A/N: YARG! CHRIST, what a long update! I really am sorry, but I've been away. And this is the last time I'll use that as an excuse, I swear! Hell (school) has started again now, and I'll be miserable, but available! Either way, my darlings, read on…

8: Broken Porcelain

Adam is still shaking when Jake takes the keys out of his pocket and unlocks his front door. Adam can't do it on his own, he seems to have lost every trace of power in his hands, and Jake won't ask him to. He has the feeling that if you'd put Adam's keys in his open palm, it'd break, crack like old porcelain, because Adam is so pale and so fragile and so thin, the nervousness has eaten him up from the inside.

It hadn't been a point in taking Adam to another job interview today. Jake had tried, he'd dragged Adam on his shaky knees to at least three more places that afternoon, until he got sick of watching Adam staring blindly in front of himself, quiet and stiff, until the men behind their expensive desks cleared their throats and thanked him for coming in.

Poor Adam.

Poor Adam who can't even believe that these employers want anything good to happen to him at all.

Poor Adam who's heard so awfully many times that he's not good enough, from others or from that mean little voice in his head, that he's started to believe it.

Even though Jake has never seen anyone who's such a wonderful mess, someone as amazingly broken, someone who reminds him this much of porcelain that's covered in little cracks, so small and so fine and so precise that they get beautiful, as Adam.

Jake leads Adam into the apartment. It feels like helping a drunken girl home from the bar, because he really doesn't lead Adam as much as he drags him over his threshold and into the living room, drops him on the couch and then closes the door.

"Are you okay?"

Adam nods silently without looking at him. But Jake doesn't really believe him, since Adam really does look ghastly, his face is pale and shiny with sweat.

"Adam?" Jake says hesitatingly, sits down on the coffee table in front of him and gets annoyed when he hears that he's talking like he usually talks to the people at work who's in shock. "Can you hear me?"

Adam chuckles. It doesn't sound as mocking as Jake thought it would.

"Yeah, I hear you. Jesus."

"Are you going to tell me what happened in there?"

Adam finally looks at him. His eyes are almost as tenderly amused, as greyly velvety as they usually are when he's looking at Jake, but there's still a thin film of misery over them. Adam shrugs.

"Nothing special."

"Then, why do you act like you've been scarred for life during those five minutes?"

Adam grins uncertainly, even though Jake is more serious than he'd ever admit, and lifts his hand to his mouth to bite his nails.

"It was the usual," he says. "He looked at my pictures and said I was awesome."

Jake smiles widely. Even though he hears a silent 'but' instead of a dot at the end of the sentence.

"That's great. What's the hook?"

Adam sighs heavily and drops his hand on the couch. He's quiet for a few seconds, stares firmly at the edge of the coffee table before he slowly opens his mouth and says:

"He asked… He said I had to tell him… If I really wanted the job."

Jake is still waiting for the horrible part. This far, everything sounds good, but he can tell that Adam is recovering from being, for a brief second, completely devastated, tell that Adam's sitting with the same glazed calmness in his eyes that he usually has the morning after he wakes up in the middle of the night, gasping, whimpering, sweating, with stubborn little tears running down his face as Jake grabs his struggling shoulders and forces him into an aggressive embrace.

"What did you tell him?"

Adam looks at him again. Starts to bite his nails, and answers, somewhat muffled:

"I told him. About the funeral."

He talks so slowly. So fumblingly. Like it's a complete disarray in the file cabinet of his vocabulary, like he has to rummage around in his mind before he finds the words he's looking for. And Jake isn't even sure what he's supposed to answer.

Doesn't know how to handle the fact that Adam has done something he never though he would.

Jake really is awestruck. Because he knows that if it were up to Adam, no one would even know that he cared enough to go to Lawrence's funeral, know that he loved him, that he loves him still, that Adam Faulkner, who's spent all his life behind thick layers of armor, has melted, that he let his guard down for a couple of blue eyes, a cold hand on his cheek, a panicking whisper that wasn't soothing, not at all, but that still was all he had.

"And what did he say?" Jake asks gently.

"He'd call me," Adam says and shrugs. "And if I don't get the damn job, I'm going to have to rob Calvin Klein or something, because I need that fucking suit."

Jake nods and sits down next to Adam on the couch.

"And you're still sure you want to go?"

"No," Adam says, quicker than he's said anything since this morning, and takes the nails out of his mouth again. "I don't want to go. I want to stay home with you and smoke and watch 'When A Stranger Calls,' but I have to go. I have to go there and… Say a thing."

Now, the words are hopping out. Like he's waited all day to say them.

"To Lawrence?"

"Yeah."

Jake nods again.

"And you don't want me to come?"

Adam shakes his head.

"I have to do this alone. But you can be here until then. You have to. All the time. You have to be in my apartment all the time, because I don't get by without you. You're a wonderful person. I love you."

The words are still hopping out. Completely without his permission. Adam barely realizes that he's saying them until Jake looks dumbfounded for a brief second, before he smiles that way again.

"I love you, too. You know that."

And then, he puts two fingers under Adam's chin and kisses him, in a soft, gentle way that really is against all of Adam's principals, since he just wants to grab Jake's shoulders, shove his tongue deep into his mouth, feel the heat of another body beneath him, not above, since that's one of the few times when he feels he's in a small position of power, the few times when he… Gets to be in control of something in his life.

It's true that he loves Jake. He's known it for quite a while now, but he thinks it's a big enough step in his loneliness-rehab that he even lets Jake into his apartment, and Jake knows that, too. He knows that Adam would never say something like this if he didn't mean it, but there's still a shadow over them, or over Jake, when Adam actually does gain some control over their kiss, entwines his fingers in Jake's hair and presses his face closer.

It's true that Adam loves Jake. But he's not his only one.

Adam loved Lawrence. Loved him, loves him in a way that he'll never be able to love Jake.

And Jake knows he's not even entitled to confront Adam about this. It's like a silent agreement between them, an agreement about the way Adam's loss, like a fresh wound, and Jake's sloppily patched-together heart is something they can bond over, that Jake comes over to Adam's place when he needs him, he listens and he comforts Adam about the few things he tells him. And Adam loves Jake, for this and for so many other things, but he's not the only one he loves.

And when Adam walks over to his other love in his mind, when Jake watches how he sits on the couch and lets his gaze wander from the TV to the window, when he sees Adam's eyes turning absent but still filled with a way too present, way too strong and way, way too true and way too pure pain, when he sees the pain being mixed with a love that isn't for Jake, he can't help but feeling betrayed.

Ah, yes, angst… But maybe you'll feel better if you imagine Adam in that suit he's nagging about? Either way, review!