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“Anyone want anything from the edible shelf?” Niko asked his guests as he leaned on the counter that separated the kitchen from the den. Ellie, Alan, and Sarah were over, Ian would have been there too but he had grading to do so he opted to stay home and save them the trouble of getting someone to babysit Charlie.
“I still don’t know how you manage to have an entire shelf in your pantry devoted just to edibles,” Ellie laughed.
“Because, between myself, you four, Nick, and Richard I need to keep well stocked. Besides, I grow the plants myself so it’s not like I’m spending a copious amount of money on weed every week.”
“He makes a good point,” Sarah added. “And can I just say, I’m impressed you turned Richard into a stoner.”
“Wait really, he didn’t smoke with you and Nick?” Niko asked as he returned to the den and set down a tray of weed brownies for the crew.
“No!” She exclaimed, helping herself to one of the treats. “He was such a hard ass about Nick and I partaking around him too. I’m glad you got him to lighten up.”
“Yeah it was hard enough to convince Al that weed wasn’t going to bite him,” Ellie teased as she gave him a playful nudge.
Oscar meowed in agreement as the orange cat threaded a path around everyone's legs as he demanded attention from the party.
“It’s a shame Ian couldn’t make it,” Niko remarked once everyone was thoroughly stoned.
“Maybe you should give him fewer students than Mr. Dean of Staff,” Sarah teased. “Then he’d have fewer papers to grade.”
“I literally cannot, unless you can find me two more professors in theoretical mathematics. His class load has to stay where it is.”
“Sure I’ll get right on that, I’m sure they keep them on the shelf next to the peanut butter at the grocery store.”
Niko snorted. If only it were that easy, the influx of students at the institute had been a problem he’d been trying to solve for the better part of the year. What were you supposed to do when you had more students interested in a very specialized field study than there were professors who were knowledgeable enough to teach the subject? Not even Chaos Theory had the solution to that one.
“How’s he been holding up since your, um, impromptu vacation?”
“He has his bad days but he tells us that. I think this is the best he’s handled the aftermath of being on the islands to be completely honest.”
Niko nodded.
“We’ll check in on him when we get home since getting tied up in work can be one of his habits for dealing with these things,” Alan reassured.
“Check his car too,” Niko said, his tone suddenly very serious. “He won’t hide stuff in his office because he knows I’d find it, but I don’t know how often y’all use his car so…”
“I think we would know if…”
“Actually Alan, you wouldn’t. I thought I would know too, and I mean sure I caught on fast, but not nearly as fast as I should have.”
“And that wasn’t your fault, Niko,” Sarah said gently.
“Yeah, from what Ian’s said you were always a good partner,” Alan added. “To be completely honest, from what he’s told us you always sounded good for each other.”
Niko laughed but it was dry, humorless. “We were good for each other, until we weren’t.”
The trio exchanged glances, they had never really talked to Niko about the details of why he and Ian had broken up. They’d never been sure if it was a boundary he was willing to cross given that they were Ian’s new partners. However, the curiosity was always there.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t…”
“No, it’s ok,” Ellie reassured. “You can talk to us about this.”
Niko steepled his fingers on his lap. “Ellie, Alan, I imagine some of what I have to say will resonate with you as you’ve also broken up and then gotten back together with Ian… Sarah, if you think this conversation will make you uncomfortable I don’t think anyone would be offended if you wanted to go.”
“Do you not want me here for this?” Sarah asked, looking between Niko, Ellie, and Alan.
“I don’t have an issue with it,” Niko said.
“Neither do we,” Alan offered.
Ellie nodded. “We’ve talked about our reasons for separating before, it’s ancient history now.”
“Right,” Niko sighed. “So I’ve told y’all before that Ian and I dated for the first time, he broke up with me. He said we weren’t in a place emotionally where we thought long distance could work for us and with our careers just taking off it was just time for things to end. Sometimes I wonder what he meant when he said he wasn’t in the right place, that he thought if we were apart I’d cheat. I had never given him any reason to think I would cheat on him, but…”
“Emily would accuse him of cheating all the time,” Ellie finished. She and Ian had talked about it the night she’d found the box he kept his old wedding rings in.
“Yeah. Which I mean, I get why he would be anxious about it. It's not like we were overly intimate as a couple. Especially when he started drinking, he would get buzzed and try to proposition me, but every time I told him that I wasn’t going to entertain the idea of sleeping with him while he was drunk. He then wouldn’t ask when he was sober, which again I get it. It’s not like I was in the relationship because I wanted to fuck him: I knew what he’d gone through, what I was signing up for.”
“If you could have gone to Texas with him, or if he could have come to New York with you do you think things would be different?” Alan asked.
“In an ideal world, sure. But in the one we’re living in, at a time when Chaoticians like us were just seen as fashionable number crunchers by the world at large… It would have been the end of the line for one of our careers. I wouldn’t ask him to give his up, not when Emily had demanded the same thing. I could have given up mine, but I didn’t want to do that and deep down I think I knew he needed some time on his own to work himself out.”
Niko sighed again. “You know when I was younger and I found out about Angela, I did blame myself a little. I used to think that if I had just stuck it out and been there with him, he wouldn’t have gotten tangled up with such a selfish woman… but then he wouldn’t have Kelly and how could I ever wish for a world where one of my best friend’s daughters doesn’t exist?”
“You can’t save someone from themself, that’s a lesson I think we’ve all had to grapple with especially when it comes to Ian. You can show him the light, but he has to choose if he wants to stay alone in the dark or not,” Alan said.
“No you can’t,” Niko agreed. “And I had to learn that the hard way.”
Oscar jumped up onto Niko’s lap and butted his little orange head against his hand. Niko gave the cat some pets and murmured. “Yeah Oscar, you know what’s coming next don’t you.”
“When December of nineteen-eighty-seven rolled around I thought I had thoroughly buried my feelings for Ian, that I’d accepted we’d just be friends. Boy, was I wrong. I’d come down to Texas for the holidays and the next thing I knew I was extending my sabbatical at the institute because he asked me to stay. I guess that was when we had the honeymoon phase of our relationship that we’d skipped out on the first time because everything was perfect… I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.”
“Oh, Niko” Ellie whispered.
“He had some consult with someone in April, I don’t know what happened but Ian’s coping mechanism came back full force. He was drinking for about two months before I really caught on.”
“How do you tell?” Ellie asked.
“When Ian’s abusing substances there’s two extremes to his behavior; when he’s not on whatever he’s abusing he’ll be cold and distant and he’ll make any excuse to be on his own. In contrast, when he is he’ll be his normal self but turned up to like twenty, he wants you around he makes you feel like you’re the only thing that matters to him, which makes it all the more difficult to deal with the other extreme. Then you realize what’s going on and it’s like a kick to the gut, because you realize he’s been self-harming this whole time right in front of you and you didn’t notice until then.”
Sarah hummed in agreement. “That was my experience too. It’s not easy to come to terms with, and it sure as hell wasn’t to pull him out of that hole.”
“You’re stronger than I ever was, Sarah.”
“No, give yourself some credit. I think it’s harder to accept that you can’t save someone and have to leave them to sort themself out.”
“Yeah…”
“Wait… you said he talked to someone in April… of nineteen-eighty-eight?” Sarah asked. She was clearly running the dates in his head.
“Yeah, why?” Niko asked.
“Ian told me that John asked him about the Jurassic Park project around then,”
“Of course he fucking did!” Niko threw his hands up in the air dramatically, which startled Oscar off his lap. “I shouldn’t have expected anything else.”
He then grabbed a pillow off the back of the couch and screamed into it. “God that makes so much fucking sense when you think about it.”
“Does it?” Sarah asked.
“Imagine trying to tell your partner, apropos of nothing, that they talked to someone at work who asked them how reasonable they thought a dinosaur safari park sounded.”
There was a heavy silence as the three thought about how they had reacted when they found out about the very real Jurassic Park.
“You probably assume they’d think you’re crazy…” Sarah said slowly.
Niko nodded. “And I’m not going to pretend that I’m a saint. I don’t know what would have happened if he had told me the truth. I do know that the reason he didn’t tell me is because no matter what I would have done, the fear of me accusing him of being crazy was enough to get him to go off his medication so he could drink instead. He was trying his best to cope with things he never should have been coping with alone, and I can’t blame him for that. I was trying my best too, I would have done anything for him to make the hurt he was feeling go away. That’s when I realized that Ian’s best would destroy me. The worst part is I would let him…”
“You did the right thing Niko,” Alan said as he scooted closer to him and put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“I did,” Niko agreed. “I could have stayed and given him everything until I had nothing left to give. Where would that have left us though, emotionally destitute and hating each other until we died? I didn’t want that, and I didn’t want that for him either. So I did what had to be done, for both of us. Even if it was difficult, even if it wasn’t really what I wanted to do.”
“You can’t burn a candle from both ends, and looking after yourself was the best thing you could do.”
“I know.”
“Alan and I can sympathize, it wasn’t easy when we had to make that same choice. Sometimes I don’t know if we made the right one either… but then I remember where we are now,” Ellie said.
“Ellie’s right, if things didn’t go the way they did, you wouldn’t have met Nick and Richard,” Sarah said with a gentle smile. “And you three seem pretty happy.”
“That’s true, and we are. I’m sorry I didn’t mean for this to turn into a whole woe-is-me session,” Niko blushed as he felt a tad bit embarrassed about just spilling his guts out even if the trio were some of his dearest friends.
“You absolutely do not have to apologize,” Alan reassured.
“I just, it’s important to me that y’all understand that he wasn’t being malicious, he was scared and hurting and he did what he thought he had to do,” Niko couldn’t stop himself from defending Ian. It was like it was hardwired into who he was as a person, there was nothing Ian could do to make Niko hate him.
“We know,” Sarah reassured. “We all want what’s best for him, and you have every reason to be rightly concerned about his wellbeing. We’ve all been on high alert since we got back from Sorna. None of us want Ian to feel like he has to hide from us.”
“In fact, we should thank you,” Alan said. “Sharing this with us couldn’t have been easy, and we’re grateful that you felt comfortable enough with us to tell us.”
“You’re my best friends, We gotta look out for each other,” Niko said with a gentle smile.
“We do,” Ellie agreed. “And we’re always here for you if you need to talk about stuff like this.”
“Same goes for you,” he said. “You can always come to me for advice about anything. I’d like to think I’m good at helping people.”
“You are, and I think you being there when you were helped Ian more than either of you know.”
“Yeah, that’s the downside to these things, they only make sense in reverse but we have to experience them straight on.”
“Part of what makes us human at the end of the day, I suppose,” Alan mused. “If it all made sense in the moment there would be a lot of hardship we’d miss out on, but maybe we needed to go through some of those things to become the people we were meant to be.”
A silence descended as everyone seemed to stew in the weight of the conversation. They all had their own takeaways from it, as was often the case with topics such as this.
“Tell Nick and Richard we said hi when they get back,” Sarah said after checking the time. “We have classes tomorrow so we should probably get walking back.”
Niko checked the clock as well, it was eleven already. “Oh damn, yeah of course. Thanks again for stopping by. You’re all welcome over any time, you all have copies of the key for a reason.”
“Same goes for you Niko,” she reassured. Alan and Ellie nodded in agreement.
“Have a safe walk! Send me a text when you get back!” Niko called as watched the trio begin the walk down the street to their house.
When they were out of sight he walked back into the house. There was an emptiness in his chest, one he had thought he’d move past. It felt selfish, especially when he was in a happy relationship, they were both in happy relationships. But the fact of the matter was, he still loved Ian. He loved him enough to know that they wouldn’t work in the end no matter how much either of them might have wanted it to.
He was grateful to just be able to love Ian platonically, even if he would always be reminded of what they once had. That was the cost of falling in love he supposed. What was there at the start might not be there at the end.