Chapter Text
He was probably mildly high the first time he'd been alone with Schlatt in any kind of real moonlight. They were alone on a balcony in some house that's really not too far away in the city, but he knows they would never go back there, either way, because it's also so distant that they might as well have gotten enough time to shed a layer of skin on the way out. So far away that he still never saw Schlatt as anything more than his baby-faced colleague who watched people more than talked to them — though that may be a lie.
"Was the steak decent?" he asks politely, crossing the threshold.
"Well, everyone already ate the whole fucking thing, didn't they?"
"Smartass," he snorts, sitting down on the chair next to Schlatt's. "I'm trying to make small talk here. You never gave me your review when I asked you."
Schlatt looks at him like he's acting like an idiot. "You don't have to make small talk, Ted. We already know each other.”
He can't argue against that. "We never really talked that much one-on-one, though," he tries anyway. "I mean, I really do want to learn about you, man. Might as well start with how you like your steak."
He doesn't know who turned the balcony lights off, or why Schlatt is sitting outside all by himself. What he does know is that he wishes they'd kept the light on so they'd both be sitting in the orange, fluorescent glow. A normal him and a normal Schlatt. Because now he briefly forgets his own body when this Schlatt, softly illuminated by the pale moonlight, drops his head and huffs out a quiet laugh, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. There are two moles on the nape of his neck.
"The steak was good," Schlatt says, looking back up at him. Looking like something out of a movie. "You make a fine cook, Ni-vision."
He rolls his eyes and scoffs, ignoring the sudden dryness in his throat. "My dad taught me all that," he says, not really knowing why he mentions it. "He raised me well, you know?"
"Yeah." Schlatt looks away into the distant, moonlit landscape. "I can tell."
Ted isn’t someone to think in absolutes, but at this point in his life, there are a few things that he knows are set in stone. He can never bring himself to enjoy his coffee black, Peach Pit has one of the best discographies in the last twenty years of music history, and Schlatt is a chronic complainer.
So it comes as a surprise, when he opens the door of his bedroom just to see the man lying on the Airbnb couch that he’d been grouching about for a week straight.
From Ted’s position by the door, he can only see the top of Schlatt’s head propped against the armrest. He’s lying on his side, his legs curled up to fit onto the couch as he scrolled at his phone. The dim lamp in the corner of the living room has painted his hair into a warm, syrupy shade, and Ted can only imagine how his face would look in this lighting.
It’s such a disorienting thought that he briefly forgets that it’s still pitch dark out.
“Hey,” he says.
If the way Ted breaks through the silence is like a rock being thrown carelessly into a calm pond, then Schlatt reacts to it as if someone had nuked his back porch.
Ted watches, startled, as Schlatt lurches up almost violently, his upper body snapping around to the sound of Ted’s voice. “Oh, fuck,” Ted mutters as Schlatt faces him, his shoulders heaving, eyes wide and— stunned?
He swallows and steps back.
“Sorry,” Ted says, taking another step as Schlatt continues to stare at him, pale and tense and not at all like how Ted was imagining. “I—”
A jolt of pain shoots down his thigh as he backs straight into the doorknob.
“Shit,” he curses at the same time as Schlatt looks away and mutters “Jesus fucking— ”
They both flinch when the sound of a phone clattering to the floor echoes loudly in the room.
“Sorry,” Ted says again, raising one hand placatingly while his other presses down at the sore spot on his leg. “I didn’t mean to jump you like that.”
For a few seconds, Schlatt doesn’t say anything, just rubs a hand over the lower half of his face as his eyes dart across the floor. Then he drops the hand, and Ted watches as his lips press into a thin, mean scowl.
“What the hell are you doing up?” Schlatt glares up at him before pushing himself into a fully sitting position, turning to reach for his phone that’d slid off the cushion.
“I just wanted to get some water,” Ted explains weakly, gesturing in the direction of the kitchen.
“Go get it then,” Schlatt says, bunching up the hand over his lap in a tight fist. He grumbles to himself as he picks up the phone, “Bumbling around like fucking Bambi.”
“I really didn’t mean to scare you,” Ted says, glancing between Schlatt and the dark hallway that leads outside the room. “Are you alrigh–”
“Are you gonna go get that fucking water or not, Ted?”
Ted takes the hint, dropping his eyes while he puts both hands up in surrender, and steps out of the living room.
He tries not to let the mortification of the whole situation get to him, but when he rubs a hand over the back of his hand, he can feel the embarrassed heat burning beneath the skin. Now his last half a day with the man in LA is going to be living hell, and there’s not even a funny, charming Charlie to distract Schlatt from wailing on Ted anymore.
“Fucking hell,” he curses under his breath, stepping into the kitchen.
If the dim 04:21 displayed on the microwave is accurate at all, then Charlie is going to land in Vermont any minute now. Not for the first time since last night, though now definitely more selfishly than before, Ted wishes Charlie didn’t have to fly out one night earlier than Schlatt.
He’s missed both of them, is one thing. Another thing, however, is that a part of him might always dread being alone with Schlatt in some way. And that isn’t always because Schlatt has the personality of a grumpy cartoon cat, but Ted usually tries not to think about it.
It’s hard, though. Just like how it’s hard to see the glass as half full when Ted turns off the tap. In the pale moonlight that pours from the window above the sink, the glass is clear and sterile in a way that almost feels cruel, the way it’s posing such a direct contrast to Ted’s warzone of a freshly awoken brain. It’s harder than usual to not remember how Schlatt used to sometimes look at him, when he was still clean-shaven and a little simpler. Making him feel nostalgic in a guilty, wrong way.
Schlatt just looks nice when he’s calm and relaxed, that’s all. Or when he was quietly glancing over like Ted troubled, confused, and impressed him all at once. Mystified him.
Ted wonders what that might look like on Schlatt’s face now. It would surely suit those brown eyes that never quite hardened along the rest of him much better than his angry scowls, or his haunted expression from earlier.
Then, something finally registers. Ted blinks, realizing he hasn’t even asked Schlatt why he was lying awake on the couch at four in the morning.
———
When Ted walks back to the living room, two glasses of water in hands, he’s not exactly surprised to find Schlatt still on the couch. Something inside him tenses up anyway.
The living room of the Airbnb has a large window that spans across nearly an entire wall. He can imagine how the room would look if the curtains were open, tranquil and moonlit with the intricate shadows of the trees outside casting onto the hardwood floor. In this part of the city, it might even be possible to see some faint marks of stars in the sky. But the curtains are drawn tightly shut, and there is nothing to see on that wall besides the wrinkles on the cheap, beige fabric.
Still, Schlatt seems to have found something of interest in them. Over the back of the couch, Ted can see him staring in that direction, his eyes fixed intently on seemingly nothing in particular as the rest of his face remains firmly blank.
Ted clears his throat, announcing his presence.
The springs in the couch cushions creak as Schlatt turns around and glances up at him, and some unreadable thing in his expression shifts for just a second before he rolls his eyes. Hard.
“Um.” Ted watches as Schlatt pulls up his phone and completely ignores him. “Is your phone okay?”
If Schlatt can hear the nerves in Ted’s voice, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “Don’t even worry about it,” he scoffs, tapping at something on the screen. “I will be billing you if I find so much as a scrape later.”
He sounds almost normal again, just his usual disgruntled self bundled up in the same hoodie and sweatpants he wore last night. If he isn’t actively looking for more, Ted probably would’ve missed the deeper-than-usual bags under Schlatt’s eyes and the way he’s forcing his mouth into a stern, unwavering line. Posturing like the picture of unaffectedness.
Ted presses his tongue against the tip of his canine until it turns a little numb. “Fine, then,” he says, walking around the couch. “Now scooch over.”
Schlatt makes an annoyed face at him, but he obliges, pulling his legs towards himself and making space for Ted.
"You're not going back to sleep?" he asks, eyeing the glass of water warily when Ted places one on the coffee table in front of him.
"Nah," Ted replies, sipping his own water once he sits down. "Don't think I can fall asleep again."
"Sucks to suck," Schlatt says.
They sit in silence for a few long, slow moments. Ted places his glass down and watches the condensation drip down the side. There’s a TV mounted on the wall, wide-screened and possibly the only thing in the house that’s really worth something, but Ted doesn’t reach for the remote on the table. Not wanting to break the delicate quietness in that way.
Schlatt, slightly blurred in Ted’s peripheral vision, has started scrolling quickly on his phone like he’s in a competition for the largest number of TikTok videos watched in one minute. His knees are pulled up almost to his chest, leaving a foot of space between them.
Ted thinks he’d enjoy it, this quiet domesticity of sitting together in a dimly lit room, if the air didn't feel so thick between them.
“Is your leg okay?”
Blinking, Ted turns to face Schlatt.
The man peers at him over the top of his phone. With the light from the lamp on his face, his eyes look like a brand of honey that Ted sometimes puts on his toast.
“Huh— Oh.” Ted glances down at his lap. He’d already forgotten about the bump against the doorknob. “It’s not even anything, dude. I’m fine.”
Schlatt drops his eyes as he hums quietly. Then he lowers his phone by a few inches, and there’s an exaggeratedly disappointed pout tugging at the corners of his mouth.
A groan escapes Ted before he can stop himself. “Oh my God, shut up,” he says. “You better pray my leg is in one piece, mister. I’m your ride out of this city.”
“I can afford an Uber to the airport, Ted.” Schlatt scoffs, slightly tilting his head haughtily back. “Maybe I’ll just do that instead of risking dying in your totaled truck.”
And now it’s a whole performance, as it often is with everything Schlatt-related. "Sure," Ted says, playing sarcastic.
“What do you mean, sure?”
“Would a regular driver bend at your every whim and coddle you like the little pampered boy you are?” Ted asks, making a show out of smirking a bit meanly.
A part of him doesn’t understand why this is how so many of his jokes go when it comes to Schlatt. Another part of him doesn’t know why they insist on carrying on bits and jokes when no camera is rolling at all, instead of just talking like real people.
But Schlatt is glancing away, rubbing at his moustache as if he’s deep in thought. With the warm light from the lamp behind them, Ted can see the small upturned curve of his mouth beneath his palm.
There is enjoyment in this, Ted thinks. Without these jokes and bits, he doesn’t know where Schlatt and he will ever be.
“So?” Ted leans to his side. Leans closer, and tries to ignore how Schlatt’s eyes slightly widen at that. “Are you going to admit it?”
“Whatever, Ted,” Schlatt huffs quietly as he shifts back against the armrest, his fingers briefly grasping at the fabric of the cushion before he flattens his palm against it. “You’re such a big, dumb pushover. Happy now?”
“Yes, actually,” Ted says, emphasizing every vowel as he settles back into his end of the couch.
“Okay.” Schlatt yawns loudly into a palm before shoving his phone and his hands all into the pocket of his hoodie. “I don’t actually give a fuck,” he adds.
“I wouldn’t call myself a pushover, though,” Ted continues on with his overly exaggerated voice, ignoring the dig. “Like— sorry that I’m happy just to see others happy, unlike some others.”
“Wow,” Schlatt deadpans, tilting his head to the side and leaning against the back of the couch. “All the girls would kill for a guy like you, Ted.”
He’s talking to Ted in the most bored, monotonous voice a human can realistically manage. But it’s hard to acknowledge that when the joke is so far out of left field it might as well hit him squarely in the head.
It’s also just plain hard to think when Schlatt’s face is slightly smooshed against the couch cushions with stray hairs falling all over his face, looking soft and almost cozy. And he’s looking at Ted in this quiet, half-lidded way, like he maybe does sort of mean what he says.
“Hah. Uh— yeah, sure,” Ted stammers. He’s losing the bit. “Thanks, man?”
His statement comes out wavering like a question, and that’s evidently funny to Schlatt.
“What the hell?” Schlatt narrows his eyes at him, the corners of his lips tugging upwards into an amused, barely-there grin. “You sound so worried.”
He looks nice in this light. Ted just shifts against the cushion, which feels too firm and too soft at the same time.
“And you sound like you’re falling asleep,” he counters. Something inside him twinges at that. “Why aren’t you in bed, again?”
Schlatt blinks slowly at him. “I should be asking you,” he replies. “I thought you said you wanted to get your eight hours before heading to the airport.”
Ted gives him an honest answer. “Sometimes I have a hard time staying asleep on beds that aren’t mine.” He gestures up and down at himself. “It’s like, when your body remembers those little details that your brain doesn’t compute.”
At that, Schlatt mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously close to a comment about Ted’s brain.
“Pardon me?”
“I said that’s still your brain,” Schlatt says, glancing sideways. “You just never know there’s a whiny little bitch in your head until it starts throwing a fit.”
Ted expects sarcasm and condescension in Schlatt’s words, but he doesn’t hear any.
Now, though, with Schlatt curling up against the end of the couch that he despises like it’s the most cozy spot on earth, Ted doesn’t know if he should let it pass.
“Is that why you’re awake?” he asks, his tone carefully casual. “Some… thing throwing a fit.”
Schlatt visibly stiffens. That’s really all the answer that Ted needs.
“Hey,” Ted breathes. He curls his fingers into fists so he wouldn’t do anything stupid, like reach for Schlatt. “If you want to talk about it—”
“No,” Schlatt cuts him off, stony-faced as he straightens up. “Definitely not.”
“I mean, I’m—”
“No, Ted,” Schlatt says.
His voice is steely in a way that Ted hasn’t heard in a long time. Not outwardly, loudly pissed off like earlier, but truly rigid like a line that’s been pulled taut.
And Ted cares; he really does. There’s a part of him that wants to press a cup of honey lemon tea—his mom’s recipe—into Schlatt’s hands and trap him right there with a blanket until they can at least figure something out. But the larger part of him knows when to quit.
“That’s fine,” Ted says, keeping his tone light. “It’s fine, man. We can talk about whatever.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Schlatt hisses. “There’s nothing to talk about. It’s just some dumb fucking dream, Ted.”
“Uh. Yeah, no. Everyone dreams.” Ted falters. Leave it to Schlatt to constantly make him feel so fucking adrift in any given conversation. “I’m not judging you, Schlatt.”
“That’s not what I—” Schlatt exhales harshly, his expression twisting into a fleeting wince before it goes flat. He visibly forces his raised shoulders down. “Whatever. Just forget it.”
Ted clenches and unclenches his fingers. He feels distinctly like he’s trying to talk a cat out of mounting a too-tall tree for no reason. Or like he’s trying to talk Schlatt out of leaving this room then never saying anything real about himself again. Hard to achieve, but he has to do it anyway because he cares. He might also really fucking worry.
“I sometimes get these random ass dreams about my friends,” Ted says, trying to act like he’s no longer thinking about the Schlatt of it all. “Nothing— nothing bad, you know. Just random. I had a pretty nice one about you and Charlie a few days before you guys came.”
Schlatt glances at him, mouth pinched pale with what may be irritation.
Ted adjusts his glasses, fidgeting. “We, uh, we were filming a special episode in public,” he says, recalling more specifics from the hazy memory. “I think Charlie and I both dressed up as sandwich ingredients without telling you to, y’know, make fun of you.”
He mostly clearly remembers glancing down from the vehicle they were recording in and seeing the tops of people’s heads, then looking back up to see Charlie’s bright, neon green overalls and Schlatt’s curls of hair bouncing in the wind, and feeling content.
The hair detail, admittedly, might just be something his brain just now fabricated. The product of the times in the last week when Ted noticed Schlatt rolling down the truck’s windows, complaining about the shitty air conditioning as loose strands of brown hair are blown across his face.
Ted raises his hand further up from his glasses and rubs a finger across his brow, trying to remember something else to talk about.
“But then you showed up in a pretty nice fit,” he ends up saying, “and you just looked cool next to us two idiots.”
That earns a weird look from the guy, which is maybe enough to make Ted feel lighter. “Is that the whole premise?” Schlatt asks, his voice flat. “Schlatt wrangling two dumb fucks in LA?”
“That’d be funny,” Ted muses, smiling for a second before waving a hand dismissively. “But no. We were riding a cable car, actually, you know the type that hangs from a zipline in the air. We recorded the episode over a, uh—”
He pauses, just now realizing why waking up from this particular dream made him feel strange in the most neutral sense of the word.
“—Some zoo, I think.”
It's a struggle to not grimace as he waits for his words to register and for the mood to plummet. Then it does, and Ted has to look away momentarily as Schlatt’s expression turns rigid in live action.
“Yeah, no,” Ted says, reaching up and lightly scratching at a brow, feeling the wry smile he’s trying to wear turn into some pinched amalgamation of embarrassment and actual regret. Jesus fucking Christ. “I didn’t really… I honestly never thought anything more about it until now.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Schlatt replies. He sounds like he’s trying to be indifferent and failing. It reminds Ted of how he acted last night when they said bye to Charlie at the airport.
“Man,” Ted mutters. “That’s not an example of a good dream, huh.”
“Well. You tried.” Schlatt raises a hand and brushes his hair out of his face, looking as awkward as Ted feels.
For a few seconds, Ted is left floundering in silence. He turns to the empty, black TV screen on the wall in front of them and sees his blurry reflection staring blankly back. He feels a bit like he’d just upchucked some of his organs out on the glass table for Schlatt’s entertainment.
But then Schlatt’s reflection shifts, an arm reaching hesitantly out before he drops his hand onto his knee.
“That sounds fun, the cable car.” His voice is gentle. “It’d probably be a good episode.”
“Yeah,” Ted replies. A part of him wants to say we can do it sometime, but he knows they won’t.
His reflection looks like he needs a drink, or maybe ten cigarettes.
Schlatt’s reflection lowers his head, rubbing a hand over one knee. “Did you know the floor lamps they put in these bedrooms are from IKEA?” he asks.
The sudden question catches Ted off guard. “Uh.” He glances to the corner of the living room, where the dim lamp stands silently. It seems similar enough to the ones in their actual rooms, which means it is just as ordinary and unimpressive. “Are they?”
“Yeah,” Schlatt says, his eyes fixed on his own lap when Ted turns back to him. “There’s one exactly like those in my family’s house. In our living room.”
“Oh,” Ted murmurs. He tries to let the hazy but sudden surge of understanding show on his face too strongly, but he definitely fails.
Fortunately, Schlatt is not looking. He seems, all of a sudden, focused on tugging at a loose thread on his sleeve. “I was thinking about it before I went to sleep, for whatever the fuck reason. So I guess that’s why.”
Ted opens his mouth before closing it again. Now that Schlatt has actually talked, he no longer knows what to say.
“I’m telling you this because your little story was so miserable,” Schlatt says, answering a question that Ted isn’t planning to ask, his hands clumsily wavering as he pulls off the thread with a snap. “You love to be in everyone’s business, right? Cheer up.”
It doesn’t take a genius to catch Schlatt’s attempt at leveling their playing fields — one vague but real crumb from his box of secrets after Ted accidentally gutted a part of himself.
Not exactly a fair trade, but Ted supposes it’s nice of Schlatt to try. To momentarily stop being something wholly illusive for Ted’s benefit.
“Okay,” Ted says. He forces out a stilted laugh. “I’m cheering up.”
Schlatt peers up at him, his lips pressed into a thin, hesitant line. Something in his expression makes Ted wonder what he was like when he was younger, as a teenager and as a boy. Maybe he’d always had the same soft eyes but stiffly set jaw. Maybe not.
“I really am,” Ted adds, plastering a smile onto his face. “See?”
Schlatt’s eyes flick down to his mouth. “Sure,” he says, and when he looks back up, he can’t seem to fully meet Ted’s eyes.
Now is not the time to read too deeply into it.
Ted swallows dryly. He’s beginning to realize that real conversations — no, real conversations with Schlatt — are out of his element.
“You know we can just,” he gestures towards the hallway, “take that lamp out of your room. Do you want me to—”
Schlatt sighs. “No, you idiot,” he replies, the previous pale uncertainty on his face shifting into one of mild annoyance. “We’re not moving any fucking furniture in this house. Because they will fucking surcharge us, and I will not be paying.”
And here’s the Schlatt he knows again.
“Okay, damn,” Ted grins unsteadily. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
There are a few beats when Schlatt looks like he wants to scold Ted some more, his gaze fixed intensely on Ted’s face. But in the end, he just looks away with a slow shake of his head.
“You don’t need to do anything, Ted,” Schlatt says, pushing a hand through his hair as his voice turns a little strange and distant. “Go to bed and stare at the ceiling or whatever the fuck you do. Hit your vape or something.”
Ted huffs out a laugh. He feels slightly less off-kilter, even as he knows that a part of him will be thinking about what Schlatt said for days. “I’ll find a documentary,” he says, reaching for the remote on the table.
He lands on a film about migrating birds.
A flock of ducks is in a lake, and the camera zooms in on their heads as the narrator lists out how much flying they’d have to do this winter. Somehow, the music makes them look almost contemplative as they swim around peacefully, occasionally bobbing in and out of the water.
“This is depressing,” Schlatt says after a minute of it. “You should sleep, so you don’t crash your truck later.”
He may be right. Ted doesn’t feel all that tired yet, but he knows it might all just hit him like a truck when he has to drive, well, his own truck.
Still, Ted is honest when he says, “I’d rather sit here with you.”
Schlatt doesn’t say anything for a beat. Then he lets out a quiet exhale, sounding resigned and almost wistful. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
On the TV screen, some other birds are flying over the lake, casting their long, stretched-out reflections over the water. In the distance, the setting sun peeks through the tree line.
———
The sun may be rising outside the window, but the curtains are still tightly drawn.
“I should say sorry.”
Ted rolls his head against the couch cushion to squint at Schlatt, half-asleep and barely comprehending anything. “What?” he mumbles. His eyelids feel like they’re filled with lead.
The image of Schlatt is mostly blurred, but Ted thinks—dreams?—that he sees Schlatt looking back at him, still sitting in the corner of the couch with his knees against his chest.
“You’re a sweet guy, Ted,” Schlatt says. Maybe. It’s hard to tell when his voice is lower than the documentary narrator’s droning about strong wind currents. “I shouldn’t have been snarking at you all night.”
Ted realizes he may be dreaming. He talks anyway. “I don’t mind that,” he mutters, trying to rub his eyes just to be blocked by his glasses. He lets his hand fall back onto his lap. “That’s just… I dunno. You’re you, you know.”
“Yeah,” Schlatt says. Ted sees him more than hears him over the serene music and bird calls. “I do try, Ted, but it’s— Yeah. I know.”
———
They almost don’t make it to the airport in time.
Ted wakes up to Schlatt shoving him hard enough to almost send him falling off the couch. He jumps up before even remembering he can’t see shit without his glasses, and spends half a minute fumbling for them on the cushion before realizing they are on the coffee table. Schlatt threatens to kill him when they lock the door to the Airbnb behind them.
They don’t hug at the airport, not like how they’d hugged Charlie. Mostly because Schlatt has slammed the passenger door shut before Ted can even offer to help him get his luggage. He does wave back when Ted shouts bye through the window, though, and that’s better than nothing.
The drive back to the Airbnb is mostly silent. He plays his playlist but keeps the volume low, and Neil Smith is singing it’s been a long season through as he pulls back into the parking lot of the house, somehow already feeling entirely different from how he’d left it.
He packs up his own stuff, then checks over everything one last time before he leaves the key in the designated spot.
The lamp in the corner of the living room has been left on, forgotten in the rush out of the door. He flicks the switch off, and a part of him feels weird knowing that Schlatt’s fingers had been there hours earlier, doing the exact opposite motion.
But besides that, it honestly looks like nobody has ever come in to disturb anything. Probably because the three of them did spend most of their week in the studio. That should be something worth celebrating — no extra chore for him today — but Ted just feels lonely as he drives to his apartment.
Charlie has texted that he landed safely with a silly selfie hours ago, as well as a paragraph about how much he enjoyed the past week. What an absolute sweetheart. Ted replies with his own paragraph of sentimental stuff that he would have a much harder time saying in person, to which Charlie responds with a heart minutes later.
When he checks later and sees Schlatt’s plane has landed, Ted considers sending a paragraph over to Schlatt, too, but in the end he only types, hey dude, it was nice seeing you in person again. hope you had fun last week!
Because nothing is as easy as it should be when it comes to Schlatt. There’s no logical reason behind it. It simply is.
Ted doesn’t expect anything from that end again, so when he gets a text hours later, at a quarter before midnight, he almost thinks it’s a spam message. But it is Schlatt’s number, with an awkward space between the J and S, and an old, old photo of him with his face half-obstructed by his cap.
11:45 PM Thanks man, it was fun. Get some rest >>
That shouldn’t make something lurch inside Ted, but it does. He reacts to the message with a thumbs up, trying not to think about what time zone Schlatt sent that text from, and throws his phone on the nightstand. It clatters loudly against the wooden surface.
Ted feels juvenile. He feels like those first few days of seventh grade again, when he’d just started his growth spurt and began to feel too tall for his skin, as well as all his classmates around him. Or when he’d first moved to Ithaca on a drizzling day and got lost on his way to the dorms. This kind of loneliness has many cures; he’s well aware of that. Maybe he’ll get in the dating scene or start hitting the gym tomorrow.
There are too many lives in Los Angeles, all rallying and rushing towards a better tomorrow, for him to wallow over things that he can hardly wrap his mind around, floating in the intersection between past and present and always just out of arm’s reach.
For now, though, he listens to Schlatt, lies down in his bed, and sleeps through a dreamless night.