The Dead Boy's Guide To Second Chances

17. mayfly

TWELVE MONTHS PRIOR TO THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

If anyone would have asked seventeen-year-old Oliver if he'd ever liked someone, he would have denied it profusely. His crushes were mayflies: there one day and gone the next, perishing either through natural causes or through his violently crushing them under his palm. Usually, the latter.

Usually.

This thing with Finn—whatever this was—was not a mayfly. It was a three-months-and-a-few weeks-fly and crushing it, he understood with a resigned sort of horror, was not as easy as it had once seemed.

He knew that it was just temporary. Everything always was. He wasn't in Blissby to make friends, and certainly not to get caught up in anything beyond that. His teenage years were a corridor leading to only one thing: the day he turned eighteen and was finally free from the whims of the foster care system. In the narrow space between him and the uncertain future, there was simply no time to move in the furniture beyond the barest comforts.

What he hadn't considered was that, somehow, the furniture might move itself in.

"Have you ever seen The Hunger?" Finn asked. He was sprawled across one of the desks as he was wont to do, his head pillowed in Oliver's lap. "It's got your band on the soundtrack."

"Bauhaus," Oliver distractedly acknowledged. His fingers were itching with the urge to run them through Finn's hair, but he kept them planted firmly on the desk. Someone could walk in any second. Granted, they were at the back of the library and this arrangement would've raised questions even without the petting of hair. Still, to a teenager with little experience in casual physical contact, the gesture felt unbearably intimate.

Finn snapped his fingers. "That's the one. It was on the telly last night. My dad wanted to watch it because David Bowie's in it."

"Was it any good?" Oliver asked. His eyes were stuck on Finn's lashes. They were almost blonde, so they didn't look that long from a distance but this close, with the soft light of the setting sun catching in them, Oliver could see how they fanned against Finn's cheeks.

"No idea." Finn laughed; Oliver felt his own lips quirking into a smile as the sound vibrated through his body. "I fell asleep halfway through. It was weird, though. You'd probably love it."

"Why, because I'm weird?" Oliver snorted.

"No. 'Cause it's got Bauhaus. And vampires. Bisexual ones, even!"

"Incredible," commented Oliver. His voice sounded insufferably fond even to his own ears. He didn't think it could not be—not when he had Finn O'Connell in his lap, lazing in the spill of afternoon light like a cat stretching in the sun and talking about things that reminded him of Oliver.

Really, it was no wonder his heart stung with unsung sonnets every time they were in the same room; no wonder that, within weeks, he'd gone from watching Finn from a distance to making shared Spotify playlists with him and saving his football match dates in his calendar.

It was all temporary. But the mayfly didn't know this, did it? Surely, with an entire lifetime crammed into twenty-four hours, the minutes were all the more intense—the seconds all the sweeter for their spareness.

Even if the mayfly knew its fate, that was no reason it shouldn't live the few hours it was granted to the fullest.

Gingerly, Oliver reached out and brushed a curl from Finn's forehead.

***

Oliver had gotten worse at adhering to the Walker family ritual. It wasn't on purpose, cross his heart. It was just that time moved differently in the library and now that the sun set at five, there was no way of tracking the hours until dinner just by looking out the window. (Also: Finn O'Connell was of the clingy variety and seemed to grow more arms every time Oliver tried to send him home. It would have been irritating if not for the fact that everything he did was distressingly endearing.)