"Troye, what did he do to you baby?"
Jacob can feel Troye tense beside him from where they're cuddling on the couch, a lazy Sunday full of 80's movies and salty snacks.
"Can we please not talk about this?"
"I promise you can tr-"
"I really don't want to talk about this, Jake," he says more firmly.
"Will you at least tell me why you don't want to talk about it?"
He can feel Troye shaking. He can feel Troye's body breaking beneath his skin, can see his jaw moving as he chews the words 'no,' and 'stop,' and 'it's okay,' into silences. Then, he is getting up.
"What're you doing?" Jacob asks worriedly. He watches Troye slip his shoes on. He's only in a pair of shorts and a white, stained shirt, and Jacob bites his lip so, so worried, "W-where are you going?" Troye has never just- left. He never leaves. Jacob doesn't know where he would go. He can feel his heart pressing against his ribs. He can feel himself forgetting how to breathe.
"Troye, babe," he says softly, trying not to sound like he is pleading, "it's okay. You don't have to tell me, just come sit down."
Troye's hand grips the doorknob, knuckles turning white under the heavy grasp.
"I'm used, Jacob," he says bitterly, "I'm used, and disgusting, and a just another hand-me-down. I'm just fucking used."
Jacob can't move. He knows he's trying to, he knows he can feel himself trying to get up and run after Troye to see if he's okay, to see where he is going, but his body won't fucking move, it won't react. The hurt Jacob is feeling is like when you wake up from a dream, and realise it isn't reality. Except, instead it isn't a dream he is waking up from, it's a nightmare. A beautifully, decomposing, nightmare that is reality. And he is waking up with tears pooling in his eyes, and sweat slicking his forehead, and the nightmare is just a little too real.
He texts Caspar, "do you feel like skating?"
"hell ya, meet you there in twenty"
Before Jacob leaves, he sets a note on the kitchen counter.
"the word 'beautiful' has been used to describe things billions upon billions of times, but that doesn't make the word any less beautiful.
and the same goes for you."
(Jacob gets home late. Troye still isn't home, but the note is gone.
Troye doesn't come back that night.
In the morning, when he does get back, neither of them talk about what happened.)
**
Jacob thinks that there are glimpses of resumption nestled somewhere between the thinness of Troye's skin, and the brittleness of his bones. Somewhere in the space between each cell, every synapse junction, and the gap between his les lèvres when he whispers how safe he feels with Jacob, is where all the renascence is forming, peaking out in the corners of his smile.
Jacob feels the constant sting of an ache in his neck, and the thing is, it is not even real. It is there because he has been craning his neck- squinting- trying to find Troye deep inside the shell of his body.
(They don't teach you how to love broken people in school. They don't teach you how much it rips out of you, not just you, but your soul. Emptying you one by fucking one.
Jacob remembers his grandpa telling him when he was beginning to drive: "You have to learn things for yourself, you can't always have people there yelling at you what to do. If you crash into a pond, you don't need people there telling you that you did just that, you'll figure it out on your own eventually."
