hunter campbell ☆ dean winchester. (![]() ![]() @ 2017-10-18 08:12:00 |
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She’d fallen asleep easily. Too easily, she wanted to say, considering how often she shared her bed with someone else (which was hardly ever). Hunter wasn’t just anyone, though. Hunter wasn’t like anyone else she’d taken home. Her type was more the kind who left once they’d scratched their itch, not the kind who wanted to make her coffee in the morning. That had been fine, truthfully. For a while, Elle didn’t want anything to tie her to any specific place. She’d been young and more interested in living life to the fullest, which meant not ending up stuck anywhere. She was older, now. Smarter, supposedly. She was tethered here, though, because of whatever was going on with Hunter. She didn’t know how she felt about that (or, more like, didn’t know how she felt about being okay with that), and she was pretty sure he was the reason she was having dreams about being shunned by classmates and neighbors, about faceless friends no longer talking to her and whispering behind her back instead, about deciding to act the part if all they thought about her was trouble anyway, about only ever being good for a fun time, and then watching boys retreat to their girlfriends like she’d never meant anything in the first place. When it culminated in a door slamming in what looked like a hospital, Elle woke up. Careful not to wake him when she got up (although, if she did wake him, she didn’t stop to look back), Elle pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts before heading to the kitchen, intending on using “trying to figure out what’s for breakfast” as a way to clear her head. She got as far as pulling out pancake mix and starting a pot of coffee before she stopped, leaning against the counter. “Christ, get your shit together, Marshall,” she muttered to herself. Maybe she did need to take Lucy’s advice after all. Hunter was a careful person. He didn't make decisions without thinking through all of the ways in which those decisions could have consequences. He lived his life with purpose and intention--or at least that was how he had primarily lived his life up until he'd moved back to Dunhaven. Moving back had somehow woken something in him that thought that life didn't need to be so structured, something that inherently knew that life was what happened when you were busy making plans. He couldn't explain the urgency he felt these days, like there was no five years from now, only this moment right now. He felt this certainty that the only certainty in life was today and that there would never be a guarantee for tomorrow. He'd done little to actually discuss that feeling with anyone--it was so new and foreign to him that he wasn't even sure how to explain it to himself. Waking up on Sunday morning, though, he was pretty sure that he needed to start trying because his showing up at Elle's place unannounced for the reasons he was showing up were proof enough that his new lease on life was very much going to be affecting people other than himself. Slipping out from under the sheets, Hunter stood up and carefully pulled on his trousers from the suit he'd worn to chaperone the dance the night before. He pressed a palm into his right eye, forcing the sleep from it and left Elle's room to find her where she stood in the kitchen. "You're up early," he said by way of breaking the morning after ice. That was something he'd never imagined he'd have to do with Elle--not because the thought of a morning after was so unimaginable, but because he had never imagined he'd have done anything to potentially jeopardize their friendship, or make it awkward. “Hmm?” Elle had been so wrapped up in her own head that she hadn’t even noticed Hunter had gotten up, let alone joined her in the kitchen. She frowned and shook her head, waving a hand at the coffee pot. “Got hungry, thought I’d get started on coffee instead of stare at the ceiling some more. You want waffles?” That was dismissive of the actual reason she’d gotten up early, though, and she knew it. She already had trouble looking at his face and being less than fully honest with him. He was her best friend, and she was supposed to lean on him when things weren’t going well. But what if it involved him? Or at least her own stupid insecurities when it came to him? What then? She sighed, shoulders slumping a little. “You ever have a dream… or a string of them, where everyone just ends up leaving? Or --” Her voice faltered a little. She was used to not showing weakness, and this -- standing barefoot in her kitchen with him -- was way more intimate than last night was in a lot of ways. “You’re like the town pariah? And you spend the entire dream being made fun of, or shunned, or ignored, or whatever the fuck it is, and it feels so fucking real.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I’m up early.” Hunter couldn’t honestly say he’d had dreams like that and wasn’t sure it would be helpful to pretend like he knew what that sort of dream felt like. So he shook his head and leaned back against the opposite counter, his eyes focused on her. A small wrinkle puckered between his brow. “I can’t say that I have, but I can imagine waking up from something like that would be a pretty shit feeling. Were you dreaming that last night?” God, this was embarrassing. Elle’s cheeks felt hot, and she wanted to go back in time so she could never mention anything at all. Would it have been better if he’d understood what she meant? Or worse? “Yep.” She pursed her lips, a frown crossing her face. “Figured it’s probably…” She looked at him, finally. “Thinking you’re gonna take off. And I’ll be…” It wasn’t like her to be so insecure, but then again, she didn’t usually sleep with her best friend. Until recently, anyway. She shrugged. “Here, and out a best friend. It’s stupid, forget it.” “Oh,” Hunter said, struggling to find a better response. He’d thought about what might happen if this went badly, of course, he just had only thought about it from the perspective of him being the one to get theoretically dumped. He hadn’t even considered that she might worry that he’d be the one to leave. Lifting a hand, he scratched at his bare shoulder and pressed his lips together in thought. “If this ended right now, I’d still be your best friend,” he said, after a moment of silence. “Seriously, Elle, we’ve been through a lot and you’re probably the only person who’s really seen me at my best and at my worst and the only person I’m just me around. I won’t let sex change that.” His voice was stern, and he knew that he meant it. For better or worse, their bond of friendship was going to be there, so long as he had a say in the matter. It sounded extra stupid with Hunter being so earnest about their friendship. He was so confident, so sure, and she was a mess. “You’re right,” she admitted. “Mostly. And you know how much it pains me to say that.” That part was said in jest, and she cracked a faint smile. “It does change some things, though, doesn’t it?” It might not have made a difference with any other guy, but it was like he’d said: she’d seen him at his best and worst, and the same was true in reverse. That made it different than before. Nodding, Hunter said, “Yeah, it changes some things. I think we get to decide what it changes, though.” Pushing away from the counter, he took a few steps toward her until he could rest his hands on her hips. “We don’t have to know exactly what it changes right now. As long as you know that you’re not going to wake up to find me just gone.” Elle was glad Hunter was on the same page she was, because despite her neuroses, she wasn’t sure she was ready to define what was going on here. What they had was good -- in general, of course, but the new dynamic was fun, too. Except for this one moment of awkward insecurity, she felt less self-conscious with him than she’d ever felt before. It didn’t have to be weird. It wasn’t weird, and maybe that was what scared her. “You’d eat all my food first,” she corrected him, reaching up to drape her arms over his shoulders and play with the hair at the back of his neck. “Then you’d leave.” Hunter’s grin split across his face and he laughed. “See, these are the perks of sleeping with your best friend. You know exactly how to keep me here,” he teased. This was good, he thought. They weren’t awkward like he’d worried about. And he felt pretty confident in the fact that, if something were to change between them that needed to be addressed, they’d be able to talk about it. After all, Elle was the one person he could count on to be brutally honest with him. For now, he thought it was enough to just enjoy whatever this new dynamic was between them because it was fun and new and exciting. “So what was that about waffles?” he asked, leaning forward to kiss her, his smile pressing against her lips. Elle huffed, but her attempt to sound irritated was ruined by the hint of a smile on her own face. Damn him and his stupid, adorable face. And his stupid chest, and his stupid arms. It was nearly impossible to keep her hands off him now that she had permission to touch. “You’re not gonna get any if you keep this up,” she warned, though she wasn’t making any moves to push him away or stop him from kissing her. She did the opposite, in fact, and had been kissing him back. “Or is this your plan to get me back to bed? You don’t need to try that hard, you know.” Encouraged by Elle’s lack of any real reticence, Hunter shrugged. He kissed her again, and then the edge of her jawline. He wasn’t all that interested in waffles at the moment--Elle had a way of distracting him like that, and he wasn’t sure how exactly that was a new development. His lips brushed over her neck and then he kissed her again, never once losing the smile on his face. “Bed, kitchen, either one.” “You’re ridiculous,” she said fondly, dropping her hands to his back so she could pull him flush against her. “And a little selfish. And definitely needy.” But Elle didn’t sound upset about any of those things. He was sweet and charming, too, goofy and weird. She took a moment (a long one) to get lost in kissing him before she pulled back to consider her options. “I haven’t christened the kitchen yet,” she told him. It was the truth; she hardly ever even brought men back to her apartment, preferring to go to theirs so she had an easier exit. Hunter was the exception to that. “You up for that honor?” “Mm, yes, I am all of those things,” Hunter conceded, though he sounded thoroughly unapologetic about it. Honestly, selfish and needy weren’t traits he would have associated with himself, even jokingly, until recently. He chalked it up to the fact that he’d relieved himself of all of the pressure and expectations that had made him so straight-laced over the years, opening himself up to new parts of himself. If that came with the way Elle described him fondly, he’d take it. Hooking his hands around her legs, Hunter lifted Elle up onto the kitchen counter behind her and grinned. “Hell yes,” he said, echoing her words from the night of her birthday, “just hope you can keep up.” |