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yeyinde · 1 year ago

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fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

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an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex.

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through.

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you?

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right.

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it.

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within.

It's all wrong. It feels wrong.

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon.

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that.

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream.

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do.

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment.

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win.

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust.

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers:

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell.

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe.

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them.

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping.

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way.

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault.

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery.

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind.

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown.

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you?

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being.

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder.

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours.

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words.

Can’t fix a broken man.

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand.

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help.

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding.

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught.

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight.

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down.

You know all too well what it feels like to drown.

You pull away. He clings tighter.

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder.

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.”

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't.

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle.

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral.

You can't be.

Won't be.

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone.

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty.

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time.

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?)

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs.

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known.

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose.

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty.

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving.

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm.

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.”

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed.

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me.

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.”

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him.

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this:

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is.

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this:

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race.

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality.

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings.

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy.

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning.

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter.

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation.

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings.

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design.

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent.

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout.

Threw it at the floor by his feet.

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside.

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia.

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation.

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable.

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself?

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe.

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone.

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss).

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself.

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place.

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning.

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch.

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own.

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his.

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow.

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts.

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine.

You have to be.

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly.

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be.

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe.

(Probably. Undoubtedly.

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.)

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless.

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts.

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk.

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete.

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?)

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots.

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded.

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either.

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for.

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough.

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that?

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all.

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages.

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free.

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again.

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food.

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies.

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head.

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too.

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke.

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway.

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice.

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand.

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape.

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever.

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous.

You're not ready to see Bear.

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again.

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe?

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it.

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.)

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette.

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens.

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do.

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual).

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection.

But it's moot. All of it.

He doesn't come back to the bar.

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty.

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale.

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking.

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between.

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you.

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted.

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything.

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems.

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side.

"Teach me how to swim instead."

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up.

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise."

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?"

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn.

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole.

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes.

"Bet you were born in April."

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close.

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him.

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces.

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush.

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone.

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots."

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right.

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams.

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt.

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore.

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead.

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering.

Considering.

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't.

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe.

Sort of.

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA.

Drowning, of course.

Or some fictive version of it.

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise.

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation.

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach.

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent.

Or they're supposed to be.

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers.

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear.

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them.

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries.

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point.

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort.

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap.

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave.

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off.

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood.

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable.

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes.

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it.

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you.

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda.

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity.

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion.

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again.

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day.

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant).

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window.

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land.

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close.

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!).

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing.

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol.

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations.

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring.

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs.

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger.

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from.

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out.

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all.

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you.

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards.

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet.

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with.

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks.

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse.

Like most things when it comes to him.

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly.

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting.

“...Bear?”

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail.

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre.

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own.

“Then why did you?”

“You know why,” you admit quietly.

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand.

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia.

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it.

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead.

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.”

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve.

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable.

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage.

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder.

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out.

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub?

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile.

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight?

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions.

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram.

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again.

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.”

It quiets him, this soft confession.

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind.

“Doesn't mean you can't try.”

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.”

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.”

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.”

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery.

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality.

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again.

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale.

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too.

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be.

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass.

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits.

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable.

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture.

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret.

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession:

there's no one else.

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?”

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give.

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home.

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there.

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?”

“That, too.”

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch.

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit.

It would be so easy to just give in.

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly.

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow.

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief.

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible.

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches.

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination.

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup.

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm.

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you.

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say.

Things like:

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts.

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky.

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober?

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back.

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart.

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously.

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response.

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise.

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…”

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close.

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down.

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone.

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt.

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces.

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works.

Somehow, somehow.

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something.

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest.

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed.

It's odd, though.

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start.

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you.

But something has to give eventually.

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word.

Though, not always.

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other.

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept.

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?”

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground.

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions.

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in.

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must.

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table.

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering.

You'd always had a weakness for men like him.

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious.

Still. Still.

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it.

And in all honesty, you are.

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood.

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given.

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow.

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste.

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man.

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own.

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into.

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway.

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory.

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.”

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are.

Pavlov's finest.

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.”

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort.

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck.

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one.

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him.

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer.

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat.

“...Not drinking as much helps.”

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you.

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run.

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward.

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres.

Skingraft over the wound.

“Proud, huh?”

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms.

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.”

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat.

You should.

But you don't.

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man.

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.”

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?”

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside.

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue.

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one.

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.”

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

#joe graves x reader #joe graves x you #bear graves x reader #joe bear graves x reader #joe bear graves #barry sloane #joe graves #six (2017)#seal team six #history six #bear x reader #bear graves x you #joegravesfics

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yeyinde · 2 years ago

Text

fever in a shockwave., i | Joe "Bear" Graves x f!Reader

pt., i | swallow him whole (like a pill that makes you choke)

It's one thing to sit back and passively watch a man self-destruct on minimum wage and tips, but another thing entirely to help him on that journey. So, you call it. Or: this is what happens when resident travesty Joe Graves meets a local track star fleeing from everything. (The only problem being: no one ever taught you how to run.)

warnings: implied/references to cheating (but not really); angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series wordcount: 15,1k

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It's one thing to sit back and passively watch a man self-destruct on minimum wage and tips, but another thing entirely to help him on that journey.

So, you call it.

(Like you should have months ago.)

Get me a scotch. Whisky, and—his hazy gaze slides to the woman barely sitting on the broken stool, eyes drooping and grinning much too wide considering where she's at, before jerking to you again—uh, whatever, uh… she's having.

She's having long island iced tea. You're tired of making it, anyway.

You nod, dutifully, but hand him a glass of room-temperature water, instead.

"This isn't what I asked for."

His voice is pitched low. Always. A strange, rasping timbre that you pretend does nothing to you no matter how many times his eyes slide over your body, liquid blue, and asks for something—bourbon, a scotch, rye.

You can't quite meet his gaze when you shrug. "I know."

There is something about this man who reeks of stale cigarettes, motel shampoo, and wheat malt. Something that makes you ache in all the wrong ways. A man on the verge of implosion; a deadly, gaseous bomb that will leak miasma into the aether until you're rotten from the inside out. Organs full of those awful fumes he'll exude.

Going out with a bang, heavy and suffocating.

His hand jerks on the table. You watch his knuckles slide over the wood, clenching into a tight fist. So tight the scarred tissue around his bones turns white. Bleached under the strain of barely keeping it together.

There is something about an angry man that itches under your skin.

"What the fuck?" The woman beside him breaks the stifling silence. "We paid—"

"S'alright," he says. Low, low—voice scraping against the gravel. His chin falls when you look up. Expression blank, but not vacant. Anger, and—

Maybe a little bit of guilt, sadness, regret.

"Let's get outta here, then," she coos, hand trailing over his chest.

"Yeah," he mutters, and you wonder what caused the shadows in his eyes this time, the ones dulled, glossy, and drenched in cheap liquor. His fist clenches, eyes narrowing. "Let's go."

Anger clings to him. His shoulders are drawn tight even when he wobbles on his feet, unsteady. His hand slams down on the counter, nails—dirty, chewed down the wick—grazing the chipped grain as he tries to stable himself.

His chin lifts, as if he's demanding you to say something. Threatening in blotchy malt, eyes fixed on you like a cobra, a predator. Ocean blue, foggy and glazed over with the nearly hundred dollar tab he tossed on tonight —all in shots, in long island iced teas—and wonder what the blue looks like on a clear day.

Wonder, haltingly, if you'll ever find out.

He leans forward, eyes cresting. Corners turned down in some facsimile of goading, of jeer. His palm turns on the table, closer, now. The space between you is cut by the counter; a perfect partition.

He waits a beat, takes three inhale, two exhales, and then—

Hands loop around his broad waist, chipped pink shaved into almond points catching on a stain in the shade of grease-yellow.

"You comin'?" She murmurs from behind him, voice muffled.

His eyes don't waver. "Yeah."

Yours drop. A flash of gold catching in the jaundiced light.

There are bad ideas, and there is this.

(A sickness.)

On the opposite side of the Virginia Beach boardwalk is a dive bar on the fringes of obsoletion. One just barely clinging to its last vestiges of life. It is considered too far away for a younger, rowdier crowd to congregate, and too dilapidated to pull anyone who wasn't searching for one thing, and one thing only: escapism.

Numbed apathy at the bottom of cheap ale. Curated indifference in a bottle.

There is no affection in some of the older generations' tones when they speak of this place. It isn't something of their youths, or anything to feel that weepy sense of nostalgia over.

It's just a beaten-down pub in a sea of many.

Hardly anyone's first choice.

(Somewhere in the crumbling pages of Freud, you're sure, it would tell you why you decided to work here of all places, too.)

You clock into work, ready for the usual slough to pass through. Another mundane night that the chef has dubbed the usual.

The usual being: opening at five to an empty bar that stretches until eight, maybe none, when the solid sea of regulars (lifers, you've taken to calling them), will have settled in their spots. It mostly consists of twelve people—max—dispersed in the bar, some of them truckers on break or passersby, tourists, who wandered too far down the boardwalk because they didn't know any better.

It's normal. Routine.

You expected the same lour stagnancy that bleeds into everything else, dripping down in a steady trickle like the rainwater that leaks in from the cracks in the shingles your boss refuses to fix, pelting the bottom of the tin bucket perched beneath the hole until it's overflowing. Grey water trapped in a metal prison.

You've come to expect the sulphurous scent whenever you take your place behind the counter.

The most offbeat thing that happened today was your horoscope this morning said to be wary of sinkholes, a problem you haven't thought of since you were younger, and one you doubt you'd face in Virginia, of all places.

(It also said: love life? Tragic. Finances? Might improve sooner than you think. Social life? Could be better.)

Nothing unusual, really.

And then—

A flash from the corner of your eye. Two fingers jerking up once, flagging you down. The universal sign for hey, bartender, over here. You obey the command, painting an unnecessary smile on your face, one that rarely ever goes acknowledged. You turn to the man who waved you over, and—

Well.

He's massive. Different, but decidedly not out of place in a room that reeks of stale beer and lemon cleaner. He moulds to the shadows, sticking like glue to the crevasse in the corner.

Something about him prickles your skin. A break in the routine.

Your heart does this strange, off-rhythm beat when you walk up to him, taking stock of the way he barely fits on the rusted stool. His legs are too bulky, too broad, for both of them to fit together. One thigh spends nearly the entire length of the worn, flat cushion.

They are long enough that he has to bend at the knee to keep his foot flush with the floor.

But it doesn't matter. Not really. Except the strange lurch doesn't settle when it becomes apparent he isn't going to look away.

He keeps his gaze—cenote blue—fixed on you the whole time.

It's in his eyes where you find just how similar he is to some of the regulars:

Anger. Resentment. Bitterness.

A broken thing scraping the bottom of a bottle for something to abate the everpresent ache inside.

When you're close enough, he dips his chin. The thick auburn beard covering his face is rough and worn; it's unkempt, like his hair—moused, greasy—and his clothes—stained and wrinkled. He has a pock on his forehead, and a small scar. The silvery skin catches in the ugly fluorescent lighting above.

He's in a state of disarray. Chaotically unkempt, but the shadows under his eyes—tenebrism on breathing flesh—tell you, implicitly, that he does not care. A chiaroscuro in sabotage, he leaks ruin when you lean in with a tight, shaky smile.

No greeting. Just—

"Whisky. Two shots."

It's blunt. Unapologetic. A direct dismissal.

You're not his friend. You deserve no pleasantries in such a place, nor will you find any with him.

And, really—

You're used to men like him sidling up to the bar, barking out their drink of choice without so much as a hello, lovely evening for it. This is no different from anyone else who sat on that same chair, ordered the same drink, and stank of the same corrosive rot.

Nothing different at all.

Yet, he leaks octane out of every pore of his body. The rust in his gaze is a warning sign: this is a man on the verge of collapse, and one less stable than Betelgeuse.

His eyes are murky blue. Stagnant water. It's a trap, though. There's a livewire buried under the velvet surface.

Your smile wobbles. "Sure."

He's dangerous. The hisses in your head say he's everything you should run from.

(Too bad for them, no one ever taught you how.)

It becomes a routine.

He shows up at the same time each week—six on the dot—takes the stool across from the entrance, and diagonal to the washrooms, the kitchen.

He looks around the room. Then reaches for his phone.

And he looks—

Miserable.

It's none of your business. None at all. It's not even something you should be noticing—like how his knuckles are always split apart or in some state of healing. How he turns his phone off as soon as he sits down, but always takes a moment to stare at the photo on his wallpaper—a woman, his wife, smiling at the camera. Something shudders over his expression. He turns it off, and slips it in his pocket.

In that singular moment, something switches.

He waves you over. Orders a drink. Stumbles out the door when it's time for closing like all the other frequent flyers looking to chase their demons away in amber.

A man like him shouldn't be here.

Military, Pete says; he spoke to him a few days after his first arrival but adds nothing more except a shake of his head, and a softly uttered poor fucking sod, which, coming from the man who is running himself bankrupt to feed an unquenchable addiction, it pacts a degree of potency that leaves you feeling numb.

You heard him utter something back in a low tone to a man who tried to drag him back a few weeks after he first took his seat, and never left.

God ain't here, is he? He wasn't there then, and he isn't here now. Leave me alone, Buddha. Just—take care of them. Take care of the team, the boys. Just do that for me, and find this son of—

There are no answers in the bunch of his shoulders, the low hang of his head. He grinds the heel of his palm into his left eye so hard, you sometimes wonder if he's trying to shatter his socket to finally alleviate the ache inside. The other hand always curled tight around a glass, half empty. Knuckles bloodied.

And that's how he spends his evening.

Chasing relief in whisky.

Oftentimes, he's alone.

Just himself and two empty stools beside him that whine when his broad thighs tap against the cushions, rusted metal grating together, and orders the same cheap booze.

Has the same haunted look in his eyes, the same shadows. Reeks of the same rot. A wound that never heals. It's just dulled in an easy, quick swallow out of a smeared shot glass until he's too drunk to keep his eyes open.

(You suppose it's hard to be chased by ghosts when they're drenched in formaldehyde.

Or cheap perfume—)

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, he isn't.

You'd be remiss not to notice. Even chasing an easy out at the end of a bottle, it's obvious he's an attractive man. Big. Broad.

Surly.

(Your type always seems to be carrying some weight.

Maybe that's why their shoulders are always so big.)

He's unshaven—face covered in thick bristles of burnt umber that curl at the ends; some grey leaks in around his temples, his jaw. You don't think he's washed his hair in a week much less his beard, and yet—

You wonder what it would feel like on your skin—

(Bad thoughts. Bad—)

He wears several Walmart brand Henleys in rotation, all the same ones you'd get from a pack for less than twenty dollars. Maybe even less than ten. Grey, charcoal blue, midnight blue, black, white. In that order. And jeans. Ones that barely fit around his thick thighs, his wide waist.

Black shoes—trousers never tucked in—and a—

It catches in the glow. The woman beside him glances down once, recognition bleeds in the draw of her brows, and you expect anger, reproach, scorn. You tense, waiting for it. For the proverbial comeuppance men like him are supposed to get. It's how it goes in the movies, right?

He's supposed to be the smarmy type who oozes sycophantic charm, women hanging off them as they dabble in hedonism without any feelings of regret. Men like him are followed by a thundercloud. A looming storm in the distance promises a torrential downpour.

You wonder if the deluge would soak you, too.

And—

Nothing.

Instead, her hand falls to the centre of his chest, placed right against his sternum. Eyes coy, glossy. One of her lashes clings to the bottom.

"What are you doing after this?"

She's curated perfection: sultry and alluring.

You can see his glazed eyes drift down to her open blouse—the brand on the button says Michael Kors, and probably costs triple your earnings for the night—and you know, then, that he'll leave with her.

None of the women he takes home is the type you'd find in a dive bar like this, but you suppose pickings are slim in a college town that likes to gossip. They run the risk of getting caught nestled too close together in the back by Tim the Vicar, and so they come here. Where the hardened, rugged alcoholics go to escape the prying eyes of their neighbours, and coworkers.

A sea of shady, drunk people.

In the corner near the exit, a man slides a bag into the awaiting hands of a businessman. A woman sits by herself in a booth for six, and you know her husband, a pastor who has been trying to raise funds to open a new church, runs the town's chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. A man who stays until closing, drinking pint after pint on the opposite side of the stool will stand up, keys in hand, and go deliver the morning news at five AM.

The woman in Anne Klein trousers and a Michael Kors blouse who runs her nails down his cheap, stained Henley, eyes dark and full of promises for later, is someone you pass on the highway on your commute to this little cesspit outside of town.

She's always smiling brightly on a billboard next to her husband, a man running for mayor.

Maybe, you think, bringing your thumb up to your lips, teeth digging into the seam between your skin and nail as you watch them stumble out of the bar, they're a perfect match. Both drunk, both looking for cheap thrills drenched in sleaze, and—

Both wear gold bands around their ring finger.

(—to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy law, in the presence of God I make this vow—)

You're eight and treading water. Your mum brings you to the local pool, eyes covered by bulky black sunglasses that hide her expression from you.

(No one ever taught you how to swim. You wonder if she knows this, but doubt it. She doesn't really know much about you at all.)

You cling to the wet ledge, cement digging into your skin as you struggle to stay above the waves that lap at you, pooling inside of your ears. It's warbled. Distorted.

"...For another woman, can you believe it? God, he just—he makes me so fucking sick. Can't he see what he's doing to me? Pathetic, is what he is."

Your grip slips, and you plunge under the surface, knees scratching the sides. You can still hear her—a garbled tangent. Leaving us. Won't even try to make it work. How am I supposed to take care of a kid all on my own? How am I supposed to—

It's a kaleidoscope in shades of blue. The water is warm at the surface, but as you sink to the bottom, eyes catching on a pair of yellow goggles, it gets cold. A sudden chill.

No one taught you how to swim, and despite the instinct inside of you to gasp for air that isn't there, to flail, you don't. You—

Drift.

It's a baptism in chlorine.

It's both louder and quieter than anything you'd ever experienced before.

Pathetic. Stupid, selfish man. Leaving me like this with you, all for some cheap floozy—

Serene. Everything is static underwater. Your burning eyes fix themselves on the hazy yellow wavering at the bottom of the endless blue, and slowly, slowly slip shut.

You think you'd like to stay down here forever.

But you're not quite as lucky as you wish you were. Buoyancy spits you back out.

You surface gasping, gagging, coughing out the water that you'd swallowed on your quick ascent, something to fill your belly up and keep you grounded, an anchor. It didn't work. Your stomach churns with the briny water you gulped down.

Your hands claw at the side of the pool, knuckles shredding against the harsh stucco that covers the concrete ledge. It bites into your skin until it bleeds.

But you're okay. You breathe, and breathe, and—

"It's madness to think I can do it alone. And what are you doing? Stop playing around! You're causing a scene—"

Chlorine on your tongue, spuming inside of your lungs; the taste is familiar. Bitter. Acrid.

It's poison inside of you.

(A sickness.)

He forms a habit with each visit.

But he isn't the only one.

He talks to you— sometimes —and you're distinctly aware of every my bartender is my therapist joke that had ever been conceived, but it's different.

No, really. It is.

He tells you about things. He's a SEAL— former —and even cracks a facsimile of a smile when you ask if he'd have to kill you now or later for leaking such covert information. It's a dumb joke. It's not even funny, but his lips twitch beneath his thick beard, eyes crinkle.

He even huffs at you when you ask when he's going to shave it.

Maybe next year, kid.

Kid. It's what he calls you. Never your name. Nothing to make you a real, living person to him. Just a hazy object in the ethanol gossamer that clouds the blue of his eyes until he's squinting at you, and saying bring me a whisky, kid.

Impartial. Distant.

He never goes out of his way to start the conversion, or to invite you over, but he never really tells you to knock it off, leave him alone, either.

Sometimes, you say something stupid, like shouldn't you be training or something instead of giving yourself cirrhosis? and you can see him shut down. Retreat. His shoulders unfurl, spine straightened, and his eyes harden. A veil of moondust white plumes between you, dislodged when the crater forms.

A chasm resides in the echoes of camaraderie and you wish you could just eat your words or swallow your tongue.

It never lasts too long.

A visit later, two. Then, when you pluck up the courage to talk to him again, he eases into it with slurred words, and a little drunk grin twisting on his lips at the dumb (safe) things you say.

It doesn't count as a smile. You tell him this during the end of surf season. I've never seen you smile. You grin when you're drunk, but. Who doesn't?

And he says, got nothing to smile about, kid.

You hate the way your fingers itch.

He's broken pieces that are too shattered, too splintered to fit back together. Kintsugi isn't enough to seal the cracks, and you should leave him alone to his own ruinous devices. Let him rot—like all the others you ignore, content to refill their glass whenever they wander up.

But he's different.

(Or maybe you're just broken, too.

A fixer. Stupid. There is nothing in this to fix.)

You keep at it without really knowing what it is. There is no end goal. No greater purpose.

(Maybe, it's the reek of loneliness that wafts off of him. The same scent you wake up to, clinging to your pillow. The one that gnarls behind your ribs like a mouldering infestation.

Maybe, it's because out of all the men who wander in, he's the only one who looks like he's already too far gone, and you've always liked the taste of crushing disappointment.)

It becomes something. An ebb and flow.

He sits on the same stool every week while you paddle on, a soliloquy about the inanities of your life to an audience who is too big to drown himself at the end of the glass, but sometimes stares down at it like he wishes he could.

It pays off in slow, small ways.

One month in, you start a game.

It's this silly thing you play in the safe haven of your head; a way to pass the time when the seconds (minutes, hours) tick by pokily, and the stench of cheap malt makes your head swim.

You don't know why you tell him this little secret of yours—maybe, it's the way he holds his glass, clutched between bloodied knuckles, the scabs from last week ripped off and leaking ichor over the cracks in his skin.

Or how distant he feels, like he's further away than ever before. A chasm. It crackles in the air when he orders, words muted. A clicking grumble out of his throat, mouth barely opening.

It's uttered through clenched teeth, but there is no anger. No bitterness. Just—

Defeat.

So, you talk.

(Empty words. No meaning. It's what you're best at, isn't it?

Filling space.)

The door opens, and you tell him out of the corner of your mouth that the man will order a cocktail.

He barely looks up. Says nothing, but his eyes follow yours, locking on to the man who wanders up to the counter. His Hawaiian shirt sticks out like a sore thumb.

He huffs, shoulders shaking.

"A tourist," is all he says, but he waits. Watches.

It feels a bit like satisfaction when the man grins wide, and asks for whisky sour. Says he's from out of town.

You catch the way his brows bounce from the corner of your eye. The soft, golden light casts shadows in the valleys of his forehead. They carry the colour of victory, and you tuck the hue in your chest, in the locked box where everything else goes.

(Three weeks later, he joins in. Adds his own commentary to each drink order.

Social smoker, he says after a moment when you tell him he'll order something hard first—tequila, a whisky—and then mixed drinks. Vodka cranberry. Rum and coke. He doesn't usually smoke, but when the boys go outside for one, he'll join.

He orders a shot of bourbon. Bear tucks his lips behind his own glass of whisky, and you mourn the loss of seeing his smile before you have to hide your own when he comes back and asks for a tall gin and tonic.

You catch his eye when the man leaves, trailing behind a group playing poker in the corner, and it feels a little bit like satisfaction when the chasm feels less imposing than it did before.)

Two, and you get his name.

Joe Graves.

It's so normal compared to the walking travesty sitting to your right, that you almost think he's lying. Almost. But then he adds, elbow knocking on the table, a glass tucked into the palm of his other hand that somehow looks two sizes too small in his massive paw: they call me… used to call me Bear.

Bear. You hate the thrill that runs through you. The ache that splits inside your chest.

And the question that looms over the lapse. The brief silence that felt poignant and stifling between call me and the bitter amendment to used to.

Military man, you think.

You take to calling him Bear just to see the way his eyebrows tick on his forehead, brow wrinkling in rucks of five deep lines. Amusement simmers in geyser blue; an undercurrent of appeasement, as if he's been longing to hear that name again.

(You tuck that away, too.)

Four, you get a flash of teeth when he grins, brief, fleeting, at your one-sided monologue about the perfect way to pour Guinness and this Instagram page some lad made about the worst pours in London.

He tucks it behind the rim of the glass as if it's illegal, wrong. Shameful. But you catch it, anyway. You catch it because you're always looking, always watching.

"In case you haven't noticed, we're in America," is all he says when you show him some of the atrocities committed, brows knotting together in the middle.

You huff. "They're awful. Look at them."

"Huh." His eyes narrow, squinting at the picture. His mouth curls to the side. "Kinda looks like yours."

"Oh, shut up, Bear. It does not!"

His hands raise in mock surrender. "It's just… I didn't know it was supposed to go flat so fast. You learn something new, right?"

You spend the rest of the evening working on your pour, nails stinging when you chew them down to the wick as you concentrate on getting the perfect patio right. All the while, he scrolls through the page with a thick finger, leading smudges on your screen, and adding in his own commentary (usually just a huff, a harsh exhale out the nose, or a scoff) to each one.

"Look," he holds your phone up, forehead creasing in jest, and then motions to the pint you slammed down in front of him a few moments ago. "They copied your technique."

He's pretty when he smiles, you think, sundrunk and blistered, dazed from the gleam of white. The jagged ends of your nails catch on the skin of your palm when you squeeze your hands into fists by your side. Something wet, sticky, pools in your laugh line until it's a bloodied leat.

(It takes two weeks to clear the image from your head, and another to pretend you haven't tucked it somewhere inside of your chest for safekeeping.)

You prod at him just to see it again. Empty words. No meaning.

What's your star sign? You ask, tapping the screen of your phone as you read your horoscope. You think, distantly, about painting your nails. Maybe, once and for all, kicking your habit of chewing them down to jagged edges as close to the line of your skin as possible.

Anne Klein, the second woman he took home, wore her nails in blue.

No good deed goes unpunished with your moon where it's at. Love life? Abysmal. Finances? Could be worse. Social life? Sorry—what's that again?

His brows bunch together in a series of five rings. You count them all. My what?

You know. When were you born?

Give me a goddamn break.

Ahhh, I bet you're a Taurus.

Now that is covert information.

Yep, totally a Taurus.

(He cracks a small smile at that, crooked and shaky, like he forgot how it's supposed to be done.)

He falls asleep at the bar five months in. Another habit is born.

Exhaustion seeped into every pore when he wandered in a few hours ago with a wrinkled plaid half-sleeve and gingham coat.

You'd pointed out that the buttons at the bottom didn't line up when he sat, and watched as he seemed to fluster a little at that. As if the stench of rot and sleep didn't cling to him like an addiction; like he didn't have stains on his collar, or oozing scabs on his knuckles, and his biggest worry right now was his button not aligning.

He looks more put together tonight than he does any others, but the two women who approached (Friday night—the poster on the door says it's singles night) were turned down.

(A trend, lately.)

It's none of your business—you're not even a therapist, you're just the one bringing the bottle—but you soak everything up like a greedy sponge, and try to ignore the elation churning in your chest when he says, no, I'm, uh. I'm not interested.

So, you babble. You turn your head away from him so he doesn't catch the grin on your lips, and take to wiping down the counter as you fall into your normal, one-sided tangent.

You get about halfway through your vague retelling of the Incident at the coffee shop when a soft grumble reaches your ears.

You turn, fingers clenching around the nozzle of the trap—local; the hinges squeak from disuse—and—

Head dropped, chin tucked into the lapels of his wrinkled shirt. They're upturned at the ends, pressing into his cheek. His arms are folded, hands tucked under his biceps.

The only thing saving him from toppling backwards is the wall he's leaning against.

You don't realise you had been staring until cold foam sloshes over the top of the pint. You fluster, eyes darting back to him, checking to see if he'd noticed, but his eyes are still closed, his mouth slightly parted.

It's—

Cute.

He looks younger, softer when he sleeps. The weight of it all bleeding out under the heavy pressure of somnolence. Fatigue.

He's typically pitched inside the shadows, leaning back into the tenebrous of the dimly lit room behind him. This is the first time he's slumped forward fully, and with an amber glow highlighting the valleys of his face, the definition of his long, broad nose, the sloping hills of his eyes, the full pink mouth hidden behind unkempt curls that lighten to ash at the ends, you're hit with the realisation of how truly fucked you are.

He's attractive. Ruggedly handsome with his kind-shaped eyes, and his crooked grin, but distinct. There is nothing innocuous about the way he looks, and yet—

You feel assured in his presence. Calmed. He's quiet, and never speaks louder than the muted scratch of a glass bottom dragging across the tabletop. His bulk should be intimidating, but he's always sitting, hunching his shoulders in on himself as if he's clutching a grenade tight to his chest.

It feels wrong to stare at a customer so blatantly like this, but your eyes keep skirting back to him in this moment of peace.

But it's brief.

A small window where he can slip into full relaxation, hiding from the phantoms that grasp at his soft tissue during the day, raking their nails over the gummy lining of his mind until he's forced to reconcile the pain with cheap whisky in a bottle.

They find him in his dreams, too. His brow twitches. Hands jerking, fingers tensing.

You want to reach over, soothe the valley between his brow, but it's not your place. So, you leave him. You leave him, and hope that despite the restlessness, he does get something from this. Much needed rest. Sleep. Anything.

The night dwindles. Most of your time lately is spent chatting away at the stonewall of a man to your right, and with that avenue snoring, you pull your textbook from beneath the counter, and let your eyes trace over the words meant to define your forever.

His soft, rough snores fill the static between you and the rest of the bar, and you let him sleep until the sparse room thins. Until the chairs are hiked over the tables you wiped down, scouring out the stickiness that catches the ends of the cloth. Until the bottles were restacked, the glasses ran through the dishwasher.

The cook pokes his head out, and bids you goodnight. You wave him off and try to ignore the look on his face when he catches sight of Bear still slouched on the stool. He says nothing more, but he never does. Never gets involved with anything outside of the kitchen.

(A smarter man than you.)

When the clock strikes well past closing, you finally sidle up to him, reaching out over the counter to knock your knuckles on the wall over his head.

(And if you're a little too close, catching the ends of his hair on your palm, then that's your secret to keep.)

"Times up, Bear."

He jerks awake, blinking at you sluggishly, and quickly brings his hands to his chest before he's even fully cognizant. He pats himself down in a way that is too purposeful to be anything but intentional, practised.

When he's settled, when whatever he was looking for is either gone or confirmed, he sniffs, clears his throat, and drags his glossy eyes up to meet yours.

"Times what?"

"Up," you punctuate the word by raising your brows, jerking your thumb to the clock on the wall that's always three minutes too late. "It's time to head home."

His eyes squint when he takes in the time, and then groans. His hand reaches up, carting through his messy hair (soft, a little greasy at the ends), before he rubs his index finger and thumb over his forehead, dragging the skin up and down.

Your hand jerks, and you bring your thumb to your mouth, teeth catching on your nail. All you taste is malt.

"Sorry," you murmur, soft, quiet; words muffled by your finger. "I should have woken you up sooner."

"No, it's—," he stops, takes a deep breath, and then runs his hand down his face until his palm covers his mouth and chin. He blinks up at you. "When did I fall asleep?"

You shrug, dropping your hand to the pocket of your apron. "A little bit after you got here."

"Jesus…" he presses his hand into his jaw, eyes glancing toward the wall. The word is laced with a tinge of surprise. Maybe, a little uncertainty.

"You looked like you needed it."

The moment the words leave your mouth, you wince. Stupid. You could have said something else— anything else—instead of that. It was busy. You didn't even notice. It's not your job to babysit grown men with marital issues and poor decisions. It's not—

But he cracks his neck, cutting off the words wanting to disembogue, and when he turns back to you, his eyes look clear—clear blue.

"This is the longest I'd slept in—"

He doesn't finish, but he doesn't have to.

The way he stares at you itches under your skin. Abrasive. Stark. It lacks the usual glaze of alcohol-suppressed thoughts, ones numbed in malt, and you aren't sure what to make of the way his pupils dilate. Sapphire-lined black. The way his eyes widen slightly, mouth parting, as if he's only just noticing you for the first time. As if you'd always been this hazy mirage that aids in suppression, and deals out crutches in pints.

A frisson passes through the canyons in his gaze. A dawning sun cast shadows over the rolling landscape.

You don't know what to make of it, so you don't. At all.

A tight smile. "It's time for me to, um. Lock up."

He blinks, as if coming out of a stupor. Rapid clicks, shutters. He shakes his head a little, as if dislodging the colluvium from his thoughts.

"Right."

"Unless you wanted to sleep here for the night?"

It gets a soft chuckle. Three lines on his cheek. Two in his brow. Three on the corner of his eye. You map them all, each dip and valley until they're cemented in your head.

He's more open like this. Sobriety looks better on him than—

His bruised knuckles rasp over the countertop.

"Lemme walk you to your car."

You blink, heart lurching in your chest. "You don't have to."

"Yeah," he shrugs, and you think he might even try to grin but looks more like a grimace. A wince. "But I want to."

It's a dangerous escarpment; a treacherous climb up an alluvial fan. Your fingers dig into the loose sediment that rains down around you, pelting you with small grains of dirt and rock. Each hit pocks your skin: a little divot where flesh once sat, but now is karst; split and cracked with caverns that run deep. The splinters crumble that brassbound resolve you've held tight in your fingers until your joints ached, and palms split. Don't be the other woman, your mother warned you. Don't.

It'll be a crater soon, or maybe a blue hole. Aquifer polluting the bottom. Everything gone. Eroded. Swallowed whole in the sinkhole that forms.

(Beware of sinkholes. Don't be the other woman.)

You know better than anyone what they say about expectations, and yet—

"Okay."

(He takes to walking you to your car every night, hands always shoved deep in his pockets or under his arms, shoulders hunched.

You watch him stand in the parking lot until he fades from your rearview mirror.)

Seven you get a touch. His fingers ghost along the curve of your wrist, brushing your skin.

His eyes aren't kind when you turn to him, but they shine with something other than the cheap rye in his glass, the scattered shots of tequila that spill around him.

It's fixed and heavy. Unwavering.

You try to smile, to shrug it off. "It's nothing."

The lie doesn't fit between your teeth, and you think he senses this, too, but he doesn't pry. You're surprised he even went out of his way to acknowledge your lour disposition—a string of weeks that coalesced into unease, into stress. One mediocre day after the other.

Rent was late. Bills pile up. The books tucked beneath the counter, saved for slow days (read: every day), and for the eventuality of when you can finally toss this ramshackle dive bar aside for something better. Greater.

And what that something is?

Well. Who knows.

But you're supposed to, aren't you? Know, that is. Have everything figured out and ready-made to fit neatly inside the margins of forever and the rest of your life.

The rest of your life was four walls and a roof.

Stuck in Virginia Beach on minimum wage that barely got you through college (thank you, inheritance), and no prospects outside of real estate.

You think about moving but have no idea where to go. What to do.

Stagnancy. It bleeds from your marrow into your bloodstream. A poison.

You shrug when his forehead creases, brows raising as he waits for you to spit out whatever inane thing that could possibly be wrong.

"Life, I guess," you huff, aiming for distant, blasè humour but it misses the mark by a solid kilometre and a half.

"Yeah," he mumbles. He always mumbles. Words sticking together like glue. "I know that feeling."

You let it drop, nodding.

(Four walls and a roof. That's the goal, then. That's always been the goal.)

You turn to him, forcing something that might, in a distant life, have been kin to a smile.

"I bet he'll order a pint."

He takes it. "He's married, but takes his ring off. The skin on his finger is pale."

He stutters over the word married.

(Four walls, you think.)

"Huh," you huff. Foam spills from the lip of the glass, drenching your fingers in malt. "My dad always kept his on."

From the corner of your eye, you see his hand tighten around the pint. His ring makes a small noise when it hits the glass.

Eight, a laugh. A low, rasping chuckle still wet from the swallow of rye he'd taken before you said something stupid like what's a man like you doing in a place like this, anyway?

It's drenched in bitter disbelief as if he isn't quite sure how you don't know. How you can't see that he fits between the waterlogged panels of the wooden floor, stained with grime and dyed with ethanol in patches around the tap. The pock marks in the counter, rubbed raw and scrubbed down to the cheap wood beneath, now jaundiced and discoloured from age. Or how he leaks the same desolate miasma of resignation, rage, and apathy as everyone else.

He belongs, his derisive laugh says. Why don't you see it, too?

It startles him, and you can see it happening as he takes in the neat, blunt cut of your eyes as you gaze at him, naked and honest.

He retreats into himself as if allowing anyone to see him plain-faced and worthy is wrong. As if he is no different to the men who wobble in their chairs, eyes rimmed red and glazed as they run from the demons in their minds, and their lives, and seek salvation at the bottom of the bottle. The ones entirely aware, and unaware, that the bottle is elk, kin, the things they flee from. A juxtaposition in a man-made disaster.

He pretends he fits in with them. You pretend you see it, too, if only so he doesn't run away.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

You count down the days until he shows up, and hate yourself a little bit more for the happiness that gnarls inside your chest each time you see him appear in the doorway.

(A sickness.)

Nine brings a man from the church in town, someone from his past. And everything quickly unravels after that.

He shows up before opening, carrying a stack of papers for some big event in the summer. An opening. A new church, he says, and jogs the stack on the counter.

(You hide a smile, tucking it into your shoulder as discomfort bleeds into the placidity of his expression when some of the pages stick.)

He looks like every priest, every vicar, you'd ever seen before. Draped in black with a stark white collar; clean-shaven, and void of shadows.

This isn't a place he should be. A place he belongs. He stands out amongst the grit, the hazy gossamer of smuggled cigarettes lit in the dingy washroom, and leaking nicotine yellow into the faded wood of the walls. The chipped, pocked tables, were picked at and worn down to soot-stained white.

He doesn't belong, but he stays, anyway. In spite of the massive chasm that split between him and everyone, everything else, he sticks it out.

And sticks out.

Bear falters when he sees him, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his coat when he wanders inside. His shoulders draw up to his chin, arms straight lines against his body.

He looks like he might run. Flee. You almost expect him to.

He doesn't.

He says nothing when takes his usual spot, but his eyes are thunderclouds, brow drawn taut. A rubber band being stretched too far.

(God ain't here, is he, Buddha?)

The priest doesn't notice the discomfiture that passes over Bear's expression, or the wan, agitated way he glares at the red stain (nail polish, you think) on the counter. He grins wide, happy, and tells you about the church they built. One raised from the funds of the community.

"...And we're, of course, happy to accept new members to our congregation when it opens."

You nod, dragging your gaze away from the calamity in blue, offering little more than a smile in return.

"I don't," you hesitate, hands smoothing over the front of your worn apron. Going to church reminds you too much of baptism. Of water. Of sinking below the waves in a world of blue, and never surfacing again. Of—

Patronisation.

You'd been to church three times in your life: to watch your mother remarry (twice), and to say goodbye to your father.

(None of them were happy memories.)

"I don't go to church much."

He smiles, placidly, eyes warm and welcoming. "Never too late to start."

You guess they have an answer ready for everything. He might have been a great salesman in a different life.

You don't want to commit, or lie—least of all to a man of faith—so, you talk. Fill space.

"Want a drink?"

His brows buoy in surprise. You wonder if anyone has ever offered a priest a pint before.

"No, I, uh—"

He's cut off by a gruff bark, a low husk of laughter. "Don't think they drink much, kid."

You blink, chin jerking toward Bear. "Oh, no?"

The priest offers an indulgent smile when you catch his eye. "Well, it's not outright forbidden but we tend to stay away from vices."

"Is it a sin?"

"No, it's not. Too much is a crutch, but all sins can be forgiven."

He opens his mouth like he's going to say more, but a low scoff from Bear cuts him off once again.

The sound draws you back to him. Sober, still. He's only just arrived, and hasn't even ordered a drink yet, and the shadows are vibrant in his geyser gaze. The moussed hair, slightly greasy and bedraggled; the stains on his shirt that stretched taut over his broad shoulders, creasing between his pecs. The wrinkles in his forehead, the condescending lilt to his grin, left cheek pulled up in a facsimile of a smile.

You've never seen him like this before. His thumb swipes across the tip of his nose as he settles on the too-small stool, eyes burning. Darkening.

"That's not true, is it, Father?" He sniffs, hands dropping as he leans forward. Even sitting he's still so—

Massive. Intimidating.

The priest looks slightly perturbed, but recognition bleeds in the cut of his brow. You wonder how many times people refute him when he preaches his sermons.

"Ah," he says, shaking his head. There is sadness in his smile when he forces it. "It is true. All sins can be forgiven by God."

"All of them?" Bear questions, unkind, biting. His fingers spread over the counter, knuckles covered with deep indigo scabs sealed in congealed blood.

"All have sinned, and all their futile attempts to reach God in His glory fail. Yet they are now saved and set right by His free gift of grace through the redemption available only in Jesus the Anointed."

Bear is quiet for a moment, eyes downcast. Then: "Romans: chapter three, verse twenty-two to twenty-five."

"You know your verses."

When his head lifts, there is an aching sense of clarity in gyre blue. His is brassy, hushed, when he speaks. "All of them."

"Then you know that forgiveness is—"

"Isaiah chapter sixty-four, verse six."

The priest falters momentarily, eyes swinging like a pendulum between Bear, and the bloodied knuckles he leaves on display. His eyes flash again, but adds: "Psalm chapter one hundred and thirty, verse three to five."

A flash of teeth beneath curled, wry burnt umber. He leans forward, forearms resting on the sticky surface. There is a storm in his gaze. Clouded blue. He spits the verse out like a curse. "Matthew chapter six, verse fourteen to fifteen."

It feels like being pitched in the middle of a movie. There is a thin vein of cognisance: you understand the characters, and the current tension, but everything else is murky. Unknown. You don't know what the meaning behind the verses bouncing between each other is, but there's a struggle. Bear is angry. The pastor is—

Sad.

You don't understand. Never will, maybe, but you quietly duck your head, wiping down pint glasses as if you weren't watching a husk of a man spit out bible verses at a priest.

"Hopefully, you remember this verse one day," he says, eyes only for Bear, and achingly sad. "Ephesians chapter four, verse thirty-two."

Bear says nothing more. He falls silent, glaring at the patchwork of stains smeared over the counter. Defeat, maybe. A battle lost. A stalemate. You don't know the meaning of the words—verses and chapters, and sin—but it makes Bear sullen, angry. Nearly apoplectic. His shoulders shake when he clenches his fist, squeezing hard enough to crack the scab on his middle finger until it lifts from his wound, and bleeds.

The priest slides two flyers out—one for you, one for Bear—and flashes one last parting glance at him before he leaves.

You tuck the flyer into your pocket.

You don't know what he does with his, but it's gone when you come back from kitchens.

Bear says nothing for the rest of the evening. His jaw clenches, eyes dip.

He orders a shot of tequila but doesn't finish it.

He's quiet when he walks you to your car. Declines your offer for a ride with a tight smile that's a touch too wobbly around the edges, like a bad secret or a sour taste in his mouth.

You wonder why he even stayed at all.

(You toss the flyer into your glovebox, and can't stop thinking about what might have happened to make him this way as you watch him fade from your rearview mirror.)

When you go home, you try to remember the verses they spat at each other, but only one sticks:

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

You hand him a box of chocolates for the holidays and watch as he blinks down at the shoddily wrapped gift.

"What's this?"

You huff. It's not wrapped terribly. You spent nearly two hours before your shift making sure the edges looked professional and neat (a clean line, the lady on the YouTube video said, shows care, and dedication), and—

Stupid, of course.

But you never said you weren't, and you're only just passing through your college classes, so. It's all particularly on brand, you think. Very you. Very—

Messy. Dumb. Stupid.

"Something for a friend," you say, and then wince. A friend. How juvenile.

You watch his throat bob, trepidation etching into your joints when he swallows, eyes creasing at the corners. His voice is gritty, sandpaper rough when he speaks: "is that what we are?"

It's not relief that floods you, but it's something. His tone is hedging. Cautious, as if he's never even uttered the word in years, and now he's faced with someone who spent thirty minutes comparing clichè Holiday designs sketched into glossy paper, and another twenty trying to decide which bow matched better.

All for a dumb box of chocolates.

The most expensive box, of course, but still very dumb. Who gives someone who routinely tries to drown themselves in amber chocolate?

(Or anything at all for that matter.)

You swallow thickly and shake your head with something that might be a grin. Maybe. Sort of.

You just—

Fill space.

"Nah, we're best friends. Thought about getting us matching necklaces, and everything to really complete the look, you know—;" the morose expression falters, eases into something that almost feels like contentment. Peace. His lips quirk, and the sight of his crooked smile makes your chest flutter. Stupid. Stupid.

"But I didn't because I wasn't about to fight a behemoth—;" this makes his brows bounce up, mouth twitching as he fights, fights, off a smile, and you feel your heart take flight, soaring through the aether. "—For Best and then have to tell everyone I lost my first fight, ever, over some cheap sterling silver. So, I guess we'll just have to get, like, matching tattoos, or whatever…"

His brows raise again—in stupefaction, bemusement, exasperation; all of the above—and he shakes his head, huffing.

"You talk a lot."

You fight a wince, and cover it up with a shrug. It doesn't hurt. You hear it all the time. Just grin. Bear it.

"Someones gotta do it or we'll be sitting in awkward silence all night."

"It's a comfortable silence."

Comfortable. He thinks it's comfortable.

Your fingers prickle. You run your index finger over the jagged line of your thumbnail, and try to resist the urge to bite it down to nothing.

"Is that what it is?"

"It would be, but you keep talking."

"File a complaint."

His brows raise, lips curling. "Alright."

You huff, then, mocking and dry, but you wear your heart on your sleeves, and the smile that twitches on your lips gives you away.

It's silly. Dumb. You feel like an idiot when you reach for the tip jar, a cardboard box with a slit cut at the top, patched up over the years with duct tape, and drag it closer.

He watches you, making a small noise of question in the back of his throat when you paw around for the marker behind the counter, but you don't answer. Can't, or you'll give your grand idea away.

You make a small noise of satisfaction when you find it. You wave it around once before bringing it to your mouth, and sink your teeth into the plastic cap, holding it steady.

His hand jerks. "What are you—"

You pull the marker from the cap, and hold the box steady, eyes lifting to catch his gaze. Something simmers in those ocean blues, pools of glossy cerulean, and you might almost call it amusement if he was anyone else, and you weren't you, but it's soft. Curious.

Your chin drops, smile turning wobbly around the cap still caught between your lips, and you bring the felt tip of the marker to the box. You cross out TIPS and write: file a complaint - only $5.

You take a moment to admire your work before you turn it toward him with a grin.

His eyes drop from yours to the box, and you see his mouth spasm in something that feels too genuine to be anything other than your first real smile.

A flash of teeth. Lines in his cheeks. Your heart thuds, palms grow damp.

"Got it all figured out, do you?"

"Aside from who gets Best or if we get matching tattoos, yes."

"I'm not getting a tattoo." He leans over the counter, brows creasing as he stares at you in mock severity. "But I will fight you for Best. And win."

Another skip. Deeper into the whole. "I thought so."

He grabs the box from your hands, and scribbles talks too much on a napkin before shoving it, and a crumbled five-dollar bill, into the slot.

"C'mon, I'll walk you to your car. Get you outta here so you can see your family."

You hide a grin behind your hand. "What family? But I guess yours is missing you, too."

He shoves his arms inside the sleeves of his wool jacket, gaze dropping to the worn counter.

"What family?"

It's sombre. Mood broken, yet again, by your inability to shut up.

You don't know how to salvage the pieces. The fractured remains of what might have been a good time.

But it's just—

Bear.

(And you.)

Best friends. A silly little notion he entertained when he could have told you to sod off ages ago.

You nudge his side, and have to remind yourself to pull away from him. That this is just casual. Best friends but not really. Not even close. "Hungry? I know a place that's always open and makes the best burgers."

He flashes a facsimile of a smile, wan and thin around the edges. "You should head home, kid. Not much for company tonight."

"Suit yourself," you murmur, slipping your hands into your pockets. You shuffle, rocking back on your heels. The silence is stifling. You wonder what part of this he finds comfortable. It lapses, and you

Fill it.

"I think you're pretty great company, for what it's worth."

He says nothing.

It's as close to outright rejection as you can bear.

You press your hands into the seam of your pocket, pulling your jacket open. "Well, happy holidays, and all—"

"Best burgers in town, huh?"

A smile creeps across your face, heart thudding in your chest. It sounds like the distant roar of the ocean, the waves crashing on the shore.

"Yep," you pop the p and wriggle your brows. "Their secret menu item is the peanut butter bacon burger, and—"

"Peanut butter and bacon?" He says it like it's a crime. Like you've committed an act of treason, and spat in his face.

Your grin widens. "It's disgustingly good."

"Disgusting, huh."

"No, no—it's salty, sweet, and savoury. It's the best combination ever made. And the sweet potato fries with Chipotle mayo? Heaven sent."

"And you've lost me."

"Did I ever even have you to begin with, or—"

The words cut a little too close to the truth, to vulnerability, and you feel heat pool under your cheeks. Embarrassment over your unintended slip-up. Your stupidity. Your inability to accept what you've been given, and stop trying to overcompensate for more, more, more—

Stop acting up; you're causing a scene!

He steps closer, hand reaching out behind you to push the old iron door open.

There is something in his gaze you can't decipher. The shadows on his brow make you think of craters, and mountains made of lunar rock.

"Yeah, you do," he rasps, words starchy and thick in his throat, but all you can hear is you do, you do, you do. "I need to try this disgusting burger of yours."

"Disgustingly good," you snipe back, if only because it's easier to fall into some facsimile of a rhythm where you always, always get the last word than it is to let the silence simmer.

(To give him a chance to see the way your hand shakes around your key, or the way you have to ask him what he said—twice—because you can't hear anything over the roaring in your ears when he fits inside your car like he belongs.)

Disgustingly good burgers with friends.

(You pat yourself on the back for only managing to get into two accidents on the way, prompting a want me to drive from him, which immediately gets turned down; but you get to the burger shack safe and sound and watch the look on his face when he bites into a peanut butter bacon burger and sweet potato fries with Chipotle mayo like it's the best meal he's ever had in months, and—

And it's enough.)

You nudge him later when you drop him off at some dingy motel by the highway, well away from the city limits but so achingly close to the bar, and say: happy holidays, Bear.

He offers something that feels like a smile. In lieu, you think. A smile in lieu. Not quite there, but almost. Almost.

"Yeah, still think I'm pretty great company? "

"The best."

He says nothing when he gets out of the car, leftovers tucked under his arm, but he pauses before he shuts the door, and turns to you, eyes cerulean in the pale light of the morning gloam.

"Get home safe, kid."

You almost say you, too.

Instead, you bite your tongue so hard it bleeds.

He wanders in looking like he was ripped from the pages of Surfer Magazine. Dirty blond hair perpetually curled from the sea salt, and bleached at the ends from the iodine in the water. He has the cut of a man who looks like he'd feel more comfortable in a wetsuit than the jeans and stark white t-shirt he struts in wearing.

Your first thought is: surfer idiot.

The second is: Surfer Dude will order a shot of tequila. Blanco.

You lean over and whisper this to Bear, who dutifully offers an indulgent quirk of his lips, before turning to catch sight of the man you'd pointed out. Targeted, he told you. You're targeting them, kid.

When he does, you think of something funny to say but the words die on your tongue when Bear tenses, and goes completely silent. Stonewalled.

The man wanders up with a wide grin, all teeth and bleached sand. Nonchalant. Easy.

It's only when his eyes skirt to Bear, do you see the undercurrent of tension in his brow, resignation in the knuckles of his joints.

They know each other. There is a history in the way they sit apart—Bear, on the lonely barstool to your right, and Surfer standing beside the one in front of you. Cut off by an angle. By you.

You think about the man that tried before him—Buddha, the almost fight in the parking lot—and wonder how much success Surfer will have.

"Thought I'd find you here, man." He nods, shaggy curls bouncing over his shoulders. He turns to you, flashes a smile, and orders a shot of tequila.

You don't miss the way his eyes trail over you—your tight v-neck, the apron tied tight around your waist. The mascara and lipgloss you started putting on a week after it became clear Bear was a regular, the one you spent a considerable chunk of your paycheque on when the saleslady said it really made your eyes pop.

You wonder what he thinks, what he sees, when he drinks you in.

He. The man in your head with broad shoulders, brown hair. Bluest eyes you'd ever seen.

The thought makes heat pools under your cheeks, vermillion scorching through your flesh.

No. Him. Surfer. Of course. Not—

Not Bear.

(Stupid. Stupid.)

"Keeping some pretty nice company, too, I see," he leans over, forearm resting on the countertop, and flashes another toothy grin. "Got a name or do they just call you pretty thing?"

"I don't know, Pretty Boy," you snap back, brows raising.

"Pretty Boy, huh?" He cuts you off, gaze skirts to Bear. A smirk pulls on the corner of his mouth. "Hear that, Bear? Pretty Boy."

"Knock it off, Caulder."

Pretty Boy—Caulder—raises his hands in mock surrender. "I'm just chatting with a nice lady who thinks I'm a Pretty Boy—"

You turn away from him, shaking your head. "Not that pretty—"

"You already said I was, so," he shrugs, eyes crinkling around the corners. "No takebacks."

"We'll see."

"What do they call you, then?"

"What do you think they call me?"

"Let me see," he stands, hands curling over the ledge of the counter as he leans back, eyes playfully drinking you in. They linger on your chest, lip caught between white teeth. "Hmm…"

"Looking for a name tag?"

"No," he smirks, pulling himself forward until his torso is hunched over the sticky table. His eyes skirt down your body before flickering up, catching your gaze once more. "Just admiring the view."

He's attractive. Boyishly cute and—begrudgingly, you have to admit—charming with his big eyes, his sleepy grins, and the wry ashen curls slicked back by his goggles.

White teeth catch in the golden light, framed in half hearts of sun-dusted pink, and you find yourself mimicking the grin, softening under the bright gleam aimed at you. He's someone easy to get swept away with.

"There isn't much to admire," you murmur, brushing loose strands of hair off your shoulder. Your chin drops, unable to hold the stormy grey gaze fixed on you. Hiding.

"Oh, there is plenty to admire," he refutes, pulling his bottom lip into the seam between his teeth. He bends down, elbow dropping to the counter, and cups his cheek in the palm of his hand. "Plenty more underneath that, ahh—cute," his ashen brows raise teasingly when he stresses the word, buoying on his sunkissed forehead: "apron."

His eyes are dark, smouldering. Flirtatious.

"Right…"

Before you can say anything more, the clang of glass knocking against wood cuts you off.

The noise makes you jump, gaze darting to Bear.

He matches your stare, holds it for a second, but whatever lurks in glazed blue is hidden from you. Dulled in malt, and shrouded in shadows that leak from the crevasses.

Bear clears his throat again, drags his gaze to the man leaning on the counter.

"What are you doing here, Caulder?"

You can't place his tone, but there's a crackle in his voice. Laced with iciness; the same shade of glacial blue as his eyes.

Pretty Boy acknowledges the coldness, the simmering anger, in his tone with a crooked grin. A flash of white teeth behind tawny bristles.

He doesn't seem like the shy type—the ones who sit close to the tap, but not too close. Enough to watch you, enjoy the view, the company you offer, and (maybe) slot themselves in your line of view in the hopes that you notice them, too. That, maybe, you approach first.

He wandered up, tousled, bleached hair bobbing with his effortless, confident gait, goggles tucked behind his ears, and keeping his fringe from falling in his eyes. Everything about him screams an abundance of effortless self-confidence.

If he wanted to flirt with you, then he'd do it.

He would fully commit regardless of who was present, and maybe, he'd prefer if more people were around to see him succeed.

This isn't meant to pick you up—that might just be a convenient bonus should you show any interest in his ploy. You know this from the way he keeps glancing at Bear from the corner of his eye; clouded slate swinging like a pendulum from you—where he levels a series of weak pickup lines, and smarmy charm—and then immediately to the man sitting diagonally to where he stands.

He's gauging his reaction.

They know each other. This much is obvious from the greeting alone, but there is a tenuous history here, made evident by the tension, the palpable unease in the man's shoulders, and the way he gazes at Bear—warily, unsure. Testing the waters before making the jump.

"Besides trying to spend the night with a pretty bartender?"

He turns to you with a wink, a cheeky little grin on his lips, and then—he hesitates. There is a moment where he ducks his chin, expression clouding over with something stagnant, subdued. It lacks the playfulness of before. Sombreness taking shape, only briefly, before he tugs it back up like a mask. Fixes it back in place with the same palpable ease from before; the same slightly condescending jocose.

"Lookin' for you, man."

He slides his forearms across the counter, making a face when his skin catches on something sticky, but it's gone. Fleeting. He straightens up, brow knotting together in something that might be anticipation but the lines in his eyes read more like grit, and determination.

You move away from their end of the counter, giving them a modicum of privacy but that's meaningless when you can still hear their hushed conversation on the opposite side of the bar, where you pretend to busy yourself with repolishing clean glasses while they exchange awkward stilted greetings.

How…how have you been, man?

Why are you here Caulder?

Guess no one taught you the art of Socialisation, eh, Bear?

You can only infer meaning from their tones, their crackled demeanour around the other. Something runs deep between them—a noxious mix of bad blood, brotherhood, grudges, and familial concern—but you're no one to either of them, and privy to even less.

You pretend you can't hear them speak (Fish Bait is askin' for ya. You said you wouldn't leave him behind, but what is this? I mean, shit, man, you can't waste away in a damned shithole while we—), or that your guts aren't churning with concern, with worry, over the taut pull in Bear's shoulders, the wrinkles in his forehead, the gyre in his gaze. A storm looms.

But it has nothing to do with you.

So, you feign ignorance. You duck beneath the counter, and organise the glasses, straighten up the bottles, gather the thick layer of dust along the shelves on the tip of your finger.

It's wiped on your cute apron when you stand, and then reach for a cloth to wipe down the grimy countertop (I failed my exam. Head trauma. Brain injury. I can't—I mean, fuck, Bear. I can't go back. I can't. But you? What are you doin', bro? Why are you moping around here, gettin' a damned beer belly when you have men counting on you? When you can go back—).

You pour drinks (Buddha is running the team. They don't need me, you all made that clear enough—). Take tips (you told me you needed me, Bear; so, this is me telling you that we need you). You tell a stray tourist where to find the infamous seafood restaurant (I lost everything, Caulder. I can't go back—). You refill the bottles (you're not Rip, man. You need to let go of him. It's been two years. Two years. She'd want you to move on—)

"I don't know what she'd want because she's dead. She's—"

You flinch when Bear raises his voice, when it carries over to you, furious and aching, and full of rot.

"I can't bury it, Caulder. I can't—"

Working in a sleazy pub on the opposite end of a boardwalk usually brings in men like him—the ones who lean over the tacky countertop, and try their luck with glib lines meant to be suasive. Charming. It's nothing you are not used to by now, but there is a degree of difference in his mien, an insincerity that etches deep. His intrigue is surface level.

Years of watching misery unfold in orders for cheap shots and pint glasses have taught you many things. The most notable being, of course, how to measure someone. Pick apart their reaction, their tone.

How to target them.

And so, when Pretty Boy leans over the counter again after raising his hands in defeat, in surrender, to Bear, and wanders over to you, a wry grin twisting on the corner of his lips, you brace yourself for the inevitable, and—

"You and Bear, huh?"

And it's not what you expect.

"Me…and….?"

He jerks his chin toward the steaming behemoth in the shadows, gulping down whisky like it's water, eyes locked, firm and dark, on the two of you. You fight a shiver, fingers trembling around the hose.

She's gone. Dead.

All this time—

You thought he was just like your father. Just like the man who patted you awkwardly on the head on the rare occasion he was ever home, and said: I'll teach you how to swim when I get back, okay?

And then walked away. Walked out of your life, and—

"Um. He's… a customer. A friend." You wince, shoulders jerking. Juvenile. Stupid.

"A friend," he says the word like he doesn't believe you, and you get it.

You get it because why would he, anyway? Some strange bartender on the wrong side of town who claims to be his friend, and he's supposed to just accept it? It's laughable, considering.

The stupid tip box in the corner—now, formally known as the complaint box, an impromptu decision that has added an extra fifteen dollars to your nightly sum—catches your eye, and you think of friendship necklaces, and fights in the alley. Of burgers in your stupid car that made noises when you put it in reverse (ones that made his brows raise, his eyes—lidded and bright from booze—slide over to you as if to ask is this safe?), and smelled strongly of that dumb Michael Kors perfume you bought—a bottle you'd spent way too much money on because he leaned into the girl next to him when she sat down, glossy in Anne Klein, and mature, and a lawyer, and better, and said you smell good.

(He went home with her that night and you spent nearly three hundred on perfume he hadn't even noticed.)

It makes you think of the itch in your palm when he offered to check under the hood because he was good at fixing things, and softly, then even better at breaking them, as if he hadn't meant for you to hear it.

"Yeah," you say, firm, then, because you are friends. Or, you're something. But nothing doesn't wait until the very end of your shift, or walk you to your car, or eat burgers with you on Christmas when he should be with his wife, his family, or laugh (a little, barely. Kind of) at your dumb jokes. Or—

Or anything. Any of what he does.

It's something. A crutch, maybe. A kinship with the person serving him booze each time he comes until he stumbles outside, and then wanders off somewhere. A motel, maybe. Home, possibly.

And whatever it is, you cling to it. Hold it so tight in your grasp, your knuckles turn white from the strain, and tuck it into the folds of your heart for safekeeping.

"Huh," he gives you a look that's different from the one before it. Cautious, guarded, but—

Hopeful, maybe. Or—

Angry.

His eyes are stormy grey when he leans in, lips peeled back in a thin grin. "Bear needs that, but he won't let anyone else get close to him. Not right now. And we get it. We do, but," the geniality in his expression fades, tightens into something a bit more severe. "But he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend."

It punches the air from your lungs the same way the confession before did—dead, gone—and you try to stutter something into your lungs before you black out from the gnarled roots of hypoxia clotting inside your head, but all you taste is chlorine and sulphur.

You don't understand what he's saying. There is history and meaning behind his words that you can't ascertain, can't ever know; a dearth of Bear compared to a disembogue. Everything you don't know stacks up higher than the things you do, and it's a bold, blunt dressing down of your choices, failures. Inactions.

It's dumb. No one blames the bartender for feeding an addict, and yet—

It's different. Different because you made it that way. You call him your friend to a man who has known him longer than you have, and yet, you'll go back and pour him a drink if he asks.

A friend. How absurd.

"Look, I don't know what you want from me—"

He shoves his hand in his pocket, and then lifts it up. It's tucked out of sight from Bear—who hasn't looked away once since Pretty Boy wandered up to you, all blond hair, smiles, and blue eyes—and it makes your throat hurt.

A folded hundred dollar bill sits in the seam of his closed index and ring finger, one of the zeros clenched between his first knuckle.

His smile is tight, eyes full of ghosts and shadows that look achingly familiar in jasper. "He's a… he's a good man. Been through a lot. Doesn't need this right now, you know?"

"What… are you trying to bribe me?"

It's hidden from view. Strategically placed.

"Just. You know. Maybe, cut him off or something." His hand twitches, the cash waving in front of you.

"Yeah." You murmur, words quiet. Hushed. You don't take the bill.

His jaw clenches. "We need to straighten him up. Can't do that with him here all the time. He needs—"

His tongue pokes through the seam of his cheek when he turns, glancing at Bear. Something in his expression tightens. Worry, concern.

"Send him home, alright?"

You make no move to accept the proffered bill, and it's not due to any sense of pride, or anything like that. You're too numbed to move.

He gives you another look—one that is just as pitying as it is reproachful—and then shoves the folded bill into the box (file a complaint—only $5).

You feel the weight of it in your stomach like a whisky sour.

(Stupid, stupid—)

She's dead, you think, swallowing hard.

Months ago, you'd said, does your wife know you spend all evening with me?

And he'd said—

No. She doesn't.

(Can't bury it, can't—)

"You, and uh…," he motions vaguely toward the door, eyes sharp. Steel lines in brackish water. "You and Caulder seem close."

You think of the cash stuffed in the tip jar. A hundred dollars to send him back.

"Yeah." You murmur, glancing down at the dirty tiles under the ledge of the cupboard. The ones you always forget to mop. "Kinda, I guess. He's—;" you'd know that, though, as his friend. "Nice. Um…"

He says nothing more, just nods his head a few times too many to be natural. To be anything but perturbed, irritated. You don't know why—maybe, he doesn't want you meddling in his affairs, in his personal life.

But—

I will fight you for Best. And win.

You don't know what to think about any of this anymore. A man who tries to drown himself at the bottom of bottles as if the answer is in forty-proof, and still wears his wedding ring but leaves, sometimes, with women who aren't her. Who stares at the screen of his phone in something that tastes so bitterly like regret and anger and helplessness, and then turns it off. Tucks it out of sight. Waves you down.

(Who, despite the hints and the signals and the blatant way you regard him, has never, not once, taken you up on any of the subtle offers you aimed at him.)

Right. Okay.

"You alright?"

You shrug, pull away when he reaches out. "Yeah. Good."

He makes a noise, soft, questioning. A grumble from his chest. He makes a move to stand up, grounding out: "he say anything to you?"

"No," you shake your head. "Nothing."

Bear slumps back in his chair, knuckles turning white. The milky bones poking through his bruised skin makes you think of that verse the priest alluded to before he left.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

You've never seen his hands healed, his eyes clear.

(No one blames the bartender, but they could a friend.)

"Oh, um. Bear?"

"Hmm?"

"You don't… you don't have to wait for me tonight."

"Okay," he knocks his split knuckles against the wood, smiling tight. "Okay. If that's what you want."

What you want is unattainable.

You mimic his taut smile. "Okay."

Ten, you realise that you've come to expect him nestled in the ramshackle ruins of your life. That he fits somewhere inside of these particular four walls and roof in a way that makes you ache.

You've had attractions before. Crushes. But this edges into strange, unfamiliar territory.

Your heart does weird things when he's around sometimes, but even curious things when he's not.

(Or, when he's leaving, and he isn't alone.)

You go to bite your nails but find broken stumps instead. The plate chewed down to nothing.

The nail on your ring finger bleeds.

You think of his busted knuckles, and wonder if this, too, is a crutch.

(Later, you look up how to stop chewing your nails. All of the results tell you to rub salt on them, or buy bitter nail polish, but you can't remember a time when you didn't taste the acrid burn of iodine or chlorine on your tongue already.)

Send him home, but don't—don't let him destroy himself like this.

So. You call it.

You hand him water, and watch as something that tasted of disappointment, resignation, flashes through hazy cobalt.

Before, you used to wonder where he went from here. A weekend spent in the clutch of another woman, in the throes of cheap beer and liquor, and then what? Home? His wife—pretty and lovely and doting—waiting for him at the door, greeting him after his extended business trip? Maybe a face peering out from between her legs, unsure of the man they're supposed to call dad who is rarely ever home, and on the off-chance that he is, reeks of malt and barley.

It always cut too close to home. Their house becomes the same shade as your own. The faceless figure lingering on the periphery takes your shape. Your mum in the doorway, arms crossed and eyes rimmed red from the tears that haven't stopped steaming down her raw, chafed cheeks since you were seven, and realised that the man who sometimes stopped by to visit was supposed to be your father.

You think of that little, faceless person, and then of yourself. Selfish. Detestable. Everything you said you wouldn't be, and yet—

You cut him off, watch him stumble out the door with a woman who isn't his wife. Watch him take a little piece of you with him.

Bear doesn't show.

Week one, two, three.

It doesn't matter, not really. He's just a customer who reeks of malt and bad choices, who has bags under his eyes, and wrinkles on his forehead. Who drowns himself in the corner each night as he tries to fight off the demons he keeps provoking.

Who's hands are always scabbed, torn. Like he spends his time punching the concrete, or ivory jaws just to feel something outside of his own anger.

He's a man on the verge of implosion.

Betelgeuse; a red giant.

Stay away from the man who stinks of nitroglycerin, and sparks a match too close to his dynamite-soaked skin.

You try to take his own advice—bury it—but you can't bury anything in muskeg.

You think of the man who had peanut stained on his beard when you finally convinced him to take a damned bite of his burger. Who told you he used to go to church every day when you asked him how he knew so much about bible verses, but he couldn't face his God right now with all this malice in his heart.

Who confessed that he didn't actually mind pop music when his teammate— Buck —used to play it on the compound just to piss them off, and added some of the songs to the playlist he made.

I'm not a dinosaur, he huffed when you asked if he still used Windows Media Player to listen to his songs. I use YouTube.

He gave you a taut smile, like he'd won something in that, and you tried to pretend you didn't want to kiss him senseless while Johnny Cash played in the background of the pub.

He hates tomatoes but doesn't mind ketchup. Likes, even, tomato soup. Used to run track in high school, and knew when he was seventeen that he was going to get married the moment he turned eighteen, have four kids and join the SEALs. He doesn't tell you how many of those came true.

He confessed to eating a whole box of pop tarts in one sitting when he came home from a mission. Can easily demolish half a pizza to himself, and actually enjoys the Bachelor whenever the girls would get together and watch it at his house.

He used to think about the men he lost every day, but now he doesn't. Not after Buck. He can't because then he'll never stop, and he won't be able to bring the men behind him home. Wouldn't, he amends it after a moment of silence. Wouldn't be able to bring them home.

Doesn't regret anything he never did. He says this with shadows in his eyes, and the ghost of something bitter in his tone. An old ache. An old wound.

He's funny—awkward, halting, as it is—and charming. Wandering this precarious line between severe, intimidating, and— dorky. Kind of. Under the glaze of alcohol, and when he smiled wide, full teeth, and his cheeks wrinkles. Or when you said something stupid, he'd tip his chin down, forehead creasing as he stared at you in mocking disapproval.

He's distant, standoffish; gruff and surly, and stubborn, too much of the All-American Dream wrapped up in machismo and vulnerability disguised as hyper-aggression but it fades into nothing when he laughs, and his throat clicks, wet and sticky. Almost a snort but not really.

Nuanced. Multifaceted.

You told him he was interesting once and there was pink on his cheeks, and a wry twist to his lips when he'd brought the bottle up to his mouth, hiding the soft snort that slipped past.

("You need to get out more if you think I'm interesting."

"I get out plenty."

"That so? With who? I'll call up my friends in NCIS and see if they have anything on them—"

"You're overprotective, too."

"Only to the ones I care about."

"And sweet."

"I'm not sweet."

"The sweetest."

"I'm not—")

The glimpse you've gotten is a small stream that bleeds into a river. One dammed by circumstances, and tragedy, and you want to cross it so badly that your fingers ache with the urge to pick at the logs that hide it from you.

You want to know what he looks like when he is loose and relaxed around family and friends. When he cheers for his dumb football team, and stumbles home late at night after hazing a new recruit into drinking beer from a bong, and carrying around a blowup doll ("it's tradition," is all he said when you blinked at him. "It's sacred;"). You want to know what he sounds like when he's trying to be funny without feeling the pinch of talons, grief and anger and resentment, digging into his flesh. Or what he sounds like completely sober.

You want to listen to Johnny Cash (gotta show you the good stuff, kid. The classics) in his truck, hold his stupid hand, and kiss him whenever you want because it's something you're allowed to do, something that isn't stuck in the confines of your yearning. You want him. Want all of him.

Want. Want. Want.

It's—

An infestation of rot, and idealism. You're making him into something he isn't, and thinking too much about what he's not.

But the bar feels emptier when he isn't here. The walks to the car are lonelier when you're by yourself at nearly four in the morning with nothing but the steady swell of the ocean, and your yearning to fill the barren silence that crushes you, but you've spent too long talking to yourself, and now that you had the taste of an audience, you can't go back what it was like before.

You should be happy. Happy for him, for Pretty Boy. This should mean that he's moved on, decided that stasis in whisky, and a dingy bar that even the health inspectors have given up on a long time ago is not what he needs in his life right now, and that he's getting better. That he's healing.

But you think of the look on his face when he stared at you from across the counter, eyes reflected in the clear glass of water, and you know—just like you think you know him—that he isn't. That this isn't the end. That he's found somewhere else to go, something else to mend the aches inside that never abate.

He didn't decide to move on. It wasn't his choice—it was yours, Caulders. It was the weight of the bill in something that used to be sacred, a place where Bear would pen things down in scratchy writing about your perceived failings— talks too much, shorts the shots all the damn time, can't pour a pint to save her life, has awful taste food, terrible taste in music —and you'd dump them into your rucksack at the end of the night, taking them home with you to lay out on a piece of construction paper as part of an ongoing project in yearning.

It wasn't his choice, and you know better than anyone else what that means, but still: you hope. You cling to that little piece of stupidity (your very brand) that tries to convince you everything is fine. That you're not complicit in watching a man moulder in grief and agony, and that this is somehow alright. That this tightly webbed knot, tangled and frayed, will somehow unspool itself despite knowing first hand that it won't.

Not until you tug the strings and unravel the weaved pain and loss on your own terms, and of your own volition.

But what else can you do?

No one held your hand when you lost your dad, but God, you wish they did. You wished someone was there to help you, but you also know that it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

You can force someone to let go by hammering their fingers until the bones shatter, and the tight grip they keep on it all releases because their fingers are pulpy mush.

You know better.

In the weeks that he's gone, absent, you oscillate between trying to convince yourself you made the right choice, and trying to pretend that he's still just a friend.

(It's when you wander out from the back of the pub and see someone sitting in his chair—elation, hope, and then the crushing sense of disappointment when the man is too small, too scrawny to be Bear—do you realise what it all means.

—a sickness.)

Eleven, you get a kiss. Blistering. Intense. Your head cracks against the brick when he pushes himself flush into your body, hand curved over your cheek, jaw.

(Three days later, you get heartbreak.

Two weeks, you shatter.)

You have other things to worry about than a man like him. Dangerous. Deadly. The kind that will suck you in like a riptide and drag you out into the open ocean without any care or concern for how you're supposed to tread the high seas.

He's poison in plaid. A bad decision in the scar tissue, and bloodied knuckles. The bags under his eyes are warning signs for you to stay away.

The ring on his finger. The women who are not his wife.

All of the bad, the ugly stacks up.

But—

Even his hideous crutches can't hide his goodness beneath the layer of resentment and grime.

It starts when he splits his knuckles on the teeth of a man who won't take no for an answer, and you see him find control, balance, and equilibrium, in violence.

It starts there. And it ends, too.

(But you're a glutton for pain, and you help him the only way you know how.)

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