Chapter 6
- seademons
- Jul 9, 2024
- 14 min read
About... Hwan
I guess I want you more than I thought I did
Now that I know that part of you's at home with him
-- Glass Animals, Helium
That evening, he woke up to a handful of messages from Justin and Hwan. It was only when he reached for his phone that he remembered what he’d done yesterday, as a dull ache traveled all across his hand, sharper when he moved his thumb. Ugh, he was so stupid. In the dark, he couldn’t see how it looked, but it probably wasn’t good. It couldn’t be. Disinterested to find out, he tapped on Justin’s name first.
The first thing that came to mind was what he’d told her earlier, Justin’s feelings for Emily. His blood promptly cooled. Still, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret that. He stood fully by what he’d done.
Nothing’s going on. I don’t know why she doesn’t want to see you anymore but maybe it’s better that way.
Justin’s reply was almost instantaneous.
Oh.
I didn’t know that’s what it was.
I don’t know what it is. You should talk to her instead.
Part of him really wanted to invite Justin to Streisand’s tomorrow, so he and Jessie could finally break up, but as soon as he considered disclosing how Ryan didn’t want to see him, he changed his mind. If he said that, Justin would immediately take it to Emily, who’d know where he’d gotten that information. She’d come straight back to Theodore and she’d be pissed. Did he want to piss her off and push her even closer to Ryan, or did he want to try and win her back? Could he even do it? It’d be one hell of a challenge to undertake.
He’d sleep on it. For now, it was better not to poke the bear, so that was where the conversation ended. Next, he tapped on Hwan’s name.
Your boyfriend paid my dad’s store a visit today. He didn’t break anything. I guess I left the back open cause when I turned around he was just there. Not in the store, but in the back with me.
He asked about last night. You already know what he wanted to know. I told him we talked about relationships and that was it. I don’t know if he’ll bring that up with you but I wanted you to know.
His eyebrows bounced. On the one hand, it wasn’t very surprising that Laith cared to know if he’d been the topic of discussion, but on the other, Theodore didn’t think he would’ve approached Hwan about it. Why hadn’t he come to him instead?
Did you guys talk about anything else?
Not really. He had his bat over a shoulder so I guess he was on the clock. It wasn’t a pleasant talk and he didn’t stay for more.
Hm. With a scowl on his forehead, he locked the screen and left his bed.
He really hoped Laith wouldn’t want to talk about this. Their relationship was already rocky; they didn’t need another argument to make things worse. It’d been made clear, time and time again, that Laith didn’t like him keeping in touch with Hwan, but in his defense, they hadn’t spoken about Laith at all. If anything, last night had been about him and his sheltered little life. Not everything was about Laith.
Laith’s voice banged into the back of his mind, that he’d end up choosing a side consciously or not—ice ran down his veins. If he split his time perfectly in half, he wouldn’t have to choose. Obviously, he wanted to choose Laith, but he couldn’t bring himself to choose someone who wouldn’t choose him back. What upset him the most was that Hwan wouldn’t choose him either. The abyss in the pit of his stomach swallowed him. A lump grew in his throat, making his eyes burn.
***
A fist knocked on Laith’s door, the hand Theodore had bitten earlier. It didn’t look nearly as bad as he thought it would; it ached when he moved his fingers, sure, but it didn’t look like it’d been bitten. If someone gave it a passing glance, a human bite wouldn’t be the first thing on their mind. There wasn’t even a bite mark, just a small, easily concealed bruise. He didn’t even think Laith would notice it. The ache was something to focus on while he waited, squeezing his hand in his kangaroo pocket.
It usually only took a couple of minutes for Laith to get the door, so as time passed and nothing happened, Theodore frowned. Maybe Laith hadn’t heard it. He knocked again, harder this time. All the way down the hall, a couple argued loudly, voices bouncing off the walls, words he couldn’t make out. They wouldn’t get like that, would they? Laith didn’t like arguing with him, so chances were low. He’d noticed that a few times before, Laith’s attempts to end arguments with him, disinclined to take them too far. It must be one of his ways to keep this alive despite, well… everything.
Heavy footsteps trailed up the hallway, growing louder. When he turned around, he saw Laith walking over with a white bottle in a hand and keys in the other. Of course. As soon as their eyes met, Theodore dropped his gaze and stepped aside—he wasn’t ready for this conversation.
“Hey,” Laith greeted.
“Hey.”
He kept his eyes down. His body naturally leaned against the opposite wall, hands stuffed deep in his pocket. Laith’s boots were black on faded red carpet, stepping unevenly up to the door. They wrapped tightly around the ankles, laces in a knot over the shin. He had his black jeans on tonight, disappearing into his boots. Once a click sounded, he pushed the door open and walked in. Theodore followed.
Still with his gaze downcast, he marched straight across the room to Laith’s bed. On the way, he heard the bottom of the bottle scrape over a surface, probably as Laith put it on the round table, and the door clicking shut. His throat closed around a lump. In silence, he took a seat on the bed.
“What’s going on?” Laith asked. His footsteps were too heavy for the carpet to successfully muffle them. Theodore pictured him walking back to the door to slip his jacket off and hang it.
“Just say what you have to say,” Theodore blurted out. “I don’t want this to take long.”
Laith’s footsteps approached slowly. A moment later, they stopped. He only had to raise his eyes an inch off the floor to see Laith’s boots about six feet away, near the bathroom door. “I’m sorry for going to him; I should’ve come to you. It was a split-second decision I made on the way back. When his station came up, I just jumped out of the train. I don’t know. I was afraid you were talking about me.”
“We weren’t.”
“I know.”
His jaw set. While he really wanted to give Laith his thoughts on all of this, he also didn’t want to start another fight. His heart burned, but only for a moment—the flames followed it down the chasm. The lump hurt.
“Is this just how it’s gonna be?” That question left him absently. Without time or the necessary mental capacity to refine his words, he just spoke them, blind in a maze. “Going from you to him wishing I didn’t have to, wishing someone would come to me for a change, that they’d pick me out in a crowd and say, I chose you for you.” A shaky breath filled his lungs. “I don’t want this.”
Those last four words left him thoughtlessly, the shape of a feeling tumbling out of his mouth. A movement in the corner of his eye focused his attention back on Laith’s boots, which only took one step forward.
“Theo.” Laith’s voice was small and soft, prompting their eyes to meet. He stood only a few feet from the bed with a slight scowl between his eyebrows, drawn out of concern. A hand hovered in the space between them in an attempt to keep Theodore calm. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want you. I’m yours—what else do you want?”
His eyebrows quirked, lump cutting into his throat. Laith slowly trembled underwater. “I guess…” His shoulders bounced. For some reason, that just made him feel absolutely pathetic. “I want something real, I guess.”
“This is real.”
He shook his head, glancing off. “I’m sorry.” A hand came up to wipe his eyes. Unfortunately, it couldn’t reach inside to try and fix that too, close the gap, stitch the abyss back together. He felt like a fucking idiot. “Of course it’s real, of course it’s real, I just—I didn’t think it’d feel this way. I didn’t know, I guess—I thought it’d feel a certain way, but how could I know? Movies aren’t real; we make sacrifices and we make it work. It’s work and work. It’s…” His shoulders raised with a breath, eyes finding Laith again—he was fine. The lump cut through his throat and choked him, but he was fine. He had everything he’d ever wanted, even if it didn’t feel that way—he had to stop acting crazy. A sigh relaxed his shoulders, despite how quickly his heart raced, lying in a bed of nails.
“I love you.” He got up immediately after saying that, walked up to Laith and closed the distance between them with a kiss. It was a sudden move, born from self-preservation; if he gave Laith even a single moment to say those words back, he would’ve had to deal with the unavoidable truth of not hearing them. The silence would’ve been deafening. It would’ve absolutely destroyed him.
When they parted, he took Laith’s arm and tugged on it. “Take me somewhere fun tonight.”
Laith didn’t budge, planted firmly before him. Instead of humoring him, Laith touched his jaw, pinching his chin between a thumb and forefinger. Green eyes bounced back and forth, trying to read him under a scowl. Three inches from Laith’s face, he held a breath. “Why are you unhappy?” Laith whispered. Despite the alcohol content in his bloodstream, he sounded incredibly sober.
“I’m not,” Theodore lied.
“What do you want me to do? What do you need from me?”
He could lie again and fabricate something meaningless just to get out of this, but the candor of this moment, in the quiet of Laith’s voice, unwilling to take his bullshit compelled him to drop the act. The depth of Laith’s eyes drew him in, warm with concern, sharp with criticism, a shade of green that was as intoxicating as it was addictive. Unable to handle it, Theodore dropped the stare, but still allowed himself to bask in Laith’s undivided attention.
“Say it back,” he whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Is it me?”
“No.” The fingers on his jaw squeezed it. “But I do,” Laith added, practically choking. “I do.”
“What?”
That word barely made it out before Laith kissed it right off his lips, holding him in place. He knew what Laith had meant; his question had only been an attempt to make him say it. Still, the confession doubled his heart in size, and somehow, made this the most fulfilled he’d ever felt. Nothing had been accomplished, yet deep in his bones, he believed that it had. A hand clasped the back of Laith’s neck to keep him close for a second longer. Breathing in deep, he let Laith part from him.
“You’re mine too—I promise.”
Just like that, his heart stopped and his entire body froze. That comment wrapped two hands around his neck and strangled it, pushing him away from Laith. It was an elegant disentanglement; his feet stumbled backwards as his hand slid from Laith’s neck down his chest and pushed. He turned around to cover his mouth, bottom lip trembling. “Don’t say that.” Laith’s room slipped away from him, a mess of shapeless colors drowning in the dark. “Don’t say it if you’re not gonna mean it. It’s cruel. You’re…”
“Of course I mean it.”
“No!” he practically shouted. It ended up sounding far more harrowing than intended, broken like a sob. “Please, don’t—don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to me.”
“Theo—”
“Don’t say it!” He touched the wall with both hands, leaning on it for support. His throat pulled in gasps of air, one after the other, in an attempt to save himself from drowning. Unfortunately, he already lay at the bottom of the ocean. The only thing in his lungs was sand. “Don’t tell me I’m yours if you’re not gonna bring me home and introduce me to your family,” he choked out. “Don’t say that if you’re not ready to commit to me. Don’t play around with this, please.” The words that left him were laborious, caught between sobs, sharp in his mouth. He panted. “You’re not gonna do any of that,” he added. “So don’t. Just… don’t.”
“I don’t speak to my parents anymore.” Laith’s voice was small, close behind. “But I’m willing to speak to yours.”
His eyes widened. Speechless, he turned to stare at Laith.
“I’ll be your plus one when you come out. I’ll spend Christmas with you, cook for you and take you out. I always knew I would, but…” Laith trailed off. His eyes dropped to the vastness of his thoughts, seeming to forgo that train of thought entirely—his mind was on something else. Theodore could read the pensiveness there, the disquiet like words surfacing on Laith’s skin. He could almost even read his thoughts, stuck on last night, unable to move on from it—Hwan’s name hung off the tip of his tongue. It went with discontent as well as cigarettes went with beer, a classic combination.
“I didn’t like that you went to him,” Laith confessed. “I know you did it because something was missing and I don’t blame you for that, but I didn’t… like it. Even now, thinking about it just—” A hand came up to gesticulate in front of Laith’s chest, then closed into a fist. “I don’t want you going to him; I want you to come to me. I want you to be with me. So I’ll bite the bullet and fucking do it.” Laith breathed in. “I’ll date you. I’ll commit to you and you’ll commit to me. Tae-hwan is a friend you don’t sleep with anymore.”
Theodore’s hand slowly slid from the wall. “Oh my god, you’re jealous. You’re doing it out of jealousy.”
“We were headed there anyway; it would’ve happened regardless. Does it matter if it’s sooner rather than later? My feelings for you haven’t changed; they’re just as real now as they were before. Do you really care why I’m doing it?”
“I’ve been sleeping with him for two weeks. Why is that only a problem now?”
“Have you?”
They held the stare.
“Yeah,” Theodore answered. “You knew that.”
“I thought—I thought it’d only been twice.”
He swallowed thick, unable to comment on that. Neither comment was really wrong; he had been seeing Hwan and he’d only slept with him twice. Well, fooled around was a more appropriate term, considering last night. Whatever Hwan had told Laith to give him such an impression, Theodore wouldn’t disprove.
“There’s your answer, then,” Laith added. “I obviously didn’t fucking know.” He looked extremely upset; his jaw was clenched, his shoulders were tense and his eyebrows were drawn into a hard scowl. A hand ran through his hair as his feet shuffled, visibly uncomfortable.
“It was only twice,” Theodore clarified, “but I have been seeing him. Not as much lately, but last week—yeah.”
“Last night…” Laith motioned vaguely. “Right?”
“Right. Last night, yeah.”
“And this week?”
“No, it was just last night. I spent the rest of the week with you.”
Laith nodded, glancing off into his own thoughts.
“What about you?” That question left him on an impulse, heart skipping a beat. The part of him that wanted to hear it was stronger than the part of him that didn’t want to feel the pain.
Laith’s jaw clenched. “Tonight. Uh, just now.”
A slow nod moved Theodore’s head up and down, stupid and pathetic. Of course. God, of course. A breath caught in his throat. He shouldn’t have asked. Deep inside, he’d already known the answer; he really didn’t need to hear it. He didn’t need to jump at every opportunity to get hurt, yet here he kept finding himself, always coaxing out words as sharp as razors hoping they’d break through skin. He was sick. Why did he want everyone to hurt him so badly? At this point, it was almost like he craved it.
“It was just—that was the only time since… the farm,” Laith clarified.
“Okay.”
That left him without a thought behind it. Okay, he wasn’t really listening, but okay, wait—that meant something. Laith had been absolutely free to sleep with anyone he’d wanted this entire time, but had only done it in retaliation to Theodore’s actions, once. That wasn’t bad. No, it wasn’t bad at all. Breath slowly came back to him, filling his lungs. Okay, he meant more than he thought he did. If Laith could go an entire week without needing anyone else…
He refused to humor that thought or even finish it.
“You can still see your friend,” Laith explained. “I won’t stop you from doing that. Just… you know.”
“I know.” He was barely even here, replying on auto pilot. The rational part of him knew he had to quit going crazy and start paying attention, though. He owed Laith that much. He slowly came back to. The depths of his mind were starting to terrify him, anyway. “That’s okay,” he added, actually present now. “I only went to him because—well, like you said, I was missing something.”
“Did you find it?”
“In him?”
Laith nodded.
His lips parted, hesitating. He almost didn’t want to say it. “Yeah, I did.” Candor felt foreign on his tongue, a strange entity that didn’t belong to him or in him. When had sincerity stopped being part of him? It burned. “But it wasn’t mine,” he quickly explained. “What I want belongs to his boyfriend.”
Laith’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Right. What he told me today—I hope I can give you that.”
“Can you?”
“I—” Laith faltered. “Yeah, I can. I have to.”
He nodded, even though part of him doubted Laith could actually do it. He’d spent it all on the Serpent.
“So,” Laith added, clearly attempting to shift the tone of this conversation, “should we celebrate?”
“Celebrate?”
“Yeah.”
As soon as he opened his mouth to question that, realization struck him. Right, yes, of course. Jesus, Laith had just asked him out. Actually, he’d correctly guessed that Theodore had been down for it since day one, so he’d simply gone ahead and made it official. Maybe that was why it’d come across like a business proposal rather than the very thing Theodore had been waiting for his entire life. My god, they were dating. He was Laith’s boyfriend. A smile pushed into his cheeks, eyes bright. It almost dulled the dread that put a timer on their relationship. He stood on a stool with a noose around his neck, but while the abyss didn’t touch the stool, he could allow himself to look away for a second. Right now, he had to celebrate the beginning of the end.
“Take me somewhere with champagne; I want to make a toast.”
“Somewhere with champagne… like a French restaurant?”
“Works for me.”
“Okay.” Green eyes traveled the room as Laith deliberated, but all Theodore could think of was the word boyfriend. It circled his mind like a mantra, a breath of air—his last. He had to enjoy this. “The best ones are all in Gorgon stations, but there’s one in Cantaloupe that looks nice. I’ve never been, though.”
“Great! We’ll eat there and fuck at my place.”
The corners of Laith’s lips slowly curled into a smile. “Alright.”
***
The walk was supposed to be a good one, triumphant, full of pride. How many times had he daydreamed about this? Going around the tunnels as Laith’s boyfriend, showing him off. Yet, all he could see were the glowing red numbers above Laith’s head, which he couldn’t read, but somehow knew they were ticking down to zero. This wouldn’t last, but how soon was soon enough? How long did he have? They looked like hieroglyphs, but did the numbers replace days, hours or minutes? It could happen immediately after dinner. No, he’d promised sex—he at least had a couple of hours. He pictured it perfectly, Laith leaving his room much like the way he’d done it the first time, with no intention of coming back. If he was good, would Laith keep him? No, anyone could be good. He had to be the best.
When are you going to break up with me? That question haunted him the entire way there. If he knew how much time they had, he’d be able to make every second count. Wait, couldn’t he do that right now? He’d already wasted so much time. This entire week had been taken for granted, worrying over menial bullshit instead of reveling in Laith’s presence. In his apartment, the most sacred place on Earth, elusive even to his closest friends. Somehow, Theodore had been invited to it and had even slept in his bed.
He almost asked. He turned to Laith with his lips parted, but at the last second, managed to keep his insanity in check. Laith stood a few feet away from him, gripping the overhead pole with a hand. When their eyes met, all Theodore could manage was the most pathetic smile he’d ever felt push into his cheeks. In response, Laith’s lips twitched, arm extending in his direction. Oh? Laith wasn’t going for his hand, holding his arm far too high. Was this a hug?
Theodore approached tentatively, unsure if touching was allowed in a space like this. Laith had walked with an arm across his shoulders before, but this was different, a cabin of the subway, closed off and stuffy, under the sharp gaze of the public. Once he was close enough, Laith guided an arm around Theodore’s back and pulled him into a hug. Okay, so this was allowed. He closed both arms around Laith’s midriff as the train began to move, shaking the crowd. His grip was tight, eyes peeking over Laith’s shoulder, nose buried in his scent. The few passengers who met his gaze quickly looked away.
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