When I first see Garen’s tattoo, I choke on a mouthful of coffee for two reasons, the first of which is obvious. I’ve never seen it before, and I took for granted the idea that maybe I’d know if the guy I was fucking had any tattoos. The second reason is that we haven’t really spoken much in the past two weeks, and the tattoo just so happens to be a small letter T on the inside of his right wrist. Again, I took for granted the idea that I would’ve been in on this decision.
Garen looks up with mild interest from the book he’d been reading as a few of the customers warily back away from the line. The worst publicity at a coffee house is one of the employees standing off to the side and choking on the house coffee. I gesture at Garen, and he hops off his stool and comes around to join me on the working side of the counter.
“When did you get that?” I force out when I can finally breathe. His brow furrows as if in confusion, but he looks immediately at his wrist and tugs his sleeve down over it.
“None of your business,” he says, and I think my head completely implodes.
“The fuck it’s not! It’s for my name, right?” I say, and he rolls his eyes.
“No, it’s for ‘tasty’ because I’m T to the A to the S-T-E-Y. Yeah, it’s for your name. But that doesn’t mean you can act so indignant about it. It’s my body,” he snaps.
“But it’s about me. I would’ve thought you’d at least bring it up at some point. You haven’t even spoken to me since that day at school, and now you’re going and mutilating your body in homage to me,” I say. His eyes snap up to mine, and I feel a comment coming before I hear it. I have no idea what it is, but I know it’s going to hit hard.
“I thought the self-mutilation thing was your area of expertise,” he says. It’s more of a punch than I thought it would be. My whole body tingles, and I pray my face isn’t turning red.
“Who the fuck have you been talking to?” I demand in a harsh whisper. Been here, done this, and I know what’ll happen if the wrong person overhears. Jerry could fire me, if he wanted. Miles could tell Faye, and she would--
“Faye told me.” She would fucking betray me, apparently. I whirl around and yank open the coffee machine behind me. The filter doesn’t need to be changed yet, but I have to do it anyway.
“It’s none of her… It’s not her place, it’s... Fuck you both!” I abandon the coffee filter right in the middle, and the grounds spill all over the floor as I shove Garen backwards. Miles tosses me a wary glance and speeds up his service. He’s trying to get the customers out before I cause a huge scene, but I can already tell the odds of this actually working out are slim to none.
“Oh come on, Travis. You never tell me anything, so someone had to. How could you decide to leave something like this out? You fucking told me about the suicide attempt the night we met, but you pointedly leave out that it was way more than an isolated incident?” Garen hisses. The door opens and another group rushes in, and Miles turns to me with round, pleading eyes.
“Trav, can you please take this to the back room or the alley or something? If Jerry catches you fighting in front of customers, he’ll have both our asses,” he says. Pissed as I may be at Garen, Miles is my friend. I throw open the door to the alley, and Garen follows me outside.
“I can’t believe you couldn’t even ask me about this. You act like I’m so bad about keeping up the talk between us? Then how come you went to Faye? How come you didn’t ask me?” I demand. He laughs harshly.
“Like you would’ve told me,” he says.
“Tell you what?” I’m practically screaming at this point, and my voice reverberates off the brick walls around us. “Tell you about this?”
Theoretically, I could’ve just pulled up my shirt sleeves. But part of me is aching for something just a bit more imposing, something that shows how fucked it all is to justify keeping it quiet. So instead, I untie the apron and throw it aside, then yank my shirt off. The moonlight hits the scars in a pretty impressive way, highlighting slightly raised white marks that criss-cross all the way up and down both arms. They look worse right now than they ever do, especially since they’re barely noticeable in normal lighting, but I don’t point that out. I don’t do anything to try to make him think it’s more or less than what it is.
“Oh god,” Garen forces out through clenched teeth. Please God, don’t let me start crying. Let me do anything right now, but do not let me cry.
“Is this the moment you were hoping for? When you went to Faye, had you been hoping that instead, you’d get some big huge revelation and we’d fucking weep together over all the marks I’ve got from fucking cutting myself for two years?” Yeah. Still almost screaming.
“If you think I wanted any part of this, you’re so wrong it’s not even funny,” he says. His voice, his body, his everything is shaking.
“Bullshit, Garen. If you think you can be my white knight or whatever, it’s not going to happen, because you know what? Even in the weirdest of fairytales, the princess isn’t a seventeen-year-old fag with suicidal tendencies. You don’t get it. You hear it all from her, and you know the story, but you don’t get it. You can’t get it,” I say. My voice is breaking now, and the screaming is slowly dissolving into what I know will soon be something a hell of a lot worse. If only for something to do to try to resist it, I pull my shirt back on and tie my apron up again.
“Then tell me, Travis. Make me understand, if I can’t from what Faye told me,” he says. He takes several steps towards me, so he must know it’s coming.
“I wanted to fucking die!” The sentence is the meeting point between the screaming and the crying. It must be, because it comes out so loudly it feels like my throat is tearing open, and then I can feel tears streaming down my face. “And if I weren’t medicated to the point of barely feeling anything, I probably still would want to. That’s what I am, Garen. I am a fucking walking zombie. And you have no idea what it’s like to have to choose between not feeling anything and feeling like you want to kill yourself. There is not a single person on this fucking planet that you can talk to that can make you understand that.”
At first, I think his eyes are glassy because he’s widening them to the point where it must be painful. Then a tear catches on his eyelashes, hovers there for a few seconds, and then falls onto his cheek.
“I can talk to you,” he says softly. His voice comes out scared and young, and I have to sit down heavily against the building wall before I completely collapse. I haven’t cried like this in years, and now I remember why I fucking hate it. It feels less like a gentle way of expelling my emotions, and more like I’m choking and gasping and trying to force out everything I’m feeling through any way it can escape, no matter what it does to me physically. It’s completely losing control, and completely losing my grip, and completely the last thing I want to do. But it won’t stop. It doesn’t stop, not for at least ten minutes. Garen is right next to me the entire time, pinned against my side and stroking my hair while I more or less sob into his chest. When I finally get a grip, I try to pull back as much as possible and drag a sleeve under my eyes as an almost overwhelming sense of shame spreads over me.
“Fuck. How can you… How can you deal with this?” I ask.
“How can you?” he shoots back, and I glance over in time to see him wipe his eyes hurriedly. “God. I mean, you constantly feel like this, and you just bottle it all up all the time. How can you not be completely insane?”
“Where have you been for the past twenty minutes? I am completely insane. Which is why I don’t get why you’re still here. How can you still want me after that? How can you still want me now that you know I’m a complete and utter psycho?” I ask. He furrows his brow again and looks down, watching the progress of the ring he’s twisting around and around on his finger.
“I’m gonna be in love with you whether you’re a psycho or not. I’m gonna be in love with you forever. I might as well just accept that now, and accept you too, because no matter who you turn out to be, I’m gonna love that guy. I can’t help it. I’m glad I can’t,” he says. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“If you make me cry again, I swear to God I will punch you in the face,” I say. He’s silent until I open my eyes again, and then he locks his onto mine.
“Being with you makes me feel like a better person,” he says. Another minute of silence.
“Being with you makes me feel like a sane person,” I say finally. Then, a second later, I add, “usually.”
He smiles slightly and looks away. “It’s kinda fucked. That whether you hate yourself or you hate me, I’m still going to be yours.”
“I don’t hate you. I never have. Fuck, I’ve wanted to, but I haven’t,” I say. He shrugs and shoots me a vaguely nervous glance.
“You did that day in the hall. I know you didn’t do it intentionally,” he says quickly when I open my mouth. “I get that now. I know you were doing what I told you to, and I know you were doing it because otherwise things would get so fucked up with your friends and your school and your life in general. But you still said it, and it still hurt both of us. Because even if it was just then? You hated us. You hated yourself and you hated me and you hated that there’s something between us. I know it went away right after that. But it was still there for a minute. And I couldn’t handle it.”
“So you avoided me for two weeks,” I say. It’s not meant to be an accusation, and I’m relieved to see he doesn’t react as though it was.
“Basically. I know it’s a shitty thing to do, but it’s… it’s not like I wasn’t thinking about you the whole time,” he says. I take his hand and stroke the T on his wrist gently with my thumb.
“Obviously,” I say, and he laughs a little.
“Yeah. It uh… it was kind of a whim. And then it wasn’t. I thought of it a few days after the thing in the hall. And then I got it that Friday. Do you… want to know why?” he asks. Nervous again. I meet his eyes, and I can tell he’s given this a lot of thought, just in case I ever wanted to know. I nod.
“Yeah. I do,” I say.
“Because… I’ve had relationships before. Albeit shitty ones, but they still count. You’re not the first guy I’ve called my boyfriend, you’re not the first guy I’ve slept with. But you’re still the first guy I’ve been in love with, and you’re still the first guy I’ve ever wanted to let fuck with my head as much as you have. And I kind of figured that I want to remember that. Even if you had never spoken to me after that, even if everything ended right then, I would still want to remember what I had – or, I guess, have – with you. So I got this,” he says, kind of raising his wrist at me. I nod.
“Understandable,” I say, and we leave it at that.
The next night, I fish out the fake ID I got made with Corey a few months ago. He wanted to see a Something Corporate show in a bar in Boston, so we went over to his cousin’s friend’s girlfriend’s brother’s sleezy apartment to get the IDs made. After the show, mine retired to my sock drawer. Except for this moment, as I present it to Lizzie, the smiling brunette behind the counter at Four Aces Tattoo Studio. She doesn’t examine it too closely, which I’m thankful for, even though it’s relatively well-made.
“There are some forms for you to fill out. Do you have a picture of what you’d like done?” she asks. I accept the clipboard from her and dig in my pocket for the slip of paper.
“I want a letter done in this style,” I say. She examines the single letter on the page, then nods.
“Should be simple enough. Ten minutes, maybe? I could draw this right on, if you want. It’s not even big enough to bother with a stencil,” she says. I nod like it’s no big deal.
“Yeah, okay,” I say. I sit down in one of the chairs to fill out the forms as she fills up a tiny little thimble of ink and pulls on her latex gloves.
“When would you like to get it?” she asks. I stretch my left forearm out across the arm of the chair and tap my wrist.
“Right here,” I say. She talks me through it at first, tells me to breathe and try to relax, that she’s just going to do one small line at first. I nod, and it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. Not really a pain, more of a grating rawness. About as comfortable as getting fucked up the ass, but I doubt this will suddenly morph into pleasure decent enough to make me come.
“So, who is G?” Lizzie asks. “Your girlfriend?”
“Um, no. My boyfriend,” I say. I wait for the reaction, for her to dig the needle deeper into my wrist. She just glances up long enough to shoot me an apologetic grin.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. What’s his name?” she asks.
“Garen,” I say slowly. I can’t actually believe I’m having a normal conversation about this. Lizzie tosses her head back to get her bangs out of her eyes.
“Been together long?” she asks. I almost shrug, but stop myself when I realize it’s probably not the best idea to move around when someone is that close to major veins and arteries with several sharp needles.
“Probably not long enough for me to be getting his initial tattooed on me,” I say, and she laughs. “He got mine done, though. He doesn’t… he doesn’t enter into stuff like this lightly, I guess. Neither do I. Not usually. So I’m kind of praying that this isn’t a big mistake.”
“The relationship or the tattoo?” she asks.
“The tattoo. I know the relationship isn’t a mistake,” I say. She looks up again with another smile.
“All done. The tattoo, that is. Your relationship is still going strong, and hopefully will be for a long time, because that letter is never coming off.” After I pay, she talks me through the after care, tells me to keep it wrapped for a couple of hours and to apply an antibacterial ointment that night and before every time I shower for the next week. I nod along, thank her, and head outside and down the street to the Grind, my head still reeling from the fact that I just had a normal conversation with a normal person about my completely abnormal relationship. Garen’s car is parked outside, and I see him leaning against the hood.
“Hey,” I say. I spare a very small glance around the parking lot before stealing a brief kiss.
“Hey. Where were you?” he asks.
“Off being stupid and reckless and illegal,” I say as we both climb into the car.
“Really? Funny. You’d think I’d remember it if we had sex on the way over here,” he replies.
“Ha, you’re so funny. Um, do you promise not to get mad at me?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“Not for a second. That question has never been followed by something good,” he says. I extend my arm, baring the white strip of gauze around my wrist. He stares at it. I stare at him. And then I realize.
“No! No, it’s not that. God,” I say.
“Oh fuck,” he says, visibly deflating. I shake my head.
“I’m sorry, I-I didn’t know you’d think that, which is fucking retarded, after last night, but it’s not, I… look,” I finish lamely, and I pull back the edge of the bandage, just enough to expose the letter. He bursts out laughing.
“Are you for real?” he asks. Slowly, I reapply the bandage and cross my arms.
“I thought you’d appreciate it. Because you got one too,” I say. My voice is the bastard child of false calm and actual confusion. He nods.
“I appreciate it. Probably more than everyone else who sees it will,” he says. I shake my head.
“I don’t care about everyone else who sees it. They don’t matter to me,” I say. He raises his eyebrows at me, and I shake my head again. “They don’t. Fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck everyone.”
“Fuck me?” he asks, with an almost hopeful quirk of an eyebrow. I fake a laugh.
“Again, you’re so funny. Pervert,” I say.
“Yeah. It’s one of the first things that attracted you to me,” he replies. I nod slowly, thoughtfully.
“Yeah, actually, it is. Since I’m not a pervert, what first attracted you to me?” I ask.
“Everything,” he says, and he catches my smile with his lips.
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Garen looks up with mild interest from the book he’d been reading as a few of the customers warily back away from the line. The worst publicity at a coffee house is one of the employees standing off to the side and choking on the house coffee. I gesture at Garen, and he hops off his stool and comes around to join me on the working side of the counter.
“When did you get that?” I force out when I can finally breathe. His brow furrows as if in confusion, but he looks immediately at his wrist and tugs his sleeve down over it.
“None of your business,” he says, and I think my head completely implodes.
“The fuck it’s not! It’s for my name, right?” I say, and he rolls his eyes.
“No, it’s for ‘tasty’ because I’m T to the A to the S-T-E-Y. Yeah, it’s for your name. But that doesn’t mean you can act so indignant about it. It’s my body,” he snaps.
“But it’s about me. I would’ve thought you’d at least bring it up at some point. You haven’t even spoken to me since that day at school, and now you’re going and mutilating your body in homage to me,” I say. His eyes snap up to mine, and I feel a comment coming before I hear it. I have no idea what it is, but I know it’s going to hit hard.
“I thought the self-mutilation thing was your area of expertise,” he says. It’s more of a punch than I thought it would be. My whole body tingles, and I pray my face isn’t turning red.
“Who the fuck have you been talking to?” I demand in a harsh whisper. Been here, done this, and I know what’ll happen if the wrong person overhears. Jerry could fire me, if he wanted. Miles could tell Faye, and she would--
“Faye told me.” She would fucking betray me, apparently. I whirl around and yank open the coffee machine behind me. The filter doesn’t need to be changed yet, but I have to do it anyway.
“It’s none of her… It’s not her place, it’s... Fuck you both!” I abandon the coffee filter right in the middle, and the grounds spill all over the floor as I shove Garen backwards. Miles tosses me a wary glance and speeds up his service. He’s trying to get the customers out before I cause a huge scene, but I can already tell the odds of this actually working out are slim to none.
“Oh come on, Travis. You never tell me anything, so someone had to. How could you decide to leave something like this out? You fucking told me about the suicide attempt the night we met, but you pointedly leave out that it was way more than an isolated incident?” Garen hisses. The door opens and another group rushes in, and Miles turns to me with round, pleading eyes.
“Trav, can you please take this to the back room or the alley or something? If Jerry catches you fighting in front of customers, he’ll have both our asses,” he says. Pissed as I may be at Garen, Miles is my friend. I throw open the door to the alley, and Garen follows me outside.
“I can’t believe you couldn’t even ask me about this. You act like I’m so bad about keeping up the talk between us? Then how come you went to Faye? How come you didn’t ask me?” I demand. He laughs harshly.
“Like you would’ve told me,” he says.
“Tell you what?” I’m practically screaming at this point, and my voice reverberates off the brick walls around us. “Tell you about this?”
Theoretically, I could’ve just pulled up my shirt sleeves. But part of me is aching for something just a bit more imposing, something that shows how fucked it all is to justify keeping it quiet. So instead, I untie the apron and throw it aside, then yank my shirt off. The moonlight hits the scars in a pretty impressive way, highlighting slightly raised white marks that criss-cross all the way up and down both arms. They look worse right now than they ever do, especially since they’re barely noticeable in normal lighting, but I don’t point that out. I don’t do anything to try to make him think it’s more or less than what it is.
“Oh god,” Garen forces out through clenched teeth. Please God, don’t let me start crying. Let me do anything right now, but do not let me cry.
“Is this the moment you were hoping for? When you went to Faye, had you been hoping that instead, you’d get some big huge revelation and we’d fucking weep together over all the marks I’ve got from fucking cutting myself for two years?” Yeah. Still almost screaming.
“If you think I wanted any part of this, you’re so wrong it’s not even funny,” he says. His voice, his body, his everything is shaking.
“Bullshit, Garen. If you think you can be my white knight or whatever, it’s not going to happen, because you know what? Even in the weirdest of fairytales, the princess isn’t a seventeen-year-old fag with suicidal tendencies. You don’t get it. You hear it all from her, and you know the story, but you don’t get it. You can’t get it,” I say. My voice is breaking now, and the screaming is slowly dissolving into what I know will soon be something a hell of a lot worse. If only for something to do to try to resist it, I pull my shirt back on and tie my apron up again.
“Then tell me, Travis. Make me understand, if I can’t from what Faye told me,” he says. He takes several steps towards me, so he must know it’s coming.
“I wanted to fucking die!” The sentence is the meeting point between the screaming and the crying. It must be, because it comes out so loudly it feels like my throat is tearing open, and then I can feel tears streaming down my face. “And if I weren’t medicated to the point of barely feeling anything, I probably still would want to. That’s what I am, Garen. I am a fucking walking zombie. And you have no idea what it’s like to have to choose between not feeling anything and feeling like you want to kill yourself. There is not a single person on this fucking planet that you can talk to that can make you understand that.”
At first, I think his eyes are glassy because he’s widening them to the point where it must be painful. Then a tear catches on his eyelashes, hovers there for a few seconds, and then falls onto his cheek.
“I can talk to you,” he says softly. His voice comes out scared and young, and I have to sit down heavily against the building wall before I completely collapse. I haven’t cried like this in years, and now I remember why I fucking hate it. It feels less like a gentle way of expelling my emotions, and more like I’m choking and gasping and trying to force out everything I’m feeling through any way it can escape, no matter what it does to me physically. It’s completely losing control, and completely losing my grip, and completely the last thing I want to do. But it won’t stop. It doesn’t stop, not for at least ten minutes. Garen is right next to me the entire time, pinned against my side and stroking my hair while I more or less sob into his chest. When I finally get a grip, I try to pull back as much as possible and drag a sleeve under my eyes as an almost overwhelming sense of shame spreads over me.
“Fuck. How can you… How can you deal with this?” I ask.
“How can you?” he shoots back, and I glance over in time to see him wipe his eyes hurriedly. “God. I mean, you constantly feel like this, and you just bottle it all up all the time. How can you not be completely insane?”
“Where have you been for the past twenty minutes? I am completely insane. Which is why I don’t get why you’re still here. How can you still want me after that? How can you still want me now that you know I’m a complete and utter psycho?” I ask. He furrows his brow again and looks down, watching the progress of the ring he’s twisting around and around on his finger.
“I’m gonna be in love with you whether you’re a psycho or not. I’m gonna be in love with you forever. I might as well just accept that now, and accept you too, because no matter who you turn out to be, I’m gonna love that guy. I can’t help it. I’m glad I can’t,” he says. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“If you make me cry again, I swear to God I will punch you in the face,” I say. He’s silent until I open my eyes again, and then he locks his onto mine.
“Being with you makes me feel like a better person,” he says. Another minute of silence.
“Being with you makes me feel like a sane person,” I say finally. Then, a second later, I add, “usually.”
He smiles slightly and looks away. “It’s kinda fucked. That whether you hate yourself or you hate me, I’m still going to be yours.”
“I don’t hate you. I never have. Fuck, I’ve wanted to, but I haven’t,” I say. He shrugs and shoots me a vaguely nervous glance.
“You did that day in the hall. I know you didn’t do it intentionally,” he says quickly when I open my mouth. “I get that now. I know you were doing what I told you to, and I know you were doing it because otherwise things would get so fucked up with your friends and your school and your life in general. But you still said it, and it still hurt both of us. Because even if it was just then? You hated us. You hated yourself and you hated me and you hated that there’s something between us. I know it went away right after that. But it was still there for a minute. And I couldn’t handle it.”
“So you avoided me for two weeks,” I say. It’s not meant to be an accusation, and I’m relieved to see he doesn’t react as though it was.
“Basically. I know it’s a shitty thing to do, but it’s… it’s not like I wasn’t thinking about you the whole time,” he says. I take his hand and stroke the T on his wrist gently with my thumb.
“Obviously,” I say, and he laughs a little.
“Yeah. It uh… it was kind of a whim. And then it wasn’t. I thought of it a few days after the thing in the hall. And then I got it that Friday. Do you… want to know why?” he asks. Nervous again. I meet his eyes, and I can tell he’s given this a lot of thought, just in case I ever wanted to know. I nod.
“Yeah. I do,” I say.
“Because… I’ve had relationships before. Albeit shitty ones, but they still count. You’re not the first guy I’ve called my boyfriend, you’re not the first guy I’ve slept with. But you’re still the first guy I’ve been in love with, and you’re still the first guy I’ve ever wanted to let fuck with my head as much as you have. And I kind of figured that I want to remember that. Even if you had never spoken to me after that, even if everything ended right then, I would still want to remember what I had – or, I guess, have – with you. So I got this,” he says, kind of raising his wrist at me. I nod.
“Understandable,” I say, and we leave it at that.
The next night, I fish out the fake ID I got made with Corey a few months ago. He wanted to see a Something Corporate show in a bar in Boston, so we went over to his cousin’s friend’s girlfriend’s brother’s sleezy apartment to get the IDs made. After the show, mine retired to my sock drawer. Except for this moment, as I present it to Lizzie, the smiling brunette behind the counter at Four Aces Tattoo Studio. She doesn’t examine it too closely, which I’m thankful for, even though it’s relatively well-made.
“There are some forms for you to fill out. Do you have a picture of what you’d like done?” she asks. I accept the clipboard from her and dig in my pocket for the slip of paper.
“I want a letter done in this style,” I say. She examines the single letter on the page, then nods.
“Should be simple enough. Ten minutes, maybe? I could draw this right on, if you want. It’s not even big enough to bother with a stencil,” she says. I nod like it’s no big deal.
“Yeah, okay,” I say. I sit down in one of the chairs to fill out the forms as she fills up a tiny little thimble of ink and pulls on her latex gloves.
“When would you like to get it?” she asks. I stretch my left forearm out across the arm of the chair and tap my wrist.
“Right here,” I say. She talks me through it at first, tells me to breathe and try to relax, that she’s just going to do one small line at first. I nod, and it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. Not really a pain, more of a grating rawness. About as comfortable as getting fucked up the ass, but I doubt this will suddenly morph into pleasure decent enough to make me come.
“So, who is G?” Lizzie asks. “Your girlfriend?”
“Um, no. My boyfriend,” I say. I wait for the reaction, for her to dig the needle deeper into my wrist. She just glances up long enough to shoot me an apologetic grin.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. What’s his name?” she asks.
“Garen,” I say slowly. I can’t actually believe I’m having a normal conversation about this. Lizzie tosses her head back to get her bangs out of her eyes.
“Been together long?” she asks. I almost shrug, but stop myself when I realize it’s probably not the best idea to move around when someone is that close to major veins and arteries with several sharp needles.
“Probably not long enough for me to be getting his initial tattooed on me,” I say, and she laughs. “He got mine done, though. He doesn’t… he doesn’t enter into stuff like this lightly, I guess. Neither do I. Not usually. So I’m kind of praying that this isn’t a big mistake.”
“The relationship or the tattoo?” she asks.
“The tattoo. I know the relationship isn’t a mistake,” I say. She looks up again with another smile.
“All done. The tattoo, that is. Your relationship is still going strong, and hopefully will be for a long time, because that letter is never coming off.” After I pay, she talks me through the after care, tells me to keep it wrapped for a couple of hours and to apply an antibacterial ointment that night and before every time I shower for the next week. I nod along, thank her, and head outside and down the street to the Grind, my head still reeling from the fact that I just had a normal conversation with a normal person about my completely abnormal relationship. Garen’s car is parked outside, and I see him leaning against the hood.
“Hey,” I say. I spare a very small glance around the parking lot before stealing a brief kiss.
“Hey. Where were you?” he asks.
“Off being stupid and reckless and illegal,” I say as we both climb into the car.
“Really? Funny. You’d think I’d remember it if we had sex on the way over here,” he replies.
“Ha, you’re so funny. Um, do you promise not to get mad at me?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“Not for a second. That question has never been followed by something good,” he says. I extend my arm, baring the white strip of gauze around my wrist. He stares at it. I stare at him. And then I realize.
“No! No, it’s not that. God,” I say.
“Oh fuck,” he says, visibly deflating. I shake my head.
“I’m sorry, I-I didn’t know you’d think that, which is fucking retarded, after last night, but it’s not, I… look,” I finish lamely, and I pull back the edge of the bandage, just enough to expose the letter. He bursts out laughing.
“Are you for real?” he asks. Slowly, I reapply the bandage and cross my arms.
“I thought you’d appreciate it. Because you got one too,” I say. My voice is the bastard child of false calm and actual confusion. He nods.
“I appreciate it. Probably more than everyone else who sees it will,” he says. I shake my head.
“I don’t care about everyone else who sees it. They don’t matter to me,” I say. He raises his eyebrows at me, and I shake my head again. “They don’t. Fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck everyone.”
“Fuck me?” he asks, with an almost hopeful quirk of an eyebrow. I fake a laugh.
“Again, you’re so funny. Pervert,” I say.
“Yeah. It’s one of the first things that attracted you to me,” he replies. I nod slowly, thoughtfully.
“Yeah, actually, it is. Since I’m not a pervert, what first attracted you to me?” I ask.
“Everything,” he says, and he catches my smile with his lips.
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