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Jesse didn’t remember his first time having sex.
He was sixteen, and the night began as many nights began when he was sixteen--with sneaking into a club. He had been hella vanilla back then by the standards that Jesse would soon climb to, not doing much more than weed and alcohol, but he’d just gotten chewed out by his parents for getting, like, a fucking C or something on a math quiz, which was a passing grade, dammit. So the night passed in a haze of smoke and drinks and when he woke up, he didn’t recognize the ceiling he was staring up at.
The first thing he felt was fear.
Soon, too soon, actually, considering he was only sixteen, this routine would become familiar. Waking up in a strange house, on a strange bed, with a strange woman, not remembering even a hint of how he got there. But that first morning, Jesse sat up so fast he almost vomited and pressed the heel of his palms into his eyes to keep from crying, from falling apart right there on a stranger’s bed.
The woman had left long scratch marks with her nails over the fresh cuts on his stomach and thighs. Little spots of red dotted the sheets where he’d been sleeping.
He yanked on his clothes so fast he got blood on his hoodie and left before she could wake up and see his choked back tears.
-----
Jesse’s first long term girlfriend was someone he met in his junior english class right before his seventeenth birthday, someone normal, who didn’t smell like smoke and cheap booze all the time and whose freckles he thought were cute. She didn’t expect anything from him, not even kisses if he didn’t feel like it, let alone sex.
It was new, as new as waking up in a stranger’s bed had once been, but this was a kind of new that didn’t make him want to throw up.
Four months into their relationship, she asked him if he’d ever had sex. He said yes. She asked him if he wanted to have sex with her.
He said yes.
It was horribly awkward, nothing like the blind, needy groping he’d experienced while clubbing. She carefully undid his jeans, looking up at his face every two seconds to make sure what she was doing was okay. He nodded and urged her on.
When she finally uncovered his lower half, it wasn’t his underwear she turned her focus to, but the wounds on his thighs.
“Jesse,” she asked, face pale, eyes already filling with tears, “what are those?”
Their ‘sex’ didn’t get any further than that. She asked him a million tearful questions, like “what did you use?” and “how deep is it?” and “did it hurt?” which Jesse thought was particularly stupid because yes, of course it hurt, that was kind of the point.
She kept asking him why. He didn’t answer.
She made him promise to stop, a promise he made without hesitation and without any intention to keep.
She broke up with him two weeks later.
He made up some excuse in his head about it being because she was a bitch with no taste.
But he knew why.
-----
He met Wendy when he was eighteen.
Well, met meaning fucked for the first time. It was shortly after he graduated from high school and had just started cooking spicy meth, and she agreed to fuck him in exchange for a hit.
She didn’t say a word as she did her work between his scarred thighs, and later they sat in the hotel room smoking up together, and she looked at him with eyes that understood.
More than he knew.
-----
The air in the car was thick with smoke, and the woman laughed as she wrestled both of their clothes off. Jesse laid back contentedly, letting himself be pinned back by her knees on his chest, enjoying the high.
“Is that from tweaking?” she said, pointing at his arms.
“Huh?” He looked at them as if they were new, taking in the lines and lines of overlapping scars and fresh cuts. Reddish-pink lines, some rimmed with purple where he’d pressed so hard with the blade that it had bruised, on a backdrop of fading white ones. A few of the newer ones were bleeding from the rough way the woman had taken his hoodie off, but he was too far gone to care. He probably wouldn’t have cared sober, anyway.
“Oh,” he said, taking another drag from the lipstick-and-lighter-stained pipe they were sharing. “Yeah, those are from tweaking.”
-----
When he had sex with Jane for the first time, she paused when she saw his cuts, old and new, but she didn’t pause for long. She didn’t say anything. And when she took off her own clothes, she made sure he saw that she had scars too.
They never talked about it explicitly, but Jane seemed almost enthralled by the marks that marred Jesse’s body. She liked to run her hands over them, extra gently over the new ones, moving her thumb over the lines on his forearm as she spooned him to keep him from choking on vomit. She muttered to him once, in those moments of fading consciousness after shooting up, that she was glad to be dating someone like her. Someone who wouldn’t judge her or ask questions. Or tell her to stop.
Jane never once asked him to stop.
When he noticed new, angry red lines joining the ridged scars on her thighs, he didn’t ask her to stop either.
Jesse had responded with a vacant hum, eyes closed. He scratched at the day-old cuts on his arms, relishing the burn of pain dripping onto the mattress.
Jane understood. They understood each other, understood that the pain was more than just pain, more than a punishment. It was a necessity. It was beautiful.
It was an addiction.
And as they both pulled each other deeper into other addictions, little red dots in Jesse’s elbow fitting in with the scars as though they had always belonged there, neither of them wanted to let go of the beauty.
They were perfect for each other in this way. Both of them, falling apart, tearing themselves apart, and letting each other. Almost helping each other, encouraging it, dragging each other down, but they were together, at least they were together, and Jesse had never not been alone in this before.
And then Jane died.
He found her, staring up at the ceiling with lifeless eyes, the smell of vomit filling the room so thickly it was hard to breathe, oh god, he couldn’t breathe, she wasn’t breathing, and she was gone.
And it was his fault.
-----
Andrea didn’t even notice his scars the first time they had sex. Or if she did, she didn’t say anything. She’d been too hungry, too busy working on getting rid of the thin layer of t-shirt between her and his chest, to squint in the dark under the blankets and really pause to think about the thin white lines adorning Jesse’s stomach.
Later, though, when she saw him in short sleeves, she looked at them with a quiet, sad expression.
She didn’t ask about the scars. That was something Jesse liked about Andrea. She knew that he had history he didn’t always want to talk about. And anyway she could probably glean most of the important stuff about the old wounds herself. But he was certain, deep in his bones, that if she ever saw any new ones, the way he had on Jane, she would ask him to stop.
He didn’t know if he would. If he even could.
There weren’t any fresh cuts when Jesse was with Andrea. Hadn’t been for a while. Rehab had restricted his access to blades, and he’d been too tired to actually bother to cut himself since.
Then Brock got sick.
That changed things.
And even though it turned out not to be ricin and Brock would be fine, he couldn’t stop feeling sick to his stomach. And the brand new cuts didn’t stop coming.
Jesse broke up with Andrea. Because he was bad for her, just like he was bad for Jane. Mr. White was right. Mr. White was always right. And they found the ricin cigarette in his roomba, and fuck, Jesse was fucking disgusting. Fucking useless, stupid, so stupid, and as Mr. White comforted him, hand on his shaking shoulders, Jesse knew that he deserved this.