This Is How It Happens (Short Fiction)

{AN: this is a short piece of a longer story I'm writing that I have no other info on, yet. I'm hoping to put it out this fall, though. It's gay romance, and it's, surprisingly, contemporary. Enjoy!}

I can’t believe that this is how it happens; this is where I finally give up. One in the morning, standing out in the cold, screaming at the top of my lungs, while I slam this huge boulder against a car again and again.

Inside, Santa is yelling and cursing and I can see him fumbling around. Ryan is screaming at me and trying to pull me away, and it makes me drop the boulder.

I shake him off and pick it up again. Go for the taillights. The paint job. The windows.

They’re built to withstand a crash, but the glass cracks, spiderwebs, and turns into a mosaic of violence and impact under the blows of a massive boulder wielded by an angry drunk bitch just about as well as it would upon kissing pavement during an accident, so I keep hitting it. I’m not hitting the car, though. I’m hitting the asshole in festive clothes who robbed me, sitting inside of it. I’m hitting my fuckhead friend who pretended she didn’t see me crying in that dark room with a red cup in her hand. I’m hitting my aunt for making me do this, making me keep going. I’m hitting Perry, again and again and again, for kicking me out of her party. Halfway around the world and she still knows how to make me feel two feet tall and caught in a lie, even when I haven’t told one.

My hands are so cold I can’t feel them anymore, but before they got like that I think they were hurting. There’s a flash of red, like I may have sliced myself open on all the broken glass, but I ignore it, and then-

Then Ryan is body-slamming me and I topple to the ground. There’s no time to rest though, because he’s pulling me back up by the collar. "Kaye, come on!"

His blond/brown/bronze/auburn/so-many-colors hair is plastered to his forehead and his dark eyes are full of nothing but panic. Over his shoulder, red.

Not blood. Santa. The Santa Suit - the asshole who robbed us dressed like Father Christmas is climbing out of the car.

Something flashes silver in his hand, and I think it’s a knife, and I think that’s why Ryan must be screaming at me that we have to go, but I don’t want to go. I want that drunk asshole to come over here so this drunk asshole can kill him, and then I want to take the knife from his corpse and just kill myself, but Ryan doesn’t know that because he doesn’t know me, and how can I convince a stranger who isn’t insane to leave me here like this after I just fantasized about how much I want to beat his girlfriend in the head with a big boulder?

It makes me angry that I feel guilty about that - Perry is awful to me, she’s always been awful to me.

Not because I’m faulty, but because she doesn’t know me and she thinks that what she sees on the surface is all there is.

But I feel guilty. Fuck, this guy.

Ryan’s fingers twine through mine, rough and cold and bony. He starts to tug on my arm. I let him pull me away, and when he starts to run, I do too.

“This way!” he shouts, the wind stealing half his words.

I follow him when he careens around the corner, feet pounding on cobblestones, and we keep running long after we’ve ditched the robber. Just two blurs of black with pink cheeks and wild eyes, running through frozen streets until all the world knows how to be is a blur of color in the corners of our eyes.

If this is dying, it feels better than I ever expected.