“What difference does it make?” Aaron asked. He groaned, leaning back. By the time he’d settled against the couch cushion, his groan had turned into a whine. “Why thefuckwould I want to know when there is no cure for it? Nothing to slow it down?”
“Because you need to know,” Oscar replied. “Because you’re still worrying about it anyway, and there’s no use in worrying about something we don’t even know is there!”
He didn’t like that he’d raised his voice a little. He didn’t like that in the midst of Aaron’s wreckage, he felt like he was the one with his forehead bleeding out behind the airbag. He wasn’t owed this. This wasn’t about him. But Oscar had only healed so much and there were years of therapy left before he could truly call himself a decent person who didn’t lose it after five minutes of human conversation.
“Ineed to know, oryouneed to know?” Aaron asked. He groaned again, leaping off the couch in one swift motion, arms swinging out. “That’s it, isn’t it?Youneed to know.”
“So what if I do? Don’t I get to find out, too? Does it mean nothing to you that I love you?” Oscar clamped his lips shut, which was more than he could say for his fifteen-year-old self, but still not good enough.
“I’m going to say something I regret if I stay here,” Aaron said, shaking his head.
He rubbed his face with both hands, running them intohis hair and gripping hard enough that Oscar wanted to jump across the room and pull his fingers out, hold them in his grasp until Aaron calmed down. But from the way he was shaking, Oscar imagined that if he did that, Aaron would explode. So he didn’t. Oscar sat and watched him melt down in front of him, this man of pure sunshine thawing in the frost.
“Fuck it. I’m going to bed.”
“Go then,” Oscar said. He hadn’t meant to sound as snappy as he did. When the door slammed shut behind Aaron, Oscar’s heart broke.
He sat on the couch with Aaron’s warm coffee and his cold hot chocolate for a good long while before he decided to lie down and get some sleep, but Oscar barely closed his eyes. All night long, he could hear Aaron crying in their bed.
And all Oscar wanted to do was go to him.
But Aaron hadn’t invited him to join, so Oscar didn’t, and instead, he joined him in his tears and wept into their couch while the cat mewed between him and the door and tried to understand.
23
PAPA’S BOY
Papa was on the sidewalk again, telling Oscar he would be fine, calling him Spike, but Oscar wouldn’t be fine. Not this time. He couldn’t be, not if what Aaron suspected was true. That couldn’t happen to Aaron. Not to his Aaron.
When Oscar was jolted out of the nightmare he had every time he was a little too stressed about something, there was bright light shining in through the window, bathing Oscar in yellow.
His heart wanted to drill a hole through his chest and plop on the floor but had somehow climbed to the space between his ears, the nook where his brain should live. Even without a semblance of orientation, Oscar knew he had fallen asleep on the couch. His neck ached, his back reminding him that he wasn’t built to rough it, and this was an old budget couch he’d inherited from the previous tenant.
More than this, Oscar knew he was alone. There was no need for superhuman hearing to understand that Aaron was not at home. The silence was all-consuming, the fridge humming away like Oscar’s joy hadn’t just been trampled onby the possibilities Aaron had spread at his feet the night before.
Luigi’s paws thudded on the floor as he leapt off the bed, the creaking door betraying to Oscar that his cat had likely spent the entire morning chasing Aaron around after being locked out of the bedroom all night long.
“Hey, bud.” Oscar rubbed the fur between Luigi’s ears and bent down for a nose bump when the cat stretched his back to reach him, yellow eyes wide with blown pupils. Oscar told himself this was because Luigi loved him.
Aaron loved him too. Whatever they’d argued about, however loud their voices had been, it didn’t matter. OscarknewAaron loved him. He certainly loved Aaron. And as he sat up, stretching and cursing at the persistent ache in his neck, Oscar pictured him standing opposite, right at the edge of the coffee table, hands trembling and eyes rimmed with red as he poured out the fear and heartache he’d held onto for days. Alone. Because Oscar hadn’t been here. And he had never hated the idea of being away from home as much as he did now.
In his mind, Aaron sobbed into his chest again and again, his soft fluffy hair brushing against his chin, and Oscar knew a lot about anger and rage; these were the entities that had reared him, that had forged him on the anvils of a childhood misunderstood. Papa had been the fire blowing strength into him, his mother the blacksmith hammering away at every inch, trying to mold him into something he hated.
Aaron wasn’t iron. He wasn’t anger. He wasn’t rage. Aaron was cream paling coffee, marshmallows floating atop hot chocolate, syrup swimming in the concave pool on a stack of pancakes.
Oscar headed into the kitchen, eyes snagging on the coffee machine. It was unplugged to the side, the plastic cracked and bent where Aaron had slammed his fist. He winced at thethought of how it must have bruised at first, how Aaron must have ignored the ache and punched it again and again and again.
If Aaron were here, Oscar would drop to his knees on the floor and kiss the skin on that hand, press gentleness where Aaron had ached. He could be cream, too, and marshmallows and syrup. He could be soft for Aaron. He could be anything.
Because Oscar might have raised himself in the corners of his parents’ bathroom, in the darkness of whatever his childhood had been. But Aaron wasn’t Oscar. All Oscar could think about was how Aaron had looked that night his friends had come over to play games with them, how full of joy he’d been at Christmas, full of light. Oscar wanted him always full of light, would drill a hole in his chest to make a well for this new darkness. He’d choke on it if he had to.
Right now, it felt like he might.
As the tears started to well up again, obscuring the broken coffee machine that held his gaze like a challenger, Oscar looked away, and his eyes snagged on the knife block, heart stuttering to a stop. Because what if Aaron had been chopping up those stupid bell peppers Oscar liked in his stir-fry when his anger had come? What if he’d…
Oscar wasn’t sure what he cleared away first—whether it was the knife block or the steak knives still sitting out to drain beside the sink—but by the time he was done, all the cutting things were bundled into a reusable shopping bag with a knot tied at the opening, cast away to sit beside the door until Oscar found a good hiding place for them.
They didn’t need knives in their apartment; they had teeth. And if Oscar wanted a haircut, then he could pay for it or shave his head.
