#it’s always patrick zweig at the scene of the crime

[pparacxosm]

sigh like a chime

(postcanon!patrick zweig x infant halfsister’s au pair!reader; idk either man; came to me in a dream; title from the sound of music let’s all act shocked; major tw for suicide talk; tw depressive behaviour; tw disordered thoughts about eating; tw vague implication of alcoholic dependency; patrick zweig is generally not doing so hot; like at all; tw strained father son dynamics; tw grown adults projecting childhood trauma onto a baby; warning you now: this is a long one !! ; make a day of it; atp coexisting; lily donaldson being a weird little girl ™; tw airports during holiday season; whoever came up with the headcanon that patrick was late for his circumcision and it got cancelled i owe you a kidney; so cw smut obviously; cw religious ((Christianity, specifically Catholicism + Judaism briefly)) motifs; tw splicing of said motifs with the aforementioned smut; tw vomit)

“It’s not that I’m not happy for him,” Patrick tells Tashi, “I really am, you know I mean that.”

He paces her kitchen impatiently, running fingers through dark, dishevelled hair.

At such times, he still looks like the boy wonder sprinting carelessly across electric blue asphalt, eyes shimmering, as if he were part of that riot of colour. Some of his athletic maturity is replaced with the facetious, callow mannerisms of a hungry novice who wants to skip the necessary steps. Who wants to swallow experience and spit out the bones.

Tashi straddles a stool at the vast marbletop island. She’s pattering away like bulletquick rainfall on her MacBook. She doesn’t even spare him a glance.

Patrick makes an effort to rein in his temper. He drops into one of the stools. He swivels left and right and cranes his neck, staring up at the coffered ceiling moulding.

“It’s almost Christmas, Patrick. Go home.”

I am home, he wants to say, but that would be revolting and stupid and he doesn’t even really mean it. Art and Tashi aren’t home for him. Nothing is. And he likes that, he likes being a nomad.

Lily clicks in like a pony. Lily—well, Lili, Lieselotte—is also the name of his little sister. He likes the coincidence. The trick of the mind he can perform, imagining an alternative family. 

Family is just being nomads together.

“Hey, I told you no tap shoes inside,” Tashi says, eyes still swimming through the pixelmire of her computer screen.

Perhaps Patrick ought to feel flattered by her attention at all. His familial woes are just as perturbing to Tashi as Lily fucking up the flooring with her ball changes.

Patrick’s still quashing his irritation. She doesn’t even fuck him, anymore. He actually doesn’t fuck much of anything at all, of late. What with how tired he is all the time, how his flesh and bones deplete with each exertion. In a way, that’s her fucking him. But it’s also just the scorn of getting older.

It gets harder to shoulder things. His patience corrodes quicker. He should lean forward, take that laptop, and lob it across the room. She’s not even wearing those stupid bluelight glasses she’s supposed to be wearing.

“Do you just not care about anything?” It’s a petulant attempt at stoking her, but it’s too meandering and abstract to really matter, let alone take effect.

She doesn’t respond for a whole five seconds, still typing, and when she does, it’s a distracted whisper of, “What?”

Her power over him is such that she can afford to be so blindly condescending. But it still stings.

He groans into the air, and it’s such a thundering sort of noise that Lily spares him a weirded out scowl on her way to the pantry. “Do you really want me in Germany? I’ll sit on my ass and start drinking beer again all day, Coach.”

Three years into their partnership, he often uses her title to signal his annoyance.

Tashi sighs like she’s disappointed. Not disappointed that he’s trying, but the fact that he’s making such meaningless, childish stabs at it. Instead of just going for it. As in, yes, smashing her MacBook over his knee and yelling pay attention to me! She’d respect that more and he knows it.

But, anyway, she lowers the screen halfmast and looks at him. “Are you jeal—”

“I’m not jealous of the baby.”

“Okay…”

“But he’s sixtyfive, Tashi! It’s ridiculous.”

Tashi does something between a scoff and a laugh, shaking her head. She rolls up the sleeves of her sweater and narrows her eyes at him. “And how old did you say the new wife was?”

“Thirtytwo, Tashi.”

Tashi laughs properly now, dropping her head and dragging her thumb and forefinger over her lashes. Patrick smiles at her amusement, albeit at his expense.

“That is pretty ridiculous.” She looks up at him again, clearing her throat, “Don’t try to bullshit me and pretend you don’t still drink beer.”

He wants to contradict her, but he decides he wants to make her laugh more. “He met her because she was his masseuse for a hot stone treatment.”

Tashi sputters, her giggles spilling everywhere, and she’s waving her hands like she’s calling timeout.

“And then he calls me,” Patrick continues, before miming a phone to his ear and straightening and dragging his voice down like an anchor with an affected distinguished rumble, “And goes, Son, I am moving back to Germany. I have love again.”

“I have love again!” Tashi wheezes, her elbows thunking on the marble and her face falling into her hands. Her shoulders are shaking with laughter.

“Like it’s a fucking disease.”

“It is.” Art’s voice still manages to quaver delivering a glib oneliner. Maybe because he doesn’t mean it. Patrick’s willing to chalk it up to his brisk stride as he enters the kitchen. Always a fucking pep in his step these days, the fucking asshole.

Patrick doesn’t turn his head. He feels a sharp instance of vertigo when Art’s hand lands on his shoulder. But both the touch and nausea are gone as soon as they arrive, and he passes off the motion of his own hand going to grab Art’s fingers as a scratch to his nose. Tashi’s too busy wiping her tears away to have noticed that, thank God.

“Oh my God, please tell him,” Tashi cackles, still gathering lost breath as Art slides her bluelight eyeglasses onto her face and enswathes her body with his, caressing her arms with his knuckles.

“He knows,” Patrick says dismissively, even though that’s a lie. He hasn’t told him.

“What do I know?”

Tashi recounts the story with the engaging enthusiasm of what Patrick is beginning to recognise as schadenfreude. But even that is still a salve, and he feels a little foolish for forgetting its effect. Not just the laughter, but all of this. He wishes they would just throw him a bone and let him stay for Christmas. He feels like a dying dog made to live too long. He offered to dress up as Santa, but Lily herself informed him that she’s far outgrown such folly and resents his assumption otherwise. She’d kicked him in the shin with the metal plate of her tap shoe. He’d let her.

Art’s smile quirks up at the image. Mean old Mr Zweig laid nude across a spa bed, cock jumping for the meek masseuse.

“Bet he slipped her eight grand to fold the towel a little lower,” Art mumbles into Tashi’s hair, the strands buttery against his lips.

She makes a face at this. She raises her hand to swat his arm reproachfully.

But Patrick only chuckles. Spares a glance over his shoulder to where Lily is sprawled on the couch, gripping the handles of her shockproof iPad case with the focus of a pilot at the yoke of a plane, her little head swallowed by a pair of AirPod maxes. Turns back and looks up at Art with a conspiratorial smirk.

“Probably had her stroke his dick with two hot stones,” he murmurs.

Tashi thinks that’s even less funny. But Art thinks it’s even more funny.

He laughs very loudly and does a less than polite impression of an old German bastard wincing and coming.

“Ah—” he hisses, “The next one up my bumhole, yes?”

It sounds like a botched Hitler lampoon, and it’s ostensibly a caricature he’s done many times before. Sometimes, they spend whole days just wading through their ancient morass of shared memories and inside references and running gags. Sometimes, even now, it's just easier that way.

Patrick laughs so hard he falls out of his chair.

They do let him stay for dinner.

It feels like they’re mocking him, but he’s hungry. So he stares into the middle distance and listens to Lily spiritedly declaim facts about deep sea turtles. She keeps surreptitiously slipping Brussels sprouts from her plate onto his. It wouldn’t be his place to mention it. And, for her part, she quaffs down her mashed potatoes like an endurance test. He tells her they’re not going anywhere. She kicks his shin again and he’s pretty sure she should have taken those shoes off by now.

He watches every gentle graze of Art and Tashi’s limbs and shoulders.

He sighs and chews his sprouts until his jaw aches.

There are worse things in his head to beat himself up with than wishful thinking.

“What’d Sassy say?” Art asks as he uncorks a Montrachet.

The corner of Patrick’s mouth quirks up almost imperceptibly. Like the reflexive twitch of a bad muscle. But he can tell Art discerns it by the way he starts to chuckle preemptively. That grin that spreads across his face like fire on dry grass.

Patrick huffs. “She said she hopes the baby chokes and dies.”

“You’re killing me, Sas.”

It’s December eighteenth at JFK. Patrick feels like a fucking sardine. Everyone is everywhere. The emetic odour of tarmac and jet fuel embues him. His fingers are red and stiff and so tightly coiled around the stainless steel handrail of the escalator that he thinks they may just pop off like caps. There’s an acetous chill to the nighttime air, and he probably should’ve worn more layers, but the sweat on his back is already soaking through the thin fabric of his shirt. He doesn’t mind. It’s better than being late.

Patrick’s dad used to enforce punctuality like a jailhouse warden. Saskia knows that.

He has his phone tucked to his ear against one shoulder.

His sister’s voice across the receiver sounds warped and liminal. His stomach is grumbling.

“You’re fucking me, Sas, you’re fucking me right over,” Patrick says. “What’s in Brazil?”

“Well, warmth, for one.”

“What about me?”

Saskia laughs. That loud, tocsin laugh she used to do when he’d wet the bed. “You boycotted the christening, Brutus.”

“Why would I fly to Germany to watch a baby take a bath?”

“Why are you flying to Germany now?”

Patrick’s teeth are on edge as he schleps his weighty duffel toward the terminal. He fishes a cigarette out of his windbreaker pocket and shoves it through his lips. He wants to spark it, even though Tashi’s psychologically tortured him into quitting, and he’d get thrown out for sure. There’s a line of security guards at every corner, and he’s seen the German Shepherd sniffer dogs.

He chews on the cigarette instead. Grinds the tip between his molars to get that stark jounce of nicotine even if it’s mostly tobacco and paper.

Saskia is saying something in his ear, and he’s only halfpretending to listen. His eyes are fastened straight ahead, singeing holes into the back of a woman’s head. Her hair is pulled into an absurdly tight ponytail. And he is so taken by the movement of the strands as it bobs with each step that he is only dragged back to reality when Saskia says his name loud enough to stab his eardrums.

He blinks. “What, bitch?”

“Paddy, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I don’t wanna throttle the little shit. I’m pushing forty and I cried because he bought it a fucking babysize tiara.”

Patrick closes his eyes, inhaling deeply through his nose. He swallows a bit of that tobacco wad on his tongue. He nearly gags. He belatedly catches that a couple of security guards are looking at him with some suspicion. He holds up a finger as if to say, sorry, and turns around to walk away.

Saskia’s still on the line, and she starts singing something, though he doesn’t understand why. He has to hold the phone a good foot away until she shuts up.

“Wh—” he scoffs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Hey, maybe you’ll get along with it.”

“Unlikely.”

“Maybe you’ll get along with dad.”

“Un—fucking—likely,” he retorts.

He ducks into a corner of the empty terminal and drops inelegantly onto a hard plastic seat. He is hyperaware of the sweat fumes under his arms, the way his track pants cling too snugly to his thighs.

“Actually, hey,” Saskia says, and he can hear her perking up. He imagines her in a hammock in Rio. She’ll burn so bad. No earthly SPF could ever keep her from shedding like a crimson serpent. “She has this au pair.”

Patrick glances up at the TV monitor over his head.

Departures to Berlin 23 30, it reads, flashing jarringly in red LED lettering, accompanied by a blinking graphic of an airplane taking off.

He makes a noncommittal grunt. “That tracks,” he mumbles.

“I’m saying you don’t have to be lonely,” says Sassy, “Make friends! She’s nice. Bit young.”

“Reckon dad’ll try to knock her up next?”

Saskia laughs herself to piggish snorting. The bigeared little boy within him, tugging at the pantleg of his sister’s pyjamas for attention, is vaguely mollified by that laughter. Albeit at his expense.

He should spend the flight feeling guilty for not getting a gift for the baby, but he listens to a true crime podcast instead.

They’re talking about a young girl who was found unconscious by the side of a road. The truck driver who spotted her was a little drunk at the time, and he was afraid that if he called the cops he’d lose his job, so he just moved her body further up the road where someone else could find her.

Apparently, she was still alive, but the truck driver thought she was already dead.

It’s not certain if she would have made it, had he done The Right Thing, but maybe it would've made a difference.

“He should've just called the cops and driven away,” one of the hosts says.

“If you’re reporting an accident, you can’t just remove yourself from the premises,” the other one replies.

“Well no, but if you report a homicide—“

“Same thing. Also, how can you just leave a person bleeding by the side of the road?”

“Was she visibly bleeding?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Patrick closes his eyes and leans his head back. The clouds roll by like lambhide.

He can picture it clearly, driving away from this fucking mess, leaving a body by the side of the road. He’d do it if he could. But he thinks he’s the body.

He shudders with a pang of cold. He doesn’t know why this image sticks. It’s like ghosts, floating in between the clouds.

Saskia texts him. Suffocate the baby with a pillow. Also delete that text. And that one.

And he, the body by the side of the road, doesn't say anything.

The plane jostles a little in a patch of turbulence. They descend into Berlin at eight in the morning.

His knees hurt from keeping them bent at an angle for so long, his ass is going numb. He should feel sorry for himself, being alone like this.

As he deplanes, a few fellow passengers glance in his direction, their noses wrinkling. He can’t tell if it’s the bitter rot of cigarette between his teeth or his sudor stench or his mouldering heart.

People converge in the baggageclaim like a throng of cattle. Patrick shoulders through. Swallowed up and spat out and alone again.

No one pays anyone any attention. Everyone is hurrying to make this flight or get to the next. When Patrick finds a men’s room, he realises he should be glad for that. In the reflection of the large mirror above a long stretch of white porcelain sinks, he can see shadows like cosmic abysses under his eyes. Some of the veins in his arms—which are sticking out from under his sleeves like pythons—are slightly swollen and purple.

His duffle bag bangs against his hip as he shuffles onto the tarmac and joins the taxi queue.

Berlin greets him with an onslaught of sleet.

His bones rattle like clicking spoons in the cold. He’s cursing under his breath and trying to remember the last time he was sincerely back in Germany.

Not just a brief cut across for a match, a layover, a hamfisted excuse to see his sister.

He was probably nine.

Patrick lumbers up the walkway to his father’s home. It looks like it’s been shoveled already today but has endured several hours of snowfall since. That and—well—he guesses his dad’s playing humble now.

Sas had dubbed it a latelife crisis. But it’s not shabby. In fact, it’s nice. It’s no limestone portico. Far cry from the august Georgian Revival mausoleum he and Sas gleaned their nascent wounds in.

Lili gets a Hallmark ass two story colonial, strung with Christmas lights. Deep green door, ornate bronze knocker, festooned with a wreath. The doorbell echoes through his empty bones like a deathknell.

His teeth chinkle like coins as he waits.

When the door opens, he releases a protracted, puerile whine. “Fuck.”

You’ve never been cause of such overt disappointment.

It’s almost flattering.

But your smile quickly metamorphoses into a grimace.

His shoulders are drooping and he looks liable to topple facefirst to the snowswathed gravel at any moment. His eyelids keep fluttering, like he’s fighting a losing battle against the urge to just shut down.

“Is this the right house?” he groans, pained and shivering.

You’re marginally certain this is your boss’ son and not a homeless vagrant.

Either way, you’re nodding emphatically. “Of course it is.”

In the kitchen, he stands in the corner like a newly housed stray. Hands tucked into his armpits and chin touching his chest as he watches you spark up the cooktop through snowdappled lashes.

The powdered creamer, as you pour it into the teacup, reminds him, too, of snowfall. You keep flicking him conspicuously concerned glances.

“So you’re Patrick…” you say, spooning sugar.

He clears his throat and hums in a way that says, yeah, I’m not too thrilled about it either. His head is bowed, his eyes fallen shut, and he’s swaying vaguely on his feet. He looks like he’s making devotions. The kettle sings.

His fingers are bonetight around the cup and saucer. He lifts the cup and presses it to his cheek, like leaching the warmth from the ceramic. When he sips, you’re reminded of cats lapping milk.

There’s a moment of silence, and it’s awkward. And then he sneezes—once, twice. His throat clicks.

“Uh… tennis,” you try, folding closed the box of Five Roses.

The steam plumes up and curls around Patrick’s face, flushed and sallow. He clears his throat again, his eyes unfocused. He glances toward you and knows he should reply, but the only thing that comes out is a damp, congested sniff.

He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Tennis,” he repeats, the word muffled by the cup still pressed to his lips.

You nod slowly, rapping your knuckles rhythmically against the counter. “Wimbledon,” you say then.

Patrick scrunches up his face as if he’s in pain. He’s trying to force some simulacrum of synapse action in the conversational skills faculty of his brain.

“Yeah,” he manages. He takes another gulp of tea and tries to clear his throat again. It hurts. Everything hurts. He hurts.

You nod some more. You can’t help but think that this feels a bit like a tennis game. You and he, volleying oneword utterances back and forth. “Impressive,” you offer, cocking your brows at him.

“Thanks,” Patrick mutters.

He does actually want to be witty. And he does actually want to be charming. And he wants to make a good first impression. But right now he wants to sleep, preferably through a few decades. Certainly, the last few of his father’s life. Which, speaking of,

“Hey, where is the bastard?”

He glances around, as if to see his father lurking in a crevice somewhere. You raise a brow. Could it be an affectionate nickname? Perhaps. But you’re starting to connect some dots.

You smile like you’re trying not to provoke a sabertoothed creature. But Patrick can see in your eyes that he’s amusing you, which he doesn’t mind. Of course he doesn’t mind.

There’s a vast window above the counter, pictureframing an expansive, snowshrouded back garden that, knowing his dad, is probably a rigorously manicured viridescent green in the warmer months. How warm do things get in Germany these days?

He squints against the luminous white splay as you point beyond the glass. There’s a distant brown pinprick that lets him know this property is larger than it seems. Larger than it needs to be. But the kid needs frolicking room, he guesses.

“He’s in the den,” you say.

Patrick throws the rest of his tea back like a shot, placing his cup and saucer onto the counter with a twinkling thunk.

“Alright, then let’s go.”

“My balls are gonna freeze off before we even get there,” Patrick hisses.

Every step forward sends his feet an inch deeper into the snow, and you watch him shake out his running shoes with displeasedness. You laugh at him, and he turns back to face you, and he makes this face that could either be a smirk or an indication of great turmoil. You are struck by his ability to wear that lopsided grin in his current circumstances, to look at you like that. Well, like what? You don’t know.

It’s just that the scarf and wool peacoat you’re wearing make you look like a well-loved heirloom doll. He can see the faintest wisps of your breath in the bitter air. Your smile is so kind and so warm, he thinks, smiling wider.

He appreciates you joining him on his doormat pilgrimage. A better guy would tell you that, but he just turns around and keeps footslogging.

Together, you trudge forward across the sprawling, sleety landscape.

The door to the den is unlocked.

Patrick casts a glance back at you before he pushes it all the way open, hitting the opposite wall with a hollow bang.

It creaks a little on its hinges as it opens into a long corridor. He takes a step in first.

“Hello?” Patrick yells, his voice lilting. “Armed robbery. I have guns and knives and… bombs. Got your pretty nanny.”

You feel the little smile on your face quavering with amusement as you close the door shut behind you.

The floors are clad in dark oak panels. The walls are lined with copper sconces. There’s an ostensibly hideous and probably hilariously expensive rug in the middle of the floor and Patrick makes a show of wiping his shoes clean on it. 

“Sure as fuck not taking this thing,” he mumbles, digging his hands into his pant pockets. 

He glances toward a long sideboard on the side of the corridor. It’s laden with antique trinkets and mahoganyframed pictures, and he reaches out to prod at an ivory figurine sitting at the edge.

You stay in silence for a few moments, looking at him. 

Then, the faint creak of footsteps comes from upstairs, and you both look up at the ceiling. Seconds later, it fades to your right, and, soon enough, there appears Rupert Zweig. Cashmere jumper, tapered joggers.

There is no denying the family resemblance. And if the way Patrick’s eyes narrow as his father descends the staircase is anything to go by, he is not gonna wanna meet—

“There you are,” says Rupert, corners of his eyes crinkling. He stops at the end of the hall, hands in his pockets. The two regard each other like snipers. You have the sharp sensation you shouldn’t be here, but where would you go?

Patrick clicks his teeth wryly. “Here I am.” His hands are also in his pockets. Their deportments are uncannily kindred.

You think Patrick shouldn’t be so putout by that. Rupert Zweig is a handsome sixtyfive. Tall and broad and still in trim, despite most his days being ornamented by cognac and cigars. His silvery hair sheens like tinsel, and has not thinned much to speak of, if at all.

You figure maybe they’ll hug, as Rupert approaches. You know Rupert to be a hugger. But he only claps Patrick’s shoulder, and Patrick’s bones look like they’ve been swapped for concrete, and he watches his father give him a once over, like surveying an old car.

“I hope things are well with you,” Rupert says. Which isn’t strange paternal commentary. But his voice is tinctured with a concerned edge at the overall impression that his only son has been dragged along the pavement by the tail of a motorbike and then beaten with sticks to boot. I thought things were better, now, he’s really saying.

You think it’s concern, anyway. You, too, know Rupert to be quite concerned, and caring. But Patrick takes it as scorn.

He wears a bitter smile. “Things are peachy, Pa.”

His nostrils flare, he shifts his shoulders. Like he wants to shrug his father's hand off, but is keeping still for the sake of seeming mature.

And then it happens. A pule from the ether like the resounding stroke of a viola.

You perk up. “Oh! I’ll go—“

“Yes, dear, she’s with Giselle in the drawing room.” Rupert’s eyes crinkle, a kind brush of his fingers to your elbow.

Patrick—you glimpse, as you shuffle past him and out the passage—looks furious. And a bit queasy.

In the drawing room, Patrick stares at Giselle’s hands. She’s twisting her emerald engagement ring around her finger. The stone is big as a pebble, its facets winking.

He doesn’t let himself look to where you are. On an ivorycoloured foam playmat on the ground, doing something that is causing the baby to squeal and giggle like a strident string of bells and clap her pudgy hands together. He can hear the yarn of drool gurgling from her gummy mouth.

An angeltopped pine tree scintillates with fairy lights in the corner.

Giselle is slender porcelain. White sweater, skinny jeans, milkblonde hair. She crosses her legs at the ankles, knees to the side, like she’s the fucking queen of England. She is polite to varying degrees of genuineness.

“Lili’s so happy to see her big brother.”

Patrick’s knee shudders violently. Cut the shit, Giselle, he wants to spit.

But he knows he won’t. He doesn’t feel he can. Maybe it’d be easier, if she really was just some nympho naif. Then he could call his dad a perv and move on.

But no. Giselle is three years his junior but tenfold his put-togetherness. There are two infants in the room, and neither are her.

The room is so warm and well lit. There are bookshelves teeming with hardcover tomes whose rapiersharp corners look ostensibly untouched. A globe of the world, a framed Picasso original. Baroque vases and potted ivies and the permeating waft of jasmine and rose and leather.

It’s an intimate microcosm of his father and Giselle’s interwoven lives. Their very fumes amalgamate. And then there’s that puny thing, gossamer flesh, babbling like a brook. He doesn’t look. He can’t.

When his dad walks back in, Patrick is on his feet like a springing coil.

“You’re welcome to stay here,” says his dad, handing Patrick a set of keys.

Patrick shakes his head and feigns remorse. “Nah, Sas asked me to water her plants, so.”

Rupert looks like he’s going to say something, but decides against it.

“Right,” he nods and reaches into his pocket, retrieving a slim silver case. He flips open the lid, revealing a neat row of hand rolls. He plucks one between his long fingers. Patrick would say no, if he offered, but resents his father’s lack thereof enough to head for the door.

You think he’ll say bye to you, or maybe offer just a parting wave, but he doesn’t.

You hear him and his dad at odds like a cobra and a mongoose in the hall. You daub tender kisses onto the fleshy pink soles of Lili’s feet. You discern misty fragments of Patrick’s scathing whispers.

“... newage, hippie bullshit... nice guy act... fucking sweatpants... —christen the baby! What the fuck are you doing christening the baby? You never even took us to temple!”

However Rupert responds, on the other hand, is vaguely inaudible. It’s just a deep, cautiously placating rumble of syllables. 

You hear a bit more mumbled venom before the door creaks open and slams shut.

“He thinks he’s got everyone fooled, but I’m fucking onto hi— where is your alcohol?”

Patrick’s disembowelling every cabinet in his sister’s kitchen. On all fours like a hound rooting in the snow. He can hear the hot waft of tropical winds from Saskia’s end of the receiver. Crash of surf. Squawking birds. The staticky tempo of Brazilian phonk in the background.

“Ugh, Paddy,” Saskia mumbles like she’s disappointed.

He tears the fridge door open so fervently, the cord comes loose from the socket. There’s nothing there but bottled water, yoghurt, and salad dressing. He makes a strangled noise of agony into the ear piece.

“Saskia May,” Patrick groans with a sonnet’s desperation, resting his head against the icy fridgeshelf, between the organic grassfed butter and the handcrafted balsamic glaze, “I know you may be in a fucking beachside cabana right now, dipping Portuguese cock into your piña colada with the little umbrella in it and then sucking it off, but it is late here, and it is winter, and I am dying.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see the baby?” she asks.

“No, well, I saw her, just…” Patrick’s withdrawing all her earthenware now, “I just didn’t look.”

“What, like the fucking Basilisk?”

“Sassy, for the love of God, tell me you’ve left even a drop of liquor in your home.”

Saskia laughs, and he can hear the chime of ice. “Did you meet the au pair?”

Patrick stumbles back to the stillopen, halfway gutted fridge. He identifies with it. He sticks his head back in. “She thinks I’m a mess.”

“Wow, what a stupid whore,” his sister laughs. As everything, it is at his expense. He’s in emotional arrears, but it’s okay. It’s all okay.

He hears Saskia’s inbreathe. Marijuana? Probably. He doesn’t mind her lungs. He doesn’t mind that she’s always been more beautiful than him. He doesn’t mind that she’s warm in Rio. He knows it’s harder for her. She never got to be Rupert’s little princess. He wants to protect her in that asinine way baby brothers think they can protect their sisters. In that asinine way Patrick Zweig thinks he can protect everyone.

“Have pity on me, Sas.”

She directs him blindly like a game of Marco Polo. He wades through the ransacked bombsite he’s made of her kitchen. Avocados rolling across the slate floor. Spilled milk, which feels symbolic.

He unearths the bottle of Gordon’s dry gin from under the sink. Holds it aloft like a holy grail.

Patrick can’t remember the last time he set foot in a church, if such a time has ever occurred. Part of him expects the parishioners to take one look at him and know he doesn’t belong, for them to demand he leave.

For the things he has done, the things he has felt, the things he has wanted. Certainly for the things he cannot bring himself to believe.

He is struck by the towering stonework of the cathedral. The wooden cross in the apse is immense. Behind it, stained glass windows paint the icedover morning in vivisected coloursplays. Soft motes of sunlight waft in shafts from the ceiling.

He never thought he’d see the day—the Zweigs done up in their Sunday best. His mother would laugh herself to tears.

Rupert’s broad shoulders are ramrod straight, his argent hair slicked back handsomely. Giselle is wearing a ribbed knit dress in eggshell. Princess Lieselotte—finally, a worthy heir—is wearing a knit tunic dress embroidered with blooms, a scallopcollared ivory shirt underneath, and a crocheted woollen baby bonnet.

They look like an affiche for Norman Rockwell.

At first, he’s still trying not to meet the Basilisk’s gaze, but then he gets this disarming glimpse. The peonypink hue of her. Her comically outjutting little ears. Gibbous blue eyes, lapping up the world through cornyellow lashes. Those are Giselle’s. But the rest…

Unlucky little shit, Patrick tells her telepathically. And now he is looking straight at her, like the spell has been broken. He needs to let her know he’s onto her, and her bullshit doting father. You look like dad.

But what that means is she looks like Patrick, too.

He watches you hold her in your arms, rubbing your nose against hers.

Giselle had had you press Patrick’s shirt—his father’s shirt; of course he didn’t pack a buttonup—for him this morning. He was only kind of embarrassed. But he sat carefully in the car, leery of creasing your hard work. 

The linen of your skirt reaches your ankles. You’re wearing this creamcoloured slouchy knit turtleneck, and you’ve got a little lacy chiffon infinity veil halfway canopying your hair. Patrick is pleasantly amused by all this fabric. All the things he cannot see. Because of God, or the cold, or God and the cold.

The Zweigs find their pews, stopping frequently to greet their fellow churchgoers, and whisper inquiries after names Patrick doesn’t know. He shakes half a dozen hands if he shakes one, introduces himself as ‘Rupert’s son’ more times than he can count.

You, too, are pleasantly amused. Because Patrick is notably discomfited. You fish your little pewter cross necklace from beneath your collar. You hold it between your fingers and out toward him like an exorcist.

“He can smell your fear,” you whispergrowl, fauxominous. Lili giggles all saliva in your arms. That’s the voice you use when you pretend to be the babyeating ogre. She takes the cross between her tiny teeth. Patrick watches. You smile. “And so can she.”

Patrick looks at you for a moment, feigning indifference. “They’re both smelling how little they matter to me.”

Your smile widens.

Patrick—who has never endured a mass—takes his cues from the brush of your shoulder on when to stand, when to sit, and when to supplicate himself. The priest oscillates from English to Latin and back again. Seemingly on a whim. When Patrick fumbles trying to find the right page for the hymn, you tilt your book slightly so he can read along. 

He thinks the rosary looks good where it dangles from your lithe, supple fingers. Looping and weaving through your pretty knuckles like drops of blood. 

You are flawless in your devotion.

You slip to your knees with a fluidity that makes his tummy fasten.

You sing quietly and sweetly and when you turn to Patrick to wish peace upon him, your grin is so sweet and earnest it takes a moment for him to contend with that blessing.

Everyone falls down to the hassock again and Patrick is beginning to find the rhythm of the whole affair. At least enough to let his thoughts maunder and his body be at mercy to the motions.

It’s soothing, in its way. He can almost understand it. What blessed relief in lifting your human pains to be scoured clean.

The priest closes out the sermon with a few nice words about Jesus. Guy’s birthday’s coming up, after all.

Patrick leans forward a bit to glance at his father’s fingers, tapping on the dry leather of the psalmbook.

In the photo, little Lili is wearing a white linen nightgown that mantles her whole, like a tiny tarp. His dad cradles her, and everyone’s standing around a marble pool. He can see Saskia off to the side, hosting a very conspicuous hangover behind her mask. You’re in the picture, too. Apparently, you had been Giselle’s doula, in the beginning, and you just ended up sticking around. Which he finds more than a little strange. Patrick often sees life as a series of measures to get further away from his family.

On the edge of the photo, he can see the broad back of a becloaked man, plashing his fingers the water.

Patrick feels an inkling of discomfort at the sight of that man.

“She still sleeps in that dress, actually,” you say, rocking the babe.

The wallpaper of Lili’s room is printed with pale pink linework of woodland creatures. He’s straddling the vintage nursery rocker—a plush weathered lamb; it used to be his and Saskia’s—and his knees are hiked comically high on either side of him, his slacks riding up his ankles.

Patrick stares at the baby girl in this framed photograph. She looks too small—almost tenuous—underneath the white shift. Her eyes are flushed and still wombswollen.

“What’s the point?” he asks, trying to imagine that man softly slooshing water over her boneless head.

You smile. “It’s to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?”

You lower Lili into her French Provençal style woodcarved bassinet.

You look up at him, eyes flitting over his face. “Shame, I guess.”

It doesn’t quite make sense. A fullimmersion baptism means commitment. You have pledged yourself to God. You are bound to follow His laws. Shame is essential to these laws. Isn’t it?

You don’t know why he’s still here. Giselle is taking her Sunday nap, and Rupert’s playing solitaire or reading Guy Sajer or something in the den. Lili, too, is dead to the world. You need to do the laundry. The laundry room is too strait for him to be lingering, leaning against the doorframe, interrogating you. He likes watching the linen of your skirt gather at your feet as you crouch to the floor, depositing the armfuls of bedding into the mouth of the washing machine. All that fabric.

“It’s a different kind of shame,” you try to explain. “I can be ashamed of myself, of my body.”

“Why are you ashamed?”

You roll your eyes. “I don’t know. I’m alive.”

“Alright. And this helps?”

“A little, yeah. It takes you out of your body. Then returns you to it. And you feel brand new. Like you belong to Jesus.”

You laugh a little at the concept, but he can tell you treasure this belonging, deep down.

He walks toward you, taking the empty wicker hamper from your hands and setting it aside. “You shouldn’t feel ashamed in the first place.”

You shrug, noting his proximity. “It’s probably good to feel shame from time to time.”

He doesn’t say anything to that.

He doesn’t ask you if you feel ashamed right now. Face smushed against the top of the palpitating washing machine. If you said yes, he’d be unhappy. If you said no, he’d be unhappy.

He’s happy, now, hiking your skirt up around your waist, shucking your gauzy tights halfway down your thighs. Best not to ruin it.

So he doesn’t ask if you’re ashamed. He doesn’t ask if you’re a virgin. He does ask if you’re on birth control, and furrows his brows as his strong hands caress the flesh of your ass.

“Why not?” he laughs, dragging the beige skin down his rigid cock, rubbing the deep blush head against your hirsute pussy and bending over you. “Isn’t that shit free here?”

He burrows his head beneath your sweater, kissing your back through the cotton of your longsleeve. He doesn’t search for more bare skin, just keeps a good grip on that which he has, fingertips digging into the flesh of your hips.

He fucks into you and feels your body shudder around him with the jostle of the machine.

He doesn’t ask of shame or chastity or how long Giselle and Lili usually nap for, how far his dad is into The Forgotten Soldier. He does, however, feel it necessary to ask,

“Feels good, right?” Even though you’re drooling against the zinc and your hoarse groans are rivalling the churning noises. You roll your eyes but they stay there, your lashes fluttering.

“Yes,” you pant, clutching the edge of the machine. “It feels good.”

He bends over you, pinning you, elbow to elbow, his chin resting on your clothed shoulder. Your veil slips off your head and drapes around your neck. He quickens his pace. “It’s fucking big, isn’t it?”

You turn your head to look at him. His eyes look like they want to fuck your eyes. His mouth hovers over your drooling mouth as if to kiss you. The shaggy hair of his crotch abrades your tailbone.

“Verdict’s still out,” you say, voice quavering, and you let him lave your tongue sloppily with his.

His sister has a guestroom, but he sleeps in her bed. Reads her Audre Lorde and Laurie Colwin. Uses her toothbrush. God, she’d kill him. But he likes the transgression of violating her space. He doesn’t use her vibrator, or anything. He finds it, but he doesn’t use it.

He has his few ways of having people. So he’s always taking what he can get.

That’s why he fucks the nanny in the laundry room, and lets Art’s kid bruise him with her tap shoe, and sits on the kitchen tile drinking Saskia’s gin.

He has to hold on to the granite countertop, as he straightens from his haunches. His back is a wreck, but the ache is nothing compared to the relief and vindication and victory he feels. He can’t say for sure what the prize is. Maybe it really was just your pussy, and that’s where this all starts and ends, which is fine. The feeling of winning is so rare and precious and precious and rare and, as he unscrews the cap and raises the bottle to his lips, it’s as if he’s just slain a mighty monster.

He places the little tiara he’d filched from Lili’s room on Saskia’s mantel.

He’s less than compos mentis come Christmas Eve.

He lays in Saskia's bed for a bit, inhaling lime and ambergris, trying to figure out what to do with himself. He checks his phone: No Service.

He sighs and tumbles out the sheets like a rockslide. He figures he might as well go for a run before the blizzard clocks in since there’s nothing else to do. His feet already feel numb and damp. Everything has felt numb and damp the whole time he’s been here.

Running buzzed probably isn’t his smartest idea, but it doesn’t feel like his worst one either.

Patrick frenetically tugs two pairs of thermal leggings on. The radiotor whirrs but the house is still arrestingly gelid. He pulls on his sister’s comically inflated neon orange down jacket.

He looks at himself in the mirror.

“Oh, fuck yeah,” he whispers.

He loots and pilfers some mittens, goggles, and a neck gaiter from Saskia’s closet. She could never take to professional athleticism, but she’s a reasonably devout runner, and is partial to a halfmarathon or two most years. Which means free activegear for Paddy. He walks to the front door and slips on his dank shoes.

He steps outside once he feels decently covered head to toe, a skill he’s found refining itself as the week has shouldered past him.

Patrick strides the roadside briskly for almost a mile. His legs feel halfway atrophied, so he gives them time to warm up. The neighborhood seeps into copses of snowdusted forestry. He feels the beauty of the landscape flicker through him like a spark.

He starts jogging.

He has no mapped course, no mile time to hit. He just wants to move forward. For once. His goggles fog up with entrapped bodyheat crowning the cold air but he doesn’t fix them. The compressed insulation of his clothes, the whirring thump of his shoes to the tar—it engenders a strangely hypnotic effect. He realises, only after miles have elapsed, that he's forgotten to turn any music on. He doesn’t need it now.

He comes upon a clearing in the trees that discloses a river he hadn’t recalled.

He abates to a walk before stopping completely and removing his goggles. 

He knows a breathtaking scene when he sees one. That was never his problem, the discernment of the good thing. It was never even the obtaining of it. It’s that—well—if Sas actually had left plants for him to nurture, they’d be dead by now.

But anyway. The river.

Snowfall has burgeoned somewhat, but light is still breaking through. The sun reflects tenderly off the surface of the frozen water as if it’s all being illuminated from beneath the ice.

Patrick swears he can see evidence of a current still rushing below, but he can’t be sure that’s all too possible at these temperatures.

He tries to take a picture for posterity (or Lily; she’s ‘into vistas’ lately), but all the light is so strange and coruscating. Hardly anything can be captured in earnest.

Patrick takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

He pulls his gaiter down and doffs his hat. Allows his florid skin a few moments to feel the glacial squall, the moist sting of melting snow. He thinks he’s missed this weather, harsh as it may be.

He takes the opportunity to check his watch, vaguely hoping the GPS tracker’s been running. And hope seems to count for something here.

4.7 MILES

A surge of accomplishment and anticipation shimmers through him. He grins, breathless, at the thought of being able to tell Tashi that he’d done a cool ten miles. And the prospect of being able to eat a guiltless meal is emerging as an actual possibility. 

Patrick gears back up and begins to walk again in the direction he came. He takes advantage—always taking advantage, always taking what he can get—of the trodden path he’d made in the road. The surer grip of his shoes.

His head starts feeling strange as he’s walking. As though it’s sloshy inside, like the dirty snow he sees on the curb. But he pushes forward and chalks it up to temperature. Picks up the pace again. 

He finds himself less mesmerised by his own footfalls now and slips his AirPods in. Slips inside the eye of his mind. His sister used to have a ‘(What's The Story) Morning Glory?’ CD. Patrick’d scratched it, probably. He hopes Oasis can get back together some day. It's not so hard to reconcile. Mostly, anyway.

About a mile into the returning trek, Patrick feels his legs suddenly get heavier. He’s felt as much before. He assumes he’s just hitting the wall. It’s a little early for him, at such moderate mileage, but he knows inclemency and altitude can do things to a body.

He’s deliberate with his strides as he proceeds. He wants to be sure that his torpid legs are parting with the ground. 

It’s around the two mile mark that his spine rattles with an odd enough sensation—sharp, like an incision down the length of it—to bring him to a stumbling halt.

Patrick’s clumsily reaching around and groping at his neck and back the best he can through his layers. It feels almost like someone has poured water on his skin. Soused him like a baptism.

He tells himself he needs a second to breathe. Starts walking again. Eventually feels very marginally centred enough to pick up the pace. His knees feel like cinderbricks. Dense and angular. But he should be capable of making it home. Or at least determined enough to do so. He’s seeing houses again. He can’t be more than a mile out.

He’s thinking of raiding Saskia’s toiletries and snorting her cornucopia of bathsalts when a billow of abject nausea rolls through him. He’s stumbling again.

He moans vaguely with turnsickness. The trees are blurring together.

He sways.

Sidesteps jerkily over the curb into a stark white alloy of fresh and shoveled snow.

Doubles over.

Dissolves to his knees, bracing himself on his palms. All fours again.

He maintains this position for several minutes. He’s heaving in and out forcefully with his eyes screwed shut. It feels a bit prayerful. He’s praying to be made to vomit. Just wants to feel better and move on and he’ll never touch his dick again, he prays. Which isn’t true, but need it be?

Things go sloshy again, and warm, this time. Overwhelmingly warm, actually. He flounders in the wet, rips off his gear, and uses his bare hands to grab handfuls of snow off the ground and push it onto his face. The heat feels like bloodshed.

Patrick tears off his jacket. Patrick lays his entire body facedown in the snow. Everything is numb and damp.

“Oh my goodness, Patrick?”

One imagines the voice of God to be a little less frantic.

He’s confused by how weak his muscles feel when he tries to push himself up. How he only sees lucent whiteness when his eyes flicker open. Shit, is this it? He thought for sure he’d end up at the other place.

“Jesus Christ, I thought you were dead!”

Oh, alright. So not yet. Not yet, and certainly not Heaven. Close, though, with how relieved you sound. He is the body on the side of the road, and you’ve stopped to triage him instead of driving off. He squints up at you. Floral puffer. Scarf and muffs. You look like a fairytale illustration.

His blood’s gone cold in his extremities, and he’s mumbling, “Sorry.”

“You’re a mess.”

There it is.

For your part, you don’t sound malicious, or anything. You say it like a forgone conclusion, a fact of the matter. The way a person in an Ionesco absurdist play would say, oh, it looks like I’m wearing pants right now.

He tries to make a stab at indignity. Like maybe if he denies that he’s a mess, that should suddenly make him clean. What blessed relief. But all he manages is a whimpered grunt of protest.

“What happened? Were you attacked?”

Patrick shakes his head, suddenly aware of just how wet he is.

“Patrick, tell me.” You sound concerned, but not in pieces. He knows this is all coincidence. That you simply happened to be driving by. But the fact that you’ve found him prone in the snow, the fact that you knew to call his name, knew it was him who’d ambled to the woods and buried himself in the ground like a coldblooded mountain climber, like a defiant zealot, staring into Earth, his back to God, taunting you with his dickish solipsism—he thinks all this should terrify you. He isn’t dead. Not yet. But maybe he’d already made up his mind. Perhaps you’re just picturing him as another baby. Something small and soothable. “What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

Patrick shakes his head again and takes your assistance in getting up. All his things are gathered in your arms.

“You’re soaked, Patrick. What were you doing in the snow?”

He looks around and feebly brushes some of the debris off of his leggings and thermal pullover.

“I... I don’t know? I’m pretty sure I started feeling sick, and then I got hot, so I took all my shit off,” he explains. He’s all nonchalant about it, too.

At first, he won’t tell you where his sister’s house is. You’re going all Nuremberg on him, like he really is a baby who will drop the knife if you tell him no sternly enough. But he soaks through the polyester of your passenger seat and grins and defies you. It’s like he’s challenging you to take him back to his dad’s. Like he’s a kid acting up in school for attention.

It takes a while. You circle the block twice. Then he sees the way his fingernails tinge cobalt, and thinks of how disappointed his father’d be. Concerned, you allege, but he doesn’t buy that.

Still, he confesses like a sinner.

He asks you—as you stand on the concrete steps to the quaint, Tudorstyle home, and he holds his cap in his teeth and fishes the keys from his pocket—not to hold the state of the place against Saskia. He says there’s a lot of damage he can do in a week. He’s always making a mess. Messing things up. Has he messed you up? He doesn’t ask, but has he?

He’s even sorry for fucking you. He doesn’t tell you that, either. And he’s about to do it again. But he is sorry. That has to count for something.

You stink. Not in a really bad way, not in a noticeable way, but the stale perfume and deodorant have turned into a cool film against your skin, trapping your sweat and guilt and other gross things which you’re too tired to name. You’ve been out buying gifts all day. You’re always so last minute. You feel like you might fall asleep on Saskia’s couch.

News says blizzard’s on its way. News is all choppy static pixel kaleidoscope, too. Even if you left right now, you wouldn’t make it home before the roads got dangerous.

You’ve heard enough hypothermia horror stories to know he should be taking a shower right now, warming himself up in increments. And you’ve heard enough suicide horror stories to know you’d be wrong to leave him anyway, after how you’ve just discovered him.

Was she visibly bleeding?

He doesn’t look like he’s about to call it quits.

On the contrary, he looks relaxed, calm, selfpossessed, sitting on the arm of the couch, one knee drawn up, cigarette dangling between fingers. Also his cock is out. He’s naked.

Has he already made up his mind?

How many times has he lain like that, in the snow, lucid about his slide into the abyss? 

He finishes his cig and takes a knee by your feet. Your bare feet. You shouldn’t have taken off your shoes. They stink.

You try to tuck your feet under you, but he reaches out and grabs your ankle and tugs like you’re the baby.

“What happened to your leg?” you croak, your voice a little fraught.

His thumb keeps brushing up and down the arch of your foot, like trying to ease your tension. He leans back and looks down, past the leavening weight of his dick, to the navy bruise bloomed through the hairs just below his knee.

You watch that Cheshire cat smirk spread his mouth apart. “Violent tap dancer.”

You do kind of wish he wouldn’t do the whole slapping your pussy and calling you a good girl thing. It feels weird and Freudian and it even makes you feel kind of guilty.

Not because of his stupid uncut Jewish cock all swollen against his thigh, nor the virgin’s innards mangled in a manger at this very moment two thousand years ago. You know that’s not how you measure innocence. There’s something idiotic about that, something primeval and pathetic, something no one should be proud or ashamed of.

It’s just that he doesn’t seem fully committed to the pastiche.

He spits a thin globe of saliva right onto your clit. His fingers sweep through your coarsehaired folds. Slow, methodical, like a cartographer mapping the world with his compass and pen.

Then, he raises his fingers and strikes them down against you. You flinch, you whimper. He groans straight into you.

“Good girl. Good girl.”

And it's hot, sure, but he could stand to be crueler.

You’re this nice twentysomething with no real bearing on his life. You pray. You care. You wipe his sister's shit. He suspects he didn’t take your virginity, but he could easily imagine he did, if he wanted to. That he’s teaching you something. This could all be a lot more plastic and pornographic.

But it isn’t. Not really.

He climbs over you, all over you. He’s all over you like the flu. He wants to crawl inside of you, burrow and fester. His knee is pressed between your thighs and he’s breathing into your neck, his head tucked under your chin. His nose is the colour of raspberry syrup and he drags the cold tip of it up the column of your neck.

He smells like smoke and snow. Like sweat and musk and something stale and dry.

You crane your neck with a piercing cry when he bottoms out. He cracks your hips open like a lobster claw. You feel his fevered heartbeat thumping through your body. He seems to think the heat of your flesh is enough to warm and cure him.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” you slaver into his hair.

“I don’t get sick,” he assures you, puffing throatily. “I never get sick.”

He licks Saskia’s bathsalts from the swollen underside of your tits. You gather palmfuls of warm water and pour them over his freckled skin, watching it bloom florid. Are you clean now? Are you shameless? Has the stink gone? Sort of.

Maybe, for a second there.

But Christmas day seeps in like another reek. You feel bad when you catch whiff. You feel the stroke of midnight in your bones, and you think you can hear Carol of the Bells. You feel especially bad, because you’re holding onto his shoulders and fucking yourself on his unhewn cock, the bathwater swashing tepid around you. And he licks the silver crucifix in the dewy valley of your breasts into his mouth, and sucks on it, and looks at you like he’s trying to make a point. He sees you frown.

The pendant glints between his teeth as he says, “Don’t worry, He’s not paying attention. It’s His birthday.”

And you duck your head to laugh.

The water ripples. He wraps his arms around you in a halfway embrace, halfway detainment. You can tell he is worried you will find your morals and leave him cold.

But you won’t.

He’s big enough that he won’t just slip out of you, even in the water. You’re all steamdizzy, eyes halfmast. You watch rivulets of condensation dance down the tiling.

Are you really about to fall asleep on this man’s cock in his sister’s bathtub? Perhaps. There is something grounding about his heavy presence in all four corners of you. You feel that mollifying pressure in your head. Your hands scrabble and slip all over the skin of his shoulders. You kiss all these droplets off his skin.

“I think I’m about to throw up,” he whispers in your ear.

You pull back and sigh. He does look quite waxen and wheyfaced. You feel bad. You were starting to think that you alone could break the fever.

Your knee knocks against the tub. He has to tug himself out of you. He clambers out of the water, puddles splashing everywhere. He slumps to the ground like marmalade, his arms drape the toiletseat, his head in the bowl. Runnels drip off him and sop the bathmat. He spits and heaves. Then he retches. There is nothing solid to the bile. When was the last time he ate something? His viscera slops out of him and into the water. The gin scalds twice as sore on the way up. He sounds horrifying. His lips drip with mucus.

He feels your soft, moist flesh against his back. Your arms around his toned middle. You feel his ribcage tremble against you.

He feels the bone of your chin against the crown of his head.

Patrick knows this is all very repulsive. He's not sure why you're holding him. Maybe you're picturing a baby again.

“What would you get me for Christmas?” he murmurs, his heavy breath echoing around the toilet bowl.

You can smell his puke.

“Um— well... you know, Giselle actually—”

“No,” he grunts stubbornly. “I mean, if you could get me anything, what would you get me?”

“I don’t know,” you say, pressing your wet breasts against his wet back. The humidity is starting to disperse, the trickles cooling off. You do get sick. You get sick quite frequently, actually. This will definitely make you sick. He’ll be gone soon enough, and that’s probably for the best, but who will hold you in your ailing?

“Come on, babe.”

You drag your fingertips down the hair on his abs until you reach the thatch between his legs. “I don’t know… A hot stone massage?”

And it’s cruel and stupid and funny—it’s something only a few people would ever understand. He and Art and Sas and Tash and you. Maybe Lili, one day.

You and Patrick burst into laughter at the same time. He chuckles until he’s wheezing. The sound of it catches in his throat like a fishbone. This is what constitutes a happy moment for him.

“That’s perfect,” he mumbles into the shitter.

[pparacxosm]

dearly beloved

(tashi duncan x fem!childhood best friend!reader x patrick zweig; artashi wedding; nonlinear narrative; tw infidelity but then wrong fandom; tw obsessive dysfunctional relationships but then wrong fandom; tw patheticism but then wrong blog; oakland!tashi truthers i’m sorry; florida!tashi truthers ((if there be any)) you’re welcome ! ; uno mentioned twice for some reason; unromantic romance; callow sapphic pining; tw nascent menstruation; y2k teenage girlhood; it’s always patrick zweig at the scene of the crime; ((the crime is unrequited devotion)); tw a little bit of body shaming kind of; but then general tw for excessively derogatory banter; sorrow shared is sorrow doubled; cake shared is just good cake; tw atlanta™)

‘Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there.

So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own.

I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.’

The Priest, ‘Fleabag’ (2016—2019) Episode 2.6

It strikes you that Tashi Duncan has always had a strange way of talking about her own wedding, as if the whole event is a starstrewn chrysalis. Something transformative, that will make of her an airborne creature, carried off by the lightness of her being.

She looks fucking beautiful, of course.

Sleek and exacting, draped in silk crêpe de Chine, like a white bullet. Tashi Duncan, the bride. Heavenborne starshine, all wrapped in tender clouds, just as she should be.

But then you’ve always thought so.

When she rehearses her aisle walk, golden gazelle legs glissading her across the hotel room carpet, she speaks of herself as if she were a rare and fragile insect.

She says, “I feel my bones changing,” her hands on either arm of the makeup chair you’re in.

You sniff, eyes flicking over every part of her. She is so close, bent over you, but she’s blurred at her edges on account of your gushing tears. You’re weeping. “Your bones?” you all but wail, face twisting in sorrow as the tears sluice harder.

Your left eyelash dangles wetly halfway off your eyelid.

You’re melting like a fucking witch, because her dress reveal came before the setting spray, and now your palms are soused in foundation. You keep wiping your face to keep from bemiring the butteryellow satin of your bridesmaids gown.

You weep more than Pam, as Tashi floats around the room.

She is radiant as sunlight on water.

Tre and Tevin holler, spirited, scattering around the room in all directions, like a great empire has collapsed. Okay, Tashi! they whistle, We see you!

And you weep and weep.

And now, her amber knee, faint scar, peeks from the slit in her silken, sweeping skirt and knocks against yours.

Her arms are lithe and lustrous and they bracket you within the amalgamated cloud of her meticulously curated Big Day fragrance. She floods your body.

She’s nodding softly. She is haloed by bloodwarm morninglight. You feel too pathetic to even be looking at her. You feel worse, even, when her delicate fingers coast poetic down your arms, and she takes your hands into hers.

“Hey,” she says softly. Squeezes your fingers. The flesh of her soft and fragrant as rosepetals. Her smile unfurls like a star going nova. “You’re crying so much,” she laughs.

“Of course, I’m crying,” you choke out, a watery gasp wafting her gorgeous face. “Pauline hates me.”

Tashi spares a glance over your shoulder, where her makeup artist is leaning against an ornate dresser, chewing the edge of her thumb and seeming generally engrossed with her phone.

“Oh, honey,” Tashi’s manicured thumbs caress tender circles over your knuckles. Then clicking her teeth softly, “You are making her do her job twice.”

“Oh God,” you sob, your head dropping heavily onto the crushed velvet cushion of the chairback. “Don’t get married.”

Tashi's smile turns soft and commiserating.

“Babe.”

“T.”

Tashi places your hands gently in your lap. She swivels your chair so you’re facing the vanity mirror.

The sight of yourself festers your misery like rotting flesh. You look like a smeared oil painting. Your lashes clump like eldritch spiders. Your face is smeared and swollen and gleaming wet. Your lower lip trembles.

Tashi glows behind you in a tragic pastiche of a solar eclipse.

“I can’t do this,” you blather past the clot in your throat. Mucus bubbles from your nostrils and trickles to your mouth. You swipe at it. You sniff again. “I’m gonna mess up your wedding.”

Tashi’s warm, slender fingers trace your collarbones. In college, you used to give each other lymphatic drainage massages.

“You’re gonna make my wedding.”

This makes you tear up again, in earnest.

The tissue of your nose is raw and sore. You moan a broken lament. Her thumbs drift in gentle ellipses along the slope of your shoulders. Her warmth seeps into you.

“Do you remember what you said to me,” Tashi asks, “When I got engaged?”

You swallow, coughing around a flower of phlegm. She leans down, resting her cheek against the top of your head. Her hair spills over your shoulders in velvet sunbeams.

You blink at her reflection. Her eyes wash you in tender flame.

“‘Dear God, please, no’?”

It is staggering, at thirteen, to stand over a limp, bloodstrewn body.

You are traipsing through the halls, summoned by weeping, and, when you peek into the loo, the dense miasma of sweat and antiseptic is pervaded with something stannic and fetid.

Tashi Duncan, splayed across the tile of the corner stall, clutches her tummy with death’s desperation. The athletic uniform of Blue Vista High garbs these young girls in floaty skirts of daisy white, which Tashi now thinks is fascinatingly deplorable.

Unfamiliar and unprepared, her eyes gleam with tears. Her heart pummels in her chest to the same faraway thunk, thunk rhythm of the tennis balls striking the clay courts outside.

The world seems to have turned against her. Her clothes are drenched red, and her body is betraying her. Tashi, twentyone months your senior, is a late bloomer. Here is her inaugural encounter with the inevitability of womanhood.

So, you encounter this horror film tableau. Tashi Duncan, bloodstrewn and splayed. You don’t feel nausea or concern or anything. You’re thirteen. You’re mildly reproachful, if anything.

“Um,” you say, a bit too loudly, “I have a tampon. If you want?”

“I want to play tennis.” She writhes. “My match is in twenty minutes.”

You swing your backpack off your shoulder, clutching it in front of you and digging clumsily into the front pocket. “Well, you need a tampon.”

“I’ve never…” She seems halfcoherent. You don’t have great faith in her ability to sweep across a court. But she catches the tampon with an easy agility when you toss it over.

There’s an odd, blithe immediacy to girlhood. You drop to your knees and play gynae. You introduce yourselves somewhere there. Your hair’s pretty; Where did you get those pins on your bag?; Do you think Mr Cleven’s kind of cute? Yeah, no, me neither; Is it in yet?

“Aw, what?” you whine at her insistence you disrobe and give her your clothes, “For how long?”

“Like,” she gestures frenetically with her hand, “Twenty minutes.”

You hum, ambivalent, but doff your skirt. And they get anal about you guys jumbling formal uniforms with athletic uniforms, so she takes your shirt, too, and you wear hers, the navy nylon collared tee with the Blue Vista crest stitched to the breast.

You sit pantless on the toilet seat, reading her Princess Diaries paperback.

She wins her game, apparently.

Her mom drives you home. She brings a fleecy pair of Tashi’s Powerpuff Girls pyjama bottoms, which fall past your ankles. Says, call me Pam, honey, when you say, thank you, Mrs Duncan.

You keep her shirt, and her pants, and you still smell her womb.

She hits you up on AIM that night.

Mr Cleven is cute, she sends. He looks like Dawson Leery.

Then, But he’s THE WORST !!!!!!

And then, TLC or Destiny’s Child?

And things go from there.

When Christine McVie starts crooning for mercy, you think you’ve officially had your fill.

You have taken bridesmaid, like you took best friend before that, like you will one day take doting aunty to their gilded brood.

At times, it feels like there is no limit to what you can take.

But the very concept of a First Dance feels like a vaudeville satire portending a dire omen. You refuse to dance into hell—you just can’t do it. And you can’t watch them squeeze your heart to bloodpulp between their flush, swaying bodies.

Though you suppose that may be symbolic. Beginning as the end.

Hot red spilled upon her white regalia. Will she still let you splay and clothe her? Or does such proprietary now fall within the purview of his husbandly duties? All set to ‘Say You Love Me’.

You take it all. On the chin, lying down. You take it. You take four consecutive champagne flutes to the gut. You take deep breaths. You take yourself out of the girdling throng of devoted onlookers as the music starts. You take no prisoners. You take your leave.

You are weeping again.

You try to catch your tears as they fall. You think you owe Pauline that much.

The veranda is lit by scattered amber lanterns and the weeping moon. Each stone pillar stands sentinel to the maelstrom of revelry within. Things are hushed, here, but so much colder. You miss her warm fingertips against your skin. You miss everything. Shadows stretch across the tiled floor in languorous arcs.

You smell the sea.

You find a dark corner and sink into it, bracing yourself on the balustrade as you crouch to your haunches. Your body aches with the force of your suppressed sobs. Your shoulders tremble and your heart mewls with anguish.

You miss the sound of footsteps, so the voice does surprise you.

“One wedding that’s a funeral.”

You laugh, sort of. Damp and congested. You try to daub the tears away. “Ha,” you sniff, “Yeah, no, I—“

You stop.

It doesn’t seem the least bit real.

Let’s leave aside the fact that he’s The Ex Boyfriend. He shouldn’t even exist in this fucking stratosphere anymore. And that’s why he seems elusive, ghostly, even now. Emerging from the shadows like a demonic apparition.

You know Art and Tashi don’t really talk about it. They have a peace to protect. You cannot say the same of yourself.

Because in the unbroken silence of your dreams, there is a whistle. A sharp, clear necklace of sound, tightening around your throat, tugging forward. And even earlier, at the ceremony. A malevolent spirit in the room seemed to say, I won’t be ignored. And here he fucking is.

A horrid little laugh builds up in your throat, until you can’t keep it down any longer.

You laugh. It comes out like a savage chortle. Patrick stills, five feet away from you. His eyes are sad, a little surprised, and, yes, repelled.

Repelled by you and your laugh.

Suddenly, all you feel is helpless anger. You’re angrier than you’ve ever been, angrier than when they were together, angrier than when Art swooped in to take his stillwarm seat, angrier than all those times you had to be quiet and eat humble pie. You’re furious that the woman you love has jettisoned her last name, like a shorn chrysalis. And you’re livid that you have to deal with this asshole, this piece of shit pretty boy you’d thought you’d seen the last of, who is standing in front of you, on this moonlit veranda, trying to share in your mourning. He’s fucking insane.

So you say it, out loud, but not too loud, because you don’t want to make a scene. You certainly don’t want Tashi to see him.

“You’re insane,” you scoff, gaze vast and glossy with shock, “You’re fuckin’ insane, I knew it! I knew you were fuckin’ insane! I told her you were fuckin’ insane.”

You’re surprised at the viciousness in your voice. The blue in his eyes has become washedout, almost white. You can see tiny red capillaries blooming around the iris in the dark.

To his credit, Patrick has never left you hanging in your ferocity.

His brows are hoisted in defense. He gestures wildly into the reception hall, “I’m fuckin’ insane? He’s fuckin’ insane! And he’s marrying her!”

He’s all big words and movements like this is fucking Seinfeld.

You upheave yourself to a tremulous stand. “You’re both fucking insane,” you say darkly, though, at the moment, you feel a bit deranged.

Your vehemence startles him a little. Something imperceptible changes in his mien. Like he’s standing straighter. His eyes shine like glass. You’re bizarrely reminded of those National Geographic documentaries where lions size each other up before a fight.

But then his shoulders slump, and he nods, and you are almost incredulous at his patheticism. “Okay,” he breathes. He seems tiny. “You look nice.”

You blink, shifting.

You clear your throat. “Thank you. You don’t.”

And he doesn’t. He’s wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. And he looks vaguely showered for once, but there’s still something faintly noxious in the air he emanates.

“Yeah, well,” he shrugs, “I wasn’t gonna dress up for a wedding I wasn’t invited to.” A pause. “That’d be weird.”

For a moment, you are sure you tripped on a rock out here, and cracked your skull open on a pillar, and all of this is a stage play happening in the most masochistic corner of your mind. You have never been so disbelieving of his inanity.

“Oh, yeah, that’d be weird!” you say, eyes still wide and marginally manic. “That’d be crazy, for sure. If you dressed up for the wedding you weren’t invited to.”

He fills in the blank there—always could, for his part—that he’s shown up to the wedding. He gives a feeble chuckle. He looks awkward, really, which is… fucking something.

“When are they gonna cut the cake?” His voice is small and tentative like a child’s.

“You’re not getting any, you cow.”

He looks sincerely wounded at that, his eyes casting downward, and it borders on pitiful. But the sympathy stirred feels like a small lashing, like punishment for your lack of decorum. There is something contemptuous in that pitifulness.

You know an athlete’s body is his wound.

But you can’t bring yourself to say sorry.

You just lower your hackles with a visible exhale, which he seems to recognise as safe treadspace.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

You snort. “Why are you here?”

He connects those dots, too, the perceptive bastard.

He clears his throat, hands in his pockets, rolls back and forth on his feet.

He stares at the ground. “You gotta say a speech?”

“Yeah, but I probably won’t.”

The ocean rushes. Luther Vandross thumps faintly from beyond. First dance is over, apparently.

Patrick peers up at you, like he’s debating saying what he’ll say next.

“Wanna go get a drink?”

Tashi jumps on the balls of her feet. Her waifishness is often a screen hiding an impressive amount of energy. PE is competition in its purest form. Every time she manages to wrest the ball from the opposing team she feels invincible. She is invincible. She dribbles the ball quickly, ponytail swishing in the air as she runs towards the goalpost.

From the corner of her eye she registers movement. She’s always hyperaware of her surroundings. That’s why she notices you sitting down in the stands, two other little girls (in the way that a year—which is all the time sundering you two—can feel like a decade when you’re fourteen) on either side of you.

One of your friends doles out UNO cards, and it is clear it is the other who had suggested this place of loitering, because she has her gaze trained conspicuously on a boy in Tashi’s class.

Tashi pivots. Makes a pointed throw. The ball goes past the goalkeeper into the net. Her team cheers. She checks to see if you have borne witness, but you are too busy stewing over your dealt cards.

She runs over to you. You look up when you hear her barrelling up the steps of the bleachers with a haste that makes them shudder.

She slides in between you and Vidya, who is unperturbed on account of her intently watching Anshu Morya pretend two basketballs are his tits and siring great gales of laughter from his audience of other fourteen year old boys.

Tashi slips a lanky arm around your shoulder.

“Hey, you,” she says, “Why didn’t you come say hi?”

You feel weird and diminutive and caught in a weird way, because Essence is looking upon her from your other side as though she is a seraph who has descended and deigned to grace you with her presence.

(Essence is in under13’s tennis, where it is wildly regarded that the girls who do under14’s tennis are the coolest people ever).

“Uh,” you drawl dumbly.

“You’re my friend now,” she squeezes your arm, pulling you closer to her side, “You have to say hi.”

Tashi seems to preen beneath the attention of these little girls, with a poise remarkably incongruous for fourteen. It feels a stark juxtaposition to the girl you’d seen, wailing, wet, and splayed in her own nascent womanhood.

You’ll come to think this a lot. Tashi Duncan, the impenetrable infanta. She tries not to show any inkling of vulnerability, if she can help it.

That’s why you always remember. You’re always recalling that blood.

And so part of you that is purely little girl thinks, I saw her first.

Even though Adidas singled her out as showing great promise. Even if Patrick Zweig won her number, and Art Donaldson, in some primevally spurning way, will have her as his bride. It was you who saw her, truly saw her, for the first time. Weeping in her own carmine deluge in a girl’s bathroom stall at Blue Vista High.

And, if you saw her first, shouldn’t you get to keep her?

You cannot bear to see her be wed.

What you’d really said, when she told you she was engaged, was a frayed and hollowed: Congratulations.

Dear God, please, no came later. It came clawing rotten from your throat like the undead, while you curled in on yourself yourself like a woman wounded, in the dark, beneath your covers.

“Dear God, please, no,” you’d whispered, lachrymose.

Your first dream, as it were, takes place on the shore of Virginia Key Beach, twenty minutes south of your neighbourhood in Allapattah.

It doesn’t look real, though.

It’s more like a film set.

That could be due to the fact that you haven’t been home in a year or due to the fact that Tashi is there, and she hasn’t been home in longer.

But you know it’s Florida because the air’s so thin and friable in California. Like the sun hasn’t fully seeped through. You know it’s summer because there’s crickets chirping in the trees behind you.

It’s dark, but the moon is bright, and, without looking, you know Tashi is just behind you, sitting on a rock halfsubmerged in the water. You’re sitting in the water right by her. You can feel her presence on your arm as you lean back. You guys are stripped to your bras and panties, like you always were. Her hair is curly.

There might have been more happening; you have a vague impression that there was talking at some point in this dream, but the details fade in the minutes after waking up. What you do retain is distressing. 

You are saying something when you are suddenly supine, and you see that Tashi is atop you, straddling you, though you cannot necessarily feel any weight of her. She doesn’t even feel warm. Her skin against you isn’t a temperature, it’s a sensation. Buzzing, like the vague shock of an electric socket.

“Hi,” she says, her voice low. 

And you’re about to say something, and then you are silenced. You wake up soon after your lips meet.

The dream haunts you for a week, until you go to a party and find a boy and kiss him instead.

The dream is not a revelation, not by a long shot, but you had thought they were a thing of girlhood. And, too, you thought Tashi was impenetrable to such things as your little desires. You’d thought, for a wretched moment, that you could be normal about a beautiful girl.

And you’re usually better at controlling yourself.

You usually can go about your day without suddenly remembering the image of Tashi leaning in.

When you do find a boy that Saturday—a short, slight, facetious glasseswearer named Noel, who prides himself on being a silent, occasionally witty observer the same way you do—you talk with him and laugh with him and kiss him and feel the world right itself. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change, if you can just get a fucking grip.

You go another few weeks without incident, until there’s another dream.

A few others.

Tashi chalks up your odd behavior to anything from exam season to homesickness. You let her.

No one knows about these dreams, with one exception.

Patrick Zweig figures you out embarrassingly quick.

All it takes is one night on the town, the three of you. A couple hours watching you replenish and rotate her moscow mules and vodka sodas and ace pineapples with a surgeon’s precision. Like forecasting weather. And he feels sure enough in his conclusions to corner you as you’re emerging from the putrid bathroom of the dive bar and say, “You got it bad for Tashi, don’t you, kid?”

You are on the drunk side of tipsy, at this point, and you blink a few times before you remember to zip your fly and respond.

All you come up with, for your part, is a weak, “Sorry?”

Patrick smiles. It doesn’t seem particularly mean, but you don’t presume to know him well enough to bet on it.

“I’m just saying,” Patrick says slowly. “Seems like you like her an awful lot. Kid.”

Your gaze goes bonehard. You don’t like him. You don’t like that you can smell his nausea-siring wintry cologne. You cannot conceptualise the scent, but it can’t be natural. He is so pretentious, he probably has it shipped from Marseille or somewhere.

He’s cracked open your ribs and plucked a raw nerve, just to watch you writhe. And there’s that obnoxious little smile, only half his mouth. Though not outright hostile, it’s not friendly.

You open your mouth. But you are so furious, you’re unable to speak. What’s more infuriating, Patrick patiently waits for you to find your words.

“Well,” you say, steadying your feet like you’re prepared to brawl this guy, “What are you gonna do about it?”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

And you must look surprised, because Patrick laughs.

“May these be the worst of our days.”

The pub is a dive, just a short stumble from the wedding venue. The air is dense with the acerbic musk of piss and spirits, danker than the worst of times. It’s a visceral contrast to the beauty of the union, and it’s one of which you both feel deserving.

You sit on a slightly cracked stool at the mucky wooden bar. You nurse a beer, and a broken heart, and Pat is on his third scotch in as many minutes. The bartender keeps giving him these nervous glances.

He gurgles out a pfft as he tips his glass to you, “Yeah, and the best of theirs.”

You regard the middle distance with a sort of weary disgust. A miserable guilt. You know what he’s portending. It’s all downhill from here. But you cannot deny that these are not unkind heights from which to fall. Garlanded by intricate golden sconces casting pristine white marble awash with warmth and love. You two cannot wish them ill in a way that even means anything.

“Fuck, they’re so happy,” you moan, “We suck.”

You feel your lungs grow achy. You are drowning in selfpity and selfpity’s lesser endearing cousin, envy. Patrick seems to bear it better. He releases a noise. A laugh maybe; a bitter, bloodaddled thing.

“Hey, I think the one of us wearing the bridesmaids dress places significantly lower on the Ultimately Fucked Over scale.”

He spins his glass around on the sticky tabletop. The scraping sound makes you envision ground bonematter.

“This colour wouldn’t suit you,” you mumble, swinging your beer idly by its neck.

Patrick’s brows seem to knit at this.

“Yes it would,” he grumbles.

“I always hated you.”

He quirks a brow, looking at you askance.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

You make a face. “It is.” Your eyes close for a moment, as though envisaging which set of words would spurn him best. “And he’s better for her than you.”

Patrick’s mouth parts into a slackened smirk. He laughs again. “And you think you’re better for her than both of us.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Always the bridesmaid…” he singsongs.

You feel your skin heat with something sore and cloying.

“Oh fuck you.” Your eyes roll as well as they are able without you getting vertigo. “I fucked her last.”

His smile grows like a burgeoning parasite. His head is still hung between his shoulders, but he peers up at you through the dark veil of his lashes.

He tongues the inside of his cheek like he’s suppressing laughter, like he now thinks it wouldn’t be kind. “No kidding.”

You frown at this, at his amusement.

“What, you don’t think I fucked her?”

Patrick shrugs. Hums vaguely.

“Wow.”

“Not in, like, a homophobic way, or—“

“Wow.”

He snorts.

“I’m sorry.”

You shake your head. “You’re not.” You swig a mouthful of beer, relishing faintly in the acrid aftertaste. “And I’m not either. Fucked her after you broke up, licked you clean out her pussy, you’re nothing.” You stand up and close the distance between you, stumbling into him, your forehead thunking against his as you draw the word out childishly. Nothingggg-uh.

He chuckles noiselessly. “Oh yeah?”

You straighten clumsily, leaning back, but you’re still stood between his open legs, and you brace your hand against his thigh. “Yeah,” you say.

Patrick narrows his eyes at you. He inhales a breath with an air of the long since victorious.

He gives it a moment before he says it. You’re lifting your bottle to the seam of your lips.

“I fucked her two months ago.”

You slam the green glass against the bartop, eyes wide as canyons as you turn to look at him, your forgone sip dribbling down your chin. “What?” you enunciate sharply.

He leans back in his chair, raising his hands as if shirking blame. But something wicked gleams in his eyes.

You scoff. “Bull. Shit.”

He tilts his head to the side, resting an elbow against the bar, his gaze flickering between your face and the beer trickling down your neck.

He shrugs. Hums.

Your eyes search his face frenetically. Your fingers claw into the flesh of his thigh. “He doesn’t know?”

Now, something like guilt manages to sniff him out. He glances off obliquely, his throat working around a swallow. His expression is hard to discern. Swimming between guilt and a strange sort of defiance.

“Wow,” you drawl protractedly. You’re almost impressed. “You’re an ass. You said that because you wanted to make me feel bad, you wanted to one up me, like you get points for fucking her—“

“A game that you started, by the way.”

“Hey.” You lean into his space again, finding his eyes with a sniper’s determination. “Hey. You’re a piece of shit.”

His jaw works against his skin.

“Uh-huh.”

“No, you are. You are, and you know it.” Your nails embed themselves in his thigh, your other hand coming to place a finger in the hollow of his chest. “Because no matter what,” your voice is low and gravelly now, “You’re done. You’re out. I’m in.”

You lean back to look him over, as though admiring your work, but he only wears a plaintive, resigned sort of smile.

“You think that’s better?”

His voice is so soft as to seep like smoke down your spine. Your nails unearth themselves from his skin. You have not drawn blood, but morning bruises would not startle him.

A long few moments pass.

“This is what you do now, you’re all profound?” you murmur.

He shrugs, a rueful simper on his mouth. “Eh,” he hums dismissively.

You sigh. Remove your hands from him and stumble back onto your stool.

“You’d look like shit in this dress,” you say, at length.

“Maybe.”

You tip your beer into your mouth, even though it has run dry.

There’s a bit of a moue on your face. You trace the sticky outlines on the tabletop, focusing intently on the grooves. “I look amazing in this dress.”

“You’d look amazing out of it.”

Your brows furrow. You look up at him. “Dude, what?”

Patrick blinks. He seems genuinely surprised.

“Aren’t we gonna…?”

“No, what? Why would you—?”

“Oh, I just—“

“What?” Your face is skewed confusedly.

“Because we—“

Your phone trembles against the bar.

“Hold on,” you say, and then, grin growing, “Darling Ms Duncan,” you croon melodically as you hoist the device to your cheek.

Her verdant meadow laughter on the other end. “Donaldson,” she chuckles. You can hear the vague commotion of the festivities ensconcing her.

You frown.

“Don’t hurt me, Starshine.”

“You missed your speech.”

You gasp, your voice going all light and airy the way it does when you’re feigning guilt. “What?” you drawl, “No…”

Tashi cottons on, and you can hear her teasing smile as she indulges you, “Oh,” she hums in fauxsympathy, “Oh, yeah, uh-huh.”

“No way,” you grouse softly, “I’m so sorry.”

“Come back before we cut the cake,” says Tashi, “Where are you, by the way?”

“Oh, I’m in a bar, you won’t believe who I ran into.”

“Who?”

Patrick steels to alertness in front of you, shaking his head in abject alarm.

You smile.

“Patrick Zweig. I think we’re gonna have sex tonight probably. Compound our sadness. It’ll be really pathetic.”

Patrick looks at you like you’ve walloped his puppy.

Tashi is silent on the other end. You know well the firm, seraphic way her face has set in anger.

“That’s not funny,” she says, and it occurs to you that, if what Patrick’s told you is true, then it really isn’t funny.

You bite your lip. “Oh.”

“That’s—“ she takes a breath; you can picture the heat wash off of her. She can be very purposeful with her emotions. “Hey, listen,” her voice has softened, “Please come back.”

“Okay, Ms Duncan.”

“Come back and eat the cake, you chose the cake.”

A simper slithers over your lips. “We chose the cake.” Your husband was somewhere sticking his prick in a green juice, you don’t add. “It’s kind of our cake, in a way.”

“Well,” Tashi hums, unconvinced, but you can hear her smile.

“Yeah, I’m coming, worry not, my dear. Save me a dance.”

You drop the phone.

Patrick is still looking at you like the apocalypse has been announced.

You roll your eyes.

“Put your dick down, she didn’t believe me,” you say. “Because you showing up to her wedding would be crazy.”

He chuckles dryly, but you do not miss the relief in his bones.

He cocks his head wryly, “Not really, considering…”

You stand up again, elbow leaning on the bar, your temple against your knuckles as you gape at him, sort of mystified. “You’re not bullshitting me,” you say, the corner of your open mouth quirking up incredulously, “Like actually.”

Patrick shrugs. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Atlanta.”

“Fuck!” You smack your hand down on the table, looking around as though to share in your disbelief with a makebelieve audience. “And since then, have you…? With anyone?”

“Dude, that was two months ago,” he says, like you’re a bit slow, or perhaps like he’s offended by the notion, “Yes.”

You click your tongue. “Ah, shit. You should’ve said no. Would’ve sucked you off, seen if I could taste her.”

Your hip ghosts absently against his spread open knee.

“You can still try,” he offers.

You shake your head, stifling a smile. “Nah.”

“God, we’re the worst.”

“You’re the worst.” You let your smile divulge itself.

“We should get married.”

“Fuck no.”

Patrick lets himself look putout by this, eyes going downcast. You’ve always thought his smile—really his whole face—looks vulnerable, like soft bread. He looks like the perfect sad boy, the victim rather than the perpetrator.  

“Oh,” says Patrick.

You hit him in the arm. “Don’t do that. You know it’d suck.”

“I don’t think so, actually,” he muses.

“What do we have in common? Like, sincerely. Besides her. You can’t build a marriage around a person who isn’t in the marriage.”

He makes a face as though to say this is an evidently incorrect statement. He gestures vaguely in the direction of Art and Tashi’s wedding venue.

That gets a laugh out of you.

“Oh, you pathetic asshole.” You steady yourself on his thigh again, this time with your fist. “No one has mentioned your name once today.”

You know it’s a low blow.

He returns your smile, though his is sad and weird again. They’ve all forgotten about me, it seems to say, Maybe you’ve forgotten about me, too.

Ugh, you think. Fucking Patrick who can’t stop being fucking neglected by everyone.

You clear your throat softly. “See? You don’t wanna marry me.”

Patrick lets out a depleted sigh, like he, too, is not so thrilled with the notion. And you’ve heard better proposal stories. He looks like a Labrador who’s figured out he has to go to the vet. He kicks the edge of the barstool with his sneaker.

“I do. I still do. That was fucked, but I still would.” He looks angry and lonely and resigned, and a little happy too, weirdly. “We should have one of those, ‘by the time we’re thirty—’”

“Thirty?”

“Fifty.”

You like how quickly he bends, in that moment. It has you picturing flower arrangements. But you narrow your eyes, a wry gleam to your smile.

“I think I’ll still have a shot, at fifty.”

“I won’t,” he says, with the smile of the recently condemned.

“I think you will, actually.” You regard him sort of pensively. And maybe it’s a bit clinical. “I think age is gonna humble you. And then you’ll be fifty and grey and, like, penitent. Plus fifty’s still virile, generally. And I’ve heard good things about your situation down there. Just—“

You push off the bar, your fist leaning down more heavily on his thigh as your other hand comes up to his forehead, as though checking his temperature, before sweeping upwards and pushing his hair back. You’re on your toes—further on your toes, considering the heels—assessing his hairline closely, your nose grazing his forehead and your hips certainly slotted between his.

Patrick makes an insincere attempt to push you off. “Hey, what—“

“Did your maternal grandfather have hair?”

He hesitates, “What, my mom’s dad?”

“Mhm.”

He feels that breath against his brow.

“To this day,” he shrugs, “But he’s an asshole.”

“That’s good news.” You lean back.

“That my gramps is an asshole?”

“No, the—“ You gesture to his hair again, “That’s how you know, I think. If you’ll bald. Is your maternal grandfather.”

“You think? Didn’t you do health science?”

“Didn’t you do fuck all and doesn’t everyone hate you?”

He seems unharmed, if enchanted, by this persistent claim.

He points again in the general direction of the wedding beyond the brick wall of the bar.

“They may hate me. You don’t hate me.”

You follow his finger like everything between you and that marble dance floor will collapse, and you will be given a clear view of that proprietary, knowing way Art Donaldson holds her as they dance.

You look back at him. “You really seem to believe that. It makes me concerned.”

“For me?”

“No, for myself. I don’t like that I’m putting out such false vibes.”

He is charmed by this verbiage.

He laughs, like he’s still unconvinced. “Okay.”

He holds it against you, of course.

He doesn’t do a goddamn thing, as promised, but he holds it against you.

Patrick doesn’t like the college parties, but he manages. He doesn’t like feeling like an interloper, really. Doesn’t like that Art and Tashi have this fully functional ecosphere in which he cannot take root—like he’s some sort of invasive strain of alien vegetation.

As soon as he can, Patrick excuses himself from the purgatory of social interaction with whichever set of strangers Tashi calls her friends. He extricates his arm from around her waist and catches your eye as he goes to stand, mimes taking a drink, and watches with relief as you narrow your eyes but push out of your chair and head toward the bar. You order four shots of something.

“You’re lasting longer than I thought,” he says as soon as he’s close enough to you. He takes one shot—vodka, he thinks as it slides down his throat—then another from the bar top. “You were making that face, though.”

You scowl up at him. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I was not.”

Patrick snorts. “If that helps you sleep at night. I know I won’t be sleeping.”

He bites his lip and does a crude mimicry of delivering backshots with his pelvis, his hands holding an imaginary set of hips, and you suddenly feel beset with a strange nausea. You defeatedly slide toward him another one of those shots.

“What’s the point of her having you as a friend if you aren’t going to support us?”

“I bought you three fucking shots,” you say. You quickly throw the last one back before he can get at it, because, by now, you at least know Patrick well enough to know he’s nearly about to make a grab for it. 

He grins. “Kid, if Art had won that game, I’d make my pass at you ten times over.”

That’s enough to turn the nausea into chunder, and you quickly push past him and book it to the bathroom as it blooms up your throat.

You see your tendons as racketstrings, as you crouch over the toilet.

Taut and crossed over one another inextricably.

He’ll always have that over you, the tennis. You never had the tenacity for it. But it means he has a whole other way to upset her, too.

You take comfort in the fact that Tashi is quick to stand and take you into her arms when you reappear, halftorn, wrung out. She’s happy to take you back to your room, and nurse you for the night.

Patrick doesn’t begrudge. He’s fine to let you have your little pleasures. She’s still his, is the thing.

You’re confused about the Art Donaldson of it all.

He has a warmth in his eyes. And a mischief and a validation. He’s like Patrick, in that he watches—he watches very closely. But where Patrick has always seemed content, in this strange, visceral way, to take what he can get, Art feels like he’s waiting for… something. He’s sort of always fighting with Patrick, but they’re taking care of one another, strangely. He has this weird, symbiotic desire to know more about Tashi and Patrick’s relationship, which—well—you’d be canting to pass judgement.

Grey, grey skies out the windows of Tashi’s dorm room. It’s the most neutral space for you all. Bundled in jackets and hats on beer runs. Fingers freezing as you sit on the floor and play UNO, bumming and trading all of Patrick’s cigarettes because it’s all you can think to do. It rains all day. Patrick tucks his fingers under Tashi’s thigh, kisses the corner of her mouth.

Art has a cold, passes it on to Patrick, and now you’re all incubating it in this cloistered space that soon becomes littered with used tissues and cough drops and tornopen packets of TheraFlu.

Patrick is glad to help no one feel left out. He announces as much—I don’t want you guys to feel left out��with this quizzical simper, as Tashi places down a wild drawfour and declares blue. And maybe she’s doing something foul and saccharine like looking right into Pat’s eyes when she says that.

“I don’t think you have any blues,” says Art, sliding four cards from the deck, wearing his own quizzical simper. “I think you just want us to think you have blues, I think you’re playing smart.”

You can tell by the way Patrick grips his beer bottle that he thinks Art is flirting with her.

There seems to be an odd, prophetic thought you two share.

If the two of them—Tashi and Art—were to get married, they would have golden brown babies like Renaissance cherubs while you and he sat in the dark with the rest of the godless degenerate art.

So, in some way, perhaps, you’d seen it all coming.

When Patrick picks up the phone, shoves it between shoulder and ear, and takes the sorelyneeded, sweetyolkdripping, heavily hotsauced bagel sandwich out of his mouth so he can mumble, “Yeah?” he does not expect the first words across the receiver to be,

“Hey, you fuck. I have your shit.”

Patrick rolls his eyes and takes a large bite, craning over his open palm to keep egg and cheese off his Puma shirt. This is a time when brands like Puma still want Patrick Zweig wearing their shirts.

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“You know, this feels like Christmas. Do you know that? This feels like Christmas day for me. You think you’re this special boy who can have whatever he wants. You’re bullshit. The bell tolls for thee. Your ex, I should note, has bent over and spread her cheeks for me.”

And you feel a way, about the coarseness of your words, the fissures in your mouth. But this isn’t about demeaning Tashi. It’s about flaying him.

“Dude.”

“Her beautiful, soft, floralscented cheeks.”

Patrick hangs up on you, which feels like how you imagine the President feels after election day.

You wait for him to call back.

It’s less than a minute before your phone shudders. He puts you on speaker.

“Are you done?” he says.

“Dude,” you say, “Never ever. Never ever ever.”

“How much for shipping?”

“Fuck you, coward, you’re still in town.”

There’s a revolting, wet sort of noise as he chews. And it is between these chews that he says, “You want to see me, then? Make sure I’m miserable?”

“I don’t need to see you to make sure you’re miserable, your whole life is miserable,” you say.

Patrick chuckles, the sound garbled by his food. It’s not the noise that makes you recoil from the receiver. You are more disgusted at the prospect of him being fed. Okay, sure—you, in your sadism, have been picturing him gaunt and desolate on the floor. And perhaps you are unmoored by how coherent and gutful he sounds now.

It’s harder to hide sorrow in your eyes. Maybe you do just want to see his eyes, and make sure.

“You’re real classy, kid, I think I’ll miss you most of all,” he swallows. “Where d’you want to meet?”

When you return to the reception hall, the cake is still unsevered and the music has gone slow. Otis Redding, ‘These Arms of Mine’.

Tevin keeps a clammy hand on your midback, the other slackly holding your fingers up.

You’re blinking brine from your eyes and sniffing shallowly. Tev’s giving you a chary sort of look, slightly frowning. He clears his throat.

“If things don’t work out with Lainey, I could marry you.”

But he doesn’t sound too keen on the idea. Which you think is a bit comical, because you've smelled his room, and you've seen him in braces, so, ostensible case for grooming aside, even you're not so desperate.

Still, you squeeze his shoulder lightly through his blazer. You clear your throat, roll your eyes. You let this child sway you side to side, and think of yourself at seventeen, varnishing Tashi’s toenails and daubing them clean with mephitic acetone. Over and over. Trying every colour. One time, you forgot to open a window, and the fumes had you two flaked out on the carpet.

“That’s nice, Tevvy, how’s that promposal coming along?”

In the bar a dozen minutes off campus, you slide the sloppily taped Amazon box across the table.

A microcosm of his pathos condensed into 18 x 12 inches. Each item in isolation meaningless, but altogether painting an intimate lithograph of a man discarded. All tender and immiscible.

Jacket. Toothbrush. Edgefrayed leather wristband. An old iPod with cracked plastic. A pack of cigarettes, crushed and reformed. A small bottle of aftershave. A few crumpled receipts. Unbranded notebook. Expensive fountain pen he probably stole from the bank. A plastic cardholder and a wallet, both empty. A pack of gum.

It feels a bit stupid that Patrick should come all this way for a couple knickknacks. You could have just let him Venmo you for the shipping, and it may have hurt his pride all the same. But you take pleasure in knowing that he was hoping you wouldn’t be the one to meet him here.

“How’s Tashi?” he asks.

You give a small, malicious laugh.

The predictability dissolves none of the abject carnal rapture there.

Of course it’s why he came. He wants to know all about your (singular) dear Ms Duncan. He still has a glimmer of faith that she will change her mind. Even though you both know the girl well enough to know that’s not a thing she does too often.

If you hated him, you would tell him that Tashi is thriving. Healing like a child of God. She’s a new woman, never better, can’t wipe the smile off her face.

But maybe you don’t hate him that much after all.

“She’s a fucking wreck. Moping, crying in the lecture halls, shouting your name in the rain. It’s pathetic.”

A twinge of a smile crosses Patrick’s face, the petty bitch.

“You know I meant her knee,” he says, then takes a sip of his beer.

You cross your arms on the table, then retract them with a wince once you feel how sticky the wood is.

“I don’t know,” you say while rubbing some gunk off your elbow. “I don’t know that, Patrick. You know I think you’re a raging assface.”

Patrick raises his eyebrows. “Have you guys ever fucked?”

His faith, glimmer as it may, is not without its fractures. He has a needling, bonechewing suspicion that this may be the last time you two ever see one another, that you occupy the same orbit. So he thinks he’s allowed to ask.

You just glare at him in cold annoyance. Probably fantasising about smashing his beer bottle over his head. Patrick is familiar with the expression.

“Patrick, please don’t talk to me that way.” There’s violence in your voice that’s probably not just aggrieved feminism.

He knows you’re a woman mutilated about Tashi. He considers saying something even shittier, but what’s the point? You’re not a threat to him anymore. He’s out of the running.

“Fine. Have you guys ever made love?”

Before you can bite his head off, he raises his hands in defense.

“Not trying to be disrespectful, or suggest you have casual pussy and not committed long term lesbian relationship pussy. It’s just… if I figured it out.”

There’s a moment of quiet.

“And, y’know, if she’s single and clearly in a bad place, maybe it’s worth… taking advantage.”

You are at once shocked and maybe even appreciative of his forthright shittiness. It gives you slight confidence, despite yourself.

Call him oldfashioned—or, well, remarkably progressive—but he’s rooting for you kids.

You’re both the perfect combination of hot and insufferable. Stupid and insane.

He knows you weren’t lying; Tashi probably is a wreck. It sometimes makes his tongue go metallic, the thought of her rendered so still and helpless. Maybe it’s better he only got a glimpse of that anguish.

So he’s been ousted, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean you need to dump the baby out with the bathwater. He knows she needs someone.

You sigh. “I’m getting a drink.”

You stand and walk toward the bar. You return with the same beer he’s drinking. He wonders if you got it just because it’s the cheapest, or if you actually like it.

“We never did anything,” you say, picking at the moist label with your thumbnail. “Well. We did everything. But not that.”

Patrick nods. “There’s time.”

“She’s hurt.”

“She’d be lying down.”

She is lying down.

The sky goes gold in Allapattah.

You’re by her desk, looking over her colourcoded portfolios and notebooks and Stanford paraphernalia and assorted photos and inspirational posters. You smile amusedly as you trace your finger over a WINNER cheer banner and a Never Give up, Give 100% Instead! placard.

“Mom says stay over for dinner,” Tashi mumbles, rifling through a Teen People. “Should I ask for ‘Writing’s On The Wall’ or ‘Fanmail’ for my birthday?”

“Mmm...”

You pick up her Girl Scout badges, look them over.

“Put them back in the same order!” Tashi warns, unable to help herself. But she’s spent a lot of time sorting them.

You look up. You give her a blithe, nervous smile.

You shuffle to the bed and knee onto the mattress, collapsing into her. The two of you an interwreathed coalescence of tepid girlskin.

“I have ‘Fanmail’,” you mumble into the skin of her neck.

You hear Tev and Tre roughhousing like dogs in the living room.

She gets you alone in a small, ornate sidehall before the ceremony.

She slides her arms around your shoulders and hugs you tightly. Her skin is soft, balmy and fragrant as summertime honey. The flowery milk aroma of her hair imbues you.

“You remember Ozymandias?” she says, withdrawing and placing her palms upon your shoulders. There is a conspiratorial twinkle of glee in her eye.

“… The poem?” Your brows draw in with a vague scepticism.

Your throat is still fleshtender with the sobbing. Your eyes moist and caustic. But your makeup, for Pauline’s part, looks great. You’re determined to maintain your ramshackle semblance of civility for as long as possible.

Tashi kneads your skin. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

She clasps your shoulders and spins you around so your back is against her, and you stumble shakily to keep your strappy gold stilettos off her satiny white train. Her arms slink back around you, her thumb caressing the faint protrusion of your collarbone. You feel the sly grin on her lips as she creeps her fingers beneath your hair, sweeping it away and pressing her mouth softly against the gossamertender skin beneath your ear.

“That’s what I’m going for,” she whispers, making a flourishing sort of gesture with her hands in front of you, as if mapping the splay of a billboard. “A grand, glorious, eternal, and yet ultimately doomed endeavour. Something that stands tall and proud, resplendent and beautiful, but, in time, all turns to dust and fades into nothing but a vague memory.”

You shudder with laughter, the bare skin of her chest heated against that of your shoulderblade.

“What?” Tashi giggles softly against the shell of your ear.

“Nothing,” you grin, shaking your head.

You like, in fact, the tender morbidity of her words. That there is a melancholy in her hope. This union, like any, may well be ephemeral. Tashi Duncan, your romantic realist. You hope those are her vows. Wouldn't that throw the kid for a loop.

At the altar, you set your gaze heavenward, determined not to weep once more. This way, the sorrow has nowhere to fall but back within you. And so you do not even see her, as she flows down the aisle and embarks upon her ethereal odyssey.

You don’t think you’d have even been able to take it, anyway.

To bear witness to her metamorphosis under hallowed eaves.

But you feel it. The transience of power. Nothing beside remains.

Pam drives you two to Virginia Key Beach every Sunday after service at the COGIC. You are dithering, at first, about shucking off your clothing. The sea is such a vast, living thing. Nothing like a poky stall in the school bathroom. But, by week three, your Sunday best is sandstrewn, and you and Tashi are giggling things of cotton panties and training bras and seawater.

The waves feel giant and warm.

It fills your mouth and nostrils. The ocean envelops you. The water lifts you up. She mounts your back and drags you under. You laugh so hard you choke a bit, coughing up salt. She laughs even harder as she slaps your back unhelpfully. Her head is bent over yours, ducking to check that you’re okay, but she’s still simpering impishly. The next wave pulls you under and your lips brush against her lips, almost by accident.

You hear her small, hiccupy gasp.

You can feel the way her fingers scrabble against your shoulders. She sinks her little nails in. That Thursday, you had painted them blue.

You lie in a nest of towels afterwards, exhausted and depleted, like children after a bath.

You reach out with your hand and take a few of her wet curls between your fingers.

“When I’m tennis famous, I’m gonna marry Justin Timberlake,” she murmurs, resting her head on her arm, still panting.

“Can I be your flower girl?” you say, running your fingers through her hair.

You were a flower girl at your aunt’s wedding last Summer. You found the job so enchanting. All the doting gazes, the petals between your fingers. It doesn’t occur to you to want for more, at this time.

“You can be…” she mumbles, peeking at you over her arm. “Everything.”

It’s a strange, untenable idea, a thing not named. There are things you cannot be.

But you understand completely. “You too.”

“I wanna be a butterfly,” she hums to herself. “And fly away.”

Your lips twitch. “With Justin?”

Tashi’s face glows a little. “With you.”

Like all Floridian nights, the one of the wedding is humid. You can picture the way the feathery curls along Tashi’s hairline will start to rouse. You can picture, too, the way Art Donaldson’s stupid nose will caress that soft hair, how he will breathe her in. You don’t much want to picture anything beyond that.

There is so much moonlight to see by. It spills across Patrick’s skin in soft luminous beams.

The sand is damp between your bare toes, the satin of your dress growing wet beneath your bum. You are ensconced by a warm, saline squall.

The sea laves the shore like a hungry tongue.

The cake is a pistachio sponge, bedaubed with rosesuffused cream, the layers laden with a tart raspberry treacle, and the frangible ivory of white chocolate. You filch two slices, wrap them in monogrammed serviettes. A&T. Awful and tragic, he had joked bleakly as you clumsily took off your shoes on the foreshore. Agonising and traumatic, you’d offered. You went back and forth like this for a bit.

Patrick’s cigarette gilds his face in a copper glow. His eyes are trained pensively on swathes of sea foam.

Your phone garbles between your feet. Hums—bleary, melancholic—with Amy Winehouse.

And now, the final frame. Love is a losing game.

The cake is good. The cake is fucking amazing. You’d said that, at the tasting. Fuck, this is amazing, had been your honeyed moan. It was enough for Tashi to make the decision. You feel bad, now, lapping frosting off your fingers in her absence, your sugarcoated teeth.

Patrick blows the smoke away from you, disperses the acrid cloud with a fan of his hand. The wind will waft, though; sweep some of that fetor back to you. And all you do is breathe.

Selfprofessed, profound…

Patrick spares you a glance. Then does gawping a doubletake.

“Fuck, you’re not crying.” He sniffs deeply, his hand swiping roughly the wet skin of his cheek.

Your eyes widen.

“Oh, shit, did we start?”

He breathes a dilapidated, spitladen laugh, scrubbing harsh his cheeks with his fingers.

The heavy rivulets keep cascading. Washing his skin.

“Yeah!” he scoffs wetly, sweeping his wrist beneath his nose, sniffing again.

You stifle a rueful simper, wiping your fingers off on the napkin. “Ah, fuck, sorry.”

He gives another watery laugh.

“You’re a dick,” he grins.

And then you’re grinning too, though your brows quaver with concern, “No, oh my God, sorry! I cried a lot earlier.”

He’s shaking his head, freshets of tears still trickling down. “You’re an ass, I can’t believe—“

“I’ve never seen you cry,” you smile, something like wonder misting your eyes.

He chuckles, his cig singeing down, the smoke pirouetting upwards.

“No one has.”

You beam, but your shoulders tense with guilt. “Fuck!” you giggle, rumpling the serviette and resting it in the sand, shifting where you sit, and straightening as if centring yourself. “I’m sorry, I’ll do it now.”

“No, you won’t. You’re laughing.”

You laugh loudly, dropping your forehead to your hoisted knees.

“That’s closer than you think!” you say.

Patrick takes a deep, terminal drag of his cigarette—the ember coruscating violently—before extinguishing it in the sand beside him.

“Fuck,” he whispers, dipping his face into his shirt collar and using the fabric to swipe at his nostrils, snivelling more.

Then his shoulders fall. Elbows resting on his knees, hands falling slack between them.

The song starts up again.

For you I was aflame…

The ocean whispers soft susurrations against the beachfront.

You are struck, suddenly, by his silverveiled visage. Your gaze strokes the slope of his nose, the arch of his cheekbone. You are so enthralled by this wet gleam of his milky skin. There’s something about that; about his unencumbered tearflood and the faraway joy of the party.

Before you can stop yourself, you move in.

Your noses bump. There’s a moment where your teeth clack together and Patrick makes an annoyed noise, but it’s quickly replaced by something that sounds more like pleasure as he turns to fit his mouth against yours more easily.

You taste his tears and mouth and tongue. His hand comes to cradle the back of your neck. Your blotchy eyes flutter closed. You dig your fingers into the sand and close your fists around it. You taste the smoke and the cake and the oceanfront. It’s all a bit warm and desperate.

You think of the seaspray, the burgeoning goosebumps on your arms. You think of your mouth, mollified against his own, his hot spit on your gums, his tongue, hotter still, stroking yours. How he tips your head back so your jaw can fall further, so there is more of you available. You think of mouths. Of course, you think of Tashi’s mouth. Her smile in the mirror.

There’s a poignant tremor to Amy’s voice, as she sings,

Memories mar my mind.

And you are struck by this phrasing. And this is, perhaps, why and when the tears find you. And the sobs come soon after.

Patrick pulls away with a damp little noise.

“Oh my God.”

You’re weeping. Your shoulders start to tremble with spasmodic sobs, and you are bawling. Your face swims hot with a mire of tears and snot. He is not overtly repulsed. Well, you would not know for sure, because you cannot see him. But you feel him shift a little closer, and put a hand on your bare shoulder, his palm flushed and calloused. He gives you a few resigned pats.

“This is not what I wanted, for the record,” he says, unbothered by your head falling against his chest. “Because now I’m gonna feel like shit. Thinking, wow, was the kiss so shit that it made her cry like a baby?”

You lift your hands and cover your face, sobbing harder.

“Which,” Patrick continues, thumb caressing idly the sweat-tacky skin of your shoulder now, “I know that’s not it.”

A beat.

“Do you wanna tell me that’s not it?”

“That’s not it,” you blubber, smearing mucus off your lips.

You pull away from him dragging your hands down your face. When you look at him, you’re sure you look a sorry sight. Tender with despair, all messy, smeared, and febrile. You sniff shallowly.

“You were right,” you say weakly, “It’s not better.”

“What’s not better?” His voice, you note somewhere in the miasma of your sorrow, is uncharacteristically kind.

Your lip quivers, “I’ll have to be there when he puts a baby in her.” Your face has twisted in anguish and you are wailing once more, sobbing loud and earnest.

Patrick blinks at you, “Jesus.”

But he pulls you closer again. Turns your body, in fact, so you are leaning back into his raised lap and he is halfway cradling you like a baby. You weep into his shirt, painting it wet and viscid, and the scent of his awful cologne only makes you sadder.

“Oh my God,” Patrick says again, rubbing up and down your arm, and he sounds a bit amused, which is a little fair. “He might not,” he offers.

You snivel loudly and pull back, swallowing your sobs and casting him a disappointed glower.

“Yeah, ok. He probably will.”

You fall hard against his soaked front again, whimpering feebly. Patrick looks down at you.

“Hey, we can do that, too,” he offers now, in a pick-yourself-up sort of tone that juxtaposes so fiercely with the proposition he’s actually making, you nearly laugh. “We time it right, they can be the same age. Then we’ll put ours in the same school as theirs, and teach ours to just fuckin’ decimate the shit.”

And now you are laughing. You’re still teary and frail so it hurts all the same as a sob, but he can see you’re smiling, so he continues,

“Just everything. Fuckin’ grades, boom. Sports, boom. Instruments, boom. Our one’s gonna play two cellos, a piano, a guitar, and an oboe, all at the same time. He’ll use his fingers, toes, and dick,” says Patrick, and he sounds utterly sincere and emphatic, even as he’s sort of smirking now, because you’re laughing even harder. “And we’ll tell him to bully theirs, too. Every day just ‘oh you’re a piece of shit, you’re ugly, your parents’ marriage was doomed from the beginning’, and their fucker’ll be like ‘no I’m not’ and ‘fuck you’—”

You’re tickled, too, by the voice he puts on to imitate these fictitious children. How he talks all low and churlish like he’s instead caricaturing a worldweary pensioner.

“—and ‘I wish you weren’t so much cooler and better than me, and didn’t fuck my girlfriend, and my mom’.”

You make a face.

“Don’t make it weird.”

“Alright, fine. He won’t fuck her,” Patrick concedes, “That’d be fucking legendary if he did, though. But he won’t.”

You are, again, charmed by this, by how easily he yields. It makes you think of a nursery and fresh, boneless toes.

You rest your face on the wet of your weeping on his chest, and you feel a bit humiliated. But this isn’t so bad, as far as humiliations go.

“What if it’s a girl?” you croak, your words halfway muffled by where your cheek is squashed against him.

“Even better.”

“Where would we live? I don’t wanna go to New York, I don’t have the fortitude.”

The worst of your sobbing has waned to stillness, but he’s still rubbing your arm.

“We can shack up in the Midwest. Somewhere chill.” His leg starts shifting beneath you, and you think he wants another cigarette, but he doesn’t move. Instead, “Omaha?”

You shrug. You hated not being in Florida, but still. You shrug. “Sure. And what’ll you do? Coach? Or become like a blue collar fuckin’…” you trail off vaguely. “I can’t even picture it.”

“I always wanted to be a fireman.”

“That’s sexy.”

His laugh, when it sounds, echoes through his chest like there’s a cavern where his heart should be. Which you don’t think is such an unthinkable idea.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” you nod. You clear your throat. “Especially because you could die at any moment. So if we end up hating each other, I can just wait for you to die in a fire, and, that way, I don’t have to murder you. Then our kid doesn’t lose both parents at once.”

He pauses as if considering this. His leg shifts again. “Fuck,” he murmurs after a while.

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t ruin it.”

You clear your throat again. “And a dog,” you say.

“Fuck, yeah, a dog,” he says in his most New Yorkian fashion. Like a traveling salesman who needs you to look at this vacuum and do it quickly. It’s pretty funny. “It can eat theirs.”

You make a reproachful sort of noise. “Not everything has to be—“

“Okay, fine, yeah, just a dog,” he cedes again. The nursery, in your mind, is astralthemed. “Just a dog for the two of us. And our Nobel Prize winning child. I’ve always wanted one named Bagel.”

You think he can somehow hear your mildly scathing New York musings.

“A kid or a dog?”

“A dog.”

“We can name the dog Bagel,” you shrug, as though agreeing to dinner plans, and the tender pulse of a postweep migraine begins to encroach upon you, like the waxing sea. “Can we name the kid Bagel?”

“No.”

The song is still on loop.

Five story fire as you came…

You think of Patrick in sootscuffed bunker gear and a fireman’s helmet.

“Bagel Zweig,” you mumble wryly, your skull beginning to thump with the ache of your patheticism.

Patrick laughs. Lifts you off his knees, unceremoniously but not unkindly, and begins to rifle in his pockets for his Camel pack.

A sudden bout of cheering sounds from the reception, flashing taunting beams in purple hues. You wonder what the fuck they have to be so happy about. You sigh. Perhaps, too, did people cheer, at the mortal fall of Ozymandias. You think about that. That loss of power. That loss.