Chapter Text
There’s a girl in Jerma’s kitchen when he comes down the stairs on Thursday morning.
She’s a bit mousy, but stereotypically attractive for, well, for a sixteen-year-old. Pretty forgettable. Very blonde. Her hair is in braids. The most outstanding part about her is that she’s in Jerma’s house, sitting at his kitchen table next to his son, giggling at him in between licking donut icing off her fingers.
“Dad, this is Blaire,” Ludwig supplies upon seeing the look of abject confusion that Jerma knows is strewn across his face. “I’m taking her to school. Her mom can’t this morning.”
“Hi,” the girl says, looking bashful, wiggling her fingers in greeting. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” Jerma says carefully, not taking his eyes off Ludwig. “I, ah, you’ve never—you haven’t mentioned her before.”
“Oh, yeah, well, we mostly hang out at school. We’re both so super busy. But she’s, like, we’re kind of going out.”
“Kind of?” Blaire says, sounding a little hurt.
“We are,” Ludwig clarifies. “It’s—yeah. She’s my girlfriend.”
“Oh.” Jerma lingers in the entryway for just a second longer before he manages to spur himself on, clearing his throat and tying up his bathrobe before he begins to hunt through one of the cabinets for the grounds for his pre-coffee coffee. It’s a ritual. Regular coffee to prep himself for the iced coffee he’s going to get before he goes to school. He’s doing fine. His heart problems are for future Jeremy to deal with. “That’s—yeah, that’s great. Guess you really haven’t been together that long, ‘cause I never, uh—” He fumbles a little with the coffee can and spills grounds on the counter. He clenches his teeth together to hold back a string of expletives. “—I’ve never heard about her before.”
“It hasn’t been official for that long.”
“It’s been almost a month,” Blaire says in an undertone, sad and whimpery. Which is kind of like, grow up, maybe, Jerma thinks. That really isn’t that long. But it’s also long enough that Jerma definitely still should’ve known about this. What the f*ck is going on?
“I don’t know, it’s just, like, I’m busy. I just forget to tell people about things,” Ludwig replies.
Jerma laughs, partially in disbelief and partially because there’s no other way to cope with the migraine he’s suddenly developing. He’s never f*cked up this bad while making coffee before. “You live with one other person. We see each other every single day. I feel like you could’ve said something at some point.”
“Well, sorry I didn’t, but you know now. Here she is. We’re dating. It’s great. We’re a power couple.”
“That is so… great.” Jerma clicks his tongue as he sweeps coffee grounds into the sink. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m, uh, that’s great. That’s so great.”
There’s a beat of suffocating silence as Jerma thinks very hard about choosing the right mug.
“Mr. Harrington, do you want any breakfast?” the girl asks, a little timid. “We have lots of extra donuts. If you want some.”
“Uh, no. Thanks. I’m cutting out sugar.”
Ludwig snorts out a laugh. “Since when?”
“Since last week,” Jerma says distractedly, his migraine growing worse when he spots a chip in one of their nice World Market mugs. That was a Christmas present. His whole day is ruined now. “I thought I told you. ‘Cause I tell you things, you know, I just like to include you in the things going on in my life. I like telling you things about myself. It’s what I do. It’s what I like to do.”
“Yeah, okay, fine, I get it, but you literally ate three apple pies from McDonald’s yesterday. One donut’s not gonna hurt.”
“I—yesterday was a cheat day.” Jerma shuts the cabinet door and pours his coffee in one of the unbroken World Market mugs. One of the ones that hasn’t been cruelly overlooked and treated like it’s worthless and not worth being told about how one of the little teacups is now having tea parties with the World Market mug’s baby mug. He catches his hand with the side of the coffee pot and hisses “f*ck” a little too loud, shoving the pot back into the machine like he’s trying to punish an entity incapable of being punished. Much like the entity sitting across from the girl. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I have to get ready for class. Um, it was nice to meet you, Blaire.”
“You’re gonna drink that upstairs? In your room?” Ludwig says flatly. Jerma cringes at the tone: with it, he knows immediately they’re going to be in a fight for the next two days. Like it’s Jerma’s fault. And he knows already that Ludwig is going to make it into his f*cking fault like every other argument they ever have. “Not at the table like every other morning? We’re not gonna have a conversation?”
“I’m late for a meeting. Teachers’ meeting.” Clutching his mug so tightly it’s going to leave imprints, Jerma leaves the kitchen from where he came. “You need to pick up groceries before you come home. I’m gonna be out. I’ll send you a list.”
“Dad, come on—”
“I’m late,” Jerma says curtly, his robe whipping around his legs as he heads back up the stairs. “We’ll talk later.”
His iced coffee tastes like absolute dogsh*t, but he supposes he deserves it for bothering to trust Dunkin’ again. Jerma drinks his thirty-two-ounce dogsh*t iced coffee alone in the Grant Sawyer Middle parking lot, looking at everything and nothing all at once, melting little by little like a snowman sweating under the sun.
A girlfriend. That’s fine. That’s normal. Of course it’s normal. Ludwig is sixteen, very popular, very attractive, very friendly, and very charismatic. It would be weirder if he didn’t have a girlfriend. Honestly, Jerma doesn’t know why it could’ve ever come as a shock. Ludwig has had quote-unquote “girlfriends” here and there over the past few years, cute little harmless, week-long flings, never a big deal. Something to coo over and congratulate him for. Then he’ll mope around for a day after the inevitable breakup, dismissing girls as boring and stupid and not worth his time, nobody seems to really like him for him, God, it’s so hard being so adored. And Jerma will assure him that high school is just a sh*tty, shallow place full of sh*tty, shallow people and he’ll find a girl who genuinely values him sooner rather than later and Jerma will order him whatever he wants for dinner and they’ll spend the night together watching movies on the couch. Always the easiest way to take Ludwig’s mind off things and remind him how loved he is just for being him and that he doesn’t have to try to be anything more.
Feeling worse by the second, Jerma acutely misses the boy he saw not even an hour ago. He’s a dripping snowman and he’s cold. He desires warmth.
But to the point, Ludwig has never had a long-term girlfriend before. That’s new. And never one that he’s had to hide. That’s the disturbing part, that’s the crux of it—why was he hiding her? Is there something wrong with her? Does she do drugs? Does she deal drugs? Does she hurt animals or something? Does she steal? Who knows what she’s hiding in those braids?
It’s driving Jerma f*cking crazy. He sips his coffee and clenches his teeth down on the straw. He knows space would probably be good, especially because he knows that Ludwig has to be upset with him now, but he just has to know what the problem is. He can’t not know. If this girl is troubled, then Ludwig doesn’t need to associate with her. He has enough going on already. He doesn’t need to absorb her poor qualities. She should get help for them and then come back in, say, a year or ten.
Hating himself as he does it, Jerma fishes his phone out of his pocket and pulls up the contact pinned up at the top of his messages.
Hey im sorry i got so short w/you. I get it if youre mad but please dont be I didnt mean to snap at you
Im just confused why you didnt tell me about her before now. Thats why i got upset
I love you have a good day at school okay? call me if u need anything
Jerma watches his phone for at least a minute or so, hoping to see the life signs of little grey dots appear in the corner, but no such luck. He sinks down a few inches in his seat and takes another very, very long, aggressive sip of coffee.
He’s distracted all throughout the day. He misspells ‘myriad’, ‘analysis’, and ‘frequently’ on the whiteboard and he gets corrected by more than one smartypants, know-it-all little sh*t. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching English, Mr. Harrington?” I don’t know, aren’t you supposed to be bumming cigarettes off eighth graders and giving yourself early heart disease from stuffing your face full of Hot Cheetos and processed sugar every day? f*ck off.
Jerma does get a few texts back. About four hour after he sent his. It’s fine.
you overreacted so bad it was really embarrassing
you sounded like a neurotic freak. which is why I didn’t tell you. cuz I knew you’d act like a neurotic freak abt it. everything’s fine Blaire is super normal she’s like really cool
And it hurts, of course. It does. It always hurts whenever Ludwig hurls anything like that at him. Calling him weird and meaning it, calling him a freak, telling him he’s a psycho, whatever. That never feels good. But, honestly, the flimsiness of the excuse is more of an insult than anything else.
I wouldnt have freakrd out if youd just mentioned that you had a girlfriend before. A month is a rly rly long time Lud
Why didnt you want me to know is there somethig wrong with her
I’ve been busy oh my god I literally just forgot to tell you for a while and then it lasted long enough that I knew you’d be weird when I said anything
there’s nothing wrong with her she’s great
I love you but i dont trust your jusgement. 16 yearolds arent great at looking out for their best intrets
Intrests
you spelled it wrong twice
can’t you just trust me instead of generalizing me? that feels really sh*tty jsyk
Sorry. youre right
Youre right I do trust you
We should probly talk later. Ill make spagheti for dinner
are you going to actually make spaghetti or are you going to set the kitchen on fire and then ask me to make spaghetti bc you’re too ashamed/scared to try it again
Ill make spagheti :(
I love you <33
It takes a few minutes and it has Jerma checking and rechecking his phone over and over again during lunch, but he finally gets a ‘Ludwig loved “I love you <33”’ notification. It’s fine. It’s enough for now.
But Jerma still can’t help but worry a little bit.
Of course Jerma trusts Ludwig. He trusts him very much. Ludwig’s very minor infractions have all had a greater cause to them far beyond his control and it’s not fair to blame him for them, because when a boy feels trapped, he’ll naturally act out. The shoplifting habit was trained out of him once he got a little bit of counseling and Jerma made a far more concentrated effort to spend as much time as he could with Ludwig. Ludwig stopped taking Jerma’s car in the middle of the night once he got one of his own and he was given a little more personal freedom. There was that silly little scam he pulled where he was selling fake drugs to kids in lower grades, but that was quickly put to a stop as well once he started making his own money from streaming. All Ludwig ever needs is patience and tender love and care and resources and a chance to rectify his mistakes. He’s a really, really good boy, the best f*cking kid in the world, the most gorgeous example of a human being that Jerma has ever seen in his life, and he deserves all the trust that Jerma can give him. And Jerma should trust Ludwig about this. He should, really. The girlfriend thing shouldn’t be an issue. At all.
So why does it feel like one?
Against his better judgment, Jerma calls Ludwig as soon as he gets out of school, chewing on his lip, cutting it open by accident when the dial tone lasts for as long as it does.
“Hey, Dad,” Ludwig finally answers, sounding tired.
“Hey! Hey, I’m glad you picked up, I was really hoping you weren’t busy. Um, listen, I, like, I just, I wanted to say I’m sorry. Again. I really am.”
“Yeah, it’s okay, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”
“You sure? I-I-I just don’t want you to think that I’m upset with you or anything.”
“It’s fine,” Ludwig stresses. “Seriously, relax, you’re making yourself insane. Please. I told you, it’s okay.”
“Okay. Just… wanted to make sure. You don’t have to get groceries, I’ll get them. You can go home if you want. Don’t stress out about it.”
“Oh, sh*t, really? Okay. Then I’m gonna be out for a couple hours.”
“Where?”
“Why?” Ludwig immediately counters.
“Because I just like to know where you are. It makes me feel better.”
“I’m just going to Charlie’s to hang out. That’s all.”
“Okay. Yeah. Good. Just be home by, like, seven. Dinner’s probably gonna be ready by then.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to actually make dinner?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I told you, I’m making spaghetti. We’re having spaghetti for dinner.”
“If you make me pick something up on the way home, I’m gonna let all the air out of your tires, I swear to God.”
“I’m making spaghetti! I’ve made you spaghetti before! Lots of times! So many different times where nothing went wrong and everything was okay and I didn’t get hurt and nothing got burned. If I can trust you, you have to trust me, okay? This goes both ways. I’ll trust you that you know what you’re doing and you can trust me that I can make you spaghetti and that everything’s gonna be fine.”
“Okay, I’m just saying. I trust you. I’m driving right now, uh, I’ll talk to you later.”
“I love you,” Jerma says quickly, sort of a desperate little bid. “I love you so much, you know that? I always want you to know that.”
“I love you too. I’ll let you know when I’m coming home. See you.”
“See you,” Jerma says softly, listening to Ludwig hang up.
It seems like the kid is always out of the house these days.
“It’s chewy.”
Jerma frowns at a stubborn chunk of spaghetti that he has to cut with the side of his fork. “It’s—it’s been worse. I think it’s fine. I mean, anybody would do this if they just forgot to stir it a few times. It’s not me. It’s just a thing that could happen to literally anybody. I had a lot going on at once. I-I was getting distracted.”
“You had two things going on,” Ludwig points out. “You had the sauce, and then you had the pasta. It’s only two things.”
“Okay, well, you know what, I was doing laundry, I was running the dishwasher, I was doing a bunch of sh*t while I was waiting for this to get done.”
“Dad, the dishwasher runs by itself—”
“Okay, okay, alright, yeah, okay, well, you weren’t here,” Jerma talks over Ludwig, waving his hands with a dismissive flourish before stabbing at his pasta again. “It’s a lot. I have a lot going on that you just don’t see ‘cause you’re never here. What’d you say earlier? You’re busy, right? Too busy to tell people about things?”
“Oh my f*cking God,” Ludwig groans, setting his fork down and rubbing his hands over his face. “You’re still stuck on it?”
“Can we not use that language at the table?” Jerma asks lightly.
“Can you get over me just forgetting to tell you literally one thing? This thing that barely matters?”
“Barely matters? Your girlfriend barely matters? Lud, you’ve never had an actual relationship before, okay? This is really serious sh*t. That matters to me. A lot.”
Ludwig rolls his eyes. “Alright, first of all, I have had actual relationships before—”
“No you haven’t,” Jerma says, shaking his head. “Nope. Nothing real. Nothing like this.”
“Yes I have! I just—I didn’t tell you about them. I never brought them to the house. But I’ve had real relationships. Like, a few times. Blaire’s just new.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s like…” Ludwig keeps his face hidden in his hands as he exhales. “...you get weird around them. You always, like, you interrogate them. You vet them. And you never let me go out with them. I only get to have a girlfriend when you don’t know about them. And you especially won’t let me go over to their place and you most especially won’t let me go anywhere with them at night. Do you know how insane it is that my curfew is at eleven? I’m not a goddamn kid. You act like I’m special.”
“You are special.”
Ludwig drops his hands to give Jerma an exasperated look. “I mean disabled, Dad.”
Jerma picks at his spaghetti in silence for a moment. “...so what you’re telling me is that you’ve been, uh, lying to me. All because I care about you and I don’t want you involved with—with anyone who’s going to be a bad influence on you. You’ve been lying to me. Is that it?”
“I’m not lying! I’m just… omitting certain aspects of my life from you that you’re super unfairly critical of.”
Jerma laughs a little and shakes his head, unable to react any other way. “That’s—you’re still lying. That’s still just lying. That’s exactly what it is. Oh my God, Lud, and you want me to trust you? How many girls have you been f*cking around with under my nose? Did you—you haven’t had sex with any of them, have you?”
“Dad!”
“What? I-i-it’s, it’s a simple—it’s just a question.” Jerma swallows past something thick in his throat, his insides burning in the strangest, most sickeningly warm kind of way. It’s anger, maybe, but something else that he can’t place. “I don’t want you ruining your life or getting hurt or making a mistake that you can’t take back or anything like that. I don’t want you around some stupid f*ckin’ kid that’s gonna just, like, take you and chew you up and spit you out and treat you like sh*t. You haven’t had sex with any of them, right?”
“Let me ask you a question,” Ludwig says, his voice stronger and harder, teetering on the edge of losing his temper. “What would you do if I did? Also, follow-up question: why is it literally any of your business? Can I start asking you about your sex life? Or lack thereof?”
Jerma turns a violent shade of mottled red and he nearly spills a glass of water all over the table. “Alright, well, hang on, that’s completely uncalled for, first off, there’s no reason you should be asking me about that. I’m an adult and I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions. You’re sixteen years old; I don’t care if you say you’re not a kid anymore, you are, both physically and mentally, and also legally, and I’m just trying to keep you safe. There’s no reason for you to be giving yourself up to these girls who aren’t gonna remember your name in a year. I’m looking out for you. That’s all. I love you. They f*ckin’ don’t.”
“What do you know?” Ludwig snaps, slamming his fork down just to make noise, Jerma’s pretty certain. “I have a career, I have a car, I have a life, I have friends, I have all this sh*t that a normal, functioning person who’s capable of making their own decisions is supposed to have—when are you gonna decide that I’m old enough to think for myself? When I’m eighteen? Twenty-one? Tell me when. Just tell me when, it’s fine, I can wait. I’ll wait until then to grow a brain and start being a normal teenager who has sex with my girlfriend like a normal teenager should.”
“You are having sex with her. You are, aren’t you?”
“Jesus Christ, why do you care?”
“Just answer the question, Ludwig.” Jerma is forcing his voice steady. It’s on the precipice of either cracking or rising to a dangerous degree.
“I—” Ludwig exhales harshly, looking away and glaring at the dining room wall like it’s done something to hurt him. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. That’s it, you caught me. Are you f*cking satisfied? Are you gonna actually lose your sh*t at me like I’m, like, a preacher’s daughter who’s supposed to be saving herself for marriage?”
Jerma is so frustrated and upset and hurt that he doesn’t know what to do without throwing a tantrum first. His jaw tightens as he shoves his chair back and gets to his feet. “Okay. I’m—I’m not hungry anymore. Go clean up the kitchen.”
Staring at him resolutely, eyes bright and furious, Ludwig doesn’t move. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I’m not cleaning sh*t. You can’t make me.”
Jerma clenches his hands over the back of the chair next to him. “Ludwig—”
“Okay, okay, fine, oh my God, I’ll do it! I never get a break in this house! I should’ve never come home at all!” Ludwig snatches his plate and water glass off the table and stalks off to the kitchen. “I’m failing pre-calc because you never let me work on anything that actually matters!”
“Oh, yeah, why not, sure, that makes sense, it’s my fault you’re failing. Sure, yeah, okay, just blame me for everything that’s going wrong in your life. Everything is my fault. It’s always my fault. I’m a terrible f*cking father and I’m destroying your life. I never let you leave the house or ever go out with your friends. Everything’s always my fault because I’m a bad person.” It’s probably not healthy how badly he suddenly needs alcohol, but Jerma rapidly becomes aware that if he doesn’t dull his nerves, he’s going to have a screaming, crying panic attack. He goes straight for the liquor cabinet in the living room, fingernails digging into his palms.
“Don’t do that,” Ludwig tells him from the kitchen, dishes clattering hard enough to make Jerma cringe at their well-being. “Why do you always do that? I call you out for being a psycho and then you just shut down and guilt-trip me.”
“I’m not talking anymore. I’ll say something I’ll regret and I-I, I don’t, I can’t do that to you.” Jerma realizes he’ll need to go to the kitchen if he wants a wine glass, and he’d really rather not. There’s not much left in the sh*tty, cheap bottle of chardonnay from Albertsons, so he can just take the whole thing, it doesn’t matter, it’s fine, there’s no laws against that. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Fine. Go.” There’s another terrible crash of ceramic and silverware. Jerma can’t listen to it anymore.
He’s trying to read more books lately. Trying is the key word; no matter what, they always just tire him out and pull him out of focus. He’ll read ten or eleven pages and his brain will forcibly shut off and forbid him from reading any more. He figured that clouding his senses would help, but it doesn’t do sh*t. Jerma abandons the thriller he’s trying to be thrilled by within the span of ten minutes and swaps it out for his iPad instead, admitting defeat. The chardonnay is bitter and heavy and incredibly dry and the bottle feels heavier and heavier in his hand every time he tips it back.
He’s only seen the girl once, but she’s far too bright and vivid in his head. Jerma sees her and her blonde braids and her perfect teeth and her delicate hands. She’s beautiful, of course. Beautiful in the way that any stupid, shallow teenage boy would drool over. Popular and pretty. Probably lost her virginity in seventh grade. Probably takes the boys she gets and eats them alive like a demonic entity. Probably ruins them.
She’s ruining his son.
Jerma can’t focus on the game he’s playing, either.
He can see her. He really can and she won’t leave his head. He can see her and her claws digging into Ludwig’s skin and dragging him up the stairs, smiling at him because she has to act like she cares about him in some capacity. She’s a little succubus, a siren, any one of those mythical creatures that abuse their victims for pleasure—she’s trying to consume him.
He can see her and her sticky, artificial-cherry lips on Ludwig’s mouth and face and neck. He can see those claws scratching and tearing at the designer clothes that Ludwig has worked so hard to buy for himself, ruining those, too, leaving him open and vulnerable and defenseless. She’s going to desecrate him.
And Ludwig is going to give himself over to her, because she’s left him with little option but to surrender his body. Who knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t? She’s going to shove her tongue down his throat and rake her claws down his body and leave cuts all over him. Make him bleed. She’s going to taint him and make him smell like her and pluck his heart out of his chest. She’s going to touch him and make him think he wants this. He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. But he thinks he does.
She’s going to touch him and make him say her name. Just for the thrill of hearing it from him, she’ll take advantage of his bright, sweet, smooth, boyish voice and withdraw it from his lips. She’s going to hurt him and she’s going to f*ck him and there’s nothing that Jerma can do to stop her from doing it because he really is a terrible f*cking father and he can’t protect his son. He’s failed. He did a bad job. He is a terrible, terrible father.
Oh, God, he hates her. He hates her. He mostly hates himself, but Christ, he hates her. He hates this teenage girl with a burning, unrelenting passion, a fury that makes him see red, his vocal cords tied together and his blood simmering. She’s never done a goddamn thing to him, not once, and he knows nothing about her, really, but he hates her more than he’s ever hated another human being.
Jerma shuts his iPad off and chugs way too much chardonnay, even as his stomach turns.
The walk from his own bedroom to Ludwig’s nearly an hour later feels so much longer than usual. That in and of itself feels like it almost takes an hour.
Jerma knows somewhere in the back of his head that he should knock, that’s an established rule, but he just doesn’t have the time. Who does? He more-or-less stumbles into Ludwig’s room, clinging to the doorknob like a life preserver. “Hey, Lud?”
Ludwig doesn’t look up. He’s scowling at his Nintendo Switch with a pair of headphones on. Kind of overkill if he’s in his bedroom alone, but what does Jerma know, really. There’s no sign of acknowledgment whatsoever, but Jerma presses on regardless. He just has to get closer. He wades through the mess on the floor that he knows he’s told Ludwig to clean half a million times and collapses on the bed, laying limply and heavily at Ludwig’s side. “Lud. Hey.” He reaches out and taps the tip of Ludwig’s nose with his finger. “Hi, hey, honey, are you listening to me?”
Probably angrier than it warrants, Ludwig tears his headphones off. “What?”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you. That I, uh, that I lost my temper so bad. I really am, I just, I get, I don’t know, I worry about you and I always think, like—” Jerma feels his lip tremble as he tries to speak and he feels a tiny sob hiccup out of his mouth.
Ludwig looks both stressed and exasperated. “Dad, look, don’t, come on—”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” Jerma whimpers, dropping his head and burying his face in Ludwig’s shoulder, throwing an arm over his chest and clutching at his side. “I-I just get worried that, like, y-you’re, you’re pulling away from me and you’ll leave, and I need you too bad, you’re everything in the whole world to me and I love you so much, I just, I don’t want anything to take you away.”
“Okay, first of all, you’re drunk,” Ludwig says softly, as though Jerma isn’t aware of that. “Second of all, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. With you. Nothing’s gonna take me away. You think I wanna be responsible for you hanging yourself from the ceiling fan or swallowing a bottle of pills just because I left Vegas? I’m gonna be wherever you are.”
“It’s not just about leaving Vegas,” Jerma mumbles into Ludwig’s shirt, comforted by the warm, spicy, overpowered smell of deodorant trying to cover up teen boy hormones. “It’s just being away so much. You’re always gone. Always out with someone. I never see you anymore. It really hurts, you know, knowing that there’s all these people you’d rather hang out with than me. Especially, like, a—a girl. It’s kind of like, what makes her that special, you know? More special than me? I can do all the same things she can do. Like, emotional support and, uh, cuddling. Kissing. I kiss you all the time.”
“Dad, I don’t want you to be my girlfriend.”
Jerma giggles too hard to talk for a moment. “No,” he manages through it, weak and limp, tucked into Ludwig’s side like it was a space carved out just for him. “No, I don’t—that’s not what I mean. I don’t wanna be your girlfriend, that’s f*ckin’ crazy, no. I’m not your girlfriend. I can’t be your girlfriend. I-I-I’m just saying that I can be good. Just as good as her. Lud, could you—can you do something nice for me?”
There’s a little shift. Jerma lifts his head to see Ludwig put his headphones and Switch on the cluttered bedside table before he turns over and faces Jerma, draping an arm over his side, looking him in the eye. “What do you want me to do for you?”
“Could you break up with her?” It’s abrupt and indelicate, but Jerma’s filter is nonexistent right now. “I—please? For me?”
Ludwig sighs. “Dad—”
“Please, please, please, Ludwig, honey, please, I’ll do anything, I’ll get you anything you want; it’ll be like Christmas and your birthday all at once. I’ll get you anything you want to eat. I’ll get you those new headphones you wanted. I’ll get you a new keyboard. Would you like that?” Jerma asks anxiously, watching Ludwig with big, pleading eyes. “All you have to do is break up with this girl and I’ll do it. I promise.”
Ludwig mulls this over. “Really? If I break up with Blaire, you’ll actually get me SteelSeries headphones? Like, for real?”
“Yeah. Yeah, anything, I’ll buy them tomorrow, I swear to God. Anything at all.”
“Okay. Yeah, I can break up with her.”
Jerma feels all the weight in the world lifting off his shoulders as he hugs Ludwig as tight as he can, laughing deliriously. “Oh my God, you don’t know how happy that makes me. Oh, f*ck.” He kisses Ludwig firmly on the mouth, cradling his face, stroking his cheek. “Oh my God. You’re beautiful.” He feels a little mesmerized, actually. God, Ludwig’s delicate, batting eyelashes. “You really are, you know. You are so pretty. Look at those eyes, they’re gorgeous.”
Ludwig smiles. “Aw, hey, no, they’re just brown. They don’t look like yours.”
“Are you f*ckin’ serious? They’re, like, you look like a baby deer or something. You look like a doll. Like, a doll that someone would scribble over with crayon and marker ‘cause they love it so much and they’re obsessed with it. I can’t believe I made something like this.”
“Yeah, actually, I can’t believe it either. Really weird to think about you with a woman in any context.”
Jerma frowns. “I don’t, uh—what? What d’you mean?”
Ludwig snickers. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re really gay.”
“What? No. I mean—yeah, like, I’m, I guess I’m—I have qualities, I guess just stereotypical ones, and they’re ones that you shouldn’t judge people for, just so we’re on the same page, but—how would you even know?”
“Dad, it’s almost painful. You’re gay in the same way that, uh, a mad scientist or a dark wizard is. I just know. You can sense it. I'm not upset over it or anything, it’s not a big deal, it’s just, like, I can tell.”
Jerma feels snowman-esque once more. “Oh. It’s not something I really think about, I guess.”
Ludwig looks at Jerma like he’s trying to seek something out in his face. Maybe look behind his eyes for something previously unreachable. “Aren’t you lonely? There’s no way you’re not. I literally don’t think you’ve ever had any kind of girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever since Mom left.”
Not only is it not something that Jerma often thinks about, but it’s also not something that he wants to think about. Any kind of romantic or carnal desire is always pushed away and put out of his head in favor of focusing on either work or Ludwig. Usually Ludwig. Every single physical effort he makes in any capacity and in any sense is dedicated to making Ludwig’s life better. It’s a borderline obsession, honestly. Maybe that’s not healthy, but, honestly, who cares, it doesn’t matter. Being a good parent doesn’t make Jerma a bad person. “I mean, I’ve seen… women here and there. It’s not a necessity. I don’t need anyone. Not anyone else; I’ve got you.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Dad, I think you should probably lean into that a little bit. Just try something different. I won’t get pissed at you for trying to, I dunno, just, like, connect with someone. Have you ever even tried dating a guy before? Maybe it won’t be so boring and pointless if you get into a relationship with someone you’re actually attracted to.”
It’s a fair point. It is, Ludwig’s right. But it shouldn’t matter. Jerma doesn’t want it to matter. He’s settled and comfortable with his wonderful job and his wonderful house and his wonderful son and their wonderful life. Jerma makes a nonsense noise, low and groaning as he buries his face in Ludwig’s neck. “I don’t know,” he says mournfully. “I don’t wanna deal with it. Relationships are—they’re messy and stupid and sh*tty and hard work and I’m fine right now. I’m fine. This, right here—” Jerma clings to Ludwig tightly, their legs tangled together. “—this is better than anything. Anything else that I could want. I, I feel good here. Doesn’t this feel good?”
“Yeah,” Ludwig murmurs, pressing his lips against Jerma’s head. It comes with a swirling feeling of affection and warmth and validation, making Jerma’s heart flutter with gratitude. “Yeah, it does. I just, like… I worry about you sometimes, I guess. That you’re not happy. I don’t think you’d be this clingy if you were happy.”
“I’m happy. You make me so happy. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Jerma tells him honestly, voice soft against Ludwig’s pink, warm skin. “I’d be in a ditch somewhere. Or I’d be rotting away in an alleyway outside a casino and I’d probably be millions of dollars in debt to some sinister mogul.”
“Nah, I don’t think so. You’d probably be in tons of debt, but I don’t think you’d be rotting. What did you do before me?”
Jerma considers this for a moment and decides to conveniently leave out the gambling issues he had before he got essentially cleaned up. “I spent a lot of time with your mom. I taught. I went to the gym. I played video games. There’s a lot about myself that I don’t really remember or, just, I don’t remember a lot about that time. I dunno. I was really young. I was only, like, twenty, right? Yeah. No one remembers when they’re twenty. It’s horrible. Then we had you and she left and you just needed me so much that things have just kind of been like this for years and years.”
“So you’re just okay with not having a life outside of me?”
Jerma laughs and nuzzles Ludwig’s neck. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, actually, I am. I’m completely okay with that. I love you being my life. That’s the greatest life ever. I can’t imagine having a better one.”
Ludwig strokes his thumb over Jerma’s back. “I still think you should find a boyfriend.”
“Sex and romance are not the most important thing in the world. I know they seem like they are, but they’re not. That’s—it’s such a low priority the older you get.”
“Dad—”
“Okay, okay, okay okay okay, okay, fine, yeah, I get it. If it’ll make you feel better, and if you do this one thing for me, then, yeah, I’ll, I’ll find someone. I’ll go out. Promise.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. If you really want me to.”
“Good.” Ludwig gives Jerma an affectionate squeeze and sighs in contentment. Jerma gives in to the soft fuzzies filling his head with cotton and lets his brain get swallowed up by them, letting it get stuck in his gears until the whole thing shuts down.
Saturday morning dawns bright white with cloud cover. It’ll probably rain soon. The lack of contrast gives Ludwig a dull glow, his features soft and illuminated. His hair is crushed in some places and sticking up in others. From this close up, Jerma can see the slits that he cut in his eyebrows are vanishing as the hair grows back. The hand curled loosely near his face reveals where his nail polish is chipping. His roots are almost fully grown out, but there’s definitely still some bleached blond around the edges. All very temporary acts of rebellion. It’s hard to maintain, but Ludwig will do it for the sake of curating a highly personal aesthetic. He’ll do anything to get people to look at him—not in a toxic way, not in a desperate way. He just loves to entertain people. He wants to be wanted. It’s an inherited trait.
Jerma would happily spend the rest of his life here in Ludwig’s rumpled mess of a queen-sized bed, analyzing every little piece of him there is to see. Before Ludwig turned fourteen or so, they slept in the same bed together almost every night. Ludwig’s eighth-grade counselor had advised them to maintain at least a little bit of space. The advice was promptly ignored for another year until Ludwig decided that he was too grown-up to spend so much time in his father’s bed, which Jerma can pinpoint as the beginning of the end.
Fourteen was a bad year. So much fighting and crying and lots of horrible, horrible language that Jerma will never be able to forget, statements that had genuinely hurt him and still do whenever he thinks about them. Lots of slamming doors. Petty crime. Trouble at school. Trying desperately to climb out of puberty is hard and so is trying to grapple with finally realizing that you’re a person and the real world exists, but you’re not allowed to jump into it yet because your brain is still all soup. Jerma just wishes he knew then what he knows now; maybe that would’ve kept Ludwig from drawing away.
It’s kind of sh*tty in some ways. Just a little bit. In selfish, sad, awful, mean kind of ways. I don’t leave the house when you’re here and we have the chance to spend time together. Or I don’t make friends because I don’t want anyone to compete with you. Or If I was out late at night, I’d want you to worry about me. Jerma’s petty, bitter, lonely thoughts always jump out whenever Ludwig acts like he doesn’t want to be inside the house.
The thing is, Jerma always has to play multiple roles at once. He’s a father, a mother, a brother, a best friend, a mentor, a teacher, a domestic partner. And he’s happy to do it. More than happy. He wants to be anything Ludwig needs him to be. But, in turn, he needs Ludwig to be a son, a brother, a student, his other half. They only have each other. Jerma doesn’t think it’s too much to ask for Ludwig to provide in return.
But what kind of father is Jerma if he asks for equal treatment? Children aren’t supposed to be grateful. If you claim a child is supposed to be grateful, it insinuates that providing basic needs is a privilege. Which is sh*tty. It’s kind of evil. Jerma just has to make up for all these places that Ludwig is lacking and that’s just the way things work.
Jerma’s rationale exists. His critical thinking exists. He’s just… not very good at relying on them. If it was anyone other than Ludwig, he’d think more clearly, less selfishly.
Selfish. He’s so f*cking selfish.
Jerma shuts his eyes for a moment and exhales, willing it away. He’s not going to destroy this Saturday morning for himself.
Jerma gazes at Ludwig’s sweet, relaxed face. It’s no wonder that girls want to steal him away. He’s very kissable in his sleep, his breathing soft and even, his mouth parted and deep pink. Jerma lifts his hand and strokes his thumb over Ludwig’s hot cheek, shuffling forward ever so slightly to give him a peck on the lips.
Kissing on the mouth has kind of always been a facet of their dynamic. Nothing is ever meant by it; it’s just something they do. It’s too difficult to explain to anyone else. It’s theirs and theirs alone. It’s just nice and intimate and peaceful and another way to keep each other close. Even when Ludwig did try to separate himself from Jerma, they didn’t lose that. Maybe it’s because it’s just so easy. Habit, mostly.
Ludwig makes a soft noise and Jerma quickly withdraws, feeling his cheeks turn pink. Ludwig scrubs the heel of his hand over his eye and yawns, half-hidden by his shirtsleeve. When he lowers his arm, Jerma can see his little smile and heavy eyelids.
“Hey,” Ludwig whispers, his voice heavy and rough, thick from sleep.
Jerma smiles. “Hey.”
“Kiss me again. It was nice. An’ this time it’ll be not as weird, ‘cause I’m awake now.”
Jerma frowns a little. “It was weird before?”
“Kind of. But it’s okay.” Ludwig’s fingers are light on Jerma’s jawline as he bumps their noses together. “You’re weird. So it’s fine.”
Their lips slide together before Jerma can think up a really, really good comeback, something in the ballpark of “You’re weird”. But this is better.
There really is so much nuance to it. Both of them know when to stop before it gets uncomfortable. As Jerma said last night, they kiss all the time. Ludwig really doesn’t need a girlfriend for that. What does he need her for, to push her tongue in his mouth? Gag him or something? Gross. Ludwig has everything he needs right here.
He’ll never need to go back to Blaire ever again. Just to remind Ludwig of that, Jerma shifts closer and splays his fingers over Ludwig’s back, drawing them over a young, healthy spine. Ludwig doesn’t know how good he’s got it.
Ludwig’s hand is on his neck. Their legs are nearly tangled, almost slotted together, but not quite. There’s still a degree of separation. Because there always is. There has to be. They have limits, obviously, because everyone does and everyone should and everything is normal and okay and they’re doing fine. Nobody actually knows what goes on in people’s homes behind closed doors. They’re only abnormal in comparison to a whitewashed version of everything that families commonly show off to the world. They can’t be the only ones who do this.
Jerma can feel himself getting flustered, though. They’re reaching a point where they should stop soon. It’s just so easy to keep going, especially after last night; it just spurs Jerma on so he can remind Ludwig what matters. Ludwig sighs against Jerma’s mouth, a tiny, unconscious sound, small and implicit, and that, well, maybe that should be the place where they stop.
Jerma pulls away and takes a second to breathe. “Okay, that’s enough.” His blush deepening, he untangles himself from Ludwig, carefully avoiding the consequences of his actions. Overactive boy hormones that he can’t touch. “Maybe you should go take a shower.”
Ludwig barks out a laugh and rolls over to face the opposite wall as Jerma climbs out of bed. “You started it,” he points out. “You know, maybe don’t make out with me if you don’t like where it’s gonna end up.”
“I wasn’t making out with you, Lud, Jesus f*cking Christ. Why? Why do you do this to me?”
“You were totally making out with me. You need to get a boyfriend soon or I’m gonna have to call CPS on you. f*cking weirdo,” Ludwig giggles, pushing his hands underneath the waistband of his sweatpants.
Jerma swallows and looks away, pushing a hand through his hair as his skin burns. “Do you—you want pancakes for breakfast? I-I’m good at pancakes now. I’ll make you pancakes.”
“Yeah, that’s cool.” Ludwig makes a noise that manages to unstick Jerma’s feet from the floor and he quickly stumbles over piles of clothes and garbage as he heads for the bedroom door. “Make me coffee.”
“Fine. I want you to clean this room this afternoon. Got it? You’re not leaving the house until this gets cleaned up. I almost twisted my ankle just walking over here. It’s a f*cking disaster.”
“You’re a f*cking disaster,” Ludwig tells him.
“You think I don’t know that? Clean your room.” Unable to scrub his face clean of its mottled color, Jerma quickly turns and heads for the staircase, finger-combing his hair into a more reasonable shape. Like he has someone he’s supposed to look nice for. Look put-together for.
He’s just in so many pieces. He needs a semblance of togetherness.
Jerma feels like he’s lost and Ludwig has won. He doesn’t know what kind of game it was, though. Imagine waking up from a thirty-year coma and you find out that the whole time you were in that coma, you were somehow also competing in the Olympics and it turns out you didn’t even get a medal. It’s kind of like that. He has no idea what competition he lost in, but he knows he lost.
However, it doesn’t keep Jerma from going cotton-candy soft when he’s trying to scrape a failed, folded-in-on-itself pancake off the pan and he suddenly feels a pair of arms slip around his waist. “‘Morning, honey,” Ludwig says into his shoulder, nuzzling the rumpled sweater that Jerma has yet to change out of from yesterday.
“Hey.” Jerma gives up on the failed pancake and tries to flip another one. It actually works this time. Little victories. “You feeling okay now?”
“I’m always okay. But yeah.” Ludwig squeezes Jerma lightly. “I think we’ve probably gotta stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“You know what. It wasn’t weird when I was younger. Now it kind of is.”
“It’s not weird. I don’t get why you think it’s weird. Maybe it’d be weird for, for other people, you know, people who aren’t us, but in the—the capacity of us, it’s not weird. I don’t think it’s weird.”
“Okay, so you don’t think it’s weird that we make out in bed.”
“It’s not—! Alright, you know what? Let me explain something to you right now.” Despite the fact that the pancakes are still runny in the middle, Jerma turns the stove eye off, sets his spatula down, and unhooks Ludwig from around his midsection.
“There’s like, there’s a scientific explanation for why kissing, and I mean certain types of kissing, is directly tied to sexual attraction and your pheromones and stuff like that. It’s an exchange, right? You exchange spit and hormones and all this other gross sh*t if you introduce tongues into it. Once you introduce tongues, that’s it, you’re f*cked, that’s basically like, you know how your brain is actually chemically altered when you have sex with someone? Like, it changes both your and their physical being? That’s kissing with tongues on a much smaller scale. Just kissing, just pressing your lips together, nothing else, that’s just, it signifies attachment and affection and it doesn’t relate to sexual attraction because even if it does feel good, that’s just this crazy rush of dopamine that you get from being around someone that you care about. There’s so much nuance to it. It’s not weird, Lud.”
Ludwig mulls this over for a second. “…you know what’s crazy? You didn’t raise me religiously, but I can still feel both the Catholicism and the Jewishness just, like, radiating through you whenever you try to justify anything that you do. You can just say that you wanna keep doing something ‘cause it feels good even if it’s kind of f*cked up. Whether or not you should do it is a whole other story, but you should just be honest with yourself.”
Jerma presses his lips together in a hard, straight line and snatches the spatula back off the stove. “Do you want to stop kissing? You can just tell me. Tell me right now. I won’t be upset.”
Ludwig sits at the kitchen table, looking oddly smug. “No. I like it. It’s a lot of fun. I get to use it on girls. I’m just wondering where you draw the line and say that there’s definitely a place where it stops being okay.”
“Tongues. That’s where it stops. Tongues, touching, making noises, all that sh*t. That’s what ‘making out’ means.”
“Can I ask you something?” Ludwig says, his voice cracking a little before he clears his throat. “And do you promise to actually answer it?”
“I… sure. Yeah.”
“If I did that first, like, with, um, if I put my tongue in your mouth first, would that be okay? So you’d feel less like a creep?”
“Don’t talk like that,” Jerma mutters, bending over the stove. He remembers at the last second that he has to turn the burner back on. “Don’t—that’s inappropriate. We don’t have to kiss anymore.”
“Whatever you say. I just think some stuff is weird no matter what you say.” Ludwig takes a clementine from the bowl in the middle of the table and pierces it with his thumbnail. “I seriously think the boyfriend thing would fix it. You know, so you can have someone else to push your issues onto.”
Jerma laughs through the pain. “Why do you want me to find someone so bad? Do you want someone you don’t know inserting themselves into your life without them even asking you if that’s okay first?”
“Dad, if you really wanna know, I think it’d be funny. And, also, I don’t think it’d be permanent. I can’t see that happening. I wanna just experience it.”
“Why do you talk about me like I’m a chinchilla with a f*cked-up eye that you like watching run into sh*t?”
“‘Cause that’s what you are.” Ludwig grins and pops a clementine segment into his mouth. “Seriously, Dad, just think about it. Go out. Get out of the house for the first time in ten years. You never know what’s gonna happen.”
He is not at home here. He feels stupid. He feels pathetic. He doesn’t belong. Nursing bitter whiskey that makes his chest tight, Jerma curls in on himself at the bar, trying to be smaller than he is, his eyes darting up any time he detects movement near him. He knows he has to look like a fish right now, dinner-plate-eyed and nervous about absolutely everything and being aware of absolutely nothing, and he’s worried that somebody is going to be concerned about him if he gets noticed at all. He wonders if people will think he got stood up. Abandoned. Having an anxiety attack over a divorce.
Ha, f*cking idiots, Jerma thinks, staring into his glass and stirring the whiskey slowly with the useless little straw he was given with the glass. I got divorced fourteen years ago. So joke’s on you. I bet you all feel like real dickhe*ds now.
He feels a tap on his shoulder that almost makes him tumble off his stool. Jerma twists around, prepared to scowl, say that his divorce is long since passed, thank you, he’s fine, but the polite, interested, charming smile he sees is enough to make him lose his focus.
“It’s not a whole lot of fun, is it?” the young man behind the stool asks him. He has lots of soft brown hair piled in waves, the sides of his head shorn short, very trendy. He’s wearing a pair of pink plastic cat ears, which Jerma can only assume is meant to be a conversation piece, because it’s worth talking about.
The young man looks eerily familiar. Jerma tries not to think about it. “What’s not? Getting divorced?”
The young man tilts his head just a little to the side, his expression turning to one of confusion. “Are you—you’re getting divorced?”
“No. I did. A really long time ago. But not now. I’m over it. It’s been fourteen years. I don’t know where she is.” Without looking away, Jerma grabs at his whiskey and misses a few times before he’s finally able to bring it to his lips and swallow too much of it at once. He coughs. Hard. “f*ck—I’m sorry. What were you saying? I’m—augh, sh*t—I’m sorry.”
The young man looks fascinated. There are worse reactions out there. “I was gonna say ‘drinking alone’. Drinking alone isn’t much fun. I just saw you sitting here, like, melting, and I figured I’d ask you to buy me a drink. Then you wouldn’t just have to sit here thinking about your, uh, divorce.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, ah—sure.” Jerma lets out a wheezy giggle, his shoulders drawing up and his mouth closing over his straw when the young man sits next to him. His heart is beating oddly. He gets an actual eyeful of the man this time, and notices that he’s… well, not much of a man, really. His cheeks are still soft and round and blemished in that post-adolescent sense, not quite carved out yet. His eyes are big and shiny and full of life and his voice has a bit of a hitch to it, not entirely even.
“Are you old enough to be in here?” Jerma asks him, feeling an immediate protectiveness. A concern. “You can’t order drinks on your own, can you? You’re—no. No, you’re underage. You snuck in here. Where are your parents?”
“Oh my God, dude, relax, I’m nineteen. I’m not a kid. I’m French; I’ve basically been drinking since I was ten. My name’s Emilia.” The young man—young person? That’s a very feminine name—flashes Jerma a sparkling grin. “They don’t card here. I still need you to buy me a drink, though. Just one.”
“Nineteen? That’s still… I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that.”
“Hey.” Emilia covers Jerma’s hand with their own, brushing a thumb over the back of his palm. Jerma feels himself turn pink, his eyes flickering from their joined hands on the bar to Emilia’s face. “I promise, it’s okay. You don’t get out much, do you?”
“No,” Jerma admits. Warmth seems to spread up through his arm from the touch. “I guess I don’t. I don’t know, I just, I don’t think I should buy a drink for a teenager. That’s a little slimy. I’m not that kind of person.”
“Okay, if it’ll make you feel any better, you can just buy me a soda and we can just talk. How’s that?”
“You just wanna talk to me? Why?” Jerma asks, knowing even as he says it that it’s the most socially inept thing he could possibly say.
Emilia laughs. “I don’t know, I feel like I know you from somewhere. It’s like I’ve seen you before a million times. I wanna just… reintroduce myself, I guess.”
Jerma looks at Emilia’s playful, earnest, closed smile and dark eyebrows. The little curl that falls over their forehead. Their pink mouth and baby-deer eyes.
“Yeah,” Jerma says, his mouth twitching. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“So you’re like—you’re a prostitute?”
“No! No, oh my God, why does everyone say that? I’m not a prostitute, Jesus, I’m a performer. I just dress up and I go to parties and I make out with people for, like, three-hundred dollars. Nothing below the waist. That’s extra,” Emilia says with a wink.
“So you’re just, you’re, you’re a more Catholic prostitute.” Jerma can’t keep his laughter buttoned. He’s a little loose. A little fruity. He’s almost through his second glass of whiskey. “Do you dress up like that? Like, in robes or something?”
“No, but that’s a really good idea, I should start doing that. Sacrilege makes bank. I mainly dress up as a maid. Catgirl maid,” Emilia clarifies. “You’ve gotta have the ears. Ties it all together.”
“A—a catgirl maid? With the whole... costume? The dress, the, the apron, everything?”
“Oh yeah. Everything,” Emilia says, looking at Jerma meaningfully, despite the fact that Jerma doesn’t know what they mean at all. “It’s tons of fun. I make so much f*ckin’ money just from looking pretty and letting guys and super weird, horny girls with a lot of issues grope me. It gets me through college, y’know? What do you do, Jeremy?”
“Me? Oh.” Admittedly, Jerma is a little distracted by everything he’s been forced to take in in the past few minutes. “I’m a teacher. At Grant Sawyer. I-it’s not nearly as exciting as dressing up like a catgirl maid, I mean, that’s, that’s way more…” He starts to laugh again and he has to hide his face in his arm. “That’s really exciting.”
“Okay, you teach. That’s cool. That’s gotta be, like, fulfilling. What else do you do?”
“I, uh—I mostly spend time with my son. You know, we see movies, we play video games, we go out. He’s great. Honestly, he’s the best thing that I’ve got in my life. I know, like, everyone says that about their kid, whatever, but everyone else’s kid sucks compared to mine. He’s the best.”
“Aww, that’s cute,” Emilia says, looking thoroughly charmed. “I wish I had a dad like you.”
“What’s wrong with your dad?”
“Dead,” Emilia says cheerfully. “That’s probably why I’m always looking for a new one.” They take Jerma’s hand a second time, knitting pairs of fingers together, squeezing him lightly. “You wanna get outta here?”
It was definitely a good thing that Jerma didn’t buy the kid a drink after all, because they drove here. Really irresponsible. Jerma feels the urge to scold them, but it’s hard trying to get out anything coherent when Emilia’s shoving him into the back of the car parked outside of the tiny little club, cramming him against the backseat. The slam of the door startles Jerma back to reality for a second and he laughs nervously, pushing himself up and frantically brushing his hair back into place. “Hey, listen, wait, I don’t do this with people, this isn’t, I’ve never—it’s been, like, years, and I’ve only ever—”
“You talk too much, Jeremy,” Emilia cuts him off, climbing into Jerma’s lap and kissing him firmly.
It’s surprisingly easy to give in. Emilia’s mouth is sticky-sweet from co*ke and they’re pliant and smooth, parting their lips for Jerma almost instantly. They run their hands up and over Jerma’s chest before hooking them behind his neck, licking at his mouth. It’s all so much at once that Jerma feels much, much younger than he is, panicking and wondering what to do, where to put his hands. He finally places them on Emilia’s shoulders, making a pathetic, helpless, muffled noise.
Jerma does not want to hook up with someone in a car like he’s a teenager at a drive-in movie theater. Especially not with the first person he’s had physical contact with for this long. Especially not with someone who has a completely different kind of body than what he’s used to.
He digs his fingers into Emilia’s shoulders and pushes them back, trying to take a breath. “Hey, look, listen to me. I—okay, I wanna do this, just once, I-I think that’d be okay, but I don’t wanna do it here. Let’s go to my place. It’s five minutes away. My son’s out, it’ll be fine.” Jerma actually isn’t entirely sure if Ludwig is out of the house, but it’s a Saturday night. That’s more than a safe bet. “Can we do that? It feels too weird here.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.” Emilia kisses him once more, brief but hard, hard enough to make Jerma’s head spin when they pull away again. “I wanna see all of you.”
Jerma is not entirely sober, so directions are a bit more difficult than they’d normally be, but Emilia is a good and patient listener. It’s sweet of them. Sticky-sweet. Jerma can still taste them.
The lights are on in Ludwig’s bedroom when they pull up next to the house. Jerma cringes and shrinks a little. “sh*t, he is home, I thought he’d be—maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”
“It’s fine, oh my God, we’ll be quiet. The walls in your house aren’t that thin, are they?”
They aren’t great. Regardless, Jerma feels like it would be a little ridiculous to tell Emilia no at this point. Almost cruel. They drove him home, after all.
Also, Jerma’s skin is still buzzing and the sticky-sweetness on his tongue isn’t enough to satiate him. And the silky black top and kicky little skirt that Emilia is wearing is driving Jerma insane in a way that’s hard to think about. Jerma has to reason with himself that the only way to fix everything that feels wrong, weird, and/or out of place is by inviting Emilia inside.
The front door falls shut and the exciting concept of a flat surface seems to rid Emilia of all rationale. They shove Jerma up against it and pin his wrists to the hardwood, keeping him in place like a moth on a corkboard. Jerma’s head spins again. When Emilia licks the inside of his mouth, a sharp thrill rolls down his spine, the sensation practically unfamiliar. He can’t remember ever having gotten this hot and bothered this quickly. He feels his co*ck twitch as he moans softly against Emilia’s mouth, longing to touch them.
Emilia kisses the corner of Jerma’s mouth, breathless and warm, pushing their hand underneath the hem of Jerma’s shirt. “You’re so f*cking hot,” they whisper, pressing more kisses down the length of Jerma’s neck, inclining their head to bite at it. A hickey definitely isn’t something that Jerma needs, but it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s wonderful, he’ll let Emilia do whatever they want. Jerma can’t f*cking think right now. He can cover up any marks easily. “I just saw you looking so lonely and I just, f*ck, I knew you needed somebody. You’ll be my new daddy, won’t you?”
The way that Emilia speaks, the way their eyes are shaped, how brown they are, that soft dark hair, that sweet, even laugh, all of these little things, all of these strange little things. Jerma has to put the similarities out of his head. He can’t think about it. He can’t even try to approach it. That’s sick, that’s horrifying, that’s perverted, that’s wrong—it’s all just a coincidence. A major coincidence. But thinking of himself as Emilia’s dad is a step too far. Jerma can’t twist his role like that.
But it shouldn’t mean anything. That’s just cutesy sex play. Perverting it would be entirely Jerma’s fault, not this poor half-orphaned, Catholic prostitute. So Jerma just nods, shuts his eyes, and agrees. “Whatever you want.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Emilia murmurs, running his tongue over the mark on Jerma’s neck. Jerma tries desperately to ignore the way that the phrase shoots straight down between his legs.
Jerma and Ludwig each occupy the only two bedrooms in their tiny, two-story postage stamp of a house. They directly face each other at the end of a short hallway, a six-foot space between them. When light spills out from under Ludwig’s door, the glow from a hundred kitschy LEDs touch Jerma and Emilia’s shoes. It’s the only sense of contact that Jerma gets with Ludwig before Emilia sweeps him away and shuts the bedroom door behind them.
“Okay, okay, but we do have to be quiet, seriously, I-I don’t wanna, like, he doesn’t need to know what I’m doing, he doesn’t need to know anything—”
“Hey, Jeremy, listen, if I end up making you scream, that’s on you.” Emilia practically tears Jerma’s shirt off his head and throws a pair of arms around his neck, a moan lost in another deep kiss. Jerma’s hands are free and not quite as nervous, so he slides them down, his heart pounding and his sense of shame pleading with him to stop as he pushes them under Emilia’s skirt. His fingers slip over a pair of silk panties.
“Do you—do you wear these all the time?” Jerma’s asking out of more genuine curiosity than anything else. His room is dark and the only light they have is the moon filtering in through the open blinds, making him feel a little more safe. Maybe a little brave. “With your catgirl costume?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t wear anything.” Emilia’s breath hitches as they draw their hand up Jerma’s chest. “Get on the bed so I can touch you.”
Jerma has never had trouble following orders in his life, but he bends to them so easily tonight that it’s an embarrassment. His bed is unmade and he says another little prayer of gratitude to the lack of lighting as he stumbles back onto the mattress. Emilia straddles his waist, fingers splayed out over Jerma’s torso, feeling him out, exploring.
Even the silhouette looks the same. Jerma has to close his eyes once more and turn his head, mingled guilt and excitement twisting him into knots, his co*ck straining against his jeans zipper.
“Call me Jeremy,” Jerma says, restraining the urge to roll his hips up against Emilia’s perfect ass. “Not Dad. I can’t—no. I can’t take it. I-it feels too close.”
Emilia giggles softly, moving backwards just enough to unzip Jerma’s jeans. “Seems like you’ve got some unresolved issues.”
“No. What? No. No. Shut up. I don’t wanna talk anymore. Just—I’m only doing this to see if I’ll like it, okay? I’m not your dad. I’m only one kid’s dad and I’m keeping him safe.”
“If you say so, mister,” Emilia says, a laugh still on their lips as they take Jerma in their delicate fingers.
Despite how good it feels, something in the pit of Jerma’s stomach feels irreparably twisted and dark. He swallows and squeezes his eyes shut, just trying to lay back and think of Paris.
Paris. France. Ludwig. f*ck.
“You said you’ve never done this before, right?” Emilia murmurs, reaching up to stroke their thumb over Jerma’s jaw, turning his head for him. Jerma is so physically exhausted, his back aching, his breath refusing to rise and fall the way it normally should. He feels so f*cking old.
But that could be because Emilia is completely insane. There’s no way that these are normal circ*mstances.
“I’ve… huh?” Jerma turns his head, his eyelashes fluttering languidly. “What? No. I’ve had sex before. Lots of times.”
Emilia laughs, snuggling close to Jerma like they’re lovers. They’re a little too comfortable with intimacy. “No, with someone like me. Someone other than a woman. I thought that’s what you said in the car.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s right. I’ve never—” Jerma giggles, feeling that strange, giddy hysteria rise inside him again despite the fact that he’s on the verge of passing out. He lifts his arm and rests it over his eyes. “No. Yeah, I haven’t. It was different. Really different.”
“Was it better? If you say no, I’m gonna be really upset.”
“No, no, yeah, don’t worry, it was—it was good. It was,” Jerma says honestly. He feels very safe with his arm over his eyes. He doesn’t need to look at anything right now. Even though the room is still dark, he needs that pitch-blackness to keep him in this self-contained shroud. It’s hard being alone with somebody he hasn’t spent his entire life with. “It was just different. I never, uh… my son actually told me to do this.”
Emilia snickers and it’s difficult to listen to, because it still sounds so much the same. Jerma presses his arm down against his face until his eyes hurt. He’d do anything not to return to those kinds of thoughts. “Why did your kid tell you to get laid? How old is he, anyway? You’re not that old.”
“He’s sixteen. I got married young.”
“And your situation was so dire that he actively wanted you to hook up with someone? What kind of relationship do you guys have?”
“It’s normal,” Jerma says very, very quickly, quickly enough that Emilia starts laughing again. “It is! Look, listen, he just, he worries about me! I worry about him. We worry about each other. I worry about him being reckless, and he worries about me not being reckless enough. He just wanted me to get out for once. Make a connection with someone. It’s fine. I don’t know why you think that’s weird.”
“I didn’t say it was weird. Calm down. You’re putting words in my mouth. I just can’t imagine, like, me telling my mom that she should get laid.”
Jerma has the idea that Emilia doesn’t tell their mother a lot of things, because he can’t imagine anyone being openly comfortable with the idea that they’re doing a low-cost, low-reward version of sanitized sex work just to get themselves through college. It’s not the kind of thing that has longevity. “He didn’t tell me to get laid. He told me to get out of the house and I-I’m not good at meeting people and I didn’t wanna deal with f*ckin’ dating apps because I’m thirty-six years old so I just—I’m here now. You’re here now. It was just, this was, it just happened this way. I don’t know.”
“Mmm,” Emilia hums, annoyingly noncommittal. “What’s he look like?”
“My son? Oh, yeah, hang on, I’ll show you,” Jerma says, forgetting in a second how tired he is, puppyish in his sudden burst of excitement. He leans over the side of the bed and grabs at his crumpled jeans, fishing his phone out of a back pocket. “He’s so cute. He doesn’t really look anything like me, he mostly takes after his mother, but there’s way more of my personality in him. But he’s, like, he’s a thousand times more talented than me. He’s got a lot more charisma, just, he’s just really incredible. I’m crazy about him.” He quickly scrolls through his photos until he finds one that he’s very fond of, the picture that Ludwig took of the two of them on the last day of tenth grade earlier that year. “He was fifteen here. He just turned sixteen a month ago. He looks really handsome here, you know, dashing.”
Emilia looks over the photo for a second, half-smiling. “Yeah, he is cute. He’s a little—” They frown thoughtfully. “Huh. Never mind. You know what, a lot of white boys—or white boys-adjacent—look the same. I dunno. He’s got the same face shape as me. Eyes are the same color. That’s kind of funny.” They settle back down into the covers. “Familiarity, that makes sense. Stick with what makes you comfortable.”
Jerma turns his phone off and pushes it onto the side table, feeling another sudden wave of lethargy and guilt. “Wh-wh-what am I sticking with? What does that mean?”
“Look, relax, I’m not calling you weird or a freak or anything like that, don’t worry, I’m just saying that I can kind of get why you’d be into somebody with… more familiar features. You don’t get out much, obviously, you don’t have a lot of sexual experience outside of this set comfort zone, you only really talk to this one kid and I guess the same adults over and over at your school, so, yeah. It’s not crazy to wanna go after someone who has traits that you already know. Probably something to do with brain chemicals.”
That’s oddly comforting. Even if Emilia almost definitely doesn’t know what they’re talking about, it’s enough to make Jerma feel slightly less sh*tty and strange about the whole situation. It still doesn’t feel right, it’s still poking at his brain, digging tiny, negging fingers into the squirmy patterns it finds, but there’s a certain level of bullsh*t you’re willing to accept if the alternative is too uncomfortable to consider. Besides, the whole familiarity concept makes sense. Jerma can accept that. Jerma wants to accept that, because it’s a cozy plausibility.
Cozy enough to put him to sleep for now. Jerma turns on his side and watches Emilia and their long eyelashes flutter gently and lazily, like a butterfly drunk on sugar water. “Thanks for all this,” he says quietly. “I guess it's just… it’s nice to know what I like. Thanks for taking pity on me. You’re a good kid.”
Emilia smiles. “I’m not, but thanks.” They tuck themselves into Jerma’s side once more. “I’m glad you got something out of me without paying for it first.”
What an awful statement. More out of pity than anything else, Jerma presses a kiss to Emilia’s head and briefly noses their soft, barely-formed curls. He desperately hopes that this person’s mother loves them, because he’ll have to kill her otherwise.
The bed is cold and empty the next morning. The sky, still holding out hope for rain, is heavy and dark.
Jerma has a slight headache. Not enough water in between the whiskey. He rolls onto his side with a grumbling noise, his throat dry and sticky. His back is much worse off and he thinks he might be forced to get it looked at again. Which is something he doesn’t even know will be covered by his insurance. Stupid f*cking college kids with testosterone-pumped ox levels of stamina.
Speaking of the stupid f*cking college kid, their clothes are gone, too. The only trace of them left is the physical exertion that Jerma feels. Maybe it’s for the best, but it still feels a little empty.
He needs to see Ludwig. He needs to hug him. He needs to force him down onto the couch and cling to him for an hour and nurse a cup of coffee while he watches him be adorably bad at video games. This was weird. This was weird and sh*tty and awful and overly indulgent and Jerma needs to scrub it off.
As he creaks and stumbles his way out of bed, his phone buzzes on the bedside table. After scrubbing the dust out of his eyes, jamming his glasses on, and pulling on his bathrobe over his shoulders, he peers at the screen.
why is there a 20 year old enby eating my cereal in the kitchen??
have you actually completely lost it? Where are you?
Jerma was going to shower first, but this situation requires immediate diffusion. As quickly as he can manage, he throws on his clothes from the night before, his heart pounding badly enough to make him start sweating. Why didn’t he just tell the kid to go home? Why did he think any of this was going to go over well? Has he actually completely lost it? He definitely has. For some reason—added security, maybe—he pulls his bathrobe over his shirt and jeans before rushing down the stairs. Security. Security and morning habits. Something like that.
It’s like a really f*cked-up Hallmark card when Jerma steps into the kitchen. Neither Emilia nor Ludwig look entirely comfortable, but Emilia is sort of able to mask some of that with the cereal as a distraction. Ludwig, lumpy and misshapen in his chair, has the most uncanny Kubrick-esque nature to him as he scowls at Jerma, looking disgusted, annoyed, and oddly dark.
“‘Morning,” Emilia offers.
“Hey,” Jerma croaks, pulling his bathrobe shut tight. He’s much too warm in the multiple layers. He clears his throat, but it barely helps. “Uh. Ludwig. This is—this is Emilia. Emilia, this is my son.”
“Yeah, we’ve met,” Ludwig says, not bothering to contain the sneer in his voice. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Can you—? Yeah.” Jerma swallows hard and nods. “Uh, I’m sorry. You just—enjoy your breakfast,” he tells Emilia, so unspeakably lame that he feels small and pathetic the second it comes out of his mouth.
Emilia just nods, looking amused. “You got it.”
“Great. Come on.” Ludwig snatches Jerma around the wrist and pulls him across the living room, all the way to the walk-in closet, a dusty, lonely place stuffed full of old bored games and toys and puzzles and Christmas decorations and other things that make Jerma sickeningly nostalgic. It’s a little frightening how easily Ludwig is able to manhandle him. That might just be adrenaline brought on by fury, but it can’t be ignored for much longer that Ludwig is almost definitely going to wind up being taller and much stronger than him within the next few years. He’s already exactly Jerma’s height. (At the very least, he’s not going to be much taller. Jerma would probably kill himself if Ludwig wound up being over six feet.)
Ludwig slides the door shut with a clatter, flicks at the light switch, and immediately punches Jerma in the chest. “What the f*ck?”
“Ow, oh my God, Lud, what—”
“When I told you to get out of the house, I didn’t mean hooking up with some f*cking, like, some annoying f*cking gender-confused college student who’s almost twenty years younger than you! You’re crazy! Why would you do that? Do you have an actual explanation? Did he kidnap you? Did he hold you at gunpoint? That’s the only reason you could give me that I could actually accept.”
Jerma whimpers and rubs the potential bruise under his collarbone. “Okay, okay, I know, it’s, I get it, I know you’re upset with me, I’m sorry, but don’t be mean. Not to them. They didn’t do anything wrong.”
Ludwig rolls his eyes with a little more extravagance than the situation calls for, frankly. “Oh, sorry I didn’t get your jailbait hookup’s pronouns right. I’ll ask next time.”
“That’s out of line. That’s completely uncalled for. They’re legal, first of all, more than legal, and—”
“I don’t care if it’s legal! It’s f*cking weird, Dad! I don’t care if it was just sex! You’re forty years old!”
“I’m not forty years old. I’m not forty, we don’t have a relationship, this was a one-time thing, and this never would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for you trying to force me to something I never wanted to do in the first place,” Jerma snaps, jabbing Ludwig in the middle of his chest with one harsh finger. “I get that it was out of line, sure, f*ckin’ whatever, maybe it’s just because I really am that socially f*cking inept and I don’t know what’s best for me, maybe it wasn’t appropriate, I get it, I get all of that. But you’re not going to make me feel guilty about this. I’ll make myself feel guilty if it’ll make you feel better. But you won’t.”
“Why? Why can’t I? Why can’t I make you feel guilty? Why isn’t that allowed? I’m not allowed to date a girl my own age because that’s irresponsible or some sh*t, but you’re allowed to pick up f*cking liberal arts students who are barely older than me because you supposedly know what you’re doing? I don’t think you have any f*cking idea what you’re doing. I think you’re just as stupid and sh*tty and selfish as every other lonely single guy going through a midlife crisis.”
“Where the f*ck is this coming from?” It’s hard to get the words out, because Jerma’s throat feels sewn shut and his chest is tight enough that taking in each breath hurts it a little more. “What are you actually mad about? It’s not this. There’s no way. You’re—you’re just jealous, aren’t you? That’s what this is about.”
Ludwig laughs this sharp, high laugh that cuts across Jerma’s ears like steel. “What am I supposed to be jealous of? What are you even implying?”
“You’re jealous that this wasn’t your idea. That I spent one night not thinking all about you. You’re so used to it that you hate it when I think about anyone else.” Jerma’s voice is unsteady enough that it comes through in his voice. He hugs himself tightly and tries to swallow again, but he really can’t at this point. “You like it that I don’t have a life outside of you, don’t you?”
“Oh my God, you’re f*cking impossible. Holy sh*t. You know what? Forget the headphones. I don’t give a sh*t if you buy me anything or not. I swear to God, I’m getting emancipated.” Ludwig yanks the closet door open. “I’m going to Jonathan’s. Don’t call me.”
“He’s a bad influence,” Jerma mutters, looking at the floor, at the way that the unloved shag carpet hugs his socks. “I don’t want you hanging around him.”
“Well, you know what, no one could be as bad as you, so at least there’s that.” Ludwig shuts the door, leaving Jerma alone to look through the slats at Ludwig’s retreating figure, blurring with every step.
He stays in the closet long enough that by the time he gets out, Emilia has finished their cereal and they’re very, very focused on checking their phone. They look like they’ve seen a ghost when they see Jerma return to the kitchen, dragging his feet, eyes burning.
“Hey, I, uh.” Emilia looks mortified and that only makes Jerma feel that much worse. “I couldn’t help but overhear some of that. Jesus, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine.” Jerma, being the stupid little cowardly bitch baby that he is, can’t look Emilia in the eye. “I think you should leave.”
“Yeah. That sounds good.” Emilia puts their bowl and spoon in the sink and slips their phone into their skirt pocket. “Seriously, though, I really am sorry. I hope everything works out. I… can I see you again?” they ask timidly. “He doesn’t have to know if he's really gonna be that upset about it.”
“No, I can’t, he’s right, I shouldn’t have—this was a bad idea. I-it’s not you, you were great, it’s just, I’m too old for you. I’m sorry.”
“No, yeah, I mean, it’s okay.” Emilia gives a little shrug and hesitates when they pass Jerma, lingering near him for a second. “If you wanna know what I think, I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I think you care a lot. I’ve met a lot of creepy, good-for-nothing assholes in my line of work. Lots of bad clients. You’re not a creep.” They pause. “I think you could probably do with some therapy, though. Not in a bad way; like, I don’t mean that you’re crazy. Nothing like that. Maybe you should just see someone and, uh, talk stuff through. You seem like you need someone to talk to.”
“Yeah. I guess so. I guess everyone does. Ah, drive safe. And I’d—” Jerma looks at a cobweb in the corner of the kitchen ceiling that he should get rid of soon. “I’d go into a different line of work. If I were you. I’m just saying.”
Emilia snorts. “You sound like my mom. I’ll think about it, though. I’ve been looking into some different stuff. Maybe you’ll see me around.”
Just before they leave, Jerma turns his head and asks Emilia, “What else do you wanna do with your life?”
Emilia grins back at him. “I might be a locksmith. Or a housekeeper. I’m good with my hands.”
As soon as Emilia’s car pulls away from the curb, Jerma makes a concentrated effort to get as drunk as he possibly can. After all, there’s no one there to stop him or scold him or tell him he should care a little more about himself and his heart; does he really need more health problems?
The answer is no, obviously, no one does, least of all him, but if this sh*t is determined to kill him, it better do it sooner rather than later. That’ll show him. Won’t he be sorry if he comes home and he finds me dead. Who’s a bad influence? I’m a bad f*cking influence.
“Hey, you know who it is, it’s your boy, don’t leave a message ‘cause I won’t listen to it, just text me and I’ll answer. Probably.”
“Lud, I’m really, really sorry about everything, I-I-I didn’t mean to snap like that, I’m sorry I swore at you, that was so, so sh*tty of me, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever done, ever, i-in my whole life. I just wanna talk about this. I wanna talk to you, please let me talk to you, I wanna hear your side and I want you to hear my side and I wanna talk this out and just f*ckin’ put it to rest and be done with it. Please, please, please call me. I love you. So much. But call me. Please.”
“Hey, you know who it is, it’s your boy, don’t leave a message ‘cause I won’t listen to it, just text me and I’ll answer. Probably.”
“I know it hasn’t been that long, I bet you’re probably, uh, you’re busy, I guess, it’s fine. That’s okay. S’long as you’re having fun. I always want you to have fun. You’re a good kid. You’re the best kid in the whole world, you know that? You’re so f*cking beautiful, you’re, like, it hurts how amazing you are. You’re so good at everything you do. Can you call me? Just for a few minutes? I-I just wanna—ugh—I just wanna talk for a second. Just a second, that’s all. I just wanna talk to you. I miss you. Can you come home soon? Okay. Okay. Um. I love you. Bye.”
“Hey, you know who it is, it’s your boy, don’t leave a message ‘cause I won’t listen to it, just text me and I’ll answer. Probably.”
“Ludwig, I’m a little drunk, jus’ a little, I’m, it’s not, I’m not doing… super… m’not super. Not super hot. I’m not hot. I don’t think I’ve ever been hot, I think I’ve been tricking people my whole life. I trick everyone, I, like, I tell people I’m a good person, but it’s not true, I’m the worst, I’m so f*cking bad at just… everything. I’m gross. I’ve got bad skin, I’m, I’m so sick of this skin. But I’m also—I think I’m gonna be sick, hold on, I’ll, just, I’ll talk to you later.”
Jerma does not feel less drunk after he vomits up every single last bit of physical substance in his stomach. He doesn’t feel so brutally nauseous anymore, which is kind of better, he guesses, but everything smells horrific and he feels even more wracked with exhaustion and his bones are too loose to move. The floor is cold and it feels good when his bare skin touches it.
He doesn’t want to not be drunk. Once he sobers up, he’ll have to think clearly and he won’t have an excuse for acting overly emotional and irrational. He’s going to keep being drunk as long as no one’s around to watch. Nobody loves him, apparently, so the only person he has to entertain is himself.
He sits against the wall and grabs at the nearly-empty bottle of wine he dragged with him to the bathroom like a security blanket and drains the rest of it, ignoring the way that his stomach turns, trying to immediately reject it. Everything about his stupid f*cking body sucks and refuses to listen to anything he has to say. No one ever listens to him. Not his body, not his son, nobody, nobody ever. His hands are too big and the only things they fit into are each other.
He needs more wine. He can’t be out of it. Jerma tries to push himself up and walk downstairs to get more, but his socks slip on the tile. He crashes in a heap to the floor and the bottle cracks, singing a screeching song as it shatters just ahead of him.
It’s so humiliating and no one’s even around to see it. Jerma tries to lift his heavy, heavy head, but it hurts too badly to get it more than an inch off the ground. Moaning in pain, he draws a hand up and pushes a hand through his hair, clenching it, trying to either punish himself or check and see if he’s not dead yet. Either/or. It feels like there’s heat signatures in the places that made contact with the floor first. Everything hurts.
He doesn’t bother to move after that. This is a good place for him. He’s fine here. He’s fine.
He first hears the pouring rain the next time he moves. The second thing he hears is Ludwig’s voice.
“Dad? Dad, hey, answer me.” It’s so panicked that it gives Jerma’s sad little heart a swell of satisfaction and pleasure despite how out of it he is. He feels Ludwig’s hands on him, solid and warm and capable, pushing him onto his back. “Wake up. Wake up wake up wake up, wake up now, tell me you’re okay.”
“M’awake,” Jerma manages, squinting his eyes open. Something must have happened to his glasses, because Ludwig isn’t properly in focus, but Jerma can still see the fear on his face. His beautiful face. Etched by f*cking angels.
“Oh my God, holy f*ck, I thought you were dead. What did you do? Why is there so much broken glass in here? Seriously, it’s everywhere, what happened?”
“Dropped it.” Jerma curls up on his side and crosses his forearms over his face. Ludwig’s face is such a divine gift, such a beautiful thing to look at, but he’d rather see total darkness. There’s something about total darkness with the rain. It’s peaceful. “Slipped, fell, my legs aren’t good. I suck.”
“How much did you drink? You look like sh*t. Everything looks like sh*t. I’m so glad you’re not taking meds anymore, Jesus Christ. Come on.” Ludwig pulls Jerma to his feet with a small bit of success, groaning and trying to prop up the dead weight meant for the frozen embrace of the bathroom floor. “You can’t keep doing this every time we get in a fight.”
“Stop getting in fights,” Jerma mumbles, clinging as best he can to Ludwig. His fingers are loose. They don’t grip well. “Where did you go? I called you.”
“Uh, yeah, you called me a lot. Probably six or seven times. I had to turn my phone off; it was getting embarrassing.”
“Why didn’t you call back?” The question is blubbery and whiny and sniffly. Jerma knows he’s probably not doing a very good job at being led down the hallway, but, again, legs. They suck. He sucks. Everything sucks. “I needed you.”
Ludwig sighs. “Dad, listen, I’m still pissed at you. I only came home ‘cause I heard you, like, crying in one of your voicemails and I felt sh*tty about it. I didn’t wanna stay away.”
“Did you go back to that girl?” Just the idea of it is enough to make Jerma feel nauseous again. “I hate her.”
“Yeah, thanks; believe it or not, I got that from context clues. No. I didn’t. I told you, I went over to Jonathan’s. We just hung out with some friends.” Ludwig nudges Jerma’s bedroom door open. “I wasn’t away for that long. I think you and I have different perspectives of time.”
“I think it’s… it’s perseptives. Perceptions,” Jerma corrects himself. “Like that. I know what it does.”
“Yeah, Dad, sure.” Ludwig eases Jerma down onto the bed, still just as cold as it was this morning. Emilia feels so distant, despite the fact that they were here just a few short hours ago. “Maybe you should just sleep this off. We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Yeah. Uh, stay? Stay here,” Jerma pleads, grabbing at Ludwig’s sleeve. “Please? I need you.”
“I… sure. For a second.” It seems too slow, slow enough that Jerma almost gets upset, but Ludwig finally slips into bed next to him. Ludwig is wearing the world’s softest blue sweater, so cozy and so perfect for this weather. Thunder rumbles low somewhere in the mountains, foreboding and shy all at once. They’re lucky they’re in the house together. Bundled together, warm and alone, they’re nestled in the perfect little box. The box is safe. The floor isn’t safe; it’s an illusion of safety. The box is safe. Jerma is keeping Ludwig safe after all.
“I’ll never do it again. Any of it. I’m sorry. You’re the best thing—” Even though his fingers don’t work very well, Jerma still clings to Ludwig as tight as he can, sinking his hands into that soft sweater. Some part of him wants to tear it for some reason. “—you’re the best thing I could ever have. I-I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean any of it.”
“Yeah. I know.” Ludwig presses his lips against Jerma’s forehead. “You know why I’m upset, though, right? It’s not because I’m, like, jealous or whatever. I just know that you’re better than that. That’s all.”
Jerma lifts his chin to look at Ludwig’s face and sees Emilia for a split second. It’s brief, but it’s there.
Jerma shakes his head, his heart clenching so painfully it’s like it’s ill. “I’m not,” he whispers, pulling at Ludwig’s sweater, tugging him down enough to reach his mouth.
To his credit, Ludwig doesn’t pull away immediately. There’s resistance behind it, but at the very least, he’s trying to placate Jerma. It’s a small miracle in and of itself. Jerma clutches at Ludwig like he’s liable to dissolve. Ludwig tastes like some kind of artificial sugar. Vanilla, maybe. Something fake and cutesy like that.
He’s sure it was her. It was definitely the girl.
Jerma breaks the kiss, eyes flickering up and then down to Ludwig’s mouth. “That’s her. I know it is.”
“What is?” Ludwig’s tone is defensive. Way too f*cking defensive.
“You know who I’m talking about. The f*cking, the, the girl. Her. Whatever her goddamn name is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ludwig scrubs at his mouth with the back of his hand. “What, my lips?”
“They taste like f*ckin’ lip gloss. Is that just another thing you’re wearing now?”
“Yeah, maybe I am, so what? I wear lip gloss now. Why is that the thing you’re the most worried about out of everything else?”
“Because you’re not wearing lip gloss. She is.” Even though they’re close to the edge of the bed and Jerma is less than coordinated right now, he still clenches his hand around Ludwig’s shoulder and shoves him down against the mattress, looming over him. One hand is braced next to Ludwig’s head, the other aside his neck. “I just—” Jerma giggles and shakes his head a little, not out of real joy or pleasure or anything. It’s an involuntary noise and it doesn’t sound remotely right. “It’s like, f*ck, you know, if she was here, I could just, I could—she makes me so mad. I think about her and then I just think about her and you and her f*cking hands all over you and i-it makes me wanna kill her. I could kill her. I really could. I think I could. If I had to. Did you really go to see her? Did you f*ck her?”
“Dad, you’re drunk and you sound f*cking insane,” Ludwig says, his voice low and careful. There’s a strange blush spreading across his face. “Get off or I’m gonna hit you.”
“I just need to know if she touched you.” Jerma is starting to get dizzy in this close proximity. Their mingled breath is getting to him in the worst way. He’s lightheaded. “Did you forget to call me back because you were f*cking her? Too busy to talk to Dad because some f*cking high school girl made you think you were special? That’s not her job. That’s my job. I’m the only one who gets to make you feel that way. I’ll f*ck you myself if that’s what it’s gotta take for you to remember that.”
Ludwig freezes, his blush darkening tenfold. Jerma realizes about three seconds too late what he actually let slip out of his mouth and he jerks back, scrambling closer to the end of the bed. “Wait, wait, no, hold on, I-I didn’t—”
“No, no, come on, what was that? Can you say that again? What’d you mean by that?” Ludwig pushes himself up and crowds Jerma’s space this time, edging him against the footboard. “What are you gonna do?”
“Lud, I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry, I’m still, I-I’m not all, like, there, I’m still drunk. I’m still really drunk. I’m so sorry. I don’t know, you know how I am, sometimes I just say whatever and things come out of my mouth and I-I-I don’t know what they mean. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I really, really am,” Jerma babbles, dipping his head and hiding his face behind curled, entwined fingers.
“No, don’t be. You don’t have to be sorry.” Ludwig grabs Jerma’s wrists and pulls his hands away, stealing his hiding place from him. “But if you’re gonna make threats like that, you better follow through. You really think that’s gonna scare me? You’re too much of a puss* to actually try anything. You’re a drunk and you’re pathetic and you’re so f*cking lucky you’ve got me, ‘cause no one else would have you. You have to hook up with teenagers that look like me because you’re so scared of anything that doesn’t give you all these hugs and kisses and tell you that it’s okay to live in this f*cking delusional hellscape you have that you keep trying to pull me into. I get so sick of you sometimes. You need therapy, you need—I don’t know what you need. You need something. I’m tired of taking care of you all the time.” Ludwig flings Jerma’s wrists away and climbs off the bed. “You smell like sh*t. You need a shower.”
“Lud, wait, can you just, can we talk? That wasn’t talking. Please. Don’t leave me like this,” Jerma pleads, his voice scratched. It sounds like it’s bleeding. He twists around as Ludwig crosses the bedroom floor. “I said I was sorry. I meant it.”
“I’m done talking. Just, like, I don’t know, clean yourself up in a few hours. Go to bed and then maybe try and act like a person, but not until you wake up.”
“Are you gonna leave again?”
“No, dumbass,” Ludwig says tiredly. “I’ll be in my room. But don’t bother me, for Christ’s sake. Go to sleep.” The bedroom door swings shut behind him and the bang shakes a tremor loose from Jerma’s body.
After the events of the day, Jerma thinks, therapy might be something to consider.
