Chapter 4
IV
Wade rose from the bed in the middle of the night. He had been waiting for Logan's growly breathing to turn into his usual deeper snores; it had taken around an hour. Meanwhile, he had been overthinking. He looks at you with a frown, and whispers, “Hey, it's not legally overthinking if that's your normal amount of thinking.”
Getting up, he checked his phone, which showed half past one, and a text from Al. He had texted her that they’d be away for the night, to which she had responded “Thumbs up emoji. Thumbs up emoji” followed by “Mother duck, shoe you dog!” At least her speech-to-text app works perfectly – Wade thought – even if her emoji game is still shit. Keeping it back on the bedside table, he glanced at Logan, who was asleep with a small frown on his face. His bare chest was rising and falling slowly. Wade stared at it/him for a moment, and his brain offered sentences and longings that contained words like ‘tiddies’, ‘warm’, ‘nuzzle’ and ‘snuggle’. With each word, for the first time in a long, long time, he was horrified by what his brain was saying (along with being the usual amount of amused). He tore his eyes away, pulled on the tight pants, and walked out of the room.
Stepping down the stairs softly, he reached the dining room and was greeted first with a sharp, slightly sweet smell, and second with “Hey! Can't sleep?”
Irina stood hunched by the large circular table, holding a test tube containing a clear liquid with a pair of small tongs. Her free hand was holding a pen and keeping a notebook open. A table lamp threw a circle of white light over it. One of the burners was also lighted up, its blue flame illuminating her glasses and giving her face a ghostly appearance.
Wade shook his head. “You neither?”
“I have mild insomnia. Some nights, sleep just doesn't come,” she said while placing the test tube over the flame. “Even though I tell my body how much I want it by turning in all possible directions within a single minute.” She added with a wink.
“I think my brain is just braining too much.” He sighed.
“Ah, that old fucker.”
Wade chuckled.
“I see the clothes fit you well.”
He looked down at his exposed midriff. “My slutty waist refused to be covered.”
She snorted and continued with her work.
“So, what're you up to?”
She looked down at the notebook. “Too complex to explain, but you can say I'm getting ahead of work.”
“Work being making drugs?”
“I should remind you that the term 'drug' means both recreational and medicinal.”
“Understood.” He said, then began walking slowly around the room, looking at the formulae on the walls. “How do you do it, make all this yourself?”
She poured the contents of the test tube into a beaker containing a dark green liquid, saying a little absentmindedly, “Uhh, through my post-doctorate? Won't go into the exact details, most people are lost when I mention my academia beyond postgraduation.”
“Say a few words anyway,” he said, bending down and looking at a crystallized deposit at the bottom of a jar, adding, “so I can rest assured I'm not dumb, just ignorant, and you're the weird one.” He grinned, straightening up.
She shrugged, returning the smile. “Sure. Peptides, ketones, alkaloids, redox, um... sodium metabisulfite?”
Wade nodded. “Thank you. Weirdo.”
She smirked. He watched her add different chemicals into other chemicals for a while. Finally, fixing a test tube filled with a white fluid on a stand and placing it over a burner, she looked at him. “Want some hot chocolate?”
“Oh, I don’t want to disturb you.”
“It’s no trouble. This reaction will take some time. We can take a walk outside, if you want. Clear your head.”
“Sure, why not.” He said as she set the flame to low and turned to go to the kitchen.
With their fingers around the comfortably hot mugs, the pair went outside the house. In the city, the temperature normally stayed up by a few degrees due to pollution and proximity, but here, under the open sky with no buildings nearby, the air was chillier than usual. They could see their own exhalations. Irina handed her cup to Wade and went inside, returning a few moments later with two shawls. They wrapped those around themselves and stepped down the front stairs onto the grass.
“What do you do with the farm? Any animals?” Wade asked, breathing in the aroma of the hot drink.
“No, nothing like that. We moved my lab here only a few months ago, but I love this place. Hope to someday start a proper garden here. Bigger trees near the border, maybe some flowers around the centre. Make it a bit more filled and not so empty. Same around the back too.” She took a careful sip from the cup, blowing on it first so her glasses wouldn’t get fogged up, but they did anyway.
Wade nodded, looking around, trying to imagine trees and plants in the bare lawn. “So, do you spend all your time here? Must take quite long to travel in and out of the city.”
“Not all my time, just as long as it takes to manufacture the supply. You saw all those packets in the kitchen. Dee is the one who usually makes multiple rounds. We thought about getting machinery, but I don’t want this whole thing to get too big. Or permanent.” She wiped her glasses on her top. “I guess in a few days we’ll move back to the city, for a week or so. We have a flat there.”
“Damn, you guys are rich!”
“Getting there.” She said, making Wade laugh.
“I still can’t believe Dopinder hid such a huge thing.”
She shrugged. “You guys had your own stuff going on. I heard from him about you, the breakup, and then Logan getting abducted. He looks fine now, by the way.”
“He heals fast. Last night was…” He trailed off as the memories returned, trying to drown them out by taking a bigger sip of the hot liquid.
They reached the boundary of the lawn. Moonlight bathed the wooden fence and the dirt path that led to the farm from the main road with its silver light. Crickets and cicadas formed the choir of the night. The stars twinkled in the sky above, innumerable and incredible. Wade breathed in deep, taking it all in, willing the outer world to calm his inner one. They turned back towards the house, walking slowly, letting their bare feet feel the cool grass and the damp soil.
“This does feel much better.” He said, taking more deep breaths.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Irina asked slowly. “About him?”
Wade stopped, startled. “There’s…it…there’s nothing to talk about.” He turned away from her.
She looked guilty. “I’m sorry for prying. I didn’t mean to. It’s just…” She didn’t say further, instead choosing to lean against the fence, her cup balanced on it, its cold wood digging into the bone of her forearm.
Wade joined her after a moment. He asked, “What?”
She looked up at the stars. “You looked…really sad coming down the stairs.” She said, slightly unsure about his reaction to this observation. Then decided to add, “And I noticed your face when Logan pushed you away.”
“When?” He frowned.
“Earlier, when you leaned on his shoulder? Inside.”
“Oh, that.” He scoffed, but it was clear it took deliberate effort. “It was nothing, it’s our usual…” He searched for the word. “Slapstick.”
She lifted her shoulders. “I’m just telling what I saw.”
They stood there in silence for a while. Wade joined her gaze up into the dark endlessness. There, under that sky and surrounded by moonlit emptiness, he suddenly felt very tiny. And lonely. Finally, he said, “It’s…complicated. He’s him, and I’m… me.”
“And what’s wrong with either of these people?” She asked.
“Nothing wrong, just…I’m not sure they’re the right fit for each other.” He sighed, still looking up.
She was glad he wasn’t looking at her, or he would have seen the incredulous face she made for a second. From all that she had heard from Dopinder and all that she had seen that evening, the ‘right’ fit was pretty clear to her. Changing her face from outrage-at-this-idiocy to general interest, she thought for a moment about how to approach this, and finally said, “There is no right fit, you know.”
“No, I know, people working to become right for each other and all that crap, which is not really crap. I know. It’s just…I mean…” He looked for the words, then gave up and turned to her. “Look at me.”
She met his eyes. Inside them, clearly visible, were fear and vulnerability, two things that were used to being buried under fifty pounds of humour and sarcasm, and were now out in the open, in this near-darkness and cold.
His hands pointed to himself. “Who could work towards fitting with this? Who could…” He spoke the next words with some difficulty. “Who could…love this?” He turned away again, hunching over the fence. Irina stood by him, silent, letting him go on. He sighed loudly and continued, “Look, I don’t usually think about all that stuff, my face and scars and everything. I know it’s… whatever to look at, and doesn’t matter to friends and people who know and like me. But now, ever since I accepted what I…” He paused, debating whether to go on or not. Looking at her face, he gave in, “What I feel for him. Ever since I accepted that, I’m having all these weird, nervous thoughts when I think about him and me, and it’s…I don’t know.”
She said after a pause, slowly, herself trying to understand as much as trying to help him understand. “When we like someone, our sense of self, our self-worth, comes to the front. We start thinking more about how we appear to that person, what they think of us, if they could ever think of us as we think of them.”
He nodded. “And…I don’t know if he’d ever think of me like that. I know what I feel for him,” He shrugged. “And I know all the jokes about violence being our love language, which is cool, it’s fun and all. But then…at times like these,” He looked up and said, “on a night like this, I just feel so…I don’t know. Lonely? Touch-starved?” He lowered his head, his voice devoid of its usual strength. “Do I sound too pathetic?”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t.”
He went on. “And as much as I hate feeling like this, I cannot deny knowing what I want, what I need. But…I don’t know if he’d want to give that, or ask for something like that in return. I don’t know if he’d want to be so…soft.” He exhaled the last word, suddenly feeling very naked out here.
She said after a while, “A lot of people think anger is the only emotion worth expressing. So, eventually, they end up turning everything into anger,” She took a breath, then added, “not realizing how choked up they’re making themselves.”
He leaned towards her and said, “The true source of constipation.”
She laughed. “That too, probably.” She continued, “But these people, they’re actually starved, of everything they’ve denied themselves from feeling and everything they’ve refused from others, getting angrier in the process.” She looked towards him. “Could your Logan be one of them?”
“I don’t know.” He thought back to all his interactions with Logan: the first time they had met, he was the one who had initiated contact, tapping him on the forehead; he also hadn’t really been very repulsed or disgusted when they were tied so tightly together by Nova’s goons; and all their fights had begun with Logan stabbing him first, which admittedly wasn’t very affectionate, but was contact all the same. “I don’t know.” He repeated. Trying to dissipate the heaviness he felt, he said, “Look at you, being such a brilliant therapist. You sure chemistry is the best option for you?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She explained after a moment, “Dee had some of these issues when we first started dating, the low self-worth and high self-doubt kind. He needed more physical and emotional reassurances.”
“Couldn’t believe he scored so good?”
“Ignoring the objectification, because, well,” she shrugged. “I am a great score, but yeah, he couldn’t.” She smiled.
“Aww, that poor little choco-lava cake.” Wade looked at the mug in his hands. “I’m really happy for him. For you both.”
“Thanks.” She said, then added, “You should give us a chance to be happy for you too.”
He looked at her, surprised, and then smiled. “You’re good.”
“I know.” She smiled back. “Just talk to him.”
“Everyone does keep telling me I should.” He remembered Domino and Yukio. “I will. Only, the moment he gets some quiet time, he wants to go do something else, like find drug lords and go searching for some faraway farm.”
She tilted her head. “Maybe he’s trying to avoid something too.”
He thought about this. “Maybe. There’s already something I want to ask him. I’ll try to somehow segue into feelings from there.”
“Good. Do that.”
They stood there, finishing their drinks that were now cold. Looking at his empty mug, Wade said, “I don’t know why I just spill everything to women willing to listen.”
“Empathy, probably.” She said with a smile. “And, I don’t know, your feminine energy is maybe stronger, so you’re easier to talk to.”
“First, thank you. Second, please don’t add gender confusion to my troubles. Just say the gay is strong with this one.” They straightened up, beginning their walk back to the house. “Didn’t take you for one to believe in masculine and feminine energies.”
She lifted her shoulders. “Eh, I don’t, not really. It’s all a spectrum anyway. Everyone’s got everything inside, it’s just what comes out when.”
Entering the house, Wade looked at the packets of coke on the kitchen counter as he placed his mug in the sink, and asked, “Do you have anything that would make me see the gates of heaven and then let me dream of the stairway?”
She thought for a moment, then moved towards a corner of the kitchen. “A good trip depends on the state of mind of the person as much as on the drug,” She opened a drawer as Wade groaned, her fingers probing through its contents. Finding what she was looking for, she turned to him, a small yellow pill held between her index finger and thumb. “But this should show you pretty colours and then bring sleep.”
He clapped happily and took the pill from her. “Thank you! You’re my favourite person currently.”
“I’ll try not to let it get to my head.” She winked at him and left, finishing up the reactions and turning off the burners.
He downed the pill with a glass of water. Leaning by the counter, he kept looking out the window for a moment, then turned and went back upstairs. He looks at you, walking up the stairs, and says, “Look, I know the last few chapters have been a bit talk-heavy and action-low-y, but we’ll get back to it soon. Your blorbos just need a bit of, as cruel writers say, character development. I wonder why this development is always sad and angst-y, and never them just finding joy and rainbows and all that pretty shit.” He sighs. “Anyway, I hope it isn’t getting too much. We’ll get to the plot soon.” He shrugs, entering their room and closing the door behind him.
Logan slept deeply. Wade looked at him with an expression that he wouldn’t have let anyone describe as ‘fondly’ (he lifts up a middle finger towards you) but other options seemed sparse. As he got into bed, he noticed his phone’s screen showed a new message, but he could already see a bright tinge at the edge of his vision. “Not this soon.” He muttered and let his head hit the pillow, allowing the colours to overtake his mind.