Page 12 of I've Walked Where You've Been
He was towelling his hair when, suddenly, for the first time since he was nine, it was just him inside his own head.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.” He stumbled to his bed, clutching his head. It was like a void had opened up, a screaming silence that felt as wrong as suddenly not being able to feel his own body.
For a second he was sure that something had happened to Ethan, that he’d gotten hurt enough that the bond had become silent, but that didn’t seem right. Matty could tell there was a bond there, just…blocked.
Matty blinked at the floor, realising what was happening. Ethan was blocking him out on purpose, just like Matty had done when he’d spent time with Barb.
Ethan was away somewhere, kissing and touching that fucker of a boyfriend, and he’d shut Matty out.
Matty didn’t move for the whole forty-three minutes it took for Ethan to open up the bond again, letting through a feeling of elation and pleasure and a little embarrassment. Matty took a deep breath, gulping it in as if he were surfacing the water after a long time in the deep.
Matty was dressed and sitting cross-legged on his bed when Ethan came back to the room, looking happy. For some reason, that pleased, small smile just made everything worse.
“Hey,” Ethan said, throwing a questioning look at whatever expression was on Matty’s face. “You okay?”
Matty wet his lips. He didn’t want to sound accusatory, but he had toknow. “Did you…block the bond just now?”
Ethan blushed. “Oh. Yeah, sorry. I was with Frank, so…”
Matty swallowed. “Did it feel this bad when I used to do it?” he asked quietly.
Ethan looked away. “I mean…yeah. It wasn’t…it didn’t feel great.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Ethan shrugged. “We’re going to have to get used to it, right? It’s not so bad after a while.”
“Right, yeah. I guess.”
How did non-romantic bondmates even do this? There had to be another way of tuning out the bond other than just shutting it down. Matty didn’t know how to ask for it, though.
He didn’t know if he could.
That night, he closed his eyes in the darkness and focused on the way the bond filled him up. On its soft edges, its giving flow.
He fell asleep clinging to the feel of Ethan inside his head.
**********
It was a harrowing realisation that, all these years, Ethan had beencarefulwith Matty.
Not, like,thoughtfully, but more likefearfully.
No excuses for all the shit Ethan had done, but Matty thought about how fucking young they had been when Matty had first cut off the bond. Had Ethan realised what was happening? Had he told his parents, his friends? Or had he just withstood it alone?
Matty couldn’t imagine having that happen when he was fourteen. That jolt of emptiness, that scooped-out, hollow feeling. It felt…perverse.
And Ethan had been forced to just…normalise it. To accept it as part of his life—theirlife. That pain was how their bond would be.
When Matty thought further back to when he’d stayed away from Ethan long enough to cause bond-sickness, it all seemed to crystallise in some dirty gem he could hardly look through.
Ethan might have tried to live his life without thinking about Matty—but that might have been a far more fucked up defensive mechanism than Matty had ever known.
Maybe it wasn’t fair—Matty had suffered too, after all. He had complexes burrowed deep in his soul because of Ethan. But it was no wonder Ethan wasn’t the one to reach out—Matty wouldn’t either, if Ethan had put him through that level of trauma.
Something had to change.
**********
