oxygen_4_losers (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} oxygen_losers) wrote,@ 2006-11-25 15:45:00 |
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Eyes Like The Summer
Title: Eyes Like The Summer (7/?)
Authos: oxygen_losers
Rating: PG-13, yo!
Summary: "It took two months before I realized there was something wrong with Pete. And I don’t mean wrong like ‘hey-he’s-hiding-in-trees-you-shoulda-pi
Previous Chapters:
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/midnig
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/midnig
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
Chapter Seven
(A/N: Well…okay, here we go with the actual plot now. This has been planned from the beginning, and I hate to disappoint, but I have to tell the story, y’know?)
It took two months before I realized there was something wrong with Pete.
And I don’t mean wrong like ‘hey-he’s-hiding-in-trees-you-shoulda-pi
I guess I always knew it was there. I always knew something was off. That moment in the forest, when I’d asked how he found his secret garden…I couldn’t forget the way his smile had faltered, the way his grin suddenly seemed more like bared teeth and less like a smile.
So it was little things. Little things like:
Come at him from any angle he couldn’t see you and he froze.
Hug him from behind and he cringed.
Raise a hand and his head ducked just a little, eyes closed.
Touch him when he was asleep and he whimpered.
Touch him when he was dreaming and he screamed the sort of murder that had your mother running into your bedroom, clutching her bathrobe around herself because she thought someone was dying, don’t scare her like that.
Maybe that was the one that got me.
“Pete?” I asked, once she’d gone and he didn’t reply, just smiled and shook. “Pete, hey, c’mon. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I’d never heard anything so unconvincing in my life. He was as not-okay as I’d ever seen anyone—trembling, fingers curled tightly in the fabric of my comforter, white-knuckled to the point where my own joints ached in sympathy. He wouldn’t look at me, either, which was a first—Pete was anything but shy. Everyone he interacted with, he met them face-on, looked the in the eye, but this…his head was ducked, face turned down to stare at his own knees, and even from this angle I could see that his eyes were darting frantically around the room. Panicked.
“Pete?” My hand hovered over his shoulder—he certainly didn’t look like he wanted me to touch him, but I didn’t know what else to do. He certainly didn’t look like he was up for sharing whatever was going on in his head. I let my palm drop and in the split second he surged at me, like my hand on his shoulder had been a starting gun.
“What are you—mmph!” Okay, pause. Rewind. I’d missed something here, obviously, because he’d screamed, panicked and then—tackled me? I was too taken aback to do anything more than squirm underneath him because really, he may have been smaller than me, but he was strong. And hey, look at that, his tongue was in my mouth and his hands were in my shirt and he only pulled back when I made an angry sort of noise in the back of my throat and which point he…he just stared at me, and he wasn’t smiling, wasn’t doing anything I normally associated with Pete (because even when he wasn’t smiling, his eyes were). He just watched me, face blank and then he tucked his head into the curve of my throat and sort of…nuzzled at me.
“Peter?”
He tensed at the sound of his name and…was that a whimper? He nudged at me frantically, and he was bracing himself above me, but his arms were trembling, he kept his face turned away, and he kept making these weird gaspy noises. “I’ll be good,” he whispered finally and my heart seized in my chest.
Because Pete Wentz didn’t do broken. He didn’t do scared. He didn’t whimper and squirm and rub himself pitifully against me, like his whole body was begging for reassurance I didn’t have any idea how to give. It was an apology, a weird, animal apology because maybe I was the one on my back, but he was offering me the smooth, tanned skin on the back of his neck in submission and he made sure his head was lower than mine and I’d seen enough of the Discovery Channel to recognize it.
“Stop, Pete,” I said softly and he keened deep in his chest, a desperate, mournful noise I’d never heard him make before, and mouthed at my collarbone. He wasn’t stopping. He was shaking so bad I didn’t think he could and I was terrified—not because he was squirming around on top of me, half-clothed and gasping, but because he really didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on.
“I’ll be good,” he repeated, like that was all that mattered, like that would make everything all better.
“Good? Pete, what’re you talking about?” That…in any context, that didn’t sound healthy. I couldn’t think of a single situation that would have him trembling like this and promising he’d ‘be good’ that was deeply disturbing. “Pete, hey, it’s me. Come on.”
He shuddered again, gasped, blinking like I’d just thrown a bucket of cold water on him. “Trick?” he said slowly and good, thank God, he was actually looking me in the eye. I brushed one hand over his flushed cheek.
“Yeah, Pete. What’s going on?”
He grinned and it was so sudden, so smooth, so instantaneous that I wondered how many times he’d practised smiling no matter how he felt. “Nothin’, man. Bad dream, s’all. Sorry for climbing all over you.”
I didn’t believe a word of it, because if nothing else, he was still trembling and his smile wasn’t right on one side. But I didn’t press it, I knew better than that. I let him curl up next to me with his head on my chest and I stoked his hair back from his face until the panicked rise and fall of his chest tapered off into the deep, even breathing that meant he was asleep.
```````````````
I always had to remind myself that Andy was blind. It didn’t seem possible for him to know so much without seeing, but maybe it was just me–maybe I just had a difficult time imagining life without the way sunlight slanted over the curve of Pete’s shoulders when he bowed his head.
“This is a surprise.” Andy planted his hands on his knees and smiled up at me, tucking a stray lock of hair into his messy ponytail. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the two of you apart.”
I hadn’t meant to leave Pete at home, actually. But he’d been asleep still when I woke up, and I didn’t want to wake him up, he looked so peaceful like that. Plus, I’d needed to talk to Andy alone, and Pete never wanted to leave my side when we were together. “Just me today,” I agreed softly. “Do you need any help?”
Andy was up to his elbows in dirt–I hadn’t figured Joe for a gardening sort of man, and I’d been right on that count. It was Andy who kept the plants surrounding their house alive, who kept the flowers in bloom and the vegetables heavy and ripe on the vine and he seemed to like being outdoors more than being in his own house. He was filthy, sure–his face was streaked with mud, the knees of his jeans green and brown from kneeling in the grass all morning, and the back of his neck was beginning to burn, but he was smiling nonetheless.
“Weeding,” he said happily. “Always weeding. Especially around these late summer roses–poor things, can’t even bloom in peace. Just make sure you get the roots.”
We spent nearly half an hour in silence, me tugging up weeds at nearly half the rate Andy was going. He made no comment on my less-than-perfect technique, not even when I had to dig the roots out with my fingers and I was grateful for that. Some things didn’t need advice, just practice, and this was one of them.
“Grateful as I am for the help and the company,” Andy said at last, “I don’t think that was the reason you came over.”
I sighed–it wasn’t, and I knew he’d have picked it up the moment I set foot in his yard, but half of me really didn’t want to know. Half of me wanted to turn a bland eye to Pete’s attacks, to pretend they were just bad dreams like he told me, that he was fine, that he was happy, that I was imagining all of this.
But he’d been scared last night, so scared, and when had Pete ever seemed nervous about anything? He wore clothes too tight, to small, too bright, with no sense of shame, and always (or so I thought) said the first thing that popped into his head, no matter how rude, inappropriate, or philosophical it might come off. He was exactly the way I always wished I could be, unashamed of who he was and to see him like that, see him trembling and frightened and so not himself...it had shaken me and I couldn’t pretend that away.
“No,” I admitted finally, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “I wanted to talk to you alone. It’s about Pete,” I added, as if there was any question. Lately, my entire life was about Pete.
Something in Andy’s face changed, something in those sightless eyes and he looked old, suddenly, weary, almost as if...no, he couldn’t have been expecting this question, could he? “I need to know,” I pressed, because maybe he didn’t want to tell me, maybe he didn’t think I should know. “Please, Andy.”
He rubbed at his temples, leaving a streak of dirt across one side of his forehead, but he nodded. “You do need to know,” he agreed. “I’ll make tea. This isn’t the place to talk about this.”
``````````````````````
If there was one thing to say about Andy, it was that he knew how to make tea. I didn’t even like tea and I still enjoyed Andy’s. He’d let Joe make it the first time we were there because (as Andy had whispered to me once while Joe struggled with cleaning the gutters) Joe liked to feel like the man of the house sometimes, liked to feel like he could take care of Andy. So Andy let him, even thought they both knew that Andy was more than capable of taking care of himself.
“Thought we’d try something new,” Andy said, sliding a mug across the table to me. I’d always just stuck to traditional chamomile, which Andy grew and dried himself, but this smelled stronger, like flowers and spring and a little bit like comfort. “Rooibos and jasmine,” he explained. “Try it, you’ll like it.”
I did. It was warm and light enough to be appropriate for a Wilmette summer day. But as much as I enjoyed the tea, that wasn’t what I’d come here for, and I was impatient. I tried not to be around Andy, mostly because he was always so calm and serene, but this...I had to know and I had to know now.
But I wasn’t ever going to be as bold as Pete. I couldn’t just come out and ask because granted, my tongue hadn’t been paralysed like this for months, not since I’d met Pete, but even under the cover of the little self-assurance Pete had managed to instill in me, I was still Patrick, still socially inept in every way possible, and asking questions was never going to be easy for me.
“Where’s Joe?” I winced–it hadn’t been what I’d been meaning to ask at all and Andy knew it.
“At work,” he said dismissively, but didn’t press me for why I’d showed up alone today, why I needed so badly to talk to him. He was waiting for me, waiting for my question, forcing me to swallow my nerves and just ask already.
“Okay,” I said finally and I closed my eyes because for some reason this was so much easier when I didn’t have to look at Andy, regardless of the fact that he couldn’t see me. “I want to know what happened to Pete.”
“What do you mean?” My head snapped up and I glared at Andy, but he wasn’t frowning, didn’t look confused, and he wasn’t playing with me–he honestly wanted to know what I was referring to, and that scared me more than any straight answer he could have given because didn’t that imply that more than one thing had happened to Pete...?
“He slept over at my house last night.” Andy raised an eyebrow and I said hurriedly, “Not like that, he was just over late and my mom didn’t want him walking home after midnight.
“And he was fine the whole night. Nothing happened, nothing weird...he fell asleep first and I was getting ready for bed and I covered him up with a blanket, right? My house gets cold at night.” I was rambling and fully aware of it, staring down at the steam spiralling up out of my cup. “And I touched him and he just...screamed. I’ve never heard him sound like that.” I bit my lip and glanced up at him.
“Then what?” His voice was cool, crisp, professional, calculating in a way I’d never heard Andy sound before. This wasn’t the warm, friendly man I was so used to, he wasn’t curious for any personal reason, he was...was analysing everything I said, like maybe he could learn something from it.
“He sort of...attacked me.”
“Physically?” There it was, a flicker of that old concern and I was relieved. This was all so strange, the last thing I needed was Andy turning into someone else entirely. “Did he hurt you?”
“Well, no. On both counts.”
He nodded with a sigh. “A sexual advance, then.”
I frowned. I recognized that tone, the clipped way of speaking. I’d heard it before, in every therapist my mother had ever sent me to–the tone of someone who didn’t want to get too attached. “Andy...were you ever...?”
He smiled then, faint but undeniably Andy. “Yes,” he said. “That obvious? I haven’t practised in nearly five years, I was hoping maybe you wouldn’t notice.”
“You told me you were a teacher.”
“I am now,” he said quietly, smile fading. “I worked with children, before. I closed my practice five years ago last month. I couldn’t do it any more.”
“Why?”
He sighed and stared down into the depths of his mug, as if maybe his blind eyes could find an answer there. He tilted his head to the side and watched me evenly, unblinking. “Because I failed Pete so completely.”
Title: Eyes Like The Summer (7/?)
Authos: oxygen_losers
Rating: PG-13, yo!
Summary: "It took two months before I realized there was something wrong with Pete. And I don’t mean wrong like ‘hey-he’s-hiding-in-trees-you-shoulda-pi
Previous Chapters:
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/midnig
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
http://community.livejournal.com/midnig
http://community.livejournal.com/patric
Chapter Seven
(A/N: Well…okay, here we go with the actual plot now. This has been planned from the beginning, and I hate to disappoint, but I have to tell the story, y’know?)
It took two months before I realized there was something wrong with Pete.
And I don’t mean wrong like ‘hey-he’s-hiding-in-trees-you-shoulda-pi
I guess I always knew it was there. I always knew something was off. That moment in the forest, when I’d asked how he found his secret garden…I couldn’t forget the way his smile had faltered, the way his grin suddenly seemed more like bared teeth and less like a smile.
So it was little things. Little things like:
Come at him from any angle he couldn’t see you and he froze.
Hug him from behind and he cringed.
Raise a hand and his head ducked just a little, eyes closed.
Touch him when he was asleep and he whimpered.
Touch him when he was dreaming and he screamed the sort of murder that had your mother running into your bedroom, clutching her bathrobe around herself because she thought someone was dying, don’t scare her like that.
Maybe that was the one that got me.
“Pete?” I asked, once she’d gone and he didn’t reply, just smiled and shook. “Pete, hey, c’mon. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I’d never heard anything so unconvincing in my life. He was as not-okay as I’d ever seen anyone—trembling, fingers curled tightly in the fabric of my comforter, white-knuckled to the point where my own joints ached in sympathy. He wouldn’t look at me, either, which was a first—Pete was anything but shy. Everyone he interacted with, he met them face-on, looked the in the eye, but this…his head was ducked, face turned down to stare at his own knees, and even from this angle I could see that his eyes were darting frantically around the room. Panicked.
“Pete?” My hand hovered over his shoulder—he certainly didn’t look like he wanted me to touch him, but I didn’t know what else to do. He certainly didn’t look like he was up for sharing whatever was going on in his head. I let my palm drop and in the split second he surged at me, like my hand on his shoulder had been a starting gun.
“What are you—mmph!” Okay, pause. Rewind. I’d missed something here, obviously, because he’d screamed, panicked and then—tackled me? I was too taken aback to do anything more than squirm underneath him because really, he may have been smaller than me, but he was strong. And hey, look at that, his tongue was in my mouth and his hands were in my shirt and he only pulled back when I made an angry sort of noise in the back of my throat and which point he…he just stared at me, and he wasn’t smiling, wasn’t doing anything I normally associated with Pete (because even when he wasn’t smiling, his eyes were). He just watched me, face blank and then he tucked his head into the curve of my throat and sort of…nuzzled at me.
“Peter?”
He tensed at the sound of his name and…was that a whimper? He nudged at me frantically, and he was bracing himself above me, but his arms were trembling, he kept his face turned away, and he kept making these weird gaspy noises. “I’ll be good,” he whispered finally and my heart seized in my chest.
Because Pete Wentz didn’t do broken. He didn’t do scared. He didn’t whimper and squirm and rub himself pitifully against me, like his whole body was begging for reassurance I didn’t have any idea how to give. It was an apology, a weird, animal apology because maybe I was the one on my back, but he was offering me the smooth, tanned skin on the back of his neck in submission and he made sure his head was lower than mine and I’d seen enough of the Discovery Channel to recognize it.
“Stop, Pete,” I said softly and he keened deep in his chest, a desperate, mournful noise I’d never heard him make before, and mouthed at my collarbone. He wasn’t stopping. He was shaking so bad I didn’t think he could and I was terrified—not because he was squirming around on top of me, half-clothed and gasping, but because he really didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on.
“I’ll be good,” he repeated, like that was all that mattered, like that would make everything all better.
“Good? Pete, what’re you talking about?” That…in any context, that didn’t sound healthy. I couldn’t think of a single situation that would have him trembling like this and promising he’d ‘be good’ that was deeply disturbing. “Pete, hey, it’s me. Come on.”
He shuddered again, gasped, blinking like I’d just thrown a bucket of cold water on him. “Trick?” he said slowly and good, thank God, he was actually looking me in the eye. I brushed one hand over his flushed cheek.
“Yeah, Pete. What’s going on?”
He grinned and it was so sudden, so smooth, so instantaneous that I wondered how many times he’d practised smiling no matter how he felt. “Nothin’, man. Bad dream, s’all. Sorry for climbing all over you.”
I didn’t believe a word of it, because if nothing else, he was still trembling and his smile wasn’t right on one side. But I didn’t press it, I knew better than that. I let him curl up next to me with his head on my chest and I stoked his hair back from his face until the panicked rise and fall of his chest tapered off into the deep, even breathing that meant he was asleep.
```````````````
I always had to remind myself that Andy was blind. It didn’t seem possible for him to know so much without seeing, but maybe it was just me–maybe I just had a difficult time imagining life without the way sunlight slanted over the curve of Pete’s shoulders when he bowed his head.
“This is a surprise.” Andy planted his hands on his knees and smiled up at me, tucking a stray lock of hair into his messy ponytail. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the two of you apart.”
I hadn’t meant to leave Pete at home, actually. But he’d been asleep still when I woke up, and I didn’t want to wake him up, he looked so peaceful like that. Plus, I’d needed to talk to Andy alone, and Pete never wanted to leave my side when we were together. “Just me today,” I agreed softly. “Do you need any help?”
Andy was up to his elbows in dirt–I hadn’t figured Joe for a gardening sort of man, and I’d been right on that count. It was Andy who kept the plants surrounding their house alive, who kept the flowers in bloom and the vegetables heavy and ripe on the vine and he seemed to like being outdoors more than being in his own house. He was filthy, sure–his face was streaked with mud, the knees of his jeans green and brown from kneeling in the grass all morning, and the back of his neck was beginning to burn, but he was smiling nonetheless.
“Weeding,” he said happily. “Always weeding. Especially around these late summer roses–poor things, can’t even bloom in peace. Just make sure you get the roots.”
We spent nearly half an hour in silence, me tugging up weeds at nearly half the rate Andy was going. He made no comment on my less-than-perfect technique, not even when I had to dig the roots out with my fingers and I was grateful for that. Some things didn’t need advice, just practice, and this was one of them.
“Grateful as I am for the help and the company,” Andy said at last, “I don’t think that was the reason you came over.”
I sighed–it wasn’t, and I knew he’d have picked it up the moment I set foot in his yard, but half of me really didn’t want to know. Half of me wanted to turn a bland eye to Pete’s attacks, to pretend they were just bad dreams like he told me, that he was fine, that he was happy, that I was imagining all of this.
But he’d been scared last night, so scared, and when had Pete ever seemed nervous about anything? He wore clothes too tight, to small, too bright, with no sense of shame, and always (or so I thought) said the first thing that popped into his head, no matter how rude, inappropriate, or philosophical it might come off. He was exactly the way I always wished I could be, unashamed of who he was and to see him like that, see him trembling and frightened and so not himself...it had shaken me and I couldn’t pretend that away.
“No,” I admitted finally, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “I wanted to talk to you alone. It’s about Pete,” I added, as if there was any question. Lately, my entire life was about Pete.
Something in Andy’s face changed, something in those sightless eyes and he looked old, suddenly, weary, almost as if...no, he couldn’t have been expecting this question, could he? “I need to know,” I pressed, because maybe he didn’t want to tell me, maybe he didn’t think I should know. “Please, Andy.”
He rubbed at his temples, leaving a streak of dirt across one side of his forehead, but he nodded. “You do need to know,” he agreed. “I’ll make tea. This isn’t the place to talk about this.”
``````````````````````
If there was one thing to say about Andy, it was that he knew how to make tea. I didn’t even like tea and I still enjoyed Andy’s. He’d let Joe make it the first time we were there because (as Andy had whispered to me once while Joe struggled with cleaning the gutters) Joe liked to feel like the man of the house sometimes, liked to feel like he could take care of Andy. So Andy let him, even thought they both knew that Andy was more than capable of taking care of himself.
“Thought we’d try something new,” Andy said, sliding a mug across the table to me. I’d always just stuck to traditional chamomile, which Andy grew and dried himself, but this smelled stronger, like flowers and spring and a little bit like comfort. “Rooibos and jasmine,” he explained. “Try it, you’ll like it.”
I did. It was warm and light enough to be appropriate for a Wilmette summer day. But as much as I enjoyed the tea, that wasn’t what I’d come here for, and I was impatient. I tried not to be around Andy, mostly because he was always so calm and serene, but this...I had to know and I had to know now.
But I wasn’t ever going to be as bold as Pete. I couldn’t just come out and ask because granted, my tongue hadn’t been paralysed like this for months, not since I’d met Pete, but even under the cover of the little self-assurance Pete had managed to instill in me, I was still Patrick, still socially inept in every way possible, and asking questions was never going to be easy for me.
“Where’s Joe?” I winced–it hadn’t been what I’d been meaning to ask at all and Andy knew it.
“At work,” he said dismissively, but didn’t press me for why I’d showed up alone today, why I needed so badly to talk to him. He was waiting for me, waiting for my question, forcing me to swallow my nerves and just ask already.
“Okay,” I said finally and I closed my eyes because for some reason this was so much easier when I didn’t have to look at Andy, regardless of the fact that he couldn’t see me. “I want to know what happened to Pete.”
“What do you mean?” My head snapped up and I glared at Andy, but he wasn’t frowning, didn’t look confused, and he wasn’t playing with me–he honestly wanted to know what I was referring to, and that scared me more than any straight answer he could have given because didn’t that imply that more than one thing had happened to Pete...?
“He slept over at my house last night.” Andy raised an eyebrow and I said hurriedly, “Not like that, he was just over late and my mom didn’t want him walking home after midnight.
“And he was fine the whole night. Nothing happened, nothing weird...he fell asleep first and I was getting ready for bed and I covered him up with a blanket, right? My house gets cold at night.” I was rambling and fully aware of it, staring down at the steam spiralling up out of my cup. “And I touched him and he just...screamed. I’ve never heard him sound like that.” I bit my lip and glanced up at him.
“Then what?” His voice was cool, crisp, professional, calculating in a way I’d never heard Andy sound before. This wasn’t the warm, friendly man I was so used to, he wasn’t curious for any personal reason, he was...was analysing everything I said, like maybe he could learn something from it.
“He sort of...attacked me.”
“Physically?” There it was, a flicker of that old concern and I was relieved. This was all so strange, the last thing I needed was Andy turning into someone else entirely. “Did he hurt you?”
“Well, no. On both counts.”
He nodded with a sigh. “A sexual advance, then.”
I frowned. I recognized that tone, the clipped way of speaking. I’d heard it before, in every therapist my mother had ever sent me to–the tone of someone who didn’t want to get too attached. “Andy...were you ever...?”
He smiled then, faint but undeniably Andy. “Yes,” he said. “That obvious? I haven’t practised in nearly five years, I was hoping maybe you wouldn’t notice.”
“You told me you were a teacher.”
“I am now,” he said quietly, smile fading. “I worked with children, before. I closed my practice five years ago last month. I couldn’t do it any more.”
“Why?”
He sighed and stared down into the depths of his mug, as if maybe his blind eyes could find an answer there. He tilted his head to the side and watched me evenly, unblinking. “Because I failed Pete so completely.”
