Work Text:
Title from “Such a Simple Thing,” by Ray LaMontagne.
My Heart Is Like Paper, Yours Is Like a Flame
She picks up her pace as she makes her way to the shop, and tries to make the burning in her legs drown out the ringing in her ears. She looks up to the same stars she’s seen every night since she can remember, and tries to exhale away the chaos of the day. She blinks a few times whenever her vision starts to swim, and tries not to picture Elsie waving from the back seat.
She’s not sure how long she wanders around the brightly-lit aisles, browsing without really looking, in no rush to get back to Isaac or her empty caravan. After however many minutes, she barely even hears the door swing open or the squeal of a trainer on the tile floor. But she’d know that voice anywhere.
“Maeve!” It’s one syllable, but somehow he still ends on a stammer. “Hi, I was just-- You’re here!”
Her head snaps up, out of her daze, and she realizes she’s almost walked right into him. He’s close, too close, and she takes a quick step back, nearly knocking a dozen packets of crisps right off the shelf.
“Hi, Otis.”
He smiles, wide and bright, and it makes her jaw ache. “Congratulations on the Quiz Heads!”
Right.
The finals seem like ages ago, and she can’t imagine what it might feel like to be celebrating right now. “Thanks.”
“I saw you on TV.” He’s still smiling, and she’s still biting back the corners of her mouth until she tastes copper. In avoiding his eyes, she notices that the tips of his ears are turning bright red. “You guys were incredible.”
“Thanks,” she says again. Her insides feel like a spin cycle, and now, mixing in with the anger and sadness and regret, is the way he makes her feel. She doesn't know what to call it, really. Or, she does, but she won't.
“I was wondering, if-”
“I’m sorry, Otis,” she interrupts. “I just— I really can’t do this tonight.”
His face falls, perhaps more steeply than she’s ever seen in the year or so she’s known him well. He tries to hide it, but he does a shit job.
“Okay, yeah,” he answers slowly, before pointing at the refrigerated shelves behind her. “I told Mum I’d grab milk on my way home.”
They awkwardly shuffle around each other, doing their best not to touch, and just before she turns away for good, he blurts out, “Look, I’m sorry if my message upset you. I just- I saw you on TV and I had to-”
She frowns. “Your message?”
“Did you not...” He frowns and tilts his head, looking not unlike a sky-eyed puppy dog. “Is that not why you’re brushing me off?”
She doesn’t even have the energy to hate the hope that tickles in her chest. She just has to get out of here. “No, Otis, I’m brushing you off because I've had a shit night.” He opens his mouth as if to ask, but she won’t let him. “And I don't want to talk about it -- I just need to get some things and get back home.”
She doesn’t mention Isaac. She wonders for a moment if it would make his eyes flash that frosty blue they do sometimes -- and then shakes her head to clear the thought, selfish and stupid, from her mind.
Instead, he just looks at her, for what feels like a very long time. “Yeah, sorry, of course.” But it’s never that simple, not with Otis. “And I’m sorry again, about the voicemail, if that’s-- I only wanted to say, uh, congratulations. You were brilliant today.”
She dips her head so he won’t see her eyes shimmer, and pats at her pockets, realizing they’re empty but for a few pounds. She can’t really remember looking at her phone after making the call this afternoon, though she knows she must have.
“Hear that in the least patronizing way you can, please,” he tacks on to the end of his run-on thought, with another sheepish grin, but she’s hardly even listening anymore. It’s too much for tonight.
“Thank you,” she says once more, almost mechanical at this point, grabbing a handful of random items from nearby shelves and tossing some bills at the cashier, who barely has the chance to hand her a bag before she’s out the door. “Goodnight, Otis.”
She wants the night sky to swallow her back up the second she steps outside, squeezing her eyes shut as tears track icy down her cheeks. But still, she hears him echo softly behind her. “‘Night, Maeve.”
She spends the entire walk home preoccupied by what he could have said in a voicemail to leave him so flustered and apologetic -- and then about 20 minutes tearing her caravan apart looking for her phone before she remembers Isaac again.
He smiles at her when she opens his door, and her stomach drops at how smug it looks. She sought him out in the first place, looking for a refuge in shared trauma, but after her encounter with Otis, she finds she's not really in the mood for his morose sarcasm.
“You’d think a personal chef would be a bit more punctual,” he teases, and her middle fingers go up on instinct after she drops the shopping bag on the counter. His grin widens; he’s the type to take that as the highest form of flirtation.
“Did I leave my phone here?” She tries to ask casually, forming the words around the adrenaline that's still burning in the back of her throat.
“No.” Isaac frowns, and he’s pretty good, but she’s known too many liars to not recognize the twist at the corner of his mouth. “No, I don’t think I saw it.”
It takes her five seconds to spot it on the side table. Her whole shit kingdom for just one man who doesn’t try and manipulate her.
“Christ,” she scoffs as she clicks first to voicemail and then over to missed calls. “You think you’d know to be better at this.”
And with that she storms out, leaving the groceries scattered on the countertop and Isaac’s protests blowing in the wind. (“It won’t work!” he calls after her, like she hasn’t heard it a million times in her own head.) She doesn’t shed a tear until she’s back in her own caravan, curled up in a bed that still smells like her sister’s strawberry-scented cuddly toy.
It's just a few hours later when she wakes with a start. Her eyelids feel like sandpaper from all the crying, and the emptiness around her is almost deafening -- she was only just beginning to get used to the idea of a fuller house.
When she’s struck with a pang of loneliness so sharp it makes her breath stutter, she realizes there’s only one person she wants to talk to.
She reaches the steps in front of Otis’ house without remembering the walk, and without a plan -- internally debating the merits of chucking pebbles at the top windows until she finds his, trying her luck at the door, or, alternately, turning around and taking her crazy arse back home.
The question is answered for her when she shuffles her feet as she nears the front door and startles at the sound of a nearby female voice.
“Who’s that? Eric?”
She rounds to the side porch to see Otis’ mum sat at a table with a mug of tea, wrapped in a yellow robe that doesn't look nearly warm enough for the late hour.
“Hello, Dr. Millburn.”
The woman’s brown furrows, but not menacingly. She looks distracted, Maeve thinks, too distracted to properly worry about the intrusion. “Who are you?”
“I’m Maeve. Maeve Wiley,” she answers, feeling an only slightly lesser version of the panic that crept up on the disastrous night she went over to meet Jackson’s mums. “I’m a friend of Otis’ from school.”
“So you’re the mysterious Maeve.” Dr. Milburn narrows her eyes again, and this time it feels a little more like being looked through.
“Mysterious?”
“Well your name seems to come up quite a lot, but I'm not sure I actually know anything about you.” Maeve scuffs her foot against the deck, absently hoping her makeup isn’t too smudged. “Though I did re-read Wollstonecraft on Otis’ insistence of your recommendation. Liked it much better than I remembered.”
That sets a proud grin on her face, and a swarm of butterflies in her stomach, but it’s easy to tamp both down when Dr. Milburn’s demeanor darkens.
“I thought maybe it was just a crush,” the woman continues, “but now I wonder if maybe you’re a fellow... clinician?”
Maeve’s first instinct is to lie, but there’s something oddly comforting about the idea that Otis’ mum’s concerns about her seem to be due to their work together -- and not the fact that she’s a red-eyed caravan park girl who turns up at people’s houses in the middle of the night.
She sighs. In for a penny, and all that. “I’m not a therapist,” she answers. “I’m in charge of cash flow and scheduling.”
She steels her shoulders as the other woman does the same with her gaze.
“It’s very serious, what the two of you did. And please note the past tense,” she says coolly. Maeve knows his mother is only referring to the clinic, but still, her stomach bottoms out. “It’s incredibly unethical.”
“It was my idea to charge,” she admits quickly, and this time it isn’t just taking the fall. “Otis, he has a gift for helping people... when he can focus it the right way.”
She remembers hearing him diagnose Adam that first time, with a calming reminder to accept every part of himself. She remembers how happy he’d made Aimee with the simple suggestion that her own pleasure might be worth consideration. She remembers watching him talk Liam down off the moon at the dance, before she was even certain that speech was for her. It’s so genuine, what he does, and she’s never felt anything like being around him.
“He’s incredibly talented, and kind,” she tells his mum, letting emotion flood her better judgement, “and he just-- he really cares.”
The sound Dr. Milburn makes is barely a chuckle, but when their eyes meet again, there does seem to be a touch of something like maternal warmth. Maeve’s honestly not sure she’d recognize it if she saw it.
“Yes,” the woman says, knowingly. “Perhaps he's not the only one.”
That’s the problem with her feelings for Otis, she realizes sharply. They’re rose-colored glasses, and she can’t ever afford to lose the big picture.
His mother sighs, and tips her head back, either towards the stars or the upstairs windows. “I suppose I’m not in much position to judge anyone tonight.”
It’s a statement that begs more than a few questions, Maeve thinks, but she’s 100-percent sure she’s not the one who should be asking them. After a beat, Dr. Milburn seems to realize the same.
“Upstairs,” she offers. “The one at the end -- you’ll think it’s the bathroom.”
“Thank you.”
Maeve rushes inside, and up the stairs, down the hall, with barely even a breath. Otis’ light is still on, but he’s lying in bed -- and he nearly jumps out of his skin when she bursts through the door without bothering to knock.
“What did you say in that message?”
“Maeve!” He shoots upright immediately, folding his legs in towards himself and scrabbling at the covers. She can’t help a little smirk at his frantic discomfort.
“The voicemail, dickhead, what did you say?” Every one of her emotions feels like it’s breaking the needle, but most pressing at the moment is curiosity.
“What?” His hair is all stuck up in different directions, and he’s looking at her like she’s speaking a different language. In other circumstances, she might find it endearing.
“Isaac deleted it,” she explains fast, like it’ll make it less humiliating, “and I just want to know what you--”
“He what?”
“He’s an arsehole, I’m over it.” Otis won’t be, she can see it in the pinch of his lips, but she doesn’t let it pull focus. “What. Did. You. Say?”
“I, uh-” He stammers and then heaves a deep breath, nervously reaching down again to smooth the covers at the end of the bed. It’s like he can’t meet her eyes, now that he understands why she’s here. “Do you want to sit?”
“No.” She folds her arms across her chest. “Out with it.”
She glances around his room while she waits. It’s not like she pictured, but it’s nice.
“Okay, I, well… My dad’s been around recently, and-”
“Otis.”
“I said I was sorry,” he admits at her prompting. “For what I said to you at the party, for Ruby, I--”
She doesn't want to, but she flinches at the memories. “You were drunk,” she shrugs.
“I was.... horrendous,” he continues. He seems to have found some of his composure, she notices his eyes look particularly icy. “I was angry, and shitty, and spinning out on the punishment of getting the thing I wanted most, right when I wasn’t allowed to have it. I found it unfair, and I took it out on you— I knew how to hurt you, and I did. And I’m so, so sorry.”
She doesn’t answer him, so certain that if she speaks, the tears burning at the backs of her eyelids will spill over.
“But you’re not selfish, Maeve, you have to believe that.” He’s right when he says that he knows her -- that was the most painful part. “You’re not selfish, you’re strong.”
She snorts derisively, and looks down at his floor. “I’m not that strong,”
“You are.”
“Saying it again doesn’t make it true, Otis.” Now she’s the one who can’t meet his eyes.
“I’m telling you,” he insists. Stubborn as always. “I know you may not always be able to see it, but I-”
“I had to call social services on my mum today, okay?” The admission comes out in a rush, and so do her tears.
“Oh, Maeve, I’m--”
“Don't say sorry,” she warns, swiping at her cheeks and willing her voice not to shake. “She’s using again, and it wasn’t safe for Elsie.”
She stares at his bedroom floor for a long moment, clenching her fists until her wrists start to twinge. When she does look up, he still seems horrified -- and she can’t really blame him. “She's never gonna forgive me.”
When Otis finally speaks, though, it's soft and almost pleading. “Maeve, will you please just come and sit?”
Exhausted, she gives in, crossing the room to take a seat on the side of his bed as he swings his legs around to sit next to her. She holds herself together for a split-second, but when he gingerly reaches out, as if to take her hand, it’s too much. She twists into his arms on a sob, and if any fragment of her heart was left to break today, it would at the way he’s right there to catch her.
“It’s not your fault.” He talks to her softly as she soaks through the shoulder of his sleep shirt, soothing a hand up and down her back. “I’m so sorry you had to do that.”
She doesn’t scold him for the apology this time, it would feel hypocritical with his arms around her. She doesn’t even protest when, after a few minutes, he maneuvers them back until they’re leaning against the wall at the head of his bed.
Otis keeps an arm wrapped around her shoulders, and Maeve curls into his chest, absently noticing his Super Mario pajama pants and letting the image tug at the corners of her mouth. He smells warm and familiar, and after a while, her tears start to taper off and she relaxes against him.
“Could you just… keep talking for a bit?” she murmurs. “It doesn't matter what about.” He nods, but he’s so close that his lips accidentally brush against her forehead, and they both freeze for a second at the spark.
“My dad’s been back around because he cheated on his new wife and she kicked him out,” Otis offers. “The older I get, the more I’m realizing that he’s kind of an awful person.”
The next part he says lower, and she can almost feel the sadness rumbling in his ribcage. “My mum told me I look just like him when I lie. Ola said I try so hard to be a good guy that I end up the opposite. I’m just worried that the parts of me that come from him are destined to be rotten.”
“If that’s how it worked, I’d already be fertilizer,” Maeve deadpans, eliciting a weak chuckle on each side.
“I don’t want to be like him,” he continues after a beat. “I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t want to hurt you.”
There’s so much in his voice that she has to look up, and when she meets his eyes, her breath hitches in her throat.
“I don’t want more apologies, Otis,” she protests, weakly. “Tell me something good.”
His arm tightens around her for just a second. “Back when I was invisible, I could be kind of a dickhead. It didn’t matter much, really, only Eric was there to hear it.” It’s strange to think about, how the time before they knew one another wasn’t all that long ago.
“But you’ve helped me become somebody, Maeve,” he continues. “Somebody better.”
“Otis--”
“And so tonight, I just called to tell you that. And to tell you how proud it made me feel to see you win that championship. And to tell you how sorry I was for treating you the way that I have. And to tell you that I lo-”
“Don’t!” She sits up on a gasp, pressing away from his chest as her heart thuds against her sternum. She doesn’t get too far, his palm is still on her shoulder as her hand fists in his shirt and then snaps back to her side. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true,” he says, clear and certain, like a heartbreaking deja vu. “We’re good together. Great, even.”
“And what do you expect me to say back?”
She’s not sure why, exactly, she’s immediately antagonistic, but the second he began to say it, Maeve thought of a recurring dream she has sometimes. She’s stuck in a car, buckled into the passenger seat, and there’s a cinder block on the accelerator and no one around for miles.
“N-nothing,” Otis stammers, finally taking his hand off her arm. She knows it’s true, he’s not the type to bargain with words like that. “I mean, anything. Whatever you want to say.”
She’s learned how to wake herself up from the dream most nights, to focus on the details that tell her what’s happening isn’t real. But his expectant face, hopeful and nervous, tells her that they’re speeding towards the point of no return. It’s almost time to crash or bail.
“Maeve, you’re the most brilliant person I know.” He says it so easily, and there’s no dishonest twist to his mouth when he does. “You’re smart, and stunning, and I-”
“I lost your jumper.” It’s not at all what she means to say, but it’s what comes out when she cuts him off. “The one you let me borrow.”
Otis sputters a little in confusion, but he does his best. “That’s okay,” he answers, and she glances up to see his brow furrow.
“I mean, I kept it, for a long time. Too long,” she explains in a rush. “And then after you gave me that trophy last term, and I read your letter, I came to bring it to you.”
“Maeve, it’s fine. I have loads more.” He still doesn’t understand.
“But when I got to your house, you were with Ola. Like, with her, with her. ” She looks up again to watch it click. “And so I ran away and I threw your jumper on a clothesline in the caravan park.”
“Oh,” he exhales, wincing a little. “I didn’t know.”
“I waited too long. I was a coward, and I waited until you were happy with someone else, and then I tried to steal you back,” she confesses. “So I’m not all brilliant.”
He frowns as she finishes. “You are, though,” he replies, adding a teasing grin that he does his best to drop when she glares back at him.
“Fuck off.”
“Look, it wasn’t right with Ola. And we both knew it, I think,” he explains in that soft, earnest way of his. “We were just… trying something because it seemed like it might work for a while.”
For a split-second, she thinks of Jackson, and how it always felt like they were playing with borrowed time. “I think I realized, afterwards,” Otis continues, “that what I liked the most about her was that she liked me back.”
“She’d have been crazy not to.” It’s almost an admission on her part, and when he raises his eyebrows at her, she scoffs lightly and moves back to sit next to him again. The bed isn’t large, so their arms brush against one another, and Maeve takes a deep breath, in and out, and takes his hand in hers, looking down to watch their fingers tangle together.
“Otis, I do, still,” she tells him, struggling for the right words over the thudding in her chest. “Like” feels insignificant. “Love” feels monumental. And then there’s the matter of the rest of it.
“But I don’t know how we could expect this to work,” she admits after a moment. “We’re so different. You’re you, and I’m...me.”
She can practically hear his consternation at that, but when she looks up, she doesn’t see any pity on his face. In fact, he looks a little angry. “Do I have Isaac to thank for that, too?”
It peeves her a little, that he’s not entirely wrong. She’d thought she was past fighting with her inferiority complex after Jackson, but Otis is different. He always has been.
When her silence serves as an answer, he sighs. “Maeve, when I say you’re the most brilliant person I know, I don’t just mean your freakish, National Quiz Championship-winning brain.” Instead of swallowing her smile, she turns to press it into his shoulder. It feels like progress, and his answering grin makes her heart skip a beat.
“I mean that you’re... formidable. You’re clever and profound and beautiful and so much more,” he says, his voice at a low, impassioned decibel. “And you are strong. You’re gonna be amazing at whatever it is you want to do.”
A kitchen table with four chairs. But maybe not all of them are empty.
“I’d just like to be there cheering you on,” Otis finishes. “If you’ll have me.”
For a moment, she allows herself to imagine a world where it’s that simple. But part of her brain is still trying to pry the cinder block off the gas pedal. “What if it’s too much?”
It’s the least painful version of the question she really wants to ask. The rest light up like neon signs in her brain as she watches him weigh his answer. What if I lose you? What if you betray me? What if you’re just like everyone else I’ve ever loved?
“It can be whatever you want it to be, Maeve,” Otis says finally, with a squeeze of her hand, and the concession is a little dizzying. “All I’m asking is for us to maybe try being in the same place at the same time for once.”
He makes it sound easy enough. At the very least, it loosens the knot in her chest from icy panic to something warmer. “I think I want to kiss you,” she says, grinning so hard it crinkles her nose as she watches his eyes go wide.
“Yeah?” It comes out on a breath, and she nods, pursing her lips.
“Yeah.”
It’s soft and sweet, and even more than she had hoped. The part of her that had allowed herself to picture this moment had worried a bit that Otis might kiss her too delicately, like a china doll. But he’s bolder than she expected, bringing a hand up to cup her jaw and diving in like he’s been waiting for the chance. It thrills her to think that he probably has.
She loses whole minutes kissing him -- trying to remember every time she caught herself glancing absently at his lips while he was talking -- and when they pull back to catch a breath, he looks as dazed as she feels.
“Hi,” he whispers, with a foolish smile she can’t help but match.
“Hi,” she replies, threading her fingers through his hair before leaning in again. “I’ve missed you.”
They stay up, talking and kissing, for awhile longer, eventually sliding down the wall until they’re staring at each other from across his pillows. When her eyelids start to drift closed, he presses his lips to her forehead -- this time on purpose -- and she feels more content than she has in a very long time.
In the morning, maybe she’ll see if she can get his jumper back. Or, even better, she’ll just borrow another.