ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS

18.

He gulps. This isn't happening. He has to do something, anything, to get rid of that thought.

"Oh and, for future reference, I should probably tell you that my eyes aren't hazel. You know, just in case you need that for your sonnets" he teases, then pauses with a long sigh. In the blink of an eye, the irony on his lips is gone. "Nobody pays attention, they all think my eyes are hazel, but they're not. They're green."

He feels ashamed of how little his voice got. Almost as little and shaky as that of a kid.

Adam gently drops his pen, his blue eyes boring into his back.

"I know."

*

Dawson woke up on the right foot this morning. Being the early bird he is, before the clock stroke 8, he had already done the following,

1 — Gone for a walk to clear his mind. Didn't help.

2 — Sat on a musky rock for half an hour feeling sorry for himself.

3 — Decided to just get breakfast and walk back to the tent.

Dawson makes his entrance just in time for Adam's awakening.

The boy is sitting up, his smile is barely detectable to the naked eye. He looks a little hazy. "What's that?"

"Tea," Dawson puts the cup down on the desk, "I remember—"

"Thank you," Adam mumbles, diving back into the duvet cocoon he made for himself.

On the way back to his bed, Dawson stumbles on something. Hamilton's journal is lying on the ground, right by Dawson's feet, open and facing down.

He probably fell asleep with it, then kicked it off the bed, he hypothesizes.

He doesn't pick it up at first. He glances at Adam, hoping that would make him feel any less guilty about touching his most precious belonging.

In the end, he decides to pick it up. First and foremost, he dusts off the cover and checks whether the impact damaged the journal in any way. Then, he turns it around.

His heart constricts into his chest.

It can't be, he thinks but a broken gasp is the only sound that manages to escape his parted lips.

NEUTRON STAR COLLISION
by A.M.H

Instictively, he shuts the journal, his thumb still marking the incriminating page.

Is that poem about him? He really wants to know if Hamilton wrote poems about him but he's too afraid, afraid of the truth, of the irriversibility of it. He's stuck between a comfortable reality and an unsteady possibility. What would change? What wouldn't?

His mind goes back to the time he found that folded short poem in Hamilton's book. Retuning it without reading it felt like the right thing to do back then. But now, now something has changed. Things are different. He is different.

He stares at the leather cover, debating whether he should open it again. He needs to know, but then again, fear blocks him. Curiosity is eating him alive, consuming him from the inside but what's the cost of it? What's the cost of crossing that line? Never being able to take a step back, never being able to forget. It's a life sentence he's not prepared to get.