Just The Way You Are - Fletcher/Jones - Standalone
Title: Just The Way You Are
Author: russsel
Part: 1/1
Rating: PG
Pairing: Fletcher/Jones
Genre: AU
Summary: Triggered by lack of self-confidence and severe insecurity, Tom turns to the dark pits of anorexia to solve his problem.
A/N: This was originally supposed to be short, but of course, I got a bit carried away. Probably because this deals with a sensitive subject-anorexia, and some of the things in here are taken from personal experiences. I was surprised at how it turned out, because I was just going with the flow as I was writing it. I never planned it to be stream of consciousness, but I like it just the way it is. I hope you guys enjoy! :)
Disclaimer: I do not own McFly in any way.
The bedsprings creak softly when Tom shifts to his side, awake but not completely done dreaming.
It’s one of those instances where he wakes up and he never really knows if he’s still dreaming or not, because everything feels like the way they should, asleep or awake.
He blinks the fleeting dreams away, like gusts of wind that makes his eyes feel like they’re twenty stones heavy and it’s all he can do not to close them, and moves his chest back to face the ceiling. A latent jiggling of skin forces his eyes to his stomach hidden underneath the sheets, and, pushing them halfway down his rubber duck boxers, he lifts a hand up and pinches the piece of skin beside his navel between his thumb and index finger. He gives it a light shake, and the rest of his stomach dances along with it.
He gives a silent huff of disappointment.
It’s been a tough week and a half for him. What, with trying to watch what he eats and inwardly punishing himself for lusting over a sumptuous slice of cake or piece of pie on the other side of the bakery window, it’s a wonder he hasn’t keeled over yet in lack of the necessary sugar. Well, necessary for him anyway. But he’s made a promise-he’s going to lose the fat in two more weeks and he’ll feel better about himself in the clothes that Danny has bought for him, the ones that hug his body like a second layer of skin. He’ll be able to feel comfortable walking down the street with Danny without worrying about other people thinking, Oh, do you think that bloke there knows there’s a giant blob clinging to his arm?
He trains his eyes to look at Danny from the corners, and he frowns slightly, his forehead crinkling subtly.
He wonders if Danny ever thinks about what other people might be thinking whenever they would walk together. Does he hear them talking but he cares too much about Tom that he doesn’t really discuss it, because it’d make him sad? That sounds like something he’d do. But he can’t really be sure unless he asks him, and since Danny hasn’t brought it up, what’s the use?
He reluctantly pulls the covers back up to his collarbones and turns to face Danny. He feels like there’s a weight pushing down his cheek into the pillow, and he wonders why gravity’s picking on him so much. He bites his bottom lip and watches Danny sleep away.
His eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open to breathe, his hand cushioning his cheek, the other swallowed underneath the pillow. Tom reaches over to his face and brushes a lock of curly hair away from his eyelid. The action makes Danny’s face quiver slightly, and the next second, he’s opening his eyes, and he smiles when he sees Tom’s face. It’s one of those smiles that make Tom feel as though he’s being appreciated for doing something amazing. Like saving a life or rescuing a cat from a very tall tree.
He smiles back.
“Hey,” Danny whispers, inching closer to give Tom a kiss on the forehead, and Tom feels like he’s about to float into space, but the sheets hold him back. He gives a chuckle in response. “I was just dreaming ‘bout you.”
“Oh yeah?” Tom asks, laying his head on Danny’s freckle-ridden chest, and Danny laughs, wrapping an arm around Tom’s shoulders. Tom keeps his hands between their chests with his fingers clasped together. “How’d I look?”
He feels Danny smile, and the arm pull him closer. “Perfect.”
Tom sits down on the kitchen table still only clad in his boxers, and he reaches a hand across to grab the box of cereal in the center. As he’s pouring the frosty flakes in his bowl (reduced-sugar, the box says, but he knows better), Danny enters and plops down on the chair opposite him, freshly showered, the beads of water that the towel failed to collect glistening on his chest. He shakes his curly mane a few times, showering Tom and his bowl, and retrieves the box after Tom sets it back down on the table.
“That’s all you’re eating?” Danny asks skeptically as Tom pours milk over the flakes, which take up just a little more than half of the bowl. He stops when they cover the underside of the topmost layer, and he pops the top back and hands it over to Danny. There’s a lot of calories in the cereal enough as it is, and there’s the added fat from the milk, enough to make him feel-look bloated, the very thing he wishes to avoid.
He nods. “Yeah, I ate a bit too much chicken from last night. I’m still digesting.” Danny raises a brow and shoves a spoonful of milky cereal into his mouth.
“No you didn’t,” Danny argued after swallowing. “I ate most of the chicken. You only had one slice.”
Tom hovers his spoon over the bowl and looks at Danny. That one slice of chicken might not have looked too much to Danny, but it felt like the entire chicken itself, so much that he decided to ignore the side of smashed potatoes because it’d fill him up too much. He can still feel the slice churning in his stomach.
“It was a large slice, Dan, and I’d just had a large lunch with Katie and them.”
Of course, it was a complete lie. He hasn’t been eating lunch with Katie and his other co-workers for a while now. It isn’t any wonder why Danny looks like he’s not buying it.
He shifts his eyes to his cereal and dips the spoon in the pool of milk.
“This isn’t like you, Tom,” Danny says, and at once, it makes Tom feel guilty.
He might as well have said, Why are you starving yourself? What are you getting out of all this?, which doesn’t make him feel any better about the situation.
He stirs the flakes around, creating a tiny whirlpool.
Danny continues. “Come on, tell me what’s up. You haven’t asked me to buy ice cream, or cake, or anything. What’s happened Tom? Has someone died from work?”
Tom shakes his head. He wishes it were that easy to tell him.
“Nothing’s wrong, really,” Tom assures him, but it feels empty, just like his stomach, and he stops playing with his food. He lifts his head up and looks at Danny with a smile. “I’m fine.”
Danny shoots him a worried look, his brows creasing together, but not enough to form lines on his forehead. “You know, whatever it is, I’m right here. You can talk to me.”
“I know.” Tom turns back to his cereal and scoops up a hefty amount with the spoon. He presses it between unwilling lips, and he chews dramatically, showing Danny there is, in fact, nothing wrong. He grimaces after a second, however, because there is something wrong. The cereal’s gone all soggy, and he’s lost his appetite.
He collects the bowl, stands up, and throws everything down the sink.
When Tom rejects Katie’s third offering of her pasta salad, she finally decides to sit down in his cubicle and press the POWER button on the monitor. The screen turns black, and Tom lifts his head up to look at her disapprovingly for disturbing his work.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asks, crossing her long legs and folding her arms over her chest. “You used to love my pasta salad-hell, you always eat nearly all of it.”
Tom shakes his head and sinks in his swivel chair, fingers interlocked over his growing stomach. What he wouldn’t give for a pillow to hide behind at that moment.
“I’m not hungry. I just ate loads for breakfast.” Another lie, but he doesn’t care. Whatever gets her off his back. She, like Danny before her, doesn’t seem to buy it, however, and she only looks at him with a skeptical, scrutinizing look, like he’s being surveyed through a magnifying glass. He hates it when she does that.
“This coming from a man who eats five cheeseburgers for lunch everyday, and that’s after eating most of Roger’s food.”
He knows the statement is meant to guilt him to saying the truth, but it does the opposite. It makes him appalled-now he knows just how unhealthy he ate before. No wonder he blew up to such galactic proportions. In his mind, he crosses cheeseburgers off his list of What I’ll Be Eating From Now On.
“I realized it’s unhealthy to eat that much junk food,” Tom defends, pressing the POWER button and sending the screen jolting back into a monotonous procession of confusing numbers and figures. “I feel better now.”
Tom should win an award for “Most Lies Told in One Day.” After laying off the junk food, he always feels out of energy, like the only thing he wants to do after getting home from work is to lie down on the bed and sleep with the promise that he’ll feel better the next day. But he never does; all it does is make him feel worse, as though he has balls of iron tied around his ankles. It’s all for a good cause, however; with all the fat gone, he’ll feel better about himself and going out in public. No more, Do I look fat in this shirt? Do they think I look fat in this shirt? Does Danny think they think I look fat in this shirt?
“I liked you better when you ate,” Katie admits, and it catches Tom off-guard with its bluntness. It forces his eyes back to her just as she’s getting up from her seat. “You were always laughing and all that. Making jokes and eating with us. Now you’re just glued to that computer screen, counting off the minutes until work’s over. You’re not the same Tom anymore.”
Tom feels horrible at once. What is it with everyone making him feel like he’s the worst person in the entire world?
“Katie…” he starts, hoping to reconcile, to talk everything out. He doesn’t want to alienate people; he just wants more confidence in himself.
“I’ll just see you later,” she says before he can continue, and she’s out of his cubicle the next second, leaving him alone with his computer and the discarded box of salad in the trash can, feeling worse than ever before.
“You sure you don’t want any popcorn?” Danny asks, shaking the bowl in front of Tom’s face and making the popcorn roll over more of the butter. Tom feels queasy. Butter equals fat. No, thank you.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Tom says, and he snuggles up closer to Danny under the covers just as Godzilla destroys a large building in the television.
They sit without speaking for a while, only the roaring of the lizard monster and the townspeople’s harried cries for help breaking the silence every now and then. Tom’s not focusing on the movie at all, but not because he’s seen it a few times before. He’s thinking about what Katie said, about the change in his personality. Has he really changed that much? If so, how come he hasn’t noticed it? He still feels like the same Tom, only more tired and sleepy, but not fat. Well, getting there, at least.
“Dan,” he finally says, looking up to catch Danny’s eyes, who looks back after hearing his name.
“Yeah?”
“I made Katie real mad earlier,” he admits, and at once, he searches for that look of solace that Danny always gives him whenever he confesses his mistakes. But all he sees are two blue orbs staring back, inquiring and not comforting, and he feels vulnerable. Everything’s changed all of a sudden.
“Oh yeah? What’d you do?”
“I don’t even know what I did,” Tom says, turning back to the television and watching Godzilla wading in the ocean. “All I did was say that I wasn’t hungry when she offered her salad. After that, she went on about how I changed all of a sudden and that she liked me better when…” He drifts off. He’s not sure if he should tell Danny the rest.
Danny notices the pause and shakes Tom’s shoulder to make him look at him. Tom does.
“I don’t really know what’s going on, why you’re not eating like you used to,” Danny begins, and Tom feels a tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach. He’s finally noticed. “But I’m not going to bully you into doing something you don’t want to by asking you to start eating again. I’m not your mum.” With this he laughs, and Tom laughs silently with him. “I just want you to think about one thing.”
“What?”
Danny reaches up and tangles his fingers in Tom’s hair, slowly massaging his scalp. “Is it worth it?”
The movie ends and the credits roll, and Danny lingers until the last line of the production company has made its way across the screen before untangling his arms from around Tom’s shoulders and walking over to eject the disc from the player. Tom stays under the blanket, hugging himself, knees brought up to his stomach, legs crossing each other, and he watches Danny pop the disc inside the case. He thinks about it, just as much as his muddled thoughts will allow him, and he rests his head back on Danny’s chest the moment he returns to turn the channel to the last half of the football match.
Is it worth it?
Tom opens his eyes to slits and watches the ceiling. It’s still dark; dawn apparently has not broken yet. It’s too dark for the orange slivers of light, and he doesn’t bother to look for them. He prefers Danny doesn’t see him.
He turns his head to look at the digital clock sitting atop the bedside table next to a glass half-filled with water. It reads 3:24.
He sits up as quietly as possible, pushes the covers aside, dangles his legs on the edge of the bed, and jumps off.
With light, tip-toed steps, he makes for the bathroom.
He closes the door behind him, not wanting to wake Danny up, and reaches, in the darkness, along the wall for the light switch. He flips it on, fluorescent light floods the room too fast for his eyes to get accustomed to, and he closes his eyes and covers his eyelids with the back of his hand. It takes him a few seconds to be able to squint, and, not wasting any more time, he walks across the tiled floor, cold assaulting the soles of his feet like tiny needles pricking his skin, making him uncomfortable with every step, and faces his reflection on the large mirror above the sink.
Something churns in the pit of his stomach at the sight of his body.
His collarbones are starting to disappear again, and he traces the depression with his index finger. It’s a bad sign. He moves his eyes lower. His chest has puffed out as though inflated by a balloon pump, and he slides his hand down his sternum and cups one of them. It’s beginning to feel more firm, but there’s still that softness that he doesn’t like, that makes him want to stick his finger down his throat and throw up just to see if it’s going to make any difference. He slides it further down and, with the aid of his other hand, grabs a handful of skin on both sides of his navel. It makes him sick to see that he’s able to hold that much fat, and it makes him wonder if his diet is even working at all.
He drops them and turns on the faucet.
He runs his hands under the tap, rinsing them thoroughly, as though touching the excess weight was a sin, though there’s really nothing to wash off. He’s too tired to pick up the soap and start lathering, so he gives his hands one last good rubbing before twisting the knob and drying his hand with a small towel.
He looks at himself one last time. He wonders how Danny would love such a hideous being. All fat and no muscle. He looks like an overgrown boy, always at the peak of maturity but never reaching it. He wonders how Danny can stand looking at him, touching him, kissing him, loving him knowing he’s far less good-looking than he is…
But should he question it?
He mulls this over as he makes his way back to the bed, sitting first on the edge, looking, as best he could without getting a headache, at the picture of him and Danny on their first date propped up beside the clock. He smiles, lies on his side, facing the picture, and pulls the sheets up around him to try to go back to sleep. Just then, he feels Danny’s arms wrapping around his waist, skin warm to the touch but a thousand times more comfortable than the blanket, and the next second, he’s being pulled until he can feel his chest on his back.
“Danny?” he asks quietly, barely a whisper, and Danny tightens his embrace, burying his face in the crook of Tom’s neck.
“Hmm?” Danny replies, the air rushing out of his nose tickling Tom slightly.
Tom takes a moment to breathe. “I love you.”
Danny chuckles and kisses his neck three times, making him feel like he’s about to float into space again, but Danny’s arms doesn’t want him to because he says, a little louder than a whisper, “I love you, too.”
Tom bites his lip and finally lets himself drift off to sleep.
He skips breakfast for the eleventh day in a row and he feels like he’s about to faint.
“Come on, at least eat an apple or something,” Danny says, picking up and apple from the fruit basket and offering it to Tom, who is preoccupied with filing papers neatly in his bag for his big speech today.
He looks up and darts his eyes to the apple. It looks so tantalizing.
Maybe he should eat something; fainting in the middle of his speech is probably the worst thing he can do. And really, what’s in an apple to blow him up any further?
He smiles, reaches for the apple, and takes a bite. Danny grins and sits back down to finish the rest of his pancakes with a side of bacon and eggs. It makes Tom queasy and hungry at the same time. He looks away before he can hurl or attack the plate with a week’s worth of empty stomach.
“I’m going now,” he says, striding over to Danny to kiss him on the cheek, and he averts his eyes to the cupboard when Danny kisses back. He smells the food, however, and it’s all he can do not to finish it for Danny and walk out of the house to start his car.
He drives off to work. He’s had his apple. Nothing can go wrong today.
“…just fainted out of nowhere…”
“…sure he ate something this morning…”
“…can’t believe this happened…”
The voices are panicked, Danny’s the most distraught of them all, and Tom doesn’t know what’s happening.
The last he remembers is the applause from the board, congratulating him for a job well done, and turning to look at Katie, who gave him a subtle thumbs up behind her clipboard. After that… nothing.
And now, he’s on the bed, the back of his head throbbing, his stomach in painful knots. He doesn’t want to open his eyes because he doesn’t want to see Danny’s face right now.
Not when he’s sounding like Tom has just died.
But his eyelids have a mind of their own, and he opens them halfway, the ceiling coming into view.
“Look, Dan, he’s stirring,” he hears Katie say, and after hearing the shuffling of feet, he feels something grab his hand. He looks down and sees Danny watching him, his eyebrows knitted together, blue eyes swimming in concern. Behind him stands Katie, her arms crossed over her chest, and Roger, hands deep in his pockets. At once, Tom feels guilty, and the stomachache isn’t making matters any better.
“Tom? Tom, look at me.” Tom turns back to Danny. “Are you alright?”
“’m fine,” Tom replies. He doesn’t want Danny to worry any more than he already is. That’s too selfish of him.
Danny reaches up and cups Tom’s cheek. His hands are mildly sweaty. “You sure? Does your head hurt? Your-?”
“I’m fine, Dan, don’t worry,” Tom manages with a smile, pushing himself off the mattress and propping himself up on the headboard. The other three look on with unwavering interest. “All I need’s a bit of water, that’s all.”
“We’ll get it,” Katie said promptly, and she and Roger step out of the room without saying another word.
Silence.
Danny and Tom are staring at each other, Danny’s hand still on Tom’s cheek, Tom enjoying the feeling of his warm skin. He didn’t know it would come to this. All he wanted was to look perfect for Danny. Danny doesn’t deserve someone who looks like him. Danny’s beautiful. Danny’s fit. Danny’s perfect. And Tom’s, well… Not.
“I’m sorry for all this,” Tom apologizes, and Danny shakes his head, telling him otherwise. This befuddles Tom.
How come whenever he messes up, Danny always looks the other way and pretends that nothing ever happened? How come he cares so much?
“It’s not your fault,” Danny assures him, and Tom feels worse than ever.
He knows it was his fault-they both know. It was Tom who refused to stop eating because he felt inferior to everyone else, especially next to Danny when they were out in public. It was Tom who lied to Danny about eating. So who else is to blame?
“What made you want to do this? Starve yourself?”
The answer is at the tip of his tongue-because I want to be confident in my own skin, because I want to be able to go out in public without people criticizing the way I look, because I want to look the best I can for you-but for some reason, he can’t say it. He stays silent, only watching Danny’s eyes, his heart beginning to pick up speed.
He finally finds the answer when Danny opens his mouth to ask again.
“I did it for you.”
The words leave his mouth before he can stop them, and he feels guilty again. He made it sound like Danny forced him into starvation, drove him to be thinner, and that he had no say whatsoever.
Danny’s face changes, and Tom can feel tears beginning to sting his eyes. He wants to take it all back and say that everything is his fault, and line up all the reasons why he thinks so-knows so.
“Did you think I wanted this?” Danny asks, but his tone isn’t angry, and, as Tom finds quite hard to believe, he’s smiling. Tom’s dumbstruck. “Why do you think I chose you in the first place? I don’t care about the way you look, Tom, it’s you I care about. What’s inside you. So what if you’re not fit like all those other blokes on the telly-nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect, and I don’t want you to be. Skinny or not, you’re still the same Tom I love, and gain or lose a few pounds, that’s never going to change. I love you just the way you are.”
Tom tries not to cry, but it’s too late.
Tears stream from his eyes, some of the drops wedging themselves between Danny’s hand and his cheek, and Danny grins and rubs his thumb under his eye.
“Oh, don’t cry, Tom.” Danny adds his other hand and wipes furiously, trying to collect as much of his tears as he can before wetting the front of his shirt. Some find their way, pockmarking his shirt with pebble-sized watermarks, but Tom doesn’t mind. He doesn’t even mind that his nostrils are adding to the cause, and Danny laughs, grabs Tom by the back of his head, and presses his face on his shirt.
His shirt is terribly damp after thirty seconds, but he doesn’t make an acknowledgement-he just thinks its funny, and he urges Tom on to laugh with him.
He manages a tear-stained laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Tom says again, muffled by Danny’s shirt, and Danny shakes his head again.
“Forget it,” Danny assures, pulling Tom back to look at his reddened, drenched face. “So, what do you think about some ice cream and cheesecake?”
Tom laughs loudly and buries his face in Danny’s shirt once again, and Danny wraps his arms around his shoulders just as Katie and Roger emerge from the other side of the door holding a glass of iced-water.
Tom wakes up and it’s not dark outside.
Must be a sign.
He pushes the covers off him, lightly jumps to his feet, and, grabbing the jumper sticking out from the half-opened drawer, slips it on and makes his way out the door.
In the kitchen, he feels a twinge in his stomach, but he ignores it. He’s not listening this time, and he walks over to the refrigerator and pulls out a plate of leftover cheesecake and a box of orange juice. He closes the door with his hip, places them on the table, and slides two slices of bread in the toaster. He rummages in the refrigerator again for butter as he waits.
Soon, the table’s all laid out with food, and he stands with his backside pressed on the edge of the counter as he surveys his work.
He doesn’t know if he’s made too much, and looking at all of it and thinking about the inevitability of them ending up in his stomach is making his skin prickle uncomfortably.
Before he can dwell any deeper into it, Danny walks into the kitchen scratching his head in mid-yawn, his body looking fit as always. It makes Tom’s face break out into a smile, and he bites his bottom lip before it goes out of control.
Which is what Danny does when he sees the food littering the table.
Tom grins at him when their eyes meet, Danny strides over to him, wraps his arms around his waist, and picks him up an inch above the ground. It’s no strain on Danny-he’s lighter now, but that’s all about to change.
Danny leads him to one of the chairs and sits opposite him, looking earnest, waiting for Tom to make the first action.
At first, Tom feels queasy just looking at them, his stomach doing acrobatic flips and twisting in turning like a complicated machine. He wants to turn away, wants to get up, whisper in Danny’s ear, I’m not really hungry, I ate too much cheesecake yesterday, but then he remembers his reaction to his fainting.
He doesn’t want to see Danny looking like that ever again.
So he picks up a slice of toast, slathers butter all over the crusty surface with the butter knife, and, looking at Danny with a smile, takes a large bite.
When it travels down his throat, it feels foreign, like it doesn’t belong, and he feels as though his body is trying to fight it off, make him drop the rest because he doesn’t want to go back looking like he did before. He was so close.
But Danny’s smiling again, enjoying the sight of him eating, going back to the same Tom that he misses, and picking up his courage one more time, he takes another huge chunk.
He swallows and grins.
It’s going to take time, he knows, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t do it. He just has to ignore that little voice inside his head telling him to stop. He has to keep going.
Danny thinks he’s beautiful as it is, and he doesn’t want to change that for the world.
Author: russsel
Part: 1/1
Rating: PG
Pairing: Fletcher/Jones
Genre: AU
Summary: Triggered by lack of self-confidence and severe insecurity, Tom turns to the dark pits of anorexia to solve his problem.
A/N: This was originally supposed to be short, but of course, I got a bit carried away. Probably because this deals with a sensitive subject-anorexia, and some of the things in here are taken from personal experiences. I was surprised at how it turned out, because I was just going with the flow as I was writing it. I never planned it to be stream of consciousness, but I like it just the way it is. I hope you guys enjoy! :)
Disclaimer: I do not own McFly in any way.
The bedsprings creak softly when Tom shifts to his side, awake but not completely done dreaming.
It’s one of those instances where he wakes up and he never really knows if he’s still dreaming or not, because everything feels like the way they should, asleep or awake.
He blinks the fleeting dreams away, like gusts of wind that makes his eyes feel like they’re twenty stones heavy and it’s all he can do not to close them, and moves his chest back to face the ceiling. A latent jiggling of skin forces his eyes to his stomach hidden underneath the sheets, and, pushing them halfway down his rubber duck boxers, he lifts a hand up and pinches the piece of skin beside his navel between his thumb and index finger. He gives it a light shake, and the rest of his stomach dances along with it.
He gives a silent huff of disappointment.
It’s been a tough week and a half for him. What, with trying to watch what he eats and inwardly punishing himself for lusting over a sumptuous slice of cake or piece of pie on the other side of the bakery window, it’s a wonder he hasn’t keeled over yet in lack of the necessary sugar. Well, necessary for him anyway. But he’s made a promise-he’s going to lose the fat in two more weeks and he’ll feel better about himself in the clothes that Danny has bought for him, the ones that hug his body like a second layer of skin. He’ll be able to feel comfortable walking down the street with Danny without worrying about other people thinking, Oh, do you think that bloke there knows there’s a giant blob clinging to his arm?
He trains his eyes to look at Danny from the corners, and he frowns slightly, his forehead crinkling subtly.
He wonders if Danny ever thinks about what other people might be thinking whenever they would walk together. Does he hear them talking but he cares too much about Tom that he doesn’t really discuss it, because it’d make him sad? That sounds like something he’d do. But he can’t really be sure unless he asks him, and since Danny hasn’t brought it up, what’s the use?
He reluctantly pulls the covers back up to his collarbones and turns to face Danny. He feels like there’s a weight pushing down his cheek into the pillow, and he wonders why gravity’s picking on him so much. He bites his bottom lip and watches Danny sleep away.
His eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open to breathe, his hand cushioning his cheek, the other swallowed underneath the pillow. Tom reaches over to his face and brushes a lock of curly hair away from his eyelid. The action makes Danny’s face quiver slightly, and the next second, he’s opening his eyes, and he smiles when he sees Tom’s face. It’s one of those smiles that make Tom feel as though he’s being appreciated for doing something amazing. Like saving a life or rescuing a cat from a very tall tree.
He smiles back.
“Hey,” Danny whispers, inching closer to give Tom a kiss on the forehead, and Tom feels like he’s about to float into space, but the sheets hold him back. He gives a chuckle in response. “I was just dreaming ‘bout you.”
“Oh yeah?” Tom asks, laying his head on Danny’s freckle-ridden chest, and Danny laughs, wrapping an arm around Tom’s shoulders. Tom keeps his hands between their chests with his fingers clasped together. “How’d I look?”
He feels Danny smile, and the arm pull him closer. “Perfect.”
Tom sits down on the kitchen table still only clad in his boxers, and he reaches a hand across to grab the box of cereal in the center. As he’s pouring the frosty flakes in his bowl (reduced-sugar, the box says, but he knows better), Danny enters and plops down on the chair opposite him, freshly showered, the beads of water that the towel failed to collect glistening on his chest. He shakes his curly mane a few times, showering Tom and his bowl, and retrieves the box after Tom sets it back down on the table.
“That’s all you’re eating?” Danny asks skeptically as Tom pours milk over the flakes, which take up just a little more than half of the bowl. He stops when they cover the underside of the topmost layer, and he pops the top back and hands it over to Danny. There’s a lot of calories in the cereal enough as it is, and there’s the added fat from the milk, enough to make him feel-look bloated, the very thing he wishes to avoid.
He nods. “Yeah, I ate a bit too much chicken from last night. I’m still digesting.” Danny raises a brow and shoves a spoonful of milky cereal into his mouth.
“No you didn’t,” Danny argued after swallowing. “I ate most of the chicken. You only had one slice.”
Tom hovers his spoon over the bowl and looks at Danny. That one slice of chicken might not have looked too much to Danny, but it felt like the entire chicken itself, so much that he decided to ignore the side of smashed potatoes because it’d fill him up too much. He can still feel the slice churning in his stomach.
“It was a large slice, Dan, and I’d just had a large lunch with Katie and them.”
Of course, it was a complete lie. He hasn’t been eating lunch with Katie and his other co-workers for a while now. It isn’t any wonder why Danny looks like he’s not buying it.
He shifts his eyes to his cereal and dips the spoon in the pool of milk.
“This isn’t like you, Tom,” Danny says, and at once, it makes Tom feel guilty.
He might as well have said, Why are you starving yourself? What are you getting out of all this?, which doesn’t make him feel any better about the situation.
He stirs the flakes around, creating a tiny whirlpool.
Danny continues. “Come on, tell me what’s up. You haven’t asked me to buy ice cream, or cake, or anything. What’s happened Tom? Has someone died from work?”
Tom shakes his head. He wishes it were that easy to tell him.
“Nothing’s wrong, really,” Tom assures him, but it feels empty, just like his stomach, and he stops playing with his food. He lifts his head up and looks at Danny with a smile. “I’m fine.”
Danny shoots him a worried look, his brows creasing together, but not enough to form lines on his forehead. “You know, whatever it is, I’m right here. You can talk to me.”
“I know.” Tom turns back to his cereal and scoops up a hefty amount with the spoon. He presses it between unwilling lips, and he chews dramatically, showing Danny there is, in fact, nothing wrong. He grimaces after a second, however, because there is something wrong. The cereal’s gone all soggy, and he’s lost his appetite.
He collects the bowl, stands up, and throws everything down the sink.
When Tom rejects Katie’s third offering of her pasta salad, she finally decides to sit down in his cubicle and press the POWER button on the monitor. The screen turns black, and Tom lifts his head up to look at her disapprovingly for disturbing his work.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asks, crossing her long legs and folding her arms over her chest. “You used to love my pasta salad-hell, you always eat nearly all of it.”
Tom shakes his head and sinks in his swivel chair, fingers interlocked over his growing stomach. What he wouldn’t give for a pillow to hide behind at that moment.
“I’m not hungry. I just ate loads for breakfast.” Another lie, but he doesn’t care. Whatever gets her off his back. She, like Danny before her, doesn’t seem to buy it, however, and she only looks at him with a skeptical, scrutinizing look, like he’s being surveyed through a magnifying glass. He hates it when she does that.
“This coming from a man who eats five cheeseburgers for lunch everyday, and that’s after eating most of Roger’s food.”
He knows the statement is meant to guilt him to saying the truth, but it does the opposite. It makes him appalled-now he knows just how unhealthy he ate before. No wonder he blew up to such galactic proportions. In his mind, he crosses cheeseburgers off his list of What I’ll Be Eating From Now On.
“I realized it’s unhealthy to eat that much junk food,” Tom defends, pressing the POWER button and sending the screen jolting back into a monotonous procession of confusing numbers and figures. “I feel better now.”
Tom should win an award for “Most Lies Told in One Day.” After laying off the junk food, he always feels out of energy, like the only thing he wants to do after getting home from work is to lie down on the bed and sleep with the promise that he’ll feel better the next day. But he never does; all it does is make him feel worse, as though he has balls of iron tied around his ankles. It’s all for a good cause, however; with all the fat gone, he’ll feel better about himself and going out in public. No more, Do I look fat in this shirt? Do they think I look fat in this shirt? Does Danny think they think I look fat in this shirt?
“I liked you better when you ate,” Katie admits, and it catches Tom off-guard with its bluntness. It forces his eyes back to her just as she’s getting up from her seat. “You were always laughing and all that. Making jokes and eating with us. Now you’re just glued to that computer screen, counting off the minutes until work’s over. You’re not the same Tom anymore.”
Tom feels horrible at once. What is it with everyone making him feel like he’s the worst person in the entire world?
“Katie…” he starts, hoping to reconcile, to talk everything out. He doesn’t want to alienate people; he just wants more confidence in himself.
“I’ll just see you later,” she says before he can continue, and she’s out of his cubicle the next second, leaving him alone with his computer and the discarded box of salad in the trash can, feeling worse than ever before.
“You sure you don’t want any popcorn?” Danny asks, shaking the bowl in front of Tom’s face and making the popcorn roll over more of the butter. Tom feels queasy. Butter equals fat. No, thank you.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Tom says, and he snuggles up closer to Danny under the covers just as Godzilla destroys a large building in the television.
They sit without speaking for a while, only the roaring of the lizard monster and the townspeople’s harried cries for help breaking the silence every now and then. Tom’s not focusing on the movie at all, but not because he’s seen it a few times before. He’s thinking about what Katie said, about the change in his personality. Has he really changed that much? If so, how come he hasn’t noticed it? He still feels like the same Tom, only more tired and sleepy, but not fat. Well, getting there, at least.
“Dan,” he finally says, looking up to catch Danny’s eyes, who looks back after hearing his name.
“Yeah?”
“I made Katie real mad earlier,” he admits, and at once, he searches for that look of solace that Danny always gives him whenever he confesses his mistakes. But all he sees are two blue orbs staring back, inquiring and not comforting, and he feels vulnerable. Everything’s changed all of a sudden.
“Oh yeah? What’d you do?”
“I don’t even know what I did,” Tom says, turning back to the television and watching Godzilla wading in the ocean. “All I did was say that I wasn’t hungry when she offered her salad. After that, she went on about how I changed all of a sudden and that she liked me better when…” He drifts off. He’s not sure if he should tell Danny the rest.
Danny notices the pause and shakes Tom’s shoulder to make him look at him. Tom does.
“I don’t really know what’s going on, why you’re not eating like you used to,” Danny begins, and Tom feels a tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach. He’s finally noticed. “But I’m not going to bully you into doing something you don’t want to by asking you to start eating again. I’m not your mum.” With this he laughs, and Tom laughs silently with him. “I just want you to think about one thing.”
“What?”
Danny reaches up and tangles his fingers in Tom’s hair, slowly massaging his scalp. “Is it worth it?”
The movie ends and the credits roll, and Danny lingers until the last line of the production company has made its way across the screen before untangling his arms from around Tom’s shoulders and walking over to eject the disc from the player. Tom stays under the blanket, hugging himself, knees brought up to his stomach, legs crossing each other, and he watches Danny pop the disc inside the case. He thinks about it, just as much as his muddled thoughts will allow him, and he rests his head back on Danny’s chest the moment he returns to turn the channel to the last half of the football match.
Is it worth it?
Tom opens his eyes to slits and watches the ceiling. It’s still dark; dawn apparently has not broken yet. It’s too dark for the orange slivers of light, and he doesn’t bother to look for them. He prefers Danny doesn’t see him.
He turns his head to look at the digital clock sitting atop the bedside table next to a glass half-filled with water. It reads 3:24.
He sits up as quietly as possible, pushes the covers aside, dangles his legs on the edge of the bed, and jumps off.
With light, tip-toed steps, he makes for the bathroom.
He closes the door behind him, not wanting to wake Danny up, and reaches, in the darkness, along the wall for the light switch. He flips it on, fluorescent light floods the room too fast for his eyes to get accustomed to, and he closes his eyes and covers his eyelids with the back of his hand. It takes him a few seconds to be able to squint, and, not wasting any more time, he walks across the tiled floor, cold assaulting the soles of his feet like tiny needles pricking his skin, making him uncomfortable with every step, and faces his reflection on the large mirror above the sink.
Something churns in the pit of his stomach at the sight of his body.
His collarbones are starting to disappear again, and he traces the depression with his index finger. It’s a bad sign. He moves his eyes lower. His chest has puffed out as though inflated by a balloon pump, and he slides his hand down his sternum and cups one of them. It’s beginning to feel more firm, but there’s still that softness that he doesn’t like, that makes him want to stick his finger down his throat and throw up just to see if it’s going to make any difference. He slides it further down and, with the aid of his other hand, grabs a handful of skin on both sides of his navel. It makes him sick to see that he’s able to hold that much fat, and it makes him wonder if his diet is even working at all.
He drops them and turns on the faucet.
He runs his hands under the tap, rinsing them thoroughly, as though touching the excess weight was a sin, though there’s really nothing to wash off. He’s too tired to pick up the soap and start lathering, so he gives his hands one last good rubbing before twisting the knob and drying his hand with a small towel.
He looks at himself one last time. He wonders how Danny would love such a hideous being. All fat and no muscle. He looks like an overgrown boy, always at the peak of maturity but never reaching it. He wonders how Danny can stand looking at him, touching him, kissing him, loving him knowing he’s far less good-looking than he is…
But should he question it?
He mulls this over as he makes his way back to the bed, sitting first on the edge, looking, as best he could without getting a headache, at the picture of him and Danny on their first date propped up beside the clock. He smiles, lies on his side, facing the picture, and pulls the sheets up around him to try to go back to sleep. Just then, he feels Danny’s arms wrapping around his waist, skin warm to the touch but a thousand times more comfortable than the blanket, and the next second, he’s being pulled until he can feel his chest on his back.
“Danny?” he asks quietly, barely a whisper, and Danny tightens his embrace, burying his face in the crook of Tom’s neck.
“Hmm?” Danny replies, the air rushing out of his nose tickling Tom slightly.
Tom takes a moment to breathe. “I love you.”
Danny chuckles and kisses his neck three times, making him feel like he’s about to float into space again, but Danny’s arms doesn’t want him to because he says, a little louder than a whisper, “I love you, too.”
Tom bites his lip and finally lets himself drift off to sleep.
He skips breakfast for the eleventh day in a row and he feels like he’s about to faint.
“Come on, at least eat an apple or something,” Danny says, picking up and apple from the fruit basket and offering it to Tom, who is preoccupied with filing papers neatly in his bag for his big speech today.
He looks up and darts his eyes to the apple. It looks so tantalizing.
Maybe he should eat something; fainting in the middle of his speech is probably the worst thing he can do. And really, what’s in an apple to blow him up any further?
He smiles, reaches for the apple, and takes a bite. Danny grins and sits back down to finish the rest of his pancakes with a side of bacon and eggs. It makes Tom queasy and hungry at the same time. He looks away before he can hurl or attack the plate with a week’s worth of empty stomach.
“I’m going now,” he says, striding over to Danny to kiss him on the cheek, and he averts his eyes to the cupboard when Danny kisses back. He smells the food, however, and it’s all he can do not to finish it for Danny and walk out of the house to start his car.
He drives off to work. He’s had his apple. Nothing can go wrong today.
“…just fainted out of nowhere…”
“…sure he ate something this morning…”
“…can’t believe this happened…”
The voices are panicked, Danny’s the most distraught of them all, and Tom doesn’t know what’s happening.
The last he remembers is the applause from the board, congratulating him for a job well done, and turning to look at Katie, who gave him a subtle thumbs up behind her clipboard. After that… nothing.
And now, he’s on the bed, the back of his head throbbing, his stomach in painful knots. He doesn’t want to open his eyes because he doesn’t want to see Danny’s face right now.
Not when he’s sounding like Tom has just died.
But his eyelids have a mind of their own, and he opens them halfway, the ceiling coming into view.
“Look, Dan, he’s stirring,” he hears Katie say, and after hearing the shuffling of feet, he feels something grab his hand. He looks down and sees Danny watching him, his eyebrows knitted together, blue eyes swimming in concern. Behind him stands Katie, her arms crossed over her chest, and Roger, hands deep in his pockets. At once, Tom feels guilty, and the stomachache isn’t making matters any better.
“Tom? Tom, look at me.” Tom turns back to Danny. “Are you alright?”
“’m fine,” Tom replies. He doesn’t want Danny to worry any more than he already is. That’s too selfish of him.
Danny reaches up and cups Tom’s cheek. His hands are mildly sweaty. “You sure? Does your head hurt? Your-?”
“I’m fine, Dan, don’t worry,” Tom manages with a smile, pushing himself off the mattress and propping himself up on the headboard. The other three look on with unwavering interest. “All I need’s a bit of water, that’s all.”
“We’ll get it,” Katie said promptly, and she and Roger step out of the room without saying another word.
Silence.
Danny and Tom are staring at each other, Danny’s hand still on Tom’s cheek, Tom enjoying the feeling of his warm skin. He didn’t know it would come to this. All he wanted was to look perfect for Danny. Danny doesn’t deserve someone who looks like him. Danny’s beautiful. Danny’s fit. Danny’s perfect. And Tom’s, well… Not.
“I’m sorry for all this,” Tom apologizes, and Danny shakes his head, telling him otherwise. This befuddles Tom.
How come whenever he messes up, Danny always looks the other way and pretends that nothing ever happened? How come he cares so much?
“It’s not your fault,” Danny assures him, and Tom feels worse than ever.
He knows it was his fault-they both know. It was Tom who refused to stop eating because he felt inferior to everyone else, especially next to Danny when they were out in public. It was Tom who lied to Danny about eating. So who else is to blame?
“What made you want to do this? Starve yourself?”
The answer is at the tip of his tongue-because I want to be confident in my own skin, because I want to be able to go out in public without people criticizing the way I look, because I want to look the best I can for you-but for some reason, he can’t say it. He stays silent, only watching Danny’s eyes, his heart beginning to pick up speed.
He finally finds the answer when Danny opens his mouth to ask again.
“I did it for you.”
The words leave his mouth before he can stop them, and he feels guilty again. He made it sound like Danny forced him into starvation, drove him to be thinner, and that he had no say whatsoever.
Danny’s face changes, and Tom can feel tears beginning to sting his eyes. He wants to take it all back and say that everything is his fault, and line up all the reasons why he thinks so-knows so.
“Did you think I wanted this?” Danny asks, but his tone isn’t angry, and, as Tom finds quite hard to believe, he’s smiling. Tom’s dumbstruck. “Why do you think I chose you in the first place? I don’t care about the way you look, Tom, it’s you I care about. What’s inside you. So what if you’re not fit like all those other blokes on the telly-nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect, and I don’t want you to be. Skinny or not, you’re still the same Tom I love, and gain or lose a few pounds, that’s never going to change. I love you just the way you are.”
Tom tries not to cry, but it’s too late.
Tears stream from his eyes, some of the drops wedging themselves between Danny’s hand and his cheek, and Danny grins and rubs his thumb under his eye.
“Oh, don’t cry, Tom.” Danny adds his other hand and wipes furiously, trying to collect as much of his tears as he can before wetting the front of his shirt. Some find their way, pockmarking his shirt with pebble-sized watermarks, but Tom doesn’t mind. He doesn’t even mind that his nostrils are adding to the cause, and Danny laughs, grabs Tom by the back of his head, and presses his face on his shirt.
His shirt is terribly damp after thirty seconds, but he doesn’t make an acknowledgement-he just thinks its funny, and he urges Tom on to laugh with him.
He manages a tear-stained laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Tom says again, muffled by Danny’s shirt, and Danny shakes his head again.
“Forget it,” Danny assures, pulling Tom back to look at his reddened, drenched face. “So, what do you think about some ice cream and cheesecake?”
Tom laughs loudly and buries his face in Danny’s shirt once again, and Danny wraps his arms around his shoulders just as Katie and Roger emerge from the other side of the door holding a glass of iced-water.
Tom wakes up and it’s not dark outside.
Must be a sign.
He pushes the covers off him, lightly jumps to his feet, and, grabbing the jumper sticking out from the half-opened drawer, slips it on and makes his way out the door.
In the kitchen, he feels a twinge in his stomach, but he ignores it. He’s not listening this time, and he walks over to the refrigerator and pulls out a plate of leftover cheesecake and a box of orange juice. He closes the door with his hip, places them on the table, and slides two slices of bread in the toaster. He rummages in the refrigerator again for butter as he waits.
Soon, the table’s all laid out with food, and he stands with his backside pressed on the edge of the counter as he surveys his work.
He doesn’t know if he’s made too much, and looking at all of it and thinking about the inevitability of them ending up in his stomach is making his skin prickle uncomfortably.
Before he can dwell any deeper into it, Danny walks into the kitchen scratching his head in mid-yawn, his body looking fit as always. It makes Tom’s face break out into a smile, and he bites his bottom lip before it goes out of control.
Which is what Danny does when he sees the food littering the table.
Tom grins at him when their eyes meet, Danny strides over to him, wraps his arms around his waist, and picks him up an inch above the ground. It’s no strain on Danny-he’s lighter now, but that’s all about to change.
Danny leads him to one of the chairs and sits opposite him, looking earnest, waiting for Tom to make the first action.
At first, Tom feels queasy just looking at them, his stomach doing acrobatic flips and twisting in turning like a complicated machine. He wants to turn away, wants to get up, whisper in Danny’s ear, I’m not really hungry, I ate too much cheesecake yesterday, but then he remembers his reaction to his fainting.
He doesn’t want to see Danny looking like that ever again.
So he picks up a slice of toast, slathers butter all over the crusty surface with the butter knife, and, looking at Danny with a smile, takes a large bite.
When it travels down his throat, it feels foreign, like it doesn’t belong, and he feels as though his body is trying to fight it off, make him drop the rest because he doesn’t want to go back looking like he did before. He was so close.
But Danny’s smiling again, enjoying the sight of him eating, going back to the same Tom that he misses, and picking up his courage one more time, he takes another huge chunk.
He swallows and grins.
It’s going to take time, he knows, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t do it. He just has to ignore that little voice inside his head telling him to stop. He has to keep going.
Danny thinks he’s beautiful as it is, and he doesn’t want to change that for the world.