Chapter Text
“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The words cut through me like a smoke alarm in the middle of the night, slicing clean through the biting wind and weaving around the cars to find their way to me.
In an instant, I was forced to confront where I was; halfway across the Brooklyn bridge, one foot up on the railings and my hands nearly frozen to the rusted metal, my upper body leaned over and facing the rolling blackness below. I had been thinking about the water, the bottomless dark embrace of it, how in just a few moments I wouldn’t have to worry about a damn thing anymore. In the water, none of it would matter; not the job, not the affair, not the apartment.
The wind against my face was like being slapped with a cold rag, over and over again, my cheeks growing raw. My hair was in my mouth and in my eyes. I was thirsty, my throat backed up with snot from the cold. Where had that voice come from?
Upon turning my head, slowly and stiffly against the cold, there was a man standing beside me, close enough that I could hit him if I wanted to. He had an elbow on the railings, his body poised toward me but his face turned away over the bridge, toward the night, toward the blackness.
“What?” My voice was thin, cracking and hoarse. I couldn’t remember the last time I had spoken. He chuckled, turning to face me. He was devastating, considering the circumstances. The closest streetlight was far away, on the other side of the bridge; I had to rely on the headlights of all the passing cars to see him clearly and yet, the flecks of green in his eyes lit up like the fourth of July. He wore a small, easy smile like we had met a dozen times before, a lip ring tugging softly at one side. He wasn’t dressed for the cold — not like me. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of redness in his cheeks. I wondered if he was a model.
“Jumping in there,” he said plainly, nodding pointedly over the railing. Without even realising it, I had stepped back down onto the pavement, my feet starting to go numb. If he hadn’t interrupted, they would be more than numb by now. “I wouldn’t do that.” He definitely couldn’t be a model; models are supposed to be tall. Models don’t have tattoos on their neck.
“I wasn’t going to.” That could even have been true. My tone, though, was desperately unconvincing, so much so that it drew out another wry chuckle.
“Sure you were.” I flexed my fingers around the railing, releasing my vice grip.
“I don’t think it’s any of your business,” I hissed around a wet sniffle, the cold biting at my fingers, settling beneath my nails, starting to make them feel as though they were about to fall off. With one shoulder the stranger shrugged, peering down at the river, tilting his head to one side and then straightening back up.
“The water would be cold,” he mused, a little sardonic but somehow still sincere, his hands slipping into his pockets, “but, honestly, from this height I don’t think it would even kill you. Not right away.” He produced a slender pack of cigarettes, taking out one for himself and then offering one to me, one eyebrow arched playfully. I scoffed, looking back out at the river, at the city stretched beyond it. It was so dark. Of course it would kill me. What the hell was he talking about? “Best case scenario, you’d get pulled under the water and hit your head. Worst case? You’d just float along and slowly freeze to death. And you’d have plenty of time to wish you hadn’t jumped. Can you swim?” What an utterly bizarre thing to come out and say.
When I said nothing, growing irritated by his presence and scolding myself in my mind for not having just done it already, I felt the sleeve of his jacket brush mine. He was leaning against the railings now, mirroring me, looking out over what could be seen of the skyline.
“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t bother,” he murmured nonchalantly around the cigarette in his mouth, followed by the click of a lighter and the crackle of its flame, the smoke drifting across my face. It hadn’t even been too long since my last cigarette, but I had never really considered that it might not have been my last cigarette after all.
“Thanks for the advice,” I muttered back, looking down at my hands, how mottled with poor circulation they were. I gripped onto the railing again, tighter and tighter, my knuckles growing white just to have something to hold onto. I was hoping he would just leave. I knew that, even if he did, that would be it for me. There was no way I would be able to carry on with it. The embarrassment was already reaching painful levels. Still, I sighed. “Are you still here?”
“I guess I am.” From the corner of my eye, I saw that he was smiling again. What on earth was there to smile about? “Can’t exactly leave you here, can I?”
“So you’re the good Samaritan in this situation?”
“Hardly.” Between the wind, the cars and the faraway hum of the city, all I could hear was the way his cigarette crackled as he inhaled. I drew back my hands and peeled back my hair from my face, tucking it behind my numb ears, feeling the tangles and knots. Faced with reality and the awareness of my own body, the cold ceased to be poetic and cinematic; it was starting to hurt.
“What’s your name?” He asked me, smoke billowing from between his lips as he said it. He was eyeing me with a strange fondness I didn’t understand.
“Gerard.” I cringed at it. “Or, you know, Gee. Everybody calls me Gee.” That wasn’t true – only my brother called me Gee. At this point, I guess he was my everybody.
“Gerard.” It sounded nice, the way he said it. He smiled around it, crossing his right hand across his chest and toward me, cigarette between his fingers. “Pleasure.” I gingerly took his hand, barely even shaking it. He didn’t seem to register how cold my hands were.
“You didn’t tell me yours,” I said as he retracted his hand, drawing the cigarette back to his lips and allowing me another flame-bathed peek at his face. There were tattoos on his fingers, lettering I couldn’t make out. When he dashed his cigarette over the railing I watched as it tumbled toward the water, the wind carrying it along, until I lost sight of it. That could have been me.
“Frank,” he said softly, hunching over the railing a little and just looking over his shoulder at me.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a Frank. At least, you know, under fifty.” He let out a dry chuckle, drawing himself back away from the railing and straightening back up.
“Happy to be your first,” he said coolly, his smile flashing teeth, bright in the passing lights. It almost felt like flirting; something that would have been offensive if I wasn’t so damn miserable. I wondered, for a second, if he was one of those serial killers, the ones that like guys. But serial killers are supposed to be tall, too. You’d almost deserve it if you let yourself get lured to your doom by some tattooed pipsqueak who’s barely pushing five-seven. He was harmless. He looked around, hands back in his pockets, the hint of a grimace on his face as he inhaled. “What do you say we get a cup of coffee? You can tell me all about what got you up here.” The grimace disappeared, as quickly as it had come.
“It’s late,” I protested, my default rejection line for any and all come-ons, last-minute plans and spontaneous decisions. I delivered it with much less conviction than I usually would. He hummed.
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. All the good places will be closed by now.” He moved behind me and started to walk away, calling over his shoulder, “and, besides, you’re busy, right?” I stayed where I was, watching as he slowly strolled away. I felt a pull to go with him, a pull I couldn’t identify. There was a desperate ache in my chest, either from my ceaseless crying all night, or the freezing air in my lungs that was beginning to claw at me, begging for a cigarette. But the ache went with him. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder, and this time my feet found movement, going with him with nothing but a meek, embarrassed smile and a wet, resigned sniffle.
We walked for almost half an hour in silence, save for my mumbled thanks when he finally did offer me a cigarette and again when he lit it for me upon realising that my fingers barely worked. I couldn’t bring myself to ask where we were going, or to come up with some excuse to get out of it altogether. I wanted to ask him about himself, about what could have caused him to come across me in the middle of the night, what he had been doing. I could only manage glances at him, and covert though I thought they were he caught me every time. He was young; younger than me, even, but they way he carried himself was so effortless, so confident, that it was magnetising. He seemed so at ease in our silence that it felt rude to try and find a way to break it.
When we stopped in front of a townhouse, red brick appearing black like blood in the darkness, I dug my hands deeper into my pockets.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a diner,” I said quietly, and he chuckled, one foot on the bottom step with the toes of his boot extinguishing what must have been his tenth cigarette.
“My coffee’s better.” My smile grew tense, my fingernails scraping at the bottom of my pockets, drawing my lip in between my teeth and beginning to chew on it.
“I appreciate the offer, but—“ He just scoffed, shaking his head.
“It’s just coffee.” I sighed, looking up at the house again, but saying nothing. All of the lights were on, the glow almost red. “And then, I don’t know, you can go on with your life.” That seemed to amuse him. “Or not, you know. But, coffee first, always.” The bare branches of the trees above our heads cast thick shadows across his face, highlighting his soft features. His lip ring glinted at me in the near darkness as he tucked a lock of dark hair behind his ear. A past version of me would have been in the door before he had even had a chance to invite me inside and knowing that made me all the more uneasy. I wasn’t like that anymore. I didn’t do that anymore. I thought about her, whether she had said yes to some inexplicably charismatic stranger and that was why I was in this mess.
“Alright,” I conceded, nodding once. His smile widened and he continued up the steps, my body going with him though my mind was still on the sidewalk.
It was difficult for me to even understand what had made me hesitate about coming inside. The moment the door was closed behind us, I was enveloped in warmth, so much so that it made my face and my neck prickle uncomfortably. Finally freeing my hands from my pockets and flexing my fingers, I started to relax.
I followed Frank down the narrow hallway, the walls painted a deep plum colour and adorned with small paintings in ornate gilt frames. I scanned the pictures as we walked: there was fruit, plums and pomegranates cracked open and weeping into silk tablecloths; there were animals, birds shot through with arrows and deer being gutted; there were women in various states of undress, some of them in repose and some of them self-copulating, some of them bathing, and there were men, being butchered by those same women. I had seen some of these same pieces before, in books.
Frank had shrugged out of his jacket, the leather slung over his shoulders that I now realised were slender and toned beneath his tight, washed-thin black t-shirt. There were more tattoos; on the back of his neck, on his arms, on the thin strip of skin showing between his shirt and his jeans. I tore my eyes away, flustered by the heat rising to my cheeks. He stopped to hang his jacket up and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, reached out to take mine too. Nervously, willingly, I removed mine. He took it with a smile as I pulled the sleeves of my sweater around my hands, folding my arms tight to my chest, as if guarding it from something.
“This way,” he said lightly, trailing slowly up a flight of spiralling stairs. They were painted a thick, glossy black, so black they looked slick with oil, bottomless like the water I had been staring into before he showed up. The stairs were hung with artwork too, bigger pieces of even wider variety: a woman in the embrace of some kind of faun or satyr; a man stripped naked and self-flagellating, and then at the very top, a massive reimagining of the crucifixion, of Christ carrying his cross. I couldn’t help but stare into his calm, mournful eyes, our gazes locking as blood flowed down between the thorns, over his pallid face.
“Quite a collection,” I murmured, almost to myself, and Frank just hummed, disappearing down another hallway. I found him in a kitchen, a huge, dark kitchen that, even in my dreams, I couldn’t have imagined.
“The art’s not mine,” he said, hands disappearing into a large, deep cupboard and producing two coffee cups, matching and black. I looked around the room – it was almost as large as my apartment just on its own. But the house is? The kitchen was only half of it, the rest a kind of dining room. There was an island in the centre with the sink, large blocks of knives and utensils dotted around. Watching his hands, I noticed the espresso machine, bigger than most I had ever seen a barista use. What was with this guy? Had he won the lotto or something?
“Whose is it?” I asked, lingering half a world away to perch at the very edge of the sofa, the deep black leather warm and buttery to my touch, not cold like I had expected. Looking around a little more as the room was filled with the sound of coffee grinding, trying my best not to stare at him with all my might, I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped. I would give anything to live here. It was unbelievable. The walls in this part of the room were taken up by bookshelves, almost completely up to the ceiling, books stacked on top of each other with not an empty space in sight. In the low lighting, I couldn’t make out any of the titles, but I wondered if I knew them. If perhaps we had read some of the same things.
“A friend’s,” he said over the screech of steaming milk, my eyes snapping up to look at him. “It’s not really my taste, but, you know, beggars can’t be choosers.” The machine whirred to a stop and I watched as he poured each of us a cup. The air was thick with the smell of coffee now, sweet and bitter at the same time, and warm. When he approached me I took the cup as he offered it, the ceramic delightfully hot to the touch, bringing blood rushing back to my hands. He sat across from me in the matching black leather armchair, easing back into it and crossing one foot over his thigh. He wore scuffed and creased leather boots, like the kind you would wear for riding motorcycles. I wondered if he had one, or maybe five. I resisted an inappropriate laugh — maybe he was Bruce Wayne. I conjured the mental image of when Robin steals the Batmobile and tries to convince the girls that he’s Batman. Like this guy could ever be Batman. He looked out of place, so young and so small and far too much of a degenerate to live somewhere like this, and yet I couldn’t believe I was here to see it.
I didn’t know what to say and so I stared down into my coffee, the white warmth a welcome distraction. It smelled better than anything I had ever smelled before. One sip of the stuff turned into a gulp as the liquid warmed my tongue and left a sharp trail of heat down the back of my throat.
“Are you going to tell me what had you up on that bridge in the middle of the night?” Frank asked gently, his voice growing warmer, warm like the invitation into a warm house on a winter’s night.
“Not much to tell,” I whispered back, once more taking refuge in my coffee, holding it protectively to the centre of my chest and feeling its heat flow through me. My heart rate should have been skyrocketing but I was suddenly so tired, so exhausted that my anxiety was dulled, useless. He scoffed, a soft noise at the back of his throat.
“People don’t find themselves contemplating jumping off a bridge over ‘not much’.”
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“Hm.” There was a dry smile on his face now, almost mocking, but it wasn’t as though I could blame him. Maybe it was ridiculous. It was just a job. It was just an affair. It was just an apartment. His lips twitched, eyes softening at the edges and burning into mine. Here in the lamplight his eyes were almost amber, like honey, like leaves.
“I lost my job,” I started shakily, drawing in a deep breath and dipping my head down before forcing myself to come out with it, to say the words out loud, “and my girlfriend has been having an affair.” My eyebrows flinched. “Ex-girlfriend, I guess. She kicked me out of the apartment.”
He had a puzzled, measured expression on his face. I could tell, then, that he was weighing up which question to ask me first. I sighed, rubbing at my temple with my thumb. Before I could try and start back-pedalling, making excuses, explaining how bad it really was and giving half a dozen reasons as to why I wasn’t a complete loser and why I was justified in feeling the way I did, he spoke.
“How did you find out?” His voice was level. It was a strange question to ask without so much as an I’m sorry. “Did she tell you?” I answered flatly, robotic, my tongue operating independently from my brain.
“There was a message on the answering machine.”
He hummed.
“It been going on for long?” I shook my head, looking back down at my half empty cup.
“Since last Christmas.”
“And the job?” He reached around into his back pocket for his cigarettes, lighting one and leaving the pack on the table that separated us before settling back into his chair. “What did you do?” Please, don’t hesitate to use the past tense.
“I’m an illustrator.” I grimaced. “I—well, I’d just got this job at Cartoon Network. I’m in the middle of writing—”
“I meant what did you do to get fired,” he said coolly, grinning slightly around the smoke in his mouth, little more than a tease. I glared back at him and the smile didn’t budge, like he was goading me.
“I didn’t get fired,” I mumbled, my voice wavering along with my eyes. I tried to steady myself with more coffee but before I knew it, the cup was empty. I sighed. “They laid me off. Budget cuts, you know. Can I have a cigarette?”
“Sure.” He leaned forward to nudge the pack closer to me just as I went for it, drawing his hand back so quickly and so sharply that I could have imagined he reached out at all. I couldn’t say any more. “I still don’t understand what got you to the bridge,” he said, surprisingly softly. There was that same confused, transfixing expression, doe eyes holding mine as if he was rooting around in my brain himself, slipping inside my head. My voice came out in that same dry monotone, like I was being commanded to speak.
“I couldn’t face starting again. I don’t know, I suppose… I wanted to have some kind of control. Over something.”
“Free falling from the Brooklyn Bridge isn’t exactly my idea of control,” he teased, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I knew exactly what he meant. The same thing had occurred to me. Perhaps that’s why it was taking me so long to just jump. His face softened and he set down his cup, leaning his elbows on his knees. “You know, it takes a lot of guts to make that decision.”
“What decision?”
“Taking your own life. Any life, I guess, but particularly your own.” I had never considered that phrase. It felt warm to me — not detached and clinical like committing suicide. “It takes even more guts to keep going.”
“Yeah. Guts I don’t think I have.” His smile turned a little lopsided around his cigarette.
“Do you want to die?” He asked me then, the words quiet but starkly clear. I would have expected the question to send me spiralling, exploding into tears and beating my fists against the sides of my head.
“I don’t know,” I murmured as the realisation hit. Embarrassed by my quiet revelation, shame overcoming me at having been talked down off the bridge and into this room, I scrambled to make excuses for myself. “I just don’t want to keep going.”
“That’s not the same,” he chuckled out.
“I know that.”
“I think it would be a shame if you killed yourself.”
“Thanks,” I shot back snidely, grimacing when he laughed. Was he intentionally being rude? To what effect? “You don’t know me. How would you know?” He shrugged a shoulder, leaning back in the armchair as he took a long drag on his cigarette.
“Gerard, you don’t want to die.” His voice came out warm, syrupy, like it was dripping out of his mouth. I couldn’t say anything to that. Instead I smiled, embarrassed that he was right, embarrassed at the way he said my name like he had said it a thousand times. I could feel myself growing sad, crushingly sad, as if the temperature was rising and I couldn’t breathe. My head was so foggy and yet, so clear.
“I just want to be happy,” I whispered, my voice cracking under the weight of it all, the weight of the day, the weight of Frank’s eyes on my face. Not even my psychiatrist could have drawn that statement out of me. She would have had better luck drawing it from the mouth of a corpse. And yet, now, it was so easy for the words to come out. I wondered if, maybe, it was because I would never see this guy again. There was a realisation I wasn’t quite comfortable with.
“What makes you happy?” Frank asked, and I realised he was closer to me now, sitting by my side on the sofa. I had not even seen him move, nor feel his weight shifting next to me. “Control?”
“I don’t know.” It was an impossible question. She had made me happy, at least for a time. She was out of my league. I was lucky. I was safe, and comfortable, and just starting to live out a dream. I had some element of control, some sort of hold on my life, finally. I was starting to be somebody. I had a life, people, things. I had a home. “Oh, god,” I moaned suddenly, throwing my head into my hands, ash from the cigarette falling onto my thigh.
“What?”
“I can’t go home,” I groaned, erupting into anxious laughter, shaking my head side to side. “I can’t go home. I was meant to be dead by now. I wasn’t planning on going back.” The irony was hilarious to me, but it started to bring back the pain, the pressure, everything I had been running away from. It was all back in front of me.
“Will she be there?”
“God, I don’t know.” I rubbed my hands over my face and stared, into space, through my legs and through the sofa and through the floor. It was getting hard to breathe. “She’s probably changed the fucking locks already.” I laughed again, at the ridiculousness of it all. There was silence for a little while.
“You can stay here, if you need to.” He stubbed out his cigarette decisively as if that was that and I had no say in the matter. “There’s a few spare bedrooms. You can take your pick.” The invitation didn’t bother me — the alarm bells were silent, or broken, or the batteries had been removed. I did find myself wanting to stay — but why? It wasn’t like he was such incredible company. He was rude, if a little kind and gracious to boot. But mostly rude.
“No. I mean, I can probably just call someone,” I said hesitantly, the words spilling out just as I realised that, in my hazy rage up there on the bridge, I had tossed my cell phone into the water too, sending it hurtling down into the blackness. I sighed, rubbing at my temples and clenching my jaw, my eyes screwing closed.
“You threw your phone in, didn’t you,” Frank murmured, a whisper of humour in it. I just nodded, helpless, tears beginning to spill out in sheer frustration. This was truly my lowest moment. Thinking about suicide is low, I suppose, but not as low as backing out and being left with nothing at all. He didn’t seem bothered by my tears, just watching me carefully. “You can use mine.”
“I don’t know the numbers,” I mumbled around my sleeve as I did my best to wipe at my eyes and my nose all at once, my chest heaving, my face beginning to sting. Number, I thought to myself. There was only one person left who could help me. Realising that you don’t even know your own brother’s phone number is haunting. I was stuck. Frank was watching me patiently, eyes a little cloudy as if he were weighing something up.
“Just stay here,” he sighed, rising off the sofa and picking up our cups, moving back toward the kitchen and saying over his shoulder, “I could use the company.”