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The shadows on the ceiling dance as Jude trains his eyes on the blank expanse of ceiling above. Willem is asleep, has been asleep a long time, and he snuffles softly, his breath hot against Jude’s chest. Willem clings to comfort in sleep, Jude has noticed. It’s not uncommon that he finds Willem clutching the covers in a white-knuckled grip, or holding onto Jude as though afraid Jude will fall through his hands.
Maybe it’s an effort to delay the inevitable, to keep Jude between the sheets, away from the blades lodged underneath the bathroom sink. It should be enough, Jude thinks. Father Luke, Dr. Traylor, Caleb, they’re all either dead or so far away it’s almost laughable they have such a strong hold over him. He has friends, people he can call family, and he has Willem, who defies every attempt at quantification. But the life he now lives, which felt for years like an unattainable fantasy, still feels surreal, like it’ll disappear from under him if he so much as breathes too hard or makes the slightest noise.
He loves Willem. That much is indisputable, the thought of him not loving Willem too perverse to even dwell on. But something low and ugly in him is angry at him, hates Willem for seemingly being unable to notice how sex ruins everything. Willem is nothing like the others –he is kind and good, has only ever treated Jude with gentleness–and yet, ever since they consummated their relationship, Father Luke and Dr. Traylor and Caleb seem to have crept into the very walls of their apartment with a terrifying omnipotence. Willem turns, and there are Caleb’s eyes, and, reflected in them, Jude’s own broken body, limbs twisted in a grotesque picture of slumber, the stairwell echoing around him. Willem reaches a hand toward him and there is Dr. Traylor, brandishing the fireplace poker, and his leg burns with phantom pains so excruciating he might as well be experiencing his final night with the Doctor all over again.
Ana, help me, he thinks. Tell me how to stop seeing them in everything. Teach me to be good, to give Willem the love, the care, the partner he deserves. Help me, Ana. Please. But Ana doesn’t respond, she never does, and Jude curses her for dying, for leaving him alone. She might’ve been the only one to help him, fix him, make him into a normal person, but no sooner was he was confronted with a glimpse as to what could be than she was taken cruelly from him, and Jude was forced to watch her wither away as his own recovery could only stagnate and decline in her absence.
Willem noses further into Jude’s chest, and Jude extricates himself carefully from Willem’s grip, listens for any change in Willem’s breathing that might indicate wakefulness. But Willem has always been a heavy sleeper, so Jude makes his way unimpeded to the bathroom. He stares at his reflection until his vision blurs and his eyes dissolve into slurs of black. There’s something comforting in it, in viewing the world through the fisheye lens of unfocused eyes, in that his body smudges around the edges and he can almost imagine himself another person, one whose body and mind don’t still cow to old memories.
But, unbidden, his vision sharpens once again, and Jude is brought back to the motel with Father Luke, when the men would leave and he’d have to come back to his body, fresh and raw, and Father Luke would hold him and caress him and tell him, only a little longer, Jude. Only a little longer and then you’ll turn sixteen and we can live together like a real couple in a little cabin and every Sunday we’ll go fishing together. You want that, right?
But the cabin would prove to be nothing more than a fantasy, Father Luke himself a fiction—a scabbed-over version of a man named Edgar Wilmot that Jude had never known. The veneer-thin hope Jude had spent years clinging to as his last, desperate lifeline had shattered with the police arrival and Father Luke’s swinging body, gravity pulling the noose toward the earth as if desperate to return him to life.
And so what follows next truly is an inevitability, the cutting having imprinted upon his past, present and future. They all want him to stop, Willem and Harold and Andy, but they don’t, will never understand the necessity of it–the way the hyenas finally stop, their voices quieting to a manageable roar while the world around him narrows simply to the blade and the purpled flesh of his arm, so thick with scar tissue it almost resembles something alien, otherworldly. For a brief moment, Father Luke and Dr. Traylor and Caleb leave him, content to silently witness his own self-destruction, him, deformed, repulsive, sick.
When he finishes, he cracks the window slightly to dissipate the cloying smell of blood, which seems to seep into him with a kind of permanent heaviness. His rag runs deep pink under the sputtering flow of the sink water, and he begins to feel an unsettling kind of guilt that here he is, one room over from Willem, cutting himself, as Willem sleeps and clutches for a Jude that isn’t there, one that perhaps has never existed in the first place.
The door unlatches with a quiet click, and Jude makes his way to the kitchen. He doesn’t feel right somehow, as if something sick and distinctly wrong is roiling around in the foundations of his stomach. Maybe if he emerges the next morning with something to show from the night before–bread, scones, who knows–Willem will forgive the waxen sheen of his skin, the bruise-blue dark circles under his eyes. He will know Jude hasn’t slept, that he hasn’t been sleeping right for weeks, will know, implicitly, that Jude has been cutting more and more for reasons he surely can’t discern.
He’s taken out all the ingredients for scones with currants and has just begun to cube the butter when he hears a sound from deep in the hallway. Willem has padded up a door from their bedroom to the bathroom as though lost, searching. When he appears not to find the thing he’s looking for, he turns, and, seeing Jude, takes on a grateful look. He sidles behind Jude, lays his head on Jude’s shoulder. Jude’s hand pauses over the tub of flour, and he freezes, trying to discern the nature of the touch. Surely Willem doesn’t want sex again, not after last night. He’ll indulge him, if that’s what he wants–it’s one of the cardinal rules Jude has set himself for their relationship, to never refuse Willem, ever. But he can’t act this time, can’t play the part. He’ll just have to lie there and press himself down to the size of a coin and wait for it to be over, the way he did for Father Luke’s clients. The comparison makes him sick, because this is Willem, Willem, not Father Luke, but his mind is moving a million miles an hour and he hears the metal measuring cup fall to the countertop as if from far away, flour strewn around in a mockery of snow.
But then Willem is moving away, his hands near his sides.
“I’m sorry, Judy,” he says, and the tightness in Jude’s chest eases almost imperceptibly. “I woke up and you weren’t there, and I panicked. You weren’t–” and here he looks up almost hopefully, and something in Jude twists as he watches Willem figure it out, his face shifting through hope to disillusionment.
“Will you let me see?” he asks instead, and Jude rolls up his sleeve for Willem’s inspection. Willem is careful, almost frighteningly so, his fingertips ghosting over Jude’s scarred flesh as though afraid.
“You only cut a couple times,” he says. “I’m proud of you, Jude. I know it’s not easy.”
For a moment, Jude wishes he were someone else, someone better, someone deserving of Willem. Someone for whom Willem would say, I’m proud of you, in response to a raise or a promotion or an athletic goal achieved, not his partner having cut himself five times as opposed to fifteen.
But then Willem is rolling Jude’s sleeve back down over the bandages with the utmost of care, as though Jude is a precious thing between his hands, not a commodity stolen and bought and sold and used. And it feels so good for touch to carry no promises with it. No promises of sex, of illusions capitalizing off childhood dreams, of a freedom just out of his reach. Just Willem, rubbing between the meat of his thumb and forefinger almost thoughtlessly, as though taking care of Jude is something innate, something unconscious, and it’s this, this seemingly banal action that makes Jude feel loved, more so than any words or gestures could convey.
“Are you making scones?” asks Willem, and Jude nods, coming back to himself.
“Blackcurrant,” he says, and his throat is raspy and dry with unspoken words.
“Can I help?” he asks, and Jude passes him the recipe, which by now is dusted with flour and dotted with grease spots from the butter. The flour is wiped away with surprising efficiency, and they stand, side by side, measuring the wet ingredients and combining them with the dry, laminating the dough until it becomes something crisp and buttery. By the time they finish,the sun is just beginning to rise and seep through the slats of the windows, coating the kitchen in a kind of warm light. The oven timer goes off and Jude takes out the scones. Action and reaction. The axiom of causality: every action exists as the consequence of a cause. For the first time in a while, the world feels simple again.