fic: apartment story (andrew/jesse, rpf, pg-13, 4000 words)
<4000 words. They have no girlfriends, Andrew is in New York filming Spiderman, and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Pictures are from Flickr, nabbed after typing the appropriate keywords into the search engine (ie "tooth brush" and "jewnicorn"). All mistakes are mine.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
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"This is it," Jesse says. He spreads his arms out to indicate the entirety of the room. There isn't much. His voices echoes throughout. "This is my new apartment," he says.
Andrew nods. "It's nice," he says amiably. "Where’s the furniture?"
Jesse shrugs. He hadn't thought of that. "I wanted to go minimalist," he says, "I need space for all my cats."
Andrew laughs. "You don't even have a couch," he says.
"I have a futon," Jesse says. "And a skillet." Skillets, Jesse knows, are important.
Andrew smiles. It's a slow smile that spreads across his face like a blush, or a rash. More of a blush, really. Andrew can smile like nobody’s business. He should be in toothpaste commercials, Jesse thinks.
"We should go furniture shopping," Andrew says.
Jesse blinks. He shrugs after a long moment, mulling the idea over. Toothpaste commercials, he thinks.
Andrew is still smiling at him but softer now.
"Okay," Jesse says. "Let's."
||
They buy a couch.
"I have never seen so many couches in my life," Jesse says. "It was like, couch heaven. We should've picked the uh, the one shaped like a woman's lips. You liked that, right?"
"Yeah, yeah of course," Andrew says, laughing.
They also buy a bed, an ottoman and a coffee table. Andrew buys a potted plant, a cactus, and perches it on top of the kitchen counter when they get back to the apartment which is still, not surprisingly, empty, the furniture not due to arrive until Tuesday.
"It's a house warming present," Andrew says, looking almost shy. Almost.
"My house is warmed," Jesse says. "Thank you." Toothpaste commercials.
They eat dinner on Jesse's futon, brushing crumbs from their laps and wiping their hands across the legs of their pants. Jesse made a tomato sandwiches - Andrew watched him in the kitchen, his face set in concentration and his eyebrows knit with ferocity.
"These are good sandwiches," he tells Jesse earnestly and leans over him, head blocking the light from the overhead lamp. The light shines directly above the soft mess of Andrew’s hair, like a halo and Jesse blinks, blinks again.
"We forgot to buy more lighting fixtures."
||
Andrew comes over again on a Wednesday.
It's noon and he's just finished a photoshoot. Jesse is feeding his cats on the kitchen counter, thinking about buying toothpaste.
"How nice of you to come by," Jesse says as Andrew strides into the kitchen with pomp and purpose. "Unfortunately, I am ill-equipped to feed you right now as I have nothing in the fridge but cat food."
"Oh, don't worry about it," Andrew says. "I eat anything." He comes up to Jesse on the counter, like he's going in for a hug but then steps back, arms dangling awkwardly at his sides.
"You look like a marionette," Jesse says.
||
Jesse's reading two scripts at the moment. In one he plays a paraplegic in love with his attending physician. In another, he plays a camper lost in the woods in the midst of an impending apocalypse. They're both immensely bleak projects, but Jesse loves bleak more than anything.
To get into the mind frame of the first character, he buys a wheelchair. He spends a few days pretending to be paralyzed from the waist down, wheeling himself to and from the kitchen.
"I really admire your tenacity," Andrew says, "but I have two tickets to see Yo La Tengo and I would really appreciate it if you went."
"Can't," Jesse says. He sighs and gestures to his legs. He knows he's being stubborn but sometimes he likes to test Andrew's patience.
Andrew rolls his eyes. "Jess!"
"What do you want me to do? Are you a miracle worker? No. I hate crowded places and besides, I don't listen to anything that isn't --"
"Musical theater, I know, I know," Andrew says. He frowns. Finally, he climbs up to his feet.
"Fine. I'll carry you downstairs. I'll bring the wheelchair."
"You should really get a girlfriend," Jesse says.
"And lose the pleasure of your company?" Andrew snorts. "No way." He wheels Jesse out the door, and true to his promise, carries him down three flights of stairs.
"My hero," Jesse simpers.
Andrew laughs and drops him in the process.
||
"Oh, don't pout, Jess," Andrew says. "It's just swollen. You'll live. Besides, now you have a perfectly good reason to stay in a wheelchair."
"I am not speaking to you," Jesse says. "Yo La Tengo sucked."
"Oh? I am inclined to disbelieve that seeing as you bobbed your head during the interlude."
"Oh, come on. It was a minute jerk of the head! I was jostled by a crowd of teenagers who all smelled of stale BO. Stale BO! You were the only thing that smelled remotely pleasant. I did not have a good time."
"You thought I smelled good?"
"No, I thought you smell like athlete's foot."
Andrew grins. He wheels Jesse into the grocery store, dropping a basket into his lap. "What's this?" Jesse looks up at him, one eyebrow raised.
"Dinner." He hands Jesse several boxes of microwaveables. "You will cook me a good meal. You owe me at least that much."
"You dropped me down a flight of stairs and now I owe you dinner. Right. I see how that is completely fair and just."
"Well, I wouldn't have dropped you if you hadn't insisted on pretending you were a paraplegic! I mean, really, method acting?"
"Welcome to New York," Jesse says.
||
Begrudgingly, Jesse makes Andrew dinner.
They eat in the living room. It's late, early morning, and Andrew has to leave for a photoshoot in a few hours.
Andrew puts his plate down, goes to the kitchen, comes back with a pack of frozen peas. "It doesn't look so bad," he says, cradling Jesse's foot in his lap. He touches Jesse gently, cups his ankle, brushes his fingers across the top of Jesse's foot. Jesse is startled by the tenderness in the gesture. He doesn't say a thing. He hums instead.
"Sorry for dropping you," Andrew says.
Jesse shrugs noncommittally. It's no big deal, really, but Andrew is looking at him repentantly, brows furrowed. He has such expressive eyes. Jesse waves a hand at him, mostly to dispel the weird atmosphere.
"I was exaggerating," Jesse says. "I'm a serial exaggerator. I'm fine, really."
Andrew doesn't seem convinced. "Sorry," he says again.
Jesse chews on his lip. "Stop apologizing. You can make it up to me later." He flops on his back and flings an arm over his face. He feels oddly warm even though it’s the middle of October. Jesse wiggles his ankle in Andrew's lap, testing for pain as Andrew rubs the underside of his foot. His hand is soft, his touch softer and it surprises Jesse into looking into his face.
"I have another role coming up," Jesse says. "You can help me get into character, if you want."
"I have time now," Andrew says.
||
They set up a tent in the living room made of blankets, a futon, cushions pushed off the living room couch. Jesse pushes himself bodily inside the makeshift tent, rolling on his back and staring up at the net of blankets above his head.
"Now I feel like wildlife camper," he says, wriggling his toes. Andrew climbs in a moment later, lying on his side. He smells like the previous night, all sweat and skin, cologne.
"What are you doing here?" Jesse says. "You're the bear, you can't sleep inside the tent or I'll have to kill you."
"That doesn't seem very nice."
"We're in the wild. And you're a bear. In the wild. You're going to eat me. Of course I'm going to have to kill you."
"I can't be a friendly bear? One who steals picnic baskets?"
"No."
Andrew sighs, rolling his eyes. He is about to slip out of the tent when Jesse clamps a hand down his wrist. "I was just kidding. You can stay. Share my tent with me. It must be cold out."
"Are you in character now or --"
"Stay," Jesse says again, firmly. Andrew gingerly flops down next to him. Their shoulders touch. The point of contact is electric, like a clap of thunder.
"This is a nice tent," Andrew says after a moment. His eyes are closed as he speaks and up close Jesse can see the way his eyelashes fan out across his cheeks.
"Thanks for helping me build it," Jesse says. He closes his eyes too.
Jesse can feel the warm press of Andrew's shoulder against his own, a comforting weight that makes his skin fill with heat.
"What time do you have to leave again?" Jesse asks, but Andrew is already asleep next to him, his face slack. He must be so tired. Jesse leans up on his elbows, watches him a little bit, traces the outline of his nose with the tip of his finger, careful not to wake him. He falls asleep soon after and in the morning finds his toothbrush missing from the medicine cabinet.
A text from Andrew, reads: sorry I used your toothbrush this morning and dropped it in the toilet! ! I’ll get you a new one - promise! x
||
Jesse copes with rejection differently. He wears sweatpants and stocks up on cat food.
"What happened," Andrew says, walking into the living room. He looks concerned. He swats three cats off the couch, folding himself next to Jesse.
"Are you all right? Why are you wearing sweatpants? It's two in the afternoon."
"It's because I've given up on life," Jesse says.
"You didn't get the part?"
Jesse doesn't nod. He doesn't want to get into it. Politics, he thinks. It makes his stomach turn.
"And we practiced so hard too," Andrew says wistfully.
Jesse almost smiles. "You were a good bear," he says.
"A menacing one," Andrew adds. They don't talk for a moment. Cats swarm the couch, paw at their feet. Finally, Andrew picks up a passing one - Herbert - and drops him into Jesse's lap.
"Pet the cat," he says, nudging Jesse on the shoulder. "I find it relieves stress."
"Does it?"
Andrew nods. He curls an arm behind the couch, around Jesse's shoulders, and pulls him to his chest.
Herbert meows.
"You still owe me a toothbrush," Jesse says.
"Don’t worry - I’ll get you an electric one with dolphins on them."
||
"There are no dolphins," Jesse says. "Where are the dolphins?."
||
Another way Jesse copes with rejection: he rearranges the furniture. He moves the fridge into the living room and with Andrew's help manages to haul the living room furniture into the kitchen, including the potted cactus that sits on the coffee table. He feels infinitely better afterwards, devoid of worldly troubles.
They're on the bed, next to each other, ankles crossed on the wall, bouncing a basketball on it. Jesse doesn't even know where the basketball is from. Organized sports make him nervous.
"So tell me about the new film," Jesse says. They're drinking beer. Jesse hates beer but Andrew seems to like it so whatever. Little sacrifices. That’s what marriage is all about, but wait. No.
"What's it called again?" Jesse asks.
"Spiderman" Andrew says, snorting out a laugh. He takes a long swig of his beer, wiping the froth off his mouth against the back of his arm, smiling. Only Andrew can make a smile seem outrageously flirtatious and sincere at the same time. Only Andrew, Jesse thinks.
They spend the rest of the evening moving the furniture back, in between drinking some more and clearing out the litter box. They blast Frank Sinatra and hit each other with the ball, breaking a few vases in the process.
Andrew dances to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, wiggles his hips in a wide cant. And Jesse doesn't dance but Andrew grabs him anyway and twirls him around the living room and Jesse is uncoordinated enough that he crashes against the fridge.
"Wow," Jesse says from the floor. "Okay, that's strike two for you."
Andrew laughs and pulls him up to his feet. "The song is rather apt," he says, "You fill my heart with song. You're all I worship and adore."
Andrew is an affectionate drunk, touchy too, which means when he kisses Jesse it’s code for I love you, you’re my favorite person in the whole wide world and not much else. It also means Jesse shouldn’t read too deeply into it because it probably doesn’t mean anything.
So Jesse doesn’t read too deeply into it. He just obsesses. At length.
||
Andrew invites him to the set Spiderman because Jesse has all this free time on his hands and is, essentially, unemployed. It's a little weird because Jesse is in no way affiliated with the film and holds a strong dislike for popcorn movies but he goes anyway, to show support, like a loving wife or a doting girlfriend although doesn't like the comparison.
Jesse sits in a corner, makes small talk with the crew while the camera is rolling and steals a can of Sprite from the buffet table when no one is looking. He fills his pockets with chocolate, also from the buffet table. He misses his cats so he doodles in a corner and works on ideas for his next screenplay, roughly inspired by and based on the life and many loves of Boris Yeltsin.
He watches Andrew too as Andrew swings none too elegantly from wall to wall, hoisted by nylon cords. He looks good. Jesse looks away after he catches himself smiling and takes a sip of his stolen Sprite. He thinks about the kiss and decides not to think about it again. He thinks about it again. He laughs and thinks, life is easier for heterosexuals. It is. Maybe.
When filming wraps up for the day, at eleven PM, Andrew grabs him for an impromptu picture. Their elbows bump. The shot is shaky, the angle and lighting equally terrible and Jesse feels weird now standing too close to Andrew, sniffing his jacket.
They're both tired - Jesse from sitting all day and filling himself with so much fizzy drinks and sweets and Andrew from twelve straight hours of playing a Marvel superhero.
"You need sleep," Jesse tells him. "And for the record, that's a terrible picture."
Andrew shrugs and sets it as his wallpaper. It's a picture of their shoes, mostly Jesse's shoes, smudged with dirt, the dye blurred over from overuse.
"Do you want to have dinner?" Andrew asks, nudging him in the shoulder. He looks hopeful, like a deer with soft eyes and long, elegant legs. Bambi, Jesse thinks, and his chest heaves when he remembers that Bambi's mother dies not ten minutes into the film.
Andrew looks at him, concerned. "Are you all right?"
"Oh my god," Jesse says. He's not all right. He's in love with Andrew Garfield.
||
Jesse picks up Herbert and Tabitha from the floor. They’re named after deceased pets from his childhood. He kisses them on top of their heads. They run away. He’ll never find them in his apartment. He should stop thinking about the things he usually thinks about. Andrew. Surging oil prices. Andrew. Global warming. Andrew. Whether or not he left the stove on. Andrew. His unfinished screenplay. Andrew.
||
Jesse starts drinking organic soymilk, thinking it will make him feel better. It doesn't. The future is bleak.
||
Men see things in a box. Jesse knows this is not set in stone because he only heard it from a Cameron Crowe movie. He wants to hide in a box, with all his cats, Herbert, Tabitha, Fitzwilliam, Lelu, Chatzkel, Alfred, Danya, Shoshanna (Benjamin, Reuben) Zev and Yidel, and never come out, even if his apartment were on fire. He hopes that never happens. That is his worst fear.
That night he dreams about swimming in a pool of cats. As he breaks the surface, he finds Andrew staring down at him, smiling. Curiously enough, he has cat ears. The two of them float on top of a cumulus cloud and for a moment, Jesse feels serence.
||
"I'm worried about you," Andrew tells him when they see each other again the next day. There's something different about him too - he seems taller somehow, like he's grown three inches. It's the soymilk, Jesse thinks sourly, it's making his bones shrink. He makes a mental note to throw it away later.
Because of his rigorous work schedule, Andrew comes over less and less. Jesse despairs, in the dark, in the silence, feeling friendless and alone under his blankets as he eats cereal from a bowl. This is what depression is like, misery, heartache, the stuff of TV movies.
Jesse picks up the phone on a Wednesday. "Oh good, I thought you'd died," says his mother.
They talk small talk and Jesse promises to wash behind his ears, engage in safe sex. It's been two months of dawdling. His cats are restless. Jesse is restless. He finds a drawing on the coffee table. It's Andrew's, he knows, because only Andrew can draw a cactus shaped like a penis and still imbue it with as much sincerity as it is due. Jesse smiles a little, adding a little something in the corner: a sullen clam-like creature, in need of a hug.
Jesse crumples it and decides to cut his hair in the bathroom.
||
Of course, Andrew is horrified. "What happened to your hair?"
Jesse shrugs one shoulder. "Do you like it? Does it suit me? How do I look?"
"I am heartbroken," Andrew says and indeed he does look the part. Well. At least they're being honest with each other. "What prompted the decision? Why did you cut your hair? Oh, Jesse."
Jesse shrugs again."Well, you know," he says, altogether too casual, "I wanted to go for a new look." This is true. He’s pined furiously and now he has come of age. The hair is a testament to that. No more baby curls.
"You look like a Jewish Powder. With more hair, of course, but the resemblance is still there," Andrew says. His eyes never leave Jesse’s face.
"You've lost your ability to humor me," Jesse says. "I don't think we should be friends anymore."
Andrew splutters. "What." He scoffs. "Is this real life?"
"You kissed me three weeks ago after dancing to Frank Sinatra," Jesse adds, unable to stop his brain from overriding (Andrew's smell, his hand on Jesse's shoulder, the crooked tilt of his lips, the soft concern in his eyes - all too much, too much, but at the some time, not enough)
"Just putting it out there," Jesse says, nodding. "Let it settle. Settle."
||
They let it settle.
||
To pass the time, Jesse plays dominoes with his friends in Brooklyn. They've all read Fernando Pessoa and live meaningless, vapid lives. In college, they partied and got drunk and contemplated hurling themselves off the Brooklyn bridge. Jesse slept fourteen hours and spent most of his free time telling people that.
"I miss sleeping fourteen hours," Jesse says. This is true. Out of the four of them, only he has the bleakest future. No love life, no screenplay, no Oscar. He takes the subway home and contemplates taking in stray cats, even the ones that bite. Come to me New York cats, he thinks on the subway platform.
Male spinster. I will be a male spinster, Jesse thinks. He laughs a little, but inwardly. Still, the woman next to him on the train gives him a funny look.
||
Back in Jesse's apartment, a burglar hangs from the ceiling in the dark. "Help!" says the burglar. Jesse does a spinning kick and his foot connects with the burglar's shoulder.
"Ouch! Jesse!"
It's an English burglar, with Andrew's voice. Jesse flips on the switch. He turns it off again, then back on.
"Andrew, why are you hanging from my ceiling in your Spiderman costume?"
Andrew's face is red like an angry tomato. "Help me down!"
||
Jesse laughs at Andrew's explanation. Laughter is good, the first step towards recovery. It also helps that Andrew is sitting next to him in his skin-tight spiderman costume, his biceps bulging. Jesse prefers brain over brawn but any day will pick Andrew over anyone.
"This was supposed to be a grand gesture," Andrew tells him. "I was supposed to kiss you in my costume, upside down, like in the first movie. Costume department made me borrow this, I begged them to -- all right, I stole this when they weren't looking -- and I thought you'd be home before nine but then you were gone all night! Playing dominoes!" He blushes an attractive shade of red, gesticulates wildly as he speaks, like a bird. Free bird, Jesse thinks. Like the song.
"You were planning to kiss me upside down?" Jesse says.
"Pretty much," Andrew says. "Stupid, I know."
"Stupid," Jesse agrees but the heat rises to his cheeks anyway. He thinks for a moment. Jesse looks at Andrew. Andrew is looking at the floor.
"I have an idea," Jesse says.
||
"Does this work for you?" Jesse asks. He's hanging from the ceiling. The process involved ropes.
"You're hanging from the ceiling," Andrew says. "I don't think this is how it's supposed to work."
"I am indulging your whim. I may just change my mind. Now quick, kiss me, although I should warn you, I am no Mary Jane."
"Not even," Andrew agrees, shaking his head. "You're hanging from the ceiling and you still look like a Jewish Powder." He laughs at Jesse's startled look.
They kiss, noses bumping, teeth clicking. Ten seconds in, Jesse's head starts to hurt. He thinks his brain may be melting out of his ears.
"I adore you Jesse Eisenberg," Andrew says. He sounds like he means it. Jesse snorts. He is hanging from the ceiling.
"You are weird," he tells Andrew fondly, "Weird like a pervert."
Andrew laughs. "I'm not the one hanging from the ceiling."
"Touché," Jesse says and swings around a little bit, attempting to reach Andrew's mouth.
||
A note is slid under the front door.
END