FicWad

You lay on the bed, half-sitting against the headboard, a cigarette dangling from your lower lip, your pants unbuttoned and low on your hips even though you're not wearing any underwear.

The cigarette droops and threatens to light your chest hair on fire, so you pick it up at the last minute between two thick fingers and exhale.

He is lying on the bed beside you, his silver hair messy on the sheets and his glasses bent at an awkward angle between his nose and the mattress.

He is your best friend and your roommate.

You know that he loves you because he told you so before he fell asleep. You also know that he had planned to tell you, in a circumspect way, because he knows he can't handle his drink in the way that you can so he always just refuses to drink with you altogether.

This is the kind of relationship you have: knowledge on knowledge, plans on plans, lies on lies.

You lick your lip to get a shred of tobacco off and remember that only an hour (or two or four or twenty-four) ago you shared a cigarette and he licked his lips just so to get an identical fragment off and you had wished it had been your tongue to taste that lost leaf. You have sympathy for the shred when he picks it out of his mouth with his finger tips and brushes it into the air. You know that he will do that to you someday too.

Just an annoying bit of harmful chemicals wrapped in a dried leaf.

You are always just a little melancholy when you drink and the drool from his lips where it dries against the fabric of the sheet looks like a skull.

Your hand fits gently around the crown of his head, and you can imagine kissing him with your fingers in this soft hair. You can imagine the hard line of one of his frowns and upside-down-smiles melting into soft-soft lips.

You can't imagine you together, though, and that is a good reason to put out your cigarette in the glass tumbler beside the bed that stands on a stack of textbooks and click off the lamp. The streetlights are enough to watch his face by.

You exhale.