A Stranger to Sorrow Chapter 15
“Rosie! How goes life on the Sugarland Express?"
“Diabetic.” He heard the long, hacking cough down the line, her asthmatic greeting card. “Monty’s spittin’ chunks. What the hell, Padaloser? I go on the Brad and Angie Saviour Tour and I get back to find you’ve gone feral on us? Since when did the Sugarshack not meet your every feeble need?”
“Monty Sugar, editor in chief. You can’t make this shit up. He had a heart attack this week?”
“Naw, he blue-pencilled Stanley so bad the poor guy got carried out on a stretcher. Figure that got the stress out of his system for June. And ‘course you’re not there to raise his blood pressure every five fucking minutes.”
“Hey. Have some fucking sensitivity, Rosie. My uncle died.”
“Yeah, yeah. The uncle you couldn’t stand. So what tree you shakin’ in Titsville?”
Jared laughed. “You know, I’ve been back here for a week and it took you and all your class ten seconds to come up with that one.”
“I’m flippin’ you the bird. Just so you know.”
“Ooooh. Oooh, yeah, harder, Rosie, harder.”
She cackled. “So I miss your huge, sweaty carcass. Why’dja leave me? We had something beautiful.”
“We did. We do.” Jared nodded at a passerby who was staring at him with distrust. “Rosie, you know you’re the best steam-shovel we got…”
“Uh-oh. What do you want?”
“Track two sisters? Lotte Ulrike and Karin Anna Ackles.” He spelt the names for her. “Placed in foster care in July 1997. Foster family Corstens, in McKinney.”
“They do a dice ‘n’ dash?”
“What? No. Jeez. No, they’re missing people. Well, missing from my story, anyway. I’m thinkin’ heartrending reunion for my main angle.”
“Uh-huh. And what’s my reward for finding these Danish Pastries for you?”
“Stars tickets. Any game you want.”
He heard her sucking on her inhaler, and felt again the ever-present shiver of concern that accompanied any thought of her lungs and her 40 cigarettes a day.
“You’re on. Give me a couple.”
The phone went dead, and Jared packed his own away, pleased. He didn’t need to ask the time frame - Rosie McHendry’s ‘couple’ was hours. If the girls could be tracked, and he had every reason to believe they could, she’d find them. He clapped his hands together in satisfaction and headed off to interview whoever would give him the time of day and energy enough to complain.
When he finally drove out through the wilderness of Parcae Road, past all the empty fields, the abandoned fences, he had a notebook half-full of suspicion and resentment. Titchville was a blown-knee athlete, propped against the bar, holding reminisces up to the light as if they were proof and demand that things should be better. Mothers clutched their children’s hands tightly, their fear as clear as a statement. The men respected his height, sneered at his profession, accorded him the briefest of rights on the basis of kinship, and spoke of lost jobs, and missed prospects, and deaf’n’blind government, down south.
He was beyond glad to be pulling into the drive of Jensen’s home.
And it did something more to him to see that Jensen had come out to the front porch, wiping his hands on a rag, squinting into the afternoon light to greet him.
“I bring bear claws!” Jared swung the bag high as he got out of the car. “And beer.” Jensen grinned at him, soft, welcoming, and Jared’s heart sang.
“Reckon you can help me with a window frame first?”
“Reckon I can.”
Jensen nodded, and dropped back into the mirk of the hallway, Jared scrambling to stay close behind.
The work always came first, and it was comfortable, calming, helping to bring something lost back into the warmth of being wanted.
They worked for an hour before Jensen called a halt.
“Yeah? Early for you.”
“Yeah. Well.” He shrugged a little. “Think this is as much as I can do with the supplies I have. Need more sugar soap for the walls, for starters.”
“Okay. So - beers and bears?”
Jensen gave a small laugh.
“Sure.”
They climbed up onto the top balcony, the one that faced north to the hills and the college in the distance, half-shaded by the old pine tree framing the house. Jared cracked off the tops and handed a bottle to Jensen; they clinked them together in harmony, and then stood leaning against the newly-repaired railing, feeling the sun seep into their bones.
“Bet you missed this,” Jared said. When Jensen looked at him quizzically, Jared felt a sudden flush of concern at the topic. “I mean - when you were inside. This. The view.”
“Mmm.” Jensen dragged his T shirt over his head and dropped it onto the boards at their feet, then re-settled his cap low over his eyes. The beer bottle sagged in one hand over the balcony as they both looked out over the wilderness garden. It was more than a minute before he spoke again.
“The things I missed… it wasn’t the big things. Baseball. Friends. Family, fuck, I didn’t miss them, not really. I buried those things, hardly thought about them at all. Those things, you can’t - “ He gestured, no words for that loss. “But little things, stupid things, I missed. Pop tarts. Wearing flipflops in summer. Friendly dogs. And choice. Choice of anything. What you got to eat, when you woke up, what TV station was on. And smells. I missed jasmine. Inside smells like…” Jensen paused again, his eyes distant. “The smell of it, that’s the first thing, every morning, when you’re still kinda asleep and the realization hasn’t hit you that you’re still in there. It’s the smell that cuts through. The minute that gets hold of you, the dream is gone.”
It was more than Jensen had said in three days. He stood with his head bowed, fingers working hard against each other as if grinding rocks to dust in each hand.
Without thinking, Jared took a step toward him, reached out with his hand to cup the back of Jensen’s head. Jensen stood still, un-tethered but caught.
“This?” Jared bent to him, kissed him on the lips, gently, mouth closed, eyes wide open and searching. “Did you miss this?”
He saw how Jensen’s mouth breathed open, how his eyes grew large and dark and so deeply, deeply desperate. Had a minute to guess at what would happen next, and then Jensen surged against him, gripping his shoulders, one arm circling around to bunch the shirt at his back.
“No,” Jensen said, “no,” but he pushed hard into Jared’s body, hipbones connecting, finding softness and hardness between. A sad little sound escaped him, and he looked away from Jared’s face, buried his own into Jared’s neck and gasped into his shoulder.
Just that sound was enough to make Jared bend and turn to find Jensen’s mouth again, to bring him up and with him, tongues and teeth and breaths so harsh they hurt, they burned.
With a lost word Jensen turned his face away, burrowed it against Jared’s neck as he gasped, and shuddered, as his body bucked into Jared’s, his hands gripping the shirt so hard it threatened to rip in two. There was nothing Jared could do but meet him there, follow his own body’s ancient demand, pulling Jensen tight.
It came to him, in that long moment of everything that floated beyond orgasm, that he would never be happy again unless Jensen was hard against him, with him. The realization was excruciating, a piercing sweetness unlike anything he’d ever known before, terrifying in its vulnerability, its openness to the infinite.
Then Jensen drew back, and he heard the words, “God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never -“
“Hey. No.” Jared cupped Jensen’s head, a feeling he guessed was tenderness flooding his being. “You didn’t take this. I gave it to you.”
Jensen raised his eyes to Jared’s, and he saw the echo of his own helplessness in them.
“No. I- I don’t know what I’m doing.” Jensen pulled back completely this time, breaking contact. “Christ, Jared, this shouldn’t be happening. You don’t know me, you don’t know what’s happened.”
“I know enough.”
“Really?” Jensen looked about him, found his discarded T shirt and then dropped it. “That’s bullshit. You don’t get it, you don’t get me. They hate me, man, they want to run me out of town on a rail, and here you are - “ He gestured towards Jared as though he were a stranger, as though they hadn’t just rutted against each other, shared that sweet madness.
“Yeah. Here I am.” Not stubbornness; certainty. “With you.”
“With…” A shake of his head, and Jensen turned back into the darkness of the house, clomping down the stairs to the yard below. Jared followed him. There was nothing else he could do.
Jensen kept trudging towards the line of small trees that marked the end of the garden.
“Where are you going?”
“Creek.”
At least he’s talking to me, Jared thought. And the creek made sense. When he drew alongside, he saw that Jensen was scowling.
“You really don’t get to do this,” Jensen muttered to the ground.
“Yeah? Do what, exactly?”
“This.” A wave of his hand. “Jump into my mess.”
“Think it’s a free country. Can jump into just about anything I choose, last I looked.”
“Jared! You don’t know what could happen here.” Exasperation, despair, but it was as if that moment of surrender between them had given Jared his own personal Rosetta Stone that allowed him to read Jensen Ackles completely. Because now he heard, above all else, the need.
“You’ve never really done this before, have you?”
“What? Done what?” Jensen pushed through the low-lying bushes to stand at the creek’s edge.
“Asked for help.”
If he’d punched him, he couldn’t have shocked Jensen into such stillness. Jared pressed on.
“More than cleaning up the old house. I mean asking someone to stand up beside you.”
The creek was too sluggish to sing, but it did trickle between the roots of the nearest cedar elms. Insects hummed; a crow called, harsh and high. Somehow these sounds only served to make it feel more hushed, more strained towards silence.
At last, Jensen made an unhappy gesture.
“I know you’re smart. You do this, right, figure people out?”
“Jensen, I -“
“And you’re not doing it because it’s your job. I get that.” He looked straight at Jared for the first time since they’d gasped in each other’s arms. “I get that - you actually want to be here. Be part of this.”
“So, what? Is it because I’m a Padalecki? You don’t trust me?”
Jensen made a dismissive noise.
“I don’t know what to trust. I don’t even trust myself. Shit, Jared, I’m tryin’ to figure out everything here. What I - how I should live. What I should be. Who. I don’t know.” His tone was disgusted. “I sound like some whiny emo brat.”
“Jensen.” Jared’s stomach suddenly dropped in horror. “Jense, you are gay? Because I wouldn’t have - just now, that wasn’t..?”
“Oh, man.” Jensen spun on his heel, his face turned away, towards the house. “I went to jail when I was still figuring out who I was. Hell, I was still figuring out what I wanted to do, to study. And once I was in Cole, once - you just, there isn’t a way to talk about that. To figure that. Things happen that just - they’re just the way things are. It’s just the way things are. And you cope. Or you don’t. And I coped.” He dropped his head, and ran a hand through his short-cropped hair. “So now you ask me if I’m gay? And I got no answer for you. I don’t - I don’t remember what that kid thought. What he wanted. I only remember what he did to get by in Cole.”
Jared stood with his mouth slowly opening.
“I didn’t mean - Jensen, I wouldn’t -“
Jensen raised a hand, still facing away.
“I know you wouldn’t, and I don’t expect you to understand. I just need you to know that when you ask me a question like that, I’m the poster boy for arrested development. I thought I was something, then I wasn’t, and now I have to work it all out again.”
A bird started piping somewhere from the yard, frenetic and startling in the quiet heat. Jared reached out, dared to grip Jensen’s shoulder.
“I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. I mean, I can’t, man. So you got to know I’m going to keep getting it wrong. That’s a given.”
“A given, huh?” Jensen half-turned towards him, and his smile was real, if twisted. “Then that’s something solid we can work with.”