(500) Days Of Jesse - Part Seven
Title: (500) Days Of Jesse
Part: Seven
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jewnicorn/(500) Days Of Summer crossover. Loosely based on the plot of the film.
Disclaimer: Never happened, all a figment of my imagination. I am not affiliated with anyone mentioned in this work of fiction. (500) Days Of Summer is property of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
A/N: Remember to pay close attention to the numbers before each section, they denote the number of days that Andrew and Jesse have known one another at each point -same as the film, of course- it'll help you in keeping track of where they are on their 500 day timeline :)
Previous: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six
~
(431)
Three nights ago, Andrew had fallen face first into his pillows dressed in that ridiculous tuxedo, and -for the most part anyway- hasn’t moved since. The first night, he didn’t sleep a wink. The second night, his body gave in and sunk into a dreamless -though not restful- sleep somewhere around four a.m. The third night, last night, he slept like a baby, completely exhausted, both physically and emotionally.
All of this reminds him way too much of the few hours he spent curled up on his bed after he and Jesse fought over Andrew punching that drunken homophobe. At that point, Andrew couldn’t have imagined a time when he’d felt worse, and even then, he knew that he’d probably get Jesse back because it was just a stupid fight after all. Even throughout the months between their actual break up and the day of Armie and Elizabeth’s wedding, he hadn’t felt as terribly as he does now. During that time, he knew it was over for good and there was nothing he could do about it, there was no real point in being upset then.
But he’d been given a second chance at the wedding. They spent the entire night together, they held hands on the way home and Jesse snuggled down into Andrew’s shoulder in the way that he always used to. That’s why it hurts even more now, because now he’s had his heart broken twice. Despite it all, he still wants him back, even now.
At some point during the second day of wallowing, he ripped off his tux, threw it to the other side of the room, and made the choice to forgo clothing, except boxers, until further notice because he wasn‘t planning on seeing anyone for a long, long time. He hasn’t shaved or showered, he’s barely gotten up to eat, and he hasn’t been to work. Though, somewhere amongst that haze of tears, periodic fits of rage and blind confusion in which he honestly begins to believe that Jesse’s party was just some awful nightmare, he had completely forgotten to switch off his alarm clock.
He’s practically hanging off of the bed when it wakes him with its shrill, piercing cry at eight a.m -he’s meant to be at play rehearsal by nine, but he’s not planning to go. His eyes, all blood shoot and dark, fly open on the first beep and his hand darts up to shut it off all before he rolls over, tangles himself up in the sheets and falls back to sleep. Sleep is good place to be, because right now, he’s too drained to dream of anything, let alone Jesse.
(432)
No change.
(433)
No change.
(434)
The alarm goes off at eight as usual, but this time, he’s already awake, staring at the red glow of the numbers through even redder eyes.
It takes two hours of staring up at the ceiling and a fierce growl of the stomach before Andrew decides that he ought to get up. His bathrobe is hanging on the back of his door so he puts it on before heading out towards the kitchen and into the too bright light of the morning to find something to eat. He checks the fridge, just stares into it. Half a carton of orange juice, an egg and two tomatoes. Not much in the way of sustenance. Zombie-like, he heads for the cupboards and finds nothing in there, nothing that he feels like eating anyway, and he‘s out of cereal. He can’t actually remember the last time he went food shopping.
For the last few days he’s just been going through the motions without really thinking about it. Get woken up by the alarm at eight, shut it off, go to sleep for another two hours, grab some breakfast, sit around in bed, eat, sleep, pee, lay around wallowing in self pity, sleep. Repeat. The way he’d figured it, if he kept to a routine then it’d keep his mind off of Jesse, and the guy that kissed him, and the pure catastrophe that the party was last week. But, he hadn’t taken into account how much sitting-around-doing-nothing- time that he had. When he’s awake, Jesse is all that he sees, the image of Jesse being kissed by that guy is practically burned onto the insides of Andrew’s eyelids so that he sees it whenever he blinks, sometimes he’s scared he may throw up.
The crying came to a complete stop about three days ago, now it’s just a case of trying to get out of this self-imposed isolation. His phone has been ringing almost non-stop. Emma, Justin, Joe, Ryan, even Carey has called. Where are you? Why haven’t you been at work? Are you okay? Why won’t you answer the door? We’re worried about you.
Jesse hasn’t called. Not once. He probably didn’t see Andrew leave.
It’s gotten to the point where Andrew just doesn’t want to care any more, about any of it, about Jesse, but unfortunately, he still does. He tried so hard with him but it didn’t work. Andrew was so sure that Jesse was The One, his one, but that whole idea‘s gone to shit and he‘s starting to question his belief in fate and destiny and the possibility of there being someone out there for everyone. This puts his whole belief system out of whack and it’s unnerving, to find that everything he’d had faith in his entire life was a complete lie.
He’d put so much time and effort into their relationship for nothing, just to get heartbroken. If that’s fate, then fuck fate. What’s the point of even trying? He’s not sad or even angry with Jesse any more, he’s angry with the universe, for giving him something so wonderful just to tear it away. He can’t be mad at Jesse, not really, they’re not together any more, haven’t been for months, so it’s not like he was cheating or anything like that, he didn‘t do anything wrong.
All Andrew wants is Jesse back, but he can’t think of a way to make it happen…
Andrew’s hair is all stuck up and messy on one side in the way that always used to make Jesse laugh, and he still hasn’t shaved or showered. He decides to head out of his apartment for the first time and down to a nearby grocery store to get something to eat. Fuck it, he keeps his bathrobe on, who cares if he’s not dressed?
People stare, whisper things, point. Doesn’t matter, he barely pays attention to them.
It’s 10:04am and he buys a six pack of beer and a share size pack of M&Ms, which earns him a disgusted, condescending look from the guy behind the counter who just takes Andrew’s money without saying a word.
For the first time in days, Andrew speaks, his voice hoarse from lack of use.
“What?”
With that, he picks up his bag and turns to leave. Back to his apartment for a few more days spent pathetic and alone.
(440)
“Hey look, it’s the return of the Prodigal Son.” It’s Justin, sat at the bar with his right fist raised.
Andrew bumps his own against it. “Hey.”
“Where the hell have you been, man?”
“At home.”
Andrew doesn’t ask Justin if he wants a drink, he knows he does, so he goes over to the fridge to fish a bottle out and Justin watches him the entire time.
“You haven’t answered any of our calls, the memory on your machine must be full by now.”
“I have fifty-six messages on there,” Andrew says, placing the bottle down.
Justin leans forward a little bit, it‘s lunch time on a Thursday, so it‘s pretty quiet in here, he doesn‘t need to speak loudly this time. “All we wanted was one call, one quick, ten second call letting us know you were okay, then we would’ve left you alone until you were ready to come out of hibernation.”
“I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” Andrew frowns, wiping the countertop. Usually it’s the barkeep listening to the sorrows of the patron, but he and Justin have reversed those roles today.
“Yeah, we got that much,” Justin nods, leaning back to take a sip of his drink. “So, what brings you out of the cocoon?”
“I got a call from my boss and he threatened to fire me if I kept missing shifts.”
Justin widens his eyes. “Well, that would do it.”
“I should have just let him fire me,” Andrew shrugs, staring down at the cloth in his hand as it slides across the polished wood.
“What, so you could eventually run out of money and end up kicked out of your apartment?”
“It’d the kick up the arse I need.” He finally looks up, right into Justin’s eyes, a look of grave seriousness on his face. “It’d give me a reason to actually do something with my life. You know, I’ve been working in this bar since I arrived here five years ago. I came here to become a proper, professional actor.” He uses both hands to gesture to himself. “Now look at me.”
Justin shrugs, nonchalant. “Then quit.”
“What?”
“Quit. Leave. Get out of here, go do something. It‘ll help you get over him, putting your mind to work on something different.” It’s strange, how in the beginning, Justin was encouraging Andrew to ask Jesse out, and now, he’s coming up with ways of forgetting him. Justin’s idea, however, seems appealing. A fresh start.
Justin continues, “Andrew, you’re the only one who can make those changes.”
Andrew nods, smiling just a little, the first time he‘s smiled at all in over a week. “I guess you’re right.”
“You know I’m right,” Justin smirks, self-satisfied.
Andrew stares off into the middle distance, appearing to be talking more to himself than to his friend, as if he‘s just made an important realisation. “On the opening night of A View From The Bridge, right after Jesse kissed me, this agent came up to me and asked if I had representation, he gave me his card and said I should call him, but I… I don’t know, I just forgot. I was too wrapped in Jesse, too excited, too focussed on getting him out of there and being alone with him, that I just forgot. I don‘t even know where I put that guy‘s card, I could‘ve thrown it away for all I know.” Andrew thinks back to the diner, to the day they broke up, when Jesse said that Andrew had lost focus on his acting because of their relationship. “Well, I guess he was right about one thing, then.”
That’s when he starts to picture it, how his life could turn out if he just quit, if he went home and found that card and got an agent and actually became a professional actor. These things he sees, they’re all of the things he’d pictured whilst he was waiting in that Heathrow terminal for the flight that would take him to New York and his new home. Lights, cameras, parties, awards, success, critical acclaim. That was five years ago, before he got so distracted. The best part of all of it though, is the thought that all of those things could still be within his grasp, if only he could reach out and grab it.
“I’m gonna do it.” He says all of a sudden, slapping his hands down onto the bar. “I’m gonna quit.”
Andrew turns, starts heading for the door that leads out back, feeling stronger than he has in weeks and a hell of a lot more hopeful. As he goes, he hears Justin say:
“Do it, before you change your mind.”
(453)
It felt good, quitting. It was freeing, as if he’d been tied down for years without knowing it and now that all those bindings were gone, he felt so much lighter. That feeling lasted for all of a week and a half, because no matter how much he looked, Andrew couldn’t find that agent’s card anywhere.
So now he’s single and unemployed, without any real direction in life.
He’s had nothing do to except flip through the Yellow Pages looking for talent agencies to call. They want headshots and résumés, but those things are expensive and you kind of need a job in order to pay for them. He plans to go looking for a new place to work sometime next week.
Since then, since all he does is sit around at home all day, Andrew has often found himself fixating on the tiniest things out of sheer boredom, spacing out in the middle of conversations with his friends. Right now, Andrew’s staring at Emma’s ponytail, how coppery her hair looks in the sunlight and the way it appears to ripple and shimmer in the breeze from the open window. He’d spent so much time noticing all of these small, almost insignificant instances of beauty in Jesse, and now that he’s not here, Andrew’s realised that those little things are everywhere, kind of like that weird kid in American Beauty with his plastic bag video.
It’s Joe that knocks him out of it this time. “What about this mug?”
Andrew looks up, he’s sat on his bed, Emma’s rifling through his closet and Joe is out in the kitchen raiding the cupboards. They’re all dressed in thin sweatpants and t-shirts since Summer is on its way, and today, they’re getting rid of everything that reminds Andrew of Jesse, windows thrown wide open as if to air the whole place out and make it fresh. The mug Joe’s holding, Jesse bought it for Andrew, and he definitely doesn’t want it any more, doesn’t want that tiny reminder of how good things used to be for him. It’s depressing.
“Bin it,” he calls.
Joe nods, throws it into a black bag of trash and carries on searching for unwanted mementos. Andrew hears it break.
“What about this one?”
“Get rid of it,” Andrew says, he doesn’t even bother to look this time, he’s busy going through his books, hunting out anything that Jesse may have left behind.
Emma must have moved over to the doorway to look at the mug, because she says, “but it’s so pretty, look at the little kittens.”
“You can have it.”
Joe enters the bedroom to give it to her, and leans against Andrew’s doorway, staring down at the three piles made up of clothing that Emma has extracted from Andrew’s closet. Jesse’s clothes, clothes bought for Andrew by Jesse, clothes bought for Jesse by Andrew. Each pile is smaller than the last and Andrew wants them thrown out too. Though, if Emma gets her way she’ll probably take it all down to a thrift store after picking out some stuff for herself, because, and Andrew has never understood this fact, but women seem to love wearing men’s shirts.
Andrew would take it back to him, but that would hurt… way too much. He asked the others if they’d maybe do it, and they all said that it’d be too awkward, so this is the only way.
“I can’t believe how much stuff he left here,” Emma says, putting the mug aside to rifle through the Jesse pile.
Four t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some boxers and a lone sock. This is just the clothes though, there’s also the mugs, and the fridge magnets, and the game of Cluedo under Andrew’s bed, and probably a load of other crap that Andrew’s forgotten about. Andrew plans to stick the Mike Dirnt poster on eBay. On top all of that, there’s the Green Day records, and the record player, but those aren’t the sort of things you just throw out, and Andrew wants to keep them anyway. He tells himself that he’ll eventually forget that they had anything to do with his ex. All of the memories attached to those things should fade away over time, hopefully.
“There’s probably more of my things over at his,” Andrew says, getting up to check that Emma got everything from the closet. “We spent more time there than we ever did here. He probably got rid of it all the day we broke up, I doubt I’ll ever see any of it again.”
“Andrew… and don’t get mad, but, I still think you’re over-reacting,” Emma says. From the thick silence that preceded that statement, Andrew can tell that she had given Joe a very meaningful look, noiselessly communicating that one of them should say something.
He replies coolly. “How am I over-reacting?”
“It was one kiss, I saw it too. It was a quick peck on the lips and you didn’t even stick around to ask questions or get an explanation or anything like that.”
“I don’t need one, he was off with me all night, he didn’t want me there.”
“Then why did he invite you?” Joe says, catching Andrew off guard. He looks to his neighbour, Joe’s smirking because he knows he’s right.
Andrew stares down at the floor, mouth hanging open dumbly. “I…”
“Point proven.”
“I should’ve seen this coming -you missed this hoodie, it‘s his too- I should’ve known this was going to happen. It was all way too good to last.” Andrew bunches the fabric of the hoodie up in his fist, the same black one Jesse was wearing the day they met at Barnes & Noble. “Why didn’t I see it?”
“Because you were in love with him,” Emma replies simply, taking the jacket from him.
“Yeah, this is a classic case of rose tinted glasses, buddy. You were only focusing on the good things and disregarded all the low points, because, well… you loved him,” Joe adds with a shrug.
He can feel their eyes following him as he walks over to the other side of the room. “Well, I don’t any more. That‘s it, this is a new chapter for me. Not even a new chapter, it’s a whole new book. Clean slate.”
He kneels down to check under his bed, and that’s when he finds it. It’s this old, battered filofax that he keeps all of his paperwork in, bank statements, insurance policies, receipts, that sort of thing.
He remembers now, coming home on opening night with Jesse, that card still in his hand, absentmindedly throwing it onto a pile of opened letters before pushing Jesse into his bedroom and forgetting about it altogether. More letters piled up on top of it to the point where the pile got so large that Andrew needed to get it out of the way, he’d shoved all of it into this box. He finds the card, sandwiched between two nondescript, probably important letters covered in tiny print.
Holding it up for the other two to see, he smiles brightly, almost like his old self again. “Look!”
Emma squints at it, unable to read the text, so Andrew explains and all she says is, “Call him, call him now.”
“Yeah, in a sec.”
Andrew feels bright and hopeful with this warm glow of hope filling up his chest and spreading outwards. He keeps looking through the papers, maybe there are some other great things in here that he’d forgotten about too.
At the bottom, he finds a stiff brown envelope, on which his name, address, and the words ‘Do not bend’ are written in swirly, girlish script. This came from Elizabeth, mailed to him a few weeks ago, containing the picture of he and Jesse at her wedding. Unlike the business card of that agent, this was shoved away on purpose because looking at it made Andrew’s heart ache.
“I need another rubbish bag,” he says monotonously, getting up. “I’m gonna call this guy too.”
Emma smiles at him proudly, watching him leave the room, Joe gives him a pat on his back as he goes.
Andrew hides the envelope under his shirt so that the other two can’t see it as he heads out to the kitchen, but makes sure to keep the business card in full view for their benefit. He doesn’t need another bag, he doesn’t plan to throw the photo away, because he wants to keep it for reasons that are unfathomable to him at the moment. He’d told them that he didn’t love Jesse any more, but that was a lie. He still loves him, just a little less than before.
Hastily, to make sure that neither of them are looking, he hides the picture in the cutlery drawer, knowing that neither of his friends will check in there for any Jesse memorabilia. He’d have hidden it in the living room, but they haven’t even started on that yet.
Andrew’s glad he found it, if Emma did, if Joe did, they would have held it up, questioned him on it, ‘What about this?’. He wants the picture, so if he had’ve said yes to keeping it, then they would’ve known that he’s still not over him, not just yet. Andrew wants to them to think he’s done with Jesse, it’s a proximity thing. If his friends, if those closest to him believe that he’s over Jesse, and eventually stop mentioning him altogether, then hopefully, Andrew will start to believe it too.
Then, trying to push the last few moments to the back of his mind, Andrew pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, and calls the number. Someone picks up, he’s not really sure what to say, it’s not a receptionist or a secretary that picks up, the line goes straight to the guy whose name is printed above the number on the card.
“Uh, hi,” Andrew says, unsure, feeling nervous and little sick at the prospect of something good happening for him. “This is Andrew… Andrew Garfield, from A View From The Bridge in Queens. We spoke a few months ago, and I’m only just getting back to you, so yeah, I’m sorry.”
After a second or two of silence during which Andrew contemplates hanging up, the guy says, “Oh yes, I remember you.”
(460-488)
Andrew’s new agent is this guy called Rick. He’s not the best agent out there, but he’s good enough, and it’s not like Andrew’s got offers rolling in from anyone else in New York.
Mostly, he sends Andrew to auditions for commercials and a few off-Broadway plays, he gets a call-back from time and to time and he did get picked for one cat food commercial that everyone in the country will be likely to see on their televisions very soon. Justin hasn‘t stopped making fun of him for it, but it‘s okay.
Nothing major comes along for a couple of weeks, not until Andrew gets a phone call during which Rick explains that he’s managed to pull some strings and get Andrew an audition for The Book Of Mormon.
“I’ll need you in Manhattan in a little over a week, okay?”
Andrew hangs up the phone, jumps up a down, and makes plans to get himself there.
(499)
And that’s what brings us back to the subway station. The universe allowed Andrew all of a month to forget about Jesse. He was all but gone from Andrew’s mind, the picture of the two of them shoved back into the bottom of Andrew’s filofax. A month before Jesse strolled back into his life as if he’d never left. A month before Andrew’s heart started to ache with wanting again.
“Train’s here,” Jesse says.
Andrew looks down, to where Jesse’s still gripping his forearm in the way that reminds him of their first date, and just waits for him to let go. Once he does, Andrew heads for the train door and prays that Jesse doesn’t hope to continue their conversation.
He finds two spare seats in the otherwise crowded carriage. He sits down in one and slings his backpack into the other, implying that he doesn’t want Jesse to take it. He wants him to just go away because Andrew doesn’t want him ruining this not perfect, but still okay, world that he’s built up for himself over the last few weeks.
“I’m gonna sit here then,” Andrew says, looking out the window, hoping that Jesse goes away and that everything doesn’t come crashing down around himself.
Jesse just stands there awkwardly. “Okay, well, um, it looks like everywhere else is full, so can I…?”
Andrew looks up to find him gesturing to the seat currently occupied by his backpack. A large part of him wants to say ‘No’ or ‘Do you really think that’s the best idea?’ but he can’t. He knows why he can’t say it.
“Yeah. Yeah fine, whatever,” Andrew moves his bag away. “Let me just move this…”
So Jesse sits, and the train starts to move, and neither of them say a word for a few minutes. Andrew feels as though he’s pulled every muscle in his body as he’s straining so hard to ensure that a decent sized gap remains between the two of their bodies. He doesn’t want any more physical contact, because even the smallest touch from Jesse can bring back floods and floods of memories. All of which Andrew’s strived to repress because they make him nostalgic in a really bad way.
Andrew looks to the window and sees Jesse smiling at him in the reflection, and oh God! Even that brings back memories. He sighs hopelessly, will this journey never end? Why are they always meeting on trains?
“So, where are you headed?” Jesse asks.
“Manhattan.”
Andrew‘s forced to look at him, forced to look into his perfect, beautiful face. He wants to cry because after a month and a half of not seeing him, Andrew’s brain had forgotten all of the minor details. The golden colour of Jesse’s eyelashes, the flecks of darker blue in his otherwise pale blue eyes, the freckles on his cheek bones.
Jesse’s really smiling now, and Andrew is forcing himself not to smile back, telling himself that he’s his own person and not just some hopeless planet orbiting around Jesse, the star of this whole thing. Then he starts to think that maybe he’ll never stop getting pulled in, that this is it, he’s stuck with it. He’s been resigned to a life of wanting but not being able to have. That’s kind of scary and frustrating all at the same time. He’s so jealous of that guy, whoever it was that got to kiss Jesse, because he’s probably a huge part of his life now. Andrew’s so jealous it makes him feel sick.
“Manhattan? No kidding?”
“You’re not going there too?” Andrew asks.
“I am,” Jesse nods, still smiling.
“Oh…”
“My play’s getting put on, off Broadway, but still, I need to go down there and help out,” Jesse explains. It seems that everything’s gone right for the pair of them. If they were still together, Andrew thinks, they’d probably be this up-and-coming power couple, taking over New York theatre one play at a time. “What about you, what’s your reason for going there?”
“I have an audition, The Book of Mormon. I quit my bar job.”
“You got an audition for a Broadway show? That’s incredible.”
“Yeah,” Andrew shrugs, smiles sadly, hoping that he doesn’t seem big-headed, wondering why, after all the pain, he still cares about what Jesse thinks of him. He really shouldn’t care. “I have an agent now.”
Jesse bites his lip for a second in a way that makes Andrew‘s mouth water, nods enthusiastically. “That’s really great.”
He means it, that’s the worst part.
“So, how long are you staying there?”
“A couple of days, I’m staying at The Salisbury, you?”
“A few months, I’ve been moving my stuff to my new apartment over the last week, now it’s all done, so I can move in myself. My sister‘s bringing the cats over in a week.”
That’s it? Jesse’s place isn’t Jesse’s place any more. The wall of pictures and notes and drawings has been taken down, ready to be moved someplace else, a place that Andrew will never get to see.
“Cool,” Andrew says, he doesn’t know what else to say.
“What about the others? Emma, Ryan, Joe-”
“They’re fine.”
“That’s good. Armie and Elizabeth are fine too,” Jesse pauses for a second, “they miss you though.”
Then they remain silent, because it was Andrew’s turn to speak and he didn’t know what to say to that, he misses Armie and Elizabeth too, but Jesse the most. He misses him like crazy. So he just sits there, stomach twisting in knots because despite the fact that he’s heading to an audition for the kind of part that he’s spent his whole life dreaming for, there’s still so much more that he wants. He wants to be happy again, he wants to know the real reason why Jesse broke up with him, he just wants Jesse back. He keeps coming back into Andrew’s life at these random intervals, like the universe is dangling him in front of Andrew’s face to tease him, only to take him away when Andrew tries to reach out. He can’t think what he’s done to deserve it.
The quiet between the two of them continues on for a few more minutes, the pair of them listening to the chatter of the other passengers in the carriage and the rhythmic beat of the wheels underneath them. It’s the kind of silence that’s thick and palpable, it makes Andrew so uncomfortable his skin could crawl, his heart beating fast and breathing coming out in short, quick breaths because he just wants to run away from all of it. He steals a quick look at Jesse, and finds that he looks pained. He looks about the same as Andrew feels, all torn up and confused, his face scrunched up and his eyes glazed over.
“Andrew, where did you go?” Jesse says finally, voice small.
Andrew blinks, “where did I go?”
“At my party, on the roof, you left and you didn’t say goodbye or anything. Where did you go, more importantly, why did you go?” Jesse sounds as though he might cry, and Andrew feels as though he might because when Jesse looks up at him with all this pain in his eyes, it’s all Andrew can do not to reach out and hug him.
“I saw you kissing that guy, and it felt like someone had shot me in the chest, so I had to go,” Andrew replies, matter-of-fact. “Imagine how you’d have felt if it were the other way around.”
“You saw me kiss a guy?” Jesse frowns and gets that little wrinkle between his eyebrows that Andrew always loved… loves. “What guy?”
“Dark hair, stubble, arm around you, acting all friendly.”
“That was my friend, Justin.”
“Who?”
“You know, the guy you were all jealous of before we got together. My best friend, my straight best friend with a girlfriend. When he gets drunk he gets overly friendly and he’s kissed me dozens of times, but it never means anything. I tend to just push him off and tell him to go lie down,” Jesse laughs. It’s the kind of sound that used to make Andrew’s heart flutter, but this time, it just sounds as though Jesse’s mocking him. It’s crushing and insulting all at the same time. “You thought that was a real kiss?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Andrew says, seething all of a sudden.
Jesse smiles innocently. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
And that’s what does it.
Andrew can feel all of the things he’d wanted to say to Jesse since the day they broke up rising in his throat, ready to come pouring out uncensored and full of malice. It all comes out in this harsh whisper that appears to hurt Jesse more than if Andrew had chosen to yell and embarrass him in front of all these people. He leans right into Jesse’s face as if to punish him with his words, making Jesse recoil in his seat with fear, his eyes wide and terrified.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through. You’ve broken my heart twice, and you think it’s okay to just walk on over to me and start talking like nothing’s happened? I’m not as fortunate as you, I can’t just forget and act like everything’s okay. I quit my job, I stopped talking to Armie and Elizabeth, I cleared my apartment of everything that reminded me of you because I wanted to forget you, it‘s practically empty now. I can’t though, I can’t forget you because you’ve set up camp right here,” Andrew presses his index finger to his forehead and stares up at it in disgust, “and I just can’t get you out of there without doing myself some serious damage. When we broke up, you said we were ruining each other, but that’s a lie. You’ve torn me to pieces, but clearly, I never affected you at all.”
Andrew’s pretty sure that he hits Jesse with his bag as he gets up. He doesn’t care one bit, he just gets up and stomps off down the train in search of another seat.
(500)
Andrew went to the audition yesterday after getting off of the train, finding his hotel, and trying to calm down for two hours. Now he’s just sat in his beige, lifeless hotel room staring out of his window into the street below, the whole thing feeling vaguely similar to his week spent alone at home in nothing but a pair of boxers. He thinks about why and how he let this happen. He thinks about how he used to be. Andrew, the guy who did the dumping but was never dumped. Andrew, the happiest guy in the world, who never really knew what it was to hurt and to want one thing so much.
It felt good, saying those things to Jesse, it felt good to let it all out after so long, but he doesn’t feel any better, he hasn’t stopped wanting him -it’s like an addiction.
Then there’s a knock at the door, and instead of getting up to answer it, Andrew just yells that it’s open, expecting it to be room-service or housekeeping or something. It’s neither of those things, Andrew turns to look and finds the one person he didn’t expect to see. Part of him wishes that he hadn’t told him where he was staying, though at the same time, he’s glad that he did.
Andrew rolls his eyes. “What do you want now?”
“You did affect me,” Jesse says from the doorway, an accusing tone to his voice. Andrew can just picture him now, he probably stayed up all night working on this speech. He‘s got that pained look on his face again and he‘s twisting his hands together viciously as he just stands there, staring at Andrew from the other side of the room. “You think you didn’t, you think that I’m happy, but I’m not. I put on a brave face yesterday, but I’ve fallen apart on the inside just the same as you. I tried to be nice because I didn’t want you to hate me, despite the fact that I broke up with you.”
Andrew lets that sink in for a second.
“You can never just be straight with me, can you?” he says.
Jesse steps forward, shutting the door behind himself. “What?”
Andrew gets to his feet -leaving the bed between the two of them- feeling all of that rage from yesterday boiling up again. This time, he yells, because no matter what he says, Jesse just doesn’t seem to absorb any of it. He feels his cheeks redden, and his hands are flailing about all over the place and he’s just so angry. The words fire out without a pause.
“You broke up with me and didn’t give me a proper reason, you don’t contact me for months, you see me at the wedding and we act like it’s all normal, you hold my hand, tell me you miss me, fall asleep on my shoulder, invite me to a party, ignore me at the party, let another guy kiss you, ignore me for a few more weeks, laugh at me for jumping to conclusions, pretend to be happy when you’re not, and then turn up at my hotel out of the blue looking for sympathy!”
“Don’t shout at me,” Jesse says quietly. He looks so small, stood there with his sleeves pulled over his hands and his lips pressed together in the way that Andrew knows Jesse does when he’s trying not to cry.
“Why not? You deserve it, for months and months I’ve kept all my feelings bottled up, I haven’t screamed or thrown things, I never took anything out on you when you’re the one that‘s responsible for all this.” Andrew replies, walking around the bed, pointing at him, shoving his finger into his chest. “I just sat around and cried like a pathetic idiot and worried my friends to death, but now, I’m going to yell at you because it’s the least you deserve for you what you did to me.”
The tears are welling up in Jesse‘s eyes, Andrew can see that from here, but he‘s not crying yet.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Thanks a lot, I’m all better now,” Andrew laughs like an insane person, shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of what Jesse just said, as if that one word makes everything okay again. He walks away from him again, back to the other side of the room. “You know, all I did was love you unconditionally but you had to go and ruin all of it, because clearly it just wasn’t enough for y-”
“Shut up!” Jesse screams, stopping Andrew dead in his tracks. His eyes squeezed tight and his fists over his ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Andrew can feel his heart pumping hard in his chest from the shock, the silence left behind after Jesse’s outburst is so suffocating and thick that it hurts his ears. He can barely breathe.
Jesse‘s staring so hard at Andrew, now it‘s his turn to be angry. His face is bright red and electrified with emotion. His voice cracks and stumbles as he speaks. “It’s not… it’s not that it wasn’t enough for me, I broke up with you because, because it was too much for me and I was scared!”
Andrew swallows hard, his mouth and throat bone dry. “What could you have possibly been afraid of?”
“That you’d finally realise that I’m not good enough for you and dump me,” Jesse hangs his head in embarrassment.
“What?” “I’m not as interesting as you think, I’m boring and unattractive and weird and I was terrified that day you’d work that out one day and break up with me, like five years down the line, once you‘d gotten bored of me. By that time I’d be so deeply in love with you that losing you would probably kill me. So I broke up with you earlier on to save the inevitable pain of losing you after who knows how long.”
“So you hurt me to save yourself from some hypothetical pain that may or may not have come your way? You broke up with me to keep me from doing it to you?” Andrew’s finally got his reason, but he’s so infuriated by what Jesse’s just told him that he can barely speak, he just splutters. “You… you selfish arsehole!”
“I’m not proud of it!“ Jesse counters.
“I would never have broken up with you, you should have known that!”
“Well, I-”
“Wasn’t it clear enough? I was in love with you, I told you every day. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, I punched a guy in the face and risked my job for you. I made up stupid excuses to come and see you at work in the beginning, and I practically worshipped the ground you walked on and you thought I’d break up with you?”
Andrew’s finding it hard to piece it all together, he feels so many different things all at once, so instead of shouting any more, he just turns away from Jesse and says: “You know, there’s a fine line between love and hate and you’re stood right on it.”
Andrew can feel that Jesse’s stood behind him now. Jesse sounds both happy and sad at the same time as he says: “You still love me?”
“Of course I do,” Andrew nods, rubbing his eyes with exasperation. “I’m a fucking idiot for it, but I do.”
“You know, I was terrified, almost every day. These little thoughts kept popping into my head. ‘What if he goes off of me? What if he finds someone better? What if he realises that I’m not the enigma from the bookstore like he thought and that I’m just a weird, awkward loser who can’t love him as much as he loves me because I just don’t know how?”
Andrew spins around and leans against the windowsill, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re not an awkward loser. Weird? Yes. Awkward loser? No.”
“Thank you,” Jesse says, a look of genuine gratitude on his face, as if he doesn’t deserve Andrew’s backhanded compliment.
“You should’ve just come to me,” Andrew says, speaking as if that would have been the most obvious choice to make, and by the look on Jesse‘s face, of regret and guilt, he clearly wishes he had‘ve made that choice. “Instead of just breaking it off when you got scared you should have just talked to me and told me all about the things that worried you. I would’ve sat you down and told you that everything’s going to be okay because there’s no one better than you.”
“I would’ve said ‘Jesse, I’ve been looking for my one, you know ‘The One’, the perfect guy my whole life. It took over twenty-six years, moving to another country, and the choice to walk into random bookstore to buy a script before I found you. I had to make up some bullshit about dropping it in a shower, sing in a karaoke bar, get scratched by your demon cat, allow you to buy me an expensive record player, and give a guy twice my size a bloody nose before you fell in love with me. If it took that much effort to find you, keep you, and get you to love me back, then you have to be worth a hell of a lot, right? I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think that I was in it for the long haul. If you were just a fling, acting as a stop-gap until something better came along, I would’ve ran away at the sight of that cat, because, and I won’t lie, Snowy creeps the life out of me. Jesse, I adore you. So much.’”
Jesse sounds as though he’s trying to speak over a lump in his throat. “Would you really have said all that?”
Andrew can see the tears glistening in his eyes.
Andrew nods, eyes shut, “and I’d’ve meant it, too. I do mean it. You just never gave me the chance to say it until now.”
Jesse just stares at him in awe for a few seconds, mouth hung open as a wave of different emotions flit across his face. Happiness, sadness, self-loathing. It’s then that the tears spill over, his face crumples up as he collapses onto the hotel bed, face in his hands as he sobs.
“I’ve ruined everything.”
Despite himself, Andrew just can’t help but feel sorry for him, so he goes over and sits down beside him by way of comfort.
“I ruined the… the b-best thing that happened to both of us!”
“Yeah,” Andrew huffs in defeat and reaches over to rub Jesse’s back, right between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, you did. I’m not gonna lie to you.”
Jesse takes his hands away from his face so that Andrew can see his eyes all blood-shot and puffy. Andrew’s never seen him cry before, it’s heart-breaking in an entirely different way to what he’s used to. “I’m so sorry,” Jesse says earnestly. “I mean it.”
Under normal circumstances, Andrew would’ve said something like ‘Don’t worry, it’s okay’, but instead, he just nods and says: “I know.”
Now that he thinks about it, Andrew really can’t believe how awful things have turned out, for the both of them. Andrew’s hurt almost every day since the break up, but Jesse was terrified of getting dumped since the very beginning. Jesse had never been in a proper relationship before Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t been genuinely happy before Jesse. It’s not fair, that either of them should have gone through so much worry and pain. Why shouldn’t they be happy like everyone else? Who says that they can’t be? Andrew made Jesse happy and Jesse made Andrew happy, and they could probably do it again if they tried. Who’s stopping them?
Andrew tilts his head back to stretch the tension out of his neck, yells up at the ceiling. “God, I am so tired of everything!”
“Me too.” Jesse replies, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I hate this.”
Andrew lifts both hands to gesture to the two of them, all pathetic in this anonymous hotel room, one of them in tears and the other completely exasperated, fed up with all this shit and wishing that they could just be happy again. “Look at us, Jesse. Why couldn’t we have just been a normal couple? Like Ryan and Emma, or Carey and Joe, or Elizabeth and Armie? What‘s wrong with us?”
“We’re both fucked up and insecure? Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t know,“ Jesse laughs, and unlike the one from the train yesterday, Jesse uses this laugh to mock himself rather than Andrew. “Besides, you need two normal individuals to make a normal couple, and we’re not normal.”
“Yeah,” Andrew agrees, letting out one small, hopeless chuckle. “Yeah, you’re totally right.”
“You wanna know something?” Jesse says, just staring off into the middle distance in defeat. “If I had one wish, I’d go back in time and punch myself in the face right before I broke up with you, ultimately knocking myself out, and then Present Me would drag Past Me out of that diner and explain to Past Me that if Past Me breaks up with Past You then everything will be wrong for Future Andrew and Jesse, i.e. Present Us.”
Present Us, they could be ‘us’ again. That’s a nice thought.
Then Jesse does something that makes Andrew smile fondly at him in the way that he always used to before things got so shitty and broken. Jesse starts gesticulating all over the place as he speaks, the way that he does when he’s talking about something he really feels passionate about, like he does when he talks about Green Day or Woody Allen or animal charities. He screws his face up, not with pain this time, but with feeling, looking cartoonish and adorable.
“I’d go all A Christmas Carol on my ass and say ‘No, Past Jesse! Don’t break up with him, it’s the worst thing you could possibly do, heed my warning! Go in there, kiss him, tell him you love him. It’ll all be okay if you just listen to me!’”
“Yeah, that’d be great, except Past Andrew would be freaked the fuck out by another Jesse just popping up out of no where. Besides, you don’t have one wish, or the ability to construct your own time machine, and, unfortunately, Dr. Who and Dr. Emmett Brown are both fictional, so you can’t ask them for help.” Andrew nudges Jesse’s shoulder with his own. “So what are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna stick around and try and make it up to you,” Jesse looks up at him. “That’s if… that’s if you’re willing to let me. It’ll probably take a while, though.”
Andrew likes the sound of that.
“I’m willing to let you. We’ve got plenty of time. Years.”
“Yeah?” Jesse asks hopefully.
“Yeah.”
He hasn‘t forgiven him, not just yet, but Andrew never stopped loving him, so what’s the point of trying to fight it any more? You can’t just unlove someone like that, it’s pretty much impossible. Jesse wants to fix it, he wants Andrew back, and Andrew wants the same. The air has been cleared, and life’s just too short to waste sitting around wanting and not having. Sure, things could fuck up again, could fuck up spectacularly but Andrew would rather give it another shot than sit around for the rest of his life imagining what could have been. He feels happier than he has in months with the thought of Jesse being back in his life for good, even if he has to be a little guarded with his emotions for a while, but he has a feeling it’ll be worth it.
“I got rid of a load of your clothes and sold that Mike Dirnt poster, just so you know.”
“’I’ll get you a new one, that’s the first thing I’ll do,” Jesse says after a moment or two. “I shouldn’t have broken up with you. That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done and I hate myself for it.”
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Andrew admits, thinking back to how terrified Jesse had looked earlier on and how bad it made him feel deep down. He screws his face up in confusion, “and don’t hate yourself, that‘s just unhealthy.”
“Well, you hate me.”
“I said you’re sat on the line between love and hate. I kind of hate the fact that I don’t hate you, because I should, but I don’t hate you specifically, if that makes sense. You fucked me over, but I still want you more than anything in this world. Is that weird?” He turns to look at him.
You know how they say that you always hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.
“Yeah,” Jesse chuckles, hanging his head. “Yeah, you definitely should hate me.”
“But I don’t,” Andrew says simply. There’s nothing he could possibly do to change that fact.
Leaning down to place a kiss on Jesse‘s temple all warm and gentle and soft, he knows that, yeah, this is the only person he was ever meant to kiss. He speaks into Jesse’s skin, whispers, “I… opposite of hate you.”
Then Jesse just leans down and nuzzles down into Andrew’s shoulder for what Andrew knows will not be the last time. He can feel Jesse smiling against him, right through the fabric of his shirt. What Andrew just said, it‘s probably not the exact thing Jesse was hoping to hear, but that smile says that he knows things will get better with time. After a while, and a lot of healing, they might just go back to their weird, individual version of ’normal’, and Andrew will be able to forgive him fully, and say those three words again, the way they’re meant to be said.
“I opposite of hate you, too,” Jesse says gently.
For five hundred days, Jesse has dominated Andrew’s life, but there’s not a time limit any more, who knows where they’ll be another five hundred days from now. Andrew had said that they’d have plenty of time to fix this, an indefinite amount of weeks and months and years. Andrew just reaches over to take Jesse’s hand, and holds it there as the two of them stare out of the window and into the streets of New York City. He’d probably lose his mind if he tried to keep track of all the days to come, some of them great, some of them downright awful, and some of them… just okay.
So, from now on, he’s going to stop counting.
~
So there it is, the final part. I really hope you guys liked it, and I just want to say thank you for reading it. Thank you for the wonderful comments and the support and for sticking with me even though it sometimes took me an age to update. You’re all amazing. <3
Part: Seven
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jewnicorn/(500) Days Of Summer crossover. Loosely based on the plot of the film.
Disclaimer: Never happened, all a figment of my imagination. I am not affiliated with anyone mentioned in this work of fiction. (500) Days Of Summer is property of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
A/N: Remember to pay close attention to the numbers before each section, they denote the number of days that Andrew and Jesse have known one another at each point -same as the film, of course- it'll help you in keeping track of where they are on their 500 day timeline :)
Previous: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six
~
(431)
Three nights ago, Andrew had fallen face first into his pillows dressed in that ridiculous tuxedo, and -for the most part anyway- hasn’t moved since. The first night, he didn’t sleep a wink. The second night, his body gave in and sunk into a dreamless -though not restful- sleep somewhere around four a.m. The third night, last night, he slept like a baby, completely exhausted, both physically and emotionally.
All of this reminds him way too much of the few hours he spent curled up on his bed after he and Jesse fought over Andrew punching that drunken homophobe. At that point, Andrew couldn’t have imagined a time when he’d felt worse, and even then, he knew that he’d probably get Jesse back because it was just a stupid fight after all. Even throughout the months between their actual break up and the day of Armie and Elizabeth’s wedding, he hadn’t felt as terribly as he does now. During that time, he knew it was over for good and there was nothing he could do about it, there was no real point in being upset then.
But he’d been given a second chance at the wedding. They spent the entire night together, they held hands on the way home and Jesse snuggled down into Andrew’s shoulder in the way that he always used to. That’s why it hurts even more now, because now he’s had his heart broken twice. Despite it all, he still wants him back, even now.
At some point during the second day of wallowing, he ripped off his tux, threw it to the other side of the room, and made the choice to forgo clothing, except boxers, until further notice because he wasn‘t planning on seeing anyone for a long, long time. He hasn’t shaved or showered, he’s barely gotten up to eat, and he hasn’t been to work. Though, somewhere amongst that haze of tears, periodic fits of rage and blind confusion in which he honestly begins to believe that Jesse’s party was just some awful nightmare, he had completely forgotten to switch off his alarm clock.
He’s practically hanging off of the bed when it wakes him with its shrill, piercing cry at eight a.m -he’s meant to be at play rehearsal by nine, but he’s not planning to go. His eyes, all blood shoot and dark, fly open on the first beep and his hand darts up to shut it off all before he rolls over, tangles himself up in the sheets and falls back to sleep. Sleep is good place to be, because right now, he’s too drained to dream of anything, let alone Jesse.
(432)
No change.
(433)
No change.
(434)
The alarm goes off at eight as usual, but this time, he’s already awake, staring at the red glow of the numbers through even redder eyes.
It takes two hours of staring up at the ceiling and a fierce growl of the stomach before Andrew decides that he ought to get up. His bathrobe is hanging on the back of his door so he puts it on before heading out towards the kitchen and into the too bright light of the morning to find something to eat. He checks the fridge, just stares into it. Half a carton of orange juice, an egg and two tomatoes. Not much in the way of sustenance. Zombie-like, he heads for the cupboards and finds nothing in there, nothing that he feels like eating anyway, and he‘s out of cereal. He can’t actually remember the last time he went food shopping.
For the last few days he’s just been going through the motions without really thinking about it. Get woken up by the alarm at eight, shut it off, go to sleep for another two hours, grab some breakfast, sit around in bed, eat, sleep, pee, lay around wallowing in self pity, sleep. Repeat. The way he’d figured it, if he kept to a routine then it’d keep his mind off of Jesse, and the guy that kissed him, and the pure catastrophe that the party was last week. But, he hadn’t taken into account how much sitting-around-doing-nothing- time that he had. When he’s awake, Jesse is all that he sees, the image of Jesse being kissed by that guy is practically burned onto the insides of Andrew’s eyelids so that he sees it whenever he blinks, sometimes he’s scared he may throw up.
The crying came to a complete stop about three days ago, now it’s just a case of trying to get out of this self-imposed isolation. His phone has been ringing almost non-stop. Emma, Justin, Joe, Ryan, even Carey has called. Where are you? Why haven’t you been at work? Are you okay? Why won’t you answer the door? We’re worried about you.
Jesse hasn’t called. Not once. He probably didn’t see Andrew leave.
It’s gotten to the point where Andrew just doesn’t want to care any more, about any of it, about Jesse, but unfortunately, he still does. He tried so hard with him but it didn’t work. Andrew was so sure that Jesse was The One, his one, but that whole idea‘s gone to shit and he‘s starting to question his belief in fate and destiny and the possibility of there being someone out there for everyone. This puts his whole belief system out of whack and it’s unnerving, to find that everything he’d had faith in his entire life was a complete lie.
He’d put so much time and effort into their relationship for nothing, just to get heartbroken. If that’s fate, then fuck fate. What’s the point of even trying? He’s not sad or even angry with Jesse any more, he’s angry with the universe, for giving him something so wonderful just to tear it away. He can’t be mad at Jesse, not really, they’re not together any more, haven’t been for months, so it’s not like he was cheating or anything like that, he didn‘t do anything wrong.
All Andrew wants is Jesse back, but he can’t think of a way to make it happen…
Andrew’s hair is all stuck up and messy on one side in the way that always used to make Jesse laugh, and he still hasn’t shaved or showered. He decides to head out of his apartment for the first time and down to a nearby grocery store to get something to eat. Fuck it, he keeps his bathrobe on, who cares if he’s not dressed?
People stare, whisper things, point. Doesn’t matter, he barely pays attention to them.
It’s 10:04am and he buys a six pack of beer and a share size pack of M&Ms, which earns him a disgusted, condescending look from the guy behind the counter who just takes Andrew’s money without saying a word.
For the first time in days, Andrew speaks, his voice hoarse from lack of use.
“What?”
With that, he picks up his bag and turns to leave. Back to his apartment for a few more days spent pathetic and alone.
(440)
“Hey look, it’s the return of the Prodigal Son.” It’s Justin, sat at the bar with his right fist raised.
Andrew bumps his own against it. “Hey.”
“Where the hell have you been, man?”
“At home.”
Andrew doesn’t ask Justin if he wants a drink, he knows he does, so he goes over to the fridge to fish a bottle out and Justin watches him the entire time.
“You haven’t answered any of our calls, the memory on your machine must be full by now.”
“I have fifty-six messages on there,” Andrew says, placing the bottle down.
Justin leans forward a little bit, it‘s lunch time on a Thursday, so it‘s pretty quiet in here, he doesn‘t need to speak loudly this time. “All we wanted was one call, one quick, ten second call letting us know you were okay, then we would’ve left you alone until you were ready to come out of hibernation.”
“I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” Andrew frowns, wiping the countertop. Usually it’s the barkeep listening to the sorrows of the patron, but he and Justin have reversed those roles today.
“Yeah, we got that much,” Justin nods, leaning back to take a sip of his drink. “So, what brings you out of the cocoon?”
“I got a call from my boss and he threatened to fire me if I kept missing shifts.”
Justin widens his eyes. “Well, that would do it.”
“I should have just let him fire me,” Andrew shrugs, staring down at the cloth in his hand as it slides across the polished wood.
“What, so you could eventually run out of money and end up kicked out of your apartment?”
“It’d the kick up the arse I need.” He finally looks up, right into Justin’s eyes, a look of grave seriousness on his face. “It’d give me a reason to actually do something with my life. You know, I’ve been working in this bar since I arrived here five years ago. I came here to become a proper, professional actor.” He uses both hands to gesture to himself. “Now look at me.”
Justin shrugs, nonchalant. “Then quit.”
“What?”
“Quit. Leave. Get out of here, go do something. It‘ll help you get over him, putting your mind to work on something different.” It’s strange, how in the beginning, Justin was encouraging Andrew to ask Jesse out, and now, he’s coming up with ways of forgetting him. Justin’s idea, however, seems appealing. A fresh start.
Justin continues, “Andrew, you’re the only one who can make those changes.”
Andrew nods, smiling just a little, the first time he‘s smiled at all in over a week. “I guess you’re right.”
“You know I’m right,” Justin smirks, self-satisfied.
Andrew stares off into the middle distance, appearing to be talking more to himself than to his friend, as if he‘s just made an important realisation. “On the opening night of A View From The Bridge, right after Jesse kissed me, this agent came up to me and asked if I had representation, he gave me his card and said I should call him, but I… I don’t know, I just forgot. I was too wrapped in Jesse, too excited, too focussed on getting him out of there and being alone with him, that I just forgot. I don‘t even know where I put that guy‘s card, I could‘ve thrown it away for all I know.” Andrew thinks back to the diner, to the day they broke up, when Jesse said that Andrew had lost focus on his acting because of their relationship. “Well, I guess he was right about one thing, then.”
That’s when he starts to picture it, how his life could turn out if he just quit, if he went home and found that card and got an agent and actually became a professional actor. These things he sees, they’re all of the things he’d pictured whilst he was waiting in that Heathrow terminal for the flight that would take him to New York and his new home. Lights, cameras, parties, awards, success, critical acclaim. That was five years ago, before he got so distracted. The best part of all of it though, is the thought that all of those things could still be within his grasp, if only he could reach out and grab it.
“I’m gonna do it.” He says all of a sudden, slapping his hands down onto the bar. “I’m gonna quit.”
Andrew turns, starts heading for the door that leads out back, feeling stronger than he has in weeks and a hell of a lot more hopeful. As he goes, he hears Justin say:
“Do it, before you change your mind.”
(453)
It felt good, quitting. It was freeing, as if he’d been tied down for years without knowing it and now that all those bindings were gone, he felt so much lighter. That feeling lasted for all of a week and a half, because no matter how much he looked, Andrew couldn’t find that agent’s card anywhere.
So now he’s single and unemployed, without any real direction in life.
He’s had nothing do to except flip through the Yellow Pages looking for talent agencies to call. They want headshots and résumés, but those things are expensive and you kind of need a job in order to pay for them. He plans to go looking for a new place to work sometime next week.
Since then, since all he does is sit around at home all day, Andrew has often found himself fixating on the tiniest things out of sheer boredom, spacing out in the middle of conversations with his friends. Right now, Andrew’s staring at Emma’s ponytail, how coppery her hair looks in the sunlight and the way it appears to ripple and shimmer in the breeze from the open window. He’d spent so much time noticing all of these small, almost insignificant instances of beauty in Jesse, and now that he’s not here, Andrew’s realised that those little things are everywhere, kind of like that weird kid in American Beauty with his plastic bag video.
It’s Joe that knocks him out of it this time. “What about this mug?”
Andrew looks up, he’s sat on his bed, Emma’s rifling through his closet and Joe is out in the kitchen raiding the cupboards. They’re all dressed in thin sweatpants and t-shirts since Summer is on its way, and today, they’re getting rid of everything that reminds Andrew of Jesse, windows thrown wide open as if to air the whole place out and make it fresh. The mug Joe’s holding, Jesse bought it for Andrew, and he definitely doesn’t want it any more, doesn’t want that tiny reminder of how good things used to be for him. It’s depressing.
“Bin it,” he calls.
Joe nods, throws it into a black bag of trash and carries on searching for unwanted mementos. Andrew hears it break.
“What about this one?”
“Get rid of it,” Andrew says, he doesn’t even bother to look this time, he’s busy going through his books, hunting out anything that Jesse may have left behind.
Emma must have moved over to the doorway to look at the mug, because she says, “but it’s so pretty, look at the little kittens.”
“You can have it.”
Joe enters the bedroom to give it to her, and leans against Andrew’s doorway, staring down at the three piles made up of clothing that Emma has extracted from Andrew’s closet. Jesse’s clothes, clothes bought for Andrew by Jesse, clothes bought for Jesse by Andrew. Each pile is smaller than the last and Andrew wants them thrown out too. Though, if Emma gets her way she’ll probably take it all down to a thrift store after picking out some stuff for herself, because, and Andrew has never understood this fact, but women seem to love wearing men’s shirts.
Andrew would take it back to him, but that would hurt… way too much. He asked the others if they’d maybe do it, and they all said that it’d be too awkward, so this is the only way.
“I can’t believe how much stuff he left here,” Emma says, putting the mug aside to rifle through the Jesse pile.
Four t-shirts, a pair of jeans, some boxers and a lone sock. This is just the clothes though, there’s also the mugs, and the fridge magnets, and the game of Cluedo under Andrew’s bed, and probably a load of other crap that Andrew’s forgotten about. Andrew plans to stick the Mike Dirnt poster on eBay. On top all of that, there’s the Green Day records, and the record player, but those aren’t the sort of things you just throw out, and Andrew wants to keep them anyway. He tells himself that he’ll eventually forget that they had anything to do with his ex. All of the memories attached to those things should fade away over time, hopefully.
“There’s probably more of my things over at his,” Andrew says, getting up to check that Emma got everything from the closet. “We spent more time there than we ever did here. He probably got rid of it all the day we broke up, I doubt I’ll ever see any of it again.”
“Andrew… and don’t get mad, but, I still think you’re over-reacting,” Emma says. From the thick silence that preceded that statement, Andrew can tell that she had given Joe a very meaningful look, noiselessly communicating that one of them should say something.
He replies coolly. “How am I over-reacting?”
“It was one kiss, I saw it too. It was a quick peck on the lips and you didn’t even stick around to ask questions or get an explanation or anything like that.”
“I don’t need one, he was off with me all night, he didn’t want me there.”
“Then why did he invite you?” Joe says, catching Andrew off guard. He looks to his neighbour, Joe’s smirking because he knows he’s right.
Andrew stares down at the floor, mouth hanging open dumbly. “I…”
“Point proven.”
“I should’ve seen this coming -you missed this hoodie, it‘s his too- I should’ve known this was going to happen. It was all way too good to last.” Andrew bunches the fabric of the hoodie up in his fist, the same black one Jesse was wearing the day they met at Barnes & Noble. “Why didn’t I see it?”
“Because you were in love with him,” Emma replies simply, taking the jacket from him.
“Yeah, this is a classic case of rose tinted glasses, buddy. You were only focusing on the good things and disregarded all the low points, because, well… you loved him,” Joe adds with a shrug.
He can feel their eyes following him as he walks over to the other side of the room. “Well, I don’t any more. That‘s it, this is a new chapter for me. Not even a new chapter, it’s a whole new book. Clean slate.”
He kneels down to check under his bed, and that’s when he finds it. It’s this old, battered filofax that he keeps all of his paperwork in, bank statements, insurance policies, receipts, that sort of thing.
He remembers now, coming home on opening night with Jesse, that card still in his hand, absentmindedly throwing it onto a pile of opened letters before pushing Jesse into his bedroom and forgetting about it altogether. More letters piled up on top of it to the point where the pile got so large that Andrew needed to get it out of the way, he’d shoved all of it into this box. He finds the card, sandwiched between two nondescript, probably important letters covered in tiny print.
Holding it up for the other two to see, he smiles brightly, almost like his old self again. “Look!”
Emma squints at it, unable to read the text, so Andrew explains and all she says is, “Call him, call him now.”
“Yeah, in a sec.”
Andrew feels bright and hopeful with this warm glow of hope filling up his chest and spreading outwards. He keeps looking through the papers, maybe there are some other great things in here that he’d forgotten about too.
At the bottom, he finds a stiff brown envelope, on which his name, address, and the words ‘Do not bend’ are written in swirly, girlish script. This came from Elizabeth, mailed to him a few weeks ago, containing the picture of he and Jesse at her wedding. Unlike the business card of that agent, this was shoved away on purpose because looking at it made Andrew’s heart ache.
“I need another rubbish bag,” he says monotonously, getting up. “I’m gonna call this guy too.”
Emma smiles at him proudly, watching him leave the room, Joe gives him a pat on his back as he goes.
Andrew hides the envelope under his shirt so that the other two can’t see it as he heads out to the kitchen, but makes sure to keep the business card in full view for their benefit. He doesn’t need another bag, he doesn’t plan to throw the photo away, because he wants to keep it for reasons that are unfathomable to him at the moment. He’d told them that he didn’t love Jesse any more, but that was a lie. He still loves him, just a little less than before.
Hastily, to make sure that neither of them are looking, he hides the picture in the cutlery drawer, knowing that neither of his friends will check in there for any Jesse memorabilia. He’d have hidden it in the living room, but they haven’t even started on that yet.
Andrew’s glad he found it, if Emma did, if Joe did, they would have held it up, questioned him on it, ‘What about this?’. He wants the picture, so if he had’ve said yes to keeping it, then they would’ve known that he’s still not over him, not just yet. Andrew wants to them to think he’s done with Jesse, it’s a proximity thing. If his friends, if those closest to him believe that he’s over Jesse, and eventually stop mentioning him altogether, then hopefully, Andrew will start to believe it too.
Then, trying to push the last few moments to the back of his mind, Andrew pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, and calls the number. Someone picks up, he’s not really sure what to say, it’s not a receptionist or a secretary that picks up, the line goes straight to the guy whose name is printed above the number on the card.
“Uh, hi,” Andrew says, unsure, feeling nervous and little sick at the prospect of something good happening for him. “This is Andrew… Andrew Garfield, from A View From The Bridge in Queens. We spoke a few months ago, and I’m only just getting back to you, so yeah, I’m sorry.”
After a second or two of silence during which Andrew contemplates hanging up, the guy says, “Oh yes, I remember you.”
(460-488)
Andrew’s new agent is this guy called Rick. He’s not the best agent out there, but he’s good enough, and it’s not like Andrew’s got offers rolling in from anyone else in New York.
Mostly, he sends Andrew to auditions for commercials and a few off-Broadway plays, he gets a call-back from time and to time and he did get picked for one cat food commercial that everyone in the country will be likely to see on their televisions very soon. Justin hasn‘t stopped making fun of him for it, but it‘s okay.
Nothing major comes along for a couple of weeks, not until Andrew gets a phone call during which Rick explains that he’s managed to pull some strings and get Andrew an audition for The Book Of Mormon.
“I’ll need you in Manhattan in a little over a week, okay?”
Andrew hangs up the phone, jumps up a down, and makes plans to get himself there.
(499)
And that’s what brings us back to the subway station. The universe allowed Andrew all of a month to forget about Jesse. He was all but gone from Andrew’s mind, the picture of the two of them shoved back into the bottom of Andrew’s filofax. A month before Jesse strolled back into his life as if he’d never left. A month before Andrew’s heart started to ache with wanting again.
“Train’s here,” Jesse says.
Andrew looks down, to where Jesse’s still gripping his forearm in the way that reminds him of their first date, and just waits for him to let go. Once he does, Andrew heads for the train door and prays that Jesse doesn’t hope to continue their conversation.
He finds two spare seats in the otherwise crowded carriage. He sits down in one and slings his backpack into the other, implying that he doesn’t want Jesse to take it. He wants him to just go away because Andrew doesn’t want him ruining this not perfect, but still okay, world that he’s built up for himself over the last few weeks.
“I’m gonna sit here then,” Andrew says, looking out the window, hoping that Jesse goes away and that everything doesn’t come crashing down around himself.
Jesse just stands there awkwardly. “Okay, well, um, it looks like everywhere else is full, so can I…?”
Andrew looks up to find him gesturing to the seat currently occupied by his backpack. A large part of him wants to say ‘No’ or ‘Do you really think that’s the best idea?’ but he can’t. He knows why he can’t say it.
“Yeah. Yeah fine, whatever,” Andrew moves his bag away. “Let me just move this…”
So Jesse sits, and the train starts to move, and neither of them say a word for a few minutes. Andrew feels as though he’s pulled every muscle in his body as he’s straining so hard to ensure that a decent sized gap remains between the two of their bodies. He doesn’t want any more physical contact, because even the smallest touch from Jesse can bring back floods and floods of memories. All of which Andrew’s strived to repress because they make him nostalgic in a really bad way.
Andrew looks to the window and sees Jesse smiling at him in the reflection, and oh God! Even that brings back memories. He sighs hopelessly, will this journey never end? Why are they always meeting on trains?
“So, where are you headed?” Jesse asks.
“Manhattan.”
Andrew‘s forced to look at him, forced to look into his perfect, beautiful face. He wants to cry because after a month and a half of not seeing him, Andrew’s brain had forgotten all of the minor details. The golden colour of Jesse’s eyelashes, the flecks of darker blue in his otherwise pale blue eyes, the freckles on his cheek bones.
Jesse’s really smiling now, and Andrew is forcing himself not to smile back, telling himself that he’s his own person and not just some hopeless planet orbiting around Jesse, the star of this whole thing. Then he starts to think that maybe he’ll never stop getting pulled in, that this is it, he’s stuck with it. He’s been resigned to a life of wanting but not being able to have. That’s kind of scary and frustrating all at the same time. He’s so jealous of that guy, whoever it was that got to kiss Jesse, because he’s probably a huge part of his life now. Andrew’s so jealous it makes him feel sick.
“Manhattan? No kidding?”
“You’re not going there too?” Andrew asks.
“I am,” Jesse nods, still smiling.
“Oh…”
“My play’s getting put on, off Broadway, but still, I need to go down there and help out,” Jesse explains. It seems that everything’s gone right for the pair of them. If they were still together, Andrew thinks, they’d probably be this up-and-coming power couple, taking over New York theatre one play at a time. “What about you, what’s your reason for going there?”
“I have an audition, The Book of Mormon. I quit my bar job.”
“You got an audition for a Broadway show? That’s incredible.”
“Yeah,” Andrew shrugs, smiles sadly, hoping that he doesn’t seem big-headed, wondering why, after all the pain, he still cares about what Jesse thinks of him. He really shouldn’t care. “I have an agent now.”
Jesse bites his lip for a second in a way that makes Andrew‘s mouth water, nods enthusiastically. “That’s really great.”
He means it, that’s the worst part.
“So, how long are you staying there?”
“A couple of days, I’m staying at The Salisbury, you?”
“A few months, I’ve been moving my stuff to my new apartment over the last week, now it’s all done, so I can move in myself. My sister‘s bringing the cats over in a week.”
That’s it? Jesse’s place isn’t Jesse’s place any more. The wall of pictures and notes and drawings has been taken down, ready to be moved someplace else, a place that Andrew will never get to see.
“Cool,” Andrew says, he doesn’t know what else to say.
“What about the others? Emma, Ryan, Joe-”
“They’re fine.”
“That’s good. Armie and Elizabeth are fine too,” Jesse pauses for a second, “they miss you though.”
Then they remain silent, because it was Andrew’s turn to speak and he didn’t know what to say to that, he misses Armie and Elizabeth too, but Jesse the most. He misses him like crazy. So he just sits there, stomach twisting in knots because despite the fact that he’s heading to an audition for the kind of part that he’s spent his whole life dreaming for, there’s still so much more that he wants. He wants to be happy again, he wants to know the real reason why Jesse broke up with him, he just wants Jesse back. He keeps coming back into Andrew’s life at these random intervals, like the universe is dangling him in front of Andrew’s face to tease him, only to take him away when Andrew tries to reach out. He can’t think what he’s done to deserve it.
The quiet between the two of them continues on for a few more minutes, the pair of them listening to the chatter of the other passengers in the carriage and the rhythmic beat of the wheels underneath them. It’s the kind of silence that’s thick and palpable, it makes Andrew so uncomfortable his skin could crawl, his heart beating fast and breathing coming out in short, quick breaths because he just wants to run away from all of it. He steals a quick look at Jesse, and finds that he looks pained. He looks about the same as Andrew feels, all torn up and confused, his face scrunched up and his eyes glazed over.
“Andrew, where did you go?” Jesse says finally, voice small.
Andrew blinks, “where did I go?”
“At my party, on the roof, you left and you didn’t say goodbye or anything. Where did you go, more importantly, why did you go?” Jesse sounds as though he might cry, and Andrew feels as though he might because when Jesse looks up at him with all this pain in his eyes, it’s all Andrew can do not to reach out and hug him.
“I saw you kissing that guy, and it felt like someone had shot me in the chest, so I had to go,” Andrew replies, matter-of-fact. “Imagine how you’d have felt if it were the other way around.”
“You saw me kiss a guy?” Jesse frowns and gets that little wrinkle between his eyebrows that Andrew always loved… loves. “What guy?”
“Dark hair, stubble, arm around you, acting all friendly.”
“That was my friend, Justin.”
“Who?”
“You know, the guy you were all jealous of before we got together. My best friend, my straight best friend with a girlfriend. When he gets drunk he gets overly friendly and he’s kissed me dozens of times, but it never means anything. I tend to just push him off and tell him to go lie down,” Jesse laughs. It’s the kind of sound that used to make Andrew’s heart flutter, but this time, it just sounds as though Jesse’s mocking him. It’s crushing and insulting all at the same time. “You thought that was a real kiss?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Andrew says, seething all of a sudden.
Jesse smiles innocently. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
And that’s what does it.
Andrew can feel all of the things he’d wanted to say to Jesse since the day they broke up rising in his throat, ready to come pouring out uncensored and full of malice. It all comes out in this harsh whisper that appears to hurt Jesse more than if Andrew had chosen to yell and embarrass him in front of all these people. He leans right into Jesse’s face as if to punish him with his words, making Jesse recoil in his seat with fear, his eyes wide and terrified.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through. You’ve broken my heart twice, and you think it’s okay to just walk on over to me and start talking like nothing’s happened? I’m not as fortunate as you, I can’t just forget and act like everything’s okay. I quit my job, I stopped talking to Armie and Elizabeth, I cleared my apartment of everything that reminded me of you because I wanted to forget you, it‘s practically empty now. I can’t though, I can’t forget you because you’ve set up camp right here,” Andrew presses his index finger to his forehead and stares up at it in disgust, “and I just can’t get you out of there without doing myself some serious damage. When we broke up, you said we were ruining each other, but that’s a lie. You’ve torn me to pieces, but clearly, I never affected you at all.”
Andrew’s pretty sure that he hits Jesse with his bag as he gets up. He doesn’t care one bit, he just gets up and stomps off down the train in search of another seat.
(500)
Andrew went to the audition yesterday after getting off of the train, finding his hotel, and trying to calm down for two hours. Now he’s just sat in his beige, lifeless hotel room staring out of his window into the street below, the whole thing feeling vaguely similar to his week spent alone at home in nothing but a pair of boxers. He thinks about why and how he let this happen. He thinks about how he used to be. Andrew, the guy who did the dumping but was never dumped. Andrew, the happiest guy in the world, who never really knew what it was to hurt and to want one thing so much.
It felt good, saying those things to Jesse, it felt good to let it all out after so long, but he doesn’t feel any better, he hasn’t stopped wanting him -it’s like an addiction.
Then there’s a knock at the door, and instead of getting up to answer it, Andrew just yells that it’s open, expecting it to be room-service or housekeeping or something. It’s neither of those things, Andrew turns to look and finds the one person he didn’t expect to see. Part of him wishes that he hadn’t told him where he was staying, though at the same time, he’s glad that he did.
Andrew rolls his eyes. “What do you want now?”
“You did affect me,” Jesse says from the doorway, an accusing tone to his voice. Andrew can just picture him now, he probably stayed up all night working on this speech. He‘s got that pained look on his face again and he‘s twisting his hands together viciously as he just stands there, staring at Andrew from the other side of the room. “You think you didn’t, you think that I’m happy, but I’m not. I put on a brave face yesterday, but I’ve fallen apart on the inside just the same as you. I tried to be nice because I didn’t want you to hate me, despite the fact that I broke up with you.”
Andrew lets that sink in for a second.
“You can never just be straight with me, can you?” he says.
Jesse steps forward, shutting the door behind himself. “What?”
Andrew gets to his feet -leaving the bed between the two of them- feeling all of that rage from yesterday boiling up again. This time, he yells, because no matter what he says, Jesse just doesn’t seem to absorb any of it. He feels his cheeks redden, and his hands are flailing about all over the place and he’s just so angry. The words fire out without a pause.
“You broke up with me and didn’t give me a proper reason, you don’t contact me for months, you see me at the wedding and we act like it’s all normal, you hold my hand, tell me you miss me, fall asleep on my shoulder, invite me to a party, ignore me at the party, let another guy kiss you, ignore me for a few more weeks, laugh at me for jumping to conclusions, pretend to be happy when you’re not, and then turn up at my hotel out of the blue looking for sympathy!”
“Don’t shout at me,” Jesse says quietly. He looks so small, stood there with his sleeves pulled over his hands and his lips pressed together in the way that Andrew knows Jesse does when he’s trying not to cry.
“Why not? You deserve it, for months and months I’ve kept all my feelings bottled up, I haven’t screamed or thrown things, I never took anything out on you when you’re the one that‘s responsible for all this.” Andrew replies, walking around the bed, pointing at him, shoving his finger into his chest. “I just sat around and cried like a pathetic idiot and worried my friends to death, but now, I’m going to yell at you because it’s the least you deserve for you what you did to me.”
The tears are welling up in Jesse‘s eyes, Andrew can see that from here, but he‘s not crying yet.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Thanks a lot, I’m all better now,” Andrew laughs like an insane person, shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of what Jesse just said, as if that one word makes everything okay again. He walks away from him again, back to the other side of the room. “You know, all I did was love you unconditionally but you had to go and ruin all of it, because clearly it just wasn’t enough for y-”
“Shut up!” Jesse screams, stopping Andrew dead in his tracks. His eyes squeezed tight and his fists over his ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Andrew can feel his heart pumping hard in his chest from the shock, the silence left behind after Jesse’s outburst is so suffocating and thick that it hurts his ears. He can barely breathe.
Jesse‘s staring so hard at Andrew, now it‘s his turn to be angry. His face is bright red and electrified with emotion. His voice cracks and stumbles as he speaks. “It’s not… it’s not that it wasn’t enough for me, I broke up with you because, because it was too much for me and I was scared!”
Andrew swallows hard, his mouth and throat bone dry. “What could you have possibly been afraid of?”
“That you’d finally realise that I’m not good enough for you and dump me,” Jesse hangs his head in embarrassment.
“What?” “I’m not as interesting as you think, I’m boring and unattractive and weird and I was terrified that day you’d work that out one day and break up with me, like five years down the line, once you‘d gotten bored of me. By that time I’d be so deeply in love with you that losing you would probably kill me. So I broke up with you earlier on to save the inevitable pain of losing you after who knows how long.”
“So you hurt me to save yourself from some hypothetical pain that may or may not have come your way? You broke up with me to keep me from doing it to you?” Andrew’s finally got his reason, but he’s so infuriated by what Jesse’s just told him that he can barely speak, he just splutters. “You… you selfish arsehole!”
“I’m not proud of it!“ Jesse counters.
“I would never have broken up with you, you should have known that!”
“Well, I-”
“Wasn’t it clear enough? I was in love with you, I told you every day. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, I punched a guy in the face and risked my job for you. I made up stupid excuses to come and see you at work in the beginning, and I practically worshipped the ground you walked on and you thought I’d break up with you?”
Andrew’s finding it hard to piece it all together, he feels so many different things all at once, so instead of shouting any more, he just turns away from Jesse and says: “You know, there’s a fine line between love and hate and you’re stood right on it.”
Andrew can feel that Jesse’s stood behind him now. Jesse sounds both happy and sad at the same time as he says: “You still love me?”
“Of course I do,” Andrew nods, rubbing his eyes with exasperation. “I’m a fucking idiot for it, but I do.”
“You know, I was terrified, almost every day. These little thoughts kept popping into my head. ‘What if he goes off of me? What if he finds someone better? What if he realises that I’m not the enigma from the bookstore like he thought and that I’m just a weird, awkward loser who can’t love him as much as he loves me because I just don’t know how?”
Andrew spins around and leans against the windowsill, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re not an awkward loser. Weird? Yes. Awkward loser? No.”
“Thank you,” Jesse says, a look of genuine gratitude on his face, as if he doesn’t deserve Andrew’s backhanded compliment.
“You should’ve just come to me,” Andrew says, speaking as if that would have been the most obvious choice to make, and by the look on Jesse‘s face, of regret and guilt, he clearly wishes he had‘ve made that choice. “Instead of just breaking it off when you got scared you should have just talked to me and told me all about the things that worried you. I would’ve sat you down and told you that everything’s going to be okay because there’s no one better than you.”
“I would’ve said ‘Jesse, I’ve been looking for my one, you know ‘The One’, the perfect guy my whole life. It took over twenty-six years, moving to another country, and the choice to walk into random bookstore to buy a script before I found you. I had to make up some bullshit about dropping it in a shower, sing in a karaoke bar, get scratched by your demon cat, allow you to buy me an expensive record player, and give a guy twice my size a bloody nose before you fell in love with me. If it took that much effort to find you, keep you, and get you to love me back, then you have to be worth a hell of a lot, right? I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think that I was in it for the long haul. If you were just a fling, acting as a stop-gap until something better came along, I would’ve ran away at the sight of that cat, because, and I won’t lie, Snowy creeps the life out of me. Jesse, I adore you. So much.’”
Jesse sounds as though he’s trying to speak over a lump in his throat. “Would you really have said all that?”
Andrew can see the tears glistening in his eyes.
Andrew nods, eyes shut, “and I’d’ve meant it, too. I do mean it. You just never gave me the chance to say it until now.”
Jesse just stares at him in awe for a few seconds, mouth hung open as a wave of different emotions flit across his face. Happiness, sadness, self-loathing. It’s then that the tears spill over, his face crumples up as he collapses onto the hotel bed, face in his hands as he sobs.
“I’ve ruined everything.”
Despite himself, Andrew just can’t help but feel sorry for him, so he goes over and sits down beside him by way of comfort.
“I ruined the… the b-best thing that happened to both of us!”
“Yeah,” Andrew huffs in defeat and reaches over to rub Jesse’s back, right between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, you did. I’m not gonna lie to you.”
Jesse takes his hands away from his face so that Andrew can see his eyes all blood-shot and puffy. Andrew’s never seen him cry before, it’s heart-breaking in an entirely different way to what he’s used to. “I’m so sorry,” Jesse says earnestly. “I mean it.”
Under normal circumstances, Andrew would’ve said something like ‘Don’t worry, it’s okay’, but instead, he just nods and says: “I know.”
Now that he thinks about it, Andrew really can’t believe how awful things have turned out, for the both of them. Andrew’s hurt almost every day since the break up, but Jesse was terrified of getting dumped since the very beginning. Jesse had never been in a proper relationship before Andrew, and Andrew hadn’t been genuinely happy before Jesse. It’s not fair, that either of them should have gone through so much worry and pain. Why shouldn’t they be happy like everyone else? Who says that they can’t be? Andrew made Jesse happy and Jesse made Andrew happy, and they could probably do it again if they tried. Who’s stopping them?
Andrew tilts his head back to stretch the tension out of his neck, yells up at the ceiling. “God, I am so tired of everything!”
“Me too.” Jesse replies, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “I hate this.”
Andrew lifts both hands to gesture to the two of them, all pathetic in this anonymous hotel room, one of them in tears and the other completely exasperated, fed up with all this shit and wishing that they could just be happy again. “Look at us, Jesse. Why couldn’t we have just been a normal couple? Like Ryan and Emma, or Carey and Joe, or Elizabeth and Armie? What‘s wrong with us?”
“We’re both fucked up and insecure? Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t know,“ Jesse laughs, and unlike the one from the train yesterday, Jesse uses this laugh to mock himself rather than Andrew. “Besides, you need two normal individuals to make a normal couple, and we’re not normal.”
“Yeah,” Andrew agrees, letting out one small, hopeless chuckle. “Yeah, you’re totally right.”
“You wanna know something?” Jesse says, just staring off into the middle distance in defeat. “If I had one wish, I’d go back in time and punch myself in the face right before I broke up with you, ultimately knocking myself out, and then Present Me would drag Past Me out of that diner and explain to Past Me that if Past Me breaks up with Past You then everything will be wrong for Future Andrew and Jesse, i.e. Present Us.”
Present Us, they could be ‘us’ again. That’s a nice thought.
Then Jesse does something that makes Andrew smile fondly at him in the way that he always used to before things got so shitty and broken. Jesse starts gesticulating all over the place as he speaks, the way that he does when he’s talking about something he really feels passionate about, like he does when he talks about Green Day or Woody Allen or animal charities. He screws his face up, not with pain this time, but with feeling, looking cartoonish and adorable.
“I’d go all A Christmas Carol on my ass and say ‘No, Past Jesse! Don’t break up with him, it’s the worst thing you could possibly do, heed my warning! Go in there, kiss him, tell him you love him. It’ll all be okay if you just listen to me!’”
“Yeah, that’d be great, except Past Andrew would be freaked the fuck out by another Jesse just popping up out of no where. Besides, you don’t have one wish, or the ability to construct your own time machine, and, unfortunately, Dr. Who and Dr. Emmett Brown are both fictional, so you can’t ask them for help.” Andrew nudges Jesse’s shoulder with his own. “So what are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna stick around and try and make it up to you,” Jesse looks up at him. “That’s if… that’s if you’re willing to let me. It’ll probably take a while, though.”
Andrew likes the sound of that.
“I’m willing to let you. We’ve got plenty of time. Years.”
“Yeah?” Jesse asks hopefully.
“Yeah.”
He hasn‘t forgiven him, not just yet, but Andrew never stopped loving him, so what’s the point of trying to fight it any more? You can’t just unlove someone like that, it’s pretty much impossible. Jesse wants to fix it, he wants Andrew back, and Andrew wants the same. The air has been cleared, and life’s just too short to waste sitting around wanting and not having. Sure, things could fuck up again, could fuck up spectacularly but Andrew would rather give it another shot than sit around for the rest of his life imagining what could have been. He feels happier than he has in months with the thought of Jesse being back in his life for good, even if he has to be a little guarded with his emotions for a while, but he has a feeling it’ll be worth it.
“I got rid of a load of your clothes and sold that Mike Dirnt poster, just so you know.”
“’I’ll get you a new one, that’s the first thing I’ll do,” Jesse says after a moment or two. “I shouldn’t have broken up with you. That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done and I hate myself for it.”
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Andrew admits, thinking back to how terrified Jesse had looked earlier on and how bad it made him feel deep down. He screws his face up in confusion, “and don’t hate yourself, that‘s just unhealthy.”
“Well, you hate me.”
“I said you’re sat on the line between love and hate. I kind of hate the fact that I don’t hate you, because I should, but I don’t hate you specifically, if that makes sense. You fucked me over, but I still want you more than anything in this world. Is that weird?” He turns to look at him.
You know how they say that you always hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.
“Yeah,” Jesse chuckles, hanging his head. “Yeah, you definitely should hate me.”
“But I don’t,” Andrew says simply. There’s nothing he could possibly do to change that fact.
Leaning down to place a kiss on Jesse‘s temple all warm and gentle and soft, he knows that, yeah, this is the only person he was ever meant to kiss. He speaks into Jesse’s skin, whispers, “I… opposite of hate you.”
Then Jesse just leans down and nuzzles down into Andrew’s shoulder for what Andrew knows will not be the last time. He can feel Jesse smiling against him, right through the fabric of his shirt. What Andrew just said, it‘s probably not the exact thing Jesse was hoping to hear, but that smile says that he knows things will get better with time. After a while, and a lot of healing, they might just go back to their weird, individual version of ’normal’, and Andrew will be able to forgive him fully, and say those three words again, the way they’re meant to be said.
“I opposite of hate you, too,” Jesse says gently.
For five hundred days, Jesse has dominated Andrew’s life, but there’s not a time limit any more, who knows where they’ll be another five hundred days from now. Andrew had said that they’d have plenty of time to fix this, an indefinite amount of weeks and months and years. Andrew just reaches over to take Jesse’s hand, and holds it there as the two of them stare out of the window and into the streets of New York City. He’d probably lose his mind if he tried to keep track of all the days to come, some of them great, some of them downright awful, and some of them… just okay.
So, from now on, he’s going to stop counting.
~
So there it is, the final part. I really hope you guys liked it, and I just want to say thank you for reading it. Thank you for the wonderful comments and the support and for sticking with me even though it sometimes took me an age to update. You’re all amazing. <3