Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter forty-one

Early June

Jake and Aaron stayed up late that night.

It wasn't that they weren't tired, because both of them knew the other was. Yet, it seemed to work out that every time one of them suggested they go to bed, the other refused. It only played out like this when they had way too much on their minds. Tonight was no exception.

The lights from the TV flickered rapidly across the darkened room as Jake's console shook from the gun he was firing on screen.

"They've got more ammo on the east side." Aaron mumbled from the edge of the bed where he was sitting, staring intently at the screen.

"I see." Jake whispered back as he sat cross-legged on the bed behind him.

"As long as they don't fuckin' get to it first."

Aaron tensed up as he moved along the screen, while Jake couldn't have cared less about what was going on inside the game. He liked that his hands were busy on the controller because it gave him something to do, but his mind wasn't registering any of the moves he was making. At this point, he wasn't even sure where Aaron was on the map, or where the hell the east side was supposed to be. Jake had never felt so out of it before. It had been four hours since he talked to his dad, and he still felt like he was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. He almost wished he would just explode already so it would be quick, sudden, and thoughtless. But where's the damage control in that?

"Dude, where the fuck are you?" Aaron leaned forward to squint at the map on the screen. "How are you still back at the base?"

Jake realized now that he hadn't been moving his character, but rather running in circles all the while Aaron was focused in on a specific motive. God, I am so out of it. Aaron looked back to Jake suspiciously, full of an energy that Jake wished he could channel.

"You good?"

Jake faked a small smile and nodded. "Yeah, sorry."

He sent his character running.

When they ultimately lost the match, Aaron's shoulders fell defeatedly as his head rolled back towards the ceiling. Jake moved through the selections on the screen to start another match, and just as quickly as Aaron mourned the first loss—and then their second—they were on to playing a third. When the timer started, Aaron moved into full play again, but Jake sat silently in the back, moving his character forward slowly, just trying to avoid death.

His mind was spinning, his dad's voice as he talked about Connor echoing in his skull.

'You don't even know him!,' he should have said, but saying that would be admitting that Jake did know him. He was trapped under the wall he built to protect himself, the pieces that started breaking off crushing him as they fell. Connor would know what to do. But Connor wasn't the right person to go to... not when he was the 'problem'.

Jake dropped the controller down into his lap and pushed his hands up onto his face, trying to scrub his mind of all the intrusive conversations he might have with his dad in the future and all the different ways they could end. His fingers hastily grabbed ahold of the hair he failed to brush through this morning when he woke up on Connor's floor cursing the sunlight. That fleeting rush of adrenaline from earlier was coming back and it made Jake want to die. He hadn't known what a full-blown anxiety attack looked like before—he had always stopped somewhere short of breaking down completely—but he was guessing he was coming pretty close tonight. The feeling of trying to avoid getting to that point was almost worse than if he just let it happen.

I can't do this again.

He blew out a deep breath and picked the controller back up, trying to take his mind off of it.