Chapter Text
Do you know I could break beneath the weight
of the goodness, love, I still carry for you?
That I’d walk so far just to take
the injury of finally knowing you?
April 28th, 2022 9:56am
It isn’t the first time Ed has driven over the short bridge through the forest and thought, Wonder if today’s the day I drive into the river. And it probably won’t be the last.
The bridge is hardly anything in the grand scheme of the drive out to the cabin. Takes less than a minute to cross, and the river beneath it is mucky and stagnant. Hardly a marvel. But it’s far enough from the edge of the bridge to the ravine below where Ed is fairly sure if he turned the steering wheel just a bit to the right, the fall could kill him instantly. And if it doesn’t get him right away, the water is deep enough where the car would get submerged pretty quickly. As far as exit plans go, drowning sounds terrible to him—the idea of the thrashing and the panic and the suffocation of it all. But he supposes that’s only for the first couple of minutes. After that, it’s supposed to be nice, right? Like drifting off to sleep? And it’s a far more interesting obituary than “Local deadbeat queer takes a bunch of pills.” How fucking original is that?
But by the time he can give the idea any serious consideration, the car is already over the bridge, barreling down the craggy paved road and through the trees. He sighs, though not with any driving emotion behind it. Opportunity missed, he supposes.
The main reason Ed hasn’t given it any real consideration this time around, though, sits in the front passenger seat. His black labrador, Blackbeard sticks his head out the open window, tongue lolling out of his mouth as the wind blows past. Ed reaches over to give him a scritch between his shoulders, earning him a tail wag. It’s a good distraction from his spiraling thoughts. If Ed’s honest with himself, Blackbeard is top of the very short list of Things Worth Staying Alive For, According to One Ed Teach. There are other things, of course. But those things—things like warmth, good food, orgasms—are so amorphous and fleeting. In the moment, biting into a slice of chocolate cake or really getting into the rhythm of a good fuck is fantastic, but after it’s all over, what are you left with? He can only hit the metaphorical Instant Dopamine Button so many times before everything becomes hollow and those things stop being good enough reasons to get up every morning.
Blackbeard hadn’t started out as a suicide prevention plan, obviously. During the pandemic lockdown, he’d convinced Izzy they needed to do what everyone else was doing in their boredom and adopt a shelter dog. Izzy was against it initially, but less than a day in, he and the dog were already napping on the couch together. At the time, it had been a heartwarming idea to Ed, having a pet around. But looking back, it was so clearly a subconscious eleventh hour plan to salvage his obviously crumbling marriage. Straight people have kids to save their relationships. The gays adopt pets. Clearly, it wasn’t the best plan. Otherwise, it would have worked.
Ed ended up with Blackbeard after everything was said and done, and it’s been quite literally a lifesaver. A dog is something dependent on him. Something that would suffer if he leaves. He’d always thought if anything were to happen to him before, Izzy would be upset, sure, but he’d move on. He’s one of the most stalwart, pragmatic people Ed knows. He can take care of himself if left alone. But Blackbeard needs food, exercise, attention. And if Ed goes and does something rash, that wouldn’t be very fair to him, would it?
It’s a bit fucked up to think about a relationship with a dog like that—transactional, symbiotic—but his therapist Renee doesn’t seem to think so. “Any reason to stay alive is a good reason, Ed,” she’d told him during a session a few months back. “A lot of people’s only reason to stay alive is their pet. If that’s what you need to cling to right now to get through the day, cling to it. There will be more reasons to come as you get out of the darker days.”
He snorts softly at the thought of that. Get out of the darker days. As if this hasn’t been his life for the past thirty odd years. As if the morose, agonizing weight of knowing life is an absolute meaningless slog will just go away after a while, scattering off into the wind like smoke. He’s tried so hard to blame his shit mental health on something concrete and fixable—the dreariness of Michigan winters, his terrible diet, his non-existent exercise schedule—hoping that he can finally nail down the one thing that makes everything feel so bland and change it. But even in the summer, even eating as many green things as he can get his hands on and hiking until his feet blister, the dark cloud that hangs over him doesn’t relent.
Ed’s old enough and has lived through enough of these down swings to know that no one thing is ever going to be the cure. There’s times when he feels better, sure, but it always returns to the baseline of misery. The “darker days” Renee talked about are just days. He just wishes the universe would stop giving him hope that things will improve.
He scratches at his freshly shaved chin as they pass the stump of the massive oak on the side of the road that fell during a storm a few springs back, his indication that he’s just around the corner from the cabin. He sighs. That’s the bitch of it: he still has a shred of hope that his brain chemistry will magically right itself one day. That he’ll wake up and he’ll just feel—not happy, per se. Happiness is a thing he’s pretty sure he’s incapable of. Besides, he doesn’t even want to be happy, he doesn’t think. He just wants to look in the mirror and not feel empty. He wants to be content. He wants to say he’s doing all right and mean it for fucking once.
Ed doesn’t think that’s such a huge ask. But apparently, the universe thinks otherwise.
It isn’t long after passing the stump that he spots a frustratingly hard to see green mailbox and turns into the drive beside it. In the passenger seat, Blackbeard pulls his head back into the car and howls softly, his slender body wiggling in anticipation. He knows exactly where they are. Ed scratches behind the dog’s ears and smirks. “You ready to see dad? Yeah? Ready to see Iz?” That gets him an ecstatic bark, and Ed can’t help but grin. Someone had to be excited to see Izzy, he guesses.
His chest tightens at the thought. It isn’t as though he’s dreading seeing Izzy. It will be their first time seeing each other since the divorce was finalized, but as far as divorces go, things have been amicable. They don’t have kids, and Ed was more than willing to let Izzy take most of the assets, including the cabin. The whole process had taken goddamn forever, but when it finally ended, there wasn’t any bitterness. It was just—done. And they haven’t been friends or anything since, but they keep in each other’s spheres. Ed still follows Izzy on Instagram, sees all his photos of his new boyfriend (can’t for the life of him remember his name. Reminds him of ketchup? Mayonnaise? Some kind of condiment.) Feels very normal about all of it. There’s no pining, no late-night hookup requests, no pleas to take each other back. It’s all super well-adjusted and healthy. He only cries over a new photo of him every couple of months or so. For Ed, that’s doing pretty damn well.
It isn’t the fact that Ed is seeing Izzy again that’s getting him nervous. It’s that Izzy is seeing Ed again.
Ed hasn’t changed all that much in the past four months, by his standards, but he’s sure Izzy will say something about how he’s presenting himself these days. Izzy had a front row seat to Ed’s gender crisis a couple years back. Had a proper freak out when he’d shaved the beard he’d been growing for years down to stubble on a whim. So it isn’t like he’ll be blindsided by anything. Ed’s also out as genderfluid to just about everyone now—he keeps it to himself when it comes to work because fuck, he just doesn’t want to have to deal with all that bullshit. But he has the trans flag emoji next to the rainbow in his Instagram bio, “he/they/she” pronouns very clear underneath his name. Everyone knows. He isn’t really hiding anything from anyone. But he’s still bracing himself for Izzy’s commentary. About how he’s still clean shaven, about the eyeliner (he skipped eyeshadow today—didn’t want to lay it on too thick), about the sheer black lace shirt he’s wearing, about the new necklaces and rings. It won’t be negative, he doesn’t think, but even the idea of compliments has him tense. He doesn’t want to be perceived or remarked upon at all. By anyone, but especially not Izzy.
Not just because of his appearance, either. When they’d last seen each other at the lawyer’s office on D Day, they’d hugged, perhaps a little too tightly for two people who had just officially ended their marriage. And Izzy had said into his ear, “Don’t be a stranger. I’ll always care for you. And I want you to take care of yourself too.”
And fuck. You don’t walk away from a decade long relationship without the ability to tell that the other person was falling apart. All it’s going to take is a look, and Ed will be had.
Maybe it isn’t too late to turn around. Izzy isn’t the only person he could have called to take the dog for the weekend. He’s doing it simply because Izzy hasn’t seen Blackbeard in nearly a year, and he thought it’d be good for the both of them. But there are others, right? Ivan from work is nice enough. He might be able to take him on short notice. Though, he might have mentioned he was allergic to dogs before. Or was that Fang? Either way, there are options. If he turns around before—
“Shit,” he mutters.
All his plans to flee dissipate as the cabin comes into view. Standing on the porch, leaning against the railing of the steps down to the lawn is Izzy, waving at him as he pulls up to the house.
Fucker. How long has he been standing there waiting for him?
Sighing, Ed parks the car in the driveway and groans, “Here we fucking go,” before plastering on a strained smile and waving back.
The cabin, from the outside, looks very much as Ed remembers it. Unsurprising, given Izzy had been so insistent on how he wanted everything to look when they first moved in. Ed had let him take control on pretty much everything because he simply was not the kind of person to really give a shit about interior design or landscaping. But the end result was a cute, put-together wood paneled cabin that any lesbian Ed knows would die for. The wrap around porch looks freshly power washed, and Ed notices the flower beds in front are blooming. The place is maintained. It hardly looks any different from the year before when he’d last seen it, which makes Ed feel a certain way that he can’t quite place.
Blackbeard practically flies over the center console and out the driver’s side door as soon as Ed is on the pavement and out of the way. The dog is a black blur, shooting around the car and zooming right up to Izzy, practically knocking him off his feet. “Hey, easy!” Ed calls out, but Blackbeard completely ignores him, doing his best to leap up and shower Izzy with kisses. “You know the bastard’s only got one leg. Calm down.”
Izzy doesn’t seem to mind much, laughing and leaning down to give the dog better access to lick his face, but he keeps his grip on the railing. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m all right because my best boy’s here, isn’t that right? Isn’t that right? ” The switch in Izzy’s voice from his normal raspy cadence to the cooing, enthusiastic baby talk has Blackbeard vibrating, and he whines excitedly as he litters Izzy’s face with more kisses before taking off and sprinting around the yard in circles.
“Fucking lunatic,” Ed murmurs as the lab makes laps around the lawn, darting in and out of the trees that surround the house. “Sorry I got him all wound up for you.”
Izzy shrugs, taking his time descending the stairs and walking the path to meet Ed on the driveway. “Ah, it’s nothing,” he says with a dismissive wave. “Gives me an excuse to get off my sorry arse and get moving.”
Ed snorts. Izzy is one of the fittest people he knows. He imagines he’s still waking up at five each morning to work out in the home gym. The way his biceps push against his t-shirt sleeves seem to suggest so, anyway. (Fucking stop looking at his biceps, horny idiot, he chastises himself.)
He wanders back to the car and pulls out the essentials he brought along out of the back seat—a bag of dog food, water and food bowls, a leash and harness. He sets it all down on the steps before digging into his jacket pocket and pulling out a small blue bottle with a white screw top safety lid. “So, new development: he’s got allergies,” Ed explains.
“Allergies?” Izzy repeats with a scowl. Well, a deeper scowl than his usual resting scowl. “What’s he allergic to?”
“Fucking everything,” Ed sighs. “Got a test done, and it’s insane. Like, eight different types of grass, pollen, ragweed.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You wanna know the weirdest one? Human dander.”
The scowl deepens yet again. “Are you fucking kidding?”
Ed shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Dogs can be allergic to people?”
“Apparently.”
“Fucking hell, I’ve heard it all now.”
Holding out the bottle to Izzy, Ed says, “Yeah, I got him on these so he doesn’t break out into hives. Just give him one in the morning. I usually put it in peanut butter or something. Sometimes he gets picky and doesn’t want to take it that way, so you might have to shove it in the back of his mouth and hope for the best.”
“Wonderful,” Izzy grumbles, taking the pill bottle from him.
Ed shoves his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, wrapping his fingers around the near empty carton of cigarettes inside, digging the pad of his thumb into the fraying corner. “Thanks for taking him this weekend, by the way,” he says.
“It’s nothing,” Izzy says with another shrug. “Was about to reach out to you anyway and ask if I could take him for a bit. Missed the little bugger.”
Off in the trees, Blackbeard barks. Ed can just barely see the dog race to a tree and stare up the trunk at a frightened squirrel rushing up into the branches and out of his reach.
“What’s the occasion for this weekend, anyhow?” Izzy asks, crossing his arms over his broad chest. (Don’t look at his tits either, pervert.)
Ed holds back a sigh. This was exactly how he feared this conversation would play out. Can’t just drop the dog off and be on his merry way. There has to be small talk that dances just on the edge of getting personal before teetering over. “Queen Anne’s reunion this weekend. The ten year.”
Izzy raises an eyebrow. “And you’re going? That’s never been your thing.”
“Well, the usual suspects all decided to go, so I figured I would if they did.”
“With your friends,” Izzy says with a scoff, “I’d wager they’re going just to gossip about everyone else.”
That actually gets a genuine laugh out of Ed. “I think Lucius did mention something about ‘showing all the plebs what a smokeshow he turned out to be,’ so a little bit of column A, little bit of column B.”
“And that’s the whole weekend?”
“No, just Saturday,” Ed says. “Stede and I are making a weekend out of it before meeting up with everyone else.”
“Ah, Bonnet. Course he’s involved.”
“Be nice,” Ed says.
Izzy holds up his hands in surrender. “I’m being nice. Just making an observation. Knew you wouldn’t go if he wasn’t going, is all.”
He can’t help but roll his eyes at that one. Izzy is very good at acting like he doesn’t care about things, but his weird contempt for Stede has always been very apparent. Ed hasn’t ever put together why. Though, with the way some things shook out in the year since they separated—well, Ed has a few guesses. Ones he doesn’t have the time to think about just now.
Silence settles between them. Ed shifts on his feet, watching Blackbeard walk back to the lush green of the lawn and roll around on his back in the grass (thank god for those allergy meds,) sprinkling in a few super casual glances at his watch for good measure. Now’s the time to leave, he tells himself. The polite chit-chat obligation has been fulfilled. He doesn’t have to stick around and make it more awkward. But instead of an excuse to leave, Ed blurts out, “Your new guy seems nice.”
He isn’t brave enough to look at Izzy while he says it. He watches Blackbeard dig the back of his skull into the grass, panting open mouthed with absolute joy.
“He’s very nice,” Izzy finally responds.
“What’s his name again?” Ed asks. “Hellmann?”
“The fuck—his name’s Frenchie.”
“Frenchie,” Ed says, smacking his forehead with his free hand. “Of course.”
“Where the fuck did you get Hellmann?”
“Well, I knew it was some kind of condiment company. Thought it was mayonnaise. Turns out it was mustard. Go figure.”
“The mustard company is French’s, you twat.”
“Close enough.” He chances a glance at Izzy out of the corner of his eye. Turns out, Izzy isn’t brave enough to look at him either. “Guess you got a type. He seems a little too alternative for you to have met him at work.”
The edge of Izzy’s mouth turns upward. Like he can’t help it. “Met at a bar he plays at frequently. He’s the bassist for a grunge band.”
Ed nearly chokes. “Grunge band?”
“Yep.”
“The man who hasn’t listened to anything except John Denver for the past twenty years is dating a bassist for a grunge band?”
“Seems that way, yeah.”
“I tried to get you to go to a Fall Out Boy concert once eight years ago, and you said that was too intense for you.”
Izzy shrugs, the cheeky grin faltering a little. “Suppose I’ve broadened my interests.”
The unspoken “since you left me” hits Ed like a punch to the sternum. If he dwells on it too long, his thoughts about how he was somehow never a strong enough force in Izzy’s life to get him to take interest in the things he liked will lead back into the kind of spiraling that caused their divorce in the first place. He figures he should at least get back in the car and on the road before he goes down that rabbit hole. He uses his thumbnail to pick more at the quickly deteriorating edge of the cigarette carton in his pocket instead and goes silent.
It isn’t quiet for too long, though. “How have you been?” Izzy soon asks.
Fucking Christ. Here we go. “Fine,” Ed answers, the word clipped.
“You’ve lost weight.”
Ed shrugs a shoulder. “Probably.”
“You eating enough?”
“Probably not.”
He can tell Izzy has something to say about that, but he glosses over it. “Still seeing Renee?”
“Yep.” No mention that their last session had been a couple months ago.
“Taking your meds?”
“Uh huh.” All right, that one is just a lie.
Izzy exhales, sharp and abrupt. “I’m still allowed to worry about you, you know.”
Ed holds back the derisive groan forming at the back of his throat. Should have left after giving him the allergy pills. He’s such a moron, trying to be cordial. If he gives Izzy an inch, he’d run a whole marathon. Nothing has changed. “You’re allowed to do whatever you’d like,” he finally grumbles out.
“You’ve just been less active online,” Izzy continues. “Gets me concerned sometimes. Don’t want you isolating yourself.”
“What a kind way of saying I have no life. Thanks, Iz,” he quips.
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Ed knows. “I’m doing okay. Don’t see any bullet holes in my skull yet, do you?”
“That’s not funny, Ed.”
Of course it isn’t funny. He isn’t really looking for him to laugh. It’s more an attempt to get Izzy uncomfortable enough to end the fucking conversation already. But he supposes throwing in a super casual shoot-yourself-in-the-face joke to get someone to back off works better on acquaintances, not so great on ex-husbands. Ed finally lets go of the cigarette carton in his pocket, running his now free hand down his face. “I get it. I’ll try and throw you proof of life every once in a while or something, okay? I promise, I’ve just been busy.”
Izzy says nothing, simply staring at him, the urge to challenge what he said clearly dancing on the edge of his tongue. Truthfully, it’s a shit lie. Everything he’s been feeding Izzy is a terrible lie, for the most part. But Ed also knows, as nosy as he is, Izzy won’t press too hard for the truth. There are things you forfeit when you end a relationship, Ed has found. Things that were once so apparent and unavoidable get locked away in cabinets, keys buried and lost. The details of the other person you were once so intimately familiar with are still there, just hidden and out of reach, perhaps never to be accessed again. Ed’s come to terms with that about Izzy. And with the resigned sigh Izzy lets out of his nose, followed by the slump of his shoulders, Ed can see Izzy has to some degree as well, try as he might to pry that cabinet back open.
“I just—” Izzy runs the tips of his fingers through his dark goatee (When did it get so flecked with grey? Ed wonders.) “I still have love for you. Different than what it was, but it’s there. And I don’t want you just surviving. I want you to be happy , Edward.”
It’s involuntary, the way Ed’s whole body tenses at the name. He doesn’t tell all the muscles in arms to bunch up as if gearing up for a fight, nor does he realize how tightly he’s clenching his teeth until he notices the ache in the hinges of his jaw. The instant nausea that blooms in his gut is new. He closes his eyes, slowly letting his breath out through his nose.
The visceral feeling comes over him within a matter of seconds. And Izzy realizes his mistake just as quickly. “Shit. Ed. Ed. Sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay,” Ed says, the response automatic.
“I’ve been good about it, I promise,” Izzy babbles. “Just haven’t seen you in so long. It slipped out.”
Ed shakes his head and tries to put on a reassuring grin, but it comes out more as a flat grimace. “Whatever. Don’t worry about it.”
“Really. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Even to Ed, the words lack any conviction. But it’s just difficult pretending any more that it actually is fine. He’s been part of this exact same conversation dozens of times since telling people he just wants to be called Ed now, no other variations of the name. People very rarely called him Eddie before, so he hasn’t really run into that. It’s Edward that gets people. His mother is the worst offender there, but Izzy is a close second. He always called him Edward throughout their relationship, even though most of his friends use Ed. At the time, he’d kind of liked it—the full name, for a while, had felt intimate. Something only they shared (though, Ed could never bring himself to call him Israel. Nor did he seem to want to be called that.) But as he realized his gender might be a little more complicated than just man, hearing “Edward” has become less appealing. At first, it was kind of like wearing a pair of socks that were soaking wet—uncomfortable but tolerable. Hearing it less and less, though, when it does come up, it’s more like a kick to the gut, the combination of every dysphoric thought he’s had over the weeks and months slamming themselves into his body with one word.
But of course, he never lets anyone know that. And he sees Izzy so infrequently now—what would be the point of giving him a lecture about it? It’s better to shrug it off than risk starting a whole thing over it. And to Izzy’s credit, he doesn’t keep harping on just how awful he feels about it. He simply clamps his mouth shut and goes quiet.
They stand there for a moment, watching the dog. Blackbeard is finally slowing down, panting heavily as he gets the last bits of his energy out by galloping another lap around the lawn. Ed gives it a moment before shooting another arbitrary look at his watch. “Should go. Supposed to meet Stede for lunch in a few hours in Althea, so I gotta hit the road.”
“Right,” Izzy says with a nod. As Ed walks back to the car, he calls out to him, “Let me know when you get there. It’s a long drive.”
“Okay,” Ed huffs, opening the driver door.
“Hey, Ed.”
He pauses, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, but looks back at him.
Izzy stands there, hands on his hips and expression blank as they lock eyes. He’s always been handsome in a rugged way—honestly, the new grey poking out through his dark hair is really working for him—but the sun filtering through the clustered trees surrounding the house hits him in a way that reminds Ed that he really is gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous that would make a nineteen-year-old idiot who knew nothing about himself fall head over heels and make a guy like him his entire personality for the next decade of his life.
Izzy hesitates, but soon says, “I like the necklace.”
Ed’s fingers reflexively reach up and stroke the string of freshwater pearls he had put around his neck that morning. “Thank you,” he mumbles out as a reply.
“And the shirt. It’s nice.”
Ed nods.
“Still miss the beard, though.”
A laugh escapes him, almost like it’s been kicked out of him. Ed grips the edge of the car door and shoots another strained grin back at Izzy. “I don’t,” he says. And before he can let Izzy say anything more, he drops down into the driver’s seat and shuts the door behind him.
He turns the car around in the wider part of the drive that leads up to the double door garage—backing out of such a long drive through trees is just a mess waiting to happen—and he decides to be nice and throw a wave toward Izzy before driving off. Izzy waves back, but soon has his hands full as Blackbeard pounces back on him, distracting him while Ed makes his getaway. Ed watches them in the rearview mirror before the trees get in the way, and the green mailbox eventually lets him know it’s time to turn back onto the road ahead.
The forest, if you don’t know where you’re going, can get confusing pretty quickly, but Ed knows exactly which turns to take to make it to the highway. The exit is a strange waypoint out in the middle of nowhere, a reflective green and white beacon that signals civilization is still a possibility. But Ed can’t bring himself to turn off and officially start on the two and half hour drive out to the other side of the state. Just a quarter mile off from the exit, he pulls over onto the shoulder, keeping the car running while he rolls down his window and finally lights up a cigarette, trying not to fucking break down into a teary mess.
He lets the smoke out of his mouth slowly, closing his eyes to stave off the tears stinging at the edges of his eyes. It really didn’t go that poorly, he keeps telling himself. It could have been worse. They didn’t fight. There wasn’t even any resentment. It was just—it just hurt . And he hadn’t been anticipating the pain. He recalls being six years old and falling off the swings, landing on his side and dislocating his shoulder. The initial impact was a bitch, yeah, but what was worse was the aftershock—the way all his adrenaline shot into him in one giant wave, so overwhelming that he could hardly breathe as his shoulder felt like it was being stabbed.
That’s what this feels like. A stealthy pain that’s so great, it’s like his head is being shoved underwater.
It isn’t even what he said to Ed that hurts the most. The full name thing—he supposes he could call it “deadnaming” but is it technically deadnaming when you’re still using a shortened version of the same name?—that’s whatever. He’s dealt with that before and will probably continue to deal with it. The beard comment was annoying too, but—whatever. That isn’t the source of the problem either.
Ed really can’t put his finger on it for a moment, until he thinks back to Izzy, standing in that patch of sunlight. Then, it hits him.
He’s fucking happy.
Of course he’s happy. New boyfriend, new interests or whatever the fuck hanging out at dingy bars listening to grunge bands at thirty-four years old is. Things are happening for Izzy. He has things he actually wants to show off on social media, things that make him smile like he’s keeping a very obvious, wonderful secret. He’s out there. He’s moving on.
And Ed is miserable.
He lets the cigarette sit between his index and middle finger while he rests his forehead on the same hand. Being this upset about it feels stupid. He knows he’s miserable. He spent the whole fucking drive over thinking about how miserable he is. Izzy isn’t wrong for being concerned about him, but when he so clearly has good things happening for him, it feels shittier. If Izzy was also clearly having a terrible time, Ed could at least chalk it up to “divorce just makes people miserable” and leave it at that. But seeing him happy? Being in a position where he can actually pity him, throw his little “I’m worried about you’s” around like he’s motherfucking Marie Antoinette deigning to let the sad little peasant in front of her scrounge around for crumbs of cake?
Maybe he’s being unfair. In all likelihood, Izzy is actually concerned for him.
But Ed doesn’t feel concerned about or cared for. He just feels broken. A shattered piece of pottery that no one cares enough about to glue back together.
He takes another drag off the cigarette, and the stream of smoke he lets out seems to carry some of his tension with it. Swallowing hard, he catches his eye in the rearview mirror. Get it the fuck together, Teach, he tells himself. The least he can try to do is put off the inevitable depressive episode until after the weekend. Come Sunday, he can stay in bed as long as he wants (though, he’s already running low on sick days for work. He’ll worry about that after the weekend too.) All he has to do is just get from Thursday to Sunday. How hard can that be?
Just as he takes one last puff off the cigarette, flicking the butt of it onto the pavement and readying himself to get back on the road, his phone pings.
He digs it out of his pocket, and the notification on screen has a whole new feeling of dread slithering down into his gut.
Stede: On my way! What’s your ETA?
“Fuck,” Ed sighs.
He’s about to spend a whole weekend with his former college roommate before their ten year reunion. How hard can acting like he isn’t slowly falling apart be?
Well, it’d be a hell of a lot easier if he hadn’t recently realized that he’s been utterly and completely in love with Stede Bonnet for almost fourteen years. And that there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.