6 - Jasper
Jasper
I NEVER THOUGHT of myself as a people person—actually, I was positive I was the furthest thing from it. And yet, for some reason, people saw my shitty attitude and scathing remarks as me being real, honest, and even a good person. The meaner I was, the more people seemed to appreciate me.
Make that make sense.
Although I disliked talking to people, I ended up getting into political science courses after high school and working part-time as a bartender.
A warehouse job with no customer interaction would have suited me better, but the tips I made serving drinks were hard to beat, and the hours worked well with my class schedule.
The goal had always been to provide for Mom, so she could take it easy before she worked herself into an early grave waitressing—one that I was sure she was already half a step into. As much as she tried to act like she had it all together, there was no mistaking the tiredness in her eyes.
And then there was Milo. Of my two brothers, he was the one I had to worry about most.
He was always one bad day away from disappearing, and ever since he’d moved out, it had become so much harder to keep an eye on him. Whenever he fell in love, the rest of the world vanished. I seldom got a call, let alone a text, until things started going south.
That’s how I knew it was falling apart.
It would start with cryptic messages. It was always vague statements without any context, like he was testing the waters.
He’d ask me if I thought he was enough, or if something about him was really all that bad.
I was the soundboard, a role he’d mistakenly given me, under the impression that I was fair and just, rather than self-serving.
Then, uncharacteristically, he’d start video calling me when he was alone. When his girlfriend wasn’t home, he’d beg me to come over and keep him company. I always showed up, no matter how much it killed me to watch him suffer.
I still wasn’t there to stop him from trying to take his own life.
I spent far too long being delicate with him when what he really needed was a firmer hand. Now, though, I was done letting him run himself into the ground, done with standing on the sidelines, afraid of ruining the only good thing I had.
I wasn’t going to lose him.
“Hey, could I get a drink?” A high-pitched voice called, and all the noise in the bar came flooding back in past the earplugs I was wearing. I was assaulted by the bass vibrating through the floorboards, the clinking of glasses, and dozens of people talking way too loudly.
Across the room, a local band was setting up their equipment, going through the motions of sound check. I had a love-hate relationship with live events. Most of the local talent was painful to listen to, but they gave us more breaks at the bar while people crowded around the stage during sets.
I wished Milo would be honest about what he wanted.
“Sure, what can I do for you?” I dragged my attention back to the woman on the other side of the counter, wiping out the inside of a highball glass for the tenth time.
“What do you like?” She hopped up onto the barstool directly in front of me and leaned in, elbows pressing into the sticky counter, her breath smelling like the entire liquor cabinet.
“Water,” I replied dryly, my mind split between the moment and where I needed to be.
Milo just had to let me take care of him.
“That’s boring!” She laughed obnoxiously, twirling a section of her blond hair around her index finger. “I don’t know what I want.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, earning another laugh despite my best effort to be a dick.
Worry pinched my chest, the platinum hair between her fingers reminding me of how Milo looked in that hospital bed, deathly pale and lacking the usual spark that made him him.
My phone hadn’t lit up with any signs of life for at least twenty minutes.
With his condition, that might as well have meant he was dead.
I needed to check on him.
“What about a Blue Hawaiian?” she continued, pulling out a compact mirror and reapplying bright red lipstick.
“I can do that.” I nodded and turned my back on her, letting muscle memory do the work. Ice. Rum. Curacao. Juice. My hands moved with practiced ease, but my head was somewhere else entirely.
Milo’s suicide attempt dragged me back into the things I’d tried to bury.
When my childhood friend had first brought her boyfriend to my front door after his mother passed away, she’d begged me to convince my mom to take him in so he wouldn’t end up in the system. At fifteen, he’d been a broken, fragile little boy with no one to show him what real love looked like.
The guilt still plagued me for sitting idly by while that girl ruined him from the inside out.
I didn’t know she had that kind of cruelty in her, and to this day, Milo was still convinced he’d brought it upon himself.
The regret took up far too much space in my chest. Sometimes, I was sure I was suffocating in it.
I tried to tell myself that I’d only been thirteen at the time, yet that reminder felt like nothing more than a cop-out.
I should have protected him, should have kept him safe.
Instead, I’d watched everything unfold right under my nose because he loved her.
Even now, I couldn’t say her name. Not out loud, not even in my head.
She was a fracture line I refused to trace.
I hated her—but without her, I’d never have met Milo.
And he fucking needed me.
“You’ve got like… that sexy nerd thing going on,” the woman at the bar slurred as I set the glass down between us. “You know that?”
“Gay,” I said immediately.
“What?”
“I like men.” I wiped my hands on a rag and turned the tablet toward her. “How are you paying?”
“Oh.” She blinked. “Card.”
I watched her fumble with her wallet, my patience thinning with each second. She tapped her debit card and slid off the stool, disappearing into the crowd with her drink.
“I didn’t know you only liked men.” My coworker, Brandon, nudged me.
He was arguably the most tolerable person I had to work with. He was tall, awkward, and always had his hair tied up in a man-bun. Even though he was annoyingly nosy, he did get brownie points for keeping up with my scathing remarks.
“Actually, I don’t like anyone,” I corrected him, feeling my phone buzz in my pocket.
Fucking finally.
Milo: I’m scared to be alone.
It sounded ominous, but I knew what it meant. I caught myself smiling, my thumb absently stroking the screen. He was so close to admitting he needed me—he just needed a little provocation, and if I was good at anything, it was that.
“Is this your exception to not liking anyone?” Brandon grinned, eyebrow waggling.
“My brother,” I said, hastily typing a response before shoving my phone into my pocket.
“I’m just saying, you’d be a lot less miserable if you got laid.”
“I don’t think there’s a cure. I was born like this.”
I could count my relationships on one hand. At the end of the day, dating didn’t really suit me. People needed too much in a relationship, and the unspoken pressure to perform stressed me out.
I had to reserve my energy for Milo.
With him, I didn’t mind the neediness. I liked it even.
He forced me to go out to parties, made friends for me, and was just enough of a pain in my ass to keep me on my toes.
As codependent as he was, I got as much out of our relationship as he did, in my own way.
He made me realize that I didn’t need to go out and search for what I already had at home.
“I’ll handle the next wave,” Brandon declared. “Stock the wedges so we don’t scare off the patrons with your resting bitch face.”
Weariness bled into my laughter as I crouched behind the bar. My knees popped. I thought I had at least eight more years before my body started betraying me, but apparently not.
Someone had done a shit job with the limes again, half of the wedges thick enough to choke on. I fixed them one by one, nearly cutting myself once or twice, my focus stuck on the silent phone in my pocket.
“Low on tonic, too,” Brandon called from the other end of the bar.
“Yeah, I’m on it,” I acknowledged, throwing the old wedges into the trash.
By the time I stocked the tonic, I knew I needed to get outside.
With only a few hours left in my shift, I excused myself from the bar, grabbing my coat and scarf from the back as I shoved my earplugs in my pocket.
I didn’t usually smoke anything other than pot, but like in any other kitchen, smokers got the most breaks, which meant pretending I needed a smoke if I wanted my hard-earned fifteen minutes of solitude.
Once I was outside, I propped the door open with a crate.
The chill of an autumn night was all I needed to clear my head. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up pack of cigarettes. I slid one out of the crinkled foil and held it between my lips, never lighting it, my back against the brick wall.
I heard a faint rustling in the dark next to the bins and turned to investigate. A man was curled up next to the trash bin, wrapped in a jacket far too thin for the cruelty of a fast-approaching northern winter.
I shouldn’t have looked.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, tucking the cigarette behind my ear as I pulled away from the wall and yanked the scarf from around my neck. “Here.”
I watched awkwardly as he wrapped himself up in the scarf, muttering thanks. His nose was bright red, and his fingers were trembling. The guilt gnawed at my insides, and I couldn’t help but feel like what I’d given him wasn’t enough.
“Do you want a smoke?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, please.” He perked up.
It wasn’t a solution, but it was enough to quiet the guilt.
I pulled another cigarette from my pack and handed it to him along with my lighter, and watched quietly as he lit it.
Once I was sure he was in decent enough shape and had gotten my lighter back, I turned away, pulled out my phone and returned to the matter at hand.
Oliver wasn’t a friend of mine, though I’d known him for years through Milo.
It didn’t make calling him any less weird, but I needed to find out if he’d left the apartment yet, and how urgent my brother’s cry for help really was.
My job didn’t actually matter in the end, not as much as Milo.
If it were a life-or-death situation, I’d leave in a heartbeat.
“Hello?”
“Have you left the apartment?” I interrogated him immediately.
“Yeah, about an hour ago. What’s up?” He sounded worried. “Do you need me to go back there?”
“No,” I hesitated. “Just wondering.”
The last thing I wanted was for Oliver to go back. No matter how much he tried to convince himself he was just a really good friend, he was always waiting for the day Milo would acknowledge his feelings. Every relationship was a substitute, every girl a stand-in for what he really wanted.
Politely turning him down every time they were drunk and partying wasn’t enough—Milo needed to cut him loose and end his self-imposed suffering, or one day, I might do it for him.
“He seemed okay when I left,” Oliver said. “But if you think I should go back—”
“It’s fine,” I clipped. “I’ll drop by the apartment after work.” I didn’t bother with a proper goodbye, promptly hanging up on him and shoving my cigarette back into the pack.
Fuck.
Oliver wouldn’t be able to tell from looks alone when Milo was spiralling, wouldn’t clock the distant look in his eyes, or the little nervous movements he made while trying to swallow the need to pull himself apart.
My jaw clenched as I made my way back inside, the sound of live music grating on my nerves.
I knew that Milo would probably last a few hours alone, but my body was already bracing to find his corpse.
The fear of loss had my hands shaking as I went through the motions, popping my earplugs back in and returning to my station behind the bar.
Please be good, Milo.