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It’s bad.
It’s so bad.
Nick hadn’t even realised how detached he’s been from his own heart, until Charlie makes him check in with it non-stop.
“On a scale of one to ten, how was your day today?” He’s asked as they’re halfway to Charlie’s house, their hands swinging between them.
“I dunno,” Nick replies, already starting to sweat under his collar. They started this exercise about a week ago and it still hasn’t gotten any easier. “Maybe a seven?”
Charlie hums. “Mine’s a seven too. I woke up kind of anxious, but it was mostly okay by second period. And I had so much fun at lunch today. Food’s getting easier and… Yeah. I’m really happy about that.”
Nick knows it’s his time to share about his day, now. But he honestly can’t remember a single thing notable about it, except for how easy it was to breathe whenever Charlie was around.
Charlie bumps gently into him, his feet cutting diagonally into Nick’s path before moving away again. “Why a seven?”
Nick tries not to look towards the end of the road, wondering how much longer they have – because it’s not like he’s not enjoying talking to Charlie – but his dratted desperation bring him there anyway. “Nothing special really happened today. So, you know.” He swallows instinctively. “Seven’s a pretty neutral number.”
“How are you feeling about your Geography thing?”
Oh, yeah. That happened, didn’t it? Getting scolded for turning in a less-than-okay draft for his Geography project. He blocked it out almost as soon as it happened, because he didn’t want to cry in front of his classmates.
Charlie’s hand is sweating in his. Or maybe it’s his hand that’s sweaty.
“Fine.” Nick says. “I knew it wasn’t a good draft anyway. But I have time to re-do it.”
The first part’s a lie. He hadn’t known that it was a bad draft – or at least not that it was bad enough to warrant such a horrid chewing out in front of everybody. And he’d actually tried really hard on it. Stayed up late and everything, staring at it until he was so sure there was nothing else he could improve on.
“Mr Burton’s an asshole anyway.” Charlie says, scowling. His voice is tight and maybe a little upset, and Nick has to remind himself that Charlie’s not angry at him. Angry for him, maybe, but not at him.
Everything’s fine. His day was a seven.
“He also looks like Mandark from Dexter’s Laboratory, don’t you think? Beady little eyes,” Charlie glares at nothing, then shudders as if he’s caught a chill.
Nick laughs, and tucks Charlie under his arm. Charlie wraps his hands around Nick’s waist and presses an ear to his heart.
***
Tao helps him with his Geography project, and he ends up getting an A-. It’s still not enough to bump his overall grade to a B unless he scores almost 90 on his final exam, but it might just scrape him a B.
The moment the door to the art room pushes open, he’s being attacked by an armful of Charlie, peppering his face with kisses and hugging him so tight he thinks he might burst.
Nick just barely keeps himself on his two feet, and heaves Charlie off the ground with a happy grunt. “I’m guessing Tao told you?”
“An A-!” Charlie shouts, his luscious voice bouncing off the walls. “My boyfriend’s a genius!”
Nick laughs, flushing red either from embarrassment or from the effort of situating Charlie on his back.
“How’re you feelin’?” Charlie slings his forearms across Nick’s shoulders, and leans sideways to peck him again on the cheek. Nick never wants this to end; god, he loves him so much.
“Happy,” he mumbles around a wide smile. “I’m really happy about it.”
Charlie reaches around to thrust his phone in front of his face. The screen lights up to an emotion wheel that Charlie has been obsessed with lately. Nick rolls his eyes – makes sure Charlie can see it – and follows the straight lines to the appropriate word.
“Valued. I’m feeling valued and proud.” He does a little jump as he replies to rearrange Charlie, who’s definitely smirking behind him. “Happy now?”
“Thank you for sharing. I’m feeling…” Charlie double taps into the playful wedge of the wheel, and zooms in further to – “Aroused. I’m feeling aroused. Because you’re smart and hot as fuck.”
Nick huffs and adjusts his hand to grab at Charlie’s ass. “Okay. Milkshakes, then my house.”
Charlie nips once at the tip of his right ear with his teeth, then points him towards the door. “Onward, Nicholas Nelson. Milkshakes, then s-e-x.”
***
Things like the emotion wheel help when he’s prompted to look at them, but he still doesn’t like talking about his feelings. Hell, he doesn’t even like feeling his feelings.
The side effect of ignoring his heart and brain, however, is that he has no idea what he doesn’t like.
He knows what makes him happy, of course, but the other side of the coin is entirely missing. Like, on a sliding scale of emotions, there’s a steel wall between him and anything north of negative.
He listens to his friends talk about which classes they hate, and the jobs they would loath to do in the future, and doesn’t understand how they’d even… how.
Doesn’t everyone just… do things? Go to school, take the subjects they’re not too bad in, find a job, grit their teeth and get through everything necessary in order to be delivered into the weekend, or things they actually like to do, or whatever?
Up until Charlie, he’d never chosen a thing for himself. Not rugby, which was his father’s decision, or Truham, which was his mum’s, and he doesn’t particularly like any of his classes. His entire life, he’s lived it thinking that everything was easy peasy – that all he had to do every morning was to put on a mask of I-know-what-I’m-doing. And have everyone just fall for it.
He used to think that meant he was good at pulling it off. But he’s starting to realise now that that just meant he was fake; that he was never meant to wear it.
And maybe, that the mask – which had been slipping bit by bit before he met Charlie – was taking more effort to put on than he’d ever thought.
He blinks awake to Charlie stroking his thumb across his forehead. His boyfriend’s curls are blocking the setting ochre sun from his face, but there’s still enough light to see that Charlie is gazing at him with worry swimming deep in his blue eyes.
Nick sits up, disoriented. He – oh, he was was lying across Charlie’s lap, and when did that happen?
“Sorry,” He coughs a little, moving his tongue around to get rid of the tacky feeling coating his teeth. “Did I fall asleep?”
“Yeah.” Charlie says, helping him push his fringe off of his face and wiping the gunk from the corners of his eyes. “You sleep okay?”
Nick nods without even thinking about it.
“You were…” Charlie trails off, long enough until Nick lies back down in his lap again. “You were having a nightmare. Did you know that?”
“Was I? I feel fine.” He blinks, struggling to remember his sleep.
Did he say something while he was dreaming? But he feels fine, really. He doesn’t feel any different from normal – like his sleep was a maze that he had to navigate to get to the exit. Which he did, didn’t he? But what if? Maybe he got stuck in the maze and didn’t even realise. There’s that one recurring one of Charlie dying. But he hadn’t dreamt of that this afternoon, had he? He usually wakes up in tears when he has that one.
“Okay, okay.” Charlie says, cutting out his worried stare like he knows that the panic mounting steadily in Nick’s chest is not helping anyone. “But Nick. It’s okay even if you’re not okay. You know that, right?”
Yeah, see, the thing is.
Nick is starting to realise that maybe he doesn’t actually know that.
But it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t want to not be okay. Who wants that?
So he turns his head and nuzzles his nose against Charlie’s calf, breathing deep against his skin to try and stop his heart from its horrendous rabbiting. He wants Charlie to kiss him, so badly, but he doesn’t quite know how to ask for it. Not now, when his head is already being cradled in his lap as if he’s an infant without a clue of how to take care of himself.
It’s embarrassing, being so weak. Being so out of control of his own feelings. Being caught out.
His mind wanders again to what he might have said in his sleep. Like Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking in the cover of night and running her hands under clear water while confessing her bloody sins. Like Nicholas Nelson the rugby captain, who has to run himself ragged, who has to unravel the earth beneath his cleats for some clarity of mind.
Then Charlie kisses him, without him having to ask, right between the furrow of his eyebrows, and Nick is washed clean.
***
“This feels stupid as fuck.” Charlie giggles, then smothers his smile in the crook of his elbow. “Okay. I’m done laughing. I’m zen. We’re zen.”
Nick tries to stop smiling, too, and relaxes into the floor. The lady with the nice voice on this meditation episode tells them to melt their shoulders into the ground, so that’s he tries to do. He can feel Charlie doing the same, wriggling into the carpet, and they can’t help but laugh.
The lady drones on and on about settling in, about feeling your body, and they both fall slowly silent.
Then, between one breath and the next, something shifts in the air. Nick feels his body get pushed into the floor by how heavy the change is, the blood in his body thudding gently in his ears. There is something frothing in his veins, enough for him to think of moving his wrists or ankles to try and dissipate the energy, but he can’t. It’s like her voice is encasing him in foam, shaped perfectly to his limbs.
The longer it goes on – the more she tells them to focus on each breath and imagine yourself as a wave, breaking rhythmically against the shore and plug into the universe – the more Nick feels like he’s floating somewhere above his real body, lying motionless on the carpet of Charlie’s room. He watches himself, detached, and for a long minute he can genuinely see the air enter and leave with every rise and fall of his chest. He can genuinely see Charlie lying next to him, finger twitching minutely like the shiver of a leaf on a branch.
He analyses himself as if he’s lying on a doctor’s table, except he’s both patient and doctor. Or maybe the dead body and the mortician. The executed and the executor?
Like that one moment in rugby matches, when he’s about to kick the ball towards the post. When the expectations of his entire team rest on his shoulders but it doesn’t even feel heavy at all. Because he’s focusing so much on the target that he feels like god, like he can make anything true if only he wants it bad enough.
But now the guided meditation moves into the emotions part of the program.
And he’s no longer looking at the target. He’s no longer looking at the target because he is the target.
He’s the victim that’s being forced to stay on the TV channel that he always, always skips past as quickly as he can.
Which is a fucking nightmare. It’s like watching a horror movie without being able to close your eyes, because all the bad things are cut from your own highlight reel.
Imagine that you’re at the top of the mountain.
Nick sees himself standing on top of all the love he’s enjoyed since he was a child, and how insanely tall that thing is. Some people live to eighty and not even have a taste of that, but he’s seventeen and been invited to a buffet of it, all because of Char–
Think about the path you had to take to get there. All the cuts and scrapes. All the thirst and sweat. All the hurt.
He wants so badly to hold onto that first visual. The one where he’s nothing but a lucky man, grateful for all he has and expectant of the rest of his life with his boyfriend. But this annoying lady, and her descriptions about the stupid route up that mountain, is letting in memories of all the strife he’s been through to get to Charlie, and it’s really ruining things.
Memories about all his fights with David. All the imagined fights with his dad, who was never there to hear his rehearsed, perfect arguments anyway. All of his mum’s tired smiles. All of his masks. All of everybody’s masks. All of his flaws.
He doesn’t want to think about these things. He hasn’t thought about these things ever –
But look at the view. Breathe deep. The crisp air. The amazing view. Celebrate how far you’ve come.
Breathe, Nick. Breathe. Don’t lose it now.
As you stand there, though. You realise that there are more peaks that you have to climb. You can’t see the end, that’s how long the range is.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck –
He sits up, ignoring the dull burn in his abs from the effort with which he’s launched himself off the floor. He fumbles with Charlie’s phone until his thumb manages to hit the pause button, then he hugs his knees to his chest, wheezing through heavy breaths in the silence of the room.
“Baby,” Charlie’s hands cup his face, trying to coax him to look up, but he resolutely keeps his chin down. “Baby, baby. Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.” The words come out a bit too loudly, through the tears that burn at the very back of his skull. Burning through his memories like they’re documents in flimsy cardboard boxes. He hopes Charlie doesn’t know that one of his tells for anger is swallowing convulsively, trying to drench the flame. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. Just over it.”
***
The anger comes a few weeks later, and Charlie doesn’t even bat an eye. Almost as if he had known it was coming from the rolling clouds swirling above Nick’s head.
And the storm comes. Later than expected, but inevitably.
But Charlie leaves the windows open, even though the rain that comes with that storm drenches everything they own. All their cardboard boxes, breaking them open like fruit split down the middle. Still, he takes care of it – of them – with the patience of a saint.
He sits with Nick on the days where naming his emotions feels like reopening old wounds. He doesn’t push when Nick gets mad and starts putting his fences up. Or shuts down, lips locked tight like he’s content to never speak again. He puts Nellie next to Nick and says “talk to us”. He places Nick in between his legs and strokes through his hair until he’s shifting from the discomfort at the sheer tenderness; at being taken care of. Then he holds him through that, until he’s a puddle of tears in his arms.
Crying sorry, crying I can’t believe I’m like this, crying is it really so bad? Being unable to feel?
But things get better. Later than expected, and so much more difficult than expected, but inevitably.
They figure out that journaling doesn’t work. His pen feels too unwieldy in his hand, like it’s a surgical knife that he’s never learned how – or is too scared – to use on his own heart.
They figure out that Nick shares more easily when there’s no eye contact. So Charlie spoons him, or sits back to back to him, and just lets him trip over all his words until he finds a clear enough path to climb.
They also figure out, through many tense arguments, that Nick is never going to be the kind of person who’s better off being in touch with his emotions all the time. Nick will always need some distance between the events and the emotions, and he might not ever want to talk about certain things. Quite unlike Charlie, who pursues and picks apart everything to their logical conclusion.
But they practice skills that make it easier to be honest when Nick is ready to talk. They learn about somatic awareness, and they take more notice of what it might mean when their shoulders are tight or when their jaws are unknowingly clenched. Nick seeks Charlie out like a bear to a burrow when he wakes up shaking. The frequency of Charlie’s panic attacks lessen and when he does get them, Nick’s knowledge of how to help him makes the anxiety pass by quicker.
And it helps them not just in the bad times, but in the good times too.
Because 15 years later, Charlie wakes up to his husband squatting in the kitchen – voice calm and measured as he talks to their two kids through their big feelings, teaching them how to identify when they’re overwhelmed, telling them that it’s okay to not be okay sometimes – and, on the way to the coffee machine, he makes sure to plant a kiss on the crown of Nick’s head.
Nick grabs lightly at his hand before letting him go, and gives him a steady smile that sets Charlie’s heart leaping through his chest.
They’re happy. And even if they’re not, everything is going to be fine.