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In Robby’s room, there is a tall, mahogany dresser with nine drawers that are stuffed to full with old college sweatshirts, scrubs, neatly folded pants, socks. The accumulation of a life. Hospital fundraiser t-shirts, workout clothes he rarely wears.
The top drawer, though, is only half-full. Stray t-shirts in the wrong size, a pair of sweatpants with JOHNS HOPKINS printed up the side. Big, thick socks and thin nylon ones, meant for a prosthetic.
The tenth drawer is Jack’s.
Jack had never asked for it, but he can remember the first time Robby waved a hand in its direction with a dismissive, mumbled, I’ve got your stuff.
When he’d pulled open the drawer and found it stocked not only with the random items he’d left at Robby’s over the years, but also things that Robby had clearly bought for him—
Well, it’s hard to say exactly what that had felt like. The emotions had surged suddenly, overwhelming for an instant, before receding back into being so distant that he could hardly feel a thing. His therapist has called it the intellectualization of his feelings. Jack calls it being an avoidant asshole.
He’d looked over his shoulder at Robby and swallowed the first three things he wanted to say.
What am I supposed to do with this?
Tell me to stay and I’ll stay.
Jesus Christ, Robby, what are we doing to each other?
Instead, he’d settled for a quiet thank you that Robby acknowledged only by nodding at the floor. He’d grabbed the sweatpants off the top of the small pile and shuffled to the bathroom, where he’d stared at his own reflection until it started to look like someone else.
The two of them have been like this for years. Aware of the connection between them, circling around it like two hawks over downed prey. It is painful, an instinct denied.
“Are you going to stay over?” Robby asks from across the room. He’s bent over, half muffled as he tries to get something out from under the bed.
“Since when do you need to know in advance?” Jack asks distractedly, staring at the brass knobs of the tenth drawer.
Robby’s head pops back up over the far side of the mattress. “It’s not that,” he says. “Just wanted to see if you wanted to try this new breakfast spot in the morning. The eggs benedict is supposed to be unbelievable. Well, if you believe Williams, which— frankly, you should.”
“Williams… from the PACU?”
Robby nods. “Yeah, he’s— what are you looking at?”
There was a time when Jack thought it was him that was avoiding getting too close. Slipping out of Robby’s bed before dawn, pushing away the brief moments when it felt as though they were close to the edge of admission.
But then— Robby all but sprinting from his bed after they’d slept together. Not even laying down to catch his breath, just disappearing. After the door had slammed shut, Jack had slid down into the sheets and covered his face with his arm, then hadn’t moved again for an hour.
“Nothing,” Jack tells him.
Robby makes a small, unsatisfied noise. “Okay… you alright, man?
After Robby left him naked and alone, still slick with sweat that smelled of them both, he’d pushed forward. The same way he always has, same way he probably always will. Taken a shower, packed up the last of his things. Refused to speak to Robby for the next two months. It had looked like moving on, even if it hadn’t felt like it.
So many things can look like moving on, even when they are distinctly something else.
It has been nearly three years since Anna died and Jack has thrown himself into a thousand things that had, at one time, looked like grieving but felt like dying. Only recently has he felt himself clawing to the other side; still raw, but feeling the telltale itch of healing.
For a while, Robby had kept his distance. Jack had essentially demanded it, then orchestrated it himself by moving to the night shift and all but avoiding him. Robby had always been sensitive to changes in others’ behavior; he had slipped from Jack’s periphery without complaint, given him space.
“No,” Jack says slowly.
Robby blinks, comes around the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Robby,” Jack says, letting his gaze slide to meet Robby’s. Robby freezes, hands half-extended toward him. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“This. You just— you just assumed I’m sleeping in your bed, that we’re going to breakfast together. Robby, what is this?” Jack exhales sharply, chest tight. “What are we doing, man?”
Robby’s shoulders drag slowly upward, a helpless shrug. “What do you want me to say?”
Jack doesn’t answer.
They’ve been sleeping together for three months. Not the strange, distant sharing of a mattress that has defined them for so long. But something realer, something rawer. Tender and grief-stricken and steady. Jack gasps his name in the dark and Robby holds him, touches him, moves him.
“We’re— we’re the same as we’ve always been, Jack.”
Jack bites back how badly that hurts by turning his gaze toward the closed drawer. His belongings, the things he needs. All of the things that ought to have stayed buried, that kept clawing their way out of the dirt, refusing to die. His entire history with Robby, summed up in a single smattering of objects, like a blood stain on the wall being used to determine the circumstances of a death. There is meaning in the inanimate, if only one looked close enough.
“Why can’t we be honest with each other?” he asks softly.
Robby blinks, gaze dropping. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Jack, don’t—”
“You’re a fucking coward,” Jack says tightly. “And so am I.”
Robby’s shoulders pull back and he glares at Jack. “You want to be honest now? After everything we’ve— we’ve done?” he asks, voice low. “Jack, it’ll do more harm than good.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
He doesn’t. He truly doesn’t care what carnage will follow this particular explosion. How many has he had to live through? What’s one more?
Jack reaches for the detonation button. “I don’t want to hide from this anymore. I’m exhausted, Robby.”
“Please,” Robby gasps, stepping forward with one hand out, like he’s going to try to physically stop Jack from speaking any further. “Please, don’t—”
“I have to! We can’t live like this!” Jack says, arms spreading. “We’re both miserable because we can’t just admit that this is something we— we want.”
“I don’t.” Robby shakes his head, freezing. “I don’t want it.”
Jack scoffs, rips open the drawer beside him. “This is what not wanting it looks like?”
“That—” Robby says, voice tightening toward panic. “You’ve been through a lot. And we’re— we’re close, we’re friends.”
“How many friends have a goddamn drawer in your house, Robby?”
Robby’s eyes are wide and his fingers flex at his sides. “It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that with us.”
“Then what is it like?”
“Jesus, what is this?” Robby laughs, breathy and joyless. “We care about each other—”
“Robby, for Christ’s sake,” Jack cuts across him, exasperated as he tugs a hand through his hair. “I’ve been in love with you for a fucking decade.”
Robby’s eyes widen and his breath grows shallow. “Jack, don’t,” he breathes.
“Why? It’s not like you don’t know.” Jack exhales sharply, feeling his face crumple. “You know, Robby. You’ve known this whole time and all you ever do is leave!”
“That’s not true. You— you leave.” Robby steps back, straightens into a fresh glare. “You don’t want me, man. You never have.”
Jack stares at him. “How can you possibly think that? After all this time, after everything I’ve said, everything we’ve done, Robby, come on—”
“Because you married someone else!” Robby shouts, his composure finally shattering.
Jack’s heart eviscerates itself, a shredded mass of blood and need in his chest. He shakes his head, a sob biting at his throat. “And you were in the way,” Jack says, voice breaking, “the whole fucking time.”
“Fuck you, Jack.” Robby recoils, looks away.
“I know. I know, but Robby— what was I supposed to do? I loved her. And you— you and I, we were…”
“We were what, exactly?” Robby snaps. “Not good enough, obviously. Not for you.”
Jack’s heart pounds. “You kept telling me it was nothing! You didn’t— you couldn’t even tell me that it was more than just sharing a bed, Robby. For God’s sake, I was so goddamn lonely—”
“Don’t say that to me,” Robby says, voice sharp. “Do not act like you didn’t choose this.”
“We both chose this!” Jack points between them. “Can you honestly tell me that you were ever going to— to look me in the eye and tell me what I told you? That night?”
Robby lifts his brows, giving Jack a dangerously incredulous look. “Your wedding night?” he asks, low. “You expected me to tell you I was— what— choosing you, 12 hours before you chose somebody else?”
Jack closes his eyes, struck between the ribs by that. “You were never going to say it, Robby,” he murmurs. “So I told you then, and I’m telling you now—”
“Stop.”
“I loved Anna. And I love you.”
Simple enough, though those seven words contain an entire world within them. Jack’s entire world, narrowed down into just the parts that have truly mattered. Two truths, sitting opposite one another with the gulf of him between. He had spent so long trying to push one or the other out, to rebuild around just one.
He loved Anna. He loved Robby. Through the simple act of voicing it, Jack feels the knots working themselves open. He sighs with it, the relief of a clenched muscle relaxing. Of a simple fact, stated with surgical precision.
But truth is rarely simple. It is a thousand things, made in the image of its beholder. Blood splatter, painted from his body. The visceral mess of it is strangely beautiful when he stands back from it, but he has had to bleed for it. It does not feel beautiful; it feels like dying.
Robby is looking at him as if he’s the one bleeding and Jack is the one who stabbed him in the gut. “That’s not true,” he repeats weakly, looking away.
“It is.” Jack’s teeth grind together. “And I have felt guilty about it for so long that it— it ruined me. It is still ruining me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was never the husband that I wanted to be.”
To either of you, Jack doesn’t say. But his chest throbs with it, as pained as he’d have been if he had said it out loud. Robby stares at him, dark and wounded. Neither of them moves, neither of them even breathes.
“You were a good husband,” Robby says, voice thin. “Anna—”
“It’s not that simple. I was yours the entire time I was hers.”
“But we never…” Robby’s eyes, flicking quickly from side to side, are cloudy with emotion. “It was just sleep. It was just—”
“Fuck, Robby, it’s never been just anything!”
“You’re right,” Robby snaps, hard and fast. “It’s fucking nothing.”
Jack stares at him, certain he’s never been in this much agony. Not when he lost his leg, not when he was learning how to walk again, not even when Anna died. Because Anna was just gone — she wasn’t looking him in the face and choosing to leave.
Robby softens, looks away as he tries to blink back his emotion. He doesn't mean it, but it hurts like truth all the same.
“No, it isn’t,” Jack says, voice small. “And you know it.”
Robby’s gaze is unreadable. “Look, I’m never going to be that guy, man. You were right to choose Anna, alright? You were right about everything.”
“That’s not— Robby—”
“Please, Jack. Just— just leave it, okay?”
The room is deathly silent as they look at each other. Neither of them makes any move toward the other, though the desire to is palpable between them. Jack’s fingers twitch, his shoulders spasm.
Jack will not leave him.
That’s the truth, in all its bloody and broken and excruciating glory. He will stay, he will crawl into bed with Robby whenever he's given half a chance. Hell, he'll stay tonight, if Robby lets him.
“I can’t give you what you’re asking for,” Robby says softly.
“I’m not asking for anything.” Jack looks one last time at the drawer, open now. His belongings inside it. “I just want you to tell me— tell me you feel it, too.”
Robby stares at him for a long moment. Then, in a barely audible exhale: “I do.”
It will never be more than this. Jack is, all at once, certain of that much. But it can be enough. It has to be enough.
He moves toward the drawer, pulls out the shorts he likes to sleep in.
"Jack, I'm—"
"Don't," Jack murmurs without looking at him. He closes the drawer, watching his own hands as they do it. "I'll stay."