his brown eyes ➵ thomgelica

iv.

"hey," she says quietly sometime between fourteen and fifteen. they're laying on his bedroom floor since both their parents are gone working or whatever, and well, he's long since stopped pretending to be annoyed when she'd come bother him. sometimes he hates his parents and all his friends and sometimes her, but not really, never not really, except she sorta hates him. she hates him.

if you're a woman, you understand.

he doesn't look up from where he's working on the english paper he's said is worth more than half his grade and a requirement to graduate, and he's so studious laying there on a pillow, crafting theses and sentence structure. he has a bad habit of chewing on his pens, of biting his lip when he concentrates, but aside from that, she doesn't know much else.

that's a lie, actually.

she knows everything about him from how he likes to drink his soda when it's room temperature, how he really, really likes writing and english and maybe wants to do that when he grows up, but all of his teachers and parents say that he should focus on something more realistic like history or politics.

but he helped his dad repair the car, coincidentally the car he inherited as a gift when he was sixteen, weeks and weeks of years of the effort spent slaving shirtless in the summer heat with peter.

and she's seen thomas shirtless every time she's closed her eyes since she was eleven, can predict precisely when he'll roll his eyes or laugh genuinely or say something stupid. for three years, he's been her best friend, and for two, she fancied herself in love with him and his brown eyes and the french music he loves when he isn't pretending to like angsty emo bands. he swears her parents like him more than his own do, and he's weirdly obsessed with always playing the banker in monopoly, hides cigarettes in his desk drawer, called her for the very first time from a pay phone three towns away because he "didn't know what I'm doing, angelica. i just wanna talk".

she's not sure how she convinced him to come back home -- she's even less sure he even knows -- in the middle of the night before his parents could worry. it was last year, and his fingers were cold when he'd rasped his knuckles on her bedroom window.

she opened it after eventually swearing to not because it was way late, because he was so clueless it caused her heart physical pain, but after a mouthed argument and him nearly falling off the thing with the vines he'd climbed and scaled to make it up to her room, she let him in. and tried not to think about the lost boys and salem's lot since they watched them recently.

he kicked off his all black converse, left them next to her flip flops. he dropped his patched backpack by her desk. his eyes were so gaunt. he said it was all too much, that he didn't know who else to call.

she tried to stop that from getting to her head (heart). she asked him why he came back, then, he said he didn't know, but she thought it was a lie. she let him have it. and her fluffy pillow even though he looked like an idiot standing there towering over her and awkward and uncomfortable in her very girly, very pink bedroom. it wore her heart a little more down. that, and his love of chinese food. mac and cheese. only one crepe.

"hey," she says again since he isn't listening. his small tv's so quiet playing supernatural that she can hear the scratch of his pen guided by his elegant penmanship. "thomas."

he hums noncommittally in response, and when she hits him with her purple painted toes, he doesn't even flinch.

"thomas, hey. thomas."