The role of the hero in antiquity 4/7
The guys found out, or rather, Brendon repeated the exact summary of events he had given Jon to them later the same night.
“I just. Well, Jon knows and… it’s only fair. If you don’t want me around, I can be gone by the end of the week.”
Jon knew just how much that wasn’t gonna happen, but he also knew, on the off-chance his flatmates were bigger assholes then he’d pegged them for, he was not gonna let Brendon walk. That was about the extent of the plan, but the part about Brendon not leaving was a definite.
He needn’t have worried, cause Ryan loved it. Ryan fucking preened. Jon couldn’t pretend he was surprised.
“I told you. I knew it.”
Spencer looked at Ryan, then at Jon. Eventually, he turned to Brendon.
“I swear, sometimes I don’t even know the guy,” he mumbled while Ryan was probably thinking plot-lines.
Spencer glared. Hard. Ryan raised an eyebrow.
“What? I told you.”
“Ryan. Not a fucking novel,” Spencer gritted out. “The point…”
Brendon exchanged a glance with Jon, amusement barely concealed in his expression.
“No, the point is, I told you,” Ryan interrupted. “The point is, I knew. Straight away.”
“The point, Ryan, is for once absolutely nothing to do with you. For fuck’s sake, did you even… any of you, do you have any idea how dangerous this is? The things that could happen, just meeting some stranger you hook up with on the net?”
Ryan didn’t answer.
Brendon wasn’t looking at Spencer when he replied. “Yeah, actually.”
Spencer apparently had no comeback for that.
Brendon sighed.
“Look, just… I’m not asking you to deal with this. I get it. I know it’s not. You wouldn’t want anything to do with it and that’s cool.”
Spencer groaned.
“Could any of you make this more awkward if you tried, seriously? Right, first off, Ryan, you’re not writing about this. You’re not fucking gonna interview Brendon about pet names and hourly rates and… anything. Secondly, Brendon, you’re not going anywhere. You’re our friend. Yeah, maybe we don’t know much. But. Not leaving.”
Spencer shifted his gaze to Jon maybe shrank back a little. “As for you…”
Jon wasn’t frightened. At all. It was just that thing Spencer could do with his eyes.
“… well. Get the fuck over yourself.”
Brendon grinned at Ryan.
“He’s totally the guy who asks for a blow-job and ends up fucking your face, right?”
Ryan grinned back. “You have no idea.”
Spencer glared, but it lacked the usual conviction.
“I liked you so much better when you weren’t a whore talking kinks with my boyfriend.”
“You’ll like me even less once he starts charging you,” Brendon retorted with a sweet smile.
“Don’t even,” Spencer warned when Ryan shot him a calculating look. Ryan shifted his gaze to Brendon.
“How much for the story, then?”
“Ryan!”
Brendon just grinned. “You can’t give that many blowjobs, dude. Not on top of working off your rent.”
Spencer looked at Jon accusingly.
“Remind me why I ever trusted your judgement?”
“After shacking up with you and Ryan? Dude, I guess you must be stupid.”
“Yeah, fuck off and die.”
***
The part about not being judgemental hadn’t actually been all that hard for Jon. He hadn’t faked that. Brendon didn’t eat babies or torture animals, he just sold his ass. Hell, if Brendon didn’t see anything wrong with it, Jon could deal.
Except now every time Jon passed a cup over the counter, he couldn’t stop wondering. There were a couple of business-men among the Starbucks crowd, grey suits, grey skin, grey hair. Jon imagined going down on them. Imagined them paying for that like they paid for their coffee, not even looking at the guy trying to provide service with a smile.
The thought made him want to buy a gun.
The flat had never been much of a place for talking about work, not with both Spencer and Jon pretty much hating what they did for a living, but yeah, sometimes episodes involving general stupidity of paying customers had been relayed for everyone’s amusement. Like the chicken-tikka-latte incident or that time Spencer’s brilliance had led the actual drummer to almost jump off the roof of the one-storey studio building while the rest of the band expressed their sincerest regret that it probably wouldn’t be enough of a fall for a successful suicide attempt but offering Spencer a contract just in case.
Somehow, Jon didn’t think Brendon’s stories would have been quite as funny.
Jon had just enough experience with the gay below the waist thing to know it could really, really hurt. While those particular memories were buried safely at the very bottom of the not-even-going-there-pile, Brendon’s current profession had the side-effect of turning them into a slide-show that ran on repeat for hours and hours in Jon’s head while Brendon was out there, doing. Well, whatever the fuck he was doing, Jon kinda hoped it wasn’t that.
Jon had promised himself he wouldn’t ask, only Jon was a hell of a lot better at keeping promises he made to other people then the ones he made to himself.
Ryan, Jon and Spencer had been watching Giant and while Jon could totally justify a completely non-sexual attraction to James Dean, he couldn’t really find a convincing excuse for checking his phone every fifteen minutes. Brendon had left the house in the late afternoon and it was early morning by now, so maybe Jon was freaking out a little.
“Jon?”
Ryan had one infuriating eyebrow raised, indicating he’d been waiting for a reaction for a while. This was just great, cause Jon definitely was in the mood for one of their insane conversations right now.
“Yeah, what?”
“You want the TV on or off? We’re going to bed.”
Jon also really didn’t need to see the smirk that accompanied those words.
“On. On, definitely. I can’t even imagine the kind of dirty talk you guys get into after a movie like this.”
“Come on darling, why don’t you kick off your spurs?” Spencer drawled with a pout Jon had never seen before and really also never wanted to see again.
Ryan got up quietly, following Spencer, but then he turned round in the doorway.
“Well, there's one thing you got to say for cattle... boy, you put your brand on one of them, you're gonna know where it's at!” he mumbled, complete with the ridiculous accent.
Ryan fucking Ross was entirely too smart for his own good and one of those days, it’d get him punched in the face.
It was four thirty when Brendon came in and Jon hadn’t even moved, had just sat there staring at a rerun of the pretend indestructible knives mutilating random food items and smoking so much he practically felt his eyes bleed.
Brendon smiled at him tiredly, surveying the stack of DVD cases next to their x-box.
“Do I detect a Western obsession?” he asked and took the joint from Jon’s hand, lighting it again cause apparently Jon had forgotten all about taking a drag every now and then to keep it going.
“James Dean, that’s entirely not the same thing.”
Brendon cast him a worried glance.
“Whoa, what happened to your comeback?”
Jon shrugged. “Cowboy jokes maybe aren’t as funny as they once seemed.”
Brendon took another hit and nodded, like Jon had just confirmed an undisputable fact.
“So I know this is Spencer’s line”, Brendon mumbled. “But… do you wanna talk about it?”
“My penchant for James Dean? Dude, I’m totally not descending into a spiral of self-doubt over that.”
Brendon smiled briefly. “Better. Not what I meant, though.”
And yeah, Jon was so fucked cause he couldn’t come up with anything but exactly what was in his stupid stoned head right then.
“They shouldn’t hurt you.”
Jon was an idiot and predictably, Brendon froze next to him.
Jon wanted to reach over and do that Spencer thing where he just repeated words over and over and held on until some of the tension disappeared. He couldn’t. He started rolling another joint, furious with himself.
“Okay. You need to stop freaking out, Jon.”
He was not freaking out.
“Jon?”
His hands were not shaking, he’d just never been particularly good at rolling up and that was why a lot of weed and tobacco refused to stay where he’d put it.
“Shit,” Brendon mumbled and very suddenly, there was a hand resting between Jon’s shoulder blades.
“I just.” Jon didn’t even sound like himself. He could hear that, so he bit back the words. He wasn’t about to trust this voice, which sounded like he’d been chewing on broken glass.
Brendon’s hand was rubbing soothing circles on Jon’s back.
“Jon, breathe, okay? I think you’re having a panic attack.”
Jon wasn’t impressed when he discovered he couldn’t argue with that assessment right now. He was kinda preoccupied, what with the breaths coming short and painful and quick and something tightening low in his stomach, something that he knew he wouldn’t be able to just puke up but which made bile and disgust rise up in his throat regardless.
He felt Brendon’s body behind him, Brendon pressing his chest against Jon’s back, Brendon’s arms reaching around Jon and holding him still, but the sensations were distant, drowned out by that godforsaken slide-show that had suddenly turned into a movie, complete with ear splitting dolby surround sound track, a blur of fists and screams and Tom’s hand on Jon’s neck.
Don’t be a princess about it, Jonny. You know I wouldn’t hurt you, man.
“Jon, breathe.”
Yeah, fuck.
“That’s good. Breathe, Jon. Safe. It’s safe. You’re safe.”
And no one could even begin to understand just how much Jon wanted to laugh right then, wanted to turn round to silence that soft, reassuring voice with some stupid one-liner.
“Safe, Jon. Safe.”
Instead, Jon fucking bawled.
Brendon held on to him as he shook and trembled and fucking howled and choked on his own screams, he didn’t let go. He’d stopped talking, stopped telling Jon things would be alright.
And then, when the line of acceptable wasn’t even visible on the horizon anymore, Jon finally admitted it.
“He was my fucking world, Brendon. He was my best friend. I thought. I. Shit, I loved him.”
Cause he had. He’d told Tom, more then once. Tom had always given the words right back to him, never rejected them. Never taken them seriously. Never hearing more then “I’m your best friend”. Tom had never fucked him while they were sober. The one time Jon had asked if he could, well, return the favour, Tom had laughed in his face.
Dude, I’m not gay.
Jon hadn’t brought the subject up again after that, had taken whatever he could get anyway, cause it was TOM and he wanted, everything, anything at all.
“It hurt,” Jon whispered. “When he. He wouldn’t, usually. He just. He’d. We were always touching, hugging, all that. But he wouldn’t… never like that. Never while we were sober.”
Brendon sighed.
“My first boyfriend was a needle freak who ended up on smack when I was seventeen and fixed me up with my first client three months later.”
“Yeah, way to upstage me, Brendon.” Jon grumbled. He was pretty sure he could hear Brendon smile in the dark.
“He was also the minister’s son of the Mormon community we’d both come from.”
Jon smiled, too. “You’re shitting me.”
“Told you it was pretty lifetime.”
“Your three moms getting banged by that same minister to save their souls?”
“Your fucking boyfriend never teach you when to keep your mouth shut, Walker?”
“Whore.”
“Yeah, lame. You lose.”
Jon couldn’t argue with that.
“It’s not the same thing”, Brendon mumbled suddenly and Jon remembered that actually, the initial plan hadn’t been for him to have a nervous breakdown over goddamn fucking Tom Conrad.
“They don’t. They don’t get to hurt me, not in the way you think.”
“Yeah right, strawberries and champagne?”
“Jon, you suck at this.”
Jon shrugged.
“The point”, Brendon continued in a passable Spencer impersonation, “is they never get that part of me. I’d never trust them enough to let them come that close. Let’s face facts, you wouldn’t exactly be heart-broken over some customer complaining their beverage of choice isn’t hot enough, right?”
“Are you implying I don’t whole-heartedly aspire to meeting the high standards of my barista calling?”
“Jon.”
“Yeah, no. I get it.”
“Now, can we go get some sleep? I gotta be pretty tomorrow.”
Jon sighed and leaned forward slightly so Brendon could wriggle away from him.
“Yeah, you do that.”
Jon’s gaze flicked back to the TV. Not pretend indestructible knives now but hideously cutesy porcelain dolls, fragile behind their frozen, painted smiles.
“Come on”, Brendon just grabbed the remote and Jon stared up at him stupidly.
“I was watching that.”
Brendon giggled. “You’re not that gay, Jon.”
“Your clients cope by keeping you gagged most of the time, right?”
“Shut up. Bed.”
It would have seemed like a good idea, only Jon really didn’t wanna go to his room right now. Brendon looked down at him for a long moment and sighed.
“Sleep with me?” he asked quietly, sticking out his hand to pull Jon up from the couch.
“If that’s your usual pick-up line, it’ll take you a while to work off 20 k.”
“It’s not.”
Somehow, Jon didn’t think it would be a good idea to press the point right now. There wasn’t much time anyway, he was out cold two minutes after he’d hit the mattress, one of Brendon’s arms draped over him. He didn’t dream.