Catharsis || Lashton AU - boyxboy

27. fābù

"I think I saw you in my sleep, lover,
I think I saw you in my dreams
You were stitching up the seams
On every mangled promise that your body couldn't keep.
I think I saw you in my sleep."
La Dispute, Such Small Hands

l.h.

The following days after Miles lashed out at me outside of Joe's on the other side of town, I found myself avoiding my shop like the Plague. I decided I didn't want to see Sully or Noël or Cassie or, God forbid, the sexually ambiguous lovesick eighteen-year-old boy who shall not be named. All in all, I didn't want to see anyone that I knew, because I was tired of the lying, and the going behind my back, and the manipulating and the pushing me around and the total lack of respect and regard for me.

I was tired of everyone acting selfishly. I was tired of being mistreated and being expected to take it. That wasn't my job, and they're not in the place to appoint me team ragdoll.

When I got home, I ran into Ms. Sawyer in the lobby where she was getting her mail. She was an old, petite woman with short gray hair and brown eyes who walked with a cane, and she had crow's feet and laugh lines and it was a pleasant thing to see. To know that such an old woman had wrinkled as a result of her happiness. I hoped that it would be the same in my case when I got old. Mostly, I just hoped that I would get old one day.

When I walked up next to her at the mailboxes to retrieve my own mail, she turned slightly towards me and smiled widely. "Luke, Dear!" she exclaimed, smiling with her eyes squinted that had resulted in the crow's feet by her eyes. "Oh, I haven't seen you in ages! How are you? How is...oh, what's her name? Casey?" she asked, and I stood there smiling back at her, not actually bothering with my mail because I didn't have the key, and I probably didn't have any mail, anyway. "Cassie! Oh yes, how are you two these days?"

I decided I wouldn't tell her that we're not together anymore, because Ms. Sawyer had gotten quite old, and she always loved Cassie. She didn't need to know that Cassie had betrayed me, had waited until I trusted her enough to turn my back and then twisted her knife into my spine, crippling me and everything that I was. She could continue to believe that we were fine, that Cassie was the love of my life, that I would marry her and we would name our child after her. If that's what Ms. Sawyer would like to believe, then I'll let her believe that, because there was nothing wrong with it. I didn't need to drag an elderly woman down with me. Surely that'd be a new level of low.

"We're fine, yeah." I said, smiling sadly, wishing I could just go back to my apartment, to confront the past that I had left behind there just a few hours prior because it could no longer be the past. Because I fucked up and I tried to make someone else save me. I could never just save myself. "She's visiting with her parents down in Virginia." I lie, lie because she wasn't visiting her parents, because I hadn't seen her in days, lie because I didn't even know where Cassie was from, where her parents lived. Lie after lie after lie. It'd become almost second nature.

"That's great news, dear!" Ms. Sawyer said, smiling brightly still, and it put me at peace to know that it really made her happy but it also burned like daggers in my soul that she couldn't see past it all. I didn't expect her to, because it wasn't her job and she had no reason to believe I would lie to her about it, and she was just a kind, decrepit old woman who truly wished the best for me. She didn't need to know that I didn't actually love Cassie, that I didn't really care where she was or what she was doing right now, or that I had allowed myself to become obsessed with an eighteen-year-old boy who had a knack for tearing me down. She didn't need to know that. "Would you come by for tea tomorrow? I'd love to hear all about it!"

The first time I had tea with Ms. Sawyer, I had just moved into the apartment and I was still a mess from my fathers death. I spent the day venting to her about it all, and I learned that her husband of 62 years had passed just weeks before I arrived. She had no children, no one to care for her or to talk to her or to be there for her. She spent the rest of the time we were together telling me about her husband, and it was the first time I'd seen that sparkle in someone's eye since my mother had died. She loved him. She loved him and I remember wishing someone would just love me that same way, and when I met Cassie, I thought I'd met that person but there was never the spark or the click, there was never that sparkle in my eye or that spark in my soul. Cassie loved me and all I ever did was let her down.