Work Text:
It starts when Erik picks up the phone to call his mother and Charles answers.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in November—not too cold—which means Erik is smoking with the windows open and the radio on, trying to come up with something he did that week that will keep his mother from thinking he’s a miserable fuck with no friends or future. He’s considering inventing a happy hour outing after work on Wednesday, except that would require telling her he’s finally found a firm to work for and that’s a lie he’s not willing to keep up.
He gives up around three, goes down to the deli for a sandwich because his fridge is empty again and it’s as good an excuse as any to put off calling, and pulls out his phone on the way back. A therapist might call it a symptom of masochistic tendencies—the weather’s not so nice that he doesn’t need a coat—but Erik likes the cold, clean air, and the park is mostly empty. He’s German, anyways—sort of. Es gibt kein schlechtes Wetter, es gibt nur falsche Kleidung. And wearing thin sweaters isn’t a symptom of anything.
The phone rings twice, and then Charles is picking up and saying Lehnsherr residence in his pleasantest, most professional voice, which means that Erik almost hangs up on instinct.
“What are you doing at my mother’s house?” He bites out instead.
He can hear a half-second pause where Charles stops to smile winningly, as if Erik is right there and not a safe forty-five minute train away.
“We’re doing kaffee und kuchen,” Charles says. “You should come over.”
The irritating thing about Charles—the really irritating thing, the thing that makes all the other irritating things look like saintly virtues—is the fact that he actually is charming, despite all his attempts at it. He’s sleazy, desperate, self-absorbed, and not a tenth as cool as he imagines himself to be, and yet, incredibly, it’s impossible not to find him endearing. Erik’s mother is only the latest in a long, long line of victims.
“My mother used to think you were a wretched slut,” Erik says, not half regretfully. Those had been better times.
“She still does, I think,” Charles replies. Then, “We all have our flaws, Erik.”
“Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow,” Erik says, and hangs up just in time to hear the beginnings of Charles’s protests.
It actually starts a long time before that, back when he was still chainsmoking like it was a competition and Charles had only slept with half his therapy group, but Erik likes to pretend that his life hasn’t been one slow, inevitable slide into misery ever since the day Charles had smiled at him and asked him for coffee. (He hadn’t gone, of course—that had been his first mistake; never give Charles a challenge. The second one had been a week later, when Charles had asked for his phone number—for strictly organizational purposes, he tries to keep track of everyone’s contact info for the association, so would you mind?—and he’d been fool enough to give it. Everything had gone downhill from there.)
The really sad thing, of course, is that his mother lasted three years without falling prey to Charles, and Erik had really only lasted a generous two months—right up until he’d been too bitter and on-edge to do anything but drink and smoke and chain paperclips together in endless strings, and had thought fuck it. He hadn’t meant it to lead to anything, and then it had, and then Charles’s hand had been on his fly and Erik was telling him that he had better things to do than fuck a slutty postdoc with more trust fund than sense. For a moment, Charles’s face had fallen in a way Erik had previously thought restricted to the realm of Disney movies. Then something had come over it—wild-eyed and delighted—and Charles had laughed, and Erik had thought the man was off his head on something and that would be the end of it.
So he’d gone home, and jerked off to the imaginary version of their fuck, which had considerably fewer gag reflexes and considerably better lighting than the real version would have, and thought thank god that’s over. The next morning Charles had texted him an invitation for brunch.
One of Charles’s virtues: he doesn’t hold grudges.
It’s half past one on a Tuesday and Erik is on the couch, smoking while paging idly through a secondhand novel, when he hears a polite tempo’ed rap at the door. No one has ever called him a genius, but it doesn’t take one to know who it is.
His apartment is a fifth-floor walkup with half the square footage shoved into closets of increasingly contorted shapes and a horrible carpet in the bathroom that would cost Erik his security deposit to rip out. The air conditioning only half-functions in the summer, and there’s a family next door whose children seem to be having a perpetual tantrum, but the light is good, and he can afford it, and the empty floorspace makes it look bigger than it really is. (Erik isn’t a minimalist by design, but he’s never managed to accumulate stuff the way other people seem to. When he’d moved in, he’d bought a dining table and two chairs—it had seemed too sad to buy just one—and left the couch to fill the rest of the living space.)
The point is: no one else seems to like it—even his mother barely visits—but that’s fine with him. After all those years growing up in cramped apartments, the smell of mold omnipresent, having his own space feels like a luxury.
(Charles, of course, is the exception to the rule. But Charles was fed belief in his own exceptionalism right on a silver spoon.)
“Oh good,” Charles says when Erik opens the door. “You still haven’t found a job. I was worried you might not be home.”
“I’m freelance.”
Charles pushes past him into the room, toeing his shoes off and collapsing on the couch like he owns the place. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Fresh air.” Erik shuts the door and follows him. “Good for the lungs. Prevents mold.”
“I don’t want to think of what your heating bill looks like.” Charles eyes the pack of Mavericks on the floor by the couch dubiously. “You really ought to quit.”
Erik’s eyes flick skyward for the briefest of moments as he tosses the pack and lighter at Charles.
With a sigh—the kind that only ever comes from people with too much money that think shit taste should be punishable by death—Charles catches it and pries one out as he sites down, grimacing as he lights it and takes a drag. “That’s disgusting.”
“Fuck off.”
There are some benefits to having a friend that’s too rich to have a stable job, but being visited at all hours of the day isn’t one of them. It hadn’t been as much of a problem when Erik had had a firm, even if he’d pretended to take “flexible hours” at face value and work mostly from home. At least then when Charles had shown up in the middle of the day drunk from whatever society lunch he’d attended, Erik could claim work and head into the office to avoid him. Freelancing has its downsides.
“You should come to our next meeting at the center,” Charles says after a moment. He looks pitifully sincere. “It’s open-forum style. You don’t even have to speak.”
“The problem isn’t that I don’t want to speak, Charles. You know that.” Erik exhales, watching the smoke dissipate in the air in front of Charles’ face. “I just don’t have anything to say to them.”
Erik had gone to the meetings in the beginning, when he’d just moved back from a twelve year stint wandering around Europe, and had grand ideas about setting down enough roots to make his mother stop worrying. It’s not even that he disagrees with their principles, in theory. He’s all for community, queer solidarity in the abstract. But the meetings had been youth outreach and block parties and let’s all write our pronouns down on index cards and do icebreakers, and every time Erik had looked up he’d wondered what the hell he had in common with these people that he was still talking to him.
The thing about being a faggot, Erik knows, is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that all the other faggots will like you. It certainly doesn’t mean you’ll like them. So somewhere around month three he’d stopped going to meetings. The only thing that had come out of it in the end was Charles.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Charles tries, and Erik snorts.
Charles is better at the whole thing—networking, community building, making friends—despite the fact that he gives off the general aura of a repeat sex offender with a bit of a cardigan fetish. Charles likes people, petty, and shallow, and deeply uninteresting as they are—that’s what it comes down to. But he’ll never understand why Erik, who spent most of his childhood beating up other kids for calling him a fag and a good portion of his adult life looking for excuses to do the same, doesn’t feel the same.
“They don’t want me there,” Erik says.
Charles blinks, looking offended. “That’s not true—they like you. You’re good with people.”
Erik snorts, unwilling to dignify that with a response.
“You’re not as unlikeable as you think you are, Erik.” Charles pouts, which looks as ridiculous as it always does, and takes another drag of his cigarette before throwing his head back and closing his eyes.
Your taste is not universal, Erik thinks. But Charles, despite his uncomfortable tendency to know what’s going on in Erik’s head, doesn’t respond.
“The woman downstairs,” Erik says instead, “the one with the cat that looks like it’s been put in the dryer. I think she’s the one who keeps complaining to the landlord about me smoking inside.”
And Charles sighs, and lets the conversation move on.
He texts Charles about the woman with the cat on Thursday—she’s started giving him looks in the hall that make him grateful he doesn’t have a car for her to key. Charles texts back a shitty picture of an informational flier about lung cancer, the hypocrite, but Erik doesn’t hear from him again until Saturday, right in the middle of Shacharit.
He doesn’t bother going to services often—his mother had taken him every Saturday as a kid, growing up, but that habit had dissipated as soon as he’d gotten to university and realized the nearest shul was a fifteen minute bike ride away, which might as well have been three hours when he’d had a hangover. Later, it had been too much effort to find a decent minyan—not too new agey, not too chatty, and willing to start after nine and finish things up by noon—and it hadn’t been until he’d moved back to the city, determined to do the adult thing, that he’d made himself look.
It's not a particularly nice minyan. All of the regulars are perpetually irritated old men, services happen in the moldy basement of a much nicer shul with a rabbi that talks about togetherness too much, and there’s a perennial argument about raising the mechitza. But most of them are bitter and gay enough not to bother asking about Erik’s nonexistent wife or children, and no one bothers him so long as he shows up on time when they need a tenth.
Besides, it’s Rosh Chodesh. He likes Hallel.
So of course his phone rings just when the room has gone silent, and of course he hadn’t thought to put it on vibrate because the only people who call him are his mother and Charles—the former who knows better and the latter who is usually too hungover to get up before noon.
The good news is that no one there is shomer shabbat, even if they all look the other way and pretend that there’s an eruv when someone’s keys fall out of their pocket. But Charles is Charles—he’ll keep calling—and there’s no letting the call go to voicemail and pretending that it was someone else’s cell.
By the time he’s left the service and found a spot just behind the stairway to secret himself away, Charles is on his third call, and the frustrated sigh of relief Erik hears when he picks up doesn’t make him any more receptive to whatever request is about to be made of him.
“I’m in services, Charles,” he grinds out before Charles can say anything.
“What, right now?”
Erik lets him dangle for a minute before saying, “I stepped out. What do you need?”
“My date cancelled on me for the benefit tonight.”
Erik tries to remember which one of Charles’ many dates he’s referring to. There have been dozens of them, since Erik first met him, and none of them have lasted longer than a couple of months.
“And?” Erik replies. Charles is suspiciously silent for several seconds. “Bring Raven,” he adds.
“Last time I brought Raven, she wore a dress that said dyke supremacy on it.”
Erik snorts.
“No—Erik, stop that, it’s not funny. I’m really in trouble here.”
Erik thinks, privately, that Charles’s definition of in trouble is five steps removed from any normal person’s. “So go alone.”
There’s a frustrated huff, and then the click of a lighter. When Charles speaks again, moments later, he sounds marginally calmer. “It’s my mother’s benefit,” he says, and that changes things.
Charles should be difficult to pity. He’s hideously clever and overprivileged, and more than half of his problems are self-inflicted because of it. The problems that aren’t are, at the very least, not worse than most of the general population’s. He grew up in a beautiful house with staff that took care of his every need and a mother he was too smart for, a father who only cared about him up until he’d gone and decided to be a fag, and a sister who’d figured out what Charles never did—that there was no secret code to getting your parents to love you.
Charles Xavier is flighty and irresponsible, too angry to ever be well-adjusted and too repressed to ever admit how angry he is. He’s also terribly, achingly lonely.
“You do realize,” Erik says, “that your mother won’t talk to you for a month if you bring me.”
“Frankly, my friend,” Charles replies with a tiredness that isn’t new, “I don’t fucking care.”
The event itself is as bad as Erik’s worst nightmares, but as he’s been reliably informed by multiple exes that he has the sensibilities of a misanthropic mountain lion, that doesn’t mean much.
There are people and free booze, but that’s where the resemblance to the sort of parties Erik prefers ends. Everyone is dressed in various shades of eveningwear while making polite conversation about the stock market and somehow managing to avoid looking any servers in the eye. It’s only long years of practice that lets Erik take Charles’s arm and follow him into the belly of the beast.
He lets his friend guide them around the room, introducing himself when necessary and giving people icy looks until they go away whenever Charles starts to look put-upon, which is often. Erik knows Charles has his reasons for going to these things, most of which involve some sort of delightfully Catholic predilection for self-inflicted suffering and procuring funding for whatever his current philanthropic pet project is, but it hardly seems worth the cost from where Erik is standing.
Half an hour in, the headache Charles has been nursing since before they even got out of the car starts to hit Erik. In the vague hopes of escape he looks at Charles—still schmoozing—and then at the doorway.
He doesn’t see escape. But he does see Raven.
She’s in a sheer blue number that wouldn’t be out of place on a Hollywood red carpet—or perhaps, Erik considers, a particularly classy strip club. She doesn’t have dyke supremacy emblazoned anywhere on her person—a dear loss for every attendee, as far as Erik is concerned. Instead, there’s a wide-eyed young thing wrapped around her, looking utterly out of their depth.
Erik catches her eye from across the room and raises his glass in greeting. She smiles sharply, and does the same.
When he looks back, Charles has drifted a few feet away from him and is chatting with a group of elaborately coiffed older women, including, at last, the illustrious and frozen Mrs. Darkhölme, formerly Xavier.
He’s met her twice before. First, when he’d been Raven’s date and Sharon had been willing enough to believe that he was going to make an honest woman out of her daughter that she’d smiled at him. The second time, Charles had dragged him into the bathroom in full view of her and Erik had allowed it to get far enough to be suspiciously mussed when they both emerged. Erik remembers watching her mouth thin and the muscles in her jaw clench, not embarrassment, or disappointment—expressions his own mother wore constantly throughout his own adolescence—but a bitter sort of retroactive calculation: I should never have had a son.
Erik has managed to avoid her since then. He’s certain she’s as glad of that as he is.
So Erik doesn’t bother greeting her, instead turning to another one of her perfectly coiffed acquaintances—woman, middle aged, hints of botox around the mouth and forehead—and gives her a cold smile.
Contrary to popular opinion, he’s not incapable of small talk. He finds it dull, and draining, and almost never worth the effort, but that’s a different thing entirely. So he smiles, not altogether kindly, and asks the woman what her particular interest is in—he briefly glances at one of the tastefully arranged infographics dotting the hotel ballroom—children’s music education.
Erik watches Charles out of the corner of his eye while he talks, waiting for a tightness in his shoulders, a stretching of the tendons in his hand, that means he needs Erik to come over and bare his teeth. Not that Charles would ever admit it. Not that Charles would ever ask, if he did. But no one ever brings Erik anywhere for his sparkling personality.
The woman—Diane, she says—turns the conversation to her husband, pointing out an absent-minded looking man across the room, then changes tack and asks, “Who are you here with?”
Erik smiles with all his teeth, and very deliberately wraps his fingers around Charles’s wrist. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have I not introduced you to my date?”
Nothing in her expression changes. It’s not a Hallmark movie with him as the poor-but-honest waitress and a Christmas party full of rich in-laws that will tell him he doesn’t belong. Everyone who’s anyone knew that to begin with; drawing attention to it would just be gauche.
If he were a little more naïve, or a little more optimistic, he might read something pleasant into her lack of reaction. But he knows how he looks—he’s got the face of a dentist and the smile of a Neo-Nazi, and he could tattoo cocksucker across his chest and people would still act shocked that he lives up to the title. Her detached geniality just means she’d rather die than express surprise, or dismay, or anything even half-resembling a human emotion.
(It is, he’ll admit, ironic. The one who doesn’t give a shit about outreach, about you-and-me-are-all-the-same, about two-and-a-half-waspy-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence-see-we-can-be-perfect-middle-american-consumers-too is the one that passes for a red-blooded American man. It’s Charles, who sluts around because he’s terrified of the fact that his perfect consumerist domestic bliss is coming for him, that still gets clocked in seconds.)
“Of course I have,” Diane says, recovering. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes; it hasn’t for the whole conversation. “So wonderful that Charles was able to bring you.”
“I’m so glad to have been able to come,” Erik replies, not a trace of warmth to be seen. “It’s always nice to be among friends.”
He feels a tug at his hand and looks down only to realize that his fingers are still clenched around Charles’ wrist. When he looks up, Charles is staring at him with the same look in his eyes that had gotten Erik the first time—wonder and delight and a horrible, horrible sense of familiarity, as if he’d known what Erik was thinking.
It had been easy—easier—that first time, to give into it. That had been before he’d known what it meant coming from Charles. Before Erik had seen him give the same look to the barista, and Raven’s flatmate, and the girl who ran the desk at the community center on Thursdays, and three dozen other people, all of whom were utterly unprepared for it.
Charles means it, of course—that’s what makes it so devasting. Charles falls in love with everybody; more fool them if they fall in love back.
With a slightly queasy feeling—half guilt, half something he refuses to name—Erik removes his hand and takes half a step away. “I’m going out for some air.”
He’s halfway through a second cigarette, bummed off the very helpful valet smoking round back of the dumpsters, when Charles catches up with him.
It’s cold out, too cold for just a suit jacket. Erik appreciates it, likes the way it makes his lungs seize just a little bit when he inhales, but Charles’s cheeks have already turned pink—the perils of pale, English skin.
“It’s not like you to run off,” Charles says. He comes to stand a foot away from Erik, just far enough that it feels like he’s making a point.
Erik takes a long drag, watching the cherry flare.
He still remembers being sixteen, smoking behind the school gym in a dirty t-shirt and trousers that hung too far above his freezing ankles, wondering if the roof would fall in if he pried the supports out of their crumbling concrete foundations. His mother’s face had been perpetually creased, then—thin and tired and bitter with worry and exhaustion—and going home and seeing the peeling wallpaper of their shoebox kitchen had seemed so much harder than beating the shit out of anybody who laughed at his knobby knees, or weird mélange of accents, or the way he didn’t ever stare after the girls with their short skirts and shining hair.
He wants to punch his sixteen year old self for being such a selfish ass, putting his mother through that. It probably makes him a hypocrite. He doesn’t care.
“Why did you want me here, Charles?” he asks. The veranda they’re on is deserted. In the quiet, his voice seems loud.
Charles sighs, leaning on the railing with his forearms. “Is it so wrong to want my friend with me at one of these horrible things?”
“No,” Erik says. He exhales. In the dark, the smoke is nearly invisible. “But that’s not why.”
There’s another moment, and then Charles is digging out a half-crushed cigarette from where he’d ferreted it away in the depths of his suit. “Would you mind?” he says, putting it between his teeth.
Erik lights it for him. He can feel the whisper Charles’s breath on his hand.
“Do you know,” Charles says, exhaling with visible satisfaction at the nicotine flooding his brain, “your mother keeps a stack of pictures of you in a kitchen drawer—that one right next to the stove, with the loose handle.”
“I do.” They’re tied with a strand of butcher’s twine, marked carefully with dates in his mother’s thin, spidery handwriting.
“She showed me them,” Charles says. Then, “You were a very cute child.”
“No, I wasn’t.” He’d been too skinny, with eyes so wide they’d seemed to swallow his head and a thin mouth caught in a perpetual scowl. His mother had told him he’d looked wise beyond his years. He hadn’t. He’d just looked awkward and bitter.
“No, you weren’t. But you were very—oh, I don’t know. Very soulful, I think. You had an expressive face.”
Erik snorts and stubs out his cigarette. “You’re avoiding the question.”
Charles is silent. For a long moment, the only noise that reaches them is from inside, damped by two sets of double doors.
“The way your mother looked at those pictures,” he says at last, and there would be a shakiness at the edges of his words if he weren’t so terribly, abominably English. “I can’t remember a single time my mother looked at me like that. Not once.”
Raven had once shown him the family portraits from Charles’s childhood: Raven—red haired, pug-nosed, and freckled—in the middle, Charles just behind her, their hands clutched surreptitiously together where the camera couldn’t see, and Sharon and their stepfather looming over them from the back, faces frozen in facsimiles of domestic bliss.
“I figured maybe you had the right of it,” Charles continues. “Why should I bother running around trying to make nice with everyone? Why should I still care what she thinks of me?” He breathes out, careful and controlled, as though something might escape if he doesn’t. “It turns out I don’t like that much either.”
Erik looks at Charles—the pale sheen of his cheeks, tinged red by the cold, the wide, miserable set of his mouth. “You don’t like being angry.”
Charles turns his head to look at Erik fully, tired and unsurprised. “You think I should be.”
“I think you are.”
Charles exhales, the cloud of smoke disappearing into the air. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. “What has anger ever accomplished?”
“Enough,” Erik says, and thinks of being sixteen and so utterly at odds with the world he would have thrown himself off the roof of the gym if he hadn’t been angry enough to want to burn it down first.
Charles looks at him sidelong. Erik is struck, not for the first time, by how handsome he is. “You don’t want me to be angry, Erik. Neither of us does.”
“Maybe,” Erik says carefully, “I do.”
Charles looks at him for a long minute, and closes the distance between them.
His lips are cool, dry, and acrid tasting. Instinctively, inevitably, Erik feels his hand come up, tangling itself in Charles’s hair, pulling him closer. He can feel the ambient heat of Charles’s body, pressed against his. He can feel something twisting deep inside his chest.
It’s been four months, three weeks, and six days since the last time they did this, Erik thinks, because he is an utterly pathological fool. He pulls away.
For a second that stretches into aeons, Charles is still, eyes still closed. Then he breathes out, and his eyes open.
“No,” Charles says bitterly, “you really don’t.”
On Sunday afternoon, he takes the train into Jersey to see his mother.
There’s something about the rush the tracks that he loves, big metal beasts lumbering below the ground in an endless network of tunnels. He’d loved the Deutsche Bahn when he’d lived in Germany—sleek, fast things darting across the German countryside fifteen minutes behind schedule—but there’s something about the trains of New York that had set its hooks in him as a child, ten years old and so delighted by the rumbling that he’d forgotten to cling to his mother’s hand.
It's always a little strange, coming to his mother’s house, like being caught in a dreamscape jumble of half-familiar objects from other times and places. There’s a mezuzah in the doorway he remembers, blurry and vague, wrapped in rags and stuffed in a suitcase on their way out of Berlin. His grandmother’s candlesticks by the counter, still dented from where he’d dropped them when he was ten. A blanket, a tablecloth, the cheap plastic vase his mother had discovered at the discount store that first week in New York.
But his mother is the same, mostly. A little older, a little less tired, with a softer smile.
She puts on a pot of coffee when he gets there and clicks her tongue at the pack of cigarettes that falls out of his coat pocket when he takes it off. “You should quit,” she says, somehow a harsher admonishment for being in Yiddish than any of Charles’s hundreds of attempts. “It’s not good for you.”
Erik doesn’t say anything about the Marlboro reds she has in the drawer next to the fridge. “I know, mame,” he says. Then, “How is the shop?”
She gives him a look that means she knows what he’s doing, but lets him carry on the conversation like that all the way through the cake—drozdzowka, like her mother used to make, she says—and the dregs of the coffee.
“Charles called me yesterday,” she says when she’s gotten up to put the dishes in the sink. “He said he was taking you to a party.”
“He did,” Erik allows.
“Nice boy.” Erik pretends not to notice the tightening of tendons in her hands as she reaches for the dish soap. “Not Jewish.”
“Anglican,” Erik says, though he doubts Charles has been in a church since he was fifteen.
She hums, an edge of something in her voice. “My cousin Bryna, you know—her husband was a goy when they met.”
“I know, mame.” Erik doesn’t try to explain that Charles would never convert. It isn’t relevant.
Her mouth pinches together into a hard line.“Your father wasn’t—”
“I know, mame,” Erik repeats. He doesn’t want to talk about his father any more than she does.
She sighs. “Charles is a nice boy.”
“Very popular,” Erik adds, unable to keep an edge of sarcasm from his voice.
His mother clicks her tongue again. “No one is without fault, Erik.”
“In other words,” Erik says. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
He watches his mother’s shoulders rise and fall in a silent sigh. But she only says, “Nu, give your mother a hand. Take the fleishig dishes out of the dishwasher.”
Raven shows up at his flat that night, uninvited and unannounced.
The first he knows of it is the jangle of a lock—no key necessary—and his door opening, Raven standing in the doorway. It’s a terrible taunt coming from her, made worse by the fact that he’d been the one to teach her how to do it.
Raven can’t abide boundaries and rules and separation—-neat, solid, lines, keeping everything where it ought to go. But she knows him well enough to understand why he can, why he makes a box for everything and then slots it into place. She knows why it matters so much that’s there’s an inside and an outside—why private is cut off from public with two locks and a solid wall. So it means something, the breaking in. She’s making a point.
Raven is always making a point.
He looks at her, suddenly viscerally, unavoidably aware of the dishes from dinner sitting in the sink, the dust on half the shelves, the wide empty expanse of the walls. He’s not stupid enough to believe she won’t notice; he’s not enough of an optimist to hope she won’t put it together. Charles may be good at people, but so is Raven, in her own way, and she’s never shared her brother’s blindness to the material.
“Raven.”
“Erik,” she replies, unruffled. He watches as she steps in, the door falling shut behind her. “You seem well.”
He sits up too quickly, betraying a nervousness he doesn’t even really feel. “So do you.”
“I am,” she says. “I was surprised to see you last night.”
“It was a last minute thing.” Erik smiles, thin and mean. “I hope—Nicky, was it?—enjoyed themself.”
After Charles had disappeared, Erik had gone back into the party to see Raven. He’d introduced himself to her date, deliberately ignored the fact that they were still clutching her like someone was going to call the cops on them if they let go, and decided to feel bad for them for about three seconds before moving on.
It’s a bit funny, really, how desperate Raven is to pretend she’s a different breed, when at the heart of it she and Charles are built of the exact same stuff. Before Nicky, there was River, and Kai, and a string of the rest of them going back so far only Charles really knows when it started. The only difference between her and her brother is that Charles will sleep with anyone—though he seems to set his lower limit at anyone too young to know what a Roth IRA is. Raven exclusively prefers the wide-eyed and coltish. It’s not a little bit sleazy, and slightly disgusting if Erik thinks about it for too long, but at least it’s not about age with her; she doesn’t go so young they can’t drink.
“They did.” Raven smiles at him, and the coppery tones of her hair make him think unpleasant things about hellfire and grinning devils.
Erik really can’t stand much more of this, so he bites the bullet. “Why are you here?”
“What, not going to offer me something to drink first?” She slides gracefully over the back of the couch and lands neatly, crossing her legs at the ankle.
She isn’t not attractive, but something in him hates her for flirting.
They’d slept together half a dozen times when they’d first met and had twice that number of vicious arguments. It’s three years ago now, and Erik is self-aware enough to know that’s too long to still be raw about it. That doesn’t change the fact that he is.
In another world, he knows, they would have made an absolutely spectacular couple. But in this one, she’s bitter and he’s tired and the only way it’s ever ended is in one of them smashing something and walking out the door. For as long as Erik has known her, Raven has been waging an unending fucking war against her mother and Charles and anyone who dares look at her wrong on the street. He’s too old to be another martyr in it. He knows she’ll never forgive him for that.
Raven’s face settles in something slightly more polite than a sneer at his lack of response. “I’ve come to talk to you about my brother.”
“Your brother.” He raises his eyebrows, incredulous.
“He called me last night at three in the morning, drunk out of his mind. The only even vaguely coherent thing he said was your name.” Raven’s mouth is a tight, bitter line. “I assume you’ve rejected him again.”
“And?” If Erik was going to feel guilty about Charles deciding to fall in love with him, he would have started a long time ago. It’s not his fault, after all, any more than it’s Charles’s. It’s the way they’re built; you can’t blame either of them for that. “If he chooses not to believe me when I say I’m not interested, it’s not my fault.”
“It’s your fault if you keep stringing him along,” she responds. “You’re not subtle, Erik. Anyone with half a brain can tell you want him. Charles may have plenty of faults, but brainlessness isn’t one of them.”
“And?” he repeats.
Her expression hardens into something cold and brittle. “And it would be a very good idea to stop. For your sake.”
Erik blinks. “This is what you came here for? To threaten me?” It’s almost funny. “You don’t even like Charles.”
“Not really,” Raven agrees. “But I’m tired of him trailing after you like a perpetually kicked puppy just because you’re so absorbed by your own ennui that you can’t be bothered to deal with it.”
“I have dealt with it,” Erik points out. “Multiple times. He just refuses to listen.”
“Don’t be stupid, Erik. You know telling him you don’t want him will never work. If you really wanted to deal with it, you would have done it already.”
“And how would I have done it?” He doesn’t bother hiding the venom in his voice. She’s earned it.
Raven smiles, brilliant and sharp.
(She really is attractive, Erik reflects. Not beautiful—not quite—but attractive, in the most basic sense of the word. She has a magnetism to her like the light of an anglerfish.)
“Give him what he wants,” she says. “For a few months, at least—until he gets bored. Give him a real relationship with you.”
Erik snorts. “Charles doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me. Charles doesn’t even want to be in a relationship. He just pretends he does because it’s easier than confronting the fact that he’s an entitled, shallow bastard who only ever really wants the thrill of infatuation and the melodrama of pretending that he’s too damaged to ever really be loved.”
Something bitter and cold comes over Raven’s face, not a substantial change from her normal expression. “He likes you, Erik—really likes you, underneath his idiotic infatuation. That’s more than most people get.”
“How very magnanimous of him.”
Raven stands up, disgusted. “Someday soon,” she says bitterly, “you’re going to have to decide exactly what you want from my brother. I’ve got my fingers crossed that when you do, he’ll finally give up on you.”
The door slams behind her when she leaves.
Erik shows up at Charles’s flat early on Wednesday afternoon to find him completely and utterly soused.
Charles has a standing brunch date with Raven, the kind that involves bottomless mimosas and Irish coffee and very little food. It began, Erik suspects, as an act of teenage rebellion—sneaking into their mother’s liquor cabinet on Saturday mornings to mix gin with apple juice—and has maintained itself through the power of shared spite. That it now happens on Wednesdays is only an unfortunate effect of the ridiculous amounts of money in their possession, leaving them bored and annoyed when everyone else is working.
Charles looks up when he enters, interested in the dazed sort of way that only accompanies copious amounts of alcohol. “Erik!” he says, delighted. He’s sprawled out languidly on the couch, laptop shakily balanced on the edge of the coffee table. “How did you get in?”
“Your locks are terrible.”
Charles frowns. “You broke in?”
“I didn’t have to.” It’s the truth. Not that Charles has reason to mind if it wasn’t; half the time, he forgets to lock the door anyways. “I brought lunch.”
“Oh, Erik,” Charles replies, using the voice Erik has only ever heard him use on lost teenagers at the community center. “How thoughtful.”
Erik looks at Charles, trying his best to seem unamused. “I know you’ve just eaten, Charles.” A very generous description of what Charles usually does at brunch, but needs must. “It’s from that awful French bakery.”
Charles’s delight settles into something a little less jubilant and a little more real, and Erik takes the opportunity to remove his coat and scarf and drop the bag on the table. He joins Charles on the couch, glancing with little interest at the paper Charles has pulled up.
“Gene therapy, Charles? At this hour?” In this state? Erik adds privately, though he’s long since realized that Charles prefers to save intellectual pursuits for when he’s inebriated enough that they become a challenge hard enough to give up on.
Charles casts him a look. “God’s mysteries wait for no one.” But he stretches out with a huff to grab the chess set that lives on the coffee table and drops it unceremoniously between them on the couch.
It’s been a long time since chess with Charles has been a game of strategy. It had been different at first, of course—Erik wrong-footed, frustrated and unable to escape the uncomfortable feeling that Charles could see what he was planning five, six moves in advance. But he knows Charles, now, and Charles knows him. Playing with him isn’t a matter of finding the better strategy; it’s a matter of guessing which one Charles is in the mood for.
It's not really chess anymore, Erik thinks, but he sets up the pieces anyways and opens with the king’s pawn.
By the sixth move, Erik knows it’s going to be a slow game. Charles like this is in no mood to do more than lazily scheme. He’ll draw out the opening until Erik is forced to overextend himself, and Erik knows he doesn’t have the patience to match Charles move for move.
“Don’t you miss working?” he asks instead of despairing, determined not to let himself be beat in silence. Erik nods at the still-open laptop. “You liked teaching.”
Charles smiles, and moves his knight. “For a man so vocally critical of WASPs, you really do have an attachment to the protestant work ethic.”
“For a man who often professes to be one,” Erik says, considering the board, “you seem to have a problem with it.”
Charles’s brow wrinkles ever so briefly, but it smoothes itself out half a second later. “Don’t you miss working?”
“I’m freelance,” Erik replies. “I am working.”
Charles sighs and leans back, errantly pushing hair out of his eyes as he considers the board. “So am I, in a way. I like our little LGBTQ Association. I like having the time to pick and choose what I do.”
“That’s not a job.”
“Smoking a pack a day alone in your apartment isn’t a job either, my friend,” Charles says, full of saintly pity.
Erik hates him for it, a little. “Neither is getting drunk on queer trivia nights and pretending you’ve fallen in love with the bartender.”
“Let’s not do this.” Charles sighs. “Not when we were having such a lovely time.”
Erik moves his queen in, putting Charles in check. It’s a bad move. He doesn’t care.
Silence stretches out as his friend observes the board, echoing through the halls into the too-big living room of the too-empty apartment. He can hear Charles’s breaths, the measured up-and-down of his chest as it rasps against his half-unbuttoned shirt. Car horns blare outside.
The brush of Charles’s fingertips against his knight is deafening. Erik doesn’t look up—he doesn’t think he could stand to see Charles watching him with those sad, piteous eyes. Erik doesn’t want to be furious at him; he knows he will be.
“You know I care about you, don’t you?” Charles says softly, out of the blue. “Really, I mean. Properly.”
Erik focuses on the board. His king is wide open. His bishops are trapped. He can’t even castle to escape. “I know.”
Caught between his lungs and his mouth is something more, a tight ball of words wedged in his esophagus. I care about you more than I’ve cared about anything in the last fifteen years. He needs Charles to hear it, he knows. But he won’t say it.
Charles looks at him for a long, strange moment, and Erik lets himself look back. Whatever Charles sees in Erik—whatever he thinks he sees—resolves something in him. The hurt crease of Charles’s brow softens. His eyes meet Erik’s, blue and bright and full of three years of things left unsaid.
I love you. Erik thinks, miserable, but he doesn’t say it.
He remembers what it was like three years ago, back from Frankfurt, and Kraków before it, and Prague, Graz, Belfast, Antwerp and Cologne, Katowice and Leipzig before that. Ten years spent wandering around Europe looking for roots, chasing after his fuzzy memories of being three, four, both his parents outside his room, smoking on a balcony in West Berlin. All he’d found were streets and buildings, museums and plaques—his grandmother’s grave in an English cemetery, thousands of miles from home. His parents were long gone.
New York had seemed like the only option, after all that—a grey period punctuating a bleak, inexorable march of clauses and subclauses. And even the city had seemed alien when he’d come back: their old apartment someone else’s, his mother moved to Jersey where she could have a garden. He’d tried to put down roots, anyways, because the only other option had been not trying. He’d tried, and he’d failed—but he’d found Charles.
He's not naïve enough to give Charles the credit for infusing some semblance of meaning into his life; Charles certainly doesn’t deserve it. But he drifted for ten years without anchor, and even though Erik loves his mother, she’s not enough to keep him tied down. Charles—petty and self-absorbed, charming and generous and terribly lonely—is.
Erik isn’t willing to risk losing that. He could survive another three years without Charles, he knows. He spent the better part of fifteen years waking up and going to sleep with nothing in between but meaningless small talk and complaints to his landlord about the plumbing. But it isn’t much of a life.
So Erik stays where he is, and lets Charles take his queen.
The game is already over, anyways. Charles will have him in five moves—four, if he’s really paying attention. Erik didn’t really expect it to go any other way.
When Erik was six, his father had gone into the hospital for an ache in his chest and hadn’t come back. He doesn’t remember it. There are flashes, later, of a graveyard filled with crosses, his mother’s mouth pinched tight and bitter. But that’s not the same thing.
The truth is, if you asked him what his father looked like, he’d only be able to recall his mother’s walled-off face as she’d looked at an old picture of their wedding. She’d loved him, Erik thinks, or else she wouldn’t have followed him back from Britain. But Erik remembers the way her chest moved against his as she carried him onto the train out of Berlin—a sigh of utter relief.
Marriage is difficult, she’d told him when he’d still been young enough to ask. Love isn’t enough. And Erik had nodded like he understood. And eventually he did.
The point of it all is: his mother was an optimist, once upon a time. Erik was smart enough to learn from her mistakes.
It’s cold when he steps out, the December air biting into the booze-flushed skin of his face. Erik shivers inadvertently as goosebumps spring up on the skin of his exposed forearms. It had been too hot in the bar, loud and crowded and just dark enough to give him a headache, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his turtleneck to cope. Now he rolls them back down and luxuriates in the feeling of the thin sheen of sweat across his forehead evaporating.
A laugh comes from inside, louder even than the muffled din, and Erik takes a moment to deeply regret agreeing to come.
Charles has a fondness for dive bars that only makes sense when Erik thinks about a sixteen year old Charles sneaking out of the house to the pub down the road. Erik finds it difficult to share his enthusiasm, especially on nights like this, when there’s another of America’s seemingly endless array of football games on and the people who aren’t cheering at the television are somehow louder than the people who are.
It's not anything he hasn’t suffered through before, anyways, though it’s probably significant that Erik agreed to come knowing exactly what sort of evening was in store for him. But as much as he’d been prepared for an evening of Charles alternately trying to look interested in American football and complaining about the barbarity of the sport, he hadn’t been ready for a tap on the shoulder half an hour in, followed by a crowd of acquaintances-cum-friends-for-a-night—Charles’s, of course—to descend on them.
They’re playing quarters, now, and debating the merits of various pieces of television programming from their childhoods. Even if Erik wanted to contribute, he doesn’t have anything to add. He remembers, vaguely, flashes of Sandmännchen—his mother turning the television on while she cooked, his father a weighty presence behind him—but nothing more. He was too old for the sort of shows they’re talking about by the time he got to the states. Even Charles, childhood split between Westchester and London, knows more than he does.
Erik pulls out a cigarette and lights it, staring blankly at the curb. He tries to be surprised when he hears the door open behind him, letting out a blast of warm air and noise before it’s abruptly cut off again.
“I wish you’d stayed,” Charles says from behind him. “I like watching you cheat at quarters.”
“I don’t cheat.”
Charles huffs, joining him by the curb. “You win more than you should. That’s the same thing to most people.”
Erik snorts. Charles’s own particular brand of logic is beyond aid, but that doesn’t he’s wrong. “I’ve had enough to drink,” he says by way of excuse, though in the cold, wet air, he feels blisteringly, blindingly awake.
“I didn’t mean for them to get started like that,” Charles replies, because Erik’s long-practiced poker face means nothing to him and he never knows when to quit. “You know Americans. They’re so very—” He pauses.
“American?” Erik offers.
“Exactly.”
“It isn’t that,” Erik says, though he doesn’t know how to explain to Charles why. It isn’t the children’s shows, he knows—it isn’t the football or the references to god knows what fifteen year old pop culture phenomenon. It’s not America, really, because Germany hadn’t been better and Poland had been ten times worse.
He'd tried, during that long, exhausting decade—really tried—to be German, to be Polish, too. But in the end his German had only ever been decent and his Polish was indelibly marked by the accent of a classroom. Yiddish is the only language he’s ever really been fluent in. His English is just very, very good.
“What is it, then?” Charles asks.
Erik takes a drag, and sighs, pulling out his pack to offer Charles a cigarette too. Charles takes it. “Nothing,” he says.
Charles, for once, lets him have the lie.
It’s still strange how comfortable it is to stand in the quiet with Charles. Erik is no stranger to silence, but that’s a different sort of silence: the stark, unbreakable kind that comes from being alone. It’s different, with someone else—easier, less heavy.
“Eva asked me if you were single,” Charles says after a few minutes. “After you went out.”
Erik makes a low sound of acknowledgement.
“She thinks you’re sexy—mysterious.”
“If you’re going to flirt with me,” Erik says, “you could at least do me the favor of not pretending it’s for your friend.”
Charles hums, unfazed. “It is for her, actually. You’d like her. She’s a nurse—no nonsense. Very striking eyes, too.”
“I’m not particularly interested in women at the moment,” Erik replies, the understatement of the century.
“You were interested in Raven.”
Erik sighs. “That was different. That was Raven.” Then, too tired to be bitter, “If you’re so taken with Eva’s eyes, you should ask her for dinner yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that to her,” Charles says dismissively. “She doesn’t deserve it.”
Erik stares down the street. A raindrop—barely a raindrop, a tiny speck of water—hits his face, right above the arch of his eyebrow, followed by the slow patter of more around him. With more humor than he’s ever felt, he says, “And I do?”
“You never actually let me try,” Charles reminds him, the tone of an inside joke coloring the statement. Neither of them are laughing. “That’s different, in any case.”
Erik doesn’t ask him Different, how? because no matter what, he’s not that far gone. But he doesn’t say anything else, either; he doesn’t have anything to say.
Charles sighs and shifts his weight to the other foot, exhaling smoke into the night air. “Do you know why all my relationships fail?”
“Because your emotionally neglectful parents left you with at least four different complexes that you pretend make you unlovable in order to ignore the fact that you’ve never actually wanted to commit to anyone.”
“Hurtful,” Charles replies, smiling, “and untrue. You’re losing your touch, my friend.” He sighs, and exhales again. Erik watches the smoke pass his lips. “I get bored—that’s why they fail.”
Erik snorts derisively, not in denial—Charles isn’t lying—but at the simple, bare, obviousness of it all.
“I do!” Charles protests, for once having missed what Erik was really thinking. The butt of his cigarette flares, one last inhale, and then he’s stubbing it out, half still left unsmoked. “I get bored—of the people, of the routine, shall-I-clear-out-a-drawer-for-your-clothes, I-have-Wednesday-night-free-from-six-to-nine, all of it. But I only get bored because I’m not that interested in them in the first place.”
“Yes, you are.”
Charles sighs. “Yes, I am. But not—” He looks at Erik then, suddenly, and Erik feels something vital and delicate in him tremble, right down at the base of his stomach. “Not the way I’m interested in you.”
Erik looks away, down at the puddle of oil slick three centimeters away from the tip of his left shoe. “Raven said you were going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“An ultimatum.” He lets the butt of his own cigarette fall to the pavement, then steps on it, grinding the ash into nothingness. Then he pulls out another.
“That’s going to kill you, you know,” Charles says.
Erik ignores him and lights it anyways. “You don’t want to do this, Charles. You don’t want to make me say it out loud.”
“Yes,” Charles says simply. If Erik were a stranger, he would say Charles sounds distraught. “I do.”
Erik looks at the asphalt for a few long seconds. The steady drizzle has begun to saturate it, finally, and the colors of the streetlamps and the neon lights across the street are wavery reflections on its surface.
Then he looks up.
“I don’t want you,” Erik says.
“Yes, you do.” Charles meets his eyes unflinchingly. “Now do it properly. Reject me in a way I can’t ignore. You owe me that much, at least.”
Erik looks back down at the street, the red-blue-yellow mixing and swirling as puddles begin to pool. “What do you want me to say, Charles? What haven’t I said already?”
“Well,” Charles replies. His voice doesn’t waver—it never has, when they’ve argued. No matter what Erik says, Charles just looks on with complete neutrality, unwilling to drop his act of perfect English detachment for even a single minute. “You could start by explaining why you’re so determined to make yourself miserable.”
Erik does laugh at that, harsh even to his own ears. “That’s what you think this is about? Some petty, juvenile attempt at self-destruction?”
“Why else, then?” Charles retorts, tipping his chin up. “Since I met you you’ve done nothing but get let go from jobs you hate and brood alone in your apartment while you use up your severance. You smoke so much you’ve probably taken at least thirty years off your lifespan and you meet every attempt at reaching to you with outright hostility. It’s obvious you don’t want to be happy.”
Erik doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then, quietly, “Humor me, for a second. Imagine that this—us—isn’t one long, drawn out exercise in self-inflicted torture for me. Why else might I reject you?”
Charles exhales angrily. “I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to invent endless reasons for not wanting me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Erik says, meeting his eyes. “I want you. You know that. Why won’t I give in?”
Charles stares at him for a long minute. If Erik were like him, he might be able to figure out what it means. But he isn’t. And he can’t.
“How do you think it would go? The two of us—how long do you think we would survive the way we are?”
“You’re afraid.” Charles sounds terribly, awfully sober. “You’re afraid we’re going to hate each other—or, no.” He sees the pressing together of Erik’s mouth, the tightening of Erik’s jaw. “No, that’s not it.” Charles swallows. Erik watches the bob of his Adam’s apple against the skin of his throat. “You’re afraid I’m going to leave you.”
Erik sighs. “I’m not afraid. I know. You’re going to—as you put it—get bored.” Then, with a wry, joyless humor, “And you’re not going to like me when that happens.”
Charles blinks. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not how any of this— In any case, I still like them, I just don’t—”
“No, Charles,” Erik interrupts. He smiles a bitter smile, full of teeth. “You’re not going to like me when that happens, because if you ever get bored of me, I’m going to do my utter best to make you miserable.”
Something filters across Charles’s face, smoothing away the wrinkle in his brow. The corners of his mouth crease, then uncrease. And Erik watches as his pupils expand, and his shoulders slope into a delighted sigh. “Oh, Erik.”
“No,” Erik says. “This doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything,” Charles replies, a lightness filtering into his voice. “Don’t you understand? I thought— It doesn’t matter what I thought. The only thing stopping you is your own stubborn convictions. And they’re wrong.”
“My friend,” Erik says, tired. “I’ve watched you fall in love too many times to think I’m special.”
“But you are.”
A year and a half ago, Charles—crossfaded beyond belief on expensive wine and god knows what—had stumbled into Erik’s apartment at half past three in the morning. His pupils had been blown out, a red flush high in his cheeks, and Erik hadn’t been surprised when he’d reached up to press his fingers to the nape of Erik’s neck. But Charles hadn’t moved, hadn’t tried to kiss him—just held himself there, looking into Erik’s eyes.
I know everything about you, he’d said, almost reverent, as if it were some sort of prayer. Then he’d fallen sideways onto the couch.
“You’re a wonderful liar,” Erik says now, in the present. “You’re best when you’re lying to yourself.”
“And you’re a condescending asshole,” Charles’s replies crisply. “What do you want me to do now? Ignore this? Ignore you?” He’s closer, now. Erik could reach out and touch him. “Do you really expect me to give up on you just because you’re afraid of having something to lose? You’re not a coward, Erik. Stop acting like one.”
“The last time I felt like I had a home,” Erik says, quiet, bitter. “I was six. My mother still tucked me into bed.” He shoves his hands deep into his pockets. His fingernails dig into his palms. “I spent more than a decade looking for roots—history. Something that felt like home. And I ended up here.”
It would be easier, better, if Charles really did know everything about him. If he were translucent and obvious, laid out on a glass slide in front of a horrible microscope. Instead, speaking is like pulling teeth, ripping each rib out of his chest. He makes himself say it anyways. Charles is right; he’s not a coward.
“You’re why I stayed here.” Erik looks at Charles, a herculean feat. “And if that’s gone— I won’t start again. I can’t fucking start again, Charles.”
In the light of the streetlamp, Erik can see every detail of Charles’s eyelashes dark and stuck together from the rain.
There is, Erik discovered a long time ago, a deep well of unending compassion inside of Charles. Patronizing, condescending, derived from the morals of books written for sweet little English children that would grow up to politely and pleasantly kill just as many people as all the other children of the world—but there.
Now, though, there’s something else in Charles’s face. Not love—not really. Not wonder, or hope, or pity, but something utterly unique to Charles.
“You won’t have to,” Charles says.
Erik isn’t fool enough to believe it.
The light that had bloomed in Charles’s face shutters and dies. “You really are a coward.”
A car drives through the intersection at the far end of the block in a spray of water and lights.
Charles sighs, the lop of his shoulders utterly and completely exhausted. He must have been passionate about something, once—wide-eyed and optimistic and full of energy. But that was a long time ago.
He sighs again, and says in a faintly amused tone, “I’m trying to think of a way to tell you we can’t be friends anymore that doesn’t make me sound like an eight-year-old saying that you’re not invited to my birthday party.”
Nothing seizes in Erik’s chest, because his life isn’t a melodrama written for preteens. But there’s an acid taste in his throat that has nothing to do with the three beers he’d downed. “Is that it, then? You’re running away?”
“I’m not the coward here,” Charles says. Then, his voice not so even and unmoved as he would like, “If you’re so afraid of losing whatever this—us—is, I’ll solve your problem for you. No more fear. I won’t call you. I won’t talk to you. It’ll be as if we never knew each other.”
Erik imagines, briefly—involuntarily—a world without Charles’ horribly-timed phone calls, and inconvenient invasions of his apartment, and coffee dates with his mother. He imagines spending the last of his severance to break his lease, moving somewhere far, far to the west—he’s done heading east, heading back—a new too-empty apartment, a new local coffee shop that blends into all the other ones, new calls with his mother begging him to come and visit. Days and weeks and months of silence and work and nothing to come home to but smoking himself into an early grave.
The terrible thing about someone finding their way into every part of your life is that it stops feeling like your life when they’re gone.
“Or,” Charles says, and Erik hears the hitch in his voice, “for once in your life, you can stop worrying about the infinite catastrophes of a faraway future and come home with me.”
A long silence. Sirens, in the distance. The rain not loud enough to break the silence. “That’s not fair,” Erik says at long last. It’s a child’s complaint, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
“Life isn’t fair. You told me that.”
“It didn’t stick.”
“No,” Charles says, “it didn’t. But we’re beyond fair now, you and I.” His eyes are electric-blue. Erik feels pinned down by them, pulverized. “I have spent the last three years of my life utterly, breathtakingly in love with you. And it’s been, to put it lightly, a fucking nightmare.”
“Always the charmer, Charles. How better to begin a romance for the ages?”
“Don’t you understand? it’s not about that anymore. It hasn’t been in years.” Erik can see where the steady drizzle has plastered Charles’s hair to his cheek. “You—all of you—are so completely and unbelievably mundane to me. I’m not going to get bored of you, Erik. I am bored of you. I have been for years.”
Erik still remembers the first time he’d realized absolutely fucked he was, the entire scene frozen like a tableau in his memories. Charles’s mouth bright red, eyes too bright, the shape of his fingers as he’d stared up at the empty night sky. He’d just broken up with someone, then—the first person he’d gone for since Erik had brutally turned him down in that club coatroom.
He'd been relieved, then—the utter idiot—for reasons he hadn’t wanted to look into, and strangely gratified that it was him Charles had gone to. Maybe it had been that that made him ask, or maybe it was the booze, but he’d wondered, errantly—fishing, he knows now—why Charles had dumped them.
Whatever Charles told him is lost to time, but Erik remembers the look on his face when the breakup had come up—complete and utter disinterest. Something had curled in Erik’s stomach then, oil-black and nauseating, and he’d wondered when it was that Charles had become something he didn’t want to lose.
“Oh,” Erik says in the present, and he thinks You’re the most ridiculous man I know and I love you and I don’t think I remember how to live a life without you in it. But mostly he just thinks I can’t keep living like this.
He kisses Charles.
It’s an utter nightmare. Teeth get in the way, clacking awkwardly. The angle is off, forcing both of them to crane their necks in a horrible, unnatural way, and they both taste like cheap beer and cigarettes in a way that turns Erik’s stomach a bit. He’s too impatient, too intense, too unwilling to wait.
But he can feel Charles’s skin against his, turned cool and clammy by the rain, and Charles’s fingernails are digging into the nape of his neck, and it feels like a dam breaking, it feels like a revelation, it feels like a perfectly ordinary, wildly inept kiss and that itself is a damn wonder. Erik doesn’t remember the last time he kissed someone and it didn’t feel like a disaster waiting to happen.
When Charles pulls back, he’s smiling like a madman, and his eyes are fever-bright.
“Life isn’t going to be any less of nightmare if we’re fucking each other, you know,” Erik says, an automatic thing.
Charles gives him a sad sort of look, piteous and kind and deeply aggravating, and Erik sighs.
“It might,” he acknowledges, leaning down to kiss Charles thoroughly enough to wipe that expression off his face. It’s better this time, easy and natural as breathing, but it’s more than that too. It’s a triumph, a conquest—one fucking victory in an endless parade of humiliations. “Just a little.”
“A little,” Charles murmurs in agreement, and nothing magically clicks inside Erik, no part of him starts thinking grand thoughts about the all-conquering power of love. Charles is still flighty and irresponsible and he’s still bitter and misanthropic, and Erik isn’t quite sure he won’t take the train to Jersey and keep heading west, some day. But something deep in his chest settles a little, maybe, and for the first time he can remember, he breathes just a bit deeper.
Six months later:
At a quarter past noon on a Saturday, Charles waits for him two blocks from the shul—right next to the tucked away parking lot where everyone hides their cars from everyone else—to pick him up to go see his mother.
Charles is hungover—his bloodshot eyes and the Advil in the cupholders tell a rich and distinct story—but the slump of his shoulders is relaxed, and the semi-permanent crease between his eyebrows isn’t as deep as it could be.
Erik climbs in quickly, grateful for the rush of AC and the low tones of whatever puff piece NPR is playing on the radio. It’s getting hot in the city already, and a suit just makes it worse.
As they pull out onto the road he notices a box in the backseat stuck between the stack of overdue library books and the pile of discarded paper coffee cups. “What’s that?”
“It’s a tichel.” Charles mispronounces the word with the good will of someone who looked it up on Wikipedia to be inclusive. Erik briefly considers shoving him out the car window. “For your mother.”
“She’ll get ideas, you know.”
“Good,” Charles says. “I want her to get them.”
Erik clicks his tongue and is struck with the unfortunate realization that he’s starting to sound like her. “She’ll start thinking you want to convert.”
“Maybe I do.”
“No, you don’t,” Erik says, an immeasurable fondness pooling deep in his stomach and leaching into his voice. “It’s already bad enough I’ve brought home a shiksa. Don’t get her hopes up only to dash them.”
“I am not a shiksa,” Charles replies, deeply offended.
“Yes,” Erik says. He looks over at Charles. His friend’s mouth is pinched shut, a faint red tinge to his cheeks—though that might be from the heat. Erik allows himself to think, briefly, about the ride back: Charles with a different wrinkle in his brow, exhausted. The yellow light of the streetlamps passing by. And the knowledge, strange and immutable, that he’s going home. “You really are.”