btw i want to say that the entire tumblr community banding together is what got these changes reversed so i hope u all realise the power of a reblog and start reblogging posts instead of just liking them this is the reblog website so hit that button right now
I plead I beg I die for “Stop holding me like that. Friends don’t hold each other like that.” Jossam? (Also hiiiiii I live just barely and I am lurking. I hope you’re doing well <33)
It had struck him as insult to injury, the whole…‘waiting until the worst time of year to do this’ thing. Just another twist of his parents’ knife, another slight he’d have to waffle over in Alan’s office once everything was said and done. Already he could imagine how that conversation would go, and already it made the back of his eyes ache.
‘And why do you think this was malice on your parents’ part, precisely?’ Alan would ask, fingers steepled and eyes narrowed, the old-wood smell of his office transporting him right on back to the lodge, to the mountain, to the night it had all broken bad.
‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one,’ he’d retort, arms folded to show how closed off he was, cheeks pressed tight to his teeth to prove how closely he was guarding his words, ‘but there’s this saying: Once is a mistake. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.’
Alan would be quiet for a beat, maybe two. Three if he was feeling funny. Then he’d lean forward so his elbows rested on the great, imposing desk between them and say, ‘I’m familiar with the adage…though perhaps not how it applies.’
So he would raise a finger. ‘One. They stopped the search to do this instead.’
‘Would you prefer more of you go missing?’
He would press on, not willing to concede. Another finger would go up. ‘Two. They scheduled it for today. They waited juuust long enough for the snow to melt, but couldn’t make it until the sun came back out, huh? Nah. Nah, nah, nah, we had to do this smack dab in the heart of grey season. Dead grass, dead trees, everything covered in slush, everything fucking dead…’
‘Do you think grieving is easier in summer?’
‘And three…’ Only there he’d pause, just as he was doing now. He’d have to, he’d have no other choice, because all at once he realized he’d walked himself into a corner—in both his imagination and real life. ‘Three,’ he’d try again, too aware of Alan’s gaze bearing down on him, ‘they invited her.’
‘You’d rather they didn’t?’
Josh shut his eyes to try and block the image out. Pointless, obviously, an exercise in futility if ever there was one; still, he could hear footsteps crunching in the grass behind him, and if he didn’t do something about the melodrama running reel-to-reel inside his head, the chances of it spilling out of his mouth would become a very real, very plausible threat. Today had been bad enough, he didn’t need to make it worse.
Sam didn’t say anything as she stood beside the picnic table, not even about the cigarette hanging between his fingers. She just stood there, staring off in the same direction he was, her arms folded to show how closed off she was, her cheeks pressed tight to her teeth to—
He took a drag and let it out slowly, again willing the voice of cinematic bullshit silent in his head. This wasn’t the time. It certainly wasn’t the place.
Like she’d only been waiting for him to show some sign of life, Sam took a deep breath. The kind, he knew from experience, that came before an ‘Are you okay?’ Only, she didn’t say anything afterwards. Not at first. Instead, she motioned for him to scoot over, climbing up onto the tabletop to join him there in all her funeral finery. Her dark shoes, he could see, were splashed with mud. She’d bitten her nails down to the quick, leaving her cuticles bloody and ragged.
He couldn’t bring himself to look her full in the face.
“They’re wrapping up in there, I think,” she said eventually, still staring off across the tiny pond. “Hard to tell, but…seems like it, anyway.”
“Mmm,” he answered, because that was all he trusted himself to say.
She echoed the sound back at him, humming low in her chest before sighing. Her head dropped into her hands, her face hidden by her palms, and only then did he risk glancing over. Her fingers were shaking; her voice was not. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quiet beneath the wind kicking up behind them, and of all the conversations he’d been avoiding today, he had to admit he hadn’t seen this one coming.
So he frowned. And he blinked. And he finally noticed how long the ash of his cigarette had gone in his brooding, flicking it loose before stubbing it out altogether. “For what?” he scoffed, grimacing at the gravely sound of his voice. “You didn’t run them off. Didn’t convince Bob and Linda to wait for the ugliest day of the year to do this, either. From where I’m standing—ah, wait, sitting, sorry—from where I’m sitting, Sammy, you are the last person who owes me anything resembling an apology.”
Her next breath whistled softly through her nose. As he feared she might, she looked up from her hands, scrunching the one corner of her mouth like she always did when she caught him lying. “I’m also the only person you’ve avoided all day, so.” She held his gaze for a beat, then turned back towards the pond, preemptively wiping at her eyes. “Just FYI, you’re not half as slick as you think you are.”
“Oh no?”
Slowly, she shook her head. A few wisps of her hair had come loose from her clip. “Nope. Pretty obvious, actually.”
In his mind, it was too easy to imagine Alan arching his eyebrows, his shoulders shrugging in a silent challenge; a dare. ‘How much are you willing to divulge?’ that move would ask him. ‘How brave are you willing to be today?’
By his measure, he’d already been braver than anyone should have to be. He’d gotten out of bed, he’d gotten dressed, he’d packed the box of memorial programs, he hadn’t swerved his car off a bridge or through a median or into a retaining wall. He was doing pretty damn good in the bravery department, actually, he was setting a new high score.
What was one more thing?
“Well. Shit,” he sniffed, glancing dourly at his cigarette butt before flicking it off into the parking lot. “You probably won’t believe me when I tell you this, but that one’s got nothing to do with the twins. Not the first thing.”
She glanced at him, uncertain at first, then more intently on a double take. “…I don’t…I don’t understand. If it’s not about them, then what…?” Her voice trailed off there, but his own rose up in his head to take its place.
The late-night phone calls, it whispered, the showing up when I need you to. The food you keep sneaking into my freezer—real meat and real cheese—the surprise milkshakes without any lectures. It’s about the sitting together without saying anything, Samantha, the not pressing. It’s about how you know I’m about to snap a full minute before I realize I’m biting my tongue and steer the conversation somewhere else. It’s the comforting hand between my shoulder blades thing, it’s the stepping between me and someone else thing, it’s how you don’t ask if I’ve been crying like a bitch because you know I have been, how you apologize for how red your eyes are, instead. It’s about how easy you’re making this for me, don’t you get that? This shouldn’t be easy. None of this should be fucking easy.
But maybe Alan was right. Maybe he wasn’t feeling brave enough to dig that deep today.
“Me,” he managed to say before he lost his nerve. He nodded, too, reassuring her he meant it. To his surprise, however, his throat locked up before he could say anything else, his eyes prickling with the tears he’d been forcing back since he’d woken up, and he realized nodding was all he could do.
Whether she knew what he meant—what he really meant—or not, Sam wasted no time in proving him right. She gathered him up in her arms like he was the smaller one of them, pulling him to her collarbone so she could tuck him beneath her chin and stroke the hair from his face and hold him steady through the storm working its way out of his heart, and she was so warm, and she was so soft, and even though she’d forgotten her perfume that morning, the remnants on her clothes melted the memory of the funeral home flowers from his aching sinuses, and—
And this was it. This was what he’d been trying to avoid.
It took every ounce of strength he had in him, but he slid out of her grasp. Turned away with his elbows on his knees and his head shaking, shaking, shaking like he could erase all of it. “I-I can’t, Sam,” he stammered through teeth chattering with unspent adrenaline, unspent tears. “Appreciate it, really. I do. I just…can’t.” Josh swallowed hard once, twice, then forced himself to laugh, if only to exorcise the worst of it. “You’ve been…fuck, you’ve been a better friend than I deserve lately, okay? You have. But you can’t do that, all right? You can’t keep doing it.”
For a moment, she reeled beside him, her hands still halfway outstretched, as though expecting him to fall back against her. Into her. It was impossible to say where her surprise ended and her hurt began, only that both were there in the hazel gleam of her eyes, magnified by the tears that had started gathering. “Can’t keep doing what?” she asked. “Josh, what am I doing wrong?”
“You can’t—” he began, but that voice rose up inside his head again, scattering his thoughts into a million sepia-toned vignettes: her hand on his elbow, his chin on her shoulder, her fingers in his hair, all of them rushing past in a kaleidoscope of bad decisions, of brotherly betrayal. “You can’t hold me like that,” he choked out, no longer sure if he was on the verge of crying or laughing until his vision spotted. “Friends don’t hold each other like that, and if you keep doing it, it’s going to be very, very hard to keep telling myself we’re friends. Okay?”
In the silence that followed, he turned to her, searching her face for confusion, or realization, or disgust, or distress, or any of the other things he’d convinced himself he’d find there. His sisters were dead, gone, their empty caskets sitting quietly in the funeral home behind them, and there he was, sitting on a picnic table with their best friend, feeling sorry not for their loss—not today—but for slipping oh-so-insidiously into the gap they’d left behind.
“Okay?” he asked again, his throat growing tighter with each passing second she didn’t answer.
And again she surprised him, wasting no time. Sam shifted beside him, taking to her knees as her hands stilled his trembling jaw and she pressed her lips to his. “Okay,” she agreed, her mouth feather-light against his, “okay.”
He gripped her tight with shaking hands. He kissed her back.
He decided there were some things Alan didn’t need to know.
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