PROLOGUE

Straight boys fuck you over.

They screw you inside out until there’s nothing left but your teeth, and hair, and the remains of your vaporized fragments hanging loosely against the drain of their bathtub.

They walk around wearing the stench of the last girl they kissed and then whisper in your ear, morning nectar still dripping off of the edge of their mouths how they wouldn’t really mind having a taste of you, but hell, you have no taste because they’ve all but sucked it out the night before when they called you at three in the deepest point of dawn, hungry, expecting the world to remain still — expecting your existence to remain platonic.

Peel you off your skin, and pop you in their mouth like a cherry.

They smile when you bite off skin with your teeth after their touch and dye your hair black in exchange of their grin. Black dye masks how damaged you are under all the pigment and the gloss of the straightening iron. Because it burns, and it only burns, and he burns you out like the cigarette dangling on the edge of his mouth.

“We can’t because I’m not.”

He puts you out with a drag of his boot, making sure to slough you sweet and slow against the gravel until he’s sure your light is out; and disregards your shadow folded over his once again because all you’ll ever be is—

(—a boy)

—a friend.

I’ll tell you a secret.

It’s always the kiss you want. Screw the guttural gasps of desperation and the cold sweat stained sheets because nothing compares to that mouth — the same one that lies to you about the distance from where you stand, the untold desire keeping you in circles, holding you right there. There — where you’re only friends. Only friends—we’re bros, right? You’re my other half. I have your back.

It’s not only your back that they have though. That’s never the case. Never ever, when all they can remind you every nine o’clock, is your existence being their sanctuary, and everything, your everything—every inhale, afterthought, piece; every tendril of your being, they have it wrapped around their finger like a fragile little scarlet string and they know. They are painfully aware of the fact—your lingering stare, the parched lips, the shaking fingers, the barely functional heart that’s aching under the gates of your bones, they fucking know and wear it as a charm but they will always, always choose to be blind when you do take a step because—we’re bros, right?

So. We can’t because I’m not.

Not what? You fight the urge to scream into their face, rip yourself apart so they’d understand. Just so you can understand. But you don’t. You never do.

So instead, you break your bones in to straighten your fibres out and everything keeping you together, because you’ll lose if you don’t. Losing to him is losing him and losing him is losing to him.

And that’s what you do. You continue to feed them, and they proceed to take all that they can get, while the remaining pieces are left to cry instead of sleep, and even after everything, they’re still digging around in the damn mud pot of contradiction, trying to bury their head in because they will never have the heart to look at you.

He won’t ever dare to take a look at you.

That’s his promise — because you’re his friend, and you fucking can’t because he’s not.

I’m not. He reminds you after he eats everything you’ve plated for him that you have to offer. We can’t.

He folds you down like paper, and rests you into the bottom of their cup to brew — but he never drinks you up. So you sit there, and you question all the times he has said that he loved you.

Because does he really?

Straight boys fuck you over.

But boys in denial fuck you up even worse.

Fault Line

2018

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