Work Text:
Hi-yeah, we drift in and out
Hi-yeah, sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two...
– Talking Heads, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).
The ending strains of ‘Pure Imagination’ from the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie soundtrack faded as Lea put her gearstick into park and yanked the handbrake. She turned off the ignition and reached down to unlatch the trunk, then opened the driver’s side door, swinging her legs out.
She walked around to the back of her car and hoisted the first suitcase out of the trunk with a heavy groan, setting it down on the concrete floor of the parking garage under her old apartment block with a sigh of relief. She had been pleasantly surprised that her keycard still gave her access to the garage. She’d thought she’d have to lug all of her junk in from the street, so it was nice that she wouldn’t have to, after all.
She had parked her car in Shaun’s space. It wasn’t like he needed it, since he didn’t own a car, she rationalised. It didn’t even occur to her to check if her old space was free. She had just assumed someone would be in her previous apartment by now. It wasn’t a bad building, after all. Oh, who was she kidding? It was meh. Except for the boy (formerly) next door.
In Lea’s opinion, Dr. Shaun Murphy thoroughly improved the ambience of the place, and he was the most important reason she was so eager to return to a place where she’d never really loved living.
You don’t even like San Jose! – Um, of course I like it. Shaun is there! had pretty much been Lea’s mantra/internal argument as she’d driven, mile by mile, all the way back to San Jose.
All she had been thinking about – that is, when she wasn’t sobbing about what a bust going back to Hershey had turned out to be – was seeing Shaun again after all these months. She absolutely couldn’t wait. She couldn’t even begin to decide what to say, how to act, what to do – and here she blushed a little – not least because, last time she had been in that building, she had been kissing him goodbye. Which, as it transpired, had turned out to be more of a ‘see ya later’.
Lifting bag after bag out of her trunk like it was some sort of clown car – Jesus, they just kept coming (in reality, it was four suitcases and her trundle bed, broken into parts for easy transportation, but man, they were heavy) – Lea idly wondered how the hell she had managed to accumulate such a huge array of bric-a-brac, and why, in God’s name, she insisted on dragging it back with her. Honestly, she just wanted the task of unloading over and done with so she could see Shaun for the first time in months. As soon as possible, preferably.
Neither of them had FaceTimed or Skyped since she’d left. That just wasn’t Shaun’s style. Though, admittedly, she’d never actually asked if he wanted to in the first place. Plus, she’d been busy getting back into the swing of things in Hershey, and he had no doubt been at least doubly busy with his residency at St. Bonaventure Hospital. She knew his schedule was generally pretty punishing, and his workdays were long.
Lea had heard the key turn in his front door at all hours of the night when they’d been neighbours. Over time, it became the case that she didn’t quite fall asleep properly each night he came home late, only dozing until she heard those keys jingle, his door swing open and shut, and knew that he had safely made it home from another long shift.
That first week in Hershey, she hadn’t had an easy time of falling asleep because she missed the sounds of life back in San Jose.
And she – well, she’d been preoccupied mostly with trying to keep her family’s auto shop from going broke, and not falling out with her brother.
She had succeeded at neither endeavour.
The business she’d returned to was unrecognisable from the lively workshop she had left behind when she’d moved to San Jose to take up her new job there.
The sullen-faced employees did their jobs in slow motion, bored and dispassionate. Several had taken a pay cut to stay on, with a concomitant decrease in their enthusiasm for their work. Her brother, with regret, had had to fire a number of loyal, long-serving (and therefore expensive) employees to reduce operating costs.
They faced increasingly stiff competition from chain and franchised body shops – who had access to huge economies of scale when it came to buying genuine and OEM parts and paint – that had sprung up like mushrooms all over Hershey.
Their little Mom-and-Pop enterprise certainly couldn’t compete on price, but Lea had been so hopeful that they could still hold their own on quality service and impeccable work.
Not so much.
It wasn’t helping to think about it. Every time she did, she just got angry all over again. She reminded herself it was better to focus on what (okay, who) she was coming back to, instead of worrying about what she was leaving behind.
All of this was why she’d left Hershey to come back to a place she had never really considered ‘home’ before. The day her brother had nailed up the ‘GOING OUT OF BUSINESS – FIXTURES AND FITTINGS FOR SALE, ENQUIRE WITHIN’ sign, she had known in an instant, and with total certainty, that there was nothing left for her in Hershey anymore. When the shop was empty of the shelving and cupboards and filing cabinets they had sold to cover the last rent check, she felt devastated, as though she had witnessed a death.
Generally speaking, and to paraphrase Neil Diamond, San Jose was fine, but it wasn’t home, and Hershey was home, but it wasn’t hers no more.
She knew she could tell Shaun exactly what had gone down in Hell-shey and he would listen to every word with that attentive look on his face, and not judge her for running back to San Jose. Yep, Shaun Murphy sure knew a whole lot, and could teach Lea a thing or two, about the fine art of running from things. To Lea, it felt like an age had passed since she had helped him to run away on their road trip to get smashed and sing dreadful karaoke out of a tequila bottle.
She dumped her bags in a haphazard fashion on the floor of Shaun’s mercifully unlocked storage unit. It was untouched and empty – aside from that behemoth of a television that dwarfed all other objects he owned, he didn’t really have a lot of stuff in that apartment of his. Lea was sure he wouldn’t mind loaning a bit of space to her for the bags, at least for the moment.
After all, she had more important things to do.
She punched the elevator call button, breathless and excited. It had always been a slow elevator, but tonight it seemed particularly sluggish to arrive. Finally, the bell dinged and the doors slid open. Lea barrelled in, not waiting for anyone who might be coming or going. She jabbed the Close Door button with even more impatience. The doors shut and the elevator rose upward, till it reached her old floor. She poked the Open Door button with the same fervour as she had pressed the Close Door button.
The doors slid open and Lea looked cautiously out into the hallway. No sign of Shaun. He must not have gotten home from work yet. She decided she would sit and wait for him. She checked her phone clock. Nine-ish. Hopefully he wouldn’t be long. What if he’s at some other groovy place hanging out with another girl? her inner voice hissed. Lea nearly laughed aloud at her own melodramatics. Shaun Murphy? Out? Drinking? Partying? Not in this universe. Unless it was with her, of course.
The faint jingling of keys sounded from within the elevator. Lea’s heart leapt into her throat. That was definitely a Shaun-like key jingle.
It was amazing, Lea considered idly, how quickly you could get used to the everyday sounds of someone else living their life. And how you didn’t soon forget those sounds, even if you didn’t see the person who made them for quite a while.
The elevator doors opened to reveal Shaun, backpack across his shoulders. Lea breathed deeply as she laid eyes on him for the first time in way too long. She took in his boyish hair and his curious eyes and the sheer purpose in his stride as he bounded along the corridor to his front door. God, did he ever age? Who the hell did he think he was, Peter Pan? For crying out loud! And he was doing a freaking surgical residency. That had to age a person, right?
It simply wasn’t fair that Lea had already had to consider the relative merits and potency of L’Oreal’s anti-ageing moisturiser lineup, versus Olay’s or Nivea’s offerings, and yet this guy still looked exactly the Goddamn same. And, just to add insult to injury, they were the same age as one another.
Having considered that, though, Lea quickly decided that the very fact that Shaun looked the same was comforting as well. In a way.
Lea was a little disappointed at his backpack being on his shoulders – it would make hugging the life out of him, or, well, whatever (wink, wink) – a bit tricky.
His head was partly down and he looked lost in thought. He didn’t notice Lea until he was practically on top of her.
When Shaun recognised her, he didn’t speak a word or make any sort of surprised face. He just looked like he was seeing nothing in particular, his face blank, and Lea might as well have been a window, what with the way he stared right through her. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, one hand in his pocket; Lea guessed he was touching the toy scalpel and trying to comprehend her reappearance.
The longer he stared at her without saying even one word, the more she started to feel as though maybe she ought to have at least warned him that she was coming back to San Jose.
He still didn’t say anything, but his closed-off, self-protective body language told Lea how bowled over he was to see her. She wasn’t entirely sure yet about whether he was bowled over in the good or bad sense, but the meter was leaning towards ‘bad’, the longer he just... didn’t react.
She decided to break the silence. “Aren’t you gonna say ‘hello’?”
“Hello,” Shaun replied, evenly, but he barely made eye contact with Lea, and he looked as though he would have preferred to be just about anywhere other than there with her.
Oooookay, Lea thought, That wasn’t the reception I was expecting.
“I’m back,” she said, unable to suppress her excitement, but also becoming increasingly aware that this was obviously not going to be a warm and fuzzy reunion scene.
“I can see that,” Shaun said, mildly.
Lea was floored at his short tone, but she managed to find her voice to ask, “Can I please crash with you for a few days? I have my trundle in pieces downstairs. Hershey got kind of ugly. I had to leave.” Ask me what happened, Shaun! Lea added, in her head.
Shaun nodded briefly. “Okay. You can stay with me. I’ll help you with your luggage. Where is it?”
“I dumped it in your storage cage. It wasn’t locked and it didn’t look like you were using it.”
Without further ado, Shaun unlocked his front door, took off his backpack and dropped it in the entryway, and then rolled up his shirt sleeves. He followed Lea to the elevator in silence.
Lea eyed Shaun, debating whether to try and start a conversation, but just then, he did it for her.
“You look tired. Are you tired?”
Lea nodded. “Yeah, it was a long drive. Stopped a few times, but still.”
“Are you hungry or thirsty?”
“I had Mickey D’s for dinner not long ago. I’m okay. Thanks, though.”
“McDonald’s is not ‘dinner’. I can fix you something.”
“Really, I’m fine, Shaun. I just want to get my stuff upstairs and lay down.”
“You can’t just have fast food for dinner,” Shaun repeated.
Lea’s eyes narrowed, “Actually, Shaun, I can just have fast food for dinner, if I want to. I’m an adult. The choice is mine. That’s how being an adult works.”
“It has almost no nutritional value.”
“I’m aware of that, Shaun,” Lea replied, an edge creeping into her voice. Had he always been this insistent? “I’m tired and I want to rest.”
The elevator stopped at the parking garage level and the doors dinged open. Agitated, Lea strode directly to the storage cage, with Shaun following closely behind. Lea stopped short at the chain-link gate of the cage, and Shaun nearly crashed into her.
“Sorry,” Lea apologised, “And, uh, sorry for the mess you’re about to witness.”
Shaun shrugged. “You moved states. It’s not unreasonable to have a large amount of luggage when you do something like that. I had a few bags when I moved here from Wyoming.”
With that, he pushed past her and went to retrieve two suitcases, rolling them on their castors. He left them with Lea and got back inside the unit to collect a couple more suitcases, plus her huge duffel bag, which he handed to her without a word. Their fingers brushed during the exchange, but Shaun wore an expression like he had just been burned on contact. He abruptly jerked away from Lea, instead turning his attention to the four suitcases in total he had brought out from the locker, plus the parts of her trundle bed, which he balanced on the suitcases.
Something is weird here, Lea thought. He can’t even look me in the face. I wonder what happened while I was gone.
“Thanks for that,” she tried.
Shaun shrugged again. “It’s fine.”
No, it’s not, Lea disagreed privately. It’s not fine at all. I hope my leaving didn’t screw him up too bad. He is not happy to see me. I don’t know him the best, but he’s not happy at all.
Moving briskly, his manner businesslike, Shaun lined up the suitcases back to back in two rows and lifted each of their telescopic handles so he could wheel all of them at once.
“Here, let me – ”, Lea protested, trying to relieve Shaun of some of her luggage.
He shook her off impatiently and rolled the suitcases across the smooth concrete to the elevator. Lea could only follow along in his wake.
Shaun called the elevator and as they waited for it to come back down, Lea stole sideward glances at him. His posture was rigid and straight-backed, no real emotion on his face. Her heart sank: had it been a mistake to return to San Jose?
The elevator arrived. Shaun gestured for Lea to get in before him, then manoeuvred the suitcases in after her, bringing up the rear. The doors closed. They rode back up in total silence.
The doors opened again and Shaun pushed the suitcases out of the elevator and into the hallway. He seized the handles and steered them into his apartment, holding the door open for Lea as well. She ducked under his arm and looked for somewhere to drop her bag.
“Blankets are in the linen closet, if you need any more; there’s also a spare pillow. Help yourself. I’m going to fix myself some dinner. Are you sure you wouldn’t like any?” Shaun rattled off, his tone flat.
“Are you gonna let me go without having any of it?” Lea tried to joke. Shaun didn’t laugh.
Lea was about to attempt a follow-up quip when, suddenly, Shaun spoke again. He did not look at Lea as he said quietly, mostly to himself, “I have already let you go.”
When she heard Shaun say that, Lea felt as though he had slapped her. She brought her hand to her open mouth in shock, her eyes wide as she absorbed just how succinctly he had summed up his current feelings about her homecoming.
“What’s wrong, Shaun?” Lea pressed, when she had stopped reeling from the blow of his last statement. “I thought you’d be happy to see me, but I’m getting the distinct impression that you’d rather I wasn’t here at all.”
Shaun shook his head. “That’s not true. I’m happy to see you. I didn’t expect to see you again.”
“Well, do you think you could at least act like it, then?” Lea snapped.
“I don’t know what to say to you about that,” Shaun replied, his face still a mask.
“Okay. Well. I’m going to set up my bed.” Lea mumbled. Shaun gave no reply, then turned away from Lea and contemplated the contents of his pantry instead.
Lea sighed. Welcome home.
She gathered up the parts of her trundle bed and started reassembling it. The apartment was silent except for the rattle of kitchen gadgets and clang of pots and pans while Shaun cooked.
As she worked, she looked around the apartment, trying to notice anything different from the last time she’d been inside it. Her heart lifted briefly at the sight of the prized baseball she had lent to Shaun, positioned just so on the console table. It had to mean something that it had pride of place, right? He hadn’t forgotten her.
Her bed made up, Lea sat down on the mattress, tried to gather her thoughts, and just be for awhile. She tried very, very hard not to think about anything in particular.
After she’d relaxed for a while, she decided to get up and sit at the counter to watch Shaun cook. It wasn’t like she should unpack and get comfortable too quickly, given how Shaun was acting. But maybe he’d unwind from the day while he was cooking. Some people found cooking relaxing. Lea was not one of them, and honestly, she considered those who were to be weirdos. But perhaps Shaun was one of those people. And, well, he was definitely a bit of a weirdo. After all, wasn’t everybody somebody’s else’s weirdo, in the end?
He was kinda quiet at times, and anyone looking at him could just know he was thinking about big concepts, the kinds of stuff it would never occur to most people to contemplate. Then other times, he could look disturbingly similar to Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Especially when he was very, very upset about something. Honestly, Lea almost would have preferred he shout at her, instead of this pseudo-silent treatment that only served to stab her in the heart. But Lea was absolutely sure that Shaun’s mom’s corpse was definitely not rotting in the basement, and that he was not going around stabbing women in showers in dingy roadside motels, wearing his mother’s dress.
Shaun barely looked up as the feet of the barstool scraped the floor when Lea sat down.
“So, how was your day?” she attempted.
Without turning around, Shaun responded, “It was Jared’s last day today. He’s going to work in Denver. I went and saw Dr. Glassman after that. He has brain cancer. He’ll be having surgery soon.”
“Oh, my God!” Lea clapped her hand to her mouth. “That’s awful about Glassy. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?” Shaun replied, briskly. “I’m not the one having brain surgery. Dr. Glassman is.”
“Well, yeah, of course, but you and Glassy are pretty close. You must be worried about him, right?”
“It’s operable,” Shaun said, turning off the stove and finally acknowledging Lea, still sitting at the counter. “He has a very good oncologist.”
“He has a very good friend, too,” Lea said, gently.
“Yes. Dr. Glassman is my friend,” Shaun agreed.
“I’m your friend too, Shaun,” Lea reminded him, softly.
Shaun shook his head. “You were. But then you went to Hershey.”
Lea sighed. “That’s – not how friendship works, Shaun. Just because I wasn’t here doesn’t mean I wasn’t still your friend. I didn’t stop being your friend ‘cause I went to Hershey.”
“You weren’t here,” Shaun repeated.
“I didn’t stop being your friend,” Lea argued again.
“I made a new friend. Kenny. He moved into your old apartment. He’s not here anymore,” Shaun said, his tone now disarmingly conversational. He pulled out the other barstool next to Lea and sat down. “People go away a lot,” he observed.
“Yeah, they do,” Lea agreed, “But sometimes they come back. Like I have.”
Shaun shook his head, “And sometimes they leave again. You might leave again.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Lea conceded, “But I definitely hope I can stay for a while.”
Why the hell isn’t he asking about Hershey? Lea puzzled in her mind.
Instead, she commented, “It looks like your mac and cheese is cooling off. You’d better eat it soon.”
Shaun shook his head. “It’s still too hot. Last time I ate it that hot, I burned my mouth. It hurt.”
Lea cringed, sympathetic. “Oh, yeah, cheese burns. Man, those suck. Like, you just wanna love the cheese, and it doesn’t wanna love you back. Tragic.”
After a couple more minutes, Shaun got up and opened his cabinets, taking out two bowls and two glasses, then opened a drawer and picked up two forks and two spoons. He set all these down near the still-steaming pot of cheesy comfort. Lea’s stomach rumbled. All of a sudden, her McDonald’s meal seemed about ten hours ago, instead of just an hour or so.
Shaun saw her looking longingly at the food, gestured to the pot, and asked, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some?”
“Okay, you’ve twisted my arm. That smells fantastic,” Lea admitted.
Shaun gave her the first smile she’d seen on him so far that evening, and started ladling macaroni cheese into the two bowls. Her heart leapt at the sight of his smile. Maybe it wouldn’t be —
“Do you want something to drink? I have orange juice, Coke Zero, Pepsi Max, or sparkling water,” Shaun offered. “I try to avoid refined sugar. Except in my pancakes.”
“Coke Zero would be great, but I can get it. You eat,” Lea said, pushing her chair back. “Do you want anything, while I’m up?”
“Just pour me a glass of Coke, please.” Shaun replied. “Thank you.”
Lea filled the two glasses with Coke and set one down in front of Shaun, then placed her own to the side of her bowl of macaroni cheese. She went back to her seat, sat down, and lifted her fork.
“I wasn’t sure if you eat yours with a fork or spoon,” Shaun said. “So I gave you both.”
“Oh, a fork is fine,” Lea responded, setting aside the clean spoon so it wouldn’t get dirty, then returning to the waiting bowl of deliciousness. She loaded up a forkful and started to eat, punctuating every few mouthfuls with a sip of her Coke. Shaun looked a little nervous – then Lea realised that he was probably worried she wouldn’t enjoy his cooking.
“It’s wonderful, Shaun,” she reassured him. “I don’t know what you put in this, but it’s terrific.”
Shaun glanced around surreptitiously, as though he was considering revealing state secrets, then looked at Lea and said, “I add smoked bacon and two types of cheese.”
“I thought I tasted bacon,” Lea said. “Wow. Thanks so much for sharing your food. And your apartment, of course.”
“That’s okay,” Shaun replied. “Have you eaten enough? There’s a bit more left.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m full,” Lea answered. “You should have it.”
“I’m full, too,” Shaun said. “I’ll put the leftovers in a bowl. You can have it for lunch tomorrow. It heats up okay.”
“Don’t you want to take it for your own lunch?” Lea asked.
Shaun shook his head. “I don’t usually get time to eat it hot. My days are busy. I eat sandwiches, mostly. I can put them down and pick them up again later. That goes cold if I get called away. It’s not nice cold. You can have it. I’ll leave it in the fridge. It’s the bowl covered in foil, but please take off the foil before you microwave it. Are you done with that?” he finished, reaching for Lea’s empty bowl.
“Oh, let me clear up. You go relax,” Lea protested, getting up to gather the dishes.
Shaun pointed to his dishwasher. “Okay. Just rinse them out and put them in the dishwasher. I’ll run it later. I’m going to have a shower now.”
Lea nodded. “Okay. Is it all right if I have one after you? I feel kinda grimy from being cooped up in the car today.”
“Yes,” Shaun said. “You’ll find more towels on the bathroom shelves. I won’t be long. The remote control is on the coffee table if you want to watch television.”
“Thanks. I just might do that,” Lea said gratefully, flopping onto the couch. She wanted to get a bit of a closer look at Shaun’s mementos – particularly that baseball.
Once the bathroom door had safely shut behind Shaun, Lea reached over to the console and lifted the baseball. A folded piece of paper was under it, and Lea realised it must be Shaun’s penmanship on the paper. She couldn’t help herself. She picked it up and unfolded it, then began to read. The handwriting was jagged and there were holes in the paper from being folded and unfolded so many times. Obviously Shaun had wrestled with himself at length, considering whether to mail it or not. The letter read:
Lea —
It was hard to watch you leave. It’s been three months and I still wish you would open your door in the mornings and say ‘Hi,’ like you always did.
Kenny, my new neighbour, is friendly enough, but every time he opens the door I feel disappointed. It’s not you. It never is.
Why aren’t you here? Where are you? What are you doing? Why don’t you call? Do you like it in Hershey? I hope you are getting to build all kinds of engines like you wanted, and work on cool cars.
You got me to do all kinds of new things too. I never sang karaoke before, or learned to drive, and I definitely never kissed anyone prior to that night either.
Smiling softly to herself at the memory of Shaun’s apprehensive face, expression nervous but somehow also eager, as he bent down to her, arms held pinned to his sides, she was hit by such a wave of regret.
This particular tsunami of wistfulness had knocked her over with some regularity back in Hershey, and tonight, it slammed into her hard enough to make her lose her breath.
There was never one ounce of regret for kissing him, just overwhelming sorrow that she didn’t get to do it more than once that night. Or more than once beyond it. She should have taught him earlier in the evening. Then she could have realised just how much she’d be leaving behind. And then maybe – maybe they could’ve – maybe she —
And then, a much more bittersweet memory: kissing him the night she left.
Shoving all of that emotion in a mental drawer for the moment, Lea returned to reading Shaun’s letter:
Work’s okay. I think Dr. Melendez is starting to respect me a little more, and Dr. Glassman isn’t forcing me to talk to anybody now, not since you told me how to stand up for myself. I only want to talk to you, anyway, but you’re not here, so that doesn’t work. So I don’t talk to anyone really. Claire, sometimes, I guess. She gives good advice to me every so often, now that you aren’t here to give yours.
I made a big mistake at work recently and I had to tell the administration. I wanted to come home and tell you about it, but you’re not here so that makes it hard to tell you things. I guess I have to fix it by myself.
It hurts. Lea, I miss you. I hope you come back so we can sing karaoke again and drink tequila and go on dates that don’t start out as dates.
I listen to ‘Islands in the Stream’ a lot, and I think about you. It reminds me of the trip we took. Sometimes I smile, sometimes I feel sad.
I’ve been buying these pine tree-shaped air fresheners, because when I smell that scent I remember everything about you. Then it makes me upset, because everything I remember about you is here, while you aren’t.
Please come back sometime and visit me. One day you were here and the next you were gone and nothing’s really okay anymore.
— Shaun.
She was so engrossed in reading, tears pricking at her eyes, as she struggled to comprehend all the emotions behind his words, that she didn’t hear the bathroom door open.
“What are you doing, Lea?” Shaun asked curiously, walking across to her. “Is the remote control not working?”
Lea stuffed the letter into her pocket and straightened up. “Oh, I was just visiting my baseball. Seeing how you two were getting along in my absence.”
“I made sure it didn’t get hurt. You can take it back now if you want.”
“Oh, no, it’s yours. To remember me by. We talked about it.”
“I don’t need that to remember you by. I can just do that by myself,” Shaun said.
“Yeah, I bet the smell of pine trees helps you with that,” Lea said, before she abruptly shut her mouth.
Idiot! Lea cursed herself. Just because the letter was addressed to her didn’t mean Shaun had ever intended for her to actually read it!
Shaun didn’t seem to notice her slip of the tongue. His face brightened. “Yes. I bought an air freshener with that scent. It hangs from my bedpost. I always smell pine trees when I fall asleep and when I wake up. It’s nice.”
“Oh, right, I saw it hanging when I was getting my suitcases out of the way. I was wondering what that was about,” Lea lied, in an effort to cover up her snooping. “They say scents bring back the strongest feelings of nostalgia.”
“Yes,” Shaun nodded again. “The night my brother Steve died, the copper pipes smelled like burnt food. I don’t like it when I smell real burnt food either, because it’s not a nice memory to revisit. But I like it when I smell pine trees, because they remind me of that day you taught me to drive and we drank tequila and sang karaoke, and then we kissed until I got sick from drinking. Except for crashing into that rock and throwing up, that’s a nice memory.”
Lea was startled to hear him drop that middle tidbit in so casually: ‘and then we kissed’. That was treacherous ground, from a general ‘feelings’ standpoint, she decided. She chose not to acknowledge the whole statement in full, just the less... emotionally recent parts.
“That makes sense,” Lea agreed. “I’m just gonna apologise right now for all the times you had to smell my cooking burning. That can’t have been pleasant. I’m a pretty terrible cook.”
“It wasn’t,” agreed Shaun easily, surprising Lea with his stoicism in the face of what had to be a brutal reminder of one of the worst nights of his life. “But it’s better to cook your own food than subsist on takeout, even if you do burn things a lot.”
“Yeah, I definitely notice I feel healthier when I eat home-cooked stuff,” Lea conceded.
“Do you want to watch something on TV?” Shaun asked her. Lea nodded, sitting down again. She heard the forbidden paper crinkling in her pocket. She had decided she would make a point of rereading that letter later, after Shaun went to bed. Maybe then she could tell him she understood how he felt, without totally giving away the fact that she had read it.
The TV clicked past a movie, the current scene showing a young English boy sitting on a park bench next to Johnny Depp, and another featuring an open-air concert in Central Park, and then to CBS, which was playing the last few minutes of a rerun episode of The Big Bang Theory.
“Do you see much of yourself in Sheldon Cooper? Doesn’t he have autism?” Lea heard herself ask Shaun, over the laugh track.
He turned away from the screen to answer. “I know Jim Parsons read John Elder Robison’s autobiography Look Me in the Eye to prepare for that role, which has influenced his portrayal of the character, and John Elder Robison is certainly on the spectrum, as well as having savant abilities. Some things, yes, Sheldon does remind me of myself, at times. But the producers have never really answered whether Sheldon is autistic or not. They say they just think of him as ‘Sheldon-y’.”
“But what do you think, Shaun?” Lea pressed.
Shaun looked thoughtful, before he answered her. “Sometimes I think it’s better not to explain it. People start to assume everyone on the spectrum has savant syndrome, and we don’t. Or that we hate being touched. Or that we have no emotions. Many assumptions. None of these things are true across the board.”
“Can you give me a ‘for instance’?” Lea queried. “And do you mind if I refer to some of the things you do as ‘Shaun-ish’? ‘Cause, let’s face it, you can be pretty random sometimes.”
“Only if I get to call your unique compulsions ‘Lea-esque’,” Shaun quipped.
“Deal,” Lea said. “Wanna shake on it?”
They shook hands.
“So, getting back to Sheldon versus Shaun...” Lea prompted him, pulling her legs up underneath her on the couch and turning to Shaun, leaning forward with interest.
“I don’t always understand sarcasm, for a start, and sometimes people’s jokes make no sense to me, for another. I also have an eidetic memory,” Shaun told her. “It’s helpful, when you’re in my kind of job, if you can recall entire pages of Gray’s Anatomy almost at will.”
“An idea-memory-what? And why do you have a book of Grey’s Anatomy episode scripts? Is that ‘Shaun-ish’ or what?” Lea sounded out, looking baffled. Shaun laughed slightly at her mispronunciation and ignorance.
“Laypeople usually call an eidetic memory a ‘photographic memory’,” he explained patiently. “It’s a misnomer. The brain isn’t a camera. And Gray’s Anatomy is a seminal medical textbook. See, that’s my copy on that bookshelf over there. The show’s name is a pun.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” Lea nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard that term before. ‘Photographic memory’. But I definitely never knew Grey’s was a medical in-joke.”
The whole time she and Shaun were talking so easily, Lea felt things between them tilt back towards ‘normal’. She mused on how ‘normal’ was a spectrum, and ‘autism’ was a spectrum, and how the process of falling for somebody was a kind of spectrum too.
She realised right then that she was a lot further along that last particular track than she had previously thought. I’ve gotta tell him before I screw up my chance, she thought.
“Shaun,” she began, nervously, turning the television off. “Shaun, I gotta tell you some stuff and I need you to not talk until I’m done. Okay?”
“Okay,” Shaun agreed.
Lea suddenly found herself very engrossed in looking down at her hands. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I came back, in no small part, because I need you in my life,” Lea said quietly. “I missed you like crazy every day in Hershey and at first, I couldn’t even work out why, or what that meant. I guess the distance helped me understand it or – or whatever. Oh, Shaun, you’ve gotta know, I want to tell you, you have to know how I feel about you. If you didn’t work it out when we kissed, then – well, I hope you can – damn it. You know what, I’m just gonna — ”
Lost for any further words to help verbalise her feelings, Lea decided instead to simply fall back on actions. So she leaned across to Shaun and kissed him, praying he’d understand. She held her breath as she waited for Shaun to respond – the equal pressure, the synchronicity of breathing, hearts pounding together in time.
But he didn’t respond the way she had hoped. She had just felt him start to kiss her back when, suddenly, he tore away from her.
Shaun stumbled to his feet, alternating covering his face with his hands and nearly tearing his hair from his scalp in what seemed to be devastating, unrelenting, utter panic. He sprinted to his front door, threw it open, disappeared into the hallway, and just ran like hell away from Lea, who could do nothing except watch him flee, tears streaming down her face.
She thought nothing else in the world could feel as horrible as the disaster that had been Hershey.
She had been wrong.
This was the worst.
Still crying, Lea got up to close the door quietly, but didn’t lock it. She was pretty sure Shaun didn’t have his keys and she didn’t want him to suffer the indignity of knocking on his own door, asking to be let in.
She briefly considered running out into the night after Shaun, but she knew him well enough to realise he needed to be in a Lea-free zone for a little while. He would come back eventually. He wouldn’t miss work.
A cold, spitefully helpful little voice piped up in Lea’s mind. Yes, he would. How soon you forget the things he does because of you.
She leaned her weight on the wood and tried to get the world to stay still. She stumbled over to her trundle and got in under the covers. But she couldn’t even close her eyes.
Sitting up and taking stock of the empty apartment, Lea’s eyes lit on Shaun’s neatly made bed. A crazy little idea began to form. I couldn’t... could I?
Lea wrestled with herself about whether she might have an easier time falling asleep enveloped by the scent of pine trees. It seemed to be working for Shaun. He never really looked tired or like he needed more sleep, not even when she lived next door and saw him most days.
Before she could change her mind, she’d gathered her pillow and deposited it on one side of Shaun’s bed. She had no idea which suitcase her pyjamas were in, but she did take some time to locate a fresh pair of underwear. Then she opened the first likely-looking drawer of his bureau to find a T-shirt to sleep in.
She laughed quietly when she beheld what looked like a shirt filing system. Rows of neatly folded polos and T-shirts stood vertically in the drawer, arranged by colour.
This is absolute Peak Shaun, Lea thought fondly, running her fingertips over the cotton. She plucked a navy blue crew-neck out and unfolded it. It had the St. Bonaventure Hospital logo printed on it.
Carrying it with her to the bathroom, along with her clean underwear, Lea turned on the taps, let the water run until it was warm enough to stand under, stripped and stepped gratefully under the stream.
She shampooed her hair and rinsed off, watching all the mistakes wash down the drain. She tried not to stay in there too long — if Shaun came back that night, she didn’t really want his first glimpse of her on returning to be something quite that momentous, even though that thought made her warm all over, right down to her toes, in a rather different way than the gloriously hot shower water was currently doing. Maybe later in the piece, but not right then.
She turned off the water, towelled off, borrowed Shaun’s deodorant spray, slipped the T-shirt over her head, and put on her underwear. She squeezed out toothpaste onto her finger and brushed her teeth as best she could, then gargled and spat out mouthwash.
Lea caught sight of Shaun’s cologne sitting on the bathroom counter. It was a charcoal grey rectangular glass bottle, patterned in light grey plaid. Picking it up, she took the cap off and brought the bottle to her nose, inhaling the scent from the spray nozzle. She’d smelled it faintly on him before and had always thought it was wonderful, but had no idea what it was called.
She searched the bottle for a name or a brand, but did not see one until she looked underneath it. “‘Burberry Brit’,” she read aloud to herself. “Well, you can keep your pine trees, Murphy,” she muttered. “I’d rather be smelling you wearing this, any day. Hot damn. They should have named it ‘Burberry Sex-in-a-Bottle’.”
She sprayed the tiniest bit on her finger and dabbed it on her nose, something she had always done with a boyfriend’s cologne in the past, just to smell his scent for a while. Putting the cap back on, she returned it to its proper place on the counter, hung up her towel, and left the bathroom, turning off the light behind her. She stepped gingerly back into the main apartment, holding her breath, but Shaun hadn’t returned.
Feeling better after her shower and her latest foray into wearing men’s aftershave, Lea turned off the overhead lights and flicked the On switch on Shaun’s bedside lamp. She punched her pillow into a more comfortable shape and placed her phone on the nightstand. Then she pushed back the comforter, got into bed, and pulled the covers up and over herself. She decided to leave the lamp on in case Shaun came back. She rolled over and was soon fast asleep.
Lea had no idea what time Shaun came back to the apartment, but at some point during the night, he’d come to bed and laid down beside her. She woke to find him sitting up, leaning against the bedhead, fiddling with the scalpel talisman as though his life depended on it. The occasional sob racked his entire body.
Do I pretend to be asleep? Lea asked herself, surreptitiously glancing up at Shaun. His knees were drawn up to his chest and his face was laid on top of them, so she was fairly sure he didn’t see her looking at him. Or do I say something?
She decided to sit up next to him and be a presence, but that she wouldn’t force herself on him. She’d already done that enough times in the last twenty-four hours.
Silently, bracing her hand on the headboard, she slowly pulled herself up to a sitting position. Shaun must have felt the mattress shift, because he lifted his head slightly off his knees and glanced sideways at her, his eyes sad.
The lamp was still on beside the bed. Lea reached back behind her to flick the lamp off. She had a feeling that things would be easier on Shaun if he couldn’t see her, and if he didn’t have to look at her.
Or was she just making it easier on herself?
“Do you want to talk, Shaun?” Lea said into the darkness.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Lea,” Shaun answered honestly.
“Have you slept any?” she asked him.
“No,” he replied.
“Do you think you will?” she went on.
“I doubt it. There’s too much stuck in my head to sleep,” he observed.
“Do you want me to stay awake with you?” she questioned him.
She felt Shaun shrug before he answered Lea with his own question. “Have you slept at all?”
“A few hours, I think. Deeply enough that I didn’t hear you come back in,” Lea said, trying to reassure him.
“Then I wouldn’t mind, I suppose. I don’t know what we should talk about, but I don’t think I’ll feel worse if you stay awake with me.”
“I never came back with the goal of making your life worse, Shaun.”
“Did you come back with any goal at all?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Hershey was your dream. I remember you saying that. So, now that you don’t have Hershey, do you have a new dream?”
“No, I don’t have one yet. Hershey turned into a living nightmare. You still haven’t asked me why it was so terrible. Are you scared of what I’ll say, Shaun? That my dream was nothing, ‘cause you weren’t there with me? Huh? Is that what you want me to tell you?”
“I don’t mind what you tell me.”
“Aaargh!” Lea thundered, trying not to screech her frustration.
She could feel Shaun physically recoil at that outburst. Right. Loud noises. Possibly not good for Shaun, but, really, just not good for anyone at God-only-knows o’clock in the morning.
She tried to soften her voice. “Shaun, would you like me to go somewhere else? Back to my trundle, or I could probably get a hotel room — ”
“You can stay here,” Shaun said. “You don’t have to leave yet.”
“Yeah, but then you won’t sleep,” Lea tried to argue.
“I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, even when you weren’t here. It won’t make a difference. I’m a light sleeper. Had to be in the bus, in case the police found us and we had to make a run for it.”
Bus? Police? Lea wondered. Why would Shaun have slept in a bus? Didn’t he live with Glassy growing up?
There was a hell of a lot she didn’t know about this guy. But she certainly wanted to.
“Oh, well, if me being here is all the same to you, then why did you run out of here like a bat out of hell when I kissed you?” Lea said, irritated. “Did you not want me to? Did I get that wrong?”
“When you kiss me it means you’re leaving. You kissed me and then you went away. So if you kiss me, I know you’re leaving.” Shaun replied, as though his explanation made perfect sense.
“Huh?” Lea replied, genuinely confused.
“When I kissed you, you didn’t leave. You said you wanted to do it again.” Shaun elaborated, his voice tense.
“I did – I do,” Lea said, “For God’s sake, Shaun, I’m not doing this for kicks. Lord knows, if I had been, I’d have just gotten a hotel room, instead of coming straight to you when Hershey fell apart. Or, hell, gone somewhere else entirely. The whole time I was driving, I was driving back to you. It kept me sane to know I was gonna see you and we could talk about what happened in Hershey that made it so I had to leave, and you would help me feel better. I never even liked living here in San Jose until I met you. I don’t know you that well and yet I was coming back here because of you. I could have gone anywhere else that wasn’t Hershey, but I came back here. And the whole night you just... never asked why.”
“Why you left Hershey? Or why you came back to San Jose, when you could have gone anywhere else?” Shaun asked.
“Both, Shaun!” Lea nearly shouted. “Aren’t you curious?”
“It sounds like you want me to be,” Shaun ventured. “But I think if you wanted to tell me, you’d have told me already. So I won’t ask. You might not really be ready to tell me.”
Lea thought about that for a second. Maybe they could table the whole sad story of Hershey for the moment, she considered. It didn’t matter just then, right? Shaun wasn’t doing well, and that mattered more. Hershey had happened and there wasn’t going to be anything Shaun could do about it. He couldn’t erase it for her, and he couldn’t make it not hurt.
Lea decided to try very, very hard not to be resentful about her decision to let it go, for now.
Okay, she was a little resentful.
But what can Shaun really do to help? she argued with herself. What exactly do you want the poor guy to do? You’ve already sprung yourself on him tonight without any warning whatsoever, made yourself quite at home in his oasis of personal space, read a private letter you were never meant to see, and to top it off, you kissed him, which made him literally run away screaming into the night! Why get him even more worked up about his helplessness in this situation?
“You’re thinking,” Shaun observed.
“How would you know? You can’t see me,” Lea countered.
“I know what you sound like when you’re loud. You were loud a lot of the time when you were my neighbour. I know what your silence sounds like, too. I have been hearing it for months.” Shaun told her. “I can tell you’re thinking. You’re quiet.”
“Is there anything you don’t know, Shaun?” Lea shot back, slightly exasperated.
“Ask me a question. See if I have an answer for it,” Shaun said, calmly.
“Oh, I’ll bet you have an answer,” Lea sniped.
“Ask me something,” Shaun repeated.
Lea thought for a few moments. “How do you honestly feel about me being back in San Jose?”
There was a pregnant silence that seemed to drag on and on.
“I don’t think I can answer that,” he said, finally.
“Could you maybe try?” Lea asked him, her voice gentle.
It was a long time before Shaun spoke again.
“Everything. Nothing.”