Interproximal - Dentist!AU, Jared/Jensen RPS, PG-13
Title: Interproximal
Series: Dentist!Verse
Author: thelonejuliet
Characters: Jensen, Jared, Mike, Tom, Chad, Gabe, etc. etc.
Pairing: Mike/Tom
Word Count: 3,477
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. Definitely angst. And heartbroken!boys.
Disclaimer: These people belong not to me, but to themselves and whoever else they so choose.
Beta: confused_one06
Author's Note(s): I'm SO sorry I disappeared. But you can expect regular postings from now on! Just had to get my life together for a bit!
Previous Parts of the Dentist!AU found here.
All fics found here!
Verse Summary - Jensen Ackles, a new dentist in town with a troubled love life, takes on a new patient in the form of barowner Jared Padalecki. Sparks fly and attraction deepens but can the secrets that both men harbor destroy everything before it's too late?
Chapter/Part Summary: Jensen gets a surprising visit and begins to heal.
Banner made by mss_celestal!
Interproximal
Interproximal - The space in between two adjacent teeth.
Five weeks. It had been five weeks, two days, 16 hours and 43 minutes since his world was turned upside down, and Jensen was doing well.
Okay, so maybe that was a lie, but he’d gotten good at lying to himself. It was easier when you were numb, not entirely sure what you were feeling. That way, you could make things up and actually believe them.
Okay, so actually, Jensen still felt like yesterday’s garbage. But at least he was smiling again.
“Dude, why didn’t you warn me about Molly?!” Gabe whispered harshly as he passed behind Jensen on his way to the front desk, the cougar in tow.
Jensen just smiled. “Just call it an initiation, junior!” he called over his shoulder as he made his way back to Exam Room 7, where he had a very irritated Mike Rosenbaum waiting for him.
“Abou’ ‘ime!” Mike tried to threaten, complete with an angry glare, but Jensen couldn’t help but laugh.
Mike had managed to get one side of his face swollen, and Jensen was sure that he’d chipped a tooth with whatever he’d done. Even Tom was barely suppressing giggles over in the corner of the room.
“Do I even want to know how this happened?” Jensen teased.
Mike blushed a little, and looked over at Tom. Tom just started laughing harder. Jensen rolled his eyes and leaned against the counter, waiting for an answer.
Once Tom had sobered up a bit, snorting every couple words, he explained. “Rosey here thought that it would be fun to ditch his lovely Accounting firm to come visit me for lunch. I was busy, and promptly refused the blow job he was offering. But you know Mike. He was persistent, and when he knelt down, he slipped and smacked his face on the edge of my desk.”
And the laughter was renewed tenfold, with Mike spluttering between the cousins.
It was only when Gabe walked in that they let it slide, getting down to some semblance of business. “Okay,” Jensen started, motioning to Gabe. “Tommy, this is my new recruit, Gabriel Tigerman. I told you I needed help and, well, this is it.”
Tom shook Gabe’s hand and murmured some sort of greeting. Mike, having helped interview the possible candidates as part owner of the practice, just glared.
“Well, Gabriel,” Tom said brightly, motioning to his boyfriend. “Let’s just get you used to working on divas like this, huh?”
Jensen stood back and watched the scene, as Gabe inspected Mike and nearly got his fingers bitten off. Yeah, he was far from okay, but at least he could see a light at the end of the tunnel.
* * *
“Yo! Jenny!” Chris called from the living room couch, where he and Steve had been parked for the better part of three days. “Door!”
Jensen hefted himself out of the kitchen chair with a sigh, grumbling about how Chris and Steve were way closer to the damn door. He had bills to pay in order to live this pathetic excuse of a life, and he didn’t appreciate being torn away from it because musicians were lazy.
Nevertheless, he dragged lethargic legs to the front door to receive the surprise of his life. “Chad?” he exclaimed, feeling over a month’s worth of anger and hurt begin to swell up. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
Chad looked terrified, and with good reason. One of Jensen’s hands was still clenched around the door, knuckles turning solid white, and the other was balled into a fist at his side, ready to swing at a moment’s notice. Chad had a lot of nerve showing up on Jensen’s doorstep after being the cause of his misery.
“Well?” he snarled when Chad just stood there, stammering.
“I wanted to apologize,” he squeaked, words rushing out in a tumble of syllables. “For that night. For everything. For being an asshole to you from Day One. You didn’t deserve it, any of it, and I know that. But, you have to understand that I - ”
“I have to understand?” Jensen growled, lips twisting in a sneer as he let go of the door and stepped onto the small porch. “Is that really what you want to say to me?”
Before he was even aware of his actions, he pulled his arm back and let the fist fly, connecting solidly with Chad’s chin, snapping the blond’s head back. He didn’t give Chad a chance to recover before he swung again, catching Chad’s nose and sending the other man stumbling back and tripping down the porch steps. Another punch landing on Chad’s cheekbone sent him onto his ass.
Vision taking a red tint, Jensen bent over and twisted his fingers in Chad’s shirt, pulling him to his feet again. He couldn’t help but smile as he saw the blood flowing from Chad’s nose, both eyes already beginning to swell. He reared his arm back to hit him again, but his wrist was suddenly encased in a tight grip and he was pulled backwards as Chad fell to the ground again, eyes wide with fear.
“Jensen!” Christian’s voice was harsh in Jensen’s ear, as solid arms wrapped around his chest from behind and pulled him back up the steps. “Calm down!”
Jensen let Chris plop him down onto the edge of the porch as the anger slowly drained out of his body. He wasn’t even aware that he was crying until Steve was next him, pulling him in with both arms and whispering, “It’s okay, man.”
Jensen shook his head, breath hitching as he cried harder, too much emotion pent up for too long. He thought he was getting better, that the ache would be nonexistent in a couple weeks, but that obviously wasn’t the case. It hadn’t gotten any better, not with constant updates from Mike and Tom about Jared, however unintentional they may be. And he was just so angry. All the time. He wanted to lash out at the people around him every time he got a sympathetic look, regardless of the concern behind it.
He just wanted to feel better.
After all the shit he’d been put through in his life, was it too much to ask that he be allowed some happiness?
“I’m sorry, Jensen.”
Jensen’s head snapped up at Chad’s words, the closeness of his voice. He was standing only a foot away, Chris’s hand wrapped around his arm in case Jensen started throwing more punches.
Jensen scrubbed a hand across his face, wiping the tears away. “Sorry for what, exactly?” he asked, voice gravelly with emotion.
“That night,” Chad whispered, voice muffled from his most-likely-broken nose. “I took advantage. Jared, he… It wasn’t his fault. His ex, Sandy, she…It was her idea. She went crazy, apparently, and…The blame’s not on Jared. None of it. And he misses you. I know he does, even if he’s not speaking to me.”
Jensen could feel the disbelief written across his face. “Sandy?” he repeated. “What does she have to do with anything? And what do you mean you ‘took advantage’?”
He stood up and took a couple steps forward, until he could practically smell the blood on Chad’s face. Chad’s eyes widened further and he stumbled back against Chris. Jensen held his hands up in a gesture of peace. “I just want some answers.”
He chose to ignore the voice in the back of his head telling him that Jared could have given him answers a long time ago.
“Sandy met Justin, your ex, out in L.A. and he told her all about you and Jared. I don’t know how he knew about Jared,” Chad said, body relaxing slightly when Jensen didn’t interrupt. “Then she called me, spinning some story about how bad you were for Jared, how you could ruin him. I believed her, and I couldn’t let Jared get hurt. But you two were impossible to break up. Then Sandy came up with the idea of getting you to break up with him. I drugged him, Jensen. That night, when you walked in. I drugged him. He didn’t know what was going on, not until you had seen us.”
Jensen felt his heart drop. He’d refused to even speak to Jared, and after the first week, Jared had stopped calling. He’d screwed up by not just trusting Jared, and now he wasn’t sure if he could take it back, if he could fix it.
“Steve?” he whispered, turning to his friend as the panic rose in his throat. “Oh, God.”
Steve moved to catch him just as Jensen stumbled, breath coming in short, fast hitches. Jensen could feel his throat closing up, vision beginning to go fuzzy around the edges. He was only vaguely aware of the movement around him. He couldn’t be sure if his friends were talking to him or each other, but he welcomed the darkness when it finally closed in.
* * *
As foreign as it sounded to his own ears, Jared couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of Tom dropping a box half-full with nails on his foot and the cursing that followed.
“Told you to be careful, dude!” he called from his place at the door, where he set the two beers on the patio table Mike had bought him as a housewarming gift.
He raised a hand over his eyes to squint at the corner of the yard where Tom was picking nails out of the grass and throwing them back in the box. It had taken them all day, but the doghouse they’d built for Harley and Sadie was finished, and it looked good. They could paint it on another day.
“Beer’s over here!” he yelled over to Tom as he situated himself in one of the chairs that Tom had bought to match Mike’s table, though they weren’t even the same color. He looked around at his yard, the trees spreading out behind the little neighborhood he’d moved into. After Chad had sold his share of the Wax franchise, as Jared had taken to calling in his head, he’d finally taken pity on his dogs and given them some space to run around in. It wasn’t fair to keep them all cooped up, and that apartment just held too many memories for Jared to stay in it and not go insane.
Jared shook his head as his thoughts drifted to Jensen again, as they usually did after 30 seconds of not thinking about him. He couldn’t believe it had been so long. He’d given up on calling Jensen, at Mike and Tom’s request, but he hadn’t given up hope that Jensen would finally call him back. It was hard, not having Jensen around to share the small stuff - or the big stuff, as was the case with Jared’s new house. He wanted someone to laugh with again. He just wanted to be able to laugh, period.
“Looks good, Jay,” Tom muttered, plopping down in the other chair and swiping his beer. “And here Rosey thought we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Jared nodded his head, still too lost in his thoughts to do much more.
“He misses you, y’know,” Tom whispered suddenly.
Jared let his head fall back against the chair and turned it a fraction to peer at Tom. “Then why hasn’t he called? Tried to see me? It’s not like he doesn’t know where I am.”
Tom shook his head, a sad smile forming on his lips. “Pride,” he responded simply. “You know Jen. He’s been hurt too many times. He just…he’s too proud, especially now that so much time has passed.”
Jared nodded and turned his face back into the sun, closing his eyes and letting the heat wash over him. He should be happy, with all the positive turns his life had taken recently. Opening night of the second Wax was a hit, and both locations were thriving. He’d gone back to school, working toward a possible business degree. He had a new house, which he was incredibly proud of, and two dogs that covered him in slobbery love. But none of it really seemed to affect him, not without Jensen.
After Sandy, he’d just been adrift, trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life since his dream of engineering had been ripped away from him. He slept with everything that moved, a string of faceless fucks that never meant enough for him to even remember their names when it was over. Then he had walked into the dentist office, and it was as if his whole world suddenly made sense. A pair of big, green eyes blinked down at him, and he fell. Everything in his life, all the shitty circumstances, had led him to Jensen. He was able to build himself back up, feel like he had a purpose again. He got to mend his own heart and build up another dream up around Jensen.
Then that had been ripped away, too.
The ringing of his phone snapped Jared out of his dreary thoughts, and he fished it out of his pocket half-heartedly. He didn’t even check the caller ID before he answered it.
“What?” he spluttered, eyes shooting open as he sat up and sent his beer bottle rolling across the patio. He could see Tom tense up at his side.
Jensen’s at the hospital.
Four little words out of Mike’s mouth had Jared’s head spinning. He was hardly aware of what he was doing, what was going on around him. All he could see was his mind’s image of Jensen, broken and bandaged, in a hospital bed with machines the only thing keeping him alive.
“Jared? Jared!”
Mike’s voice was still floating out of the phone as Tom reached over and pulled it from Jared’s lax fingers. He heard Tom speaking softly into it, and then Tom was jostling him out of his chair, moving them through the house and out into the driveway.
It wasn’t until they were halfway there that Jared realized where they were going.
* * *
Jensen was sure that his head had been ripped off, or at least attempted to run away from the rest of his body, if the amount of pain he was in when he woke was any indication. He groaned, blinking fuzzy eyes at a sterile room, with Chris hovering in the corner.
Chris smiled when he noticed Jensen was awake and moved over to the chair at his bedside. “Hey, Jen, how ya feeling?”
Jensen winced at the sound of his own voice when he responded, “Like someone took a 2x4 to my head. What happened?”
Chris’s eyes softened at his question, causing Jensen’s heart to racing. It was never good news when Christian Kane started to get mushy. “You don’t remember?” he whispered.
Jensen snorted. Of course he remembered. He didn’t think he would ever get the image of Chad on his doorstep out of his mind. He was sure that it was going to be playing in a rotation with the image of Jared and Chad kissing on the backs of his eyelids. “After, what happened after?”
Chris nodded, almost absently. “Panic attack,” he replied. “Your inhaler was in the house, and we didn’t catch you before you went down. Doctor thinks you might have a concussion. He wants to keep you overnight…”
Jensen shook his head, groaning as the throbbing in his temples grew worse. He struggled to sit up, smiling gratefully as Chris helped him. “I can’t miss work tomorrow. I’ve already missed too much with this whole Jared thing. I can’t leave Gabe by himself,” he protested.
“Yes, you can,” Gabe called from the doorway, causing Chris and Jensen both to startle.
Chris excused himself as Jensen began to protest. “Dude, no - ”
Gabe stepped forward and clamped a hand over Jensen’s mouth to stifle any interruptions. “Yes,” he repeated. “I’ve been working under you for almost a month. I’ve been out of school for almost four months. I can do this. Kristen’s at the office now, going over the books. We’ll cancel anything that’s too complex, but the regular check-ups and cleanings we’ll keep. I’ll have Allison there to help me out if I need it. Just trust me, okay? You’re going to have to leave me on my own sometime. Think of this as a trial run. If I screw up, then you can fire me and break my little heart.”
Jensen snorted, his glare lessening ever so slightly as Gabriel removed his hand. Gabe just stood back, folding his arms over his chest and cocking an eyebrow, as he waited to for Jensen to say something.
After a few minutes of staring each other down, Jensen finally sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Trial run.”
Jensen laughed when Gabe launched himself, and he ended up with an armful of young intern muttering ‘thank you’ over and over. Suddenly his headache didn’t seem so bad.
* * *
Jared could feel his throat closing up as he took in the sight before him, eyes stinging behind his eyes. Jensen’s face was open and happy, bubbly laughter pouring out of his mouth. And Jared couldn’t help but smile. He wanted Jensen to be happy, even if it wasn’t him that was putting that smile on his face.
Jared backed out of the room before Jensen could see him and immediately made his way toward the elevators. Mike and Tom were just coming back from getting coffee, Chris right behind them. He smiled sadly at all of their puzzled looks and shook his head, walking away before they could ask any questions.
Maybe it was time to finally let Jensen go.
* * *
Jensen could do nothing but gape at his friends, too shocked to form a coherent thought let alone string a sentence together. Jared had been there. Jared had come to see him. Jared, Jared, Jared. That one word floated around his head, filling him with happiness and a sense of foreboding at the same time.
“Why didn’t he say hello?” Jensen asked when he found his voice again, surprised at the anger he was feeling. After all this time, Jared couldn’t even walk through the door?
Tom stepped forward, motioning Steve, Chris and Mike out of the room. He closed the door behind them then walked over to sit in the chair Chris had vacated earlier. He was worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, staring at Jensen with some inscrutable expression that had Jensen’s heart doing double time.
“I think he saw you with Gabe,” Tom whispered, still looking at Jensen with that odd glint in his eyes. “When he passed us in the hall…he looked shattered, man.”
Jensen’s eyes widened as a feeling of utter horror spread throughout his veins. “Tommy,” he breathed, shaking his head as if to deny any claim of wrongdoing. “But, that wasn’t…”
Tom nodded his head. “I know, Jen,” he responded, concern written all over his face. “But you need to talk to him.”
Jensen swiped a hand across his face, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly between thumb and forefinger. “It’s been so long. I don’t even know where to start.”
“You’re miserable, Jensen. You’ve been moping around for a month and a half, and it’s got to stop,” Tom growled, standing up and pacing the length of the hospital room. “You could have cleared this up weeks ago! You’re my cousin, and I love you, but you’re an idiot. A complete idiot. Jared is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you just let him slip right through your fingers. You didn’t even let him explain! It took fucking Chad to force the truth on you for you to even listen! And Lord knows that Mike and I have tried to help. But, I’m done, Jen. I’m finished dealing with you and your bullshit. I know that you’ve had a rough time, but that’s no excuse. Not anymore. You’re 26 years old. It’s time to get your head out of your ass and let go.”
Jensen was left speechless as Tom ended his diatribe and just stood there, staring at Jensen with so much pity in his eyes that Jensen had to look away. He knew he was an idiot; he knew that every word Tom had just shouted at him was true. But how does a leopard change its spots?
Maybe it was time to find out.
He looked up at Tom, trying to cover up the fear he was sure was evident in every fiber of his being. “Okay,” he nodded.
Tom looked confused for a second before a wide grin split across his face. “Okay?” he repeated.
Jensen smiled back, resolve twisting itself into a knot in his stomach. “Okay.”
**********************
Didja miss me? ;-)
_
Series: Dentist!Verse
Author: thelonejuliet
Characters: Jensen, Jared, Mike, Tom, Chad, Gabe, etc. etc.
Pairing: Mike/Tom
Word Count: 3,477
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. Definitely angst. And heartbroken!boys.
Disclaimer: These people belong not to me, but to themselves and whoever else they so choose.
Beta: confused_one06
Author's Note(s): I'm SO sorry I disappeared. But you can expect regular postings from now on! Just had to get my life together for a bit!
Previous Parts of the Dentist!AU found here.
All fics found here!
Verse Summary - Jensen Ackles, a new dentist in town with a troubled love life, takes on a new patient in the form of barowner Jared Padalecki. Sparks fly and attraction deepens but can the secrets that both men harbor destroy everything before it's too late?
Chapter/Part Summary: Jensen gets a surprising visit and begins to heal.
Banner made by mss_celestal!
Interproximal
Interproximal - The space in between two adjacent teeth.
Five weeks. It had been five weeks, two days, 16 hours and 43 minutes since his world was turned upside down, and Jensen was doing well.
Okay, so maybe that was a lie, but he’d gotten good at lying to himself. It was easier when you were numb, not entirely sure what you were feeling. That way, you could make things up and actually believe them.
Okay, so actually, Jensen still felt like yesterday’s garbage. But at least he was smiling again.
“Dude, why didn’t you warn me about Molly?!” Gabe whispered harshly as he passed behind Jensen on his way to the front desk, the cougar in tow.
Jensen just smiled. “Just call it an initiation, junior!” he called over his shoulder as he made his way back to Exam Room 7, where he had a very irritated Mike Rosenbaum waiting for him.
“Abou’ ‘ime!” Mike tried to threaten, complete with an angry glare, but Jensen couldn’t help but laugh.
Mike had managed to get one side of his face swollen, and Jensen was sure that he’d chipped a tooth with whatever he’d done. Even Tom was barely suppressing giggles over in the corner of the room.
“Do I even want to know how this happened?” Jensen teased.
Mike blushed a little, and looked over at Tom. Tom just started laughing harder. Jensen rolled his eyes and leaned against the counter, waiting for an answer.
Once Tom had sobered up a bit, snorting every couple words, he explained. “Rosey here thought that it would be fun to ditch his lovely Accounting firm to come visit me for lunch. I was busy, and promptly refused the blow job he was offering. But you know Mike. He was persistent, and when he knelt down, he slipped and smacked his face on the edge of my desk.”
And the laughter was renewed tenfold, with Mike spluttering between the cousins.
It was only when Gabe walked in that they let it slide, getting down to some semblance of business. “Okay,” Jensen started, motioning to Gabe. “Tommy, this is my new recruit, Gabriel Tigerman. I told you I needed help and, well, this is it.”
Tom shook Gabe’s hand and murmured some sort of greeting. Mike, having helped interview the possible candidates as part owner of the practice, just glared.
“Well, Gabriel,” Tom said brightly, motioning to his boyfriend. “Let’s just get you used to working on divas like this, huh?”
Jensen stood back and watched the scene, as Gabe inspected Mike and nearly got his fingers bitten off. Yeah, he was far from okay, but at least he could see a light at the end of the tunnel.
* * *
“Yo! Jenny!” Chris called from the living room couch, where he and Steve had been parked for the better part of three days. “Door!”
Jensen hefted himself out of the kitchen chair with a sigh, grumbling about how Chris and Steve were way closer to the damn door. He had bills to pay in order to live this pathetic excuse of a life, and he didn’t appreciate being torn away from it because musicians were lazy.
Nevertheless, he dragged lethargic legs to the front door to receive the surprise of his life. “Chad?” he exclaimed, feeling over a month’s worth of anger and hurt begin to swell up. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
Chad looked terrified, and with good reason. One of Jensen’s hands was still clenched around the door, knuckles turning solid white, and the other was balled into a fist at his side, ready to swing at a moment’s notice. Chad had a lot of nerve showing up on Jensen’s doorstep after being the cause of his misery.
“Well?” he snarled when Chad just stood there, stammering.
“I wanted to apologize,” he squeaked, words rushing out in a tumble of syllables. “For that night. For everything. For being an asshole to you from Day One. You didn’t deserve it, any of it, and I know that. But, you have to understand that I - ”
“I have to understand?” Jensen growled, lips twisting in a sneer as he let go of the door and stepped onto the small porch. “Is that really what you want to say to me?”
Before he was even aware of his actions, he pulled his arm back and let the fist fly, connecting solidly with Chad’s chin, snapping the blond’s head back. He didn’t give Chad a chance to recover before he swung again, catching Chad’s nose and sending the other man stumbling back and tripping down the porch steps. Another punch landing on Chad’s cheekbone sent him onto his ass.
Vision taking a red tint, Jensen bent over and twisted his fingers in Chad’s shirt, pulling him to his feet again. He couldn’t help but smile as he saw the blood flowing from Chad’s nose, both eyes already beginning to swell. He reared his arm back to hit him again, but his wrist was suddenly encased in a tight grip and he was pulled backwards as Chad fell to the ground again, eyes wide with fear.
“Jensen!” Christian’s voice was harsh in Jensen’s ear, as solid arms wrapped around his chest from behind and pulled him back up the steps. “Calm down!”
Jensen let Chris plop him down onto the edge of the porch as the anger slowly drained out of his body. He wasn’t even aware that he was crying until Steve was next him, pulling him in with both arms and whispering, “It’s okay, man.”
Jensen shook his head, breath hitching as he cried harder, too much emotion pent up for too long. He thought he was getting better, that the ache would be nonexistent in a couple weeks, but that obviously wasn’t the case. It hadn’t gotten any better, not with constant updates from Mike and Tom about Jared, however unintentional they may be. And he was just so angry. All the time. He wanted to lash out at the people around him every time he got a sympathetic look, regardless of the concern behind it.
He just wanted to feel better.
After all the shit he’d been put through in his life, was it too much to ask that he be allowed some happiness?
“I’m sorry, Jensen.”
Jensen’s head snapped up at Chad’s words, the closeness of his voice. He was standing only a foot away, Chris’s hand wrapped around his arm in case Jensen started throwing more punches.
Jensen scrubbed a hand across his face, wiping the tears away. “Sorry for what, exactly?” he asked, voice gravelly with emotion.
“That night,” Chad whispered, voice muffled from his most-likely-broken nose. “I took advantage. Jared, he… It wasn’t his fault. His ex, Sandy, she…It was her idea. She went crazy, apparently, and…The blame’s not on Jared. None of it. And he misses you. I know he does, even if he’s not speaking to me.”
Jensen could feel the disbelief written across his face. “Sandy?” he repeated. “What does she have to do with anything? And what do you mean you ‘took advantage’?”
He stood up and took a couple steps forward, until he could practically smell the blood on Chad’s face. Chad’s eyes widened further and he stumbled back against Chris. Jensen held his hands up in a gesture of peace. “I just want some answers.”
He chose to ignore the voice in the back of his head telling him that Jared could have given him answers a long time ago.
“Sandy met Justin, your ex, out in L.A. and he told her all about you and Jared. I don’t know how he knew about Jared,” Chad said, body relaxing slightly when Jensen didn’t interrupt. “Then she called me, spinning some story about how bad you were for Jared, how you could ruin him. I believed her, and I couldn’t let Jared get hurt. But you two were impossible to break up. Then Sandy came up with the idea of getting you to break up with him. I drugged him, Jensen. That night, when you walked in. I drugged him. He didn’t know what was going on, not until you had seen us.”
Jensen felt his heart drop. He’d refused to even speak to Jared, and after the first week, Jared had stopped calling. He’d screwed up by not just trusting Jared, and now he wasn’t sure if he could take it back, if he could fix it.
“Steve?” he whispered, turning to his friend as the panic rose in his throat. “Oh, God.”
Steve moved to catch him just as Jensen stumbled, breath coming in short, fast hitches. Jensen could feel his throat closing up, vision beginning to go fuzzy around the edges. He was only vaguely aware of the movement around him. He couldn’t be sure if his friends were talking to him or each other, but he welcomed the darkness when it finally closed in.
* * *
As foreign as it sounded to his own ears, Jared couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of Tom dropping a box half-full with nails on his foot and the cursing that followed.
“Told you to be careful, dude!” he called from his place at the door, where he set the two beers on the patio table Mike had bought him as a housewarming gift.
He raised a hand over his eyes to squint at the corner of the yard where Tom was picking nails out of the grass and throwing them back in the box. It had taken them all day, but the doghouse they’d built for Harley and Sadie was finished, and it looked good. They could paint it on another day.
“Beer’s over here!” he yelled over to Tom as he situated himself in one of the chairs that Tom had bought to match Mike’s table, though they weren’t even the same color. He looked around at his yard, the trees spreading out behind the little neighborhood he’d moved into. After Chad had sold his share of the Wax franchise, as Jared had taken to calling in his head, he’d finally taken pity on his dogs and given them some space to run around in. It wasn’t fair to keep them all cooped up, and that apartment just held too many memories for Jared to stay in it and not go insane.
Jared shook his head as his thoughts drifted to Jensen again, as they usually did after 30 seconds of not thinking about him. He couldn’t believe it had been so long. He’d given up on calling Jensen, at Mike and Tom’s request, but he hadn’t given up hope that Jensen would finally call him back. It was hard, not having Jensen around to share the small stuff - or the big stuff, as was the case with Jared’s new house. He wanted someone to laugh with again. He just wanted to be able to laugh, period.
“Looks good, Jay,” Tom muttered, plopping down in the other chair and swiping his beer. “And here Rosey thought we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Jared nodded his head, still too lost in his thoughts to do much more.
“He misses you, y’know,” Tom whispered suddenly.
Jared let his head fall back against the chair and turned it a fraction to peer at Tom. “Then why hasn’t he called? Tried to see me? It’s not like he doesn’t know where I am.”
Tom shook his head, a sad smile forming on his lips. “Pride,” he responded simply. “You know Jen. He’s been hurt too many times. He just…he’s too proud, especially now that so much time has passed.”
Jared nodded and turned his face back into the sun, closing his eyes and letting the heat wash over him. He should be happy, with all the positive turns his life had taken recently. Opening night of the second Wax was a hit, and both locations were thriving. He’d gone back to school, working toward a possible business degree. He had a new house, which he was incredibly proud of, and two dogs that covered him in slobbery love. But none of it really seemed to affect him, not without Jensen.
After Sandy, he’d just been adrift, trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life since his dream of engineering had been ripped away from him. He slept with everything that moved, a string of faceless fucks that never meant enough for him to even remember their names when it was over. Then he had walked into the dentist office, and it was as if his whole world suddenly made sense. A pair of big, green eyes blinked down at him, and he fell. Everything in his life, all the shitty circumstances, had led him to Jensen. He was able to build himself back up, feel like he had a purpose again. He got to mend his own heart and build up another dream up around Jensen.
Then that had been ripped away, too.
The ringing of his phone snapped Jared out of his dreary thoughts, and he fished it out of his pocket half-heartedly. He didn’t even check the caller ID before he answered it.
“What?” he spluttered, eyes shooting open as he sat up and sent his beer bottle rolling across the patio. He could see Tom tense up at his side.
Jensen’s at the hospital.
Four little words out of Mike’s mouth had Jared’s head spinning. He was hardly aware of what he was doing, what was going on around him. All he could see was his mind’s image of Jensen, broken and bandaged, in a hospital bed with machines the only thing keeping him alive.
“Jared? Jared!”
Mike’s voice was still floating out of the phone as Tom reached over and pulled it from Jared’s lax fingers. He heard Tom speaking softly into it, and then Tom was jostling him out of his chair, moving them through the house and out into the driveway.
It wasn’t until they were halfway there that Jared realized where they were going.
* * *
Jensen was sure that his head had been ripped off, or at least attempted to run away from the rest of his body, if the amount of pain he was in when he woke was any indication. He groaned, blinking fuzzy eyes at a sterile room, with Chris hovering in the corner.
Chris smiled when he noticed Jensen was awake and moved over to the chair at his bedside. “Hey, Jen, how ya feeling?”
Jensen winced at the sound of his own voice when he responded, “Like someone took a 2x4 to my head. What happened?”
Chris’s eyes softened at his question, causing Jensen’s heart to racing. It was never good news when Christian Kane started to get mushy. “You don’t remember?” he whispered.
Jensen snorted. Of course he remembered. He didn’t think he would ever get the image of Chad on his doorstep out of his mind. He was sure that it was going to be playing in a rotation with the image of Jared and Chad kissing on the backs of his eyelids. “After, what happened after?”
Chris nodded, almost absently. “Panic attack,” he replied. “Your inhaler was in the house, and we didn’t catch you before you went down. Doctor thinks you might have a concussion. He wants to keep you overnight…”
Jensen shook his head, groaning as the throbbing in his temples grew worse. He struggled to sit up, smiling gratefully as Chris helped him. “I can’t miss work tomorrow. I’ve already missed too much with this whole Jared thing. I can’t leave Gabe by himself,” he protested.
“Yes, you can,” Gabe called from the doorway, causing Chris and Jensen both to startle.
Chris excused himself as Jensen began to protest. “Dude, no - ”
Gabe stepped forward and clamped a hand over Jensen’s mouth to stifle any interruptions. “Yes,” he repeated. “I’ve been working under you for almost a month. I’ve been out of school for almost four months. I can do this. Kristen’s at the office now, going over the books. We’ll cancel anything that’s too complex, but the regular check-ups and cleanings we’ll keep. I’ll have Allison there to help me out if I need it. Just trust me, okay? You’re going to have to leave me on my own sometime. Think of this as a trial run. If I screw up, then you can fire me and break my little heart.”
Jensen snorted, his glare lessening ever so slightly as Gabriel removed his hand. Gabe just stood back, folding his arms over his chest and cocking an eyebrow, as he waited to for Jensen to say something.
After a few minutes of staring each other down, Jensen finally sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Trial run.”
Jensen laughed when Gabe launched himself, and he ended up with an armful of young intern muttering ‘thank you’ over and over. Suddenly his headache didn’t seem so bad.
* * *
Jared could feel his throat closing up as he took in the sight before him, eyes stinging behind his eyes. Jensen’s face was open and happy, bubbly laughter pouring out of his mouth. And Jared couldn’t help but smile. He wanted Jensen to be happy, even if it wasn’t him that was putting that smile on his face.
Jared backed out of the room before Jensen could see him and immediately made his way toward the elevators. Mike and Tom were just coming back from getting coffee, Chris right behind them. He smiled sadly at all of their puzzled looks and shook his head, walking away before they could ask any questions.
Maybe it was time to finally let Jensen go.
* * *
Jensen could do nothing but gape at his friends, too shocked to form a coherent thought let alone string a sentence together. Jared had been there. Jared had come to see him. Jared, Jared, Jared. That one word floated around his head, filling him with happiness and a sense of foreboding at the same time.
“Why didn’t he say hello?” Jensen asked when he found his voice again, surprised at the anger he was feeling. After all this time, Jared couldn’t even walk through the door?
Tom stepped forward, motioning Steve, Chris and Mike out of the room. He closed the door behind them then walked over to sit in the chair Chris had vacated earlier. He was worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, staring at Jensen with some inscrutable expression that had Jensen’s heart doing double time.
“I think he saw you with Gabe,” Tom whispered, still looking at Jensen with that odd glint in his eyes. “When he passed us in the hall…he looked shattered, man.”
Jensen’s eyes widened as a feeling of utter horror spread throughout his veins. “Tommy,” he breathed, shaking his head as if to deny any claim of wrongdoing. “But, that wasn’t…”
Tom nodded his head. “I know, Jen,” he responded, concern written all over his face. “But you need to talk to him.”
Jensen swiped a hand across his face, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly between thumb and forefinger. “It’s been so long. I don’t even know where to start.”
“You’re miserable, Jensen. You’ve been moping around for a month and a half, and it’s got to stop,” Tom growled, standing up and pacing the length of the hospital room. “You could have cleared this up weeks ago! You’re my cousin, and I love you, but you’re an idiot. A complete idiot. Jared is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you just let him slip right through your fingers. You didn’t even let him explain! It took fucking Chad to force the truth on you for you to even listen! And Lord knows that Mike and I have tried to help. But, I’m done, Jen. I’m finished dealing with you and your bullshit. I know that you’ve had a rough time, but that’s no excuse. Not anymore. You’re 26 years old. It’s time to get your head out of your ass and let go.”
Jensen was left speechless as Tom ended his diatribe and just stood there, staring at Jensen with so much pity in his eyes that Jensen had to look away. He knew he was an idiot; he knew that every word Tom had just shouted at him was true. But how does a leopard change its spots?
Maybe it was time to find out.
He looked up at Tom, trying to cover up the fear he was sure was evident in every fiber of his being. “Okay,” he nodded.
Tom looked confused for a second before a wide grin split across his face. “Okay?” he repeated.
Jensen smiled back, resolve twisting itself into a knot in his stomach. “Okay.”
**********************
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