He steps onto the slick sidewalk, rain pooling beneath his feet. Jacob waves goodbye to Elliot softly, his face devoid of emotion. He doesn’t feel much anymore, now that his adrenaline has ebbed away. He’s wiped his hands on his shirt, smearing a tad of blood onto it, though the black soaks it up nicely.
“Hey,” Elliot leans out the driver’s window. “C’mere.” Jacob looks lethargically surprised but does as he’s asked. The doctor quickly fumbles through his glovebox, producing a small pair of hand gloves. “So you don’t get blood on anything else.” He says, unabashed of the crime they’ve committed, talking about it so openly.
“Thanks.” Jacob replies, slipping them on, they fit nicely. He wonders why someone with such a lanky body carries something so small.
“Oh, and your umbrella, you forgot it.” His smile is polite and cordial, the kind he must give to everyone. Jacob grabs his umbrella from Elliot’s hands, now gloved, he can’t feel the sensation of their fingers touching. “I need something from you.” Elliot begins, clutching the end of the umbrella as if it’s a bartering chip. “I need you to promise this stays between us.”
“Of course.” He gives a false smile, too tired to care. “I don’t want to be known for it either.”
Elliot nods, lets go, and flips his Mustang into reverse. Jacob backs away and heads up the stairs to his shitty little apartment, listening to his neighbours squabble inside their unit, smelling the exhaust from Elliot’s car wafting up the flight of stairs.
As soon as he steps inside, he realizes something unnerving. Maddy’s gone, and this is the first time he’s been alone since he could remember.
His first call is to strip and do a load of laundry, throwing everything into the wash, before cleaning his hands off in the kitchen sink. The water runs pink for a short bit, before slowly going clear.
He wants to shower but knows there’ll be no hot water if he does laundry too. So, instead, he decides his best action would be to just wash his hair.
The laundry machine rattles as he stands in the bathroom, staring at his reflection. His dark eyes are bloodshot and heavy, his hair slick with oil and rainwater, and his naked chest looks empty and void of muscle or fat. Dressed in only his underwear, he wonders if this is even a body that someone could enjoy. There’s nothing but hanging skin and protruding bone that makes his flat chest look sickly. His skin is covered in pox from picking scars and eczema, and his haircut barely makes him look past twenty.
Only someone with a weird fetish would love you. He told himself, eyes going slack and dejected as he looked down at the sink. But who knows, rich old men always have weird fetishes, none as weird as yours.
Jacob tries to pry his face down with his hands, covering his face so he doesn’t have to look in the mirror. He paces back and forth, thinking of any way to make his brain stop before it gets worse.
Homework.
Jacob snorts at the thought, but slowly, it lingers. He didn’t want to do it, never did, but his brain trickled through a lie he could tell himself. It was still technically homework if he feminized them.
He slumps into his bedroom, kneels under his bed and pulls out a cardboard box labelled THERAPY in Sharpie. His hands lift the top off smoothly as he begins to file through the scraps inside.
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You know you’re disgusting, right? His thoughts are uncontrollable, and he attempts to ignore them, as he lifts a catalogue and begins to flip through it. This isn’t normal for anyone.
He knows it’s not normal, but it’s the closest thing he could get without feeling sick or getting heart palpitations. Sometimes they were women, but mostly they were men, but always made him feel at something close to at ease.
He crawls into bed, taking time to carefully prop himself up against the wall where nobody can see him in the cracks of his window blinds. Jacob lets out a deep sigh, opening the first page.
The first few are nothing too interesting. Ladies’ rings and bracelets and a few accessories, but he quickly skips past them. Even though he’s seen this magazine hundreds of times, he feels like he recognizes something new.
Jacob flips ten pages deep when he sees it. A 1969 Seiko Quartz Astron, wrapped neatly around a man’s wrist. The man’s skin is deep and warm-toned, just like Elliot, and dressed in an outdated suit of black and white. He couldn’t see the face of the disembodied hands, but he could see the man’s chest, where his heart sat underneath the ribs, and knew he could hear that heartbeat if he wanted to. He was so close to the doctor’s chest that he could feel it.
He tries to look at the next page, but his body is stuck repeating the same image of the Seiko on the man’s wrist. It looks too similar not to be him. The cuticles are so well-manicured that they must be professional. The subtle colour changes from the palm to the back of his hand. His breath gets hotter as he stares, trying to make sense of anything, of why he’s like this in the first place.
He’d always had a fondness for hands, in one way or another. Stealing nail polish when he was little, wore watches as he got older, now trying to ignore them as much as possible except for this magazine.
Fuck it. He begins to massage himself through his underwear for a few moments, his mind constantly drifting back to Elliot and how much he’d prefer it be the doctor’s hands between his thighs. Staring at the ceiling, his face goes pink and numb, looking down only to remind himself how pathetic he is, all alone.
He’s dead silent for about three minutes before he gives up, throwing his covers to the side as he stands, leaving the magazine open to the Seiko’s page. He’s groggy and a little dazed as he walks out into the living room, grabbing a large book from the stack.
The phone book is heavier than he is, as he returns to his little bedroom haven. This isn’t normal, this is stalking. He softly flips through the lists of names and addresses before eventually settling on the DE section.
Elliot DeMile’s full phone number and address lie clear as day, an address in Beaconsfield and a 450 area code. His heart flutters, knowing he’s doing something immoral, something akin to stalking, but he has to know.
Jacob wishes he could have a recording of Elliot’s voice, to play over and over, a photo of his watch or maybe one of his ties to wear. There was just too much to want, to collect, and he knew this wasn’t right.
He’s not supposed to have any magazines that Dr. Hendricks isn’t aware of, he’s not supposed to touch himself unless it’s about or around a woman, and he sure as hell isn’t allowed to obsess over a man he just met.
But his image is intoxicating and doesn’t leave his mind. Even alone, the thought of Elliot keeps him comforted. Another adult man, one who treats him with respect, and decency. Not a boss, not a kid, not a neighbour who only tolerates you, but a real human male companion.
He thought of the books he read, the ones where the man and woman fell in love at first sight and didn’t believe it was possible, but now he understood. It’s not love at first sight, it’s lust, and if he were to personify any sin, it’d be that one. The men in the books comforted him at night, the thought of cuddling in their arms like the women were allowed to in the novels, and being taken care of with passion and loyalty that he never got to experience. Fake love was as delicious as it was fictional, but placing Elliot in that shell of a human figure was so easy.
Jacob hadn’t spoken to another man like that in almost a year. Let alone kept secrets and stories together.
The image of the teenager who jumped him was jumbled and vapid now.
His mind was filled with one image and one image alone.
Elliot.