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There’s a moment where the night stops being night, but hasn’t become morning yet, and there’s something keeping Oliver up. The gentle, steady, baritone roar of the motorcycle he’s sitting on helps him relax, but he knows he can’t go home quite yet. Wind flows through his hair like harmony in a concert room as he stares at the skyline and how the darkness slowly turns pinker, keeping time with his fingertips. His head, like a broken record, keeps skipping over to the moments spent with Josh –today or yesterday? He couldn’t quite determine. -- and Oliver hasn’t felt real in so long. It was so odd, complicated, he hated explaining it, feeling like a goddamn liar as nonsense spilled out of his lips like dissonant notes down a trombone, or blood out of some innocent man’s mouth. It always felt heavy and bitter, but Oli knew, when he said he felt fake, it wasn’t hyperbolic. The stars were slowly disappearing, replaced by a concerto of birds, the second movement would soon be there, and Oliver was freezing.
The act of caring needed to be justified for it to make sense, but Oli knew, at that precise moment, that nothing could stop him from driving the motorcycle off the cliff, just laziness. He laughed stiffly at that fact; what else could he do? Spinning and spinning was all he spent his time doing lately, disregarding the things he should be taking care of, namely, himself.
If he decided not to, it wasn’t a question of safety, it wasn’t that he was scared of pain.. At the moment, he could not even imagine feeling anything at all. The bubblewrap protecting him from reality had oftentimes asphyxiated him too, so Oliver had tried to dull the white noise with diverse techniques, all involving sharp things and psychoactives. He likes to feel, who doesn’t? Though chamber music was never his biggest fancy, it was so much better than feeling like he was drowning under the regular, shapeless humming. It was not a wave but a chunk that seemed to always get stuck in his throat; he couldn’t swallow it, couldn’t spit it out, couldn’t even yell, and he just wanted something to feel again.
Because Oliver knew, he had a distant memory, a flicker of what it had felt like to feel. An aftertaste of unspoken love that lingered in the sheets long after Josh left. Josh didn’t heal him, didn’t break the barrier, Oliver had yet to understand how it worked and why it happened so often, but the things he did made his chest tighten, or feel broader, or his heart beat faster, and that, nothing else could.
As the sun came up, Oliver decided against driving off the cliff-- it would be such a mess to clean up...-- and instead, picking up the can he’d crushed and throwing it in the closest trashcan, he headed back home, his body nothing but a collection of failed attempts to emote.
When he got there, Josh knew, and thank god for him, honestly. He took him in, pinning him to the door immediately, a fast, harsh rhythm composed of nasty words hitting Oliver’s ears as he responded to it with delight, like the fucking freak he was.
“Oh yeah. Totally.” Was all that escaped Oli’s lips as he gave himself to the abuse, an easy compromise they’d come to accepting after realizing that it just was the better way. The way Josh broke him was nothing like anyone had ever done before, it was liberating because it was all play and act.
None of the other people had cared about his carcass after, when the sun had come up and was filling the room, to most he was but a ghost. Not Josh. Josh was there for when Oliver couldn’t feel a thing, but also right after, when he felt everything together, with anger and sadness and Josh held him as he shook, every single time, patient and loving. He wasn’t perfect either, he got mad for real sometimes too, and those were the worst times Oliver had ever lived through, and his arms were loitered with round little burns that matched his, and the cabinet was filled with pills without a prescription to pair them up with, but it was good enough, and at the moment, good enough was something they could settle for.