Nobody ever tells you how fucking easy some things are. 

You hear a lot of “it’s hard but it’s worth it”’s and “god he drives me mad but I love that about him” but they never talk about how fucking easy a lot of this shit is. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s complete and utter torture to wake up everyday and have a nose full of blonde hair and a dead arm or to have someone who knows you hate corn so much they sit and pick out each and every individual piece that’s in your food before serving it because they’re just that considerate. And they’re so acutely aware of food allergies and that everyone’s tastes are different that they don’t even hesitate to accommodate. It’s infuriating. Good lord, Sunshine, I can handle some fucking corn in my burrito bowl. Piss off. 

But it’s easy to forget that there’s corn in my burrito bowl until the delivery boy has already blushed his way back to his car and I’ve started digging in to the disaster I’d so carelessly ordered specifically how Justin would have, even though he’s gone now and I fucking hate corn. It’s easy to stare down at it and think back to the call I’d made to get myself to this point and realise I hadn’t even stopped to add on my usual “everything but the corn” that had been my only request at that take away since I was fucking 17 years old. Until I’d made the same order again with Justin, except it was with him breathing down my fucking neck about how he loves corn, so I’d added it on and made some half ass remark about how he’d be picking that shit out of my side when it arrived. And then I was remembering how he had. I’d chuckled back then, but he had. Piece by fucking piece and then again a few weeks later when we were both high and craving it. And again and again and again. God it was so fucking easy to forget. 

It was hard to man up and eat it though, to ignore the off flavour of those disgusting little devils as I stubbornly shovelled the food into my mouth, ignoring the image of his little blond head smiling over at me as he proudly ate his half of the bowl, pulling corn away as it fell onto mine. Fuck him. 

—-

The break doesn’t last long, but it’s long enough for me to realise just how easy it really is to love Justin. You’d think I knew by now. You’d think I would have caught on and understood that he’s just it for me. He’s simply every single thing for me but I’m an idiot who’s never known love outside of friendship and I’m sorry but you’ll all have to forgive me for that. 

It’d been something dumb, really. But it wasn’t like he’d needed much at that point, cause I’d found solace in the bottom of enough bottles to give my old man a run for his money, and I’d fucked enough tricks to set Justin’s fear of germs alight and it spread like wildfire from there because he’d asked me not to touch him and, well, I’m an asshole. 

He’d asked me not to touch him, not to rub their ‘grime’ on him and I’d snapped something about dealing with it when he was fucking around with Ian and yeah, that part is on me, but I don’t do well with him refusing to be touched. It scares me. 

So I’d been an asshole and he’d shoved me into the shower and frowned through scrubbing me down and then he’d fallen asleep with his back to me and proceeded to have a nightmare that ended with him crying on the couch while I tried to get him to swallow some of the relaxants he’d been refusing since he’d first left the hospital. He doesn’t likebeing a robot, he doesn’t like having his senses taken away. I understand that, honestly, because at least with weed he’s choosing to mellow out. Taking a pill to ease something he can’t even run from in sleep, while you’re in the middle of trying to run from it, is pretty horrifying to me too. Especially when it doesn’t help you run faster. 

He’d pushed at me and cried and then cried a little harder when I’d all but forced the tiny thing between his teeth and then he’d cried for another half hour before he’d fallen asleep sitting half up and curled in on himself, and I’d left him there because it was 2am on a Monday morning and I had an 11am meeting that I couldn’t miss. It was one of those shitty nights. 

He was groggy in the morning and I’d called Deb and moved his shift to the afternoon, just after the lunch rush, and he’d batted me away when I’d leaned down to kiss his forehead, trying to inhale just a little of his scent because I do that sometimes and he normally doesn’t mind, and I’d left with a sour taste in my mouth because he’s such a little shit sometimes. 

It should have been a warning, but I’m an idiot and an asshole, so let’s not pretend to be surprised that I wasn’t looking out for all the little signs he was sending me. 

—-

Him leaving came three days later, after I’d stumbled home on a Thursday afternoon with a hickey on my neck that I wasn’t too pleased about and whiskey seeping through my skin because he just wouldn’t fucking look at me like he was supposed to. He wouldn’t even make eye contact while he bustled around me and chucked a tantrum as he set the table. He’d stopped dead in his tracks, mouth hanging open and tears flooding his eyes quicker than I’d expected, staring straight at my neck with the most devastating look that would have shattered my lungs and cut through my heart if I wasn’t absolutely shit faced before dinner. 

He’d huffed, still refusing to look at my face, and turned swiftly for the bedroom, scuffling around in there while my drunk brain tried to catch up, and by the time it had, he was already sniffling and rubbing at his eyes as he barrelled past me with his backpack and jacket, beelining for the sketchbooks on the counter. 

I’d tried, reached out to grab his arm, but that had just set him off. Back on his “don’t touch me” bullshit that was starting to make me angry at that point, but I’m not an asshole who hits the people he loves and drowns in the cheapest shit he can find, so I backed off. Literally threw my hands up, stepping back in surrender and rolling my eyes as I did so because I really needed him to know how I felt about the whole situation. I really needed him to hear my silent thoughts of, ‘really, Sunshine? You’re still going on about this?’ 

Apparently he had, because he’d moved around to the cabinet above the fridge where I kept his meds and he’d started stuffing those in with whatever else it was he’d grabbed, and mumbling on with things I couldn’t quite hear. He’d never done that before. He’d never pulled his shit down and started packing them, not even with the fiddler, so my mind has zeroed in on that. Seeing each box and orange bottle as he pulled them down, my own brain betraying me as I listed off what each of them were for in my head right down to his three fucking inhalers and both his drowsy and non drowsy antihistamines. 

“I don’t want them to touch you!” He’d sounded broken, torn down the middle, and I’d been too drunk and concerned by the fact that he was disorganising his perfectly lined up pills to listen in. 

“Who gives a fuck what you want,” I’d snapped, slurred, “put those back.” 

I’d had a thing about him messing with his medication, because he used to get confused by it all and I’d come home to find him crying under the table, afraid to face the stress of putting that much shit in his mouth without overdosing on any of it. Which was a relief and a pain, because at lease I knew he didn’t want to fucking die anymore but I also had to deal with the chore of helping him sort out his doses. As I said, even with the fiddler, I’d pop out each little pill and set them in his stupid weekly organiser and I’d hand them to him every Monday morning over a plate of diner grease. Like hell was I letting that other fucker touch Sunshine’s shit. He’d have been dead two days into their little romance. Half because the other guys spent 90% of his time on that fucking cello and 10% because Justin needs to be heavily coerced into swallowing them all sometimes. And by sometimes I mean at lease twice a week. He’s a work in progress. 

“No!” He’d sounded hysterical, all shaky hands and heaving chest. I’m a fucking asshole, we get it, but I didn’t even move to calm him. He didn’t want me to touch him, so it’s his own fault, really. “I give a fuck what I want. I give a fuck and I don’t want their germs, I don’t want their fucking germs!” 

And with that he’d been out the door, out into the germy world while I’d stood there, stunned and drunk. And it was so fuckinf easy to let him leave. 

I’d eaten whatever it was that he’d made straight from the pan and then I’d thrown it up in the kitchen sink and slept on the floor next to his side of the bed. I don’t really know why, but it felt like the right decision at the time. 

—-

He’d barely been gone a week a when I’d order the fucking corn in my burrito bowl, but I’d seen him at the diner so I knew he wasn’t dead. I was pissed off for reasons I still don’t fully understand, so I wasn’t going out of my way to fix anything. 

I don’t understand why I was pissed off because I know Justin is literally fucked in the head, I know he’s got issues he can’t control that all seem misplaced and out of character but that all stem back to the fact that he copped a baseball bat to the skull. I’m probably the only person who does understand that. I know he’s got some fucking problems and I still want him around anyways, I want to count out his antidepressants and the weird blue pills he takes to help with the tremors in his hand. I want to stay awake just a few hours longer to make sure he’s not being haunted by that fucking parking garage and I want to wake up with a dead arm from the weight of him because I understand he’s fucked up but he’s still Sunshine. He’s still Justin. So I couldn’t figure out why I was so mad at him and the situation, but I was, so I avoided speaking to him like the plague and he ignored me at Sunday dinner like the little brat that he is. It was whatever. I didn’t fucking care, I was just pissed off. It was easy to be pissed off. 

—-

I stopped being pissed off by the second week because I’d started trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with the kid and I’d noticed little things that should have slipped into my line of sight maybe like a billion weeks ago when they’d probably started happening. 

He’d washed his hands at least ten times at Deb’s during an impromptu celebration dinner for something Ted had done that I really didn’t care about, it was just an excuse for us to all have pasta shoved down our throats. I’d noticed because he’d washed them three times in ten minutes at one point and my brain just sort of went “he’s been doing that a lot lately” in some sort of pondering voice that sounded a lot like someone that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And he had been doing that a lot, scrubbing at his hands or whipping out hand sanitizer from literal thin air and covering all the way up his forearms with it. He’d done it before, way back when he was still new to sex and he wasn’t all that comfortable having another mans jizz on his hands. His mother had said something about him having a thing for dirty hands as a child, just one time in passing, while she was doing that thing that mothers do where the reminisce on the life of their offspring. She hadn’t even been talking to me then. She’d said it to Vic and Deb and I was just being a nosy fucker. 

Anyways, he’d had his stints with hand washing and cock touching but he’d grown out of that after like a month because he’d deemed having certain body parts in his mouth to be just a smidge grosser and he’d gone on to start rinsing his mouth after every blowjob, until I fucked that right out of him and I guess I just got used to him being weird with gross things until he got used to them. Exposure therapy or some shit, I don’t know. He got over it all eventually. I didn’t even notice when he’d stopped, but I could probably pinpoint a moment in time. Like I said, Justin’s fucked up. And it all leads back to that fucking baseball bat. 

—-

His PTSD and antidepressants were basically a two in one package deal. Lucky him, right? He fucking hated the big ass horse sized pill he had to take but he endured it every fucking day, unlike the muscle relaxant, because he likes to be able to round corners without scoping out the new environment first. He likes not having to make sure nobody was coming up behind him. He liked not being triggered by someone knocking into him accidentally. The kid liked to be fucking happy, so he let me break up the tablet and add it to the pile of pretty little pills and he let me shove them down his throat every night like the good little blonde boy he is. Was. Was, because he’s a fucking little shit. Anyways. 

They were the same thing. It did the job and he got better and more open and less aggressive. He also stopped being grossed out by a lot of things. He didn’t scrunch his nose up at the the sound of someone coughing, he didn’t gag when I sneezed and a little spit landed on him. He didn’t find new and weird things to cry about when it came to sex and he stopped listing off random facts about how easy it is to get salmonella, “which comes from animal feces, Brian.” I’m surprised the kids not vegan. He probably doesn’t know about half the death traps hidden in his diner bacon. 

He stopped being afraid of a lot of things. But germs most especially. 

I should have noticed. 

—-

It wasn’t like it was back then, though, because he wasn’t just washing his hands after a quick hand job before work this time. 

He was screaming and crying through the night and freaking out at the thought of me touching him because he wasn’t sure where I’d been and then he was having a little fucking mental breakdown on a Thursday afternoon and leaving me drunk and dumbfounded over GERMS. 

This was way out of my league of expertise, but I tried anyways. 

I cornered him at dinner that Sunday, following him up the stairs and into the bathroom on his fourth trip up there, probably to wash his hands more thoroughly, and I locked the door behind me as he jumped out of his skin and glared at me in the mirror. 

“Out.” 

He was rubbing vigorously at his right wrist, twisting it and scratching a little in a way that made me nauseous. 

I decided in that moment. And it was so fucking easy. 

“I’m clean,” I started with, and he glared at me harder, just with a little more scepticism, “I promise.” 

That always got him. 

His lips tightened out and he glanced down at his hands, rubbing softer now, but still rubbing. 

“You know that shit Deb buys gives you rashes.” God I’m so fucking whipped. Shut the fuck up about it. I count and plan his daily dosage of drugs, me knowing what he’s allergic to shouldn’t surprise you. 

“I don’t want anyone to touch me but they keep doing it anyways.” He sounded so small, so broken and tired and I said the dumbest fucking thing I could have said but it was all I could think about in that moment. 

“Have you been taking your meds?” 

“I’m not a fucking imbecile,” in my defence, I didn’t have time to think of a better way to word it, a better way to ask. He hates his meds, but I’ll go fuck myself I guess. “I can deal with my own medication. I’m not a child.” 

He spat at me a little, spinning around and barely turning off the two taps before trying to charge past me to the locked door without actually touching me. 

“Sunshine...” I didn’t know what to say, again, because I’m really shitty at this stuff and it was one of the hard things about relationships that I had already faced head on with hi’ which means it wasn’t entirely uncharted territory. So I went with, “I haven’t tricked in a week, okay?” 

“Well you’re not fucking me,” he’d screeched in response and I’d fought the urge to smack my own forehead because this kid was clearly out of his fucking mind and I couldn’t just, you know, talk him down like a normal partner. 

“I haven’t drank since you left. I couldn’t really figure out why you left so I guess I wanted to keep a clear head until I got an answer but I just-“ talking is so fucking hard. “You’re washing your hands a lot.” 

“You stopped drinking?” Of course he’d zero in on that. Of course he’d go for the one I was expecting him to gloss over. Fuck this kid. 

“Yeah, I...you just left.” 

His big fucking ocean blue eyes stared up at me, all tired and shit, like some wounded baby owl. 

It was so fucking easy. 

“And I won’t start again.” 

“Why?” 

Fuck. 

This. 

Kid. 

“Because there’s something wrong with you, Justin.” His shoulders squared. “And I don’t want to be a part of the problem. I want to be a piece of the solution.” 

I whispered the last part, looking away and trying to pretend I hadn’t just said that absolute bullshit, and he let me. He let me take a metaphorical step back. It was so easy. 

“You can’t give up drinking for me. That’s not how it works.” 

“You’re pretty full of yourself,” I tried to joke, “I’ve got a kid you know. And I don’t want to be the dad that gets walked out on at 5 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon because he’s too drunk to realise his partner is falling apart at the seems.” 

“Okay,” Justin had said. 

Okay.  He hadn’t questioned if I’d stop the tricking, too, but I guess he didn’t expect me to. It was easy though. The fucking easiest decision of my life. I didn’t tell him though, just in case. 

—-

One simple yet excruciatingly long and drawn out trip to the doctors office had Justin’s meds switched and his blood taken and his arm pricked about 72 times in another allergy test to figure out what exactly it was in Deb’s handwash that had Justin’s skin puffing up and flaking off if it so much as shared the same room as him. 

He’d cried a lot, which wasn’t surprising, because he didn’t want to change his medication and he didn’t want to have allergy testing done because he didn’t want the nurses germs on him and he didn’t want to be in a building full of sickness and germs germs germs. It threw me back to that tired and scared Justin I found under the table all that time ago, desperate for a leg to stand on. He was brave though, so we’ll give him props for that. 

We could add extreme paranoia to the list of things that are fucked up about Justin. It was already there, but we can highlight it now, with a short and simple ‘germs trigger it’ in the footnotes. 

The doctor recommended avoiding alcohol this time around for him too, sending a firm eye to Justin as he stressed the severity of having as many pills as he did and mixing them with copious amounts of alcohol. 

He’d looked all shy and bashful and I wondered if he’d let me hold his hand on the way home. He didn’t. But he did smile brightly at me as we inspected his new tablets in the car, smaller than the last ones but apparently more disgusting on his tongue.

“Guess we’re sober together,” I said, holding the steering wheel tighter as I turned the corner onto our street. 

“God we’re gonna be so boring,” he replied. 

“Happy,” I corrected. It was easy.