Chapter Text
If the people he cared about didn’t stop ending up in hospital, Carl was really going to lose his shit. He was breathless by the time he reached the nurse’s desk in A&E.
“I’m looking for my son, Jasper Stewart. He was brought here after an accident,” Carl told the woman at the desk. Mercifully, she took him right back, and Carl was finally able to breathe again when he saw Jasper sitting up on a bed and speaking with a nurse. He had a few cuts and bruises, and his arm was in some kind of temporary splint, but on the whole he seemed alright.
“Fucking hell, Jasper! What happened?” Carl asked, ignoring the pointed look from the nurse, who apparently didn’t appreciate colorful language.
“Some complete fucking prick sideswiped us on Gemma’s scooter,” Jasper explained. “Didn’t even stop after. I’m alright though.” The nurse left them, presumably to wash her ears out with soap, if the affronted look she gave them as she departed was anything to go by.
“What about Gemma?” Carl asked. His eyes kept roving over Jasper, on the lookout for any hidden hurt that may have been missed.
“She’s totally fine,” Jasper said. “They already let her go. She wanted to stay with me at least till you were here, but her parents took her home. Her dad’s a total arsehole.”
“Something you two have in common then,” Carl joked. Jasper just rolled his eyes. “What’s the deal with the arm?” he asked, gesturing to the splint.
“They said it’s probably broken,” Jasper told him. “They’ll put a cast on once they x-ray it, and then we can go.” Carl nodded, and they sat mostly in silence for a few minutes until someone came round to take Jasper for his x-ray.
Once Jasper was gone, Carl pulled out his phone and called Victoria. Of course she didn’t answer. Carl was fairly certain she hadn’t answered a single one of his calls since she left him, but he left her a voicemail letting her know what happened and that Jasper was fine. They brought Jasper back from x-ray, confirmed his arm was broken, got him all set with a cast, and then finally let Carl take him home.
Jasper settled himself on the couch and requested Carl bring him something to eat. “It’s not your fucking legs that are broken,” Carl complained even as he began assembling a sandwich for him. There was a knock on the door, and Jasper shot Carl a meaningful smirk. “Expecting company?” Carl flipped him off. After making her case for Carl taking additional time off after the Mhor shitshow, Rachel had stayed around and was still at the flat the other afternoon when Jasper came home from school. When she left, Jasper hadn’t said anything, but his shit-eating grin was enough for Carl to tell him to fuck off anyway.
Carl headed to answer the door, trying very hard to ignore the feeling of hope that bubbled up when he wondered if it might actually be Rachel. That feeling morphed into something much more complicated when he opened the door and saw Victoria. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked.
“Eloquent as always, Carl. I’m here to check on Jasper,” she responded.
“There really is a first time for fucking everything I guess,” Carl said. Victoria ignored him and came through to the living room.
Jasper’s surprise at seeing his mum was evident. More subtle was his delight, but Carl still clocked it. As much as Victoria’s departure from their lives had fucked Carl up—and boy had it—it had fucked Jasper up even more. Carl had been so deeply lost in his own grief and anger that he hadn’t been able to help Jasper through his, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know it was there. Nevertheless, Victoria was his mum, and Carl knew there’d always be a part of him that yearned for her presence and attention. Carl didn’t want to admit it, but he was afraid the same might be true for him.
Victoria fawned over Jasper, which he received with the eye-rolling and grumbling typical of boys his age. Carl retreated awkwardly to the kitchen to finish Jasper’s sandwich. The three of them hadn’t been in the same room together since the divorce and even before that, it had been quite some time since they’d felt like anything close to a happy family.
Still, Carl did remember a time when they had been. He remembered when Jasper looked at him with adoration instead of loathing. When the idea of being his dad gave him a purpose, before he felt crushed under the weight of his own incompetence to fill the role. He remembered when he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to be wanted by a woman like Vic. She lit up every room she walked into. She made friends easily and was the life of every party, and he was the one she came home to. When he fucked it all up, and she left, he took it as confirmation of what some part of him had always known: he simply wasn’t good enough for her.
After the divorce, he’d directed plenty of his anger at her, but at the root of it all, he was most angry at himself for ever foolishly believing he could have kept her. And although he would rather take another bullet—or ten—than admit it, he was enough of a fucking idiot that some part of him still loved her and wanted her anyway.
Carl delivered the sandwich to Jasper on the couch. “Jesus, Carl,” Victoria said, “He’s hit by a car, and all you can feed him is a sandwich?” Carl rolled his eyes. “Well Martin’s away this weekend, so I’m afraid it’s this or starvation. But please feel free to leave if the sandwich has offended you.”
Jasper sensed the fight brewing. “Mum, it’s fine really.” His eyes pleaded with her to let it drop. “Ok, ok,” she said, putting her hands up in mock surrender. Carl knew better, because she never surrendered. “How about I order us some takeout, hm?” she asked. “Our favorite Thai place still on the corner?” Jasper’s eyes flicked to Carl, who dragged his hand down his face in exasperation but didn’t protest. “Yeah, that’d be alright,” Jasper agreed.
Two hours later, the takeout containers were empty, Carl and Vic had polished off two bottles of wine, and the credits were rolling on the shitty action film they’d let Jasper choose. He was going to milk the “but I was hit by a car” angle as long as he could. Carl wasn’t sure why Vic was still hanging around, but he’d stopped worrying about it around the time the first bottle of wine was emptied. Jasper sat with Vic on the couch, his head leaned on her shoulder and failed to stifle his third yawn in as many minutes. “I think you’d best be off to bed, love,” she told him. To Carl’s complete shock, Jasper didn’t put up a fight and shuffled off to his room with a muttered, “G’night” to both his parents.
“I need the loo,” Vic said, leaving Carl alone in the living room. He gathered the takeaway containers and brought them into the kitchen, then got himself a tall glass of water. The wine was buzzing pleasantly in his veins, but he knew he’d be paying for it in the morning. Vic returned and brought her glass into the kitchen.
He couldn’t help himself when he asked, “Your duty free friend won’t be upset you’re out late?”
“Pilot. And it turns out his marriage wasn’t as over as he said it was,” Vic huffed. Carl’s laugh escaped before he could even think about trying to stop it. “No need to be a prick about it, darling,” she scolded. “Especially after you’ve spent the whole evening being practically bearable.”
“Practically bearable” was the nicest thing she’d said about him in ages. “Well, Jas liked having you here, and he was hit by a car today, so I figured I’d try not to fuck it up for him.”
Vic brought her glass over and reached around Carl to place it in the sink, but then she didn’t pull back out of his space. She looked up at him and asked, “Was Jas the only one who liked having me here?” Carl didn’t say anything. His brain seemed to have ground to a halt, giving up rather than trying to parse what the fuck was happening. Vic took hold of his shirt and pulled him down into a kiss.
He didn’t need his brain for this. His body remembered. She tasted the same as she always had. Her scent had driven him mad from their first night together, and that hadn’t changed either in the intervening years. She kept a firm hold on his shirt as she deepened the kiss, slipping her tongue into his mouth. Something, in the very dim recesses of his mind, was telling him to stop. Telling him that this was a very, very bad fucking idea. Somehow, that thought was able to push its way through the overwhelming want and need that were rapidly consuming him. He managed to pull back and say, “Vic, wait.”
“Jesus, Carl,” she said, “for once try not to overthink every fucking thing.” Then she closed what remained of the space between them, pressing her body into his, and kissed him again. She raised her hand to the back of his head, lightly scraping her nails down the nape of his neck, bringing forth a sound from him that was something between a whine and a groan.
Whatever doubts were trying to make themselves heard were finally drowned out as his arms wrapped around her of their own accord. He grabbed her ass, pulling her into him, desperate to close a space between them that wasn’t there. She broke the kiss this time, looking at him with the gleam of something like triumph in her eyes, but he was already too fucking gone to care as he followed her to the bedroom.