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Jasper should’ve known that when your dad— stepdad— whatever the fuck you want to even call Carl, the guy always riding his arse twenty-four hours a day— managed to crack a years-old cold case and rescue a woman from a hyperbaric chamber, it’s probably not that hard to find one teenager who, three days after moving into Angus’s half-brother’s cousin’s flat with a kit bag and a dream, was already starting to think about maybe taking the L and heading home. He just didn’t expect Carl to make so much of a fuss about it when he finally discovered him.
“Okay, you did not have to threaten to arrest anybody,” he huffs, tossing the bag into the backseat before slumping into the front. If it’s possible to die of embarrassment… “As you can see: I came willingly.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t actually arrest anybody, off-duty or not, considering that I found you in a bloody crack den.” Then he punctuates that statement with a clip around the ear, which, while objectively pretty light, still makes him squawk on principle. He’s sure Childline would love to hear about this. “I’m just curious, is it that you lie awake at night and think of all the ways you’re going to piss me off the next day? Or is it more of an impulse decision every time? Because I’m really dying to know, before I strangle you myself right now.”
Splitting hairs over whether or not ‘crack den’ is the most accurate description of Duncan’s place is, he suspects, a loser argument. Especially considering the amount of loose bills lying around and the very much illegal handgun he found stashed under the bathroom sink while looking for mouthwash. He should’ve realized the ‘rent’ on that place was way too good to be true, cop’s son— stepson— whatever— and all. “I remember what you said pretty fucking clearly, which is that if I want to live under your roof, I need to start following your rules, so I found my own roof and now you’re still not happy—“
“Do not say fuck at me—“
“You say fuck to signal there’s a noun coming up—“
“And when you spend decades investigating fucking homicides for a living, maybe you’ll finally earn the right to say some big boy vocabulary words yourself.” Carl pinches the bridge of his nose like he wants to take it off, then shakes his head, hard. He should be keeping his eyes on the road a lot better than he currently is, but Jasper doesn’t quite want even more of his laser focus directed at him. “You know what Akram told me?”
“Wait, you talk to Akram about me?” Jasper squawks again, this new piece of knowledge throwing him completely off-kilter. “Since when?” Akram knows things about him that aren’t good? Through Carl’s heavily-biased account of events? He can’t believe this shit.
“That you’re acting out because you’re desperate for my attention— to which I told him that he’s got two little girls at home who send him TikToks of kittens getting stuck in loo roll all day, which doesn’t exactly qualify him to give me advice on you and your nonstop fucking antics.”
“And what words of wisdom did he have for you next,” Jasper mutters, trying to look bored, drumming his fingers on the dash. Desperate for attention— Carl’s attention, what a complete load of rubbish—
“He told me to skelp you. Two birds, one stone.”
“Carl!”
“Mina and Yara have a little Youtube channel where they make their own kitten do homemade obstacle courses, and then he forced me to watch every bloody video on it and share my thoughts. They’re very cute. So of course I had to ask if Akram would be willing to trade for a weekend, because I’m thinking they can be left unsupervised for longer stretches than you— might manage to catch up on my beauty sleep, eh?”
“I’d love to get away from you for longer,” Jasper snorts, cranking up the dial on the radio to try to drown him out, “be my guest.” He can’t believe Akram of all people gave Carl advice like that— Akram, who’s probably the coolest person he knows, after Carl. Old Carl, that is, who he could exchange more than a handful of sentences with before tripping some wire that’d have them snarling at each other like junkyard dogs. He’s okay knocking this one down to second place.
“Do you think this is all a bloody joke? Quitting school, hanging out on street corners all day with the worst kinds of people? Moving into a place like that? Throwing your life away?”
The slam on the brakes catches him by surprise, making his stomach swoop, and so does the expression on Carl’s face when he turns towards him. Carl always looks like he just crawled out of a grave and only keeps himself upright with a hefty dose of Red Bull and Marlboro Blues, but he can see even in the sodium glow of the streetlights that the bags under his eyes run even deeper than usual, bloodshot spiderwebs criss-crossing them. Almost like he really hasn’t slept since the last time he saw Jasper. “You’re the one who started cracking them,” he says, running on pure bravado to keep from thinking about anything else. Carl can never take shit serious, either, if you paid him. Always a deflection, always another brush-off. “Take a look in the fucking mirror, next time you want to have a go at me.”
Carl jerking his chin up, hard, comes as a relief. Gun to his head, he’s been pushing for a reaction over and over again, for a long while now. Real anger, not just the bitter, passive-aggressive kind that lingers and never resolves. The man finally giving a shit the way he used to, not just tiptoeing around him like they’re two ghosts left to haunt the same house, since Mum decided to throw in the towel on family living. But he somehow doesn’t expect the next words out of his mouth, even though he’s already good as drawn Jasper a map to the destination. “You know, I’ve found Akram’s a pretty wise man. Maybe I ought to start taking his advice, before the next time I see you is in a body bag.”
Jasper sputters like he just swallowed a mouthful of seawater, and he can’t quite seem to catch his breath after that. “You can’t do that,” shit, like there’s really much of anything to stop him. He’s got about enough sense left in his head not to try to jump out onto the road, and he’s all out of other ideas. He’s pretty sure Carl put the child locks on right as they got in the car, anyway, just in case. “Carl. I’m not some kid anymore. What happened to staying out of each other’s way from now on?”
Carl makes a noncommittal sort of noise in the back of his throat, and gets the ignition going again. “It was the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, that’s what. And change the bloody station to something that’s not going to make my eardrums rupture.”
The remaining drive to his execution is shorter than he expected; if he didn’t want to get caught, in hindsight, he probably could’ve tried going a touch further than a few blocks out. “I’ll tell Mum,” he throws out, really stupidly, as they get past the foyer, Carl keeping a hand on the back of his neck like he’ll bolt if he doesn’t. Mum always let Carl have his way in the raising of him, because she didn’t give two shits. “Doubt she’ll be thrilled, once she hears about this…”
Carl just rolls his eyes. Like it’s not even worth engaging with, and he’s right, that one was like writing some bullshit on a test you haven’t studied for and hoping for pity points. “Don’t rack up my phone bill with international calls.”
He opens his mouth to argue back some more, uselessly, only to get cornered by Martin the second he reaches the kitchen— and he didn’t know that a philosophy PhD wearing his mother’s old apron was even capable of looking that menacing. “The prodigal son returns, huh?” There’s a delicious smell coming from the pot he’s stirring, not that Jasper’s going to live long enough to enjoy it. He can’t believe he’s even managed to reach Martin’s breaking point. “You have anything to say for yourself, running off without so much as a note on the kitchen table? We thought you might’ve been kidnapped, by the way. Even started a running list of suspects on the fridge.”
Anybody with a remaining shred of a conscience would’ve apologized, on the spot, after seeing that list (in smeared biro ink, like it was scrawled in a hurry) still under the strawberry-shaped magnet; Martin’s never been anything but good to him, doesn’t deserve to be dragged into their family soap opera, doesn’t deserve to be the pressure valve for all the anger pent up inside him. “They make you an honorary copper too, now?” Jasper mutters instead, kicking at the tile with the scuffed toe of his trainer. “Must’ve missed the big announcement.”
The hand’s back on the scruff of his neck, like he’s a misbehaving kitten that’s wandered off too far from the litter, and then Carl squeezes tight. “That’s enough. Be a good boy and give Martin the apology he’s angling for already, and then say whatever it is you wish you were telling me to my face.”
It’s that one last dose of trademark condescension that finally makes him crash out. Or maybe the fact that after everything, Carl can still read him far better than he wants to admit. The #1 Dad mug in the dishrack, legacy of a primary school-era Father’s Day, doesn’t help much either. “You know what, fine, I will. Fuck you.”
Carl tilts his head ever-so-slightly, and he realizes he’s just now landed on the usage of the word he really won’t abide. Still, the solid swat he isn’t quick enough to dodge comes as far more of a surprise than it should’ve, after he’s been running his mouth since the second the man burst into Duncan’s living room like this was some kind of special op. “Let’s rephrase that one, shall we? Again, before I kill you.”
“You can’t do that with him right there!”
“You want to talk to me like that in front of the lodger? Don’t be surprised when I get on your arse in front of him. Now go to your room before I really decide to give him a show.”
“Oi,” Martin says, raising an eyebrow and pausing from a resumed bout of stirring. “The lodger? There was a point where I saw that kid more often than you did—“
“Excuse me, our dear friend Martin, whose input on parenting the world’s stroppiest and worst-behaved teenager I’ve always found invaluable—“
Martin gives him a self-satisfied smile. Then he points the spatula at Jasper, in a way that feels more than a little menacing. “You think you didn’t deserve that? You’re lucky I don’t think there’ll be any room to improve on what your dad’s got planned for you. Had me worried fucking sick, and you’re not even sorry.”
Now Carl looks far too pleased with himself. “See? Invaluable.”
Out of all the things he could possibly say in this moment, Jasper just about picks the worst. “He’s not my dad.”
Before Carl can even respond— hurt, angry, worst of all, indifferent— there’s a surprisingly strong grip on his bicep, and then the crack of that bloody spatula across the seat of his jeans, one, two, three times. “Since when are you allowed to— Carl, are you just going to let him— Martin, ow, okay, I’m sorry!”
“Enough of that,” Martin says, briskly, letting him go once he’s realized he’s left the burner on. “You sound like you just walked off the set of some bad Netflix original: you’re not even my real dad, anyway, so just bugger off and leave me alone! I’m a little unsure of who else besides your bloody dad would’ve been turning half of Edinburgh upside down to find you, amount of hell you raise without even trying.”
Carl just keeps looking at him with that downright creepy cop stare, like he can see right down to his bone marrow and Jasper never should’ve tried to pull a fast one in the first place, and he’s not getting busted for forging Mum’s signature on his end-of-term marks this time. “I’d do anything for you, lad.” Which makes Jasper suddenly feel less like Nelson Mandela rebelling against an unjust regime, and more like an ungrateful prick, though that can’t be right. “Including tanning your hide whenever you want to turn up on a police blotter. Now, if you’re not in that room in the next ten seconds, I’m going to just assume you’re picking the kitchen as the venue, which works as well for me.”
Jasper makes sure to slam his door hard enough to rattle the picture frames, but he’s only been pacing around for what feels like another ten seconds before Carl’s back, belt in hand— wait, belt in hand? He’s even managed to outgrow the clothes brush hanging out in the hall by now, they’ve gotten into the big leagues? “We really can’t talk this through?” he asks, a weak grimace on his face as his resolve starts to waver. “I can’t just be grounded until I’m thirty or something? I promise I’ll have learned my lesson by then.”
Carl, in turn, just looks grimly amused by his sudden change of heart. “Can’t even see that possibility in the rearview mirror anymore, kid.” Then he sits down heavily on the bed, fingers splayed across his forehead. “I thought we were past this bullshit, months ago, and now I swear I’m scooping more of it than ever before. You got an explanation for that? Because I’m fucking lost, personally, I guess this is one of the ‘endless complexities of the adolescent male mind’ that everybody’s always banging on about to me.”
Jasper latches onto a piece of skin on his lower lip and peels it with his teeth, so that he’s not tempted to actually unleash what he wants to say. That the start of a slow thaw between them brought more buried anger along with it, hand in fucking hand. That he can’t resist testing the structural integrity of their relationship even as they try to rebuild it, sometimes by throwing a stick of dynamite into the works. That Carl’s steady creep back into acting like a dad instead of a sullen, hostile stranger feels like a noose around his neck after months of near-total freedom, even when he spent those same months secretly craving it. That the thought of trusting him again and getting another slap in the face the next time Carl feels cornered— he can’t help it, sweetheart, it’s just in his nature, he bolts if you get too close— or bleeds out from a final lucky bullet, just seems so much worse than one clean break. Even after everything, he doesn’t really want to hurt him, doesn’t have it in him to land the killing blow.
Carl’s impatient sigh comes all too soon. “I know I’m not your dad,” he says, which… it’s not what Jasper wants to hear, not exactly. At this point, he doesn’t know what the hell he does wish he could hear from him, wanting the man around and wanting him the fuck away simultaneously. Maybe wanting to be the only one doing the pushing. And if making sense of all that’s driving him a little crazy, well, Carl’s probably on the verge of being sectioned by now. “But I’m what’s left, unfortunately for you, and I’m putting a stop to all this. A hard one. From now on, if your arse isn’t in this house at eleven sharp every night— and I’m feeling free to adjust that number down, just try me— there’s going to be hell to pay.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” Jasper looks down at it like it’s a snake about to strike. Might as well be. “All this because I went over to a friend’s flat?”
“No, because you’re done throwing a fit and running away from home whenever you don’t like the rules around here, holding the whole bloody house hostage. I can’t stop you from doing whatever you please once you’re eighteen— probably— but for now? Get over here.”
Jasper isn’t quite sure what he was expecting; maybe the mental images were too horrific to contemplate, so he just blocked them out before they got this far. When Carl gives his lap a sarcastic little pat, as he remains frozen in place, that’s when he realizes that he really, genuinely means to give him a smacking, like he last did when he was fourteen and got busted with a pack of stolen cigarettes. That’d been enough to make him behave himself for the next couple of years. “Are you shitting me? I’m not seven, Carl—“
“Aye, and you’re not grown yet either, are you?” He fixes him with a stare hard enough to pin him to the opposite wall, then massages one temple with his free hand, like Jasper’s giving him the mother of all migraines. “I said get over here, not stand over there and keep giving me arguments I could already predict in my sleep. I’m not particularly interested in keeping this row going all night.”
His last stand is truly feeble, but he just feels the need to get it out in the open, anyway. “I hate you.”
“Feel free to join an extremely long list of people, half of whom employ me.” He snaps his fingers like he’s summoning a half-trained puppy. “Jasper, if I actually have to come get you, and here I am trying to leave you with one last scrap of dignity—“
He’s only just reached a cautious arm’s length before Carl’s gotten a hold of his bicep and pinned him down flat, as easy as anything, and he’s only got about a split second to reflect on just how humiliating a position he’s found himself in before it gets even worse. It’s possible that a pair of oversized joggers he’d borrowed— okay, stolen— from Angus might’ve not been the best choice of attire for tonight. In his defense, he hadn’t predicted this particular chain of events when he pulled them out this morning. “You’re dead certain that talk’s off the table,” he mutters as they descend down to his knees, exposing his bare thighs to the cool air of the room. He’s pretty sure the boxers weren’t originally his, either, come to think of it, and— wait a minute— “Carl! You can’t be serious, I’m not just going to let you—“
His pathetic protest, zero leverage behind it, gets him precisely nowhere nearer to a reclothed arse. “You expected something different after all this? Think we’ve established by now that you’re still not half as grown as you consider yourself.” He grits his teeth hard enough he swears he can hear his enamel wear out on the spot, and yet there’s still zero moves on Carl’s part to pull them back up, forcing him to reluctantly settle and accept his fate; it’s not like he’s going anywhere now. “We’ll be talking about plenty in a minute, trust me, I’m just starting to think our little chats that only involve words go straight in one ear and out the other with you. I keep trying to give you an opening: you want to start us off with why we’re here, your take on it?”
“Not really.”
Carl lets out a frustrated sigh. “I just do not feel like I run a draconian police state around here,” he says before he cracks his hand down, hard. And if it doesn’t hurt about as much as it did when he was fourteen and stealing cigarettes from the corner store, with that exact same earsplitting, skin-on-skin sound that’s impossible to drag his attention away from. (Not that the sound’s about to be his biggest problem in a minute). “Tell me where you’re going, at least Martin, if you can’t manage that. Go to school— yes, every bloody day it’s in session, and on time, too. Don’t smoke or drink or get high or get yourself hauled into the station. That’s about it. I don’t get on you to scrub your disgusting loo, or stop bringing that girl around here behind closed doors, or wipe those pissy little expressions off your face, I even give you pocket money whenever you ask, and as a thank you, I get you running off to a drug den without so much as a note? I think I at least deserve an explanation.”
“I don’t want—“
“Tough shit,” he says, and he follows that up with a series of swats that just about make him jerk off his lap. The man who taught him how to swim by throwing him into the pool has never been too fond of easing him into anything. “I wasn’t asking you what you did or didn’t want. I was informing you of what you’re about to tell me, right now, if there’s anything about being able to sit down again before your eighteenth birthday that appeals to you.”
His resolution to maintain a stoic front lasts about another thirty seconds, because even after having to recover from two separate gunshot wounds, Carl can still pack one hell of a wallop. And this time, he doesn’t seem too likely to quit before he gets an answer. “I don’t know, maybe I wanted to see if you could be bothered to come find me for once?” he snarls into the duvet cover, embarrassed by how quick the man’s already making him fold. For the first time tonight, the first time in forever, he feels dangerously close to tears, pooling on his lash line and blurring his vision before he blinks hard. He won’t say out loud that it was kind of a relief, having him show up and finally put an end to the game of chicken, one he wasn’t even sure how far he wanted to escalate.
Of all the reactions he expected to get in response— and the belt making its grand entrance was topping the list— a bitter laugh was about the last one. “I’d really fucking hate,” Carl says slowly, “if what I’m modeling for you, as the strong male figure or whatever the hell it is your mum said when she dropped you off, is acting just like me.”
Oh, no. He forgot that Carl started actually trying in therapy right after he started shagging the shrink, and gained a whole new respect for her field in the afterglow. (Having done it three and a half times now himself, Jasper thinks he’s well on his way to becoming an expert on how this works). Here they go.
“No, see, I feel like the example I’ve set is such complete dogshit, it’s my responsibility to correct that,” Carl just goes on saying. “It really doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out that you’re trying to see if I’ll come running after you, because again, you’re me.” Jasper really isn’t feeling this characterization of him, he can name about ten differences between them off the top of his head, but the man’s not giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise, and keeps distracting him with his iron-coated palm besides. “Same kind of bullshit, except I can recognize it for what it is coming out of your mouth,” and Jasper hates the rough sort of fondness in his voice, he really does. “Let me spell it out for you: I’ll always be bothered. Every single time, from now on. You’re probably going to regret convincing me the last thing you need is even more space, I’m sure of it, but that’s still what’s going to happen.”
“Don’t try to pretend you give a shit.” He laughs, and it comes out right on the verge of downright unstable. This is all just too bloody personal to take anymore, pressed flat over his thigh, skin hitting skin in an endless rhythm that’s getting to him far more than he wants to admit. It’s hard to think someone who truly doesn’t give a shit about him would be taking valuable time out of his evening to punish him like this, in a way that involves all his undivided attention, too. Or someone who doesn’t, on some level, consider himself his father. “You can give it your best shot and sometimes I’m dumb enough to believe it, but Mum played me your exact words, Carl, loud and clear—“
They never did really manage to talk about it, before they had bigger problems scooped into their ice cream dishes. That fucking voicemail, which still echoes in his head whenever he makes the mistake of letting his guard down and falling for Carl’s playing-daddy routine, fussing over whether his jacket’s warm enough for the biting Scottish winters or if he finished his homework, yes, all of it, before heading out. Whenever he tells himself actions speak louder than words, and no matter what he might’ve said when Jasper was approaching absolute peak pissiness, someone who thought he’d be better off without him wouldn’t have beat a thug into bloody ribbons just for running his mouth. I wanted you to know, the problem isn’t with you, darling, that’s not why you’re always bashing your head against a brick wall with him. It’s not that you’re not lovable. It’s that he just can’t love. Leaving him with that delectable food for thought, and a stepdad who got stuck with him like a senior dog he couldn’t quite bring himself to rehome, she’d hung up on him with a smacked kiss into the receiver. He made five separate calls after that from Nan’s that went straight to—
“I know what you bloody well heard.” Carl mutters some choice words under his breath that he’s definitely not allowed to use talking about girls, much less his mum, but he can’t even bring himself to be all that offended on her behalf. “And I also know you’re old enough by now to realize people say shit they don’t mean after they’ve come within an inch of dying and had the world’s messiest divorce, besides, while on the phone with their ex-wife. A divorce where one of the testiest issues was what’s going to happen to a teenager she turned out to have zero fucking interest in looking after.”
Jasper isn’t going to let something he already knew long before this— long before she left, in fact— get to him, even with Carl saying it as though it’s as obvious as reading a thermometer. Absolutely not. “Aren’t you the one always telling me to quit making excuses and take responsibility for my own actions? Because this sounds nothing like that.”
He has got to figure out where and when the right moments are to run his mouth, and that’s not with Carl within very close whacking range. After a quick blitz of swats, though, his hand suddenly stops dead in its tracks, giving Jasper enough time to catch a halting breath. “You’re right,” he says, which are words he thought he’d only hear from him if there was a mushroom cloud hanging over Edinburgh first. “I’m a bitter, washed-up old man carrying around decades of unhealed baggage, according to Rachel, starting with my tragic childhood and ending with lethal amounts of exposure to the absolute worst humanity has to offer—“
“You’re not that old—“
“I’ve felt ancient since the day you tried to explain to me what the hell ‘brat summer’ was supposed to be, and expected me to listen to the deluxe album in the car, too. And then there was a whole separate remix.” Jasper thinks he can be excused for yelping as he starts to take aim at his thighs, considering that he doesn’t even think that’s a fair or legitimate target in the first place. ”But you’re right, it’s no excuse. Has it ever occurred to you that I might’ve been frustrated with myself, the grown man here? That I felt like I was failing you, that you were stuck getting raised during a critical juncture in your development by someone who barely had any business keeping a goldfish alive? Too wrapped up in his own pain and his own bullshit to notice yours?”
Not only is that a reassuring explanation, it also comes dangerously close to making sense. In fact, it’s almost too good to be true. “You’re sure you’re not having me on?” he asks, suspiciously, between a couple of hard sniffs; his nose still tingles after, an even bigger warning sign. He’s not going to let Carl make him cry, regardless of what may or may not have happened when he was fourteen, or how much he feels like he’s having an inferno lit up back there. “Just telling me what you think I want to hear?”
Another breathless, disbelieving laugh. “Exactly when have I ever done that, a day in your life? I’m the one who told you Father Christmas wasn’t real, and that you’d be getting laughed at by your mates soon enough if you didn’t wise up. I don’t lie to you. Not ever.”
He’s right— he can’t remember a single time, even when he came down for his morning bowl of Lucky Charms to hear she’s not coming back, I reckon between sips of morning whisky. Carl won’t let the sentiment linger in the air for longer than a few seconds, though, before he’s back to aiming at the undercurve of his arse, another patently unfair move. “So, now that we’ve gotten all of the glaring emotional issues out of the way, I guess we can get back to raising you.” He’s not all too thrilled by the sound of that, especially when Carl temporarily pauses his assault on his backside to rustle around on the bed for the belt he’d laid down. Oh, shit. “Hell of a lot to discuss, huh?”
“Do we really have to?”
He gets the thing tapping against his arse, like a warning shot, for his trouble. “I told you— you get to be angry, all you want. Hurt, abandoned. The whole spectrum of negative emotion, believe me, I know I’ve more than earned it.” He’s got no real range aiming it over his knee, Jasper suspects this is for dramatic effect more than anything else, but the snap on the descent is still enough to make him hiss, when it lands on already-scorched skin. The vulnerability of the position doesn’t help at all, either, as a couple of tears that he can’t blink away finally fall down his face. “I’m listening, always. But you be angry at me and put all that where it belongs. You don’t self-destruct. You don’t give up on school when you’re months away from finishing and make them blow up my work phone every day, and get drunk and high on the regular, and put yourself at risk to prove some kind of a point about how you don’t need anybody else, least of all me. Or you see where you wind up all—over—again. Flat over my fucking knee.”
It’s been five, six, maybe; he’s lost count as it all turns into an indistinct blur of heat and deep ache, and the flow of his tears gets steadier, leaving a growing damp stain on the comforter. Anybody would cry in his position, especially when for the life of him, Carl just won’t stop talking. “Okay, okay, I get it—“
“Moving in with your mate’s half-brother’s cousin, who’s dealing while on probation for, what was it again, vehicle theft? All because he cut you one hell of a deal on rent, and because you wanted to stick a thumb in my eye the best way you could.” Jasper wants to protest, but he’s hit the nail on the head there, honestly. “You know, I’ve just got to laugh,” he says completely humourlessly, “at the thought of you on the scene if one of those deals went south. If somebody had picked up a knife, or a gun. Just what do you think you would’ve done then, Rambo, hm? Besides died right quick?”
The briefest bit of defiance flares up in him again— an extinction burst, like he’s supposed to be learning about in Psychology and isn’t. “We would’ve gotten out of there, I’m not so soft as you think—“
“Of course I think you’re bloody well— that’s not an insult, Jasper, it’s the truth, I’m actually trained and still managed to get myself shot more than once. You have no idea how unpredictable these situations are, how a fucking cross-breeze can change the trajectory of people’s lives.” Like he wanted the reminder that hits like a blow to the teeth, and now the tears are truly impossible to stop. “You belong on the other side of the line,” and he lays down that expectation with an even firmer smack. “You’ve got no place whatsoever settling down on mine.”
“Dad, I’m sorry,” he says miserably, sucking in a harsh gulp of air and giving an involuntary kick, the last of his self-control starting to slip away from him altogether. If this goes on a single blow longer, it’ll be a sob, next, and he has the feeling that’s coming right down the pike no matter how hard he tries to keep it from happening. He’s always thought of their battles like the unstoppable force and immovable object, locked in an eternal stalemate, but now, that object’s finally shifting wherever Carl wants to move it. “I didn’t think—“
It’s not that he’s never called him that, or thought it more often than he’s said it out loud. A couple times growing up, when he was sick or hurt, too young and too scared to know better. He doesn’t remember his actual dad in anything besides a few snatches of memories, the clearest one being the day he left— it’s always just been Carl, taking him along to the station while he bangs out a pile of reports, serving up powdered donuts for dinner and making him promise not to tell Mum, listening to him prattle on about MF Doom’s latest album and trying not to look as bored as humanly possible. Here, even long after the divorce, still riding his arse. Maybe he really has been kind of a prick lately.
Angus, right when he came in: shit, Jasper’s dad is here, hide the bong! He didn’t have to think twice about it.
If Carl’s startled, put off, hearing it, he does an admirable job of hiding that from him. “You start working with what you’ve got upstairs for once, that’s half the battle right there, I reckon.” The belt snaps down again, more perfunctory than anything this time. He knows he’s figured it out. “You thought what, that I don’t want you around? That you’d be doing me a favor by pissing off into the night, never to be seen again? Believe me, I wouldn’t be bending myself into a pretzel here if you weren’t the only person I’ve got left to give a damn about.”
Him starting to sob at that is downright theatrical— loud, messy ones, too, making it hard to take in enough air to keep from hyperventilating, much less care in the slightest about embarrassing himself anymore. He didn’t know he had anything left in him that could cry like that, when nothing about the events of the past year had managed to touch that frozen, guarded place inside of him. “I’m sorry,” he hiccups into the comforter, snot starting to pool under his face, and wonders if saying that is even going to be enough. Too bad he can’t quite manage to get any other sentences through his brain and out through his mouth. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Carl sighs like this has somehow worn him out too, and rests a hand on his heaving back, dropping the belt onto the mattress once more. Then he’s kind enough to finally replace his pants and joggers— though it triggers an audible hiss from him, he swears he might be more comfortable leaving them off at this point— and haul him upright. “C’mere, love, like I shouldn’t be the one saying it. I’ve got you.” He hasn’t called him that in years, not since he was twelve and broke his leg in two places skateboarding, and Carl had to carry him into A&E— he doesn’t remember where Mum was, if or when she even found out about it, even though he ended up needing surgery to put screws in. Maybe this was the six months she spent in Dubai, or the four in Milan, or—
Jasper trembles on unsteady feet, which is when Carl gets him into his arms and pulls him close enough to his chest to compress his ribcage. It feels like forever since that’s happened, too, but his face instinctively finds the crook of his neck anyway. He tries to take a deep, shuddering breath, gathering himself the best he can, before Carl cups the back of his head and then that’s all shot to hell. “Hey, stop all that,” he says, gentler than he figured he knew how to be with him anymore. “Better out than in.”
There’s a spreading damp spot across his left shoulder by the time his breathing’s gotten marginally less ragged, Carl still rubbing his shoulderblades in a soothing rhythm like he’s ten again, struggling to fall asleep with a bad flu. He really, really hates to admit it, but despite the headache starting to pound in his sinuses and his eyes nearly having swollen shut, he is starting to feel a little better. “You think this might be the last time I have to do this?” Carl finally says, breaking the easy silence between them. “Because hope springs eternal.”
“Well, that’s up to you, not me, I reckon,” Jasper says with his face still pressed into the wool of his jumper, and gets a light pat to the arse for his trouble, like it hasn’t been through more than enough for one night. “I don’t call the shots anymore, remember?”
“I’m glad to see your ability to mouth off remains completely unaffected, after everything.” He cards his hand through his hair, though, actions nowhere near as gruff as his words. Little affectionate touches, another thing he didn’t realize he’d missed until they’d vanished altogether. “Stop coming up with brand new, creative ways to make me stroke out before fifty, and I won’t call that particular one, eh?”
When Jasper gives him a tired nod, too worn out on all fronts to be able to argue with him, he shifts gears abruptly. “You still thinking about what that man said to you, in the ice cream parlour?”
“Yeah,” he mutters, voice watery and weak, but maybe weak isn’t the worst thing to be with him as the guardrail. He hates how rattled he was, still is, the way the words sneak up on him when he’s brushing his teeth or turning up his music to tinnitus-inducing volumes or in the middle of some much-neglected Highers revision. Not even so much imagining it happening, the gory details of the actual acts, as the obvious glee the man took in trying to destroy him mentally— break him. Which makes him feel even more pathetic that he can’t let it go, like he’s letting him win after all. But Carl’s got his own demons nipping at his heels, and he doesn’t sound like he’s judging. He never did. “All the time.”
“You should be.”
“What the fuck— has anybody ever told you that when you’re comforting somebody, you’re supposed to try to make them feel better?”
“I’m not going to tell you that I’d never let something like that happen to you, because I don’t have eyes on the back of my fucking head, no matter what you seem to think. Anything can happen in an instant, and you’re old enough to hear that.” Despite whatever the hell’s coming out of his mouth, which is the opposite of reassuring, the way he draws Jasper in closer, like he’s precious to him, makes him sag even deeper into his arms. “I want you to remember that there’s sick fucking people out there, and unfortunately, you got saddled with a guy whose job it is to keep them off the street— which makes you a target. You need to be careful and not make yourself an even bigger one, and not just because you don’t want to get skelped by your da, Jesus Christ, so I don’t wind up having to identify you at the morgue. You have any idea what keeps going through my head every time you do a runner?”
“Crime scene photos with a lot of blood in them?”
“You’re a lot smarter than half the marks you bring home,” he says grimly, which Jasper wants to take as a compliment. “Don’t ever put me through that again,” he adds with the faintest, thready hint of vulnerability in his own voice. “You’ve given me a really shitty past few days, kid, and you’re not going to even understand how much until you’ve got your own wee brats giving you no end of hell. And believe me when I say I’m looking forward to the day.”
“I won’t,” Jasper says, back to muffled jumper speech, arms thrown around his neck as a handful of lingering tears start leaking again. This really is more than he thinks he’s cried in one stretch since hitting double digits. “I thought I’d never see you again, maybe, after the— and then you got bloody shot— and bloody shot again—“
“Lad, who else was going to get you in the divorce, precisely. Let’s apply an ounce of critical thinking skills to the situation.” In spite of himself, Jasper lets out a watery snort. It sure as fuck wasn’t going to be Mum, and he knew Carl wasn’t really about to dump him at Nan’s, either. “Listen— all right, no, first come here, you’re barely even on your feet anymore.”
“I’m already ‘here’.”
Carl rolls his eyes— he can tell, even without having to see him— and pulls Jasper down to sit on the bed next to him, practically sprawled back into his lap once he’s got an arm tight around him again. He would literally kill himself if anybody from school saw this, but they won’t, so he puts up with it, for Carl’s sake. He seems to need the reassurance right now.
“I said listen up, because I don’t want to have to say this kind of sentimental shite ever again, but you seem to need to keep hearing it— from now on, you just assume it’s a given. Me winding up with you? Isn’t how I got screwed when she left, not even close. You’re the only thing I really wanted to keep.”
He wishes he missed Mum. When the counsellor at school gave him an obligatory check-in, that was all she could bang on about, how it’s okay to be angry, Jasper, and I can’t imagine how you must be feeling right now, Jasper, all that shite they taught her to say like she’s reading from a script. During her latest ‘quick chat’, complete with a mug of Lipton tea that tasted like drainwater: I understand that you might be acting out because of all the big changes you’re going through at home, Jasper. He didn’t know how to explain that after years of it happening in slow motion, her finally pulling the plug on being his mother was a relief. Especially because trying to explain probably would’ve ended in him getting slapped with a detention, instead of a free ticket out of the rest of his classes for the day.
It’s Carl’s loss, real and imagined— the only constant he’s ever really had— that ended up knocking him so much further off-kilter. And they probably could’ve kept an exchange of this kind of sentimental shite going a fair bit longer if it wasn’t for Martin’s face appearing in the cracked doorway, which is the craziest jumpscare he’s gotten in a while. Then, even after seeing what’s obviously going on here, he just pushes the door open anyway. “How’s he doing?”
“Like he could really use some bloody privacy?” He tries to not look too much like he’s been sitting on Carl’s lap like he’s in Year 1, budges over a couple of inches. It’s not the biggest deal in the world for Martin to walk in on— especially after he just tore a strip off of him by himself— but still. A man has to keep, you know, the very last scrap of his dignity alive.
“We try to knock in civilized society, Martin,” Carl drawls, “whatever this is really couldn’t wait?”
“Considering that your shahi paneer is practically ice cold, no.” He’s damn near tapping his foot, too. “I spend all day cooking for you ingrates, trying to get some actual spice and flavor inside your pasty bodies for once, or at least anything that isn’t a Jaffa cake on your way out the door—“
“That sauce came in a bloody can from Tesco, Martin, I don’t know who you think you’re kidding with this martyred housewife routine—“
“So you’ll be coming out for supper, presently, which we’ll be having as a family.” Carl rolls his eyes, but says nothing, which is as good as a declaration of love from him. Martin scrubs a hand over Jasper’s hair like he’d pet a cat— he knows all’s forgiven now. “You going to be all right, fella? You need a pillow or something?”
“He’s fucking fine, Christ alive, I barely tapped him,” Carl says, at the same time as Jasper says, “yes, please” without hesitation. He’s probably got a couple of days left to keep milking this for sympathy, and he plans on making the most of it. Better start laying the groundwork now.
He’ll say it more eventually, maybe. The dad thing. Take it out for another few test runs before he can really commit to it. At the very least, when he sees that bloody mug in the kitchen from now on, it won’t feel like it’s taunting him, and for now, that’ll have to be enough.