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dvp95 · 5 years ago

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can’t breathe when you touch my sleeve - chapter 11

pairing: dan howell/phil lester

rating: e

warnings: none

tags: alternate universe, slow burn, fluff & humour, tiny bit of inner turmoil wrt sexuality but trust me it’s not that deep, deeper than anticipated but still not that deep y'all this is primarily silly, eventual smut, idiots in love

word count: 3,995 for this chapter (49,787 total)

summary: Dan keeps making a fool of himself in interviews, to the point where it’s basically a meme. Now he’s got to sit down for the better part of an hour and sell his show to the YouTuber he’d had a massive crush on when he was a teenager.

read from the beginning on ao3 or on tumblr!

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

The flat is dark but for the string lights over Phil's headboard and the candles on his nightstand. Phil's fingers are tracing patterns on Dan's chest, loopy circles and spirals that leave goosebumps in their wake. He's humming something familiar under his breath that Dan can't place and his eyes are half-lidded behind his glasses.

They're tangled up on Phil's bed, ostensibly getting ready to sleep, but Dan is struggling. He doesn't want to miss a single moment he's got left with Phil. He'd thrown on some boxers in concession of sharing space with a dog, and Phil has gotten completely dressed in Dan's pyjamas with muttered complaints about the cold. Dan already misses looking at his body, but he has to admit that he likes looking at this, too.

"Remind me again when you're leaving?"

Dan sighs, lightly tapping a line of freckles down Phil's arm and tangling their fingers together when he reaches them. "Sunday afternoon."

"Too soon," Phil says, quiet and light like he's trying to play off how much it sucks.

"Too soon," Dan agrees. "But I'll be back as soon as I can. And we can - I mean, I want to still, like. Date you. Even when I'm not here."

With a little hum of a noise, Phil blinks up at Dan. He looks a little perplexed. "Well, yeah," he says. "I'm just gonna remind you again that I introduced you to my parents. I wasn't planning on running off with the next local idiot who fawns all over me."

"I did not fawn," Dan protests, but his lips are twitching. He presses them to Phil's forehead to hide the movement. He didn't actually believe that Phil was thinking of this as something with a time limit, but it's nice to be reassured. They're quiet for a long moment, and then Dan has to ask the embarrassing question that's been plaguing him. "Are you, like. Are you my boyfriend?"

Phil laughs, not unkindly, and nuzzles into Dan's neck to press a kiss there. Dan can feel the curve of his smirk when the sensation makes Dan shiver.

"Yeah, Dan," says Phil, low and fond. "I'm your boyfriend."

"I'm just making sure," says Dan.

"You're so stupid," Phil says, pulling back from Dan's neck to grin up at him. His eyes are so bright that it almost aches to look at.

There really isn't a good argument for that. Dan shrugs, pulls Phil close enough that he can feel Phil's heartbeat. He buries his face in Phil's hair so that he doesn't have to watch Phil's expression change when he says, "Yeah. I told my brother about you, actually. Told him you were my boyfriend."

Phil chuckles. "I told my brother about you, too. Dunno why you're embarrassed about it."

"Yeah, but that's different," Dan mutters. "You talk to Martyn."

"I get that your family is," Phil says, pauses for a brief moment, "complicated, but I'm not bothered by them knowing about me."

"That's good," says Dan. "Because, er, I'm having lunch with my mum after the morning interviews tomorrow, and I thought - well, y'know."

A gentle hand in Dan's hair pulls him back from the cuddle so that Phil can look at him. His eyes flicker over Dan's face like they're looking for something. Whatever it is, he doesn't seem to find it.

Phil smiles indulgently, shaking his head a bit. "I actually don't know, Dan. I'm gonna need you to use your words. Because right now it sounds like you're inviting me to lunch with your mum. Which, to be clear, wouldn't be weird for me, since you've met mine, but I get the feeling it might be weird for you."

That hadn't been at all what Dan was asking. He thinks about it, though, wonders if if would be better or worse to have backup for this lunch.

Dan loves his mum. Their relationship is strained, distant, has got a heavy buildup of guilt and mistrust on both sides, but he loves her. He isn't sure he can bring Phil into that and explain it, not when he's met the wonderfully warm people who raised Phil.

"I was actually just asking if you'd be okay with me mentioning you, but how about," Dan says slowly, turning the idea over in his head. "We meet you at the park after lunch? I wanted to whine until she brought Colin, anyway, this gives me a good excuse."

"Colin?"

"My family dog," says Dan. "Don't make fun of his name, your dog's name is nerdy and a pun."

Phil laughs and kisses the tip of Dan's nose. "I wouldn't dream of it. I like animals with hilariously normal names."

"So, you'll come? You really don't have to."

"Sure, I just," Phil says and pulls a little face, like he doesn't want to voice whatever he's thinking. "Is she... one of the people reacting badly? Wanna know what I'm getting into, here."

"No, she's been great," Dan says quietly. "She might be weird, but she won't be... y'know."

"I do know."

The smile playing around Phil's lips makes Dan want to kiss him, so he does. He can't believe that he's just allowed to do that, can't believe he somehow stumbled into being the luckiest person alive.

Dan's done a lot of things over the past decade that he thinks would shock and awe his teenage self. He's met and worked with some pretty big names, gotten drunk with his costars at some pretty big events, and publicly made a fool of himself in some pretty big ways.

He thinks this would take the cake, though. Just the simple act of kissing his boyfriend in bed would have been more than teen Dan could have dreamed of. He'd wanted that, of course, in a pipe dream sort of way, like how he'd wanted to stop hurting his girlfriend, wanted to feel some kind of acceptance for who he was so terrified to be. But the world had been way too fucking scary for him to consider it outside of daydreams.

Not to mention the fact that the man he's kissing is AmazingPhil. Dan laughs, pulls back from Phil to grin at him.

"You know," he says, "I used to have the biggest fucking crush on you."

"Used to?" Phil teases, brushing his fingers over Dan's ribs to make him squirm and laugh harder.

"Shut the fuck up," Dan says fondly. "I mean, like, in 2007."

Phil blinks. He's a lot sleepier than Dan is, which Dan very generously attributes to how long it takes Phil to do simple math in his head. "Wait, you seriously had a crush on me when you were sixteen?"

"Maybe," says Dan.

"Oh, that's so cute," Phil coos. He gives Dan a smug little grin and rolls on top of him. Their limbs are so long and they're both so clumsy that Dan isn't surprised by Phil almost kneeing him in the balls in the process, but he's also so far gone that he barely cares. "And what would sixteen-year-old Dan think of all this?"

"He wouldn't believe it," Dan laughs, settling his hands on Phil's hips. "Like, literally, this would have never occurred to him as a possibility."

"Why not?" Phil teases, knocking their noses together gently. Dan gets the impression that he's more charmed than he's letting on with his dry voice. "You didn't wanna come to Summer in the City? Make an impression?"

That makes Dan honk a laugh right in Phil's face. Objectively, that's mortifying. Phil just snorts, though, so Dan decides not to worry about it on top of everything else he's constantly anxious about in Phil's presence. "The impression I would have made on you in 2007 or even, like, ten years ago, wouldn't have been anything good. You think I'm awkward now? You can only imagine what I was like before I had any kind of confidence."

"I'm sure it was very cute," says Phil. "I'd have added you on MySpace."

"I hate you," says Dan, not least because he'd sent Phil a friend request on MySpace. He is absolutely not going to bring that up, though.

"Yeah, sure seems like you do," says Phil, grinning.

Dan doesn't like the smug look on his face, so he takes Phil's glasses off and sets them aside, chuckling when he immediately starts to squint. "It's bedtime," he reminds Phil.

"Bedtime," Phil agrees, and he blinks a bunch before he laughs. "I can't see you. You gotta kiss me goodnight."

Definitely a request Dan can handle.

Once again, Dan finds himself staring at the ceiling of Phil's flat. He's got a snoring dog at his feet and a snoring man draped over him, and he should really be relaxed enough to drift off by now. He's comforted by the smell of Phil's sheets and the soft pattering of rain against the small windows, but it doesn't help get him any sleepier. It's frustrating. He's got interviews all morning - the last of the Isles leg before they get shipped off to the continent for another two weeks of the same circus - and he doesn't want to be cranky for them or have to apologise to another makeup artist for the dark circles under his eyes. He tries for a really long time to fall asleep before he gives up on it for the moment and reaches for his phone.

The familiar cycle of applications helps settle some of the restless energy that's thrumming under Dan's skin. The fingers of his right hand run over Phil's shoulders and through his hair, gentle and idle enough to avoid waking him, as he scrolls through different social media sites with his left thumb.

His feeds are busy enough, since it's not quite late enough to be considered unreasonable in Atlanta or Chicago and Los Angeles is fully awake, but none of it is really catching his attention. He likes a bunch of dog photos and gets lost in a Twitter moment on a topic he's never heard about before. Three different times, he almost buys something that's being advertised to him before he remembers that he already owns something similar to it.

Normally he'd put on some AmazingPhil videos to help him fall asleep, but that feels pretty weird to do when the man himself is literally drooling on his chest right now. Not to mention, he'd have to get up to find some headphones, and that would just defeat the purpose of staying in bed.

Dan spends twenty minutes drafting an email to his grandma, hindered by only using one thumb and his brain not being at full firing power as it is. It ends up saying more or less what he'd texted to his mum, only with an apology at the end. He doesn't know why he does that. He isn't sorry for who he is, or for not telling her, or for not believing in the god that might inform her reaction. He almost deletes the apology, actually, but the fact is that he is. He is sorry for all of those things.

He doesn't want to be. He wants to be unapologetic. But this is a woman who he's always respected and who is so vocal about supporting his career that he sometimes gets embarrassed by the statuses she posts about him on Facebook. This is also a woman who brought him to church for a good chunk of his life.

It's so vivid, even now. Getting his collar smoothed down by her dainty hands, his cheeks pinched by all her friends. The stifling, muggy air and hard pew under him in the summer.

Discomfort. Physical discomfort, as a child, and a deeper sort once he realised he didn't belong there. If he has to narrow it down, he's sorry that he might be giving her a different sort of discomfort in return.

He emails so that he can check for her response on his own time instead of panicking and shutting his phone off like he did with his mum, and then he goes into the app store to download some new, mindless games. Those entertain him for a while, the easy taps of his thumb giving him something to focus on that is not all the ways he's failed his family or the terrifying reality of what he might see in his mother's eyes tomorrow.

Today, he supposes. He'll be lucky to get a couple of hours at all.

In the end, he doesn't get any sleep. He wants to, because he knows he's going to be a zombie at work and at lunch, but maybe that's a good thing. He doesn't know what his mum is going to say, after all, doesn't know if she's going to try and defend his dad or talk about his reaction at all, so perhaps it's for the best that Dan feels everything a little more numbly than usual.

Dan turns off his alarm a split second after it rings, which is never a great feeling after a hard hit of insomnia. It's the final acknowledgement that sleep is not coming, no matter how much he tries to will it. He sighs and gently rolls Phil off of him. The way Phil grumbles and curls into his pillow, cuddling it to his chest, manages to get a weak smile out of Dan. He's just... cute. That's all there really is to it. Thor perks up when Dan gets out of bed, his ears all the way up, and Dan figures that it isn't the worst idea in the world to get some fresh air.

"You wanna go for a walk?" Dan whispers. He has to bite back a laugh at the way Thor reacts - spinning excitedly in a circle on the bed before hopping down and running to the door.

The sun is just starting to rise, giving Dan enough light to avoid injuring himself as he finds something to throw on for the walk. He ends up with his own pyjama pants and some graphic tee or other of Phil's because he can't be bothered to look for something else. He figures that anyone else awake right now won't judge him for it.

He remembers to grab keys and doggy bags before he tries to get Thor out of the door without his excitement turning into barking. He hasn't really barked much in Dan's presence, but he doesn't want to take any chances. It would be just his luck to wake everyone in the building up because he has no idea what he's doing when it comes to training a dog. The dog his family had when he was growing up was cute, but he was real bad at being a dog. Dan's got absolutely no practice with making dogs listen to him, and he's not exactly assertive. He's been chased by chickens more than once.

The chill of the dawn air makes Dan glad he grabbed one of Phil's countless denim jackets, and he pauses on the pavement outside for only a brief moment before Thor starts tugging him down the road. Thor knows the area, even if Dan doesn't, so he's happy to let the dog guide them with his nose and stubby little legs.

It's too early to talk to anyone, for sure, but Dan wants to rip the band-aid off before he has to shift into his public persona. He texts his mum with one hand, can u bring colin please i miss him so much and ive got a friend for him, attaches a cute photo of Thor sniffing at a neighbour's flower box. After a moment's thought, he sends the photo to Phil as well. He'd watched Phil put his phone on silent before they got into bed, so he isn't worried about waking him up. Dan has to slip his phone back into his pocket to quietly scold Thor for eating someone else's petunias and scurry away from the scene of the crime.

Everything feels just a little hazy with the rising sun, the mist of barely-there rain, and Dan's own lack of sleep. He lets Thor guide him into a lazy walk around the block and breathes in the polluted air like it's going to make everything better.

Maybe it should be scary how right this feels. In fact, it is scary, and Dan would like to blame it entirely on his insomnia and idiocy, but he knows it's more than that. He wants this to be his routine, as stupid as that is. He doesn't want that right away, doesn't want to leave Atlanta and come right to Phil's flat, but he wants... that. Eventually. First, he wants a drawer in one of Phil's dressers, wants to text whenever he's outside, wants to meet Phil at the dog park with two coffees and a grin on his face.

Dan never really took himself for a hopeless romantic, but then again, he also never thought that he'd be able to date someone he wanted to be with for the long haul. Even a medium haul had been off the table with the girls he's dated since his last actual relationship. It was always going to be missing something.

When Thor starts whining and tugging at the lead a bit harder, Dan smiles. "You wanna go home, cutie?" he murmurs, spotting the distinctive blue of Phil's front door. "Let's take you home."

The questions are the same every time. Not the exact same, no, but still the same. Every publication and media site wants to know the same shit about the show, and they don't even have all the answers.

"No, we haven't heard about a new season yet," Jaime is saying for the third time in one morning, with some kind of unending patience that Dan will never understand. "Trust me, the internet will know as soon as we know. Of course it would be nice to keep working - I don't think my character's storyline is anywhere near done!"

She laughs, but Dan can tell that it's forced. It's starting to take a strain on her, too, and he knows that they're all just waiting for something original to come up. Patrick has zoned out, pulling a Full Dan and staring off into space.

There aren't any pins for Dan to comment on this time, even if he'd wanted to. The morning has been slogging, not least since he'd left Phil still asleep in bed with a kiss to his sweet-smelling hair. Dan is so tired, but he knows they're all so tired. There's nothing for them to do but paste smiles on their faces and deflect spoilery questions while they count down the minutes to their free afternoon. Well, Jaime and Patrick have a free afternoon. Dan is going to have his hands full.

His mum had agreed to bring Colin happily and mooned over Thor's photo, but Dan has been perplexed by the fact that she didn't even ask whose dog it was. He wants to tell her, wants to be clear that he hasn't gone and got himself a big responsibility just yet, but there's a larger, pettier part of Dan that wants to keep Phil to himself until his mum is face to face with him. Dan wants to see if she has to school her expression, wants to know if this is an arms-length continuation of their relationship or the start of something rocky and healing.

Since Patrick is off in his own world, Dan tries his best to be present for this interview. He makes the interviewer laugh and tells stupid anecdotes to keep the attention off of everything Jaime won't say about her character arc.

It's a good thing he is paying attention, because Dan isn't sure how he'd have reacted if he'd been caught off guard by, "And as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of fans have been speculating about on-set romances. Is there any truth to those rumours or is that just some fun for the fans?"

Jaime snorts loudly. It's very unladylike. Dan is so, so fond of her.

"Uh, no," says Jaime. "I mean, if you're talking about between the three of us - which I have seen, the shipping isn't as quiet as y'all think it is - then, I'm sorry, but there's no way. I won't even act like there is to keep people guessing. I'm not going to date Daniel or Patrick for, like, twenty thousand reasons. If you want to talk about Tanner, though..."

She winks and trills her real laugh, which makes Dan laugh in turn. Jaime's crush on the man who plays Patrick's father is such an open secret that he's surprised more people don't ask her about it. Maybe they think it's a sensitive or uncomfortable subject, but Jaime's got no compunctions about loudly fancying someone who is both a decade older than her and married. The interviewer's laugh is a bit less genuine.

"Really?" he asks, sounding skeptical enough that Dan wonders if he ought to be offended. "And the two of you think the same? No chance?"

What? If they did want to be with Jaime, why the fuck would they say that in an interview right after she'd denounced them as romantic interests? Dan wonders if this guy understands that's an insane thing to expect, or if he's just trying to get a reaction out of them.

"Er, yeah," Dan says. He looks at his costars for backup. Jaime shrugs, and Patrick seems to have only just realised he's being spoken to and has the panic of 'what was just asked of me?' in his eyes that Dan is all too familiar with. He decides to word his answer clearly enough that he can help get Patrick up to speed as well. "I mean, like, we're all just good friends. I don't think any of us have any interest in more than that. And honestly, if we did disagree with Jaime, we wouldn't force our feelings on her anyway. That'd be fuc- I mean, that would be messed up."

He sees the glint of triumph in the interviewer's face and groans internally. Fuck, he should have stayed in bed.

"Interesting," he says, "that you've already thought about a situation where you have unrequited feelings for your on-screen girlfriend?"

Yeah, Dan thinks. Super interesting. He's kissed Jaime a thousand fucking times for the camera and it doesn't do anything for him, thanks ever so. He sighs and runs a hand through his straightened fringe so he doesn't slap himself in the face for opening this can of worms.

"Look, I get that a lot of fans want to know," Dan says, keeping his tone as light as possible. "The thing is that I'd like to keep my personal life private. I'm happy to tell you that it doesn't involve Jaime in any way, though."

"I'm fine with my personal life being public," Patrick deadpans. "There's nothing going on in it and that's how I like it. We're all equally pathetic that way, right?"

"Oi," Dan says, unable to hide his offense. The lack of sleep is really making his filter drop, and that's dangerous.

Jaime throws him a life vest before the interviewer can jump on his reaction, patting Dan's knee and saying, "You know, Patrick, some of us are pathetic in many more ways. Like, do you remember the time..."

And off she goes, weaving a story about Dan making an ass of himself. He interjects at all the right moments, laughs and groans in equal measure, covers his face when he starts to legitimately blush at the memory of an entire Starbucks thinking he'd gone insane.

He's comfortable with sharing that amount with his fans, he thinks. He's not dating Jaime, he never will be dating Jaime, and he's a private person. That's really all they need to know for now.

#can't breathe when you touch my sleeve #phan #phanfic #phanfiction #dnp fic #words words words

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actingdeep · 4 years ago

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Jean & Cat

Give me your hand. Only give 'yes' or 'no' answers for now. We will go back later at the end. Close your eyes. I'm going to start by saying the Lord's Prayer. "Okay." That was all Lorraine could say these days. She would eat oatmeal when we set a bowl for her and she would smile. We put a red cigarette in her fingers and told her to inhale. She would cough twice in an elderly way, with sunken eyes staring straight forward, and she would smile. We shifted our intimate yet quaint and twisted car songs and dialogues to the back porch around 6 a.m., after tiptoeing past conked couple Jean and Ryan crashing on their living room floorbed, making coffee, using the restroom and watering the silly-looking dog. There is a very alien type of relaxation that comes with being the last ones alive from a late night civil war on your own good health, with everyone else defenseless and asleep like regrettable casualties. The horizon stretched and yawned. Past our feet, in the dew-covered grass, layed the sheepdoglike Lily, with her green bone flinging around her teeth. Cat had abilities within her revealing dormant truths and hidden pasts in others. I had amphetamines within me releasing all boring skepticism and reason. By the end of the night, she had given me a personal palm reading. The accuracy was daunting at first (and still is). It was a superstitious and almost laughable act, yes; but it was pinnacle altruism--and at that moment, after all these years, it was finally clear to me that she was my friend. I was feeling a little effete as a hidden star burnished the scale of an overripe and infirm world. Cat and I had inadvertently stayed up all night. We were either still drunk, or low-key tweaking, or probably both. Our eager spirits were about to be given another boost out of their usual pockets of time and space. We lounged with sleepless energy in squat gray outdoor chairs on the small back porch, with blowing trees and birds singing in the early summer morning. Jean had already long fallen asleep on her living room floorbed, and now that I finally had Cat out of the car, I could let my blood cool between easy nature and cheap science. The dome of the pipe we were smoking Annie from caught some outside debris from the wind that was blowing and made a slight brownish blemish on the inside, which made the taste of the rolling smoke a little less clean than the previous hits. Many a time when Jean and I were gulping down cherry-flavored vodka around this time six or seven years ago, in the bedroom right behind Cat's, when they still had their old house, I had never fathomed a table could turn so drastically: the table being my relationship with these two women--mother and daughter--over time frames scattered and separated by intermittent spaces of buildup and decay. The days when talking to Cat filled me with dread seemed like false memories when I looked at her now. I almost liked her more than Jean these days--a funny thought, indeed. "Are you still hungry?" "Okay." At 4 a.m. we were back from the bar, and pulled in the driveway of Jean's grandparent's house. She struggled to shut her car door and sauntered inside. I followed, but before I made it in the house, I heard my name called back from behind me from the driveway. I turned to see Cat gesturing for me under the dim car light. She was looking around in the car for something I don't remember what. I got back in to help her search for something likely of the highest unimportance. As we began to talk more, we ended up being in the car for at least an hour. When Cat begins to chatter with you, an angel should come down from Headache Heaven to give you a Valium and a bucket of popcorn. We hadn't talked very much all night, only because once she dropped off Jean and I at the bar, she didn't come in to join us finally until around the last half hour we were there, where I would eventually start a scene that would close the entire bar for the night. We laughed about that, and caught up with one another in general about the changes and differences in our respective current lives. Her overall pleasantness caught me off-guard, somewhat. As conversations in parked vehicles usually go, especially with our current bodily chemical states, we eventually graduated from serious discussion, to banter, to no words--just full duet performances to bands like The Violent Femmes and Fleetwood Mac, stridulate and true. This is nothing like using Tarot cards. Those things are complete bull shit. I am going to try to knock something loose here. They're screaming again: this time, passively-aggressively around the edges of the room, little hash symbols and asterisks and ampersands tunneling in the air and in and out of Lorraine's smiling ears. At first, the day was calm: quiet snores, with the T.V. playing The Price is Right, as some were still laid out on the floor asleep, some in chairs with coffee and paper, awake. The small house seemed much more open than it should have been. I watched the game show and sat on the couch next to Brenda, Cat's girlfriend, as she was scrolling her finger on a phone screen and grimacing a little. Jean's disheveled head was zzzing right next to my left foot. I put back large gulps of the coffee Brenda made me to put off my ineludible crash, and had cigarettes on the bright, thin clean carpet. Brenda started it; it was around 11:30 a.m. Grunting, she staggered over to Cat's floorbed to lean down, and WHUP!, smack her on her overturned body, making her yelp in a terrible way, like a little, running dog that pivoted wrong and twisted it's paw. Some moments you don't want to ever remember--that is--until you really can't. She had only been asleep for about twenty minutes, and immediately: "Fuck! What is...what is wrong with you?" cried Cat, still stridulate. "Who's all these motherfuckers in yer phone messagin' ya? Always fuckin' around on me, ain't ya? Don't give a rat's ass about me." "I don't talk to anyone, Brenda. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" "Ah, bull shit," waved Brenda, turning away like a troll. "Fuck you!" "Fuck you right back, bitch." "I haven't gotten any sleep all night, Brenda. I was up talking to Derek all night, and I just fucking fell asleep." "Well, good morning bitch!" And so on. This match lasted hours; piercing echoes branching off into littler sub-arguments (but just as loud) over other things they thought would be good also brought up, neither showing mercy, except to make a jeer and cackle at the other's expense. Dan had already taken Ryan to his morning college class and hadn't gotten back yet, so between sleeping Jean, contented Lorraine, and highly tired I, no one was attempting to dampen the vicious quarrel in any way. I was sitting quietly, looking down at my feet and Jean's stirring hair ball, not from lack of sleep, but from the plain child greenness of these two women. I knew Cat as a married woman to a husband, once. But no surprise came to me when I met her current girlfriend (womanfriend). I knew this was more of an emotionally-hinged relationship and sexually less so; only the emotions in use were nothing but petulant combativeness, desperation, and cold resentment; they were fools together. After a while, crash impending, I would simply walk outside, away from it all, until the screams muffled themselves in the distance. "Okay." Dan was the man of the house, and also Cat's dad. He was a few years shy of sixty years. Although I had never met him before, having stayed the night at his house, he was quite jolly and approachable. He smoked cigarettes with the front door open. His wife Lorraine sat by him in a low-back rocking chair, onlooking. The rooms of the house were typical in the grandparently sense: white-gold ceiling fan, porcelain figurines behind glass cases, mini fish tank, placemats on multiple kitchen tables, a smiling woman sitting in a smiling rocking chair, big television. The only thing out of place was the smoking; it was a subtle invasion of a seemingly innocent atmosphere, akin to squeezing your girlfriend's ass at church service. I couldn't believe I was smoking a square on a davenport. Did you know the dead see the future? Back in school, when Jean and I dated as teenagers, her mother Cat was in a seriously disobliging state--dependent on drugs like Xanax and methadone. She would stay in her room twenty-four seven and roar at us to turn the music down. She only left the house when absolutely necessary, and had a round, evil scorn forever in her floating eyes. She was ponderous, choleric and painstakingly contrary, instigating daily screaming matches with her husband, or daughter, or both. She was always in carping pain, and loved to spite her old pasts to herself in drugged, futile insanity. When she would bring her mom her dinner trays, Jean usually took accusation and insult as gratuity. On the occasions she was in good spirits (which usually implied she was unusually zapped), she would talk to you for what seemed like long hours about things like ghosts or glory days if you weren't careful to sneak past her bedroom door, which was permanently ajar, with a low, rambling sound leaking out of it always. I loved being in Jean's room more than anywhere in those days. I remember a pink sheet covering an overhead window making every movement and shadow a cotton candy daydream, sitting on a stack of two single mattresses, with us both leaning against a wall with blanketed legs and her kitten, soft and white between us, with secret, window eyes. And there would be Jean: beautiful and youthful in blonde and black and pink and brown eyes. She was in the school's color guard and I would watch her practice double and triple rifle spins in her backyard for hours, smoking dirt weed to her music playlists. We were underage drinkers; but she always had a guy to buy alcohol for us (to them, just her), and once he would drop it off, she would cutely thank him and send him away, bringing it into her room where I waited, and we would drink from the bottle, giggling; or, we would just stay in her room for hours to avoid Cat by playing music, taking pictures, or just making each other laugh hysterically in various ways. I hope I never forget that laugh. "Okay, honey." We carried our drinks over to a rounded booth in the corner and talked for a while, saying hello to the barkeep Stephen as we walked in, and to all the other puffy, smiling faces we recognized, but didn't know. It was just Jean and I right now, talking like we always could, no matter where or when we ever were. Apparently, Cat was sticking around the parking lot for a while to connect to the internet on her phone for something rather (or was she?), and selling soupcons of various pills here and there to her bar regular buddies, amiably, with wrinkled eye corners. Something is coming through. A man with a flattop military haircut. I also see an older man sitting in an easy chair. How well do you remember your childhood? Does the name Tom mean anything to you? Jean and I sat near the DJ booth, which wasn't really a booth inasmuch as it was a large man sitting in a folding chair with a laptop. We laughed, but were loving what he was playing. Her and I have always been able to listen to music together comfortably for long periods of time, often with naps and cool silences. In the moment, I felt that we were actually a good couple when we were seventeen, even though it only lasted a couple weeks, tops; but being friends was barely different, and easy to do. She had many boyfriends, one at a time, in constant replicating sequences--one, and another, and another. I never minded that--it is a task for most people to be alone. Ryan was her current boyfriend, but she didn't bring him to the bar--and not just because he was underage. She used men like a body pillow or an aspirin; leave them at the house and use them for comfort as needed (and they were always young). She was dull now. I had to entertain her because she was dull, and I loved her; but of course, in loving her, I was dull, also. After some rounds, we would smile more easily. I asked when her mom was going to join us, because, to this point, I really had no clue as to what Cat was even doing, us having sat there drinking, unjoined for an hour or two now. "She's in the car, smoking speed. That's her drug of choice now." After I gave off a questioning look, she continued: "I really don't mind it. I mean, at least she can function." Hmmm. I rounded my eyes, and curled my wet lips. I excused myself, and bolted outside towards the car. I knew Cat would share; greed a moral hit-man. The dim car light was on across the street. After twenty minutes or so, I sat back down in the booth and readjusted my eyes, feeling fresh. Jean was standing by the DJ booth. "Do you take requests?" "I take donations." An older woman with a strained gait and a proud, pauper air waddled up to our booth and gave a friendly hello-how-are-you to Jean, but not to me. Jean had a subtle knack for being pleasurable and forebearing to humdrum dishwater persons, the subjective soul inside me under a spell of well whiskey, and also Cat's treat, slowly making my thoughts increasingly insubordinate here. "Aye! A Jeanie in a bottle!" "Hi, it's good to see you." (No it isn't. She's foul!) "Been missin' ya round this place. Where ya been, girly?" "Just working, and taking care of grandma." "Oh, bless your heart! How is she? (She's okay.) "Y'know--good days and bad days." (Too bad this Jeanie can't grant wishes; she'd make it no days.) At one point, I reached over and took a sip out of Jean's beer bottle. The woman slowly straightened her mouth and furrowed her brow, glaring at me. "You're disrespectful." "I bought this. I've bought all her drinks." A cheap maneuver. She turned to Jean: "You should find better friends." I saw Jean's mouth twitch a little, then turn up again. "This is my oldest friend," she defended me cooly, with an undertone of hate only I could detect. I smiled at the woman as if to say, "How about that?" She had a countenance that was one part protectiveness for Jean, another part antipathy for me, and a third part, something I couldn't place, but that was definitely for herself. "It's okay, honey, he's really okay," said Jean sedatively. Jean looked more allayed than I was once the woman had eventually returned to her table. The front door was slowly staving off tottering bodies as the night bloomed into day. As she passed by them, coming back in from a cigarette, Jean looked up and noticed an old school friend of hers, who was talking to a man that happened to be sitting right next to me, at the far end of the bar. This made her face light right up, I noticed, which contented me quite well, as Jean in general wasn't particularly boisterous. She skipped up to the old friend and gave a kind and delighted hello. But this girl was obviously completely disinterested in her, and gave her a lowbred, patronizing sneer. "Okay." Freshly cold-shouldered, Jean rubbed her arms, and became specially downcast, then: this was not okay. Seeing her so depreciated so abruptly sparked a most tender agony within me that would prod my heart, even under the many obtunding whiskeys I had imbibed over the night. I called the insipid girl's attention, and seconds later, she looked up at me, and when she looked up at me, I vengefully, and without restriction, said: "What kind of rude, phony, fucking bitch are you?" Her body didn't move, but her fingers and face started to contort as she glared at me. She dropped her jaw a little, and then clenched it, and widened her thick, black eyes as a fire rose in them. Jean stood back a little, and the girl began to defend herself in belligerent fury, while I held my own ground in the meantime. Every sentence she spoke bumbled over the next; she was clearly plastered, and in rage. I continued to fuel that rage as I rebounded spurring insults like "Fuck you!" and "What do you know?" with gibes like "I can't! I'm outta cash!" and "Fish swim, birds fly, and you're a cunt!" This soon started a mini-uproar on that end of the bar, and very quickly had all the remaining bar-goers perking up from their glasses. Some people began to hover nearby us gingerly, in case of the possibility that things could get physical, as her and I continued to altercate, teams now forming behind us. After about three more minutes of her drunkenly calling me names and I relentlessly making fun of her for being fake and angry, the bartender Stephen kicked her out. He was good friends with Jean (a regular there), and had saw us together all night, and must have been partial. He told the friends of the girl I accosted, now a tornado of nails and hair and fury, body still unmoved, to take her outside, and so they did. He locked the doors, then turned to give me a face of exhausted vitriol. I still sat there at the long bar next to my friend Cat, the medium, and her deservedly defended daughter, one of my most nascent and esteemed loves from years and years ago. Because of our mutual friend Jean, he would only give me a little hell for causing such a row, and I gave him a most disingenuous apology. We reset and regrouped, and were soon out the door. What a perfect pleasure it is to mislay all complacency and trepidation, and to actuate defiance in the face of all of our false, permeable cordialities, and to see just how easily it can all fall away. To feel what I did to be an imperative as to glorify a strayed memory of a forgotten devotion only moreover authenticates my conviction that the ways we go, and the happenings in our lives, occur for no reason at all but for our own attempts at nullifying an unavoidable and steadfast state of lifelong suffering. Jean thanked me for standing up for her, and gifted me an old look and smile that, so many years ago, I would have never believed I had forgotten. "Okay."

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