two. one.

Reccers Notes: The voice is so very Davis. Also, the fic hits you like a punch in the gut.

654 words, pg, after bride
by wings4 music at wings_for_craft

The countdown warrants a climax and finally explosions. Fireworks don’t set off. She steps back, says “I have to go” and she’s gone before the lights go off in their skies.

He’s probably fooling himself, but he’s nearly certain that she’s settling for Jimmy. Meaning she’s fooling herself.

His world has never been in equilibrium, but she’s rocked at a core within him, he thought to be numb.

Sympathy, pity, and voids he witnessed, knew, felt all too well. Chloe Sullivan has chased those things to their infinity and replaced with a finite longing…for her.

Five…four…“three…”

There’s a countdown and then there isn’t.

Maybe she promised herself a moment. This moment. To forget yesterday and tomorrow. To not pretend, but rather encompass a woman who’s intensely drawn to a man who, for once, feels those exact instincts and hears something through her thick walls even she cannot distinguish.

She doesn’t come through.

“Two,” he whispers after her “three”, having understood her verbalization of the number.

But one never leaves nor escapes her mouth.

Their eyes lock. Lips wait to touch. Breaths come unevenly from both parties - impatiently lingering on each other.

A countdown warrants a climax and finally explosions. Fireworks don’t set off. She steps back, says “I have to go” and she’s gone before the lights go off in their skies.

As she walks away from him, back turned, he wants to ask about the number of romantic films in which someone speaks that very line.

Of those she’s watched and that have said that, she’s probably made fun of or screamed at half of them. Her cousin Lois did them the favor the other half of the time. The two probably roll their eyes, call the line-speaker an idiot, and laugh off the ‘oh so cliché’ incident.

But he knows the two are romantics at heart, and they only criticize because someone has run away from a love ‘so obviously there.’ He also knows that women like Chloe and Lois, they have a disdain for people like that, and hence never have wanted to be the speakers of such lines. Nor have they ever wanted to be “those girls.” And even though each probably had prior experiences of being “those girls” who pacify feelings so strong, neither ever categorized themselves as such because they were more discreet about their pacifications, feelings and ensured that they never uttered such cliché lines like “I have to go”.

Thus, Davis Bloome knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it pained Chloe to have to utter “I have to go”. And to him of all people. It was in her eyes for the flicker of a second. Her tone was stoic, hands steady, and even if that ache hadn’t crossed the light of her eyes for a millisecond, he still would know. Beyond a shadow…of a doubt.

As she walks away from him, back turned, he wants to grab her wrist and pull her to him. But he’s not that guy.

“I’m not that guy,” he murmurs, trying to convince himself. He’s left unconvinced. He’s more than on the verge of becoming “that guy” as he and Chloe have already (even if for just a second) tested a boundary. That guy who takes another’s girl, pulls her against himself, and kisses her senseless. Leaves her aching for more. Forcing her to choose when choices are no longer an option because she’s married. Married.

But Chloe isn’t a girl, much less anyone’s girl. Only she could have said “one” and closed the space between without him completely devolving into “that guy”.

[But because she didn’t, because she’s good at heart, and he’s nearly certain he’s not, he is nearly certain that he’s beyond recognition at this point. Who he could have been lies in some inexplicable mass destruction of lives both lived and unlived, and what little control he’ll have left when he feels his core not entirely ruptured, he’ll take immediate control of just so can have control of something. And because she was supposed to be his salvation (his damnation, rather, something in the far back of his mind screams at times), it’ll be she that he will have to grasp onto.]