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Joyce has seen a fair few things in her life that she’s not sure she was meant to see. This is, however, the first time she was glad it happened.
As it stands, she’s sitting at her kitchen table, hand still sealed over her mouth, reeling. Her eyes are unblinking, but she can’t stop her mind from spinning, her thoughts from rocketing out of control. She’d seen this coming with Will, ever since he was a little boy. She’d been prepared to talk to Will about this. Jonathan had always been so much different from his younger brother. Plus, he had seemed so interested in Nancy, Joyce thought — you know, bullet dodged.
Bullet dramatically undodged, she thinks now, rubbing her hand up over her eyes. Down the hall, she hears a door click open. Soft footsteps pad cautiously down the hallway. She’s not sure who thinks they can get past her, but she lifts her head all the same and catches them in the act.
Steve and Jonathan both are halfway past the kitchen; Jonathan is in front, eyes fixed on the door, but Steve is following up the back and he makes wide-eyed direct eye contact with Joyce. For a moment, she sees nothing but fear in the boy’s face. It makes her heart clench with a different kind of terror, and her thoughts clear all at once. She knows exactly what she wants to say, even if they don’t want to hear it.
“I’m sorry I didn’t knock,” Joyce says, just to start it off. Jonathan jumps nearly a foot in the air, and Steve’s hand locks around his wrist, grounding him.
“Mom—”
“It was an invasion of privacy and I didn’t mean to,” Joyce says over him, as Jonathan groans loudly and Steve’s face gets redder by the second. “I only saw you kissing—”
“God, Mom, stop,” Jonathan insists. He seems to hesitate for a moment before he hauls Steve over to the kitchen table. “I didn’t want you to—”
“There’s nothing—”
“It wasn’t what it—”
“I’m really sorry,” Steve interjects. The both of them look at him.
“What’re you sorry for?” Jonathan asks, voice soft. Joyce stands from the table, and their eyes both flicker to her. Steve still has that fear on his face, like Joyce might throw something at him; Jonathan has a gentler fear, but still, she knows her son. He looks like he’s had a nightmare.
“Neither of you have anything to be sorry for,” she promises them. Jonathan is the shorter of the two, and he’s still at least half a foot above his own mother. Regardless, she reaches up and cups his face in one of her hands. She strokes over Steve’s cheek with the other, keeps eye contact with him until his expression softens, until he realizes she’s not angry with him.
For a moment, Joyce just looks at them both. She can’t help but see Jonathan at every age when she sees him, but especially right now; he seems like he’s newborn, like he’s two years old, five, ten, fifteen, and the man she sees in front of her now. Somebody who loves even when she’s not there, somebody who is growing into an adult who doesn’t necessarily need her, not anymore. Even if he can live without her, she wants him to remember he will always be her son, that she will always be here.
Still, he’s a boy, and she doesn’t want to scare him off.
“I know you two are friends,” Joyce begins. Jonathan squeezes his eyes shut, for a moment, before snapping them back open. They look red, almost wet when he looks to Joyce. She tightens her grip a bit on his face, grounding him herself. “I know you’re also… boys, so, I know you’re probably boyfriends—”
“Oh, God, Mom,” Jonathan breathes, but it doesn’t sound like an argument this time. It feels more like a confession, and so Joyce, emboldened, continues.
“And I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with you,” Joyce tells them firmly. “Nothing wrong with this, with you two together. Or if you break up— It’s okay to be who you are, do you understand what I’m saying? It’s okay.”
She can’t help but look to Steve’s frightened expression as she says it, but the fear isn’t really there anymore. It’s been replaced instead with a dawning excitement, a red-faced exhilaration, and, before Joyce knows it, Steve is ducking down and wrapping her up in a hug. She laughs, and feels him laughing, too, as he nearly lifts her off her feet.
“Thank you so much,” he says, face buried in her shoulder. She rubs the boy’s back, lets him hug her as tightly as he can before he seems to remember himself and releases her. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he says, and rubs at his face with his sleeve, but Joyce pulls his hand from his face and dries it herself.
“Don’t be,” she promises him. When he sniffles, she looks to Jonathan, but he’s not faring much better. “Oh, honey.”
Jonathan doesn’t say anything, just folding into Joyce like a collapsing house of cards. She catches her son in her arms and rubs his back as he tries to muffle cries into the damp fabric over her shoulder. Until he can breathe again, she just stands there, holding her grown son, letting him cry himself out.
“I love you,” she tells him quietly.
“I know,” he replies, and she can tell he does, he feels it and he knows he’s loved, unconditionally. “I love you, too, Mom.”
Joyce squeezes him tight. When she feels Steve still so close to them, she doesn’t hesitate to withdraw from Jonathan just enough to pull Steve in and include him in their embrace, too, wrapping both arms around both boys.