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It was 2015 when Jax put on the headset. The crisp beginnings of autumn were cooling the tepid air, heaps of unraked leaves melding on the pavement in front of his ramshackle apartment complex, and he thinks he had been on his way home from his minimum-wage job with it nestled in his eager fingers. He’d scored the headset off of some sketchy website with no traceable IP address, or perhaps he’d obtained it from a classmate. Was he on his way home from school? He can’t remember if he lived with a roommate—did he ever have someone who would have searched for him after his disappearance, rung the authorities, strewn missing person posters amongst lampposts? Anyone?
Evidently not.
Either way, it doesn’t matter now—the passage of time, that is. He has no clue how time functions in this dimension, if the real world is still happening somewhere out there, if time dilation is a proven theory taken into account the circus’s existence, and it doesn’t matter. No one was waiting out there for him. No one is waiting in here for him anymore.
The next morning, he stomps to the dining area and yanks Gangle’s mask off before Ragatha can finish her practiced spiel of a cheery good morning, hurling it toward the floor. It’s only fair that one person gets to wear a mask around here and Gangle doesn’t deserve that privilege.
If Jax were able to, he would beat Caine up for making the grievous mistake of assigning Gangle of all people to a position of power—heck, he’d take Ragatha and her toxic positivity over the alternative of picking up every menial task at this over-policed wreck of a workplace. Clearly, she can’t handle any emotion beyond depression; why she bothers parading around in that stupid mask of hers is a mystery to him.
“Seven is a funny number.” He can hear Ragatha talking to herself when he tunes back into the hellscape surrounding him, tapering into a slow giggle. Frankly, she sounds demonic—how fitting—and she’s face down on the counter again, apparently schizophrenic. There’s a pickle slice stuck to one of her curls, mustard acting as its binder—he’s about to open his mouth to yell for Gangle, but she suddenly shoots up, lowering at him. “You.”
“Me,” Jax states flatly, an amused grin lifting the corners of his mouth. He wipes another section of the fridge.
“You give me… you remind me of an angry cat. Did you know that?”
He blinks. “Maybe you should get your eyes checked, Raggy. Or attend an AA meeting.”
“No, I’m—what?”
“Hm?” he asks, wiping the same square inches of the fridge he’d already wiped. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Pomni throwing her hands up with a wooden mannequin wearing a fedora, engaged in what can only be the world’s liveliest conversation or a heated argument. She shouldn’t show the NPCs that much emotion; it’s not like they’re real. Nothing is.
“Thought you said something mean.”
“I’m always mean to you, keep up,” Jax replies with a condescending smirk before he decides to retrieve the broom where it’s propped up on a metal rack near the sink.
He covertly sweeps a path to the commercial coffeemaker separating the front of house from the back of house, observing Pomni take orders and operate the register with unease. She seems to have found a tentative rhythm—every time she sends a customer to the lobby, she tallies a mark on a notepad or a piece of scratch paper behind the tip jar, and her pink tongue pokes out in concentration each time she keys in a sequence on the register. She glances back at the kitchen every third NPC, worried multi-colored irises swallowing her expression. Her eyebrows draw together whenever someone orders a menu item he can’t overhear from his temporary hideout. It’s all very fascinating stuff. He would’ve continued sweeping in circles if it weren't for Gangle’s maniacal mess of ribbon dragging him by the ear to man the fries.
Jax used to play this game with—
Jax used to play this game. The rules are simple, born from mind-numbing boredom and a desperate bid to pass the infinite hours at their disposal. He would say a letter and roll a six-sided die, then the other person would add on to the letter stated with a set number of letters provided by the die’s outcome to form a word.
H, 4.
Happy.
I, 2.
Ill.
T, 6.
Traitor
A, 4
Alone.
R, 5.
Ribb—
“Hey, um, I wanted to—“ Pomni cuts herself off with a darting look at the field, sucking in a deep breath as if she needs to square herself up. “Apologize. You know, since you’re wearing…” She twirls her fingers in the air, to which Jax huffs out a derisive snort.
“‘s not your fault, is it?”
“Still, I feel bad.” The sincerity in her tone trips him up for a millisecond.
“Yeah, whatever. Look at that dork in my body over there.” He points to Evil Jax, rubbing a sheepish hand up and down his arm as he shakes in place like a leaf clinging to its last trace of life to a branch. Jax doesn’t believe he’s seen a sight more pathetic and he’s seen plenty over the daysmonthsyears he’s spent trapped here.
“Why do you think he’s so scared? It’s just baseball—softball? What’re we playing?” questions Pomni, tilting her head to the side in bemusement.
“Don’t know, don’t care. I swear to god, I’m gonna rip him apart with my bare hands when this is over. He’ll be a pile of shredded denim when I’m through with him,” growls Jax, clenching his hands into fists as his counterpart catches sight of his own shadow and jumps.
“Jesus, what did the guy do to you?” she asks as though the answer is not literally shaking in his boots on an outfield.
“Exist.”
“Well, I think he’s sort of sweet. I guess I feel bad that no one on his team likes him.”
That strikes him harder than any baseball bat would. Gritting his teeth, he crosses his arms and musters up all of the anger in his tall frame to aim a nasty glare at that naive, odious, stupid, skin-wearing imposter. There’s something dark brewing in his stomach that he won’t acknowledge, can’t because he doesn’t have a name for it, but a red-hot iron scorches his intestines and paints his lungs with smoke all the same.
“He’s dead,” he manages to scrape out of his sandpaper-lined throat. Dead, dead, dead for wearing his face and earning her admiration at the snap of his trembling fingers. He hopes that Caine programmed blood in today’s suggestion-box disasters, hopes the digital flesh of his heart will taste metallic and justified if he manages to overcome this dumb vegan restriction. Evil Jax returns his stare with raised eyebrows and a pinched mouth as though he’s biting the inside of his cheek. Jax is going to snap his legs and use them to break his ribcage.
He doesn’t know when Pomni stood up, only that she’s in his line of vision, eyes downcast in concern. “You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he says easily, pupils shrinking back to their normal black squares.
“It’s just—“ She hesitates, then sits back down next to him, markedly closer than she had been before. “You had this scary look on your face. I said your name a few times too; you were starting to freak me out.”
“Oh, don’t worry your precious little head. I was busy thinking about the delicious lunch I’m going to make out of that guy.”
“Right,” affirms Pomni. “How delicious can he be when we have no seasoning out here?”
“I imagine the sun has been slow-cooking him,” says Jax, leaning in to get a better look at the broad beam that’s graced her face. She doesn’t often smile or laugh for good reason—a private part of himself that he has yet to actively strangle, but will check off the list somewhere down the line, likes that he is the reason for that smile. Not Ragatha, not Zooble, not Evil Jax who will soon be turned to rabbit stew, him.
Jax’s foot is thumping on the dirt. He squeezes his knee to curb the behavior, knuckles purple, not the blank sheet of white they would be if he were still…
It doesn’t matter.
Among the scarce digital possessions in Jax’s room, a purple and yellow polka-dotted blanket is his favorite. His first day here, said blanket had been folded neatly at the foot of his bed, the only item in his room not nailed to a wall or too heavy to lift. That day, it was the closest tether to the human world that he could cling to. The blanket is all artificial fibers and plush that arbitrarily reminds him of this comforter he borrowed once upon a time when he might’ve been someone. Over the daysmonthsyears he’s spent here—who really knows?—he’s had the opportunity to spruce up his room more, but he’s never parted with that thing nor done much beyond adding another bookshelf. Call him a creature of comfort.
What would he want to put in here, though? An AI-generated poster, perhaps a rug to shield his feet from getting cold in the morning? Oh, wait, they don’t.
Jax finds himself wishing that he had at the bare minimum taken Caine up on the window because Pomni’s in his room with her ever-present frown. He’s aware he’s a jackass, but everybody knows the general rules of hosting a fri—person… except for him. For starters: have an attractive enough place to host.
“Does Casa à la Jax live up to your expectations?” he asks, rolling his eyes as he sinks into his desk chair. It has no cushion. Okay, he should’ve swindled Caine into generating a lot more furniture.
“Yeah. I like your room.” She snags her lower lip between her teeth as she winds a finger through the tassels of Jax’s blanket. Her feet don’t even reach the floor, god, he keeps forgetting how tiny she is. Like a porcelain doll. “Jax?” Pomni ventures, light and breezy.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for showing me earlier.” She gives him a coy little grin. Her lips are painted black as midnight; he wants to ask if that’s a conscious choice or not, but he presumes he has his answer. When is anything in the circus voluntary?
“Wha—oh. Whatever.” He looks at the space next to his bed. The gray void mimicking a floor is emptier than usual.
“It’s funny, I thought I would’ve linked her door to Kinger way sooner. I mean, they’re literally king and queen chess pieces, I can’t believe—and how did you not know?”
“I don’t know if I like your tone,” Jax quips, crossing the short area to tug one of the bells on her hat. “I showed you if I recall.”
“You didn’t remember he had a wife until I reminded you at the game. Again.” She’s quick to reply.
“Touché.”
Quietude blankets them. Jax, for all of the witty remarks that are usually on the tip of his tongue, keeps the peace for lack of anything to say. He flicks the bell on her hat repeatedly, zoning out until—
“Stop.” Pomni wraps her small fingers around his wrist, and she envelops him so easily, a shockwave pulses through him. She’s so… she’s so petite. Her hand is warm.
Jax can’t remember the last time someone held his hand, adjacently or not. Maybe never.
He rips his wrist out of her delicate grip, feeling branded. “Dude.”
“Don’t dude me, quit pissing me off!” Pomni’s knee approaches his, like they’re going to knock together, but she falters at the last second. “It’s like you can’t keep your hands to yourself.”
“You caught me, Pom Pom; I can’t resist you!” He drapes a hand over his forehead as if he’s a fawning maiden. “Ah, and isn’t that exactly what you’ve all been hanging off the edge of your seat for, a cheesy heterosexual romance to tie—“
“Who do you address when you do that?”
Jax snaps his mouth shut, turning his head to the side as he scrutinizes her. “You hear a word I said or?”
“Some kind of invisible audience? You act like you’re starring in a sitcom or something. Ragatha and I were talking about it earlier, actually.” Pomni blinks up at him, wide-eyed, like Mars’s two moons are sucking him into orbit.
It’s easy to get swept away in her eyes, kaleidoscopic and huge as they are. He tries not to lose himself in the pinwheels of her pupils as he tears himself away to blink at the imaginary audience he’d been addressing.
“Ragatha can mind her own business,” says Jax. “And so what if I do? Someone has to keep the masses entertained.”
Pomni’s visage is indecipherable before she shakes her head, changing the subject back to Kinger’s wife. He thought discussing abstraction would be more painful albeit it’s in more of a haunting-the-narrative sort of manner.
At some point, she asks if he was close with anybody before they abstracted, akin to asking somebody what the time is. Jax kicks her out and refuses to speak to her for the next five adventures.
He can tell Ragatha is itching to spout off. She’s idling with one of her red curls as they watch a television broadcasting a program nobody in here has a hope of understanding. His skin pricks with the barbs of the words he’d tossed around earlier. Caine has an arsenal of realistic graphics up his sleeve, especially in the horror department, yet he can’t be bothered to shell out for some half-decent movies. What else does he expect?
Makes complete sense! Jax thinks as Ragatha clears her throat and asks if everything is okay between him and Pomni in that faux-compassionate inflection that reminds him exactly why he avoids finding himself alone with her nowadays. Pomni must have confided in her one-on-one; the thought causes a pit to form in his gut for all of a miserable minute before indignation overtakes him, a riptide dragging him to sea. So what if she has apparently struck up a pathetic little friendship with Ragamuffin? That doesn’t give her any right to go talking %$!# about him behind his back.
“I’m just peachy, Nagatha,” he replies, injecting as much venom into his voice as he possibly can. “Knock yourself out sitting there alone like a freak or whatever it is you were doing.”
Pomni’s about to enter her room when he storms down the corridor. She nearly jumps out of her skin when she spots him and attempts to scurry inside, but he settles a heavy palm on her shoulder.
She flinches away, flattening herself against the door, looking for all intents and purposes like captured prey. The fight drains out of him like someone had turned on a spigot somewhere deep in his chest. It’s involuntary—he wants to grasp that steadily slipping rope of anger and yank it back with a fierceness, but the fear scribbled across her being sends a pang to his heart. He didn’t think he had one still.
“What did you tell her?” Jax eventually spits out.
“Uh,” says Pomni intelligently.
“Was it fun gossiping about how much you hate me? How I’m the scum of the earth?” he sneers. “He was so mean to me, Ragatha, I don’t understand. One minute we’re painting each other’s nails and having sleepovers, and now he won’t even look at me! I don’t know how any of us put up with that guy!”
“… Was that supposed to be an impression of me?” she asks before, weirdly enough, the barest hint of a smile curls her lips. Her shoulders relax, arms dropping limply to her sides. “Six out of ten.”
“Deflecting!” he mocks in a sing-song tone.
“I told her that we had a fight and it was my fault. That’s all,” she contends after a few beats of silence with a shrug. “So you’re officially talking to me again?”
“Feels like you’re holding out on me, is that what your dear Rags would say if I asked her to corroborate?” Jax smirks before he jabs her puffy little shoulder.
“I don’t know what you’re so worked up about, honestly. That’s really all I said.” Pomni nudges her door open as she grants him another faint smile. In a frenzied out-of-body moment, he grabs her waist and draws her back, not quite done with this catastrophe of a conversation, not quite certain what else to do with the frantic, overwrought energy ratcheting up his spine.
“Don’t pull that again.” His voice comes out less forceful than intended. She flicks her eyes up and down his body as if he’s a Rorschach blot she can’t decipher. Ultimately, she says nothing as she pries Jax’s fingers off of her with a grimace.
He’s noticed that about her, how her first instinct is to shy away from physical touch. The uncomfortable rigidity in her posture when someone intrudes into her personal bubble. The way she avoids high fives. The grimace she’d been incapable of concealing. How could he not?
That doesn’t stop the irrational part of his rabbit brain—the part that inexplicably craves to be the reason behind Pomni’s joy—from wanting to reach out. Someone else he used to know never liked physical touch either, and all it had taken was some exposure therapy.
He’s fixated on the ceiling long after he has retreated back to his room for the evening, pillow clutched to his chest. The image of her smiling face is tattooed on his inner eyelids. He counts to five with each inhalation and exhalation of breath to calm down, get a handle on his racing pulse, but much like everything else in this digital hell, it’s a moot endeavor. %$!#, how could he have let this happen? He distinctly remembers promising himself at that baseball game forever ago that he would rid himself of the rush he gets when she so much as pays him a sliver of positive attention—he’s supposed to be an emotionless husk, the shallow comedian no one should spare a second glance.
Sometimes, he gets this impulsive urge to peel away all of his skin to find a different him underneath. There would be nothing of substance.
Jax ups his evasive maneuvers, always the first of the group to enter the portal and the first to leave, declining Pomni’s requests for him to show her around the circus per their unspoken routine. It was comforting in the beginning, playing the role of tour guide and trading nonsensical backstories for each area’s existence back and forth—she has a nameless trait in her that makes him want to run his mouth endlessly when he’s alone with her. She might be the one in the jester outfit, but he’s the real clown.
He’s never felt like this before, so naturally, he has to cut himself off like some sort of junkie.
Currently, he’s sprawled out on the floor, propped up against some oversized building blocks while he fidgets erratically with the straps of his overalls. Pomni’s a stubborn pair of pliers to his carefully constructed façade, leaving him exposed as a cut live wire. She’s infuriating. She’d somehow slipped past his endless rows of spiked defenses, seen through him as if it doesn’t matter that all of their existences consist of mere lines of code on a derelict desktop, she made—makes him feel alive as if that isn’t the worst possible thing to feel in a place like this. He hates her. He hates the tinkling of the stupid bells on her stupid hat and he hates how relentless she is when he circumvents her interrogations about life before the circus and he hates her unconscious habit of wetting her lips when she’s deep in a flow state and he hates, hates, hates how much he likes her.
“What’re you doing?” Jax’s head snaps up at Gangle’s soft-spoken inquiry. “Are you… crying?”
He runs an index finger under his right eye, wincing when, sure enough, a wet splotch stains his glove. “%$!# off,” he says, giving her the finger. His foot had fallen asleep, but he pushes through the phantom pins-and-needles sensation to stand anyway, glaring daggers at her.
“D-don’t hurt me! I—“
Jax sees a flash of red, ready to smack that aggravating mask of hers off her face. She whimpers, ribbons already braced like two flimsy pieces of fabric would seize her a fighting chance, but he freezes when Pomni comes strolling down the spiral staircase at far too close of a tile distance. She doesn’t appear to have noticed them. He wonders where she could have gone. No one is tailgating her, so it’s not like she went on an exploration with anyone else.
Did she?
The thought lodges itself in his throat like shrapnel. They aren’t friends. He shouldn’t care this much; he repeated to himself over and over and overandover not to care this much. She can do activities with whomever she wants. Telling himself that tightens the coil around his insides further. They aren’t friends. They aren’t friends.
Still, Jax thought that exploring was their—
He thought they had—
He doesn’t want to think anymore.
Gangle and Pomni are gone by the time he snaps back to reality.
Another knock on his door. Jax remains motionless, like always. The hinges heave their familiar creak as Pomni sinks against his door and recaps her day, like always. It’s been approximately six days of nightly visitations, entirely unprompted by him—he realizes now how poorly he underestimated her level of stubbornness, but at the same time, the hole he’s in is embedded too deep in the crust of the earth to crawl out of.
“Kinger dropped a fire quote on me when we got separated from you guys,” she rambles on. “Change is the essential process of all existence. I assumed the cemetery we were at was, um, bringing back old memories, and I didn’t really understand what he meant other than change is generally good. He did get me thinking about how our physical surroundings are always the same outside of Caine’s adventures… but we’ve all continued to change as people. Even Caine, I guess, although he isn’t human? Anyway, I thought about you when he said that, too.”
Jax is almost tempted to pry further, take the bait. He’s also tempted to inform Pomni that Kinger ripped off Star Trek.
“Because, and no offense, er—you aren’t gonna reply to me, actually, what does it matter?—you’re scared of change.”
He slinks over to the wall barricading him from her, slumping down an inch out of sight from the threshold.
“It’s okay to be scared. I am pretty much 24/7! But I don’t think you should deal with this stuff alone, Jax, it’s not good for you. I’ve been worried about you for—I wish—” She scoffs at herself. A subdued jingle. She’s standing up.
Curled against the door, he mouths along with her: You know where to find me if you need to talk.
Today’s adventure is a short one. Caine was in rough condition expositing the complexities of what had amounted to a subpar Indiana Jones bootleg, spacing out and hovering around Zooble like an oversized mosquito. Jax is the one who manages to restore his slandered name by the conniving mannequin archaeologist. Honestly, his goal was to avoid trapping himself into a path with Pomni—which, given the layout of the caves, had a real possibility of occurring—but winning a challenge is an appreciated ego boost. A sorely needed one.
Caine, in a complete flip turn from this morning, offers him a prize of his choosing.
The red-and-blue striped carpet is smaller than he anticipated and sort of gaudy in his overwhelmingly purple room, but it fulfills its purpose in covering the empty gray space next to his bed. He raises a hand to his sternum, rubbing his fur like he can massage away the bone-deep ache that’s taken up permanent residence in his ribcage.
He can’t keep doing this, not if he wants to steer clear of abstraction. He makes up his mind.
Jax unceremoniously drops into the chair next to Pomni’s, kicking his legs out as he pretends as though he hasn’t been ditching them all to eat his meals on the kitchen counter for the past few weeks. He must be magnetic considering how fast all five pairs of eyeballs in the room lock in on him.
“No need to stare, people. I know I’m ravishing.”
Zooble lets loose a long-suffering groan before lowering their head to the table. “I can’t today. I refuse.”
“Hi Jax! Glad you’re eating with us and feeling… better?” Ragatha pipes up.
“Sure, I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m a changed man,” he says, maintaining deliberate eye contact with Pomni, fishing for a reaction. A request for him to elaborate. A twitch of her eyebrow. Anything.
She spears a potato on her fork and slowly chews on it, acting the same lethargic Pomni at breakfast as always. Like he hadn’t directly acknowledged her a few seconds ago. Like he hadn’t clearly baited her into a response that was supposed to culminate in her agreeing to continue last night’s conversation.
“Pomni,” he says pointedly. Annoyedly.
She holds a finger up, swallowing down the chunk of potato. “Yes?”
“It’s rude not to reply to someone when they’re talking to you.”
“Oh?”
Jax opens his mouth and shuts it. %$!#. How did she gain the upper hand on him with two %$!#ing words? Lowering his voice to a whisper, he hunches over, reminding her that “you said I could find you if I needed to talk.”
He’s half expecting another smart-aleck comment, but surprisingly, they finish their breakfast in silence and wait for Caine to show up. He doesn’t, which Zooble loudly curses about before they’re hobbling out of the room—Jax isn’t sure what that’s all about, nor does he care.
He walks Pomni back to his room like an inmate approaching death row, careful to keep her in front of him so she doesn’t glimpse the raw terror gripping his psyche.
“A changed man, are you?” Pomni teases, though there’s a barely detectable edge to her tone once he kicks the door shut.
“Eh.”
A beat of silence, then two. Three.
“You wanted to talk?” she prompts.
“Let’s play a game,” he suggests, pivoting to search his desk drawers for the die he’d shoved in there to collect dust ages ago.
“Um.” She hums a confused, soft little noise that has Jax angling the rest of his back toward her, acutely aware of the heat pooling in his cheeks. “Okay…?”
“We can talk while we play.”
He explains the rules and passes her the die, moving to sit down on the carpet. Her knee is brushing his. She shakes the die in her tiny palms and lobs it, landing on a three.
“K.”
“Kite.” He takes the die, palms it. “I’m sorry. I don’t—I don’t do apologies, but I owe you one.”
“I mean…” Pomni sighs, bunching her legs up against her chest. “It did hurt a lot when you ghosted me. So, thank you. But I was worried about you for the most part because you aren’t that close to—I didn’t want to risk—“
Jax rolls a two. “R.”
“Oh.” She taps her fingers on a red stripe, tongue darting out to her lower lip. He laser-focuses on it, ears wilting. “Um—uhh… red! Is that right?”
“There you go.” He nods, holding out a hand and letting their fingers brush together. “Your favorite color.”
“You remembered that?” She blinks, dumbfounded. “E.”
“Ender.”
“How are you this fast?” Pomni grumbles as Jax reaches for the die.
“Lots of practice, Pom Pom. My friend and I came up with this game not too long after I got here, back when Caine’s adventures were way worse and way more spaced out. We would’ve probably been Scrabble champions if we owned that. He was pretty obsessed with games and theater, said he had dreams of becoming a Hollywood actor. But he also used to say he’d probably wind up as an extra on a sitcom no one remembers ten years from now. And now he’ll never get that chance. Anyway.” He rolls a one. “P.”
“Jax,” she says in a voice crafted from silk, kick-starting a fresh wave of goosebumps—or she would have if those existed here. “What was his name?”
“Finish your round.”
“… Pi,” says Pomni. “As in the, y’know—the math pi.”
“The math pi,” echoes Jax. He’s helpless to stop the pleased smile that bubbles out of him as she rains her fists of fury upon his bicep, arguing that it’s a valid answer. “Fine, fine—his name’s Ribbit.”
“Ah,” she responds, reaching over his leg to nab the die. She throws it up and catches it a few times, lost in thought. Jax has free reign to thoroughly map out the dark circles framing the galaxies of her eyes, the two pink circles on her cheeks, the gossamer tufts of bangs dangling out of her hat, the thin line of her pursed lips. Pomni would definitely taste like the potatoes and waffles she was eating earlier. He swallows a thick gob of spit, feeling vaguely as though someone is holding him underwater. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t imagine—I’m sorry.”
“Yep.”
“Jax…”
“It’s your turn, by the way.”
Pomni ambushes him in a hug, wrapping her arms around his waist as she smushes her face into his collarbone. He barely registers the position, too focused on regaining the breath she’d just knocked out of his lungs, then proceeds to lose it all over again when she swings her legs around his hips. “I hope this is okay,” she murmurs and he can feel the vibration in his bones and her warm breath fanning over his fur and if he doesn’t—
“Pomni,” Jax chokes out on a desperate exhale, tamping down the steadily rising urge to grip her face and drag her into him. “You have to—Pomni.”
She removes herself from his collarbone, kaleidoscopic eyes gazing imploringly at him, cheeks dotted with that permanent shade of red. Jax thinks in a fleeting second of Pomni-induced insanity that red is his favorite color, too.
A stuttery breath is punched out of him as he loosely drapes his arms over her shoulders—the sight of her in his lap, limbs slotted together so neatly with his like she’s built to fill in all of his empty gaps, withers his last shred of self-control to dust. He nearly barrels them both over, saved only by the firm hand he plants on the back of her head and the other he splays atop the carpet.
She does taste like potatoes and waffles, but also something he can’t put a name to. Something distinctly her, perhaps. He kisses her like she’s his sole source of oxygen, pressing harder and deeper. It’s heaven to be kissing her, it’s hell not to have her kiss back, it’s purgatory all at once.
Reality slams into him suddenly with all the force of a level eight tsunami. Oh yeah, Pomni is not kissing him back. He pulls away with a wet smack, immediately searching for any point of interest to observe that isn’t the girl perched in his lap. Shame and mortification is a bucket of ice water over the hot, shivery intensity he’d been consumed with as he pants, lost in the maelstrom of his horrible, horrible feelings that he—
Pomni taps the underside of his jaw. She leaves her hand there, a tender caress, as she realigns their lips with a lot more grace than Jax had shown. He can’t bite back the low groan she draws out of him when she skirts her free hand across his back, fisting the fabric of his overalls as she finally reciprocates in earnest.
Breathing isn’t a requirement in this world; Pomni’s too new to remember that presumably because she keeps trying to break the kiss again, and he keeps chasing after her, unwilling to let her stray for more than a second.
Jax already failed to keep his flimsy promises of not starting anything with Pomni to himself, platonic or romantic alike. He may as well throw caution to the wind.
“Okay, timeout for real.” Pomni ducks her head, causing him to collide with her cheek. He easily course-corrects, tilting his head so he can—“I’m serious!”
“Huh?” Jax mumbles groggily.
“Are we going to pretend that you didn’t kiss me?”
“Pom,” he whines, sneaking his arms back around her shoulders. “I’m serious too. Meeting adjourned.”
“No, I called a ti—Jax! Time the %$!# out.” Pomni stops his advancement with a pointer finger to his forehead. “I don’t think you’re aware of what you’re doing. This might not be a good idea.”
She cannot be serious. It takes a hefty amount of effort to rip his hungry eyes away from her lips; she’s studying him with an impassive air, too casual to be entirely neutral.
“The reason I tried to kill Evil Jax after we won was because you said you thought he was sweet,” says Jax. “I was all empty threats until you said that.”
“Evil Jax? But that was—“
“I tolerated Ragatha much better before you got here. She hogs all of your time with that giant %$!#ing crush she has on you, acting like she’s your guard dog, trying to get you alone all the time. I hated when you would let her sleep over in your room. I hate when you pick hanging out with her over hanging out with me.”
“See, I knew that’s what this was! Just because she’s my friend doesn’t mean I don’t have room for more friends. We can have a sleepover if that’s what this is about. I bet I could squeeze all three of us—“
She is, in fact, being serious. Jax can’t believe she thinks that’s all he wants from her after he’d jammed his tongue down her throat no less than three times. “I asked for this carpet because it reminds me of you. It’s fine if you don’t think this is a good idea, but I don’t agree.”
Pomni spares a quick glance at the floor before a brilliant shade of pink paints her visage. “Oh.”
Well, at least Jax got to kiss her before he’s sent packing to the friend zone. What a royal mess he’s gotten himself into—Jesus, if only the Jax of last year could see him now.
The thought gives him pause. Hadn’t this entire morning started with him claiming to be a changed man? He didn’t necessarily believe in that drivel because they’re all static cartoon characters, but maybe… maybe he has changed without his realization. Huh.
“I-I liked it when we kissed. We could, um…” She trails off, dropping a weightless peck on his shoulder that threatens to unmoor his spirit from his body.
“Make out in front of Ragatha?”
“No,” says Pomni with a smile he’s never seen her wear before, much less aim at him. “I was going to say pick up where we left off.”