Addiction: On Aether Maxwell

i.

arabella likes holding you in her arms.

you still couldn’t believe that you were actually dating her. it had come off as a shock, really; you had thought that she was just being friendly with all the one-on-one tutorials at different coffee shops and restaurants. you had also thought that all her compliments and sweet words were meant in a friendly manner, but apparently not.

it’s not like you were complaining, though. arabella is pretty. arabella has long, red hair that falls straight down her back. arabella has freckles in her cheeks and her brown eyes are the prettiest ones you’ve seen. arabella is pretty, smug, and smart. arabella makes you feel warm on the inside and it’s almost as if you’re experiencing a crush for the first time all over again.

the only thing is that she actually likes you back this time.

you burrow yourself further into her chest. you didn’t know what time it was, and you didn’t actually want to know. never mind that both of you probably have early-morning lectures to attend or any extra-curricular duties you have to get to. all that matters is arabella, arabella’s arms around you, and the sound of her laughter when she sees you move closer for her warmth.

you like her. you like her a lot.

“sleepy, princess?”

you like the way she calls you ‘princess’. it makes you feel special. appreciated. needed. cared for and adored.

“...a little bit.”

“too bad.”

“huh?”

you feel her fingers on your back. you like her fingers, too. you feel them stroke your back lightly, almost comfortingly; they then move down and before you know it, her hand is curled around your waist. you try not to react.

“thought we could do something else.” she’s smirking. you can almost hear the way her lips curve up. arabella looks especially pretty when she’s smirking. “but if you’re really tired…”

she doesn’t finish her sentence. you peek up at her with a pout, with sleepy eyes, with your lip jutting out the way she likes it.

you like other things, too.

ii.

you really like how this stranger is kissing you right now.

you pretend that this stranger is arabella despite the many, many differences. you can’t help but list them in your head. arabella’s lips are softer and she tastes like strawberries. arabella is teasing and tender. arabella’s fingers are warm. arabella usually has hair in her face and you always, always had to push it out of her face before actually kissing.

but this stranger’s lips are chapped and he tastes like alcohol; some kind of whiskey coke, you don’t know. this stranger is rough and his hands are all over you. his fingers are both cold and warm; you feel the cool metal of his multiple rings rub against your sides. this stranger didn’t bother teasing; he had just gone for it as soon as the two of you had entered the bathroom--

(but wasn’t that the point?)

he pulls away from the kiss and you try to forget where you are. you try to ignore the heavy pounding of music against walls, the muffled vocals coming from outside the bathroom. instead, you focus on the stranger. he’s kissing your neck with an aggressiveness you never really experienced in your past relationship, leaving marks that you know you’d have a hard time covering up the next night. he’s muttering something against your skin and you can’t hear him, not really, not when you’re blocking out the music and the laughter and how this isn’t arabella, it’s not her, not her, not her.

“--ther?”

you startle. he (his name is jae-won, you remember) looks up at you with wet lips and dark eyes and you end up remembering how attracted you were to him much earlier on the stools. his tongue pokes out from the corner of his mouth and you catch a glimpse of his hands on your sides, gold and silver twinkling despite the shitty, dim lights and

“do you still wanna do this?”

jae-won doesn’t do anything while waiting for you to answer. you swallow. you could end it right now without any hard feelings, could leave and go back to your place and cry to seong-hui about the breakup. you could do all of that and not waste this stranger’s time.

but it’s been weeks and you’ve wanted, wanted, wanted.

so you tell him to kiss you, and he kisses you without question.

and

so

much

more.

he calls you sweetheart. he says the word smoothly, sweetly, tensely, aggressively. he whispers it between your lips, into your neck, in the darkness of the cab on the way to his apartment, and before he pushes you back into his bed.

(he calls you sweetheart lovingly.)

(that’s all you want.)

iii.

why do they keep leaving?

what did i do wrong?

why don’t they love me?

am i the problem?

am i not enough?

iv.

tadashi lets you stay on his couch when the apartment gets too lonely.

he makes you a warm mug of hot chocolate, turns on netflix, and lets you pick the movie. you always pick a shitty romantic movie and end up crying at the end of it. he doesn’t mind; hell, tadashi watches with you and lets you rant about how stupid the characters get. he comments here and there from time to time, but mostly lets you rant your anger out.

it helps for a while, but the pain lingers.

you eventually start missing something else and end up staring at him while he makes you a drink. you eye his rolled up sleeves, the slight exhaustion in his features, and the way he handles the different tools with ease.

tadashi makes you feel warm. he always has. he’s always been there, has always taken care of you, has never made you feel like a burden despite the fact that he had his own life.

tadashi makes you feel loved.

you keep watching.

(you could.)

(just one time.)

he catches your eye and smiles, lifts the mug as if to say that it was on its way. says that he’s heating up some leftovers for the both of you.

(but god, you can’t.)

v.

theo likes making you feel loved.

you almost can’t understand why he does so. he’s been patient since the start; patient and willing and eager from the first time you two had started a friendship with one another. you don’t understand how one could be so patient. you had been stuck for so long on losing jae-won; when theo came along with an eager smile and red cheeks, you had to reject him, insisting that you weren’t ready and that things still felt painful.

but theo stuck around and waited. he picked you up for lunch on the weekly and treated you to small snacks here and there, made himself available if you wanted to talk and let anything out. theo distracted you with bad jokes on the worse days and had invited you over to his place once. you had dreaded the visit. you liked him, you really did, but it hurt all over and you weren’t ready to open yourself up again.

you ended up going anyway.

you kept a spare foil packet in your bag just in case.

theo cheered you up by plucking at a guitar, by asking for your favorite song at the moment (please, please, please let me get what i want by the smiths), and by playing it whilst referring to his laptop screen from time to time. it had honestly rendered you speechless. he played the guitar, fumbling a bit at the start, but managed to play the entire thing with a little more ease come the end.

he grinned at you when he finished, upon seeing your stunned expression. theo offered to play up another song if he could manage to find the chords online.

you fall harder after that.

...

you glance up at theo. his attention is on the television screen and he’s laughing warmly at a passing joke. his arm fits just right around you and you can feel the muscle through his sweater. it’s enough to make you imagine what else he could do with that kind of muscle.

he could kiss you the way you wanted him to.

he could hold you the way you wanted him to.

he could love you the way you wanted him to.

(you almost kiss him.)

(almost.)