#HUGSUANDSOBSALIL

[wolfvsh]

It was sick — maybe even perverted — but she wasn’t so sure it was beautiful. As she stared at her friend (were they even friends anymore?), she felt as her teeth grew sharper, blood-thirsty. She could practically taste the skin… feel it give beneath her nails. Want was a wicked thing, a surefire path to trouble — one she knew too well. Yet, standing there, right in front of him and his kiss-like stare, Girty couldn’t shake the foolish desire to crack the door open, to let him back in.  She knew she should stick to what she did best: flash a noncommittal smile, say something stupid, turn on her heel and wave her fingers before disappearing—back to her trailer, back to the loneliness waiting for her, pulling her in like a familiar tide. Eve had been a close… No, a beloved companion. It felt wrong, like cheating (or stealing). But maybe she was exactly as selfish as every Mountaineer believed her to be.  A hand shot forward, desperately latching onto his arm, as if any second now he’d see the chaos laid bare before him and react the same way everyone else always did — give up, turn his back on the ugliness. In her eyes flickered a rare glint of vulnerability, paired with the awkward shuffle of her boots, like a schoolgirl caught in a moment far too big for her. “Well, my talented poet —” Not yours... Eve's. And instead of asking for his company, a shoulder to rest her head on: “Y'feel like whiskin' me away somewhere warmer?” The one not clinging to him tilted the flask’s mouth toward the ground, giving it a couple of shakes — just a few sad drops lost to the snow. “Ran outta poison.” It would kill her if he said no — would also kill her if he said yes.

August never felt the rift that’d formed between him and Girty quite so starkly as he did when she was standing right next to him. The absence of her always loomed in the background, haunting him just as much as an actual ghost, but when he was on his own, it was easier to look past it, to distract himself, to convince himself he could exist in a world without her in it.

But when she was there, really there, close enough to touch but more out of reach than ever, it just made the raw, hollow wound in his heart, the one that was shaped exactly like her, start gnawing away at him all over again. He didn’t know how he’d been walking around like this all this time, how he was supposed to keep doing it.

He watched as she took a swallow from the flask, watched as her attention seemed to wander, and his brain immediately started scrambling, trying to come up with some magic words, anything at all that might get her to stay, just for a minute. But then her eyes darted towards him again, and it was like exhaling after holding his breath, like when the storm clouds finally break, at least for a second. He’d take it. He’d take anything she was willing to offer.

“Guess it depends on the lore,” he replied, tilting his head a little. “Some of them don’t actually eat ‘cause they’re hungry. It’s just the virus trying to spread. So it triggers the hunger response to get ‘em to bite people. I guess if it were those kinds it might, especially if they’re not actually undead, just infected. But sometimes flesh and brains are the only things that’ll stop them from decaying. The only things that’ll stop them from feeling the pain of being dead as they rot away.” He paused for a second, then added, his voice softening a little, “It’s kinda beautiful in a sick sort of way, ain’t it? Needing someone so bad that the only thing you can do to feel alive is sink your teeth into ‘em.”