hiii this is my first post as an author. i've been listening to nettles ever since it released and i instantly thought of this teehee.
warnings: character death, grief, toxic relationship elements?, mentions of self-destruction, implied suicidal thoughts, medical trauma, mild blood/injuries
--
it was nettle season. the kind that dripped golden light through lace curtains, and left your skin sun-warmed and aching.
jake smelled like honey and rust. like old summers and first loves. like something fleeting.
you were seventeen and full of wanting. and he was there, walking barefoot through the overgrown grass, humming a song you didn’t know the name of. the back of his hand brushed yours and that was enough to make your knees weak.
--
“do you believe in god?” he asked, one afternoon.
you shrugged. “i believe in you.”
he had bruises he never spoke about. calloused palms and quiet eyes. a laugh that cracked down the middle like a broken cassette tape.
“when i go,” he said once, “lay me down where the trees bend low.”
you didn’t cry. not then. not until weeks later when you found his flannel in the laundry and it still smelled like cedar wood and sleep.
--
“will you stay?”
you did. you stayed through the fevers. the vomiting. the nightmares that woke him up screaming.
you kissed his eyelids. you fed him soup. you read to him when his voice disappeared. you did everything love required.
and it still wasn’t enough.
--
the morning jake died, there were gardenias on the tile. white and soft. like forgiveness. like forgetting.
“you smell like nettles,” he whispered before he slipped. “you smell like home.”
“to love me is to suffer me.” he said that. not in a cruel way. in a way that tasted like surrender.
and you? you suffered. you burned. you swallowed the grief whole and it still made a home inside you.
you didn’t move on. that’s not what it was. you just… woke up one day and made tea. you learned to laugh again, even if it cracked in the middle.
you still visit him. you leave letters under the tree.
“the hurt was real,” you wrote once. “so the love was real too.”
he never left. not really.
he’s in the warmth on your skin. in the silence after the song ends. in the scent of gardenias drifting in on a breeze that sounds like him saying your name.
