Chapter 7 #2
And on a couch among a mismatched set with soft knit throws sat two people.
They looked around Aaron and Oscar’s age, somewhere in their early twenties.
The man was tall, which was clear from his long legs, even though he was sitting.
He had wide shoulders and hair buzzed down to the scalp, green eyes wide as saucers on a handsome face.
His arm was wrapped around the woman who sat beside him.
She was pretty, with dewy brown skin and thin brown braids woven with pink down to her waist, long lilac nails on slim hands that were digging around in a popcorn bowl.
On the coffee table, there were three pots of instant noodles, one of them half-finished, and something twisted in Oscar’s gut as he realized he’d interrupted Aaron not only during dinner, but also movie night with his friends.
There were unopened bags of candy beside the half-eaten noodles. Oscar knew these were for Aaron, coffee-loving Aaron who chased a sugar rush like a dog with a thrown ball.
“Hi!” The woman smiled at Oscar, scrunching up her nose.
“Hello,” Oscar mumbled, scratching his head.
“Do you guys want to join?” The man glanced at Oscar only for a moment, then fixed his gaze on Aaron. “Ron?”
“We’ll be heading straight in, actually.” Aaron picked up two bags of candy and walked past the coffee table, heading to a door beside the TV unit. Oscar glanced at the others awkwardly and hurried across, scurrying behind him like a mouse.
The man on the couch looked like the kind of person Ryan might hang around, a gymbro who’d call a trans guy buddy like Ryan sometimes did with Oscar—as though Oscar wasn’t an entire two fucking years older than him—and then craft him a program to sculpt hips like a vase.
Not that Oscar had ever gone to Ryan for gym advice.
Or to the gym at all. But he imagined Ryan would do something like that.
Ryan.
Oscar willed his rage to simmer as he pulled Aaron’s door shut behind him and took in the view. It was a tiny room, far smaller than Oscar’s back home, the sloping ceiling taking up most of the space, but Aaron had still managed to make something gorgeous of it.
The curtains on his window were drawn shut, and the lighting bathed the room in blue, glinting off the trans flag pinned to his wall, which matched the knitted blanket Aaron had sent him a picture of that second time they’d chatted.
Although there were only a few pieces of furniture, Aaron had created storage space out of moving carts and low shelves, stacked with books and clothes and photos of him with much shorter hair between a pretty girl and a pink-haired person with a septum piercing, as well as one singular photo of him with an older woman who had the same nose and mouth. Maybe his mother.
Aaron shrugged off his jacket and hung it on a hook drilled into the door, then shimmied out of his sweatpants to reveal an entire bunny pajama underneath.
“No headband?” Oscar asked, lips twitching.
“But of course!” Aaron’s cheeks pinked, seeming almost purple underneath the blue lights, and Oscar wished to swim in the ocean of him as he reached for the pile of fleece on his small desk and put it on, pushing back his hair. “Pleased?”
“Very,” Oscar replied.
He glanced around, not sure where he was supposed to sit, but Aaron seemed to be far better prepared. He headed to a small set of drawers and pulled out a stack of clothes.
“No outside clothes on my bed,” Aaron said. On his bed. “I’ll go get us something to drink.” He passed, curling his small fingers around Oscar’s shoulder and pressing.
Pressing.
He pressed.
Oscar could barely contain himself as the door shut behind him.
In a quick flustered fumble, he undressed, shedding the scents of the bus, sneaking a sniff of his armpits.
Maybe Paulie had been onto something when he’d said the knockoff deodorant was better than the brand name.
Oscar could smell nothing except for the fresh cool lingering scent of what he’d sprayed after his shower that morning.
Moments later, he was wearing a pair of Aaron’s soft sweatpants, the scent of his flowery detergent wrapping him up like a blanket. The larger T-shirt, which must have engulfed Aaron when he wore it, was comfortable on Oscar’s bigger frame.
Aaron returned soon after with a mug of tea for Oscar and—unsurprisingly—a cup of coffee for himself.
He clambered onto the bed, crossing his legs and wrapping his hands around the cup, and Oscar thought that if he ended every single one of his days to the image of Aaron in pajamas drinking coffee on a blanket he’d knitted himself, then it would be a happy life he lived.
“Come.” Aaron patted the blanket.
Over the incessant pounding of his heart, Oscar approached.
Their knees were a hair’s width apart as they sat facing each other, cups in hand and steam curling in front of their faces.
Aaron had removed his glasses, and Oscar could see all the freckles climbing up the sides of his nose, curving into his brow bones.
“I didn’t mean to spoil your night with your friends. And not your dinner, either,” he said.
He’d always been so terrible at apologizing when he upset his mother.
She’d always called him rude and proud and thankless.
But since then, Oscar had learned that these were qualities he’d honed for her.
Because Oscar said sorry to the door when he bumped into it and cleaned up every spill in every coffee shop he went to.
He left a tip and let other people pass ahead of him when he was getting on the bus.
And he could apologize to Aaron without blinking.
“You couldn’t spoil anything if you tried.” Aaron shook his head. “Spike, you were so upset on the phone. What the hell happened?”
Spike.
Oscar wished he could sit in the car with Papa and cry about Ryan. Maybe they could hate him together. Papa had never really hated anyone, but Oscar knew he wouldn’t have liked someone like Ryan for Lina.
“It was awful.” Oscar’s mumble came out pathetic, and maybe a few years earlier, he’d have shuttered and followed it with a well, anyway, but in his mind’s eye, he could imagine Christina shaking her head at him, tutting until he shared.
And Aaron sat in front of him with those wide blue eyes and an open heart, soft fingers wrapped around a cup of coffee at half past ten at night, ready to listen.
So Oscar spilled.
And for the first time since they’d met, he watched Aaron transform, his features clenching, chiseling his softness into hewn marble, hard and cold.
Hot. The burning fires of his rage pierced through Oscar and bolstered him, an anvil on which the sword of Oscar’s righteous anger could be forged.
“I’d knock his teeth out if I met him,” Aaron said.
His coffee was finished now, Oscar’s tea too, and they were munching on white-bellied crocodile gummies from one of the packs Aaron had brought.
“You really don’t strike me as the violent type,” Oscar replied.
He thought about the way his throat would scratch every time he yelled at his mother, how he’d sometimes had to fight himself not to slam a cupboard shut on her hand.
Christina had told him these could be intrusive thoughts and that he’d done a good job fighting them.
After a few years of therapy, she’d admitted she would have probably shut his mother’s hand in a cupboard, then added, “off the record, of course,” as though Oscar was a journalist who would report her to Marjorie Peters, Class A Bitch.
“I’m not,” Aaron replied. “But I’d knock Ryan’s teeth out if I met him.”
“I don’t like the way he is around Lina, either.” Oscar shrugged. They hadn’t talked about their families the last time they’d met. He remembered Aaron saying he didn’t really talk to them before their surgery, so Oscar hadn’t brought it up. “But, anyway.”
He dove in for another gummy, but it seemed Aaron had the same idea. Their fingers caught in the mouth of the bag, twitching, and Oscar could look at nothing but Aaron’s freckled knuckles, hovering.
What felt like a decade later, Oscar pulled his hand out, and Aaron dove in, pulling out a gummy. He pressed it into Oscar’s hand. It tasted better than all the others, like a gift, and Oscar looked up and found Aaron’s gaze while he chewed.
“Luigi’s okay on his own?” Aaron asked, voice softening.
“I was supposed to sleep in Lina’s dorm. He’s all set,” Oscar replied, barely whispering.
Aaron nodded, reaching for a green crocodile. He cut into it with his teeth, splitting it in two, and chewed.
“You’ve had a long day. Do you want to watch me beat the fuck out of this stupid level on my game?” Aaron asked.
“I would like nothing more,” Oscar said.
For a moment, they were standing outside a coffee shop, on the precipice of a goodbye that hadn’t happened, and as Aaron settled against his headboard with his red handheld console and his glasses back on, Oscar hoped it never would.
He sat beside him, hissing and gasping and laughing a little every time the little character fell to his dramatic death or made a leap that was too ambitious.
“It’s giving me anxiety each time he dies like that, I swear,” Oscar said.
“Then let’s do something else. You’ve had enough anxiety for the day, I’d wager.”
Aaron switched to a building game before Oscar could complain. He’d never played this one before, and it was mesmerizing to watch Aaron’s nimble fingers put together the colorful building blocks and turn them into something beautiful. Just like he’d done with his blanket.
“I could watch this forever,” Oscar mumbled.
“You can if you want to,” Aaron mumbled back. He turned his head, resting his cheek against the headboard. “Sleep over?”
Oscar should have hesitated at least a minute, maybe, but Papa had always been so sincere, so why would Oscar want to play games like that? He nodded.
Aaron’s lips curled, eyes brightening, and it set something inside Oscar on fire, a simmering flame slow-cooking the feeling he’d nurtured since that day at the clinic.
A moment later, they had slipped beneath the covers, nestled underneath the warm sanctuary Aaron had put together stitch by stitch, Aaron still moving blocks around in his little cartoon world, Oscar watching with hungry eyes, eager for this softness, aching to have as much of it as Aaron was ready to give.
He wasn’t sure at which point his body decided to move without command, resting his head on Aaron’s shoulder, but Oscar liked it, and judging from the way Aaron shuffled closer, it seemed that Aaron liked it too. It was a beautiful way to drift off.
That night, Oscar dreamed in technicolor.