Sugar Trip[Driam]

5. do a david bowie cover

"Would you kiss me?"

Every word forebodes to a pitfall; a sudden spasm within all walls of surrealism and sound mind. Horror. Death. It's Drew; his soul-crushing, tire-slashing, shit-eating smile staring Liam straight in the face, saying, 'danger,' 'turn back now,' 'hide.' His fingers curl into the computer chair beneath a saline, stinging shudder of sobriety snaking up his spine. Jesus Christ. If there were ever a line to cross, Drew would be a fucking funambulist.

"What are you saying..." Liam scoffs indignantly. He's the image of despair, rotting alive like he just happened to still be there. A reality-check'd been a long time coming, but no amount of bracing and brooding over what-ifs and and what-abouts could brief him on the shame; the nightmarish reality hurtling towards him like a drag car. This is it, Liam thinks, this is where the band-aid gets ripped off, where the good thing ends. This is the part where Drew calls it quits, tells Liam to leave, that he's sick and never wants to see him again. 

But Drew just sits there with a resigned, quiet leisure, leg bouncing absently on the mattress.

"I'm not..." Liam starts, searching through the scopes of his mind for a word; a word to redeem this, to make time rewind on itself then and there. "...like that," he decides; exasperatedly gesturing as though he could grasp the words out of thin air. At this point, it's irredeemable.

Like a patient on the table, the end was always just someone else's wrong move away. Only Liam didn't know it. Doomsday was supposed to be on his own terms, when he finally got too sick of looking in the mirror to see the same flaming-hot mess staring desperately back. He should've known better, really. Drew's practically the poster-child of throwing curve balls in people's lives, putting a wrench in every plan and ploy. He should've expected to be thwarted, to be thrown off track and left for dead.

Drew loses the megawatt smile and supplies a casual, conspiratorial shrug; like this is normal, like he doesn't eat people like Liam for breakfast. His poker-face is about as unpleasant and petrifying as a train crash, one inciting a feeling of die-hard horror, deadly and dissonant. It rings true to those Animal Planet episodes where the predator is inching through a marsh, every movement calculated and choreographed, eyes magnified on their prey. Liam just knows he's about to be eaten alive, that he's only being messed with for the sake of cold-blooded cruelty.

"I'm not," Liam breathes defensively. "Drew, I swear to God." Every word just makes it worse.

The cards are on the table, staring straight into the scummiest slums of Liam's brain like they expect him to do something, to be a better guy. It's the ball, finally in his court, and here he is, blanking. It's humiliation, it's regret, it's disgust in Liam's bones where marrow should be. And amping it up to eleven is Drew's expectant, evil eyes slowly eating at him in small, splintering, savage little bites. Like Liam really had been caught in a cobweb and alas, his spider was there, waiting all along, just... screwing with him.

He should've done this sooner, should've cut ties the moment he caught feelings. He should've seen it from a mile afar, from the pop-punk pinup posters on Drew's walls to the girls' names notched in his bed post. He's an idiot.

"Hey, Liam?" Drew finally raises, every syllable sharp as a thumbtack scratch, heavy with the likeness of Liam carrying his own cross. Here it comes, the guillotine, the grandiose execution. This is the curtain call, the crack of doom crashing down upon Liam with a crescendo and a cloud of confetti. The end. "I bet you get this a lot," he says, "but you're the worst goddamn liar I've ever met."

He's got to be kidding.

"How many uh, 'goddamn liars' have you met?" Liam makes wryly, mouth dry-- humor drier. There's a universe where this was all just a joke, where everything just went back to normal afterwards, like some sort of sitcom episode. But from the flat-lining atmosphere and the fraught strain in Liam's voice, there was no excuse for these circumstances. He's been caught, blatant and biting, like a fish on a wire.