Agliophobia [Part Two]
Title: Agliophobia [Fear of Pain]
By: Me[g]
Starring: Adam Lazzara, John Nolan, OMC
Rated: R, mostly for language for now
Summary: The life of Adam Lazzara [and John Nolan] as told by J-No. Probably going to get a little confusing and will most likely jump around a bunch. Pay. Attention.
Disclaimer: I own Adam and John, yadda yadda yadda, but this never happened…yadda yadda yadda….yeah, that’s it.
Missed a part? Just starting to read now? Go here >> na_classic
Notes: Narf. I really don’t like this chapter for the most part. In fact, I hate it. Period. No questions. this chapter is dedicated to loveless_lover because she helped me out with a buncha stuff and helped get this finished.
Part Two
Adam just couldn’t ever get over it. Everything just built up on everything else [everything being the drinking, the drugs, and the weak suicide attempts] and eventually I had to get him out of there. He was spending his nights awake in front of the television, eyes wide and hardly blinking [which resulted in dragging him by his ankles to the optometrist to get him a pair of glasses he never wore] and hours at a time curled up next to the stove in complete silence, sometimes followed by a rather long stream of tears. I knew I couldn’t let him live like that.
I told him to move in with me.
I moved into a bigger apartment [in the same complex… I am far too attached to my door-woman], one with two bedrooms and bigger closets. Jesse came over and helped move my things up a floor before driving to Adam’s and Dean’s place and loading all of his belongings into Jesse’s car and bringing them back to my apartment. Everything of Dean’s that wasn’t sent back to his family ended up in the back corner of the hallway closet.
Adam’s room was right next to mine. The blue and green flannel sheets were always left untucked and the pillows all stuffed up in the corner next to the wall, which he had pushed the bed up against the first night he slept in it. He’d safety-pinned the curtains closed and taken the light bulb out of the lamp. It was dark, dark like his hair and his nail polish and his t-shirts. And dark like his eyes.
The first week after he moved in, he slept in my bed; coming to me in the middle of the night looking for comfort and I allowed him to curl up next to me and fall asleep. After the first week, I slept in his room a couple of times or would lie in his bed until he fell asleep and then go back to my room. He used to talk in his sleep…have entire conversations with no one. It was sort of scary to wake up in the middle of the night and just hear him talking. I’d walk in there and call his name, but he’d be fast asleep and babbling about light bulbs and other nonsense.
And after a while, everything became routine. I’d wake up every morning and pour him a bowl of Fruit Loops and leave it on the counter for him to pick up when he decided to get out of bed. I’d sit around watching cartoons or whatever the hell was on until the plastic scraped against the wooden countertop and he sat down next to me on the couch and then we’d sit together until he was finished and I’d take his bowl, put it in the dishwasher, and go take a shower. Adam would take one after me, and I’d leave to do whatever it was I needed to do that day, making sure to always leave a note on the dry-erase board by the door. I was always home in time for lunch and every Tuesday he would make us grilled cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup. If I had to, I would leave again and return home exactly when I told him I would be home.
There was never any room for disappointment with Adam.
When I actually went online and looked up what the fear of pain is actually called, in my mind I realized that he didn’t even seem to be that scared of physical pain [although a paper cut is about as traumatic as the time he fell out of bed and bruised his tailbone], it was always the emotions that got the best of him. If I told him I didn’t want to play cards, he’d take it as I didn’t like him and would lock himself in his room. When there were no Fruit Loops left in the house [since he moved in, it’s still the only cereal I eat], I was trying to starve him to death and he wouldn’t eat anything until I cooked him up a big meal or went and bought a whole stash of Fruit Loops.
He was a hassle, always a hassle, but best friends take care of each other at any cost and that’s exactly what I intended on doing.
- - -
What went on in our apartment is never clear in my head, just little bits and pieces of nonsense and unimportant events. All that I clearly remember is for three months he never left the house until I carried him while he was sleeping into the car and brought him to his dentist appointment [at which he was given laughing gas and dealt a hefty dose of hand-holding squeezing]. Adam is deathly afraid of dentists, apparently.
One of the scenarios vivid in my memory was the first date I’d had since I’d secretly dated Jesse. His name was Conor or something like that and I think the only reason I wanted to date him was because he reminded me of Adam, just a bit more sane and calm. He had the same hair cut that Adam did when I first met him; it hung in his eyes precisely the same way and moved with the same shampoo commercial-esque grace. We went out to dinner and went to see a few local bands play at a club, and then decided to go back to the apartment to have some dessert and maybe watch a movie. When we walked in the door, all the lights were off and Adam was lying on the floor in flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt, Fight Club giving the room a blue light.
“You’re late,” he said, not bothering to look at me.
“I didn’t tell you when I’d be home, Adam. Come meet Conor.”
The second I spoke the word meet, he was turned around and staring at me with a what have you done look on his face.
“Hi,” Conor said meekly.
“I. Um. Er. Hi,” was all that Adam managed to squeak. “Um. I gotta go,” he said before quickly getting up and dashing to his bedroom.
“Bye?” Conor said, looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“He’s a little off,” I tried to explain, leading Conor to the couch to have him sit while I retrieved some cheesecake from the fridge. I lowered my voice as not to stir up Adam’s emotions and half-whispered, “His boyfriend died a while ago and he hasn’t been the same since.”
“He just seems shy.”
“He won’t leave the apartment.”
“Oh.”
I set the plates on the table and messed around with the DVD player until The Last Samurai was gracing the screen instead of Fight Club. “Yeah, I don’t remember the last time he met someone new. It takes like three people to get him out of his room to go buy groceries.”
“That’s weird.”
“You can’t blame him, I guess. He’s real sensitive. Got some phobia of emotional pain, I guess.”
“Hello again,” Conor said, looking away from me.
Adam was leaning against the wall, half-hidden by the shadows of the dark apartment. “Don’t talk about me behind my back, John.” Please don’t cry ran through my mind. I wanted me and Conor to work. “I can’t believe you.”
“Adam, I wasn’t insulting you,” I started. “I was just trying to explain to Conor why you-“
“Why I lock myself up in my room? Well sorry if I’m in a fragile emotional state.” I could hear the change in his voice that happens when he’s about to cry.
I got up and reached out for him and he moved his shoulder away. “Don’t touch me, jerk.” He never says jerk.
“I should go,” Conor said.
“No, it’s okay,” I said.
“It’s alright, we’ll do this again some other time,” he said.
We never did. He never called me back. Adam scared off my date. And the next two after that, which was when I gave up. I couldn’t tell him he was ruining my social life or that I was in serious need of some sexual attention. Fuckfuckfuck, I needed some ass.
- - -
For over a year, he was held up in the apartment. Apart from the times when Jesse came over to carry him kicking and screaming and crying to the car to go somewhere, the only place he ever went was down the hall to play with some little kid’s kitten [Gretta], who he promptly renamed Lisa. Lisa came to visit several times and gave me the pleasure of going out and buying a lint roller because she leaves a layer of light gray hair over everything. Adam has tried to steal her and get away with it several times. Didn’t work.
I ended up buying him his own damn kitten under the strict pledge that Adam go out of the house at least twice in a month for no less than three hours. He said he would stay out for a entire [cumulative] day if I bought him two. So I bought him two kittens. He traded a minimum 6 hours a month and one pet for 24 hours and two of them.
His little kittens were siblings [or so we have assumed as they were kept in the same cage] and almost identical. The female, who he named Lola before he’d even held her, is the one who caught his eye first. A dark grey ball of fluff with white paws and eyes that were even more blue than Jesse’s [possible? For a cat, I guess] is what she is. Her brother, named Ray [you know, I think Adam had/has a thing for the singer of Lola Ray…his pants are awfully tight], is a lighter gray, with a bit of an obsession with Adam’s stuffed pig [that Michelle bought him for his most recent birthday]. Lola is insane. Though she doesn’t cling to everything with her claws, she is restless and wanders about constantly. Ray is the opposite; always sleeping in someone’s lap or on Adam’s pillows or in his and Lola’s little pet bed. He’s the one who saunters over to the door when someone knocks and sits idly by, eyeing whoever walks in while Lola begs for attention and purrs and rubs against ankles. They are a bit like Adam, really. Lola is the attention whore craving side of him and Ray is the subdued hold me side of Adam.
Adam tried to get out of his agreement, but failed to do so and ended up hiding beneath a hooded sweatshirt for an average of two hours on twelve days for the first month or so. He had a leaving-the-house ritual, a process that involved a check list and a fair amount of complaining. He always needed to have a bottle of water, a stick of lip balm, and twenty dollars [in case he got lost and needed to take a cab home, and in which case, he has one of my address labels on his chap stick]. It just ended up that we’d go out to eat a few nights, out to bars some other nights, over to Jesse’s or to Michelle’s, or maybe go visit Eddie.
But he calculated exactly down to the minutes how long he had until he didn’t have to leave any more during a month and kept it on a little piece of paper, stuffed in the back of his sock drawer. Do not keep bright blue paper in a drawer full of white socks, it’s a bit obvious. He’d make us leave dinner early to go home and by the time we got there, the Styrofoam would not have been enough to keep it warm.
- - -
About a year and half after Adam moved in with me, I was out for the day helping Michelle move into her fiancé’s apartment and when I came back home at seven that evening, hoping to take Adam out for pizza, he wasn’t there. He never ever left the house without me. Ever. I called Jesse and I called his parents’ house and I called Eddie and Adam was not at any of their houses. I called his cell phone and he didn’t pick up. I was worried he was kidnapped or laying dead in an alley or being raped by some crazed homeless man or…
When I swung open the door, there he was.
“Hi John. I went to get pizza.”
Pizza. He went to get pizza. Without me. Alone. By himself.
I grabbed the box from his arms, put it on the table, and wrapped my arms around him. “God, I thought something terrible happened to you!”
“Erm…I just went to get pizza.”
“By yourself!”
He grinned. “By myself.”
Ray appeared and hopped up onto one of the chairs next to the table, studying me and Adam. Lola wandered around us in a circle and I pulled back and stared him in the eyes.
“I’m proud of you, Adam.”
He leaned over and kissed me right on the lips. “Couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taken so long at Shelly’s.” He pulled away from me and went to the pantry, grabbing some paper plates and a beer from the fridge before starting in on the cheese pizza and leaving me standing there with the outline of his lips burning on mine.
Adam's Kittens.
Lola
Ray
Don't ask me when the next part will be done. I have no idea. Don't ask me when the ISTP sequel will be done because I don't even know.
While dearest loveless_lover helped me out and jumped through my monitor, I drew her a picture so she knew what was going on in the office. Labeled for your convenience.
By: Me[g]
Starring: Adam Lazzara, John Nolan, OMC
Rated: R, mostly for language for now
Summary: The life of Adam Lazzara [and John Nolan] as told by J-No. Probably going to get a little confusing and will most likely jump around a bunch. Pay. Attention.
Disclaimer: I own Adam and John, yadda yadda yadda, but this never happened…yadda yadda yadda….yeah, that’s it.
Missed a part? Just starting to read now? Go here >> na_classic
Notes: Narf. I really don’t like this chapter for the most part. In fact, I hate it. Period. No questions. this chapter is dedicated to loveless_lover because she helped me out with a buncha stuff and helped get this finished.
Part Two
Adam just couldn’t ever get over it. Everything just built up on everything else [everything being the drinking, the drugs, and the weak suicide attempts] and eventually I had to get him out of there. He was spending his nights awake in front of the television, eyes wide and hardly blinking [which resulted in dragging him by his ankles to the optometrist to get him a pair of glasses he never wore] and hours at a time curled up next to the stove in complete silence, sometimes followed by a rather long stream of tears. I knew I couldn’t let him live like that.
I told him to move in with me.
I moved into a bigger apartment [in the same complex… I am far too attached to my door-woman], one with two bedrooms and bigger closets. Jesse came over and helped move my things up a floor before driving to Adam’s and Dean’s place and loading all of his belongings into Jesse’s car and bringing them back to my apartment. Everything of Dean’s that wasn’t sent back to his family ended up in the back corner of the hallway closet.
Adam’s room was right next to mine. The blue and green flannel sheets were always left untucked and the pillows all stuffed up in the corner next to the wall, which he had pushed the bed up against the first night he slept in it. He’d safety-pinned the curtains closed and taken the light bulb out of the lamp. It was dark, dark like his hair and his nail polish and his t-shirts. And dark like his eyes.
The first week after he moved in, he slept in my bed; coming to me in the middle of the night looking for comfort and I allowed him to curl up next to me and fall asleep. After the first week, I slept in his room a couple of times or would lie in his bed until he fell asleep and then go back to my room. He used to talk in his sleep…have entire conversations with no one. It was sort of scary to wake up in the middle of the night and just hear him talking. I’d walk in there and call his name, but he’d be fast asleep and babbling about light bulbs and other nonsense.
And after a while, everything became routine. I’d wake up every morning and pour him a bowl of Fruit Loops and leave it on the counter for him to pick up when he decided to get out of bed. I’d sit around watching cartoons or whatever the hell was on until the plastic scraped against the wooden countertop and he sat down next to me on the couch and then we’d sit together until he was finished and I’d take his bowl, put it in the dishwasher, and go take a shower. Adam would take one after me, and I’d leave to do whatever it was I needed to do that day, making sure to always leave a note on the dry-erase board by the door. I was always home in time for lunch and every Tuesday he would make us grilled cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup. If I had to, I would leave again and return home exactly when I told him I would be home.
There was never any room for disappointment with Adam.
When I actually went online and looked up what the fear of pain is actually called, in my mind I realized that he didn’t even seem to be that scared of physical pain [although a paper cut is about as traumatic as the time he fell out of bed and bruised his tailbone], it was always the emotions that got the best of him. If I told him I didn’t want to play cards, he’d take it as I didn’t like him and would lock himself in his room. When there were no Fruit Loops left in the house [since he moved in, it’s still the only cereal I eat], I was trying to starve him to death and he wouldn’t eat anything until I cooked him up a big meal or went and bought a whole stash of Fruit Loops.
He was a hassle, always a hassle, but best friends take care of each other at any cost and that’s exactly what I intended on doing.
- - -
What went on in our apartment is never clear in my head, just little bits and pieces of nonsense and unimportant events. All that I clearly remember is for three months he never left the house until I carried him while he was sleeping into the car and brought him to his dentist appointment [at which he was given laughing gas and dealt a hefty dose of hand-holding squeezing]. Adam is deathly afraid of dentists, apparently.
One of the scenarios vivid in my memory was the first date I’d had since I’d secretly dated Jesse. His name was Conor or something like that and I think the only reason I wanted to date him was because he reminded me of Adam, just a bit more sane and calm. He had the same hair cut that Adam did when I first met him; it hung in his eyes precisely the same way and moved with the same shampoo commercial-esque grace. We went out to dinner and went to see a few local bands play at a club, and then decided to go back to the apartment to have some dessert and maybe watch a movie. When we walked in the door, all the lights were off and Adam was lying on the floor in flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt, Fight Club giving the room a blue light.
“You’re late,” he said, not bothering to look at me.
“I didn’t tell you when I’d be home, Adam. Come meet Conor.”
The second I spoke the word meet, he was turned around and staring at me with a what have you done look on his face.
“Hi,” Conor said meekly.
“I. Um. Er. Hi,” was all that Adam managed to squeak. “Um. I gotta go,” he said before quickly getting up and dashing to his bedroom.
“Bye?” Conor said, looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“He’s a little off,” I tried to explain, leading Conor to the couch to have him sit while I retrieved some cheesecake from the fridge. I lowered my voice as not to stir up Adam’s emotions and half-whispered, “His boyfriend died a while ago and he hasn’t been the same since.”
“He just seems shy.”
“He won’t leave the apartment.”
“Oh.”
I set the plates on the table and messed around with the DVD player until The Last Samurai was gracing the screen instead of Fight Club. “Yeah, I don’t remember the last time he met someone new. It takes like three people to get him out of his room to go buy groceries.”
“That’s weird.”
“You can’t blame him, I guess. He’s real sensitive. Got some phobia of emotional pain, I guess.”
“Hello again,” Conor said, looking away from me.
Adam was leaning against the wall, half-hidden by the shadows of the dark apartment. “Don’t talk about me behind my back, John.” Please don’t cry ran through my mind. I wanted me and Conor to work. “I can’t believe you.”
“Adam, I wasn’t insulting you,” I started. “I was just trying to explain to Conor why you-“
“Why I lock myself up in my room? Well sorry if I’m in a fragile emotional state.” I could hear the change in his voice that happens when he’s about to cry.
I got up and reached out for him and he moved his shoulder away. “Don’t touch me, jerk.” He never says jerk.
“I should go,” Conor said.
“No, it’s okay,” I said.
“It’s alright, we’ll do this again some other time,” he said.
We never did. He never called me back. Adam scared off my date. And the next two after that, which was when I gave up. I couldn’t tell him he was ruining my social life or that I was in serious need of some sexual attention. Fuckfuckfuck, I needed some ass.
- - -
For over a year, he was held up in the apartment. Apart from the times when Jesse came over to carry him kicking and screaming and crying to the car to go somewhere, the only place he ever went was down the hall to play with some little kid’s kitten [Gretta], who he promptly renamed Lisa. Lisa came to visit several times and gave me the pleasure of going out and buying a lint roller because she leaves a layer of light gray hair over everything. Adam has tried to steal her and get away with it several times. Didn’t work.
I ended up buying him his own damn kitten under the strict pledge that Adam go out of the house at least twice in a month for no less than three hours. He said he would stay out for a entire [cumulative] day if I bought him two. So I bought him two kittens. He traded a minimum 6 hours a month and one pet for 24 hours and two of them.
His little kittens were siblings [or so we have assumed as they were kept in the same cage] and almost identical. The female, who he named Lola before he’d even held her, is the one who caught his eye first. A dark grey ball of fluff with white paws and eyes that were even more blue than Jesse’s [possible? For a cat, I guess] is what she is. Her brother, named Ray [you know, I think Adam had/has a thing for the singer of Lola Ray…his pants are awfully tight], is a lighter gray, with a bit of an obsession with Adam’s stuffed pig [that Michelle bought him for his most recent birthday]. Lola is insane. Though she doesn’t cling to everything with her claws, she is restless and wanders about constantly. Ray is the opposite; always sleeping in someone’s lap or on Adam’s pillows or in his and Lola’s little pet bed. He’s the one who saunters over to the door when someone knocks and sits idly by, eyeing whoever walks in while Lola begs for attention and purrs and rubs against ankles. They are a bit like Adam, really. Lola is the attention whore craving side of him and Ray is the subdued hold me side of Adam.
Adam tried to get out of his agreement, but failed to do so and ended up hiding beneath a hooded sweatshirt for an average of two hours on twelve days for the first month or so. He had a leaving-the-house ritual, a process that involved a check list and a fair amount of complaining. He always needed to have a bottle of water, a stick of lip balm, and twenty dollars [in case he got lost and needed to take a cab home, and in which case, he has one of my address labels on his chap stick]. It just ended up that we’d go out to eat a few nights, out to bars some other nights, over to Jesse’s or to Michelle’s, or maybe go visit Eddie.
But he calculated exactly down to the minutes how long he had until he didn’t have to leave any more during a month and kept it on a little piece of paper, stuffed in the back of his sock drawer. Do not keep bright blue paper in a drawer full of white socks, it’s a bit obvious. He’d make us leave dinner early to go home and by the time we got there, the Styrofoam would not have been enough to keep it warm.
- - -
About a year and half after Adam moved in with me, I was out for the day helping Michelle move into her fiancé’s apartment and when I came back home at seven that evening, hoping to take Adam out for pizza, he wasn’t there. He never ever left the house without me. Ever. I called Jesse and I called his parents’ house and I called Eddie and Adam was not at any of their houses. I called his cell phone and he didn’t pick up. I was worried he was kidnapped or laying dead in an alley or being raped by some crazed homeless man or…
When I swung open the door, there he was.
“Hi John. I went to get pizza.”
Pizza. He went to get pizza. Without me. Alone. By himself.
I grabbed the box from his arms, put it on the table, and wrapped my arms around him. “God, I thought something terrible happened to you!”
“Erm…I just went to get pizza.”
“By yourself!”
He grinned. “By myself.”
Ray appeared and hopped up onto one of the chairs next to the table, studying me and Adam. Lola wandered around us in a circle and I pulled back and stared him in the eyes.
“I’m proud of you, Adam.”
He leaned over and kissed me right on the lips. “Couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taken so long at Shelly’s.” He pulled away from me and went to the pantry, grabbing some paper plates and a beer from the fridge before starting in on the cheese pizza and leaving me standing there with the outline of his lips burning on mine.
Adam's Kittens.
Lola
Ray
Don't ask me when the next part will be done. I have no idea. Don't ask me when the ISTP sequel will be done because I don't even know.
While dearest loveless_lover helped me out and jumped through my monitor, I drew her a picture so she knew what was going on in the office. Labeled for your convenience.