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“Are you ok?”
Tommy took a minute to take in the fringe hanging over Wilbur’s face, his mouth pulled flat, his tight grip on the steering wheel.
His shoulders rose up to his ears. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” Wilbur asked. “You mumbled.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“For making me leave?” Wilbur gripped the steering wheel harder. Tommy winced.
“For slipping and making everyone look at us and ruining it and making you leave,” he said abashedly. “You were laughing.” Wilburs gaze met his for a split second. “You looked happy.”
Silence stretched out and Tommy made his body go slack. Not tense, not comfortable. Just— defeated.
“Tommy...” Wilbur tried. “I want you to be ok. It’s not your fault you slipped.”
“But it was. I know I let it happen. I didn’t try to fight it.”
“I thought you said fighting it doesn’t do anything?”
“It— doesn’t. But It makes me feel like less of a jerk.” He swallowed.
He risked a glance at Wilbur, who’s brow was furrowed in that dipping way it did when he was trying to quell his emotions. His chest rose, and fell. “I don’t think you’re going to believe me right now, so we should talk about it in the morning,” he said. “But you know that I love you.”
When Tommy didn’t reply, Wilbur looked at him and tapped his knee. “You know that I love you.”
Tommy huffed.
“Let me do this for you, Tommy, please. I like looking after you.”
They were nearly to his house, where he would step out of the car and open his front door (met with the darkness of a family gone to sleep hours ago) and stay up in his room tossing and turning with guilt until the sun rose.
“You keep telling me I’m not,” Tommy whispered, barely audible over the hum and rumble of the car. “But I’m a burden– even if I’m a light one,” he added when Wilbur opened his mouth to deny it.
The car turned into his neighborhood.
“You always want to look after me, Tommy,” Wilbur said. The boy hummed. “But you won’t let me look after you. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, exhaustion dragging at his every bone. “I don’t know.”
He thought about waking up in the morning to set the breakfast table, sorting his parents’ receipts over a marble counter late into the night. He thought about standing behind their door, hand raised to knock, frozen in place for minutes while they slept. He thought about the medical bills he cost them, zeros multiplying off the paper, streaming Sundays and schooldays to keep them in their house. Crying, sobbing over the phone to a friend who wouldn’t stay the year. Silence behind a screen and the fear of typing— sending anything, because he’d already taken too much that week.
Despair curled deep in his gut.
“I give everything I have to people Wilbur, but I take so much. You work and you work ,” he gave a pointed glance at his brother, who wasn’t even looking. “and you’re tired– I see it. I take enough of your time just hanging out with you, even if you enjoy it.”
The view through the windshield blurred, mucus rising in his throat. “I don’t think I've ever been looked out for.” He bit back a sob, disgusting of him. “I don’t think I know how to–” another soft cry “how to be.”
At this point he was breaking breathes in half, knees curled up on the seat (squeezing the life out of them) chin resting on them, feeling more and more like the petulant , annoying child he’d become. As if he couldn’t leave that behind in his real childhood– and now he was bringing it back up like bile to burden his new family too.
The car rolled to a stop at which he could only assume was his house. He sniffled a few times and wiped an arm over his eyes.
“Tommy,” Wilbur whispered gently, and a hand landed on his knee, thumb rubbing circles on his skin. Tommy looked up with bleary eyes, throat still ringing with pain.
“Sweetheart–” he paused, as if this hadn’t gone according to plan, as if he were surprised by something on Tommy’s face, as if it was worse than he’d thought. He cried harder.
He faintly registered the sound of a seatbelt clicking and the cold rush of wind from a car door opened, and then Wilbur was on his left, taking off his seatbelt and sliding arms under his back and legs. Tommy considered throwing him off, resisting, but he wanted – he wanted to be cared for. And he didn’t know how to be, but he knew what he wanted.
Tommy was maneuvered into the back seat, he blearily realized around tear-filled eyes and muffled cries. Then Wilbur was sliding in next to him, and the car door closed, and Wilbur pulled him close.
He rubbed a thumb up under Tommy’s eye to wipe away the tears, and pushed back the fronds of blonde hair that were sticking to the wetness on his face, and Tommy thought: I am gross, and he’s hugging me– with whatever amount of brain power he was able to muster.
“You feel nasty?” Wilbur murmured, tilting Tommy’s face into his shoulder. He nodded up against it. Wilbur let out a long breath.
“Sometimes I don’t know either, did you know that?”
“You don’t?” But you know everything , Tommy thought in that childlike awe that comes with having an older brother.
“No,” Wilbur shook his head. “It took me a long time to accept help from my friends, and even still, sometimes, I want to push it all away and wallow.” He poked Tommy’s forehead, then squeezed his shoulders with the arm he had around them. Tommy nuzzled in further.
“I want you to look after me,” Tommy confessed. “Even when I’m not feeling small.”
“And I want to look after you,” Wilbur said, rubbing the boy’s back. “No matter what.”
Tommy sniffled and let the silence hung comfortably while he processed the vow, Wilbur’s arm around him a steady source of comfort in the lashing ocean crashing up against the walls of the car. And Tommy— Tommy was tired.
Really, it could have been anything that made him give in in the end. It could have been the frustration of arguing with his brother, steered back to reality no matter what fruitless excuse he came up with. It could have been his rapidly approaching headspace that made him desperate to be cared for, or maybe he just needed a quiet moment like this to make his resolve crumble. Either way, he let his head sink onto Wilbur’s chest, briefly catching the thump of a slow heartbeat, and down onto his leg where he cushioned his cheek. Wilbur didn’t hesitate to start running fingers through his hair.
“I don’t think I got to be a kid.”
“Mm. I agree.”
“My parents were the kids.”
At that, the hand in his hair paused, then resumed after a moment. Tommy was too tired and just a little bit too small to care why.
“You can be a baby whenever you want and I’ll always take care of you.”
If Tommy could sink any further into the seat he would. “Ok,” he murmured instead, eyelids drooping closed and fist tightening weakly on the hem of Wilbur’s shirt.
After a while, when the lights in the car switched off, and the moon was just a little higher in the sky, Wilbur roused him with a light squeeze on his arm. Tommy shuffled slowly to turn on his back, head still against Wilbur’s thigh, peeking up through the sunroof with the mind of a hazy toddler.
His brother was looking at the moon too.
“L’ve you,” Tommy managed. The rest was said in his half-lidded eyes trained on Wilbur’s chin.
“I love you too, baby.” The hand in his hair didn’t cease. “You’re the most precious thing I’ve ever held.”
“Like wh’n you h’ld me,” he whispered back.
And without opening his eyes again or reaching up to feel Wilbur’s face, he knew his big brother was smiling, and he knew that somehow he’d found a place to be cared for.