Raphael /BoyxBoy/

||Twenty-Seven||

I couldn't sleep when I first moved into my new dorm room. My sheets smelled like the store, newly bought and with little character. I wished I could have brought the old ones I had. My head was filled with a foreign scent that was so unfamiliar; it kept me up for hours on end. Meanwhile, Dan dreamed blissfully on the opposite side of me, unaccompanied for one rare moment, and not making any sound unless I held my breath and focused on the sound of his own patterned breaths.

I couldn't sleep then, and I couldn't sleep when Raphael was in my bed again because the smell of him by my side, and the smell of him lingering on my sheets, my pillows, my room, was like a pair of hands wrapped tightly around my throat. Extremely so that I had to turn on my back and breathe deeply ten times in a row just to feel normal again. Just to turn back on my side and stare at him again.

The darkness of my room was a cover up. His face didn't look the same, his shoulders didn't look the same, and the rest of his body was a limp shape beneath the covers. If I squinted my eyes, I could pretend he was someone else.

I squinted my eyes.

He moved, a little bit, a small shift, and I closed my eyes.

Pretending was a side-job now, a seasonal occupation. Except it seemed like every season was Raphael-season, where trees only sprouted green leaves under his command, and flowers only bloomed if he wanted them to.

The covers slid down an inch from his shoulders, and I watched as a section of his skin glittered in the dark before my eyelids weighed heavy and I lost sense of what was real and what was just a piece of my imagination.

—

Raphael lingered like the shadow of a forgotten furniture piece.

All I had to do was be there, stare at him as he writhed, and his body twisted. Sometimes he let me hold his hips in place, and sometimes he didn't ask for anything more than my eyes on his body.

Mine was a bridge he used to get to the way things were before, but he always seemed to forget something. Things like the morning cup of coffee when we woke up to tangled limbs, or the shower gel that lay half-used in his shower, in his apartment. Or the sound of his records that played in the back when I volunteered to make breakfast, and the hitching sound the player made every time it came across a scratch. He would laugh, and tell me a ridiculous story of how this one was scratched after a drunken night, or the other from a jealous ex-boyfriend who thought they were the perfect choice of weapon. They were. But he also forgot me. It seemed like every time he clenched around me, he would lock his wrists in a pair of invisible handcuffs, and declare that as an excuse not to reach out and card his fingers through my hair like he used to, or lace our fingers together. Or even touch himself. He never touched him self after, and I never volunteered.

I found myself dividing him into three different versions of himself. The one he used to be, and the one he became when Scarlet or Dan were around,  the version of himself when we were alone in my room after 1am, and the version of himself when we were alone somewhere else at a more reasonable hour.

The latter was the one I found myself craving the most. The one where he would be looking at me like I was more than just someone he liked to fuck. Talk to me about things other than what he was going to do with his teeth, and how he was going to twist his hips. Things about his tattoo ideas, his fear of sharp needles that became a dark undertone neither of us ever brought up. I would imagine the mark on his thigh, but never allowed myself to voice my thoughts. Things about his apartment, even though I hadn't been in almost a month, and I missed how every inch of it was a reflection of himself. Sometimes he mentioned his friends, even though I never met them, but I learned all their names and background stories on how they met, and where they worked, and who they were seeing.