know everything. Maybe it was selfish. That is why he typed and untyped so many messages to Cedric since last night but didn't send them, he didn't call him even if his thumb hovered over the call button every five minutes, and didn't leave everything else to go and ring Cedric's doorbell like the last time because he knew Cedric wouldn't like it.

But the sun was sinking along the horizon and painting the sky yellow and orange, but he still wasn't there, and that uncomfortable knot in Damien's gut was getting twistier and tighter by the minute.

Caiden was sitting on the couch and looking unblinkingly at the narrow space between a table and the wall where Butterscotch had been hiding for almost 12 hours now.

"Cay? Don't you have tennis practice today?" Damien asked cautiously.

"No tennis practice today," Caiden whispered distractedly without giving any explanation.

"Why?" This time Damien didn't bother to hide his frustration.

"I don't know," Caiden replied the same way.

Their mother intervened in the conversation before Damien could ask anything more.

"Ced can't make it this week— he is running down a fever. I offered to send him some soup, but he told me that his mother's taking care of him."

Lie. It was a lie. That was all that was ringing in Damien's ears as his mother finished speaking. He had learned from previous experiences never to ignore it when his intuition screamed at him— with everything he had on his mind, he did just that, and now it took almost no time for regret to start building up.