Tronnor One-Shots

Hello

Five hundred and fifty-seven voicemails have compiled on Connor's phone. They hang in cellular barb wire, stuck into silence by the punctures in their clothes—deepening with each second they are left unattended. Connor knows without approaching them that each one begs more than the last. Laden with we-need-to-talks and I'm-sorry's and I still love you's he can imagine they are, but to no extent that he can find the will to entertain. Their single voice and cohesively sorrowful tones must grovel to be worthy of untangling and bandaging and a kiss of a call back.

In the three years it took for the fence to be splattered in that much yearning blood, Connor neither kissed nor called back. Not to the pleasure of the one man pinned to his telephone lines, anyway. He let him dangle there, no contact name—just a code of meaningless numbers that showed up on his phone over and over and over like a persistent telemarketer's. He left his attention to the abundance of other boys—new boys, names flourished with emoji hearts and lips and champagne bottles—and let them superficially fill the hole in his chest, in which the flesh had been replaced by declined calls.

Connor carried boys in stretching plastic shopping bags. He picked them out and up at bars and at nightclubs and at friend-of-a-friends' houseparties. He shrunk them down and crammed them into his phone—to distract from the voicemails—to have on hand. When he was lonely, he'd pluck one out at random and place him into his sheets, tucking him in with sweet nothings of no expectations before tearing the quilt back all the same. The pounding of men upon him made him forget that the joy of his prior relationship even existed. The man left on the ringing wasn't joy, this was joy. This was joy. This was joy.

Right?

Right it seemed, until one morning Connor's coffee went cold in his hands. Sitting at his counter, the reminiscent pressure of Harvey—or was this one Wesley?—still hot on his inner thighs, his attention had been captured by the leaves outside his window. It was November, Californian autumn was finally beginning, and wind engaged the leaves in a romantic waltz with the silvery atmosphere. Connor wished he could be toasty by the hand of this sweater weather, but the only part of the conditions he felt was a plummeting sensation in his gut, like he himself was a leaf. A leaf who forgot how to dance and fell, swooping downwards into the oblivion of the gossamer fog carpeting rock and puddle.

Why? Because he was suddenly moving his thumb, slowly, through his recent calls.

Why? Because the remnant feelings of Harvey/Wesley's midnight touch spread with uncomfortable heat to his groin.

Why? Because, through all of last night's prodding and pleasure, he could not be distracted. With each clench of bedsheets and passionate surge of body, he thought of nothing but the voicemails. It was as if—suddenly, after three whole years of a successful coping mechanism—his ex-love had found his way through the charging port of his phone and slinked back into his room. His bed turned back into their bed, as Connor hallucinated chiseled pecs into being a scrawny chest—arms like bull's legs to that of chalky pencil crayons. Connor hadn't heard his voice in over a thousand days, yet he had managed still to take over the night.

Connor rubbed his temples, because the uneasy truth was: he had let him take over the night. His mind had photoshopped freckles and blue into a strange face he only usually saw in the dark—made it dangerously familiar—and still proceeded to lend his body with the fervour he would to one he adored. He allowed his every corner to be ravished, like he used to welcome zealously from the man whose love his lopsidedly healing heart mourned. He should have stopped it, because physically, with the boy from who-knows-where, last night was supposed to just be primal, stark neutral sex. But with that mindset, now, with the boy from who-knows-how-to-get-him-off-his-mind, it became reminiscent of a mutual yet past infatuation, and therefore regretful.