Gelegenheitssex, Oder?
Juri wants it to be more. Jan won't stop talking about his girlfriend.
Juri snags a drag from Jan’s cigarette, pulling the cylinder from Jan’s chilly fingers and lifting it to his lips. The flicker of Jan’s eyes on him is like the sweetest caress.
“I thought you didn’t smoke.” It sounds like a rebuke and also like a question. Juri doesn’t but the chance to touch something that was on Jan’s lips, even just for a moment was too tempting.
“Don’t.”
The cigarette tastes like ash, awful, but also faintly like Jan. Juri holds on longer than he’d normally want to because of that. He’s smoked before, messed around as a kid but never enough to acquire a taste for it. The smoke filling his lungs makes him want to cough. He wonders how Jan can stand it.
A weird urge to steal Jan’s almost empty pack overtakes him. Just take it and hold on to it forever and ever. The urge is freaky and yet Juri can’t shake it. These days together, these rare moments, aren’t enough. He wants something more solid than moments, even if it means bodily taking something from Jan to get it.
He knows he’s lucky to even get this time with him. The others…aren’t there. Linke’s moved and Frank’s just plain moved on. Juri has no interest in talking to the other two. Some wounds don’t heal so easily.
You could say Juri’s moved on. He’s teaching now, drumming, making enough money to live. Drumming fills his life now. It makes him wonder sometimes where he ever found the time to do anything else. You could say he’s moved on if it weren’t for the discordant fact that he’s standing outside a building in the freezing Neumünster winter trying to share a cigarette with the one person he can’t seem to let go of.
Thus, the visits, each one increasingly hard to explain away.
Before Panik, they didn’t know each other, didn’t have any thing to do with one another. Now, after, they shouldn’t. It should go back to Timo and David, and Linke, and Jan. Instead, that friendship is shattered and the four are spread across a country and a world.
He hasn’t forgotten the others, per se, he just hasn’t spent the free moments drumming can’t fill worrying and wondering about them, wanting to hold them and make sure they’re okay and since when has he considered Jan in any way fragile? He’s just…not as likely to have walked out of that steady on his feet as Linke or Frank.
“I really like her.”
“Good.”
Why was Jan telling him this? To assuage some measure of guilt over the sex? Juri didn’t need this reminder that they were nothing, could never be anything. That he was lucky to be standing next to Jan right now.
“She’s nice. We see each other every day. That’s how we met- she’s in school, too.”
“Hn.” Juri’s answer is noncommittal. Great, he thinks. Great, great, great. Wonderful. Her selling point is that she’s nice and he sees her every day. And that she’s a girl, probably.
“She’s studying microbiology. We share the labs a lot.” Juri wants Jan to shut up. He loves the sound of his voice, every change in timbre making his heart quicken and other parts react, but he would give anything for him to shut up right now. “You know, most of the people leave the lab a mess, everything out of order, but you know when she’s just left because everything’s where it’s supposed to be.”
The talking continues, with less and less response on Juri’s part. There is nothing he can think of to say to the chattering about a girl he doesn’t know and definitely doesn’t want to meet. He detests her and he hasn’t even met her. It is a vague hate since he has no reason other than her name makes Jan happy but it is definitely hate.
“I’m going to miss the train,” he tells Jan eventually.
ØØØ
Day in and day out, Juri thinks about Jan.
He pushes Jan’s face to the side to get his teaching done but everything reminds him of the little blonde. It’s worst when he’s practicing. Alone, in his apartment, he loses himself in his drums and the music he knows- and comes up with Jan’s face, with the way he looks when he’s a second from coming, with the way he sounds as he is.
Juri has no privacy, in his own head.
He has friends but none he feels comfortable talking about this with. Not many people know where he stands on sexuality and far fewer he wants to talk about it with. Even fewer who know who Jan is and the tenuous boundary they have between friends with benefits and more.
Juri picks Frank because Frank is gayer than he is and Linke is too difficult to get a hold of even before the hassle of international calling. Frank is also kind and willing to listen, and not above taking a call from someone about such a base subject.
But Frank is not Jan and Frank’s voice at 2 a.m. calling from a different time zone does nothing to quell the raging hard on Juri has. So he hangs up, letting Frank get back to one of the hundreds of shows and movies he’s involved in and sits there, pondering how perverted it would be to call Jan right then.
Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Juri has never been one to rush things. He’s relaxed, letting life move him like a sailboat floating on a river. He’s got a course, definitely, and the sails are mostly open, heading into the wind but he’s not touching the rudder, except when he’s about to crash.
The current takes him with it and he rarely does more than keep watch, doing whatever the boat demands.
When he was with Panik, the current was stronger, the water choppier, and the winds constantly changing.
Now he’s gone back to idly pushing the wheel this way and that, avoiding the rocks and debris floating in the river. The river’s quiet now, almost like, for a time, he was on a different river altogether.
He wants to be back on that other river. Not for the excitement- he doesn’t need any more excitement. Not for the winds whipping about, changing almost too fast to fasten the sails- he’s happy with his calm winds. No, what Juri longs for are the crewmates he had.
Most of his life, he was steering his own boat, alone but not lonely. He had a taste, though, for a time, of a boat with laughter and anger, happiness and excitement, a boat with any emotion than quiet amusement.
He got kicked off that boat when he and a few other key crewmates threatened mutiny. Luckily, Juri had his own boat he could hop on to. Frank had a racing sloop. Linke had a ketch.
Jan had the dinghy from the original boat. He took it and he turned back the way they’d come while the rest sailed out to sea. Juri quickly found the river he had started out on. Passing launches and yachts brought news of the others. Frank was racing now and he was good. Linke had crossed the whole ocean and was in another land. The other boat stayed where it was, continuing on down the river. Juri realized by then that his river had never been all that far from that other river and maybe, just maybe, if he tried, he could get news to that other river, see whether that dinghy was still afloat.
It was.
Somehow, that hurt just as much.
ØØØ
He’s in Neumünster again and it’s not to visit family.
He feels like a booty call. He waves the unpleasant feeling off as he steps off the train and sees a shivering Jan wrapped up in a hoodie, trying valiantly to glare at him from underneath his hood. Juri grins, shifting his bag to one shoulder. He sweeps his shivering friend up in hug and feels a small thrill when Jan clings to him longer than necessary. Much longer.
“Missed you,” Jan chatters into his ear. “What took you so long?”
“Teaching,” Juri answers with a smile. They walk back to the station and the warmth. Jan walks close to him, his presence a warm comfort.
The crowd thickens around the door. Jan is pushed against him. Juri closes his eyes, biting his lip at the touch. A hand brushes his. Juri ignores it. Probably a fellow passenger trying to get inside. The hand brushes his again, then twines its fingers with his. Juri’s eyes fly open and he looks down.
Jan smiles tentatively at him.
Juri smiles back.
Maybe being a booty call isn’t as unbearable as he thought.