Post S4 Fic
Justin in LA
******************
2 Weeks In
When he leaves you tell yourself you can stand anything, absolutely anything,
for a few months. When you drop him off curbside and kiss him breathless the
look in his eyes tells you he misses you already. That’s enough to make you
believe that four, five, six months apart will do nothing to this. This bond
you have. And it is a bond, isn’t it?
Every day for the first two weeks he calls you before he goes to bed. After
the first four nights you notice the pattern and give up hope of getting any
shuteye before 3am. He tells you about his day, what new thing he learned, which
new celebrity he met, how much he misses you.
You miss him too, but it’s been two weeks and you’re not going to admit it yet.
You figure in two months you can casually state that the loft is getting a little
lonely without him.
4 Weeks In
About a month into his sabbatical he starts telling you more about how much
he loves LA and less about how much he misses you. You pretend not to notice
the change.
It’s only when the nightly phone calls start coming every other day and then
every third that you really start to wonder if…
You tell yourself that he’s young and beautiful and brilliant and when you were
his age you would have killed for an opportunity like this. There is no way
you’ll even for one second stand in his way, not even a little. If you have
to feign indifference until it kills you on the inside, that’s exactly what
you’ll do.
6 Months In
When he left he told you that LA was temporary and necessary and he’d be there
for ‘six months max’. And it isn’t that you took that literally, or that you’ve
been crossing days off the calendar in the kitchen or that you plugged a countdown
into your cell phone or that you check that calendar and that countdown with
some regularity, but still. It’s been six months and one week to the day, and
he tells you in a conversation that lasts six seconds, though it’s been one
of only a handful in the last six weeks, that he’s ‘just not sure’ when he’ll
be ‘getting back to Pittsburgh’.
And the crazy thing is you’ve almost gone to visit him more times than you would
dare to reveal. And the crazier thing is he came to surprise you one weekend
a few months ago but you happened to be in New York on businesses. The disconnect
of him not knowing you were out of town and you not suspecting that he was going
to come home made your stomach curl in on itself and quiver until you vomited
in the pretty black toilet in your suite at the W in Union Square. You tell
yourself, and Cynthia, that the crab cakes at lunch were bad. You refuse to
admit that it has something to do with the fact there was a time, not long ago,
when you would have known Justin was coming home before he even knew himself.
8 Months In
The day the calendar tells you he’s been gone for eight months you officially
decide he is not coming home, or rather not coming back to Pittsburgh (as it
is clearly no longer home to him). You throw the calendar in the trash (in the
dumpster outside of the building so you can’t retrieve it later) and delete
the countdown from your phone. You curse yourself for days for putting your
life on hold for nothing.
It’s not that you’re angry with him, or even surprised. It’s that you hate yourself
with every ounce of your being for actually falling in love. You realize if
you’d never felt this for him the letting go would be so easy. If you’d never
wanted him with you so badly, having him nowhere near you would be a cakewalk.
If you didn’t know there was a person in the world that could make you feel…fuck
it’s lesbionic…but safe and happy, you wouldn’t have to miss the way that feels.
**
He comes home in the middle of the night, in the middle of the week, about ten
months after he left. You can’t be sure it’s been ten months because you stopped
counting, but you know it’s been too long.
When he slips into bed beside you, skin cold and clammy and smelling like an
airplane, you want to strangle him because all you want to do is cry with relief.
But you’ve never been one to cry, so you roll toward him and put your arms around
his back and press your lips to his temple, “Welcome home.”
“Thanks,” he murmurs into your chest, “It’s good to be here.”
“I missed you,” he adds before falling asleep in your arms.
You sigh to yourself. He has no idea.
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