Soulmate 51!!!
51. Your soulmate’s current thoughts about you will show up on your skin for a short while.
Miss you, miss you, miss you, appears across the back of his left hand, a light tingling sensation like someone was passing their finger across his skin announces their presence just as Michael picks up his beer.
A warmth fuzzy and soft, simmers in the pit of his stomach, and he bites down on the smile that wants to spread across his face.
Instead he drops the beer back on top of the table, and closes his eyes thinking, I miss you, so much more.
When he opens his eyes, feels a little shocked to see Maria sitting across from him.
It had been almost six months since their break up, and with all of the restrictions in place thanks to the quarantine, Michael hadn’t had to try very hard to avoid her.
He hadn’t even heard her truck come up, probably too distracted by Alex. It’s been a while since Michael has fully embraced their soulmate bond, and over the last couple of months he and Alex have been leaving more and more messages on each other, deliberately thinking them at each other.
After hearing Alex sing that song, he couldn’t exactly keep his thoughts to himself, and when he’d run out of the bar, feeling a weird sort of embarrassment at the fact that everyone could see his thoughts spread across the backs of Alex’s hands and up and around his neck, almost like a collar.
Alex hadn’t followed after him, but the words, me too had settled around Michael’s left wrist like a snug bracelet.
"Is there something I can help you with, DeLuca?" He asks, covering the back of his hand with his other hand, almost automatically, so used to keeping the words that had sporadically appeared on his skin while they were dating away from her.
She opens her mouth and then closes it, brow furrowing, and looking a little frustrated, like the conversation isn’t going the way she thought it would.
Michael takes in the way she keeps licking her lips, and her shifty eyes, and her fidgety fingers, and the fact that her leg is bouncing so much the buckle of her boot is hitting the metal legs of the chair.
And then he tilts his head to the side and takes in her outfit, something that he might’ve noticed right off the bat several months ago. She’s wearing one of those short jumper things, that he’s pretty sure he’s heard Isobel call a romper, in a brown color that very nearly matches her own skin tone, the neckline plunges all the way down, exposing a line down the middle of her chest with a thick black belt around her waist. Her hair was left curly and messy, the way that it usually looked in the mornings before she showered and took a straightener to it, the way that Michael used to tell her that he liked it.
She’s not wearing a lot of makeup, but the fact that she is, along with everything else, paints the picture of why she’s here for Michael, and Michael can’t help feeling both incredulous and a little bit angry.
Before he can say anything, Maria pushes her shoulders back, making the slit in the romper widen as she looks at Michael from beneath heavy lids.
"How've you been?" She asks instead of getting to the point. "It's been a while."
And the way she says the last sentence erases any doubts that Michael had in his head.
Maria was here not as an ex who was once a friend to check up on him, but as an ex who wants to keep reaping from the benefits of their failed relationship.
Michael hadn't been lying to Maria when he told her that he loved her, and it had hurt so much when she'd told him that it was over.
But it had hurt even more when Alex had told him that he was leaving, and it was then that Michael realized that while he did love her, he loved Alex more, and in a way that was completely different.
If Maria left today, and didn't talk to him again, Michael would go on living his life, maybe a little sad for a while, but he'd get over it.
If Alex decided to never speak to him again, Michael wouldn't die, but it would feel like he was.
It was that easy and that simple. So it's easy and simple, to grab his beer and take a long swig and then speak.
"I'm doing fine," he says, voice clipped, trying to copy how Alex talks to strangers who won't leave him alone at the bar. "Things are rough, yeah, but that's the same everywhere these days."
"I hear that," Maria says, chuckling a little and then making a hand at his beer. "You're not gonna offer me one?"
"I would," Michael says, taking the last swing of his beer. "If the beer was what you were here for."
Maria raises both eyebrows at that, almost like she hadn't expected to be caught out so soon, or like she'd been expecting for Michael to play along with her.
She tries to pull an innocent face at him, and then sighs, leaning back in her chair, and crossing her arms over her chest.
"Fine, you want the truth? The truth is that it's been months and I am a girl with a healthy sex appetite, okay? And my choices were either going to a super spreader event, the two numbers on my phone that I would consider only under dire circumstances, or someone who wouldn't mind having sex with an ex."
She says the last choice, voice a little breathy and gives him a pointed look that would've worked on him months ago, but it barely makes a flame flicker now.
"When did I ever give you the impression that I wouldn't mind having sex with an ex?" Michael asks, honestly interested in the answer.
Maria gives him an incredulous look back, as though the answer should be obvious, and it hits him almost like a ton of bricks to the solar plexus.
"You're talking about Alex?" He asks, feeling even more incredulous.
"Obviously," she says, and then clears her throat, batting her eyelashes. "I know it's technically not the same thing, but I know you still had feelings for me when we broke up, and breaking up didn't just make my feelings disappear, so I was hoping you wouldn't mind, giving me a helping hand."
"DeLuca," Michael says, trying to sound earnest and kind. "I'm flattered. Really. But the answer is no."
Maria blinks at him a few times like he'd pulled a rabbit out of his hat, "Are you serious?"
She gives him a look like he would be an idiot to reject what she's offering, and there is a small part of him that is yelling at him to take the offer, because sex is sex, but he doesn't listen to that part because there is an even bigger part reminding him that Alex is coming back and that things will be different when he gets here.
"Yeah," Michael says, looking at her evenly.
Her eyes fall away from his face, just as he feels a tingling sensation across his forearm.
Michael lifts his arm to see the words as they appear.
Not possible.
Michael sees her noticing the words that must appear, and her eyebrows almost shoot off her face in her clear surprise.
"So that's why?" She says, sounding like she just figured something out. "You found your soulmate."
"I've known who my soulmate's been for a while now, DeLuca," he says. "Knowing that it was him didn't make it any easier for us to be together."
Maria frowns, "Your soulmate is a guy. But I thought that Alex was the only guy you've ever been interested in."
She says it with conviction like in the months that they dated they talked about their exes, but she never asked, and Michael never brought it up.
"I'm not straight with an Alex exception," Michael says, and he can't help the sneer when she fixes him with an incredulous look. "I'm bisexual, and I've been sexually attracted to and sexually involved with plenty of more men than just Alex."
Maria makes a face at that, like she doesn't understand, but Michael isn't a sex ed teacher, and he's not going to pull up charts and explain to her what she doesn't understand.
"What about Alex?" She asks, looking angrier by the second. "You're going to break his heart with this whole soulmate thing."
"Like you didn't come here with the intention of breaking his heart by propositioning me," Michael retorts.
Maria colors slightly, but doesn't back down.
She opens her mouth to keep speaking, probably to defend herself, but Michael shakes his head a little.
"Listen, Alex has nothing to worry about because he has a direct line to my thoughts about him at all times."
He gives her a pointed look and it still takes her a moment to realize it.
"Alex is your soulmate," she says, sounding both shocked and defeated.
"Yep," Michael says, popping the p, and wishing he still had another beer out here.
"How long have you known?"
"Since we were seventeen," he says and she makes a rude noise at the back of her throat.
She stares at him for a moment, stupefied and angry, "This was never going to actually work between us, huh?"
Michael just licks his lips, and gives her a helpless look, "Some things just aren't meant to be."
She nods her head sharply at that and then gets to her feet.
"Sorry, for bothering you, it won't happen again," she says and then turns to leave before Michael can say anything.
And then turns back around, "And please, don't tell anyone I was here. Me knowing that I fell low enough to do this is more than enough."
And then turns and actually makes it to her truck this time.
Michael lets the icy hurt that spreads across his chest at her parting words slide away.
Instead he looks back down at the words fading on his arm, and lets the warmth of knowing Alex is somewhere else thinking about him and missing Michael as much as Michael misses him, fill him up, chasing the rest of the chill away.
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