It wasn’t glamorous.
The Boston rental market being what it was, Jax’s apartment consisted of a single room large enough for a bed, a desk, a couch, and a kitchenette—no baking in his future—with a bathroom the size of his closet in Hobbes’s place. The hardwood floors were scuffed and uneven, and the double-hung windows were drafty and yet somehow still difficult to pry open. He definitely didn’t have room for his keyboard. But he had a place for his laptop and a place to sleep, so he couldn’t complain. It was only temporary.
He repeated that to himself as he dragged his suitcase out from under the bed and hung his clothes in the closet. He was an adult now. Adults didn’t live out of suitcases for months at a time.
Adults did, however, consider hanging an extra blanket in front of a window because the window was drafty. Fuck Boston winters. Why couldn’t Jax have decided to defend in summer or fall?
In any case, now that his mother was gone, he didn’t have an excuse to eat out all the time, so he needed something to fill his cupboards and the mini fridge. There was a corner store a handful of blocks away. He could get the basics there and worry about fancier things when he was settled.
It wasn’t currently snowing, which was as good as he could hope for in terms of weather, so he put his gear on and went outside.
His neighborhood wasn’t far from campus, in Fenway-Kenmore. There were maybe too many bars per capita in the neighborhood, but maybe that was a good thing. They could be home away from home when Jax got nostalgic for the Rock. One of them probably even had decent live music. He was within walking distance of a Target, or at least he would’ve been if it weren’t twenty below.
He took his time at the store, not eager to go back out in the cold. Bread, milk, eggs, peanut butter, some instant ramen that he added to his basket with a wry twist of a smile. He hardly felt like a college student anymore. Rice, deli meat, carrots, onions, tea. That was probably all he could carry without risking the bags breaking and spilling his groceries all over the icy sidewalk, so he paid, tucked the ends of his scarf back inside his coat, and went home.
At just past four, the sky was already a deep, bruised blue. Soon it would be fully dark and Jax would be alone in his sad apartment, eating instant noodles.
But it was fine. It wasnecessary. In a few months, he could go back to London and be with Sam and George and Alice and Hobbes…. At least he’d made up with his mother.
He wondered how Ari was faring with his.
It had been a month since their disastrous dinner, and Jax felt no closer to getting past it. What if he’d taken his pill that morning? What if he’d called off the dinner when he realized he hadn’t? What if he’d taken Ari’s warnings more seriously? What if they’d waited longer for Jax to meet them and they’d met on more neutral territory, like a restaurant, somewhere they’d have had to stay civil?
There was no excuse for how Nasreen treated him. He wasn’t denying that. But Jax could have put up with it for Ari, if Ari hadn’t left him high and dry to deal with it.
If Jax’s own mistakes hadn’t made him overreact to her petty insults and lash out to hurt her and Ari in turn.
If they were still together, Jax would be… what? Hurrying home to do the same thing he was doing now, probably, except with the promise of a phone call with Ari to keep him warm.
Thinking of that led to remembering the strange moment he felt when the plane touched down in Boston, when he turned his phone on to find multiple missed calls from Ari. But he hadn’t left a message, and he hadn’t texted…. Jax had concluded that it must not have been important. That had been days ago, and Jax hadn’t heard anything since.
A car slushed past down the street, kicking dirty snow onto the sidewalk. Jax grimaced and shifted to walk closer to the buildings. Next time he decided to get a PhD, he was applying to the University of Hawaii.
The wind kicked up when he rounded the final corner back to his building, and he grimaced and buried his face deeper into his scarf. Definitely Hawaii. Maybe even Australia. Except everything killed you in Australia. That was no good.
He was deliberating the relative merits of New Zealand when he came within a block of his apartment… and froze.
There was a familiar figure standing on the step, flyaway hair stuffed under a knitted hat, one hand pressed to the side of his head.
Somewhere in the depths of Jax’s multiple winter layers, his phone rang.
He dropped one of the grocery bags.
The sound of a full aluminum can hitting the pavement must have reached Ari, because he looked over, his cheeks red from the wind, the color just visible in the light from the streetlamp.
It probably wasn’t cold enough that Jax had started hallucinating. Numbly, he bent to pick up his grocery bag and walked the rest of the way to the door.
Ari still had his phone to his ear, but when Jax grew close enough that he could hear the phone ringing, he blinked and pulled it away.
What the hell did Jax even say?What are you doing hereseemed like the obvious choice, but it was also kind of confrontational. Jax didn’t want to fight. The sight of Ari filled him with a bone-deep longing. He just wanted to erase the past month from his life and go back to how things were.
“I had to see you,” Ari said before Jax could ask the question. “I’m sorry, I know it’s… creepy.”
Laughter bubbled out of Jax in a sharp bark. “Maybe a little. But I don’t mind.”
Ari smiled slightly. “Good.” His eyes flicked about as he attempted to take in all of Jax. Jax was doing the same. He wanted to take in every inch of him too.
“We should go inside,” Jax finally managed, and he unlocked his door and brought Ari upstairs.
