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One might believe that sharing a double sized mattress between three adult men would take a toll on their quality of sleep.
Alex and Tim are not small men, by any means. Alex’s limbs are long, longer than should be legal. He often tucks one leg underneath himself and drapes the other across his two boyfriends. Tim, on the other hand, is the shortest of the three but he’s bulky, firm arms and a belly that pushes into the back of the man who decided to settle down beside him.
The two of them combined often dooms Jay to clinging to the edge of the bed for dear life. He usually has the good fortune of being the first to fall asleep, before Tim returns home from work and before Alex passes out and lets a half-awake Jay snuggle into his side. His favorite place to be is pressed in the middle of them both, their hearts thrumming in his ear, bellies soft against his bones and flesh.
But Jay couldn’t stop himself from pulling an all-nighter. His dreams these days aren’t filled with shadows that stretch too far or trees that prod at him with their daggers for branches. Instead he sees warmth and twinkling sunlight, beautiful gem creatures that touch his face and dart away before he has the chance to ask them what they’re doing there.
Last night, he had to pour the visions out onto his laptop screen, hoping they might form together and create a coherent story. It turned something like a list, bullet points and numbers, but it’s a start, and he can polish it when he isn’t shaking and slopping dribbles of coffee onto the wood floors.
Neon blue numbers winked at him when he made his way up to the bedroom, announcing that it was three o’ clock, also known as Time To Go The Fuck To Sleep hour to Jay. He didn’t want to disturb his boyfriends, not after Tim spent over ten hours bathing and feeding fussy animals and Alex… is Alex and will eat whoever dares to disrupt his slumber.
So there Jay is now, shoulder pressed to the hard floor and a mockup of dirty laundry being used in lieu of pillows and blankets. Alex’s hoodie slides off of his hips and onto his legs when he inches up, eyes stinging under the faint gleam of white seeping into the window. Whoever was last to hit the hay forgot to draw the curtains.
Oh yeah, that was him.
Jay shakes his head at past-Jay, cursing under his breath. His joints might as well be coated in rust, complaining as much as they do. Movement is necessary if he wants to save his boyfriends from the approaching assault of sunlight, though. Sometimes sacrifices must be made for the ones we love, or something courageous like that, fuck, he’s exhausted, he just wants to be nice.
A quick glance at the neon clock that told him to get the fuck to bed earlier shows that he snoozed for about two and a half hours. Five forty four AM. The last time Jay was up before six in the morning, he had to duck and cover in the tornado cellar. Being up before that time nowadays, there best be an emergency in the process of wrecking everything in sight.
Whatever. It’s not the end of the world. He has more time on his hands, he can write and take a walk and maybe go out, see Reggie, take advantage of the nice weather, if it continues behaving nice.
“Sleep tight,” he whispers to the prone bodies huddled up on the mattress. Alex has his shoulders bunched up and Tim’s head against his chest, arms around his neck. If they were to wake up, right now, Alex would insist he was just trying to strangle Tim in his sleep, and Tim would agree with him to save face.
Shaking his head, Jay wanders on unsteady feet down the hall, where no sunlight can reach him and destroy his eyesight. Unfortunately, that leaves him to the fates of the shadows in the corridor. The first step of the staircase is… there, right?
Wrong, very /very/ wrong. His leg slides out and the rest of him goes with it, back slammed to the wall and, suddenly, his ass is right on the floor, pain radiating throughout his delicate bones.
He’s on his back, blinking slowly, trying to remember what it’s like to be human. There aren’t any lights on in the kitchen, just the sunlight streaming in from the bare window above the sink, creating a single square of searing white.
Emerging into that square is Christina, still in her nightgown, twice her size because she overestimates her own shape. She clutches a steaming mug of coffee; he knows it’s coffee, he can smell it from his new resting place. Maybe he’ll pass out here. He won’t have to deal with the pain anymore.
“You look comfortable, dear,” Christina says sweetly, before padding along the floor to stoop down at Jay’s side. She takes his hand, pulling him to stand despite his feet failing to grasp the concept of gravity. He sways once he’s upright, but she maintains her grip on him. “There you go, there… you alright?”
“Alright as I’m gonna be after a fall like that,” Jay mumbles under his breath. He brushes off the front of his shirt, however unnecessary it might be-- he and Alex keep this place spotless. They might as well, being the ones at home most of the time. “You’re up early.”
“/You’re/ up early,” Christina parrots back to him. He opens his mouth, and shuts it when he realizes he doesn’t have anything to say to that. Hard to argue when she’s right. And when there’s nothing to really argue about. Boy, he’s tired. She steers him to the kitchen table, careful to keep from releasing his arm until she has him seated. “You look like shit, actually. Didn’t you wear those clothes yesterday?”
“Yeah, and I slept for all of two hours in them, what of it?” Jay sasses without any real bite behind his words.
Christina, ever the understanding saint, darts over to the coffeemaker and pours a second mug, right in the one that Tim snatched up from the grocery store around Christmas. It’s the perfect recipe to make him smile: good free coffee, coffee he doesn’t have to work for, and it’s in his favorite cup, the one that has a false antler for a handle and a grinning deer on the front. Today, it’s just not happening, no smiles, no grins. Jay takes the mug, hoping his relieved grimace gives away how grateful he is.
“I just had a long night, couldn’t sleep, lots of daydreams that I had to write down right then and there,” Jay explains between sips. He sears his throat until it’s raw, and the coffee deeply requires at least three spoonfuls of sugar, but it’s taking his mind off the throb of his tailbone. “Then your son and Tim decided to take up the whole bed.”
Christina hides a grin in her mug before coming down to sit beside him, the wooden legs of her chair scraping against the floor.
“Do you want me to put Alex in time-out?” she offers in such a tone that Jay can’t be certain that she’s being serious. “I’m not sure how effective it would be anymore.”
“No, please. No.”
They fall into a comfortable quiet after that, passing between each other a silent recognition that they are both exhausted and do not have much to say. Jay stretches an arm over the table, grasping for the glass container of sugar and pouring it into his coffee, showing no hesitation in turning the cup of coffee into a cup of sugar with coffee.
“I’m not taking you to the dentist,” Christina warns him when he takes a long gulp, filling his mouth up with soppy sweet muck. That’s what he gets for failing to stir it in.
“The dentist can sing the whole way home with the money I’ll be giving him, not yours, don’t worry about it,” Jay assures her before taking another gulp, no hesitation at all. He’ll make sure to brush his teeth twice as long after this. He eyes her nodding off over the table, not as awake as she may want to be, going by the huge mug in her hand. “…so why are you awake? Don’t you have work today?”
She nods, heavily leaning against the back of her chair. Her eyes fixate upon the green glowing numbers upon the oven. About an hour before she has to get out to her car and start her day. Jay knows her routine well by now; not because he has seen it so frequently but because it is such a short one. Lay in bed for as long as possible, hop out, tie hair up in a bun, put on her coat, and out the door she goes. She comes home wearing a faded layer of lipstick and faint blush, so he has to assume she puts it on at the school before class starts.
Her determination to lounge about in her bedroom is either waning today, or there is something going on that Jay needs to be worrying about.
“I had a dream about Sean breaking into the house and stealing Alex.”
Jay doesn’t know what he expected.
It wasn’t that, though. That’s for sure.
He nurses his mug, keeps his eyes to the tabletop to try to discern what an appropriate response would be. An apology to show his sympathy? A reassurance that Sean was kind of a bully? Complete silence?
Jay opts for the last one-- solely because it seemed to be the least dangerous path to take.
Christina takes it as a cue to continue speaking, not that Jay would have stopped her. It’s almost his job to provide an ear for her when she needs one, as often as they are stuck in the house together.
“He was tiny again, but, part of me knew what was going to happen to us in the future so I tried to save him. I woke up before Sean broke down the bedroom door,” she says, painting a more vivid picture than Jay wanted. He can hear the wood splintering, Christina’s eyes fogging over as the tears spring up and she begs him to leave.
“I’m sorry,” Jay offers, apologizing both for the stressful dreams and for how wonderfully helpful and comforting he must be right now. He shrinks up in his chair, knees crowding close together.
Of course Christina doesn’t brush him off as silly or in the way. She shakes her head, short bobbing hair waving in time.
“Don’t worry. It happens sometimes.”
She turns her eyes on him, pierces him through in the manner that Alex does, when he stares hard at Jay and needs an answer out of him. The similarity jars Jay, nauseating him. He has to put down his coffee to hug his stomach and duck his head, breaking their eye contact.
“You have a lot of nightmares. Tim tells me about it, sometimes, when we go out to the pharmacy to pick up meds for myself,” she says, slowly, with honey-sweet sympathy that Jay will never feel he deserves. He squirms in his chair under the weight of her concern. “He asks if there’s anything over the counter we could get for you and I don’t think there is, but, do you want me to ask into it?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Jay sputters out before he can give himself the chance to consider it. These nightmares come about once a week, and he does wish they came, well, never, but he’s used to them. “If-- if anything, you should be looking into something like that.”
Her short bark of a laugh coaxes a nervous giggle from his own lips, albeit one that has no real feeling behind it.
“I said it only happens sometimes.”
Though her words are far from stiff, Jay can tell he needs to stop trying to push the sympathy onto her. So, he does-- he closes up his knees again and sits, watching the oven clock tick off the minutes they have left together.
Sean Kralie.
Jay does not think of him often, nor does he wish he was a more prominent subject in this home. There is a reason he isn’t here anymore, a reason Jay is semi-aware of when it comes to the sour tones in which both Christina and Alex speak of him.
The full reason, though, a proper confirmation of his suspicions? He has yet to receive that, and to do so means poking at what could be potential scars, waiting to break back open and bleed the small family dry.
“Can I ask about--”
“It’s not fair to keep you in the dark about him, so ask anything you want,” Christina interrupts before giving Jay a smirk he’s more used to seeing on Alex’s face. He sinks in his seat, biting his tongue. Sometimes he forgets that Christina possesses the tendencies of a mind reader.
“…I just wondered. Why did you leave him?” Jay asks, every word painful on the back of his throat. Nosey, nosey, nosey, but he needs answers, he’s that type of person, to go barreling in and demanding answers but this is Christina, he doesn’t /demand/ answers. He asks for them, under his breath, head down, refusing to be of any trouble to her, this kind woman who owes him absolutely nothing and wants to give him everything.
Nothing, at first, and Jay begins to panic on the inside, feels the coffee coming back up. He fucked up, he’s just a kid she’s housing for now because her son likes him, no, nope, doesn’t matter how kind she is to him, it’s all an act, surely. She gave him permission to ask? Still doesn’t matter, she owes him /nothing/.
Jay forces air into his lungs, trying to reach some vague state of calm while she sits silent, knees crossed, like she needs to be the polite one.
“I think you already figured out the main reason. That reason is sleeping upstairs right now and he’ll probably sleep right on through to noon if you let him.”
Her casual tone brings him a peace he couldn’t achieve on his own, though his heart continues to flutter.
“He never got along with Alex. Never the type for male-on-male affection as it was, I guess it was an army thing,” Christina says, no hitch in her breath or nervous pause. “But, when Alex left for college, Sean didn’t calm down, he just seemed angrier and he was never around for us to talk about it. Almost preferred the cussing and yelling, kept the house lively. I thought things might change when Alex texted saying you three were coming here.”
“You’ll tell me if my son gives you any trouble, won’t you?”
You flinch at the sound of another voice. It is too early for voices. Your stomach is filled with nameless creatures that wish to escape as much as you do from your own flesh. Hearing another set of vocal cords flexing sets them off. They strum a not-so-gentle song upon your intestines.
“What?”
Down in the living room, passed out on the couch, hugging a throw pillow to your startled and slamming heart, you’re suddenly not so alone with your buzzing thoughts and television. Hard to tell which buzzes louder. Zzzzz. You can see the zees above your head and the big grey screen. Tired, so very tired.
“I know he’s a trouble-maker. Been one ever since Christina decided to keep ‘em. Got her sick as hell before he came rolling out into the world.”
Alex’s father, that’s who it is, you knew right away who was babbling at you but your brain couldn’t put a name to it. Sonny? No, he isn’t warm, there is no way he could be a Sonny. Shun, Sean, shun, Sean, it is Sean, you remember now. Sean Kralie.
“He’s fine,” you mumble, he’s fine, everything is fine, fine as it could be. The pillows don’t taste of your blood or anybody else’s. No new tapes to be discovered between the couch cushions. There is no bullet resting inside of you, turning you to red liquid metal and pale marble. Tim is upstairs, alive, Alex is… somewhere, hopefully not drowning his brain in vodka, but he is here, and it is Alex, nothing more, nobody else. Just Alex.
A pair of shiny dress shoes glint in the face of your wavering vision. You will your body to move, placing your back against the cushions. Your spine is falling out of alignment. Or maybe you slept the wrong way. Easy to do on a couch you don’t feel welcome on.
Sean hovers over you, head and face shaven, his veiny hands working at a tie that looks like a noose to you. Nothing should ever come that close to the throat unless it is a loving mouth. You squirm at the collision of intimate thought and the sight of your-- friend, boyfriend, best friend, only friend, lover-- his dad above you.
You clasp a hand over the blue-black continent on your neck. Do you look suspicious? Defensive?
“He ain’t fine. I know he ain’t fine, nobody acts this secretive unless they got somethin’ worth hiding,” Sean says, his words heavy and poisonous. You can taste bile. Father figures are strange creatures. You never had a father. If this is what they are like, you don’t feel as though you were missing out on much.
“What exactly are you trying to get out of talking to me about this?” you ask, because you know this isn’t for your own safety. You just met this man, and he doesn’t look at you long, whenever you two happen to cross paths in the house. He doesn’t care about you. This isn’t for you.
He’s still winding his fingers around his tie. It’s silk, sleek, gorgeous. It’s the prettiest noose you’ve ever seen. You don’t think it’s a noose for himself.
“Nothing, son. I just know what kind of person that kid is. You might think you know, but he’s sneaky. I’m sure you know that, at least, you ain’t stupid enough to ignore it.”
(You knew Alex in school, knew him at his worst, you know the man that is struggling to claw his way across a field of souls he shattered with his own hands just so he can have something called life again.)
(Is he sneaky? Yes. Is he worth keeping an eye on? Yes.)
(But what does his father know about him after these many years away from him?)
(Less than you. That’s for certain.)
“You’ll be the first to know if something happens, sir,” you lie. Dishonesty ought to remind you of lead embedded in your flesh.
This lie is heavy as any other lie, but rather than a sword covered in accidental blood, it’s a shield.
Sean finally leaves you be, gives you a nod and lets you lounge on the couch he paid for with the money he’s off to earn more of. Some government job, something to do with computers, Alex told you about the nights he spent at his father’s side, codes pouring from sore fingertips and eyes hot under the glare of a computer monitor.
You don’t know if that will be the last time he hounds you for answers.
He wants to know what Alex is up to, thinks he is the only liar living under the roof of his home.
You have a pretty face, and Tim has a quiet set mouth.
You are both liars, Alex is a liar, you’re all liars, and Alex is the one Sean chases down.
“I really, really hoped he might change his tune, once he had his son back.”
Jay dares to look up from his lap, sees Christina stirring her spoon around her mug. There is nothing left to stir but air. Clang, clang, clang, Jay would worry that the ruckus would wake the slumbering boys upstairs if he hadn’t seen Tim’s ears were blocked by Alex’s chest and arm.
“I remember how much he yelled when you three came in,” she says to the mug, a strange grin on her chapped lips. She stirs the air, keeps stirring, clanging, slower now. “It was like Alex was sixteen again and y’all two behind him, lookin’ so small and confused and cute, you were the younger friends he had that he wasn’t so afraid to be himself around. He had older friends but he’d turn into that little pretentious prick you guys see when you’re watching movies with him.”
The coffee in Jay’s throat curdles and scrapes him from the inside when he laughs. Of course. He and Tim get the best of both worlds. An Alex pretending he knows what culture is and an Alex that loves playing kiddy Nintendo games a little too much.
“But what really made me feel like it was old times was the yelling.”
Clang. Clang. Then, still hands.
“All I could think was, how can he see our boy, alive, and, shit, maybe even a little bit happy because he has his friends with him… and be this angry?”
Christina places her mug down and folds her hands in her lap. Polite. Closed in. Quiet. Just as she was the night they arrived. Too quiet and too afraid to step in and do more than assure the visitors, yes, this is normal, this is what you should expect from now on if you stay here, and stay they did, hearing every toxic word spewed between two strong-willed men standing at odds with one another.
“I was angry. A little bit. I’ll admit that. I still am, that Alex let us lose all that time we could have spent together, and he’s almost a /man/ now and I missed all of that. But he’s home. He can catch me up. He doesn’t talk much about anything but what he does say, like how happy he is that he came back or that he’s happy to see me gardening again, or, or that you and Tim help ‘round the house, it all has so much meaning. He’s happy.”
“And he’s willing to miss all of that because he thinks you three have been out taking drugs,” Christina huffs, sitting straight. Her hands ball into fists upon her knees. “Or, or out killing people, whatever it is he thought you three were up to. Breaking the law. He was a paranoid bastard who valued the law over the love of his family.”
(How funny, that Alex’s father was right to be paranoid. He was just a little late to the party. Months late.)
“I can promise you that none of us were out selling drugs when we were gone,” Jay pipes up. He isn’t lying; it’s a rare and relieving instance where he isn’t forced to fudge the truth so that Christina may remain safe. “The closest I came to getting involved was in middle school when these senior kids asked if I wanted to try their pot. I said no and they didn’t even give me any trouble.”
Christina shakes her head.
“Yeah. Peer pressure is bullshit. It’s all in your head. The real pressure comes later in life, over things you’re ‘supposed’ to want.”
Here, in this tiny town, the norm is known far and wide: women can’t leave their husband. Women can’t live as single mothers.
You’re looking into the window of your own home, decorated only by dust. You’ve been shut out by an overly concerned mother and a father that didn’t want to have you see him at his worst. They stand in plain view, in the middle of the tiniest living room you’ve ever seen.
About ten minutes ago, they were shouting. Now, your mother sits on the black recliner, head in her hands, her thin body that she gave to you shaking in time to her sobbing. Your father perches at the chair’s arm, running a hand along her jutting spine, his blank eyes fixed to the floor.
Nobody wants to see their parents crying. Six year olds don’t need to see their sole source of nurturing and life breaking apart at the seams like that. They need to think that it’s invulnerable, that they are safe, so they don’t lose their innocence in the world too soon.
You’re lucky. You clung to your childhood, because your mother insisted on it.
When your father was no longer a part of the house, she had to work overtime to take care of the both of you. Still, she made time to be with you.
She sat up at night when she had every right to be catching up on sleep, reading you the ridiculous fairy tales that you snatched up from the school library without telling. You always gave it back, of course, hiding glowing reviews scribbled in neon crayon colors inside the pages. The best recommendations came with a promise that it would be much better if read by a mother.
Your lunches were packed. You would pretend to no longer like something she put in, the nonessential stuff. No more sugar cookies, no more juicy green apples, no more crackers. By the end of the year, you were having a peanut butter sandwich every day… and whatever else she snuck into your lunch as a substitute, thus screwing up your plan to help her keep the extra money.
Still, she packed your lunch, put time and effort into it the night before school-- and she brought you to school herself, she wanted to spend that bit of relaxing time between work and rest with you. The bus was an option but it meant a ten minute walk in a neighborhood no child should be walking alone in. So instead, there the two of you were, murmuring past dry mouths of odd dreams and singing along to whatever the radio decided to spout that day.
She was not the best mother in the world. No one can be the best at anything, you think, because as soon as somebody is the best, then somebody else steps up to the plate and takes the title.
In a town that is disturbed by the thought of a family that isn’t nuclear, though, she did her best.
You didn’t appreciate it at the time. No child is aware of the turmoil a parent must go through to keep both of their lives rolling without a hitch, and that’s the way it should be.
You can still see the wrinkled face that came in to greet you one last time before bed, and you remember reaching to touch it, cradle it in the hands that could never be large enough to hold all of her and give her the rest she deserves.
She visited in the middle of the night sometimes, after you were woken by the phone ringing. She stayed on the phone for hours, with voices you didn’t recognize, telling her she was doing awful by you. No dad, no money, what was she thinking, splitting up with him like that?
Tear tracks glistened under the moonlight that managed to break in past the drapes.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“Mommy’s just tired, little birdie. Close your eyes and sleep. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Her fingers were long and beautiful. The best feeling in the world for ten year old you was to have her hands in your hair, petting it from your forehead and back into place. It never took long for you to drift into unconsciousness when she touched you like that.
The tears stayed with you in your nightmares, though, drowning her, pulling her far from your short armed reach.
“I think you’re brave for doing it.”
Christina perks up. Her eyebrows raise up behind her floppy bangs.
“Do you now.”
Jay isn’t shrunk away anymore. He sits, chest out, a hand for each knee. The thought of his own mother, working for him and his happiness, pushes him to unfold and look this good person in the eye.
“It couldn’t have been easy to leave him, even if you thought he was an asshole. He was all you knew for a while and now you’re on your own. But you’re doing what you think is best, and, uh, I think it’s best, too, considering Alex isn’t throwing shit around the house and you’re actually talking to us now.”
Christina’s eyes seem to gloss over, and for a minute, Jay’s panic seeps back. Young Jay didn’t know how to handle crying and he hasn’t changed much in the many years since then.
He must visibly jump when she rises from her chair, the legs screeching against the ground. The woman’s eyes remain wet, but she smiles beneath it, a vague giggle passing from her lips at the sight of him.
“You really are like a deer, or a bird, whatever. You jump when ya think you’re in trouble.”
She crosses to his side of the dining table, bare feet slapping the linoleum. One hand on either side of his head, she tilts him forward to kiss his crown, brief but warm. The heat spreads to his fingertips.
“You’re a sweetheart, Jay. I ain’t alone so long as I got you three boys. Y’all are alright with me.”
The oven’s clock is flashing seven AM at him while he listens to her padding up the steps.
His own mother would be rising from her bed at this time, if nothing has changed since he left. She would switch off the alarm clock, sit up, and sit for a good five minutes, watching the shapes of the tree shadows on the floor warp and shift.
If he recalls right, she put a second phone in the house shortly before he left for college, right beside her bed.
If he just so happened to call, she wouldn’t have far to go.