Will lied about the booze. Two fingers of whiskey turned into half a bottle. He liked to think it made him a better person. Made him friendly, funnier, someone relatable and datable. He bathed in its glow as it rustled through him, making him smile. He tried not to give into the false sense of happiness and security. He smiled when he couldn't help it, when he was expected to, but didn't follow through. It wasn't in his eyes. His heart wasn't rehearsing. It took him away from himself, until his demons were at his side and he had red glaring in his vision.

It let him sleep. In blackness, entangled by nightmares that soaked the sheets and when he sprung from the bed he was sure it was blood (not sweat) that drenched him.

The bed was getting smaller, crowded with dogs that panted and wagged concernedly. They laid their heads over his legs and waited until the morning when he wasn't blinded by another life of violence and cruelty that felt like his own hands and eyes. He lived in their skin. All their senses were becoming his. All their memories were casting shadows on his and their voices called him out into the street at night.

His fingers plucked strings and his teeth drew blood. His skin felt loose, more like a suit than something he had come into the world with. Shedding death and growing older, more calloused. Her flesh was in his hands. He could see his design reflected in hers. Her blood coated his arms, up to his elbows, like armor. He brushed her hair softly at first, then gripped her dark brown strands and pulled her head back. Her throat was bare to his wolf's teeth. Alana. Will didn't want to look into her eyes.

His mouth closed over hers. Her chest was pressed into his and their clothes were caught on the breeze from the open window, swimming around them. They weren't naked. They held onto their insecurities, their hypocrisies of each other, and their fear. But he still saw her and she peered through him horribly vividly. She cut through him like she had a knife in her hand.

He didn't see the scars. The age, the lines, the stretch marks, the cast on their souls. He just saw delectable skin that he wanted to kiss. He breathed her in, pushed back her hair and rested his forehead on hers. In the moment they were unaccountable, they were children, and they could dream. She sighed with him.

It was blindness, deafness. He wanted to forget the terrible things he did to her in his dreams. It was calm, they didn't say a word, and the wind had died down. There was stillness like the ocean roar on a bright morning echoing the oranges and reds of the sky on the waves, or maybe it just hurt too much to move after a night of drinking.

But she couldn't stay and he couldn't love her.

The next day she looked at him with the same concern she had always held for him, but there was something else in her eyes. It was loss, hesitation, and frustration, with herself, for letting him get too close. For letting him look at what they could have had if they were different people. They were back to just friends, but there was a quiet distance between them that sickened him. He had his dogs and his whiskey. He dreamed of her and even when it was the ugliest, most disgusting of dreams he was happy. She came to him naked and shivering. She laid in his arms cold and unmoving. She kissed his eyelids and caressed his skin like a ghost that would never leave him.

I am too tired to hold onto you. And you are too dead to be held onto.