5,601
You guys are awesome for commenting on the last part. I'm trying something new with this one, the format might seem a bit wonky because I've never used "flashbacks" like this before. If it's hard to understand, let me know. And I forgot to say it before, but just remember this is entirely unedited, barely looked over before I post it.
Enjoy. Hopefully I'll hit 10 000 at some point tomorrow.
5,601 / 50,000
(11.2%)
Brian sits down on his side of the bed -- and they have fucking sides, Justin thinks, they have sides and they have fights and they read the paper in the morning (well, sometimes they read the paper in the morning.) They have sides, and Brian sits down on his, the box spring creaking as he moves, because it’s old and Justin’s mother hasn’t gotten around to spending nine hundred dollars on a bed only to be used for guests.
“Can you say something, maybe?” Justin asks, and he almost puts his hands on his hips, but then his mother with the broken bed flashes through his memory and he remembers when the kitchen always used to be tinted yellow, like sunshine, before the remodel. The kitchen used to be tinted yellow, and Justin could barely see over the table top, could barely see his mother standing in the doorway, watching his father hopelessly.
Another noise, and Justin wants to launch himself across the bed, fuck the bed, he wants to strangle Brian, wants to wrap his hands around Brian’s throat until he’s making one sound or another -- anything to keep Justin from this deafening silence -- he wants to strangle him until it’s too late to do anything other than love him forever.
“What the fuck do you want me to say?” Brian finally asks, and he sounds maybe desperate too, not desperate for the same reasons Justin is -- he sounds desperate for the silence, like he might enjoy it, enjoy the comfort of the last three hundred and sixty five days surrounding his skin like wool.
Justin has been too hot in this sudden wave of heat to wear much of anything.
“Forget it,” Justin shrugs, voice pitched, like his mother’s used to be, that tone that says, no no, forget about me, I’ll be fine, I promise. No need to worry. No, no, you go to your baseball game, I’ll keep myself entertained since your father is on his business trip. Have fun, Justin. “Fucking forget it.”
Gritting his teeth, Brian half turns, until he’s looking over his shoulder, but at the carpet instead of Justin’s face. He says, “The sudden domesticity of Thanksgiving have you wishing for something else?”
“Fuck you,” Justin snaps, leaning forward to yank the blankets on his side -- his side -- of the bed open. They pull and tug and they’re a little threadbare in some places, because they need to be replaced too, but he pulls and he tries and he’s been trying so hard for so long that his arms feel like rubber, and maybe he can’t fight with these blankets any longer.
Brian’s out of the bed, then, and as he snatches a blanket out of Justin’s hand, the yarn snags his finger and he almost hisses, almost hisses but this time he’s determined to not make a sound, to not upset the gentle balance of Brian’s fucking night.
“Fuck you too,” He shrugs, balling the blanket up, stomping over to the rocking chair in the corner of the room. He’s barefoot so the motion isn’t as dramatic as Justin knows he wants it to be, but it suffices for twelve thirty at night.
Justin’s standing beside the bed, lost, one hand in his hair as he asks, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m going to fucking sleep. Now shut up,” Brian grumbles, sitting down in the rocking chair, squeaking back and forth back and forth as he spreads the quilt out over his spider legs and leans back, closing his eyes against the soft light.
Frowning, Justin’s heart bursts with -- fine, you son of a bitch -- as he turns out the light and crawls into bed. Cold bed, cold hands. Fucking ice.
.
Justin read this short story once. It was published in the morning newspaper, and he thought about it all day, all through his coffee and his work load and his lunch break, through dinner and while he was lying there in bed, Brian breathing beside him, steady up and down up and down like his moods.
The story had been about this man who thought his wife was cheating on him. He was so convinced, that he climbed a tree outside of the house that the guy he thought his wife was cheating on him with lived in. So he climbed this tree and, and he slipped. Fell to his death. And he got reincarnated as this parrot, this parrot who had been stuck in a pet shop, ready to be sold.
But this is the thing: he still had a human mind, a human mind stuck inside the skull of a bird, and he was sitting there, on his perch, when his wife came in. His wife came in and he said “hello”, but what he really meant was, “holy shit, it’s you.”
And it just stuck in Justin’s stomach for nights, nights and lunch hours and daybreaks, stuck in his stomach until he was coughing it up every morning, looking at Brian over coffee and newspapers and thinking, holy shit. It’s you. I miss you.
“Remember when you worked at that department store?” Justin wants to ask sometimes, ask with a little smile on his face, a coy little smile that implies exactly how much Brian remembers, how much Brian knows.
He wants to say: remember when you worked at that department store, remember when we met, remember when I was there on a whim, because I had no idea what else to get my mother other than perfume? Remember how you had been on your break, how you weren’t really supposed to be in the department that we bumped into each other in? Remember when things were like that?
He wants to say: because here’s what I remember. I remember you, and I remember me. I remember when things were different, when we were different and you wore jeans sometimes, jeans and sneakers and t-shirts with ripped necklines. I remember leaving that summer camp, and I know you do too.
He wants to say: I remember leaving that summer camp with an ache in my sides, bouncing around in the back seat of my mother’s car. I remember that feeling, thinking what if I never saw you again, thinking that maybe we were supposed to meet later, when things would be easier. I remember thinking too much for someone so young, thinking about you weeks later in math class and during gym, and I’d see your face in my classmates. I’d see your face in everyone, and I’d wonder what you were doing.
He needs to say this, now: maybe things didn’t work out like I expected, maybe I met you again, maybe we met each other and maybe things were fine for a little bit, maybe when we were younger. Maybe I thought you were a different person, and maybe I wish I could hate you for stupid things like the way you race through orange lights instead of waiting for green, and maybe I wish I could hate you for everything that you’ve ever done to piss me off. Maybe I wish I could hate you for everything so I’d finally have a reason to leave.
But so far, that hasn’t happened.
.
Brian wakes up in the rocking chair with a sore back and a sore neck. He doesn’t say anything but Justin can tell by the way he walks, the way he might be getting a little older than their lake and fire days. They get dressed and they go downstairs with smiles on their faces, because they’re fine, goddamnit, and they’ve got this down to a science.
And besides, their flight back to New York leaves in two hours.
.
“So how was your holiday?”
Justin looks up from the proofs -- those fucking proofs -- spread across his desk, eyes bleary from studying sharpened photographs, and blinks. Anna, wonderful reliable Anna, is standing in the doorway of his office, fingers wrapped around the wood frames. She’s smiling at him.
He smiles back.
“Wonderful.”
Grinning like she believes him, she slips into his office, letting the door click behind her as she moves, on route, over to his desk.
“Cynthia told me your flight was delayed,” She says, laying a few envelopes on his desk, thick and tan colored. “Brian was pissed, I bet.”
Justin nods and reaches for the envelopes. One is from their business lawyer, the other a bill from the printing company.
“He wasn’t exactly thrilled,” He shrugs, only half listening now, mostly interested in the address labels of the envelopes. Gossiping assistants, he thinks, how fantastic.
Anna takes his coffee cup for a refill, and manages on her way out the door, “You two have a meeting with Brown Athletics in forty five, Brian bumped it from three to eleven.”
Fucking magnificent, Justin thinks, watching her close the door.
.
They’re both quiet on the way home, because that’s how it’s been lately, it’s always been quiet, it’s quiet every moment they aren’t in the midst of a blow-up fight, spitting words and memories like fire. Justin keeps to himself in the passenger seat, coffee and suitcase rested on his lap, hands crossed, watching out the window.
Brian alternates between flicking the left turn signal, and messing with the heating system, turning it up until it’s sauna hot, letting it drop until the cold air outside is beginning to seep in.
But it’s quiet. And as long as they’re not yelling, Justin is okay with the silence.
“Hey, you remember…” He starts out, turning slightly, watching, but only getting Brian’s profile in return. He pauses, waits, maybe, but no. Nothing. He shakes his head a little, and turns back to the window.
Maybe, he thinks to himself again, but he isn’t sure of what might be.
.
It’s Thanksgiving 2002 and they’re listening to Johnny Cash, some cheap compilation CD that Justin found in a bargain bin for five bucks a few months ago. His voice is deep and warm and it feels like the day before Christmas as Justin mixes the mayonnaise into his bowl of tuna, little piles of onions sitting chopped on the cutting board.
Brian comes out of his bedroom in a pair of cheap gym shorts, they’re bright red with white stripes, and they look uncomfortable. Justin looks over his bowl of half mashed tuna, looks over the bowl at the glasses sitting crooked on Brian’s nose, the hair stuck to one side of his head but standing by itself on the other, and he laughs.
“Now you just need your Orwell novel,” Justin smiles, eyes watering, maybe from the onions but probably from something else.
Snorting, Brian half grimaces as he walks up to the counter, leaning against it with one hip, letting his arm drape over the cheap top.
“You’re fucking hilarious,” He drones, reaching over to steal a piece of onion. It’s the too hot kind, but Justin doesn’t have time to warn him before it’s inside his mouth, burning the corners of his lips. “Fuck! That’s hot!”
Justin hands over a half empty glass of water and says, “It’s onion.”
“Fuck,” Brian manages again, before gulping down the remainder of the water in one go. When he pulls the glass away from his mouth, he still looks pained, eyes watering and pink. “No more onions.”
Giggling despite himself, Justin mashes the tuna against the side of the bowl, the closest they’ll get to a turkey this year. Tuna and cranberry sauce. Justin doesn’t know how good it’ll taste.
“Onions fucking rule,” Justin explains, tossing half of them in. “And you know it.” He pauses, trails off slightly, glances at Brian’s back half as he walks away. “Where did your pants go, anyway?”
Brian’s almost entirely in his bedroom, but Justin still hears him call, “No change to do laundry… everything’s dirty.”
“Dirty,” Justin repeats, softly, laughing to himself. “Okay.”
He tries to ignore Brian half singing along to ‘The Matador’, though he only knows half the words and invents lyrics for the chunks he can’t remember. Justin smiles, shaking his head, watching his onions disappear into the tuna mash.
.
They dish the tuna out onto slices of white bread, and in a particularly genius idea that was entirely Justin’s doing, use turkey shaped cookie cutters to make it holiday appropriate. A mountain of cranberry sauce is spooned onto each of their plates, even though neither of them have plans to actually eat it.
“Hey, leave it on this,” Justin half-mumbles, all tuna mouth as Brian flips past A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. “I like this one.”
Enjoy. Hopefully I'll hit 10 000 at some point tomorrow.
5,601 / 50,000
(11.2%)
Brian sits down on his side of the bed -- and they have fucking sides, Justin thinks, they have sides and they have fights and they read the paper in the morning (well, sometimes they read the paper in the morning.) They have sides, and Brian sits down on his, the box spring creaking as he moves, because it’s old and Justin’s mother hasn’t gotten around to spending nine hundred dollars on a bed only to be used for guests.
“Can you say something, maybe?” Justin asks, and he almost puts his hands on his hips, but then his mother with the broken bed flashes through his memory and he remembers when the kitchen always used to be tinted yellow, like sunshine, before the remodel. The kitchen used to be tinted yellow, and Justin could barely see over the table top, could barely see his mother standing in the doorway, watching his father hopelessly.
Another noise, and Justin wants to launch himself across the bed, fuck the bed, he wants to strangle Brian, wants to wrap his hands around Brian’s throat until he’s making one sound or another -- anything to keep Justin from this deafening silence -- he wants to strangle him until it’s too late to do anything other than love him forever.
“What the fuck do you want me to say?” Brian finally asks, and he sounds maybe desperate too, not desperate for the same reasons Justin is -- he sounds desperate for the silence, like he might enjoy it, enjoy the comfort of the last three hundred and sixty five days surrounding his skin like wool.
Justin has been too hot in this sudden wave of heat to wear much of anything.
“Forget it,” Justin shrugs, voice pitched, like his mother’s used to be, that tone that says, no no, forget about me, I’ll be fine, I promise. No need to worry. No, no, you go to your baseball game, I’ll keep myself entertained since your father is on his business trip. Have fun, Justin. “Fucking forget it.”
Gritting his teeth, Brian half turns, until he’s looking over his shoulder, but at the carpet instead of Justin’s face. He says, “The sudden domesticity of Thanksgiving have you wishing for something else?”
“Fuck you,” Justin snaps, leaning forward to yank the blankets on his side -- his side -- of the bed open. They pull and tug and they’re a little threadbare in some places, because they need to be replaced too, but he pulls and he tries and he’s been trying so hard for so long that his arms feel like rubber, and maybe he can’t fight with these blankets any longer.
Brian’s out of the bed, then, and as he snatches a blanket out of Justin’s hand, the yarn snags his finger and he almost hisses, almost hisses but this time he’s determined to not make a sound, to not upset the gentle balance of Brian’s fucking night.
“Fuck you too,” He shrugs, balling the blanket up, stomping over to the rocking chair in the corner of the room. He’s barefoot so the motion isn’t as dramatic as Justin knows he wants it to be, but it suffices for twelve thirty at night.
Justin’s standing beside the bed, lost, one hand in his hair as he asks, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m going to fucking sleep. Now shut up,” Brian grumbles, sitting down in the rocking chair, squeaking back and forth back and forth as he spreads the quilt out over his spider legs and leans back, closing his eyes against the soft light.
Frowning, Justin’s heart bursts with -- fine, you son of a bitch -- as he turns out the light and crawls into bed. Cold bed, cold hands. Fucking ice.
.
Justin read this short story once. It was published in the morning newspaper, and he thought about it all day, all through his coffee and his work load and his lunch break, through dinner and while he was lying there in bed, Brian breathing beside him, steady up and down up and down like his moods.
The story had been about this man who thought his wife was cheating on him. He was so convinced, that he climbed a tree outside of the house that the guy he thought his wife was cheating on him with lived in. So he climbed this tree and, and he slipped. Fell to his death. And he got reincarnated as this parrot, this parrot who had been stuck in a pet shop, ready to be sold.
But this is the thing: he still had a human mind, a human mind stuck inside the skull of a bird, and he was sitting there, on his perch, when his wife came in. His wife came in and he said “hello”, but what he really meant was, “holy shit, it’s you.”
And it just stuck in Justin’s stomach for nights, nights and lunch hours and daybreaks, stuck in his stomach until he was coughing it up every morning, looking at Brian over coffee and newspapers and thinking, holy shit. It’s you. I miss you.
“Remember when you worked at that department store?” Justin wants to ask sometimes, ask with a little smile on his face, a coy little smile that implies exactly how much Brian remembers, how much Brian knows.
He wants to say: remember when you worked at that department store, remember when we met, remember when I was there on a whim, because I had no idea what else to get my mother other than perfume? Remember how you had been on your break, how you weren’t really supposed to be in the department that we bumped into each other in? Remember when things were like that?
He wants to say: because here’s what I remember. I remember you, and I remember me. I remember when things were different, when we were different and you wore jeans sometimes, jeans and sneakers and t-shirts with ripped necklines. I remember leaving that summer camp, and I know you do too.
He wants to say: I remember leaving that summer camp with an ache in my sides, bouncing around in the back seat of my mother’s car. I remember that feeling, thinking what if I never saw you again, thinking that maybe we were supposed to meet later, when things would be easier. I remember thinking too much for someone so young, thinking about you weeks later in math class and during gym, and I’d see your face in my classmates. I’d see your face in everyone, and I’d wonder what you were doing.
He needs to say this, now: maybe things didn’t work out like I expected, maybe I met you again, maybe we met each other and maybe things were fine for a little bit, maybe when we were younger. Maybe I thought you were a different person, and maybe I wish I could hate you for stupid things like the way you race through orange lights instead of waiting for green, and maybe I wish I could hate you for everything that you’ve ever done to piss me off. Maybe I wish I could hate you for everything so I’d finally have a reason to leave.
But so far, that hasn’t happened.
.
Brian wakes up in the rocking chair with a sore back and a sore neck. He doesn’t say anything but Justin can tell by the way he walks, the way he might be getting a little older than their lake and fire days. They get dressed and they go downstairs with smiles on their faces, because they’re fine, goddamnit, and they’ve got this down to a science.
And besides, their flight back to New York leaves in two hours.
.
“So how was your holiday?”
Justin looks up from the proofs -- those fucking proofs -- spread across his desk, eyes bleary from studying sharpened photographs, and blinks. Anna, wonderful reliable Anna, is standing in the doorway of his office, fingers wrapped around the wood frames. She’s smiling at him.
He smiles back.
“Wonderful.”
Grinning like she believes him, she slips into his office, letting the door click behind her as she moves, on route, over to his desk.
“Cynthia told me your flight was delayed,” She says, laying a few envelopes on his desk, thick and tan colored. “Brian was pissed, I bet.”
Justin nods and reaches for the envelopes. One is from their business lawyer, the other a bill from the printing company.
“He wasn’t exactly thrilled,” He shrugs, only half listening now, mostly interested in the address labels of the envelopes. Gossiping assistants, he thinks, how fantastic.
Anna takes his coffee cup for a refill, and manages on her way out the door, “You two have a meeting with Brown Athletics in forty five, Brian bumped it from three to eleven.”
Fucking magnificent, Justin thinks, watching her close the door.
.
They’re both quiet on the way home, because that’s how it’s been lately, it’s always been quiet, it’s quiet every moment they aren’t in the midst of a blow-up fight, spitting words and memories like fire. Justin keeps to himself in the passenger seat, coffee and suitcase rested on his lap, hands crossed, watching out the window.
Brian alternates between flicking the left turn signal, and messing with the heating system, turning it up until it’s sauna hot, letting it drop until the cold air outside is beginning to seep in.
But it’s quiet. And as long as they’re not yelling, Justin is okay with the silence.
“Hey, you remember…” He starts out, turning slightly, watching, but only getting Brian’s profile in return. He pauses, waits, maybe, but no. Nothing. He shakes his head a little, and turns back to the window.
Maybe, he thinks to himself again, but he isn’t sure of what might be.
.
It’s Thanksgiving 2002 and they’re listening to Johnny Cash, some cheap compilation CD that Justin found in a bargain bin for five bucks a few months ago. His voice is deep and warm and it feels like the day before Christmas as Justin mixes the mayonnaise into his bowl of tuna, little piles of onions sitting chopped on the cutting board.
Brian comes out of his bedroom in a pair of cheap gym shorts, they’re bright red with white stripes, and they look uncomfortable. Justin looks over his bowl of half mashed tuna, looks over the bowl at the glasses sitting crooked on Brian’s nose, the hair stuck to one side of his head but standing by itself on the other, and he laughs.
“Now you just need your Orwell novel,” Justin smiles, eyes watering, maybe from the onions but probably from something else.
Snorting, Brian half grimaces as he walks up to the counter, leaning against it with one hip, letting his arm drape over the cheap top.
“You’re fucking hilarious,” He drones, reaching over to steal a piece of onion. It’s the too hot kind, but Justin doesn’t have time to warn him before it’s inside his mouth, burning the corners of his lips. “Fuck! That’s hot!”
Justin hands over a half empty glass of water and says, “It’s onion.”
“Fuck,” Brian manages again, before gulping down the remainder of the water in one go. When he pulls the glass away from his mouth, he still looks pained, eyes watering and pink. “No more onions.”
Giggling despite himself, Justin mashes the tuna against the side of the bowl, the closest they’ll get to a turkey this year. Tuna and cranberry sauce. Justin doesn’t know how good it’ll taste.
“Onions fucking rule,” Justin explains, tossing half of them in. “And you know it.” He pauses, trails off slightly, glances at Brian’s back half as he walks away. “Where did your pants go, anyway?”
Brian’s almost entirely in his bedroom, but Justin still hears him call, “No change to do laundry… everything’s dirty.”
“Dirty,” Justin repeats, softly, laughing to himself. “Okay.”
He tries to ignore Brian half singing along to ‘The Matador’, though he only knows half the words and invents lyrics for the chunks he can’t remember. Justin smiles, shaking his head, watching his onions disappear into the tuna mash.
.
They dish the tuna out onto slices of white bread, and in a particularly genius idea that was entirely Justin’s doing, use turkey shaped cookie cutters to make it holiday appropriate. A mountain of cranberry sauce is spooned onto each of their plates, even though neither of them have plans to actually eat it.
“Hey, leave it on this,” Justin half-mumbles, all tuna mouth as Brian flips past A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. “I like this one.”