Page 1 of Crybaby
CHAPTER ONE
Repression, in Jason’s opinion, was unfairly maligned. What was wrong with a little bit of good, old-fashioned denial every now and again? Jason had been practicing it for most of his life, what with being bi, and it had taken him until the end of college to accept how attracted to his then-best-friend and roommate he was. And, sure, he’d struggled and hated himself for a while, and it had sucked, but still. It hadworked.
Kind of.
He’d been in a great friends-with-benefits relationship with a pregnant woman—her partner having fucked off months earlier—when Jason had to really crank up the denial routine. They’d been lazing about, watching TV after sex, when a commercial about a lonely couch or something came on and Jason’s friend—hormonal to the brim—had started crying, and Jason had just…popped a fucking boner even though he’d come like twenty minutes ago.
And, come on. What was he supposed to do? Accept it?
Hell, no.
So, he’d gone back to repression. He wasn’t going to admit, even to himself, that the sudden sight of Lana’s face wet with tears, blue eyes big and shining, hitching breaths desperate and strangled, had turned him on.
Like, what waswrongwith him, that he got hot under the collar for women crying? Like, really? Really? He didn’t have enough problems? He hadn’t gone through enough sexual discoveries?
He’d looked it up briefly—dacryphilia, fucking weird-ass medical name, fuck that—before the strict repression-and-denial regime had been put in place, and apparently, it was athing, getting turned-on by other people crying. It was like realizing that other men were also gay, and it wasn’t just ahimthing—both relieving and distressing.
So he’d pushed it down and put it away in a tightly locked box, and ended his semi-relationship with Lana, which she hadn’t been too bothered about, and hadn’t thought about it since.
Well, okay, that might not have beencompletelytrue. Sometimes the image of teary eyes and wet cheeks and gasping breaths infiltrated his head when he was jerking off, but that didn’t mean anything. Everybody knew jerking off was like going to Vegas—you didn’t talk about it, and it didn’t count.
So, yeah, hebarelythought about it. It wasn’t a problem.
Until Sasha.
*****
Jason had met Alexander Ivanov—“Call me Sasha”—at work. It was sort of funny to look back on it now, but Jason hadn’t been sure what to think of Sasha when he was first hired. Sasha wasn’t exactly loud, but he was sociable and funny and seemed to take up a lot of space, which wasn’t helped by how tall and wide-shouldered he was. Even his Russian accent was endearing, especially coupled with his too-big-for-his-face smile—not that Jason would ever admit to thinking that, lest Sasha’s overblown head grow any larger.
Jason was…not the opposite, maybe, but he was definitely confounded by the ease with which Sasha seemed to justconnectwith people, to make them smile and feel comfortable even if they’d just met.
So when Sasha showed up at the office on his first day and seemed to have become best buddies with every single person by lunchtime, Jason had shrugged and hadn’t thought much of it. Sasha would just be another identified object drifting in space, close enough to see but far enough to be unreachable.
As Jason found out, however, Sasha turned out to be very much reachable. They’dclicked. Honestly, for a long time, Jason had been looking for a catch. People didn’t justclick. Maybe at the start, sure, but then you had to work for it, figure it out. The other person would get tired of Jason’s sarcastic humour, or how much of a homebody he was, or his insecurities manifesting in an inability to take risks. Sometimes, even when people liked him, he couldn’t help but be suspicious, wondering if they were lying to him somehow. He’d developed the habit of being blunt and straightforward in an attempt to assure everybody around him that he was telling the truth—that his reactions, good or bad, were genuine.
Despite all of this, Sasha was just…unaffected. He gave as good as he got, that was for sure, but he was so open and casual and frankly cavalier about everything that none of Jason’s traits seemed to pierce his thick skin. It was annoying, really, and not at all charming.
See? Denial and repression. Keystones of any stable mind. Jason was wise beyond his years, he really was.
So, Sasha had crashed into his life like the giant, Russian bull he was—yes, that’s a thing, look it up—and it had all been going swimmingly. Sasha had taken over eighty percent of his social life, insisting on a few nights out at bars, mainly with other co-workers, and a lot of nights in, playing video games and watching movies.
How was Jason to know that it was precisely one of those movies that would ruin everything?
Okay, so that sounded unnecessarily dramatic and ominous, but it had come as a shock. A very, very unwelcome shock.
Sasha had come over to his apartment after work, carpooling with Jason like he often did, and they’d ordered takeout and put a movie on. They usually played video games, but Sasha had injured his wrist playingsquash, of all things—which was ridiculous, Jason kept reminding him, because who the fuck playedsquash?—and he didn’t want to strain the injury further. Jason insisted that Sasha—who was much worse than Jason in pretty much every game, his accent thickening until it crumbled into Russian, much to Jason’s amusement—was making the injury up so he didn’t have to loseagain.
“So funny,” Sasha said, big wolf grin in place. “I think you forget, my turn to pick movie.”
Jason froze as he grabbed some proper utensils from the kitchen to eat the takeout, which they always used because Sasha was too much of a princess to use the planet-killing plastic cutlery like a good American.
“Fuck. Please, not another Russian drama,” Jason whined.
“No, no. Of course not,” Sasha agreed and proceeded to put on a Russian drama.
Luckily, the movie was shorter than the three-and-a-half-hour monstrosity he had chosen once, which had led to his right to choose movies being revoked for a month by the powers-that-be, which consisted of Jason and his desire to have brain cells that hadn’t been killed off by the most absurdly convoluted plot in all of history.
Sasha should have been thankful Jason didn’t ban him from choosing movies for longer. He should be thankful that Jason sat through the film at all, which was a testament of his love—no, not love,like.Very strong but platonic like for Sasha.
