Naïve to the Bone (lgbt)

time 03 | camera man for the weekend life

👍

song is soul removal (river phoenix) by mathew lee cothran

Saturday was a visitation day which meant Consuelo was ecstatic and Leo was fucking bummed.

Per custody orders, Theo and Zoe got to come over every other weekend. Nikolai didn't demand to see Leo, so he got to come and go as he pleased, meaning he hadn't been to his dad's house since Christmas four years prior.

Consuelo opened the blinds in Leo's room and beamed at her sleeping son, hands on her hips. When all her children were in the house, nothing could bring her down. He, to no shock, did not wake up. She rolled her eyes and leaned over to shake his shoulder. "Mijo — its nine already. They're gonna be here in an hour."

Leo stirred with a grunt. "An hour?" He said, meaning 'That's forever, why can't I keep sleeping?'

"Get up! If you're showered and downstairs by 9:30, JoJo can spend the night." Consuelo countered, glancing around his dirty room and pointedly ignoring the bong poorly hidden under a t-shirt. She was forever using JoJo as bait to get Leo to do things, and it was forever working.

"Showers are for losers." He replied under his breath, shielding his eyes from the sun before shooing her out of his room so she didn't have to see him get out of bed in his underwear. Not only was it embarrassing, but his knobby knees and thin legs would only serve as fuel for her to guilt him into eating more throughout the rest of the day. She closed the door on her way out, saying something about breakfast, and Leo threw off the blankets, sorting through the little piles of dirty clothes and half-done homework sprawled around his floor for a towel.

Finding one, he padded barefoot across the carpet to the bathroom just left of his bedroom door. A bedsheet was hung over the mirror so he wouldn't have to look at himself. That only lead to bad days, so he tried to avoid it as much as possible. The shower was quick and relatively painless. He found that if he shut his eyes when washing, he wouldn't have to acknowledge the old stretch marks on his thighs, the fading scars on his stomach, the ribcage like piano keys he was so ashamed of.

+

He was downstairs by 9:28.

His mother was beginning to fry bacon, meat bacon, downstairs for Theo who refused to eat vegan meat. The smell only made Leo's stomach upset.

"Oh, you're down." His mother said cheerily, peeling apart the last two slices of bacon before lying them into the pan with a sizzle. "Will you turn on the faucet for me?"

He nodded wordlessly and moved to turn on the sink. Gross, he thought as he poured a bit of soap into her hands at her request. Meat is gross.

She dried her hands off on a kitchen towel, gazing at Leo with her I'm-seeing-my-kids-today smile that only surfaced on weekends. "Will you pull out the tofu? I'm gonna make you vegan huevos con papas."

He, again, nodded wordlessly before heading towards the fridge. He helped her warm tortillas on the comal, but not with as much enthusiasm as he did as a kid. This time, it wasn't because of his eating disorder, but because of his mother.

Leo knew that his mother loved him. They had a wonderful relationship, actually, but he couldn't help but be a little jealous. She always got so excited when Theo and Zoe came over. Watching her dance around the kitchen, nearly buzzing with excitement, humming as she spiced and separated chunks of tofu and potato with a wooden spatula, his chest was filled with that ugly dejected feeling he tried so hard to fight off. She doesn't get like that for me. The part of his brain that wasn't a gremlin tried to remind him that she sees him all the time, that she loves him just as much as she does the other kids, that she's just excited because she's not seen Theo and Zoe in two weeks, and he knew that, but that stupid insecure gremlin never seemed to want to listen.