OPEN [boyxboy] ✓

thirty-six:: when old wounds are reopened.

[Hold Up- Beyoncé (cover by Kayles Soto)]

THIRTY-SIX: when old wounds are reopened.

Calum Cain was in my bedroom.

My ex-best friend, could've been boyfriend, was standing here right in front of me as if nothing had changed. As if seven years weren't thrown away and we were still those kids on my fourteenth birthday, my fifteenth birthday, my sixteenth and seventeenth, biking with the wind in our faces. The same Calum Cain who had left me bleeding on the ground after jumping me with his friends, that Calum had climbed the side of my house just as he'd been doing for the past four years since we'd gotten in high school.

He was always one for clichés despite the fact that he always considered cliché to be girly and girly was gay. And gay was something that he most definitely was not.

He was very impulsive however so I'd always catch him in the middle of a spontaneous cliché. Calum was staring at me, his hair a mess on top of his forehead. I hadn't looked at him that much since our slip in detention. I hadn't seen him since I'd told him I hated him, Calum's hair had grown out a bit more -it always did grow fast- it was still a bit short but it had grown to that awkward stage between his ears and nonexistent...

And he still looked damn gorgeous. He was still attractive, rugged though, his lips still heart shaped and slightly chapped and his eyes still blue as ever. He looked like the old Calum but it didn't feel comfortable, it didn't feel like home. He wasn't the same and neither was I, I had Paul now. Paul was my home.

Funny how being almost in love could do that to you.

There was a past and a future living and breathing in my house at the same time and Calum Cain was most definitely not the latter.

My voice came out weak, the confusion that my boyfriend had put me in had dissipated, my thoughts were clear of everything except: what the fuck and why the fuck.

"Calum?" It was as if he wasn't really there but maybe I just didn't want him to be really there because him being attainable physically was almost as toxic as dowsing myself in rubbing alcohol and lighting a cigarette.

He wasn't healthy for me anymore and he didn't get that. "Yeah. Listen, I-"

His voice was rushed but mine was too, bordering on disappearing or simply cracking. He was smiling at me, that blue-braced smile and those bright eyes, rage lit inside of me. How could he come here? How could he act like everything was okay? "I really don't want to hear it." "Why'd you think that that was okay? We're not friends anymore, you can't just scale the side of my house."

"... Ian."

The sheets were scrunched beneath my fingers from the bed I hadn't bothered to make that morning. Paul had hounded me about proper hygiene and offered to make it for me -because that was exactly how caring he always was, it would be annoying if I wasn't this into him- but my unmade bed was really the only thing keeping me from snapping. I wanted to throw something, scream, hurt him the way he hurt me.

"Don't."

It almost seemed as if he wanted me to forgive him, as if he expected this to blow over, because the boy in front of me had just furrowed his brows, smile faltering at my monotonous voice. He was never serious so he replied sarcastically, "What am I supposed to do when you keep ignoring me? Send a gift basket?" I was wrong, he was still the same old Calum.