CW: Trauma survivor, referenced noncon and assault, heavy internalized victim-blaming and self-loathing/anti-asexuality (Chris has serious issues from his conditioning around this)
(references events from this small series)
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
When Chris picks up his phone, it's not at all the message from Laken he expected to see. Not the kind of thing they've ever sent before.
He has to read it two times, then three. The letters swim and shake along with a dull pounding inside his head, but no matter how he tries to make them into other words - tell himself he must have misunderstood, must be missing something - they come back together the same in the end.
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
Each letter is as crisp and clean as a sterilized blade between each rib, one by one by one by one.
The words are a body blow. They're a hundred blows, beating him into a barely recognizable shattered shell of himself. It wasn't supposed to happen this way - it's been a bad few days, yeah, a bad week really, but until yesterday's fight it had never occurred to him that Laken might give up on him.
The fight was his fault, anyway.
He meant to apologize last night, but then Nova had come into his room, and he'd lost the rest of the night to lying next to Jake, trying to remember how to stop living inside his head again, how to stop being still.
He'd woke up this morning with his stomach doing butterfly flips inside him, nervous, but he'd really wanted to say he was sorry, for the fight, for all the weirdness lately. He'd wanted to apologize for being difficult.
Instead... he'd woken up to find a missed text from the night before, sent after he'd shoved Nova away but before he could stand to look at anything again.
I think you should spend time apart, not with me.
There it sits.
He hasn't unlocked his phone yet. Instead, he keeps tapping the button to light up the screen, looking at the message preview that has all he needs to see. Lets it go dark again. As if one of these times he'll click and it'll say something else.
But it doesn't,
It just says the same damn thing.
I think you should spend time apart.
Not with me.
He's still staring at it when another one comes in. He feels the soft pulse of his phone in his hand, and the screen lights on its own.
LAKEN - NOW Did you see my message?
He thinks maybe Kauri had it easier when he was the age Chris is now. Back when Kauri carried on entire conversations in emoji form, letting the nuance and ambiguity take over, the recipient working through the meaning on their own. With this, each letter is merciless, each word is unmistakable. He can’t misunderstand it.
Can he?
He opens the phone with shaking fingers, types back yes, presses send, and turns his phone off.
Then he throws it at the wall.
He’s grateful for the heavy plastic case that makes it bounce off and drop to the floor without breaking. There's a strip on the back, textured and a soft purple, gray, white, and black. He rubs his fingers over it sometimes in class to keep himself from rocking and being distracting.
Now he just... stares at it.
Laken bought that for him. They bought the shirt he's wearing right now-
He yanks it off his head before he can think, balls up the soft fabric and throws it as well. It just sort of drifts pointlessly to the floor, a single eyeball from the print of a band he likes staring back at him.
Laken has ranted before about people who break up by text message, and Chris has to breathe through a physical ache in his chest that tightens every muscle at how awful he must be that they're not doing this face to face. How awful, how used-up, how shredded apart, how fucking pretty he is.
After all, he and Laken have been together for more than a year, and he still held perfectly still for Nova to touch him before he remembered how to move. After all, he’s a grown man who still cried and fell apart when Jake was hurt. After all, after all, after all...
He scrambles across the floor for his phone again, turns it back on. Part of him hopes he’ll see a new text saying they take it back, they didn’t mean it. Or just asking him to apologize for what he’d said that night before, for how he’d thrown their confusion over his reaction to something back at them, echoing out the way Kauri fights sometimes, talking about himself the way he thinks everyone else might be thinking about him, so he says the insult first and no one else gets to surprise him with it.
But there’s nothing new.
He manages to open the texts again, barely, and breathes in gasps, nearly pants, as he types out, you don’t want me at your place?
Not right now.
Is it because of what I can’t do?
It takes them a minute to answer. Every single second ticks by with a slowness Chris hasn’t felt since his days in the cold white room, tied down to stillness, forced to endure every minute that passed in perfect silence or to the soundtrack of his own tears and pleading for it to stop.
When they do respond, it’s just, it’s because of what you won’t do.
His breath catches in his throat. The ache in his head starts to pound harder, and he has to close his eyes against a sharp stab behind them.
What he won’t do.
They’ve never cared before. How-... how could they suddenly care now? The fight had only a little bit been about that, it’d really been about something else. About his nightmares, how he’s not sleeping, not seeing his friends, skipping therapy. It hadn’t even been about... that. About what Chris can do and what he can’t, in bed.
But that was the thing - the fight had started when Chris had flinched back from Laken’s touch to his back, and snapped at them, and accused them of wanting too much, and...
And now this.
It’s like they knew about Nova. Knew that he could be good just fine - better than fine, Handler Petrus said he was one of the best he’d ever worked with once - he just... wouldn’t. Won’t. Doesn’t want to. Never wanted to.
Can’t do it without tearing himself to pieces all over again.
It was always a scream inside his mind, but should he have pushed it down and tried harder to be more like everyone else? Is he losing Laken because of it? Did Nova pick up on something Chris himself doesn’t know?
Should he have... tried?
Even if it hurt?
He drops the phone again, then kicks it viciously under his bed, listening to the scrape of it sliding across the floor, the thump as it hits the wall. He hears it vibrate again, but this time he doesn’t care what Laken has to say.
They’ve said enough.
He understands.
Part of him expected this eventually.
He leaves the room, doesn’t bother to pull on his compression shirt, even. He lets his skin prickle bare and exposed to the air. He accepts the discomfort, the uneasy feeling of being too seen, too felt.
The house is quiet, this early.
He makes himself toast with butter, wincing at the scrape of the knife against the crisp bread, the sound boring into his ears. But eventually it’s done, and he slumps into a chair at the kitchen table, willing himself to cry. Somehow, the tears just... don’t happen.
He can hear Jake snoring softly from the living room. He’d been up with Chris until nearly 4 am, then Chris was awake again at 6:30, looking at that text, looking over and over and over again. Two hours of sleep leave him weirdly euphoric alongside his despair. Like he’s floating in some nightmare place that isn’t awake and isn’t sleeping, either.
He’s probably slept nine hours in three days at this point. He keeps seeing Jake with a knife sticking out of him every time he closes his eyes. Jake, screaming as Antoni pushed cloth into his wound to stop up the bleeding. Jake with a bullet wound, sitting up against the wall, staring at him with wide eyes whispering, It’s okay, Tristan, I love you, it’s okay as he dies.
He can’t sleep. He can’t leave for long. He can’t breathe. He can’t think.
Him being what he is, it’s the reason Jake is hurt. If he hadn’t been his brother, he wouldn’t have decided to run a house for Romantics, and he wouldn’t have ended up dealing with all the dangerous bits about them.
Jake said it himself, didn’t he? It’s a mistake, running a house for Romantics. Not his best idea. A mistake.
Chris is a mistake.
Him being weak, and cowardly... it’s hurting Jake, making his life harder.
He makes everyone’s life harder.
There’s a soft sound of footsteps behind him, and he turns to find Nova in the doorway, staring back. She’s in a sleeveless gray dress and has her long dark hair pulled back from her temples, spilling in a waterfall down her back. Her eyes are dark and fathomless, and she gives him a faint, slight smile.
She had smiled like that with one hand down his pants.
Chris turns around, too fast, his head spinning a little, and hunches over his toast. “Good... good, um, good morning,” He mumbles.
She clears her throat. “Morning. Chris, about-... about last night...”
“Don’t, um, don’t-... don’t don’t don’t worry about it.” He takes a breath. He doesn’t want his toast any longer.
“I’m sorry,” She says, simply. “I spoke to Sarita about it, and... and she said this happens with us, and I should apologize, but, um. So I am. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-... I thought I was helping.”
“I... know you did.” His words are slowing down. Chris can’t hold on to his thoughts, they want to drift away somewhere else, somewhere safer. Somewhere darker.
“When I was with-... with my Miss, she would always say, if you are sad the best way to fix it is to make your body forget that feeling, replace it with something else. And that was what we replaced my sadness with. So, you were sad and upset, and I thought I could fix it that way.” She pauses, flushing a little, looking down and to the side as she moves with effortless grace to get a glass and fill it with water, take a small sip.
“Kauri used to... to do that,” Chris says after a pause, thinking about it. Kauri, who would show up in the small hours of the morning reeking of liquor and someone else’s cologne, or just didn’t show up at all. Kauri, who would laugh instead of crying, and laugh with someone’s arms around him, a guy whose name he didn’t know.
Kauri, who ran and ran and ran and can do things and be things that Chris can’t.
Or... won’t.
What if he’s been hurting Laken this whole time and didn’t know it, because he was already hurt himself?
His foot starts to tap tap tap on the floor until he stops it.
“Did he? Did it-... work for him?” Nova asks it with genuine curiosity, and her eyes are so pretty. He looks up at her, and then down again, pushing the plate of toast away from himself.
“I don’t know,” Chris whispers. “I, I don’t know. He’s happy now, but...”
“Was he happy then?”
“No. But, but, but... maybe we aren’t supposed to be. At least... not with, with anyone... who isn’t like us.”
“Jake isn’t like us,” Nova points out. Her presence in the room feels heavy, like a weight pushing down on him. But what does it matter? He’s not with Laken anymore, anyway. If he wanted to, he could stand right up and kiss Nova right now, press her back into the counter, and learn what it’s like to be the one doing things and not just having them done to him.
But his body doesn’t stir at the thought. It never has.
“He is,” Chris answers. “A, a little bit. I’m, I’m, I’m sorry, too, Nova. Sorry that I-I can’t.”
“No, I know. You have a partner, and I shouldn’t have-”
“I don’t have... I, I, I I don’t have a partner anymore.” Chris stands up, leaving her there with his plate of untouched toast. The sky outside is bright as the sun rises, as if mocking the way he feels like a stormcloud inside.
Nova watches him leave, and whispers to herself, “No partner?”
Chris goes outside, pulling a sweatshirt that hangs on the coatrack on over his head to protect his skin, curling up on the porch swing and watching cars pulling out of driveways as the neighborhood starts to head to work in ones and twos.
He doesn’t cry.
He sits very, very still, and he is silent.
Upstairs, under the bed, his phone vibrates, again and again, unnoticed.
Just go talk to Nat, Chris.
That’s all I said.
Just go see Nat and get a night or three away from the house.
Being there all the time is overwhelming you.
Are you even looking at these?
Chris you can’t just ignore me every time I say something you don’t like
Chris answer me
...
...
Oh shit, Chris, my phone autocorrected earlier and I didn’t notice
I meant “some time at Nat’s”, not apart
Chris?
Are you seeing my messages?
Baby?
Chris, please check your phone and answer me.
Please.
A story full of wisdom and with examples to elaborate that people create misunderstanding, misconceptions just due to the lack of communication difference.
A story full of wisdom and with examples to elaborate that people create misunderstanding, misconceptions just due to the lack of communication difference.
