AN: For Freak-of-Spade’s Octubre Challenge-o.

Requirements: Hate must turn to love. Both main characters must be over the age of 18. Must use the words: thesaurus, Kaleidoscope, arithmetic, dusky, iridescent and question. One character must say: “You only said that because right now, you’re feeling very small inside!” Slash. At some point in the story, one of the MCs must do something very immature/stupid/embarrassing.

No dates or high school romances.

NOTE. PLEASE READ THIS BOLDED SECTION.
If you get confused, please, please, please don’t stop reading. I’ll explain everything at the end, so please don’t give up on it.

Lost on Mars

The door slams. Robin enters screaming. He’s screaming. I plug my ears and look back toward my computer, columns of pretty words turned ugly blurring on my screen. Nothing. There’s nothing here but the yelling and the slamming of doors.

Eventually he finds me slumped in my chair, paging through a thesaurus to find the best word to describe how I’m feeling. Disdain. Anxious. Distressed. I give up and set the book down, staring up at him through my bed head, able to predict his words before he even says them.

“She’s… She’s… They don’t even want to let me see the goddamned kids anymore, Marty!” he finally roars, reaching past me to knock my papers to the floor. They flutter and fall around my feet and I let them lay there, dead pieces of paper snow piling up around bare feet. It’s cold in here. I try not to grit my teeth. “What the fuck is so wrong with me that even my kids are kept from me? If you… Jesus Christ, if you…” His words shatter in his throat as he buries his hands in his hair, setting it on end.

I poke a few random keys on my keyboard. I’ve heard this all before. Here’s the part where I play the role of the temptress, luring him farther and farther away from the happy wife and the happy children and the happy American life of wife, job, kids, death. An evil bastard. I took it all away. I might as well have raped him the night we met in that club, he’s probably thinking. It’s my fault. It’s my fault, damn it. Jesus Christ. I don’t want to hear it all again.

“So do you need something?” I ask as I shove my glasses back up my nose and look at him over the tops because I know he hates it. Condescending, he calls it. I secretly agree. Mother fucker.

“Damn it!” He kicks my chair. I grit my teeth. “Fuck, Marty!” There’s pain in his voice as his hands shove my books off the desk. They land like bombs around my toes and I clear my throat, pulling my feet up onto the chair.

“Robin,” I calmly state his name and he stares at me, wild-eyed and breathing hard. “Why don’t you go lie down for awhile? I’ll be in there later. I’ll give you a massage.”

After a moment he nods and says quietly, like a lost, confused child, “Okay…” but I’m already looking away, picking up the books and papers, straightening them out and pretending that this is helping to straighten out my life.

Instead my eyes find the perfect word for this point in time, screaming out at me from worn pages.

Abhorrence.

Later I visit him like I promised, peeking into the bedroom where he lies on his side of the bed, hugging it with fingers clenching the quilt so he doesn’t fall off but doesn’t roll onto my side. I sleep the same way at night. It gets so much colder then.

For a moment I just stand and look at him, feeling like a voyeur in my own home. I imagine what this couple’s like. Robin’s a lawyer maybe. Or a business man. He’s in love with a man who works in construction. They’re not very alike, but that’s what makes them love each other even more. Besides, Robin secretly loves the calluses in his boyfriend’s hands. It secretly turns him on.

He snores then. A loud snort. We’re nothing like that. I sigh and walk forward, through the spell broken in colorful shards, an opened kaleidoscope making a pathway to the bed. My knees hug his sides after I roll him gently onto his stomach. He grunts and lets me rub his skin, waking up to question, “What…? Mars?”

“Shh…” I urge, bending down to whisper into his ear. He shivers. I’ve turned him on, I bet. Fucking pig. I only wanted to shut him up. God, I hate his voice. I hate when he calls me Mars. I hate hate hate it.

My hands travel up his shoulders to his neck. A groan leaves him. He likes it here at the base of his neck. And I’d like to wrap my fingers around it. Asphyxiation for an asshole. I grin and knead harder till he grunts and tenses.

“What’re you doing?” he mumbles, annoyance on his tongue. “That hurts.”

“Nothing.”

Wishing I could kill you.

Useless son of a bitch.

He turns his head and smiles at me – smiles at me as if he didn’t just throw my things on the floor like a child in the midst of a tantrum, as if he didn’t just scream in my face about his godforsaken ex-wife, who I feel for now, oddly enough – and rolls over beneath me, his hands running up and down my jeaned thighs.

“Why don’t you take off your shirt?” he whispers up toward my belly button, still smiling. Imbecile. “I’ll give you a massage now. How’s that sound?”

I stare at him suspiciously just for a moment, wondering about any ulterior motives. If he has any, his smile hides them and I sigh, peeling off my shirt and rolling off him and onto my stomach. His knees immediately hug my sides as his weight centers around the backs of my thighs. I close my eyes while his hands rub circles into my shoulders, uncoiling my muscles that have been tense since he came home.

My nose runs. I rub it on my arm and stare at our pillows, remembering days when his hands didn’t make me flinch like this – when this would lead to hot, wet mouths on mouths on bodies in bodies and I shake my head. No. No, he’s a fucking idiot.

--

The door slams. Robin enters shouting. A chair topples over in the kitchen and I pull my head from beneath my pillow as his loud footsteps come thudding up the hallway.

My eyes find him standing in the doorway, breathing hard. His chest rises and falls beneath his T-shirt and I lick my lips out of anxiousness or desire, I don’t know.

“What’s wrong?” I whisper. “What’s the matter? Nothing. Let him say nothing. He says something.

“Jess… She… God…” The bitch. His ex-wife. Fuck her. “She… Tonight I went to visit her and the kids. She didn’t know. She didn’t know about me. I told her about you and she hadn’t known. She… She started to yell.” His voice shakes, brittle like the last of the fall leaves rustling outside the window.

Annoyance. I feel it zing from my chest and to my head, making it ache. “She didn’t know? You moved in with me and she didn’t even know?”

He walks to the bed, crawls across the mattress, lies in my arms. It hurts. In my chest beneath his head, it hurts. He was hiding me. He hid me from her. And she hates me – us – just for being us. But I play with his hair, halfheartedly rubbing his back, lost and scared though I can't figure out why.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “It’ll be okay. I promise. I’m sure she’ll get over it right away and you’ll be having the kids over every weekend.” I hate kids. I hate her. My head hurts. God, my head hurts. “Tell me you love me.”

Looking up at me from beneath his hair, he smiles a tight, twitching smile. “I love you.”

“Tell me you’ll never leave.”

Still smiling, he tilts his head up to kiss my lips. He doesn’t answer. I feel a twinge in my chest once more. What is this feeling? I tell myself I’ll have to look it up some time because I can’t identify it. Instead, for now I close my eyes and sigh, holding him so he still won’t be able to move even if he lets me go.

--

The door slams. Robin enters smiling. He’s smiling as he finds me on the couch, taking me by the hands and swinging me around the living room. I stare at him in surprise through the smudged lenses of my glasses, wondering what the hell got into him.

He laughs at my bewilderment and lets my hands go so he can wrap his arms around me, holding me tight as he pivots us in tight little circles. “Oh, God, Mars,” he whispers. “Oh, God… I talked to Jess today.”

I freeze at her name, pulling away from him to stare him in the eye. There are iridescent speckles making them glint with evident happiness and my stomach drops. Jess. I hate her. Abhorrence. Disdain. Anxiousness. I shiver.

“Why were you talking to her?” I demand, sitting back on the couch and crossing my arms over my chest, hoping to display the perfect amount of negative nonverbal communication.

“Don’t be mad, Mars,” he whispers my pet name, normally a sure fire way to get me to calm down but I don’t want to calm down. I want to know why he’s talking to that bitch and how I can get him to never do it again. “Come on, sweetie.” He sits next to me, brushes my hair from my face, kisses my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my lips. When I don’t react he sighs. “Because… I’ve just been missing the kids. You know that. I thought maybe I could get her to let me see them. I think she’ll let me. I really think she will.”

I stare at him. That bitch and her kids. Will she ever go away? Will he ever stop loving them and start loving just me.

“That’s great,” I finally say. “That’s really great. I’m really happy for you, Robin.”

No. No, I’m not.

I hug him, face burrowing into his neck while I hope she fucks him over. I hope this backfires and she doesn’t want him. I hope his kids don’t want him. I don’t want him to want them more than he wants me. I don’t want to be left and forced to want someone else.

--

The door slams. Robin enters grinning. He’s grinning as he puts an arm around my shoulder and looks around the bare room.

“So this is it,” he announces, spreading his arms wide. “I think… I think we can put a couch here along this wall. And your bookshelves against this one.” He scurries back and forth across the room before grabbing my arm and giving it a yank. “And look at this. Come look at this.”

I laugh as he drags me down the hallway, reaching back to cover my eyes with his hands.

“What’re you doing, Robin?” I ask, leaning into him.

“You’re going to love this. I promise. Look…” He stands behind me and takes away his hands with his chin resting on my head. I stare into the small room and raise my eyebrows. Empty. It’s empty. Idiot.

“There’s nothing in here, stupid,” I point out while looking up to stick out my tongue at him.

Robin lets me go and walks into the room, his hands sweeping through the area. “But there will be… You can put your desk here and I’ll put up shelves above it… And I’ll probably get a heater for you too, because the seller says it gets kind of cold in winter… But this is it. The office. Where you’ll write the most beautiful words and you’ll get your poetry published…” He’s breathless when he stops talking, arms still outspread like he’s experiencing rapture.

I run to him. Hug him. I want to experience it too.

--

The door slams. Robin enters, licking his lips as he looks around my apartment.

“Just…ignore the mess,” I implore, tugging his hand and walking through the piles of papers littering the floor. The words I’ve scrawled on the walls in black ballpoint pen swirl around us as I kiss him hard, spinning in slow waltz circles in the center of the room.

“I’m not used to this,” he mumbles against my lips and I back away, raising my eyebrows. Skeptical. Did I judge things incorrectly? Was I wrong to bring him here?

“Not used to what? A messy apartment? I can’t help it. That’s how we artistic people are. Disorganized. Free. Spontaneous. Synonym, synonym, synonym.”

He shakes his head and looks past me to a wall made up of scribbled nightmares. “No, not this. I mean…this.” His hands are on my chest, running down my sides to the small of my back, folded there and keeping me pressed to him.

“You’re…a virgin?”

“No… No, I mean. A man. This is my first time with a man, Mars…” He pulls the nickname out of nowhere and I feel like I’m floating in outer space – I feel like I am Mars. “I’m… I’m married. Separated. I have two kids. And… I have a wife…” He mumbles and rambles and I feel jealous. Envious. Anxious. So I kiss him again.

“That’s okay,” I whisper. “This is okay. This is now. So don’t leave, okay?”

A grin shivers onto his face. “Okay. I’ll never leave.”

--

The door slams. Robin enters, looking nervous, looking lost. A smile twitches uneasily on his face as he wanders through the dim room, following another, younger man. I watch him as he carefully maneuvers around the room, exuding anxiousness. Distress.

When he moves to sit down I look back toward my paper, smudged with alliteration and rhythm, made up arithmetic problems scattered along the edges. Was Tennyson right? Is it really better to have loved and lost to have never loved at all, minus four, divided by three, and then squared…

The answer is zero.

There is nothing here.

“Shit.” I reach for my eraser, but my hand hits glass instead. I watch it fall, red curlicues of liquid rushing to the floor but meeting jeans and shoes instead.

He stands in front of me. Robin. Grinning like an idiot and apologizing like he’s done something wrong even though it’s his denim and Nikes that are tie-dyed and dripping. Idiot. Sorry, sweet little idiot.

“Sorry, sorry,” he whispers then shouts when his whisper is devoured by the surrounding sounds.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, and then add, “I’m sorry too. Let me… Let me buy you a drink.”

Nodding his head, he smiles some more and I get up to trudge to the bar. When I get back, a drink in each hand, he’s sitting in my chair, leafing through the pile of scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper. He looks up at me eagerly, eyes wide and childlike.

“You’re a poet?” he wonders and I shrug, nod, sit beside him.

“I guess.” I take the papers from him – gently though, touching his knuckles purposefully – and reach toward the garbage bin nearby.

“Wait! What’re you doing?” he demands, taking my arm in his hands and pulling it to him. “Don’t… Why would you throw it away?”

“It’s garbage,” I tell him.

“You only said that because right now…you’re feeling very small inside…” he informs me, completely serious, right out of an episode of Oprah and I fight back the urge to laugh, and glad that I do because later on I’ll learn that he was just telling me how he felt by telling me what I felt, looking into a mirror.

“That’s how you can tell the poets apart from others. Any other writer would look at this and laugh. It’s just not good. It’s just ugly. It’s…writer’s block. None of it’s any good.”

A smile lights up his face in the dimness of the club. “I… I disagree. I love it.”

I can’t help smiling back as I lie the papers back down on the table and read through my tangle of words. “Well… It might not be too bad. I guess. Not all of it.”

He takes my hands in his then, meets my eyes, and whispers, “I love it.” And I devour it before the surrounding noise can.

--

The door slams. Robin enters, tiptoeing across the room. He tiptoes to the bed and sits on its edge, staring down at me while I blearily blink up at him through the dusky half-light of late afternoon.

“What’s going on?” I ask through a thick layer of drool in my mouth, feeling completely lost.

“You fell asleep while I was rubbing your back. I went and got dinner ready.” He reaches out a tentative hand, brushing his fingertips through my hair. Goddamn him. Asshole. Making dinner and giving me a massage and letting me sleep.

I turn my head away from him. “I was supposed to give you the backrub…”

“I know…” His fingers stroke the back of my neck and travel between my shoulders. I shiver and try to jerk away. Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me. “Listen, Mars...”

“Don’t call me that,” I hiss and jump when I realize that it came from me, left my mouth, slapped him across the face.

He apologizes. Apologizes though his skin is bright red with surprised pain, and damp with sweat. I curl up into a ball. Don’t look at me, I want to tell him. Don’t apologize to me.

“Listen… I’m sorry,” he tries again and I roll my eyes because I know. Fucking idiot just told me. I know. “I’m sorry about earlier and…and times before today when I got angry. I’m not like you. I can’t think of the right words to say ever and I know that sometimes I say the wrong thing in the wrong way and that I’ve been stressed and angry lately but I don’t… I don’t want to.” His body’s pressed against mine, on my side of the bed. It’s warm. It’s suddenly so warm. I can’t breathe. Fucking hell. What’s he doing? What’s he saying?

“You’re going to leave me,” I find myself whispering, sounding broken and afraid, distressed and anxious. “You’re going to go back to her. You’ll leave me. When I asked you last time, you didn’t answer me.” My insecurities are tumbling from my mouth and I can’t stop them and there’s nothing poetic and beautiful about this moment. It’s ugly and I abhor it.

He rolls me over onto my back and presses a kiss onto the side of my face. “I love you,” he tells me. Antonym of abhorrence. My stomach clenches. I repeat his three words and I can’t breathe. A grin shivers onto his face. “I’ll never leave.”

THE END.

Shitty end. I blame my mother nagging me to get off the computer. SHIT. I’m so pissed off at the ending. And school. And life. FUCKKK. AND THE TV IS TOO LOUD. JESUS.

Ignoring my rant:

Anyone confused? First and last section are present time. All other sections after the first move back in time. So if you’re still confused, just read the second to last section and work up… Then read the first section. And then read the last one. O.o If you’re still confused, let me know, and I’ll try to explain it. o.o

Childish thing was supposed to be the beginning when Robin knocks things to the floor like a bitch.

It was originally going to end with the club scene, but I ended up liking them and wanted them to like each other again.