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Dave's scared of how you touch him, but he's more scared to say something about it. It's on the tip of the pale pink tongue that flicks out to wet his bitten-raw lips as your gloved hand squeezes the meat of his inner thigh. It's how he shifts in your lap to keep himself light, weight sinking to the soles of his feet like he's going to spring away at any second.
The first time you touch him, his head snaps back to look at you like he's expecting an explanation. Like you're going to tell him why you saw it fit to smooth your hand over his ass as he clipped coupons for apple juice at the kitchen counter.
You don't offer one, and he doesn't ask.
----
The night you pull him into your lap, he squirms. His protests are a muffled 'what the fuck' above the sound of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. His legs kick out as his hands grasp your wrists, struggling to tug them off. You hiss in his ear once- only the once- to shut that mouth of his until the commercials are on.
You fail to mention the episode is previously recorded, and while he gives a squawk as you fast forward through the break, he still doesn't ask for an explanation.
----
He fights you harder than ever when you strife now. His guard is at an all-time high, sweat beaded on his brow as he parries your attacks, chest heaving with exertion as he tries to keep you at bay. His breath is shallow and fast as his cool quickly evaporates in the Texas heat.
Sometimes, you only stop after he's fallen to his knees.
Not the first time he does it though, not the second. But when he tries to get to his feet, arms shaking with effort and his katana no more than a crutch, you end it.
You sling him over your shoulder, the pounding of his fists weak on your back until he gets the message that you're not putting him down. Those are the nights he's too worn out to do much more than shower, shovel bagel bites into his mouth, and crawl into bed.
Those are the nights he's too exhausted to so much as turn his head as you open the door, slipping in like a shadow, footsteps on the floor as silent as your entry. The bed doesn't fit you both. Not comfortably, anyway. But Dave rolls onto his side as you lift the single blanket on his bed, huddles closer to the wall.
It must be his attempt to escape, but to you it's an opening, an invitation.
He tenses as you fit against his back, hand toying with the hem of his shirt. It's broken in and too-big, swallows him up like Jonah and the whale. You're certain he got it from the thrift store, and judging from the stale scent, never bothered to wash it.
His back bows outward when you sneak a hand under his shirt, shies from your touch only to press against you further. The softness of his stomach is leaving these days, definition showing in its wake, and it flutters under your fingertips.
“I’m tired,” he gripes, restlessly shifting.
“Then go to sleep,” you tell him.
-------
You don’t kiss him on the lips, but you kiss him everywhere else.
You press your lips to the indent beneath his ear, close your eyes to focus on that sweet gasp he can’t hold back. You trail along his jaw, find his pulse in his throat and count the beats. His Adam’s apple is becoming more prominent these days, and you linger as you mouth at it.
Dave’s got collarbones that could catch rainwater, and you leave them dotted with pretty red marks from your teeth.
His hands grip the sheets, fisted and tense. You know if you checked, his eyes would be wide, focused on the ceiling and waiting for this to end.
“You can touch me back, y’know,” you tell him as you stroke his sides.
The way he nods is nice, but the way he trembles is better.
----
There’s a switch that flips, and Dave understands that. It’s on or off, no dimmer installed. He doesn’t scoot away when you sit on the futon with him and hand over a carton of chow mein. There’s no flinching or drawing back as your shoulders press together or you lean in to stab your fork into the carton for a bite.
He snatches some of your orange chicken in turn, the two of you trading hollow jabs until the crime drama on TV and the impending food coma silence you both.
You congratulate yourself on the picture of normalcy that this would appear to be at anyone who saw.
-------
It’s impossible to pinpoint what flips the switch the first time. The urge had been skulking in the back of your mind longer than you’d like to admit, even to someone like yourself.
It doesn’t help when Dave’s limbs get long and that ungainly gait of his starts to turn into a sure stride.
You find his blog. Hell, it’s not like you have to snoop it out. He’s got a whole menagerie of them like some kind of exotic electronic animal hoarder. One always links to another, weaves an online web that hops from his comics to his photography before jumping to the beats he put together and the lyrics he’s laid down.
Beyond the .jpeg artifacts and questionable irony that pave the way, you find a blog entirely devoid of those hallmarks. The colors are drab and the fonts surprisingly legible. There are photos of dead things floating in jars, fogged eyes open and veins bulging with preservatives.
He talks on this blog. Talks on it like someone his age would, tripped up in smaller things, posts about wanting fast food or for the weather to change. How he fucked up the deck of his skateboard pulling off a darkside grind and the latest of Bro’s boobytraps he’d fallen victim to.
He also talks about wanting to be touched. It’s the usual cut and dry teenage babble to you, nothing that hasn’t been said before. The hunger for another’s hands on your skin, a warm body against yours. To be someone’s first choice when it comes to affection.
You show him he’s your first choice.
He stops talking about it on his blog after that. Stops talking about much at all there, really.
---------
Dave gets himself a job as soon as he can at a grocery store a few blocks over. It’s near enough to walk to, but not quite far enough for him to justify bus fare. The distance is perfectly situated that when you offer a ride, he accepts every time.
Better to ride shotgun than to trudge along under the hot Texas sun, or look over your shoulder at every noise while walking home in the night.
--------
You make a point of getting in Dave’s line whenever you get groceries now. Well, it’s not his so much as he’s the one with the short end of the stick left asking the soul-searchingly deep question of paper or plastic.
It’s policy, and he has to ask no matter how many times you come in. No matter the fact that he’s known for years. Paper in plastic. Double bag that shit, make it sturdy enough to hold the weight of the entire stock of hot pockets and whatever holiday-themed pop tarts were on the shelf.
He squints under the bleak fluorescent lighting of the store as he bags a copious amount of orange gatorade, eyes narrowed and naked without shades. There’s no deep wines or terrible teen romance novel ruby-reds here. You’re looking smack dab at some Hawaiian-Punch-red peepers. Man, you fucking love Hawaiian Punch.
Good thing you already have near-hoarder levels of it back at the apartment.
When the cashier asks if you’d like help out, it’s another always-yes past your lips.
Dave comes around from his little bagging post, apron bordering on offensively-green and hitting just above the knees. He pushes the cart to the truck for you, elbows locked in a clean line.
You slip him an honest Abe after he loads everything into the flatbed, ruffle his feathered blond hair and call him sonny boy. Tell him your bones get the aches sometimes and at least there’s one good apple in this upstart generation.
The face he makes at you as he pockets the tip is reminiscent of a hella mad smash-faced cat.
You go home and google hella mad smash-faced cats while you wait for Dave’s shift to end. You don’t know why this is one of the first image results.
You like the one below it much better.
The printer makes dolphin noises as it eats up a sheet of paper and spits it out in the time it takes for you to slip into Dave’s room and grab one of his many self-portrait polaroids. By the time you’ve cut the cat’s face out with safety scissors and smeared enough Elmer’s glue on Dave’s face to ensure the operation’s a success, it’s time to pick him up.
A novelty pin that looks like the end of an arrow is what pins it to his door, has it waiting for him as he shuffles wearily for his room. He pauses with the hand on the knob and stares at the photo. You count the seconds on one hand, then the other, move on to your toes when your fingers run out.
You stop at nineteen and a half. Not because Dave reacts then, but because you run out of things to count on and start internally debating if you have half a pinky toe on your left foot or three quarters of it decided to tango with a homemade cherry bomb.
When Dave finally looks to you, his eyes are tired and unhinged. You’ve seen it coming for a while, like rust eating metal over the years. He’s worn down after too many years of play and fighting to distinguish a hard line that’s been blurred soft as watercolors.
He doesn’t know what you want, if this bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a photo you’ve put on his door is supposed to mean something deeper to him.
He’s supposed to be stronger than this.
“Go to sleep kid,” you say with a wave of your hand, turning your attention back to Antique Roadshow.
Dave obeys, and you watch a man’s face fall as he’s told his once priceless armoire is now better off as kindling.
It’s all because he tried to better it.
-----
You let him drink early, call it controlled experimentation in your books, give him the chance now so he's not sneaking out to do it later. He’s at the age that he’s desperate enough to be an adult and young enough not to know better that he buys your lie at full price.
He goes overboard the first time, doesn't know how to pace himself and what his limits are. He ends the night with rubbery legs as he hurtles for the bathroom, and you save his shades from hitting the toilet water in tandem with his vomit.
You pet his hair back as his shoulders jerk and shudder with each heave, reassuringly massage the nape of his neck as he hangs his head and spits thick, nasty drool into the swirling water. You run the taps and grunt for him to rinse his mouth out, and he doesn’t need to be told twice.
He's still got the legs of a newborn foal as he wobbles out of the bathroom and you think he's going for his room, but his hand finds his way to your shirt and he has you tow him along to the living room.
He lays on your chest and cries, cheeks ruddy and eyes pink, teardrops on light lashes. He burbles watery words of weakness he's going to regret in the morning, but you let him go on until his sentences are short, punctuated by two second snores before he's roused awake to speak again. He cries a lot, but you figure the world's given him enough shit for him to get a free pass for that.
It's hard to make Dave happy. You only know what makes you happy. Things would be a lot fucking easier if the two intersected more often and in a lot less shallow ways.
You tell him he can play your xbox without having to ask anymore, and it seems to help in a superficial sort of way. Like you’re icing a limb that needs to be amputated.
-----------
You wake up one day at dusk to the sound of the front door opening and muted grumbles. There’s the crinkle of bags and shuffling footsteps, and you scrub a hand over your face as you roll over. The yellow of the cable box’s clock shows it’s half past seven, and you groggily recall that you were supposed to nab Dave from work once he got off.
‘Once he got off’ predates now by what is easily two episodes of Long Island Medium.
You stand from the futon with a low groan, joints popping when you stretch your arms over your head. A grocery bag is kicked through the door as you watch, and Dave follows behind, more bags draped along his arms like pressed shirts on a dry cleaner’s line.
“Do a little dumpster diving kid?” you ask.
The bags slide from Dave’s arms to the counter with dull thunks, and he rolls his shoulders, clutches at them like he can squeeze the ache out.
“May as well have,” Dave says. “Only got trash.”
“That’s my boy,” you say as you set the rummaging through the goods.
You’re like a kid in a candy shop as paw through hot pockets and bags of jerky. Cans of frosting with no cake mix accompanying them, and the holy grail that is a carton of Capri Suns. God damn, this kid is good. You raised him well, a chip off the old block.
“Look at you, all grown up and bringing home the bacon for your big bro. Got me feeling like a pampered little housewife over here.”
Dave shrugs like it’s nothing, like it’s not the first time he’s bought groceries all on his own and brought them home. Not a pizza or a jug of soda, not something to tide the both of you over for the night, but something you know took a nice bite out of his paycheck.
And he doesn’t even complain that he had to shuttle it home on the bus because you forgot to set an alarm.
Reality for so many is cold and harsh, unforgiving in the face of mistakes. For you it’s surreal, a never-ending trip head over heels down the rabbit hole. You’ve fucked up every step along the way─ half the time on purpose─ and this is what you’ve got to show for it.
The boy you’ve taken care of is now taking care of you. Not that he’s a boy anymore. He’s jumped the hurdles of puberty now. Those long limbs now fit his frame and the softness of his cheeks is gone. The light tones of his voice have deepened, the ends of his sentences scratched with gravel.
Your little man is, well, just a man now.
(But he’ll always be your little man anyway.)
He deserves to be treated like a man, enjoy the adult privileges that come with adult responsibilities.
You catch Dave around the waist with enough force as he’s shelving Cheez Its (white cheddar, what a fuckin’ good kid he is) that he’d be hitting the ground with those crackers if you weren’t already hauling him along.
The only thing that stops you is the card table you’ve called a dining table for the past seven years. It squeals and adds another set of gouge marks to the linoleum as Dave knocks his ass hard enough to go sprawling back on it.
The switch is flipped on.
The both of you are nothing but tensed muscles and held breath as the legs tremble under his weight. You swear to golden-curled, glowing-skinned Renaissance baby Jesus and his weirdly mature face that you’ll buy a new table tomorrow if the legs don’t give out now.
The table creaks like it could go either way.
Okay. Okay, fuck that noise.
You swear to the hot mess that is dollar store figurine baby Jesus. With its chipping paint and staggered wrist stump where its hand has snapped off. That vaguely haunted looking gaze and gormless face.
You swear to him that you’ll get a new table, up the ante even by making sure it’s not some garage sale shit. IKEA or bust for this kitchen, impossible to pronounce Swedish name and even more impossible to understand assembly instructions be damned.
Dave’s the first to realize he’s not about to reenact an episode of America’s Funniest Video’s because you’re too busy trying to remember if the catalogue leveling out the legs of the coffee table in the living room is for IKEA or JC Penny’s. He plants his palms flat on the tabletop and sits himself up, feet kicking slightly as his legs hang over the side.
By the time that you recall it’s actually a Cosmo keeping the table in the other room level, Dave’s looking at you like he’s half-bored and about to go back to putting away groceries. His breath is a soft, attentive inhale as you close the small gap between you two.
You rest your hands on his kneecaps, give a squeeze before you run your palms up along his thighs. His legs part easily and you thumb the inseam at his inner thigh. The look he gives you is something you’ve seen before.
Not on his face, but in text books and galleries. It’s the serene resignation of every depiction you’ve seen of royalty that knows full well their feet’ll be swinging five feet off the ground sooner than later, hanged by their own subjects. It’s somber and pretty, and you like it so much more than you should.
Your favorite part of it is the understanding in it.
Dave plants his palms on the tabletop as your hand slides along his stomach, rests at his chest to feel it rise and fall with shallow breaths. Your fingertips are light as they move up that pale, swan-like neck of his. He almost bows his head as he looks away, but your thumb catches under his chin as you cup his cheek with nothing short of gentility.
You don’t want him to think this is some kind of punishment.
It’s never been about punishment.
His lips are softer than you’ve always imagined, and his breath tastes overly-fruity. He makes a noise, and you can’t tell if it’s good or bad, but you love it. You swallow it the moment it slips past his lips only to coax another from him.
You like to think you’re the first to kiss him like this. That you’ll be the last. That you’ll be the only one.
He doesn’t quite kiss you back, but he doesn’t resist. Dave’s soft and sweet, a nectar for you to indulge in. You take the time to teach him, regardless of how unresponsive he is. There’s nothing rushed or overwhelming about how you kiss him, all impish pecks and soft presses like a middle schooler who doesn’t know there’s more to kissing than that.
It’s only when you try to deepen the kiss that Dave errs on the less cooperative. Your tongue flicks over his lips, and he does nothing. You do it again, bringing your thumb up to the corner of his lips, and when they still don’t part you force your thumb past the corner and hook his mouth like a trout.
He grits his teeth, but you’re not going anywhere. You’ve played puppeteer long enough to know what pulls his strings. Long enough to know that for you, the kid’s all bark and no bite. His lips pull back as you work the nail of your thumb between the rows of his teeth, and it’s not long before the pad of your thumb is pressing heavy on the back of his tongue.
It’s underhanded and messy, but it works. There’s nothing he can do to stop your tongue as it slips over his lips and presses into his mouth. He’s as stupidly sweet to the taste as his lips hinted, and it’s not long before you tongue flicks over the piece of gum that’s the source.
You steal it easily, and Dave’s reaction is faster than his thoughts, tongue immediately sliding against yours to try and retrieve it before he can stop himself. You try not to be too pleased with yourself, but you can’t help being a little proud of how easily he falls for this.
Any urge to maintain a certain level of make out decorum burns to cinders at Dave’s forced response. You aim to overwhelm and victory comes fast. Your kisses turn artless and hungry and Dave wilts under them, the quiet, breathless noises he makes lost beneath wet slurps.
Dave’s knees automatically jerk together when the hand you’ve had on his thigh this whole time slides over his crotch. Except now the rest of you is there to get in the way and all that happens is that his knees grip your sides.
You palm his half-hard dick through his jeans, and his hips rock to meet your touch. He’s slack-jawed and pliant when you halt your kisses, your thumb wet with saliva as you withdraw it from his mouth. The look in his eyes is glazed over and nothing short of tame.
Dave ruts against your hand as long as you’ll let him, the denim heated and confining. There’s no protest as you deftly undo the button and tug the zipper down, and Dave goes so far as to use his braced hands to lift his hips, shimmies them as you yank his jeans to his thighs.
His gasp of relief as his cock is freed is sweet on your ears, a noise you file away for the nights you don’t rouse him from sleep.
Nothing is straightforward under this roof, and you remind Dave of that when you turn baby’s first blow job into a lesson in patience. You leisurely run the tip of your tongue along a defined vein, your nose filled with the scent of heated musk and need.
The fact that he won’t last long is all the more reason to drag things out.
You swipe over the beading drop of precum, bitter as it mixes with saliva. Fingers work their way into your hair with no apparent intention of pulling you away or pressing you closer. He’s mooring himself to you, nails biting into your scalp as you take him into the wet pocket of your cheek.
Dave’s hips piston erratically, table legs shaking and swaying with every movement. You pull back and suckle the head only to take him down until he’s bumping the back of your throat, muscles constricting and fluttering around him.
There’s no porn star moan or mantra-like chant when he comes. It’s a choked yelp forced past a lump in his throat as he spills into your mouth. The flat of your tongue fits to the underside of his cock and you feel every last heated twitch as cum spills hot into your mouth.
You swallow every drop, throat still working even after the last surges. You keep him in your mouth as he goes soft, keep him until he’s panting weakly, fingers leaving your hair as he squirms because the stimulation is too much.
When you stand it’s with a fond pat to Dave’s thigh, like he’s a pet that’s done well. He fumbles to jerk his pants back up and, you’re quite sure, make a show of not glancing at the erection you have outlined against the crotch of your jeans. A pointless endeavor considering he’s felt it pressed against his ass innumerous times before through the sheer fabric of his sleeping shorts─ or less.
Dave’s gone before he gets the chance to see you tear the seal off the jug of apple juice he brought home and drink straight from the bottle. You swish the sweet drink in your mouth, sip at it as you stow the rest of the groceries away.
It’s hard not to jack off right there, but you want to save it for before bed when you can really enjoy it. In the meantime you allow yourself the friction the kitchen drawers offer as you shelve snacks.
Dave showers.
He showers through an episode of Ghost Adventures and two episodes of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Which is weird, because that kid’s got a lifetime habit of showering like he’s rationing water in the desert.
He finally emerges during the credits for America’s Next Top Model, hair damp and skin pinked from the hot water. You have a bowl of Cheez Its at the ready, and he reaches for them with pruned fingertips. He sits next to you on the futon and watches old Maury reruns on a channel number too high to count.
It’s half past ten and even with the windows open and traffic dull in the background, it manages to be an easy eighty in the apartment.
Dave shivers anyway.
---------------------
Your new IKEA table is named Ingatorp and you only think about crying three times while assembling it.
------------------
Dave gets a boyfriend.
Not that you’re in on it, but when you come home to find a guy with wild dark hair sitting in the groove of your futon that is perfectly fitted to your ass, you can’t help but assume that’s the deal. It doesn’t help that he’s got an arm slung around Dave, who’s taken to sitting with his hands folded in his lap like some shy Southern belle.
His name is Jake, and you decide if there was a human equivalent of a barn cat, it’d be him. Tall, dark and handsome is his MO, and the way he speaks makes you think of middle schooler hyped up on pixie sticks trying to imitate the Geico Gecko and the voiceovers for Outback Steak House at the same time.
He talks. A lot. When they were passing out mind-to-mouth filters he was busy taking a piss and by the time he’d washed his hands and returned they were fresh out. The stream of sounds that comes out of his mouth is white noise to your ears when he’s around. The enthusiasm he shows for every topic─ from blue chicks to bullets─ is nearly disconcerting. Half the time you think he’s trying to sell you something.
It’s the most talking the apartment has been privy to in years.
Animal ambassador is Jake’s job. Getting bit the hell up by animals is what it entails, what with all the marks and scars he’s sporting whenever you see him. His work bleeds into his babbling, and as your watch from the kitchen as he extols the importance of conserving space for wildlife and helping them adapt, you wonder how many people he’s smacked with those over-enthused gesticulations of his.
You give Jake and the shitty, banged up jeep he takes Dave to the drive-in to two weeks.
He makes it four. Four weeks of shy kisses on the cheek and brow, four weeks of parking himself on your spot. Dave’s got a weird thing about letting the guy in his room, far as you can tell. The few times he does, the door’s left wide open, like he’s sabotaging his own chances of getting some age-appropriate tonguing and heavy petting.
Watching them hold hands gives you secondhand embarrassment so hard it makes your teeth hurt. Their fingers don’t interlock like those panned-in shots every romance movie seems to have. Instead it’s like seeing the stiff fingers of corpses in rigor mortis trying to be shoved together.
You know it’s over when you come home and the first thing Dave does when you close the door is ask for Chinese.
Dave’s not an asker. Not a beggar or a taker, either. He’s learned to accept his lot in life and expect nothing more.
Half an hour later the both of you are on the futon, laps full of white cartons and fingers poised with chopsticks. Dave’s saddled himself with enough orange chicken to kill a small horse, and it’s hard to find a spot where he’s not chewing long enough to grill him.
“You tell Jake and his botherations to fuck off?”
Dave snorts, drops a chopstick to thump at his chest. You’ve done the movement enough yourself to know he’s managed to snort some General Tso’s right into his throat.
“Something like that,” Dave tells you once he’s got his breath back.
“Wanna walk me through the events? Tell me all about baby’s first break up?”
Dave shrugs and kicks his feet up on the coffee table, ankles crossing as he picks at his food.
“He got his britches or trousers or whatever the hell he calls them up in a knot.”
“And this was because?”
“Made a Steve Irwin joke.”
Air hisses through your teeth as your lips draw back. “Low blow, smalls. Let the crocodile man rest in peace.”
Dave shrugs again and melts back into the futon, chin to his chest and licking the orange glaze from his lips. It clicks then, slides into place like that one Godsend of a block in Tetris that clears the entire cluttered screen.
What a smooth criminal you’ve come to raise, able to shirk his boytoy and get Chinese on top. It’s enough to make you reach over and ruffle his hair until he’s moving under your hand like a bobblehead.
Six half-eaten cartons, four fortune cookies, and two full bellies later, you find the Patron Saint of Bad Ideas and Beasty-Wrestling hissing excitedly that he’s about to jump a croc. You both pour one out for him─ right into your mouths.
-------------------
Jake shows up at the front door three days later, one hand rubbing the back of his neck and the other clutching a grocery store bouquet of flowers. The cellophane wrapping crinkles as he tightens his grip, gives you a smile with those bucked bunny teeth.
“Hey there, big daddy,” he says, but the pep and vigor in it is expired. “I’m sure you want nothing more than to wash your hands of a ne'er-do-well such as myself, but if you could let Dave know─”
“Are those flowers for me?” you ask.
They’re not, but you want them. No one’s ever given you flowers, and if this chump thinks he can still show up, then you’re enforcing bridge fare.
Jake forces a laugh at your question, but it’s quick to die when your face remains stoic. He looks from the flowers and back to you, like a child on their first day of class unable to answer teacher’s question.
You’re a kick-ass teacher, so you decide to drop a hint.
“Pretty people get flowers,” you say seriously. “Do you think I’m pretty, Jake?”
“O-Of course, Mr. Strider,” Jake answers. He pushes the flowers at you with a face that says he doesn’t understand what’s happening. Like you’re a street magician who’s tricked him into handing over his wallet.
“Thank you for making me feel pretty,” you tell Jake as you step aside.
He moves past you, nearly jumps out of his skin when you bark at Dave that there’s company to be entertained.
You watch the exchange go down with the same attentiveness you give to your soaps. Not any soap, either. You’re not talking General Hospital or The Young and the Restless. You treat this as some choice Telemundo shit, a telenovela for the ages.
“Oh, crumbs,” are Jake’s first words when Dave emerges from his room. He says them not to Dave, but to his empty hands. The bare palms that have no apology offering in them.
Dave doesn’t sit, even when Jake does. Stands over him instead, arms crossed over his chest. He’s still and unyielding in all the wrong ways. There’s nothing collected and in control about it. It’s stiff and hurts to look at, like a broken body that never had the bones set right.
“What is it?” Dave asks, ignoring how Jake pats the spot next to him as though he’s inviting a pet to join him.
Jake’s expression runs the gamut from relieved to pants-wettingly excited in a frame of time so small and new it’s yet to be named.
“I don’t even remember what it was that got me so up in arms. I’m sure it was something trivial, really nothing worth going so bonkers,” Jake says, leg jogging. “Nothing really, well, you know─ worth losing you over.”
Dave takes a step back and looks at you with his very best can-you-believe-this-guy face. You can totally believe it. You have seen too many episodes of Degrassi not to believe it. This is a season finale, the ex coming back for a second shot.
Dave’s response is not nearly as dramatic as what you’d see on TV, but at least you don’t have to wait through a commercial break to see it. His expression is tired and frustrated, like he’s just stepped in a puddle of puppy piss when he finally thought the dog was house broken.
“Jake, c’mon. I’m not doing the break up and make up routine with you,” Dave says. There’s no bite, only weariness.
“I hardly consider this some kind of a routine,” Jake says.
He takes Dave's hand in his and it's as terrible as ever to witness. You wish you could lop Jake's hand off, cleave it clean from his wrist like a thief. That's what Jake is, aware of it or not. Dave is yours. He's always been yours.
“Give me one good reason,” Jake says as his thumb eases over Dave’s knuckles, “one good reason to call it quits and I’ll stay out of your hair for good.”
Dave doesn’t meet Jake’s eyes. That’s too direct for a kid like him. He’s all flitting, uneven glances and sharp looks from the corner of his vision. The tip of his tongue catches between his teeth as he goes to wet his lips.
You know what he wants to say. What he won’t say. It’s the oldest excuse in the book, such a tired cliche even the soaps steer clear of it.
It’s not you, it’s me.
Kid’s a martyr, through and through. Soaking up all the blame like a sponge, the prettiest scapegoat this side of the Andes. That’s right, Dave. Keep telling yourself it’s all you. Cover up for the fact that you brother’s had one hand up your shirt and the other down the front of your pants for years.
May as well return the favor and cover for him.
“You forgot the kid’s birthday,” you say.
Jake looks at you all dazed and dumb like you’re not supposed to be there. Like you and Dave aren’t a packaged deal. That guy’s striking out mad fast today and you’re ready to play bouncer if he wants to stay.
But he doesn’t.
Instead he mumbles his apologies, little quips about how he’s dreadfully sorry and that he’s a right ass for letting such a momentous occasion slip his mind. Deserves the doghouse, that he’ll see himself right out and that you and Dave will have to excuse his flip frickin’ whatever the fuck botherations. You think he makes half those words up, and his accent toes the same line.
Dave’s birthday is in three weeks.
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You buy Dave an ice cream cake for his birthday. The squared edges have started to slope by the time you get it back from Wal Mart and set it on the table. You really don’t care what the cake looks like at this point. You got all your brownie points already by balancing a ritzy pair of headphone on his face while he slept and sneaking a few sweet LP records you know he’s been looking for under his pillow.
It’s not long before he shows up in the kitchen to snoop around the bags you’ve brought home, but you shoo him towards the table as you stock the shelves. Kid can’t be doing thug work when he’s the birthday boy.
He drops down like a sack of old bones at the table, squints at the melted icing words that herald this day as better than the rest. You don’t actually bother with the whole song and dance, the lighting of the candles. This sucker of a cake is quick approaching a melted mound and you’re on a mission to get it on Hello Kitty paper plates as soon as possible.
Lil Cal cuts the cake, your hand over his to guide him. You make sure to get a confectionary rose along with a few sloppy letters. Wet droplets of ice cream splatter Dave’s shirt as you let the slab of cake hit his plate. His dabs at the spots with his fingers, licks the sweetness from the tips.
“So little man, how’s it feel to be the big-- well, you know,” you say.
You don’t actually know how old he is these days, and you may have realized this huge oversight when you went to buy candles and were left to stare at the waxen numbers with no idea which to pick.
“Seventeen,” Dave tells you. “The apparently-big seventeen.”
The way he narrows his eyes says he’s more than cottoned on to your forgetful moment.
Today, Dave is turning seventeen. Today, you find out you’ve sucked sixteen-year-old dick and had a damn good time doing it. Today, you learn that you are shit at judging ages, because they sure don’t make kids like they used to. Now they make ‘em hot.
You don’t ask what he’s doing here shoving ice cream cake in his mouth for breakfast at one in the afternoon instead of having his ass at school. Having his ass at school hasn’t been a thing for a while. The last thing you ever recall relating to school was signing some papers he pushed at you and figuring it was for a field trip.
The two of you eat cake until you have to switch to bowls to contain the sweet slop. Sugar roses crack between Dave’s molars as he eats them, and you trap one between your upper palate and tongue to let it melt.
The rest of the day is just as lazy, spent surfing channels and draped over furniture like throw blankets. You let Dave have control of the remote, don’t even bat an eyelash when he turns on Desperate Housewives. At least it’s not one you’ve seen before.
The futon’s not big enough for the both of you, and you lie together on your sides fitted from shoulder to hip to foot. Each breath you take makes stray wisps of fine hair ruffle on his head, fills your chest and presses it to Dave’s back.
You trade small jokes and jabs about the characters, bodies pressed closer with snorts of laughter. It’s easy to pass hours in thirty minute blocks like this, in short-lived story lines and over-reaching arcs.
When you ask what he wants for dinner, offer him anything his birthday boy heart desires, you already know the answer.
“Pizza,” he says.
“Meat lover’s?”
“With stuffed crust.”
“Aight, kid. You got it.”
Your phone is on the coffee table, and there is one solid mass of Dave that is between you and it. By the way Dave rolls his shoulders and arches his back until it pops flush against your stomach, that isn’t changing anytime soon.
He makes a kind of compressed noise as you reach over him, the weight of your body on his pressing him flat into the futon. He plants a palm flat to push back, but by then you’ve snagged the phone and you’re right back to being the big spoon on campus.
Forty-five minutes later you’ve got two extra large Meat Lover’s pizzas, bread twists and a two liter bottle of Sprite.
It’s been the birthday dinner tradition for all seventeen years of Dave’s life, even when he was too young to enjoy it.
It strikes you wrong in the stomach when the realization of how long you’ve had Dave hits you. It’s been too long and too short at once, so many memories and emotions crammed into the too-small space of your mind.
Seventeen years the two of you have spent lying on the futon like lazy swine when it was too hot to move. Seventeen years of sleeping under Craigslist comforters during cold snaps. Seventeen years of feeding Dave chicken noodle soup straight from the can- because who the fuck ever read the directions to find out you had to cut it with water- when his dreams went wild with fever and those pale lips flushed the sickly red of poisonous berries.
It reminds you that you never liked the Greeks much because those has-beens thought they'd trundled their way through every love out there and waxed wise like the scholars they heralded themselves to be. But they never came close to pegging what you've had for seventeen fucking years with Dave.
They found love, sought it out like explorers, or waited with baited traps. You reared yours though, cultivated it every second of every minute of every day until it bloomed something sick and lovely like the corpse plant.
It’s fucked up and terrible but you are long past the nights of being kept up by that.
Instead you gorge on pizza and soda, lick grease from your fingers and wrinkle your nose when you hiccup carbonation into it.
Hours later and on the cusp of sleep, you remember to ask the big question.
“Get everything you want for your birthday?”
Dave grunts.
“Now, now, let’s use our words.”
Dave looks sidelong at you.
“Look, kiddo. You can’t be moping about ‘cause you didn’t tell Santa what you wanted. It’s not like he didn’t spoil you rotten and then some. Tell ya, what. I’ll give you a nice crisp Benjamin and you can head to the mall tomorrow to pick whatever it is you wanted up.”
The way he doesn’t immediately accept has you thinking what he wants isn’t all that easy to buy.
“Don’t go down the world peace route, kid.”
His laughter is dry, and though his arms are crossed against his chest, he drops his head to rest against your shoulder.
Christ, he really is seventeen, all the awkward half-hearted moves included. You drape an arm over his shoulders like it’s nothing. You wouldn’t call him a runt, but he’s slight beneath your arm, fits there like he was meant to be protected by you.
Dave’s shoulder is the next thing to touch you, leans heavy and comfortable like he’s warming to the waters.
“You’re not gonna cough it up, are you?” you ask.
Still silent, Dave’s nearly sinking into you.
“Then I’m gonna have to ask for you to show me,” you say.
That gets Dave moving. Slow and unsteady, but it’s something. The weight of his head on your shoulder lifts as he sits up, and your smile is natural and encouraging as you find your lap being straddled.
Dave settles himself warm and easy on you, ass resting on your thighs as he places his hands to your chest. He splays his thin fingers over your sternum and stares at the tips, eyes focused and sharp as his cheeks redden. You rest your hands on his narrow hips, push his shirt up just enough to thumb as his sides.
He won't ask for what he wants because he still grasps how fucked up it is. How fucked up he is. Welcome to the club, Dave. Here’s your members-only jacket, name already on the breast and everything.
You're a trellis he's been trained to, wrapped around and entangled himself. He's grown all wrong, vines knotted and woven until there's no room left. He won’t grow right until someone cuts his vines and rips him from you, retrains him to another trellis. Forces change on him. But he's not a fucking plant in the end, and no one can take him from you but himself. And after seventeen years, that's just too big and scary for a broken boy like him.
Jake sure drove that home.
And after seventeen years, with your hands affectionately squeezing his sides as his arms slide around your neck and his weight shifts to your crotch, Dave flips the switch.