fic: Deadsville (J2 AU) 3/3
MASTER POST
ONE | TWO | THREE
NOTES & SOUNDTRACK
ART POST
PART THREE
Sandy is Jared’s favorite scrub nurse. She’s tiny and dark-haired, cute where Genevieve is more sultry, but they still look similar enough that he has a hard time looking her in the eye sometimes. She’s too smart for her own good, too, knows him too well, and she cares.
They’re scrubbing in for an appendectomy a few days after Gen’s miscarriage, Sandy babbling about some cute thing her dachshund did the night before, when she stops dead in the middle of a sentence and grabs his hand under the water.
“You have to stop this, Jared,” she says, squeezing his fingers.
“What?” he asks, glancing between their joined hands and her face, which is practically glowing with concern and affection.
She smiles sadly. “You have the biggest hands out of everybody I know. I can barely wrap my whole hand around one of your fingers,” she says, holding up his right hand to demonstrate. She’s right. “I always love working with you because I can watch your hands.”
He gives her a funny look. “Um, okay.”
“You don’t have surgeon’s hands to look at ‘em. But they serve you well.” She hands him the soap and shakes her head. “You’re not eating, are you? I can tell by your hands, you know. And your face, and how your scrubs fit. You’re a big man, so it takes a while to show up, but I can see it. What ever it is that’s so wrong in your world, sweetie? It’s not worth getting sick over,” she says, finally releasing his hand. She looks up and gives him a doe-eyed look that he can’t withstand. “You’re miserable.”
“We just lost a baby,” he says defensively, lathering up to his elbows. “I defy anyone to not be a little miserable after that.”
Sandy stares at him for a moment, then she shakes her head, rinsing off her own arms and flicking excess water into the basin. “That’s a real good reason, and it makes me sound like a big ol’ asshole for not believing you one bit.”
“I really wish everyone would quit telling me I’m lyin’ when I talk,” he says bitterly.
She gives him a look he doesn’t want to deconstruct, and she turns off the water and grabs the box of sterile gloves. “You ever think it might be time to start wondering why people keep saying that?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.
He sighs and looks through the window into the operating room, where the anesthesiologist he hates is talking to a group of nurses and one of Jared’s interns. “Honestly?” he says. “No.”
“Left hand,” says Sandy, shaking her head. She snaps the latex a little harder than he thinks is strictly necessary.
--
Not too long after Jensen and Danneel got back from Greece, he got to talking about things with Misha. The topic had been their lunches, eaten at four in the morning in front of the TV in Misha’s office, but somehow that got warped completely. Some Kind of Wonderful was on, which was apparently Misha’s favorite John Hughes movie, not the most appropriate backdrop for an emotional postmortem.
“You want to know what I think?” Misha asked, giving him a grim look.
“No,” said Jensen, picking half-heartedly at the remains of the reuben he brought up from the cafeteria. The bread was soggy and the whole thing kind of sucked, but it was better than the vile-smelling thrice-heated falafel Misha was cheerfully finishing.
“Ha,” said Misha, rolling his eyes and setting down his fork. He had a smear of tahini dressing on his cheek. “You, my friend, are full of shit.”
Jensen shrugged. He fiddled with his ring. “I love my wife.”
Misha frowned. “Nobody’s saying you don’t. It’s not mutually exclusive.”
“Right, apparently this is just one of those weirdo ‘verses where that means jack shit.”
“But seriously,” said Misha a second later, shoving his plate away and sighing like he was going to have to explain the intricacies of the human kidney to a kindergartener. “Look at yourself, Jensen. Something is going to give, and it’s going to be a gory fucking mess and you know it.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.” Jensen peeled the top piece of bread back from his sandwich and picked off a chunk of corned beef. He chewed it slowly and swallowed before he looked back up. There was some thousand island on his fingers and he could feel a speck of sauerkraut stuck to his chin. Misha rolled his eyes and handed him a napkin.
“This is not healthy, this thing you’re doing,” said Misha. He looked concerned. Jensen rolled his shoulders and ate another piece of meat.
“You want to know something?” he said. He tossed the crumpled napkin next to his plate and sat back, arms crossed over his chest. “We’re probably going to separate.”
Misha did a spit-take and kind of twitched, his elbow slipping clean off the edge of his desk with a painful scraping sound. “What?”
Jensen dragged his hand through his hair and huffed out a breath, too late thinking that he probably still had thousand island all over his fingers. “We went on this vacation to see if we couldn’t maybe work through some of the problems. The ones we could fix anyway, not the other stuff. The, you know, cocksucking stuff.”
“Comrade, you truly have a way with words,” said Misha, laughing so hard he was kind of purple.
“Yeah. Not a lot she can do there. Not that it came up, but Christ, she’s not an idiot. She can’t not know, right?” He shook his head. “But no, we had dinner in this little restaurant that’s basically a shack on a rock, and I think we just decided that it was hopeless to continue as we are.”
“Jensen, I gotta ask this, so don’t get pissed, okay?” Misha gave him a very stern look, head tipped forward just enough that he had to look up at Jensen. “But, seriously, why did you marry her in the first place?”
Jensen opened his mouth, thinking it would be such an easy answer, but somehow nothing came out, throat clogging up with nothing. He stared at a caraway seed poking out of the top piece of rye on his sandwich and shook his head.
“She’s beautiful, you know?” he said finally. “And she’s amazing. And she was there.” He couldn’t quite believe that everything wrong with his life boiled down to that, that proximity was the root of all evil. He had to laugh a little, actually, because how could he not?
Misha’s frown deepened, two parallel lines sketching across his forehead like gutters on a bowling lane. “Asking for trouble, man,” he said.
“Yeah, well. And she loves me. She really does. And I love her. She makes me happy to be around, makes me want to take care of her and keep her happy. I love her.” He folded his arms on the edge of the desk and put his head down, rattling a deep sigh around in his chest.
Misha muted the TV and didn’t say anything for a few moments, long enough of a pause that Jensen looked up to see what was keeping him. Finally, Misha nodded and gave him a sad smile. “I hate to break this to you, buddy, but you’re in love with somebody who isn’t your wife.”
Jensen jerked in his seat, shying toward the door. “What.”
“Please tell me this isn’t news to you,” Misha implored, staring at him pityingly. He took another bite of his falafel, chewed thoughtfully for a moment with the whole chunk bulging one cheek like a hamster with a baby carrot. “Jensen. Seriously.”
“Me and him, it’s always just been,” said Jensen, watching the screen so he didn’t have to look at Misha. “We don’t talk about it. I don’t even know if he, like, does this with other guys. I don’t know if he’s ever been with another guy besides me, though I gotta guess he has.”
“So it’s like Fight Club. Your own little gay sex Fight Club. Well goddamn.”
Jensen slumped in his chair, covering his face with one hand. “She deserves better than me.”
--
Jared wakes up from a nap full of bad dreams, gasping awake on the couch, sounds down the hallway, closet doors, some kind of scraping noise on the hardwood. He sits up and wipes at his eyes, wondering what time it must be and how soon he’s got to head to the hospital.
He finds Gen in their bedroom, in the closet, a suitcase laid open like an autopsy on the bed.
“What’re you doing?” he asks muzzily.
She looks up, startled. “Oh, you’re home,” she says.
“Was nappin’ in the living room,” he says, stretching his arms over his head, hooking fingers on the doorjamb.
“I’m packing,” she says, not much inflection. She turns and tosses a pair of fawn colored pants onto the bed.
He scratches his head. “I see that. Um, why?”
“Because I’m going back to Phoenix.”
“You can tell Billy Beane to go fuck himself,” says Jared, dropping his arms and snorting.
“It’s cute how you think this is his idea,” she says coolly. “God forbid Genevieve have a mind of her own, right? Not where the ballclub is concerned.”
He ignores the obvious argument, that if one of her ballplayers or Beane or, fuck, some minor leaguer half a country away, calls and says jump, Gen laughs and asks how high and how far and if she should post bail or buy Motrin. He just says, “Are you absolutely sure?”
She keeps grabbing things from the closet. “I’m sure,” she says, voice muffled by the mound of clothing in her arms. “I have to do something that gets me out of this house. I have to get back to work, and this time of year, work for me is in Phoenix. With my team.”
He drags his hands through his hair, shoving it back away from his face. “Gen, you just had a miscarriage,” he says, trying a different tack. “You do not need to go back to work yet. As a doctor, I strongly discourage it.”
She shakes her head and drops the pile on the bed next to her suitcase. The jersey on top is a brand-new Garciaparra, not even worn yet. “Well, you’re not my doctor, are you?” she says.
“You want me to call Jensen? Because I will.”
“You will not,” she says, shaking her head and starting with the folding of her clothes. “Look, Jared. You don’t understand. You get to go and escape to the hospital and distract yourself, cutting people open and rearranging their insides and stuff. I’m stuck here in this fucking house, all by myself all day because my son is hundreds of miles away from me right now. All I have to do is sit around and think and cry, and I cannot do that to myself anymore.” She tosses a few shirts aside, deciding against them at the last minute. One of them is a jersey with the number 99 and Cortese on the back, which makes him smile. “Not how I’m built. I gotta be useful or I’m going to lose my mind.”
“So... what, then,” he says, tone going hard and cold, “you’re just going to get on a plane and go play with a bunch of overgrown children? Is that it?”
She looks up sharply, balling up the shirt she had been folding and pegging a perfect strike into his sternum, snarling. “Don’t you dare,” she says furiously. “I am an assistant to the Director of Player Personnel. My job is goddamn important to a bunch of people. Some of these men-and they are men, you jealous pathetic little child-some of them are closer to me than brothers.” She shoves some hastily folded shirts into the suitcase, stopping after a few and turning back to him. “I’ve watched some of them grow up from scared little draftees straight out of some backwater high school to starting at the goddamn Coliseum. Sometimes all they want from me is a hug and a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
Jared draws back like he’s been struck. He barely recognizes the terse, spitting creature that’s taken over his wife’s body, not liking the way grief has twisted her face. “Genevieve-”
She shakes her head, deflating a little, pivoting in place and holding up a hand. “I need this, Jared.”
“It’s too soon, Gen,” he says.
“It wasn’t soon enough,” she snaps back. She shakes her head and turns away, starts selecting underwear from her drawer. “This is not a discussion,” she says, voice fading back to calm and resolute, even though she was shaking and visibly held together with Scotch tape and chewing gum, bursting at the seams. “I’ll be back on Tuesday, though I’ll have to head back down on Thursday.”
“Funny, this feels an awful lot like you’re leaving,” he says, much more bitterly than he intended. He grabs her arm, squeezes until she glares up at him. “Come, on, don’t do this, Jens-”
Her whole body jags away as she catches the slip a second before he does. She exhales heavily through her nose. “Jared,” she says softly, laying a hand on his chest. “Just. Space, okay? Let’s stretch it out, see if it sticks. Go golfing with Chad. Make fire, grill meat. Get drunk. Something.”
He glances at the bed and flinches. She ducks around him and drops a load of brightly colored panties into her suitcase, then she closes the lid and zips up the sides. He steps out of the way so she can leave the room, and one of the wheels on the suitcase just barely misses running over his bare toes. She pauses in the hallway, a door down in front of Andy’s room, and looks back at him.
“I’ll be back again in a few days, and I think you and I both know we have some things to talk about then,” she says. She uses her free hand to tuck her bangs behind one ear. He opens his mouth to protest but she just shakes her head. “I just can’t anymore, Jared. I just can’t.”
Once she’s gone, the taxi she called while he was asleep ferrying her away to the airport, he turns and punches the wall. It leaves one hell of a dent.
--
Danneel was sprawled out on their beach blanket, eyes closed behind her big Jackie-O sunglasses, one hand curled over the spine of her discarded paperback. Jensen was more than a little jealous that she could just lie out in the Greek sun wearing nothing but that tiny bikini bottom and have absolutely no fear of blistering to a rich, crustacean red. Jensen huddled miserably in the fetal position under a rental umbrella, still in his t-shirt, though he did concede to rolling his pant legs and burying his toes in the sand.
“Would you relax,” she growled, not opening her eyes or even sitting up.
“I am relaxed,” he protested.
“I can hear you freaking out about skin cancer from here,” she said. “Just lie back and close your eyes. Listen to the gulls.”
He stared out at the water, fiddling with the thong of one of his sandals and thinking about how the unearthly blue of the Aegean made him nervous. “What? No. I’m fine,” he said.
“Is it your hip?” she asked, leaning up on her elbows and lifting her sunglasses to give him a mildly concerned look.
He shifted a little, testing and stretching the muscles from his ribcage down to his knee. “Not really, actually,” he said, honestly a little surprised. “Huh. Doesn’t hurt today.”
“That’s good,” she said, giving him a smile. She sat up a little more. “See, when we actually make love regularly, you don’t seem to have problems. My vagina is magic.”
He snorted and tossed his shoe back to the sand. “That must be it,” he said.
She rolled her eyes and dropped her glasses back down her nose. He watched her breasts jiggle as she moved her arm. She really was a spectacular woman, he thought, and he had never wished harder that he could just give her everything. “Glad we figured that out,” she said, scooting over and wrapping one arm around his lower back, pressing her cheek against the rounded muscle of his shoulder. He lifted his arm and pulled her closer.
“You ever going to tell me what happened?” she asked after a second of watching two sea birds fight over a scrap of food a few feet down the beach.
“The accident, you mean?” he asked.
She nodded, lightly tracing patterns on his stomach with her nails. “Jared said something about you getting crushed under a Honda when I asked him one time,” she said.
He bit his lip and nodded. He kissed the top of her head and kept his eyes on the horizon. “That’s about it,” he said. “I spent about three months in the hospital, and then rehab. I’m lucky I can walk at all,” he reported dully.
There were lots of things he could have told her about it. He could have told her about how he was the only survivor of the crash, or that it was the fact he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt that saved him. He could have described lying in the street, pinned under the other driver’s Honda but still conscious enough to watch his roommate's Nissan burst into flames. He could have said that he watched two people he loved die, but he didn’t.
She reached up and carded her fingers through his hair, which was tipping with gold from all the sun he couldn’t avoid. “Let’s head back to the room, okay?” she whispered.
--
Jared is drunk. Really, stupidly, blindly drunk.
He’s been keeping tabs on Jensen, though he refuses to think of it as creepy. He’s just making sure that the guy’s okay. He kind of hopes Jensen’s doing the same for him, but he doubts it. In fact, he has a feeling that this is going to end with him walking half a block and getting a possibly broken nose checked out in his own ER once Jensen opens the door and punches him.
The man behind the bar in the lobby of Jensen’s hotel is pretty obviously bored to tears by Jared’s sad, stupid story. Jared figures that the guy probably hears plenty of guys and their sob stories about how their wives left them, but he’s too drunk for anything other than perfect egocentrism.
“No more for you, buddy,” the bartender says. “You got somebody you can call or d’you want be to call a cab?”
“I know somebody upstairs,” Jared says, lurching to his feet and stretching his arms up over his head.
The bartender looks dubious. “You sure?”
Jared nods. “Room 462,” he says, smiling serenely.
He heads for the bank of elevators and waits with an elderly couple and two giggling teenage girls. He stumbles a little getting off the elevator, which is concerning, so he decides to take a few minutes to sober up. He sits down on a big, squashy couch in a small seating area to the left of the elevators. There’s a huge plate glass window overlooking the avenue below, the lights of the cars smearing into a long yellow and red line in both directions. It’s raining.
It’s probably half an hour that he sits there watching the cars go by. A family with noisy children gets off the elevator and heads the opposite direction of Jensen’s room, though the mother pauses and eyeballs Jared like she thinks he might be a threat. He ignores her. A man with a loud voice and a cellphone comes from that same direction and jabbers loudly about Nielsen ratings while he waits for the elevator to come. A group of college-age girls comes stumbling home, drunk and tired from a night on the town.
Jared waits until the sound of their giggles disappears down the corridor, and then he hoists himself to his feet. He walks evenly, no tripping over nothing, no weaving, no holding onto the walls. He moves with purpose and he knocks on the door with purpose.
He can hear the television on in the room, and it goes silent after the knocks.
“Hang on,” Jensen yells.
A few moments later, the sound of a deadbolt being thrown, some rustling, and the door cracks open.
Jensen stands there, gorgeous and tired and real, staring at him blankly. Jared looks down, first at the plaid flannel pants he’s wearing and then at the faded San Diego State t-shirt with the stretched out neck. Jared has wondered where that shirt got to, but he should have known. It always looked better on Jensen, anyway.
“What do you want?” Jensen asks. His voice is very carefully neutral.
“I want to-we need to talk.”
Jensen shakes his head and makes a face. He scratches his right ear and squints unhappily at Jared. “At one-thirty Tuesday morning?”
Jared glances down the hallway at the sound of the elevator beeping. “Can I come in?”
“I’d rather you not,” Jensen says.
“I don’t want to have this-the conversation we need to have.” Jared pauses and rakes his hands through his hair. Jensen continues to stare at him with no expression on his face. “Look, can we not do this out in the hallway so that everyone on the floor can hear it?”
Jensen sighs and takes a step back, waving vaguely over his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “You’re right. Let’s not do this out here.” He sounds annoyed.
Jared brushes past him into the room, and Jensen’s just so warm and familiar and everything he wants, and it takes just about all his mental faculties not to just lean in and enjoy it. He leans against the wall and watches as Jensen closes the door.
“I’ve missed you,” Jared says. Jensen freezes, hand still on the lock. “I just thought you should know that.”
“That isn’t fair, Jared,” Jensen says after a moment, turning around and glaring at him.
“It’s the truth,” Jared insists.
“Fuck you, Jared.” Jensen shoots him a disgusted look and goes deeper into the room.
Jared looks around before following him. It’s nice enough but generic, with soft goldenrod-colored wallpaper and walnut furniture, prints of the Golden Gate Bridge at night framed on the walls. It looks like he’s been living here a while, the open closet door revealing a sizable chunk of wardrobe hanging up, a deflated soft-side suitcase on the shelf at the top, and a chaotic sea of shoes cluttering the floor. The nightstand on the left side of the bed is cluttered with the detritus of a single man’s daily life: cellphone, contact case, lotion, a lot of takeout containers. There’s crumpled tissues and discarded clothes on the floor. The bed hasn’t been made properly in a while, like Jensen leaves the ‘don’t bother cleaning’ tag on his doorknob most of the time.
“Jen, please.”
Jensen stops the little table over by the balcony doors and gives him a look Jared’s not even going to try to figure out. There’s a bottle of bourbon in the middle of the table, a stack of little glasses next to it. The wall-mounted flatscreen is on mute, SportsCenter doing pre-season segments on some National League teams Jared could give a shit about.
“You know, I’ve always wondered about the Jen thing,” Jensen says, shaking his head. He grabs the remote from the table and turns off the TV.
“What?”
“You never used to call me Jen. And okay, yeah, I would’ve probably killed you. I went through most of school being called Jenny, and that gives a guy a fuck of a complex.” He sits on the edge of the table and worries the bottom hem of the shirt. Jared leans on the wall to the left of the balcony door and watches him, thinks he looks thinner and paler than he used to (but then again, so does Jared). “But I guess I just stopped caring or something, and you kept it up. I was thinking about when that started, and I decided it must have been when the thing with Genevieve started. You call us both Jen, less chance of fucking up the names, right?”
Jared makes a strangled sound in his throat. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” he says warningly.
“I’m genuinely curious, Jared,” Jensen says mildly, squaring himself back up to his full height. “It never used to bother me, but I can’t stop thinking about it now. Like, what is the first initial of the name you say in bed?”
“Why don’t you just go full-on Alanis on me?” Jared snaps, shoving away from the wall but not going any closer. “Would she go down on me in a theater?” he says mockingly. “Am I thinking of you when I fuck her?”
Jensen draws back half a step and gives him a hurt look. “That’s not my point,” he says. Jared snorts and Jensen finally snaps. He closes the space between them and slams his hand on the wall next to Jared’s head and his face goes red. “What we were-it wasn’t fair to anybody. Not me, not you, not Gen or Danny or Lila. It was unhealthy and it was sad and it was killing me, okay? So I stepped back. It was out of hand. And fuck you! You don’t get to stand here, drunk off your ass and acting like you’re the only wounded party. You said you loved me and then you left me.”
“We were finished!” Jared growls.
“Bullshit,” Jensen hisses back. “This thing is never gonna be finished and you and me both know it.”
Jared swallows down whatever hurtful thing he was thinking about slinging back at him and just stares down at him. It’s always gotten him off just a little that Jensen is just enough shorter than him that he has to look up when they’re this close. Jensen’s not a small guy by any means, but he’s smaller than Jared is, built slim and just this side of pretty.
“If I kiss you are you going to hit me?” Jared asks, watching in fascination as Jensen’s breath hitches and his tongue darts out to wet his lips.
Jensen shakes his head. “You shouldn’t, though,” he says.
Jared puts one tentative hand on his waist, feeling the muscles skitter and jump under his palm. “I should probably go,” he says. Jensen nods, melting forward and burying his face in Jared’s chest.
They stand like that for several minutes, wrapped up in each other. Jensen pulls back a little and looks up at him with a sad kind of smile. “Or you could stay,” he says.
“Or I could stay,” Jared agrees.
“I’m tired of fighting,” Jensen says. “I’m tired of everything, you know?” He takes a few steps away and idly gathers up some discarded clothes on the ground. “It’s stupid, but I always just slept better when you were around. I don’t want to-can we just sleep?”
Jared grins so big he thinks Jensen can probably see his second molars, and he’s closing up the distance between them again and crushing him in a hug before he can think about it. He doesn’t have him back, not yet, but this is enough for now, he thinks.
--
“Northwest Airlines flight 629 to Las Vegas is now boarding at Gate 27,” a tinny female voice announced barely audible over the airport din.
Jared grinned. “That’s us,” he said.
“Are we absolutely, completely, one hundred percent fucking sure that we’re going to do this?” Gen asked, squeezing Jared’s hands and looking up at him beseechingly. She bit her bottom lip.
He leaned down and kisses her lightly, running his tongue over the slightly puffy spot she’s been worrying all afternoon. “I am absolutely sure,” he said.
She nodded, still not looking completely convinced, but she threaded her hand with his and shouldered her bag. “Well, okay then,” she said. “I’m just confused, I guess, as to why we’re just running off to Vegas instead of having, you know, a real ceremony in front of our family and friends.”
Jared swallowed and busied himself with dodging a group of Asian tourists. “The thought of going through the whole wedding thing makes me physically ill,” Jared said. “I was best man in the single worst wedding in history, seriously. I cannot do that again.”
She smiled a little. “I promise I don’t have Bridezilla tendencies,” she said.
“Yeah, Danneel said the same thing. Lies, by the way,” he added. The terminal wasn’t as crowded as he expected, but their gate was way at the far end. He glanced down at Gen and tried to ignore the look on her face, the slightly annoyed, slightly dubious one that she always got when Jensen came up in conversation.
“Well, come on,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Our winged chariot awaits.”
--
April rolls around. Jensen delivers more babies, goes to a Giants game with Jared and Andy, and starts to feel like he’s found a footing in the silty bottom of the lake he was thrown into.
He gets a phone call from Genevieve right before Easter, mostly questions she has about follow-up and whatnot, and he finds that it’s not so hard to hear her voice. He’s always liked her, always been very careful not to resent her (after all, he had all the parts of Jared that mattered).
Somehow, he finds himself accepting an invitation to her Easter banquet, dinner because there’s a day game and she’s got lonely boys to feed. He and Jared might have come to an understanding, might even be circling back around to being friends again, but they’re not even a little bit okay enough to be forced to interact with people.
“I would have done it for anyone,” he insists, trying to play professional, trying to beg off.
He’s not up to skirting around Jared or a room full of people. He doesn’t really have anywhere else to go, either, his sister flying back to Texas to meet their brother’s new fiancée, and it’s still too soon to be breaking bread with Danneel. They are planning to get together to hide eggs and chocolate bunnies for Lila, no matter how many times Jensen points out that Lila isn’t even a year old yet. Danneel insists that it’s the principle of the idea that’s important.
“Mommy and Daddy and a holiday, okay?” she says.
Genevieve isn’t having any of his excuses, though. “It meant everything to me, Jensen,” she says quietly.
He can see her in his mind, standing there in the beautiful kitchen of the little house in Berkeley that Jared bought after they got back from Vegas, twisting a chunk of hair around her finger while she talks.
“And don’t you dare say it was because it’s your job. You let me cry on you and you stroked my hair and you told me it would be okay.”
“Okay,” he acquiesces, pressing his phone hard against his face and closing his eyes. “But there better be meat.”
When he pulls into the driveway on Easter, he’s the first to arrive, but he usually tries to be early to such things in case the host needs help. Genevieve is kneeling out front, transplanting Jensen’s yellow tulips from the pot to a planter box next to the front door. Jared’s red Explorer is gleaming in the sunlight, probably freshly washed and waxed and taking up half the driveway. Jensen parks his sensible little Oldsmobile behind it, thinking their cars are going to look low-rent and silly compared to some of the bonus baby Escalades and Maseratis that will also be attending.
“You made it!” says Genevieve, springing to her feet and shucking off her soil covered gardening gloves. He comes around the car and lets her pull him down into a hug. “I’m so glad. You’re kinda early, though.”
He shrugs. “Nothing better to do. Need help with anything?”
She grins. “Let’s go in and see. The caterer’s got Jared running ragged. It’s some funny shit, you should see it.”
He helps her carry her gardening supplies into the garage when she finishes, and follows her into the kitchen and helps himself to a glass of orange juice while she washes her hands.
“Ugh,” she says, coming to stand next to him against the counter, trying to keep out of the path of the caterer, a tiny blonde woman in a blue jacket who keeps barreling in and out of the room, muttering to herself. Genevieve pokes the side of the juice carton and scowls. “You know what I don’t get? Why I have to choose between having lots of pulp and having added calcium. Who decided that people who want extra calcium in their diets via orange juice have to give up pulp? I love pulp, but I’m also realistic about the fact I’m female and I need to consume, like, a zillion milligrams of calcium so that my bones don’t turn into sponges on my fortieth birthday, you know?”
Jensen stares at her for a second. “What?”
She frowns and grabs the carton. “Okay, my point is that it’s arbitrary and cruel that the people at Tropicana just decided that people have to choose between calcium and fiber,” she says. “Why bother fortifying your juice with one thing if you’re going to just take away some other nutrient?”
“So… buy juice with pulp and drink milk, or stir fiber powder into your juice with calcium,” he suggests.
“That isn’t the point!” she says. “Maybe I just like pulp, dammit!”
“Jared doesn’t,” he points out.
“Fair enough,” she says after a second, giving him a sideways look. He busies himself with finishing off his glass, and she puts the carton away.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I like pulp, too.”
“I know,” she says. She gives him a strained smile. “You know, there was a long time there when it would already be gone by the time I would get there. And I never really minded as much as I probably should’ve, come to think of it.”
Jensen turns sharply, startled. “Are we talking about-”
“I have eyes, Jensen,” she says gently. She stands on her toes and starts pulling dishes down from a cupboard. “I wasn’t going to accept his proposal, you know. When he asked me, I told him I’d think about it. I was going to let him down easy, maybe give him a shove in the right direction. But then Danneel got pregnant, so I thought ‘hey, wait, maybe there is a chance for me,’ and I said yes. And then the next thing I know, we’re running off to Vegas.”
Jensen doesn’t know what to say to that, so he takes the stack of plates from her and carries them into the dining room to help her set the table. There are two caterers setting up a buffet table.
“Your husband is grabbing us another table. He said you had one upstairs,” one of them says to Genevieve.
Before Jensen can come up with anything to say, there’s a knock at the front door, and then the whole house is full of people.
For some reason, Misha and his wife are there, too, even though Jensen was pretty sure they were only his friends. Predictably, Misha and Barry Zito get along like they were separated at birth. Jared’s scrub nurse, Sandy, who Jensen adores, hugs him and compliments him on his sweater. Her husband asks him for advice on his golf game.
“The color really brings out your eyes,” Sandy tells Jensen, patting him on the arm.
“Thank you,” Jensen replies.
Jared catches his eye from across the room and nods, smiling a little. Jensen can’t help himself and smiles back. It’s enough.
--
The accident happened Halloween weekend of Jensen’s sophomore year of college.
“It’s not looking good, kiddo,” was the first thing Jensen’s father said when he woke up in the hospital and asked what happened. He’d never seen his father look so old or grave, but he was on a powerful morphine drip and the world was fuzzy.
“You’re been unconscious for five days,” said Dad, grave like Jensen had never seen.
“Where’s Mom?” Jensen croaked, throat raw like he’d been swilling gasoline. Dad looked away, and then Jensen remembered.
His parents and Mackenzie had flown out to California for the weekend, though Dad was irritable about being away from work and Mom had the flu, but it was the first time he’d seen them since July and he didn’t care how much they sniped at each other. They were all going out to eat, dragging Jensen’s long-suffering roommate along with them. Mackenzie had torn her ACL playing volleyball, so she had to stretch her leg out across the backseat, and Mom and Dad had some awful fight right before they left. Steve, who drove a little Nissan, offered her his passenger seat and she accepted, sniffing at Dad, “At least some men here are gentlemen.”
He missed both funerals, stuck at UCLA Medical Center in intensive care. Steve’s parents and stepbrother came and sat with him a lot, insisting they didn’t blame him for surviving. Dad and Mackenzie flew back a few days after Mom’s funeral, just in time for Steve’s, and Mackenzie and the stepbrother took about a million pictures between them.
“They’re not sure if you’ll ever walk again,” Dad continued, looking away. “They’re saying possible nerve damage, and that your pelvis is broken in three places. Apparently you got an angel watching out for you, though. None of your organs were damaged.”
“Dad, I’m-”
Altogether, the recovery and physical therapy took more than a year, but Jensen was back in school by the next fall, a new life plan in mind, hobbling around on crutches. There was talk of cosmetic surgery to correct the terrible scarring left behind, all the ruined skin on his right side, but it didn’t bother Jensen. He was self-flagellating enough to own it, he thought. And anyway, it wasn’t like he intended for anyone to see it.
“You’re lucky you don’t remember the accident,” his sister told him one day before he was discharged. She was painting his toenails bright purple while he laid in bed and enjoyed being whacked out of his gourd on painkillers. His thoughts were sluggish, stuck on the pavement, the burning Nissan, but he shook himself.
“I remember some of it,” he admitted.
She gave him a sharp look and shook her head, screwing the cap back on the bottle of polish. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Okay? Please don’t tell me.”
“Okay,” he said.
--
It’s been a long shift and Jared is tired. He’s sleeping poorly, catching a couple hours in his office or an on-call room when he can. He wonders sometimes how he does his job at all. He’s depressed, he knows he is, which is just great. It’s May now, a year since Jensen broke it off, six months since DC, one month since Gen and Andy moved across the Bay. He doesn’t want to go home to an empty house, so he drifts around looking for something to do.
He watches some TV in a lounge, listens to some nurses gossip, signs off on some paperwork, and does a round of his post-ops. They’re mostly all asleep, the only one awake a little Asian girl who swallowed three keys. He gives her a Chupa-Chup and gets her undying love, even though she can’t pronounce his name. He’s just heading to the cafeteria to get something to eat when his pager goes off.
Jared spends the next six hours trying to staunch internal bleeding, a one-car car accident on San Leandro, Jaws of Life and a paramedic yelling like the end of the world. But eventually the patient flatlines, tipping over from mostly dead into the dark and quiet.
“Time of death,” says Jared, squinting at the clock high up on the wall, “Three nineteen.”
After he strips off his bloody scrubs, takes a shower and has a granola bar, he collapses in an on-call room and grabs a few hours of sleep.
A nurse comes to wake him up, looking nervous. “Um, Dr. P. Jared. Wake up.”
He cracks open an eye. “Go away.”
“I got a next of kin who won’t stop shouting until he gets to scream at the surgeon who killed his husband.”
Jared groans and rolls onto his back. “God, this might sound insensitive of me, but can’t you say something about Prop 8 and get him to shut up.”
She raises her eyebrows. “He beat me to it,” she says after a moment. “And I was like, dude, you’re fuckin’ Seth Vincennes, you can scream at me all day, just let me stare at you.” She smiles weakly.
“Wait,” says Jared, sitting up and giving her an odd look. “Like, Aquaman Seth Vincennes?”
“In the flesh and voice, screaming the whole hospital down. Prima donna.”
“Can you calm him down a little, get him some coffee, maybe? Put him in one of the conference rooms?” The nurse nods and Jared sits up and stretches. “I’ll be down in a minute, gonna go splash some water on my face.”
He takes his time, giving the bereaved a chance to collect himself. When he slips into the conference room, he finds a slim, dark-haired man standing by the windows, one hand on the glass.
“Mr. Vincennes,” he says.
The man turns to him, wide-eyed and pale. He’s very good looking, pretty in the same way Jensen is, blue eyes and shiny white veneers, but Jared is struck by how little he is. Maybe it’s the fear and confusion and grief on his face making him small, but he barely reaches Jared’s shoulder. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and a Dodgers shirt that’s too big for him, a community property shirt, and Jared has to look away.
“Are you the doctor?” he asks, voice soft and faintly Southern accented.
“Dr. Padalecki,” says Jared, holding out a hand. Vincennes regards it suspiciously for a moment, then takes it and shakes up and down twice, dropping it quickly and stepping away again.
“He died on your operating table,” says Vincennes.
“He lost a lot of blood at the scene,” says Jared delicately, gesturing toward the table in the middle of the room and waiting for Vincennes to take a seat. “We tried everything we could, but the damage was already too extensive.”
He looks away while Vincennes covers his face with his hands, shaking badly. “We’re up here to see my sister, she just had a baby,” he says finally. “Yesterday we went surfing at Half Moon Bay. He had to have Chinese food, went out late, didn’t come back, and I.”
Jared nods. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Vincennes.”
Vincennes looks up. “I feel like I’ve been ripped open,” he says. “Ripped open and everything inside removed, thrown into the ocean. I’m not. What do I do? I don’t even know what-not going to survive this, don’t think.” He stands up and paces back over to the window, staring at the view of Oakland below.
It’s early morning, barely past sunrise. Jared wonders how Vincennes got to the hospital so fast, how quickly he must have figured out something was wrong. Did he just know, Jared wonders, did he feel the screaming metal crush the same time his husband did? How long does it take to get to that point?
“He was everything and now he’s-” Vincennes sways on his feet and crumples onto the chair behind him, nothing but the wrapper left behind. “No. No.”
--
“So you’re the famous Jared,” said Danneel, offering a hand. Her handshake was firm and strong, and she was gorgeous and glowing in a knee-length fuchsia dress. Of course she was gorgeous, Jared thought, but he gave her his best smile. The lobby of her building was beautiful, too, a doorman and windows to let in the winter sunlight.
“I’m the famous Jared,” he agreed. His tone was friendly, warm and open. Jensen eyed them cautiously, but Jared just clapped a hand down on his shoulder and squeezed. Danneel’s eyes rested on the contact for a second and the look on her face flickered, but Jared didn’t think Jensen noticed. He took his hand back.
“I’ve only told her good things,” Jensen promised. His tone was a little stilted. Jared had the mean impulse to ask what exactly those good things were.
Danneel smiled. “I hear you have a fantastic appetite,” she said. “That’s good. I like a man who can eat.”
“I hear you’re a real fine cook,” said Jared, really laying on the charm and hoping it would distract her from the fact Jensen was still staring at him.
She slipped her arm through his and leaned in close. “Why don’t you walk up with me and I’ll tell you all about it. Jen can wait for everyone else, right?”
Jensen blinked at her, and after a moment he nodded. “Sure, yeah. Uh, wine’s in the fridge if you want to start in on that.” He checked his watch and frowned, a little furrow between his brows that Jared didn’t recognize at all. “Misha and his wife’ll be here soon, and Mackenzie and Aaron.”
“So what, I’m a seventh wheel here?” Jared joked.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” said Danneel, patting him with her free hand and steering him toward the elevators. “I have a single friend coming for you. Her name’s Katie and she’s a real catch. You’ll just love her.”
Katie turned out to be Jensen’s sister's boss, a young, no-nonsense brunette with big eyes and a throaty laugh. She told filthy jokes all through dinner and traded bawdy stories with Misha and his wife, while Danneel entertained Mackenzie and her fiancé, and Jensen at there looking vaguely uncomfortable.
Danneel’s dinner was wonderful, of course, which made Jared hate her just that much more. He got drunk on the screwdrivers she served after dinner, made out with Jensen in the hallway, and went home with Katie after the party. He found, to his delight, that the dirty talk and deep laugh extended to her brightly colored bedroom as well.
Before he left the next morning, still wet from a quick shower and sharing coffee and biscotti in the kitchen, Katie stopped him. “You could just tell him,” she said. “Before everything starts moving like the rails are greased. Just tell him.”
“What?” he asked, feigning ignorance.
She shook her head. “Nevermind,” she said. She walked him to the door, cinching the belt of her peignoir while he pulled on his coat and scarf for the January chill. She handed him her card and told him to call her sometime. She didn’t sound like she was hoping for it.
He didn’t call.
--
Jared doesn’t have the patience to wait for an elevator, and the office Jensen shares with the other OB/Gyn residents is on the fifth floor. He runs up five flights of stairs, glad the stairwell is empty as always, and walks as briskly as he can through the twisting hallway.
He knocks sharply when he reaches the door with Jensen’s name on it. “Just a minute!”
“I can’t give this up,” says Jared breathlessly as soon as Jensen opens the door.
Jensen stares at him for a second. “Um, okay,” he says. “I guess come in.” He takes a step back and lets Jared into the office, and Jared suddenly feels too big to be allowed and too wild to fit in the tiny room. “What are you talking about?” Jensen says slowly once they’re seated on opposite sides of the desk.
“I love you,” says Jared. Jensen raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth to respond but Jared lunges across the desk and covers his mouth. “No, don’t-don’t say anything yet. I have to, um. I have to say this. So let me, okay?”
Jensen nods and Jared removes his hand, but he doesn’t retake his seat. He sits on the edge of the desk and twists his torso so that he can look at Jensen.
“You have been the best thing in my life for eight years. Even when I couldn’t even admit it to myself, or when you finally got sick of me and ended it. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m kind of a huge dick sometimes. Like, high-quality deadbeat asshole, right here.” He runs his hands through his hair and sneaks a look at Jensen. “That Padalecki kid, man, what a douche.”
Jensen swallows heavily, raises an eyebrow. “Can I ask what brought this on?”
“Lost a patient last night. This morning, talked to the husband, said he was his everything. Wasn’t gonna survive losing him. Uh, two dudes, by the way. And all I could think was the only way I would know how he would feel was if I lost you. Nobody else comes close. My god, I’m a horrible person. Fuck.”
“You know, this whole thing is just stupid if you think about it,” says Jensen, shaking his head, sitting back and looking amazed. “Do you remember that next day after we met? We got up and went to class-”
“Pharmacology,” Jared interrupts. “Shapiro.”
Jensen smiles faintly, still staring into the distance. “After class we went to the diner, and I had waffles. I don’t even like waffles, you know? But I didn’t even know what the hell I was ordering because I was so deliriously happy right then. Because we were just sitting there in that diner, shooting the shit, and I just knew.” He gives a helpless what-can-I-do shrug. “That was it for me. I was done. I’d found mine.”
Jared feels very cold all of a sudden. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he says blinking rapidly, “but what the fucking fuck? Why didn’t you say anything? Ever?”
Jensen makes a high-pitched derisive sound. “You never seemed to-it never seemed like you felt it the same way I did. I was in love with you, and if being near you meant I had to take what I could get, well. That’s what I did.” He leans forward and gives Jared a grim smile.
Jared stares at him, thinking, this changes everything, the sky is red, the A’s have won the pennant, you can’t pull this kinda switch on me.
“You ever sit and think about how much of this coulda been avoided?” says Jared, croaking and kind of sick to his stomach, lurching feeling in his chest like driving too fast over the hills. “Like, if we woulda done this one thing different, if I hadn’t said that or you hadn’t done this.”
“Everyday,” says Jensen, then he’s standing up, rounding the desk and stopping in front of Jared. He puts a tentative hand on his cheek, which Jared leans into, and that cracks something and spreads a smile across his face.
“So, um, pay attention,” says Jared, pulling him close. “I love you.”
--
Jensen promised himself that he would end the thing with Jared if kids got involved. It wasn’t that he was planning on having any, and he didn’t think Danneel wanted them either, but just in case. Jensen was a big believer in planning.
Less than six months after his mother died, his father remarried his secretary. Jensen was not suspicious. He didn’t need to be; his father’s affair was long standing and pretty much general knowledge.
“How lucky for Gina that Mom kicked the bucket, huh?” his sister said to him once. Jensen had nothing against his stepmother, but he didn’t want to get to know her, either, and he very much resented his father for putting him in the awkward situation in the first place. He promised himself he would never do that to his kids.
He thought about it a lot over the course of Danneel’s pregnancy, how to bring it up with Jared, what to say, how Jared might react.
And then, not too long before Lila was born, he couldn’t take it anymore. Danneel was going through a “get away from me, I don’t even want to look at you, it’s your fault I’m huge and miserable” period where she didn’t even want to look at him, and Genevieve was on a ten-game roadtrip out east, so he slept at Jared’s.
And then one night, he rolled over and stared out into the empty bedroom and he said, “This has got to stop.”
THE END
NOTES & SOUNDTRACK
MASTER POST
ART POST
ONE | TWO | THREE
NOTES & SOUNDTRACK
ART POST
PART THREE
Sandy is Jared’s favorite scrub nurse. She’s tiny and dark-haired, cute where Genevieve is more sultry, but they still look similar enough that he has a hard time looking her in the eye sometimes. She’s too smart for her own good, too, knows him too well, and she cares.
They’re scrubbing in for an appendectomy a few days after Gen’s miscarriage, Sandy babbling about some cute thing her dachshund did the night before, when she stops dead in the middle of a sentence and grabs his hand under the water.
“You have to stop this, Jared,” she says, squeezing his fingers.
“What?” he asks, glancing between their joined hands and her face, which is practically glowing with concern and affection.
She smiles sadly. “You have the biggest hands out of everybody I know. I can barely wrap my whole hand around one of your fingers,” she says, holding up his right hand to demonstrate. She’s right. “I always love working with you because I can watch your hands.”
He gives her a funny look. “Um, okay.”
“You don’t have surgeon’s hands to look at ‘em. But they serve you well.” She hands him the soap and shakes her head. “You’re not eating, are you? I can tell by your hands, you know. And your face, and how your scrubs fit. You’re a big man, so it takes a while to show up, but I can see it. What ever it is that’s so wrong in your world, sweetie? It’s not worth getting sick over,” she says, finally releasing his hand. She looks up and gives him a doe-eyed look that he can’t withstand. “You’re miserable.”
“We just lost a baby,” he says defensively, lathering up to his elbows. “I defy anyone to not be a little miserable after that.”
Sandy stares at him for a moment, then she shakes her head, rinsing off her own arms and flicking excess water into the basin. “That’s a real good reason, and it makes me sound like a big ol’ asshole for not believing you one bit.”
“I really wish everyone would quit telling me I’m lyin’ when I talk,” he says bitterly.
She gives him a look he doesn’t want to deconstruct, and she turns off the water and grabs the box of sterile gloves. “You ever think it might be time to start wondering why people keep saying that?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.
He sighs and looks through the window into the operating room, where the anesthesiologist he hates is talking to a group of nurses and one of Jared’s interns. “Honestly?” he says. “No.”
“Left hand,” says Sandy, shaking her head. She snaps the latex a little harder than he thinks is strictly necessary.
--
Not too long after Jensen and Danneel got back from Greece, he got to talking about things with Misha. The topic had been their lunches, eaten at four in the morning in front of the TV in Misha’s office, but somehow that got warped completely. Some Kind of Wonderful was on, which was apparently Misha’s favorite John Hughes movie, not the most appropriate backdrop for an emotional postmortem.
“You want to know what I think?” Misha asked, giving him a grim look.
“No,” said Jensen, picking half-heartedly at the remains of the reuben he brought up from the cafeteria. The bread was soggy and the whole thing kind of sucked, but it was better than the vile-smelling thrice-heated falafel Misha was cheerfully finishing.
“Ha,” said Misha, rolling his eyes and setting down his fork. He had a smear of tahini dressing on his cheek. “You, my friend, are full of shit.”
Jensen shrugged. He fiddled with his ring. “I love my wife.”
Misha frowned. “Nobody’s saying you don’t. It’s not mutually exclusive.”
“Right, apparently this is just one of those weirdo ‘verses where that means jack shit.”
“But seriously,” said Misha a second later, shoving his plate away and sighing like he was going to have to explain the intricacies of the human kidney to a kindergartener. “Look at yourself, Jensen. Something is going to give, and it’s going to be a gory fucking mess and you know it.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.” Jensen peeled the top piece of bread back from his sandwich and picked off a chunk of corned beef. He chewed it slowly and swallowed before he looked back up. There was some thousand island on his fingers and he could feel a speck of sauerkraut stuck to his chin. Misha rolled his eyes and handed him a napkin.
“This is not healthy, this thing you’re doing,” said Misha. He looked concerned. Jensen rolled his shoulders and ate another piece of meat.
“You want to know something?” he said. He tossed the crumpled napkin next to his plate and sat back, arms crossed over his chest. “We’re probably going to separate.”
Misha did a spit-take and kind of twitched, his elbow slipping clean off the edge of his desk with a painful scraping sound. “What?”
Jensen dragged his hand through his hair and huffed out a breath, too late thinking that he probably still had thousand island all over his fingers. “We went on this vacation to see if we couldn’t maybe work through some of the problems. The ones we could fix anyway, not the other stuff. The, you know, cocksucking stuff.”
“Comrade, you truly have a way with words,” said Misha, laughing so hard he was kind of purple.
“Yeah. Not a lot she can do there. Not that it came up, but Christ, she’s not an idiot. She can’t not know, right?” He shook his head. “But no, we had dinner in this little restaurant that’s basically a shack on a rock, and I think we just decided that it was hopeless to continue as we are.”
“Jensen, I gotta ask this, so don’t get pissed, okay?” Misha gave him a very stern look, head tipped forward just enough that he had to look up at Jensen. “But, seriously, why did you marry her in the first place?”
Jensen opened his mouth, thinking it would be such an easy answer, but somehow nothing came out, throat clogging up with nothing. He stared at a caraway seed poking out of the top piece of rye on his sandwich and shook his head.
“She’s beautiful, you know?” he said finally. “And she’s amazing. And she was there.” He couldn’t quite believe that everything wrong with his life boiled down to that, that proximity was the root of all evil. He had to laugh a little, actually, because how could he not?
Misha’s frown deepened, two parallel lines sketching across his forehead like gutters on a bowling lane. “Asking for trouble, man,” he said.
“Yeah, well. And she loves me. She really does. And I love her. She makes me happy to be around, makes me want to take care of her and keep her happy. I love her.” He folded his arms on the edge of the desk and put his head down, rattling a deep sigh around in his chest.
Misha muted the TV and didn’t say anything for a few moments, long enough of a pause that Jensen looked up to see what was keeping him. Finally, Misha nodded and gave him a sad smile. “I hate to break this to you, buddy, but you’re in love with somebody who isn’t your wife.”
Jensen jerked in his seat, shying toward the door. “What.”
“Please tell me this isn’t news to you,” Misha implored, staring at him pityingly. He took another bite of his falafel, chewed thoughtfully for a moment with the whole chunk bulging one cheek like a hamster with a baby carrot. “Jensen. Seriously.”
“Me and him, it’s always just been,” said Jensen, watching the screen so he didn’t have to look at Misha. “We don’t talk about it. I don’t even know if he, like, does this with other guys. I don’t know if he’s ever been with another guy besides me, though I gotta guess he has.”
“So it’s like Fight Club. Your own little gay sex Fight Club. Well goddamn.”
Jensen slumped in his chair, covering his face with one hand. “She deserves better than me.”
--
Jared wakes up from a nap full of bad dreams, gasping awake on the couch, sounds down the hallway, closet doors, some kind of scraping noise on the hardwood. He sits up and wipes at his eyes, wondering what time it must be and how soon he’s got to head to the hospital.
He finds Gen in their bedroom, in the closet, a suitcase laid open like an autopsy on the bed.
“What’re you doing?” he asks muzzily.
She looks up, startled. “Oh, you’re home,” she says.
“Was nappin’ in the living room,” he says, stretching his arms over his head, hooking fingers on the doorjamb.
“I’m packing,” she says, not much inflection. She turns and tosses a pair of fawn colored pants onto the bed.
He scratches his head. “I see that. Um, why?”
“Because I’m going back to Phoenix.”
“You can tell Billy Beane to go fuck himself,” says Jared, dropping his arms and snorting.
“It’s cute how you think this is his idea,” she says coolly. “God forbid Genevieve have a mind of her own, right? Not where the ballclub is concerned.”
He ignores the obvious argument, that if one of her ballplayers or Beane or, fuck, some minor leaguer half a country away, calls and says jump, Gen laughs and asks how high and how far and if she should post bail or buy Motrin. He just says, “Are you absolutely sure?”
She keeps grabbing things from the closet. “I’m sure,” she says, voice muffled by the mound of clothing in her arms. “I have to do something that gets me out of this house. I have to get back to work, and this time of year, work for me is in Phoenix. With my team.”
He drags his hands through his hair, shoving it back away from his face. “Gen, you just had a miscarriage,” he says, trying a different tack. “You do not need to go back to work yet. As a doctor, I strongly discourage it.”
She shakes her head and drops the pile on the bed next to her suitcase. The jersey on top is a brand-new Garciaparra, not even worn yet. “Well, you’re not my doctor, are you?” she says.
“You want me to call Jensen? Because I will.”
“You will not,” she says, shaking her head and starting with the folding of her clothes. “Look, Jared. You don’t understand. You get to go and escape to the hospital and distract yourself, cutting people open and rearranging their insides and stuff. I’m stuck here in this fucking house, all by myself all day because my son is hundreds of miles away from me right now. All I have to do is sit around and think and cry, and I cannot do that to myself anymore.” She tosses a few shirts aside, deciding against them at the last minute. One of them is a jersey with the number 99 and Cortese on the back, which makes him smile. “Not how I’m built. I gotta be useful or I’m going to lose my mind.”
“So... what, then,” he says, tone going hard and cold, “you’re just going to get on a plane and go play with a bunch of overgrown children? Is that it?”
She looks up sharply, balling up the shirt she had been folding and pegging a perfect strike into his sternum, snarling. “Don’t you dare,” she says furiously. “I am an assistant to the Director of Player Personnel. My job is goddamn important to a bunch of people. Some of these men-and they are men, you jealous pathetic little child-some of them are closer to me than brothers.” She shoves some hastily folded shirts into the suitcase, stopping after a few and turning back to him. “I’ve watched some of them grow up from scared little draftees straight out of some backwater high school to starting at the goddamn Coliseum. Sometimes all they want from me is a hug and a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
Jared draws back like he’s been struck. He barely recognizes the terse, spitting creature that’s taken over his wife’s body, not liking the way grief has twisted her face. “Genevieve-”
She shakes her head, deflating a little, pivoting in place and holding up a hand. “I need this, Jared.”
“It’s too soon, Gen,” he says.
“It wasn’t soon enough,” she snaps back. She shakes her head and turns away, starts selecting underwear from her drawer. “This is not a discussion,” she says, voice fading back to calm and resolute, even though she was shaking and visibly held together with Scotch tape and chewing gum, bursting at the seams. “I’ll be back on Tuesday, though I’ll have to head back down on Thursday.”
“Funny, this feels an awful lot like you’re leaving,” he says, much more bitterly than he intended. He grabs her arm, squeezes until she glares up at him. “Come, on, don’t do this, Jens-”
Her whole body jags away as she catches the slip a second before he does. She exhales heavily through her nose. “Jared,” she says softly, laying a hand on his chest. “Just. Space, okay? Let’s stretch it out, see if it sticks. Go golfing with Chad. Make fire, grill meat. Get drunk. Something.”
He glances at the bed and flinches. She ducks around him and drops a load of brightly colored panties into her suitcase, then she closes the lid and zips up the sides. He steps out of the way so she can leave the room, and one of the wheels on the suitcase just barely misses running over his bare toes. She pauses in the hallway, a door down in front of Andy’s room, and looks back at him.
“I’ll be back again in a few days, and I think you and I both know we have some things to talk about then,” she says. She uses her free hand to tuck her bangs behind one ear. He opens his mouth to protest but she just shakes her head. “I just can’t anymore, Jared. I just can’t.”
Once she’s gone, the taxi she called while he was asleep ferrying her away to the airport, he turns and punches the wall. It leaves one hell of a dent.
--
Danneel was sprawled out on their beach blanket, eyes closed behind her big Jackie-O sunglasses, one hand curled over the spine of her discarded paperback. Jensen was more than a little jealous that she could just lie out in the Greek sun wearing nothing but that tiny bikini bottom and have absolutely no fear of blistering to a rich, crustacean red. Jensen huddled miserably in the fetal position under a rental umbrella, still in his t-shirt, though he did concede to rolling his pant legs and burying his toes in the sand.
“Would you relax,” she growled, not opening her eyes or even sitting up.
“I am relaxed,” he protested.
“I can hear you freaking out about skin cancer from here,” she said. “Just lie back and close your eyes. Listen to the gulls.”
He stared out at the water, fiddling with the thong of one of his sandals and thinking about how the unearthly blue of the Aegean made him nervous. “What? No. I’m fine,” he said.
“Is it your hip?” she asked, leaning up on her elbows and lifting her sunglasses to give him a mildly concerned look.
He shifted a little, testing and stretching the muscles from his ribcage down to his knee. “Not really, actually,” he said, honestly a little surprised. “Huh. Doesn’t hurt today.”
“That’s good,” she said, giving him a smile. She sat up a little more. “See, when we actually make love regularly, you don’t seem to have problems. My vagina is magic.”
He snorted and tossed his shoe back to the sand. “That must be it,” he said.
She rolled her eyes and dropped her glasses back down her nose. He watched her breasts jiggle as she moved her arm. She really was a spectacular woman, he thought, and he had never wished harder that he could just give her everything. “Glad we figured that out,” she said, scooting over and wrapping one arm around his lower back, pressing her cheek against the rounded muscle of his shoulder. He lifted his arm and pulled her closer.
“You ever going to tell me what happened?” she asked after a second of watching two sea birds fight over a scrap of food a few feet down the beach.
“The accident, you mean?” he asked.
She nodded, lightly tracing patterns on his stomach with her nails. “Jared said something about you getting crushed under a Honda when I asked him one time,” she said.
He bit his lip and nodded. He kissed the top of her head and kept his eyes on the horizon. “That’s about it,” he said. “I spent about three months in the hospital, and then rehab. I’m lucky I can walk at all,” he reported dully.
There were lots of things he could have told her about it. He could have told her about how he was the only survivor of the crash, or that it was the fact he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt that saved him. He could have described lying in the street, pinned under the other driver’s Honda but still conscious enough to watch his roommate's Nissan burst into flames. He could have said that he watched two people he loved die, but he didn’t.
She reached up and carded her fingers through his hair, which was tipping with gold from all the sun he couldn’t avoid. “Let’s head back to the room, okay?” she whispered.
--
Jared is drunk. Really, stupidly, blindly drunk.
He’s been keeping tabs on Jensen, though he refuses to think of it as creepy. He’s just making sure that the guy’s okay. He kind of hopes Jensen’s doing the same for him, but he doubts it. In fact, he has a feeling that this is going to end with him walking half a block and getting a possibly broken nose checked out in his own ER once Jensen opens the door and punches him.
The man behind the bar in the lobby of Jensen’s hotel is pretty obviously bored to tears by Jared’s sad, stupid story. Jared figures that the guy probably hears plenty of guys and their sob stories about how their wives left them, but he’s too drunk for anything other than perfect egocentrism.
“No more for you, buddy,” the bartender says. “You got somebody you can call or d’you want be to call a cab?”
“I know somebody upstairs,” Jared says, lurching to his feet and stretching his arms up over his head.
The bartender looks dubious. “You sure?”
Jared nods. “Room 462,” he says, smiling serenely.
He heads for the bank of elevators and waits with an elderly couple and two giggling teenage girls. He stumbles a little getting off the elevator, which is concerning, so he decides to take a few minutes to sober up. He sits down on a big, squashy couch in a small seating area to the left of the elevators. There’s a huge plate glass window overlooking the avenue below, the lights of the cars smearing into a long yellow and red line in both directions. It’s raining.
It’s probably half an hour that he sits there watching the cars go by. A family with noisy children gets off the elevator and heads the opposite direction of Jensen’s room, though the mother pauses and eyeballs Jared like she thinks he might be a threat. He ignores her. A man with a loud voice and a cellphone comes from that same direction and jabbers loudly about Nielsen ratings while he waits for the elevator to come. A group of college-age girls comes stumbling home, drunk and tired from a night on the town.
Jared waits until the sound of their giggles disappears down the corridor, and then he hoists himself to his feet. He walks evenly, no tripping over nothing, no weaving, no holding onto the walls. He moves with purpose and he knocks on the door with purpose.
He can hear the television on in the room, and it goes silent after the knocks.
“Hang on,” Jensen yells.
A few moments later, the sound of a deadbolt being thrown, some rustling, and the door cracks open.
Jensen stands there, gorgeous and tired and real, staring at him blankly. Jared looks down, first at the plaid flannel pants he’s wearing and then at the faded San Diego State t-shirt with the stretched out neck. Jared has wondered where that shirt got to, but he should have known. It always looked better on Jensen, anyway.
“What do you want?” Jensen asks. His voice is very carefully neutral.
“I want to-we need to talk.”
Jensen shakes his head and makes a face. He scratches his right ear and squints unhappily at Jared. “At one-thirty Tuesday morning?”
Jared glances down the hallway at the sound of the elevator beeping. “Can I come in?”
“I’d rather you not,” Jensen says.
“I don’t want to have this-the conversation we need to have.” Jared pauses and rakes his hands through his hair. Jensen continues to stare at him with no expression on his face. “Look, can we not do this out in the hallway so that everyone on the floor can hear it?”
Jensen sighs and takes a step back, waving vaguely over his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “You’re right. Let’s not do this out here.” He sounds annoyed.
Jared brushes past him into the room, and Jensen’s just so warm and familiar and everything he wants, and it takes just about all his mental faculties not to just lean in and enjoy it. He leans against the wall and watches as Jensen closes the door.
“I’ve missed you,” Jared says. Jensen freezes, hand still on the lock. “I just thought you should know that.”
“That isn’t fair, Jared,” Jensen says after a moment, turning around and glaring at him.
“It’s the truth,” Jared insists.
“Fuck you, Jared.” Jensen shoots him a disgusted look and goes deeper into the room.
Jared looks around before following him. It’s nice enough but generic, with soft goldenrod-colored wallpaper and walnut furniture, prints of the Golden Gate Bridge at night framed on the walls. It looks like he’s been living here a while, the open closet door revealing a sizable chunk of wardrobe hanging up, a deflated soft-side suitcase on the shelf at the top, and a chaotic sea of shoes cluttering the floor. The nightstand on the left side of the bed is cluttered with the detritus of a single man’s daily life: cellphone, contact case, lotion, a lot of takeout containers. There’s crumpled tissues and discarded clothes on the floor. The bed hasn’t been made properly in a while, like Jensen leaves the ‘don’t bother cleaning’ tag on his doorknob most of the time.
“Jen, please.”
Jensen stops the little table over by the balcony doors and gives him a look Jared’s not even going to try to figure out. There’s a bottle of bourbon in the middle of the table, a stack of little glasses next to it. The wall-mounted flatscreen is on mute, SportsCenter doing pre-season segments on some National League teams Jared could give a shit about.
“You know, I’ve always wondered about the Jen thing,” Jensen says, shaking his head. He grabs the remote from the table and turns off the TV.
“What?”
“You never used to call me Jen. And okay, yeah, I would’ve probably killed you. I went through most of school being called Jenny, and that gives a guy a fuck of a complex.” He sits on the edge of the table and worries the bottom hem of the shirt. Jared leans on the wall to the left of the balcony door and watches him, thinks he looks thinner and paler than he used to (but then again, so does Jared). “But I guess I just stopped caring or something, and you kept it up. I was thinking about when that started, and I decided it must have been when the thing with Genevieve started. You call us both Jen, less chance of fucking up the names, right?”
Jared makes a strangled sound in his throat. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” he says warningly.
“I’m genuinely curious, Jared,” Jensen says mildly, squaring himself back up to his full height. “It never used to bother me, but I can’t stop thinking about it now. Like, what is the first initial of the name you say in bed?”
“Why don’t you just go full-on Alanis on me?” Jared snaps, shoving away from the wall but not going any closer. “Would she go down on me in a theater?” he says mockingly. “Am I thinking of you when I fuck her?”
Jensen draws back half a step and gives him a hurt look. “That’s not my point,” he says. Jared snorts and Jensen finally snaps. He closes the space between them and slams his hand on the wall next to Jared’s head and his face goes red. “What we were-it wasn’t fair to anybody. Not me, not you, not Gen or Danny or Lila. It was unhealthy and it was sad and it was killing me, okay? So I stepped back. It was out of hand. And fuck you! You don’t get to stand here, drunk off your ass and acting like you’re the only wounded party. You said you loved me and then you left me.”
“We were finished!” Jared growls.
“Bullshit,” Jensen hisses back. “This thing is never gonna be finished and you and me both know it.”
Jared swallows down whatever hurtful thing he was thinking about slinging back at him and just stares down at him. It’s always gotten him off just a little that Jensen is just enough shorter than him that he has to look up when they’re this close. Jensen’s not a small guy by any means, but he’s smaller than Jared is, built slim and just this side of pretty.
“If I kiss you are you going to hit me?” Jared asks, watching in fascination as Jensen’s breath hitches and his tongue darts out to wet his lips.
Jensen shakes his head. “You shouldn’t, though,” he says.
Jared puts one tentative hand on his waist, feeling the muscles skitter and jump under his palm. “I should probably go,” he says. Jensen nods, melting forward and burying his face in Jared’s chest.
They stand like that for several minutes, wrapped up in each other. Jensen pulls back a little and looks up at him with a sad kind of smile. “Or you could stay,” he says.
“Or I could stay,” Jared agrees.
“I’m tired of fighting,” Jensen says. “I’m tired of everything, you know?” He takes a few steps away and idly gathers up some discarded clothes on the ground. “It’s stupid, but I always just slept better when you were around. I don’t want to-can we just sleep?”
Jared grins so big he thinks Jensen can probably see his second molars, and he’s closing up the distance between them again and crushing him in a hug before he can think about it. He doesn’t have him back, not yet, but this is enough for now, he thinks.
--
“Northwest Airlines flight 629 to Las Vegas is now boarding at Gate 27,” a tinny female voice announced barely audible over the airport din.
Jared grinned. “That’s us,” he said.
“Are we absolutely, completely, one hundred percent fucking sure that we’re going to do this?” Gen asked, squeezing Jared’s hands and looking up at him beseechingly. She bit her bottom lip.
He leaned down and kisses her lightly, running his tongue over the slightly puffy spot she’s been worrying all afternoon. “I am absolutely sure,” he said.
She nodded, still not looking completely convinced, but she threaded her hand with his and shouldered her bag. “Well, okay then,” she said. “I’m just confused, I guess, as to why we’re just running off to Vegas instead of having, you know, a real ceremony in front of our family and friends.”
Jared swallowed and busied himself with dodging a group of Asian tourists. “The thought of going through the whole wedding thing makes me physically ill,” Jared said. “I was best man in the single worst wedding in history, seriously. I cannot do that again.”
She smiled a little. “I promise I don’t have Bridezilla tendencies,” she said.
“Yeah, Danneel said the same thing. Lies, by the way,” he added. The terminal wasn’t as crowded as he expected, but their gate was way at the far end. He glanced down at Gen and tried to ignore the look on her face, the slightly annoyed, slightly dubious one that she always got when Jensen came up in conversation.
“Well, come on,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Our winged chariot awaits.”
--
April rolls around. Jensen delivers more babies, goes to a Giants game with Jared and Andy, and starts to feel like he’s found a footing in the silty bottom of the lake he was thrown into.
He gets a phone call from Genevieve right before Easter, mostly questions she has about follow-up and whatnot, and he finds that it’s not so hard to hear her voice. He’s always liked her, always been very careful not to resent her (after all, he had all the parts of Jared that mattered).
Somehow, he finds himself accepting an invitation to her Easter banquet, dinner because there’s a day game and she’s got lonely boys to feed. He and Jared might have come to an understanding, might even be circling back around to being friends again, but they’re not even a little bit okay enough to be forced to interact with people.
“I would have done it for anyone,” he insists, trying to play professional, trying to beg off.
He’s not up to skirting around Jared or a room full of people. He doesn’t really have anywhere else to go, either, his sister flying back to Texas to meet their brother’s new fiancée, and it’s still too soon to be breaking bread with Danneel. They are planning to get together to hide eggs and chocolate bunnies for Lila, no matter how many times Jensen points out that Lila isn’t even a year old yet. Danneel insists that it’s the principle of the idea that’s important.
“Mommy and Daddy and a holiday, okay?” she says.
Genevieve isn’t having any of his excuses, though. “It meant everything to me, Jensen,” she says quietly.
He can see her in his mind, standing there in the beautiful kitchen of the little house in Berkeley that Jared bought after they got back from Vegas, twisting a chunk of hair around her finger while she talks.
“And don’t you dare say it was because it’s your job. You let me cry on you and you stroked my hair and you told me it would be okay.”
“Okay,” he acquiesces, pressing his phone hard against his face and closing his eyes. “But there better be meat.”
When he pulls into the driveway on Easter, he’s the first to arrive, but he usually tries to be early to such things in case the host needs help. Genevieve is kneeling out front, transplanting Jensen’s yellow tulips from the pot to a planter box next to the front door. Jared’s red Explorer is gleaming in the sunlight, probably freshly washed and waxed and taking up half the driveway. Jensen parks his sensible little Oldsmobile behind it, thinking their cars are going to look low-rent and silly compared to some of the bonus baby Escalades and Maseratis that will also be attending.
“You made it!” says Genevieve, springing to her feet and shucking off her soil covered gardening gloves. He comes around the car and lets her pull him down into a hug. “I’m so glad. You’re kinda early, though.”
He shrugs. “Nothing better to do. Need help with anything?”
She grins. “Let’s go in and see. The caterer’s got Jared running ragged. It’s some funny shit, you should see it.”
He helps her carry her gardening supplies into the garage when she finishes, and follows her into the kitchen and helps himself to a glass of orange juice while she washes her hands.
“Ugh,” she says, coming to stand next to him against the counter, trying to keep out of the path of the caterer, a tiny blonde woman in a blue jacket who keeps barreling in and out of the room, muttering to herself. Genevieve pokes the side of the juice carton and scowls. “You know what I don’t get? Why I have to choose between having lots of pulp and having added calcium. Who decided that people who want extra calcium in their diets via orange juice have to give up pulp? I love pulp, but I’m also realistic about the fact I’m female and I need to consume, like, a zillion milligrams of calcium so that my bones don’t turn into sponges on my fortieth birthday, you know?”
Jensen stares at her for a second. “What?”
She frowns and grabs the carton. “Okay, my point is that it’s arbitrary and cruel that the people at Tropicana just decided that people have to choose between calcium and fiber,” she says. “Why bother fortifying your juice with one thing if you’re going to just take away some other nutrient?”
“So… buy juice with pulp and drink milk, or stir fiber powder into your juice with calcium,” he suggests.
“That isn’t the point!” she says. “Maybe I just like pulp, dammit!”
“Jared doesn’t,” he points out.
“Fair enough,” she says after a second, giving him a sideways look. He busies himself with finishing off his glass, and she puts the carton away.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I like pulp, too.”
“I know,” she says. She gives him a strained smile. “You know, there was a long time there when it would already be gone by the time I would get there. And I never really minded as much as I probably should’ve, come to think of it.”
Jensen turns sharply, startled. “Are we talking about-”
“I have eyes, Jensen,” she says gently. She stands on her toes and starts pulling dishes down from a cupboard. “I wasn’t going to accept his proposal, you know. When he asked me, I told him I’d think about it. I was going to let him down easy, maybe give him a shove in the right direction. But then Danneel got pregnant, so I thought ‘hey, wait, maybe there is a chance for me,’ and I said yes. And then the next thing I know, we’re running off to Vegas.”
Jensen doesn’t know what to say to that, so he takes the stack of plates from her and carries them into the dining room to help her set the table. There are two caterers setting up a buffet table.
“Your husband is grabbing us another table. He said you had one upstairs,” one of them says to Genevieve.
Before Jensen can come up with anything to say, there’s a knock at the front door, and then the whole house is full of people.
For some reason, Misha and his wife are there, too, even though Jensen was pretty sure they were only his friends. Predictably, Misha and Barry Zito get along like they were separated at birth. Jared’s scrub nurse, Sandy, who Jensen adores, hugs him and compliments him on his sweater. Her husband asks him for advice on his golf game.
“The color really brings out your eyes,” Sandy tells Jensen, patting him on the arm.
“Thank you,” Jensen replies.
Jared catches his eye from across the room and nods, smiling a little. Jensen can’t help himself and smiles back. It’s enough.
--
The accident happened Halloween weekend of Jensen’s sophomore year of college.
“It’s not looking good, kiddo,” was the first thing Jensen’s father said when he woke up in the hospital and asked what happened. He’d never seen his father look so old or grave, but he was on a powerful morphine drip and the world was fuzzy.
“You’re been unconscious for five days,” said Dad, grave like Jensen had never seen.
“Where’s Mom?” Jensen croaked, throat raw like he’d been swilling gasoline. Dad looked away, and then Jensen remembered.
His parents and Mackenzie had flown out to California for the weekend, though Dad was irritable about being away from work and Mom had the flu, but it was the first time he’d seen them since July and he didn’t care how much they sniped at each other. They were all going out to eat, dragging Jensen’s long-suffering roommate along with them. Mackenzie had torn her ACL playing volleyball, so she had to stretch her leg out across the backseat, and Mom and Dad had some awful fight right before they left. Steve, who drove a little Nissan, offered her his passenger seat and she accepted, sniffing at Dad, “At least some men here are gentlemen.”
He missed both funerals, stuck at UCLA Medical Center in intensive care. Steve’s parents and stepbrother came and sat with him a lot, insisting they didn’t blame him for surviving. Dad and Mackenzie flew back a few days after Mom’s funeral, just in time for Steve’s, and Mackenzie and the stepbrother took about a million pictures between them.
“They’re not sure if you’ll ever walk again,” Dad continued, looking away. “They’re saying possible nerve damage, and that your pelvis is broken in three places. Apparently you got an angel watching out for you, though. None of your organs were damaged.”
“Dad, I’m-”
Altogether, the recovery and physical therapy took more than a year, but Jensen was back in school by the next fall, a new life plan in mind, hobbling around on crutches. There was talk of cosmetic surgery to correct the terrible scarring left behind, all the ruined skin on his right side, but it didn’t bother Jensen. He was self-flagellating enough to own it, he thought. And anyway, it wasn’t like he intended for anyone to see it.
“You’re lucky you don’t remember the accident,” his sister told him one day before he was discharged. She was painting his toenails bright purple while he laid in bed and enjoyed being whacked out of his gourd on painkillers. His thoughts were sluggish, stuck on the pavement, the burning Nissan, but he shook himself.
“I remember some of it,” he admitted.
She gave him a sharp look and shook her head, screwing the cap back on the bottle of polish. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Okay? Please don’t tell me.”
“Okay,” he said.
--
It’s been a long shift and Jared is tired. He’s sleeping poorly, catching a couple hours in his office or an on-call room when he can. He wonders sometimes how he does his job at all. He’s depressed, he knows he is, which is just great. It’s May now, a year since Jensen broke it off, six months since DC, one month since Gen and Andy moved across the Bay. He doesn’t want to go home to an empty house, so he drifts around looking for something to do.
He watches some TV in a lounge, listens to some nurses gossip, signs off on some paperwork, and does a round of his post-ops. They’re mostly all asleep, the only one awake a little Asian girl who swallowed three keys. He gives her a Chupa-Chup and gets her undying love, even though she can’t pronounce his name. He’s just heading to the cafeteria to get something to eat when his pager goes off.
Jared spends the next six hours trying to staunch internal bleeding, a one-car car accident on San Leandro, Jaws of Life and a paramedic yelling like the end of the world. But eventually the patient flatlines, tipping over from mostly dead into the dark and quiet.
“Time of death,” says Jared, squinting at the clock high up on the wall, “Three nineteen.”
After he strips off his bloody scrubs, takes a shower and has a granola bar, he collapses in an on-call room and grabs a few hours of sleep.
A nurse comes to wake him up, looking nervous. “Um, Dr. P. Jared. Wake up.”
He cracks open an eye. “Go away.”
“I got a next of kin who won’t stop shouting until he gets to scream at the surgeon who killed his husband.”
Jared groans and rolls onto his back. “God, this might sound insensitive of me, but can’t you say something about Prop 8 and get him to shut up.”
She raises her eyebrows. “He beat me to it,” she says after a moment. “And I was like, dude, you’re fuckin’ Seth Vincennes, you can scream at me all day, just let me stare at you.” She smiles weakly.
“Wait,” says Jared, sitting up and giving her an odd look. “Like, Aquaman Seth Vincennes?”
“In the flesh and voice, screaming the whole hospital down. Prima donna.”
“Can you calm him down a little, get him some coffee, maybe? Put him in one of the conference rooms?” The nurse nods and Jared sits up and stretches. “I’ll be down in a minute, gonna go splash some water on my face.”
He takes his time, giving the bereaved a chance to collect himself. When he slips into the conference room, he finds a slim, dark-haired man standing by the windows, one hand on the glass.
“Mr. Vincennes,” he says.
The man turns to him, wide-eyed and pale. He’s very good looking, pretty in the same way Jensen is, blue eyes and shiny white veneers, but Jared is struck by how little he is. Maybe it’s the fear and confusion and grief on his face making him small, but he barely reaches Jared’s shoulder. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and a Dodgers shirt that’s too big for him, a community property shirt, and Jared has to look away.
“Are you the doctor?” he asks, voice soft and faintly Southern accented.
“Dr. Padalecki,” says Jared, holding out a hand. Vincennes regards it suspiciously for a moment, then takes it and shakes up and down twice, dropping it quickly and stepping away again.
“He died on your operating table,” says Vincennes.
“He lost a lot of blood at the scene,” says Jared delicately, gesturing toward the table in the middle of the room and waiting for Vincennes to take a seat. “We tried everything we could, but the damage was already too extensive.”
He looks away while Vincennes covers his face with his hands, shaking badly. “We’re up here to see my sister, she just had a baby,” he says finally. “Yesterday we went surfing at Half Moon Bay. He had to have Chinese food, went out late, didn’t come back, and I.”
Jared nods. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Vincennes.”
Vincennes looks up. “I feel like I’ve been ripped open,” he says. “Ripped open and everything inside removed, thrown into the ocean. I’m not. What do I do? I don’t even know what-not going to survive this, don’t think.” He stands up and paces back over to the window, staring at the view of Oakland below.
It’s early morning, barely past sunrise. Jared wonders how Vincennes got to the hospital so fast, how quickly he must have figured out something was wrong. Did he just know, Jared wonders, did he feel the screaming metal crush the same time his husband did? How long does it take to get to that point?
“He was everything and now he’s-” Vincennes sways on his feet and crumples onto the chair behind him, nothing but the wrapper left behind. “No. No.”
--
“So you’re the famous Jared,” said Danneel, offering a hand. Her handshake was firm and strong, and she was gorgeous and glowing in a knee-length fuchsia dress. Of course she was gorgeous, Jared thought, but he gave her his best smile. The lobby of her building was beautiful, too, a doorman and windows to let in the winter sunlight.
“I’m the famous Jared,” he agreed. His tone was friendly, warm and open. Jensen eyed them cautiously, but Jared just clapped a hand down on his shoulder and squeezed. Danneel’s eyes rested on the contact for a second and the look on her face flickered, but Jared didn’t think Jensen noticed. He took his hand back.
“I’ve only told her good things,” Jensen promised. His tone was a little stilted. Jared had the mean impulse to ask what exactly those good things were.
Danneel smiled. “I hear you have a fantastic appetite,” she said. “That’s good. I like a man who can eat.”
“I hear you’re a real fine cook,” said Jared, really laying on the charm and hoping it would distract her from the fact Jensen was still staring at him.
She slipped her arm through his and leaned in close. “Why don’t you walk up with me and I’ll tell you all about it. Jen can wait for everyone else, right?”
Jensen blinked at her, and after a moment he nodded. “Sure, yeah. Uh, wine’s in the fridge if you want to start in on that.” He checked his watch and frowned, a little furrow between his brows that Jared didn’t recognize at all. “Misha and his wife’ll be here soon, and Mackenzie and Aaron.”
“So what, I’m a seventh wheel here?” Jared joked.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” said Danneel, patting him with her free hand and steering him toward the elevators. “I have a single friend coming for you. Her name’s Katie and she’s a real catch. You’ll just love her.”
Katie turned out to be Jensen’s sister's boss, a young, no-nonsense brunette with big eyes and a throaty laugh. She told filthy jokes all through dinner and traded bawdy stories with Misha and his wife, while Danneel entertained Mackenzie and her fiancé, and Jensen at there looking vaguely uncomfortable.
Danneel’s dinner was wonderful, of course, which made Jared hate her just that much more. He got drunk on the screwdrivers she served after dinner, made out with Jensen in the hallway, and went home with Katie after the party. He found, to his delight, that the dirty talk and deep laugh extended to her brightly colored bedroom as well.
Before he left the next morning, still wet from a quick shower and sharing coffee and biscotti in the kitchen, Katie stopped him. “You could just tell him,” she said. “Before everything starts moving like the rails are greased. Just tell him.”
“What?” he asked, feigning ignorance.
She shook her head. “Nevermind,” she said. She walked him to the door, cinching the belt of her peignoir while he pulled on his coat and scarf for the January chill. She handed him her card and told him to call her sometime. She didn’t sound like she was hoping for it.
He didn’t call.
--
Jared doesn’t have the patience to wait for an elevator, and the office Jensen shares with the other OB/Gyn residents is on the fifth floor. He runs up five flights of stairs, glad the stairwell is empty as always, and walks as briskly as he can through the twisting hallway.
He knocks sharply when he reaches the door with Jensen’s name on it. “Just a minute!”
“I can’t give this up,” says Jared breathlessly as soon as Jensen opens the door.
Jensen stares at him for a second. “Um, okay,” he says. “I guess come in.” He takes a step back and lets Jared into the office, and Jared suddenly feels too big to be allowed and too wild to fit in the tiny room. “What are you talking about?” Jensen says slowly once they’re seated on opposite sides of the desk.
“I love you,” says Jared. Jensen raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth to respond but Jared lunges across the desk and covers his mouth. “No, don’t-don’t say anything yet. I have to, um. I have to say this. So let me, okay?”
Jensen nods and Jared removes his hand, but he doesn’t retake his seat. He sits on the edge of the desk and twists his torso so that he can look at Jensen.
“You have been the best thing in my life for eight years. Even when I couldn’t even admit it to myself, or when you finally got sick of me and ended it. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m kind of a huge dick sometimes. Like, high-quality deadbeat asshole, right here.” He runs his hands through his hair and sneaks a look at Jensen. “That Padalecki kid, man, what a douche.”
Jensen swallows heavily, raises an eyebrow. “Can I ask what brought this on?”
“Lost a patient last night. This morning, talked to the husband, said he was his everything. Wasn’t gonna survive losing him. Uh, two dudes, by the way. And all I could think was the only way I would know how he would feel was if I lost you. Nobody else comes close. My god, I’m a horrible person. Fuck.”
“You know, this whole thing is just stupid if you think about it,” says Jensen, shaking his head, sitting back and looking amazed. “Do you remember that next day after we met? We got up and went to class-”
“Pharmacology,” Jared interrupts. “Shapiro.”
Jensen smiles faintly, still staring into the distance. “After class we went to the diner, and I had waffles. I don’t even like waffles, you know? But I didn’t even know what the hell I was ordering because I was so deliriously happy right then. Because we were just sitting there in that diner, shooting the shit, and I just knew.” He gives a helpless what-can-I-do shrug. “That was it for me. I was done. I’d found mine.”
Jared feels very cold all of a sudden. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he says blinking rapidly, “but what the fucking fuck? Why didn’t you say anything? Ever?”
Jensen makes a high-pitched derisive sound. “You never seemed to-it never seemed like you felt it the same way I did. I was in love with you, and if being near you meant I had to take what I could get, well. That’s what I did.” He leans forward and gives Jared a grim smile.
Jared stares at him, thinking, this changes everything, the sky is red, the A’s have won the pennant, you can’t pull this kinda switch on me.
“You ever sit and think about how much of this coulda been avoided?” says Jared, croaking and kind of sick to his stomach, lurching feeling in his chest like driving too fast over the hills. “Like, if we woulda done this one thing different, if I hadn’t said that or you hadn’t done this.”
“Everyday,” says Jensen, then he’s standing up, rounding the desk and stopping in front of Jared. He puts a tentative hand on his cheek, which Jared leans into, and that cracks something and spreads a smile across his face.
“So, um, pay attention,” says Jared, pulling him close. “I love you.”
--
Jensen promised himself that he would end the thing with Jared if kids got involved. It wasn’t that he was planning on having any, and he didn’t think Danneel wanted them either, but just in case. Jensen was a big believer in planning.
Less than six months after his mother died, his father remarried his secretary. Jensen was not suspicious. He didn’t need to be; his father’s affair was long standing and pretty much general knowledge.
“How lucky for Gina that Mom kicked the bucket, huh?” his sister said to him once. Jensen had nothing against his stepmother, but he didn’t want to get to know her, either, and he very much resented his father for putting him in the awkward situation in the first place. He promised himself he would never do that to his kids.
He thought about it a lot over the course of Danneel’s pregnancy, how to bring it up with Jared, what to say, how Jared might react.
And then, not too long before Lila was born, he couldn’t take it anymore. Danneel was going through a “get away from me, I don’t even want to look at you, it’s your fault I’m huge and miserable” period where she didn’t even want to look at him, and Genevieve was on a ten-game roadtrip out east, so he slept at Jared’s.
And then one night, he rolled over and stared out into the empty bedroom and he said, “This has got to stop.”
THE END
NOTES & SOUNDTRACK
MASTER POST
ART POST