[A/N] Quick warning before I forget! This story follows some noncon themes, as do all of my stories. I'll quickly explain what this means, to me in any case. It's a kind of kink where one enjoys feeling forced, manhandled, that sort of thing.
If I shout noncon from the hilltops in a story of mine it means my characters enjoy this! I usually go out of my way to show that they like this but we like a good written warning too.
(edit: 01/10/2021) I'm not really sure this warning is relevant in this. I should also take it out of the tags. Looking back I never actually displayed any noncon. Possibly manhandling, but I wouldn't say it qualifies. Just in case I'm getting any hopes up...
"How are you doing?" Andrew asked me, watching me half-heartedly while he slurped obnoxiously loudly from his milkshake.
I rubbed my hands together in the cold and hugged myself. We were sitting on a bench together outside, waiting for two other people to arrive with some takeout food which we had organised together as we sat there with the requested drinks, my coffee slowly going cold.
"I'm fine." I replied.
He hummed. "That shit with Zackary sort itself out then?"
I sighed noiselessly, taking my first sip from my black coffee while it was still hot enough to enjoy. "Yeah, I guess."
"I can always speak to him..." He suggested, assuming the truth from the tone of my voice.
I shook my head. "Don't do that. I still don't know exactly what he told Mark to get him so annoyed at me but it can't be good. I don't know why he won't even let me defend myself or explain anything... I don't want any more of my friends getting dragged into our drama."
He nodded. "Yeah, alright. But I won't though. There's nothing he could tell me that would make me ice you out like that."
I nodded, smiling thankfully but completely not believing it. "You say that but I'm pretty damn sure Mark would have said the same thing."
"Clearly not."
I groaned, pressing my face in my hands for a second.
"So stupid, I should be more hung up on Zackary but all I can think is how could Mark just crush our friendship like that?"
He frowned but said nothing.
The thing is that Mark and I weren't the closest people in the world, but we were close enough that we felt at ease around each other, not close enough to argue about everything or get in each others faces.
I'd known him from high school, I'd met him during my awkward tough guy phase where I was desperately hiding the fact that I was gay from my repressed teenage friends by wearing exclusively tracksuits, chasing after every girl, and playing rap music out loud on my phone while we were hanging out, usually at the back of the second floor of the 212 bus on the way home because most of the boys lived spread out from each other.
Mark was straight but he'd been kind of feminine. Not in a sassy way or anything, he was gentle and lean and didn't try to speak ten octaves lower than he was capable of.
I liked it a lot, it felt like I didn't need to be anyone special when I was around him, and even as we grew older his character stayed relatively consistent so I always felt like I knew him.
He had moved in with Zack maybe a year before I finally met him, and Zack was cute, real boyish charm to him, that too hadn't changed. When I mentioned it to Mark he'd told me to go for it, I hadn't told him we'd already smooched outside the apartment at this point.
Dating him was comfortable, it felt like I'd sorted out that part of my life so no worries there... but I don't know if I'd ever really valued Zackary all that much. He was just so... It was like there had been a divide between us and nothing had quite matched up, but we hadn't been different enough to break it off.
"Are you looking for a new guy?" Andrew asked, a level of disinterest in his voice, probably expressed on purpose to hint that he was not asking because he was interested himself.
I nodded, slowly. "I guess." But I had this strange feeling in my chest as I said it, like that was the wrong thing to say.
"You look different." He continued. "I thought it was on purpose."
"On... Different how?"
He frowned slowly, silent for almost a full forty second before he finally answered at which point I had already decided it was bad.
"Better." He shrugged, returning to his milkshake. "It's hard to put my finger on it but you look better. Really good actually."
That was nice of Andrew, obviously a lie given the pause, but it was a nice thing to say. I was the kind of person that really didn't give a shit about the cold hard truth, I'm fine with people lying to me to flatter me. I can tear myself apart with insults in my own time if I choose to.
"Alright... thanks."
His eyes lingered on me but he couldn't ultimately seem to come up with a more detailed description. I turned back to my coffee.
"Maybe it has something to do with your mystery zombie-man from Halloween."
I turned fast to hear Cody, who had at some point arrived with a couple bags of the food and stood behind us silently, tell me this in a sarcastic tone. His voice was slightly nasal and it always made sarcasm sound all the more sarcastic.
I looked up at him and waved slightly. How much of our conversation he had heard I did not know, but it sounded like it was enough to get the jist of it.
"Right." I responded.
"I thought we agreed it was a ghost?" Andrew asked.
Cody laughed out loud. "Maybe it is a ghost after all and it's possessed you!" He said, making strange ghost noises at me.
Soft tongue, tasted like metal and ash, his arm slipping around me as he drew me closer, the heat from his body slipping into mine as he pressed me up against me, shaking, lungs burning, the world spinning as I gave in completely and allowed him to take charge, to hold me upright and release me at his discretion.
"Who is your master?"
I shivered, his deep, resonant voice echoing inside my head.
Dammit.
That word had such a visceral effect on me now, ever since that strange dream I'd never been able to think of anything or anyone else other than him when that word came up.
Nothing helped. I was stuck thinking about that night on and off all the time. At night I would dream completely normal dreams (as normal as dreams got in any case) and at some point in those dreams he would appear, completely out of the blue, somehow he would appear and seduce me. Those strange red eyes and that beautiful face, I should have known it was a dream when it was happening because no one on earth has a face as handsome as that.
I didn't want it to be a dream... but it had to be one. That or a hallucination, which wasn't any better, and would imply that either the punch was spiked or I was headed for a mental ward in the not-so-distant future.
It didn't matter anyway.
After kissing me until my legs turned to jelly in the middle of a graveyard I had passed out and woken up in my bed, alone. Even if it all did happen the way I remembered it he still didn't want me.
I rubbed my temples. Thinking about it was frustrating, and the past few days I'd tried hard not to. Despite that at night his hauntingly handsome face seemed to creep inside my dreams just to taunt me.
It took us a while before Will joined us with the rest of the food and we could finally start eating. We sat there for a while and just scoffed what looked like the entire takeout menu from Deep Fry in the slight cold. It was warm and delicious and I was the only one of us not complaining about the greasiness of the chips and the deep fried cauliflower, which were pretty greasy.
"He's not wrong, it's just that taking it to the manager solves nothing, I swear she passes on all her own work back around the office for doing. Stupid. They should get two."
"Yeah, but two managers and you know only one of them would be doing work."
"Or you'd get two managers passing off all their work onto the rest of us."
I wasn't paying attention as Andrew and Will spoke between each other about work. For one I didn't work with them so I didn't have anything much to say and secondly I was really preoccupied with this damn feeling that someone was watching me. It was like there was someone really close by just out of vision and I wanted to be able to place them but I couldn't.
Was I actually going mad? I'd never felt this way before.
Intense eyes, glaring at me from behind me... It was wrong, every time I turned I saw no one so it couldn't be true.
At some point the conversation must have turned to something else regarding me because when I finally realised Will was saying something to me they were both looking at me expectantly.
"You need to talk to him mate." Will said to me.
"Who?" I asked.
"Zack."
Oh. I shrugged. "Why, he wasn't exactly cheery when I last met him, isn't there a certain amount of time till you're supposed to talk to someone after a break up? It's only been a week or something."
Will nodded. "But man, you gotta have noticed L won't talk to you anymore either. Or Sammy."
I looked up, my expression miserable. "Yeah, I sort of noticed but I just ignored it. It's to do with Zack as well?" Stupid question, of course it was. I was beginning to get the impression that every argument I had with anyone was somehow because of Zack.
Will nodded again. "Like I said, talk to him, phone call or something. Whatever it is he's been saying about you it's been serious enough that he's been getting people on his side real quick. I tried to get it out L but he won't say a word, says he promised."
I groaned. "Why can't he just fuck off, why does he always have to drag things out like this."
Cody laughed, having just gotten back from the toilet to sit back down beside me. "Are we back to he-who-shall-not-be-named? Do you need a distraction from your shrivelling love life?" He joked, leaning in and smacking a sloppy kiss on my cheek.
"No, agh." I yelped and turned and he cackled, kissing me on the corner of my mouth. "Dammit Cody!" I yelled half-heartedly at him.
They all laughed.
I shook my head. Cody was like that, he had a habit of kissing me on the lips as a joke whenever he got the opportunity to.
I tried to laugh with them but the moment I turned back to the table I had this really horrible feeling in my stomach. Not quite a doomsday feeling but I was nervous. I looked around as though I was somehow expecting someone to be there but saw nothing, still the feeling didn't ease up the entire time I sat there. Hard to describe, like something powerful was hovering nearby and it was pissed off.
I tried to turn around quickly enough that if there was anything there I would notice. Nothing. No one but an old man walking past, his cane scraping across the cement path, and a group of women laughing somewhere off in the distance. Still, the feeling didn't let go of me. I looked at Cody nervously and he smiled at me, unaware.
[A/N] Patrons : )
♆ Deadnerd4life ♆ Lola ♆ dianaluvsumore ♆ MidnightMystery2000 ♆ Undefinedx3 ♆ Nakiro ♆ Ingomiel ♆ sour_reads ♆ Xprincess_darknessX ♆ Orphylia ♆ Alysse714 ♆ heavenlyharold ♆ Machabae ♆ midnightdirrty ♆ LadyQueen-Sama ♆ Piques ♆ Nightstalkingheroes ♆ Kasilo ♆ DuskofViolet ♆ Alaskan_Outsider ♆ hannah_khatter ♆