Chapter Text
Simon feels every cell in his heated body.
He can smell the sweat on his skin, can taste it on his tongue, and it’s sweet, like freshly picked raspberries. The music rushes through his veins and his mind is at ease. There is nothing but happiness to be felt, no worries or sorrows of every day life plaguing his mind. The glee is almost overwhelming, suffocating him a little bit, but Simon doesn’t care and just presses back against a stranger’s touch on his lower back.
The sky is already paling when he finally stumbles out of the club to get some fresh air. Summer is approaching, but the nights are still fairly cold; Simon, however, quite enjoys the soft breeze on his hot, sticky skin. His dark curls cling to his forehead and fall over his eyes, so he brushes them back and inhales with a smile. His body is still buzzing from a mixture of alcohol and the molly he bought off a stranger in the bathroom earlier tonight.
He sits down on the curbstone and closes his eyes. The music sounds muffled through the closed club doors and a few people behind him are having a conversation that he can’t really make out. Somewhere, a bus drives by, and the smell of impending dawn lies in the air.
“Hey.”
Simon turns around. A young man stands behind him, waving a little awkwardly. Simon smiles, blinking against the harsh streetlights.
“Hey.”
The man sits down beside him. He looks a little older than Simon himself, his nose is slightly crooked and his lips form a nice curve. He doesn’t quite dare to meet Simon’s eyes, instead opting to regard the houses on the other side of the street.
“I saw you in there, on the dance floor.” He clears his throat. “You look nice.”
Simon rests his head on his knees as he watches the stranger with a soft smile. “Thank you.”
Finally, the man casts his eyes down to meet Simon’s.
“Are you here alone?”
Simon shakes his head. “Came here with a couple of friends.” He raises his head as a slight frown creeps up on his features. “I think I might have lost them though.”
They both share a chuckle, and a comfortable moment of silence ensues. Simon closes his eyes again and leans his head back against the cool morning wind. He can feel the stranger’s hand reaching out and brushing his curls back for him; his skin tingles against the touch.
“I feel like I’ve seen you before.”
Simon freezes. He hopes his face doesn’t show how startled he feels. His smile falters.
“You think?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure — do you come here often?”
Simon clears his throat and looks away. “Not really — maybe, uh… I work at a coffee shop down— downtown.”
The stranger hums but doesn’t look away from him. Simon quickly grows uncomfortable under the unwanted attention. At last, he stands up and walks back to the club doors, but the man is quick to grab his wrist to stop him.
“Hey, wait—”
Simon’s jaw clenches tightly, and this time it’s not the drugs’ fault. Slowly, he turns around. The stranger looks a tad bit apologetic, but his eyes quickly widen as realization dawns on him. Simon rolls his eyes.
“Holy shit,” the stranger breathes with a nasty chuckle lacing his voice, “You’re from that video.”
It’s a generic statement, meaningless enough that Simon could just brush it off, go, “What are you talking about?”, and walk away.
Instead, his self-restraint proves to be non-existent, and he shoves the stranger back.
“Shut the fuck up, okay?”
“Woah.” The man lifts his hands in a futile attempt to calm Simon. “Chill, okay? Look, I think it’s cool you got to fuck—”
“I said shut up!” Simon yells, and before he knows what he has done, in a moment of blinding rage, he has crashed his head forward against the stranger’s nose. A nasty crack sounds, a few people around them gasp. The man stumbles back, his hand flying to his face, blood drips from his chin. Simon breathes heavily as a cold, sobering shiver runs down his spine. The people by the entrance give him shocked looks, someone hurries over to the bleeding man to help.
Everything goes quiet. Then, Simon turns around and hurries down the road, away from the club as the night slowly vanishes.
The sky is an ugly gray and blue and Simon feels it deep inside of him. He sits on the counter in his cramped kitchen and leans against the window, a thin cardigan wrapped around his arms, smudged makeup still on his face and his skin sticky with sweat.
His heartbeat has calmed down, and now all that’s left is a feeling that he is being dragged into the ground while the neurotransmitters in his head can’t keep up with him anymore. Simon wants to sleep, but his body refuses to, instead torturing him with the regret of last night’s events and the impending doom of the afternoon shift he has to work in a few hours.
Simon wants to curl up into a ball and never leave his house again.
He doesn’t know when he became this way. A part of him refuses to believe that he was ever meant to be something else. Usually, Simon doesn’t allow himself to think about it too much. He dreads the guilt it brings, and the self-loathing and pain.
Most of the time, he hates himself enough anyway.
The café is never really busy, but today, it’s almost deserted.
While Simon’s coworker Maja is smart enough to busy herself with cleaning the coffee machine, he just stands there, leaning against the counter and trying his best not to fall asleep. There is an elderly man drinking coffee by the window and three students huddled around a table covered in books and markers.
“We’re out of sugar,” Maja says. Simon chooses to ignore her until he feels her burning stare on him.
“Go get some,” she says as annoyed as possible, “Now.”
Simon rolls his eyes before relenting. He drags himself into the dark backroom and searches for the huge box that contains the little sugar bags. When he returns, he faintly acknowledges the two new customers getting settled at a corner table, then he starts filling the sugar container only to find it to be half full still. Simon throws Maja an annoyed look.
“Are you kidding me?”
She shrugs as she pretends to still be cleaning the coffee machine. “Forgot.”
Simon clenches his jaw to hold back a snide remark and instead just turns around to put the box back, but Maja stops him.
“We have new guests, Simon.”
He stops, closes his eyes and breathes deeply. Then, he puts the box on the ground and rounds the counter to walk over to the customers, but not without shooting Maja one last angry look.
“Hey,” he greets the man and the woman who’re still getting settled, “What can I get you?”
The woman has long, dark hair that frames her sculptured face like ebony wood. Her eyes are hidden behind huge sunglasses that sit on her protruding cheek bones and a confident smile drags her lips up by the corners.
Her companion sits with his back toward Simon. Despite the nice weather outside he is wearing a hat that hides most of his hair, but a few dark blonde waves peek out from underneath.
“I’ve never been here before,” the woman says, reaching for the menu, “Is there anything you would recommend?”
“Our cinnamon buns are really good,” Simon tells her, “Oh, and we just got a new strawberry cake. I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks delicious.”
The woman gives a smile, though Simon is not quite sure if it’s directed at him or the man she’s with.
“I think I’ll go with a slice of that. What about you?”
The man looks at the menu and hums thoughtfully.
“Me, too,” he says at last and turns his head to look at Simon, “Oh, and a cup of coffee—”
At once, Simon feels his whole world come to a sudden halt.
He hasn’t seen Wilhelm in a few years — not in person, that is. He’s seen him on TV or on social media and sometimes he’s seen him on the cover of a gossip magazine, no matter how hard he’s tried to avoid it. Ever since Simon left Hillerska to go back to Marieberg, he has tried to tell himself that he is over Wilhelm, that there is nothing there anymore, it was fun while it lasted and ended tragically, that’s just how life is, especially when you’re young. And tragedy was nothing new for Simon, really he would have been surprised had it ended any differently.
But the truth is, he has accepted what happened between him and Wilhelm during his one year at Hillerska, and even though he is being haunted by the remnants of their relationship ever since, he has been trying to move on, however successful he may be.
And now, Wilhelm is sitting there right in front of him, comically large sunglasses covering his eyes and cheeks and a scarf sitting perfectly in a way that hides his mouth. To others, he might truly be unrecognizable like this, but not to Simon. And maybe that’s what bugs him most about this.
If Simon’s face falls the slightest bit and his throat runs dry, no one has to know.
“Sure,” he says and suddenly has forgotten everything that happened in the last two minutes, “I’ll — be right back.”
He manages a smile that probably looks more like he is in pain, then he turns around and hastily returns to the counter. Maja is throwing him one of her signature what-is-wrong-with-you-why-are-you-like-this looks that would normally annoy Simon, but right now, he is too preoccupied by the way his hands sweat so much that he can hardly hold his pen.
“Simon,” Maja warns when he drops his notepad.
“Two slices of that strawberry cake and a cup of coffee,” he stammers and picks up his notepad, “Can you get that ready? I, uh. I’ll be right back.”
He doesn’t wait for Maja to respond, instead just grabs the box of sugar he left by the counter earlier and disappears in the backroom.
There, he finally dares to breathe.
He is awfully aware of the way his heartbeat slows down and how his legs feel more like jello than anything else. He puts the box down, then he slides down to the ground and leans back against one of the shelves.
Simon didn’t think he’d see Wilhelm again, even if it was nothing but a glimpse of his face. He doesn’t even know if Wilhelm recognized him — for all he knows he has moved on, too, and forgotten all about what happened between them. At least that’s what Simon hopes, in a way. Over the years he has learned that the best way to cope with the trauma that was his seventeenth year of life was telling himself two things over and over again: he was always meant to be miserable and Wilhelm didn’t love him.
Sometimes, Simon has learned, it’s best to take control of the pain before it consumes you.
So, he’s grown used to the idea that misery is a nice place to be at as long as you pretend to be ignorant, and yeah, maybe Wilhelm told him that he loved him, but they were sixteen and Wilhelm had no one else left. In the grand scheme of everything, telling Simon that he loved him might have been the least evil.
And then, for the rest of the school year, Wilhelm hardly so much as looked at Simon. And then, Simon was gone, and he never heard from Wilhelm again.
So, Simon figured, Wilhelm must have come to his senses and snapped out of whatever phase he found himself stuck in when he met Simon.
At first, Simon was still brave enough to tell himself that he deserved better anyway, he wasn’t a dirty secret to be kept in the shadows, and if Wilhelm couldn’t love him openly, then he probably didn’t love him at all, so everything was better this way.
As time moved on, though, Simon started to wonder if maybe, he just wasn’t enough to be loved. Maybe Sara was right and he had a strange urge to take care of everyone around him, and it was easy to fool yourself into believing that you love someone who takes care of you. Maybe Simon compensated his lack of worth with his ability to take care of others, and somehow, he was able to fool Wilhelm with that, and so he thought he loved him.
Somewhere deep inside him, Simon knows that he is being unreasonable, that thoughts like these are just part of a bigger problem he should probably take care of, but fighting his own self-destructive tendencies is a lot harder than twisting them into a narrative that he can somewhat comfortably live with.
So: he was always meant to be miserable and Wilhelm didn’t love him.
At least this way he feels powerless enough to just accept it as truth.
“Simon!”
Maja’s voice sounds through the café. Simon opens his eyes.
“Coming!”
He feels a lot more grounded now, his hands aren’t sweaty anymore and his heart doesn’t beat like it’s ready to jump out of his chest, so he gets up and slowly walks back to the front counter.
Maja hardly eyes him and just points at the order she got ready for him.
“Don’t care what the fuck you were up to back there but don’t keep our guests waiting, ‘kay?”
Simon holds back the remark that she could have served them as well and just grabs the tray and walks over to the table.
“Sorry for the wait,” he says with an apologetic smile. The black-haired woman returns the gesture.
“Don’t worry about it.”
She has taken her sunglasses off to reveal deep-set, narrow eyes that make her even a tad bit more intimidatingly beautiful. Simon tries to keep up his smile as he sets down the plates and the cup of coffee in front of them, then he dares to glance at Wilhelm.
He is still wearing his sunglasses and the hat, but he has pulled down his scarf a bit to expose the lower half of his face. His cheeks have hollowed out a bit, a sign of time and maturity, and there is a light stubble on his chin, but apart from that, he still looks the same. His lips are just as narrow and symmetric as they once were, there is a faint line of acne scars gracing his skin and his nose still gives his face a touch of that youthfulness he had years ago.
Simon’s smile grows a bit more earnest. Then, he catches himself staring and quickly looks away.
“Enjoy,” he says before finally turning around and returning to the counter. He pretends not to notice Maja giving him a strange, judgmental look, and instead starts wiping down the squeaky clean countertop.
“I need you to take over my shift on Thursday,” she says as she leans against the shelf behind Simon, a steaming cup of tea in her hands. Simon glares at her.
“What? But that’s my only day off this week!”
Maja shrugs. “I talked to the chef about it and he said it was fine as long as you’re okay with it, so now I need you to be okay with it.”
Simon rolls his eyes and scrubs a little harder. “What’s in it for me?”
Maja lets out a scoff. “My lifelong gratitude and friendship, how about that?”
She knows that Simon will say yes. And it’s not like he has anything better to do than work anyway.
The least he can do is drag it out a bit more.
With a sigh, he turns around to face her, his arms crossed in front of his chest. Maja cocks one eyebrow as if to challenge him. For a moment, they hold eye contact before she breaks it off first.
“Fine,” she says, “In return for covering my shift you can leave now. It’s not like the shop is being overrun anyway.”
A satisfied smile wants to tug at Simon’s lips, but he resists for a moment longer. He throws a glance at the table in the back where Wilhelm and the woman are sitting. Maja lets out something akin to a groan.
“If they tip, it’s yours. Happy?”
Simon purses his lips and nods. “Sure.”
Maja rolls his eyes when he walks past her and deliberately lets their shoulders brush. “Have fun cleaning up, then.”
He disappears in the office to grab his stuff, and when he returns, he shoots a grin at Maja.
“Have a wonderful day.”
Maja makes sure to roll her eyes so hard that Simon, for a moment, is scared that they’re gonna fall out. At last, he shoots a glance at Wilhelm, as if he wants to make sure he’s real, that he hasn’t been imagining everything that happened during the last ten minutes, and his stomach drops when he finds Wilhelm looking back at him. Then, he leaves the café and disappears down the road.
Simon doesn’t care about anything but his body and the way the music waves through him. There are hands grabbing him, pulling him left and right, lips touching his neck and hot breaths hitting his skin. He doesn’t care one bit, just lets it happen and allows his mind to enjoy it.
He quickly finds himself at the bar, someone hands him a shot. He doesn’t know who bought it and who gave it to him, but he accepts it and downs it with a laugh. His entire body is buzzing and he feels like he could dance all night.
And so he does. He is alive, Simon lives under the stars and no one can destroy this for him. He breathes and everyone loves him and this is it, the one moment in his life where everything is alright, where he is the one person on earth to be allowed to live.
He cherishes it and dances.
Simon doesn’t feel real.
He lies on a couch, an untouched glass of water standing on the table next to him. The arm wrapped around him feels foreign and uncomfortable.
Somehow, he manages to escape the stranger’s touch and slips into his pants and his shirt. The door gives a loud creaking noise when he opens it, but then, he is outside. The air is cold and bizarrely fresh, but Simon enjoys it as he walks to the nearest bus stop.
It’s 3am, the sky is dark, and there is not a single star to be seen. Somehow, Simon feels understood.