CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
do not open till you've got forever to spend with me

"CAN YOU JUST TELL ME WHY YOU HATE ME SO MUCH?"

"Breaking news: it's not my problem," Sawyer deadpanned, flicking Wyatt a dispassionate look.

Last night they stayed up until the sunlight peeled away the husk of the moon, sugar melting between their teeth, their tongues sour with the aftertaste of chocolate. They didn't speak much, and they didn't have to. There weren't enough words to build a bridge overnight, to undo years of damage, but in the absence of cicada song a new star was born, an old wound patching itself together, not quite healed but healing.

At one point while they were watching the sunrise spill over the rooftops, soaking the snow in a bright corona, Sawyer caught Wyatt shutting his eyes tight, like a kid making a wish, and then blinking himself awake. They'd made themselves coffees just a half hour ago, so it wasn't possible that he was tired already. And then she realised he was testing if this was real. If he'd open his eyes and she'd be on the other side of the wall, silent and resentful, rather than beside him on the window seat, watching their filthy city crawl to life. But she was still here, hands stained with glow-in-the-dark paint, forehead pressed to the window, fogging up where her warm breath skated over the glass. There were still freshly painted stars on her ceiling, fading as the darkness retreated, but tomorrow night, they'd still be there. Evidence that something had been reborn that night.

There was no dream to wake up from. No fear that this would dissolve in his hands, that he'd done something wrong, that he was being chased by some nagging terror. Sawyer could sleep inside this moment, live inside this string of seconds. For an endless moment, as the city woke up, as the snow ploughs lumbered like mechanical bison through the snow-blanketed streets, they could heal because these minutes had some place to nestle and burrow. A place to survive. No need to wake up. This was all real.

They'd also resumed the annual Christmas Eve tradition of opening their presents under the tree while everyone else was asleep just to see what their parents had gifted them. Sawyer found another stack of cassette tapes from her father. She didn't bother opening what her mother got her. Wyatt got a new pair of sneakers and a red Puddlemere United sweatshirt. It felt like they were six again, viciously shushing each other as Wyatt almost knocked over the tree in the dark and the sound of wrapping paper tearing through the silence, before they'd been ripped apart. All of that seemed so far away then, nestled at the bottom of the tree with tinsel and ribbons crinkling under their legs.

Funny how quickly things changed.

One moment they were sneaking off into the kitchen at midnight, devouring gingerbread houses until they were eighty-percent sugar, twenty-percent sick to their stomachs like they used to when they were younger, the next were trading hostile blows in the living room. Aggravation gleamed in Wyatt's eyes. The air around them tensed. The afternoon sun set their features aglow, harsh lines bathed in harsher light, shoulders wired for a fight.

"Fine," Wyatt sighed, tipping his head back in defeat. "F-8."

Sawyer flicked him a cool look. "Miss."

"Fuck this shit," Wyatt growled, his eye twitching in frustration. In jerky motions, he marked out an X on the sheet in the appropriate box before setting the paper down on the floor under the coffee table, out of sight. "Your turn."

"H-10."

Wyatt blinked. Mouth parted in disbelief, he glanced up at her from his side of the board. The strangled sound that escaped the back of his throat wasn't human.

"How—"

Wriggling her fingers mockingly, Sawyer smirked. Wyatt had only landed one hit so far, and it'd been ten minutes into the game that Sawyer managed to hit four of his ships consecutively. Maybe she really was that intuitive. Maybe she'd also seen the reflection of his board against the TV screen and memorised the coordinates.

Brandishing his pencil like a dagger, Wyatt narrowed his eyes at her. "Dad! Sawyer's cheating!"

"Prove it," Sawyer said, nonchalantly.

Their father emerged from the kitchen with a mug of eggnog in hand.

"What're you gonna do about it?"

"Pray the gods smite her before she takes out my last ship," Wyatt muttered, supposedly under his breath, though everyone in the living room heard it.

Their father let out a dubious laugh, scratching his stomach as he stood over their board game. He sent Sawyer a conspiratorial wink. "Don't tell me when that contingency plan works out for you."

Wyatt didn't answer and Sawyer thought it was because their grandfather was a devout Bhuddist but their father didn't inherit his prayer-dirtied knees and now him and his children and all their children after that would never achieve transcendence into spiritual nirvana and Wyatt would be praying to old spirits who've shut their ears to their non-believer blood. After all, they were of witch blood and magic in their bones. In most religions that was a kind of sin. To have the supernatural intwined in the strands of their DNA was to forfeit all that was part of the natural order of the universe. Of life. Even if they'd been raised on prayer and burning incense and the Eightfold Path, no deity would listen.

"Anyway," their father said, pinning the both of them with accusatory looks over the rim of his #1 DAD mug. (Sawyer was beginning to think that stupid mug was glued to his hand, because he never went anywhere without it.) "Which one of you slimy mice ate both the gingerbread houses?"

"It wasn't me, it was the one-armed man!" Wyatt said, sending their father an innocent smile as he jabbed the pencil in Sawyer's direction, even though there was, very obviously, powdered sugar on his black shirt. They were both still in their pajamas, but Sawyer remembered to brush off all the evidence way ahead of Wyatt.

Sawyer sent Wyatt a scathing look.

"Mhm, sure. Try D-6, Sawyer."

"Dad!" Wyatt squawked in exasperation.

* * *

THERE WAS SOMETHING INEXPLICABLY MAGNETIC about the loneliness of being awake when everyone else was asleep, about a time where she was untethered from the world, like the moment in girlhood where she didn't belong to anybody. Where it felt like she wasn't anyone's daughter and she wasn't anyone's partner. Where it felt like she wasn't related to anyone at all. At the centre of the universe was herself and everything else was centrifugal. Even though she'd had no sleep the previous night, Sawyer found herself in the kitchen at two in the morning, perched on the counter with her feet dangling just inches off the floor. Ankles knocking against the drawers, Sawyer was wrestling with the plastic seal around her new tub of ice cream, half-contemplating using her teeth to just bite off the stubborn thing, when she heard a deep laugh from the doorway.

Flicking her gaze up to Oliver, who cut a lean figure against the doorframe in a white shirt that made him look softer than usual and red flannel pajama pants, arms crossed over his chest, Sawyer pinned him with an unimpressed stare. Mirth glimmered in his expression. Sawyer dug her thumb into the plastic. It didn't give.

"I got you," Oliver said, crossing the space and plucking the tub out of her hands. He fumbled with it for awhile until the plastic gave a soft rip and peeled away. Letting her take it back, he discarded the plastic seal on the counter beside her. Propping his hip against the edge of the counter, he watched as she picked up the spoon, tore the lid off, and shovelled the ice cream into her mouth. Even though she was sitting on the counter, he was still at eye-level with her. It was infuriating. "Why're you up?"

Sawyer shrugged because she didn't know how to tell him about the emptiness that was slowly choking her, that there were nights on her shoulders where she should've called him so he could pull her out of the river instead of letting herself drown just so she had confirmation that she still had feeling in her body in the morning and all of them were guilt, or that there were so many skeletons stacked up in her closet that they've started showing up in the mirror. Sometimes they weren't there and she felt good, but sometimes they crept back in, stealing away the chemistry of her brain. Sometimes, like now, she felt some semblance of normal, and she wanted to live in this string of minutes, try to prolong it as much as possible before it slipped from her grasp.

"How long have you been standing there?" Sawyer asked.

"Like, a minute or two," Oliver said, then he gestured to the broken plastic seal. "Do you always struggle with that?"

Sawyer slanted him a dark glower, but there was no heat behind it. "Do you always ask stupid questions?"

Despite the endearing grin tugging at the corner of his lips, Oliver rolled his eyes. "Rude. Anyway, I heard you cheated at battleship."

"It's not cheating if I'm just using my environment to my advantage," Sawyer drawled. At Oliver's puzzled look, Sawyer explained, "I saw the idiot's set-up in the reflection on the TV screen."

"I hate to break it to you, but that's still cheating."

"You're just defending your friend," Sawyer said, jabbing her spoon at him accusatorially.

Oliver flicked her on the knee. "He demands a rematch."

"He can ask me himself."

"He's in mourning," Oliver deadpanned. "His ships are all dead."

Sawyer flashed him a lackadaisical grin. "I am a god."

Oliver laughed. There it was again. That avalanche between her ribs. From the time his family had come over for dinner, and after, when they were all gathered around the Christmas tree to take turns opening their presents (during which Wyatt and Oliver had undergone a particularly stressful time of scrambling to hide the present addressed to them from Ashton, who'd sent them both flavoured condoms as a gag gift, from their parents), they hadn't had the chance to be alone. Among the empty plates stained with Christmas roast and the wine sloshing in glasses, they'd only exchanged surreptitious glances, not daring to speak in case they were too obvious about it, as if every interaction felt like a parade.

"Y'know, Wyatt said if I wanted, I could go sleep in your room," Oliver mused, shaking his head, "I haven't even said anything to him because I wanted to see if you were okay with it first, but it seems like he knows. I mean, I'm not surprised. He's always been scary good at Divination."

"He grew up with us," Sawyer pointed out, her words slightly garbled by the spoon in her mouth. A strand of hair had snuck its way in through the corner of her mouth, and Oliver reached over to pull it out, tucking it behind her ear. "You learn to read between the lines."

Oliver hummed.

"You can sleep in my room if you want," Sawyer muttered around the spoon, ice cream melting on her tongue.

"What was that?" But the impish gleam in Oliver's eye told her that he'd heard.

"I said you look like a cunt," Sawyer said, cuttingly. She never blushed, but she felt the heat creeping up her neck this time, and she avoided his gaze, burying a chunk of ice cream in her mouth.

"Yeah, sure," he scoffed, unconvinced. Moving to stand between her knees, Oliver smirked and plucked the tub of ice cream from her hands and the spoon from her mouth. He set them off to the side. Leaning forward, Oliver braced his palms on either side of her, his eyes flickering over her face. For an endless moment, Sawyer felt her heart stop. Then start again. This time it hammered against her skin, the heat from Oliver's dark eyes plucking at her veins like guitar strings. "Tell me to go," he said, turning the air around his words into weather.

She wasn't meant to be soft. All her life had been one sharp edge after another until she finally learnt to exist only in a solid state of aggression, only changing when provoked, and then she was napalm bombs exploding over the harbour. Under the garish kitchen lights, the dismembering sear of Oliver's stare taking her apart piece by piece, she felt her bones liquify, the burn swallowed into a darkness invented by thirst. Each time she told him to stay, she was no longer a figure standing in the storm, but a part of it. Serene as the eye, the rest of the world raging in periphery, and none of it she noticed.

Then he kissed her slowly and deeply like he was trying to chase the saccharine tang of vanilla from her mouth. When she buried her hands in his hair and pressed into him, he smiled and mouthed at her jaw, trailing heat along her skin, drawing tiny sounds from her. When he curled back to look at her, there was pink high on her cheeks. In this suspended moment, the rest of the world—the kitchen, the party raging next door, the distant traffic, the howling wind—dissipated into nothing, and it was just Sawyer and Oliver and every cosmic entity held between their hands. There could be a hurricane tearing apart the city, but neither of them could bring themselves to care when his hand was working up her spine under her shirt and she had an ankle hooked around the back of his knee.

There was a moment where she pulled away from him to catch her breath, and he was peering at her with a question mark in his expression. "Not here," she muttered, and then his lip twitched into a lopsided grin—the insolent little shit—and before she knew it, he was tug-tug-tugging her off the counter and onto her feet, steering her towards her bedroom. Hands guiding her by the hips as they stumbled over loose items littering her floor, ghosting fires against her searing skin. As he kicked the door shut behind him, she backed him against the wall, not bothering to turn on the light, and the rest of time was lost in the minutes that ran like an eternity of water between the slide of skin and skin and skin and skin.

A few times during the night, her eyes slid open briefly to the sight of Oliver's body glowing soft and phosphorescent in the half-light slanting in through the crack between her curtains like a boy-god slowly slipping from his human form, a harsh silver-blue gilding his skin.

Even though she was the only generation of non-believers in a traditionally Bhuddist lineage, Sawyer was starting to understand her own kind of religion. If life meant suffering and struggle, then death was peace, and each time she opened her eyes, she felt her heart stop. Every time she floated to the surface of consciousness, she tried to fight the current dragging her back into the abyss, tried to cling to the vision of Oliver in the moonlight, the ridge of his spine as he burrowed into the pillow, the rise and fall of his muscular back, the freckles dusting the mountain range of his shoulders every time he shifted in his sleep. Tried to memorise what wouldn't be the same once the rudeness of the moon stops allowing her to look at him without permission, the dark hair falling over his brow bone, tossed careless as tulip stems, every dip and hollow of skin. Tried to memorise the topography of something that felt too much like a dream, but each time her eyes slid open, it got more real.

Eventually, she stopped waking up sporadically, and it wasn't until the morning light came through, illuminating her room in a pollen-gold glow that she blinked awake under her duvet with the right side of the bed cold and unmade. Maybe she'd dreamt it after all. Maybe everything she'd painted with her eyes closed had been guided by the hand of desire.

Irritation blazed under her skin as she turned over and slumped into her pillow, like she could slowly asphyxiate herself. Rationally, she knew Oliver had to go. But he also could've had the common courtesy to wake her up before he left her alone. She tugged at the hem of the shirt that went down to mid-thigh. At least he'd left her his shirt. Glowering, Sawyer slid out of bed and tugged the curtains shut with a vehemence born from the ugly feeling coiling in her gut. Her legs ached a little as she clambered back onto her bed and pulled the covers over her head.

She was about to fall back asleep half-annoyed, half-too exhausted to care anymore, when the sound of the toilet flushing and the faucet running and then, a second later, the bathroom door opening drew her out from under the umbrage of her bruised feelings. When Oliver stood over her, still shirtless and scratching at his ribs, she met his funny look with furrowed brows. Relief was a wave laving at the shore of her chest. He'd stayed.

"Did you think I left?" Oliver asked, lifting a brow.

Sawyer narrowed her eyes and pulled the covers over the lower half of her face. "Don't ask stupid questions." Her voice came out muffled. It didn't mask the small trickle of satisfaction in her tone.

Grinning, Oliver went to lie on top of her, like he planned on flattening her. He tugged the duvet away from her face and rested his chin on her shoulder. His breath tickled her neck.

"Were you sad?"

The audacity. Instead of answering—mostly because his weight was crushing the breath out of her lungs—she tugged on his ear lightly before draping her arm around his shoulders and anchoring him in place.

Oliver laughed. "At least I can tell Ashton his stupid Christmas present actually works."

"Don't you dare," Sawyer warned, closing her eyes and breathing him in like he was a phenomenon she couldn't quite believe she could call hers. "You're lucky I haven't thrown you out."

Lifting his head so he hovered over her, Oliver pinned her with a look so soft his eyes shone like pools of liquid mercury. "If I did believe in luck, I'd agree."

Sawyer stuck her tongue out at him.

"Cute," Oliver drawled, rolling his eyes, and then rolling off her and onto his back. He glanced at her ceiling. With the curtains closed and the walls of her room steeped in shadows, the glow-in-the-dark solar system on her ceiling glimmered faintly. A soft 'huh' escaped his mouth. "I didn't know you had your ceiling decorated."

In the dark, the paint on the ceiling shone down on them like a million tiny stars and as he'd pressed himself into her, his skin had been filmed blue. And she'd never forget it. Rapture in fake starlight.

"Wyatt and I painted that two nights ago."

"No way." Oliver shot her a dubious look. When she didn't answer, disbelief morphed into a shimmering exaltation. She'd never seen him so happy before.

It'd been a decision executed on impulse. Wyatt had some glow-in-the-dark paint in his room from the previous Christmas, and when Sawyer told him that her room was boring, he'd jumped at the opportunity. They couldn't find that ladder, and didn't bother to look in the clutter of the storage cupboard in the back of the apartment because, with the way their parents constantly chucked things in there, playing tetris with knives would be less dangerous. Pulling one thing out of that cursed cupboard would send an avalanche of stray items charging down on them without mercy. So Sawyer sat on Wyatt's shoulders and got him to keep moving while she dotted her ceiling with little stars and planets. Once they were done, the aftermath had been only slightly comical. The paint was everywhere. Smeared all over their arms, and when the evening sun had finally set, her fingers look like they'd been dipped in liquid light. There was also paint slathered over their faces from when she'd slapped him for making a snarky remark about her weight, and when he'd smacked her in the forehead for being rude.

Sawyer didn't think she'd ever seen him so excited about a boneyard of haphazardly painted stars on her ceiling.

Oliver had that same look on his face. And he was beaming at her like he'd struck gold, like he was writing forever into the present.

Sawyer yanked a pillow out from under her head and dropped it over his face. "Don't look at me like that."

Oliver let out a sigh.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
7

this chapter was kinda filler but like fun????? to write????

i can't write smut to save my life lol but hey i have a new draco malfoy fic if you're interested where i will be Practicing writing intimate scenes (one way to look at it) because it's significantly more mature than my other fics in this aspect LOL!!!!