Chapter Text
Christmas day dawns brilliant white, blanketed by snow.
A dog’s bark slips through the crack of your open window, the radiator spitting too much heat in the night to sleep comfortably. Outside, the flurries swirl in a mad frenzy, slipping inside one by one to gather and melt piled on the rug. The sound of the owner’s shushing follows. Another person’s laughter, an apology. Good morning and Merry Christmas, one says to the other. Silence, after that.
You lie in the time machine of your childhood bed and wait for it to move, but it hasn’t been invented yet.
Downstairs, your parents breathe life into the house, dishes clattering, making breakfast. This is the third time your mother has played I’ll Be Home For Christmas this morning.
Last year, when you were still so unsure of one another, when he still felt entirely unknowable, the two of you had been in the car going nowhere, and you’d seen his eyes go tear-wet while this song played—the first time you’d discovered it was his favorite. Seeing him emotional had made you emotional, and when you’d climbed out at the end of the car ride, you’d kissed him fiercely. Feeling more in love with him than you’d ever felt before.
You see, he was real in that moment.
The sound of the barking dog, your parent’s laughter and a favorite song. An apology and merry wishes. Still, all you can hear is the memory of his quiet voice following along to the lyrics in the car.
You miss him more than you have ever missed him before and breakfast is a sad affair with your parents who love you and remind you of it constantly. Your heart is broken.
You don’t call him like you feel the need to. You take the pile of wrapped gifts for the two brothers from atop your dresser and hide them at the back of your closet. You try to forget.
You miss him more than you have ever missed him before.
Time turns a year older and in the weeks that follow, Bo moves out of the apartment the two of you have shared together for the past five years.
You defend your thesis at the end of January and the victory is passing. It makes you angry that the happiness of this achievement is overshadowed by the pain of your lukewarm goodbye, but you can’t help it. You feel badly stitched together.
And after the worry of school has passed and the tepid happiness at the prospect of your new job has settled in, you also decide to leave the small apartment that has been your home for the past five years. Packing your things slowly, pieces of your life wrapped carefully in paper, one box at a time on the bus and over the bridge, back to your childhood home to attempt to pull the tatters of your life back together.
You felt you needed to leave the place where you’d lost all sense of self, go back to your roots, to your mother’s arms.
You’re ashamed to look at her in those slow, lagging weeks. As if moving through mud you seek out the safety of your family home, your creature comforts, crawling into your mother’s bed in the middle of the night, a ghoul playing the part of a child.
But it is only that…he’d taken a piece of you with him, stolen it, or you’d given too much away until there was nothing left like you'd always known you would. Like you could never help but do.
You revert to old habits during those January days, going to the Viewpoint to sit on the benches, even on the days when it’s too cold, to get drunk alone, ten mile runs along the shoreline, watching the water crash and crash and crash. One afternoon: a small boat struggling along in the distance against the waves makes you laugh and then cry hysterically.
The dawn of the year passes and soon it’s February—you develop an obsession with time, with numbers, with the keeping of dates. The day of his birthday is a desperate, manic horror. You can’t look your mother in the eyes, can’t find the comfort you’d always done in sharing everything with her. Too ashamed of what you’d let become of her own daughter. Of your own weaknesses. You go to church on Sundays with them, you decide to finally try to get your driver’s license, fail three times and then give up again, bracing yourself for the prospect of a ticket when you start driving your father’s old Jeep to work, unable to muster the will of responsible fear.
You think constantly of that delicious ability to look across a room and have an entire conversation without words. To have a partner. To know a person so well you’d know what they need at any given moment. To lose yourself amongst a crowd and laughter and still know where they are at all times, to know when they want to go home and then get to go home together.
You think of what it is to know someone—to love someone.
You rail at the tragedy of him, to find oneself unable to love the person who loves you in return.
You horror over the destruction of your failed relationship, going over every detail obsessively in your mind, tearing it to shreds over and over trying to make sense of the minutiae. It’s agony, flagellating and cathartic. To see all the wrong, all the ugly. All the wonderful things that you miss so badly.
After all, everything is remembered more beautifully with the passage of time—fairy lights through the mist of your memory.
You wonder how he’d spent his birthday, with who. If someone had gotten him a cake. If anyone had remembered and made it special for him. If he’d fucked someone. He’ll find another, you tell your reflection in the mirror, cruelly. Men like that are never alone for long—making yourself sick in the streets with the daydreams of it.
Felled by your lukewarm goodbye, this is all you become, a mania of roiling thoughts. Unable to do anything but think and wonder and miss. A deep and unsettling missing that permeates your bones until it’s all you've become. Sometimes to a degree that you worry is not even reality; all the things you never did that seem so real in your memory because you wanted them so badly. And you feel robbed, left without any sort of proof it hadn’t all been some sort of dream. His number, blocked, one day turns to weeks without the sound of his voice. You hear his laugh coming from the backs of rooms and know it’s only your heart’s imagination, you dream of watching your clothes tumble together in the dryer. Nothing but the comfort of videos and pictures left to you.
The first time he’d let you take a picture of the two of you together, you’d gone home and cried. Sentimental and overwhelmed by the silly, girlish idea of doing something so relationshipy. But the first time he’d taken a picture of you, alone—you’d been lying on the couch in their living room, cuddled warmly against his side, close up and goofy, your eyes wide, nose practically pressed to the camera—the end of everything had flashed in your mind. Unable to keep yourself from imagining the inevitable break up, the way that afterwards he’d still have that photograph of you in his phone. The way he’d either have to keep it, let it lose itself amidst the rest of his captured memories and life, or have to hunt for you, find you, make a conscious choice to erase you.
In ways, the passage of time, of memory fading, makes it worse—worst of all, worse than anything—that you’d destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. That you’ve been left with all this nothingness.
The reality that you’d done yourself a great harm. That you’d made decisions for yourself that were immeasurably wrong. That you had been spineless in your silence. That there was a great guilt to bear and that your only victim had been yourself. For how terrible, coming to terms with the fact that this great pain you’d railed against for so long was by a measure, of your own doing.
You wonder on the notion of a fight. What does it mean to fight with a person you love? Truly.
There’s escape in escaping, and amidst the streets of the Cape and your parent’s gentle encouragement, you search frantically for your old self, attempting to let go of the person you’d been dedicated to so devoutly for so long.
You read books written only by women with your mother’s name to feel closer to her. You dedicate yourself instead to being a good daughter. You dedicate yourself to your role amidst the entity of this thing he’d so tragically lost and by which all your joint tragedies had followed; family. And you live amongst their worried glances and their encouraging attempts at healing, and in the midsts of the month of February, you start your new job. Returning to the city with frightened cowardice, overwrought by the possibility of running into him on street corners, terrified and certain you’ll find him around every bend.
But the library, like any house dedicated to the written word, becomes a safe haven. You find a sort of gentle but unambiguous understanding amongst the wisdom of the older women there that you’d found difficult to seek out with your mother in the past weeks, out of embarrassment or pain. They battle your silence and your melancholy and after several weeks you find yourself smiling and joining in on lunches and after work drinks, forsaking your anxiety for a few hours of mindless gossip and careful laughter.
“Why no boyfriend?” Cara, closer to your age than the rest of them, finally asks you one night after one too many cosmos. You flush and stammer, but you don’t tell them about him. Some things you just can’t speak about.
They hold onto it though, the lot of them. Dog-with-a-bone meddlesome but infinitely well meaning, they point out men in restaurants and bars, through the windows on the street—Oh, he’s cute, honey. Isn’t he? What about that one? And they push and push and are so loud and so boisterous and so lovely and kind that you can’t help but feel normal again. Even if it’s only for a few hours a day.
As the only man in the group, Moff pretends to be the voice of reason; counseling you to take your time, warning that boys your age aren’t worth the worry, only after one thing. We need a little more time to stew in the vat of maturity, he cajoles one night over Japanese food and amidst raucous laughter.
You find you like having a group of new friends. You like working in a place where the people are kind and fun and interested in you and your life outside of the four walls of your job. It’s nice, cathartic, to let people who have no idea of your history, of all you’d allowed, get to know you.
And in early March, you start seeing Mark. Two months, Bo says, is more than enough time to get under someone new to help you get over someone old. He works in tech, at an up and coming firm downtown; the swanky sort where it’s unclear if anyone actually does any work or not. His office, located in one of the more impressive pieces of renovated architecture, half eighteen hundred red brick, half glass, steel monstrosity. He’s impressive in a very ordinary way. Handsome and tall and rich, Ivy League. Not as tall as other men…but tall enough. But ordinary, and there’s something safe in that.
He liked to come into the library on Tuesdays. A meticulous sort of man with his routine: check-in, business, self-help, ending his perusal in the nonfiction section where he’d sit and watch you catalogue and type and fret. Chewing on pencils and chugging coffee until all your teeth would surely start falling out. Every time you’d look up to catch him staring, your stomach would pang with aches and burns.
“Mr. Ford is here again—Mark,” Cara had sidled up to you a couple weeks into his routine, bumping your shoulder with her own and poking you in the ribs. “He’s here for you, you know. Been asking the girls in fiction circulation about you.”
“What?” You’d hissed, panicked and sweating. “What did he say? What is he asking? You guys better not say anything embarrassing!”
“Oh, relax. You’re so jumpy, my goodness. You should go out with him.” She’d laughed at first, but then in a more sober tone, continued, “I think it’ll be good for you—help with whatever you’re getting over.” She’d given you a kind, sympathetic smile—showing up your farce.
The dates were meticulously planned on his end, just like the library visits. You suspected he really just wanted a girlfriend, didn't matter who she was. But you also didn’t think you minded that very much, either.
You didn’t want to wonder anymore. You just wanted to know.
And it was comforting, to have someone text you good morning, someone to recount your tuna sandwiches and burnt coffees to. He’d send you pictures of himself in the gym that you’d gag at a little, he’d take you to dinner and take you to brunch, and he didn’t like hot Irish coffee or watching the ocean much. He said he hated children, he read self-help books religiously. It was fine.
After three dates, you’d braved his apartment. The physical stuff was tepid at best, truly bad at worst. But after what you’d had, someone who could bring you to the razor’s edge just with his eyes on your tits, finding someone you could kiss without bursting into tears felt like a miracle. You promised yourself you were taking it slow this time, stopping things before they could get too heavy handed, refusing to go all the way just yet. But the truth was, letting someone new into the place that had been someone else’s for so long felt nauseating. You just weren’t ready.
But he calls, Mark does, every day. And that’s the part that feels good. He doesn’t make you wonder. That is what he has over others. His polar opposite, which feels like revenge and then betrayal.
Bo emerges from her den of iniquity and true love, deep into March—it’ll almost be spring, and then summer, and then so much time will have passed that maybe you’ll soon have stopped keeping count of the days.
The two of you go for tacos and margaritas one Friday evening, girls night out and all; Fennec away at a writing seminar in Vermont. She’s trying to write a book of short stories on love. Bo talks for a long time about how much she misses her, about how their house feels wrong without Fen in it, about how she’s happy.
It’s not that you’re jealous. It’s not that you’re not happy for them, really and truly, so happy for them. You love them both. You can see, like any person with eyes and a notion of who they are as individuals, that they’re meant to be in that novel way, like out of a story and into Fennec’s own writing. They fit together so well. But there is a sort of smallness to be found in looking at the people around you—people that are your friends, that you know well, the people you surround yourself with and who have chosen you in turn for their own lives and must thus have things in common with you that have brought the two of you together—finding partnership like this, when you cannot. It turns you helpless to the onslaught of, well—if they can find it, and we’re friends, so we must be similar in ways, then why can’t I find it, too?
Why not me? Why couldn’t it have been me?
When will it be me?
Why couldn’t he have fixed himself for me?
“What’s up with you lately? Still liking the job?” She asks eventually. Once she’s done describing the exact tone of Fen’s snores and how cute they are, and how when she’s more tired they’re deeper and louder, but when she’s stressed they’re fast and high pitched. Like a baby kitten, she says.
Like really.
“Nothing,” you sigh, leaning your elbows against the bar top, cheeks smushed between your palms as you sip your strawberry margarita from a long straw. “I’m just in a weird place. But yeah, I still like it.”
“You mean a better place without that demon.”
A limp laugh, “Sure, yeah.” You can’t remember the last time his name had been said out loud. It had become the worst sort of curse word.
The Knicks game is on the TV, and you wonder if Grogu is watching now, too. He never used to miss them.
“What’s wrong?” Bo presses, gripping the back of your neck to shake your gaze towards her. “Did something happen? You didn’t lift tail for him again, did you?”
“I hate it when you call it that,” you scowl.
“There’s nothing else to call fornication with men.”
“Ugh, no. I haven’t. I haven’t seen or spoken to him. His number is still blocked.” But Bo hadn’t seen you since early January, when it had been much worse, worrying, really. She’d been busy falling more deeply in love with her person, making their life together, and so she hadn’t been able to see that your progress had slowly plateaued into a numb, unmoving fugue. You weren’t getting better, you weren't getting any worse. You were just passing through the motions, floating through the days waiting for something. To wake up, maybe.
“I want to say good. That I’m glad. But I can see…” she trails off, “So, no. I think I won’t.”
You glance at her out of the corner of your eyes, her intense, concerned gaze. But opt to focus once again on the game on the television, too much of a coward to let her look at your whole face and really see.
“You’re not supposed to be scared every day,” she says quietly, leaning closer to you, arm going around your shoulder. “That’s not the way it was supposed to be.”
“I know it’s not,” you reply quickly, trying to open your mouth as little as possible lest something worse come out. But then, you can’t help it, “It’s just that I worry there’s something wrong with me.”
“There’s not. I would know by now if there was after all this time,” she tries for cheek, attempting to lighten the mood at the quiver of your chin.
“I think I’m intrinsically unlovable.” It’s the sort of confession you could only give to her. Something you’re embarrassed to even hold in your own mind when you look at your parents and see how much they care and worry.
Her arm around you tightens, her other palm coming to grip your hand atop the bar, like she’s bracing herself. “Just because he made you feel that way about yourself doesn’t mean it’s true.”
You can only manage a small shake of your head, a heat so unbearable rushing up your throat and face your head throbs with it, making you dizzy. How could you possibly tell her that you’d always thought that, though. That sometimes you worried that what had kept you waiting for him to change his mind for as long as you had, was that there was a part of you that was certain it was impossible he could ever do so because it was you that could not cause the change. Afraid that there was something missing in you.
Mark calls after the next round, and Bo insists you move your night to the swanky cocktail bar across the street. Says it’s her right to meet the man and veto him if she must. You comply because you don’t really care, truth be told. Whether she likes him or not is irrelevant when you’re pretty sure you don’t even like him yourself.
He’s moussed and coiffed to the nines when he waltzes in. Shiny Rolex and a money clip with BAND$ engraved on it that Bo gags at when he isn’t looking.
He chugs cucumber martinis while he tells her all about the hot water, apple cider vinegar and green juice cleanse he’s doing, and when he runs to the restroom every twenty minutes like clockwork he calls it the little boy’s room.
Bo looks at you like you’ve gone absolutely batshit, but all you can manage is a shrug. And on impulse and out of sheer, agonizing misery, you order a tequila soda with sweet grenadine and a maraschino cherry. You try not to cry while you down one and then another and then another, and as you get progressively drunker, Bo following suit loyally and Mark spending more time in the bathroom than he does at your table—you’re pretty sure he’s snorting coke like a mother fucker in there—she starts with the long list of his grievances. The Demon, she calls him. Asshole, dick bag, spawn of Satan. Whore. Lying, cheating whore. Each word is like a physical blow to your system. You nod and nod and nod, not bothering to correct that he’d never actually cheated on you, it doesn’t really matter, and you drown yourself in the grenadine. And if you focus hard enough to the point you can almost feel your brain vibrate, it’s like he’s the one that’s made them for you, it’s almost like he’s the one you’ll kiss and go home with after this.
“Fuck him!” Bo shouts, clinking her glass roughly against your own, beer and Dirty Shirley sloshing sloppy and dripping over the glass edge. She toasts to the demise of the dick who’d broken your heart, wishing him nothing but the worst. “You’re so much better off now,” she promises again, but you aren’t sure you believe her, if it’s the truth.
The shit talk feels good in a rotten way, the grenadine and tequila carbonated kisses Mark presses against your mouth later, tepid, but distracting. Distracting in a way that hurts, still connected to him but not directly. In service of him, in imitation. It’s not who you want, the flavor of this mouth. It’s all only your own delusional desperation, something self serving and small.
You throw up in the alley behind the bar after another round, spewing hot and acidic, burning it’s way up your throat as your body heaves with painful sobs, hot tears squeezing out between your shut eyes. The sight of your sick makes you gag, the way the horrible beating thing in your chest twists, even worse.
Begging off after that, you take the bus back home, no sweet twelve minute offer for a drive over the bridge and a kiss before you run inside anymore. And if you spend the way crying, with the flavor of someone else’s mouth against yours, well at least it’s all been your choice.
Right? Right.
The irony isn’t lost on you that choice had always been your excuse with him, as well.
On March twentieth, five days before Fen’s birthday and the party her friends are planning for her, your phone rings with a call from the bar. His bar. Watching the alien thing buzz and buzz until it goes to voicemail, you stare with wide eyed horror. Your fingers shake so badly you can barely press the notification of a new message in your inbox when it comes in with a hollow chime. Your heart does something so anxiously painful you worry you might keel over and die before you get the chance to listen.
Eighty four days of dead silence and now—
“It’s me. I— I keep checking to see if you’ve unblocked me. I can’t help it. But…shit—I don’t even know if this is still your number.” His laugh is hollow, horrible, the vowels slurred, a long pause. “But I need to say something I have no right to say. I’m very drunk and I’m in love with you and I’m so sorry for everything. If I was a better person I’d want you to never think of me again. And I—I wish…” his voice whispers, mumbling, and then comes back. “But I had to—I had to say the words out loud. Even just once. And I’m so fucking sorry. I am. I am.”
Before, it had been difficult because he’d been so overtly careless with you all the time, while you had been so painfully, so strictly careful with everything. The way you acted, the things you said, the way you moved and breathed and existed in front of him. You were never real. It was all a game he’d beaten you at. A game that became too hard, so you couldn’t play anymore. So it felt like you were being ripped in two at all times.
Afterwards, you were both more careful. Tried to do things the way they should’ve always been done, more honest, more yourselves. But there was still something missing. Trust, perhaps. You wanted more, and he couldn't fathom what that more was. You loved him. And at times, you had thought he might love you too, at least as best as he was able to with his broken heart the way it was. But he'd never realized, or couldn’t recognize such a thing in anyone besides his brother. He’d never known what to do with you. You could understand all of that now, could see it more clearly, riding that sick and strange passage of time; a train leaving with half your body still on it.
But in the end, it hadn’t felt like you were being ripped in two anymore. It had felt like you were being erased.
What a cruel and selfish thing to do—I’m in love with you.
For the millionth time, you wish that you could hate him. You wish that you could see all the bad that Bo sees in him.
You think that perhaps you do hate him. Perhaps you hate him more than you’ve ever hated anyone in your whole life. But it’s a sad, weak sort of hate. Because well…because well you love him, also.
Still.
You move like a ghost in the days that follow those words. Going back to search through old text messages and notes and photographs, desperate for proof that would substantiate them. Fixated on the idea that it couldn’t be true, that you’d hate the idea of him only realizing this once you’d left him. You want to know if it’d always been, this supposed love. If he’d felt it before. And then sick with humiliated, hysterical laughter that you were so unaware about the going ons of your own life and relationship you couldn’t even make sense of what had or hadn’t been between the two of you. Had you ever truly known him? Had you ever truly known what he felt or thought or wanted?
The go around in your mind makes you desperate for action, for movement, for any sort of answer or second of peace. A single moment of warm sun. Anything to distract from the what ifs.
When Peli’s bar is listed on the e-invite Fen’s best mate Boba sends, it feels like cruel and mocking kismet. Bo apologizes profusely, promising she’ll force them to move it, that if you don’t want to go they’ll all understand. But the spinning of your mind, of his words tumbling like those clothes in the dryer, the idea of being in a crowd with him and knowing where he is at all times, wondering if Grogu still loves the Knicks and if he’d won the end of year art competition at school, I’m in love with you, it all leads to anger. Fierce, sticky anger in your brain, poisoning everything so that you’re turned reckless. Maybe even vindictive.
When you step into Peli’s bar for the first time in months, and he’s just there, the same nose and mouth and eyes, hair longer, pushed back beneath a backwards cap and curling over his collar, it’s like motion sickness, like years have passed in the blink of an eye. And when Mark’s hand curls familiarly over your shoulder, pulling you into himself, when Din looks up and sees you for the first time beneath the hand of another, this revenge feels like kismet too. Like that last chance you’d wished for all those months ago to hurt him just as badly as you’d been hurt.
You look away quickly, passing around hello’s to the arrived party, not bothering to turn towards the shattering of glass from behind the bar.
Bo squeezes you tightly, pressing kisses to both your cheeks and promising that she’ll protect you, that it’s going to be a good time, and then passing you off to be kissed and squeezed by Fen, as well. Mark makes his introductions, and you’re grateful that he’s good at playing this part, the charming boyfriend. His laugh is loud and handsome, his conversation easy, if a little shallow. But maybe that’s okay, to have this shiny new toy to show off.
Your mind is sluggish with anxiety and your hands shake so badly even Mark notices, playing it off to no food since breakfast.
You feel his stare like a burn slipping against your skin. Tucked between Fennec on one side, whispering gently into your ear, her pretty laugh making it seem like everything’s alright, and Mark on the other, his arm around your shoulder, his fingers playing in your hair, a kiss to your face every once in a while.
But his words, the tinny sound of his message from last week, they’re a live wire bouncing around the walls of the bar, slithering between the happy people.
And it’s there, that awareness you’d thought on for so many months, that knowledge of another person in a crowded room, that’s really what makes your eyes pinch hot with agony. That’s really what makes you turn to look for him after an hour of forced, fake, fucking horrible laughter, the light-bulb moment that this phenomena you’d thought on so much was alive and well here between the two of you despite the now eighty-nine days of interrupted silence—being able to find your person in a crowded room.
Of course he’s looking when you turn—his gaze, unblinking on your face. Piercing.
It hurts because it also doesn’t. Because you’d become complacent. Because it would always be the same, always good, always half finished, even at completion.
At your side, Mark whispers something, lips brushing close against your ear, his finger tip caressing beneath your chin and Din’s face—you have reason to say his name again, Din Din Din—it spasms with anger, grief, something sick. Gaze moving to assess the man putting his hands on you while you take careful stock of his face, his clothes, his body. The tip jar next to the register is, like always, filled with half bills, half phone numbers. You used to sit there and pick them out, letting people think you were stealing his cash. The memory makes you smile helplessly. Just a small one.
And when his eyes come back to yours, there’s a question there, confusion, or maybe an alighting, like he’s realizing he might not know you as he once did. But when he sees your smile, the corner of his own mouth lifts too—oh, oh, don’t do that—the dimpled one that’s your favorite, like he’s also helpless to it, like he’s answering you. And then it’s gone with a blink, being overtaken by that unfathomable look again, melted away.
Sometimes, the thought that you were a real person that existed in his head, that he remembers and has memories of, that he’d known you and who and how you were, was too much for you to handle. And right now, with that question in his eyes, that wondering, it makes you desperate enough you could rush over and demand he tell you what he’s thinking, what he thinks of you.
Mark says your name, voice insistent and annoyed now, wrapping his fingers around your bicep and shaking you into attention.
“Sorry, what?” you stumble out of your reverie, faced with the unwelcome sight of his face puckered in irritation at your ignoring him.
“I said we should shoot some hoops. Don’t tell me you’re drunk already, babe. We’ve barely been here an hour.” Your inability to hold your liquor turns him off sometimes, you know.
“No. I’m not. Sorry, just sleepy, I think.” You squeeze his fingers, trying to inject warmth and some sort of caring into your voice. You don’t want to push him away. You don’t want to lose him, you realize suddenly. If he dumps you, you’ll have to face the fact that you don’t care about him at all, but you’ll also lose your distraction, your cheap get-love-quick scheme. Sometimes you worry you’ve turned into a bad person, but you can’t help how you’d tried to stitch yourself back together. This is what you had. And Din’s gaze on you is triggering enough you need Mark at this moment. You need him to keep you focused on anything but how badly you want to go over there and talk to him.
The two of you leave the table, and he buys a round each at the arcade basketball machines in the corner closest to the bar. The embarrassment that washes through you is inevitable, like you’re flaunting yourself, your new boyfriend, your body that’s been touched by both of them. Your stomach churns sticky and hot and you try and laugh and engage Mark's attempts at flirtation, angry that you’re letting yourself be so affected.
You have no reason to be embarrassed. To feel ashamed. You have as much right to be here as anyone, and you’re not going to not be where your friends are just because Din is here. He doesn’t own the bar. He isn’t the boss of you. And you can do whatever you like and go wherever you like and take your new boyfriend with you if you feel like it, and Din can’t say or do anything about it because you aren’t together anymore.
Mark wins the first round and pays for another, teasing your weak attempts at the game and your bad shots, pinching your hips and poking your ribs. Playful. He’s trying so hard. Too hard. Perhaps picking up on the strange, almost violent energy that sizzles through the night.
Out of the corner of your eye, you see Bo approach the bar, saying something to Din. She throws her head back in mocking laughter. Cruel with all the contempt you know she has for him. His face is impassive, a mask you recognize well when he’s trying to protect himself. He nods once, turning to fill two pints from the well and handing them back to her. She says something else, and you think he almost flinches, you feel crazy, heart beating in your throat, like you're going to be sick watching your friend berate him. He turns to look at you, immediately finding where you are at the machines as Bo turns back towards the party. And Mark is saying something to you again, voice snapping when he realizes you’re not paying attention to him once again, and then tugging you none too gently back towards the group. Din scowls, brow pulling low, and whips the rag off his shoulder onto the bar top. You feel like you’re wading through mud again, like you did during those horrible early January weeks when the wound was fresh and putrid without the balm of him.
“Can you pay attention to me for one fucking second,” this man, who you don’t like even a little bit and who you’re suddenly so thankful you never fucked, whines in your ear. He pinches your cheeks tight, almost painfully between fingers that are too soft and well moisturized, jerking your face towards his and pressing a too hard, reprimanding kiss to your mouth. You struggle in his hold, and suddenly hear Bo’s voice call out too loudly and in a tone that’s out of place amidst what is supposed to be a birthday party.
“If you don’t quit jerking her around, I’m gonna kick you out of my bar.”
Mark pulls his mouth off of yours lazily, giving your face one more harsh squeeze before his indolent gaze moves to Din behind you. He doesn’t give up his hold on you, though.
“And who the fuck are you?” He asks, words all slow and arrogant.
You struggle in his grip, suddenly feeling that the situation is at a boiling point you need to quell or run away from immediately.
“You need to get your hands off of her now before I make you,” Din warns again.
He sounds very calm, and you squirm out of Mark’s hold, feeling like you’re not where you’re supposed to be, like you’re on the wrong side. But Mark keeps his hold on your elbow, tight enough you worry you’ll have a bruise there later, and Din’s eyes catch the harsh grip, jaw tightening at the edge the way it does when he’s furious.
“I’m not gonna say it again.”
Mark puffs his chest out against your back, still keeping you partially in front of him, like he’s using you as a shield from the taller man in front of him.
“And I’m going to ask you again…” Mark says, petulant, a boy who’s not used to not getting his way, “who the fuck are you to tell me shit? Just some loser fucking bartender who—”
“Baby,” Din says very slowly, looking down at you, ignoring your stupid boyfriend’s tirade. His eyes are soft, your heart flutters madly. “I’m gonna need you to get the hell out of the way while I kick your boy’s ass right now.”
Gently, he grips you by the elbow, attempting to move you out of the way while his other hand presses against Mark’s shoulder, trying to shove him back from where he’s got your other arm caught in a vice. But at the same time, Mark reaches behind himself, grabbing the closest thing in his vicinity. The empty beer bottle whistles through the air when he swings it towards Din’s face, knicking him in the brow with a sickening little sound before Din jerks back and out of the way of worse harm.
“Damn, maybe that’ll finally knock some sense into him,” Bo quips jovially somewhere in the background.
In less than a second, Din is moving faster than your anxiety-addled mind can compute. Pulling you out of Mark’s painful grip and shoving you behind himself and out of the way. You let out a weak little half-scream, realizing, finally, what’s happening, mind catching up, how Mark had tried to smash a glass bottle against Din’s face and how Din is now shoving him backwards while Mark swings his fist in a pathetic attempt at a right hook. Bo’s loud voice berates the two men, and Fen’s comforting hands are pulling you back and into herself. The security guard that checks IDs at the door is rushing back to help Din throw Mark out.
You bury your face in Fen’s shoulder, her hands hugging you to herself. Bo’s voice signals her change in allegiance now, as she tells Mark what a fucking douchebag he is.
“Aren’t you going to fucking do something?” You hear Mark’s voice scream in your direction. You peek out from the safety of Fen’s shoulder to look at him being pathetically dragged out by the security guard. “Huh?” He screeches, perfectly coiffed hair flopping lamely against his forehead, asking the security guard if he has any idea who he’s dealing with. God. “Are you kidding me! This asshole just attacked me, and you’re fucking staying? Fuck you!” His voice is nasty, childish. You’re humiliated you’d even brought him here.
Din gives him one last hard shove for good measure, and a little slap against his cheekbone that’s more humiliating than anything else that’s transpired yet. “Keep talking to her like that— I fucking dare you,” before Mark is finally dragged out the door.
When your eyes fall on Din, he’s got a palm pressed to his brow, a trickle of blood sliding down his cheek. You almost choke on your gasp, shrugging off Fen and Bo’s hands as they try and stop you from going after him when he moves towards Peli’s office in the back.
He whips around when the sound of the slamming office door is stopped by your hasty grip as you slip in after him. The quiet snick of the lock turning is deafening in the silence of the room between the two of you. The months of separation reach a crescendo as you stare at each other, the both of you panting as if you’d run miles just to be here.
He lets his bloody palm fall limply to his side, revealing the split skin of his eyebrow, and wipes away the slick crimson against the thigh of his jeans. Simply watching you as blood slides down the side of his face. You can't help the thought that it’s exactly what he deserves. Or exactly what you'd needed, to have him split open and bleeding for you.
“Din…”
“What is it?”
His voice makes you want to cry. The familiar, deep sound; hopeful and fatigued.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. You’re bleeding,” you say again.
“Please. You have to listen to me,” he insists. “I’m so sorry.”
His face scrunches up with that same agony his voice supplies, wincing when the split in his brow beads blood again. Ah—he hisses, turning to rummage through the desk drawers for the first aid kit, knocking a stack of papers to the ground in his haste, snapping you awake.
You rush forward, “Here, let me,” unthinkingly, taking the little square of gauze from his fingers, gently urging him back to lean against the desk’s edge. “It’s alright. Let me help you.”
You press the little white pad to the cut, watching the crimson bloom spread slowly. He’s breathing fast, panting, your chests almost brushing together with the way you’re leaning into him. Seeing his wide, shocked eyes at your touch, your nearness, you let your own gaze go unfocused in the line of your hand against his face so that you’re not forced to meet his stare.
You keep the pressure of the gauze light, not wanting to hurt him further. You’d always tried to cause no harm.
“Thank you,” he says through a swallow.
All you can manage is a short jerk of your chin, letting your jaw loosen so that you can breathe through your mouth. He smells so good, like cinnamon and warm sweat. You can’t help it, really, when your eyes fall closed, lulled by the heat of his body so near to yours, skin prickling almost painfully, your eyes filling with tears—wanting to touch—and you hear his sharp intake of breath, the creak of wood. You open your eyes to look down at his fists wrapped tightly against the desk edge, knuckles white with the force of his grip.
He struggles through several more swallows, mouth opening and closing before he finally says, “Did…did you end up liking the library? Did it turn out well?” This question spurned out of nowhere, out of days and days of silence after having known everything about each other for months and years. Or almost everything.
He’d waited with you, through school and struggle, for you to finally find something to do with your life that was fulfilling, and then he’d gone and missed the actual happening of it, and you’re angry at him for it. Amongst so many other things.
“Yes. I like it.”
That’s good. “That’s good.” His nervous nodding dislodges your hand at the split in his skin, and you take hold of his jaw firmly, holding him in place, freezing him up. “Is it everything you hoped it would be?” he chokes out.
“Yes. I made friends.”
“That—That’s so good. I’m so glad to hear it.” He sounds like he really means it. Entirely out of your control, marionette on a string, your hand moves to cup his shoulder. The jutting wing of his clavicle pressed against the most sensitive hollow of your palm.
His breath skips once, twice.
“Did you get my message?”
“You’re an idiot.”
Your breath seems to go round and round, trapped at the hollow of your throat.
“I know.” He tugs gently at your hair in soft reprimand. “So that’s a yes.”
“Yeah, I did.”
You take a small step closer, your knees between his knees so that when you reach for another pad of gauze, the curve of your hip presses into the muscles of his hard stomach.
Pinpricks of heat move up and down your back at the sound he makes, and your hand shakes as you press it back against the cut. The blood flow is stopping, soon you’ll have to move away and mentally scramble for an excuse to stay close.
The only thing you can come up with is to kiss him.
It’s thoughtless, out of your own control. You still haven’t really looked at his eyes, and your mind has gone so far away, back to January perhaps, back to missing him worse than you’ve ever missed him before.
Here, stood before him, with his hands on you once again, for the first time in eighty nine days, you feel lonelier than you had ever been.
This is the only solution.
Teeth clicking, it’s slippery, uncoordinated, pressing too hard against his mouth as you throw yourself at him, his grunt of pain when your fingers press too roughly against the cut on his face.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” someone says.
He tastes like cinnamon, like memory. The way you remembered him during nights when your mouth felt full of salt. The tug at your hair is more insistent now, the only place he holds you, jaw hinging wide so that his tongue can slide fully against your own, he leans forward and off the desk to eat at you better. There’s a high pitched, pathetic sound coming from somewhere in the room, and you bring your arms around his neck, hugging yourself fully to him, moaning into his mouth and knocking his cap back off his head to run your fingers through his soft hair.
He’s yet to put his hands on you fully.
You pull back, ripping your mouth from his with a wet, smacking sound, “Touch me, Din.”
His palms flutter nervously over your shoulders, wide eyed look on his face, mouth kiss-reddened and wet.
“We shouldn't do this.”
“Yes, we should.” You kiss him again, licking at his chin, teeth scraping along the stubbled edge. You want to press your hips to his, but you’re scared. “Please,” you say instead.
He moans and you watch the working of his Adam’s apple, the up and down bob, pressing kisses to his throat and then licking into his mouth again. That out of control feeling from before bubbles inside of you, desperate for action. Desperate for him.
“Wait—we shouldn’t,” but finally, his hands have reached for you, wide palms around your waist and pulling you into himself. He nips at your bottom lip hungry, kiss turning sloppier, uncoordinated, his mouth working desperately at yours. “We should…we should talk,” he struggles.
“No. Let’s just do it.”
“You’re going to hold it against me afterwards.”
“I won’t. It doesn’t matter.”
Your mouth slides against his. Your hips meet, and you can feel him half hard and thickening down the leg of his jeans against your thigh. It makes you careless.
“I don’t want you to hate me anymore,” he begs.
But with a grip on your bum, he grinds against you while you clutch tightly at his hair, his desperation at odds with his refusal, trying to pull each other closer. Some horrible sound of want pulses up from your belly and out your mouth like vomit. You want it so bad your cunt hurts.
He’s saying stuff about how he doesn’t want you to be mad at him, about how he doesn’t want to hurt you, asking what it is you really need, asking to wait, to talk, but you aren’t listening anymore. You want him. The feel of his body, the way no one else will ever be able to give it to you like this. The way sex is good and real between the two of you because you love him and now he’s said he loves you too. You want him to erase the past eighty nine days with his hands and his mouth and his cock, and you don’t care how it’ll make you feel afterwards.
“I’m in love with you, too.”
You slip your never before said words onto his tongue. His whole body shivers and jerks. And you press your pelvic bone against the thick ridge of his erection, grinding frantically.
“Fuck—”
“I love you,” you say again. “Please, fuck me.”
“We shouldn't.” But he’s still kissing you back, straightening off the desk to walk you towards the couch against the wall.
“We should. We should. Please, Din,” you beg.
In the center of the room, in the midst of Peli’s green shag rug, he stops you. Pulling back to cup your face in both of his wide palms, he looks between your eyes. You have that desperate need to know exactly what he’s thinking of you again, to know how he sees you, but it’s overridden by the fear of what you suspect he might actually be seeing. A desperate girl who hadn’t learnt her lesson, come back for a second walloping.
“I don’t want you to be angry with me after this,” he says again. He sounds so sincere saying it, but you don’t know if there’s an alternative.
“I won’t be. This is what we do.”
His eyes shutter, once, twice. You think pain flashes there, but you’re not certain you care. You wonder again if you’ve become a bad person after all this.
“This is what we do?” His voice morphs into something hollow in the way he turns your words into a question.
“I want you so badly. I’m so wet for you.” You pull him back towards your mouth, “Please—please, don’t deny me this also.”
He hesitates only a second more before he’s kissing you again, laying you back against the couch as you cling to him, trying to climb your way up his body.
Jesus, fuck—he curses when his hips fall in the cradle of your thighs, nothing but the flimsy cotton of your panties and fluttery sun dress keeping you from him. He pulls at your waist while he devours your mouth, hips rutting against the heat between your thighs.
Taking a strong hold of your jaw, he holds you in place, restraining your squirming, palm cupping your bottom to lift you into his thrusting cock. The kisses he presses down the column of your throat turn slower, steadier, longer, and when he reaches the junction of your shoulder and throat, he tells you how much he’d missed you, and the way he says it, the way his voice comes up out of his throat, you know he’s telling the truth and you can’t help your sob of grief. You can’t tell him you’d missed him too, the words sound too small for the horror you’d endured the past months.
Clinging to him, you wrap your legs around the small of his back, sandals lost and discarded, pressing kisses to his temple, his ear, his cheekbone. He kisses down your chest, in turn, pushing your cardigan back over your shoulders, pulling your dress low to find you braless, breasts hot and bare for his mouth. When he pushes the hem of your dress up your stomach to kiss the soft curve of it, tongue tracing around the ring of your navel, you think you’ll come just from that.
When his whole mouth covers the curve of your sex, when he kneels on the ground between your thighs, sucking on the pink cotton turned translucent with your wet, you change your mind and tell him you’d missed him too.
He growls against your clit, dragging his teeth along your mound, all “Pretty little cunt. I fucking missed you—thought about this constantly,” as he pulls your panties down your thighs.
Not so far gone you miss the way he tucks them into his jean pocket when he thinks you’re distracted by the spear of his tongue.
The orgasm he sucks out of you is painful with how fast it comes on. Twisting in your belly, and wrung out of your cunt in a way you’re unaccustomed to after months of celibacy. Your knees shake around his ears, and you dig your heel into the meat of his shoulder, trying to grind against his face and kick him away in equal measure. And the sounds he makes between your thighs are obscene, the wet slurping, his groans as he palms the hard cock between his legs, humming when he sucks on your clit and presses the strong, flat muscle hard against you.
When he crawls up the length of your body, kisses smeared with the sweet salt of your arousal, he whines into your mouth, unzipping his jeans and only managing to shove his pants down enough to tug his cock out. It hangs thick and heavy between your spread thighs shiny with your slick, making your insides heat, your cunt clench. Gently, he rubs the pad of his thumb against your clit, slippery and hot from orgasm.
Spit, he demands, and when you do, head turned towards his hand, he not so gently shoves two fingers inside, deep and in one go, smearing your sex with your saliva to ease the way further.
It’s gross and so fucking hot. It hurts.
“Oh, fuck—baby. This is not going to last long, I’m sorry.” Hand twisting, making room for himself, he pulls his fingers from you, little hole fluttering madly around nothing and slicks his cock in your wet, the dripping tip smearing against the inside of your thigh, against your sex.
It’s okay, it’s okay, you tell him. Arching your hips to urge him inside of you, needing that heaviness to stretch you until you can’t take it, tugging him closer by your fingers twisted in the sides of his shirt. He pushes one knee to your shoulder, trapping it between his side and the couch-back, hooking the other one over his elbow so you’re caught and immobilized, folded in half as he starts to slick the wide head from the base of your spine all the way up to the swollen bud of your clit, the entire wet curve, pressing there hard once, making you cry and then circling your opening.
He’s looking down at the wet mess between your thighs with what looks like open mouthed awe, and your eyes roll backwards, spine arching tight when he pops the head in, your breath coming in fast little pants.
“Oh, fuck, finally,” he whispers, his long lashes fluttering shut.
“Ah—go slow, go slow. Fuck—gentle, please.” You dig your fingertips into his ribs.
“Yes, baby. Yes. I’m gonna be gentle with you. Fuck—” He pulls out, lets the ridge of his head pop out, catching on the rim, stretching it, and then back inside a couple of times, loosening you up before sliding in further just a tiny bit. With his thumb to your clit, he rocks slowly in and out, nudging deeper in small jerks of his hips, making sure it never really hurts. Being careful of the delicate muscles. You can feel yourself getting wetter and wetter, sliding beneath your bottom and onto Peli’s couch. God.
“Is your period soon?” he asks breathlessly, a tiny nudge of his hips following. It’s like all you are is a bundle of nerves as you feel him slide further inside of you, a beating heart.
Hmm—you mumble nonsensically, sweating, trying to wiggle closer to him despite the way he’s got you hooked open. You don’t want him to be careful, you change your mind—you just want him to fuck you. “Please, Din,” you whine.
“Your period—it’s the end of the month—”
“What? No—no. It moved.”
Fuck—he grunts, drawn out and guttural, pulling all the way out, “Look. Look down. Watch how I fuck you. God, you’re desperate for it, hungry little pussy—” You can see the way your sex clings to him, dragging wetly so that a creamy trail of you is left slicked along his cock.
He pulls you into himself by the back of the neck, pressing in again as he kisses you roughly, sliding almost all the way inside, pressing against a deep hurt like a muted bruise that makes your mind wake up. Fuck— “Condom—you…we need a condom.” He pulls back, pushes in again, there’s a wet slap of his thighs meeting your ass when you roll up to take him better.
“I don’t have one. Do you?” he asks through gritted teeth, picking up the pace.
“No.”
“Then I’m not wearing a fucking condom.”
Oh my god, you moan, clinging to him. You’re helpless like this, and Din groans against your cheek, stubble scraping along your jaw, and you sob with every thrust of his hips. The heat in you is overwhelming, the stretch of the wide base of him everytime he bottoms out and presses deeper than anyone else can, grinding there for a few seconds before pulling all the way out and pressing in again and again. You feel helpless like this, thighs spread wide and cunt dripping wet while he fucks you open, shoves against that spot that blinds. Helpless like you’re ruining your own life, like you never want it to stop, like all those months meant nothing, like it’s too much of a too-good-thing so it’s turned bad and rotten.
You wonder, in a far away manner, if you can want someone too much. If something that was born of a good and desperate heart can turn ugly, easily weaponized—
You wonder who it is that’s wielding that weapon here and now. For some reason, you feel sure it isn’t him anymore, but it doesn’t make you feel good.
“How many other girls did you fuck?”
It’s not your fault, his cock is too good, it makes you ask, makes you stupid.
“None,” he says through clenched teeth. He pinches your clit, a little mean.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I swear. I promise.” You whine against his throat. “I couldn’t even think of it. I only want you—” He pulls your mouth back to his.
The too-deep pain of his thrusts brings you to momentary awareness again, back to your previous thought—“You…oh, God, just like that—you have to pull out. You can’t come inside me. I’m responsible now—oh, that feels so good, Din, yes.”
Pressing your knees back against your shoulders, he nods once, jaw tense, intensifying the angle. You look down to watch the way your cunt parts for him, swollen and shiny wet with use, the way the thick of his cock slides in and out, it’s obscene, almost looks wrong, and he shoves in so, so deeply, a humiliating little squirt of liquid spurts from your cunt.
He groans savagely at the sight, fucking you harder, squeezing the joint of your knee so tight it hurts.
You’re coming. Each press of the tip of his cock against your cervix is a pulse of your orgasm. The twisting heat between your hips moving up your belly to your breasts which you squeeze in your palms, tight so it hurts.
“Yes. Yes—don’t stop working my cock. You're such a good girl coming for me, yes, baby. I’m going to come, too,” he moans in your ear, pressing his hot chest against your bare one, biting down on your neck out of pure, raw instinct.
“Pull out. Please, please, you have to pull out.”
He withdraws with a snarl, pressing his painfully hard cock to your stomach, sliding his palm over himself until he’s coming with frantic urgency. His spend falling in thick, long spurts across your sex and belly and breasts. The force of his orgasm so strong you can see each jerk of his cock as he grips himself, the tip flushed an angry red. As his pleasure hits it’s peak, he shoves two fingers back inside your still fluttering cunt, his middle finger tightly hooked inside of you, his thumb against your clit, squeezing both fingers tight until another little spurt of fluid trickles out of you.
Looking at your eyes, he asks, “Who do you belong to?”
And in the aftermath of all this, there really seems no point in lying.
“You, Din.”
He works his fist over himself fast, brutally, squeezing the head tight enough it looks painful, milking the thick spend out of himself. When he finally pulls his hand away, his fingers from your overwhelmed sex, he’s still half hard, as if unsatisfied he hadn’t been allowed to come inside of you.
Looking down at the picture he’s painted of you, he hums contemplatively, smearing his come into your breasts, against your swollen sex and then pushing it inside, your cunt fucked open and shivering.
You whine, wanting to tell him he shouldn’t but unable to manage the lie. When he presses his still half-hard, almost ready to go again cock back inside of you, laying himself over your chest, you start to cry. First a little hitch of your chest, a broken, silly thing, but building into true weeping, heaving sobs. He pulls back, afraid, eyes wide and panicked.
“What’s wrong? What is it? Am I hurting you?”
“Yes,” you cry. “Yes. You’ve hurt me so much.” But you pull his head back to your breast, hugging him to yourself, letting him comfort you even though neither of you deserve it.
How do you tell him that you’re crying for this soft and helpless feeling filling the cavities of your heart, how you want to feel open and powerless beneath him, how giving yourself to him makes you feel good, letting go of that control, above all, desperate for him to give himself to you.
What would he think of you if you did?
The question sits on the tip of your tongue, half a mind to ask him without even explaining the question. What would you think of me if you knew how I really feel?
Limp and shivery beneath him, he asks you, “Why are you doing this?” his mouth brushing against your nipple—crying, letting him back inside, hurting yourself or the both of you—who knows.
“I don’t know. I can’t help it,” you tell him honestly.
Eventually, he pulls you off the couch, and onto his lap on the floor, his cock gone soft with your crying, but still tucked safely inside of you. He lets you cry all the tears you need to cry, his mouth sliding soothingly over your temple, petting the crown of your hair. You stay like that long enough his cock starts to fill out again, and those deep inner muscles, accustomed now to months of disuse, flutter and twinge around him, making you whine softly.
Christ, baby. “You’ll be sore,” he rumbles in that deep, sleepy voice.
And the thought of that, the thought of that—of your body having to go through the physical healing process of forgetting him, marks fading, soreness healing, period coming, that’s what wakes you up. That re-lived horror, that physical loss—it’d been one of the worst parts of losing him.
You tense.
His sigh, one of recognition, of hurt, is long, before he’s shifting, pulling you off his cock and helping you to your feet.
Why did I do that? What’s wrong with me? you mutter, spinning to look for your discarded dress you hadn’t even noticed he’d pulled off of you, your panties that you’ve now forgotten you won’t find because they’ve been stolen away in his pocket.
“We shouldn’t have done that.”
His only response is a groan of frustration.
You find your dress, pulling it roughly over your head. You can hear the sound of clothes shuffling behind you as he puts himself to rights, as well.
“Was that a test, us not fucking, that I failed?” You whip around, turning on the offensive.
“It wasn’t a test. It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t…You’re the one that came in here—we should've talked. We need to talk, and you said this is what we do. You said this is all we are.”
“Well am I wrong? Did I lie?” you yell at him. It feels good.
“Yes!”
Jesus Christ—he groans, pulling his palm over his face, hissing when he meets the forgotten cut on his brow.
“And that out there?” He flings him arm towards the door, “Your boyfriend, or whatever the fuck that clown was.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Oh, sure. God. Fuck that—of course it’s my fucking business. Everything to do with you is my goddamn business.” He stomps towards you, jerking you up into his grip, giving you a little shake as if to jostle some sense into you.
You stand barefoot before him, entirely unwilling to make this easier than you already have. You want to be difficult. You want to continue being careless. You want to make him suffer.
“I don’t care.”
He blinks once, that hateful, indecipherable look, and lets you go.
“That was really fucking embarrassing for you out there.”
The way he says it—“You’re being mean, Din,” makes all your bravado flee. Makes you small and scared in an instant.
“Does he fuck you like I just did? I doubt you get that wet for anyone besides me.”
“You’re being mean, Din,” you say again.
“Am I?” he laughs once and humorlessly. “Then fight with me! Say something. Say anything. I am so sick of this goddamn silence!”
“For what? Not that it’s any of your business,” you’re stupid, senseless mouth, “But we haven’t had sex. I’m taking it slow. I’m not going to make the same mistakes anymore.” He gives a real laugh at that. Jackass. “And why should I fight with you? Are you going to change? Or will you just say you’re changing and then do nothing—stay exactly the same and we’ll continue on as we’ve always done and I’ll have laid down and rolled over for fucking nothing? Hmm, tell me.”
He looks at you for a long moment in a horrible way, like he sees everything. Like he sees all your shame and all the things you see in yourself that you hate so much.
“Stop looking at me. I want to leave.” You’re horrified with yourself, sudden and sharp.
“Fine.” His voice is quiet again, the fatigue is back. For a silly moment, you panic like you’ve disappointed him. “Go. Win your fight of nothingness. I’m done.”
“Fuck you. I’m done.” You turn for your shoes, scooping up your purse from where you’d dropped it by the door.
He trails behind you like something you’d captured. Like a forgotten thing.
“Why did you even come in here?” You fumble with the lock, crying. “Why did you follow me?”
But you have no answer, and nothing to show for yourself or your own dignity. And like a coward, or that same captured and forgotten thing, you run away from him. A little like a dance the two of you have been playing since you first met him.
There is a phone number that calls the house sometimes.
When his daughter picks up, she’ll stand quiet for several moments to listen to the voice on the other end without saying anything. When he is the one to answer, he finds the voice of the young man he has come to expect, asking if his daughter is home. His name is Din. The man has been given clear instructions to always refuse the boy—man. To always make excuses for his daughter.
He’s good at following the direction of his wife. Of listening to the underlying tone of his daughter’s voice when she isn’t as forthcoming with him as she is with her mother, although he knows that this year she has been less so than she’d always been before.
He knows something happened with the boy.
When she moved back home, there were parts of the man that were glad, happy, to have his only child back under their roof. They’d always been a close family, the trio. Tight knit in that way that two older, desperately yearning parents and their only child could be expected to be. They loved each other, but more importantly, they liked each other. They had always been very close and very honest.
This year, that had changed. With her return, a pallid melancholy had followed her into the house that was impossible not to notice as much as she tried to hide it. He’d watch her on days when she’d walk down to the beach from the deck of their beloved home, the way she’d sit on the rocky sand, frozen by the gusts of sea-swept winds. Watch her walk back up the path too many hours later, blue in the face and bleak in the eye.
But the man also understood that sometimes these things of the heart needed time and space to crawl their way out of the soul and let themselves be swept away to sea on their own. There was no easy scheme for a cure, only patience of which he’d always found he had an infinite well of for his wife and daughter.
He had always been a soft man by nature, tall and thin, but pudgy enough around the middle which belied how good of a cook his wife had always been, how much he enjoyed a lovely glass of vintage and a rich dinner, or a large spot of brandy with dessert by the fireplace in the evenings. They’d always lived a comfortable, indulgent sort of life. They were professors by vocation, the both of them; mathematics and ancient Roman history, his wife and he, respectively. Purveyors of books and art and music, comfortable things. A love of knowledge had always been a thing that brought them together, had been the basis for their relationship, one of the reasons they’d fallen in love in grad school. And they had, truly, fallen very deeply in love. They still were, thirty years later, and they’d always made a conscious effort to show that to their child, to provide a strong example of an honest relationship. And they’d tried to instill the same sense of purpose and being in their daughter that they’d always strived for, raised her to live in her own mind, fed by the things she read, by honesty and kindness and responsibility. You see, the point was that they had been particular in her upbringing, sheltered and cared for and given everything they possibly could to ensure she’d turn out as self fulfilled as she wanted to be, that she was able to make for herself the things she dreamt of.
He’d always felt that his personality, the things he enjoyed and gravitated towards, had set him up perfectly to serve as the father of an only daughter. A role that could sometimes be delicate for there were so many ways that she could’ve turned out; stoic and independent, anxious, removed, fanciful, perhaps a bit spoiled sometimes, but secretly that’s what he liked best, that’d she’d had a good life full of the things she wanted. But she was also mercurial, his daughter, sometimes, and given to bouts of distraction. She liked to live in her head, get lost in there on occasion, in her own worries and grievances. She was sensitive, too. Something he appreciated, respected, the great depth of feeling and empathy she’d always moved with. She was much like her mother in that sense.
Given all of this, the man thus knew that whatever it was that had happened with the boy his daughter loved, had been something troubling indeed. Over the course of their relationship, he had been critical of the young man, of his obvious absences at his dinner table and their outings which had always been such a crucial element of what made up the nexus of their family’s core. But over time and the gentle admonishing of his wife, he’d understood that not everything was always as it seemed.
The man sees this clearly, several weeks into April when the boy comes to their home.
His daughter is upstairs in her room, unwell again, the way she’d been earlier in the year. Dark circles under her eyes, not eating enough, crawling into the safe space of their bed beside her mother during the night when they thought he was sleeping and wouldn’t notice. He watches from his comfortable leather wingback at the desk in his study as the young man sits in his car for almost an hour in front of their house. He recognizes him for the car, really, stories of the old thing fondly recounted by his girl as she’d tell them about the boy she cared for. The young man clutches the wheel tightly between his fists, rolling the window down, rolling it back up, talking to himself, tugging on his own hair, smoothing down his collar an unaccountable number of times, before he finally gets out of the car, walks around it three times and then finally makes his way up the path to the front door.
The hydrangeas are out in full bloom in the garden now, one of the most beautiful times of year in the Cape.
Standing from his desk before the boy knocks, he looks up at where he knows his daughter hides, sure she’s spotted the car already and must be waiting to see what her father will do now, how he will protect her.
He stands at the door for a few moments after the knock comes, trying to collect himself—he’s wanted to meet this young man for a long time, after all—and makes sure to check the front of his sweater vest for any stray crumbs of the rum cake he’d had after lunch, before he pulls the door open.
The young man looks terribly frightened. But also terribly brave.
“Can I help you?” he asks in that patient voice he uses on students when they’ve come to beg for extra credit for their failing grade.
“Hello, sir. My name’s Din. I’m looking for your daughter. I was wondering—well, I just—” He splutters, “If I could speak to her, is all…”
“I’m sorry, Din. But she isn’t home right now. Perhaps you could give her a call later and see if she’s in.”
His jaw works several times, a flush of embarrassment bleeding across his face.
“Of course. Of course. I should have called first,” he says, which he had. The man had been the one to pick up the phone this morning and give him excuses.
He considers for a moment, before he says: “She works at the main branch of the library in the city, perhaps you’ll find her there.” Deciding suddenly to have pity on the sad sight taking up space on his doorstep and in his daughter’s heart. He’ll make it up to the girls later, this aid to the other team.
“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe…yeah. Maybe I’ll try that. Thank you, sir.” The young man shuffles awkwardly, running his palm over the back of his hair, turning to look back at the front garden. He sees his eyes catch on the flowers.
“Do you enjoy hydrangeas? I tend to them myself.”
“Oh, sure. Yeah, they’re great. Really beautiful.”
“Soothing practice, gardening.” He tells the young man that he’s trying to teach his daughter, but that she hasn’t taken to it so far.
Din laughs at that, familiar in a way, with her tendencies. “No, I wouldn’t imagine she’d have the patience for it.” There’s fondness there, he can see. Maybe even love, too. It makes the man feel suddenly very sad for his girl and for this man, neither of whom can seem to find their footing with each other.
“What year is that?” he asks then, tipping his chin at the old car.
“Two thousand eight, sir.”
“Ah, not so bad—good model. It’ll last you a while yet, if you take care of her.”
“Yes, sir. She’s been reliable.”
“Always a good thing to be.”
“Yes—yes, sir,” he trails off awkwardly, nodding, but he lets the silence sit for a moment, never one to mind a lack of chatter. There’s much to learn in the silences that sit between people. “Well, okay. I’ll go, then. Goodbye. And thank you. And I’m sorry, sir.” His voice is grave.
“It’s alright, Din. Maybe next time,” the man tells him gently.
“And I— I just wanted to say that… that it’s really good to meet you.”
“You too, Din. I’m glad I got the chance to meet you, too.”
“Alright, goodbye.”
He turns to go, walking down the steps, when the father calls, “Good luck, son.” There’s gratitude, also heartbreak, in the boy’s face, when he nods back at him.
The man follows him down the steps, waiting to watch him get in his reliable old car and drive away from the girl that hides in the house upstairs. Turning to look at their home, the old New England build on the waterfront that he’s always been so proud of, the home where they raised their daughter, where he and his wife will grow old and die together, he sees his girl’s face, just there, in the window of her bedroom. Peering down the street to where the car has disappeared, perhaps waiting to see if the young man will turn around and try again.
Through the month of May, you go to the beach every day. You’ve always been a little afraid of the ocean, of water you can’t see the bottom of. The water is never warm, but every day you manage to make it a little further out—trying to face your fears.
You’d not been able to set any resolutions in January, no energy to think of anything better on your horizon. But now, with the dawn of summer and warmer months coming into bloom, you make this your goal—to make it out into the water until it reaches your heart.
Each day you make a little bit of progress, and afterwards, you return home to your mother, a little sunburned but cheerfully tired. At moments, there is cheer to be found—while you wade in the ocean—even if the bruise of Din still remains.
And eventually, as you’d always suspected, change comes because things always change.
It had come on a Wednesday afternoon, picking up tomatoes for your mother after work. You’d seen an old man shopping alone. He’d been choosing his produce very carefully, a little hunched, fingers gnarled and liver spotted. For some reason, the sight of him had stolen your attention. And afterwards, in the parking lot, you’d seen him again, carefully stowing his groceries in the back of his little car. It had been a randomly chill day in April, wind swept in from the sea over the Cape, and he’d had no one to help him, a plaid scarf wrapped around his throat in the middle of spring. He’d been wearing two too big shoes, the orthopaedic sort, and his pleated trousers were tucked into the back of them, a little funny looking. He’d taken a bushel of bananas out of one of the brown paper bags very carefully, turning them this way and that to make sure they were unharmed. His movements, careful and precise in his aloneness.
It’d made you cry for no reason, and you’d had to sit in the parking lot for thirty extra minutes, making sure the puffiness in your face had gone down before you’d been able to drive home to your parents.
And the thing was, that you were very tired, that you didn’t want to be sad anymore. You didn’t want to cry in grocery stores ever again.
Or, perhaps, it was that after that brief, harried space of time in a locked office, you’d realized you’d been using him as a sort of excuse, Din. That you’d thought on the measure of a weapon, on the significance of a fight, how a person or a love could be turned into something self harming for no reason at all, how for some silly or broken fault in your character you didn't think you could ever deserve to keep him for yourself, and so you’d kept your rules and your distance the same way he’d always kept his. And everyone had ended up hurt and alone anyways.
There was no rhyme or reason to it. You had never seen that in your home, been given reason to believe that you were a person that could not deserve a good thing, and yet, you did sometimes.
And you didn’t want to be like that anymore.
You didn’t want to use Din as a vehicle of that belief anymore. You wonder if the two of you had ever approached the other without the intent to sabotage. You wonder if he hadn’t, if you’d even have been able to recognize it.
It had been like waking up one morning, hearing a dog bark, knowing you're in your parents house, remembering your own history and who you are and meeting that limit of pain which you will put up with for love, reaching that line and knowing it cannot be crossed. You’d met that limit within yourself, and after that there was only a great fatigue to settle into.
You wanted to be sunburnt. You wanted to be content. You wanted to let go of the things that served you no purpose.
On the mornings you’d go out for a swim before work, your father would set up a portable radiator in your room for you to come home to and warm yourself from the ocean chill. Now, you sit on your bed wrapped in a towel after a warm shower, letting your hair drip cold down your back onto the duvet.
When your mother comes in, a gentle knock preceding her, she sits down next to you, her soft hand on the warming skin of your back. The little radiator from your father belches hot air across your shivers.
“Breakfast?” Her voice is quiet—sometimes you worry she’s afraid of you.
You nod your head slowly, eyes out the window and unseeing, stomach full of a grief that you finally feel prepared to purge.
“I saw Din,” you tell her instead.
“I figured as much.” She waits for you to say more, and when you don’t she can’t help but press, “And?”
You shake your head, shrugging. “Nothing. Stupid…”
“Something happened?”
“I just got my hopes up. I’ll do better next time.”
“Daddy said he came here. That they spoke.”
“I know.”
She pets your hair, brushes water droplets from your shoulders.
“Would I sound—“ you continue, “Would I sound crazy if I said I can't understand how it ended?”
“What do you mean, baby?”
“I wish I’d been stronger. More honest. I thought I’d hold out longer.”
“You tried for a long time.”
“But I don’t think I was ever honest.” You finally turn to look at your mom. “He isn’t bad.”
“I know he’s not.” She smiles at you kindly. You’re ashamed you’ve tried to hide from her all year.
“He isn’t bad,” you say again. “He’s just…I don’t know. He’s a lot of things. Heartbroken.” You look away, the heater finally churns to a slow stop and your skin tightens with the drying water. “I think he needed me to hold out longer.”
“I don’t think you’d love him the way you do if he was bad. You’re my sweet girl, I know that sometimes you’re unsure, but I know your heart is honest even if sometimes your words don’t come out the way you’d like them to. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth about our feelings. Sometimes, people say things that aren't easily understandable because they've never been taught how to say it another way. ”
“But I was taught. You taught me.”
She shrugs, shaking her head, still smiling. A sort of well, what can you do? type of look.
You can’t understand why you’d taken so long to talk about this out loud. Perhaps you’d been ashamed, perhaps it was more of that unsure self doubt that had kept your tongue locked away. Terrible, festering insecurity. But you realize now that the only solution is to take better ownership of the things you feel, the things you want.
“It’s just that it’s hard because all this time has passed and all this silence—we were never honest with each other, and I was so hurt and it was all just so terrible. And anyways, still, I’d do anything for him. And I’m so worried I’m never going to find anyone else I love as much as I love him. That I’ll never find anyone to be with the way you and Dad are together.”
“That’s not a reason to go back if you don’t really want to, though,” she says gently.
“Sometimes I think that if he came back, and he’d changed completely, I’d take him back then.”
“If you’d change him completely, then maybe you don’t really love him.”
“Maybe. Maybe I only love parts of him.”
“You can’t fix a person, my love. They have to choose to do that for themselves.”
You wonder if she might not be talking about you.
“But also…part of what it means to be a partner is helping them fight for that fix. And fighting, conflict, I know you’re afraid of it, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You don’t always need to be so afraid—holding onto that much fear will hurt a good heart. You have to let it go. And sometimes to fight, to fight for something you love, it’s a good thing. It’s a concession or an admission, a dedication and a strengthening of that love. Don’t be afraid to fight.”
“I think he wanted that—to fight with me.”
Tears slip down your face and she wipes them away from your cheeks.
“Then go fight with him. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes it’s okay to try one more time. It doesn’t make you weak or naive. All it means is that you tried again. Sometimes we all need one more chance.”
That Sunday, you wake early and go for a swim. It’s warm outside, and the rocks are sun baked when you step carefully over them toward the water, letting them burn the soles of your feet. You start slowly, first only your ankles, then up to your knees. The Atlantic is never warm, no matter the time of year, and when the saltwater reaches your thighs you’re wracked with gooseflesh and shivers until you’re up to your hips and decide it’s time to abandon all fear. You wade forward until the water has finally reached your heart, but you don't need to go any further. You have no interest in being swept away and lost anymore.
Your feet are firmly planted in the sandbed.
You let yourself sway there, jerked by the waves until the morning sound of children’s laughter fades and then it’s just the water.
Sun high in the horizon, the water is dark ahead of you, and looking back at the time you’d met him, you’d been so young. So naive. So ready to let yourself be hurt. So ready for failure, desperate for it, even. Neither of you had been prepared for the intensity of what it was you’d find together or the struggle it would be to work through your respective faults. And you’d insisted for so long that it would all end in nothing, shattered glass left on the table cloth, looking for the end of everything in photographs. Sure that it could never work.
But look at you now, unable to move on even after that very failure.
You’d read books, you’d starved your body. You’d tried to be closer to God, to understand your mother. Still, you could not purge yourself of him.
You swim back to shore. Your shoulders are sunburnt. You get in your father’s car, and you drive to him.
You tell yourself that if he’s not there, it’ll be your sign from God and that’ll be your answer. There will be no more wondering, no more second chances, no more glances back at the past. And you repeat your mother’s words like a prayer, some things are worth fighting for.
Standing in front of his door, twelve minutes and some later, it really is a lovely drive, you hold your five fingertips up to the face of his front door and you don’t wonder whether you’ll do it or not, knock, because you’ve already decided on his second chance, but there’s a strange part of you that wishes he’d just suddenly know you’re out here and come open it without having to.
But there’s no crowd here for him to find you instinctively in. There’s only just the two of you, separated by all the things you could never say. You make a fist, you rap your knuckles, and there he is.
He pulls the door open and he doesn’t say anything at first but neither can you. What’s there to say to the person you’ve decided to love again with honesty? To the person you want to give all your second chances to and who you hope will give them in return. To the person you want to fight with. Because faced with him, the imagining of seeing hearing touching tasting again when faced with the corporeal reality is almost fragmentally unimaginable, makes all your carefully planned words scatter at your feet.
He’s right where you left him.
The specter-like-hologram of that terrible night made reality, but with something else equally intangible or unbelievable which you can also now tell is different. That tells you something has changed here, that it isn’t exactly just as you’d left it.
He gapes like a fish for a few seconds, you've taken him by surprise. And then he flushes bright red, scowling angry all of a sudden.
“Are you ever going to unblock my number?” he demands, furious.
It makes you want to laugh, which you do, and then cry, just a little. Yes, you think, fight with me.
The sight of your laughter throws him for a loop again, but then that helpless thing, and he’s smiling back at you, too.
“My father really liked you,” you tell him. “He wants to know if you’ll come to dinner Thursday night.” This is your second chance, Din. Take it. “And I’m here to fight with you, too. Just so you know. I want to fight. Okay?”
“Okay,” he says, smile blooming bright and real. “Can I bring Greg?” His perfect, true smile. Pulling you inside by the wrist, he takes your face is his hands and he kisses you—fuck, I love you. Maybe it’s a moment of mutual understanding, that everyone deserves a second chance. That everyone deserves a chance to be honest just one more time.
From the back of the house, you hear Grogu’s gleeful shriek of your name, screaming that he can’t believe you’re back. Din kisses you again, deeply, like he loves you the way he said he does. And you finally feel prepared to believe him.
Later that evening, after hours of dinner-time conversation where half a year of school time shenanigans and art projects and the highs and lows of loving the Knicks have been recounted, you and Din lay together in bed. You don't know what time it is. You’ve promised yourself that tomorrow, you won't look at the calendar, you won't count days ever again. There’s no reason to be a keeper of time any longer.
With your nose and mouth pressed against his throat, the humid wash of your breath fanning against his skin, he gives a nearly drunk sounding purr of satisfaction. Exchanging honesties and apologies and self doubts, his fingers travel up and down your naked back, and you tell him that the day you met him never ended for you. He tells you that you had always felt so far away, so far removed, but that he only felt alone when you weren’t with him anyways.
A second chance is not an easy thing to earn, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult one either. Sometimes, it’s easy to just be grateful, to just bask in letting yourself have the thing you want.
You drift in and out of sleep in his arms, and when he turns you over onto your belly, stretching himself out over your prone body to cup the swell of your stomach and the weight of your breast, pushing inside of you again, it feels easy to be grateful for the chance to be here.
And he tells you: “If you give me the chance, I’m going to make you happy every single day. I’m going to try harder every single day.” You tell him that you will, too.
The cricket song comes in through the open window, and you believe in each other.