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“I think we should see other people.”
Bonnie doesn’t exactly mind her words while she says them, because frankly their recent all-morning-long sex-a-thon has her physically and mentally exhausted.
It’s a good thing that she lost the ability to be afraid of Damon a long time ago, because the growl that echoes in their otherwise silent bedroom is as beastly as beastly gets.
She cringes as her phrasing finally registers inside her head – her thoughts definitely came out all wrong.
“I didn’t mean it that way!”
“I sure hope not!”
Damon grips her bare hip and turns her around roughly, so they are both lying on their side, facing each other. His expression is nothing but dark and menacing, and the witch’s gaze softens a little in response, wanting to sooth him. She even reaches out to touch his cheek, stroking it gently and slowly, before she tries to explain herself again.
“We are new people in a new apartment in a new town, and for three weeks all we’ve done is stay in and have sex with each other. And when we go out we manage to have some kind of sex anyway, or do I need to remind you about the bench incident in Central Park, the grocery store one, or even -”
“I don’t get why you try and make it sound like a bad thing,” he scoffs at her increasingly eager tirade, all traces of darkness gone from his visage in favor of a grating amusement.
“We cannot spend all our time wrapped in each other and we definitely can’t spend all our time alone having sex on any surface available.”
Damon’s blue eyes twinkle a brilliant cobalt as his lips quirk up in a wistful smile. “But we do it so well…”
“Can you take this seriously, please?”
“Not really.”
She glares at him, exasperated, and refuses to add anything else. For reasons unknown, maybe because she looks sexy as hell, Damon feels himself begin to cave in.
“I don’t really see your problem with this, Bonnie,” he sighs, irritated. “We’ve been together for three years. You should be glad the fires are still burning.”
“I miss doing other stuff together. Back in Mystic Falls, sex was not the only thing we did together.”
“Because there was always some crisis going, and your friends there are freaks.”
Bonnie makes a calculated choice to not bring up that his obsessive tendencies had not helped either. There are already plenty of reasons for why this relationship should not be working at all. He is controlling, possessive, arrogant and insensitive, not to mention occasionally violent (although that violence is not directed to her, ever). She is independent, slightly judgmental and often a bit too proud to admit she is wrong. They should not fit, but they do and all Bonnie wants is that they keep it that way.
“Don’t you miss when I was your friend on top of everything else?”
Damon sighs again, more deeply, but this time she can tell it’s just for show and out of an effort to not analyze what she’s saying.
“You are still my bossy know-it-all very intimate friend,” he pauses, his eyes boring into hers and his lips pressing together before he surrenders. “What do you want to do about it?”
Her answering smile is bright and soft, making her face so much younger for a moment, and it nearly takes his breath away.
“Just for one week: let’s try banning sex and doing everything else.”
The vampire groans into his pillow overdramatically loud. “I knew I would regret it.”
Flying high on her suddenly stellar mood, Bonnie threads her fingers through his short hair and suggests with all too apparent casualty; “It’s Friday. We’ve got two more days to kill before a new week starts.”
Her boyfriend immediately perks up at that. “You know what, I don’t think that will be a problem.”
Monday
The first day is the most difficult, predictably.
There are several instances where Damon throws extremely eloquent glances at Bonnie, either puppy glances that plead with her to end his misery or filthy looks that make all sorts of wicked promises.
Her body responds, a pleasant burn flaring up from her loins, but her mind is resolute to stick to the plan, so she either swats him across his head or draws away from him with a mildly reproaching scowl.
During daytime, they do their best to stay apart: she gets busy with college courses and college friends, and Damon wanders bars aimlessly, picking idle fights with any supernatural being he came across just to take the edge off.
Nighttime is the hardest part, because how are they supposed to lie down in the same bed without succumbing to both habit and temptation? The idea concerned Bonnie enough that she had found an activity that would potentially keep them busy all night, and hopefully distracted from touching each other.
After all, no TV show in history had the penchant to shock and distract like LOST, and Damon is kind of like a kid – easily excitable if you know his triggers.
They sit on the couch with their Thai takeaway, despite much needling and stalling and protesting on Damon’s part, and Bonnie tries really hard to convince him of why he should force himself to pay attention to the screen for more than his customary five minutes. In the end, she is forced to threaten him of serious physical damage to make him shut his mouth and eat. By the second episode’s ending, Damon no longer needs any persuasion to keep the marathon going – rather, he is quizzing her on whys and whats and how has he never seen this before.
‘Just like a kid’ Bonnie thinks affectionately and then something extraordinarily strange occurs to her.
“You know, that Boone character – the rich kid with the bitchy stepsister- looks a little like you.”
Actually it’s quite more than a little, but she can’t feed Damon’s ego like that- it’s just not her nature, boyfriend or not. Ian Somehander is universally hot, and Damon already believes he’s a divine gift to womankind.
The vampire snorts derisively, surprising her. “He does not.”
“He does.”
“Not.”
The witch shakes her head, having fun: “Get your super-sight in check, vampire, Boone could be your younger, sexier brother.”
Damon narrows a particularly hostile gaze on her, like she has just offended him. “I do not look like a guy who has a dog’s name.”
Really, even after all the years they have known each other, it’s at moments like this that Bonnie is sure she will never understand how his head works.“What?”
“What?” he echoes mockingly and gets on episode four.
--
TUESDAY
Tuesday is easier.
They agree on having a few friends over for dinner. Bonnie picks a couple of her college courses-mates and feels practically giddy as she and Damon go over the menu and cook together. At a point Damon chases her out of ‘his kitchen’ because she was messing up his sausage, and she retaliated by conjuring some definitely girly decorations for the table.
Her good mood comes to an abrupt halt when she opens their door to Damon’s guests: a thousand-something-year-old Djin Damon met at some bar, and a definitely lesbian witch with a misguided love for leather dresses.
Yet, against all odds, dinner is a complete success.
Everyone mingles well with everyone, and the food is good and the conversation even better, and the wine the Djin brought? Awesome.
When they are getting in bed and Bonnie expresses her surprise at her satisfaction, Damon just snorts at her with an air of absolute superiority. “Do you see? This is where being judgy gets you: on the I’m wrong side.”
WEDNESDAY
Bonnie has a secret soft spot for musicals, this Damon knows from the Phantom Of the Opera poster she used to have in her room during high school.
So he decides to one-up her, on the off chance that she will be so impressed she’ll skip all this no sex nonsense. Or at least this is how he decides to justify it to himself when he does quite a lot of compelling around to find good seats for him and his witch at Broadway’ s current production of ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’
The moment he hands her their tickets is the moment he is reminded of why he puts so much stock in keeping her happy: the bright, soft smile that she throws at him, like he just handed the moon to her, warms him all over. Bonnie is always beautiful to him, but when she smiles like that, radiant and transparently happy, she glows with a sort of untaintable innocence of spirit that never fails to humble him.
She laughs and shakes her head in mock disapproval as she reads about the plot – it’s all about a poor young man who works in a florist shop and raises a plant that feeds on human blood, even naming her like his one and secret love.
“You just can’t stay away from bloodshed, can you?”
“Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie: what have I said about that narrow minded perspective of yours?”
“Oh, shut up.” The paper she swats across his head is more a playful challenge than a token of real annoyance, and he can’t help grasping her waist and pulling her in for a long, sloppy kiss.
He is not quite as disappointed as he should be when she pushes him away, effectively preventing him from going beyond heavy petting.
--
Once more thing that happens contrary to her expectations: Bonnie is endlessly amused at the musical and its gruesome ending.
“I guess it’s easy to find the humor in that after all the real drama we’ve seen,” she says as they leave the theater and take a nice nocturnal walk, her arm tucked under his.
“Grams used to take me every year to see Wicked. It was like our unspoken tradition since I was old enough to remember, and I loved it,” she confesses in the end. “After she … died, dad took me to see Phantom of the Opera. He thought it would have cheered me up. It was great, but not the same you know. I don’t think my father ever grasped the difference.”
Damon kisses the side of her forehead, fighting to keep his mouth closed. He really doesn’t need to promise to her that he will take her to see Wicked every damned time she wants, or that her father is a clueless prick.
Such cheesiness is reserved for the likes of Stefan Salvatore alone. He is only able to switch subject and assure her that she would probably love the opera.
THURSDAY
It’s the first day Damon awakes without the urge to beg for a blow job and he mentally pats himself on the back for that.
They go to some art exhibition in Brooklyn with Carla, a particularly chatty and opinionated new friend of Bonnie’s, and her nerdy-looking boyfriend Steve. Even if Damon doesn’t particularly care for expressionism or their company, his witch’s carefree disposition rubs off him somehow.
He had forgotten how easy and natural Bonnie made being a friend appear, creating human connections all around her.
He had forgotten how this was one of the reasons he adored her.
They end the evening with an improvised dinner at a shabby Thai restaurant, and it’s when Bonnie slides her hand under the table to squeeze his, fingers so casually entwining together, that Damon realizes this is one of the best days he has spent in years.
FRIDAY
He takes her out for dancing, and it’s a normal night in a normal jazz club, with far too light drinks, some colorful tales of his adventures during prohibitionist era and a lot of laughter.
It’s as he notices the admiration reflected in her green eyes that he finally looks back and questions if all of his years spent waiting for Katherine were saturated with misery because he had made them this way. He had had some good moments… but he had always chosen to focus on what he lacked instead of what he had gained. He had cultivated his suffering and his hate as a gift to Katherine, and he had poisoned and butchered every fleeting instant of enjoyment with passionate determination as a result.
He experiences the most puzzling impulse to tell all of this to Bonnie, to expose every other secret and scar he can remember to her care. He doesn’t, but he holds her tighter as they dance slowly to the music and breathes in her scent like she is the only thing that matters.
SATURDAY
Saturday is hard – they go shopping to redecorate their apartment, and spend every single hour bickering on what they want to keep the same or change, buy or discard.
When they come back home, Damon is really, really sorry that they can’t exorcise all this frustration the old-fashioned way, because his whole body twitches with irritation.
He has been fairly tempted to throttle her all day long, but he is still quite certain nailing her against the wall would be so much more satisfying.
Angry sex undid knots you didn’t even know existed – he remembers that with painful clarity.
Damon settles for rubbing her sore feet as they watch ‘Notorious’ – his turn for movie picking, finally!- and is fairly offended when she falls asleep in the middle of it. He is tempted to shake her awake, but he resists and analyzes how young she looks in her sleep.
A soft ache in his chest accompanies the unpleasant and unwanted mental image of her aging, and the uncomfortable question of where this relationship is going.
Regardless of how her personal opinion on vampirism has improved over time, he knows only too well that Bonnie has no intention of becoming a vampire herself. The thought of forcing her turn is right where it has always been, in the back of his mind, but for the first time he perceives it as a violation of everything he loves about her.
And it’s sad because he wants forever with her and she feels the same, but their nature won’t ever allow them to have it.
Damon now very preferred that they had kept up with the mindless sex ; if they had done so, he could have continued to live in the illusion that the world just consisted of the two of them and that nothing would ever change it.
SUNDAY
The picnic in Central Park is her stupid idea, and he is moody and sulky all the morning over it.
“I know that sinister expression on your face,” she sighs, lying down in the grass to better enjoy the sunlight’s kisses on her skin. “What nefarious plot are you hatching now?”
Damon looks her over, her fragile human body in her pretty green sundress and the light in her jade eyes, her brown skin and the white blanket laid out between them, and he knows he is doing it again, the focusing on what he can’t have versus what he has in his grasp. Yet, he can’t stop wanting more.
“I want you to do a spell for me.”
“Mmm, what else is new?” she smirks.
“Make an aging potion for me or something.” He states it so clearly like it’s something he has rehearsed inside his head again and again. She jumps at his request, not quite able to understand it.
“What?”
Damon shrugs, easily shaking off her surprise and leans a bit closer to her. “You’re always saying that you won’t be a vampire because you can’t stand the thought of everything you’ve loved withering away. I can understand that, so you should understand why I’m asking.”
“No,” she sputters immediately. “No. Damon –you deserve better than that. You can’t.”
He rolls his eyes at her utter predictability. “I can and I can also ask someone else. There are plenty of witches around.”
“You love your immortality! And your eternal youth! And… you can’t mess with nature like that! An aging potion…there’s no way to predict the consequences…and if you change your mind later on…”
“So make me an aging trinket. If I don’t like outcome, I’ll just take it off.”
“But why?” She can’t believe how calm and collected he is about this.
“You know why Bonnie. Nearly two hundred years have been enough to see everything I had to see about the world, and I never had what I have now. I don’t want more if it means I don’t get a real shot to make it work with you. If you can’t be eternally young with me, then I want a way to grow old with you. I don’t want to head anywhere I can’t follow you.”
They are silent for a long time after that outburst, Bonnie staring at some spot above his right shoulder with grassy eyes and a tight mouth.
He waits it out, determined to out-stubborn her.
It does not matter how deeply his speech has moved her, Bonnie can’t fight the feeling that it would be too risky to let him mess with nature, even vampiric nature at that. For all they know, to try forcing a vampire to age like a normal human might make him sick in a multitude of supernaturally horrific ways.
However she hates the idea of staying the same while all her friends and family get old and die, she also despises the concept of taking away Damon’s eternal youth and exposing him to unfathomable risks. If there’s a small voice in her head that whispers that if only Damon aged, they might marry and adopt children and have the life she had given up on them ever having, she silences it fast. It’s not worth the price.
But maybe there was another solution, a nearly perfect compromise…
“I could spell a ring with eternal youth powers instead. So you would stay young and relatively healthy, and I would spare myself the blood cravings.”
“Um, no.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I know you, Bon-Bon. You would eventually convince yourself that I emotionally blackmailed you into this, and then I would never have any peace.”
“Please,” the witch scoffs, insulted, “Do you think I would have even suggested that if this was the first time I’d thought of it?”
“Yes!”
“Then you’re wrong, moron. You don’t get the exclusive right on making plans for our future!”
That word – ours- hits him hard in ways he can’t begin to explain, to himself or to her.
“Really?”
“Really,” she repeats less heatedly. “How can you even think otherwise? We’ve been together for three years. Of course I wondered-”
Damon cuts her off with a kiss. He takes her face between his hands and keeps kissing her until she can’t remember her name. When she looks up at him, slightly out of breath, his eyes are a very lucid cobalt blue and full of feelings he will never need to explain.
“Maybe we should flip a coin,” he suggests, clearing his throat.
“Jerk,” Bonnie exhales affectionately, resting her cheek against the crook between his shoulder and neck