in the midnight sun - act II, scenes iv-viii
Alex wakes up in the morning and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
He doesn’t understand how he’s not dead. There was so much blood in the bathtub. He waited for Jack to fall asleep before he did it, feeling guiltier by the second until his heart felt like too heavy a weight to remain in his chest anymore, and then he did it. He slit his wrists, climbed into the bathtub and waited to die. He wakes up in his own bed with his wrists bandaged up nice and tight, although incredibly sore. There are bruises on his torso, under his armpits, so he knows that he was dragged out of the tub, probably straight in here. But the thing is, he was really hoping to die last night.
Because… there is absolutely no point to his existence now that he’s ruined the one good thing to ever happen to him. He feels sick thinking about it. Jack means nothing to him; it’s not the same, it’s not the same at all but he was sad and lonely and hurt and Jack was there and he was feeling so many of the same things and it was just so, so easy to try and forget himself for a few minutes. He lies in bed and wants to die some more even though his stupid body won’t let him.
After a length of time - he doesn’t know how much because the goddamn alarm clock is broken - he hears the front door open and close, then the bedroom door. He doesn’t even bother lifting his head to see who it is. “Hi,” he says. “I want to die.”
“Please don’t.” Soft flump of someone sitting down on the bed. He opens his eyes. Grieco looks at him with the saddest eyes he’s ever seen. He starts crying even though he really doesn’t want to.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Grieco kisses his temple and carefully removes the gauze wrapped around his wrists. He can see that the inner layers are soaked with blood. Somehow, magically, the slashes on his wrists that were so deep last night he saw his own bones are now angry-looking red lines bisecting his forearms. “Why did you do it?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t live without you. I can’t be alive if you don’t love me anymore, I’d rather be dead than know I hurt you and I betrayed you, I can’t live with myself. I hate myself.” He wants to scratch the scabs on his arms until they bleed. But his brilliant, lovely, perfect better half takes both of his hands before he can do that and looks at him sadly.
“I never stopped loving you, Alex. I just…”
“No, I screwed up. You can say it. I fucked everything up. I lied to you and then I cheated and now I hate myself.”
He kind of just wants to stay in bed forever. “I hate to be the guy that says this,” Grieco sighs. “I really hate to say this, but it’s not entirely your fault. I’m the one who flew off the handle with you yesterday morning. I’m the one that ran away from my problems instead of dealing with them. I’m the one that got angry with you instead of listening and trying to understand. I’m the one who was shitty and made you upset.”
“But you had every right to be angry with me. I can’t, I’m just… He was just there and you didn’t come home and I was so lonely and he had nowhere to go and… I, he, everything happened so fast and I don’t understand and my body is freaking out and the only thing that makes it go away is sex. But I don’t want to have sex with him. I just want you. Always you.”
Alex is not expecting to be full-on kissed on the lips after a speech that depressingly pathetic. But he is. “I couldn’t stay away from you even if I tried,” Grieco confesses. “Just promise you’ll listen to me the next time you feel like doing something foolish?”
He nods weakly. He feels light-headed still. “Promise,” he yawns. “I love you more than anything.”
“Love you more than that. I’m sorry.”
“Stop being sorry.”
“I’d really rather not dwell on this experience, if that’s okay with you. We need to figure out how to move on from this without you getting eaten alive by the pack. I can’t remember the last time we got someone new that wasn’t recruited by the pack, to be honest.” Grieco lays down with him and kisses his jaw lightly. “I don’t even know where to start, what to tell you. There’s so much to know about how the pack works, all these little rules, and I’m not even in the pack really. It’s just… I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Crash course in being a werewolf?”
He’s answered with laughter, quickly followed by a stern, “Go ask Jeff. He knows everything.”
“Is Jeff in the pack?”
“No, not really. He’s just… you know. Jeff Maker.” Which isn’t really an answer, but he’s tired and achy and he wants to snuggle and nap and avoid work for as long as possible. Vinny is at least competent enough to deal with cats that have eaten weird things for one day. He and Jess can hold down the fort, Alex decides. Besides, he has a feeling they’re gonna owe him some favours for vacation time in the future if the ring sparkling on Jess’s left hand the other day is any indication, so this can be considered advance payment on future favours. Not that he minds. Maybe now both of them will stop with the married jokes when he can throw it right back at them… And that is sort of not a shocking realization at all, really.
Sleepily, he mumbles, “I’m gonna marry you one day, ‘kay?”
“Not today, though.” Grieco strokes his hair. “You’re gonna nap until the afternoon and then we are going to figure this out together. Just let me worry about stuff for a little while. You have a long way to go before you feel normal again, babe. It’s gonna be hard. Now back to sleep.” Alex tries to sit up but he shakes his head and goes, “Shhh, shhh, you don’t need to worry about it. Stay in bed.”
*
Jeff Maker, it turns out, really does know everything.
“When the fact that you exist is physically impossible,” Jeff says, “everything else starts to seem kind of possible by comparison.”
Alex has a lot of experimental accidents those first couple of weeks trying to test the limits of his changing body.
*
He goes to lunch with Jack a week after the incident, although he makes sure he calls his boyfriend beforehand to make sure that this is okay. Grieco is… carefully reserved about his opinions on the matter. He does, however, say, “Sweetie, make sure he’s staying somewhere safe, okay? ‘Cause if he doesn’t have a place in town, the pack might take him…” The ‘please don’t tell him he can stay with us’ remains unspoken but perfectly understood between them. It’s still a sensitive area of conversation with them.
When he gets to the restaurant, Jack looks pretty haggard. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days and smells like he hasn’t showered in about as long. He touches Jack lightly on the arm and asks, “You okay?”
It makes him sad when the younger man shakes his head. “My parents kicked me out.”
Alex is worried. He’s been trying not to worry, to let things go, but he feels this strangely protective instinct kicking in all of a sudden and it gets worse when he studies the bloody gouges on Jack’s arms, the backs of his hands. It’s not hard to tell what they are from. It’s not a good sign. He wants to text Grieco, call him, ask if Jack can stay with them just for a few days, but he also likes sleeping in his own bed and not on the couch, so he doesn’t. “Where have you been staying?” Jack shrugs. “You haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t been living on the street. Jack. Jack. It’s not safe.”
The waiter comes to take their drink orders; Jack orders a coke and a glass of water. Alex orders a coke, too, but his is with a double shot of rum. “It’s only noon,” Jack whispers across the table.
“You’re staying with us,” Alex decides. He pulls out his Blackberry and sends Grieco a text, ending it with just until the pack takes him, ok?. Their drinks arrive and Alex practically inhales his. This is not a good sign at all. Jack picks at the scabs on his hands absentmindedly. “Stop,” he groans, reaching across the table. “You could get an infection.”
“I can’t stay with you. Your boyfriend hates me.”
“He will understand.” His phone chimes. The reply he’s just gotten is very unhappy but understanding. “You’re kind of the best friend I have right now, so he will understand.”
Jack’s jaw drops. “I didn’t think we were friends.”
“No, you know, I kiss random strangers all the time and then go to lunch with them because I hate them. Speaking of which… Are you, you know, okay? You’re being safe?” He feels like an old man even saying it, but… It had to be said. He’d hate to think that Jack is hooking up with random strangers and not using protection. Because it’s not like Jack could go to the regular doctor if anything happened - it’s not like he’ll have insurance, probably, and Alex is not a medical doctor… Not that medical doctors can do much for werewolves anyway, but considering the biggest creature he’s ever operated on was a Welsh Corgi, it would be kind of nice to let someone else deal with the big scary problems.
Jack goes, “I can’t believe you just asked me that. Oh my God, Alex. Oh my God. You are so lame. Why am I even friends with you? Jesus Christ.” But he’s grinning, so it’s not all bad. “You’re sure he’s not going to, like, strangle me in my sleep? Stake me in the chest?”
Automatically, Alex says, “Stakes are for vampires, not for werewolves. You want to kill a werewolf, you need a silver bullet or a dagger.”
The younger man’s eyes go wide. “How did you know that?”
“My friend Jeff Maker knows everything,” he answers matter-of-factly. “He’s a werewolf too. Apparently. Which I didn’t know until just this month, but hey! What else is new?”
The waiter comes back around to take their meal orders - Jack: turkey BLT, Alex: porterhouse steak - and then Jack says, “So some guy punched me in the face the other day because I was flirting with his boyfriend. I mean, I didn’t think they were together and he was a total jackass about it. Like, seriously? If you don’t want people moving in on your territory then you kind of need to act like you’re together.”
Alex goes “Mm,” and he does actually kind of agree. “You can’t just try to sleep with everyone you meet though. You are going to get punched by a lot of jackasses that way.” Lunch is good, though, and afterward they walk for a bit and go into a couple of the stores downtown to kill some time. Alex likes being friends with Jack; he can make all the stupid jokes he wants to and Jack will laugh at them. They talk about music, shit like that. Surprisingly, they have a lot in common.
*
Inside the music store, Jack has a clumsy moment and knocks over a set of shelves. Stuff goes flying everywhere, and Jack is very obviously embarrassed. His cheeks are bright red. He grabs onto Alex’s arm and pulls him towards the door and says, “Can we leave now please?” They rush out onto the street without looking back.
Alex is curious to know what spooked him. Maybe it was his parents or someone he knows from before. He very carefully does not ask about this on the way back to the house.
Next
He doesn’t understand how he’s not dead. There was so much blood in the bathtub. He waited for Jack to fall asleep before he did it, feeling guiltier by the second until his heart felt like too heavy a weight to remain in his chest anymore, and then he did it. He slit his wrists, climbed into the bathtub and waited to die. He wakes up in his own bed with his wrists bandaged up nice and tight, although incredibly sore. There are bruises on his torso, under his armpits, so he knows that he was dragged out of the tub, probably straight in here. But the thing is, he was really hoping to die last night.
Because… there is absolutely no point to his existence now that he’s ruined the one good thing to ever happen to him. He feels sick thinking about it. Jack means nothing to him; it’s not the same, it’s not the same at all but he was sad and lonely and hurt and Jack was there and he was feeling so many of the same things and it was just so, so easy to try and forget himself for a few minutes. He lies in bed and wants to die some more even though his stupid body won’t let him.
After a length of time - he doesn’t know how much because the goddamn alarm clock is broken - he hears the front door open and close, then the bedroom door. He doesn’t even bother lifting his head to see who it is. “Hi,” he says. “I want to die.”
“Please don’t.” Soft flump of someone sitting down on the bed. He opens his eyes. Grieco looks at him with the saddest eyes he’s ever seen. He starts crying even though he really doesn’t want to.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Grieco kisses his temple and carefully removes the gauze wrapped around his wrists. He can see that the inner layers are soaked with blood. Somehow, magically, the slashes on his wrists that were so deep last night he saw his own bones are now angry-looking red lines bisecting his forearms. “Why did you do it?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t live without you. I can’t be alive if you don’t love me anymore, I’d rather be dead than know I hurt you and I betrayed you, I can’t live with myself. I hate myself.” He wants to scratch the scabs on his arms until they bleed. But his brilliant, lovely, perfect better half takes both of his hands before he can do that and looks at him sadly.
“I never stopped loving you, Alex. I just…”
“No, I screwed up. You can say it. I fucked everything up. I lied to you and then I cheated and now I hate myself.”
He kind of just wants to stay in bed forever. “I hate to be the guy that says this,” Grieco sighs. “I really hate to say this, but it’s not entirely your fault. I’m the one who flew off the handle with you yesterday morning. I’m the one that ran away from my problems instead of dealing with them. I’m the one that got angry with you instead of listening and trying to understand. I’m the one who was shitty and made you upset.”
“But you had every right to be angry with me. I can’t, I’m just… He was just there and you didn’t come home and I was so lonely and he had nowhere to go and… I, he, everything happened so fast and I don’t understand and my body is freaking out and the only thing that makes it go away is sex. But I don’t want to have sex with him. I just want you. Always you.”
Alex is not expecting to be full-on kissed on the lips after a speech that depressingly pathetic. But he is. “I couldn’t stay away from you even if I tried,” Grieco confesses. “Just promise you’ll listen to me the next time you feel like doing something foolish?”
He nods weakly. He feels light-headed still. “Promise,” he yawns. “I love you more than anything.”
“Love you more than that. I’m sorry.”
“Stop being sorry.”
“I’d really rather not dwell on this experience, if that’s okay with you. We need to figure out how to move on from this without you getting eaten alive by the pack. I can’t remember the last time we got someone new that wasn’t recruited by the pack, to be honest.” Grieco lays down with him and kisses his jaw lightly. “I don’t even know where to start, what to tell you. There’s so much to know about how the pack works, all these little rules, and I’m not even in the pack really. It’s just… I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Crash course in being a werewolf?”
He’s answered with laughter, quickly followed by a stern, “Go ask Jeff. He knows everything.”
“Is Jeff in the pack?”
“No, not really. He’s just… you know. Jeff Maker.” Which isn’t really an answer, but he’s tired and achy and he wants to snuggle and nap and avoid work for as long as possible. Vinny is at least competent enough to deal with cats that have eaten weird things for one day. He and Jess can hold down the fort, Alex decides. Besides, he has a feeling they’re gonna owe him some favours for vacation time in the future if the ring sparkling on Jess’s left hand the other day is any indication, so this can be considered advance payment on future favours. Not that he minds. Maybe now both of them will stop with the married jokes when he can throw it right back at them… And that is sort of not a shocking realization at all, really.
Sleepily, he mumbles, “I’m gonna marry you one day, ‘kay?”
“Not today, though.” Grieco strokes his hair. “You’re gonna nap until the afternoon and then we are going to figure this out together. Just let me worry about stuff for a little while. You have a long way to go before you feel normal again, babe. It’s gonna be hard. Now back to sleep.” Alex tries to sit up but he shakes his head and goes, “Shhh, shhh, you don’t need to worry about it. Stay in bed.”
*
Jeff Maker, it turns out, really does know everything.
“When the fact that you exist is physically impossible,” Jeff says, “everything else starts to seem kind of possible by comparison.”
Alex has a lot of experimental accidents those first couple of weeks trying to test the limits of his changing body.
*
He goes to lunch with Jack a week after the incident, although he makes sure he calls his boyfriend beforehand to make sure that this is okay. Grieco is… carefully reserved about his opinions on the matter. He does, however, say, “Sweetie, make sure he’s staying somewhere safe, okay? ‘Cause if he doesn’t have a place in town, the pack might take him…” The ‘please don’t tell him he can stay with us’ remains unspoken but perfectly understood between them. It’s still a sensitive area of conversation with them.
When he gets to the restaurant, Jack looks pretty haggard. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days and smells like he hasn’t showered in about as long. He touches Jack lightly on the arm and asks, “You okay?”
It makes him sad when the younger man shakes his head. “My parents kicked me out.”
Alex is worried. He’s been trying not to worry, to let things go, but he feels this strangely protective instinct kicking in all of a sudden and it gets worse when he studies the bloody gouges on Jack’s arms, the backs of his hands. It’s not hard to tell what they are from. It’s not a good sign. He wants to text Grieco, call him, ask if Jack can stay with them just for a few days, but he also likes sleeping in his own bed and not on the couch, so he doesn’t. “Where have you been staying?” Jack shrugs. “You haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t been living on the street. Jack. Jack. It’s not safe.”
The waiter comes to take their drink orders; Jack orders a coke and a glass of water. Alex orders a coke, too, but his is with a double shot of rum. “It’s only noon,” Jack whispers across the table.
“You’re staying with us,” Alex decides. He pulls out his Blackberry and sends Grieco a text, ending it with just until the pack takes him, ok?. Their drinks arrive and Alex practically inhales his. This is not a good sign at all. Jack picks at the scabs on his hands absentmindedly. “Stop,” he groans, reaching across the table. “You could get an infection.”
“I can’t stay with you. Your boyfriend hates me.”
“He will understand.” His phone chimes. The reply he’s just gotten is very unhappy but understanding. “You’re kind of the best friend I have right now, so he will understand.”
Jack’s jaw drops. “I didn’t think we were friends.”
“No, you know, I kiss random strangers all the time and then go to lunch with them because I hate them. Speaking of which… Are you, you know, okay? You’re being safe?” He feels like an old man even saying it, but… It had to be said. He’d hate to think that Jack is hooking up with random strangers and not using protection. Because it’s not like Jack could go to the regular doctor if anything happened - it’s not like he’ll have insurance, probably, and Alex is not a medical doctor… Not that medical doctors can do much for werewolves anyway, but considering the biggest creature he’s ever operated on was a Welsh Corgi, it would be kind of nice to let someone else deal with the big scary problems.
Jack goes, “I can’t believe you just asked me that. Oh my God, Alex. Oh my God. You are so lame. Why am I even friends with you? Jesus Christ.” But he’s grinning, so it’s not all bad. “You’re sure he’s not going to, like, strangle me in my sleep? Stake me in the chest?”
Automatically, Alex says, “Stakes are for vampires, not for werewolves. You want to kill a werewolf, you need a silver bullet or a dagger.”
The younger man’s eyes go wide. “How did you know that?”
“My friend Jeff Maker knows everything,” he answers matter-of-factly. “He’s a werewolf too. Apparently. Which I didn’t know until just this month, but hey! What else is new?”
The waiter comes back around to take their meal orders - Jack: turkey BLT, Alex: porterhouse steak - and then Jack says, “So some guy punched me in the face the other day because I was flirting with his boyfriend. I mean, I didn’t think they were together and he was a total jackass about it. Like, seriously? If you don’t want people moving in on your territory then you kind of need to act like you’re together.”
Alex goes “Mm,” and he does actually kind of agree. “You can’t just try to sleep with everyone you meet though. You are going to get punched by a lot of jackasses that way.” Lunch is good, though, and afterward they walk for a bit and go into a couple of the stores downtown to kill some time. Alex likes being friends with Jack; he can make all the stupid jokes he wants to and Jack will laugh at them. They talk about music, shit like that. Surprisingly, they have a lot in common.
*
Inside the music store, Jack has a clumsy moment and knocks over a set of shelves. Stuff goes flying everywhere, and Jack is very obviously embarrassed. His cheeks are bright red. He grabs onto Alex’s arm and pulls him towards the door and says, “Can we leave now please?” They rush out onto the street without looking back.
Alex is curious to know what spooked him. Maybe it was his parents or someone he knows from before. He very carefully does not ask about this on the way back to the house.
Next