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“Spencer?” Trina startles the second she spies her boyfriend leaning casually against the big notice board outside of Bremner Hall, where she’s just had a midday seminar on Curating Contemporary Art. She waves off a couple of her classmates and strolls towards him. It’s fall season now, and the turning of the leaves to a heady kaleidoscope of orange, red and tawny bronze hues has brought with it a bit of wind chill in the afternoons.“Hey—what are you doing here?”
She smiles, unable to tamp down the burst of happiness to see him, and so unexpectedly. He had promised to call, text and see her today when they parted ways last night but she hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up, knowing that unexpected things could always make it difficult for him to do any one of those things. He sent her an emoji this morning, and now he’s here in the flesh. She’ll take that over a call any day.
As she comes up close, he returns her smile with a faint twist of his lips.
But it doesn’t reach his eyes—she notices that immediately. He’s donned a dark peacoat over a henley and dark jeans, and with the breeze whipping through his hair, it lends an even more brooding energy to his sombre-faced demeanour.
Something’s up.
“So, what’s up with the big surprise? I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
He half-shrugs, his eyes flitting around the quad to the left of them in that way he sometimes does, rueful. “I was—I just wa—needed to see you, I guess. I, um, missed you.”
“Aw, you’re adorable.” Even with the charming honesty that Spencer has with her at times, there’s something off with him. But she knows not to prod. Not yet. Instead she grabs his left hand, and leans up to kiss his cheek softly. He tilts his head into the touch and she catches the corner of his mouth. A fraction of movement, and they slide into kiss, gentle as leaves floating on a breeze, before they pull away. “Well, I love surprises. Especially when they consist of you. Can I treat you to some coffee—there’s a bodega round the back of Bremner, and we can go find somewhere to sit for a while if you’ve got time?”
He’s watching her, an odd, flame-like intensity in his eyes that she can’t quite make heads or tails of but she doesn’t look away.
Yeah, something’s definitely off with her boyfriend and she wants to get to the bottom of it. Mostly because even though she has no idea what it is, an instinctive part of her aches for him. She can’t even explain it, it’s like in the bones of her, she knows, without him even having to tell her what’s going on. And all she wants is to take care of him. To just hold him. It’s mystifying and yet she’s certain of it the way she almost always has been when it comes to Spencer and how he’s feeling in a moment, no matter how impenetrable the bravado or the masks he wears.
She weaves her fingers through his, tucking her arm under his so they’re in a half-hug, and drags him to the bodega. He comes along with her sans complaint, relatively pensive as she carries the conversation, telling him about how Curtis reacted to the gifts they’d shopped for together in New York, and some of the interesting concepts she’s learning about in her seminar.
Once they’ve found a quiet patch of grass under a massive oak tree, robbed of half its leaves, she lays the big scarf she’d stuffed into her tote this morning in case it got really chilly on the ground, and they sit down. Spencer leans his back against the tree’s massive trunk and she sits facing him.
Biting on her lip, she studies him closely, the way she might a complex, inscrutable piece of art.
There are shadowy smudges under his eyes and lines of strain bracketing his mouth. He hasn’t slept. His shoulders are hunched a bit, so he’s caving inward into himself, as if he’s trying to be smaller. To hide. He’s avoiding her eyes although every few seconds his gaze flicks back to hers, and when he notices her watching him, he quickly glances away. His hands won’t stop moving, either. One picks at a one of the colourful threads on her scarf, then the plastic lid on his coffee cup, while the other taps his knee in a sharp staccato.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?”
He freezes. And then seems even more determined to avoid meeting her gaze. “Nothing,” he says too loudly. Too breezily. Not even trying to make it a good lie. “Why would you think anything’s wrong?”
Reaching out, she places her hand over the one that’s drumming on his knee. He stills at her touch. Trina waits until he finally—finally looks at her before she takes hold and brings his hand up to her lips to kiss his knuckles tenderly, the way he has hers so many times. He smiles, a fractured tip of his mouth at the chivalrous gesture turned on him. “Y’know, I can tell when something’s up with you. Always.” She kisses another part of his hand. “And I love you, and nothing will ever stop me from wanting to be here for you, Spencer—always. No matter what.”
That seems to crack a fissure somewhere deep inside him. She can see it in the harried exhale he lets out and the way his eyes shimmer a little before he blinks again at her, like he’s not quite sure she’s real. His hand trembles in hers.
It takes him a few more long moments and she waits. “It’s—um, my dad.”
Trina tenses at he mention of the missing Nikolas Cassadine. Of course, with his grandmother back, Spencer must finally have some news. Dread curls inside her because whatever the news is, it can’t be good.
“My, um, my grandmother gave me an update last night when I got home.” He lets out a brittle laugh that sounds about as cheerful as breaking glass. His eyes stare un-focusedly at a spot on the ground between them. “So, I guess you could say the great Nikolas Cassadine continues to live down to my worst expectations of him. Yup, I said live,” he announces with a showman’s dramatic flare. Yet it comes off as hollow and bitter and ugly. “Because guess what? He’s not dead or hurt or anything. He’s alive and well, swanning around Europe. Yet he’s chosen not to come back. He’s just—he abandoned me. Again. And worse, he’s abandoned Ace. All of us.”
A fiery lick of rage flares up inside her then. So strong, she feels like she’s gonna explode. Trina’s not a violent person but right about now, if she was faced with that man, she’d slap him. Kick him in the balls. Maybe even shoot his raggedy ass for good measure—just for putting that devastated look on Spencer’s face.
How can a father be this cruel? How can he keep breaking his own son’s heart?
She wondered the same thing all those years ago when he played that foul trick at that birthday party at Wyndemere. Yet since then, she’s tried to give the guy the benefit of the doubt despite evidence to the contrary from all the many ways he’s hurt Spencer and plenty of other people. Hell, just a few weeks ago, she even tried to give Spencer some hope that his dad was being held somewhere, and was potentially as determined to get back to him and his brother as any decent father would be.
Apparently she was wrong.
“I’m sorry, Spencer,” she murmurs. She reaches up with her free hand to cup his jaw, drawing his gaze up to hers so he can see the depth of her sorrow for him. Her fury on his behalf. There’s something so shattered and desperately pained in his dark eyes that makes her hurt, too. She’d do just about anything to safeguard him from this kind of harm—anything. Because he’s hers to protect. “Oh god, I’m sorry.” She comes up on her haunches to embrace him fully and kiss his cheek, his jaw, his temple—to offer comfort in the best ways she knows how. And when she hears the jagged breath he takes in as he allows himself to sway into her, letting her bear his weight, trusting her to hold him up, she feels tears prick at her eyes. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
He sobs quietly against her shoulder, and she hums, running soothing fingers through his hair as her heart breaks for him.
The time for Spencer to tell her more of what’s happened and how he feels about it all—how he can’t breathe; how he thinks he’s drowning sometimes in all this; how much it’s broken him inside to be discarded like so much trash again by the man he still loves so deeply and hates in equal measure; how he spent the whole night tossing and turning in his bed, wondering if there’s something inside him that makes him so profoundly unlovable; how he fears that he’s got something of his father’s cruelty in him; how terrified he is of messing up at every damn thing, and hurting the people he loves, her, Ace, his grandmother; and so much more—will come.
For now, they sit like that in that little corner of the quad beneath the shedding oak tree, Spencer enfolded in her arms, learning to breathe in tandem, a matched pair, his hands gripping at her to keep her close as she whispers soft words to him—I’m sorry-I love you-I’m here, always-I love you so much—for what could be minutes or hours. Days, even.
Neither of them keeps count.