NOAH
"I know," Mason whispered, his voice steady against the crown of my head. He didn’t try to pull away.
"And I am so incredibly tired," I whispered, the confession hurting worse than any of the physical ache in my limbs.
"I am so tired. I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a ti since the accident. I don’t even know what day it is anymore."
Mason shifted his weight, his hand moving up to press against the back of my head for a brief, comforting second.
"I know, Noah. I know."
"And I’ve been such a horrible friend to you," I kept sobbing, the guilt pouring out of along with the grief.
"You kept calling and calling, and I’d just sit there on the hospital floor watching your na flash on the screen, and I couldn’t bring myself to slide the bar. I didn’t have a single scrap of energy left to give anyone. I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better than the way I’ve treated you."
"Stop it," Mason said, his voice dropping into a flat, no-nonsense tone. "You’re being completely stupid now."
A wet, horrible sound ca out of , sowhere right on the border between a laugh and a miserable choke. "Mason—"
"I’m serious," he said, pulling back just enough to look down at , though he kept his arm firmly around my back.
"I don’t want your apologies. I want you to go upstairs, eat this chicken, and stop trying to hold your entire life together through pure, stubborn pride."
He paused, his expression turning incredibly soft. "You don’t have to perform for people to make them stay with you, Noah. That’s not how real life works. At least, it’s not how it works with ."
I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stood there in the shadow of the brick entryway and cried for a few minutes longer, the heavy, exhausting weights inside my chest finally losing their grip.
Mason just let do it. His arm stayed solid and unmoving around my shoulders, not offering any stupid solutions or trying to pretend he could fix the hospital, but just being present in the dark with .
And that was exactly what I needed more than anything else in the world.
Twenty minutes later, I was standing under the shower in my own bathroom. The water was scalding hot, hitting my neck and back with a force that made my skin turn bright red.
It felt like I was washing away more than just the gri of the streets; I was scrubbing off the sll of the bleach, the gray dust of the vinyl chair, and the heavy residue of a day that had nearly broken in half.
Out in the living room, Mason had made himself completely at ho, which was the most typical Mason thing he could have done.
By the ti I ca out into the room, he had already unpacked the grease-stained cardboard containers onto the table, popped the tal caps off two bottles of beer, and turned his laptop on.
He was currently sitting cross-legged on the floor, arguing loudly with the keyboard about what movie to put it on.
I erged from the bedroom wearing a clean pair of grey sweatpants and a worn-out t-shirt.
My eyes were still horribly swollen, the skin around my lids pink and puffy, and a deep, burning embarrassnt was starting to set in.
It was that sharp, uncomfortable sha that always arrives after you’ve let your guard down entirely and wept in front of another human being on a public walkway.
Mason looked up from the screen as the door clicked.
"There he is," he said brightly. He didn’t ntion the tears on the pavent. He didn’t dwell on the fact that my face was still blotchy.
He just gestured toward the cushions. "Sit down. I found sothing absolutely atrocious to watch. It’s perfect."
I slid onto the edge of the sofa, taking the cold glass bottle he handed . I looked up at the bright screen. "Is that a horror movie?"
"A spectacularly awful one," Mason said cheerfully. "The director is genuinely out of his mind. It’s exactly the kind of mindless garbage we need tonight."
"I absolutely hate horror movies," I said, but I took a small sip of the beer anyway.
"You’re going to love this one," he promised, already biting into a drumstick, his eyes locked onto the television with the sort of total, uncritical focus he brought to everything he did.
For the next hour, we just sat there. We ate the greasy chicken, drank the cold beer, and watched a program that was, in all honesty, completely unhinged.
Mason kept up a running comntary of terrible jokes and observations that I knew I shouldn’t be laughing at, but I laughed anyway.
They were small, quiet giggles at first, the kind of easy amusent that didn’t require any emotional effort, and because they were cheap, they were actually available to .
Everything wasn’t fixed. Nothing about the situation was okay, and the weight on the fifth floor of the hospital was still waiting for in the morning.
But for sixty minutes or more, I felt sothing that was very close to regular breathing.
It was the simple comfort of surfacing for a brief pocket of air before having to go back under the dark water.
This is normal, the word ca into my head quietly, settling into the empty spaces of my chest.
This is what a regular evening feels like. I had completely forgotten what it felt like to just be a person in a room.
By eleven o’clock, the chicken was down to a pile of clean bones in the cardboard box, we had finished three beers each, and the movie had ended.
We both looked slightly better than we had on the pavent, the sharp edges of the day rounded off by the salt and the alcohol.
Mason stood in the open doorway with his coat back on and his laptop bag slung over his right shoulder. He looked at closely, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
"You good, Noah?"
"Better," I said, and for the first ti in weeks, it wasn’t a script I was reciting. It was the honest version of the truth. "Thank you for coming over, Mason. You really didn’t have to do all this."
"Obviously I did," he said, stating it with the casual certainty of soone who didn’t think friendship was a complicated equation with balances to be settled.
"When you’re finally ready to tell what’s actually happening out there..." He paused, giving a long, serious look. "I’ll be right here. No tiline. No pressure from my end. Just know that I’ll be there."
I looked at his broad shoulders, his ssy hair, and the simple kindness in his eyes. "You’re a really good person, Mason."
"I know," he said, completely sincerely, without an ounce of arrogance or performance in his voice. "Get so real sleep tonight."
He turned and walked down the stairwell, and the heavy door clicked shut behind him.
The apartnt imdiately went quiet again, but it was a different sort of silence now... the lingering, hollow quiet of a room that had just held two people and now only held one.
The stillness settled back into the corners of the living room, the way water always finds its level when you stop stirring it.
I stood in the center of the rug for a minute, looking at the empty brown bottles on the coffee table and the greasy container that slled like pepper.
Mason’s visit had given four hours of grace. It had given four hours where my brain hadn’t been running the numbers or checking the charts, which was more than I had received in weeks.
But it hadn’t changed the reality of the situation. Cassian was still lying under a white sheet miles away, and Julian was still a na whispered into the dark of an intensive care room, accompanied by tears that I hadn’t put there.
My mind went back to that photograph from the wallet, the one I had been trying to forget all afternoon.
I saw the other boy first, the way I always did when I closed my eyes. In the picture, he looked so incredibly young. His smile had that rare, genuine brightness of soone who was laughing because he actually ant it, not because soone had told him to look at the lens.
His eyes had caught whatever pale coastal light was available that day, his entire face arranged into an expression of soone who was just happy, simply and effortlessly, without having to work for it.
Beautiful was the only word my brain could find for him, and it made my stomach twist with a sick, heavy ache because I hated how true the word was.
And then there was Cassian, standing right beside him in the fra.
What Cassian looked like in that picture was the part that cost the most every ti I rembered it.
It was the part that felt like a knife slipping between my ribs. I had seen Cassian’s face in every configuration he allowed the world to see... I had seen him cold, I had seen him perfectly controlled, I had seen him faintly amused by sothing I said, and I had seen him focused on a screen.
I had even seen those rare, precious monts of warmth or the brief touches of softness he showed when the day was completely quiet.
But the face in the photograph was none of those things.
This was open. It was that complete, absolute openness of soone who had simply forgotten to close the door behind him because the person standing next to him didn’t pose a threat.
The way Cassian was looking down at Julian in that faded square of paper was the exact way I had spent my entire life wanting to be looked at by soone. It was the look I had been searching for every ti I woke up in his bed.
I sat down on the edge of my mattress, the sheets cold against my bare legs, while the silence of the empty apartnt pressed in around . After the chicken, after Mason’s steadiness, and after three weeks of staring at a hospital wall, I finally understood the truth.
This wasn’t just so old obsession from his past. This was love. It was the real, heavy kind that didn’t need to perform itself for anyone else, the kind that simply existed, clearly and visibly, without any effort at all.
And Cassian was still holding onto it. Even now, lying in that high hospital bed, dreaming of him, saying his na, and weeping for him while his brain had no control over what it kept... he was still holding onto Julian.
After everything they had been through, after the years apart, after the prisons, after XUM, and after . Julian was still there at the very center of him.
The jealousy was there, sitting right in the bottom of my throat. I didn’t try to pretend I was above it anymore.
But underneath the jealousy, there was a horrible, hollow grief that didn’t even belong to .
It was for the man in the bed, the man who had loved another human being that completely, with every piece of his guarded soul, and had lost him anyway.
The last thing I thought before the exhaustion finally took over my brain and dragged down into the sheets was directed at the face in the photograph.
He loved you, I thought, the words heavy and numb in my mind. He really, truly loved you.
And sowhere below that, quieter and far more painful, ca the final question: I wonder if he’ll ever love anyone like that again.
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