Edward
I was sitting by the lake, on a bench hidden from the main path. The place was incredibly peaceful. The whisper of the wind in the trees and the soft babble of the waves on the stones had a calming effect on me. Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply, trying to relax and soften the tensions on my back. My feelings had been all over the place for the past few weeks, between me getting kicked out by my Dad, Jasper’s attack, and surgery.
How he looked, lying still on the floor, I will always remember. His closed eyes, his bruised hands, his pale skin. He was the picture of death and my greatest fear. I was still unsure how I had thought to check for his pulse, or found his phone in his back pocket, and with a calm voice I never known I possessed, called 911 for someone to rescue him. I was an automate on a mission, while another part of me was frenetically screaming his lungs out, losing his mind and his focus. The two sides of my personality melted back to one when Jasper opened his eyes and spoke to me. The guilt of having him comforting me while he was the one injured became the cement that bound both sides. I couldn't and wouldn't break down when HE was able to be rational and think straight. Right then, I needed to be strong and would only allow myself to panic later. Much later.
After the surgery, I did my best to be everything he needed. He was my sole and primary concern. I wanted him to be comfortable at home and just take time to recover, but he kept his focus on me. He was so attentive to me, so careful of my reactions. Jazz was trying so hard to hide how shaken he was about all of this, as if it was a shame to show any signs of weakness. And that just made me so angry. I thought he believed that I couldn't handle his pain, his frustration. I thought he was seeing me as a weak man, and he needed to be brave for the both of us.
Until I spoke to Emmett on the phone. I still have no idea how a seventeen year old was able to speak some wisdom into me, but what he said made sense. If Jasper needed to focus on me to deal with what happened to him, then I would let him do it. I would pretend that I didn’t know when he woke up at night, in sweat, after a pretty agitated dream and couldn’t go back to sleep. Or how intense he could get while killing some monsters on Emmett’s video games. Or how much he could be lost in his thoughts, repeating again and again in a murmur, “I am such an idiot.” Or how he kept on touching me and pulling me close to him at any time. I would pretend that I was the one being clingy and needing protection.
But after his outburst this morning, I was at a loss about what to do with Jasper. I just wanted to think about something else for a little while and feel numb. Contemplating the scenery seemed like the right thing to do. The air was so pure that I could see the clouds trying to cover the far away mountains, like a cottony scarf loosely tied around their shoulders.
“So, top or bottom?”
Leave it to Emmett to kill the moment.
“You are not really asking me this question.”
His long silence made me turn my head to look at him. He was scratching his head, hiding his face from me.
“Tanya is pregnant.”
Mouth open, eyes wide, I stared at Emmett in total disbelief. Looking back at the view, I blinked a few times, trying to process the information. But the only thing I could come up with was “Does God hate me that much?” Unable to comment on that shattering piece of information, I just chose to answer Emmett’s previous question. The lesser of two evils.
“Bottom.”
“Ewww… Edward, I didn’t need to know that.”
“Then stop asking questions you don’t want the answers to! Or answering questions I am not asking.” I was angry with him when I shouldn’t be. He was just the messenger. Emmett turned on the bench to face at me, looking all nervous and concerned.
“I thought you should know.”
“I know.” I sighted, making a huge effort to calm down. “You did well.” The last thing I wanted was to alienate him from me. Trying to lighten the mood, I added, “You also thought you wanted to know if I was top or bottom….”
“Ewww… don’t remind me! The mental images I have now…”
Emmett was hiding his face in his hands, shaking his head. I chuckled at his antics, happy to have him with me. It was exactly what I needed, even though he brought news that I had no idea how to handle.
“Does it hurt?” Emmett was staring at me intently, looking very serious.
“What?”
“To bottom. Does it hurt?” He was now looking at me as if it was the most obvious subject a straight seventeen year old could ask his gay older brother.
“Could you remind me again why we are having this conversation?”
“Because it is easier than speaking about your boyfriend freaking out this morning?”
God, I hate it when he's right.
Jasper had come back from a meeting at his company more pissed than I had ever seen him. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened, but was cursing his boss, Irina, like a trooper. He stormed into the flat, pushing past me, saying “I resigned” without even looking at me, before flying to the bedroom and slamming the door behind him. I heard something hit the wall and shatter into pieces, followed by more swearing. I didn’t even have the time to get to the door before he came out. He looked at me; all disheveled and tormented, and took my face into his hands, kissed me softly.
“I need some time alone. I’ll be back tonight.”
He must have seen the anxiety in my eyes, because he stopped me with a kiss before I spoke to add, “Don’t worry about me. I am just going to the boxing gym. I love you.”
Nodding, and kissing him lightly, I let him go, feeling utterly helpless. After a few hours, feeling like a lion in a cage in this flat which was getting smaller and smaller, I called Emmett to meet me by the lake.
“Earth to Edward, are you there?”
Emmett’s hand was waving in front of me, trying to bring me back to the conversation.
“Sorry…. Hmmm…. It does hurt, but after, it is just mind blowing.”
“EDWARD! You aren’t supposed to answer these damn questions!”
“Then why are you asking?”
“Because… it’s a boy.”
Of course, it has to be a boy. Murphy’s law through and through.
“Hopefully, he will be gay too,” Emmett added, smirking as an attempt to make me smile. It wasn’t working though.
“Or, he will be the perfect son Dad so wishes to have.” I sighed again. I was doing that a lot lately. Leaning on the bench, I observed the ducks flying just above the water, their webbed feet grazing the surface. I was envious of them. I wanted their freedom, their peace of mind, their primary concerns being about finding food and a shelter and not about dealing with all those feelings.
Life really has a way to push you around, just to see how much you can take.
“I’m a shitty brother. I was supposed to cheer you up.”
“No, you’re not…. It’s just….” I didn’t even know what I was feeling at that moment. My head and heart were in turmoil. Jasper, this kid that I will probably never meet, my Dad, my future, everything was so mixed up that it made me nauseous.
“You know, I think this kid might be lucky not to grow up with you,” Emmett mused after some silence. He was trying to take me out of my dark thoughts in his own strange way.
“Really? Care to explain?”
“Well, for instance, he will never spend a whole night puking his guts out, because his diabolic older brother makes him smoke all his cigarettes and then some cigars from Dad, just to prove a point.” Emmett laughed loudly, his booming voice scaring the ducks away.
I smiled at the memory. I had caught him and a few of his friends at the back on the garden, hiding there to smoke what looked like their first cigarettes. I was so pissed at him for doing it at that moment, that I just took them all without saying a word. If health advertisements on TV and horrible pictures on the packet didn’t disgust him, I wasn’t sure what to say to make him stop. Later on though, I had one of my most brilliant ideas: making him smoke all of them, one after the other. He was so ill afterwards that I never ever saw him with a cigarette ever again.
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
“It did.” He added, grumbling. “Unfortunately. I can’t even stand the smell of cigarettes now.”
It was my turn to laugh. For a sixteen year old, I had been quite smart, and maybe a tiny bit evil.
“Maybe Dad should have used the same method on you: making you fuck all the hot gay guys of the city until you get sick of it and turn straight.” Emmett chortled at his own joke, making me smirk.
“If only! Not sure it would have had the intended result, though.”
Smiling widely, his eyes sparkling with wickedness, he asked, “So, how many guys have you had? Apart from Jasper, I mean.”
Frowning, I shook my head, laughing.
“I can’t believe you are asking me these questions!”
“Don’t be shy! I already know you’re a bottom. I mean it can’t get more intimate than that!”
“True. But just to be fair, answer the question first.” If he wanted to know more about my sex life, there were no reasons I couldn’t get more about his. Not that I was interested, but I wouldn’t be the only one embarrassed by this conversation.
“Hmm… Shit…” Checking if I was serious, he finally gave in. “One, and it was a total disaster. Your advices about sex with girls were so full of shit. But at least, now, I know why.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at his chagrined face. “Well, for my defense, I did share the whole extent of my knowledge on straight sex.”
As he didn’t look so amused by my comment, I decided to just give him his answer. “One as well.”
He looked dumbfounded. “Only one? Except Jasper?”
“Don’t look so surprised. What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. More, I guess. Boys are supposed to be hornier than girls. So I thought two gay boys….”
“Yeah, well, I was horny, but only had one partner. Two, with Jasper.”
A goofy smile was playing on his lips. “Who was it? Mike? I am sure it was Mike!”
I felt my throat clogging up remembering of my best friend. It had taken me a very long time to get over his sudden death, and honestly, I still wasn’t sure I totally managed it.
“No, it wasn’t Mike.”
Oblivious to my sadness, Emmett asked again, “So who was it? Did I know him?”
Clearing my throat, pushing away the grief, I decided to answer his question. At least, we would talk about a subject that wasn’t a source of pain for me.
“Jake.”
“Our nanny?”
“Your nanny.”
“No, our nanny. You fucked the nanny?” Emmett looked completely startled by this revelation.
“First, it was YOUR nanny, not mine. And second, I didn’t exactly fuck him.”
“Don’t play on words with me. You totally fucked the nanny! I can’t believe it! You realize you were underage?” His voice was nearly a growl, sounding aggravated.
“Emmett! Nothing happened before I was eighteen. Well, in fact, it was his gift for my birthday.” I couldn’t understand why he would be so upset over this. I thought it would amuse him and not make him so pissed.
“Jake. Jake! JAKE!!!!”
“Yes, I do remember his name!” I rolled my eyes at him, feeling more and more exasperated by his reaction.
So much for talking about painless subjects.
“I mean, JAKE!”
“Could you please get over it?”
“How did it happen?” He was standing in front of me now, so freaking serious it could have been hilarious.
“Are you sure you want to have a step by step description of what happened?” I was just joking with him, hoping that he would calm down a little bit.
Shaking his head, clearly annoyed, he nearly shouted at me.
“Spare me the details, but I DO WANT TO KNOW! I am stunned. You asked Dad to hire a male nanny because he kept on fucking the female ones and then firing them. He even slapped you on your birthday because you told him that. And then YOU, of all people, fuck the nanny.”
The comparison made me cringe and unleashed my resentment.
“It wasn’t like that, okay! I was fifteen, Emmett! I didn’t know I was gay then. I figured it out by lusting over Jake. It took me two years to admit it, and another one for him to be interested enough to act upon it. Plus, we stayed together for a while. It wasn’t just a fuck. He was important to me, Emmett.”
We were staring at each other, waiting for one of us to look down. Neither of us did.
“He was your boyfriend?” Emmett asked in a much calmer tone.
“Kind of. We weren’t in love. I can see that now, because of what I feel for Jasper. But we cared deeply for each other. We still do.” I was pleading him with my eyes to understand what Jake had meant to me. He hadn’t been at all just a fuck and I really didn’t want my brother to assimilate me to Dad.
Pondering my explanation, Emmett finally concluded, “You really do have a thing for older men!”
“I don’t!” I was the one indignant this time.
“Edward! Jake was what? Ten years older than you?”
“…Eight years…”
“And Jasper is what? Six years older?”
“The age difference doesn’t have the same impact when you are over twenty. Jake was clearly older. Jasper just happened to have six more years than me.” I was trying to defend myself, but was clearly doing a poor job at it.
"That doesn't make any sense, you realize that, don't you?"
“Shut up, Emmett!”
A long silence followed my last words. I probably had hurt him with my angry tone, but God! How could he compare me to Dad? Everything was so fucked up. Was there any subject at all that we could speak about without getting all upset?
“I’m sorry, Edward,” Emmett murmured, while sitting back on the bench. “You are nothing like Dad.” He added, reaching for my hand and squeezing. “You practically raised me because he was never there. You, you were always there for me, always checking on me, cheering me up or teaching me things. You were the one I look up to. Not Dad, or Jake.”
I smiled sadly at him. Sharing a shitty parental figure did strengthen our bond, but it had been hard to live through it nevertheless.
“Well, Jake was the one I looked up to. He listened to me, comforted me, and challenged me. And later on, he just became… more.”
“Nothing happened before your eighteenth birthday, you swear?”
His question made me chuckle. “What if something happened? Are you planning on kicking his ass to save my virtue?”
He groaned, not seeing the humor of the situation. “It would have been wrong, Edward. I… Jake was also important to me, you know. I don’t want all the men around me to be some kind of sex predator.”
Okay, so that’s the real problem here.
“He wasn’t, Emmett. He was always respectful and incredibly uptight about the fact that NOTHING would happen before I was legal. Nothing at all. No touching, no kissing, no flirting. He pushed me away. He even resigned. Well, he tried to. But I begged him not to, because we needed him. And I stopped pursuing him. And that’s what drew him to me, strangely enough….”
I wanted him to have the whole picture of what happened exactly all those years ago. Now wasn’t the time to play games or tease each other anymore. He was clearly distressed by this conversation, and I couldn’t leave him like this.
“But he still fucked you on your eighteenth birthday.”
“What? No? He kissed me, Emmett. That was his gift. A kiss. My first gay kiss, to be totally honest. We…became intimate a few months later.”
He nodded, seemingly relieved by what I said. “Okay.”
A long silence again enveloped us, only filled by the birds cheeping, announcing twilight.
Arguing with Emmett wasn’t exactly what I had planned to forget about Jasper’s foul mood. I had already enough problems to deal with, the last of it being this future newborn brother, without starting a cold war with Emmett.
Eager to change the subject, I just asked him, “Can we call a truce?”
Turning his head to me, he looked at me for a few seconds, his face impassive, before smiling and nodding. Biting his bottom lip, he bumped his shoulder on mine, making me lose balance, before starting to punch my side playfully.
“Emmett…” My tone was supposed to be menacing, but didn’t have any effect on him.
He went from hitting to tickling me, grabbing both of my wrists with one hand, and pushing me back on the bench. This position gave him full access to my waist and stomach as he teased me even more.
“Emmett! Stop! Stop!” I was giggling, having a hard time catching my breath, and desperately trying to get out of his strong hold. I somehow managed to have him release me, only to fall on my ass on the ground.
Emmett burst out laughing, holding his side with his arms, and nearly crying. For a few seconds, I felt utterly ashamed to have been manhandled by my younger brother, but his laugh was contagious and I dissolved into laughter.
After a few minutes of totally cracking up, Emmett helped me to stand up and sit back on the bench. He was smirking again, opening his mouth and closing it, fidgeting on the bench.
“Spill!”
Looking at me with a smug look, he explained, “I did some researching.”
A bit confused, I frowned. “About?”
“Being gay. To know what it implies. Who you were.” Emmett’s face had a very mischievous expression.
“What did you do? Googled “gay” on your laptop?”
“Shit! That’s smart! I didn’t think about it.”
I chuckled at him, shaking in my head in amusement. “So, how did you get your answers?”
Turning his body to me, one knee on the bench, he rested his elbow on its back. “I had a one to one with the gay guy from school.”
“What? And what did you say? “Hey! My bro is gay like you. So let’s speak and go over the basics”?”
“Hmm… Pretty much, yes.”
“I’m sure it went well!”
Scratching his hair, he explained sheepishly, “Yeah, well, no… in fact, it didn’t. I had to stalk him for a few days and corner him to finally get him to answer me.”
My brother is really one of a kind.
“You must have scared the shit out of him.”
“Yeah… I kind of did. But it’s all cool now. We are friends. He is a nice guy and pretty funny too. A bit geeky though, but I like him.”
“You’re friends with the resident gay of your High School. I am sure your football team is overjoyed with this news!”
“We had some tensions but who cares. They need me to finish and win the season anyway.”
He stood up, hands in his pockets and took a few steps closer to the lake. Throwing some stones in the lake, he finally voiced his thoughts. “It’s just… I didn’t know how to react after you came out. In our family, being gay had always meant being weak, or some kind of weird guy, or a bit evil. But you don’t fit the profile. I know you. You are my brother. So, I wanted to understand. And Quill helped me think things through. And after, I met Jasper. I am glad you have him, you know. He makes you happy. I can see it. So I wanted you to know that I don’t care, and will never care about you being gay. You are still my brother.”
I was surprised and touched that he decided to vocalize his feelings. His recent behavior towards Jazz or me had clearly shown that it didn’t matter to him. He was back in my life as if he never left it, not even flinching when he saw us kissing, and even asking some pretty intimate details about gay sex. Having had the same education, I knew that he wasn’t raised to accept homosexuality so easily. But I had never really thought about what he went through after my little announcement.
Getting up, I walked to Emmett, squeezing his shoulder. “Thank you.”
Taking a step back to be at my level, he bumped me on my shoulder, smiling. “You’re welcome. I have to go now. You’re going to be okay?”
Bumping back on him, I replied, “Yes. Thanks for being here.”
“Just, for Jasper... don’t be so worried, he is a pretty strong guy and he will sort it out.”
“Thanks, Em. Go now. And if you want, bring your friend Quill with you next time you come see us.”
“Will do.” Smiling broadly, he left, letting me alone with my thoughts.
Grabbing my backpack, I walked by the lake, enjoying the feelings of the stones rolling under my feet. Picking a flat one, I threw it in the water, making it bounce on the surface several times. I always loved skimming stones when I was a kid. I wished I were like them, able to bounce back on the surface, flying over it, despite my weight and the possibility to be swallowed whole by the traitorous water. The stone would always drown at the end, but it didn’t matter. What was important was the number of ricochets you could actually do. I was just hoping I could rebound as well from all this mess, that neither I, nor Jasper, would be engulfed by all the hateful feelings, the pain, the fear, or the uncertainty surrounding us right now. I was so fed up with all of this; I just wanted to go away, far, far away from everything. I was dreaming of taking a break, resting, and coming back stronger, knowing what to do, because at this very moment, I felt helpless and didn’t even know who to turn to for some advices.
The vibration of my phone, alerting me of a new text message, interrupted my rumination. It was Jasper.
“I need you.”
Calling him, I hurried home.
--"You look so fine"- Garbage -- "Little Lion Man" - Mumford & Sons
Love and snuggles to all the ladies and the gentleman, who listen, share, help, or WC with me. A very special Thank You to OCDJen and Mrs Agget, for pre-reading and betaing this chapter.
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