Casey has tried hard to be happy about the thing with Delilah. He really has. After all, how many nerds achieve their life's goal and score with the head cheerleader? And it's stupid and shitty and unfair, this niggling little voice inside him that blames her for being the first of them to get possessed by aliens – the only one really, if you don't count Stan and Stokely, and Casey can't find it in his heart to blame Stan for being brave enough to walk out there in the rain to test a mistaken hypothesis and having it blow up in his face, or Stokely for nearly having all her teeth knocked out. But Delilah... Delilah panicked and ran, and got caught, and only the grace of God and a slippery floor saved Casey from the same fate so this little twinge of blame is not only unfair but also hypocritical. And Casey knows this, and knows that what he's in right now is every nerd's classic wish-fulfilment fantasy; and that he should be happy and not get up in the morning and stand by his bedroom window drinking coffee, looking out at the rain, and listening to blank nothingness wheel slowly through his head where his thoughts should be.
But this is the thing: deep down inside, Casey really doesn't think of himself as a nerd. That's what gave him balls enough to flirt with Delilah to begin with; to snark at Gabe even when it earned him a bloody nose; to come out and say to for Chrissakes the head cheerleader and the captain of the football team, I think aliens are taking over the school, and expect to be believed. Nerds are supposed to be happy to have their pictures taken for national magazines, to have head cheerleaders wearing their class rings on the traditional chain around their necks, to suddenly wake up in the morning and not be stiff with bruises from the day before. But when the cameras went away, when The Casey Connor Story went from front page to page 12 to "slow news night" and then dropped off the face of public awareness altogether, he was glad; and when Delilah's gaze began to drift absently over his shoulder while they were talking (which coincidentally started sometime during the "slow news night" stage), something deep inside him was glad of that too.
Casey remembers an old Star Trek episode in which having was suggested to be not, after all, as pleasing a thing as wanting. Now for the first time Casey understands, but something in him still stubbornly insists that it shouldn't be that way.
"She won't say things, you know?" Zeke says quietly from where he's leaning back in Casey's desk chair, boots propped on the desk, pushing the keyboard askew. "She asks them. Like she doesn't think she has a right."
"I know," Casey answers, looking out at the downpour washing the empty street outside. He sees lightning in the distance and counts. One... two...
"All that talk about not being afraid..."
...three... four...
"There had to have been something of them left in there, even with the aliens, some sort of awareness of what was going on. If there wasn't, they couldn't have come back."
...seven... eight... A long rumble, low and distant.
"How could you know what it is to not be afraid and then go back to being scared of your own shadow?" Zeke shakes his head and takes a sip of his coffee.
"Have you asked her?" Casey asks, turning a little toward Zeke without looking at him.
A moment of silence before the boots clomp onto the floor, and Casey swears he feels the warmth of Zeke's body behind his for just a moment before Zeke comes to lean against the other side of the window. Their coffee makes little oval steam-clouds on the glass. "No, my friend, I have not," Zeke answers. "Because that isn't really what gets me, you know? I thought I could get past it but I can't."
Casey turns to look up at Zeke. Zeke's eyes are fixed on the rainy street below, dark and brooding. "Get past what?" Casey asks, as if he didn't know. As if he didn't have to close his eyes sometimes against the vision of Delilah with things crawling under her skin; as if he didn't see it sometimes even when he closed his eyes. As if he hadn't gone out and bought her a huge gift pack of expensive makeup so he would have an excuse not to touch her face.
"I keep seeing her groping around trying to find her head, Case. When I kiss her she's afraid to use her tongue first so it always has to be me, and sometimes I just don't because deep down I'm scared shitless of what I'm going to find inside her mouth."
Zeke takes a long swallow of coffee, and Casey thinks that he's never heard him speak this honestly about his fears.
"How did this happen, man?" Zeke goes on after a minute in that deep, lovely voice, that voice that does things to Casey's knees that he shouldn't even be thinking about right now. "How is it they got possessed by the fucking aliens, and we're the ones who won't ever go back to normal? That is the textbook definition of Not Fucking Right."
Another thing that is Not Fucking Right, Casey wants to say, is that not only has everything he thought he wanted turned out not to be so great after all (except the lack of bullying at school, with which he is quite satisfied), but now things he never really let himself think about wanting before have come knocking on those tightly closed doors in his brain and refuse to go away. It would be a faux pas of no small water to say this to Zeke of all people, however, so when the hour alarm on his watch chirps, he says instead, hesitantly: "No football practice today?"
Zeke looks down into his mug and then drains it. "Yeah," he answers. "Yeah, I have practice. Got any more of this coffee?"
Casey isn't sure what he expected to change between himself and his parents, afterward. Granted, believing your son when he says that the school faculty are trying to kill him is a lot to ask of any parent, but an apology when he turns out to be right would surely not be too much to ask. He isn't sure he wants the breach between them healed, not after years of their ignoring his bruises, not after seeing their vindictive, self-righteous enjoyment in tearing his room apart looking for drugs and girlie magazines; so he believes that all things considered he's okay with this new resentful aloofness on their part. If nothing else, it means that they're out of town much more often.
The first time he was alone in the house at night, Casey told himself that there was nothing to be afraid of, and bought a baseball bat and twelve boxes of caffeine pills to keep beside his bed. He told himself it was stupid to sleep with every light in the house on, and did it anyway. And even then he woke from a nightmare with his sheets drenched in sweat, holding his breath as he listened for slow footsteps on the stairs. The fear didn't fade, either, as fear is supposed to in the aftermath of nightmares; it got worse until Casey fumbled blindly for the phone on his nightstand and, with no memory of even dialing, heard Zeke's slow deep voice in his ear.
Hang on, man, I'll be right there, Zeke said, and hung up; and ten minutes later came the loud rumble of his car, and the tight knot in Casey's chest only then started to unravel. Zeke came upstairs with a twelve-pack of beer and a large reassuring presence, leading to Casey dozing off during a Thighmaster infomercial and realizing only when he woke up cold that what would really have been reassuring was waking with Zeke's arms around him.
So Casey makes more coffee and doesn't say anything else about football practice, because while it would utterly mortify him to have to call Zeke in cold blood and say I'm all alone, I'm scared, can you come over? somehow Zeke has gotten into the habit of dropping by in the afternoons when Casey's parents are gone and staying until Casey falls asleep. Casey strongly suspects that it would be a nasty shock for Zeke if his own parents ever actually did come home; but he also suspects, especially when he wakes to find himself short a blanket and pillow and Zeke sprawled fast asleep on the floor beside his bed, that maybe he's not the only one who gets jittery now and then.
Zeke carries a stash of scat pens inside his jacket now like a gunslinger carries a Colt .45.
Casey told Delilah he was a virgin. He told her he wasn't ready. In a way, it was even true.
They watch the news a lot, sprawled on Casey's bed or on the couch downstairs (and the couch is better, from Casey's viewpoint, because the temptation to slide over just a bit and curl into Zeke's solid warmth is not nearly as powerful). They watch it carefully, but not the headlines; they watch the human interest stories, the filler, the stories meant to convey the reassuring impression that small-town America is still alive and well, and they watch for things like overly placid smiles and stacks of empty water jugs. Because Zeke, who does not always hide his unthinking brilliance as well as he believes he does, sat at Casey's desk one afternoon and outlined all the reasons for and against worrying about another takeover attempt, and unlike the national media the two of them had come down on the side of worrying. A little more care, a little better luck, less of students being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, Zeke pointed out, and the takeover bid would have been successful; and aliens determined enough to come all the way to Earth from God knows what dying world surely have their own equivalent of the adage about what to do if at first you don't succeed.
In an odd way, Casey thinks, there are only the two of them left. Delilah has made it clear that she much prefers to pretend that nothing ever happened. Stan is as brave as a mongoose and not particularly prone to denial; but he and Stokely both seem to be recovering and moving on, and Casey doesn't have the heart to pull them back unless there is no other choice. He and Zeke, like that old blind woman guarding the portal to Hell in a New York apartment in that movie Casey caught on HBO at one in the morning when he was ten years old. And if Casey thinks a bit too often about Zeke's weight on him, about hands that were gentler than he wanted at the time, then that's something to be kept to himself and no concern of Zeke's at all.
"That coffee done?" Zeke asks from behind him, nearly making Casey jump out of his skin.
"Yeah, just now," Casey lies, grabbing Zeke's empty mug with hands that shake so badly that the porcelain rattles like castanets on the countertop.
Zeke frowns at him for a moment and then nudges him out of the way. "Here, man. Let me do it. You need to go sit down or something."
"I'm fine," Casey says, and hears his voice shaking. "I am."
Zeke's hand slides onto Casey's shoulder and the world fades around him like an old daguerreotype. "You get any more fine and you're gonna break that mug. Go sit down, Casey."
Casey nods and heads for the couch, leaving the coffeepot steaming on the burner behind him.
That night he dreams that he and Zeke are hunting aliens and running from them, like something out of a Stephen King novel, driving in Zeke's car across long stretches of dust and desert – the last place these particular aliens are likely to be, but somehow in his dream it makes sense. It makes sense too that a motel should pop up out of nowhere just as they are getting too tired to drive; and that when Casey gets into the shower to scrub off the road grime, Zeke should get in with him. It makes all the sense in the world that Zeke should lather up his hands and run them softly over Casey's body, pulling Casey back against him into the sheltering circle of his arms.
But in the dream somehow Casey knows that Stan and Stokely have become aliens after all, and he leans his head back against Zeke's shoulder and cries from weariness and grief.
"Casey! Fuck, wake up!"
He wakes with a jolt, choking on sobs. Zeke's hand on his shoulder is just invitation enough; Casey reaches up, pulls Zeke down onto the bed, and nestles determinedly against him. And this should be the part where he calms down; but instead he thinks of Zeke gently covering his dead mouse, and cries harder.
"Casey, Jesus, the fuck set you off today?" Zeke murmurs, and Casey listens hard for annoyance or weariness and hears only concern.
Lightning illuminates the room for a moment, and Casey counts three before the thunderclap comes.
It's thunder that wakes him the next morning (and Zeke is gone, a fact that Casey doesn't let himself think too closely about), and it continues all through the day. Casey tries hard not to think about what Stan told him, about the coach and the football team standing in the rain with tentacles coming out of their faces.
Delilah gives him back his class ring, standing in front of his locker with her hair flipped over one shoulder, immaculate as holy conception, and he knows when he sees the puzzled anger in her face that she was expecting him to take the breakup badly; not that she wanted to hurt him, he believes, but not many people's egos would come away unscathed from a breakup without even a token protest. So Casey makes one, hearing it ring hollow in his own ears, and he thinks as he watches her walk away that he's made things worse. But there's nothing he can do now; so he puts his science textbook away and takes out his math book, which is looking a bit bedraggled now as the last few weeks of high school slip soundlessly away, and when he walks down the hall no one stares anymore.
"I told her it wasn't working," Zeke says quietly as he dumps fresh-ground coffee into the filter that afternoon, with the storm still raging outside. For someone who doesn't touch his own stash, Zeke ingests an astounding amount of caffeine.
"How did she take it?" Casey asks, leaning on the breakfast bar and spinning a coaster absently around with his index finger.
Zeke makes a face. "Could have been worse. I think she was a little worried about dating a student anyway."
But you won't be a student anymore in a few more weeks, Casey doesn't say. He is suddenly, fiercely glad that he doesn't have to share Zeke with anyone. After so many years of feeling completely alone, he finds this quiet, fragile contentment priceless and utterly necessary; and if he wants it to be something more, if he aches for the feel of Zeke's hands on him just one more time, then that's something to be quietly folded up and tucked into the back of his mind where it need never disrupt anything at all.
He's tired after last night's restless sleep and nearly dozes off while they watch the news. In some sort of dim floating awareness he realizes that he has curled into Zeke's side, his head on Zeke's shoulder, and that a strong, gentle hand is combing lightly through his hair; but the significance of all this, if any, escapes him.
There is a rose festival in Bethan Township; and the owner of the local convenience store has a placid, friendly smile, and in the glass refrigerator cases behind him are row upon row of soda and an empty case like a sterilized wound where the bottled water should be. Back to the fanfics page