Title: Eyes Like The Summer (8/?)

Authos: oxygen_losers

Rating: Um...we're almost approaching an R on this one, maybe.

Summary: He laughed, an abrupt, halting thing that sounded to me more like he was choking on his own words and I shuddered–I should never have let this go so long. “Sure,” he said bitterly, lips twisting into a cold smile that was more than out-of-place on him. “Sure, I don’t make you sick. Which is why you can’t talk about it.”
Previous Chapters:
http://community.livejournal.com/patrickxpeter/241893.html

http://community.livejournal.com/patrickxpeter/358852.html

http://community.livejournal.com/midnight_party/85918.html#cutid1

http://community.livejournal.com/patrickxpeter/467133.html

http://community.livejournal.com/midnight_party/105563.html#cutid1

http://community.livejournal.com/patrickxpeter/487327.html#cutid1

http://oxygen-losers.livejournal.com/1641.html#cutid1



Chapter Eight




It made sense now.

Pete made sense now.

I didn’t want him to, I didn’t want him to be this...this tragedy Andy was painting for me, and several times I was on the verge of accusing him of lying, or maybe just refusing to listen because I’d been right.

I didn’t want to know.

“It doesn’t happen as often as you’d think,” Andy said quietly and the tea had long gone cold, but he sipped absently at it anyways, eyes dark and sad, the eyes of someone who had seen (not literally, of course) too much. “Despite the media coverage, actual child abduction is pretty rare. Most Amber Alerts nowadays are divorcees who take off with a kid to ‘get back’ at their ex-husband. Or wife.”

“So he was...?”

Andy nodded tiredly. “No one understood why, either. His parents weren’t particularly wealthy, neither of them had any enemies that they knew of, and no ransom was demanded. It didn’t make any sense. It was completely random. One of those things that happens to other people.

“The man that took him was a coke addict, we found out later. Chances are he was high at the time, didn’t know what he was doing. Or maybe he did, maybe he watched Pete. We don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Why not?” I wanted to bite my tongue off the moment I’d said it–Andy’s face crumpled, his shoulders slumped and I hadn’t meant to upset him, I really hadn’t. In retrospect, though, bringing up his failure as a psychiatrist? Yeah, probably not the most sensitive thing I could have done, but my brain had sort of shut down around the time Andy had sighed and said “Pete was kidnapped when he was younger.”

Who gets kidnapped, honestly? That doesn’t happen in Wilmette. Not to real people, not to people I knew. It was always sad, hollow-eyed children on the news, frantic searches for a couple of months and then the inevitable body, too small for the hospital gurney that carried it out of the ditch, the field, the kidnapper’s house. They never showed the actual body (because even the newscasters had some respect for dead children) but that tiny, crumpled little form barely denting a too-big sheet was somehow ten times worse than the body would have been.

I guess I should have been grateful that Pete wasn’t one of those bodies.

“Pete never talked about it and the man was dead long before police got there.”

“What?”

Andy shook his head. “I can’t tell the story backwards, Patrick,” he said and I worried my lower lip between my teeth.

He rubbed at his temples wearily. “I don’t know where to begin,” he confessed with an awkward, strained smile. He didn’t want to smile–I knew he didn’t, because neither did I, but I smiled back for lack of anything better to do. This day had taken a sort of surreal turn and I wasn’t really sure if I was keeping up properly, but like I said. Brain numb. Yeah.

“The beginning works for me,” I said and God, God, I sounded so stupid, so heartless, so like I didn’t care, like this was all a joke.

Which wasn’t the case, not at all, but if I didn’t keep smiling I was going to lose it completely.

And that, at this point, was not an option.

```````````````

Pete was waiting for me when I got back.

I don’t know what I’d expected, I don’t know why I thought he’d still be asleep, but he was curled up at the head of my bed, fully-dressed, long arms wrapped around his knees. It was a pose, but it wasn’t–he just sort of fell that way when he relaxed, I knew it wasn’t deliberate.

“Hey,” he said and that should have been my first clue something was wrong because he didn’t smile. And Pete always smiled.

Instead he just fiddled with a thread along the ragged edge of the hole ripped in the knee of his jeans and he wasn’t looking at me. I wanted him to look at me because this wasn’t the Pete I knew. I needed the Pete I knew separate from the Pete Andy had painted for me and selfish? Yes, completely.

But dammit, I loved that Pete, the one that hid out in trees and slipped notes into my pockets when I wasn’t looking and made me cupcakes just because he was bored and once covered my entire arm with fragmented bits of poetry and smiled like the sunrise and curled up against me when he slept.

I wanted to keep him like that in my head.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Andy, it was that I couldn’t. Pete had, in the course of only two months, become my lifeline, my only friend, a reason for getting up in the morning, a reason for leaving my house and actually attempting to look decent. I never knew what I was missing because I’d been so used to being lonely, it seemed normal. Now, though...now I couldn’t imagine a day without Pete. I didn’t want to.

So I grinned sunnily back at him, hating myself for being so self-centered, trying to pretend that I didn’t see the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, the way he clutched fistfuls of my bedsheets, the streaked eyeliner that probably meant he’d been crying.

Oh, and it’s horrible, it’s horrible. I know, trust me, I know but...but I needed him to be okay.

I needed to not deal with this right now.

He was subdued for the rest of the day and I made up for it with a sickening amount of cheer. Seriously, I smiled so much my jaw ached afterwards and my stomach hurt from ignoring the pleading, desperate looks he’d been giving me all day–Pete wasn’t stupid, he knew where I’d been, knew that I knew something about him that I shouldn’t have.

And I knew he needed to talk about it, because he certainly hadn’t talked to Andy or his parents or anyone, actually, as far as I could tell, but I didn’t...the speculation was enough.

I didn’t want to know anything else.

We went on like that for two weeks and I watched him fade. He smiled, sure, but they were strained and only for my benefit. I watched him out of the corner of my eye and they vanished when he thought I wasn’t looking, replaced by the dead, haunted expression his face slid into so easily nowadays.

I tried to ignore the way his tight shirts hung looser on him lately. The way his lips twitched at the corners like he was trying not to scream. The way he slumped over, the way he curled up into himself, the way he flinched away from me when I tried to touch him.

I tried to pretend that I didn’t notice the band-aids peeking out from the waist of his jeans and the sleeves of his shirts. I tried to pretend that I didn’t see the circles under his eyes getting bigger and the fact that he rarely actually slept when he slept over anymore.

The summer was dying and so was Pete.

And God help me, I couldn’t open my mouth to stop it. I tried, I swear I tried to ask him what had happened, if he needed to talk about it. I knew he needed me as much as I needed him because despite the charisma, despite the fact that if he only knew how to play his cards right he could have anyone he wanted...for some inexplicable reason, he wanted me and I couldn’t even ask him what was wrong.

So fucking selfish.

And this had a wall between us now. I hated it, I hated how he bit his lip and looked away rather than ask me for something, how he kept his observations to himself now, how he blinked, startled, whenever I spoke to him.

Two weeks before he snapped.

It was sudden, too, and I’d say it was out of nowhere, but that wasn’t really true; I’d had this coming. I half expected him to punch me in the face because seriously? I deserved it.

We were sitting on my back porch watching Mojo sniffing around the yard, black tail waving in the sunset and Pete wasn’t looking at me. He was staring deliberately out into the yard and even his shoulder was tensed against mine. I could see his jaw working as he struggled to say something, though better of it, and closed his mouth.

“It makes you sick,” he said abruptly and flinched, like the words themselves hurt to say.

“Yes,” I replied because it did, the idea of what had happened to him made my stomach turn, but I watched his face fall and no, I hadn’t meant it like that at all. “You don’t make me sick, Pete. It’s not you.”

He laughed, an abrupt, halting thing that sounded to me more like he was choking on his own words and I shuddered–I should never have let this go so long. “Sure,” he said bitterly, lips twisting into a cold smile that was more than out-of-place on him. “Sure, I don’t make you sick. Which is why you can’t talk about it.”

“No, I–“ And how was I supposed to make that sound anything less than awful? “I just...didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it.”

Lame and he saw through it in a second. “Bullshit,” he snarled. “Bull-fucking-shit. I’ve been trying to bring it up for two goddamn weeks and you just...act like you can’t hear me, or you don’t notice. I’m not stupid, Patrick.”

It was the first time in a long time he’d called me by my full first name and it stung but I deserved it. “I know you’re not,” I said softly. “I just...I don’t know, Pete. I don’t know what to say.”

“No one does.” His shoulder wasn’t even touching mine anymore and his knuckles were clenched on the porch swing, white-knuckled and furious. “No one ever knows what to say besides ‘I’m sorry.’”

I bit my lip because that had been the next sentence on the tip of my tongue.

“I’m not that fucking fragile,” he continued angrily, brown eyes narrowed at me and when had he stopped wearing eyeliner? He looked so small and sad like that. “Just because I’m stupid enough to get myself taken–“

“Don’t say that,” I cut in. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

“Like you’ve got a goddamn clue!” He was yelling now and I’d never so much as seen him angry, I hadn’t known all this rage was in that little body. “You weren’t there, you don’t know a damn thing!”

“Calm down,” I said worriedly, holding out my hands, palm-first. I wasn’t sure if touching him would get me hit or not, but he let me close one hand on his shoulder at least. “Please, Pete, it’s okay...”

“it’s not okay! You don’t know what it’s like!”
And no, really, I didn’t know what it was like, I didn’t even know what he was talking about because all I knew was all Andy knew. “I know, Pete, I know, just calm down, please.” He was shaking and pale and it scared the hell out of me—he looked so frantic, so terrified.

“Fuck you,” he whispered to his kneecaps—I’d never heard him swear before now, and it caught me off guard.

Wasn’t as bad as what he said next, though. He closed his eyes, ducked his head and said quietly, “You don’t understand. You’ve never been raped.”