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When it came right down to it, he never expected to be loved again.
He knew that sounded dramatic, some nineteen-year-old’s attempt at a bathos-laden play, but at the same time - Well. It had a heavy ring of truth to it that he couldn’t deny.
The thing he thought, desperate and empty, his eyes sore after his break-up with Georgie, was the same thing he thought years later, caught unawares as he turned the lights off in his office and began the trek home.
You will never be loved again.
After a certain point, it had stopped feeling like a theatrical knife, something to wound himself with at his most self deprecating and showy, and instead became just a simple fact. Jonathan Sims is 28, English, has a phobia of spiders, and will never be loved again.
Oh, he didn’t think he would never be liked. That would be a little over the top, even for him. He was certain he’d be liked, perhaps respected by some, perhaps even loved in a platonic, conceptual sort of way. The type of thing Tim would say after he tracked down the lead he was looking for, I love you - Jon didn’t doubt he meant it. He just didn’t believe it meant anything - real. Concrete. Important.
Romantic love, familial love, the kinds plastered all over TV and films, pouring out from the pages of books - that was the kind of love for other people, not him. That was the kind that was important. That was the kind that was said to be unconditional, but Jon knew that wasn’t true. The condition of familial love was to have a family. The condition of romantic love was to have a romance. Jon, through a combination of bad luck and his own poor combination of traits, was ill-suited to those conditions. It was nobody’s fault, not really. It just was.
He’d made the mistake of voicing some of this thinking to Tim, once. Not enough to concern him, but enough to make him think Jon needed a pep talk, which Jon did not. He hadn’t wanted to be told “C’mon, you’ve got lots of great qualities!” He’d wanted someone to understand.
Tim didn’t, but Jon didn’t blame him. It was clear enough that they were operating in two different realities, similar though they might be. Tim’s reality was one where he was conventionally attractive, gregarious, comfortable with people and with sex, and his opportunities for connections, for lack of a better word, never dwindled. Jon - Jon was none of those things, and it seemed so obvious to him - some people were built for ease, and understanding, and connection, and he just wasn’t.
It made sense. Even if someone could look past his lacklustre appearance and reserved exterior, they would find someone awkward, short-tempered, and unwilling to reciprocate even the most basic of human desires. At that point, it just felt like simple arithmetic: why would someone love someone as hard to love as him, when there were so many easier options around?
He’d made his peace with it. He was - content, one might say, fulfilled, satisfied with his work and aware he was luckier than many. It didn’t make some nights any easier, though, walking home late at night feeling invisible, coming home to a dark and empty flat. Little things - Elias’ praise, Tim’s claps on the shoulder, Sasha’s quiet smiles - stood out to him, filled him with a combination of warmth and longing that was painful enough that he would pull away. Retreat. Those things - weren’t for him, not really.
And so it went.
He’d like to say it was Martin, Martin who broke the endless chain of you will never be loved, you are too hard to love, and that is fine, that had long been embedded in him, and to some extent it was. It was Martin, after all, who had been quietly, unflinchingly kind from the beginning, who bore through it all with a kind of diligent, almost angry hope that Jon could only marvel at.
It could have been Georgie, letting him back into her life without the reluctance and resentment he’d been expecting, the ease with which they’d become - friends - again, and the fact that she cared enough to walk away from him, in the end.
It might have even been Tim, thanking Jon in his last moments. The longing Tim had had previously, that Jon had understood far, far too late. Or Daisy, quiet, perceptive, and empathetic in the worst sort of way, a bond he’d never wished to have but found he couldn’t imagine without.
And it is them, certainly. But it’s not - it’s not just one thing, not just Martin, clutching his hand in his own, or his memories of Tim laughing, or Georgie setting the Admiral on his lap. Not a kiss, or a caress, or a kind word.
It’s something more than the sum of its parts, something he built the foundations of when he decided to (tenuously, painfully) trust the people in his life.
He loved them more than he hated himself. He loved them, trusted them with his teeth clenched, kept his eyes open and his head up even as everything fell apart.
And he'd hoped (wildly, dangerously, blindly) that they had loved him.