Monday Flash Fic | Not Catch and Release

He turns his back to you and you think that that’s it, that you’ve lost, everything you were, everything you could have been is over, relegated to flashes of neurons in your memory and phantom touches that leave you empty when you’re curled up in bed on those long, lonely nights.

You’ve been here before, with others, with ones that left you cold and your heart locked away, but you thought, you hoped, he was different. He thawed you, he made you believe him when he told you “till death us do part,” made you believe the murmurs of “I love you” when he was pressing into you, when you pressed into him, strong fingers running down an equally strong spine.

But now here you stand, cars whizzing by and Ben ten feet away but so far out of your reach. It’s a physical thing, when a heart breaks in two, when a life joined for so long gets fractured apart, and it happens so slowly like how beaches are carried away one grain at a time until one day, without warning, you fall right into the sea.

There’s more fish, so they say, but you’ve already caught a good one with dark eyes and dark hair and a soul as bright as the blistering sun. He’s not catch and release, he’s the love of your life, the part of your soul you searched high and low for. And you’ve staked your claim, mounted him on your wall, but you know that’s no way to keep a wild thing.

You look back to regard him, his head’s hanging low with shoulders pulled in, and you can tell he’s crying by the quake of them. You’ve killed him, you think, it’s a catch-22, and what does that say about you, that you’d rather have him dead and all yours than alive and free?

But you can’t help it, you want him, as much as you did the first day you met.

Unstable legs carry you to him and he looks up at you through tearful eyes. “Ben, I…I’m sorry,” you say and throw arms around him, encouraged by the fact he doesn’t push you away.

“N-no Will, I’m s-sorry,” he sniffles, nose nuzzling against the bare skin of your neck.

“I didn’t mean it, any of it.”

“I know, me neither.”

His breath hitches and so does yours as you stand there and sob, staining shirts and skin and souls alike. You wipe the tears from each other’s eyes and head back hand-in-hand to the car parked crooked on the side of the road, keys in the ignition and motor still running.

In twenty years time neither of you will remember what your first fight as a married couple was about, but that’s a very good thing considering it snowballed out of control on the straw of a fucking blue raspberry slushy.

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A/n: This was my first attempt at doing this flash fiction thing, and I’ll admit I had exactly zero inspiration for this all week until this second person plot jumped into my head. It’s not a pov I do often, but I like to dabble in it from time to time. 

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