“I’m telling you, Danny. I love the man, but Kevin wouldn’t know a subtle bass line if it slapped him in the face. We need something…”
Julian stopped mid-sentence as he peered over the shoulder of the customer in front of him. After living in San Francisco for six years and down the street from Jukebox Records for three, Julian had gotten to know almost everyone behind the counter at the coffee shop, bar, and store. It was safe to say, then, that meeting most newcomers caught him off-guard. He’d never been the best with socializing, even at one of his favorite record stores in the world.
This kind of confusion felt different than usual – new and exciting and scary at the same time. Julian tilted his head to the side as he locked eyes with the petite blonde barista behind the counter, wracking his brain in an attempt to remember if he’d met her before. He was sure he hadn’t – he’d certainly remember someone so striking.
His eyes traced the gentle curve of her lips and the small dimples that formed in her cheeks when she smiled. She was beautiful – almost arrestingly so – and Julian found himself feebly attempting to push his nerves to the back of his chest when she called him forward. Electricity thrummed through his veins as he met her eyes again. It took more than a moment for Julian to snap out of his daze and return himself to the aroma of warm coffee and fresh pastries. Breathing in deeply, he fiddled with his wallet awkwardly and looked up at the menu.
Julian always got the same thing here: a small cup of tea and occasionally a pastry when Lyra was working. It was clear that today was not the day for his usual order – the nerves bubbling in the pit of his stomach wouldn’t allow it. Julian cleared his throat awkwardly, finally looking back at the small blonde barista in front of him. “Hi…” he began, eying her nametag quickly before speaking again. “… Rory. Could I please have a, um…”
Jesus Christ. Pick something, Evans. Swallowing the lump forming in his throat, Julian looked back to the menu and spat out the first drink listed. “Um, oat… milk… latte…?”
Oat milk latte? You had to pick the thing farthest from tea?
Everything in Julian told him to speak up again – to clarify and ask Rory to make him his normal order. He’d already ordered, though, and he wasn’t about to make an even bigger fool of himself by walking back his already odd request. Taking a deep breath, he offered the girl a small smile and handed her his credit card. “Are you new here? I… haven’t seen you around. I mean… not that I work here. I don’t. I just come here a lot after work. I feel like I would remember if I met you, but maybe we just haven't crossed paths before. You’re really… um…”
His words trailed off and he looked down at the counter uncomfortably. Suddenly the room felt too hot. Julian wasn’t sure if he was sweating or if Rory could sense the heat rising within his cheeks. He couldn’t stop looking at her, studying all the little features of her that drew him in: her small, delicate hands, the shade of lipstick she wore, the way the sun hit her hair and turned it almost golden.
It hit Julian that he’d been standing at the register for what felt like forever. With an awkward shuffle, he stuffed a few dollars in the tip jar and gave Rory another smile. “Thanks, Rory. I like your lipstick, by the way,” he squeaked out, taking his number and making his way to his usual seat by the window. Popping a headphone in, Julian pressed play on his phone and let out a dejected sigh.
I like your lipstick? Who says that to a random girl? Are you some sort of pervert?
TW: continued mentions of domestic violence/abuse/assault
Julian knew the life cycle of a bruise intimately well. He’d nursed his fair share of them from inception to death, an unwitting father to hundreds of thousands who lived within the confines of his own body. There was the initial hit – deep red, burning scarlet, the accompanying taste of metal and the shallow gasping of breath. Then came the aftermath – dark purple, a bloody night sky streaked across the skin, pain to the touch. Eventually it faded, a yellow ring waltzing into frame, replacing the tender flesh with something closer to normalcy. And then things went back to normal, the skin healed, free of its markings, as if nothing had ever really transpired at all.
It had been two weeks since the day he’d met Aurora Graham. Knowing Julian, he’d have that date branded into his memory forever – the day he’d met Rory, the day he’d come crawling out of his self-imposed prison and seen the sunlight, the day he’d violated her trust and her body and her boundaries and had watched her leave with one last twirl of her skirt. Like Rory had mentioned that afternoon, his life had somehow split down the middle, the story of his life now composed entirely of a Before Rory and After Rory section. He’d expected After Rory to be full of bright lights and gentle hugs, skipping heartbeats and sugar cookies. And now After Rory had turned into anything but that utopic paradise.
When they’d first met, things seemed too good to be true. They clicked on another level – something cosmic, something visceral, something real beyond belief. There’d been the brush of fingertips, the earthen scent of an alleyway, smudged lipstick and the imprint of her lips against the lightly freckled skin of his shoulder. It had all happened so fast – too fast for someone like Julian, who usually needed weeks to even scratch the surface of another person.
He should’ve known better. That’s the one thought that kept creeping back into Julian’s mind night after night: You should have known better. He was better than this. He was not the boy who couldn’t control himself around a woman. He was not the boy who pushed her past her comfort zone, the one who acted first and asked for permission later. He was not the boy his female friends all talked about – the one who took things that weren’t his, the one who scarred them and left, the one who left wounds that couldn’t ever be fully healed. That was not, and never had been, him.
And yet it’s who he’d become. Julian had dreaded this reality more than anything, the one where the spectral hands of his dad finally coalesced around his neck and choked the last remaining bits of good out of him. He walked through life as a different person now – Julian Porter, son of Dylan. Julian Porter, temperamental, hard to deal with, brilliantly creative but at a cost. Julian Porter, abuser, assaulter, a machine filled to the brim with rage and anger nestled inside the body of someone who took it out on others.
He looked in the mirror and all he could see was his dad’s jaw line – strong, masculine, the jaw women went weak at the knees for. He saw the protruding veins threading up his arms, the same veins that ran up the canvas of his dad’s wrists, the ones that carried the unmistakable reality of his hellish heritage in his blood. He saw his dad’s nose, the one that was still slightly crooked after having been broken on three separate occasions. He saw his dad, fully and completely, blood splattered across his face, jaw clenched tightly. He had become his worst nightmare, and the transformation had happened at the expense of the girl he cared most about in the world.
It had all started out bright red – Rory scrambling out of his arms like a piece of prey trying to get out of the clutches of a predator. He could still see the heat in her cheeks, the tears clinging to the sides of her jade green eyes. He could hear her mumbling, babbling, throwing reasons into the air as she collected her things and left. Rory had left in such a hurry that Julian had found her baby pink hair tie on the ground next to his bed days later.
He’d tasted the blood again that night, felt the searing heat of the wound he’d somehow scratched into his own skin. He didn’t even have her phone number. That was something that had slapped the reality back into Julian – he’d just assaulted a woman he’d barely known for a few hours, a woman he couldn’t even properly apologize to. Rory hadn’t drawn blood as she removed herself from the prison of his arms, but she may as well have, because the aftermath felt exactly the same.
That night Julian had drawn the curtains and tended to the scarlet pain in his heart the only way he knew how. He thanked God for his roommates, who came back and respected his boundaries when he’d merely shaken his head at them and closed his door. At least some people in this house know how to respect boundaries, you fucking monster, he’d thought to himself. Night fell upon San Francisco, the sky dotted with muted stars. He looked up at the heavens, a swirling, dark purple, and felt it swallow him whole from his spot on the balcony.
He’d gone back in and felt the muted orchid bloom behind his irises as he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to take the past day back. He’d taken down every note that he’d previously taped up to his wall, all the little references his students and family members and friends had given Rory just hours prior. He wanted to apologize to all of them en masse for pulling the wool over their eyes, but it was too late, so he’d put the notes into an old shoebox and shoved them into the back of his closet, right past the black shirt Rory had almost worn to dinner.
The tiger lilies died slowly, agonizingly, their bright orange petals begging for attention that Julian just didn’t have anymore. He’d spent the next few days after that in a mulberry haze, red and purple and all the colors in between, healing as best as he could from the pain he’d inflicted on himself. He went to work, put more notes into the shoebox, let Belle tug along at the leash on walks, her dark, watery eyes looking into his as if saying, “Please step outside, dad. Please stop punishing yourself.”
He finally picked up his guitar a week after Rory had left. The songs had come to him in a flash, dark plum fading into something softer, more tender, a light lilac that only time could bring. Julian had heard the piano keys in his mind one morning and had ignored them, forcing the songs out onto the strings of his guitar instead. Piano was her instrument. He didn’t deserve the ivory anymore, not when he’d almost certainly taint it with splotches of red and black, the same way he’d tainted her. And so the music was scribbled onto lined sheets through an incongruous medium, one that sounded just slightly off for the subject matter. Over the last two weeks, Julian had learned to accept that everything from now on would feel slightly off, now that Rory was gone from his life.
Finally, after a week and a half, signs of life began to emerge from the cocoon Julian had wrapped himself in. He’d started throwing himself into his work, coming up with extra songs to teach the kids about subtraction, their subject of the week. He couldn’t go to Jukebox anymore, so songwriting was the next best thing, and the subject matter felt fitting, anyway. A piece of him was missing now, permanently gone, and he had to live with the guilt of that truth for the rest of his life.
It was time now for him to repent, to speak clearly about his sins and apologize as best as he could. Julian found himself looking for forgiveness everywhere he could – in the few churches he’d stepped into, in the major chords he strummed, in the notes he scribbled out and eventually threw in the trash because they’d never quite express just how sorry he was. He’d mulled the apology over in his mind, turning the words around in his consciousness over and over again, searching for the right thing to tell Rory, but nothing ever did his feelings justice.
After days upon days of serving penance for a crime everyone universally agreed he hadn’t committed, Julian had settled on the package he’d send to Rory. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but he knew he had to do something, anything, to let her know he understood her pain and would do anything to make things up to her. The project had taken the entire weekend, and it still didn’t feel right in his hands, even as he walked it to Jukebox and handed it to Finn, right in the alleyway where he’d kissed Rory a fortnight ago.
Over the weekend, Julian had learned why Zoe paid the employees at Lush $7.95 for a perfectly-made bath bomb. He’d always had a respect for people who made things by hand, but this weekend had imbued in him an undying gratitude for bath bomb creators. He’d probably inhaled more citric acid and cornstarch than he cared to admit, but after hours of tampering with the formula, Julian had three only slightly misshapen vanilla sugar bath bombs to add to his gift basket.
The next part of the gift had come much more easily to him. Chinese food had never been his forte, but Julian had promised himself he’d perfect the recipe for orange chicken and chow mein even if it killed him. Poor Danny, Kevin, and Zoe had eaten at least five different iterations of the recipe, especially since he couldn’t eat the chicken, and he’d made a mental note to make them their favorite foods as thanks for acting as lab rats. Finally, after much trial and error, he’d settled on the perfect recipes. He’d even went and gotten a fancy glass container to deliver the food in instead of his usual, spaghetti sauce splattered Tupperware. It all had to be perfect, or as close to perfect as it possibly could be.
The last part was the easiest of them all. Julian had always frequented the floral shop a few blocks down from his apartment, run by a tiny, old Chinese woman who told the white people of San Francisco that her name was Chloe when her Chinese name was Mei. He’d been paying Mei a visit every month for the past six years, to the point where she’d begun to add a few tiger lilies into his bouquet free of charge. It was an expensive habit to have, but tiger lilies had always reminded him of his mom, and he liked supporting local businesses. Occasionally he’d get other plants and flowers from her – succulents for Finn, roses for Zoe, sunflowers for Danny’s sister, Sarah.
They were good friends now, which meant Mei had immediately been able to pinpoint that something was wrong with Julian when he’d walked in. “No tiger lilies today, Xiao Liwu?” she’d asked, a paper-thin frown settling into her wrinkled skin. She’d given him the nickname – Little Gift in Chinese – after Julian had shown her a picture of the baby panda, Xiao Liwu, that he’d seen at the San Diego Zoo long ago. “You are a little gift to everyone, Julian. Don’t stop being who you are,” she had told him after sticking a free tiger lily in his bouquet all those years ago.
“No tiger lilies today, Mei,” he’d said, the dejection palpable in his tone. Julian wanted to ask her to give the nickname to someone else, someone better, someone who actually was a gift to the people around them. Someone like Rory. But he swallowed his doubts and gave her a hilariously simple run down of what he needed the lush bouquet of baby pink and white peonies for: “I really hurt someone and I need to make it up to them before I hurt them more.” Mei had smiled and given him the flowers free of charge, leaving him with a simple statement: “You couldn’t hurt a fly, Xiao Liwu, even if it flew onto your flowers and started eating them.”
The final touch, the warped, sharp-edged piece de resistance that struck him to his core, was the police report Julian had printed and filled out. Filling out his details came almost too naturally to him – cosmetically the report looked slightly different from Santa Barbara’s version of it, but the innards were all the same, and it took him a little less than a minute to get all his information down. This time, though, he’d put his information in a different set of boxes – the ones labeled “description of suspect”. Brown hair, brown eyes, crooked nose, the spitting image of Santa Barbara’s own Dylan Porter.
And so he’d done it – he’d met Finn in the alleyway and handed him the small wicker basket, complete with bath bombs, pristinely packaged Chinese food, peony bouquet, and the stupid police report Kevin had told him to leave out. He’d left Rory a tiny note, written in his cleanest handwriting, the paper still crumpled slightly at the edges from the tears he hadn’t been able to contain. “Hi, Rory. I’m so sorry. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for hurting you. I promise I’ll be better in the future with the boundaries of other people, for you. I never, ever meant to hurt you, and I am infinitely sorry that I did. You really are something special. Please don’t ever stop smiling. X Julian.”
He knew Finn would get the gift to Rory. In fact, he’d probably found her right after going back to the café – this was the time she’d taken her lunch break two weeks ago, and Julian could only hope she’d be craving Chinese food the same way she had that day, if he hadn’t ruined the idea of it for her entirely. It broke his heart knowing he’d inadvertently created a new trigger for someone – that someone wouldn’t be able to enjoy their favorite food or wear their plaid skirt or see tiger lilies the same way anymore. But a part of him had accepted who he’d become. He felt a weight lift off his shoulders as he handed the gift over and led Belle back onto the sidewalk, guitar slung around his shoulders, dog treats and songwriting notebook in tow.
It was bright out, and for the first time in weeks, Julian welcomed the warmth that illuminated the path before him. The sunshine surrounded him, pale golden like the bruise that had finally started to heal, even if it was still tender to the touch. Today was a new day – a better day, he’d already decided. Perhaps he’d pick up a few more shifts at the animal shelter later today, or he’d make another lasagna to take to the soup kitchen. His momentum was trending upward, and he knew he needed to take advantage of it.
“Excited for play time, pumpkin?” Julian asked Belle, a genuine smile spreading onto his features as Belle looked up at him and woofed. They walked a few minutes past the record store to one of the parks less frequented by tourists and locals alike. It was smaller than the other parks in the area, less decorated and a bit unassuming, but Belle had always loved it more than any of the others. Perhaps she knew her dad needed the solitude.
He found a spot to himself easily and offered a few passersby a half-smile as he fished Belle’s favorite ball out of his backpack. “You ready, muffin? Go get it!” Julian exclaimed, excitement palpable in his voice as he set his things down and wiggled the ball in front of her eyes. Watching the joy creep into Belle always lifted his spirits, and he couldn’t help but beam brightly as he tossed the ball and watched her chase after it at lightning speed. The slightly portly pit bull came trotting back to him with the ball, excitement lighting up her entire face. “Good job, monkey. I’m so proud of you. I love you so much.”
