Marcus’s POV
The slamming of the door does little to settle my nerves. If anything, it wasn’t loud enough to properly convey the storm clouds in my chest right now. I grab a pillow and scream into it because, while it’s no less ridiculous, it isn’t nearly as childish as standing at my door and slamming it repeatedly until I feel satisfied that it’s conveyed my displeasure adequately. Not that it ever could, hence why screaming into my pillow until my throat is raw, where no one can hear me, is the only proper solution at the moment.
I can’t do this alone. I can’t figure it out. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on everything, something comes along and wrenches it away from me.
And Qiang? Qiang is just wrong right now. They’re clinging to something they don’t even want, something they know is wholeheartedly terrible for them in every way, and yet they won’t move on to anything new. They are just stuck there staring at the same moldy food that they wouldn’t even eat if it were the only dish left on the table.
How do you reason with that? They alreadyknow, but they can’t fucking look away, and no matter how hard I try to grab their attentionand almost get it, it’s never enough to get the sight of that moldy food out of their head.
Worse than all of that, though, worse than sitting in a corner and crying about how they won’t pay attention to me, is knowing how badly they are hurting and knowing I just fucking added to their pain.
Absolutelynothingwas accomplished downstairs beyond the knowledge that I should have ignored their tirade in the kitchen and gone upstairs from the start. I should have just let them stew on their own, because there was no rationality in their head to have a decent discussion, or for it to do anything other than spiral exactly as it had. There was no reaching them to make them feel better.
I grab my phone because I’m so wholly out of my depth here in so many ways. I’ve never felt anything like this for anyone before. I’ve never played the relationship game. Those little middle school and high school romances that teach you all the ‘dos and don’ts’ of relationships were ones I never touched. I don’t know when to push and when to walk away, and the fallout of that is the travesty that’s just happened.
What Idoknow is that I’m not ready to give up on this. I’m not ready to let this go and let them just be in pain all by themself forever. But I also know that I don’t know what I’m doing, and that I’ve just completely fucked up. I flip through my contacts until I find Darryl’s number. He’s not much of a relationship guy either, but he’s actually delved a bit deeper into romance than I ever have.
Darryl answers after the fourth ring, and if that wasn’t enough for me to know I’d just woken him up, the half-awake grumble of his sleepy voice gives the rest of it away.
“If it’s ridiculously late here, then it’s stupidly late there, bro.”
“I’m sorry, I should have checked the time,” I start making excuses because now I feel bad.
We’re in football season with training, games, and somehow managing to keep up with everything else; we’re already exhausted. He needs sleep, not me traumasplaining all over the place.
“But the fact that you didn’t means you need to talk,”he says, his voice much clearer.
“Are you sure? I can call ba–”
I started to give Darryl an out, but he interrupts me, sounding fully awake now.“For fuck’s sake, man, just start talking.”
I sigh at that, knowing that at this point, if I hang up, he’ll stay wide awake and just pissed off for being woken up for no reason, so I dive into my spiral. “I just fucked up.”
Darryl snorts at that.“You? The great Marcus Bauer? I don’t believe it,”he says teasingly.
“That’s not helping,” I point out, rolling my eyes at the snark.
He chuckles lightly.“Okay, sorry. How did you fuck up?”
I let out a groan of frustration. “I basically just told them to fuck off.”
“As much as I love a good mystery, Boo Bear, I’m gonna need just a smidge more context on this one,”he says with that tease still in his voice.
“Did you just call me Boo Bear?” I ask him, tripping on the pet name. I shouldn’t be surprised since he pulls random shit like that out of the blue all the time, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t expecting it.
“Did it pull you out of your head enough to converse with me like a normal person?”he asks matter-of-factly.
I roll my eyes again. “Such a pain in the ass,” I grumble, an unbidden smile spreading across my face at his ridiculousness.
“Not yours,”he says simply, and I can’t help but laugh at that.
“Thank fuck for that. I’ve seen your dick, and in the Land of Nope, your dick is king.”
“I don’t know whether to be proud or saddened,”he ponders.
“Since you have no desire to inhabit my ass, I’d go with proud,” I point out.
“Fair enough, although I’m still missing the context of your stupidly late spiral and who you told to fuck off,”he changes the subject back to why I called.
