here’s the first 600 words of a nursey/rans slowburn thing i’m working on
(i don’t know fuck about hockey)
The clock on the tiled wall is ticking steadily closer to the end of Nursey’s shift, but the night feels interminable. From the kitchen he can see through to the small diner, then out the windows, where the city is beginning to wake. His hands are wrinkled and gross from the scalding hot water he’s been using to wash the dishes all night, and he’s tired, and hungry, and he doesn’t remember why he’s doing this. Why it wouldn’t just be easier to say fuck it, and do what his parents want him to. Why he can’t just quit and move back to New York and live for free instead of whatever the fuck he’s doing here, in Boston, in this city that doesn’t belong to him. Or him to it. Whatever.
All the reasons seemed better back when he was just freshly graduated and he saw daylight for more often than a few hours a week.
He turns back to the dishes he’s been stacking. Only an hour to go before he can go home and sleep.
“Hey, kid,” says Mike, Nursey’s favourite cook, a few minutes later, “someone out front for you.”
Nursey frowns but wipes his hands and unties his apron anyway. Gotta be Ransom, on his way home from his shift at the hospital. He’s halfway through his pediatrics and gynecology clinical and sometimes stops by for food.
It’s a slow night, and Kerry the waitress nods at him from where she’s reading Cosmo behind the countertop as he passes by. Sure enough, Ransom is sitting at a booth, his head in his hands and his phone on the scratched linoleum tabletop.
“What’s that?” Nursey asks, pointing to a stain on the chest of Ransom’s student scrubs. Ransom’s head jerks up.
“Huh? Oh. Uh. Just. Babies are messy,” he says. His eyes are bloodshot and there are dark circles under them.
Nursey slides in across from him. “You order anything? You look like shit, bro,” he says.
Ransom just shakes his head and pushes his phone over so Nursey can read it. There’s a text up on the screen, unopened.
Chowder @ SGH 2016 [2 hrs ago] OMG Holster ur gonna LOVE california
“He didn’t -- he didn’t tell me,” Ransom says. He’s folded in on himself, small. “We knew they were. Uh. We knew they were discussing it. But we didn’t know -- hoped Hartford would, maybe, because that’s only a bit further than Providence so he could still, he could still. Live here with me.”
The door jingles and someone comes in, and Nursey watches as Kerry puts her magazine away and goes to greet the new customer.
“Maybe he doesn’t know yet,” Nursey says, but it sounds weak to his ears. “You know Chowder like, obsessively follows the San Jose teams. And the time zones, right. Maybe. Maybe he just doesn’t know.”
Ransom closes his eyes. There are dirty dishes on the table next to them Nursey needs to pick up, and Mike and Nursey like each other, but he can’t spend too much time out front until his shift is over.
“I’m happy for him,” Ransom says. Throat dry, barely more than a whisper. “He will love it. But I never really thought -- I didn’t think.”
“He want anything?” Kerry says to Nursey as she walks by, her pad of paper and pen still out.
“Um. Yeah, a number three with -- over-easy, right, Rans?” Nursey says, as gently as he can manage. Ransom nods and Kerry writes it down silently, then gives the table over, the one with the dishes, a meaningful look before heading to the kitchen.
“What am I gonna do,” Ransom says once she’s gone, eyes still closed tight. He puts his head in his hands and his nails are bitten down to the quick. “What am I gonna do.”
