Matt kept watching them from the corner of the room, peaking over the corner of his phone; or rather, it was her that he was watching more than anything. That girl, that new girl that slithered her way into their life and established her permanence with such ease, despite the fact that she did not have the intention to when she’d first met them. 

He would shift his eyes to glance up at both of them for a while: Zach—the one whom he’d known and been the best friend of for what felt like a lifetime or perhaps more—and the mysterious little damsel next door. 

Whether the two of them were already cuddled up on each other, or just in comfortable proximity, he’d still sneak up a glance at her despite the guilt knocking back at him in his lungs. But no—he wouldn’t do that to Zach, or to either of them for that matter. These two are already a couple, have been open about it for a long time already, and what Matt sees when he looks at them does not give him even the slightest impression that it’s going to change anytime soon…or ever. They fit.

Matt lay in his usual way, sprawled in oversized clothes, with one leg halfway thrown to rest on top of a knee like a barricade. His back was sucked in by a pillow that his spikey, hunched spine could still tolerate, and against which he continued to slide down throughout the night, as the conversations between them all went on and the glances towards her progressed. 

He’d start with an inconspicuous one, an eye movement to suggest he is adjusting his dry eyes to the screen before him, and catch a glimpse of her before pulling his eyeballs back towards his phone to avoid giving any suspicion that he held even a sliver of care in his bones about was happening around him. 

His bones, ‘ah, yes’, he remembered as he peeled one hand away from the warming plastic case of his phone. His thumb caught the sterling rings that began to slide down his corpse-like fingers. It stroked down, feeling each knuckle go past the edges of the metals, an action equally out of anticipated need and habit. He pushed each ring back down, one by one as if they were his very own disobedient pets, and moved his hand up to rest in the gap between his shoulder and neck as he watched her. 

Friends—is that really what they were? He wondered as he continued to soothe himself, rocking the heel of his hand over the thin skin covering his collarbone. Minuscule sounds of clinking metal jewelry hitting against itself began to echo faintly in his ear, as the rings met the collection of necklaces that was failing to add more weight to his already ghostly appearance. The same appearance of his that no one understood until she came along, carrying the same disease with her. 

She was smart about it. Her small stature worked both for and against her in a way, but he thought that was what made her all the more interesting. Matt knew very well that, unlike hers, his height was a major advantage in his ability to play ‘walking graveyard’, and that—if it ever came to it—his body could strip itself off down to its bones and go from simply being ‘skinny’ back to looking like the walking dead within weeks or even days, that is, if he ever were to fall back into ever having a sustainable amount of fat and muscle on his bones to begin with; which he mentally couldn’t. He would rather die before he let himself get there.

‘We recognized it in each other before we even said the words, didn’t we?’ Matt thought to himself, a smile spreading across the lips of his mind. It was inevitable that they’d eventually confess it to each other—their behaviours were much too strange and similar to ignore, and in the way Matt saw it, there was never any harm in making a starving buddy…was there? 

He watched as she tiptoed around from room to room, wearing pink shorts, caught up in her own obliviousness and a bag of frozen grapes. One grape lingered a bit before it pushed past her lips, into her mouth. 

With each of these nights, his eyes began to grow more confident in following her movements, and in doing so, each passing clink of metal began to fade somewhere farther than what he could identify as the present.

‘But I’ve never thought you’d make me feel this way, Grace. Why do I even feel this way?’ he wrestled with the words twisting and turning in his chest, churning until they began disrupting the even flow of his breath, though inside he already knew exactly why that was. The simple truth is that he’d never met anyone else who did the same as he did. 

Someone who could listen to him talk about this dark passenger and truly understand, all while walking the thin line of possibility that they could share more time with it together sometime. 

Someone who understood the effort put in day by day, and who syphoned the same pleasure out of it, too. Yes—that is what truly made her different from anyone else, and much too similar to him. They both shared the pleasure of doing it; of feeling empty inside, of seeing the bones, of feeling them poke from underneath the thin layers of their skin.

The Polaroid camera of his mind began spitting out images, plastering them all over his inner walls until they were swallowed with visions of her, so much so that the frames began overlapping one over the other. 

In another world, ‘perhaps even around this time’, he thought, she would be laid down on the floor laughing, looking up at him as he sat upright just above her with a frozen grape between his fingers. The luckiest frozen grape—one that he would bring down just close enough to hover over her lips but without letting them touch it, then draw it away and watch her stretch her body out closer to it, just like a snake would.

He’d watch it all: that first tilt of her chin, the lengthening of her neck, the small rise in her chest followed by an arch in her back so deep that her ribs would start to pop up one by one from underneath her cropped top. He’d watch them gradually unveil themselves with the suspense any prized work of art should, and then move his attention back to her face to catch the way her teeth reach between his fingers, and defrost the frozen flesh of the grape with a single hot breath before grabbing a hold of the skin and piercing deep through the slush.

The grape would disappear behind her smug, victorious smile, and he would feel just as victorious for having had witnessed that.