I want to be here for my friend. But I also want to get the hell out of Raleigh. There’s only so much time I can spend here before I want to crawl out of my own skin. This is the place I was born, but there’s a reason we left the moment I turned eighteen and never looked back. Other than short visits with Jesse and Naz, we never stay. Being here for an extended period fucks with my head. I’m always looking behind me, wondering where the monsters of my past are hiding.
Don still lives in the same house. He’s never tried to contact us, at least that I’m aware of, but it’s enough that I still catch myself looking over my shoulder when I’m here, half-expecting to see his truck parked crooked in the driveway or his silhouette in a doorway.
I don’t want to see Don, but he doesn’t haunt me like my mother does. Or the man she killed to protect me.
When things get bad, I can still feel his hands around my neck, how hard the ground was when he dropped me. And no matter how long it’s been, I’m still in the same skinny, malnourished, too-weak body I was then.
The nightmares get worse when I’m here for too long, and every time I wake up reaching for Will. I need a distraction.
I’ve been writing more, which is nice, but it’s not like I’ll ever use any of it. Jesse is the one who writes the good lyrics. I help out, fill in gaps and improvise here and there, but I’ve never turned over my own stuff to see if it could work.
My brain doesn’t hear the music the way Jesse’s does. He says the melodies come with the lyrics, or he’ll think of a line, and it just naturally falls into a pattern that becomes a melody. It’s not like that for me. My words are more like poems with no tune. They have a rhythm, but no sound. Cadence, but no music.
And, more often than not, whatever words come out don’t get thefeelingright the way Jesse’s words do. There’s no depth. It’s just empty words in my chicken scratch handwriting, surrounded by stupid doodles because I can’t get my brain to focus. And the longer I’m here, the more it just becomes trauma dumping in rhymes.
There isn’t a distraction strong enough when I’m stuck here. Everything gives me a headache—from the sense of dread to the smell of the nasty Bradford Pear trees blooming.
Maybe I should talk to Jesse, get an idea of whether it would bother him if I went anywhere else for a little while. Blake will probably tell me I need to bring a bodyguard—we each have our own now. Jesse actually has two, probably because he keptgiving Blake the slip when Cory was off or sleeping, and because he seems to attract trouble.
Or maybe I just need to go out, let go of some of this tension, maybe get laid.
Yes.That’s what I need. I need to get off with another person who isn’t my hand…or my foster brother when I wake up in the middle of the night dry humping his leg.
My body and mind are wired to turn to Will for comfort, especially when I’m not fully awake. It doesn’t help that he’s never once pushed me away, told me to wake up or stop.
I wasn’t asleep last night, though. And I know he wasn’t either. He held me close and looked me right in the eyes while I pulled my cock out and stroked myself. His hand tightened in the nape of my hair when I groaned, and I swear he pulled me closer. I swear I heard his breath hitch when my cum hit his stomach.
Then the way his mouth dropped open…
When I stretched up to meet his mouth with mine, and my hand left my spent cock to reach for his, that’s when he chose to run away. He rolled onto his back, went to the bathroom to clean himself up, and returned with a washcloth for me.
Not a word was spoken about what happened. I’d tried to say something, to apologize or joke away the awkwardness, but he shushed me and pulled my back to his chest again. It took hours for me to fall back asleep. The reality of what I’d done kept me awake, itching more than the remnants of cum still drying in my pubic hair.
Is he as conditioned to give me whatever I need as I am to taking comfort from him, no matter how inappropriate it might be?How much of himself is he sacrificing to keep giving what he doesn’t have to give?
Things can’t continue on this way. If I don’t make a change now, he’ll only keep chipping away at himself just to keep me whole.
FIVE
WILL
Jesse is sitting up in bed when I get there, a notebook open on his lap and a pen flipping back and forth between his fingers. He looks better than he did a few days ago. There’s some color back in his face, and his green eyes are clearer than I remember them being. But there’s still a flatness to him that feels intangible, like someone turned the saturation down.
“Hey,” I say quietly.
He glances up and flicks his eyes over me. The corner of his mouth quirks up. “You look like shit.”
Despite the sentiment, it’s good to see a real smile from him. It sets me at ease.
“Well, we can’t all make chronic fatigue and existential dread look as sexy as you do.”
He snorts, then shifts, adjusting the pillow behind his back to get more comfortable. I slump into the chair beside his bed and scrub a hand over my face.
“You wanna talk about it?”
I give him a look that suggests I’d rather castrate myself with my guitar strings. Jesse huffs out a laugh.
We sit in silence for a minute. It’s not awkward. Jesse’s always been good at this kind of quiet, even before everything went to hell. Except normally he’s making music, writing things down, or staring into space because his head is too full of ideas to know which one to let out.
