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holding onto my heart {like a hand grenade}

["She's a rebel" Greenday]

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Mason slides into the booth and it feels like her whole body exhales. He grins easily, readily, and she doesn’t so much think as she responds just as boldly, happy to see him and not bothering with the pretense of her signature apathy.

(Roxy once told her that he lit up when she came into Der Wafflehouse. Lit up. She isn’t sure what to make of that, in the purpose of telling her. More to the point, she doesn’t understand why she can’t let it go.)

He won’t sit next to her; some days it annoys her more than she can stand. She can’t think of a reason why he deliberately places himself across from her (sometimes, she gets the feeling that he tries not to touch her very much). It drives her mad until she catches his eyes as Daisy says something pithy and somehow bittersweet.

It’s only for a moment, but it’s theirs.

And so what she thinks almost immediately, so fucking what, she thinks repeatedly.

Men and women can’t be friends (Mostly because other people won’t let them be. There is always someone to point out how someone she’d only thought of as friend is also male and then, well then). There always has to be something more (something less) and it’s not like she hasn’t thought of it herself, but that first sight newly dead therefore slightly traumatized gut reaction has long since been buried. A secret she can’t admit to. (Everyone knows that getting the shimmies for Mason is like petting a cat the wrong way, like a screwdriver made slightly sonic. Ridiculous.)

So she stays the course with pretty boys and he continues to tilt at windmills- Daisy and college girls with the hots for her dad- and they are friends. Truly. Sometimes it feels like he’s the only real friend she’s ever had, (or maybe she’s finally hit the rock bottom alive again sortof enough to admit to those inane human insecurities she used to keep locked up Tupperware tight inside her). Except they never really talk about their conquests because they aren’t that type of friends.

Maybe that’s a little odd. Maybe it’s a bit of alright. (Daisy talks enough about herself that hearing her virtues extolled from a secondary source is a hatchety murderspree short of acceptable). And sometimes Georgia calls him her best friend, slips and says it to his face, and she’s pretty sure no one should be that excited to hear that over the age of five.

She doesn’t try to explain it most days, on the days when she’s stuck on the curves of his palm or distracted by the crook of his smile. Or when a word or a glance of his sticks in her veins like molasses, clogging up her ventricles until her heart’s full of him. Most days.

And life, such as it is, goes on.

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