She shook her head as she looked at him, and before she knew it, she was laughing as well.
When he could stop laughing long enough to get his eyes open he looked at her, the smile on his face as broad as it had ever been. She looked back at him with one even brighter, the morning sun glistening off her cherry lip balm and her eyes. After a moment her smile faded completely and so did his, and then they were just... looking at each other.
She had a truly fair face. There were lots of girls prettier, but very few that were as beautiful. There was an innocence and a softness about her that put the people around her at rest. Like a human sedative walking around infecting people with peace. Big eyes, thick lips, cute freckles across the bridge of her small nose.
He leaned in without really even knowing what he was doing, as though his body had been disconnected from his brain and now acted on its own instincts.
She leaned in, too. Her lips parted slightly as they got close, showing just a smidgen of her small, white teeth and the tongue that rested on them.
They both smiled again as their lips met, her hand coming up and stroking the side of his face and pulling it in closer. He didn’t move. It was all he could do to stop himself from shaking as he felt the warmth of her body mix with his.
Her fingers traced the outline of his familiar, rough-hewn features and then suddenly pushed away from him.
They both gasped, both for air and for words
“Sorry, I... I’m-- “ Xander stammered, his mind going a mile-a-minute after its temporary rest.
“No, it’s --”
“Hi guys,” Sara said in her bubbly voice, rounding the corner with Mike carrying five drinks. “What are ya doin’?”
“Nothing!” they both said simultaneously.
Sara raised an eyebrow suspiciously, throwing a smirk at Xander as Cathy went to Mike and kissed him.
They never spoke of it again.
Mike walked forward with the determination and posture of a drill sergeant until his toes were almost touching the stone. He came to a dead halt and turned around to face Xander, but would not meet him with his eyes. Instead he stared down at the bar wrappers and trash on the ground in front of him, his face at war with itself.
Xander stared at him for almost a full minute, rubbing his tongue back and forth against the roof of his mouth as he tried to figure out what was going on.
“I need to talk to someone,” Mike said finally, still unable to meet Xander’s gaze as he clenched both his fists so tightly that his nails made tiny semicircle indents in his palms.
“Okay,” Xander said, stepping forward and forcing a smile. Awkwardly, he reached out and lay a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “What about?”
Clenching his jaw, Mike drew back fast and punched Xander square in the mouth.
Long, slithering spurts of blood and saliva spewed out of his mouth from either side of the impact as he fell backward. Two pink-tinted teeth hit the ground even before he did, getting lost amongst the stones and gravel. There was an electric pain as the bones in the bottom half of his face realigned themselves with the top. “What the hell?” he screamed, the words mumbled and distorted from the mauling his mouth had taken. “I thought you said you needed to talk?”
“I do,” Mike nodded honestly, his voice full of regret as he took another step forward. He loomed over his friend, the sun hot on his back making his features unreadable. He drew back again, as far as his arm could go. “Just not to you.”
Xander tried to get up, but before he could even summon the will to move Mike’s hand had connected with his skull at the eyebrow. It knocked him back down again, almost falling into himself as dirt and dust kicked up in all directions. The skin over his eye split, sending blood gushing down into his eye. It was as though all the blood in his body had been there, waiting to come out like a raging river held back by a frail dam. It came in great spouting bursts, turning his whole world red.
Mike pushed him down again when he tried to scamper to his feet, pinning his friend’s shoulders down with his knees. His felt his fist connect with the soft meat on the side of Xander’s face, the only audible sound within earshot the wet smack of flesh against flesh. He pulled back, his lips stiff and resolute while his eyes were floating in a half-inch of saltwater.
Xander’s face looked and felt like ground beef. His lips looked like a shirt that had been twisted and bunched to one side, showing not enough of his teeth on one side and too much on the other. The skin along his left cheek was missing, replaced instead with muscle bone barely hidden behind a veil of crimson. His mouth filled with a sweet, coppery taste as his head fell back onto the ground with a soft thud. His eyelids fluttered.
“Get up,” Mike said softly, wriggling the fingers of his tightly-wound fists. His pinky cried out to him in agony when he did, broken during one of the impact tremors along Xander’s skull. He punched Xander again, hammering down onto his nose. “Get up!” he said again, barking.
The peachy pink that had been Xander’s flesh was gone. Some of it had flown off all of its own accord, some of it hid behind a layer of thick, slick blood; but all of it was gone. It was so dark a red that
