Chapter Text
“Can you tell me in a few words why you decided to schedule a session today?”
Jerma looks up at the ceiling, frowning a little at the crack shaped like a pterodactyl. Scary stuff. “I don’t feel like I’m connecting that well with my son lately.”
“Would you consider having a session with him?”
“Oh, like, together? In the same room? No,” Jerma says, chuckling and shaking his head. “No. He doesn’t need that. This is for—I mean, of course it’s for his benefit, I wanna learn how to be better, I wanna learn how to be better for him, but it’s also for my benefit. Personally. On a personal level.”
“So you don’t think it would be beneficial to have therapy sessions with him?” the therapist, Dr. Michaels, Dr. Miguel, something like that, asks as he looks at Jerma through a pair of dickish little thin wire glasses. They’re hard to get over. That’s why Jerma keeps analyzing the ceiling, because if he doesn’t, there’s no way he can take this guy seriously.
“I… no. Not right now. I don’t think that’d be good for us. I’m just here for advice, just, whatever you can give me. Anything that works. Something to fix me,” Jerma says, even though that last one is a little too real for how short of a time he’s been inside this tiny shoebox of an office.
“Sure, Mr. Elbertson. That’s what I’m here for. You feel the need to be fixed?”
Jerma really doesn’t want to go there that soon. He f*cked it. He f*cked it immediately. Of course he did. He’s so busy blaming himself that being called the wrong name doesn’t even register until he starts speaking again. “Yeah, I guess I do, I don’t know. In some ways.”
“What do you think is broken?”
Jerma throws his hand up helplessly, blowing air out of his mouth. “I don’t f*ckin’ know, man, I—sorry. I don’t know where to start. I just wanna talk about my son and how to talk to him without pissing him off or making him miserable. That’s most of the reason I’m here. All this other sh*t, we can talk about that later. This, right now, with him, that’s what needs to be fixed. Just fix that, you know, if you can, and then we’ll talk about everything else. Sorry, I know I probably, um, I don’t sound, I’m not usually this short with people. I’m a little on edge. Agitated, I guess. It’s been a weird few weeks.”
“So your relationship with your son is what you consider your biggest obstacle. Can you describe your relationship with him?”
That’s a loaded question. “It’s… normal.”
“Normal?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s ‘normal’ to you?”
“It’s a normal father-son relationship. I love him, he loves me, we live together and we’re comfortable and we like spending time with each other. He just doesn’t wanna be around me lately.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
“Oh, yeah, I know what it is. Of course I know what it is. It’s his little girlfriend.”
“Ah,” Dr. Michaels-Miguel says, like he knows something. “And you’re sure that’s the reason why he doesn’t seem to want to spend time with you?”
“Well, yeah. It all started with her. We used to be totally inseparable, you know? Then he started seeing her and it’s kind of like—I think she poisoned him. I think she’s telling him things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“All kinds of things. She probably tells him I’m a freak or something. That I’m a bad father, that I don’t care about him enough. He yells at me now over everything and he’s always just hurling abuse at me for no reason. She’s turned him into this—this unrecognizable, f*cked-up, strange, twisted version of my son. It’s not him anymore. She poisoned him and that’s because she’s got her f*ckin’ claws in his skin. He yells at me and then he goes to her house to have sex with her and he’ll leave me alone for hours and hours. She’s a terrible influence.”
“Hmm,” Dr. Michaels-Miguel says, seemingly turning this over. “I see. There’s a lot I think we can go back to in that, but I do wanna ask before anything else: he never acted this way before he started seeing this girl? He never raised his voice to you or left the house for hours at a time?”
“He’d go out, yeah, sure; he has a lot of friends. That’s fine. I mean, I don’t like it, I don’t like him being away for that long, but it’s fine. I’m glad he has friends. That’s good for him. He’s a good boy. And we definitely fought, because you can’t not fight with somebody if they live with you under the same roof. But it wasn’t almost every single day. Ludwig—his name’s Ludwig, by the way—he used to be the best son in the world. He was sweet, he was so innocent, he was really, really nice to me, he was really good and kind and he always wanted to be there for me and spend time with me. I mean, he had his faults, but every kid does. She’s just destroying him now. She ruined my son.”
“Are you married, Mr. Elbertson?”
“It’s, um, it’s Harrington.”
“My mistake. Are you married?”
“No. Used to be. A long time ago.”
“Is your previous partner still in the picture at all?”
“No. I haven’t seen her in years. She’s still in Boston somewhere, I guess.”
“Your son doesn’t have any contact with her?”
“She calls him once a year on his birthday and, uh, she usually sends him something for Christmas. If she feels like it.”
“Does Ludwig have any other kind of parental influence in his life? Do you have a domestic partner, a girlfriend, any kind of semi-permanent fixture that he can turn to?”
“No. He doesn’t need one. I’m always there. I’ve always been there.”
“He doesn’t need anyone else. Okay. So if you were to enter a relationship, it would be for his benefit, not yours. Much like this therapy session.”
“Yeah. Everything I do is for him. I’m not a priority. He is.”
“Are you not a priority in your own life?”
That seems like a sneaky sort of question and one that Jerma doesn’t really like very much. He pulls a face and laughs a bit in his discomfort. “I dunno what that means. I prioritize his needs over mine, yeah. I think every parent does that. I don’t know why that’s worth mentioning.”
“I’m just trying to piece things together.”
You do that, Jerma thinks.
“So you don’t date because you don’t think he needs anything remotely similar to a maternal figure,” Dr. Michaels-Miguel continues. “You believe that’s more beneficial to his development?”
“His development—? He’s sixteen. He doesn’t have a lot left to develop.”
“The adult brain doesn’t fully develop until twenty-five. Better late than never. It’s possible that seeking out human contact might make you more comfortable with the idea that your son would want something similar. It’s something the two of you could relate to.”
“I’m not uncomfortable with him seeking out ‘human contact’. I don’t care about that. I get it, he wants a girlfriend, he’s a teenager, teenagers want that. That’s fine. That part is fine. I just don’t trust this girl he’s seeing and I don’t think they should be having sex with each other.”
“How old is she?”
“I don’t know, around the same age. I think she’s in his grade.”
“If they’re well-educated and cautious about what they’re doing, it’s not unnatural or unhealthy for teenagers to experiment with each other. Especially at that age.”
“They're kids! They’re still kids! They don’t f*ckin’ know what they’re doing! They’re gonna break up in a couple of months and realize how stupid they were and how many regrets they have and they’ll be in pain and they’ll hate themselves and Ludwig doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t need to be having sex with anyone. He needs to focus on growing up, going to school, playing his games, helping me with the garden on the weekends, and being a kid while he still gets a chance.”
“What do you think is an appropriate age for your son to be having sex?”
“A couple years from now?” Jerma suggests. “Ten years from now? Twenty? Who’s to say?”
“Why don’t you want him to be sexually active?”
“He just doesn’t need to be. I don’t want—he’s better than them. All of them. All the girls he goes to school with, they’re nothing compared to him. All they’re gonna do is take his body and use it. That girl, Blaire, she’s using him. It was like, the second she got her hands on him, she changed him. Do you know what he used to do? He’d wake up early with me on Sunday almost every week to help me take care of the sunflowers. We’d get coffee and then tend the sunflowers and we’d spend the rest of the day together doing whatever he wanted. You know what he does now? He gets up and gives me some kind of vague f*ckin’ excuse and go hang out with her or his friends or both all day and she just sticks her fingers in his f*ckin’ brain and turns it to mush. He’s almost never home for dinner. I told you, he was different before her. I don’t like her. I don’t want her around. She’s a bad influence.”
“Do you have any other forms of companionship? Any good friendships, any acquaintances? Any other family?”
“I… not really. No. A few, I guess. But not any that—not a lot. No one very close.”
“Have things always been this way?”
“Like, not a lot of platonic relationships? No. I don’t know. I had a lot more friends when I was younger, when I was really into online games and stuff. I stopped when Lud got a little older. You know, parenting, like, little, small, tiny kids who don’t walk or talk that well and need you to play with them all the time and it’s so easy to make them laugh, that’s really fun, I love it, and I miss it a lot sometimes, but when you can actually hold real conversations with them and you see them become their own person with their own personality, that’s so much better. I stopped doing all that other stuff so I could just listen to him. I never wanted to do anything else.”
“Your son is the only companionship you have. He’s your priority, the only thing that matters to you. His friends are taking some of that precious time away from you, but it’s primarily the girlfriend. You hate the idea that your son is sleeping with her, but it’s not just her; you don’t want him to be sleeping with anyone. Mr. Elbertson, how is it going to feel when Ludwig goes off to college?”
“…why? That’s not for a couple more years. We haven’t even picked out a school yet. What are you talking about?” Correcting the name isn’t even worth it at this point.
“Well, you won’t exactly have much control over him while he’s at school. You won’t be able to spend much time with him at all, really, other than holidays. How is it going to feel when you have to live alone?”
“I won’t. He’ll probably just go somewhere locally. He’ll commute. It’s fine.”
“And after he finishes college, provided that he’s still living at home with you throughout his career? Should abstain from forming romantic and sexual relationships until you decide that he’s allowed to? When will you be comfortable with letting him make his own decisions?”
“He can make his own decisions. I’m not letting him not make his own decisions. I just know what’s best for him. Tell me what to do about her and him and how to just—I don’t wanna talk about these, these insane hypotheticals way off in the distant f*ckin’ future. Tell me how to get rid of this girl without hurting Ludwig’s feelings,” Jerma says, throwing niceties at the wall so he can just get to the meat of things.
“That’s not for me to say. I don’t know her. All I know is what you’ve told me about her. Do you know anything about her other than the fact that she’s in a sexual relationship with your son?”
“She’s… blonde.”
“Mm-hm.”
“She likes donuts. She’s… her mother drives her to school. She’s whiny. She likes to complain. She’s not very interesting. Really forgettable face.”
“So you don’t know very much about her at all. You haven’t had too many interactions with her.”
“No. Why would I?”
“Do you avoid her on purpose?”
“Ludwig doesn’t want me around her. He’s lied about having girlfriends before. He says he doesn’t want me around any of them.”
“Does he say why?”
“He calls me ‘neurotic’ or some sh*t like that. That I ‘psychoanalyze’ them. He says I'm weird around them.”
“Similar to your own situation, it seems like you believe that Ludwig doesn’t need a partner either. That it’s not beneficial to either you or him. Do you feel like you provide the same level of emotional fulfillment that a romantic half might?”
“Yeah. I do. I honestly think I’m better than a girlfriend.”
“What makes you better than a girlfriend?”
“Well, you know, for him, I won’t ever leave. I won’t consider myself, uh, above him. I won’t leave him for my friends. I’ll give him all the, like, the cuddles and the kisses and the hugs that he wants and he won’t have to worry about satisfying me or taking things too far, because we won’t have to worry about anything gross or weird or sexual. I’ll always praise him and tell him how good he looks in whatever he’s wearing. I’ll always be there.”
“Is that something he wants just as much as you do?”
“Yeah. Of course. I think anyone would. It’s infinite love and security; is there someone out there that doesn’t want that? If they don’t, they’re insane.”
“Offering love and security isn’t the problem. I think the problem lies more with the fact that you’re conflating your role as a caregiver with this desire to fill a void in your life that’s been gaping for years. Your resentment towards any potential partners that your son could have and your aggressive aversion to him being sexually active, even past the age of eighteen, is, ah, that concerns me.”
“Oh, you’re concerned? I concern you? I’m a point of concern?”
“Frankly, yes. I think you’re very jealous of this girl and I think if you really were that considerate of Ludwig’s happiness, you’d give her a chance, but you don’t seem to want to.”
“You think I don’t care about his happiness because I don’t want him to make life-ruining mistakes? Are you f*cking serious? You know what else makes people happy? Driving drunk. Uh, hard drugs. Lots of hard drugs. Gambling, that makes people happy. It makes them really happy, like when you know how good you are at Blackjack and your strategies are impeccable, you know how to play and you know how to play really, really well, you have, it’s, you know. You get it. p*rn makes people happy beyond their wildest f*ckin’ dreams, but some of it’s, it’s harmful, it’s, like, some of it’s made for sickos who don’t see some people as human. But no, yeah, why not, sure, let’s just let everyone kill themselves just for sh*t that feels good for a second and has horrible consequences. I’m just the dick who won’t let people be happy.”
“Mr. Elbertson, I’m sure you understand the difference between allowing self-destructive behavior and allowing someone to flourish.”
“It’s Harrington,” Jerma grinds out. “Harrington. My name is Jeremy Elbertson. Harrington.” For a brief second, he actually wonders if it is Elbertson and he’s just gotten it wrong all these years. But how would Dr. Michaels-Miguel know that? Speaking of which, does he even know anything? “Let me ask you a question: are you a real doctor?”
Dr. Michaels-Miguel smiles at him. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”
That is not reassuring. “Okay,” Jerma says, clapping his hands against his thighs before he gets to his feet, smiling back painfully. “You know what, I think I should leave. Great session. I don’t think I’ll see you again, but it was great. Really. Thank you. Lots of valuable information there.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Dr. Michaels-Miguel says smoothly, unmoving as he watches Jerma cross the room to the door. “I think you should come back, Jeremy. I think you’re on the verge of something greater. A revelation.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that? Can I get some insight on that?” Jerma asks, his voice a little too loud as he puts his hand on the doorknob.
“Talk to your son.” Dr. Michaels-Miguel is enigmatic, leaning back in his chair, eyeing Jerma over his stupid glasses. “He knows more than you think.”
“Whatever,” Jerma scoffs, snapping the office door shut behind him. “Suck my asshole.”
It’s a good thing that the hallway he finds himself in is starkly empty, a little dusty, a little dark. There’s a low, fuzzy radio playing Hip to Be Square somewhere above his head. They should really turn the heat on in this place.
“Hey, where are you?”
“Just got done with something at school. Still there. Are you still at the, uh, the freakhouse? The mental institution?”
“It was counseling services, Lud, for the love of God; I wasn’t at a mental institution. I’m not a f*ckin’ millionaire. Can I come pick you up?”
“Ah… yeah, actually, that’d be great; I guess I needed a ride. I’m at the soccer field.”
“Great, I’ll be there in fifteen-ish. Oh, remind me to get eggs. We’re out of eggs.”
“I thought you got some yesterday.”
“I was going to, but, you know. The void,” Jerma says thoughtlessly, not thinking about how Ludwig has not been clued in on how he got sucked down a proverbial thought-wormhole yesterday at the grocery store and was having a series of teeny, tiny psychotic breakdowns because he kept thinking about the girl. Jesus, if she’s so f*cking forgettable, why can’t he forget about her? He forgot the eggs. While he was thinking about her, he forgot to get eggs. Go figure.
“Oh, yeah, the void, my bad, completely forgot. Always there at Albertsons.”
Albertsons. Elbertson. Does that mean anything? He’ll have to think about that one. “Yeah. You know how it goes. I’ll see you in a minute. I love you,” he adds hastily. “I want you to know that.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s okay. I love you too.”
“I know you do. Bye.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jerma can see a little group of kids clumped together on the bleachers next to the soccer field when he pulls up outside the chain link fence. He recognizes Ludwig first, of course, and a couple of his other little friends, ones that he, Jerma, likes and tolerates and others that he feels a sordid mistrust for. Standing out among them, of course, is Jonathan, a terrifyingly gruff and oversized tenth-grader who stands at least three or four inches taller than Jerma. He’s rude and mean and callous and Ludwig always acts like such a brat after being around him. Horrible influence. Even worse is the shock of blonde that Jerma sees half-hidden in Ludwig’s side.
They’re holding hands. Cuddling or something.
Impulsively, Jerma slams on the horn and gets some kind of petty joy out of seeing Ludwig jump and look around like a startled pigeon. He could do without the excessive eye-rolling and giving sickeningly sweet goodbye kisses before he jumps off the bleachers and runs across the field.
Jerma misses taking Ludwig to soccer practice. There’s just something about the safe, rough-and-tumble smell of grass stains and seeing Ludwig smile so big and bright and give it his all even while he was completely unable to help carry the team. His enthusiasm was what really mattered.
“So how’d it go?”
“Oh, it was bullsh*t,” Jerma says, tightening his hands on the wheel. “Waste of f*ckin’ time and money. I just spent an hour of my life pouring my heart out to some quack with a fake degree all for him to tell me either sh*t I already know or sh*t that I know isn’t true. It was three-hundred dollars! Three-hundred dollars that I’ll never get back because I spent it getting verbally abused by some dickhe*d who doesn’t even know me. I’m never doing that ever again. Ever. A whole Saturday afternoon, gone.”
“Okay. So it went about as well as I expected,” Ludwig remarks. “You could find another one. Some other doctor. Maybe that one was just bad.”
“Oh, yeah, and just rehash the same drippy, sad, pointless sh*t over and over and just hope that they actually listen to what I have to say? Risk being out hundreds of dollars over nothing? No. I’m not doing that.”
Ludwig giggles at the open passenger window. “What did he say?”
“…nothing. It—nothing really, uh, at all.”
“I don’t think ‘nothing’ would have you on the edge like this.”
Jerma huffs and lifts one hand off the wheel in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know, nothing! A whole bunch of nothing! The only reason I’m on the edge is because I got scammed. That’s what it was, it was a scam. A total scam. It was just, I, i-it was a bunch of nothing and the stuff that wasn’t nothing was bullsh*t. Like I said. He just made a lot of these f*ckin’ crazy claims and grasped at straws ‘cause I’m just a weird f*ckin’ guy and he didn’t know what to do with me. It was stupid.” He shakes his head. “I don’t wanna talk about it. It’s done. It’s over with.”
“You could try one of those, uh, those apps for it. The ones where you basically just text somebody your problems. I think Bl—somebody I know does that.”
Jerma rolls his eyes. “Blaire. You were gonna say Blaire, right? No thanks. I’m okay.”
Ludwig gives a shrug and looks out his window again. “Just saying.”
“Sure.” Jerma flexes his fingers and stares ahead, realizing far too late that he’s not paying attention to anything he’s looking at. Whoops. He blinks a few times. “What does she do, anyway?”
“Who, Blaire?”
“Ludwig, I can’t think of another girl that you actually know. Unless she’s another one of your secret friends that you won’t bring to the house for—whatever reason, I don’t know.”
“I know Rebecca! You know Rebecca.”
“Rebecca doesn’t count. She’s… scary,” Jerma mutters.
“Yeah, well, I don’t like her either. I do know girls. Tons of girls at school. Dad, how many women do you know?”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Jerma says, avoiding the subject so smoothly he’s almost proud of himself. “What does Blaire even do?”
“What does she—what does she do? I don’t know, she’s a junior; it’s not like she’s got an illustrious career or anything. What do you expect her to be doing?”
“You have a career. Does she have any hobbies? Does she do anything except eat up all your free time and time that you need to study so you won’t keep failing pre-calc?”
“She streams too,” Ludwig says, his voice taking on a hard edge that makes Jerma’s nerves buzz uncomfortably. “She streams and she likes to bake and she paints and she has a dog and a cat.”
“Wow, yeah, that sounds like a busy schedule. I don’t know how you two have so much time to see each other.”
“I see her, like, maybe once or twice a week outside of school. Which is normal, by the way. That’s a normal amount of time to spend with your girlfriend.”
“You’re out of the house almost every single day.” Jerma is trying very hard to control his temper, but it’s getting increasingly difficult. “And you told me you’ve had other relationships that I don’t even know about. How am I possibly supposed to trust you? Honestly, at this point, I should just—I’m this close to never letting you leave the house at all. Not until I can trust you again. I’ll lock you in your f*ckin’ bedroom.”
“Okay, as much as I love the fact that we’re talking about this again, do you even remember what I said when you asked me about this last time? Do you remember that I said that you act like a neurotic freak around both my friends and girls that I like? Do you know how completely f*cking psychotic you’re acting about Blaire? You threatened to rape me while you were drunk because you hate my girlfriend that much and all you know about her is that we’ve had sex before. That’s why you hate her so bad.”
“Rape you? What? What the f*ck are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“You don’t remember? You seriously don’t remember telling me that you were going to f*ck me while you were sh*tfaced? The other day when I had to peel you off the bathroom floor?”
“Ludwig, there’s a huge difference between—”
“I swear to God, I swear to f*cking Christ, if you say ‘There’s a difference between saying I was going to f*ck you and saying I was going to rape you’, I’m gonna grab the wheel and I’m gonna kill us both.”
“I don’t believe you.” Jerma’s throat feels oddly tight. “That’s a lie. You’re making that up. No, I don’t remember that, because I’d never say something like that.”
“I hate it when you do that,” Ludwig says bitterly. “When you just conveniently forget sh*t. You always act like I’m crazy whenever I tell you something that I know you said before. You pushed me down against your bed and looked me dead in the face and told me you’d f*ck me so I’d remember that you’re the only one who’s allowed to make me feel special.”
It’s terrifying, actually, bad enough to make Jerma feel sick, because he does remember pieces of that—he remembers pinning Ludwig down. Hurling words at him. The words are nothingness, but he remembers the act itself.
“Then I’m sorry.” It sounds hollow and Jerma hates himself so, so badly for it. “I really am, that’s, that’s horrible. I never should’ve done that. I don’t remember doing it, but I, uh. Yeah. No. That’s unforgivable. I’m really, really sorry.”
“f*ck you,” Ludwig snaps at him. It stabs a stake of ice right in the middle of Jerma’s back. “Save it. You know, if you really wanna f*ck me, you should just go ahead and do it already. Buy me dinner first, though.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t care if you’re sorry. You still said it. Seriously, you should f*ck me and get it over with. You should throw me on your bed and rip my clothes off and stick a couple of fingers up my ass—”
“Lud, stop—”
“—and stretch it out real good,” Ludwig continues determinedly, “and shove your dick in as deep as it’ll go, completely raw, no condom, no nothing, and just go for, like, a good twenty minutes until I’m literally sobbing my eyes out—”
“Please stop,” Jerma croaks.
“—and you fill me up like a f*ckin’ Twinkie and I’ve almost passed out right there on the bed. You know. If you wanna f*ck me so bad.”
They're very close to the gas station on the corner a few blocks away from the house. If Jerma were to keep driving, they’d get there in three minutes, but three minutes is too long. He can’t drive like this. His head is about to explode.
He pulls into the Circle K parking lot, morbidly grateful that it’s as empty as it is. He’s sure the only other car that’s there belongs to whoever is working the register inside. He’s busy biting through his lip as he stops the car and Ludwig is busy looking at him, the air so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Jerma cuts the engine, unbuckles his seatbelt, and immediately reaches over to grab the front of Ludwig’s sweatshirt, yanking him close. “What the f*ck is the matter with you?”
“Let me go, oh my God, what are you doing?” Ludwig says with a high little cackle.
“What am I doing? Look, I’m sorry I said what I said, I am, if I’m actually supposed to believe you and that's something I would’ve actually said to you, but you’ve got some goddamn nerve talking to me like that. You’re so out of line. What makes you think that’s okay?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t said that you wanted to f*ck me.”
“Okay, if you’re stuck on it, i-i-if this won’t get out of your head, if this is haunting you that badly, let me just—I’ll help you. Right now. I have something that’s gonna make it all better.”
“Oh, God, it’s not your dick, is it?” Ludwig says in dismay.
“You are in so much trouble. You are in so much f*cking trouble right now, you have no idea. Ludwig,” Jerma snarls, shaking his grip a few times to cut off Ludwig’s soft giggling. “Listen to me. I don’t want to f*ck you. I don’t want to have sex with you. You know I don’t want that.”
“Here’s the thing, Dad: I don’t. I don’t know that you don’t want to have sex with me. I think you do. I think that’s why you don’t want me to see Blaire. That’s why you hate that she’s having sex with me. You hate her because she gets to put her hands on me and you don’t. It pisses you off, doesn’t it?”
Mortified and feeling the sickest, warmest, blackest feeling bloom in his stomach, Jerma’s knuckles go white as his fingers clench tighter in Ludwig’s shirt. “You are a spoiled, sh*tty, oversexed, rotten, dirty, no-good little f*cking brat. I don’t even know what kind of person you are anymore.”
That seems to kill Ludwig’s smugness, his frown trembling a little as he withdraws ever so slightly—as much as he can while Jerma’s holding him so tight. “I’m not any different,” he says. “I’m still me.” He turns his eyes down and sniffles. “I’m rotten? That’s so mean.”
Jerma loosens his grip and falters. “I—no, I’m sorry. Oh my God, what am I—? Ludwig, I’m sorry, that was—oh my God, I don’t know why I said that. You’re not rotten. You’re not, you’re amazing, you’re, you’re perfect, I’m so sorry—”
“You’re so easy, holy sh*t.” Ludwig breaks his kicked-puppy expression and laughs, plucking Jerma’s hand off his sweatshirt. “I mean, yeah, you shouldn’t say sh*t like that to your only son, ‘cause you’re destroying my self-esteem gradually every single day to the point where I wish my CDH would just take me out for good, but you seriously don’t have a spine.” He hooks his finger in the collar of Jerma’s sweater and tugs him forward, running his thumb over Jerma’s mouth. Jerma feels his own breath shudder and his insides get hotter and sicker. The pad of Ludwig’s thumb presses into Jerma’s bottom lip. “If I’m already oversexed and spoiled and sh*tty, can’t I just do whatever I want? What’s it matter?”
Jerma’s eyelashes flutter for a moment as he tries to collect himself. He doesn’t know why his heart is beating this fast. There’s a staticky heat trapped in between his clothes and his skin. “What do you want to do?”
“Like I said. Whatever I want,” Ludwig says simply, gently pressing his thumb against the ridge of Jerma’s teeth. Jerma’s eyes flicker down and up again. “You said you don’t know who I am anymore. Maybe that’ll make you feel less guilty.”
“Lud.” Jerma clears his throat and curls his fingers around Ludwig’s wrist. He’s going to pull that probing thumb away. He just has to give it a second. “I… I don’t know what you’re saying, but we’re in public.”
“Barely. There’s no one here. And it’s almost dark.” Ludwig laughs again, low and warm and short, knocking a finger against Jerma’s chin and making him look back up, startled. “What are you scared of someone seeing, Dad?”
“Stop,” Jerma mutters, closing his eyes. “Lud, come on.”
“I can’t. I’m oversexed. I’m spoiled. I don’t listen to anyone, not even you. It’s just how you raised me,” Ludwig says. Even though Jerma’s eyes are still shut, it’s not any kind of surprise when he feels pressure on his mouth, firm and unyielding.
And the thing is, it’s not any different from any of their other kisses. Not physically. It’s another kiss like all the others. It should feel the same, with those meant-to-last sort of “Nice to see you, how are you?” feelings. It should put another Band-Aid over them for a few seconds. But it doesn’t. The static under Jerma’s clothes is like a beehive. His fingers are failing on Ludwig’s wrist, loosening more and more as his anxiety spikes, his heart running wildly. This is different enough that Jerma knows he should be putting a stop on it. He has to. This has gotten so out of control that he feels an impending doom in the marrow of his bones.
It is still the same kind of kiss when it first starts out, despite the fact that there’s nothing nice to see and neither of them want to know how each other are really doing. It’s the same for a second. And that’s almost fine. But then Ludwig clutches at Jerma’s sweater, giving no chance of escape as he pushes his tongue in Jerma’s mouth, unabashed and hungry.
It’s f*cked. Everything is f*cked. What they’re doing is f*cked and the way that Jerma feels is f*cked and the center console is f*cked and why the f*ck is it there and why does he need to be closer and why hasn’t he stopped? Why? Why?
You should throw me on your bed and rip my clothes off
Shove your dick in as deep as it’ll go, completely raw, no condom, no nothing
I’ll f*ck you myself if that’s what it’s gotta take for you to remember that.
Jerma wrenches Ludwig’s hand away. When he breaks the kiss, his lips are wet. “Lud, you can’t—you don’t know what you’re doing,” he manages, shakily wiping his mouth off with the back of his hand. “You need to stop. You’re putting yourself in so much danger.”
“What are you gonna do to me? Lock me in my room for real?” Ludwig whips his seatbelt off and scrambles over the center console, pushing Jerma against the driver’s door. His knee is nestled in between Jerma’s legs. Never before has the car felt this small, this enclosed, too f*cking small, too small for what Jerma feels. It doesn’t fit in his body or in his head or in his heart or in this car. Ludwig kisses him again, grabbing at his hair, free hand clumsy on the side of Jerma’s face.
Jerma vividly recalls Emilia kissing him in the backseat and how exhilarating that was, even if it was overwhelming and a little bit terrifying. This is panic and suffocation and it’s a poor angle to begin with and Ludwig is trying to choke him out with his tongue. There’s no nuance or technique to it; it’s just a punishment. If this is what you want, this is what you get. I love you. I love you so much that I’ve never hated anyone more than I hate you.
Ludwig pulls away this time and buries his face in Jerma’s neck, breathing hot and heavy as his fingers curl in, nails dragging over the back of Jerma’s head. Jerma’s hand hovers over Ludwig’s back, too scared to touch him, blood rushing in his own ears. “Lock me up,” Ludwig whispers, his mouth brushing Jerma’s throat. “I’ll be your f*cking Cinderella, Daddy.”
Ludwig hasn’t called Jerma “Daddy” in about eight years. Not since he had surgery. It makes Jerma freeze up, a terrible sense of longing and melancholy burning the corners of his eyes. “Lud, we should go home,” Jerma says, his voice quiet and strained. God, he’s going to be sick and have some kind of attack if his heart doesn’t slow down a little. “Please, come on, we should just— ah.”
When Ludwig kisses his neck, it draws a sound out of him that Jerma barely recognizes. It’s this hitched little gasp and it’s so f*cking inappropriate and blatant and Jerma feels revulsion roll over him in a dark cloud. He snatches the back of Ludwig’s sweatshirt and pulls at him like he’s just trying to get Ludwig’s attention, frantic and childish. “Lud, stop, stop, stop it, stop it right now. I’m telling you to stop. You—Ludwig,” he whines, his voice faltering when Ludwig kisses his neck again, open and damp, scraping with his teeth. “L-listen to me, f*ck, oh my God, I am—I am your father and you need to listen to me, I swear, once we get home, you’re in so much—so much trouble, you—”
A knock rings out right behind Jerma’s head and Ludwig jerks up at the same time that Jerma tries to twist around. They become even more untangled and uncomfortable than before as heat rapidly colors Jerma’s face.
There’s a very irritable, disgusted older man hunched over and looking into the car. Sweat suddenly beading on the back of Jerma’s neck, he rolls the window down and clears his throat. “Hey. Uh. Did you need something?” His voice still cracks horribly.
“Get away from the front of my store, you f*cking creep. You want me to call the cops?”
“Oh, no, no no no no, no, see, this isn’t, um, this is my—”
Ludwig clamps a hand over Jerma’s mouth and smiles at the Circle K manager. “We were just leaving. Sorry for making a scene.”
The manager’s eyes shift between the two of them. “How old’s your boytoy?”
“Old enough,” Ludwig answers for Jerma. “We’re going. Have a good night.” He reaches over and rolls the window back up before crawling back into the passenger seat and running his fingers through his hair, shaping it back into place. “Drive, Dad.”
Drive? Drive? How the f*ck is Jerma supposed to drive? His hands are clammy and his mouth is desert-dry and he’s still being watched and he’s getting invisible third-degree burns all over his skin and his pants zipper is determined to dig into him in the worst way. Jerma doesn’t even know if he remembers how to drive.
Ludwig hits him on the arm and it forces a strangled kind of half-squeal out of his mouth. “Start the car, Jesus Christ; you want him to actually call the cops?”
“I’m starting it! I’m starting—don’t put pressure on me. I’m so f*cking insane,” Jerma says through his teeth, turning his keys. The manager steps back, but Jerma can still feel that horrible gaze on him. He’s a creep. Someone thinks he’s a creep. Jerma’s a certified creep now. “I’m one day away from crashing into that store window. One day. Oh my God, I forgot to get eggs.” He laughs, a loud, high-pitched yelping noise. “So stupid.”
“You’re broken, aren’t you? Can we order something for dinner?”
“You’re not getting anything.” If the steering wheel was a neck, it would’ve been strangled limp by now. “Shut up. Keep your mouth shut for two, just, a, two, a few minutes. Can you do that?”
“Do you want me to answer, or…?”
The look of malice and fury in Jerma’s expression when he shoots Ludwig a look seems to be effective enough, because Ludwig closes his mouth immediately and slouches down in his seat. For once in his life, Jerma is able to feel a little bit of satisfaction from some level of control.
It’s the little things. Jerma feels venom in his mouth as he tries to subtly tug at his pants so they don’t feel so tight.
The garage light is yellow and the car is no longer running and the air is cold and stagnant. Jerma’s forehead is on the steering wheel and he is trying to parse apart his emotions, parse apart his words before he says them so he won’t be callous or cruel.
“I don’t know what I ever did to you,” he finally says, “to make you treat me like this.”
Ludwig makes a quiet, exasperated noise. “Like what?”
“Like this. You never listen to me. You don’t respect me. You’re just constantly—” Jerma has to collect himself and straighten back up, wiping his eyes under his glasses and sniffing. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me. I don’t know what you want from me whenever you pull sh*t like that. And don’t, like, don’t make excuses. I know you don’t really want this. Nobody would want this, nobody in their right f*ckin’ mind. This isn’t normal. You need to stop, you need to get a f*cking grip on yourself and stop playing with sh*t you don’t understand.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Stop it,” Jerma snaps, rapidly losing his patience again. “Yes you do, I know you do, and I know that you know. You’re trying to hurt me. You’re trying to get me to do something just because you’re curious or you love it whenever I freak out or break down or you just think it’s fun and scary and exciting and it’s different and nobody knows, so that makes it okay. You can’t do that. The way you’re acting is really, really concerning, it’s scary, I-I-I feel, I’m unsafe, I feel unsafe because of it, and it’s just, it’s sick. It’s sick and it’s weird and it’s wrong. I’m sorry, but it is, and you have to stop.”
“You feel unsafe. I make you feel unsafe. That’s funny. That’s so f*cking funny.” Ludwig lets out this dark little laugh that makes Jerma’s insides go cold. “Okay, see, normally, a regular adult would be able to just push away and yell at whatever dirty, evil child is trying to tempt them into committing dirty, evil acts. They’d say ‘Don’t, hey, stop, this is super inappropriate’ and they’d be able to really easily push them off without being, like, physically affected. I wouldn’t do weird sh*t like that if you could just prove to me that you don’t have these really creepy feelings for me. But you can’t. Like, I heard you. I heard you make those noises. I felt you. That stupid f*cking college guy you hooked up with looks just like me and it’s really super insulting that you thought I wouldn’t notice or care or whatever.”
“It wasn’t on purpose—”
“Stop making excuses! Oh my God, do you know how this sh*t makes me feel? Have you thought about it for one f*cking second? What am I supposed to do when I’m f*cking, like, I’m trying so hard to be well-adjusted and fit in with all my friends and have a girlfriend, but you’re here and you’re a barely-functioning, lonely, f*cked-up alcoholic and you can’t just be my dad. I can’t just have a dad who cares about me and wants what’s best for me. You have to have every f*cking piece of me. Every inch. You’re trying to make me just accept the fact that you, you want to—” Ludwig seems to crack in that moment. His breath shakes as he stares at his hands, fingers half-curled, palms up, hovering in the air above his lap. “Oh my God, this is, like, my life. What the f*ck? You know, I’ve thought about it a lot, just thinking about it and how it’s, like, okay, it was just kind of funny and weird to think about before, it was mostly funny, but now it’s… it’s real. It’s true, isn’t it? You want to. You wanna do it. You want me.”
All of that anger, all of that righteous indignation, melts away instantly to give way to shame. Shame and fear and denial. “No. No, I don’t. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you I don’t. Emilia, they, okay, they approached me and we just got along; them looking anything like you at all, in any conceivable way, doesn’t have anything to do with you. And the way we’re wired, how we react to things, how that sh*t works, it’s just a biological response. That’s it. That’s all. It’s not—”
“Shut up. Shut up, holy sh*t, you’re not saying anything.” Ludwig yanks at the passenger door handle and climbs out of the car. His heart in his throat, Jerma follows in his footsteps, dread filling him little by little. “God, you know, I wouldn’t hate it so much if you would just do it. Like I said the other day, you’re a puss*. You’re a coward and instead of actually just taking what you want, you’re just gonna bitch and moan and cry about it and hate yourself for it and then push it off on me and make me deal with it. Your self-esteem? Sure, let me take it. Your substance abuse? Why not, give it to me.” He flings open the door to the kitchen with a flourish that’s supposed to impress somebody who isn’t there. “Everything that’s wrong with you? I have to take it over and over and I never get a break. And now I have to exist as this f*cking, this, this object of, like, desire or whatever. I have to f*cking coddle you and tell you that things aren’t really that bad and you’re okay and you’re trying your best even though you’re a f*cking sex creep and every time you look at me, I know you want something from me and there’s this line that we can’t cross because you know it’s f*cked up and I know it’s f*cked up, but even though you do things that are f*cked up all the time, you have this shame, this, like, this absolutely insane level of shame that makes you think that this is the one thing that’s too far. I had to get the Catholic kind of pervert for a dad instead of the sexy atheist kind of pervert for a dad. You f*cking suck, Jeremy.”
There’s an unspeakably high number of accusations to unpack in that rant, but it all just compiles itself into that one broad, simple statement: “You f*cking suck, Jeremy.” Wilting and stripped raw against the doorframe, Jerma presses the teeth of his car keys into his palm until the pain is almost too much to bear. “Ludwig, I don’t—” His voice is barely there, aching and red. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry things are like this and I’m sorry you have to deal with me. I’m sorry I’m a such a stupid piece of sh*t. I’m sorry that you don’t get anyone better than me. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Just admit it.” Ludwig turns and folds his arms across his chest, leaning back against the kitchen counter. Jerma has never felt so small before under Ludwig’s eyes, dark and unforgiving, scrutinizing, trying to see into his head despite the fact that Jerma is constantly leaking and bleeding his thoughts and you’d have to be dead not to be able to read him. “Just admit it and then we can figure out what to do next. We can deal with it.”
“...what do you mean? What are you saying? Deal with it how?”
Ludwig snickers. “I’m not gonna call the cops or anything, relax. I mean, I should. And I totally could. If I wanted to, I could call them right now and tell them I don’t feel safe in my own home. I could call nine-one-one and cry to the operator about how I’m thinking about killing myself because my daddy’s a sick freak and he wants to do bad things to me.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and the floor seems to tilt in that instant. “It’s only three numbers. But all I’m saying is that I want you to be honest with me. I won’t get mad, I promise. Just tell me the truth. You remember when you threw a fit over me stealing stupid sh*t from Target? It’s kind of like that, except I’m just, like, a troubled youth and you wanna have sex with the troubled youth. Just tell me what you wanna do to me.”
The thing is, even though he’s been backed into a corner, poked and prodded as someone bangs on the glass that surrounds him and he’s cowering and begging for it to stop, Jerma feels physically restrained from admitting anything to either himself or Ludwig. Because it’s not true. It really, truly isn’t, not a bit of it is true, no matter how much that Ludwig insists it is. Everything that Jerma has been thinking and feeling and doing can be explained away if Ludwig would just f*cking listen to him, but he won’t. Ludwig always has to be right. And maybe that’s Jerma’s fault, maybe just a little bit, maybe it’s his fault for always reaffirming Ludwig’s feelings so he won’t have a low opinion of himself, but there should be a point where Ludwig can allow Jerma just a scrap of mercy.
He won’t. He doesn’t have a reason to. But these stakes are too high for Jerma to just lie down and give into Ludwig’s demands.
“You’re wrong,” Jerma says softly, looking at the floor, rubbing the hem of his sweater between his fingers. “The idea that I would—that I’d ever wanna hurt you is just… I don’t want to have sex with you, Ludwig. I don’t want to touch you.”
There’s a beat of silence. It’s a heavy silence and it goes on for a long, long time, just up until Ludwig sighs and Jerma can tell he’s moving. Looking up, he sees Ludwig unlock his phone. “Alright, I guess I don’t have a choice. Wait, hold on, I gotta make this realistic.” He sets his phone on the counter and pulls open a couple of drawers, quickly riffling through barely-used, disorganized kitchen utensils. Baffled and unthinking in his misery and confusion, Jerma doesn’t know what to do or if it’s anything he needs to put a stop to. “Crying on command is hard.”
“What the hell are you doing? What are you doing?”
Ludwig doesn’t answer him and instead withdraws a meat tenderizer from a pile of other unloved, long-forgotten Christmas presents from distant family. “I think this’ll work.”
“Work for what? Put that down. Right now.”
Ludwig lays his hand on the countertop and Jerma trips over himself trying to cross the kitchen in time to prevent the inevitable. Before Jerma can get his hands on Ludwig, the tenderizer has come down across the boy’s knuckles.
“Why the f*ck would you do that?” Jerma cries over the pained shriek that falls from Ludwig’s mouth, the tenderizer falling to the counter. Jerma grabs Ludwig’s wrist to look over his hand, feeling sick to his stomach. A few of Ludwig’s knuckles bead with blood rising to the surface and the skin is bright red. “Oh my God, why? Look at you!”
“I told you, for realism!” Ludwig yanks his hand out of Jerma’s grip and grabs his phone off the counter. “Oh, f*ck, that actually, that hurts so bad,” he whimpers, sniffling as he taps his screen three times with one shaking finger. “I should’ve faked it.”
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” Jerma hears from the tinny phone speaker.
“Hi, I-I’m sorry, I’m in lots of trouble, I’m really scared, um, see, my daddy, he’s a bad man, he’s trying to—”
Jerma only means to take the phone away. He just means to grab it and put it in his pocket and go from there, wherever there is, and attempt to resolve the massive amount of deconstruction they’ve endured today. He means to do that, but when attempts it, he knocks it out of Ludwig’s grip and it falls to the floor, leaving both of them to scramble.
Jerma makes contact with the tile first and the scream of pain and resistance that radiates through his body when his knees hit it should warn him that he’s going to destroy his back if he doesn’t get a grip on himself, but this is f*cking life or death. His fingers are an inch away from Ludwig’s phone before a hand winds in his hair and pulls with unrelenting fury, an elbow driving into his shoulder blade. Ludwig rips the phone away with a little shout of triumph, half a second before Jerma pushes himself up and scrapes his fingernails over Ludwig’s open wounds, taking the phone for himself when Ludwig cries out and loosens his fingers.
It’s instinct. It’s just instinct and Jerma isn’t thinking about it when he frantically ends the call and hurls Ludwig’s phone back across the kitchen. It hits the refrigerator with a cringe-inducing thud, loud and seeming to echo throughout the house.
Breathing heavily, Ludwig looks from his hand to his phone, then back again. There are little white slanted marks imprinted across the back of his injured hand. Physical evidence.
There’s a horrible knot in Jerma’s back when he moves, but he can easily ignore it when Ludwig looks like this. He knows he should be angry and scared out of his mind. That’s a rational reaction. But Ludwig is in pain and it’s all Jerma’s fault and that’s suddenly the only thing that matters again. Jerma winces as he sits up and shuffles closer to Ludwig, reaching out for his hand. “Let me see.”
Ludwig cautiously offers his hand, tears welling in his eyes. “Sorry,” he mumbles.
“No, it’s—don’t be. Not right now.” Blood is smeared across Ludwig’s knuckles and there’s a strip of skin sliced open a little wider from one of Jerma’s fingernails. “Oh, honey, your hand, I—oh my God. Come on, let me fix it.”
Ludwig stares at him. “You aren’t, like… mad at me?”
“I will be. Probably. Later. You’re more important. There’s stuff in the medicine cabinet; let’s go.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Jerma says, maintaining a light, careful tone as he puts Neosporin on Ludwig’s cuts. “Why don’t we just forget about everything that happened today?”
“Everything? You want me to forget everything?”
“Yeah. Everything. I won’t punish you for any of it and you won’t bring any of it up again and we’ll go back to normal.”
“Look, I don’t wanna fight again, ‘cause I’m, like, really tired and everything hurts, but I don’t know if you know how hard that’s gonna be for me. For me personally. I totally get why people do heroin now.”
“Please don’t start doing heroin,” Jerma says, his voice losing its carefulness and giving way to exhaustion. “Don’t do drugs. Not hard drugs.”
“Can I do other kinds of drugs?”
“Not until you’re eighteen.” Jerma steps to the side and tries to locate some kind of bandage in the medicine cabinet that’ll stick to Ludwig’s hand in such an awkward place. “Or twenty-one; I don’t know what the legal age is anymore.”
Ludwig snorts. “That makes sense.”
“Lud, please,” Jerma says, briefly resting his forehead against the bathroom wall. “I’m asking you, please, please, please just let it go. I just wanna go on like we have been. Stop inventing sh*t. Stop accusing me of sh*t. I miss you, I just want—I want us to be us.”
“Asking me to forget every single thing that happened today is gonna be pretty hard, Dad,” Ludwig says loftily, kicking one of his heels back and forth over the floor as he balances against the edge of the sink. “I have some demands.”
Jerma lifts his head, looking weary. “Demands? What demands?”
“I want new headphones, like you promised. And a new phone, obviously, ‘cause you definitely owe me. I want my curfew to be one-thirty in the morning. And some new clothes, ‘cause some of my friends are making fun of me for always wearing the same stuff over and over.”
“I… fine. I know I have to get you a phone. The headphones, fine, whatever. One-thirty is too late. Way too late. I’ll do twelve, but not any later than that. And only on the weekends. I want you home by eleven on weekdays; I’m not letting you get less than six hours of sleep at night.”
“Eleven-thirty on weekdays and twelve-thirty on weekends.”
“Fine. Deal. Good. That’s… that’s all fine. Lud, you have so many clothes.”
“Not enough!” Ludwig whines.
“Sweetheart, you have more clothes than you know what to do with.” The more sugary and gentle that Jerma is with it, the more likely it is that Ludwig will take his side. Jerma finds gauze and tape buried behind forgotten pill bottles. A lot of these are expired. He needs to clean. “I’ve spent about five-hundred dollars on clothes in the past year.”
“I’m a growing boy and I outgrow stuff fast. I just want, like, a couple things. Just a few. Dad, please? You owe me. Do you wanna see me cry again? Please, Dad?” Ludwig begs, pulling on Jerma’s sweater with his non-injured hand. “It won’t be that much. I swear. I promise. We’ll just spend an hour at the mall. It’ll be fun. C’mon, we’ll go out tomorrow, we can get coffee, it’ll be great.”
The persuasion seems to work in the exact opposite direction. How does that always happen? Jerma looks very hard at the gauze as he snips off a strip of it. “If I take you to the mall along with everything else, you’ll forget about everything from today? All of it?”
“Yeah, sure.” Ludwig watches Jerma wrap up his knuckles. “It’s not the end of the day yet, though.”
Jerma looks up, brow furrowed, stomach sinking. “It’s not—? What do you mean?”
“I can’t forget yet. Not until I get my stuff.” Ludwig runs his free hand up Jerma’s arm. “Can I ask you something?”
Jerma exhales between his teeth as he fumbles with the medical tape. “No, actually, you can’t. Sorry.”
“I was just wondering about something. Is something actually a crime if nobody sees it?”
“What? Yes. Yes, Lud, if you’re doing something illegal, it’s always a crime even if no one can see it. I hope you know what a concerning question that is.”
“Okay, but it’s always under ‘the eyes of the law’,” Ludwig says, using gratuitous air quotes. “If the eyes can’t see, then it’s kind of a gray area.”
“But they’re not physical eyes, they’re, the eyes are always there and they always see. Always. They’re never not seeing. A crime is a crime is a crime. Is a crime. So on. The law is always there. It doesn’t disappear if no one sees it.”
“I just think it’s different if no one outside of things has to be affected by it.”
“Okay.” Jerma replaces the medical supplies and shuts the cabinet door before taking Ludwig’s hands in his own, looking him in the eye. “Say you kill someone. You kill a living person. You take his life, you rip it away from him, you leave him as this, this disgusting, this mangled, bloody, dismembered corpse, then you hide the body out in the middle of the woods. No one knows you did it and no one is ever gonna find out.”
Ludwig nods. “Okay, I like where this is heading. Who was he? What did he do?”
“That’s not the point. I don’t know, he was, like, he was a real piece of sh*t. A real dickhe*d. Terabytes of child p*rn on his computer. He f*cked dogs. He deserved it.”
“So what’s bad about that? You kill this dog rapist, nobody knows it’s you, no one misses him, and he can’t rape dogs and jack off to kids anymore. It’s a win-win scenario.”
“No, no, the point is that it’s still a crime no matter what. Killing someone in cold blood, that’s murder, that’s a crime. It doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t know.”
“I think the point you actually made is that morality is subjective even under the eyes of the law. Which is kind of what I was getting at. Some stuff doesn’t and shouldn’t count.”
“Okay, no, that’s not it. That’s not what I mean,” Jerma says, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. “Look, here’s another example. Say you’re, uh, you’re closing up shop at, like, whatever restaurant you’re working at. The cameras can’t see you, so you don’t think it’s a big deal to take some money out of the register. That’s still a crime.”
“But I don’t get caught. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Lud, I thought we were over that phase,” Jerma says, his tone pleading as he squeezes Ludwig’s hands. “sh*t, sorry,” he adds with a wince as Ludwig hisses in pain. “Look, please listen to me. I know what you’re getting at and yes, it’s still a crime. Yes, it’s still wrong. Legally and morally. I can’t believe you’re even trying to think about it.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Jerma stresses, folding his fingers with Ludwig’s, keeping a firm grip on his healthy hand. “You have no idea the kind of sh*t that you’re playing with. And punishing me for it—threatening me and insulting me and putting your hands on me even when I tell you no—you can’t keep doing that. Everything I do is because I want you to be safe and I want what’s best for you.”
“I still just wish you would admit it,” Ludwig mumbles.
Jerma sighs and inclines his head, pressing his mouth against Ludwig’s fingers and lingering there. “Lud, even if I wanted to, even if I was—if I was really that sick, if I was that mentally ill, what does it matter? When someone’s sick, it’s their responsibility not to get other people sick. If I wanted to, which I don’t, it wouldn’t change anything, because I wouldn’t let myself do anything. It’s like an impasse.”
“Were my grandma and grandpa sick?”
“That’s not… that’s completely different. That’s not fair.”
“Why? Why is it different? You told me there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Isn’t inbreeding way more f*cked up than just having sex for pleasure?”
“They were cousins, Ludwig. Cousins. Not—they weren’t—you know why it’s different.”
“So if we were cousins, you’d have sex with me?”
“No! Oh my God, can we stop fighting about this? Can we just stop talking about it? I’m begging you, please, I want to forget every single bit of it. Every single bit. Please, if you love me. I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’ll buy you headphones, I’ll get you a new phone, I’ll buy you clothes, it’s done, it’s a promise, I’ll do it. I’ll get you whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?”
“Within reason.”
“Within reason,” Ludwig reaffirms with a nod. “You better remember that.”
“I will. I promise.” Jerma nuzzled Ludwig’s hand like a puppy. “I know I said no earlier, but, uh, if you wanna order something for dinner, you can.”
It’s like everything is back to normal. Ludwig tucks himself into Jerma’s side, head resting against him, fingers splayed on his thigh, so warm and safe and stable. Jerma can ignore all the other sticky, horrible, unsavory bullsh*t they’ve been forced to endure lately. They’ve forgotten about it. None of that matters now. As the TV flickers in front of them, the familiarity is enough to lull Jerma into a sense of pillow-softness where he couldn’t fathom being happier than this.
And then Ludwig’s hand moves.
It’s really subtle. Subtle enough that Jerma doesn’t think anything of it at first. Just a readjustment, probably. Jerma’s sensibilities are so dulled that he doesn’t hear any warnings go off in his head until Ludwig’s hand is touching the crook of his hip.
Jerma doesn’t say anything. He startles a little, flushing, but he assumes that it’s just Ludwig misjudging the distance and where he wants to go. Jerma ignores it. It’s just instinct forcing him to notice the movement at all.
But then Ludwig’s hand covers his crotch and things become a lot more difficult to ignore than before.
“Lud—?”
“Shh,” Ludwig says, quiet and sharp as he rubs his palm over Jerma through his pajama pants, dropping a kiss on his neck.
The full-body shudder that it draws out of him is what scares Jerma more than anything. “What the f*ck are you doing?” His trembling fingers yank Ludwig’s hand away as he scrambles away from him, clutching at the couch for a semblance of stability. “Ludwig, I swear to God, touch me again and you’re not going anywhere tomorrow.”
“Come on, drop the act already, Jesus Christ.” Ludwig’s voice drips with impatience and bitterness as he crawls forward. He slips between Jerma’s legs like he was made for it, slotting their thighs together. His breath shaking, his heart pounding, Jerma is acutely aware that his dick has taken definitive interest in this current passage of events and it twitches with the slightest amount of pressure. Pleading with a God he’s always been undecided about the existence of isn’t doing him much good.
“You dirty old man,” Ludwig murmurs, closing the gap between them and kissing Jerma with an open mouth.
Jerma knows he should be pushing Ludwig away and scolding him and sending him to his room and making immediate arrangements to get him psychological help, but Jerma doesn’t do that. Jerma can’t do that. Jerma is stuck and Ludwig is licking at him, running his tongue along Jerma’s teeth, feeling out the curves of his mouth. The rush is so horrifyingly degenerative and twisted and wrong that Jerma feels something like a fever light his skin up. He thinks it’s glowing.
It’s not that he’s giving in. It’s that he doesn’t have a choice. Jerma makes a whiny, desperate sound against Ludwig’s mouth, fingers curling tightly in Ludwig’s shirt, rucking it up entirely by accident. He can feel Ludwig’s dick against his thigh and it’s thick and hard and the voice screaming at Jerma That’s your son, you sick f*ck inside his head is getting fainter and fainter, replaced with an animal want.
The kiss breaks and their breath mingles together, too warm and too heavy from reddened, parted lips. Ludwig pushes his hand between their bodies and works it under the waistband of Jerma’s pajamas, wrapping his fingers around Jerma’s co*ck and kissing the corner of his mouth. “You’re so f*cking hard for almost nothing,” Ludwig whispers, stroking his hand up and forcing a pathetic, pleading noise out of Jerma’s mouth. “I barely touched you. You want me so bad, don’t you?”
“No—Lud, stop,” Jerma forces out, squeezing his eyes shut and turning his head.
“I know you do. I know you wanna be inside me. You wanna take me upstairs to your big, lonely bed and put your hands on me like you did with that stupid c*nt you dragged home with you the other day.” Ludwig kisses the underside of Jerma’s jaw, his voice low and breathless. “That’s so f*cked, Dad. You really are sick. You’re absolutely f*cking disgusting. You know what’ll happen if you have sex with me, right? You’ll be a rapist. I can’t consent to that. I’m your son.” Ludwig jerks Jerma’s co*ck in a steady, rapid pace, ignoring his tiny little “No, no, no”s hidden behind curled-in fingers. Tears bead in Jerma’s eyes. It’s agony. It’s absolute torture.
“I don’t wanna hurt you,” Jerma manages, his voice torn to pieces, broken and wet. “Lud, please, I-I’m sorry, I can’t—ngh—” He sobs and suddenly feels the lightning shock of release, his hips stuttering against Ludwig’s hand as he spills on the inside of his pajamas like a teenager.
And then he opens his eyes.
He’s completely soaked in sweat. With a gasp, he jerks up, dragging a hand through his hair, his chest rising and falling. The TV is still on but the screen is unmoving, asking Jerma politely if he’d like to watch another episode.
Ludwig sleeps peacefully at his side, small and fragile and innocent, unmoving. Everything is dark and eerily quiet and the only real sound in the house, other than the buzz of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the heat humming under the floorboards, is Jerma’s inability to get a grip on himself.
His pajamas are sticky and getting colder with every second. He’s f*cking thirty-six; he should’ve graduated from wet dreams at least fifteen years ago. He needs to fix this. He can’t touch Ludwig or even think about him until this is fixed.
Going upstairs is the most humiliating experience he’s had in a very long time. He has to hold his pajamas in a certain way so they won’t seal to his skin. Guilt and terror lurking in his gut, Jerma locks himself in the bathroom and tears the offending fabric off, abandoning his shirt as well. His fingers scramble to turn the shower valve on and they slip enough times that Jerma gets terrifyingly angry at himself for a second.
The amount of abuse that Jerma can fling at himself with abandon is always immense. Because repeated exposure kind of lessens the impact, he has to be both creative and gratuitous when he really has to make it count. That means running the water ice-cold while being as insulting to his own character as he can. The chill nearly makes him choke on his own spit once the full force of it hits his body and he shivers and clutches at himself under the spray, staring at the floor of the bathtub.
Jerma remembers a long time ago, about eight years ago, when Ludwig had to undergo surgery to put his organs back where they needed to be. He’d had it once before when he was a baby, but there were complications with his lungs when he was in the third grade and he’d needed to be fixed again. Even though Ludwig hasn’t suffered since, his CDH has always kept Jerma at least a little bit on edge. At least in concept. He always thinks of the possibility that the hole is going to open back up.
It’s really not something that he wants to think about now.
Jerma sinks down and sits on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest. The CDH is not the point. The point is that Ludwig was only born with it because of his maternal grandparents. They were first cousins, so it was almost inevitable that something would’ve gone wrong at some point. There was nothing wrong with Ludwig’s mother, she was perfectly healthy, but Ludwig himself had ended up being burdened with the eventual consequences.
Jerma had explained all this to Ludwig when he was having his chest pains. “It was legal, it was okay. It wasn’t weird and you’re not weird. There’s nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing wrong with your family, either. Just because it’s not normal doesn’t mean it’s bad. Not being normal is great. Wouldn’t you rather have an interesting story to tell instead of being just like everybody else? You want a good story. Your story’s the best.”
And Jerma still mostly believes that. It hadn’t been a wise decision and he’d never openly encourage it, but, well, it was legal. And they were French. That was a whole other angle.
“It’s fine. You probably shouldn’t tell people about it, because they might not understand, not a lot of people understand, but it’s not weird. Think about it: they loved each other so much that they didn’t care about anything else or what anyone thought about them. I think that’s really beautiful. And if it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have gotten you. Your chest is just a little sick, that’s all. So don’t worry about it.”
Struck dumb, his skin numb and frozen under the assault of water, Jerma wonders if he normalized any of this for them. He wonders if every time they’ve kissed, Ludwig has gone back to the idea that what they have is beautiful and nothing else matters because they love each other. What they have, it’s supposed to be beautiful. Their… their incest. That’s what it is. That’s what is, that’s the name it must be given, and Jerma can’t avoid that word anymore, no matter how badly he wants to.
Incest. It’s such a horrible word. It’s like p*rn, just the word in and of itself, the heavy, lecherous, raunchy quality of it. It’s awful. It comes with inherent repulsion. Oh, how you have to cringe and hide.
Jerma wonders if he should kill himself.
The water is not getting any warmer. Good. Jerma wants to make sure his co*ck never gets hard ever again.
That’s an idea. Maybe he should cut his dick off. Or at least his balls. Maybe both; why not? He’ll disfigure and butcher his savage, dangerous, good-for-nothing genitalia, these organs that have done nothing but drain his head of morality and realism and ethical practices. He’d rather piss out of a mutilated slit for the rest of his life than risk hurting his son. If it’s a choice between never having sex again and feeling the urge to touch and defile Ludwig, he’d rather never have sex again.
Jerma is legitimately considering cutting his dick off with a kitchen knife. He can’t kill himself, of course he can’t (his mother would be furious with him), but he can cut his penis off.
But he can’t do that either. Even though he wants to believe he’s all for it, he’s all in, he knows he won’t f*cking do it. The pain, first off. The possibility of bleeding out. The even greater possibility that it’ll hurt even worse than he thought and he’ll stop halfway through to scream and cry and drop the knife and he’ll have a f*cked-up penis that can still get hard, but it’ll just look really embarrassing and maybe it’ll be at a weird angle for the rest of his life. That’s an unbearable thought.
Maybe he can take medication that’ll completely kill his sex drive. Jerma can start taking Adderall again and he’ll take enough that he won’t need to drink four cups of coffee a day and he’ll start cutting the grass with scissors and doing enough plastic surgery on his sunflowers that they’ll make the ones in gardening catalogs look like sh*t. Jerma will be so busy that he won’t have time to think about his ungodly impulses. That’s an idea. He can do that.
But he can’t do that. Jerma knows he can’t do that either. He doesn’t need more reasons to stay awake at night, agonizing over himself, agonizing over his life. Agonizing over what he’s let himself become.
Maybe he can start going to casinos again—no. No. Absolutely not. No further deliberation. Stuff it down.
Maybe he can just start drinking even more than he already does.
Jeremy, you’re a genius. Shuddering so hard it’s difficult to stand, Jerma finally shuts the water off and steps out of the tub, biting the tip of his thumb so his teeth won’t chatter. Alcohol. He just needs alcohol. It’s brilliant. It’s a great idea. It’ll make it harder to think, it’ll kill his sex drive, he won’t feel as nervous and scared and stressed out.
Jerma ties a towel around his waist and pulls another one over his shoulders, still shaking from top of his head to the tips of his toes. The distraction/temporary castration problem is solved, sure, but he’s really avoiding the full weight of the problem. He’s running away from the problem entirely. Which is most likely what led to it in the first place.
He stands and looks at himself in the mirror. He looks like a sopping, sad, elderly rat. As he watches the dripping melancholy that is his reflection, Jerma remembers one book he did manage to get through a few months ago solely because the font was big and it was only about a hundred pages long. It was a sappy, pretentious novelette about an old man who was sleeping with a prostitute who was way too young for him because he was on the verge of dying and he wanted to live a little before he croaked. The book itself was f*cking terrible, but one part sticks out to him: the scene where the old man was analyzing his reflection and saying that it didn’t look dead, but funeral. He mourned over his once-beautiful features as he asked himself, “sh*t, what can I do if you don’t love me?”
Jerma looks old. He feels old. He’s the funeral in the mirror. He can tell where he’s almost going gray, places where he already is. His hair is still limp and soaked and it makes his face look a lot older. He can see each individual wrinkle, as faint as they may be.
He is a dirty old man. He’s old and perverted and sick and his brain is falling apart. That has to be it. Jerma clings desperately to the idea of the midlife crisis, to the idea that this happened out of nowhere and he had no control over it. Surprise! You wanna f*ck your son! Cue the f*cking clown music! Burn the whole goddamn tent to the f*cking ground!
But it can’t have just happened out of nowhere. There’s no way it did. Blaire, in all her vapid, infuriating glory, was not what did Jerma in. He can’t think that, because he doesn’t want to think that. He will not let this girl have credit for singlehandedly ruining his life.
How long has it been so implicit? Jerma braces his hands on either side of the sink, letting his vision go out of focus so the funeral does as well. How long has he wanted this? How long has that possession, that desire, that need for closeness been perversion rather than adoration? Jerma has no f*cking idea where it all started. Sure, most of it hadn’t been realized before the events of the past few weeks, but there was something there.
Ludwig hasn’t always been like this, though. So aggressive and dominant and cruel and demanding. That’s not his son. Jerma did not raise his child this way. His Ludwig is bright and sweet and funny and charming and cute and loyal, always reaching out for Jerma’s hand to make sure he’s there. This Ludwig, this new one, this is different. This Ludwig that scolds him and shouts at him and looks actively disappointed in him. This Ludwig that manhandles him, that puts strong hands around his wrists, his body—
That’s it, Jerma suddenly realizes. He doesn’t want to f*ck his son after all. He doesn’t want to f*ck his little boy, he wants to f*ck this handsome, attractive, domineering young man who can easily pin him down and make Jerma feel so much smaller. He wants to f*ck this person that demands praise and respect. That makes more sense. That’s way more normal.
Jerma’s Ludwig, Ludwig Harrington, his darling sugar-cookie-flavored son, the boy who used to go to soccer every week and pulled Jerma away from grading papers to come play House and begged him to read books with all the funny voices, is not the in-between adult sleeping downstairs on the couch. Maybe Jerma has just been so naïve for so long in expecting Ludwig to taste like sugar cookies forever. Just for one day, he’d do absolutely anything to have that boy back, the boy who barely came up to Jerma’s chest, marker scribbles on his face and plastic glasses perched on his button nose and much-beloved matching Super Mario pajamas faded and white around the knees. Back when everything was perfect.
But Jerma will not get that boy back. He has an older boy, a different boy, a boy that was meant to replace the first. And this boy is made for him in a different way. Maybe he’s overthinking it.
God, what the f*ck is he saying? Of course that’s his boy. The in-between adult asleep on his couch is curled up in a shirt he stole from Jerma because it’s a worn-down kind of soft and it smells like him. The in-between adult is still so young, skin tender and eyes shiny. He still crammed himself into Jerma’s side while they were watching TV together and kissed him on the cheek and smiled when Jerma called him “sweetheart” and babbled about how hard he’d been practicing for some virtual tournament. That’s still his boy. It hasn’t ever not been his boy. Trying to separate them is an evil, evil thing to do.
Jerma wouldn’t love him like this if that wasn’t his son. This wouldn’t be so hard if that wasn’t his son. But he does, and it is. Jerma just doesn’t understand how things turned out this way.
That dream he’d had was so intense and so real. Terrifyingly real. Jerma has to look away from his reflection as he feels a blush creep up his neck. He feels the hands, he feels the mouth. He feels Ludwig’s spine under his fingers. He feels their sameness, their twin bodies, his smallness, his borderline feminine curves, the way that Ludwig is soft around the edges and his stomach is a source of insecurity for him. There’s pieces of them in each other that connect seamlessly.
There’s a part of him, a very, very deep, dark part of him, a part of him that lurks in the corner of a weepy, moldy basem*nt and squirms and breathes too heavy in a cage, that tells him he could do it. If he really wanted to. If Jerma wanted to, he could go downstairs and sweep Ludwig up in his arms and bring him up to the big, lonely bed. Shower him in attention. Make him feel loved. Not just loved, but adored. Pull his clothes off and kiss every inch of his body, ravish him. Pretend as though this was an act of devotion, ignore thought and reason and morality and human decency. Part of Jerma wants to entertain that. That part that he wants to cut off wants to entertain that.
And the knowledge that he could do that is the scariest thing he can fathom. Jerma knows that if he wanted to, if he tried to, Ludwig wouldn’t say no. Ludwig is impulsive. He’s impulsive and reckless and he lives for the thrill of testing his limits and seeking out a new taboo, just like every other sixteen-year-old. He can’t see four feet in front of his nose. There’s no way that even twenty-five is a real age to him and adulthood is this mystical fantasy where you don’t have rules or parents and homework and you get to do whatever you want. He can’t comprehend the reality of regret or trauma. He doesn’t know f*cking anything and if Jerma really, really wanted to, he could go f*ck Ludwig right now because he has that power.
He could exploit it.
Jerma needs to go to bed. He needs to be asleep for thirty years, thirty long years until his penis doesn’t work anymore and Ludwig is happily married to a smart, kind, loving, respectful woman who treats him well and cares about him and he has a few kids of his own and he’s wildly successful and he doesn’t need Jerma anymore. Thirty years is a long shot, but he’ll still take a handful of Advil PM and see how long he’ll be able to stay unconscious for.
There’s a soft knock at the door and Jerma squeaks, clutching at the towel around his waist. Swallowing glue in his throat, he pads over the tile and unlocks the door, pulling it open. “Hey,” he says, his voice tilting oddly.
“Hey.” Ludwig frowns at, most likely, the double-towel usage. He still sounds a little scratchy and drowsy, his eyes heavy and his pink lips pouting. His shirt—the shirt he’s borrowing, the soft red t-shirt that he often steals—is rolled up a few inches over his soft stomach. That one strip of skin is causing something like an emotional toll. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
“Okay.” Jerma’s eyes flicker from the hand that scratches at the strip of skin to Ludwig’s nap-flushed face. “Did you—do you need the bathroom?”
“No, I just saw the light on and I didn’t hear anything; I figured you were, like, talking to yourself in the mirror again.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Jerma half-laughs. “Yeah, I was, uh… he’s got a lot to say.”
“Who, you or Mirror Jeremy?”
“Both of us, I guess.” Jerma forcibly drags his gaze away from Ludwig’s stomach. “Do you think I look old?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“No, I’m serious, do I actually look old? Do I look like an old person?”
“I mean, I don’t know, I think you’re old, but not in the same way that an actual old person is. Where they’re falling apart and they sh*t themselves all the time and they need dentures. You’ve just always been old. You look fine, if that’s what you were actually asking. You worry too much.”
“Thanks.” Jerma reaches out for a moment to cradle Ludwig’s face, but stops himself, fingers curling back in. He can’t touch him now. Not at all. It’s heartbreaking and it’s going to be painful, but he needs to do whatever it takes to sabotage himself. “…I’m gonna go to bed too. I love you.”
“Love you too.” Ludwig tries to hug him, arms slipping around him, but Jerma stumbles back and clutches at the door for support. Ludwig stares, hands hovering awkwardly in the air. “Uh—you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine, I just, I, I think I slipped on something.” Jerma pulls his less-functional towel off his shoulders and hangs it clumsily on one of the wall hooks. “Wake me up tomorrow just, uh, whenever; we’ll go out then.” He edges past Ludwig and heads down the hall, feeling eyes bear into his back.
If only they could cause physical damage.
