Chapter Text
On June 22nd, Jake Dillinger almost drowned in his bathtub.
His path to the bathroom was a foggy memory of red wine and Chloe Valentine’s bare thighs. The distant image of his body stumbling to the bedroom and undressing was completely separate from his consciousness, a movie playing out in his mind rather than a memory. In the film, he didn’t have sex with her. He pulled on his suit from the spring dance the year before, his hands clumsy and swollen, fumbling in the heat as if it’d blinded him.
She followed behind, swaying to a nonexistent song, body slipping into darkness at the edges of his vision. She trailed her hand along the wall to keep herself steady in her sequin-covered five-inch heels.
He did not take her to the bathroom.
Her small, delicate hand in his, he led her to the garden. Surrounded by blooming hyacinths and fireflies, the alcohol finally got to Jake, and everything else was the same blackness he experienced right before he almost drowned. Like being asleep. There was nothing to remember because nothing happened other than nightmares and hazy dreams.
Until his loose grip on the rim of the bathtub finally gave out, and he plunged under the rosy, lukewarm water.
There was no visual warning to cue his brain into stopping himself from inhaling, so the second he was under, water shot up his nose and mouth and straight into his lungs. He gasped in more water, only borderline aware of the panic and pain overwhelming him from head to toe.
Kicking and writhing, survival instincts the only thing keeping him from simply slipping under and letting himself die, he grasped at the walls until he found a hold along the flat surface and pulled himself up.
Coughing out water and blood, he doubled over the edge of the bathtub until the floor was puddled with water both from his dripping hair and his lungs.
“Morning, sunshine,” Chloe said, her voice like a siren. Without the alcohol, though, she was much less of a seductive mermaid and more like a blaring alarm.
Jake groaned and fell back into the water, careful to keep his nose and mouth above. The back of his head hit the tile wall and the cold feeling of it felt so good on his scalp he turned to the side enough to press his cheek against it.
“Morning,” he breathed. His eyes were open but unseeing, glazed over by both the lingering alcohol in his system and the pain in his head. Still, he could make out the fuzzy silhouette of Chloe sitting draped across a windowsill. Usually, there’d be blurry glass there to hide the person in the bathroom from the outside world, but she’d opened the window and was letting unfiltered sunlight cascade into the room, uncaring that each stream of light was like a knife stabbing into Jake’s skull.
One leg was bent at the knee on the sill and the other was falling off the edge, only the tip of her toe keeping her steady against the floor. She was dressed in the white sheet from Jake’s parent’s bed, clothespins keeping it from simply falling off her. There was one on each shoulder, another just above the base of her spine. Despite being shapeless everywhere else, it hugged her hips in the same way Jake would when he was trying to get her in his bed. Tight, desperate, kissing at any bare skin.
His mouth went dry.
“I’m naked underneath,” she said, all sultry and quiet—a dagger dragging across Jake’s skin, slow and steady. Torture. He was too out of it to crawl out of the bathtub, but god. If she would just—
“Stop it,” she said, hopping off the windowsill to pick up one of her discarded heels from the floor. “I only want to know if we fucked last night. I don’t want to waste fifty bucks on plan B if I don’t have to.”
Jake blinked at her. He couldn’t even begin to think about the night before. Everything was out of order and too bright, indescribable pinpricks of neon pinks and yellows and greens.
“I think ‘m gonna throw up,” he said as an answer.
“K. I’m taking a hundred from your wallet, fifty for plan B and fifty as compensation for my dress.”
Right. Out of everything, Jake could at least remember Chloe showing up in a knee-length, sky-blue sundress. His vision had blurred at the sight, and Rich’s voice had become a droning tone in the background.
“Take another fifty. Get a red one.”
“Red what?”
“Sundress.”
Chloe laughed as she disappeared from view, a wordless promise that she’d take much more than a hundred and fifty, and that Jake’s investment would be returned in lipstick and curls and the white lacy tights he loved to see her in.
Jake waited until her footsteps had turned to the sound of water dripping from the faucet before finally drag himself to his feet. His balance had long ago been lost to whatever expensive wine he’d stolen from his parent’s liquor cabinet and the water only made it worse, but he managed to get himself out of the tub and bathroom, only casting a glance at the mess he’d left behind.
He was still in his suit. The jacket had long since been abandoned, probably in his parents’ room or his own. He was left only in his wine-stained button-up and pants. He wasn’t naked. Chloe probably didn’t need to buy the plan B.
The rest of his house was just as bright and silent as the bathroom. He wasn’t sure what time it was. Judging by the harsh light and the fact every room was at least 90 degrees, he guessed it was noon. Maybe a little bit after.
His head was pounding, his body cold despite the humidity pressing against him from all sides. He was miserable until he saw a mop of red and blond hair still asleep on his living room couch.
Rich was lying face down, hidden between the cushions and one of the overstuffed throw pillows Jake kept telling himself he would donate to goodwill. Unlike both Chloe and Jake, he was dressed in normal street clothes.
Jake picked up the pillow and smacked him over the head with it. All he got was a muffled moan and a middle finger in his face.
“Stop it, dumbass,” Jake whispered.
He leaned over the top of the couch and ruffled Rich’s hair, to which he got a slap and a glimpse of Rich’s face as he rolled over slightly to say, “Why the fuck did Chloe walk out of here dressed like Athena?”
Jake shrugged. “Dunno. Woke up to her sitting all dramatically in a window looking like a greek goddess. I was in the bathtub.”
Rich laughed—loud, boisterous, the embodiment of everything violent, happy, and drunk—before making a small sound and saying, “Advil. Need. Water.”
“Suck it up, I ran out yesterday.”
“Arghack,” he said, rolling over to look up at Jake. He was pale but otherwise looked unharmed.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I think yous were trying to get married.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You were all drunk n shit and when you saw her, you were like ‘I’m gonna marry her’ and then you disappeared for the rest of the night.”
“That’s so stupid.” A pause. “Explains a lot, though.”
“Yeah, well,” Rich shot back eloquently as he rolled off the couch and onto his feet. “M getting water, whaddya want?”
“There should be a Corona in the fridge.”
“I’m literally still drunk from last night and you’re already fucking at it again,” Rich called back, getting quieter as he disappeared into the kitchen and popped back out with a water and beer. “By the way, don’t go into the guest room. I tried to kick everyone out but Dustin was already with some girl in there and I decided the poor guy deserves it after Madeline.”
“Great.”
Rich tossed Jake the Corona when he reentered the room. It would’ve been a swift movement to simply sit next to Jake after that. Graceful, even, to move so fluidly through Jake’s house. But he paused just in front of the couch to stretch, lifting his arms above his head, the water still in hand. If Jake had any self-preservation left within him, he’d be smart enough to yell at Rich for water spilling water on his coffee table. But sometime after his parents left, he’d lost the will to live happily, so he let his eyes trail over Rich and down to the sliver of exposed skin just above the rim of his pants. Tanner than Jake from all the time he spent out in Jake’s pool. His tattoos were drawn with a ballpoint pen because he wasn’t old enough to get real ones yet, and there was a faded edge of a shark peeking out above the rim of his pants. Jake had watched him draw it on and felt nothing.
Now that he was supposedly married, though (at least metaphorically), and it was all forbidden and shadowy and illicit, Rich was tantalizing. I kind of want to marry you, Jake thought and came to the terrifying realization he had no way of telling the difference between being slightly horny and wanting to spend the rest of his life with someone.
Even sober, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to differentiate between wanting to fuck Chloe and wanting to kiss Rich at the altar.
—
Marrying someone often meant taking them out on dates. Jake had taken Chloe out on plenty of dates. He remembered their first clearly: back before his parents left, before the drinking became a daily thing and was more of a weekend habit. He’d taken her to a cheap strip-mall restaurant next to a Big Lots. His mother had to drive him there—he didn’t have his license. He remembered holding her sweaty hands and asking about her day. Giving her roses. His voice cracked every other word, still in the thick of puberty. It wouldn’t get deep until that summer.
His first date with Rich was different. For starters, it wasn’t a date. It was only in Jake’s drug-induced psychosis that he managed to convince himself it was, even as Rich abandoned Jake on the bleachers to go skateboarding around the park. Jake could distantly hear the wheels whirring as Rich plummeted down ramps and up others. There were moments it halted—either Rich chickening out of a stunt or hopping from one ledge to another. Jake didn’t watch. He only listened.
There was a half-smoked blunt in his hand. He’d smoked it too fast. His stomach was in knots, his face too hot, but it hardly mattered when Jake was inhaling humidity and letting it reshape his bones into a much simpler organism. God’s prototype—something below a human.
The sky was expansive, as it always was. With the weed in his system, it seemed poetic. An answer to every unfinished religion, the piece the church was missing in every prayer. He shaped out the words with his mouth and traced the edges, but his lungs were still too full of smoke to speak them.
He managed to realize, though, clear as day, that bigfoot was not real. If he was convinced the sky could be a stained glass window to heaven because he’d smoked some weed, then there was no doubt a man could stare into the forest and convince himself there was a monster there.
“Ew, I know that look,” Rich’s disembodied head said.
Jake blinked and suddenly the rest of Rich was there too.
“What look?”
“I’m-high-and-think-I-saw-God.”
“Shut up,” Jake groaned and rolled to his side. The metal bleachers dug into his shoulder enough that he felt the need to press harder against it, just to prove he could feel something.
From this angle, he could see the sunset, more poetic than the rest of the sky. Not quite as poetic as Rich’s smile.
Rich plopped down on the bench in front of Jake, blocking his view. Jake was about to spit out a curse when Rich said, “Hand it over. I wanna see God.”
Jake giggled. There were broken fragments of pickup lines floating in his vision, something about angels or a deity in front of him, something about a heavenly smile, but all he could do was pass the blunt over and hope that if Rich got high enough, he’d call Jake pretty.
The touch lingered too long, Rich’s fingers tangling with Jake’s as he grabbed the blunt. Jake kept waiting for him to pull away, to thank him, but all he got was Rich’s amused voice saying, “Jake, buddy, wrong hand.”
“Huh?”
Rich shook his head fondly and held up their entwined hands for Jake to see.
“If you wanted to hold my hand, baby, you could’ve just asked.”
Jake squinted helplessly. He didn’t get it.
“Jacob, you are still holding the blunt. It’s in your other hand.”
Jake frowned. Oh. Still fumbling with the fraying rope tethering him to this shaky reality, he managed to prop himself up on his elbows and, finally, pass the blunt to Rich. He laughed as he took a hit and said, “You look pretty with your eyes all red like that.”
Jake was too lethargic to blush. He only smirked and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to say that all day.”
“Mhm, sounds about right.” He blew the smoke from his lungs onto Jake’s face, resulting first in a wide-eyed sigh of contentment, then a series of coughs and a scowl.
“Fuck, don’t do that. I hate the smell of weed.”
“You’re literally smoking it right now.”
“Yeah, to see God. Not—agh, gross.”
He fake-gagged for emphasis, to which he got elbowed in the stomach. If it hadn’t been Rich, Jake was pretty sure he would’ve thrown up instead of going limp against him, still smiling.
“Woah, what’re you—”
Jake wrapped his arms around Rich’s waist and pulled him up onto his lap. He smelled like sweat and candied apricots. The weed had yet to fully permeate his clothes, and Jake relished in the last moments he got with—he was going to stick with the religious imagery a little while longer, just until the weed wore off—his garden of Eden before it was polluted with his own vices and paranoia.
“You should teach me to skateboard,” Jake said, muffled by Rich’s hoodie.
“Yeah? You’re not gonna pass out on me or something?”
“Shut up. No. C’mon, please?”
Jake pulled away to look up at Rich with puppy dog eyes. He could see the weed hitting him as it happened, the way Rich went from contrarious and argumentative to compliant in barely an instant.
“Fine. I’m not liable for any injuries, though.”
“Course not. If I try to sue you, just counter-sue for defamation or some shit and steal half my fortune.”
“I was planning on marriage then divorce, but sure, that works too.”
As he said it, Jake fumbled for the fabric of his hoodie, trying to find a solid grasp before Rich got the chance to slip away, but he was already getting up, ready to start Jake’s skateboarding lessons.
Jake made a small, ignored sound.
“You have to be on a skateboard to learn how to skateboard,” Rich called as he tumbled down the bleachers, fast and loud.
Jake only followed because Rich still had the blunt in his hand.
Unsteady and only on his feet because he felt the insatiable need to follow Rich wherever he went, he managed to get down to the concrete where Rich was waiting.
“I’m ready.”
“Right foot on the board." Jake obeyed. Rich sighed disappointedly. "No, not horizontal. Straight, you’ve gotta push off, and you can’t—no, what are you, stop—”
Jake stood on the board, feet shoulder-width apart, facing Rich. He wasn’t following instructions. He wanted Rich to hold his hand.
“Hold my hand.”
Rich stared blankly.
“Excuse me?”
“You said I only gotta ask.”
“Yeah, but—no, I—”
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. There was some internal struggle going on that Jake was missing, a hidden storm as violent as the labyrinth under Crete. He couldn’t find it in him to take it back, not while he was stoned and desperate.
“Fine,” Rich spat, “Fine, just—”
Jake stuck out both his hands, waiting patiently for Rich to take them. Rich took a shaky breath before putting the blunt between his teeth and taking them in his own. His touch was a drug in and of itself, not quite capable of getting Jake high or erasing the shadows that chased his every step, lingering in footprints and already exhaled breaths, but it was enough for Jake to want more, for him to cling tighter to Rich. Of fucking course his hands were calloused, he climbed Jake’s furniture and skateboarded everywhere and did pullups and pushups wherever he could to impress girls, but Jake still hadn’t expected him to feel so—
“Awgh oove.”
Jake was too high for this. Rich scowled and glared cross-eyed at the blunt still in his mouth. Frustrated, he mimed pushing the skateboard with his foot.
Oh. Moving. Because Jake was trying to learn to skateboard, not just hold Rich’s hand.
He shifted one foot, trying to straighten it out like Rich had tried to tell him to do earlier. It was too jerky and too fast—he squeezed Rich’s hands to keep himself steady, to which he received a hiss of pain and a squeeze back.
“Sorry, sorry, hold on—”
Giving up on straightening his right foot, he lifted the other like he was going to stomp and put it on the ground. Then, with the grace of a high school athlete high as fuck (and probably drunk, knowing Jake), he tried to kick off.
The board lurched forward, a temporary victory. Without Rich or Jake moving with it, though, it came right back at them. Rich’s eyes widened, recognizing what was happening much faster than Jake could. His nails dug into Jake’s skin as he shoved him back and let go.
Jake didn’t. Let go, that is. He held on like Rich was the last living thing on Earth.
He was. In Jake’s mind, there was nothing but the sky and the concrete barreling towards him out of the corner of his eye, all dead and too far away, but he could feel Rich’s pulse. Feel his warmth. And he wanted more, wanted to pretend Rich’s loud voice was his own, that he could command a room in the same way Rich could—not like Jake did, where everyone turned to him, eyes searching for his approval. For his love. Probably for a good fuck, too. Especially if he was already drunk, up on a table, singing or dancing dangerously close to the edge, a split second from falling and landing on some unsuspecting witness. He wanted—
Before he could identify what exactly he wanted (a blurry outline, his mother’s perfume), he was drowning again. There was no water this time, only his collision with the ground and Rich’s scream. Rationally, he knew he’d fallen and had the breath knocked out of him. But the weed had fucked his fight or flight, and a split second of breathlessness turned to gasping for air like he was falling through empty space, hands fumbling, eyes wide, heart short-circuiting.
“Fuck, fuck—”
Rich scrambled off of Jake. He didn’t need to pull out of Jake’s grasp. Jake had already abandoned Rich’s hands and was clawing at the ground for reasons he couldn’t identify, only that it felt right. It was all he had. The sky had turned and spun and abandoned him, so he needed the ground and the way it made the skin around his nails bleed.
Jake shot straight to his feet. He wasn’t sure if he was bleeding or if he was breathing again, only that for the first time in months, everything was in focus. He could feel the sting on his palms from the gravel they’d slammed against and was hyper-aware of every rib as they ached. He thought consciousness was being aware of the voices around you, not your own body. Not your own breathing, your own heart. The humidity wasn’t just a fact of life anymore, it was real. He could feel it. It was hot and terrible and it wasn’t just a hangover headache, it was real.
He turned to tell Rich. I think I really did see God, he wanted to say, it’s real, everything’s real, why is it—?
“Jesus Christ, Jake,” Rich seethed. He had his knee pulled up to his chest and was examining a scrape on his shin, probably a result of the skateboard rolling down a ramp somewhere in the distance.
Jake was well accustomed to the feeling of crashing after a high. Sometimes it was quick—a plummet into the ocean. Cold water, darkness, waves and rocks and blood. Other times it was a slow descent. No better than plummeting, but that was his fault. He always convinced himself until the bitter end that it wasn’t happening, that he’d close his eyes and wake up and his skin wouldn’t be on fire and his intestines tying themselves in knots until everything inside him was bleeding.
If the comedown from adrenaline was anything like that, he would’ve been ready. But there was no throwing up or aching. Only the bruises and cuts going from borderline addictive to just…painful. Echoes in a cave that was really his own body.
No. No no no no no no no no no—
“...in my bag, can you…?”
Jake heaved in fake air and ran his hands through fake hair and felt fake concrete slam against his knees.
“...doesn’t need stitches, but you’re never allowed…”
Please. Please please please please please please please—
“ Jake! Stop it! Stop—”
Stop…?
Rich’s clammy hands tore at Jake’s, ripping the blunt (blunt? How…?) from his hold and throwing it across the park. He was trembling. Worse than Jake had ever felt another person tremble. It was beyond just shaking, his hands jerked to the point he could barely control them.
“Oh my god, you can’t, you can’t do that, no, you can’t—”
Jake hissed out a breath as Rich’s thumb pressed against the inside of his wrist. The skin was red and black there, stained with soot and pain.
It wasn’t the same. Not like it had been before. It hurt, and Jake wasn’t sure how it happened, just that there’d been heat in his hands, he’d been in control of it, and there was a burn on his wrist. Rich looked like he was about to pass out. Jake just wanted to feel again.
“Wha–wha’s happenin’?”
Rich looked from the burn to Jake’s face, eyes wide and watery. He searched Jake’s expression with a fervor Jake had only ever seen on his father, minutes before he ran. When Jake could hear ghosts of sirens echoing through his empty, dark bedroom as his mother kissed him goodbye and his father told him not to tell a soul what had happened.
You didn’t notice we were gone. You don’t know when it happened. You don't know anything.
“Nothing happened. Nothing, no, don’t worry about it, Jesus—” Rich swiped at his eyes as he rose shakily to his feet. “I’m gonna get the first aid kit in my bag. Don’t move—at all—okay?”
Jake nodded helplessly. It was silent other than the two of them. Everything was tinted blue with dusk, a color Jake had learned usually elicited relaxation, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up in an emergency room surrounded by flashing lights and panicked parents and screams and cries and Rich kneeling in front of him, his trembling finally under control as he carefully wrapped Jake’s wrist in too many bandages.
“Does it hurt?” he whispered.
“I don't know.”
Rich stared at the dressed wound for a moment too long, his eyes glazed over. Then, softer than the universe’s whisper as it died, he kissed it.
—
“You’re a fucking narcissist, Jake. No, no, no, more —psychotic. You’re fucking psychotic. You fucking get off on this shit, don’t you?!”
Chloe grabbed a bottle from Jake’s mother’s dresser blindly—her expensive perfume, probably—and flung it across the room. Jake thought he heard it shatter but from where he was laying on their bed, he couldn’t see it.
“You like that?!” she screamed, “You want more?!”
She grabbed something else, a trinket of some sort, and hurled it at Jake. It shattered against the headboard. Jake didn’t even flinch.
“Fuck you!” Her voice was guttural, so loud Jake thought he felt the soundwaves trying to slice his skin.
Her hair was a frizzed-up mess and her eyes were dangerously wide. There was lipstick smeared down her face and across Jake’s chest. There was even a stain on her dress, thrown haphazardly over a chair. Jake would’ve been more focused on her words had his vision not honed in on her almost exposed breasts. All he’d need to do was unclip her bra, then—
“ Say something! Fucking anything—” he watched her grip her hair like she wanted to tear it out of her head. “Don’t just sit there, scream at me! Tell me I’m a fucking mess, say something—”
Tears of frustration built in her eyes. He wondered what she’d expected. She’d watched him crush up the pills he’d found in his mother’s medicine cabinet and snort them. She knew he was high out of his mind. Hell, he’d been hearing his father’s voice yelling at him for the past half hour. He was barely conscious, what did she expect him to say?
“Chlo…” he tried, but his vision blurred before he could finish. When everything was clear again, she was gone.
Maybe she was never there. Maybe it was all a hallucination.
Achy and disoriented, he groped blindly for his phone somewhere in his discarded pants on the floor. God, if she really was a hallucination, he just partook in some really fucked up masturbation ritual.
Barely aware of what he was doing, he tried to text her.
Not delivered. The message turned green. He’d been blocked.
Rich, then.
Please come over, Jake sent. He didn’t even get to imagine Rich’s golden hair in the sunlight or his pretty smile before he’d blacked out.
—
Michael Mell wore noise-canceling headphones to school every single day. For most of freshman year, Jake had viewed that as weird. To him, the silence was scarier. He couldn’t go home to the shadows of his parents (though they hadn’t run yet) and sit in their echoes. He couldn’t be alone with his thoughts as they trailed down blazing paths of you’re not enough, you’re not enough, you’re not enough.
Why someone would willingly put themselves through that was a mystery to him. Until he started showing up drunk and high and fucked. Then it made so much more sense.
School was loud. Not the people—even hungover, Jake could handle that. It was the building that was worse. It creaked with every step, screaming under the weight of any student. The air conditioner was constantly blasting. Not only air, but noise. Cries straight from hell stabbing repeatedly at Jake.
It was especially bad in the AP Lang classroom. He sat in the very back, as far from the vent as he could get, but it still wasn’t enough. Not even with Rich sitting next to him, an unwitting guard against the worst of it.
Jake sat splayed out at his desk, legs straight and bumping into the chair in front of him, arms hanging limply at his sides, head tilted back and eyes closed. At least it wasn’t humid anymore.
But there was a girl. Christine Canigula, if he remembered correctly. And she would not. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
“I disagree,” she said for possibly the fifteenth time that day, “Victor didn’t have ill intent from the start. He’s not a villain, he’s a tragic hero.”
The girl next to her, someone who really belonged in CP but had somehow managed to wriggle her way into an AP class, blushed at being called out at her apparently wrong answer. Jake wasn’t sure. He hadn’t done the summer reading.
“Okay,” the girl squeaked, “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay! I see where you’re coming from. I mean, Henry surely represented—”
“Sweetheart,” Jake seethed, forcing himself to open his eyes and look directly at her, every inch of him coated in a layer of faux kindness. Every head in the room swiveled to him. “While your commentary is surely appreciated by all of us literature nerds here, why don’t you let someone else talk for once, will ya?”
Initially, Christine looked mortified. Her face flushed red with the kind of embarrassment akin to panic. Then, upon seeing it was Jake Dillinger of all people insulting her, she shot back, “What? You have something important to say?”
He didn’t. He thought the main character’s name was Frankenstein, not Victor. He didn’t even know who they were talking about.
Next to him, Rich rose his hand. Without waiting to be called on, he said, “I don’t think ‘tragic hero’ and ‘villain’ are necessarily mutually exclusive. Who’s to say he isn’t a villain just because he’s a little depressed and guilty? Practically half the book is told from the wretch’s perspective—or, at least, we hear the story from the wretch’s perspective—and there’s no doubt that to him, Victor’s a villain. Kiley isn’t wrong.”
Christine’s expression collapsed into something like shame. She closed her mouth and turned back to face the front, dejected and humiliated. Jake felt an involuntary twinge of guilt twist in his chest.
Fuck. He wasn’t going to be able to stop thinking about this. Even as he fist-bumped Rich under his desk, his vision was blurring.
Okay. He could do this.
The bell rang at some point, and the second it did, he had his bag in his hand and was chasing after Christine as she stormed from the class, face still red from embarrassment.
“Hey!” he called, too loud even in his own head. “Slow down, baby girl—”
“Don’t.”
“Hey, no,” he shoved past some freshman on the wrong side of the hallway and caught the edge of her sleeve between two fingers. “I want to apologize, wait up—”
She halted. Jake almost ran straight into her. He stopped with a second to spare, face open with confusion.
She turned around with a surety Jake cataloged to practice mimicking later and looked up at him with the dramatic flare of an actress.
“I get yelled at for talking a lot all the time,” she said, quick and practiced, “All the time. My mother, teachers. It feels like I speak for two seconds about something I like and someone’s there to ridicule me for it. I didn’t need that from you.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake repeated. Weeks alone over the summer in his humid mansion had taught him only a few things. How to act sober, when to stick your finger down your throat to stop yourself from overdosing, and how to handle guilt.
Being passed out drunk on your parents’ bed always resulted in guilt. The feeling was practically second nature by now, an extension of existence. It lived in every organ, whispered in every thought. He was guilty of everything he did and everything he didn’t and every word he’d ever spoken and every one he hadn’t.
“Cool,” Christine replied.
Not enough. Jake leaned in closer to her. His presence alone was enough for people to make space. No one complained as they moved out of the way for Jake Dillinger to have a conversation in the hallway. But now that he was flirting too, his body language languid and rose-flushed, they were shutting their mouths and leaving a wide birth around him and Christine, like waves avoiding a rock.
“Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?” he whispered, luring her in with the way his tone seemed to beg her for a kind response.
Christine considered him. He could tell her guard was still up. Even more than that, he could tell that her walls were hiding someone sweet, loud, and authentic, and he was the reason she was trying to suppress that person.
“The play. We don’t have enough actors. If you audition, maybe I’ll forget about this whole thing.”
Jake grinned.
“And if you do forget," he said, "maybe you’d be willing to go out to dinner with me?”
At first, there was only pure confusion on her face, and for a moment he thought he’d lost her. But then that same shade of pretty red returned—the one that had entranced him earlier—and she looked down at her feet.
“Maybe,” she whispered, barely audible amidst the pounding noise of the school. Jake smiled as if he’d won the lottery and winked at her as he sauntered away to his next class, confident and suave.
No one at school, not even the theater director, who scrutinized his body language and speech for flaws and places of improvement, could tell he was only conscious because of the Provigil he’d stolen from Rich’s father earlier that week.
—
“You are a fucking miracle worker,” Rich slurred, “I dunno how you do it. I hate you for it, actually. You’re fucking annoying and I hate you.”
Jake hummed in response. This was two-drink Rich, meaning there was enough alcohol in him for something to happen, and for some reason, it was always loud. Fast. Except Rich was already both of those things all the time, so it was really louder. Faster.
Usually, Jake could meet that bomb of a personality with an explosion to match, but he was currently zero-drink Jake, and that meant twitching and cursing and snapping.
“How the hell do you do it?!” Rich continued, his voice exuberant enough that someone listening in could almost convince themself there were two people alive in that room.
“Do what, Richard? ” Jake spat out, the words bitter-tasting on his tongue. Only because they weren’t the Blue Moon currently sitting on the top shelf of his refrigerator, waiting for him. Beckoning for him with blackened, rotting fingers.
Jake took a deep breath. He had a cookbook open in front of him. Rich had told him rich boys don’t know how to cook and Jake wanted to prove him wrong, just as he wanted to prove his parents wrong and his teachers wrong and his classmates wrong. Wherever they thought his limits were, whatever they thought he couldn’t do, they were wrong.
So when Chloe called him an alcoholic too scared to face his own ‘fucked up mind’ to be completely sober for even an hour, he decided he was going to prove her wrong.
And he was doing it. He’d already done it. Three o’clock to four o’clock after school. He’d done homework, been challenged by Rich to serve a romantic, four-course meal, and overall been pretty okay. No monsters or shadows or whispers in sight.
5:06 pm: Rich grabbed a beer from Jake’s fridge. Jake’s vision tunneled.
5:10 pm: Jake’s hand started twitching. He sat on it so Rich wouldn’t see.
5:30 pm: He was in the kitchen, rereading the same recipe for the fourteenth time, his heart beating itself in circles in his chest and every nerve in his body trying to crawl out of his skin for a single fucking drop. He had to stay turned away from Rich. He couldn’t look at the— couldn’t see it— couldn’t even think its name.
Chloe was wrong. He wasn’t scared. He could be sober. He could. All he had to do was not drink the blue moon that somehow appeared in his hand, cold and perfect and more of a siren than Chloe had ever been.
“Oh my god,” Rich yelled, or whispered? Jake couldn’t tell, but he knew Rich was close, breath whispering against Jake’s neck. “Just fucking drink the thing, will ya? You’re looking at it like you wanna fuck it and lemme tell you, buddy, dick in a bottle is not a good idea.”
Jake didn’t bother responding to that. With permission from Rich (it could’ve been anyone), he scrambled to open it and chug the entire thing, yearning for whatever it would give him. It could kill him and he’d be grateful.
He dropped the bottle from his mouth to the trashcan and felt like he could breathe for the first time all day. He knew it must’ve been the placebo effect that had his muscles relaxing and his body slumping against the counter, eyes closed with relief, but real or not, it felt good. Familiar. He took a breath smelling distantly of candied apricots and said, “Do what, Richard?”
“Your mom. Sorry, no. Well, kinda.”
Jake opened one eye to peek at him, smirking. Rich flushed.
“No, stop looking at me like that. I mean how do you seduce like every girl you talk to? Christine was glaring fucking daggers at you for all of class. I thought you were fucked. Then you walk into Spanish with a date. How’d you do that?!”
Jake shrugged as he pushed himself off the counter and back to the refrigerator. He pulled out a bag of carrots and another beer.
“I dunno, it kinda just…happens. My advice to you, though? Stop being so cocky.”
“What?! ”
Jake laughed at the sheer disbelief in Rich’s voice. He turned to see his hands in the air, palms open as if he was surrendering. His face was twisted into an odd cocktail of disgust and shame.
“Girls don’t like cocky, baby.”
“Uh, yeah they fucking do.”
“That’s because you hit purely on girls with daddy issues.”
Rich clasped his hands politely in his lap and clamped his mouth shut. He had no response to that, at least not one that would preserve any of his dignity.
Jake laughed again. He was doing that more now than he’d done in the past week. Maybe this was a good system—torture himself by being sober. Then having anything, even a single drink, would be so, so much sweeter. He sipped his second one and said, “You gotta act desperate. Make them think they’re in control. You don’t deserve her, but you want her anyway.”
Rich frowned.
“Jake,” he said, “Have you seen me? I think I deserve any girl that comes my way.”
Technically speaking, an offensive statement. Misogynistic. Rude. Conceited.
Considering the way Rich was sitting, leaning back on the palms of his hands, his midriff exposed because he refused to (or was too poor to) buy any new clothes and was still wearing too-tight shirts from when he was scrawny, hair messy from the number of times Jake had fidgeted with it to distract himself from the fact he wasn't high, one eyebrow cocked—there was more, of course, but it was too convoluted and poetic to portray in words. Only a mess of metaphorical ranting produced in a hazy ache for Rich’s touch, consisting of too much gold and sunlight and apricot trees for Jake to even remember what he’d thought hours later. The bottom line was yes. Rich deserved everything, even if he was a total asshole about it.
“Just pretend,” Jake choked out. He took another sip as if that could erase every fantasy he’d constructed during sticky summer nights spent alone, memories of Chloe’s body twisted and reshaped until it wasn’t her anymore.
Rich was the only problem getting drunk couldn’t efface. He was there when Jake was coming down from a high, burning himself in a skatepark for reasons he still didn’t understand. He was there when Jake was sober, doing math problem after math problem to distract himself from the picture hung on the wall of his parent’s wedding, their empty eyes staring down at every mistake he made, judging every time Rich had to softly point out that Jake had gotten a question wrong. And that would be fine if he disappeared when Jake drank, but he only became more vivid. An incarnation of a sundress. Where he stood was the only place left Jake could comprehend. The living room was nonexistent, the counter beneath his fingertips merely a hallucination. Just Rich, his red streak dispelled from its usual position into individual strands of crimson, like veins in his hair bleeding want.
“Pretend? How? Oh, baby girl, you’re so pretty and I’m so ugly and I need your validation to feel—”
“You’re not ugly.”
“What? Yeah, I know. That was for the bit. Me pretending to be all insecure for a girl.”
Jake didn’t know how he’d missed that. Of course it was part of the bit. The words just sounded so wrong coming from Rich’s mouth, though, the worst type of hersey Jake had ever witnessed.
“Okay,” he replied, scrambling for an explanation; an excuse. “Just… you look really good, baby. All the time. And you should know it.”
“You’ve been calling me that a lot tonight.”
“What?” Jake smirked, deliberately raking his eyes over Rich’s body, slowly enough to be noticeable. Rich shifted uncomfortably. “Baby?”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Do you like it?” Jake whispered, ducking his head so he was looking up at Rich. That did something. Rich’s breath caught and he looked away, muttering curses to himself. “Can I do it again? Baby? ”
He approached carefully, well aware he was toeing the line between a demonstration of pretending and genuine flirting. Pretend to be desperate, pretend not to be. He wasn’t sure what he was doing anymore, he wanted—
“I wanna make you come without even touching you.”
Oh fuck. Jake wasn’t drunk enough for this. His hands shook where they hovered, waiting. The room was gray, not quite dark enough to need the lights on—a bit dimmer than it should have been. Someone looking in would only be able to see their outlines, they wouldn’t be able to tell Jake was on the verge of breaking.
“Jesus Christ, Jake—”
“I wanna—I wanna watch as you—you’ll be begging me to touch you, and I won’t. I won’t let, let you—”
Jake’s voice gave out. He swallowed his dignity and a gulp of air as he pulled away. He thought distance would make it better, dull the burning, douse the ache, twist images of Rich in his bed to classical paintings of fruits in a dish or shipwrecks, but all he felt was his body begging him to go back.
He searched Rich’s face for even a hint of want, a scrap of something, and he got it. Dilated pupils, parted lips, short breaths. But it wasn’t Jake-specific. It could’ve been anyone in front of Rich speaking similar words in a similar tone, and they would’ve gotten the same visceral reaction. Jake knew Rich slept around, probably even more than Jake did. He’d probably be good, and Jake would know it’d been Henry, Maddox, or Kyle who taught Rich everything he knew.
Jake spun back around to face the cutting board and carrots and cookbook. That was almost worse. Dinner with him in Jake’s empty house as if they were more than just—what? Drinking buddies? Friends? Jake didn’t even know.
“Let me what?”
Jake’s heart stopped.
“Hm?” he squeaked, still not facing Rich. He heard him hop down from the counter and approach, steady and cocky. He hadn’t taken Jake’s advice.
“You didn’t finish your sentence. You won’t let me what?”
Jake kept his mouth clamped shut. Rich shoved himself between Jake and the counter, forcing Jake to look down at him. Rich’s expression twisted into something borderline cruel. He knew. He could see everything, see Jake’s soul laid naked in the air between them, mailable and weak.
“C’mon, don’t be a coward, say it. You won’t let me…? Touch you? Touch myself? You’ve got options here, baby .”
Jake Dillinger was a liar.
I’m happy, I’m safe, I’m sober.
I won’t touch you, he’d promised, but Rich whimpering his name was enough to have him on his knees, ready to give anything and everything just to feel him breathe.
—
Friday afternoon, Jake went on a date with Christine Canigula to the mall. By Monday, Jeremy Heere was following her around like a lost puppy desperate for attention. No one else seemed to notice how pathetic he appeared—Rich laughed at all his jokes, Brooke glowed under his gaze, Chloe glowered when he looked at anyone but her. But Jake was hyper-aware of every time he glanced in Christine’s direction, his cynical expression melting into something a bit softer, a bit more human.
Jake hated him. It was muted and baseless, founded purely out of spite and confusion. Jake felt like stomping his foot like a child—Christine was his.
So he took her out on dates. He led her around the mall, drove her to the skating rink, read her Shakespeare plays in her bedroom (and stole Adderall from her bathroom). He watched teen dramas and read books to figure out how the perfect boyfriend was supposed to act. He already checked off most of the boxes—hot, tall, muscular, broad, blue eyes and brown hair and a pretty smile. Did extracurriculars, didn’t break the rules (not that people knew of), happy, supportive, rich, nice, well-liked.
When he discovered in early October that Christine seemed to be a lot more fond of the rich and hot and well-liked than she did about the happy, supportive, and nice , he started to slack off. He left necklaces in her locker and spent Friday evenings with Rich, driving with him through the rural parts of New Jersey. Farmland, forests, lakes. He found a murky pond and parked the car.
“You’re lucky there are no cops around here,” Rich said, hopping out of the car and slamming the door behind him. Jake stayed there for a moment longer, watching as Rich sauntered down to the beach and onto the dock that jutted out ten feet into the water. Three feet onto it, just out of reach of the old, rundown light flickering on and off, he turned back to look at Jake, his head tilted, a question spoken through his body language.
Jake followed blindly, footsteps unsteady and his world turning on too much of an axis. It wasn’t just that he was high—he hadn’t slept in days (kudos to his medicated ADHD girlfriend)---he was fucking exhausted. He couldn’t see straight. Rich was a beacon he followed because it was all he knew how to do, and when he finally reached him, he draped his arms over Rich’s shoulder to keep himself steady.
“You’re so fucked up,” Rich whispered, shifting so Jake was next to him and Rich’s arm was wrapped tightly around his waist, strong enough to keep Jake’s legs from buckling.
“Mhm, probably.”
Rich giggled so lightly Jake could feel it more than hear it. He led them both to the edge of the dock and peered over the edge.
“My dad used to take me fishing all the time,” he said, squinting into the blackness.
“‘S a classic,” Jake murmured, watching the water for whatever Rich was staring at. All he got were ripples and a bit of algae floating under the doc. “Oh Jesus, ‘m gonna puke.”
He heard Rich sigh disappointedly as he shifted to hold Jake from behind. Jake retched into the water until he’d rid himself of half his lunch (read: half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and more Provigil from Rich’s dad) and a bit more.
He wiped his mouth and straightened, disoriented and sweaty. He felt hot all over, confused by things as simple as Rich’s hand on his back and the taste of stomach acid in his mouth.
“Rich—” he cried and immediately had Rich’s nails digging into his hips as he led Jake over to a bench he hadn’t previously noticed. He fell against it, gasping in short, panicked breaths. He didn’t know why he was scared, why his body was telling him to run, but he was fully convinced the safest option was to throw himself into the lake and drown.
To stop himself, because even as fucked as he was, there was the smallest bit of rationality left inside him, he splayed himself starfish style across the bench, kind of sitting up and kind of vertically laying down, his head tilted back and eyes closed. It took a conscious effort to keep every muscle limp as he slowed his breathing down to something considered normal.
For a moment Rich was tense, standing over Jake as if waiting for something to go wrong. Upon realizing Jake probably wasn’t going to throw himself into the inky black water, he settled down next to Jake on the bench and nestled under his arm, his side pressed against Jake’s.
Jake was only sane until Rich curled up, knees up to his chest, and rested his head somewhere between his shoulder and chest.
Rich felt small. Smaller than he looked, for sure. He had the type of confidence that took up the whole of Jake’s vision. Whether he was 5’6 or not, it felt like he towered over Jake with every word he spoke. Yet he could fit right there, feet at Jake’s hips, the tips of his hair barely reaching Jake’s chin.
Jake never wanted him to move. He never wanted Rich out of his sight. What if he got hurt? What if someone didn’t treat him like the angel, the beauty, that he was? What if someone was stupid enough to taint him with vices and immorality and the red paint every sinner had stained on their hands? Jake had always viewed the world objectively—cynically, but objectively—but suddenly, with Rich there in his arms, it all looked corrupted and broken and dangerous, and he would dedicate his entire existence to standing between the worst of it and Rich.
Jake didn’t often wish he was sober, but he was terrified his drunken mind might be cruel enough to forget how safe that moment was.
Breathing unsteadily, he shifted cautiously, slowly, terrified to disturb Rich and break this small, silent, lingering-summer haven. It was cold and hot and dark and Jake wanted time to stop.
His grip landed on Rich’s waist and pulled him closer. Rich smiled against him.
“Your heart’s beating really fast, buddy,” he whispered, looking up at Jake.
Jake couldn’t reply. Rich stayed looking up but adjusted so he could see past Jake and up at the stars. Jake didn’t want to look. He accepted the watered-down version of their beauty reflected in Rich’s eyes.
“It’s so stupid,” Rich whispered, one hand fidgeting with the edges of Jake’s shirt.
“What is?”
“This stupid sq… god, fuck, nothing, Jake. Don’t worry about it.”
Jake’s grip tightened around Rich. To amend the worry he’d undoubtedly caused, Rich continued, “It’s nothing, Jake, really, I just… do you think it’d… do you think it’d hurt? Burning out like a star? With… with fire and smoke and shit.”
Rich closed his eyes and took a short breath. He was shaking slightly, like he was scared of something. Jake wanted it to stop. Rich shouldn’t be scared.
“No,” he lied, “Don’t people die of suffocation first? The fire takes all the oxygen and there’s the smoke. So before it even hurts, you’re dead.”
“What if you deserve to hurt?”
“What?”
“You heard me. There’s a reason hell is made of fire, Jake. It’s a punishment. So will it hurt if you deserve it? If you hold your breath and let it burn you?”
Jake watched the words form on Rich’s lips and recognized the self-destructive shape they formed. He’d done that too many times staring in the mirror, too many times cradling his mother’s jewelry in his hands and wishing she was there.
He took Rich’s face in his hold and forced him to make eye contact.
“You’re not doing that,” he said.
Rich looked down at his lap.
“I know,” he whispered, then laughed bitterly. “Obviously I’m not gonna do that, Jake. Just—”
“You’re not. You can’t leave me here. You can’t. You’re not allowed to. I can’t—I can’t do this alone. You can’t leave me. You can’t get hurt, you can’t want to get hurt, you have to stay right here with me.”
“Stop,” Rich snapped, pulling away. “You don’t get to say that shit when I gotta lay awake every night wondering if you’re gonna overdose while I’m asleep.”
What?
“No,” Jake pleaded, “No, no, no, I’m not. It’s just fun. Right? Right. It’s just for fun. To—to fuck around and not hurt. I’m not going to die, and you’re not going to die, and everything’s okay. Everything’s fucking okay.”
Jake grappled for Rich, gripping his knees like they were the only thing keeping him afloat. Rich was staring at him, eyes wide and borderline afraid, before his resolve collapsed into a soft, “Okay. Everything’s okay. There’s no fire.”
“Thank you,” Jake breathed. Rich nodded once, his face twisted with shame until he finally reached out and pressed the palm of his hand against Jake’s cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning up as if he was about to kiss Jake. For a moment, it was all Jake wanted. Rich, there, real, not burning, kissing him, but he jerked back, smiling again, already having forgotten their entire conversation.
“Wait,” he said, excitement creeping into his voice. He fumbled around in his pocket for a pack of Altoids and popped one in his mouth. “For the puke, y’know?”
Rich laughed, pure and starry, as he ran his thumb over Jake’s cheekbone and leaned up again, this time following through and kissing Jake as softly as he could, tasting like candied apricots and sugar and everything sweet and flowery. Jake was confused—he’d watched Rich drink half a bottle of vodka on the way here. He was supposed to taste bitter, sharp.
It wasn’t until Rich pulled away, tantalizingly slow, that Jake realized it was just affection, just love, that he really did taste like alcohol, but Jake was high enough to convince himself every bit of warmth Rich pressed into the kiss into something physical; something real, something like sugar.
“You okay?” Rich asked, searching Jake’s face for an explanation as to why he was sitting there, tense and still, rather than returning Rich’s affections.
“I don’t… I don’t think I’ve ever been kissed like that before.”
Rich’s face lit up in a fairy-like smile.
“You want me to do it again?” he asked softly.
Jake nodded desperately and this time when Rich kissed him he dove into it, opening his mouth and letting Rich drown him in everything sweet and candied until Jake was sure he was going to send himself into a sugar coma.
Jake tried at Rich’s pants, but Rich pushed him away.
“No, no, not tonight. Please. Just…”
He returned to his previous spot curled up in Jake’s arms, protected from the worst shadows the sun could produce.
—
Rich liked to insult Jake when Jeremy was around. Jake knew it was nothing personal, that he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, that it was all a by-product of Jeremy spouting slurs and insults at anyone who didn’t fit his ideals of perfect, but it still hurt.
He’d called Jake a slut. Christine was next to him, gladly contributing to the conversation whenever she saw fit, and Rich called him a slut. It came out of nowhere, was hardly relevant to the topic at hand, and it felt like a knife to the gut.
Mostly because, as Jake was realizing in the grey morning light of his parent’s bedroom, Rich naked and asleep in the bed next to him, it was true.
Jake didn’t know his body count. He’d lost his virginity the March before to Chloe. Then, in May, she’d broken up with him. A week later there was Madeline, then Jennie, Kylie, Brenda, and Lila. School let out in June and after that, he lost track. There were blurry memories of girls in his bed, of guys in his bed. Of being led from the living room, drunk off his ass, to different bedrooms with different sheets and posters. It was only his house half the time. He saw apartments, mansions, and one-story homes with mattresses on the floor functioning as beds and mice in the walls.
He wasn’t sure why it happened. He just… he drank, everything got fuzzy, and the person he’d usually glance once at suddenly became an obsession.
He thought Christine would be the way to settle down. And in a way, she had been. It’d only been Rich since she and he had started dating, but that was still terrible, wasn’t it? He was a cheater. He was a traitor.
He took a shaky breath as he crawled out of bed. He felt disgusting and terrifyingly accepting of just how terrible he was. He’d turn himself into the vilest creature ever to exist if only that meant Rich would pay him any attention, whether it be admiration or disgust.
He stumbled to the bathroom, eyes burning. He knew he was dumb. He knew he was depressed. He knew he was a man-whore. He just wished Rich didn’t know it too.
He found his mother’s pills—a wide variety of them, all prescriptions from accidents that had happened and been forgotten. When she’d broken her wrist skiing, when she was struggling with postpartum depression, when she got her migraines, when she needed to relax. She was a criminal. Jake wasn’t sure all of them were legal, just that a dangerous mix of them was in his hand and he was swallowing them dry, tears pouring down his face.
He slumped against the bathroom floor, crying out silent sobs against the tile. He hated this. He hated himself. He hated his body and his mind. He hated Rich and Christine and Chloe and everyone who’d ever hurt him. He deserved it, God knew he deserved it, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to beg for mercy until it stopped.
He closed his eyes. Only for a moment.
He woke up on the couch, the Princess Bride playing on the TV, fully dressed. He sat up, gasping. He heard Rich call his name from a distance, and he turned to—
He was on the concrete next to his pool, flat on his back, Rich using the net to clean out dead bugs and leaves. Jake started to ask a question, but everything went black before he could.
He ended up in his own bed, the sheets tucked up to his chin, laying on his side. There was a trashcan on the floor in front of him and a glass of water on the nightstand. He ignored both as he tumbled from the bed, the sheets tangled around his feet and legs.
“Fuck—fuck.”
It was bright out. What had it been, four hours? Five? Six? He was supposed to go to school today.
He blindly got ready for school. Brushed his teeth, his hair, splashed cold water on his face to try and erase the bags under his eyes, and staggered down the stairs, one hand on the wall to keep himself steady.
The kitchen was clean. He started to put two slices of bread in the toaster when—
“Hey! No, no, stop—”
Rich scrambled from the couch, clumsy and loud, and unplugged the toaster violently.
“What the fuck?!”
“You’re not allowed near any possibly dangerous appliances until you’re clean.”
Well, that was stupid. Jake was never clean.
“Excuse me?”
Rich squinted at him, examining his brushed teeth and hair, and new clothes.
“Are you…?”
“Am I…?” Jake snapped back, ripping the wire from Rich’s hands and plugging it back in. “What's wrong with you?”
Rich shook his head, still watching Jake carefully.
“Sorry. You were really fucking out of it for a while there, man. Like, danger-to-yourself-and-others kind of out of it.”
Jake faltered. Shit. That didn’t happen often, but it wasn’t the first time. According to Dustin, he’d once tried to jump off the roof while black-out drunk. Not for fun. Dustin repeatedly said he was trying to kill himself.
“Sorry,” Jake replied softly, ducking his head with shame. “Sorry, I don’t—let’s just go to school. I’m fine now.”
“No point, bud. It’s Saturday.”
Oh fuck. So it wasn’t six hours of danger-to-yourself-and-others, it was a full two days of it. No wonder Rich tried to keep him out of the kitchen.
“Sorry,” Jake said for the third time. He hated this.
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“What…” Jake cleared his throat, “What uh, happened? The last thing I remember is taking a bunch of shit in my mom’s bathroom.”
Rich shrugged, overly nonchalant.
“Usual high people shit. You tried to write a play for Christine, it was terrible. You watched a couple of movies, then you wanted to clean your pool, but you kept almost falling in, so I took over. Uh, you played the violin a bunch. Please never do that again, it was terrible. Then you kept asking me to take you to the skatepark and obviously that was a terrible idea, so I led you upstairs to try and distract you and the second you saw your bed you just… collapsed. You were out for, I don’t know, six hours? Seven?”
Jake nodded, sorting through the information carefully. Then, the reason for the pills in the first place burning in his mind, “Did we… uh, did I…?”
Rich stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending.
“Sex, Rich. Did we have sex?”
“What? No—you were like, majorly out of it. Not ‘oh, I’m drunk and having fun’ out of it, if I—you clearly have a very low opinion of me. I’m not that much of an asshole.”
Rich was clearly challenging him, waiting for Jake to shoot back, ‘no, obviously you are,’ but Jake was too hungover for that.
He was just fucking grateful. Grateful that Rich hadn’t left, grateful that he’d been safe, grateful Rich hadn’t taken advantage of the situation.
“Thanks.”
Rich shrugged, “Don’t worry about it.”
—
The dock had set off warning bells in Jake’s mind that had been ringing constantly since that night. They rang louder in Jake’s personal library.
Rich was playing the piano. Jake wasn’t incredibly experienced in the realm of music—his parents had tried to teach him the violin, but he only ever managed to play beginner songs—but even he could identify that Rich was a technical masterpiece. He played every note for the exact right amount of time. It wasn’t artistic yet it was still beautiful. When he finished, Jake leaned down and kissed him.
“Gorgeous,” he whispered.
“This library is gorgeous, how the hell did I not know it existed?”
Jake shrugged and returned to the shelves, scanning for a Midsummer Night’s Dream amongst the expensive first editions.
“Dunno. I like it, it’s one of my favorite rooms.”
“I don’t blame you, this place burning would almost be as bad as the Library of Alexandria.”
Jake let out a surprised laugh.
“Excuse me? The Library of Alexandria burned before the printing press was invented. Some of the stuff in there was the only copy in existence, and if it wasn’t, then it was probably the original.”
Jake spun to find Rich staring up at him, his elbows propped up on his knees and his chin in his hand.
“Continue,” he said, a fond smile on his face, “I can tell there’s more.”
“Okay, thank you. It didn’t even fucking burn down. Okay, it kind of did. Twice. But people talk about it as if it was this single catastrophic event—ask them who did it, Rich. They don’t know. Or two people will give you two different answers. One of them? Julius Ceasar. If you’re so mad about that stupid library, why don’t you give the salad jokes a rest and talk about how he burned your precious books? Further-fucking-more, it was really destroyed when Alexandria declined as a city. Like any other government project, it suffered when the economy did. People are just fucking obsessed with the idea of tragedy, like Frankenstein and Icarus. No one actually knows the story, they just know it’s fucked.”
“Mhm. And it’d be fucked if this place burned down, too.”
“Barely. There’s a million libraries just like this one.”
“Yeah, but this is the only one you’ve kissed me in.”
Jake turned back to the bookshelf to hide his blush. Rich had started saying things like that a lot, like he was mapping out the places Jake had loved him to save for later.
“Eh, I can kiss you in other places.”
He heard Rich rise from the piano bench. Jake grabbed a random Shakespeare play from the shelf.
“Yeah, but no one’s gonna know. No one’s gonna see us, we won’t let them. There’s no proof we were ever together besides, if you wanna get poetic, this house.”
Rich leaned against the shelf a couple of inches from Jake, studying his expression as he spoke. Jake refused to look at him.
“Well, you’re proof. I’m proof. We’ve got that.”
“For now.”
“What?”
“Would you break up with Christine if I liked Shakespeare?”
“What? ”
Jake was sure he wasn’t going crazy. He might’ve been a little high, but the room wasn’t spinning and Rich was as solid as he’d ever been. It was Rich going crazy, Rich speaking riddles. Jake, to his surprise, knew the answer well enough.
“Yes. I’d do it now if you asked. Just tell me to break up with her. Right now. Do it.”
He didn’t know he could sound so sure of something. He was smiling, almost grinning, waiting, yearning, aching for the words. For Rich’s approval. He reached out to take Rich’s hand, but Rich dodged and stole the book instead.
“Don’t, Jake. She’s great. She’s really good for you. Start letting her love you, it’s terrible to watch you push her away just because you hope you can fuck me later.”
Jake almost passed out. He lurched forward, trying to catch Rich before he stepped back, but he ended up crashing into the bookshelf, shaking. He didn’t know what this was. He didn’t understand. Rich and Jake weren’t dating, Rich couldn’t break up with him. He wasn’t allowed to. He couldn’t. He’d promised he wouldn’t leave.
“Stop, no, she doesn’t make it better, she’s just—”
He was talking to himself. Rich was gone.
—
When Jake found him amidst the smoke and heat and flames, he was unconscious in the library, the ashes of Othello clutched in his right hand.