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The coffee shop on the corner of Oakwood smelled of toasted cinnamon and burnt coffee, a combination that at any other time he would have found unpleasant, but today barely registered in his conscious mind. He was sitting at the table by the window, the same table he always chose since he was eighteen and discovered that from there he could see the entrance to his father's store without being seen. It had been eight years now. Eight years sitting in the same spot, ordering the same thing—a vanilla latte with whipped cream that Rhae always made fun of, calling it "a twelve-year-old girl's drink"—and looking through that foggy glass as if it were a portal to another life.
A life where he wasn't Aerion Targaryen, the second son of Maekar Targaryen, working in the accounting office of the family business surrounded by cousins and siblings who looked at him weird because he didn't fit in, because he was too quiet, too intense, too much of something that no one could ever name but everyone could feel. A life where he was just a boy sitting in a cafe waiting for his younger sister to arrive so he could rehearse a love confession that was probably going to go wrong.
He ran his hands through his hair. He had been wearing his hair longer than usual lately, falling over his shoulders in an almost platinum blonde shade that he had inherited from his father. He looked at his reflection in the window and frowned. He looked nervous. He looked too nervous. The long-sleeved black shirt he had put on with so much care that morning now seemed too formal, too pretentious, as if he were going to a job interview instead of rehearsing what he was going to say to Duncan.
Duncan.
Just thinking the name made him feel that thing in his stomach, that kind of emptiness that filled and emptied at the same time, like the ocean waves he had seen once in Lys when he was fifteen and his father had taken them all on vacation before the business became the only thing that mattered. Duncan, Dunk, Dunky. Everyone called him differently but he had always called him Duncan, from the first day, because when they met, Duncan introduced himself that way, with his hand extended and a crooked smile that made him forget his own name for three full seconds.
Three seconds. He had counted.
The waiter passed by his table for the third time and Aerion had to order another vanilla latte just to justify that he was still there taking up space. The young man—a blonde guy with an eyebrow piercing he hadn't seen before—smiled at him understandingly, as if he knew exactly what was going on, though obviously he had no idea. Nobody had any idea. That was the problem with being secretly in love with someone who probably didn't even see you as a viable option: no one could help you because no one knew, and those who did know—those who had noticed that something was wrong with Aerion Targaryen, that he stared too much, that he blushed for no reason when a certain name was mentioned—preferred not to say anything because talking about it meant making it real, and making it real was uncomfortable.
The bell on the cafe door rang and Aerion looked up.
Rhae entered like she entered everywhere: as if the entire world owed her something and she was about to collect. She wore her white hair tied up in a messy bun that looked like it had been redone in the car, a tight black dress that ended above her knees, and heels that made her legs look even longer than they already were. She was twenty years old but could pass for twenty-five effortlessly, or for seventeen if she put on an innocent face, which she did with alarming frequency when it suited her. Her lips were red—always red, always perfect, always as if she had just bitten her lips intentionally—and her eyes, that same Targaryen violet but darker, deeper, more dangerous, scanned the room in a second before settling on him.
"Aerion," she said, and it wasn't a greeting. It was a sentence.
She sat across from him without waiting for an invitation, crossed her legs, dropped her black purse on the table with a sharp thud, and looked around as if searching for something.
"Are you going to order something or did you just come to watch me suffer?" Aerion asked, trying to sound casual and failing miserably.
"I'm not hungry," Rhae replied, and then her eyes stopped on the newly arrived vanilla latte. "God, you're still drinking that shit. It looks like a Barbie milkshake."
"I like it," he said, defending it out of inertia even though he knew it was useless.
"Obviously you like it. It's you."
There was no malice in her tone, or at least not enough to dwell on. Rhae had the ability to make observations that sounded like insults but were really just... Rhae being Rhae. Aerion had gotten used to that after twenty years of being her older brother. You get used to everything. To the cold, to the fire, to the sister who tells you you're ridiculous before asking if you slept well.
He cleared his throat. His hands were sweating around the cup and that irritated him because it was a physical reaction he couldn't control, a symptom of something he wanted to keep orderly and rational but that refused to cooperate.
"So," he began, and his voice came out hoarser than expected. He coughed. "So... I want you to listen to me. This is... I need to practice. What I'm going to say to him."
It took Rhae exactly two seconds to understand who he was referring to. Her eyes narrowed—he used the English word in his head, *se estrecharon*, he corrected mentally, it was terrible how he sometimes slipped into Spanish when he was nervous—and she leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest with an expression that was a mix of curiosity and anticipated amusement.
"To Duncan," she said. It wasn't a question.
"To Duncan," Aerion confirmed.
"Alright. Talk."
"Don't interrupt me."
"I'm not going to interrupt you."
"You're going to interrupt me."
"Aerion. Talk. Now."
He took a deep breath. He looked out the window toward his father's store, where he could see the neon sign that read "Targaryens" in red and white letters that blinked every few seconds as if they had a short circuit no one bothered to fix. Duncan was in there. Probably helping a customer, probably with that way he had of moving around the store as if it were his home, as if he belonged there, as if he had always belonged there. And that, thinking that, that Duncan belonged to that world that Aerion found suffocating, provoked a strange mix of pride and jealousy he couldn't process, so he shoved it into that mental drawer where he kept all the things he couldn't process and that was getting dangerously full.
"Duncan," he said, and saying the name out loud, even as part of a rehearsal, made his heart race in a pathetic way that he recognized as such but couldn't avoid. "Duncan, I... I need to tell you something. And I need you to listen to me until the end because if you interrupt me I won't be able to finish and then I'll just stand there like an idiot staring at you and that would be worse than what it's already going to be, which is already pretty bad, so... please."
He paused. Rhae didn't say anything. She was looking at him with that neutral expression that could mean anything.
"I fell in love with you," he continued, and the words came out faster now, as if he had broken a dam. "I fell in love with you and it wasn't a momentary thing, it wasn't like in the movies where someone looks into your eyes and suddenly everything makes sense, although... although a bit of that happened too, the first time I saw you, but that's not the important part. The important part is what happened after. What kept happening. You started working at my father's store and I... I was there, as always, doing numbers in the back office, and one day I came out looking for a file and I saw you. You were organizing the shelves in the electronics section, that corner nobody touches because my father says it doesn't sell enough, and you were there, putting everything in its place as if it were the most important thing in the world, and I saw you smile. I don't know why you were smiling, you were probably thinking about something funny or probably thinking about nothing at all, people smile for no reason sometimes, but I saw that smile and it was like... like someone had punched me in the chest. Not painful. But like... like waking up."
He stopped. His throat was dry. He took a sip of the latte and the sweet taste felt irritating instead of comforting.
"And after that it was everything," he went on, lowering his voice because he realized he was speaking louder than normal and the piercing guy was looking at him from the counter. "It was everything, Rhae. Everything. It wasn't just the smile, it was... it was how you are. How you treat people. You're kind, Duncan is... he's kind to everyone, not in that fake way salespeople use so you buy more, but genuinely, as if he truly cared whether the customer left happy or not. And with me... with me it was different from the beginning. I don't know if it was actually different or if I just saw it differently because I was already... because I was already realizing things, but I felt like he treated me differently. He asked if I had eaten. He brought coffee to the office without me asking. He said goodnight when we closed the store and I stayed working late, and those goodnights... Rhae, they were different from the ones he said to everyone else. Softer. Longer. As if he wanted to say something more but didn't know how."
Rhae still wasn't speaking. Aerion couldn't read her expression and that made him more nervous, but he didn't stop because if he stopped he wasn't going to start again.
"And then I started going crazy," he said, and now his voice had a tremor he tried to disguise by taking another sip but it was still there, latent, like an earthquake under the surface. "I started going crazy because everything reminded me of him. I went to the supermarket and saw the brand of beer he likes and I'd stop to stare at it like an idiot. I heard a song on the radio and thought 'Duncan would like this song.' I saw a stray dog and thought 'Duncan would feel sorry for that dog.' I drove down the street and saw a car like his—not the same one, just the same model, same color—and my heart would stop for a second before I realized it wasn't him. And that... that's not normal, Rhae. That's not normal. I'm not like that. I'm not the kind of person who obsesses over someone, I'm the kind of person who has everything under control, who does things logically, who thinks before he feels, and suddenly I was thinking about Duncan every second of the day and I couldn't stop and I felt like I was drowning but at the same time like I was flying and that makes no sense, none at all, but it's what I feel and I feel it from the bottom of my heart and..."
He interrupted himself. He had stood up without realizing it, both hands resting on the table, leaning forward, and the latte cup had tipped over without him noticing, spilling a white puddle onto the surface that dripped over the edge. He sat back down abruptly, feeling his face burn.
"That's... basically what I want to say to him," he murmured, not looking at Rhae.
There was a silence. A long, endless silence that smelled of burnt coffee and toasted cinnamon and of the humiliation already creeping up his neck like hot water.
And then Rhae laughed.
It wasn't a full laugh, it was more of a cut-off exhale, a sound caught between astonishment and mockery, but it was enough for Aerion to feel the floor open beneath his feet.
"You're ridiculous," Rhae said, and her tone was dry, flat, as if she were saying "it's sunny outside." "Aerion, you're an absolute ridiculous fool. A complete and absolute ridiculous fool."
Aerion swallowed. He knew it. He knew it, but hearing it from his younger sister, in that way, with no filter, was like receiving a cold slap.
"Why?" he asked, and his voice sounded smaller than he wanted it to. "I'm doing it from the bottom of my heart, Rhae. Every word I said is true. Every single one."
"That's exactly why you're ridiculous," she replied, leaning forward with her elbows on the table, not caring about the puddle of latte inches from her sleeves. "Because if Duncan heard all that... that cheap romance novel monologue, he'd throw up from disgust. Seriously, Aerion. Did you hear yourself? 'Everything reminded me of him.' 'I felt like I was flying.' What planet do you live on? Duncan isn't like that. Duncan doesn't think like that. Duncan is..."
She made a vague gesture with her hand, as if the right words didn't exist or weren't worth looking for.
"Duncan is Duncan," she finished, which meant absolutely nothing.
"That tells me nothing," Aerion said, and there was an edge to his voice now, a defensiveness that arose whenever someone tried to define what he felt as wrong or disproportionate. "Just because he doesn't express things the way I do doesn't mean he can't feel something. Not all of us... not all of us have to be cold and pragmatic all the time."
"It's not about being cold, Aerion. It's about being normal. What you described isn't normal. It's obsessive and cheesy and... and pathetic, if you want me to be honest."
"I didn't ask you to be honest. I asked you to listen to me."
"And I listened. And I'm telling you it's garbage. If you say all that to Duncan he'll do one of two things: either he laughs in your face, or he gets uncomfortable and never speaks to you again. And I think I prefer the first one because at least laughter is quick and you get over it."
Aerion clenched his jaws. He felt that heat behind his eyes that preceded something he wasn't going to allow to happen, not here, not in front of Rhae, not in a public cafe where the piercing guy was already bringing napkins for the spilled latte with an expression of compassion that made him want to disappear.
"I disagree," he said, with more firmness than he felt. "I think there's a way to tell him things that... that doesn't have to be so..."
"So what? So true? So yours? Because that's the problem, Aerion. You want to tell him things your way, with your cheesy words and your novel metaphors, but Duncan doesn't speak that language. Understand? It's not that he doesn't like you, it's that he won't understand. He'll hear 'everything reminded me of you' and he'll think you're crazy. Because you are crazy. You're crazy for him and that makes you say crazy things and crazy things scare people."
That hit the mark. Not because Rhae was right—Aerion wasn't convinced of that—but because she touched the fear he already had, that fear he had been trying to ignore since he decided he was going to confess: the fear that Duncan would see him as something weird, as something that didn't fit in his world, as an anomaly that should be ignored or corrected.
The door bell rang again.
Aerion looked up and saw Myriah enter with that calm that characterized her, that way she had of moving through the world as if nothing could disturb her, as if she had seen enough pain and enough beauty not to be startled by either. She wore her brown hair loose over her shoulders, and a large grey coat that made her look thinner than she was. She was twenty-five but her eyes looked older, as if they carried something Aerion had never quite been able to identify.
Myriah saw the puddle of latte, saw Aerion's face, saw Rhae's satisfied expression, and in a second she seemed to calculate the entire situation without needing anyone to explain anything. That was what Myriah did. Read the air. Read rooms. Read people.
"What happened here?" she asked, sitting next to Aerion without asking permission, with the naturalness of someone who always has the right to be wherever they want to be.
"Nothing," Rhae said, too quickly.
"Aerion was practicing how to confess his love to Duncan," Myriah said, not as a question, but as a statement. "And what did you do?"
"I gave him my opinion."
"Your opinion. Sure."
Myriah looked at Aerion. She looked at him in that way only she could, without judgment, without mockery, without that impatience Rhae had for anything that didn't fit her vision of the world. She just looked at him, and in that gaze there was something dangerously close to compassion, though Myriah would never have admitted it was compassion because she didn't believe in compassion, she believed in action.
"And what do you think?" Aerion asked her, surprised by how much he needed to hear a voice that wasn't Rhae's.
Myriah leaned back in her chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. That was another *thing* Aerion admired about her: that she took the time to think before speaking. That she didn't throw words like darts without aiming, the way Rhae did.
"What if you give him a gift?" she said finally, lowering her gaze to him. "Or invite him out. Something simple. Without all the..." she made a circular gesture with her hand that clearly referred to the monologue he had just heard, or at least the essence of it. "Without all that."
Aerion felt a small spark of hope. It was a sensible idea. Practical. Myriah had always been the most practical of the three.
"No," Rhae said, and her voice was sharp, like a blade. "No, no, no. Drop that, Myriah."
Myriah looked at her calmly. "Why not?"
"Because Duncan isn't like that. He doesn't like cheesy gifts or formal invitations or any of that shit. If Aerion gives him something, Duncan will think it's weird. If he invites him to dinner or something, Duncan will think it's a joke. It's better if he forgets about this whole being tender and romantic thing because Duncan doesn't like any of that shit. Understand? None. Of. That. Shit."
Every word was pronounced with brutal clarity, as if Rhae were hammering nails into a coffin. Aerion felt the small spark of hope Myriah had ignited slowly extinguish, like a candle in a draft.
But Myriah didn't flinch. Myriah never flinched in front of Rhae. That was something Aerion had always admired and Rhae had always hated.
"Shut up, Rhae," Myriah said, and it wasn't a yell or a whisper, it was simply an instruction, given with the same tranquility used to say "pass the salt." "You're talking without knowing what you're talking about."
"Me? Without knowing? I know Duncan better than you, Myriah. Much better."
"Knowing someone to drink with them isn't the same as knowing someone."
That left Rhae without a response for a second, and Aerion noticed—because he noticed everything when it came to Duncan, because his brain had become a machine for processing information related to Duncan—that Rhae had a micro-reaction, a blink that lasted a fraction of a second too long, a tension in her jaw that appeared and disappeared. But she didn't say anything, and Aerion was too distracted to analyze that reaction with the attention it deserved.
Myriah turned to him again.
"Aerion. Listen to me. You don't have to give him a three-page monologue. Nor do you have to invite him to a dinner with candles and violins. But you can do smaller things. Give him something he truly likes. Not flowers, not chocolates, none of that. Think about what Duncan likes. What does he like?"
"Movies," Aerion said, and saying it he realized how much he knew about Duncan, how much information he had accumulated without realizing, like a collector filling shelves without thinking about why he fills them. "He likes action movies, from the eighties and nineties. He has a collection of DVDs in his apartment that..." he stopped, because saying "that I've seen every time I've been there" sounded weird even to him.
"DVDs," Myriah repeated, without asking uncomfortable questions. "And video games?"
"Yes. He plays a lot. He has an old console that he says is better than the new ones because 'they have soul,' those were his exact words."
Myriah smiled. It was a small smile, almost imperceptible, but it was there, and Aerion clung to it like a shipwrecked man to a piece of wood.
"Then give him something like that. A game he doesn't have. A movie he's been looking for. Something that says 'I know you' without having to say 'I know you.' Because that's what you are, Aerion. Someone who pays attention. Someone who notices things. Use that."
It was good advice. It was advice that made sense, that felt real and attainable and didn't involve standing up in the middle of nowhere to recite a monologue that would make him look like a character in a bad play. Aerion felt he could breathe again, that the weight on his chest was lightening even if it didn't disappear completely.
"Thank you, Myriah," he said, and he said it with a sincerity that sounded almost painful in the cafe environment. "Truly. Thank you."
Myriah leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. It was a quick, dry gesture, typically Myriah: affection delivered in small, precise doses, like medication. Her lips were cold and he smelled her perfume, something floral but not sweet, something that always reminded him of his grandmother's house when he was a child, though he didn't know why.
"You're welcome," she said, and she was already standing up, adjusting her coat, preparing to leave because Myriah never stayed too long in any place, as if the world charged her for every minute she remained still. "Think about it. You don't have to decide anything today."
And she left. Just like that. She walked toward the door with that measured step that seemed unhurried but somehow got her everywhere faster than everyone else, the bell rang once more, and she disappeared into the street without looking back.
The silence she left was immediately filled by Rhae.
"Good thing she's gone," she said, and her tone was pure relief, as if she had been holding something in she could finally release. "Because all that advice is useless with Duncan, Aerion. Seriously. A DVD? A video game? Is that what Myriah considers a good strategy? Duncan isn't going to look at a DVD and think 'oh, how nice, Aerion knows me.' He's going to look at a DVD and think 'oh, how weird, why is Aerion giving me this?' And then he's going to put it in a drawer and forget it exists."
"You don't have to be so..."
"So what? So honest? Because someone has to be in this family, Aerion, and clearly it's not going to be Myriah with her teen magazine advice or you with your delusions of romantic grandeur. Someone has to tell you the truth, even if it hurts."
Aerion squeezed his hands around the empty cup. The latte had gone cold and the puddle on the table was starting to dry, leaving a sticky residue that the piercing guy would probably have to clean. He felt guilty about that, about the mess he had made, and he also felt guilty for feeling guilty about something so stupid when he had bigger problems.
"You sounded pathetic," Rhae said, and now her voice had something different, something Aerion couldn't immediately identify. "What you said before. The monologue. It sounded... pathetic. And I don't want you to embarrass yourself more than you're already going to when Duncan rejects you."
"I don't know that he'll reject me," Aerion said, although the truth was he did know, deep down, in that place where he kept the things he didn't want to look at.
"You'll know if you say all those things to him. That's why I'm telling you not to do it. Not because I want to hurt you, Aerion, but because I don't want you to humiliate yourself more than necessary."
That was... strange. That almost sounded like concern, and Rhae wasn't concerned about anyone but herself, so Aerion distrusted immediately, though he didn't know exactly what to distrust.
"So what do I do?" he asked, and heard how his own voice betrayed defeat. "If I can't tell him how I feel and I can't give him anything and I can't invite him out, what do I do? Do I just stare at him for the rest of my life?"
Rhae looked at him fixedly. There was something in her eyes, something that shone and moved beneath the surface like a fish under water, but before Aerion could catch it, it disappeared.
"Have you ever flirted with him?" Rhae asked, and the change of subject was so abrupt that Aerion took a second to process it.
"Flirted?"
"Yes, Aerion. Flirted. You know what flirting is, right? Long looks. Unnecessary touches. Double-meaning comments. Those things."
Aerion felt his ears turn red and hated that his body gave him away like that, hated that he couldn't control the blood circulation in his own face.
"No," he admitted, and the word cost him.
Rhae laughed. This time it was a longer, more open laugh, a laugh that shook her shoulders and made the woman at the next table look over curiously.
"No," Rhae repeated, as if savoring the word. "Of course not. And how do you expect Duncan to know you like him if you've never given him the slightest hint? Do you think Duncan is a fortune teller? Do you think he'll read your mind and say 'oh, look, Aerion is in love with me, how nice'? No, Aerion. Duncan isn't going to do that. Duncan needs to be hit in the face with the information, but not with words, because words don't work with him. You need actions."
"What kind of actions?"
Rhae leaned forward. The puddle of latte was almost dry but she didn't seem to notice or care. Her eyes shone with something Aerion recognized as excitement, though he didn't know what kind.
"The best way to conquer Duncan," she said, lowering her voice as if she were about to share a state secret, "is by bringing out the savage he has inside."
Aerion blinked. "The savage?"
"The savage, Aerion. Duncan has a wild side. Everyone knows it. Lots of girls can confirm it if you don't believe me. They all tell you: Duncan is a savage in bed. He's intense, he's rough, he's... he's something else. And if you want him to truly notice you, you have to connect with that part of him. Not the part that brings coffee to the office and says goodnight. The other one. The one he doesn't show everyone."
Aerion felt something tighten in his stomach. It wasn't exactly displeasure, it was something more complicated than that, something that mixed curiosity with discomfort with an interest he didn't want to admit he had.
"That could end up annoying him," he said, though his voice didn't sound as convincing as he would have liked. "If I try... if I try to be that way and he doesn't interpret it well, he might think I'm being aggressive or..."
"No," Rhae cut in, waving her hand impatiently. "He's not going to think that. He's going to feel flattered, Aerion. Men like Duncan don't get that kind of attention from other men. They're going to feel complimented. That someone sees them that way, that someone desires them that way... that doesn't bother anyone. That feeds the ego, and Duncan's ego, even if it doesn't seem like it, is big. Knowing Duncan's tastes, if you approach him with that energy, with that intensity, he'll surely fall at your feet. I'm telling you."
"Seriously?" Aerion asked, and he hated how he sounded: hopeful, naive, like a teenager reading advice from a magazine he shouldn't be reading.
Rhae looked at him for a long moment. Her expression was hard to read: there was something of smugness, something of knowledge, something that almost looked like... calculation. But Aerion was too tired, too emotionally drained to analyze the nuances of his younger sister's expression.
"Seriously," Rhae said, and smiled. "Tell Duncan to grab a beer one of these days."
"A beer," Aerion repeated.
"A beer. No concerts, no dinners, no gifts. A beer. In a bar. Something simple, something Duncan likes, something that doesn't make him feel like he's on a romantic date because that will scare him off. A beer, a table, the two of you. And then you see what happens."
"Duncan always invites you to have a beer," Aerion said, and he couldn't help there being a trace of something in his voice, something that sounded almost like resentment, though it wasn't resentment, it was something closer to confusion, to that question he didn't allow himself to fully formulate: why you and not me?
Rhae didn't blink. "Yes. Because I don't invite him to concerts."
"What's wrong with concerts?"
"Everything, Aerion. Everything is wrong with concerts when you propose them to Duncan. You invited him to a concert once and he refused. Remember? He refused because that's not what Duncan likes. Duncan likes a beer, a loud bar, people around, maybe a game on TV. Not a concert where he has to sit and listen to music and pretend he cares. That's why Duncan is never going to take you into account if you keep acting like a cheesy piece of shit. Because you are a cheesy piece of shit, Aerion. And Duncan doesn't like cheesy pieces of shit."
Each word fell like a stone in still water, creating ripples that expanded and expanded until the entire pond was stirred up. Aerion sat there, looking at the dry residue of the spilled latte on the table, and felt something that could be shame or could be something worse, something that had no name but felt like being unmasked in public without knowing what mask had fallen off.
Rhae stood up. She picked up her purse from the table with a fluid motion, adjusted her little black dress, and looked down at him with an expression Aerion couldn't decipher.
"Think about it," she said, and they were the same words Myriah had said minutes before, but in Rhae's mouth they sounded completely different, they sounded like an order more than advice, like something expected to be obeyed without questions. "A beer. Nothing else. If you're not capable of doing something so simple, then you deserve for Duncan to never look at you the way you want him to look at you."
And she left. The bell rang for the third time in less than fifteen minutes, and Aerion was left alone at the table with the dry puddle and the empty cup and the feeling that he had lost something without knowing exactly what.
He looked out the window. His father's store was still there, the sign was still blinking, and somewhere inside that building Duncan was still existing, oblivious to everything, oblivious to the fact that Aerion had just been dissected and rebuilt and dissected again by two sisters who loved him in ways he didn't quite understand.
A beer.
He could do that. He could ask Duncan to have a beer. It was the simplest thing in the world. It was what Rhae did all the time without thinking, what anyone could do, what a five-year-old could do: ask someone to share something.
But nothing was simple when it came to Duncan. Nothing had been simple since the day he saw him smile in that corner of the store nobody touched.
The piercing guy passed by his table again.
"Another latte?" he asked, with a shy smile.
Aerion looked at him. He saw a young guy, probably a student, probably working part-time, probably with his own story and his own problems. He saw someone who knew nothing about Targaryens or family businesses or impossible loves or sisters who destroyed you and rebuilt you in the same breath.
"Yes," Aerion said. "Another vanilla latte. Please."
The guy nodded and left. Aerion leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and thought about Duncan.
Always, always, always thinking about Duncan.
The drive back home was a blur of neon lights scattered on the wet asphalt and traffic lights that seemed to turn red exclusively to annoy him. Aerion drove with one hand loose on the steering wheel and the other resting on the window, feeling the cold night wind hit his knuckles. The city was breathing, retreating from the day's fever, but he couldn't hear it. His mind was a constant echo of Rhae's and Myriah's words, bouncing off the walls of his skull like rubber balls in a closed room. "You're an absolute ridiculous fool," "Duncan doesn't speak that language," "Someone who pays attention." He was exhausted. Not just physically from the hours in front of the accounting books and the tension of the cafe, but emotionally drained, as if someone had opened a valve in his chest and let all his energy spill out over the vanilla-stained table.
When he finally turned the corner of his street and parked the car in front of his building, the silence of the vehicle became overwhelming. He stayed there a minute, with the engine off, looking at the grey brick facade of his apartment. The second-floor windows were dark. He knew that inside awaited the disaster he himself had left before leaving that morning: the mountain of unfolded clothes, the dishes from the previous night's dinner in the sink, the books and folders from the store scattered on the floor. It was ironic, he thought with a bitter smile, that a man so obsessed with control and precision in numbers lived in such absolute chaos. But order required energy, and energy was something Aerion Targaryen had exhausted to the last drop.
He climbed the stairs dragging his feet, keys jingling in his hand. Upon opening the door, the familiar smell of old wood, paper, and a touch of dust greeted him like a warm hug.
Before he could even reach the light switch, a roar of enthusiasm shook the silence of the apartment.
"Bobby!" was all he managed to say before a missile of golden fur and huge paws bowled him over.
His dog, a ninety-pound Golden Retriever named Bobby, had been waiting for him. He wasn't in his bed, or in the living room, but, as usual, he had usurped the sacred place: he was lying in the exact center of Aerion's bed, surrounded by an ocean of tangled sheets. Hearing the door, Bobby had jumped off the bed and was now stamping his front paws against Aerion's chest, barking with that overflowing, clumsy joy that only large dogs manage without knocking over furniture (though sometimes they knocked over people).
Aerion let out a tired laugh, the first genuinely happy sound he had made in hours, and let himself be pushed backward by the animal's weight. He buried his hands in Bobby's thick, golden neck fur, scratching him behind the ears.
"Down, Bobby, down. You're as heavy as a damn yacht," he murmured, though he didn't really try to push him away. He loved that welcome. It was unconditional, required no filters, no rehearsals, no fear of rejection. Bobby didn't judge his internal monologues or his vanilla lattes.
He took off his black jacket and let it fall over the back of a chair already covered by three sweaters. The bed was calling to him. The room was, effectively, a monumental disaster. There were randomly matched socks on the desk, coffee cups with dry residue on the nightstand, and a pile of store bills he had brought home to review that now served as a temporary carpet.
Aerion didn't bother to tidy anything up. He kicked off his shoes, unbuckled his belt, and walked to the bed, collapsing face-down onto the mattress with a groan of relief. The exhaustion of a very long day, of a very long life, seemed to compress into his shoulders. Bobby, thinking this was a new game, jumped back on the bed and curled up next to him, resting his heavy head on Aerion's calf.
From his position, face down with his head turned to the side, his gaze landed on the full-body mirror leaning against the wall, next to the closet. It was an old mirror, with a slightly chipped wooden frame, and in one of its corners, held with tape, was a photograph printed on glossy photo paper.
It was a group photo. There was Myriah, with her grey coat and that calm smile that seemed to understand the universe; Rhae, with her hair down and a mocking grimace directed at the camera; and himself, Aerion, with an expression of surprise that barely hinted at a smile. But the center of the photo, the visual magnet that always dragged Aerion's gaze, was Duncan.
Duncan was behind them, his arms wrapping Rhae and Myriah in a group hug, but his right hand extended further, resting on Aerion's shoulder. It wasn't a casual hug. The way Duncan's fingers slightly gripped the fabric of Aerion's shirt, the closeness of his body, the way he looked at the camera with that broad, confident, slightly lopsided smile... it was a gesture of pure male friendship, yes, but for Aerion it was a sharp reminder of what he yearned for. He remembered perfectly the weight of that arm on him. He remembered the smell of clean sweat, coffee, and that cheap but intoxicating cologne Duncan wore. It was the photo he looked at every night before sleeping and the first he saw when waking up. The proof that Duncan existed in his orbit.
With a sigh that hurt his ribs, Aerion rolled onto his back, gently pushing Bobby away. The room was in shadow, illuminated only by the orange light of a streetlamp filtering through the blinds. He pulled his phone from his back pocket. The screen lit up, blinding him for a second.
He opened the photo gallery. The algorithm of his digital memory was saturated with Duncan. The gallery was divided into meaningless screenshots, bills, and then... Duncan. Hundreds of photos of Duncan.
Photos he had taken secretly or with the excuse of "documenting work." In the first, Duncan was on a rented fishing boat, the last time they went to the lake. He wore a salt-stained baseball cap, a sleeveless shirt that exposed his sun-marked biceps, and held a shiny silver fish thrashing in the air. Duncan was laughing, head thrown back, the wind hitting his dark hair. Aerion remembered thinking, when taking that photo, that he wanted to lick the line of sweat running down Duncan's neck to his collarbone.
He swiped his finger. Another photo. Duncan at the pool at Myriah's parents' house. He was coming out of the water, body dripping, abdominal muscles tensed from the cold, water tracing transparent paths through the hair on his chest. His eyes were squinted against the sun and he was about to throw a rubber ball at whoever was taking the photo. Aerion stared at the drops at the waistband of the swimsuit, the trail of dark hair disappearing beneath the fabric. He felt like a voyeur, miserable, but couldn't stop looking.
He swiped again. Duncan at work. The photo was less sharp, taken from afar. He was organizing boxes in the backroom of the Targaryen store. He wore the company's green apron, stained with dust, and was focused, frowning, biting his lower lip like he always did when trying to decipher a barcode. It was such a mundane, everyday image that it hurt. Duncan in his element, oblivious to the devastating storm he was causing in Aerion's chest.
He was so absorbed in contemplating Duncan's jaw in that photo, that the sudden buzzing and brutal vibration of the phone in his hand made him jump. The screen changed abruptly, showing an incoming call. The name on the screen glowed in white letters on a green background: Duncan.
Aerion's heart stopped for a full second, and then fired like a race car engine. Adrenaline hit his system, clearing the exhaustion in one fell swoop. He jumped up in bed, startling Bobby, who barked in annoyance.
Breathe. It's just Duncan. Your friend Duncan. The guy you're hopelessly in love with and who your sister told you to ask for a beer, he thought. His fingers were trembling. He was going to let it ring once more to seem nonchalant, but the panic that he might hang up won. He swiped to answer and brought the phone to his ear.
"Hello?" his voice sounded raspy, too hoarse. He cleared his throat.
"Aerion!" Duncan's voice exploded in the earpiece, vibrant, thunderous, as it always was. He sounded like he was in the middle of a pitched battle. In the background, Aerion could hear the muffled noise of a crowd, the sound of boxes being dragged, the beeping of cash registers. "Brother, you're so lucky you didn't come to work today, I swear to God!"
Aerion closed his eyes, clenching his fist on the sheet. Duncan's voice was a balm and a stab at the same time.
"Why? What happened?" he asked, trying to sound relaxed, failing miserably.
"The store is too packed, man. It's hell. Since we opened this morning people haven't stopped coming in. Must be the season sales or something, but it's crazy. Your dad is furious, yelling at everyone, and I've been here six hours without sitting down. It's a fucking mess."
Aerion let out a low chuckle. He could almost see it: Duncan with a dirty apron, hair disheveled, running from one side to the other with that inexhaustible energy that characterized him, arguing with a customer or carrying a box that was too heavy.
"Damn," Aerion said, leaning back against the headboard. "I really needed a break today. I would've had a heart attack if I were there in the middle of that circus."
"Yeah, they told me you didn't come because you felt sick or something," Duncan said, and despite the background noise, his voice dropped a tone, becoming softer, more attentive. "Are you okay, man? It's just... well, you work a lot. Too much. You're always stuck in the office or bringing work home. You needed the rest, seriously."
Aerion swallowed. You work a lot. Duncan noticed his absences. Duncan worried.
"Yeah, it's that. I just needed a breather. Clear my head a bit, you know."
"Sure, sure. We all need it sometimes," there was a pause. The background noise seemed to dim a bit, as if Duncan had stepped away to a quieter corner. "Hey, that's why I was calling. To see if you're up for it. Are you going to trivia night at Cross's bar tonight?"
Trivia night. Wednesdays. It was a tradition among store employees and some friends. Aerion hated trivia, truth be told. Hated the noise, the warm beer, the stupid questions. He only went because Duncan went. Just to sit in a corner of the table and watch him laugh and yell the answers. But today, after the emotional dissection session at the cafe, he felt like a wounded animal. He didn't have the energy to pretend normalcy.
"Nah, I don't think so, Dunk," Aerion said, using the nickname he hated to love. "I'm not going tonight. I'm... I'm busy tonight. I have to go over some overdue invoices and honestly I'm not in the mood for the bar."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Unusual for Duncan, who never left gaps in a conversation.
"Ah, okay. I get it," Duncan said, but his tone had changed. It was no longer the explosive voice from the beginning. It was flatter, almost cautious. "Hey, Aerion... did something happen?"
"What do you mean if something happened?" Aerion's heart sped up. Was he that transparent? Could Duncan smell his misery through the phone?
"I don't know, man. It's just I've noticed you acting weird lately. And today you don't come to work, and now you say you're not going to the bar. If something's wrong, you know you can tell me, right? We're friends, damn it."
The word "friends" hit Aerion right in the stomach. We're friends. Of course. Friends. Friendly hugs. Friendly jokes.
"No, Dunk, seriously. Nothing's wrong. It's just accumulated exhaustion. You know how this is, numbers, paperwork, the old man going crazy..." Aerion lied, feeling bile in his throat. "All good."
"Sure?" Duncan insisted.
"Sure, I swear."
Another pause. Aerion could hear someone yelling Duncan's name in the distance, but Duncan didn't respond to the shouts. He was focused on the call.
"Hey, Aerion... can I tell you something?" Duncan's voice sounded strangely hesitant. As if he were chewing the words before spitting them out.
"Of course, Dunk. Tell me." Aerion pressed the phone against his ear, almost praying it was what his stupid, lovestruck mind wanted to hear, and hating himself for even thinking it.
"I'm planning to quit the job."
The world stopped. The background noise disappeared, Bobby's breathing, the humming of the fridge in the kitchen, everything evaporated into an absolute void.
"What?" the word came out as a dry whisper from Aerion's lips. "Quit? What do you mean quit? Are you talking about my father's store?"
"Yeah, man, the store. Targaryens," Duncan said, and now he sounded almost embarrassed. "I'm leaving the job, Aerion."
Aerion sat up on the bed, cold panic running through his veins like liquid ice.
"But... why?" he managed to articulate, though his mind was in total chaos. "Dunk, you've been there for years. You have a good salary, my father trusts you, the employees adore you... What happened? Did my old man say something? Did someone bother you? Tell me, I can talk to him, I can fix it."
"No, no, it's not that," Duncan cut in quickly. "It's nothing like that. Your dad has been great to me. It's just... look, I can't tell you the exact why right now. It's something personal, man. It's a move I have to make, but I swear it's not for anything bad."
"What do you mean you can't tell me?" Aerion felt a mix of anger and terror. Duncan was his anchor in that place. If Duncan left, he would be trapped in that accounting office, surrounded by relatives who looked at him weird, without the only reason he endured going to work. "Dunk, seriously, explain to me."
"I can't, Aerion. Not yet. But I promise, when things settle down I'll tell you everything," Duncan's voice sounded sincere, but there was an edge of melancholy Aerion had never heard from him. "It's just... damn, I just realized our time is running out."
"Our time? What do you mean our time is running out?" Aerion was practically begging.
"That we're getting old, man. That things change. Tomorrow I'm leaving, you're going to end up taking on more roles in the company, Myriah and Rhae have their own lives... the band is splitting up. That's why I was calling. To tell you we should take advantage and see each other as much as we can. That we shouldn't let routine separate us completely. That I'd like us to hang out more often before I leave the city."
Aerion felt a giant knot form in his throat. Before I leave the city. Duncan was leaving. Not just quitting, he was leaving. Panic threatened to suffocate him. He wanted to scream at him not to go, to stay, that he would give him anything, that he would do anything just not to lose him. But Rhae's words resonated in his head: "You're ridiculous... crazy things scare people." So he swallowed the knot and bit his tongue until he tasted blood.
"Yeah, yeah, you're right," Aerion said in a voice that sounded like it was coming from a tunnel. "We need to see each other. We can... we can go out for a beer one of these days. You and me."
"That's exactly it!" Duncan exclaimed, cheering up a bit. "A beer, something to eat, talk shit like the old days. I'd love that, man. Truly. Because the truth is I miss you when we're not together. Sometimes I think..."
"What?" Aerion asked, clinging to the phone.
"Nothing, forget it. Too late to get philosophical," Duncan let out a forced laugh. "Hey, but I swear I'm going to organize to..."
Suddenly, the sentence cut off. The background noise in the store spiked. The metallic clatter of something falling to the floor was heard, the screech of something slipping, and then Duncan's voice exploding, not on the phone, but as if he were talking to the whole room, the sound captured by the phone's microphone in a distorted way.
"Fuck!" Duncan yelled with all the force of his lungs, his voice raw and desperate. "My bracelet fell down the drain! I'm a fucking idiot!"
Aerion blinked, bewildered by the abrupt change.
"Dunk? What? What bracelet?" Aerion asked, confused, his heart still racing from the previous conversation, now shattered by the sudden panic in his friend's voice.
"The bracelet, Aerion!" Duncan's voice was back directly on the phone, but he sounded agitated, breathing heavily. "The leather bracelet! The one you gave me last year, remember? The one with the silver buckle! I was washing my hands in the backroom sink and it slipped. It fell straight down the drain grate, damn it!"
Aerion felt his heart shrink in a different way. The leather bracelet. He remembered perfectly. He had given it to him for his birthday. It was a simple dark brown braided leather band with a small silver buckle. Myriah was right: it was a gift that said "I know you" without having to say "I love you." Duncan wore it every day. Aerion had noticed, of course he had noticed, a thousand times, watching how the leather strap highlighted the thickness of his wrist, how the silver buckle gleamed when Duncan moved his hands as he spoke.
"Dunk, don't worry, I'll head over there and we'll get it out of the drain, I'll bring a screwdriver and..."
"No, no, no! Forget it, forget it!" Duncan cut in almost yelling, and in the background a deep, authoritative male voice was heard, which must have been Maekar Targaryen asking where he had gone. "Shit, your dad is calling me! Look, Aerion, I have to hang up. We'll talk later. See you at trivia at nine! Don't fail me!"
And he hung up. A dry, short, definitive click. Without giving Aerion time to say a single word more. Not a goodbye, not a "wait," not an "I haven't even said I'm going." Nothing. The phone emitted that monochrome, dead tone indicating the call had ended, and Aerion was left sitting on the edge of his bed, phone glued to his ear and mouth half-open, like an idiot trying to process what had just happened in the last three minutes.
He lowered the phone slowly. The screen returned to the photo gallery, to Duncan on the fishing boat, laughing with his head thrown back, the leather bracelet visible on his left wrist, catching a glint of sun.
Aerion stared at that wrist for a time he didn't know how to measure. It could have been thirty seconds. It could have been five minutes. The fact was, Bobby, still lying next to him on the bed, moved, rubbed his wet snout against Aerion's arm, and let out a guttural whine that seemed to say *are you going to do something or are you going to stay there staring at the phone all night like a traumatized person?*
Aerion blinked. He looked at the dog. He looked at the phone. He looked at the photo in the mirror, Duncan's hand on his shoulder, fingers gripping the fabric of his shirt.
And then something moved inside him. It wasn't exactly an idea, or a rational plan. It was more of an impulse, a kind of electric current running up his spine from the base to the back of his neck, making his hair stand on end. Something that looked like determination but was really a more volatile mix of panic, tenderness, and an absolute foolishness that Rhae would have called "pathetic" and Myriah would have called "direct action."
"It's not the end of the world," Aerion said out loud, repeating the words Duncan hadn't said but that Aerion imagined he would have said if he weren't running back to the store with a stained apron and disheveled hair. "It's not the end of the world. It's just a bracelet."
But it wasn't just a bracelet. And Aerion knew it.
He jumped to his feet, so abruptly that Bobby jumped off the bed scared and stood looking at him from the floor with ears drooped and tail between his legs, as if his owner had completely lost his mind.
"The port market," Aerion said, looking at himself in the full-body mirror. The boy looking back at him was a disaster: deep dark circles, the black shirt wrinkled, blonde hair falling over his shoulders as if he'd slept inside a hairdryer. "The port market closes at nine-thirty on Wednesdays. Night market day. The craftsman is still there. He has to still be there."
Bobby tilted his head.
"Don't look at me like that," Aerion told the dog, pointing his index finger at him. "You don't understand anything. You don't have anyone to buy bracelets for. Your life is easy."
Bobby wagged his tail, completely in agreement with that statement or completely oblivious to it, which was basically the same thing in Bobby's world.
Aerion looked at the clock on his phone. Eight-oh-three. Cross's bar was fifteen minutes away by car. Trivia started at nine. The port market was twenty minutes away by car in the opposite direction. If he went to the market first, found the bracelet, bought the bracelet, and then drove to Cross, he'd arrive at nine-fifteen or nine-twenty at the earliest. Late. But not too late. Not so late that Duncan would get mad. Not so late that he'd give up and leave.
And besides, an even bolder idea began to form in his mind. If he arrived at the bar with the new bracelet in his pocket, he could give it to Duncan during trivia. Not as a gift wrapped in tissue paper with a card that said "for you, with love." No. He would simply slide it across the table, with a beer in between, and say something casual like "here, so you'll stop crying over the drain." Something funny. Something light. Something that didn't sound like a love confession but like what Rhae called "being normal": a friendly gesture, no weight, no drama, no cheap novel monologues.
But beneath that gesture, hidden like the initials engraved on the original buckle, would be the truth. That Aerion had crossed half the city on a Wednesday night, that he had scoured a market about to close, that he had searched for a craftsman among a hundred stalls, all to replace a piece of leather that Duncan didn't even know had a meaning. And that, that invisible effort, was the only form of declaration Aerion felt capable of attempting.
It was Myriah's advice turned into action: "give him something that says 'I know you' without having to say 'I know you'."
It was Rhae's advice turned into reality: "a beer, a table, the two of you, no concerts or dinners or cheesy gifts."
A bracelet wasn't cheesy. A bracelet was practical. Duncan wore bracelets. Duncan liked bracelets. And if Aerion arrived at the bar with a beer in one hand and the bracelet in his pocket, he could do both things at once: give the gift and be there, present, normal, without yelling or crying or reciting poems.
"Alright," he told himself, pointing his finger at the mirror. "Alright. Quick shower. Clean clothes. Market. Cross. Nine-something. It works."
It worked. In theory it worked. Practice was another thing, because practice implied Aerion showering in less than five minutes, putting on clothes that weren't wrinkled, finding the car keys that were God knows where in that disastrous room, driving to the port, finding the craftsman, buying the bracelet, driving back downtown, parking in an area where he wouldn't get stuck in shitty traffic, and arriving at Cross's bar with a face that didn't look like a man who had just crossed the entire city chasing a piece of leather.
He got in the shower. The hot water hit the back of his neck and shoulders, and for a moment, just for a moment, he stood there, eyes closed, letting the heat dissolve the day's tension. The water fell on his blonde hair, flattening it against his skull, washing away the smell of coffee and anxiety down the drain. Irony. The drain. Everything went back to the drain.
He scrubbed his face with soap, rinsed, got out of the shower without bothering to dry his hair completely. He put on dark jeans he found on the back of a chair, a clean black t-shirt from the bottom of the second drawer, and the same long-sleeved black jacket from before because it was the only garment that made him feel moderately sure of himself, like thin armor smelling of spilled coffee.
The car keys were on top of the fridge. He didn't know how they'd gotten there. Bobby followed him to the door, barking.
"You stay," he told him, pointing a finger at him. "Don't get on the bed. And don't eat the invoices on the floor. They're important."
Bobby looked at him with an expression that said *I am going to get on the bed and I am going to chew every invoice I can find in the next forty-five minutes*.
Aerion sighed, closed the door, and went down the stairs two at a time. The air at the port had that taste of saltpeter and raw fish that Aerion always associated with the endings of things. The neon lights of the night market stalls flickered with an epidemic hum, reflecting in the puddles of dirty water splashing the uneven cobblestones. It was eight forty-five at night. The market was about to close, merchants were starting to cover their merchandise with plastic tarps, and Aerion ran through the narrow aisles like a madman, dodging stacked fruit crates and tourist couples walking too slowly.
He found the craftsman's stall at the very back, next to an old wooden pier where fishing boats dozed bobbing with the waves. The man was old, had sun-cured skin and dye-stained hands, and recognized him immediately.
"The bracelet boy," the craftsman said without looking up from the leather strap he was oiling. "I thought you wouldn't come back."
"I need one," Aerion panted, resting his hands on his knees to catch his breath. "A braided leather one. Dark brown. With a silver buckle."
The craftsman nodded slowly, bent down behind the counter, and pulled out a wooden box full of bracelets of all sizes and colors. Aerion looked at them with his heart in his throat. There they were. Dozens of interlaced leather strips, some with simple buckles, others with complicated engravings. His fingers trembled as he separated them, looking for the one that most resembled the one Duncan had lost down the drain that afternoon.
He found one. It was almost identical. Dark brown leather, braided in a four-cord pattern, with a brushed silver buckle that shone under the yellowish light of the stall's lantern. Aerion took it in his hands and turned it. The leather was soft, flexible, clearly handmade. He could imagine it on Duncan's wrist, perhaps adjusting to the warm skin, the cold metal against the wrist bone.
"This is it," he said, and his voice sounded too loud, too hopeful. "How much?"
"Twenty-five," the craftsman replied.
Aerion reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wallet. His fingers brushed the bills. Twenty-five dollars. It was nothing. It was nothing compared to what it meant. He was about to pull out the money when Rhae's voice exploded in his head like a bullet.
*"A cheesy piece of shit. That's what you are, Aerion. And Duncan doesn't like cheesy pieces of shit."*
He stood with his hand inside the wallet, fingers frozen over the twenty-dollar bill. The enthusiasm cooled in his veins like ice water injected directly into the bloodstream. Rhae was right. Rhae was always right when it came to Duncan. What was he doing? Did he really believe showing up at the bar with a replacement bracelet would make Duncan look at him differently? Duncan wasn't stupid. Duncan would immediately know that Aerion had crossed half the city, that he had searched a market about to close, that he had spent money and time replacing a piece of cheap jewelry that wasn't even irreplaceable. He would think it was weird. He would think it was intense. He would think all those things Rhae had told him he would think.
*"If Aerion gives him something, Duncan will think it's weird."*
His sister's words were a poison already running through his system, neutralizing any hint of hope Myriah had tried to inoculate him with that afternoon at the cafe. Aerion looked at the bracelet. He no longer saw a meaningful gift. He saw a trap. He saw a declaration of emotional dependency wrapped in leather and silver. He saw Duncan's face getting uncomfortable, Duncan's hand rejecting the gift, Duncan's voice saying "you didn't have to do that, man, it's just a bracelet" with that flat, distant tone he used when something made him uncomfortable.
"Son?" the craftsman's voice snapped him out of his paralysis. "Are you taking it or not?"
Aerion swallowed. The knot in his throat was so tight it almost kept him from breathing.
"No," he said, and the word came out like a scratch. "No, sorry. Leave it."
He left the bracelet on the counter and turned around. He felt empty, as if all his organs had been extracted and he'd been left with only skin and bones and shame. He walked two steps, three, four, eyes fixed on the wet ground, hating himself for being such a coward, hating Rhae for being right, hating Duncan for existing in a way that destroyed him so completely.
And then he saw it.
Turning his head, moving away from the craftsman's stall, his gaze fell on an object displayed at the stall next door. It wasn't a normal stall. It was a small, square table, covered with a black velvet cloth and dominated by a transparent glass display case. Inside the case, on a dark wooden stand, was a small dry willow branch. It was ugly, twisted, greyish, with withered leaves clinging to the twigs as if clinging to life out of pure stubbornness. It didn't look like much. In fact, it looked like something you could find on the floor of any forest and step on without realizing.
But there was a sign handwritten in purple ink on a piece of wrinkled parchment:
"ONE WISH WILLOW — $4.99"
Ask for a single wish. It will be granted. Only one. Forever. Think carefully about what you ask for.
Aerion stopped dead. He frowned. He looked at the branch, then the sign, then the branch again. It was ridiculous. It was the most absurd thing he had seen in his life. A dry willow branch in a display case. A wish for five dollars. It sounded like one of those tourist scams selling magic crystals and scented candles to attract love.
But something in the way the branch was arranged, something in the stillness of the object, something in the way the lantern's light seemed not to reflect off its dry leaves but be absorbed by them, kept him nailed to the spot. The seller of that stall was nowhere to be seen. There was no one shouting "buy your wish, only four ninety-nine!" It was just the branch, the sign, and the silence.
He thought of Duncan. He thought of Duncan's voice on the phone, broken, distant, talking about quitting, leaving the city, running out of time. He thought of what Myriah had said: "give him something that says 'I know you'." What did Duncan like? Movies. Video games. Beer. And weird things. Things that had a story, an anecdote, a symbolic weight that Duncan could turn over in his hands and say "this is cool, man." A one-wish willow branch wasn't cheesy. It wasn't a leather bracelet screaming "I'm in love with you." It was a curious object. It was something Duncan could put on his desk or on the shelf next to his DVDs and think of Aerion every time he saw it.
And if the wish worked... but wishes didn't work. That was absurd.
And yet.
Four ninety-nine. It was nothing. It was less than a vanilla latte.
Before his brain could argue against it, Aerion pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket, left it on the black velvet table, and grabbed one of the little packages left. He put it in a paper gift bag he found on the table.
He didn't buy the bracelet. He bought a wish.
And the wish, right now, wasn't for him. It was for Duncan. He was going to give him a wish. Duncan, who dreamed of acting, who wanted to quit, who felt time slipping through his fingers like sand... Duncan deserved a wish.
He left the port with the branch in his pocket and his heart racing, got in the car, and drove toward Cross's bar at full speed, praying not to hit traffic and to arrive before trivia ended.
Cross's bar smelled of spilled beer, kitchen grease, and cheap disinfectant. It was a long, narrow place, with exposed brick walls covered in sports team posters and black-and-white photographs of the old city. The ceiling was low, crossed by dark wooden beams from which Edison bulbs hung, casting a yellowish, sickly glow over the entire place. The music was an eighties classic playing too loud from ancient speakers that distorted the highs, and the murmur of conversations was a constant roar making it impossible to hear the person next to you unless you yelled.
Aerion entered and took three seconds to find the group. They were at the back table, the same one as always, a long, solid wooden table carved with the initials of a hundred previous customers and covered in crumpled napkins, wet coasters, and plastic cups. There were five chairs, but Duncan was standing by the bar, waiting his turn to order.
Rhae was sitting at the head, legs crossed, white hair loose over her shoulders, and red lipstick matching her leather boots. She had a beer in her hands she wasn't drinking, just using as an accessory, something to do with her fingers while she looked around with that expression of calculated boredom that characterized her. Myriah was next to her, still wearing her grey coat, brown hair tied in a messy ponytail, dark eyes scanning the room with that analytical calm that made her seem older than she was.
And there was Valaar.
Valaar was tall, slim, with dark hair slicked back and a permanent smile curving the corners of his lips as if he had just thought of a joke no one else understood. He had tanned skin, green eyes, and a way of moving, gesturing, occupying space that was simultaneously elegant and provocative. He wore a silk shirt unbuttoned two buttons more than necessary, and at that moment he was leaning over the table, talking to a young waiter with curly hair who had come over to collect the empty glasses. Valaar was whispering something in his ear, and the waiter had laughed, a blush creeping up his neck.
Myriah, watching him with the patience of a cat watching a mouse, dropped her glass on the table with a sharp thud.
"Valaar," she said, and her voice cut through the ambient noise like a knife. "Please stop flirting with every man who crosses your path. We're here for trivia, not for you to get a date for tonight."
Valaar straightened up, spun on his heels with a smile showing no trace of shame, and dropped into his chair with the grace of a cat that has just fallen off a roof and pretends it did it on purpose.
"First, I wasn't flirting, I was being nice, which is different," he said, crossing his arms behind his head. "Second, even if I were flirting, so what? It's a bar, Myriah. Bars exist for people to meet. And third, and most importantly..." he leaned toward her, lowering his voice theatrically, "at least I'm bold. Not like you, who are a prude."
Myriah didn't blink. She didn't flinch. She didn't move a millimeter. She just looked at him with those eyes that seemed to contain the patience of centuries.
"Prude?" she repeated, with a calm that was more threatening than any yell.
"Pru-de," Valaar syllabified, delighting in the word. "You don't do anything, you don't say anything, you don't look at anyone, you don't risk anything. Your life is a monument to non-risk. You're like a nun but without the religious part that gives it meaning."
"I'd rather be a prude than a dog in heat who humps the first leg it smells," Myriah replied without altering her tone of voice.
Rhae let out a laugh that made two tables turn to look.
"Point for Myriah," Rhae said, raising her beer like a trophy.
Valaar put his hand to his chest with an expression of exaggerated injury.
"You wound me, Myriah. You wound me in the deepest part of my sensitive soul. But at least I have a sensitive soul that can be wounded. You have an industrial freezer where your heart should be."
"Guys," Aerion intervened, arriving at the table and sitting in the empty chair next to Rhae. He was out of breath, hair tangled by the port wind, eyes too bright. "What am I missing?"
"Nothing," Myriah said.
"A lesson on boldness," Valaar said.
"A stupid argument," Rhae said. "Where are you coming from? You smell like the port."
"Ran an errand," Aerion said vaguely, patting the bulge in his jacket's inner pocket to make sure the willow branch was still there. It was still there. Warm. Waiting.
The table's conversation drifted, as it always drifted, toward work. Maekar Targaryen's store, the family business that was simultaneously their source of income and their prison.
"Your dad was unbearable today," said Valaar, who also worked at the store, in the customer service section. "Yelling at everyone because the quarter's numbers didn't add up. As if it's our fault people don't buy toasters in the middle of winter."
"It's always like this in January," Myriah said, with the voice of someone who has had this conversation a thousand times. "It's cyclical. The same every year."
"Yeah, but worse this year because your brother didn't come to work," Valaar pointed at Aerion with his finger. "And your dad made us all do double the work. Thanks, Aerion. Truly. A pleasure working with you."
"You're welcome," Aerion murmured, not really paying attention to the conversation. His eyes were fixed on Duncan, who was still at the bar, talking to another customer while waiting for the bartender to serve the beers. Duncan laughed at something, threw his head back, and Aerion felt that familiar pang in his chest, that pull that was half pain, half desire.
"Seriously, the store is a disaster," Valaar continued. "Today a bracelet fell down the drain and your dad almost killed Duncan for dropping it. Can you imagine? Almost killed him over a piece of leather."
Aerion tensed. "It wasn't just any piece of leather."
"What?" Valaar looked at him confused.
"Nothing. Nothing, forget it."
Rhae, who had been listening in silence, turned her head toward Aerion with a slowness that put him on guard. Her violet eyes scanned him like an airport scanner.
"Where were you?" she asked directly.
"I told you. Running an errand."
"What errand?"
"An errand, Rhae. Don't interrogate me."
Rhae looked at him a second longer, then shrugged and turned back to Valaar, resuming the conversation about work with a comment about how ridiculous the green uniform Maekar forced employees to wear was.
Aerion breathed. At that moment, Duncan returned to the table with a tray of beers. Five plastic cups filled to the brim, foam spilling over the sides, dripping onto the tray.
"Beers for everyone!" Duncan announced with that voice of his that filled any room, that made people turn, that made Aerion feel like the whole world stopped for a second to listen. "Rhae, Myriah, Valaar, Aerion, and mine. Let's toast to surviving another day in the Targaryens hell!"
Duncan distributed the cups. When he gave Aerion his, their fingers brushed. It was a half-second contact, Duncan's skin warm and rough against Aerion's, but it was enough for a chill to run down his entire spine. Duncan didn't notice. He never noticed.
Aerion stood up. The moment was now. Duncan was standing, the others were distracted drinking, and he had the willow branch in his pocket. He was going to pull it out, he was going to say "I brought you something, it's silly, but I thought you'd like it," and Duncan was going to smile and say "what's this, man?" and Aerion was going to explain and Duncan was going to laugh at how absurd it was and put it in his pocket and maybe, maybe, he'd thank him with a hug.
But just as his hand moved toward the jacket zipper, Rhae intervened.
"Where are you two going?" Rhae asked, looking at Aerion and Duncan, who was still standing. "Sit down, for God's sake. If you take this long to hand out beers, how long will you take to answer the questions? Trivia starts in two minutes."
"I was just..." Aerion started.
"Sit down, Aerion," Rhae cut in, pointing at the chair with her index finger like a sword.
Duncan shrugged and sat down. Aerion, defeated, did the same. The willow branch stayed in his pocket, burning against his chest like a lit coal.
Trivia was organized chaos. The host, a man with a beard and a flannel shirt speaking into a microphone that screeched every time he breathed, asked questions about geography, cinema, music, and history. Valaar yelled the answers before anyone could think, getting them wrong half the time but with such absolute conviction he made the rest doubt. Myriah answered quietly, almost to herself, and was almost always right. Rhae didn't participate, preferring to look at her phone and only looking up to make sarcastic comments about the questions. Duncan participated enthusiastically, slapping the table with his palm every time he knew an answer, and Aerion didn't participate at all because he couldn't concentrate on anything other than Duncan's presence next to him, the smell of beer and clean sweat emanating from his skin, the way the lamp light drew shadows on his jaw.
When trivia ended (they lost, of course, because Valaar had insisted the capital of Australia was Sydney and not Canberra), the group stayed at the table, drinking and talking. Aerion didn't say much. Duncan talked about a basketball game he'd watched the day before, gesturing widely, and Aerion just watched him, drank his warm and bitter beer, and thought about the willow branch weighing in his pocket like a secret.
When eleven o'clock struck, Valaar stood up abruptly.
"Party!" he announced, pointing at the table with both index fingers. "There's a party in a warehouse across town, in the industrial district. A friend of a friend said there's gonna be a DJ, lights, and free alcohol until three. Everyone's going. Let's go."
The idea was met with general enthusiasm. Valaar, Rhae, and Myriah were on board. Even the curly-haired waiter Valaar had flirted with earlier nodded from the other table.
But Duncan shook his head.
"I pass," he said, rubbing his eyes with clenched fists like a tired child. "I'm dead. Work today drained me. Six hours on my feet, running back and forth, your dad yelling at me... no, seriously, I don't have the energy for a party. I'm going home to sleep."
"Come on, Dunk!" Valaar insisted, throwing an arm over his shoulders. "Don't be boring. One hour, two hours max. I'll buy you a beer on the way."
"No, really, no," Duncan shook off Valaar's arm gently but firmly. "I'm exhausted. Another time."
Aerion didn't think about it. He didn't calculate. He didn't weigh the consequences. He said it before his brain could stop him.
"I'll take you home," he said, and his voice sounded too fast, too eager, but he didn't care. "I mean... I don't feel like a party either. And if you live in the direction of my place, I can drop you off on the way."
Duncan looked at him, and for a second, a second Aerion captured and stored in his memory like a photograph kept in an album, Duncan smiled. Not a wide smile, not a showy smile. A small, tired, genuine smile.
"Seriously? You don't mind?"
"Of course not. Let's go."
Valaar frowned. He crossed his arms and looked at Aerion with an expression mixing disappointment with something else, something Aerion didn't stop to analyze.
"No, wait, Aerion," Valaar said, and his voice had an edge it didn't have before. "Stay. Let's go to the party. Duncan can take a taxi, right? You don't have to leave too."
"No, I insist," Aerion said, not looking at Valaar, looking only at Duncan. "Truly, it's no trouble. Let's go, Dunk."
Valaar opened his mouth to protest, but Myriah put a hand on his arm and shook her head slightly. Valaar closed his mouth. Rhae watched the scene with an expression Aerion couldn't decipher, but it gave him a chill.
Duncan put on his jacket and thanked everyone. When they passed through the bar door, the cold night air hit them like a wall of ice. Aerion pulled the car keys from his pocket and walked to where he had parked, two blocks away.
It was then that Duncan stopped.
Next to the bar door, sitting against the brick wall, was a man. He was old, or at least looked old, with a grown beard, ragged clothes, and a plastic coffee cup in his hand. The man's eyes were lost somewhere on the horizon, as if he were seeing something no one else could.
Duncan reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and crouched down in front of the man.
"Here, sir," he said, with that voice of his, that voice that treated everyone with the same respect, whether it was a company CEO or a homeless man at a bar door. "For something hot."
The man looked at him, blinked, took the bill with trembling fingers, and nodded without saying anything.
Duncan stood up and kept walking as if nothing happened. Aerion stood watching him, heart pounding in his ears, and thought: this is why. This is why I love him. For this and a thousand other things.
Aerion's car was an old black sedan with cracked leather seats and a dashboard that glowed sickly green. Duncan sat in the passenger seat, buckled his seatbelt, and leaned back against the backrest with a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of his feet.
"Thanks, man," he said, closing his eyes. "Truly. I appreciate it."
"It's nothing," Aerion replied, starting the engine and pulling out onto the street.
The silence in the car was different from the silence of the bar. It was more intimate, denser, filled with the things unsaid. The street paraded past the windows, neon lights and streetlamps reflecting on the windshield like shooting stars. The car's heater took a while to kick in, and when it did, it filled the vehicle with a warmth somewhere between comforting and suffocating.
Duncan had his eyes closed but wasn't sleeping. Aerion knew because his lips moved, as if chewing words before releasing them.
"I'm going to quit," Duncan said, and said it just like that, no preamble, no context, as if continuing a conversation they'd left half-finished. "The store. Targaryens. I'm leaving."
Aerion squeezed his hands on the steering wheel. He knew. Duncan had said it on the phone that afternoon, but hearing it now, in the intimacy of the car, with the darkness of the city wrapping around them like a cloak, gave it a different weight.
"I know," Aerion said, eyes on the road. "You told me on the phone. But... are you sure? Is it final?"
"Yeah. Final. Tomorrow I'm giving the letter to your dad."
"And what are you going to do?"
Duncan opened his eyes. He looked at the car ceiling, then the window, then his own hands resting on his knees.
"Act," he said, and the word sounded like a confession, like a secret he had kept so long that pronouncing it broke something inside him. "My dream is to act, Aerion. It always has been. Since I was fifteen and my literature teacher made me participate in a school play and I felt like... like for the first time in my life I could be someone else. That I could stop being Duncan, the store guy, the one who carries boxes, the one who helps customers, and be anything else. A king, a beggar, a hero, a villain. Anyone. All at once. And I realized that was what I wanted to do with my life. But I left it. I left it because I had to work, because there were bills to pay, because your dad offered me a steady job and I thought it was the right thing to do. But not anymore. I'm not happy in that job anymore, Aerion. Every morning when I get up and put on that green apron, I feel like I'm drowning. Every day I spend in that store is a day I don't spend on a stage. And I can't take it anymore. I'm twenty-eight years old. If I don't do it now, I never will."
Aerion didn't say anything for a long moment. He processed Duncan's words the way he processed numbers in the office: carefully, attentively, looking for the meaning behind the figures.
"You'd be an incredible actor," he said finally, and said it with such sincerity it hurt. "Truly, Dunk. You have... you have that thing. That energy. When you walk into a room, everyone looks at you. Not everyone has that."
Duncan turned in the seat to look at him. His dark eyes shone with something that could be gratitude or vulnerability or both.
"You mean it?"
"Of course I mean it. When have I ever lied to you?"
Duncan smiled. That crooked smile, that smile that did weird things to Aerion's heart.
"Thanks, man. Truly. That means a lot coming from you."
There was another silence, but this one was different. It was softer, more comfortable, like a blanket shared on a cold night. Aerion drove in silence, turning left on the main avenue, passing the park that was dark, with trees drawing ghostly shadows against the orange sky of the city.
It was then that Duncan said something that changed everything.
"Hey, Aerion," he said, in a tone trying to sound casual but with a tremor underneath. "Are you in love with Valaar?"
Aerion almost swerved the car. His hands tightened on the steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white, and he had to make a conscious effort not to slam the brakes.
"What?" the word came out strangled.
"Valaar. Are you in love with him? It's a simple question."
"No," Aerion said, too fast, too loud. "No, of course not. Valaar is... he's like a brother to me. I've known him forever. No, no, nothing like that."
Duncan looked at him sideways, with a smile that was almost a smirk.
"Are you sure? Because you two would make a cute couple. You're both gay, you match pretty well. Valaar is all show and you're all... I don't know, all silence. You complement each other."
"No, Duncan, seriously. Valaar and I are friends. Nothing more. There's nothing there. There's never been anything."
Duncan stared at him for a long moment, with that look of his that seemed to see through things, as if he could read thoughts on the surface of the brain.
"It's pretty obvious Valaar is super in love with you, you know?" Duncan said, with the naturalness of someone commenting on the weather. "The way he looks at you, the way he always wants to be near you, the way he got jealous earlier when you said you were taking me home... it's obvious, man."
Aerion didn't know what to say. His brain was processing that information like an old computer processing a file too large: slowly, with strange noises and the risk of crashing at any moment.
"Valaar isn't in love with me," he said, although now that he thought about it, now that Duncan said it, certain things started to make sense. Valaar's glances. The way he always sat next to Aerion. The unnecessary touches on the shoulder, the arm, the back. The way he had protested when Aerion decided to take him home. But no, that couldn't be true. Valaar flirted with everyone. It was his nature. It meant nothing.
"Whatever you say," Duncan said, shrugging. "But I'm telling you because I see it. I'm like that. When I like someone, nobody knows. Nobody. I'm a stone wall. That's why I can recognize the signs in others, because I know exactly how they hide."
Aerion swallowed. When I like someone, nobody knows. Did that mean Duncan liked someone? Someone who wasn't him? The pain of that possibility was so sharp he had to bite his lip to keep from making a noise.
"And do you... like someone?" Aerion asked, and he hated how his voice sounded: trembling, hopeful, pathetic.
Duncan laughed. A short, dry laugh that revealed nothing.
"That's classified information, brother. You're not getting it that easily."
They arrived at Duncan's building. It was an old apartment building, red brick, with a fire escape climbing the facade like a metal scar. Aerion parked in front of the entrance and left the engine running.
Duncan unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the door, and got out of the car. The cold night air entered the vehicle like an invasion. Duncan turned and leaned back in, resting his forearm on the roof of the car.
"Thanks for the ride, Aerion. Truly. And for listening. About the acting and all that."
"That's what we're here for," Aerion said, and smiled, and that smile was genuine despite the pain in his chest.
Duncan nodded, patted the roof of the car twice, and straightened up to leave.
And then Aerion said it.
He didn't plan it. He didn't think it. He didn't calculate it. The word left his mouth like a bird escaping a cage, driven by desperation, by the fear that Duncan would walk away and disappear into that building and maybe tomorrow quit and maybe next week move and maybe never again would they have a moment like this, alone, in the dark, with the intimacy of the car and the warmth of the heater and the truth floating between them like stardust.
"Bye, savage," Aerion said.
Time stopped.
Duncan, who already had his back turned, who had already taken a step toward the door, froze. His body tensed like a steel cable. His shoulders squared. He turned slowly, with a slowness that was almost geological, and when his face was illuminated by the green light of the dashboard, Aerion saw the expression in his eyes and knew he had made a mistake.
"What did you say?" Duncan's voice was low, flat, dangerous.
Aerion felt the ground open beneath his feet. Savage. Rhae. Rhae and her advice. "The best way to conquer Duncan is by bringing out the savage he has inside." Aerion had tried to be bold. He had tried to be provocative. He had tried to use the word Rhae had told him to use, and he had used it at the worst possible moment, at the most vulnerable moment, when Duncan had confided his dreams and his fears and Aerion paid him back with a word he hated.
"Nothing, I..." Aerion started, but Duncan interrupted him.
"You know I don't like being called that," Duncan said, and every word was a hammer blow. "You know I hate that word. You know what it reminds me of. And you say it anyway. Just like that. As if it were a joke."
"Dunk, I didn't..."
"No, Aerion. Enough. Don't come to me saying it was an accident. I know what I heard."
Duncan turned his back definitively. He walked to the building door, opened the front door with his key, and entered without looking back. The door closed with a dry thud that resonated in the empty street like a gunshot.
Aerion stayed in the car, hands on the steering wheel, staring at the closed door. The engine was still running. The heater was still blowing. The green light of the dashboard was still illuminating his face, which was now wet.
He realized he was crying. Not the dramatic way people cry in movies, with sobs and moans, but the silent and pathetic way of someone who has been stabbed and doesn't realize they're bleeding until they see the blood. Tears fell down his cheeks, one after another, falling onto his hands, onto the steering wheel, onto his jeans.
Rhae had told him to flirt with Duncan's savage. Myriah had told him to give him something meaningful. And he, in his attempt to follow both pieces of advice, had ruined everything. He had bought a wish to give him and hadn't given it. He had tried to be provocative and had used a word Duncan detested. He had had Duncan alone, in his car, opening up, confiding, and had ruined it with a stupid word.
He reached toward the back of the car. His fingers touched the gift bag where the present for Duncan was inside. He pulled it out. He held it in front of his eyes, between thumb and index finger, looking at it through the tears that distorted its shape. A dry branch. Ugly. Withered. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents. One wish. It will be granted. Only one. Forever.
Aerion closed his eyes. He squeezed the branch with both hands, feeling the rough texture of the bark against his palms. The heat emanating from the object was almost unreal, as if it had a pulse, as if it were alive, as if it could hear him.
And in that moment, in that instant of absolute desperation, face wet with tears and heart shattered, Aerion wished.
He didn't ask for Duncan to forgive him for the word. He didn't ask for Duncan not to quit. He didn't ask for Duncan not to move. He asked for what he had been asking for eight years, sitting at that cafe table, looking out the window, drinking vanilla lattes that tasted like nothing.
"I want Duncan to fall in love with me," he whispered, and his voice broke on the last word. "That he loves me. That he loves me more than anyone in the world. More than his job, more than his dream of acting, more than himself. That he loves me the way I love him. That he loves me until he can't breathe without me. That he loves me forever."
Tears fell onto the steering wheel with a hypnotic cadence, one drop after another, blurring the green light of the dashboard in small explosions of blurriness. Aerion remained crying in the car, sunk in a pit of despair so deep it prevented him from hearing the wind whistling through the cracks of the window, or the constant purr of the engine still trembling beneath him. The cold of the night had crept into the cabin, but he didn't feel it. He only felt the crushing weight of his own stupidity. Bye, savage. Three words. Three damn words that had left his mouth driven by panic, by Rhae's poisoned advice, ruining the most intimate and vulnerable moment he had shared with Duncan.
He brought his hands to his face, stifling a sob tearing at his throat. The willow branch, that absurd and magical object he had paid four dollars and ninety-nine cents for, weighed in his inner pocket like a block of lead. He had wished for Duncan to love him. He had wished for him to love him more than his own dream, more than his life. And now, Duncan was behind that metal door, hating him for using a nickname that reminded him of his worst instincts, a past he detested. Aerion knew magic didn't exist. He knew the branch was just a piece of dry wood. He was alone, irreparably alone, and it was his fault.
He was about to turn the ignition key to leave, to return to his apartment and his dog and his misery, when suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that froze his blood.
Just inches from the glass, at the passenger window, was Duncan.
He hadn't heard the building door open, hadn't heard his footsteps on the sidewalk. He simply was there. He was almost pressed against the car window, staring fixedly at Aerion with an unsettling look. His dark eyes, which normally shone with a warm, laughing, confident light, were now empty, dark as tar pits, open in an unnatural way. He didn't blink. His face was illuminated by the greenish light of the dashboard, giving him a ghostly, almost robotic appearance. Aerion slowly lowered his hands from his face, heart pounding in his throat. There was something profoundly wrong in the way Duncan was looking at him. It was the look of a predator that has cornered its prey, a gaze that penetrated the glass and boned Aerion's soul.
A chill of pure terror, mixed with morbid curiosity, ran down his back. Duncan didn't move. Just looked.
Finally, Duncan's lips moved, forming the words against the glass fogged by both their breaths.
"Did you want to tell me something?" Duncan asked. His voice sounded muffled through the glass, but the tone was strangely flat, lacking the anger with which he had left a few minutes ago.
Aerion swallowed, mouth dry as sandpaper. He shook his head slowly, completely paralyzed by that empty stare.
"No, nothing," Aerion lied, his voice trembling, barely a whisper he knew Duncan could hear in the deathly silence of the street.
Duncan didn't flinch. His eyes remained fixed on Aerion's, studying every micro-expression of his tear-stained face. There was a long, tense pause, in which the air inside the car seemed to become heavy, hard to breathe.
"You're sad," Duncan said. It wasn't a question, it was a clinical diagnosis.
"I'm fine, Dunk, truly... just go back to your apartment, it's cold out there," Aerion tried to say, wanting to escape the situation, wanting to flee from that gaze that didn't seem to belong to the man he was in love with.
But Duncan completely ignored his words.
"Would you like to come into my house?" Duncan asked, lowering his voice to an almost intimate tone, but devoid of warmth. "You look a little sad. Come in."
Aerion blinked, confused. A minute ago he had looked at him with fury, left him stranded on the sidewalk over a stupidity, and now he invited him in with that serene, disturbing expression.
"No, Duncan, seriously, I don't want to bother. I think it's better if I go home, you need to rest and I..."
Duncan began to insist.
"Come in. Come. I don't like you being out here crying alone. Come into the house."
"Duncan, please, you already said you were angry, I think we both need space..." Aerion tried to reason, but Duncan's voice cut him off.
"Come in. Don't worry about that. I'm not angry anymore. Come in, let's have a drink, we'll talk. Come. Come into the house." The repetition was obsessive, mechanical. Duncan wasn't listening to Aerion's refusals, just pushing his agenda with iron determination.
An alarm started going off in Aerion's mind. Duncan's attitude wasn't normal. It was as if someone had erased his personality and left only a tracking program.
"What's wrong with you?" Aerion asked, turning his body toward the window, frowning. "What's wrong, Duncan?"
Duncan tilted his head slightly, a small smile, devoid of humor, appearing on his lips.
"And what's wrong with you?" he replied, returning the question without answering anything.
Aerion felt a knot in his stomach. This wasn't a normal dialogue. It was a reflection.
"I... nothing," Aerion said, looking down, feeling trapped. "I just feel bad about what I said earlier. It was stupid. I shouldn't have called you that. I'm sorry, truly."
But Duncan completely ignored the apology, as if he hadn't heard it. His face returned to that mask of serene insistence.
"Come in. Come in. Let's have a drink. Don't worry, I already told you I'm not angry. Come in." His voice was a mantra, an endless loop.
Aerion observed Duncan's eyes. They were dark, deep, and there was something behind them, an unnatural fire that wasn't there before. The willow branch's wish. Aerion shook his head slowly, stunned by the situation, heart starting to race for a completely different reason than fear.
"Duncan... are you drunk?" Aerion asked, looking for a logical explanation for this erratic behavior.
Duncan let out a laugh. A dry, short laugh that resonated against the glass. He shook his head, laughing.
"No, I'm not drunk," he said, but his laugh cut off abruptly.
Suddenly, something changed. It was as if an electric discharge went through his brain. The smile disappeared from his face, his eyes snapped open and he took a step back, looking at his hands, looking at Aerion, looking around with an expression of absolute confusion and horror.
"Wait, but... what the fuck am I doing?" Duncan murmured to himself, rubbing his face with both hands, moving away from the car as if suddenly realizing he was standing on the edge of a cliff. "What's wrong with me? What am I...?"
Aerion looked at him through the glass, paralyzed. Duncan looked lost, scared, fighting something invisible. Aerion placed his hand on the door handle, about to get out and ask if he was okay, when, out of nowhere, the transformation occurred again. The confusion vanished from Duncan's face as fast as it had come. He lowered his hands from his face, straightened his back, and smiled again. But this time, the smile was wider, more uninhibited, more like the Duncan Aerion knew, but with a predatory edge that hadn't existed before.
"I probably am drunk," Duncan said, letting out a more natural laugh, shrugging, looking Aerion in the eyes with a burning intensity. "Because I'm acting really weird, man. Really, really weird."
Before Aerion could process the words, Duncan moved. He rounded the car with long, decisive strides. Aerion heard his footsteps on the asphalt, and before he could reach the door lock, Duncan threw the passenger door wide open. The cold night air came in like an icy blast, but what froze his blood was seeing Duncan leaning into the interior, his eyes fixed on Aerion's.
Aerion tried to say something, but Duncan reached into the car, grabbed Aerion by the waist and behind the knees, and pulled him out of the seat in one tug.
"Dunk! What are you doing?" Aerion exclaimed, instinctively clinging to Duncan's neck out of pure gravity, shocked by the situation.
Duncan didn't respond. He simply carried him. He carried him as if he weighed nothing, as if he were a rag doll, closed the car door with a bump of his hip, and began walking toward the building door. Aerion was shocked by the situation, his brain trying to process Duncan's supernatural strength, the warmth of his chest, the smell of clean sweat and that cheap cologne he loved so much. He decided not to resist. He let himself be carried, wrapping his arms around Duncan's neck, burying his face in his shoulder, feeling, despite the terror and confusion, inexplicably safe.
Duncan opened the building door, climbed the dark stairs with Aerion still in his arms, without stopping to catch his breath, without showing signs of fatigue. He reached his apartment, pushed the door open, entered, and in a single motion, threw Aerion onto the couch.
Aerion bounced on the old cushions, disoriented, the air escaping from his lungs. Before he could sit up, he heard the metallic click of the lock. Duncan locked the door. Put the chain on. And then turned toward Aerion.
Duncan's apartment was in shadow, illuminated only by the orange light of a streetlamp filtering through the blinds. The shadows drew Duncan's features in an angular, dangerous way. Duncan stood in front of the door, looking at Aerion lying on the couch, chest heaving rapidly.
"I'm happy now," Duncan said, his voice raw, a deep tone Aerion had never heard from him. He walked slowly toward the couch, like a lion stalking its prey in a cage. "Do you know why?"
Aerion shook his head, mute, mouth dry, a strange heat starting to pool in his lower belly despite the fear.
Duncan stopped in front of him, crouched down, bringing his face close to Aerion's, inhaling deeply through his nose, closing his eyes for a second.
"Because all these clothes..." Duncan murmured, grabbing the fabric of Aerion's jacket, rubbing it between his fingers. "All these clothes have your scent. The whole couch smells like you. The bed smells like you. The damn car smells like you. You're driving me crazy, Aerion."
Aerion, instinctively, brought his arm to his nose and smelled himself, frowning.
"Do I smell bad?" he asked, naively, trying to break that supernatural tension with a joke.
Duncan opened his eyes. They were almost black, pupils dilated swallowing the dark iris. He leaned in closer, so much that their noses almost touched.
"No," Duncan whispered, his warm breath hitting Aerion's lips. "You smell exquisitely good. You smell like something I want to devour. You smell like mine."
The word "mine" made something explode inside Aerion. And then, out of nowhere, without warning, without transition, Duncan confessed.
"I love you, Aerion," Duncan said, looking him directly in the eyes, with a sincerity so brutal it hurt. "I love you more than my own life. I love you more than my dream of acting. I love you more than my damn sanity. Do you want to be my boyfriend? Do you want to be mine forever? Because I can't stay alive if you're not mine, Aerion. I can't breathe if you're not mine."
Aerion was stunned. Too many things were happening at the same time. His brain was a whirlwind of contradictory information. Five minutes ago he was crying in the car because Duncan hated him. Now he was locked in his apartment, with Duncan confessing an absolute and obsessive love. It was everything he had wished for. Everything he had asked the willow branch for. That he loves me. That he loves me more than anyone in the world. That he loves me until he can't breathe without me. The wish was being fulfilled. But Aerion didn't feel the joy he had imagined. He felt a delicious terror, a dark and forbidden excitement, because the love emanating from Duncan wasn't the tender and shy love Aerion had fantasized about. It was a violent, possessive, unnatural love. It was the love of a man possessed by a spell.
But before Aerion could articulate a single word, before he could say "yes" or "this is crazy," Duncan slowly leaned in and kissed him.
It was a crash. A crash of lips, teeth, ragged breath. Duncan didn't ask permission, didn't hesitate, wasn't gentle. He took Aerion's jaw with a strong, rough hand, tilted his face, and devoured him. Aerion, mind blank, followed the kiss. He opened his mouth, letting Duncan's tongue invade his territory, melting into the taste of beer and mint from his friend. It was a desperate, hungry kiss, as if Duncan were dying of thirst and Aerion was the only water source in the desert.
Then they began to kiss more passionately. Aerion buried his hands in Duncan's dark hair, pulling him closer, sinking into the couch under the weight of Duncan's larger body. Duncan's hands roamed Aerion's sides, gripping the flesh through the clothes, dragging his nails, leaving marks of possession. The moans of both filled the silent apartment, muffled only by the wet and frantic sound of their mouths eating, biting, sucking.
Duncan started taking his clothes off. He didn't unbutton or slide them off carefully; he tore them off. He pulled the long-sleeved black jacket down, throwing it to the floor. Then he grabbed Aerion's clean black t-shirt by the collar and ripped it upward, exposing Aerion's pale, slender torso to the orange light of the room. Duncan pulled back a millimeter, just to watch Aerion's chest rise and fall rapidly, to look at the white skin he had secretly fantasized about.
Aerion was already highly aroused. The fear had transmuted purely into lust, his body reacting to Duncan's brutality in a way he didn't know it could. He started to get wet. Aerion had the accumulated sexual tension of eight years of repressed love causing a thick, liquid heat to pool between his legs, soaking the fabric of his underwear. He felt throbbing, sensitive, empty, with a desperate need to be filled by the man who was devouring him.
Duncan, seeing the response of Aerion's body, smiled. It was a dark, almost sinister smile. He lowered his head and bit Aerion's neck, sucking the skin until leaving a red, purplish mark, claiming territory. Aerion threw his head back, moaning loudly, clinging to Duncan's shoulders.
"Dunk... please..." Aerion begged, not knowing exactly what he was asking for, just knowing he needed more.
Duncan pulled away suddenly, standing up. Aerion stayed on the couch, trembling, watching as Duncan began to undress too. He pulled off his shirt in one tug, revealing that broad, muscular torso, covered in dark hair that Aerion had memorized from the pool photos. Then he unbuckled his belt, the metallic sound of the buckle resonating in the apartment like a gunshot, and pulled down his jeans along with his underwear in a single kick.
Duncan's penis was already completely erect, thick, long, throbbing against his belly. Aerion stared at it, fascinated, terrified by the size, but his body reacted with a spasm of desire, his vagina clenching in anticipation.
Duncan knelt in front of the couch, between Aerion's legs. He grabbed Aerion's jeans and pulled them down roughly along with the underwear, leaving him completely naked and exposed. Duncan stared at Aerion's crotch, the wet, pink folds, shining with his arousal.
"Look at yourself," Duncan whispered, voice hoarse, running a thick finger through the slit, collecting the moisture. "You're soaked. All because of me."
Aerion moaned at the touch, arching his back.
"Duncan, I need you..." he gasped.
Duncan smiled, but didn't move up to penetrate him immediately. He lowered his head and, grabbing Aerion's knees, spread them wide open, exposing him completely.
"First, I'm going to taste you," Duncan said, and without further preamble, buried his face between Aerion's legs.
Aerion screamed. A sharp, torn scream that bounced off the walls of the small apartment. Duncan's tongue was burning, wet, rough. It wasn't gentle or exploratory oral sex. It was an attack. Duncan licked from the entrance of the vagina to the clit with long, hard strokes, sucking the lips, pushing his tongue inside as deep as he could, savoring Aerion's juices as if it were a delicacy.
"God... Duncan... Duncan!" Aerion buried his hands in Duncan's hair, squeezing his thighs against his friend's ears, rocking his hips against his face, seeking more friction, more pressure.
Duncan found the clitoris and sucked hard, pushing two thick fingers inside Aerion's vagina at the same time. The fingers moved brutally, curving upward, hitting that internal wall that made Aerion see stars. The wet sound of Duncan's mouth working, mixed with the noise of the fingers going in and out of Aerion's soaked body, was obscene, primitive. Aerion was on the edge of the abyss in a matter of minutes. His entire body tensed, the muscles in his legs trembling uncontrollably.
"I'm going to... Dunk, I'm going to come!" Aerion shouted, voice broken.
Duncan didn't stop. On the contrary, he sucked harder, gently bit the clitoris, and pushed a third finger in, stretching the entrance, pounding mercilessly. Aerion came with an explosion that blurred his vision. His pussy clenched violently around Duncan's fingers, squeezing them, while his body arched off the couch, a jet of hot liquid staining Duncan's chin and neck.
Duncan didn't pull away. He drank from Aerion, licking every drop of the orgasm, cleaning him with his tongue until Aerion's spasms became painful and he had to push Duncan's head to make him stop.
Duncan stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes shining in the shadows with an animal ferocity. Aerion was panting, bare chest rising and falling rapidly, body covered in a fine layer of sweat, trembling from the aftershocks of the orgasm. But Duncan didn't give him time to recover.
He grabbed him by the hips, turned him roughly on the couch. Aerion ended up face down, chest crushed against the cushions and ass pointing up. Aerion tried to push up on his elbows, head spinning.
"Wait... wait, Duncan, give me a..." Aerion tried to say.
"No waiting," Duncan growled, positioning himself behind him, rubbing his hot, hard erection against Aerion's sensitive and still soaked entrance.
And with a single thrust of his hips, Duncan buried himself inside Aerion to the base.
Aerion let out a howl that was half pain, half ecstatic pleasure. Duncan was huge. He stretched Aerion's inner walls to the limit, filling him completely, forcing his way through the tight, slippery channel. Duncan didn't move for a second, enjoying the sensation of being anchored deep inside Aerion, feeling Aerion's internal muscles clench around his member, throbbing, trying to adapt to the invasion.
Then, he began to move.
They began to have rough, hard sex. Duncan pulled out almost completely, leaving just the tip inside, and then thrust forward with a force that pushed Aerion against the back of the couch. Aerion clung to the cushions, tearing them with his nails, while Duncan set an relentless, brutal, primitive rhythm. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, clap, clap, clap, an obscene and constant rhythm that synchronized with Aerion's muffled moans and Duncan's low growls.
"You're mine, Aerion. You're mine," Duncan repeated with every thrust, voice broken, sweaty. He grabbed Aerion by the blonde hair, pulling his head back, forcing him to arch his back, changing the angle of penetration so his penis hit directly that sensitive spot inside Aerion that made him see stars.
"Ah! God! Duncan!" Aerion screamed, tears falling down his cheeks again, but this time from pure overflowing pleasure. His vagina was being punished, stretched, used in a way he had never experienced. It was sex without filters, without romance, pure animal instinct. And Aerion loved it. He loved it because it was Duncan. He loved it because it was the wish fulfilled.
Duncan kept fucking him with inexhaustible energy, as if possessed by a demon of lust. He let go of his hair and grabbed his hips with both hands, fingers digging into the flesh, leaving bruises, using him as leverage to thrust harder, deeper, faster.
Suddenly, Duncan pulled out completely, leaving Aerion feeling empty, gaping, desperate.
"Turn around," Duncan ordered, voice hoarse.
Aerion, trembling, turned on the couch, ending up face up. Duncan grabbed him by the thighs, lifted his legs, put Aerion's ankles on his shoulders, and buried himself again in a single thrust. Aerion screamed again, the new position allowing Duncan to reach even deeper, hitting the bottom of his belly.
Duncan leaned over him, crushing him against the couch, sweaty foreheads pressed together. He kissed him again, a wild kiss, tasting himself through Aerion's juices. And while kissing him, he started pounding into him with a dizzying speed and force. The couch creaked dangerously beneath them, sliding across the floor with the violence of the thrusts.
Aerion knew Duncan didn't truly love him. In some lucid corner of his pleasure-shattered mind, he knew the willow branch in his jacket thrown on the floor had done this. That this obsessive love, this violent possession, was the twisted and distorted manifestation of his selfish wish. But he didn't care. In that moment, with Duncan deep inside him, possessing him, claiming him, Aerion felt his life was complete. If this was the price of magic, he paid it gladly.
"Duncan... I'm going to come again..." Aerion gasped against his lips, body starting to tense again, clit rubbing against Duncan's pubic hair with every thrust, sending electric shocks through his entire nervous system.
"Yes, come for me. Come on my fucking cock," Duncan growled, speeding up the pace, his own hips starting to lose coordination, his muscles tensing, signaling he was also at the limit.
Duncan came inside Aerion.
With a deep, guttural growl that resonated in both their chests, Duncan buried his member to the root, as deep as possible, and went still. Aerion felt Duncan's cock throb violently inside his vagina, and a hot, thick, and abundant jet of semen began to flood his internal walls. Duncan came deep inside, not pulling out a millimeter, emptying his balls into the deepest part of Aerion, marking him from the inside.
The sensation of being filled so deeply, of feeling the heat of Duncan's semen hitting his cervix, pushed Aerion over the edge. He screamed Duncan's name, scratching his back with his nails, while a second orgasm, much more intense and devastating than the first, shook his body. His vagina clamped down around Duncan's penis, milking it, extracting every last drop of his essence, mixing their fluids in a primitive, wet chaos.
Duncan kept pumping softly, not pulling out, massaging Aerion's insides, extending both their orgasms, while their ragged breathing tried to return to normal.
The apartment fell silent, broken only by the sound of their heavy breathing and the deafening beating of their hearts.
Duncan collapsed onto Aerion, crushing him against the couch with his weight. He didn't pull out of him. He stayed inside, still semi-erect, sealing the union. He buried his face in Aerion's neck, smelling his skin, licking the sweat and dry tears.
"Mine," Duncan whispered against his skin, his voice sounding hollow, empty, programmed. "You're mine, Aerion. Forever. I love you. I'll love you until I die. I'll love you until I can't breathe without you."
Aerion, eyes closed, feeling the heat of Duncan's body over him and the wet weight of semen inside him, wrapped his trembling arms around Duncan's back.
"I know, Dunk," Aerion whispered, a solitary tear sliding down his temple to get lost in his hair. "I know."
The magic had worked. The wish had been granted. But Aerion, at the peak of his pleasure, in the center of his fantasy made reality, felt a glacial cold in his soul. Because the man holding him, the man who had just made love to him with destructive passion, wasn't Duncan. He wasn't the man who laughed in the store, who brought him coffee, who dreamed of being an actor. He was a puppet. A monster of obsessive desire born from a dry branch and a selfish wish. And Aerion, trapped under his weight, full of him, knew he had condemned them both to a sweet and disturbing hell from which there was no escape.
Duncan's weight on him was suffocating, but Aerion didn't dare move. The heat of Duncan's body, the beating of his heart crushing Aerion's chest, the sticky wetness between his thighs; it was all a prison of flesh and fulfilled desire. Duncan's breathing had begun to regulate, heavy and rhythmic, but it wasn't the rhythm of a man falling asleep peacefully after sex. It was the purr of a machine that has completed its task and goes into standby mode.
Aerion opened his eyes in the shadows. The orange light of the streetlamp kept filtering through the blinds, drawing horizontal lines over Duncan's broad, sweaty back. He could see the scratches he himself had left on that skin, red marks that looked like burns in the darkness. A pang of guilt, sharp and venomous, pierced the center of his chest. He had marked his owner. Or rather, he had marked his creation.
Duncan's semen was starting to cool inside him, slowly leaking out, staining the old couch cushions. It was an uncomfortable, sticky sensation, but every time Aerion tried to move his hips, even a millimeter, Duncan's arms instinctively tightened around him, like the coils of a mechanical snake.
"Don't move," Duncan murmured against his neck. His voice didn't have the kindly tone from before. It was a pristine order, devoid of emotion, executed with surgical precision. "Stay still. You're mine."
Aerion swallowed, feeling the knot in his throat tighten until it almost suffocated him.
"Dunk... I need to go to the bathroom," he whispered, his own voice sounding strange to him, broken, scraped raw by the moans and screams from minutes ago.
Duncan lifted his head. His dark eyes shone in the shadow, wide open, scanning Aerion's face as if processing a complex request. There was a blink, and for a second, the mask of loving possession fell, revealing something cold and calculating underneath. Then, the smile returned, broad, disproportionate, showing too many teeth.
"Alright," Duncan said, and slowly withdrew.
The feeling of emptiness left by Duncan's penis leaving his vagina was brutal. Aerion felt a part of his soul being ripped out, a dull, cold pain settling in his lower belly. The room air hit his wet skin and he shivered. Duncan stood up, imposing, completely naked, without any shame, looking at Aerion lying on the couch like a freshly offered sacrifice. His member, now flaccid but still imposing, glistened with shared fluids.
Duncan extended a hand to him. Aerion looked at it, the large, calloused hand that had so often passed him coffee through the car window, the hand he had dreamed would timidly stroke his cheek. Now, that hand was a claw offering to lift him from the pit of his own misery. Aerion took it.
Duncan's strength lifted him from the couch as if he were a feather. Aerion swayed on his feet, knees trembling, the inner muscles of his thighs protesting the brutality of the encounter. Duncan didn't let go of his hand. He dragged him down the small dark hallway to the bathroom.
The bathroom was small, stinking of damp and that cheap perfume of Duncan's that Aerion loved so much. Duncan turned on the fluorescent light, which flickered a couple of times before stabilizing, flooding the cramped space with a raw, white light. Aerion looked at himself in the mirror and didn't recognize himself. His blonde hair was a mess of tangles and sweat; his lips were swollen and red from kisses and bites; his neck was covered in purplish marks that went down to his collarbones. He looked like a survivor, or a victim. Or both.
Duncan stood in the doorway, arms crossed, staring at him.
"I'll clean you," Duncan said. It wasn't a question.
Before Aerion could protest, Duncan entered the cramped bathroom, forcing Aerion to back up until he hit the cold edge of the sink. Duncan turned on the tap, adjusted the temperature, and then knelt in front of Aerion.
Aerion shuddered. The position was too intimate, too similar to what had happened on the couch minutes ago. But Duncan wasn't looking for sex. He took a hand towel, soaked it in warm water, and began to clean Aerion. The contact of the rough fabric against his sensitive skin, soaked in sweat and semen, made Aerion bite his lower lip to keep from moaning. Duncan ran the towel over his thighs, over his intimate folds, cleaning the evidence of his own possession with a meticulousness bordering on obsession. Every touch was possessive, every pass of the towel a claim of territory.
"I'll take care of you," Duncan murmured, rubbing the towel against Aerion's crotch harder than necessary, making Aerion stand on his tiptoes, moaning. "Always. No one will touch you like this. No one will clean you. Only me."
Aerion grabbed Duncan's shoulders to keep his balance. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, trying to block out reality. The guilt was an acid burning his insides. The willow branch. The damn branch. It was in the pocket of his jacket, thrown on the apartment floor. A piece of dry wood worth four dollars and ninety-nine cents that had distorted reality.
"Duncan..." Aerion's voice broke. "Why did you say those things? Why... why did you carry me like that?"
Duncan stopped cleaning him and looked up. His eyes were two dark, deep wells. The fluorescent light made his skin look pale, almost sickly.
"Because it's the truth," Duncan answered, as if explaining that water is wet. "It's always been the truth. I just couldn't see it. I was blind. Now I see."
"But an hour ago you hated me," Aerion insisted, tears welling up again. "You told me to leave. You were furious about the 'savage' thing."
Duncan frowned, as if trying to remember a distant dream or a life that no longer belonged to him. He shook his head slowly.
"That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anymore. The past is noise. Only you exist, Aerion. Only you exist and my love for you." Duncan stood up, wrapping Aerion in a suffocating embrace, burying his face in the blonde hair. "My Aerion. My love. My life."
Aerion let his head fall against Duncan's chest, feeling the other man's heart beat hard against his cheek. It was a steady beat, yes, but it had an artificial rhythm, as if marking the time of a song only he could hear. The delicious terror he'd felt on the couch was turning into pure terror. He had played god with his best friend's feelings, and had created a devoted monster.
Duncan let him go and handed him one of his old t-shirts, a rock band shirt that fit Aerion like a dress, brushing the middle of his thighs. Aerion put it on without protesting, grateful for the cover, though the smell of Duncan impregnating the fabric made him feel even more trapped. Duncan put on a pair of loose sweatpants and, taking him by the hand, guided him back to the living room.
The living room was a battlefield. Aerion's black jacket lay on the floor by the door, thrown like trash. Aerion's torn t-shirt was next to the couch. The cushions were misaligned, one of them on the floor. The smell of sex, sweat, and desperation permeated the heavy air of the room.
Duncan led him to the bed. Duncan's bed, a double mattress in the corner of the studio, separated from the rest of the apartment by a bookshelf full of play scripts and worn paperback novels. Aerion had always fantasized about being in that bed, waking up between those grey sheets and perceiving Duncan's smell on the pillow. But now, the bed looked like an altar of sacrifice.
"Lie down," Duncan ordered, gently pulling his hand.
Aerion obeyed, sliding under the cold sheets. The cold lasted only a second, because Duncan got into bed beside him, wrapping him with his heat and massive body. He hugged him from behind, pressing his chest against Aerion's back, throwing a heavy arm over his waist and intertwining their legs. It was the spooning position, but more than an intimate hug, it was a padlock.
Aerion lay looking at the wall, eyes wide open, unable to sleep. The streetlight light crept through the blind, casting long shadows. He heard Duncan's breathing behind him, slow and deep. But it wasn't the breathing of a sleeping man. It was the breathing of someone awake, listening, monitoring.
"Sleep, Aerion," Duncan whispered against the nape of his neck, lips brushing sensitive skin. "I'll protect you. No one will hurt you. I'll never leave you alone again."
The words would have been paradise spoken by the real Duncan, the Duncan who flirted awkwardly and blushed when their hands brushed. But spoken by this obsessive puppet, they sounded like a life sentence.
Time began to distort in the darkness of the room. Minutes that felt like hours. Aerion dared to move, trying to roll onto his back. Duncan's arm tightened immediately, immobilizing him.
"Where are you going?" Duncan's voice cut the silence like a whip.
"Just... I just need to move, Dunk. My hip hurts," Aerion lied.
Duncan released him immediately, pulling back a bit on the bed. Aerion turned to look at him. In the shadows, he could see Duncan's eyes open, shining, fixed on him like a hawk.
"Did it hurt?" Duncan asked, and there was a trace of genuine panic in his voice, programmed panic. "Did I hurt you? I didn't want to hurt you. I just wanted to love you. Are you okay? Do you need a doctor?"
"No, no, I'm fine," Aerion hurried to say, raising a hand to touch Duncan's chest, feeling the heart beating a mile a minute under his fingers. "I'm fine, Duncan. I was just uncomfortable."
Duncan captured Aerion's hand against his chest, holding it there.
"I would never hurt you on purpose," Duncan said, his voice returning to that low, obsessive, purring tone. "You're my reason to breathe. If I hurt you, I'll cut off my hands."
Aerion felt a vomit of terror rising up his throat. The declaration wasn't poetic; it was literal. Duncan was so possessed by the spell that he would destroy himself before harming Aerion. It was slavery disguised as devotion.
"Don't do that," Aerion whispered, voice trembling. "Duncan, just... just sleep, please. I'm tired."
"I'm not sleepy," Duncan replied, tilting his head, stroking Aerion's hand with his thumb. "I'd rather look at you. Watch how you breathe. Watch how your eyelids move. You're beautiful, Aerion. The most beautiful thing in the world. I didn't know I could love something this much. My chest hurts from loving you so much."
Aerion felt like he was drowning. The intensity of those words, stripped of any human filter, any rationality, was overwhelming. He turned his face to the pillow, trying to hide his silent crying, but Duncan leaned over him, using his fingers to brush the hair from his face.
"You're crying," Duncan said, clinical tone back. "Tears are a sign of sadness. You shouldn't be sad. I love you. That should make you happy."
"I'm happy," Aerion sobbed, the biggest lie of his life. "It's just... it's a lot. It's overwhelming."
"You'll get used to it," Duncan said, with a chilling certainty. "You'll get used to me loving you like this. There's no other option."
And with that, Duncan let him go, but only to wrap him up again, this time with both legs and arms, imprisoning him against his chest. Aerion surrendered to physical and emotional exhaustion. He let himself be rocked by the false comfort of Duncan's warmth, and finally, heart heavy as lead, fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.
Morning light did not enter Duncan's apartment as a kind, comforting entity. No, the sun seemed an intruder, a fork of white, aggressive light that forced its way through the poorly closed blinds with laser precision, striking directly Aerion's closed eyelids. But it wasn't the light that woke him from his dark, dreamless sleep. It was a sound. A sound that didn't belong in this apartment, a sound so familiar and so alien at the same time that his brain took three full seconds to process it, classify it, understand that he was in danger.
A bark. A deep, wet, insistent bark. The bark of a large dog that wants to get off a bed.
Aerion snapped his eyes open.
The first thing he saw was the ceiling. But it wasn't the grey, cracked ceiling of his own apartment, the ceiling he had stared at for years counting damp stains as if they were inverse constellations. This ceiling was different. It had a crack running from the upper left corner to the center, like a dry river on a map of barren land, and the paint was a faded cream color, with yellowish stains near the ceiling lamp that was off.
Aerion blinked, disorientation clouding his mind like thick fog. His body ached. Every muscle, every joint, every fiber of his being protested with a dull, deep pain. His shoulders were stiff, his thighs tense as violin strings, and a whiplash of pain in his lower back that ran up his spine every time he tried to move. And then there was the sensation between his legs: a mix of stiffness, extreme sensitivity, and a sticky wetness that had cooled during the night, reminding him, with visceral cruelty, exactly what had happened on that same couch and then in that same bed just hours ago.
The magic. The willow branch. The wish. The possession. The violent, desperate, unnatural sex. Duncan's words resonating in his skull like lead bells: "You'll get used to me loving you like this. There's no other option."
Aerion swallowed, throat dry and scratchy. He turned on his side in bed, expecting to find Duncan's warm, oppressive body wrapping around him like a constrictor snake, but the left side of the bed was empty. The sheets were tangled, still held the imprint of a body, and the pillow smelled of that cheap Duncan perfume mixed with sweat and something else, something metallic, like dried blood.
The bark sounded again, closer, more urgent this time.
"Bobby!" Aerion exclaimed, sitting up in bed with a jolt, heart suddenly pounding in his throat.
He looked toward the foot of the bed. There was his dog. His ninety-pound Golden Retriever, his dog that should be miles away, locked in his own apartment, chewing on the invoices from the living room floor. But Bobby wasn't in his apartment. Bobby was there, in Duncan's room, jumping nervously from side to side, tail wagging at a frantic pace, wet snout pushing the air, barking directly at Aerion as if saying "Where are we? Why does everything smell weird? Get me out of here."
"How... how did you get here, Bobby?" Aerion murmured, stomach shrinking in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
It was then that Aerion looked around the room. Really looked. And the terror, that delicious terror that had transmuted into panic the night before, solidified into a block of pure ice that fell directly into the center of his stomach.
The room wasn't the same. Or rather, the room was the same, but its contents had changed drastically. The walls that the night before had only been decorated by Duncan's bookshelf of play scripts and some carelessly framed action movie posters, were now surrounded by boxes. Brown cardboard boxes, stacked one on top of another, reaching almost to the ceiling in some corners.
Aerion felt the air leave his lungs. He got out of bed, legs trembling, ignoring the pain in his thighs and the feeling of emptiness and stinging in his crotch. He walked to the first stack of boxes, barefoot on the cold wooden floor. Bobby followed, tilting his head, sniffing the boxes cautiously.
Aerion read the label written in black marker on the first box. The handwriting wasn't Duncan's. It was his. His own hasty, right-leaning handwriting. "Winter clothes - Main closet."
He shook his head, slowly at first, then faster, as if he could deny the reality of what he was seeing. He turned to another box. "Accounting books and store invoices." Another. "Bathroom stuff. Toiletries." By the door, a smaller, open box showed the edges of his collectible Star Wars figures, still wrapped in bubble wrap. And next to the bed, his nightstand, the same nightstand from his apartment, with the copper lamp he'd bought at a secondhand store, now lit in front of Duncan's window.
"My God," Aerion whispered, bringing his hands to his head, digging his fingers into his tangled blonde hair. "My God, my God, my God."
It wasn't just the clothes. It wasn't just the boxes. Aerion looked toward the corner of the room and saw Bobby's cage, disassembled and leaning against the wall. He saw his grey coat hanging on the back of Duncan's door, next to his friend's leather jacket. He saw his dress shoes lined up perfectly next to Duncan's sneakers, as if they were a lifelong married couple.
The night before, Duncan had told him he loved him, that they were meant for each other. But this... this wasn't love. This was a kidnapping. An annexation. Duncan hadn't just possessed him physically, hadn't just twisted his mind with that cursed spell from the willow branch, but while Aerion slept a dark, dreamless sleep, exhausted by physical and emotional trauma, Duncan had gone to his apartment, packed up his entire life, loaded his dog, and moved his entire existence into this small red-brick apartment.
Aerion felt he couldn't breathe. The walls of the room seemed to close in, the ceiling seemed to lower, the boxes seemed to look at him with their handwritten labels like cardboard eyes judging him. He had to get out of there. He had to find Duncan. He had to put an end to this madness before the asphyxiation consumed him completely.
He put on the previous night's jeans, which were lying on the floor by the bed, wrinkled and smelling of sex and desperation. He buckled the belt with clumsy fingers, trembling so much the metal buckle slipped from his hands twice. He looked at himself for a second in Duncan's closet mirror. He was pale, paler than normal, with deep purplish dark circles marked under his violet eyes, which were now bloodshot and full of vibrant terror. The neckline of the old rock t-shirt of Duncan's he was wearing was stretched out, exposing the bite marks and hickeys going down his neck to his collarbone, a topographic map of Duncan's possession.
"Stay here, Bobby," Aerion told the dog, his voice sounding strangely high and broken in the silence of the apartment. "Stay."
Bobby inclined his head, whimpering a bit, but didn't move from his spot. Aerion opened the bedroom door and went out into the short hallway. Duncan's apartment had always been small, a long studio, but now it felt like a claustrophobic maze. The smell of food hit his nostrils immediately. A strong, penetrating smell, mixing the aroma of burning bacon, eggs fried in excess oil, and something else... something sweet, like maple syrup that had been heated too much.
Aerion walked toward the kitchen, which was integrated into the living room. His bare feet slapped softly against the worn linoleum of the floor. As he advanced, the burning smell grew stronger, more acrid, filling his lungs with a light grey smoke that floated in the kitchen air like a ghostly mist.
And there was Duncan.
Duncan was standing in front of the stove, his back to Aerion. He wore grey sweatpants that hung low on his hips and no shirt, exposing the broad musculature of his back, crossed by the red scratches Aerion had given him the night before in the midst of his sexual madness. Duncan wasn't moving. He was completely static, like a wax statue placed in front of the stove, posture rigid, shoulders squared, head tilted slightly down, looking at something in front of him.
"Duncan..." Aerion called, stopping at the edge of the kitchen, his voice a trembling thread. "Duncan, what's going on? Why are there boxes in the room? Why is Bobby...?"
Aerion cut himself off abruptly. The terror, which until then had been an abstract idea in his mind, materialized into a visual image that froze the blood in his veins and made every hair on his body stand on end.
The stove had four burners. Two of them were on, blue flames licking the bottom of two black pans where scrambled eggs stuck to the blackened surface and bacon sputtered, emitting thick, dark smoke. But it wasn't the pans that stopped Aerion's heart. It was the fire. The front right burner. On top of it, simmering, was a stainless steel pot full of water. The water was bubbling, emitting steam, a temperature near a hundred degrees Celsius.
And submerged in that boiling water, up to the wrist, was Duncan's left hand.
Aerion felt the ground open beneath his feet. His brain tried to process the image, tried to find a logic, a rational explanation, and found none. The skin of Duncan's hand, the one under the water, had taken on a bright red hue, almost crimson, and was beginning to peel at the knuckles. Steam rose in spirals around his hairy forearm. And Duncan didn't move. Didn't scream. Didn't sweat. Showed no sign of pain. He stood there, standing, watching his own hand boil as if watching a cup of tea being prepared.
"Duncan!" Aerion shouted, panic breaking his paralysis. "Duncan, what are you doing?! Get your hand out!"
Aerion ran toward him, sliding on the linoleum in his socks, crossing the small distance between them in two long, desperate strides. He grabbed Duncan's right forearm with both hands, pulling backward, trying to pull his hand from the boiling water.
"Duncan, please! You're burning! Take it out now!" Aerion shouted, pulling with all his strength, his sleeves getting soaked with steam and splashing hot water.
But Duncan's arm didn't move. Not a millimeter. It was like trying to move a steel pole set in concrete. Aerion's strength, compared to Duncan's supernatural inertia, was ridiculous, like a child pulling on a tree.
"Let it go, Duncan! For the love of God, you're going to destroy your hand!" Aerion begged, tears of panic and frustration springing to his eyes. He could see the flesh of Duncan's fingers turning white, dissolving, skin hanging in translucent strips. It was an image of torture, of self-mutilation, and Duncan endured it with the same empty, serene expression he'd worn the night before when he said he'd cut off his hands before hurting him.
And then, out of nowhere, it happened.
With a movement so fast Aerion's eyes could barely register the blur, Duncan pulled his hand from the boiling water. Aerion let out a sigh of relief that lasted a fraction of a second. Because Duncan's hand, the left hand that had just been boiling, red, flayed, smoking, moved through the air like lightning.
Aerion didn't see the hand coming. He only felt the impact.
Duncan's wet, burning hand closed around Aerion's neck with an inhuman strength, one that had nothing to do with anatomy or physics, but with the dark magic of a granted wish. Duncan's fingers, despite being burned, pressed against Aerion's trachea, crushing it, cutting off airflow instantly. Aerion was lifted off the ground by the neck, his bare feet uselessly slapping the air, his hands instinctively going to Duncan's wrist, clawing at the wet, reddened skin, uselessly trying to loosen the grip.
Duncan looked at him. His dark eyes were wide open, pupils dilated to the point of devouring the iris completely, two black holes absorbing the kitchen light. There was no anger on his face. No fury. It was a mask of clinical calm, of absolute determination, the expression of a surgeon about to make a necessary cut, or an executioner fulfilling his duty.
Duncan's voice exploded in the small kitchen, vibrating against the walls, reverberating in Aerion's ears like thunder in a closed cave. It wasn't the soft, hoarse voice of the night before. It wasn't the voice of the friend who passed him coffee through the car window. It was a deep, distorted roar, a sound that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, charged with inhuman authority.
"LET ME MAKE YOU YOUR BREAKFAST!"
The words hit Aerion with the same force as the hand on his neck. The voice resonated in his skull, shaking his brain, and before he could process the meaning of the order, Duncan released his grip.
Aerion fell to the floor. His back hit the linoleum with a dull thud, air escaping from his lungs in a rush, leaving him gasping, coughing, clutching his burning neck. Bobby started barking frantically from the bedroom, scratching at the closed door. Aerion rolled onto his stomach, survival instinct screaming in his head louder than the pain in his throat. He couldn't stay there. He couldn't stay in this kitchen with this man who wasn't a man, with this monster of twisted devotion.
Coughing, crawling, Aerion stumbled to his feet and ran. Not toward the bedroom, not toward Bobby. He ran toward the apartment's front door. His feet slipped, his hands trembled, panic was an icy liquid running through his veins. He reached the door in three strides, grabbed the metal knob with both hands and turned.
It didn't move.
It was locked. Aerion looked down. It wasn't just the lock. There was a new deadbolt, a security bolt that hadn't been there the night before, going through the door and the frame, metallic, shiny, solid. And below, a steel chain, also new, firmly secured. Duncan had transformed the apartment into a prison while he slept.
Aerion pulled the knob, shook it, hit the door with the palm of his hand.
"Open! Open the door!" he shouted, though his voice sounded broken and strangled from the pressure on his throat.
He turned, seized by panic, pressing his back against the cold door. He looked around, chest rising and falling at a frantic rate, eyes wide. The living room, which the night before had been the stage of his sexual possession, was now a warehouse. Boxes. Boxes and more moving boxes. They were stacked against the walls, by the couch, partially blocking the window facing the street. Boxes with labels written in his handwriting. "Kitchen. Pots and pans." "Living room. Photos and decor." "Bedding." It was his entire life, boxed up, torn up by the roots from his old apartment and moved into this space that now smelled of burning bacon and boiled human flesh.
He brought his hands to his head, pulling his blonde hair, feeling he was going crazy, that this was a dream he couldn't wake up from. How had this happened in a few hours? How had Duncan managed to move all this, install locks, bring his dog, without waking him? It was impossible. It was supernatural. The willow branch hadn't just twisted Duncan's feelings, it had transformed his physique, his energy, his capacity for action. Duncan was a force of nature now, a hurricane of devotion that stopped at nothing.
Aerion slowly turned his head, with a thick, paralyzing terror spreading through his body, toward the kitchen.
Duncan was there.
He was standing in the same place, as if he hadn't moved, as if the aggression episode a minute ago hadn't occurred. The egg pan was still smoking on the stove, the water in the pot was still boiling. But in his right hand, the hand that hadn't been burned, Duncan held a plate. A white plate, with a blue border, where he had served a generous portion of scrambled eggs, slightly burnt at the edges, two strips of crispy bacon, and a slice of toast.
Duncan turned. He walked toward Aerion with a measured, slow, inevitable step. Aerion pressed harder against the door, wanting to go through it, disappear into the wood. But Duncan didn't attack him. Didn't raise a hand. He stopped a meter away from him, extended the plate forward, offering it, and on his face was a smile. A broad, kind smile, the same crooked smile he used to greet him with in the mornings at his father's store.
"Aren't you hungry, Aerion?" Duncan asked. His voice was soft, casual, completely devoid of the demonic distortion from a moment ago. He sounded as if he were asking about the weather. "I made your favorite breakfast. Scrambled eggs with bacon. I know you like the bacon really crispy, so I left it on a bit longer. I thought you'd have an appetite after... last night."
Aerion looked at the plate. Then looked into Duncan's eyes. Then looked at the plate again. The food steamed, giving off a smell that under any other circumstance would have been appetizing, but now churned his stomach, mixing with the smell of burnt skin still lingering in the kitchen air.
"Are you... are you sick in the head?" Aerion's voice was a raspy, pained whisper, vocal cords protesting the grip from a minute ago. "You... you grabbed me by the neck. You threw me to the floor. Your hand... Duncan, your hand was in boiling water. You're burning it! What's wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with you?"
Duncan tilted his head, looking at him with an expression of genuine confusion, as if Aerion were speaking a language he didn't understand. He looked at his left hand, the one that had been in the water. Aerion looked at it too, expecting to see raw flesh, blisters, blood. But the hand was perfect. The skin was a slightly pinkish tone, no marks, no burns, not a single scratch. As if it had never been in boiling water. Aerion felt a shudder of terror so deep his teeth chattered. The magic didn't just control him, it regenerated him. Duncan wasn't a man anymore. He was an invulnerable entity.
"My hand is fine, Aerion," Duncan said, with that clinical, patient tone Aerion was beginning to hate with all his soul. "I just needed to sterilize it. I wanted to make sure everything was clean before touching your food. I don't want you ingesting any bacteria. You have a sensitive stomach, you always have. You get sick easily. I'm not going to allow you to get sick in my house."
Aerion shook his head, slowly, tears starting to roll down his pale cheeks.
"It's not your house... this is your house, but my things... Why are my things here, Duncan?" Aerion pointed a trembling finger at the boxes stacked in the living room. "Why is Bobby here? What did you do?"
Duncan's smile faded. His face hardened, jaw clenching, eyes darkening a degree. Not with anger, but with solemn seriousness, like a father about to scold a child who doesn't understand the rules of the house.
"Because you won't let me be a good boyfriend," Duncan said. The words fell heavy in the stale air of the apartment. "You wanted to go slow. You wanted space. But if I give you space, you pull away. If you pull away, you get sad. If you're sad, I break. I can't be a good boyfriend if you live somewhere else, Aerion. I can't protect you if you're not here. I can't make sure you eat, that you sleep, that you're safe. So I fixed the problem."
Aerion stared at him, feeling the floor tilt beneath his bare feet.
"Answer the question, Duncan," Aerion said, trying to sound firm, though his voice broke. "Don't talk to me about being a good boyfriend. Answer me. What did you do with my things? How did you bring them here?"
Duncan let out a sigh, as if the question were a tedious obviousness, a bureaucratic formality Aerion was forcing him to repeat. He set the plate of food on the nearest box, with meticulous care, smoothing the edges of the plate with his fingers.
"I just moved everything during the night," Duncan explained, with the same naturalness someone would recount going to buy milk at the supermarket. "It didn't take long. I loaded the boxes in the back of your car. I only made three trips. Your dog was good, got in the passenger seat without complaining. I left him in the room so he wouldn't bother me while I cooked."
He paused, looking at his nails, as if remembering an important detail.
"Oh, and I called your landlord," Duncan added, looking up, with a proud smile. "I told him to cancel Aerion's tenancy. I told him you didn't need it anymore, that you had moved in with me permanently. At first he got a bit difficult about the contract and the deposit, but I explained it was best for you. That I would take care of everything. That you weren't coming back. I think he understood."
Aerion felt his knees give way. He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor, legs folded, looking at Duncan with wide eyes, chest rising and falling rapidly. He canceled the tenancy. His apartment. His space. His refuge. The place where he had his bed, his mess, his bills, his solitude. All gone. In a few hours, Duncan had erased his independent existence from the map.
"You're crazy," Aerion whispered, voice broken, trembling. "You're completely crazy. Why would you do that? Why? It's my life, Duncan! It's my home! You can't just... just erase my life and put me in boxes in your living room!"
Aerion began to pace, standing up abruptly, hysteria taking over. He paced the small space between the boxes, gesturing, putting his hands to his face, pulling his hair.
"You're crazy!" he repeated, yelling, voice breaking. "This is crazy! Who does that? Who packs someone else's things while they sleep? Who calls the landlord to cancel a lease? My God, Duncan, this is a crime! It's kidnapping! I can't believe..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
Because out of nowhere, as if he had teleported, Duncan was there. Aerion didn't see him cross the space, didn't hear his steps on the linoleum. One second he was pacing alone, on the verge of a panic attack, and the next second, Duncan's massive body was in front of him, invading his personal space.
But Duncan didn't grab him by the neck this time. Didn't push him. He raised his right hand, the healthy hand, and with a delicacy that was more terrifying than the violence, gently held Aerion's chin between his thumb and index finger. He lifted Aerion's face, forcing him to look him directly in the eyes.
Duncan's eyes were two dark abysses. There was no warmth in them, no soul, no trace of the friend who dreamed of being an actor and brought him coffee in the office. They were the eyes of an entity, of an alien force that had borrowed Duncan's body to fulfill a wish.
"Is it that you don't love me?" Duncan asked. His voice was a whisper, low, calm, deadly. "Is that it, Aerion? All this fuss, all this hysteria... is it because you don't love me?"
Aerion looked him in the eyes. He saw the latent threat behind the question. He saw that if he said "no," if he dared to pronounce the word contradicting the spell, the hand holding his chin so softly could become a deadly claw in a fraction of a second. He saw that Duncan, or whatever Duncan was now, wasn't going to accept rejection. The spell didn't allow rejection. The spell was absolute.
"No... it's not that," Aerion stuttered, tears falling down his cheeks, feeling like the most miserable coward in the universe. "It's not that, Duncan. Of course I love you. You know I love you. I've always loved you. It's just that... this is very rushed. Moving in here, canceling my apartment, my things in boxes... it's too fast. We need to go slower. Normal couples go slower. We need... we need a process."
Duncan didn't blink. He kept looking at him, processing the words, analyzing the micro-movements of Aerion's face, reading the fear in his eyes like an open book.
"Then you don't love me," Duncan concluded. It wasn't a question. It was an accusation. His voice dropped another tone, becoming deep, guttural, resonating in Aerion's chest like an earthquake. "You say you love me, but you put conditions. You say you love me, but you want to go slow. You say you love me, but you want to escape. If you truly loved me, you'd be happy to be here. If you truly loved me, you wouldn't care that I brought your things. If you truly loved me, you'd understand I did it for us."
Duncan tilted his head, and a macabre expression drew itself on his face. The lips stretched in a smile that wasn't a smile, a twisted, symmetric grimace that pulled the corners too high, showing gums, giving him a grinning skull aspect. His eyes emptied completely, becoming two black, opaque, lifeless crystals.
"I feel like you don't love me the way I love you, Aerion," Duncan said, and every word was a piece of ice driven into Aerion's heart. "I love you to the point of destroying everything for you. Your apartment, your routines, your past life. I erased it because you are my life now. But you... you just want to 'go slow'. You want to keep an emergency exit. And that's not love, Aerion. That's convenience."
Aerion opened his mouth to speak. He felt the urgent, desperate need to placate the beast, to tell him yes, that he loved him the way he loved him, that he accepted the boxes, that he accepted the apartment, that he accepted everything, just so that macabre smile would disappear from his face. He was going to tell him he felt dizzy, that he was overwhelmed but happy, that he was going to eat the scrambled eggs and that they were going to be the happiest couple in the world.
But the sound cut the air before he could articulate a single word.
Brrrrring. Brrrrring. Brrrrring.
The phone. His phone. It was in the back pocket of the jeans he had hurriedly put on. The strident, monotonous sound of the default ringtone broke the bubble of supernatural terror enveloping them, bringing with it a fragment of external reality, of the world beyond the moving boxes and boiled hands.
Duncan closed his mouth. His macabre smile vanished, replaced by cold indifference. He released Aerion's chin, took a step back, and turned toward the kitchen, walking slowly, as if the interruption had no importance, as if Aerion temporarily didn't exist.
Aerion, hands trembling so violently he almost dropped the phone, pulled it from his pocket. The screen glowed in the apartment's shadows. A name. A name that caused a knot of relief and terror at the same time.
Maekar Targaryen.
His father. The patriarch. The store owner. The man who never called unless there was a disaster of biblical proportions.
Aerion swiped to answer, pressing the phone against his ear, clearing his throat to clean his strangled voice.
"Dad?" Aerion answered, his voice sounding like a broken croak.
"Where are you, Aerion?" Maekar Targaryen's voice exploded in the earpiece. It was a deep, authoritative, impatient voice, accustomed to giving orders and not being questioned. It had the tone of a general directing troops in the middle of a war. "I've called your apartment three times and you don't answer. Daeron is trying to square the numbers for yesterday's inventory and says two boxes of receipts are missing. Aemon is in the backroom wasting time with his medical books instead of helping customers. Daera and Daella are arguing over who has to restock the electronics shelves. Aegon hasn't shown up, as usual. And Rhae isn't answering my messages. It's a fucking circus here! I need you at the store right now!"
Aerion closed his eyes for a second. His family. His siblings. The daily chaos of the Targaryen store. Normality. It was miles away, separated from him by cardboard boxes, steel bolts, and a cursed spell.
"I... yes, Dad, sorry," Aerion stuttered, turning instinctively to give his back to the kitchen, speaking quietly. "I didn't feel well last night. I fell asleep. I'm on my way. Tell Daeron the receipts are in the... in the blue box, in the office file. I'm coming."
"Make it quick, Aerion. I don't have time for your existential crises today. I have a business to run. Half an hour." And he hung up. A dry click, no goodbye, no questions about how he felt.
Aerion slowly lowered the phone. He turned, heart pounding in his chest, to look toward the kitchen.
Duncan wasn't there.
The kitchen was empty. The pan smoked on the stove. The plate of scrambled eggs and bacon was still on the box in the living room, untouched, giving off steam. But of Duncan there was no trace. He wasn't in the kitchen, wasn't in the hallway. It was as if he had faded into the air, absorbed by the apartment's shadows.
Aerion stood paralyzed for a second, looking at the empty space where Duncan had been standing a moment ago. The apartment's silence was deathly, broken only by the drip of a poorly closed tap and Bobby's muffled barking from the bedroom.
He wasn't going to stay to look for him. He wasn't going to wait for him to reappear out of nowhere. Survival instinct overcame the paralyzing terror.
"I'm on my way, Dad," Aerion whispered to the dead screen of his phone, though no one was listening.
He turned to the door. He had to get out. He had to go to the store. He had to find his father, Myriah, someone who could help him undo this hell. He looked at the new bolts on the door. They were solid steel. He wasn't going to be able to break them with brute force. He looked around, desperate, his eyes falling on Duncan's toolbox next to the couch, half hidden by one of his own boxes labeled "Winter clothes."
Aerion lunged for the toolbox, pulling it open. Inside, among wrenches and measuring tapes, he saw a flathead screwdriver and a hammer. His hands were trembling violently, but the adrenaline of terror gave him the precision he needed. He grabbed the screwdriver, inserted it into the slot of the security deadbolt, and hit the base with the hammer. Once. Twice. Three times. The metal screeched. The deadbolt bent enough for the wood to give way and the screw shot out.
He pulled the chain, ripping it from the door frame, splintering the wood. He turned the knob.
The door opened.
The bell of the Targaryen store door rang with an old, metallic sound that always made Aerion think of church bells. The smell hit him immediately: that mixed aroma of old cardboard, burnt plastic from the electronics section, the pine-scented floor cleaner Daera used too frequently, and the freshly brewed coffee always in the machine by the office. A familiar smell. A smell of home. But today, the normality of that smell felt like a mockery, a hollow shell spread over an abyss of nightmare.
Aerion entered like a man walking toward his own execution. His heart was still beating with the violence of a cornered animal, his ears were ringing from the residual adrenaline of having ripped the bolts off Duncan's door, and his hands were trembling so visibly he had to cross his arms over his chest to hide them. He expected... he didn't exactly know what he expected. That the store would be plunged in the same supernatural chaos as the apartment? That Duncan would be behind the counter with rolled-back eyes, repeating the same phrase over and over like a broken record? That the very air would be distorted, bending under the weight of a malignant wish?
But no. The store was the store.
Daeron was behind the main counter, in his dark green apron and frowning, typing on the computer with a surgeon's concentration. Aemon was in the medicine aisle—an irony Aerion always found cruel, given he was studying the degree and ended up selling cheap thermometers—organizing boxes with his meticulous method. Daera and Daella were in the electronics section, and though they weren't fighting at that exact second, the tension in Daella's shoulders suggested the truce was temporary. Everything was painfully, aberrantly normal.
And then, he saw him.
Duncan was coming out of the backroom. He wore his ink- and dust-stained apron, brown hair disheveled as if he'd run his hands through it a thousand times, and that broad, hunched posture that made him take up more space than he should. It was Duncan. His Duncan. The same one who had given him the bracelet, the same one who smiled like a kid at Christmas, the same one who...
The same one who yesterday had looked at him with eyes that weren't his eyes, who had installed steel bolts while he slept, who had spoken of love with the empty voice of a dead man.
Duncan looked up. His dark eyes swept the store until they found Aerion, who had been paralyzed a meter from the entrance, frozen like a deer in the headlights of a car. And then, Duncan's face lit up. It was a total, instantaneous transformation, as if someone had flipped a switch inside him. The smile that spread across his lips was huge, disproportionate, so full of overflowing joy it seemed... unnatural. It wasn't the crooked, lazy smile Aerion was used to. It was the smile of a fanatic, the smile of someone who has found their god after years of searching in the desert.
"Aerion!" Duncan exclaimed, and his voice resonated in the store, making Daeron look up from the computer and Aemon turn from the aisle.
Duncan crossed the distance between them in three long strides. Aerion tensed, every muscle in his body screaming at him to back away, to run, that the thing approaching him wore his friend's skin but wasn't his friend. But before he could even think about moving, Duncan was in front of him. His hands, large and calloused, grabbed Aerion's shoulders with a strength bordering on pain, and then, in front of everyone present, Duncan leaned in and planted a loud, prolonged, wet kiss on Aerion's forehead.
The world stopped.
The contact was like an icy electric shock. Aerion's skin prickled, his scalp burned under Duncan's lips, and a nauseating smell of cheap lotion and something else—something metallic, like old coins left out in the rain—filled his nostrils. Aerion let out a choked sound, a sigh of pure terror disguised as surprise.
"My boy," Duncan murmured against his skin, and the vibration of his lips on Aerion's forehead sent a shiver of shame and horror down his spine. "I missed you this morning. I thought you weren't coming."
Aerion opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He could feel Daera and Daella staring from the electronics section, could feel Aemon's analytical gaze, could feel the weight of reality collapsing in on itself.
"I... I have to... the office," Aerion stuttered, taking a step back, breaking free from Duncan's grip with a jerky motion he couldn't disguise. "Dad told me the receipts... the blue box. I'm going."
He turned and walked toward the office almost stumbling, feeling Duncan's eyes boring into his back like two burning drills. He closed the office door with a soft click and then, with trembling hands, turned the latch. He slumped against the wood, breathing hard, gasping for air as if drowning.
A kiss on the forehead. He kissed him on the forehead in front of everyone. What the fuck was going on?
He pulled out his backpack, trying to shrug off his jacket with hands that refused to cooperate. He was putting his phone in the desk drawer when the office door burst open, breaking the latch.
Rhae entered like a whirlwind. She slammed the door shut behind her and stood looking at Aerion with narrowed eyes, arms crossed under her chest, and an expression that wasn't surprise or happiness, but pure, contained, lethal fury. Her red lips were pressed into a line so thin they looked like a knife slash across her pale face.
"What the fuck happened last night?" Rhae hissed, approaching him with steps that resonated like whiplashes on the tile floor. "And don't lie to me, Aerion. I swear to God if you lie to me I'll rip your tongue out."
Aerion backed up until he hit the desk. The terror he felt for Duncan suddenly mixed with the visceral fear Rhae always provoked in him when she was like this.
"Rhae, I..."
"'Aerion and I are boyfriends'?" she interrupted him, raising her hands to make air quotes with an irony so acidic it almost burned the oxygen. "'We live together'? The idiot showed up at six in the morning, before we opened, smelling like your expensive cologne and with a psychopath smile, and told Daeron, Aemon, Daera, the new cashier, the box delivery guy, Aerion! He told everyone that you're a couple now and that you moved in with him. What the fuck did you do to him?!"
Aerion felt the ground sinking beneath his feet. Duncan had come to the store to announce they were boyfriends. He had kissed him on the forehead. He was acting as if the spell, the wish, the curse, was the absolute and undeniable reality of their lives.
"I didn't do anything to him, Rhae," Aerion whispered, and his voice broke on the last syllable. "I swear. Last night he... he invited me to his apartment and I went, and everything was normal at first, but then... something changed. He changed. He put locks on the doors, wouldn't let me leave, looked at me as if I were... I don't know, a possession. He talked about us, about forever, and his eyes, Rhae, his eyes were dead. I think... I think something bad is happening to him. Truly. I'm worried about him. I think Duncan is going through something serious."
Rhae listened without blinking. Her expression didn't soften, showed not an ounce of the concern Aerion was describing. Instead, something dark and twisted moved behind her violet eyes. A black, poisonous envy, a rage that had nothing to do with Duncan's wellbeing and everything to do with absolute selfishness.
To Rhae, Duncan had been a trophy. A secret toy. The thrill of fucking in the dark of the backroom or in the backseat of her car with the boy her older brother secretly loved gave Rhae a perverse power, a narcissistic satisfaction that made her feel alive. Duncan was rough, passionate, and dumb, easy to manipulate when she whispered what he wanted to hear. He was hers in the shadows. And now, Aerion, the pathetic brother, the ridiculous one who drank vanilla lattes and sighed out the window, had stolen her toy. Aerion was "winning." And Rhae couldn't stand losing.
But Aerion, blind as always, only saw his younger sister, the cold and pragmatic girl. He didn't see the jealous sociopath. He saw someone who could maybe help him understand this hell.
"Worried about him?" Rhae repeated, and her voice had dropped a tone, becoming silky and dangerous. "You're worried about Duncan. You. The guy who spends his life obsessing over him and now suddenly you have a relationship out of nowhere and you're worried."
"Yes, Rhae," Aerion insisted, desperate, gripping the edge of the desk until his knuckles went white. "Yes, I'm worried. It's not normal. It's not him. Please, can you talk to him? He listens to you. He always listens to you. Maybe you can find out what's wrong, what... what was done to him."
Rhae tilted her head. A slow, predatory smile spread across her face. The idea of approaching Duncan, confronting him, trying to regain control of the situation was infinitely appealing. It would return power to her.
"Alright," she said, smoothing her black dress. "I'll talk to him. Stay here and... do your numbers or whatever it is you do."
"Thank you, Rhae," Aerion said, and the sincerity in his voice was so absolute, so pathetic, that Rhae had to suppress the urge to spit in his face. "Truly. Thank you."
Rhae turned and left the office without adding anything else, leaving Aerion alone in the shadows of the room full of boxes and files.
Aerion collapsed into the swivel chair, rubbing his face with both hands. Duncan's smell still clung to his skin, his forehead, like a mark. A stigma. He swallowed, trying to calm the knot in his stomach. A soft knock on the door interrupted his collapse.
"Aerion," Myriah's voice came from the other side, soft but firm. "Can I come in?"
Aerion stood up and opened the door, destroying what little was left of the latch. Myriah was there, in her grey coat and her infinitely understanding gaze. Behind her, like a chorus of mocking angels, were Daera, Daella, Aemon, and Daeron. The twins, Daera and Daeron, held each other by the elbow like they always did when excited; Aemon had his hands in his pockets and a half smile on his face; Daella was biting her lower lip holding back a scream.
"Guys, I..." Aerion started.
"Oh, shut up!" Daera exclaimed, pushing Myriah to enter the small office and grabbing Aerion by the shoulders. "Why didn't you tell us anything, idiot?! Since when?!"
"I saw you did have a chance!" Daella chimed in, entering behind, her eyes shining with that romantic excitement only younger sisters seem to have. "Oh, Aerion, it's so cute!"
"Yeah, man," Daeron said, poking his head through the door. "You've been looking at him with doe eyes since he started working here. It's a relief you finally did something."
"It's not just that," Aemon chimed in, crossing his arms, a genuine smile lighting up his serious face. "You look very cute together. Truly. Duncan is a good guy, Aerion. Maybe the only one in this place who isn't crazy."
Myriah, who had remained leaning against the door frame, watching her siblings' assault, nodded slowly.
"He's right," Myriah said, in that voice that seemed to come from a deeper, older place than the rest of the room. "Duncan is good. And he looks at you, Aerion. He looks at you in a way... He can't stop looking at you. How tender."
Aerion felt a knot in his throat, but this time it wasn't terror, it was something more fragile, more desperate. Hope. That damn hope that refused to die. They all saw the facade. They saw Duncan's huge smile, the kiss on the forehead, the public declaration of love. They saw the happy ending of a romantic comedy.
*What if I'm the one who's crazy?* Aerion thought, clinging to Daera's arms like a life raft. *What if the apartment, the locks, the empty look, was just a nightmare caused by stress? What if the wish, the spell, just accelerated things, but Duncan's feelings are real?*
Slowly, heart pounding in his ears, Aerion turned toward the small square window of the office overlooking the store.
And there was Duncan.
He was in the appliance aisle, holding a box of microphones, but he wasn't looking at the box. He wasn't looking at the customers. He was looking directly at the office. At Aerion. His dark eyes were fixed, immobile, without a blink disturbing that absolute concentration. And the expression on his face... was love. Or at least, the version of love the spell had manufactured. It was a crushing devotion, an insatiable hunger, an adoration so intense it bordered on madness. It was the look of a man who has found his reason to exist and would burn the whole world before letting it escape.
Aerion felt blood rush to his cheeks. Under the intensity of that gaze, the terror of the night before began to blur, covered by a veil of blush and wonder. *He loves me,* he thought. *He truly loves me. Maybe the magic just removed the barriers, the fear, the masculine stupidity that kept both of them from realizing it. Maybe the wish wasn't a curse, but a brutal push toward what always should have been.*
Duncan raised a hand, oblivious to everything around him, and touched his chest, right over his heart, without taking his eyes off Aerion. It was such a tender, raw gesture that Aerion had to look away from the window, bringing his hand to his own chest, feeling himself melt.
"See?" Daella whispered, resting her chin on Aerion's shoulder. "He's going to eat you with kisses."
Aerion let out a nervous giggle, sniffling into the back of his hand.
"Yeah," he murmured, yielding to the illusion, yearning to believe in it with every fiber of his being. "I guess so."
The following hours were a strange purgatory of forced normality and furtive glances. Aerion tried to focus on the receipts in the blue box, but it was impossible. Every time he looked up, Duncan was there, whether restocking a shelf near the office, walking down the aisle to "see if he needed anything," or simply standing in the distance, looking at him with that disproportionate smile and those eyes that didn't blink enough. He was attentive, yes, but in a way that suffocated. It was like being under a magnifying glass, under the desert sun, slowly burning while the magnifying glass smiled at him.
However, Aerion forced himself to smile back. He forced himself to believe in the twisted fairy tale his siblings were selling him. When Duncan brought him coffee in the office without him asking, Aerion murmured a trembling "thank you" and let his fingers brush Duncan's. The touch was like a static shock, and Duncan made a guttural sound, almost a purr, that sent a wave of chills down Aerion's neck. But he didn't back away. He accepted the coffee. Accepted the love. Accepted the lie.
At eight o'clock at night, the store closed. Maekar left early, grumbling about the numbers, and little by little the siblings deserted. Myriah kissed Aerion on the cheek and told him to "take care of him," referring to Duncan, before disappearing into the night. The twins left together, and Daella stayed checking her phone at the bus stop.
Rhae appeared in the office, purse hanging from her shoulder.
"Duncan and I will stay to close up," she said, in a voice that allowed no reply. Her eyes locked on Aerion's, and for a second, he thought he saw a flash of warning in them, or perhaps triumph. "You go home. Rest."
Aerion swallowed. The idea of returning to Duncan's apartment, the place of enclosure, of the spell, of the nightmare, churned his stomach.
"Are you sure? I can stay and..."
"Go, Aerion," Rhae cut in, and her smile was so sweet it was painfully false.
Aerion nodded slowly. Compliance was easier than confrontation. He left the store with hunched shoulders, feeling Duncan's eyes on his back until the glass doors closed between them.
Duncan's apartment. He had to call it "home."
The drive was silent, save for the murmur of the radio. The city paraded past the window, neon lights bleeding onto the wet asphalt, shadows stretching and shrinking like living things. Aerion leaned back in the seat, trying not to think about the broken bolts, the splintered door, the empty kitchen, and the plate of cold eggs. Duncan had told him on the phone weeks ago, before all this. *Our time is running out.*
He arrived at the apartment. The door was closed. The steel bolts he had ripped out with the screwdriver and hammer hung from the splintered wood, twisted and broken, like dead limbs. But the door was closed. He pushed it and it opened with a long, pitiful creak.
The interior was dark, save for the orange street light filtering through the blinds, drawing horizontal lines on the wooden floor. The plate of eggs and bacon was still on the living room box, but now it was cold, the grease coagulated in small white and yellow puddles. The air smelled of enclosure, of staleness, of something that had rotted in the fridge and nobody had thrown out. The dripping of the kitchen tap marked the rhythm like a clock in a mausoleum. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Aerion dropped his backpack by the couch. Bobby, the dog, didn't come to greet him.
"Bobby," Aerion called, his voice sounding hollow and strange in the deathly silence of the apartment. "Bobby, come here, boy."
Nothing. Just the dripping. Maybe Duncan had locked him in the bedroom before going to the store. Yes, that must be it. Aerion walked toward the kitchen, dodging the "Winter clothes" boxes and the open toolbox. The screwdriver and hammer were still on the floor, where he had dropped them in his escape.
He poured himself a glass of water, drinking it standing up, looking out the window at the city lights. He tried to calm down. Tried to convince himself that this was his new life. That Duncan loved him. That the locks were a mistake from a crazy night. That everything would be fine.
He turned to go to the bedroom, and at that moment, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out. The screen lit up the shadows with a ghostly glow. The name on the screen was Rhae's.
Aerion swiped to answer, bringing the phone to his ear.
"Rhae? What's up? Did you close yet?" Aerion asked, walking to the living room and sitting on the edge of the couch, next to the toolbox.
"Aerion," Rhae's voice sounded strange on the other end of the line. It was tense, tight, like a steel cable about to snap. "I already talked to Duncan."
"And? What did he say? Is he okay?"
"No, Aerion, he's not okay," Rhae hissed, and there was a nuance of genuine alarm mixed with her eternal resentment. "I asked him what the fuck happened last night for him to act like that. Tell me the truth. What shit did you do to him in the apartment?"
Aerion frowned, confused.
"What do you mean 'act like that'? Rhae, I didn't do anything to him. I told you, he put the locks and..."
"Don't lie to me," she cut him off, and her voice trembled for a second. "I noticed it at work, man. I noticed right away. The way he looked at you, the way he smiled... it's sick. It's like he's drugged or... or possessed. He looks at you like you're a god he has to worship, and if you ask him something that isn't about you, he goes blank. Like he's not there. Aerion, what did you say to him? What did you give him? Tell me what happened yesterday for Duncan to act like a fucking zombie!"
Aerion's heart stopped. The horror, that cold and viscous horror he had been trying to bury under the afternoon's hope, resurfaced like a monster from the bottom of the ocean. Rhae saw it. Rhae, who was the least empathetic person on the planet, could see something was wrong. It wasn't his imagination.
"Rhae, I... I don't know," Aerion stuttered, standing up, starting to pace the dark living room. "He... I just... the damn stick, and he... he looked at me and his eyes weren't his eyes and the door closed and..."
"What stick? What are you talking about, Aerion?" Rhae's voice sounded increasingly shrill. "Tell me what shit you did to Duncan, because he's going back there and if he's crazy...!"
"I don't know!" Aerion yelled, bringing his free hand to his head, feeling he was going to collapse. "I thought he was fine! My siblings said he was fine! You said you'd talk to him! I didn't want this, Rhae, I swear, I just love him and..."
Suddenly, the air in the apartment changed. The temperature dropped sharply, as if someone had opened the door of an industrial freezer. The kitchen dripping stopped. The humming of the fridge in the corner went silent. The silence became absolute, heavy, solid. A silence that pressed against the ears, that stole the oxygen from the room.
Aerion stopped talking. His hand, holding the phone, froze against his ear.
And then, he felt the breath.
A presence behind him. A massive shadow that blocked the faint light of the window, plunging Aerion into an even deeper darkness. A penetrating, overwhelming smell of cheap lotion and rusted metal and cold sweat. And then, two thick, strong arms wrapped around his waist, trapping him against a chest hard as a rock.
Aerion let out a muffled scream, a sound of pure animal terror that caught in his throat. The phone slipped from his fingers and fell onto the couch with a thud. Rhae was still yelling from the earpiece, a tiny, distant voice lost in the void of the apartment.
"Honey," Duncan's voice resonated directly in his ear, a deep, resonant, hollow whisper that sounded as if coming from the bottom of a well. "You're trembling."
Duncan hadn't moved. Hadn't made a sound coming in. He was simply there, materialized out of nowhere, as if he had been waiting in the shadows the whole time, as if the shadows were part of him. His arms squeezed Aerion against his body with an inhuman strength, a strength that made ribs creak.
Aerion opened his mouth, but terror had paralyzed him. He could feel Duncan's chest expand against his back, but the rhythm was strange. Too slow. Too regular. Like a mechanical clock.
"D-Duncan," Aerion managed to whisper, tears pooling in his eyes. "What... what are you doing here? Rhae said... said you were going to stay to close up."
Duncan buried his face in Aerion's neck, inhaling deeply, with an obscene redundancy. His cold nose brushed Aerion's warm skin, causing a shiver of disgust and dread that churned his stomach.
"Rhae told me you were scared," Duncan murmured against his skin, and his words sent waves of vibration through Aerion's neck. "She told me you ran away this morning because I scared you. Why are you scared of me, Aerion? I just want to love you. I just want to take care of you. Forever."
His voice broke on the last word, and suddenly, Duncan deflated. His arms loosened slightly, and his enormous body began to tremble against Aerion's back. A dry, devastating sob shook Duncan's chest, a sound so raw and so painful that, despite the paralyzing terror, something in Aerion's heart broke for him.
"My father died yesterday, Aerion," Duncan whispered, and now his voice was that of a lost child, broken and tearful. "My father died and I... I didn't know what to do. I was so alone. I was so scared. I felt like the world was crashing down on me and that everything was going to end and that I was going to lose you and I couldn't... I couldn't let you go."
Aerion's tears finally fell. The horror, the black magic, the dead look... everything mixed in his mind with the image of Duncan, his Duncan, crying over his father's death. An excuse. A reason. A human explanation for inhuman behavior. Aerion clung to it like a shipwrecked man clings to a piece of wood in the middle of a storm.
"Oh, Dunk," Aerion whispered, turning slowly in Duncan's arms, facing him for the first time since the morning nightmare. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I... I got scared because I didn't understand, but... I'm sorry."
Duncan's face was bathed in tears in the shadows. His eyes, those dark, deep eyes, shone with a moisture that seemed genuine. But the smile that formed under the tears was the same as before. Too wide. Too fixed. A smile stuck to his face like a plastic mask.
"Do you forgive me?" Duncan asked, raising a hand to stroke Aerion's cheek. His fingers were cold, stiff, and the touch felt like the brush of a wet leather glove. "I didn't want to scare you. I just wanted you to stay. I wanted to protect you from everything. From death. From the world. From everyone who doesn't understand us."
Aerion nodded, forcing himself to smile, forcing himself to believe the lie.
"I forgive you," Aerion said, and raised his trembling hands to lace them behind Duncan's neck. "I'm here. I'm not going to leave."
Duncan let out a sigh that seemed to empty all the air from the apartment. His hands, enormous and cold, slid down Aerion's back to grab his waist, lifting him off the ground with a chilling ease, as if Aerion weighed no more than a feather. Aerion gasped, clinging to Duncan's shoulders, looking down at him.
Duncan's face was half illuminated by the streetlight. Half in shadow, half in sickly orange. His eyes moved, focusing on Aerion's lips with a devouring intensity. He was no longer crying. The sadness had vanished, replaced in an instant by that dark and empty hunger, that crushing, humanity-less need.
"My Aerion," Duncan whispered, and his voice had lost all trace of the vulnerability from seconds ago. Now it was a low, vibrating purr that resonated in Aerion's bones. "Mine."
And then he kissed him.
It wasn't a reconciliation kiss. It wasn't a tender kiss. It was an invasion.
Duncan's lips crashed against Aerion's with a force that cut off his breath and made their teeth clash. Aerion let out a moan of pain that was devoured by Duncan's mouth. Duncan's tongue forced Aerion's lips, entering with a desperate urgency, wet and suffocating. It tasted of mint, coffee, and something metallic and salty, like blood or dry tears. It was a kiss that didn't seek to give pleasure, but to consume, claim, mark territory. Duncan's hands squeezed Aerion's waist with a strength that would leave bruises, digging his fingers into his flesh through the clothes like claws.
Aerion squeezed his eyes shut tight, panic exploding in his chest like fireworks. He wanted to push him away. Wanted to scream. The texture of Duncan's tongue brushing against his felt wrong, felt like something cold and slippery that didn't belong in a human mouth. It was as if a creature was trying to force its way through Duncan, tasting Aerion, savoring him, making sure he was real, that he was his.
But Aerion didn't pull away. He forced himself to open his mouth wider, forced himself to respond to the kiss, moving his tongue against Duncan's with a desperation bordering on madness. He clung to Duncan's hair, pulling the brown strands, trying to anchor himself to reality, trying to convince himself that this was the kiss he had dreamed of for eight years. That this was the happy ending.
Duncan moaned into his mouth, a deep, guttural sound that sent a wave of disgusted and terrified chills down Aerion's spine. The kiss deepened, grew wetter, louder. Duncan squeezed him harder, until Aerion could feel the beats of Duncan's heart against his own chest.
But the rhythm was wrong.
Aerion could feel Duncan's chest expand and contract, but the heartbeats were erratic. Sometimes fast as a hummingbird, sometimes pauses of three seconds that made Aerion's heart stop in sympathy, only to be followed by a strong, dull beat that resonated like a drum in the apartment's silence. It was a broken rhythm. A rhythm of something that had been forcefully repaired, but didn't quite work right.
When Duncan finally separated, he did so slowly, withdrawing his lips with a wet, obscene smack that echoed in the dark room. A thread of saliva connected their mouths for a second before breaking and falling onto Aerion's chin.
Duncan was still holding him in the air. His eyes, now completely black in the shadows, roamed Aerion's face with a sick adoration, a reverence that left no room for reason.
"I love you," Duncan said, and the words sounded hollow, like an echo bouncing off the walls of an empty cave. "I love you more than my life. I love you more than the memory of my father. You're the only thing that matters, Aerion. The only thing. If I lose you, I die. If you leave, I kill everyone."
The love confession was so extreme, so stripped of any normal human emotion, that Aerion felt the air thicken in his lungs. Pure, raw, paralyzing terror threatened to take over. *I kill everyone.* He said it with the same naturalness used to say "pass the salt."
But Aerion swallowed the knot in his throat. Swallowed the fear. Swallowed the nausea. He forced a trembling smile, stroking Duncan's cold cheek with the pads of his fingers, feeling the stiff skin under his touch.
"I love you too, Duncan," Aerion lied, or perhaps told the truth, because deep in his sick obsession, horror and love had always been intertwined. "I'm not going anywhere. Never."
Duncan smiled. That immense, disproportionate smile that split his face in two and never reached his dead eyes.
"Never," Duncan repeated, and his voice became a whisper that seemed to fill every corner of the apartment, every crack in the wall, every shadow under the furniture. "Never, never, never."
He lowered him slowly, but didn't let go of his waist. Instead, he rested his forehead against Aerion's, their noses touching, breathing the same stale, heavy air. The kitchen drip started again, slow and constant. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Aerion closed his eyes, letting the tears fall silently, trapped in the embrace of the thing wearing the face of the man he loved, knowing, in the deepest part of his soul, that the spell hadn't been a gift, but a sentence he would never wake up from.