tags
The Magnus Archives, Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
- scottish safehouse era
- road trips
- bed sharing
The only thing Jon manages to say to Martin in the five-hour span of the car ride is that he wishes he could have packed more.
Well, okay, that’s not the only thing he says, but it’s the only thing that feels like it has any significance in that it’d actually gotten a response out of the man riding in the passenger seat. A distracted “yeah, would have been nice to have some different shoes” that would hardly be worth mentioning otherwise, but it’s more than Martin has said for the majority of the day. Jon doesn’t blame him. He won’t blame Martin if he never wants to speak with him again once they get to Scotland, for any number of a multitude of reasons he’s been keeping in a neat bulleted list in the back of his head. That doesn’t mean he’s still not afraid to hear it out in the open.
Jon’s lying in the back of the van that Basira rented (bought? stole? borrowed?) for them. His forearms and knees are pressed to the cold metal side, sending a sparking shiver down the whole rest of him, only exacerbated by the fact that the single blanket he’d found in Martin’s linen closet has slouched its way down to his waist to leave the rest of him exposed. He doesn’t dare move to tug it up. He doesn’t dare encroach on the dangerously thin gap of two whole inches between his back and Martin’s that the world is currently teetering on, so he sits there and tries not to shiver and tries not to think how cold he is. He’s not cold. He’s lived in the archives for the better part of a year, and god knows if Elias ever even paid the building’s heating bill.
Jon shakes his head, knocking the thought aside. Don’t think about Elias, he reminds himself. Don’t think about Elias and don’t think about Peter Lukas and don’t think about whatever the hell the cops are currently doing to his archives and his statements and his recorders. Focus on the present.
It’s currently two in the morning. They’re about four hours from their destination, not really enough of a distance to justify stopping, but Martin had been tired and had said it like he insisted Jon must be tired too, so they pulled off the interstate onto a long stretch of farm road where the only things likely to pass them were a handful of cows or grazing horses. Jon doesn’t tell Martin that he doesn’t sleep anymore. Jon doesn’t tell Martin that he doesn’t do much of anything anymore, just read statements and make bland, oversteeped tea for himself and wonder aimlessly about how human he still is. There’s no sense in poking at the delicate sense of peace they’ve been cultivating over the past few hours — jostle it too much and it might just crash out. A hot glass on a cold surface, or something like that. Thermal shock. He’d broken a test tube once like that, in a high school chemistry class, and he’ll never forget the feeling of picking glass out of his hand.
Jon breathes in slowly, breathes out even slower. The ambient air inside of the van is approximately 20.56% oxygen. 20.57%. 20.56%. Whatever. It’s twenty and change — not particularly bad or good, but hopefully stable. Jon doesn’t want to get up to open a window and risk Martin waking up when he’s only just gotten to sleep. Martin needs his sleep. Martin’s had a very long day, and Jon won’t blame him if he wants to sleep for the next twenty hours or so while Jon drives the rest of the way to what could very well be one of Daisy’s kill shacks. Maybe Jon should just get up and start driving now. But Martin had wanted him to sleep — said it wasn’t good to drive tired, even if Jon can’t possibly be tired with the hum of Lukas still buzzing under his skin like static electricity, but Jon doesn’t tell him that. 20.54%. Jon supposes he could hold his breath and just let Martin have all the oxygen; it’s not like he needs to be breathing other than to remember he still has lungs because Jared didn’t take those. Jon holds his breath. Wonders how long he can hold it until he forgets about having lungs.
Jon should get some sleep. He should try counting — shit, what was the saying again? Counting sheep? Jon has never seen a sheep in real life. They’d seen plenty of cows though on the side of the road grazing; bigger than any animal Jon has ever encountered, with long hair and long snouts and long, pointed horns that sent a shiver up his spine. Maybe Jon should try counting cows. He doubts those types of cows could jump over fences like sheep do in children’s books illustrations, but a little creative liberty never hurt anyone. He’s going to count cows. One two and three. Seven eight and nine. All the way up to fourteen. Fourteen fears. Fifteen if he counts the Extinction. Thirteen if he subtracts out the Lonely. Twelve if he subtracts out the Eye. Still twelve if he counts the Eye back in and instead removes the Hunt, and eleven if—
“Jon?”
Jon blinks, exaggeratedly, at the very uninteresting pattern in the paint of the van’s wall, waiting for something to move. Something to make another noise aside from the cricket somewhere to the left of the van. He holds his tongue between his teeth like a dog with a bone, carefully, as if it might fall out of his mouth if he lets go, and he does not move.
“Jon,” Martin says again, more awake this time as he shifts; his shoulder touches Jon like a searing brand, and yet Jon has nowhere else to go. “Jon, are you alright?”
No, Jon thinks as he carefully holds tongue between teeth, I am not alright. I am trying very hard to not breathe so you can have all the oxygen that is currently sitting at 20.53% in the van, and I’m dreadfully afraid to touch you, you see. I’m afraid that I might break you if I do. I’m afraid of the Lonely, and I’m afraid of the Eye, and I’m afraid that we’ve become so antithetical to one another that we’re going to tear each other apart. Thermal shock, and all that.
Instead he says, “Yes,” as if the word itself is being smothered out of him. And then he pauses, remembering to release his tongue from his teeth, and tries again. “Yes, I— I’m fine. What is it?”
He feels Martin shift, readjust. The touch leaves Jon’s shoulder and is replaced near the small of his back; Martin’s facing him now, he reckons.
“You weren’t breathing,” Martin says softly. “I was worried.”
Ah, Jon thinks. “Ah,” Jon repeats aloud.
“Yeah.”
“I—” Jon’s teeth click together, though from the cold or some subconscious emotion, he can’t be sure. “I was...holding my breath.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“...Why?”
Why? Oh christ. Now Martin’s really asking the hard questions. He rolls over just slightly, just enough to tilt his head back so he can in fact see the outline of the man lying behind him. Facing him. Martin’s looking at him even without his glasses, and Jon doesn’t know if it’s better or worse to look away. Maybe both options are equally bad. Maybe he’s never had a choice in the first place, and this is just a long chain of the absence of Jonathan Sims’s free will: the inability to look-not-look at the man he’s currently sharing the back of the van with, the man he’d pulled out of the Lonely not hours earlier, the man he doesn’t want to touch and risk him falling away because this isn’t real. It’s not real. It can’t be real. Jon doesn’t get nice things, and even if sleeping on the hard metal floor in the back of a van on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere is hardly five-star accommodations, it’s still more alive than Jon’s ever felt in the past few months. The most aware he’s been of his heartbeat in even longer.
Jon clears his throat, twists his chin over his shoulder. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I’ve been awake,” Martin tells him. “You’ve kinda been kicking me for the past half hour or so.”
“Oh,” Jon says. And then he determines that this is a horrible position to try and hold a conversation in, so he rolls over completely. He’s fully facing Martin. His stomach and knees are touching Martin’s and the contact is so much it’s like sticking his fingers in an electric socket, and yet he doesn’t dare pull away. His joints are locked in place. Calcifying into stiff angles. Calcification is the buildup of calcium in muscle tissue. Calcium regulates human heart rates, which is what makes hydrofluoric acid so dangerous to humans with its irreversible binding. Calcium is flowing in and out of Jon’s muscles with each thump of that runaway muscle lying just beneath his sternum. Badum. Badum. Badum.
“I’m sorry,” Jon says finally, even if the moment has long since passed.
“‘S alright.”
“I can go up front, if you like?”
Martin forces his instinct to smile out with a smile. “What, you gonna sleep sitting straight up?”
“I mean, I've done it before.”
Martin raises a quizzical, judgemental brow.
“I have!” Jon protests at the unspoken question. “It’s not that terrible.”
“Says the man whose back gives out if he sits too long.”
“I—” Jon begins, then decides against it. He closes his mouth. He doesn’t open it again because who knows what he’ll say if he does, and there’s no point in arguing because Martin has the point. He’s stolen it right from under his nose. He’s wagging it in front of him like a piece of meat at a dog, with those big wide eyes that swim with words in a language he can’t read. So much for being an avatar of Beholding. So much for having the entire knowledge of earth trickling through your brain like water drip torture, when the whole scope of human understanding can’t give him the words he’s been fumbling for since they walked out of the Lonely.
“That is besides the point,” Jon finally settles on. Good going, he thinks. Nailed it.
“Okay,” Martin says, “but maybe I don’t want you to go up there.”
Oh, Jon thinks. “Oh,” he says, just almost aloud.
Martin looks at him, eyes soft and sleepy and like Jon has just told him something very sad. Has Jon said anything sad? He doesn’t know anymore. He doesn’t know if what he says is sad to the average person because his life has been a constant, stagnant monotone of grief after grief after grief these past few years, and at some point you just start tuning it out. White noise. A constant hum. Maybe Martin’s sad that Jon is sad even if Jon can’t recognize what being sad feels like anymore, and that’s why he’s looking at him like that. Maybe. Maybe that might be the case.
“Besides,” Martin continues, cutting off any more runaway thoughts Jon might have, “I need someone to commiserate with my inevitable shoulder pain in the morning.”
“Mm,” Jon mutters; he’s not exactly appreciative of being reminded of such, because as soon as the words leave Martin’s mouth, his body decides it is the ideal time to start feeling said pain. He shifts, uncomfortably, in his own segmented space. It does little except bring him closer to Martin’s face. “We should have packed more pillows. And...blankets, and clothes— christ, we don’t even have toothbrushes.”
“Speak for yourself. I brought toiletries.”
“Yes, yes, congratulations on actually having foresight,” Jon grouses. “Just know that if I end up in dentures it will be your fault.”
There’s a smile creeping across Martin’s face: foreign, yet fighting so hard for position. “I dunno, you might look cute in dentures.”
“Martin.”
“Finish off your whole ‘old man aesthetic’ you’ve got going on.”
“Martin.”
“Hey, don’t ‘Martin’ me,” he retorts, “I happen to like retro stuff.”
“Happy to hear that I fit your aesthetic,” Jon mutters flatly. He feels Martin adjust, pull the blanket back up, and his knee bumps needlessly against Jon’s own. He can feel its warmth even between their sleep pants. He doesn’t dare move away.
Jon swallows. His mouth suddenly feels very dry.
“Is this okay?” he thinks hears himself saying.
“Is what okay?” Martin asks.
“This,” Jon answers. “This whole...thing. Being here. With me.”
And then Martin closes his eyes. And then Martin is not looking but he’s still seeing, because he’s breathing in and out the air that Jon’s breathing out and in. In and out. Out and in. The oxygen level of the van is at 20.52%. The calcium in his heart is flowing steadily with each breath.
“Do you think I don’t want to be with you?” Martin will ask, voice absent of any tone he can latch onto, any clues that he can say yes, this is what he really means. Jon doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so superfluous to the situation at hand, so he simply crosses them across his chest. Protecting something, maybe. Putting up guard.
“I don’t know,” Jon will answer honestly. “You didn’t want to for so many months, and— and now, I don’t know.”
Except—
Except they don’t say any of that. Rewind. Back up. Martin’s looking at Jon still with that whimpering spark of amusement, which means Jon hasn’t messed up yet. Which means there’s still the illusion of choice here.
“Have you ever been to Scotland?” Martin asks, this time outside of his head.
“Once,” Jon answers, “but I um. I was very young, so I don’t remember much. My mother is buried in Glasgow.”
“Oh,” Martin says.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Jon says. “You didn’t kill her.”
“I know,” Martin answers, half shrugging with his unpinned shoulder, “but that’s what you say when something bad happens to someone you care about.”
Oh, Jon thinks. “Oh,” he says aloud, because “care” and “Jonathan Sims” don’t go together in the same thought process like this. Martin still puts them together, anyway. Martin is just a master of language like that.
“Mm,” Martin hums.
“Have you ever been?” Jon says. “To Scotland, I mean?”
Martin shakes his head. “No, can’t say I have.”
“You can’t? Are you stuck under some truth-telling curse?”
Martin barks out a hushed, fiery laugh. “Was that a joke?”
“Maybe,” Jon says. Shifts off his aching shoulder. It doesn’t do much to relieve the pain, in the grand scheme of things. “You look shocked.”
Martin snorts. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you tell a joke before, Jon.”
“I tell plenty of jokes,” Jon lies but looks offended enough to mask it. “You just never listen.”
Martin laughs a little more at that, a little more steady, a little more convincing. “Sorry,” he smiles. “I guess I’ll just have to start listening more.”
“I guess you will.”
“Mm.”
20.53%. Breathe in, breathe out. He wonders if Martin is still listening to his breathing. He wonders if he’d notice if he stopped.
“I’m sorry about the van,” Jon says, apropos of nothing.
“We’ll make due,” Martin shrugs. “It’s just one night.”
“And I’m sorry about your mum.”
“Thank you. It’s okay.”
“And I’m sorry you fell in love with me.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Wait, what? No. No, Martin doesn’t say that last part. That part is from the messy, half-formed Martin that’s been growing in the back of Jon’s head like a tumor, hollowed out into a husk and filled with fog. That Martin is larger than Jon could ever hope to see. That Martin isn’t breathing in the air between them now. In and out. Hydrofluoric acid. Thermal shock, and all that.
Rewind.
“Do you mean that?” Martin says, which means that Jon did ask the last question, because god forbid the tape ever stop exactly where you want it to. Which means now he is locked in this conversation. Which means he can’t roll around, pretend to go to sleep, even if there’s nowhere to roll without a part of Martin pressed up against him and burning hot.
“I don’t know,” Jon says. “I— I don’t know.”
“Do you think it’d be better,” Martin asks slowly, like he’s sifting through the words as he goes, “if I didn’t love you?”
Yes, Jon thinks. Wait. Maybe, he corrects. “It’d be easier, wouldn’t it?” he answers ultimately. It’s a simple question loaded with gunpowder. It’s a question on a question on a question. It’s too many things he can’t put up into words all wrapped up in brown paper and left at his door like a package he didn’t order. Martin looks at him. Martin’s always looking at him. Martin looks at him without Seeing, because Martin’s eyes are just eyes and not someone else’s smashed in another person’s skull. When he was born, they were brown, and the nurses said that he looked just like his father. Now, they’re muted, washed in salt water.
“Would it?”
“Wouldn’t it?” Jon repeats. Then swallows. Averts his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Martin nods. And then he breathes in. And then he breathes out, slow, and nods again. Chews on his lip. Wriggles his nose. Presses tongue to teeth. Jon catalogues each and every one of these movements, afraid to look away and let it slip back into the fog. He’s been losing so much recently. Maybe he just never was meant to have it.
Martin blinks slowly and slides a hand under his makeshift pillow. “Can I tell you something?”
Jon thinks about the question. Then he nods, hesitantly.
Martin takes a deep breath. “I...I’m not sure...quite how to put this. But I don’t think I was proper lonely until after you woke up from your coma.”
A surge of panic, of hurt and despair flares up in Jon’s chest as he opens his mouth.
“ Not —” Martin cuts him off before his thoughts can spiral completely, “I don’t mean that in the way you might be thinking. I just— my mother died, and then I started talking to Peter, and everything just sort of...faded away.” He makes a vague, fluttering gesture with his hand for emphasis. “There’d be days when I just...wouldn’t see anyone at all. And it wasn’t like I just avoided them, I’d go to coffee and there’d be no one working at all. Like the world was empty.”
Jon hears himself swallow. He wonders if Martin does too.
Martin continues, “But every time I went to the hospital, even if the nurses and the doctors and even the patients were gone, you were there. I don’t know how, but you were. Does that make sense?”
Jon doesn’t answer, doesn’t know how to. He just lets his throat open and close around air that he doesn’t need, oxygen that is only temporary. 20.51%. 20.50%.
“I like having you where I can see you,” Martin says, “in case I wake up and everything else is gone. And I like being in love with you, Jon. You don’t...have to get that. But I do.”
“Oh,” Jon says before he has time to think it first.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“You— okay?”
“Okay,” Jon agrees, doesn’t argue but thinks about doing it. Instead, he wets his lips. Instead, for the first time in what might be well over a year, he looks at Martin and Sees. “I’d very much like to touch you.”
“Okay,” Martin says.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You always do,” Martin doesn’t say, “so why would you want to stop now?”
“You don’t mean that,” Martin doesn’t say, “you wouldn’t hurt so many people if you didn’t like it.”
“Does it matter?” Martin doesn’t say. Doesn’t get up and open the back van door. Doesn’t walk until Jon can’t see him anymore, off to somewhere where Jon can’t follow.
Martin does take his hand. Martin’s hands are big and wide and calloused around the tips. Martin’s hands are cold, like running water, like frost on a window, like shivering, stuttering snowflakes, and Jon just wonders why every cold metaphor is related to things being wet. Like being wet is something wrong. Like tears and blood and spit and tea aren’t all wet things that are good when they’re in their right containers. Martin places Jon’s hand on his cheek, and it’s like the world decides this is the time to right its 23.4 degree tilt. Time and science and theoretical math all say to hell with it and decide that the earth’s climate was fucked anyway, so why not just make things nice and neat. Martin is a planet in this geocentric equation. Martin is something living and life-supporting, and Jon is just a celestial body pretending to be. Maybe a moon. Maybe an asteroid. Maybe a planet that’s not quite a planet and in another twenty years, once they get their telescopes working better, they’ll reclassify him as something different.
“How’s this?” Martin asks in a world that isn’t spinning off its axis.
“Yes,” says a voice that might be Jon’s.
“What about,” Martin takes his hand, moves it down, then presses a soft kiss to the inner part of his wrist, “this?”
Jon shivers. “Yes.”
Martin touches the side of Jon’s face. It’s not hot like he expects. Just warm. Just fleece-blanket, sleep warm. “And—”
Jon doesn’t wait for him to ask before he’s kissing him.
There are no sparks here, like every romance has ever told him. No firework explosions. No sweat or spit or stripping off clothes, no crying and messy sex and promising to be forever together even if the both of them might be marching to their deaths tomorrow because that’s the way that these sorts of stories always go. It’s just a kiss. It’s just Jon and Martin. It’s just lips touching lips, and pulse touching pulse, and Martin’s hands are cold but his face is warm and that’s just enough to make everything feel like it’s going to be okay. They’re in the back of a van. They’re on their way to Scotland. Jon’s thinking about how much Martin loves him and in turn thinking about how much he loves Martin. Maybe they might just love each other an equal amount. In equilibrium. Maybe that’s just enough, all there is to it.
Jon doesn’t break away first. Martin doesn’t either. They just hold it there for a long, steady moment, until Jon’s head is being tucked under Martin’s chin, and Martin’s leg is wrapping over Jon’s just across the knee. His hand is just between Jon’s shoulder blades, just above where he’s missing a rib. Jon’s hands are knotted up in the front of Martin’s sleep shirt, holding on just to make sure he doesn’t get lost again.
“I love you,” Jon says, finally realizing the words he’s been meaning to say this whole time. Isn’t it funny how that works? That the words always come to you lying in bed?
“I love you too,” Martin says, presses a kiss to his forehead.
“You already said that.”
“I know. But that’s what you say when someone you love says they love you.”
“Oh,” Jon says. “Well then, I love you as well. Again.”
He feels Martin chuckle at that. He feels his own heartbeat — badum, badum — because there’s calcium flowing in and out of his cells. Calcium really isn’t white, like everyone always says it is. It’s only white when it’s in bones. It’s only white when it’s mingled with something else to be not-quite-calcium anymore, and then there’s no one looking to check unless they’re looking at your teeth, but everyone always forgets that teeth are bones too. Bones break quite easily, Jon thinks. Bones don’t know how to do anything other than stand stiff-still or break.
“Are you still thinking about losing your teeth?” Martin asks.
“Maybe,” Jon answers honestly. “What would you do if I did and had to get dentures?”
Martin makes a soft, thoughtful hum. “I’d probably make you put them in the bathroom, so I didn’t have to look at them.”
“Rude. You’re rude. They’re still my teeth.”
“And they’d look lovely in your mouth,” Martin coos, “though probably not as much floating in a glass of water.”
“Rude,” Jon argues. “I’ll have to kiss you every time I take them out, so you’ll regret making me lose all my teeth.”
Martin squeezes him tight. Martin holds him like he’s fragile. Martin touches him like Jon is his whole world, tilted on its funny little axis, like Jon is a planet and not a moon. Not an asteroid. Not a not-planet just waiting to be renamed. Chemical in, chemical out. Badum, badum, badum.
“Go to sleep,” Martin says, voice muffled into the ruff of his hair.
“Okay,” Jon answers, “I love you.” And then he closes his eyes. He lets himself dream. Something about acid and heartbeats. Something about thermal shock, about chemical reactions, now steady in equilibrium.
It’s just before seven when they pull up to the diner. Martin’s stomach has been grumbling for the past half hour. First a low, mournful sound that Jon thinks might be a cow or might be the engine finally giving out in this old death trap, before it gets louder, and then it gets more insistent, and Martin can’t keep playing like nothing is wrong by talking over it until it simply goes away. One thing Jon knows is hunger. One thing Jon knows is that it doesn’t just go away.
So they pull up to the first place they see on the side of the road, and then they sit outside on the curb waiting for the clock to turn. Martin’s wearing one of Jon’s fuzzy jackets that is much too short for him, too tight in the shoulders, and Jon is wearing one of Martin’s jumpers. He doesn’t know when or why they switched. He does know that swapping back now would be pointless, because they’ve gone and gotten themselves attached to these finicky pieces of fabric now, and so Jon sits in his jumper that threatens to swallow his kneecaps and Martin sits in his jacket that’s giving him a nice breeze around the stomach, and neither of them talk about it. They just hold hands about it instead. Holding hands is such a nice, neat way of cutting out unnecessary commentary, Jon finds, just like kissing is a way to find words he never even knew existed. Like syzygy. And sesquipedalian.
Jon’s still holding Martin’s hand when the waitress takes pity on them and opens the door a whole two minutes and thirty-four seconds prior to seven. Still holding Martin’s hand when they sit across from each other in a booth in the corner. Still holding Martin’s hand when they start kicking each other under the table, when the waitress says “aren’t you two sweet,” when the sun starts streaming through the window like it's just rolled out of bed behind them, all groggy and disoriented. Jon doesn’t dare let go of Martin’s hand now, now that he’s just learned what he’s got. He’s had it for a long time now, he just didn’t know it, Martin tells him. Jon wonders how long is a long time in that context. Jon wonders how long planets and moons consider a long time too.
“Do you think it’ll keep,” Martin asks, nodding over to the big cherry pie sitting proud behind the counter, “if we take a piece of that with us?”
“Best not to chance it,” Jon says. He turns over his shoulder, calls to the waitress. “Excuse me? Could we get a piece of that?”
Martin snorts. “Jon, it’s breakfast.”
“And time isn’t real,” Jon agrees with a nod. “It was invented in the nineteenth century to sell train tickets.” And then he pauses. And then he picks up a fork. “Well, technically greenwich mean time was established in 1675 by the Royal Observatory as a means of—”
“Okay, okay, you’ve proved your point.”
“So you’ll help me eat this?” Jon says, innocent as ever against Martin’s cruel, unsympathetic eye roll.
“Fine,” Martin says. He picks up a fork. “Yes. You drive an incredibly hard bargain.”
“We’re on vacation. We can live a little.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call running from the cops anything special.”
“But I have you,” Jon says. Squeezes Martin’s hand under the table to make sure it’s still there. “That’s something special.”
Martin doesn’t have to smile, but he does. Martin doesn’t have to rub soft circles with his thumb over the back of Jon’s hand, reassuring and grounding, but Martin’s always doing things that Jon isn’t asking him to do. Sometimes they’re stupid, like throwing himself into the Lonely. Sometimes they’re wonderful, like following Jon back out again. “That’s it?” Martin asks, voice soft under the heavy blanket of his affection. “Just because I’m here, it’s special?”
“Yes,” Jon says immediately. Then he thinks for a moment. Nods to himself, and says again, more certain, more grounded this time, “Yes.”
It’s the end of September. September is when summer dies. September is when all this warmth starts seeping out of everything; things start getting cold, and things start getting dead. Martin’s skin is still washed out and muted and frigid. Martin’s hand still holds Jon’s as if this doesn’t even matter, as if he’s not a planet and Jon’s not a not-planet pretending to be one. Maybe Martin is more like hydrofluoric acid than he thought. Maybe he’s seeping into Jon’s skin and binding to his cells and making his heart skip beats as it fumbles to keep up with the speed of earth’s rotation. Maybe Martin is all that he’s ever really needed.
It’s the end of September. When Jon was eight, he was nearly eaten by a spider. When Jon was nine, he planted marigolds with his grandmother. When Jon was sixteen, he broke a test tube in high school chemistry, and he doesn’t know why he still remembers that half a lifetime later. There aren’t any spiders or marigolds or test tubes here. There’s just Jon, and there’s just Martin, and there’s just a piece of pie between them.
The waitress pours him a too-bitter cup of boiling coffee, and the mug doesn’t shatter into a million pieces under thermal shock. Jon wonders if Martin would like to plant marigolds when they get to Scotland. Jon wonders if kissing Martin now would taste like cherries, so he leans across the table, pulls Martin close, and presses his lips against his for as long as the both of them can stand to hold it.