ficlet: and if you disappear
Title: And If You Disappear
Rating: R
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: Cancer Arc gapfiller. You start to think about the things you’ll do differently when you get through this.
Warnings: Late S4 spoilers.
Notes: camelhaircoat, a long, long time ago, requested cancer!fic for her birthday. I love her to death and I hope this meets her standards. Lots of love, darling.
you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,
am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure--you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
--that since and if you disappear
solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile
and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep--what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
--what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like, for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love, love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."
--you being in love, e e cummings
“And If You Disappear”
You’re kind of expecting it when Justin slides into the passenger seat of the Corvette just as you start the engine. You look over at him and open your mouth to say something, but he’s facing forward, staring straight ahead at the other cars lined up neatly in the parking garage. His hands are folded in his lap and he’s not wearing a seatbelt, which is so Justin - childish, immature, and stubborn to a fault. You reach across him and buckle him up, and he’s still not saying a word.
You’ve been a prick to him, but Justin loves you, and, after all this time, he just deals with it. If he queens out, it’s in silence.
At the radiologist’s, he sits in one of the hard little chairs in the waiting area, crosses his legs at the knee, and opens up the latest ArtForum he brought with him. His fingers hold the glossy pages tight so that the reflection from the fluorescent lights doesn’t create a glare, and he doesn’t react when the nurse announces your name in that grade-school roll call way.
You endure endless minutes of positioning and prepping and preparing until they finally pump you full of their toxic waste, which is ridiculous, because the time it takes to put the stuff into you is far less than the amount of time it took to get you into place. You want to find symbolic reasoning in that, but you’re not in the right state of mind for it, and leave it for another day. The nurse sits you up with a sugar-coated smile and you dress as slowly as possible, putting off the inevitable fluttering of Justin’s fingers and endless barrage of trite, sympathetic questions.
It turns out that Justin doesn’t ask you anything. He glances up when the door opens, marks his page in the magazine, and walks side-by-side with you out to the ‘vette. The three other people in the waiting room watch you pass with odd looks. You and Justin are companionable in your silence, uninterruptible, completely and utterly untouchable. You won’t say anything until Justin does, and Justin won’t say anything until he’s good and ready. You expect something, really - anything. But all he does differently is buckle himself up this time as he settles the magazine on his knees and watches straight ahead as you drive.
He makes you grilled cheese for lunch, which you only eat because you know the carbs will be out of your system in T-minus forty-seven minutes (approximately). You’ve become adept at planning out exactly when and how hard the waves will hit; the first one is killer, about an hour and a half after treatment, while the next is gentler, lulling you into a false sense of reprieve. The third one equals if not surpasses the first, and the fourth (usually the final) is like the tide going out, gentle and soothing, just some dry-heaving and stomach acid. Sometimes there’s a fifth, but usually not. This is your fourth round of treatment, and you think you have the schedule down. Life is nothing if you can’t manage it effectively, wrap it around your finger and analyze it, even if you can’t change it.
The food Justin cooks is always okay. He’s a brilliant artist, a fantastic fuck, and a stellar dancer, but one of the few things he’s set his mind to and found himself unable to execute perfectly is cooking. You consider the whole wheat bread, the dripping cheese, the puddle of grease in the middle of your plate, and you force yourself to eat it. You know that it makes Justin happy to take care of you, and you see him try to hide his self-satisfaction behind his bottle of Pellegrino. It doesn’t work, because he’s too smug for his own good sometimes.
You taught him well.
Exactly as you estimated, you’re kneeling on the bathroom floor three quarters of an hour later and making sure the entirety of the grilled cheese winds up in the toilet. Justin sits faithfully by your side, the dog you tie up outside the store you want to browse around for a minute. He offers Evian in between waves, a moist red washcloth during, and his silent support from beginning to end. You realize that he hasn’t said a word all day, and you know why that is.
You also know that he’d be sulking at Daphne’s if you’d treated him that way under normal circumstances, but these aren’t normal circumstances, and he loves you too much to leave you like this.
You’re shaking and shivering by the time the fourth wave has ebbed out to sea. Justin wipes off your face with the washcloth and then rings it out in cold water in the sink. He hangs it over the glass door of the shower to dry, something that you would never have condoned him doing if you were in a state of health fit for light reprimanding and physical punishment. He bends down so that you can grasp his forearm, and then he pulls you to your feet and leads you to the sink, where the toothbrush and toothpaste are prominently featured.
He leaves you then, and you know that this has become the only time he feels safe letting you be by yourself. He’s taken up the notion that you need to be looked after at all times, no matter if you’re sleeping, eating, half-heartedly working on your computer, or just sitting. Today was the first day he attended radiation with you - the first time you didn’t push him down when he tried to come - since he was uncomfortable with you going alone. However, you brushing your teeth, figuratively cleansing your soul for the third time this week, he thinks can be done privately. He’s as respectful of boundaries as he is skilled at erecting them.
You decide, as you rinse out your mouth, that you want a shower. Your skin is clammy and cold and your hair is streaked with sweat. You toss your reeking clothes on the floor and turn on the spray, leaning back against the glass and enjoying the contrast of cold to the hot water. You don’t know where Justin is. He wouldn’t let you shower by yourself if he knew, so maybe he left, or is on the treadmill with his headphones in. He thinks you’ll slip on the soap and break your neck if he’s not there to scrub you himself. That annoys you to no end, and you always let him know, but he just purses his lips and keeps going.
Immature, childish, and stubborn.
You’re not sure how much time has passed when the water starts to run cold, but the light slanting in through the bathroom door is at a different angle, so it must have been at least an hour. You towel off, avoiding places you’d rather not think about at the moment, and put back on the clothes that are still on the ground, scattered around carelessly. Five hundred dollars lying under the sink. Four hundred and fifty dollars that got too close to the shower and have a damp corner, which will obviously require dry cleaning.
Justin’s asleep on the bed, curled up on his side and facing the bathroom. He managed to kick his shoes off but otherwise remains completely clothed. You’ve been having nightmares recently - of dying, of being alone, of Vic blasting you with an ooze-filled ray gun - and it’s been hell on you, but Justin wakes up too, wakes up to get you back to sleep or bring you water or get the bowl when you know you’re going to vomit, and not from the radiation. It’s like retribution, kind of, because it makes you remember every night you woke up to do the exact same things for him right after his mother entrusted him to you like a precious family heirloom.
He still has them every now and then.
You wonder if you will, too, after this is all over and you can resume the life of Brian Kinney, which for the moment is vacated, hung with a hiatus sign.
You slide onto the bed and nothing feels better than the silk duvet under your back and the down pillow your head sinks onto. All you want is to sleep, because you’re exhausted from driving and hospital visits and eating and puking and living, but as soon as you close your eyes, you can’t.
You start to think about the things you’ll do differently when you get through this. (There is no if. There has never been an if once in your life, and you’re not about to start now, not when you’re thirty-three and almost as childish and immature and stubborn as Justin, who’s breathing evenly next to you.)
The sun is coming through the half-closed blinds in orange and yellow, scattering across the wood floor and the bed and Justin, stopping just short of your outstretched hand, lost in the no-man’s land between your body and his. The imagery makes you think of the light over the bed, which is dark. You hate that fucking light. It’s a reminder of the Brian Kinney Reparations Act, which you instated as a sort of rewards program for yourself following Justin’s affair with the fiddler.
It went something like this: for every week that went by without Justin, you gave yourself something in congratulations. I didn’t lose. I’m still here. He meant nothing. The first week was the Mies van der Rohe coffee table, all clean lines and shining glass surfaces, a reminder of perfection in an utterly lifeless form. The second week was a new Gucci belt, which looked better on the rack than it did with your extensive suit collection. The third week was a new laptop for office use.
Eventually, you stopped doing it every week. It was getting expensive, and you had obviously proven that there was Life Without Justin, no matter how dismal everyone portrayed it to be and in how much denial you were. But then you told Ian to sign that contract and Justin tracked you down in the backroom, all righteous indignation and disbelief, and you tore out the blue lights over the bed because that was the color that his face had been lit that night. You put in orange, the polar opposite of blue, because you’d gone three fucking months without Justin, without breaking down, without doing anything melodramatic or predictable, and you deserved a fucking reward.
Then Justin came back, and life, which you thought had been progressing as normal, really started up again. It was superbly satisfying to fuck in the glow of that light, to watch it play on his skin and blend with his hair (which was long and great for gripping when he sucked you). But the light, you decide, is past its prime. It served its original purpose as a distraction, a menial monetary play toy, something you would buy for Gus to take his mind off of a scrape he got at the park. It reminds you too much of violinists with bad facial hair and wasted time. It is a relic of the past.
Plus, you realize all too late that it is very fucking ugly.
Thinking about Gus, you put him next on your list. You have hardly seen him at all this year, what with stopping Justin’s rampaging John Wayne impersonation and opening Kinnetik and dealing with a life-threatening illness (or, at the very least, life-threatening nausea). He’s your son, and the masculine influence you promised to provide for him has been very lacking lately. You won’t be surprised if he’s turned into the most flaming little three year old ever seen, what with dealing with Lindsay and Melanie’s recent rough patch.
You love him and you miss him, and that is something you never, ever counted on.
The exact same thing could be applied to Justin, who turns his face into the pillow as you watch him. You raise your hand and trace the line of his jaw, feeling sentimental and traitorous, although your skin isn’t crawling the way it should be. Justin turns into your touch as instinctively as he always has. You slide over further so that he can feel the press of your hip against his leg, even if it isn’t insistent or all that noticeable. He responds nonetheless, changing his body position so that now his head’s on your shoulder and one of his legs is thrown over yours. Your hand creeps up and starts to move through his short hair the way it always does.
The last thing you put on your When I’m Done with Cancer list is to ask Justin to move back in, and it is impulsive and exhilarating. It won’t be that big of a difference - Justin has practically lived with you for the past few weeks anyway, with the only formalities being the absence of all his shit and that he has to periodically run back to Daphne’s for clean changes of clothes.
You miss his unquenchable happiness (except when you kick him down, but he’s starting not to take that anymore, either), and you miss him climbing over you in the night in a rush to the bathroom for a four in the morning piss, and you miss finding his sketches everywhere, on napkins and the backs of beer cartons and the inside covers of books.
You hate that you love him so much, and although that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop, it weirds you out a little.
There was no way that you could have asked Justin to move back in earlier. He had to understand what was going on between you two - had to know that his transgression would not be forgotten, and that he had to earn back the trust he had so casually misplaced. Now, though, now that he’s cleaned up your puke and pulled off your disgusting clothes and helped you in the shower (even if you didn’t need it) and cooked you endless okay meals, you can ask him. He’s proven himself. You’re willing to overlook his brief stint as the Boy Wonder of Liberty Avenue and reduce Ian to merely an irritating itch you can’t scratch instead of a burning one for everything else he has done lately.
You’re tired. You’re so fucking tired, but now that you have this list, you want to start on it. You want to make good before you lose the motivation and crawl back into bed, sweating and quaking and reaching for the bowl Justin keeps on the nightstand. You start to sit up, trying to remember the name of that electrician you got to put in the ugly orange light, but that jostles Justin and he opens his eyes, blinking up blearily at you.
“Brian?” he asks, which is not a word, but questions - the endless questions that you expected when you came out of the radiologist’s and he said nothing, when you ate the sandwich and he said nothing, when you puked it all up and he said nothing. It’s is everything alright? And do you need something? And can I help in any way at all?
You know that love is for straight people, for pathetic, delusional heterosexuals, and those queers that would rather sacrifice their dignity and pride for a warm body next to them every night for the rest of their lives (and for lesbians, but, in your opinion, they don’t count). You also know that love is supposed to be flowers and candy and stupid fucking picnics on the floor.
Still, if you could define love, you’d say that it was cleaning up vomit and cooking okay food and sleeping on the bed in the middle of the day without even fucking beforehand, because everything that Justin does for you can be substituted with the word ‘love’. Justin has always loved you.
Justin would probably define love as sitting alone in a hospital corridor every night for a month and kissing away internal wounds and putting up posters in back alleys. Justin would probably say that everything you do can be substituted with the word ‘love’ (except for tricking and drinking and doing drugs, but honestly). You’ve probably always loved him, too.
Maybe.
He’s disoriented and you’re tired and you decide that the list can wait. You lay back down and he resettles his cheek against your smelly black sweater.
“Go back to sleep,” you tell him, as sternly as you always have. “It’s fine.”
Rating: R
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: Cancer Arc gapfiller. You start to think about the things you’ll do differently when you get through this.
Warnings: Late S4 spoilers.
Notes: camelhaircoat, a long, long time ago, requested cancer!fic for her birthday. I love her to death and I hope this meets her standards. Lots of love, darling.
you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,
am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure--you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
--that since and if you disappear
solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile
and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep--what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
--what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like, for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love, love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."
--you being in love, e e cummings
“And If You Disappear”
You’re kind of expecting it when Justin slides into the passenger seat of the Corvette just as you start the engine. You look over at him and open your mouth to say something, but he’s facing forward, staring straight ahead at the other cars lined up neatly in the parking garage. His hands are folded in his lap and he’s not wearing a seatbelt, which is so Justin - childish, immature, and stubborn to a fault. You reach across him and buckle him up, and he’s still not saying a word.
You’ve been a prick to him, but Justin loves you, and, after all this time, he just deals with it. If he queens out, it’s in silence.
At the radiologist’s, he sits in one of the hard little chairs in the waiting area, crosses his legs at the knee, and opens up the latest ArtForum he brought with him. His fingers hold the glossy pages tight so that the reflection from the fluorescent lights doesn’t create a glare, and he doesn’t react when the nurse announces your name in that grade-school roll call way.
You endure endless minutes of positioning and prepping and preparing until they finally pump you full of their toxic waste, which is ridiculous, because the time it takes to put the stuff into you is far less than the amount of time it took to get you into place. You want to find symbolic reasoning in that, but you’re not in the right state of mind for it, and leave it for another day. The nurse sits you up with a sugar-coated smile and you dress as slowly as possible, putting off the inevitable fluttering of Justin’s fingers and endless barrage of trite, sympathetic questions.
It turns out that Justin doesn’t ask you anything. He glances up when the door opens, marks his page in the magazine, and walks side-by-side with you out to the ‘vette. The three other people in the waiting room watch you pass with odd looks. You and Justin are companionable in your silence, uninterruptible, completely and utterly untouchable. You won’t say anything until Justin does, and Justin won’t say anything until he’s good and ready. You expect something, really - anything. But all he does differently is buckle himself up this time as he settles the magazine on his knees and watches straight ahead as you drive.
He makes you grilled cheese for lunch, which you only eat because you know the carbs will be out of your system in T-minus forty-seven minutes (approximately). You’ve become adept at planning out exactly when and how hard the waves will hit; the first one is killer, about an hour and a half after treatment, while the next is gentler, lulling you into a false sense of reprieve. The third one equals if not surpasses the first, and the fourth (usually the final) is like the tide going out, gentle and soothing, just some dry-heaving and stomach acid. Sometimes there’s a fifth, but usually not. This is your fourth round of treatment, and you think you have the schedule down. Life is nothing if you can’t manage it effectively, wrap it around your finger and analyze it, even if you can’t change it.
The food Justin cooks is always okay. He’s a brilliant artist, a fantastic fuck, and a stellar dancer, but one of the few things he’s set his mind to and found himself unable to execute perfectly is cooking. You consider the whole wheat bread, the dripping cheese, the puddle of grease in the middle of your plate, and you force yourself to eat it. You know that it makes Justin happy to take care of you, and you see him try to hide his self-satisfaction behind his bottle of Pellegrino. It doesn’t work, because he’s too smug for his own good sometimes.
You taught him well.
Exactly as you estimated, you’re kneeling on the bathroom floor three quarters of an hour later and making sure the entirety of the grilled cheese winds up in the toilet. Justin sits faithfully by your side, the dog you tie up outside the store you want to browse around for a minute. He offers Evian in between waves, a moist red washcloth during, and his silent support from beginning to end. You realize that he hasn’t said a word all day, and you know why that is.
You also know that he’d be sulking at Daphne’s if you’d treated him that way under normal circumstances, but these aren’t normal circumstances, and he loves you too much to leave you like this.
You’re shaking and shivering by the time the fourth wave has ebbed out to sea. Justin wipes off your face with the washcloth and then rings it out in cold water in the sink. He hangs it over the glass door of the shower to dry, something that you would never have condoned him doing if you were in a state of health fit for light reprimanding and physical punishment. He bends down so that you can grasp his forearm, and then he pulls you to your feet and leads you to the sink, where the toothbrush and toothpaste are prominently featured.
He leaves you then, and you know that this has become the only time he feels safe letting you be by yourself. He’s taken up the notion that you need to be looked after at all times, no matter if you’re sleeping, eating, half-heartedly working on your computer, or just sitting. Today was the first day he attended radiation with you - the first time you didn’t push him down when he tried to come - since he was uncomfortable with you going alone. However, you brushing your teeth, figuratively cleansing your soul for the third time this week, he thinks can be done privately. He’s as respectful of boundaries as he is skilled at erecting them.
You decide, as you rinse out your mouth, that you want a shower. Your skin is clammy and cold and your hair is streaked with sweat. You toss your reeking clothes on the floor and turn on the spray, leaning back against the glass and enjoying the contrast of cold to the hot water. You don’t know where Justin is. He wouldn’t let you shower by yourself if he knew, so maybe he left, or is on the treadmill with his headphones in. He thinks you’ll slip on the soap and break your neck if he’s not there to scrub you himself. That annoys you to no end, and you always let him know, but he just purses his lips and keeps going.
Immature, childish, and stubborn.
You’re not sure how much time has passed when the water starts to run cold, but the light slanting in through the bathroom door is at a different angle, so it must have been at least an hour. You towel off, avoiding places you’d rather not think about at the moment, and put back on the clothes that are still on the ground, scattered around carelessly. Five hundred dollars lying under the sink. Four hundred and fifty dollars that got too close to the shower and have a damp corner, which will obviously require dry cleaning.
Justin’s asleep on the bed, curled up on his side and facing the bathroom. He managed to kick his shoes off but otherwise remains completely clothed. You’ve been having nightmares recently - of dying, of being alone, of Vic blasting you with an ooze-filled ray gun - and it’s been hell on you, but Justin wakes up too, wakes up to get you back to sleep or bring you water or get the bowl when you know you’re going to vomit, and not from the radiation. It’s like retribution, kind of, because it makes you remember every night you woke up to do the exact same things for him right after his mother entrusted him to you like a precious family heirloom.
He still has them every now and then.
You wonder if you will, too, after this is all over and you can resume the life of Brian Kinney, which for the moment is vacated, hung with a hiatus sign.
You slide onto the bed and nothing feels better than the silk duvet under your back and the down pillow your head sinks onto. All you want is to sleep, because you’re exhausted from driving and hospital visits and eating and puking and living, but as soon as you close your eyes, you can’t.
You start to think about the things you’ll do differently when you get through this. (There is no if. There has never been an if once in your life, and you’re not about to start now, not when you’re thirty-three and almost as childish and immature and stubborn as Justin, who’s breathing evenly next to you.)
The sun is coming through the half-closed blinds in orange and yellow, scattering across the wood floor and the bed and Justin, stopping just short of your outstretched hand, lost in the no-man’s land between your body and his. The imagery makes you think of the light over the bed, which is dark. You hate that fucking light. It’s a reminder of the Brian Kinney Reparations Act, which you instated as a sort of rewards program for yourself following Justin’s affair with the fiddler.
It went something like this: for every week that went by without Justin, you gave yourself something in congratulations. I didn’t lose. I’m still here. He meant nothing. The first week was the Mies van der Rohe coffee table, all clean lines and shining glass surfaces, a reminder of perfection in an utterly lifeless form. The second week was a new Gucci belt, which looked better on the rack than it did with your extensive suit collection. The third week was a new laptop for office use.
Eventually, you stopped doing it every week. It was getting expensive, and you had obviously proven that there was Life Without Justin, no matter how dismal everyone portrayed it to be and in how much denial you were. But then you told Ian to sign that contract and Justin tracked you down in the backroom, all righteous indignation and disbelief, and you tore out the blue lights over the bed because that was the color that his face had been lit that night. You put in orange, the polar opposite of blue, because you’d gone three fucking months without Justin, without breaking down, without doing anything melodramatic or predictable, and you deserved a fucking reward.
Then Justin came back, and life, which you thought had been progressing as normal, really started up again. It was superbly satisfying to fuck in the glow of that light, to watch it play on his skin and blend with his hair (which was long and great for gripping when he sucked you). But the light, you decide, is past its prime. It served its original purpose as a distraction, a menial monetary play toy, something you would buy for Gus to take his mind off of a scrape he got at the park. It reminds you too much of violinists with bad facial hair and wasted time. It is a relic of the past.
Plus, you realize all too late that it is very fucking ugly.
Thinking about Gus, you put him next on your list. You have hardly seen him at all this year, what with stopping Justin’s rampaging John Wayne impersonation and opening Kinnetik and dealing with a life-threatening illness (or, at the very least, life-threatening nausea). He’s your son, and the masculine influence you promised to provide for him has been very lacking lately. You won’t be surprised if he’s turned into the most flaming little three year old ever seen, what with dealing with Lindsay and Melanie’s recent rough patch.
You love him and you miss him, and that is something you never, ever counted on.
The exact same thing could be applied to Justin, who turns his face into the pillow as you watch him. You raise your hand and trace the line of his jaw, feeling sentimental and traitorous, although your skin isn’t crawling the way it should be. Justin turns into your touch as instinctively as he always has. You slide over further so that he can feel the press of your hip against his leg, even if it isn’t insistent or all that noticeable. He responds nonetheless, changing his body position so that now his head’s on your shoulder and one of his legs is thrown over yours. Your hand creeps up and starts to move through his short hair the way it always does.
The last thing you put on your When I’m Done with Cancer list is to ask Justin to move back in, and it is impulsive and exhilarating. It won’t be that big of a difference - Justin has practically lived with you for the past few weeks anyway, with the only formalities being the absence of all his shit and that he has to periodically run back to Daphne’s for clean changes of clothes.
You miss his unquenchable happiness (except when you kick him down, but he’s starting not to take that anymore, either), and you miss him climbing over you in the night in a rush to the bathroom for a four in the morning piss, and you miss finding his sketches everywhere, on napkins and the backs of beer cartons and the inside covers of books.
You hate that you love him so much, and although that doesn’t mean you’re going to stop, it weirds you out a little.
There was no way that you could have asked Justin to move back in earlier. He had to understand what was going on between you two - had to know that his transgression would not be forgotten, and that he had to earn back the trust he had so casually misplaced. Now, though, now that he’s cleaned up your puke and pulled off your disgusting clothes and helped you in the shower (even if you didn’t need it) and cooked you endless okay meals, you can ask him. He’s proven himself. You’re willing to overlook his brief stint as the Boy Wonder of Liberty Avenue and reduce Ian to merely an irritating itch you can’t scratch instead of a burning one for everything else he has done lately.
You’re tired. You’re so fucking tired, but now that you have this list, you want to start on it. You want to make good before you lose the motivation and crawl back into bed, sweating and quaking and reaching for the bowl Justin keeps on the nightstand. You start to sit up, trying to remember the name of that electrician you got to put in the ugly orange light, but that jostles Justin and he opens his eyes, blinking up blearily at you.
“Brian?” he asks, which is not a word, but questions - the endless questions that you expected when you came out of the radiologist’s and he said nothing, when you ate the sandwich and he said nothing, when you puked it all up and he said nothing. It’s is everything alright? And do you need something? And can I help in any way at all?
You know that love is for straight people, for pathetic, delusional heterosexuals, and those queers that would rather sacrifice their dignity and pride for a warm body next to them every night for the rest of their lives (and for lesbians, but, in your opinion, they don’t count). You also know that love is supposed to be flowers and candy and stupid fucking picnics on the floor.
Still, if you could define love, you’d say that it was cleaning up vomit and cooking okay food and sleeping on the bed in the middle of the day without even fucking beforehand, because everything that Justin does for you can be substituted with the word ‘love’. Justin has always loved you.
Justin would probably define love as sitting alone in a hospital corridor every night for a month and kissing away internal wounds and putting up posters in back alleys. Justin would probably say that everything you do can be substituted with the word ‘love’ (except for tricking and drinking and doing drugs, but honestly). You’ve probably always loved him, too.
Maybe.
He’s disoriented and you’re tired and you decide that the list can wait. You lay back down and he resettles his cheek against your smelly black sweater.
“Go back to sleep,” you tell him, as sternly as you always have. “It’s fine.”