Original Story- Cat Person-Dog Person 1/6
Title- Cat Person-Dog Person
Rating- PG-13
Genre- slash, romance, angst, drama
Warnings- angst, adult in a relationship with a teen, UNBETAED CONTENT
Summary- Scott is seen as the bad kid of the school, but he's never actually done anything to deserve it. There's one teacher in the whole school who sees past his reputation, Jack Carter, and Scott has fallen completely in love with him. Butthere's one problem: Scott is a cat person, and Jack is a dog person! If they aren't compatable, can they ever be together?
A/N- my first ever long slash piece!
Scott paused outside the door, his hand hovering above the handle. He glanced through the small glass window and saw that all of the seats were filled. ‘Of course they are,’ he thought. ‘Most students actually get to class before it’s half over.’
But it wasn’t his fault. Not really. He’d been trying to find his book, An Anthology of American Literature, which, despite easily being the largest of text books, was surprisingly easy to lose. Or steal, as Scott had discovered when he’d finally given up and jimmied the bolt on some poor kid’s locker.
He remembered the look on Mr. Carter’s face yesterday, when Scott had strolled in to class, late, without his book, having not been to class at all in the past few days. He didn’t want that look leveled with him again. That was why he’d had to find the book. And, like the screw-up he was, Scott had been so enthralled with searching for the book that he’d completely forgotten that class had already started.
So that was why he was outside the door of the classroom, book in arms, debating whether or not to go in, late, and disrupt the classroom, or, like a pansy, to not go in at all, and have Mr. Carter think he was just skipping again.
Scott knew he could have sat outside the classroom, debating his options, until class ended. To his great relief, however, he was spared having to choose by a girl sitting next to the door, who noticed him and announced his presence. Since a disruption had already been made, Scott decided there was nothing more to lose and grabbed the doorknob.
As he entered the room, Scott could feel all thirty-six pairs of eyes staring at him. The sensation made goose bumps ripple over his skin. He focused his own eyes on Mr. Carter, who was smiling. That look always made Scott’s stomach feel funny. No one but Mr. Carter ever smiled at him.
“Mr. Barker, so kind of you to join us,” Mr. Carter said cheerfully, and Scott suddenly wondered if the smile wasn’t entirely false, and the words merely sarcastic. But Mr. Carter continued in the same tone: “I see there are a few empty desks. Why don’t you sit up here by me?”
Scott walked around the desks and to the front, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. He sat, his back to the class, still feeling their eyes on him. Mr. Carter looked down at him, and Scott’s belly did that weird flip-flop thing again. “Now, Mr. Barker, we’ve just been going over last night’s reading. There will be a quiz on the four readings for this week on Friday. You can probably get notes from one of you classmates.”
‘No chance of that happening.’ Scott thought, but Mr. Carter wasn’t done.
“Ms. Bell, why don’t you give me your notes? I can copy them and have them back to you at break.” Scott glanced over at the girl, Renee Bell, who had a rather deer-in the-headlights-like expression. Renee was a smart girl, which was probably why she’d been chosen for her notes, but she was so shy that Scott just didn’t know if she, like the rest of the class, thought he was a delinquent, or if she felt sorry for him. Whatever she thought, she handed over the perfectly-written notes without question.
“Excellent.” Mr. Carter said cheerfully, placing the notes on the corner of the desk he lectured from. The disruption was over and class was staring again. Scott, who was actually prepared, took out his coverless spiral notebook and broken-in-half pencil and looked to his teacher expectantly.
“Last night we read a piece by Crèvecœur. Can anyone tell me a bit about him?”
Krista White raised her hand. “He was born Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, in 1735 Caen, Normandy, France. In 1755, he immigrated to the United States and was renamed John Hector St. John. He published a volume of essays, Letters from an American Farmer, in 1782.”
As she spoke, Scott scribbled furiously, misspelling half of the words. “That’s very good, Ms. White. None of it will be on the test.” Scott stopped mid-sentence and looked up at Mr. Carter in shock. “Please turn to page 268 in your text books. I’d like to draw your attention to this passage: ‘What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.’ Now, what does that tell you about the author?”
“Heeeee understood that the different aspects of foreign cultures had come together to form a new and different culture?” Krista suggested.
“He did indeed. However, that isn’t the point. I’ll read it again: ‘He is either a European, of the descendant of a European.’” Silence reigned in the classroom.
Scott had an idea, but damned if he would say anything in front of this crowd. They didn’t know why he showed up to this class alone, out of all of them, but they all wished he wouldn’t.
“Mr. Barker, how about you? Anything?” Scott looked up at his teacher, fairly certain his face had the same deer-in-the-headlights look Renee’s had had a minute ago.
“Um…He, he doesn’t say anything about Native Americans?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Carter said, and his expression of pride made Scott’s belly flop again. “Crèvecœur doesn’t mention Native Americans, or African slaves, or free African Americans. Not only that, but notice his word choice: ‘He is.’ Crèvecœur saw only European males as citizens. That bigotry is more important for you to know than the date of his birth.”
At that moment the bell rang and the class, moving as if guided by one brain, began shoveling their books into their backpacks in a single ripple motion. Scott flipped his tattered notebook shut and started to stand, but a light touch on his arm stopped him.
“Mr. Barker,” Mr. Carter said softly, and for on horrible moment Scott though his teacher was going to tell him not to show up if he was just going to disrupt the classroom. “How are things at home?”
The question was so perpendicular to what Scott had expected that all he could do was open and shut his mouth like a fish.
“You haven’t been coming to class recently, and even when you do, you skip your other classes.” Scott wondered if there was an admonishment coming, but Mr. Carter just looked at him with obvious concern in his light brown eyes. Scott realized that the two of them were about the same height, Mr. Carter maybe an inch or two taller. “I’m worried about you. You know you can tell me if something’s going on, right?”
“Y-yeah. I know.” Scott looked into those brown eyes and felt horrible lying.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Scott fled the school building as soon as Mr. Carter let him. He didn’t stop until he was outside, having escaped without any other teachers stopping him. The wind ruffled his hair and blew leaves against his shoes, and Scott shivered. It was so close to winter people expected snow to fall any day. Scott loved winter. But it was a hell of a time to be kicked out of the house.
The school was building a new gym, a two-story building with separate courts for volleyball and basket ball, and PE classes, and a pool on the roof. It was nearly done, except the pool, and the teams were already putting it to good use. So the old gym, behind the theater, was empty.
Nobody checked to see if the locks on the old gym stayed locked. And even if they did, they wouldn’t have found anything to incriminate him. Scott had made sure of that. Every morning when he left the gym, he stuffed his sleeping bag and other things into the air vent.
Of course, other students came by during the day. Those jocks everyone thought were perfect, smoking pot in the empty gym, leaving trash all over the floor. Scott slept in the locker room. He’d learned that he would stay warmer in an enclosed space than sprawled in the middle of the basketball court.
Scott flopped down against a pile of gymnastics pad that served as a mattress and dropped his notebook, textbook, and pencil onto the floor. He remembered that Mr. Carter was going to copy notes for him, so he’d better go out later and get them. In the mean time, he might actually read the passages he was supposed to.
As Scott picked on the text book, he wondered briefly why he bothered. Why he went to this one class out of all of them, why he wanted the approval of this one teacher. He always wondered why he bothered.
The answerer was always obvious. Mr. Carter -Jack, now that Scott was alone, there was no harm in thinking of his teacher that way- was the only person who’d ever shown him any kind of approval. Jack had always supported him, encouraged him, while everyone else tried to tear him down. Jack was right: Scott came from an abusive home. So he generally didn’t trust people, and stayed by himself. People saw a depressed-looking young kid, sitting alone, and they thought he was trouble. A gang banger in a school of straitlaced kids. A drug dealer. A potential school shooter. Whatever anybody thought, they avoided him, and they treated him like a delinquent when he hadn’t really done anything wrong.
Scott had come to Whitney Preparatory School in sixth grade, leaving behind all of his friends and teachers from elementary school, and from the way people treated him, you’d have though he’d left behind his personality too. People treated him entirely different here. Elementary school teachers were encouraging and understanding. Middle and high school teachers cared only about the smart kids, and didn’t care if everyone else was left in the dust. The looked as Scott and they didn’t see someone who just needed some help to succeed. They saw a waste of their time and resources, which could have been spent helping the kids who actually understood the first time something was said.
Jack was different. Jack was always glad to have him in class, always helped him when he had trouble and praised him when he did well. It made him want to try harder. For Jack. To have him smile and tell Scott he’d done a good job. It was pathetic, how eager he was to please this one person who’d never really done more than any decent human being would do.
‘But what does it say about the rest of the people in this school?’ Scott thought.
Either way, Scott knew his life revolved around Jack now. The man had taken over all his efforts, all his thoughts.
Scott put the book down, knowing he’d never get any reading done. A sharp pain hit him in the chest as he though how disappointed Jack would be, but he ignored it. A part of him was telling the rest that it was stupid to not do something that would please the only person who cared just because he thought it was pathetic that he was willing to do anything for the only person who cared. At that point, Scott decided his thoughts were getting too convoluted and he’d better stop thinking before he hurt his brain.
Scott stood, stretched, and picked a couple of bills up from the gym floor. If pot smoking jocks left their money where they had no right to be, they really had no right to expect to find it when they returned, now did they? Scott went to the cafeteria, thinking to get himself something to eat. Occupy his stomach instead of his mind.
But it was break time. That meant herds of students and teachers converging on the cafeteria, and looking at him like a particularly unpleasant insect that had somehow gotten inside. Scott got in line before the vending machine, shoulders slumped, head down, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. He hoped to grab a snack and get out without any trouble. ‘But,’ Scott thought as he felt a touch on his shoulder, ‘that seems to be impossible.’
Scott turned, fully ready to defend his presence at the school, in the cafeteria, in line, with words or force as necessary, but found himself staring into gentle light brown eyes. Jack.
Scott took a step back instinctively, unnerved by being so close to Jack -Mr. Carter, he was in public now- and ended up bumping into the person in line in front of him. The other guy looked like he might have done something about it, but there was a teacher right there so he turned back to the snack machine.
“Here are the notes I copied for you,” Jack said cheerfully, offering the stack of paper. Scott took it without a word and looked up into the brown eyes, entranced. “I looked over them, and Ms. Bell has all of the important points there. Make sure you study them well.”
Scott nodded dumbly and watched as his teacher left. The girl behind him in line cleared her throat rather loudly, and Scott snapped out of it and got a bag of chips from the vending machine. Having gotten both food and notes, Scott slunk off back to the gym, fully intending not to come out until Mr. Carter’s class the next day.
He dropped onto the pile of mats and dropped the chips at his feet in favor of going through the notes. Literary devices, author’s purpose, blah blah blah. Scott dropped the notes in favor of picking up the chips.
As he ate, his thoughts, of course, wondered back to Jack.
Jack. At some point, the total devotion he had to the one person who cared for him had transformed into some bizarre crush. Now Jack was all he could think about, the reason for him to get up in the morning, the reason he went to that one class out of the day.
On some level, Scott resented the man for it. On another, he knew that was totally ridiculous, but that didn’t stop him from feeling that way. Jack had Scott wrapped around his finger, just because he’d said some nice things. And he didn’t even know it. What would he say if Scott told Jack how much he meant to him? Gee, that’s sweet, but I’m just doing my job as a teacher? The truth was that Jack probably didn’t care about Scott any more than he cared about any of his students. It was just that, unlike anyone else, he didn’t care for Scott any less. And that was why Scott would do anything for him.
And the man didn’t even realize it! Scott would have taken a bullet for him, jumped off a cliff if he was asked too, and Jack…Jack had no idea.
Scott breathed out a slow sigh, his anger dying away to be replaced with a dead loneliness.
It was stupid to be angry at the man for not realizing something that Scott was actively trying to hide. It was stupid to be angry with him for having captivated Scott, when Scott was the one thinking about him all the time. It was stupid to be angry at him for becoming the center of Scott’s world, when all he’d done was give Scott the attention he desperately craved.
Scott didn’t understand his own mind half the time. How the hell was he supposed to know what Jack was thinking? He picked up the notes and text book, figuring that literature, however dry, would be more straightforward than his own muddled thoughts.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Scott was so engrossed with the notes that he didn’t even realize it was getting dark until the light came on. Hell, he hadn’t noticed someone coming in to be able to turn the lights on!
The textbook slipped from his hands as Scott, startled, turned around to face the gym door, tensing like a cornered animal.
“Mr. Barker,” Jack said calmly, as though he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Scott there. Once again Scott was at a loss for how to respond.
“It’s my day to lock up,” Jack explained casually, jangling the keys to demonstrate. “I guess the other teachers haven’t been doing as good of a job as they should.” He came over and Scott drew back, like a scolded animal expecting to be struck, but Jack simply sat next to him on the mats and sighed, stretching out his legs before him and looking around. Scott noticed, not for the first time, that Jack smelled like vanilla.
“It’s not as messy in here as it is outside,” he mused, and Scott’s need to defend himself overrode the fear of speaking.
“I didn’t make that mess!”
“No, I didn’t think so,” Jack admitted. “One person couldn’t eat enough food for that many wrappers.” He turned his head to look at Scott. “And you look like you haven’t been eating as much as you should.”
Once again Scott couldn’t answer, and ended up opening and closing his mouth like a fish.
“You’ve been here a while.” It wasn’t a question, so Scott didn’t try to answer, simply stared into the unusually intense brown eyes.
“There is some sort of trouble at home.” Again, not a question, so Scott simply watched those eyes flick around the room, taking in everything, and then settle back on him. He waited for Jack to get to the point, feeling disoriented.
Jack seemed to sense that, and got straight to the point. “Why don’t you come stay with me? At least for tonight anyway. I can talk to you parents, or the principal, or whomever I need to, tomorrow.”
Scott stared at Jack, hardly believing that the man had said the words he’d heard. And Jack’s burning brown eyes were still on him, and they were so close and it was so hard to think like that… Scott could feel his brain short-circuiting.
“Mr. Barker?” Scott noticed the slight uncertainty in Jack’s voice, and suddenly he was no longer looking at a dominating man whose very presence made it impossible to think, but a tired, overworked teacher who was genuinely concerned about Scott Barker, troubled teen, not Mr. Barker, English student.
“Scott,” he corrected, standing up. “Call me Scott.”
“Scott,” Jack repeated, and smiled. “Come on, Scott, grab anything you need and let’s go home.”
Scott’s belly did that odd little flip-flop again when he heard Jack say ‘let’s go home.’ It sounded like he’d somehow become part of the household, part of the family. ‘But no,’ Scott reminded himself, determined to quash any hope that might later be destroyed more cruelly. ‘He’s talking about his home, not “our” home.’
Jack had already picked up Scott’s English books and was looking around. His eyes held a question, why were the only books in sight the books for his class, but he didn’t press the matter.
“Just a minute,” Scott told him, and climbed onto the washer-dryer in the corner, likely used for uniforms, to get his sleeping back and other personal possessions from the air vent. If Jack found it odd that he’d stored things there, he said nothing about it and simply offered to carry the backpack Scott had taken in addition to his sleeping bag, filled with clothes, hygiene products, and some personal things like the baseball he and his grandpa had used to play catch when he was little. Scott instinctively refused, but then he realized that it was stupid not to let the person he would die for carry his things, and he offered his sleeping bag instead.
When they left the gym, Jack paused to lock it behind them, and Scott said without thinking that a padlock wouldn’t actually stop any of the people who’d gotten in there before. Jack shrugged and replied that it was his job to lock it, however useless it was, and they proceeded to the car in silence.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So excited was Scott to be going home with his long-time crush, so consumed with thoughts of him for so long, that he did not remember the other being that cared for him until it literally walked in front of him. “Roussi!” Scott cried, and the small calico cat turned towards him as he cried and crouched down as he mauled it. Scott’s bag fell to the ground, forgotten, and he lifted the cat by its armpits and swung it around.
Roussi tried to claw his arms with her back feet and Scott took pity on her and held her properly. He scratched her ears and she purred, the previous offence forgotten. He felt a little guilty for forgetting about her, but told himself it wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t he lucky he even remembered his own name, with the extent to which Jack had taken over his thoughts?
“A cat?” Jack had come up behind him and was watching the exchange with an amused smile. “She’s adorable.”
“Yeah, she is,” Scott said, composing himself and putting the cat down in favor of picking up his backpack. Roussi meowed and padded over to Jack, sniffing his pants cuff and stretching up to tap his knee with her paws. Jack leaned down and scratched her head with his free hand, making her purr.
“Her name is Rosy?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, but it’s spelled R-O-U-S-S-I,” Scott replied, watching as Jack knelt down and set the sleeping bag aside to better scratch Roussi’s head.
‘He likes her!’ Scott thought, ecstatic. ‘He really likes her!’
Jack sat on the sidewalk, and Roussi climbed into his lap, kneading his pants and purring. Scott sat next to him and watched the interaction, fascinated. Jack was the most important person in the world for him. And after him, Roussi. Roussi was possibly the only being in the world that would care if he’d died.
‘But Jack cares,’ Scott thought. ‘I know he does. He’s here, isn’t he? He’s taking me home with him. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t care.’
That aside, it meant the world to Scott that the two beings in the world that he loved, his teacher and his cat, liked each other. He was over the moon.
‘He’ll take me and Roussi home with him, and we’ll never leave,’ Scott mused. ‘And some day when I know he cares enough not to hate me if he doesn’t feel the same, I’ll confess. And it’ll all be great.’ Scott smiled dreamily, lost in his fantasy as he watched Jack petting Roussi.
“Is she a stray?” Scott’s head came up sharply, socked out of his fancy. Jack was looking up at him, his hand still busily rubbing Roussi’s belly.
“Yeah,” Scott murmured. “I started feeding her maybe a year ago. She was just a little kitten then. I’m not sure where she sleeps, but if I see her, she’ll come when I call.”
“She’s a sweetie.” Jack said, nudging the cat from his lap and grabbing the sleeping bag. “Do you want to bring her home?”
“Yeah,” Scott said, his heart starting to speed up as he started to consider that Jack might not want to bring the stray home. “Can I?”
“Sure,” Jack said, standing and looking down at Scott. “But I have to warn you, I have dogs.”
Scott’s brain froze, trying to process the information. Dogs. That wasn’t good.
‘No!’ Scott thought. ‘Dog people and cat people, they’re totally different! Not compatible at all! Cat people, I’m a cat person, we’re quiet, loners, we think too much and enjoy the simple things, like afternoon naps and patches of sunlight. Dog people -Jack’s a dog person! - they’re loud and social, they don’t think at all, they just play!’
‘We…’ Scott, formerly deliriously happy, now felt as though the dream he’d been privately cultivating had been viciously crushed before his eyes. ‘We’re not compatible. Even if by some miracle he does have feelings for me, we’d end up falling apart.’
“Dogs?” he murmured, still not certain how to respond.
“Yeah,” Jack said brightly, oblivious so Scott’s suffering. “A big brown dog named Coffee, and a little blonde one named Honey. I don’t know how they’ll be with cats. Will Roussi be okay?”
“Probably,” Scott said, knowing at least this answer automatically. “She’s lived on the streets since she was a kitten; she knows how to deal with dogs. They’ll probably be more scared of her.”
Jack laughed, but Scott couldn’t find it funny at all. He looked up at Jack, who was standing looking down on him, waiting, and realized that Jack wanted to go. Scott stood with difficulty, feeling as though his legs, like the solid ground he’d been testing a minute ago, would collapse beneath him at any second. He picked up the backpack, blinking furiously and trying not to let his tears fall; not in front of Jack.
Jack led him to his car, the only one in the lot, and Scott tried to focus his thoughts on that and shut everything else out. It was one of those new hybrids, small, but cheap to fill. Scott remembered that not long ago Jack had been driving a beat up SUV with lights held on with duct tape and clear packing tape over a busted-out window. He’d told a student who asked that he’d gotten it used when he was sixteen, nine years ago. That, Scott realized suddenly, meant an eight-year age difference.
‘Is it too much? But we could never have anything between us. Nothing more than it is now.’
When Scott’s tatty sleeping bag and back pack had been put in the trunk next to Jack’s new, neat accordion folder of papers to grade, the two of them got into the front seats, Scott holding Roussi in his lap. Jack asked if Scott wanted to listen to the radio, and Scott, hoping to put it on something that would calm his nerves, took him up on the offer. It occurred to him that, however incompatible they may be, this would be a chance to learn something about Jack, is he flipped through the different channels and gauged Jack’s reaction to each.
The plan was abandoned when he found the radio already on his favorite jazz station. Scott leaned the car seat back and sighed, smoothing his hand over Roussi’s multi-colored slightly matted fur and letting the smooth notes wash away his despair and apprehension.
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