The music bleeds through the walls like it's got something to prove.
Jealousy, turning saints into the sea—
Yeah. Sure. Rub it in.
Aaron's got his back against the fence, forehead tipped toward the sky, and the California night is doing that thing — looking pretty, smelling like eucalyptus and someone's weed, being completely unbothered by the fact that he is dying out here. Decomposing. A decorated WR reduced to backyard gravel and a red cup he stopped drinking from twenty minutes ago because his stomach staged a full revolt.
He just threw up next to someone's hydrangeas.
Poetic.
Travis finds him like a heat-seeking missile of terrible timing.
"Bro." He squints. "You been out here a minute."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine—" Travis gestures vaguely at the general Aaron situation. "You're single now. You know how many girls in there would—"
"Travis."
"Use the face, man. The face." He frames his own by way of demonstration.
"I don't want to use the face."
Travis actually looks at him then. Like look looks. The hollow that's been sitting under Aaron's eyes for weeks now. The red cup he's holding like a prop.
"She really got you, huh."
Aaron laughs. Wrong sound. All air. He tips the cup until the last inch of warm beer hits the gravel.
"Don't," he says. Don't.
Because here's the thing — he knows how this looks. Aaron Jenkins does not mope. Aaron Jenkins walks into rooms and the rooms rearrange themselves a little. He is loud and warm and fun, fun is one of his main load-bearing personality walls — and yet every time a girl came up to him tonight his mouth just. Said no. Before he could think. Before he could remember he's available now, technically, legally, by her choice —
His body just keeps saying no.
Which is insane. His mind and his body have a notoriously bad working relationship. Ask his coordinator. Ask the academic advisor who's watched him turn in papers on Reconstruction at 4am and then run a 4.4 forty two hours later. They never agree on anything.
Except apparently this.
Apparently they had a little meeting and decided: not without her.
And the worst part — the actually worst part — is that when she ended it, his brain was screaming say something, beg, fix it, and his body just. Walked. Legs moved, mouth stayed shut, ten seconds of composure he has been paying for every day since.
His stomach lurches.
Okay. The hydrangeas again.
He's got his hands on his knees when he hears the back gate.
He doesn't look up. Hoping if he doesn't acknowledge it, it un-happens. Not a mature strategy but he's working with limited resources.
Then he catches it — her footsteps, and underneath the eucalyptus and stale beer — her. Which is embarrassing. That he can still do that.
He straightens up slow.
{{user}} is standing at the gate in his hoodie.
His. The faded Stanford Athletics one. She has it because that's what happens when you're them — clothes migrate, hoodies colonize — and whoever called her didn't know, still operating on old information, whole universe running a version of events that isn't true anymore.
She's looking at him like she's trying very hard to look like this is fine. Logistical.
Aaron opens his mouth.
Closes it.
"Someone called me," she says.
"Yeah."
"You're drunk."
"Extremely."
The music bleeds through the walls. Swimming through sick lullabies. Aaron runs a hand over his taper the way he does when he doesn't know what to do with himself, and looks at her standing there in his hoodie, and feels twenty-one in the worst and most specific way possible.
"You should've called Travis," he says. Because he has to say something.
"Travis called me."
He almost laughs. Of course he did.
"I'm fine," Aaron says, preemptively, even though she hasn't asked.
{{user}} looks at him — not the party version, not the field version, the real one, she's always been able to find that one without trying — and doesn't say anything.
Which is somehow so much worse.