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“In fact, I get real old-fashioned when I see somebody that I care about? — Getting brought home by cops!”
At the time, Shawn thought he was joking. He thought Jon was trying to act all tough again, trying to scare Shawn into behaving to make himself look good — or at least that he felt obligated to scold him. He thought that after their little talk, he would be completely in the clear, and Jon would forget all about Shawn showing up at his place with a police officer in tow.
But now that he’s sitting in the center of the couch, having been caught loitering around his old trailer park a few months into living with the man, he thinks he may have miscalculated. Which, like, makes sense, considering he sucks at math, but he’d been hoping.
Jon looms over him with his arms crossed, and Shawn slumps a little in his seat, rubbing clammy hands against the rough fabric of his jeans — the jeans that Jon bought for him. “I honestly can’t believe you, Shawn! You sneak out, you get brought home by the cops again, you deliberately disobey me-”
“Now- Now, hang on, man,” Shawn finds his voice, “You never told me that I couldn’t stop by my old place, so that’s not my fault.”
Jon, of all the things he could do, scoffs. The jerk.
“But I gave you a curfew, and I figured it’d be common sense, Shawn! Do you remember what happened last time you paid a visit to that trailer park?” Well. Yeah, but that whole situation was Cory’s fault! Jon can’t pin that on him. “I know you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Shawn, no matter how much you pretend you don’t.”
Shawn rolls his eyes slightly, laughing to the side, but Jon doesn’t even crack a smile. Shawn feels his own smile fade of its own accord. “It’s time you start using it — before you get hurt.”
Shawn shifts in his seat, glaring down at the hands folded in his lap. So Jon isn’t joking, then.
He’s just freaking crazy.
There’s a lull of quiet, a moment where Shawn keeps his eyes down and Jon eventually drops his hands from where they’d been thrown up in exasperation.
“So, what’re you gonna do?” Shawn tries, but his voice is weaker now. Kinda embarrassing, honestly. “It’s over now, anyway, and I only got picked up because they were worried I was making trouble. But I wasn’t, so it’s all fine, and we really don’t need to-”
“What, talk about it?” the teacher interrupts, dragging a heavy hand down his face. Shawn’s mouth snaps shut, and he glowers up at the man. “I’ve heard that from you before, kid, and you keep pulling stuff like this.”
A part of him wants to protest. It’s been, like, four whole days since he’s gotten in any real trouble with Jon, beyond a couple of stern looks when Shawn has run his mouth. And before tonight, he hadn’t snuck out in three weeks! That’s gotta count for something.
“It’s not fair to either of us, Shawn, and I can’t let you get yourself hurt again. Got me?”
Shawn flushes, pursing his lips. He just wants this conversation to be over. “Yeah, yeah… I got it.”
Jon sighs, long-suffering and exasperated. Shawn sinks a bit further into the couch, letting his eyes drop and preparing himself for another lecture, because that little talk couldn’t have been it. Jon has been getting more and more uptight every time Shawn screws up, and the last time he snuck out, Jon didn’t even let him go to the mall with Cory the next day.
As if it’s Cory’s fault that Shawn doesn’t freaking listen to Jon. Poor guy — hopefully he won’t have to go even longer without seeing Shawn, this time. They’ll both start getting withdrawal symptoms again.
The couch dips beside Shawn as Jon takes a seat to his left, but that buzzing sound is in his head again – the one he hears when adults talk about stupid stuff. It blocks out all the extra crap, almost like a superpower.
A hand wraps around his arm, holding firmly just above his elbow, and Shawn instinctively jumps, leaning back from the man. His brows furrow.
“Clearly, we’ve gotta try some other methods, and you can start by taking down your jeans.”
A superpower that Jon somehow over powered.
He snaps his head up, and now he really leans back, almost yanking his own arm out of its socket with how fast he pulls it away. When he looks at Jon’s eyes, they seem serious enough, but he’s got to be joking.
He’s stupid, but he’s not that brand of stupid — he knows how most of his peers are punished at home. How Cory is punished at home, by his parents. But Jon isn’t his dad, and he can’t…
“Come on, Jon, you can’t be serious—”
“As a heart attack,” Jon deadpans, and Shawn is starting to feel a heart attack coming on. He stares at the man dumbly. “Lectures go in one ear and out the other, grounding doesn’t work when you just ignore it — hell, even taking Cory away didn’t make a damn difference. I’ve gotta get through to you somehow, kid, and if that takes tanning your hide? So be it.”
Shawn swallows, eyes wide. He moves his gaze down to where one of Jon’s hands is braced on his knee, ready to stand up at a moment’s notice.
Crap. He won’t be able to take off this time.
He takes a breath, deciding to try a different angle. “But my dad never-”
“And I am definitely not going to be taking parenting advice from Chet Hunter,” Jon interrupts firmly, and well, isn’t that the whole problem? That Jon is so determined to do things differently from his dad?
Chet… hasn’t been perfect, yeah, and maybe that led to Shawn getting in trouble a few times.
But, like. Shawn hasn’t died yet, right? So, he’s been doing just fine on his own. Obviously.
“Shawn,” Jon presses, probably somehow seeing the wheels turning in Shawn’s head. He has a real knack for that, which can be a real pain in the ass. Literally, apparently. “This isn’t up for debate, kid. Take ‘em down, or I’ll do it for you. The choice is yours.”
Now that’s just not fair.
“Jon,” he says, and his voice is manly, and it definitely doesn’t crack or come across as a whine. Not at all. “Come on, man, we’re— we’re buds, right? Buddies don’t slap each others’ butts unless they’re football players, and I’ve always been more of a lacrosse fan—”
He doesn’t even see the hand coming until his wrist is in it.
And he doesn’t even realize it’s pulling him until his nose is inches from the floor, feet dangling uselessly behind him, and he can feel Jon’s thigh pushing against his stomach.
“Lift,” Jon says simply, and somehow, Shawn instinctively knows he means lift your hips. He wonders, almost frantically, if every boy is just hardwired to know how to handle something like this. If smack-downs and ass-tannings have been happening for so many centuries that humans have, like, evolved to handle them.
It doesn’t mean he’s going to cooperate, though.
“Jon,” he says again, holding out the word for several seconds and pointedly ignoring the way his voice cracks midway through. He shifts his hips and throws his chin over his shoulder, quickly meeting steely brown eyes and really starting to believe that the guy isn’t bluffing. He swallows. “I- I get it, I won’t sneak out anymore! You can drop the act now, I believe you!”
The hand on his waistband lifts, swatting down where butt meets thigh, and Shawn yelps more out of surprise than anything. “Hey!”
“You’re getting close to losing boxer privileges, kiddo,” Jon says, shifting his arm slightly to hold around Shawn’s torso more securely. A shaky breath rushes out of him. “Lift your hips. Now.”
Shawn lets his head hang, groaning. He’s never been less jealous of Cory than he is right now, and that’s saying something. He’s not stupid — he knows why Cory is always squirming in class the day after they both get in trouble.
He lifts his hips.
Jon doesn’t waste any time.
“You’ve gotta stop taking off, Shawn,” he lectures as soon as Shawn’s jeans are around his ankles, and Shawn jolts forward when the first swat lands — the first real swat. Because that one over his jeans was nothing – the lack of pain is probably what encouraged Shawn to listen in the first place.
But ow.
“Ow!”
“Not only did you leave the apartment after curfew,” Jon continues, ignoring Shawn’s yelp entirely and continuing to lay down his Satanic bear mitt, “but you went to a dangerous area — after dark, Hunter! You know how I feel about you pulling stunts like that.”
Well, yes. Yes, he does know. Shawn is pretty sure he has hearing damage from all the hollering Jon has done about it.
“It’s dangerous, and if something had happened, I wouldn’t have known where you were!” Shawn nearly protests at that, because it’s not like anything did happen, but he swallows it, feeling the hot press of tears in the back of his eyes. Which is kinda embarrassing. It’s a freaking kid’s punishment.
But it’s not that dangerous. The most dangerous person at the trailer park is Uncle Mike, and Uncle Mike likes Shawn well enough. Eddie and his gang… they definitely hold a candle to Uncle Mike, but they’re mostly in jail or juvie, anyway. He’s not that stupid – not that type of stupid, anyway. He knows his way around.
“I get it,” he rushes out instead of voicing that, words pitched a bit higher than they rightfully should be. He wants to take this stoically, he really does, but even if he’s had worse than this, there’s something about the stinginess and the vulnerability and his teacher’s disappointment…
“Jon– Jon, stop.”
He can feel Jon shift, and he doesn’t realize until a moment later that he’s lifted his knee. Shawn falls forward slightly, sucking in a sharp breath. The position feels so much worse, so much less bearable, and tears burn his throat before he’s even smacked again.
“You don’t get it,” Jon says simply, hand crashing down and making a much louder noise against the skin of his thighs, and Shawn groans wetly, dropping his head onto the couch. He lifts up his left foot and kicks it down, once. “You don’t get it, and I know that now. But you’re going to get it by the time I’m finished with you, and every time you sit down for the next couple days, you’re going to remember it.”
That’s a threat, if Shawn’s ever heard one. And the old man seems pretty determined to follow through.
He kicks again, and Jon swats down harder.
“I care about you, Hunter,” he says firmly, as if he hasn’t said that before – as if he doesn’t care about all of his students. Shawn knows that. “That’s why you have a curfew, and that’s why I’m kicking your ass right now. A lot of people care about you, and a lot of people would be… would be devastated if you got hurt.”
Jon falters for a moment, and Shawn sucks in a breath, shoulders shuddering violently. He holds it, something hot and large pressing up against his throat, eyes burning.
“I love you, kid, and that’s not gonna change anytime soon,” he says just as his hand falls sharply, and Shawn makes a high sound in his throat, a gasp escaping. “And every time you try to pull stupid shit like this, I will be here to drag you back by the ear.”
His hand falls again. And again. And again.
And, without even thinking of remaining impassive because Jon seems to have knocked any sense of dignity right out of his body via his ass, Shawn bursts into tears.
He sobs, and he kicks against the couch, and Jon’s hand lands lower down his thighs once, twice, before the sounds of skin-to-skin stops.
He doesn’t cry loudly. For some reason, his body has never really let him cry out loud — even when he was a toddler.
But his body shakes, and he can feel the tears dripping down his face, and as soon as Jon lets go of his waist, Shawn flings off his lap to rub at them futilely, using one hand to pull up his pants. He hisses as they pass over his butt, but even that sound comes out pathetically.
His breath shudders in hiccups, and his shoulders tremble. He can’t help it, reaching another hand back to rub his butt.
“…you’re lucky we were done, kid. I didn’t tell you to get up yet.”
Shawn chokes on something of a laugh, then cuts it off immediately, remembering that Jon is a bastard who just smacked him like a five-year-old. He shoots him a wounded look. “That sucked,” he says quietly, voice rasping. He sniffs.
He doesn’t look at Jon for a while — he can’t. But as the silence drags out, and Shawn begins to wonder if maybe he did make him upset by not letting his ass get whaled on some more, he hesitantly peeks up through his bangs, standing a couple feet away from the man.
Jon, still seated on the couch, breathes out slowly, looking a bit awkward. Shawn wonders if this was his first time doing something so crappy.
Sure as hell didn’t seem like it. Shawn feels like he sat on a freaking bees nest.
Which makes it all the more embarrassing when Jon wordlessly opens his arms, and Shawn collapses into the man’s chest.
Even more so when the tears come back. God, he’s turning into Cory.
Hopefully, the dampness on Jon’s shirt isn’t noticeable — if it is, Jon doesn’t say anything. He just rubs his back, one hand going up and down in firm, soothing strokes, occasionally reaching up to the base of his skull and running through his hair. It’s embarrassing and childish and Shawn is going to die.
But, for now, Jon holds him.
And as embarrassing as that is, too, a distant part of Shawn thinks it’s all he’s ever wanted.