Page 50 of In This Iron Ground
“I get why…I mean, after everything you, you know, went through, I get that. But. Maybe, you should try talking back to whatever is telling you that this isn’t real, instead of agreeing with everything it says.”
Silence.
If he did that…if Damien did that, and it turned out that he had been right to be cautious all along, he’d be left open. Vulnerable. It was easy for Hakan to trust something that had never broken him. Damien simply knew better.
“Okay,” Damien said.
He had no idea if it was a lie.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Time slipped by. It’d been a long time since it treated Damien so kindly.
Summer arrived with a swell of heat, evaporating the school days into a stretch of freedom.
Damien and Koko were allowed to invite Olive to the house, and the three of them would spend their time hidden in the cave of Koko’s room or out in the forest, seeking trouble and not often finding it.
At seventeen, Hakan had his own group of friends and would often be out with them. Some days, however, it would be him and Damien out in the wild.
They picked a Wednesday to go to one of the further, smaller lakes, unoccupied by other pack members. By the time they reached their destination, Damien was sweating through his shirt and panting. Hakan, and his asshole werewolf Ousía, were barely affected. They stepped onto the long, wooden dock that pierced the circle of the lake, supported on creaky stilts that poked from the water.
“I need to get into the water right freaking now,” Damien said. Hakan looked over to him, smirking. “And shut your face, too,” he grumbled. Hakan snorted, setting their stuff down and taking out their towels.
“Last one in is a loser,” Hakan said, stripping off his shirt.
Damien threw a shoe at him. “You’re on.”
The cool water was a blessing. Damien felt everything in him realign as he threw himself into the deep. He stayed under the surface for as long as his lungs let him, feeling himself float.
“Jesus, thought you’d died,” Hakan said as Damien surfaced.
“Drama queen,” Damien said, rolling his eyes.
“First one to the centre wins,” Hakan said, smiling mischievously.
“Oh, yeah, sure Wolf-Man. That’s a fair race. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes. Let the poor human drown.”
“And you callmea drama queen,” Hakan said, but he kept pace with Damien as they swam towards the floating island in the middle of the lake.
There in the water, in the cool amidst the heat, Damien watched Hakan haul himself up onto the swaying surface of the artificial island. Watched his brown skin in the light, the way water streamed between the animal movement of his shoulder blades. His dark hair was plastered to his head, his neck. He looked back and his dark eyes were as bright as the sun.
Damien didn’t know if he was floating or drowning.
These feelings weren’t new. They had been trembling awake for months. But in that sunlit moment, they coalesced into something tangible. Something Damien could feel in the pit of his stomach, a shuddering creature as new as it was ancient.
Damien closed his eyes and let himself be swallowed by the black water around him. The world muffled and lost shape. He waited until the burning in his lungs was worse than the one in his stomach.
He surfaced and gasped for breath.
They made a competition out of jumping from the island and into the water. They swam around the lake and Damien watched as Hakan cut through the water like a human would never be capable of doing. The water swayed into waves around the werewolf, reacting to his force.
When Damien tired, they soaked up the sun on the dock. Damien tried not to notice how the water evaporated from Hakan’s skin. He prayed that, as a teenage boy, he smelt of arousal seventy percent of the time, and any affection that surfaced would be taken as friendship.
Whatever was happening to Damien, its manifestation into reality was impossible. It had to stay hidden, even in this summer sun.
“Man, how can you drink that?” Hakan complained as Damien took a sip of his coke.
“Don’t start that again.”
