You’re Aging Well

[finch]

This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series StoryADay '12

It was weeks before I realized something was weird. Jian has always been bigger than me. If you asked me when I was fourteen, I would have told you he was ten feet tall and even bigger in dragon form. When he entered even the largest room in his lair, I felt his presence. He filled rooms.

And then one day as he berated me for messing up something with one of my projects, I looked at the ground and noticed he was levitating.

I looked back up at him.

“Jian?”

I’d interrupted him, of course. He paused, probably out of irritation.

“Why are you floating?”

“I do as I please, Blaser, and it’s none of your-”

“Am I taller than you?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“I am! Jesus Christ, Jian, when did I get taller than you?”

“Late puberty, presumably.”

“Ha ha… wait, you mean you’ve been floating ever since I got back here?”

Jian just smirked. “You really could stand to be somewhat more observant.”

That night in bed, for the first time, I wound up laying on the mattress with him sprawled across my chest, his face buried in my neck. Somehow my calling attention to it had made it okay.

I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to jinx it.

It wasn’t as if the height difference really mattered; I still looked up to him in every way but the literal. He could kick my ass or snap my neck if he wanted to, but he still didn’t want to.

Nonetheless, as we laid there, as his breath softened into sleep and he curled up against my chest, I was suddenly keenly aware of the inches I’d gotten taller, the sudden broadness of my shoulders, the fact that I had a man’s body now and not a boy’s.

And Jian… Jian would always be eighteen, even though he’d been on the planet a hundred years and change.

For the first time, I thought I knew what it meant to feel old.

Mirrored from Jack-a-dreams.