At around seven that night, there was a knock on the door to Sasha’s apartment and his first thought was that it was one of the resident drug addicts and he was going to die. His second, more realistic but still overly pessimistic thought was that it was someone who was going to shout at him for something he’d done wrong.
It had been several seconds and Sasha hadn’t moved and they hadn’t knocked again and maybe they’d assume he wasn’t home and go away if he ignored it. But then he realised if he did that, he’d never know what they wanted and it would haunt him for weeks. He could not let that happen. He crept to the door and looked through the peephole.
It was Cooper. Sasha opened the door immediately.
Cooper was not wearing pants, but he was wearing a T-shirt, which was more than he’d worn during two thirds of their prior interactions. Cooper looked nice without his shirt on, but it was very distracting and it was hard to keep his eyes where they were meant to be. Especially since Sasha always struggled to maintain eye contact.
“Okay, so, first of all I’m sorry for just showing up at your door at night. That’s weird and probably annoying and I wasn’t going to do that, or—I was going to do that, and then I realised it was a bad play before I got to your door, but then I’d already shut my door and it locks automatically and my roommates are out and I still wasn’t going to bother you but it’s cold and I’m hungry and I don’t have my phone and I think my roommates might not be back for a couple of hours…”
“Do you want to come in?” Sasha asked when Cooper paused for breath.
“I mean, only if you want to hang out. If not it’s totally fine, but if I could borrow a jumper or something I would really appreciate it because I’m freezing my balls off.”
Sasha opened the door wider and stepped aside. “No, it’s okay. You can come in.”
Cooper grinned. “Thanks, Sasha.”
“Mmhm,” Sasha said as something that wasn’t quite anxiety squirmed in his tummy. Copper had said his name!
Cooper looked around the small room and then went and sat down on the bed, because there was nowhere else to sit. “You can tell me to go away at any time if you get sick of me, okay? Like, I realise you probably wouldn’t because even if I say it’s fine that still kinda feels like a confrontational thing to do so you know, I’m fully aware this is a shitty position to put you in, and— oh, thanks,” Cooper said as Sasha draped a blanket over his shoulders. He hugged it around himself. “Is this a weighted blanket? It feels heavy.”
“Yes,” Sasha said. He felt like he should be saying more after Cooper had talked so much, but he only needed one word to answer the question so he wasn’t sure what else he would say.
“It feels nice. You know, I always wanted to try one to see what it’s like but they’re pretty expensive, right?”
Sasha leant back against the kitchen counter on the other side of the room. Would it be weird if he sat on the bed as well? “That one wasn’t, but it’s not full length so I can’t use it to sleep with. I just use it during the day.”
“Yeah, it seems like it would be good for that. So, how long have you lived here?”
“Uh… about a month, I guess.”
“Huh. We must not have noticed you at all the first like… two weeks after you moved in.”
“Mm,” Sasha said as he contemplated whether or not he wanted to tell the truth. “I was trying not to be noticed.”
Cooper pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his folded arms on them. “Why?”
Sasha regretted bringing this up. Explaining his thought processes to someone else made him feel stupid. “I don’t know.”
Cooper nodded. “Sasha… are you okay?”
Sasha felt his throat tighten. Fuck. Genuine concern, his greatest weakness. He was going to cry. He was going to cry in front of Cooper and he didn’t want to. Sasha nodded. He couldn’t look at Cooper. “I need to…” he murmured, knowing his voice sounded strained, and headed for the bathroom.
Sasha cried in there instead, well aware that Cooper was very close and the walls were thin and he could probably hear the occasional sniffle. Cooper definitely heard the wet, snotty sound of Sasha blowing his nose when he finally felt like he’d drained enough emotional energy out of himself to hold himself together in front of Cooper.
“Sorry,” the two of them said in near perfect unison when Sasha stepped out of the bathroom.
Cooper just looked at him for a moment, and then leant his head back and let out a quiet, “Ahhh!”
Sasha nodded. ‘Ahhh’ was how he felt on the inside. “Would you like some noodles?”
“I feel like I should probably go. I’m just upsetting you and I didn’t mean to do that.”
Sasha wanted to explain that none of this was Cooper’s fault and that actually it was just the feeling of being cared about that had overwhelmed him and that was embarrassing but not in itself a bad thing. But if he tried to say all that, he would — well, straight up fail, to begin with, because saying things was so much harder than thinking them. But he’d also probably start crying again and he really didn’t want to have a meltdown in front of Cooper.
Instead he pulled up the edge of the blanket Cooper was sitting on and draped that over Cooper as well, head included this time. “Stay.”
“Okay,” Cooper said meekly from beneath the blankets.
“Would you like noodles?” Sasha asked again.
Cooper lay down, completely buried under the blankets. “Yes, please.”
“Okay. I will make noodles.”
Sasha got out the medium sized saucepan and put some water on to boil. Normally he used the small one, but it couldn’t contain enough noodles for two people. When his parents had bought him this set of three saucepans, he had thought it unnecessary, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe one day he would be the kind of person who would need a large saucepan. He hadn’t thought he’d need the medium sized one, but just a month into living alone and he was already using it.
“It’s really hot under here,” Cooper murmured from under the blankets.
“You can come out.”
“No.” Cooper squirmed and rolled over underneath the blankets. “I live here now. It’s nice.”
“The noodles are almost ready. It might be hard to eat noodles under there.”
“Ah.” Cooper peaked out from under the blanket. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”
Sasha strained the noodles and served them into two bowls. All he had to drink was water, but he did have ice cubes so at least it was chilled water. He jumped slightly when Cooper was suddenly there, at his side, helping him carry everything. Sasha handed him one of the glasses of water and the larger of the two bowls of noodles.
“You gave me way more noodles than you gave yourself,” Cooper pointed out.
“I’m not very hungry.” The truth was, Sasha had already eaten and his anxiety was only stomping his appetite down further, but he hadn’t wanted to make Cooper eat on his own. “It’s okay if you don’t finish them, though. I just thought you might require many noodles because of exercising.”
Sasha wasn’t really set up for guests. He had a small fold out table next to his bed that he put things on while he ate, but he and Cooper would have to sit rather close to one another if they both wanted to be able to reach their drinks.
“Because of exercising?” Cooper asked.
Sasha nodded. “You look like you exercise. Or, um. You jog, I think?”
“I do jog, yes. And you’re right, I do require a shocking number of noodles. Thanks, Sasha.”
“Mmmm…” Sasha said as he tried to find a position to sit in that didn’t feel awkward. Cooper saying his name sure was something. Sasha prodded his noodles around with his fork. “So, um. Where did your roommates go?”
Cooper swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “You know, I don’t know. They probably told me all sorts of things about where they were going and when they’d be back, but none of that information seems to have been filed into my long term memory, so I guess…” He shrugged. “It’s date night, so they’re on a date, because they’re dating one another. That’s all I know.”
“Oh,” Sasha said. He still hadn’t eaten anything. “What’s it like to live with two people who are dating each other?”
“I actually kind of like it. Seeing two people being happy in a relationship together is nice. I sure never managed it.”
“Being in a relationship?”
“Being happy in a relationship. Or, hmm…” Cooper tapped his fist against his chin. “I don’t know. Maybe I would have said I was happy at the time. It’s hard not to let the way things ended taint my memory of the whole thing.”
“Did it end badly?”
“I mean… I don’t know. I think just inherently most relationships don’t end in happy ways. In relative terms it was probably… eh, I don’t know. There was so much shit going on in my life at the time that it was just one more thing, you know?”
Sasha nodded. He wasn’t sure he did know, but he wasn’t sure that mattered.
“She was nice, but it was just this really weird time in my life. I was just out of high school, straight into university, and it was like… this whole future was laid out before me. I’d finish uni and then I’d get a job and at some point I’d marry this girl I was dating and I guess we’d have kids? And I was just trying my best to follow that path because I felt like I didn’t have a choice, which was dumb because I was an adult so of course I had a choice. But you know, when you’re eighteen…” Cooper shrugged.
“I do know, because I am eighteen.”
“Ah, that’s rough. I’m twenty now. It’s much better than being eighteen.”
“Hopefully,” Sasha said. “What happened with the getting married and stuff?”
“Oh, I never got anywhere near that far. Tried to fight my way through the first few months of uni and struggled so hard. My parents were paying for it, so they got mad when I started failing classes. My girlfriend got mad because I guess she was really invested in the whole marriage and kids thing and if I couldn’t even deal with uni, how was that going to go? And eventually I just had this massive breakdown and called Abra crying about how I couldn’t do that shit anymore and I wasn’t coping.”
Sasha nodded along as Cooper took a deep gulp of water.
Cooper set the glass back down. “And of course Abra being Abra he was just like, okay, why don’t you do something that makes you happy instead? And of course my first response was that I couldn’t, but as we started going down the list of reasons why, I realised they were kinda thin. I quit uni and my parents were trying to leverage the fact that I lived with them to make me go back, so for a while I was sleeping on Abra’s couch while he still lived with his parents. I tried to keep things going with my girlfriend for another couple of months, but she kept putting all the same pressures and sense of disappointment on me as my parents and eventually I just ended it.”
Cooper fell into a very abrupt silence that stretched on for an awkwardly long time. He was just staring straight ahead, not eating his noodles.
“Sorry,” Cooper said eventually. “I didn’t mean to tell you my whole life story. I just get carried away with talking sometimes. Are you seeing anyone? That was the original topic. Sorta. I think?”
Sasha shook his head. “Nobody would want to be in a relationship with me.”
“Why not?”
Sasha made a grumbling sound and shrugged. He’d thought there was enough about him that was obviously unappealing that Cooper wouldn’t feel the need to ask.
“Fair enough,” Cooper said. “I guess I feel the same. Or, like, I’d get into a relationship and whoever I was dating would end up disappointed in me. Maybe pretty quickly or maybe not for years, when they decide it’s time to become a proper adult and they realise I’m just not growing up the way they are. I mean, I guess I can’t know that I won’t, but I don’t feel like I’m going to. You know?”
“Yeah,” Sasha murmured. He certainly did know that feeling.
“So now I just get tipsy and give oral sex to strangers at parties.”
There were a few seconds of awkward silence before Sasha finally said, “Oh.”
Cooper choked on a mouthful of noodles and took a drink of his water to wash them down. “Sorry, I guess that’s a bit too TMI. Actually, to be honest, I don’t really do that anymore anyway. I think I thought it would make me feel better about myself or less lonely or something, but it really didn’t.”
“Mm,” Sasha said, because he didn’t know what else to say. He hadn’t been to a party since he was a little kid. He hadn’t given or received oral, or any other kind of sex, ever.
“Sorry,” Cooper said again. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m not uncomfortable, or at least not any more than I always am. I just don’t know what to say. I appreciate you talking to me like I’m an adult, though.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Sasha shrugged. “Sometimes people don’t. And, I mean, I guess I don’t feel like an adult, but I don’t feel like a child either. It’s not wrong to talk about adult topics in front of me.”
“Yeah, I get you. I mean we lump all these things together under the category of ‘adult stuff’, but it’s not adult stuff in the same way. Struggling with self care doesn’t mean you can’t have adult relationships in the same way that showing a child pornography and showing a child taxes aren’t the same thing even though they’re both adult stuff. Maybe? Maybe that doesn’t connect, I don’t know.”
“No, I get where you were going. I agree. It’s different.”
Cooper stared down at his own empty bowl. “You haven’t eaten any of your noodles.”
“Oh,” Sasha said. “I’m not actually hungry. I just didn’t want to make you eat alone, but I guess I did anyway.” He offered Cooper the bowl. “Do you want them?”
“Sure,” Cooper said, and their fingers brushed as he took the bowl.
With the burden of the noodles handed off, Sasha lay down on the bed and curled up in the blankets.
“This is nice,” Cooper commented.
“The noodles?”
“No, I mean — yeah, they’re nice, thank you — but just… this. Talking and hanging out.”
Sasha stared up at the ceiling. “Yeah. It is nice.”
“Would you maybe want to do this again some time? Like, in a more planned kind of way? I’m sorry again for surprising you like this. I realise that’s not the kinda wavelength you operate on.”
“Okay. When?”
“Well, Ellie and Abra do their date night thing Friday night every week, so maybe we could have a date night of our own?”
Cooper definitely hadn’t meant it like that, but Sasha still liked the way it sounded. He nodded. “I’ll make you dinner and we can, um… I don’t know.”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out, and I’ll make sure to have my key with me next time so I can just leave if you’re not feeling it.” Cooper turned his head towards the sound of a door closing next door. “Ah, that’ll be Ellie and Abra, and they’ll be wondering where I am. I should go. Thanks for all the noodles and for taking me in and keeping me warm.”
“You’re welcome,” Sasha murmured.
Cooper lifted the blankets up, draped them over Sasha, and carefully tucked him in. His smile was soft. He had light brown eyes. “Goodnight, Sasha.”
Sasha felt too hot, and it was only partly because he was buried under two blankets. “Goodnight, Cooper.”
Sasha let out a slow, steadying sigh as he watched Cooper leave. He wanted to smooch that boy.
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