A/N: Oof, this was a tough one to write. I think in part it feels very clunky to write about watching a tv show, and this chapter is so dialogue heavy and intense that it was a bit of a boxing match to get out.
I went the path of not explaining the Veronica Mars episodes in too much detail, because that felt extra clunky. Here's a recap of the last two episodes of S2 that are referenced here:
Veronica Mars S 02 E 21 Happy Go Lucky / Recap - TV Tropes
Veronica Mars S 02 E 22 Not Pictured / Recap - TV Tropes
The SPOILER ALERT for Veronica Mars Season 2 gist:
Veronica Mars is a teenage detective working to solve a bus crash that killed multiple students at her high school. It's ultimately determined that the culprit was Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas, who is dating Veronica's best friend, Mac. Cassidy's motivation is that he was sexually abused by Woody Goodman, a local politician and Cassidy's former baseball coach. Goodman had also abused other of Cassidy's former teammates, who were going to come forward about the abuse and name Cassidy as another victim. These fellow students were on the bus, and Cassidy murdered them to hide the abuse, and the other people on the bus were collateral damage to help cover his true motivation.
Chapter 6
Summer smiles as Cohen wraps his arm around her shoulders pulling her close to him and kissing the side of her head. She rests her head against his chest.
She can't help the little contented sigh that escapes her lips.
It feels easy with Cohen, solid and comfortable.
It's intense with Coop, and intense with Ryan and Coop, and intense for Cohen and Summer figuring out how to be there for each of them, but when it's just hanging out with Cohen, Summer feels like she can breathe a little easier, turn down the intensity for a little while.
So while it's just a mini-marathon of Veronica Mars, it's also a much needed break from the outside world, from awkwardly bumbling through comforting her best friend, an activity that makes Summer feel like Cohen, stammering and backtracking and trying so hard to be kind and supportive and not say any of the wrong things that she kind of becomes incoherent.
She doesn't know how Cohen does it most of the time. It's exhausting, churning out as many words as she's been churning out that summer, and in so many minefield conversations.
Maybe Trey won't die, and then you'd only be looking at attempted murder. That's reassuring, right?
Cohen laughs at one of Veronica's pithy one-liners, and Summer glances up at him, smiling at his smile, at the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs.
They rest the remote between them, and she or Cohen grab it and pause it whenever one of them wants to toss out a comment or a theory about one of the several ongoing mysteries.
Cohen's very particular about not talking when they're watching tv or a movie he hasn't seen before, paranoid that he'll miss a line, even though it's TiVo and they can obviously rewind it.
Summer's so absorbed in the action that she's a little startled when Cohen shifts positions, moving away from her.
She lifts her head from his chest and looks up, seeing that he's stretching for his wine glass off her nightstand. Her neck's a little stiff, so she scoots over a bit, resettling her head on her favorite pillow.
They keep watching
Summer glances over at Cohen. She does a double-take and fumbles for the remote. She jabs at the 'pause' button.
Cohen maybe hadn't been going for his wine glass.
He's got a book open.
A book.
They're about to figure out who orchestrated the Neptune High bus crash/mass murder, and Cohen's deciding to brush up on...The Brothers Karamazov?
He's choosing his summer reading over this?
"Are you seriously reading right now?" Summer sounds more immediately pissed off than she'd like to.
"Hmm?" Seth tears his eyes away from the book and squints at her. "Yeah, why can't I read?" He gestures toward the tv with his book. "Nothing's really happening right now."
"Nothing's happening? Are you kidding, Cohen? We just found out Woody's-"
"I know," Cohen cuts in. "It's just a little...predictable, don't you think?" His face crinkles up, but less adorably this time. "It just feels a little anticlimactic."
"Anticlimactic?" Summer stares at him, dumbfounded. "Are you joking?"
Seth shrugs. "Why do you care if I'm reading anyway? We're just watching tv. It's not like we're having a conversation or anything." His eyes return to the open book in front of him. "Besides, I can still listen. I'll check back in if it gets interesting."
Summer bites her lip, hit with a sharp pang of anger.
It's stupid to be angry.
She knows it's stupid.
But this has been one of their things this summer, watching Veronica Mars together. They'd finally found a show they both seemed to like equally, Seth perpetually disgusted with The Valley and Summer's other teen soaps, and Summer perpetually bored by Seth's weirdo anime and fantasy tv shows.
And not like they were having a conversation or anything?
Like, two-thirds of the fun of watching was pausing it and she and Cohen trading jokes and theories and commentary on Veronica's love life and Meg and Duncan's coma baby and Mac and Cassidy's adorable little puppy love thing they had going.
Cohen had been seriously invested in this for the whole season and now that things were heating up and they could finally get some answers, he was abandoning Summer to finish the season without any commentary or any banter, but with him reading his actual summer reading book.
"What?" Cohen looks at her. "You can keep it rolling."
Summer bites down harder on her lip.
She's been trying to be extra patient with Cohen, trying not to be irrationally angry or to let her rage blackouts get the best of her.
And Cohen hadn't been so intense lately-not like Ryan and Coop-but he'd been a little quieter, a little more subdued. Still his usual unfazed self, but a little more checked out, and Summer's been trying to be patient with that too. His grandfather just died and his mom just went off to rehab, so obviously there must be some weird things going on in his amazing but kind of weirdo brain.
So she wants to be reasonable and nonchalant, especially since she knows it's stupid to be this mad, or to want to argue with Cohen that he's not actually bored, that he cannot actually be bored right now, given the level of time and investment they've both put into this teen detective show.
"I just..." Summer takes a long slow breath. "I thought this was something we were doing together." She looks down at her bedspread. "It's no fun to watch if we can't even talk about it."
She glances up and Cohen is looking at her.
She looks away.
It's the annoying and uncomfortable part of working on her anger-having to express other feelings, to be soft and sad and pitiful when her instinct is to make herself ten times bigger, to lash out and make it easier for Cohen to just go along with what she wants rather than fighting back.
It's gross of her, obviously, but she feels pretty gross right now too, like she's practically begging Cohen to pay attention, and not even to her, but to a tv show.
It's like she gets to choose between being a monster or pathetic, and being a monster is at least kind of her comfort zone.
"Okay, Summer," Cohen says, grudgingly, but with that kind of good-natured exasperation that he gets. He turns down the corner of his page and slides the book onto her nightstand. "I'll watch."
Summer hits unpause, feeling a little annoyed and a little embarrassed and a little unsettled.
She'd really thought this was one of their special things that Cohen was as into it as she was.
It takes her out of it a little bit, peeking at Cohen from the corner of her eye, wanting to find him entranced by the building suspense and instead seeing his eyes glazed over, watching the screen, but with all the seeming interest and excitement as if they were watching C-SPAN.
It's like his facial expression doesn't change once.
Maybe it's irrational to be so irritated, but then, Summer's feelings haven't always been the most rational.
She tries to let it go, but his lack of interest kills all the suspense for her, and she slumps down on the bed, crossing her arms, feeling like a pouty little kid, but unable to help it at the same time.
When the end credits start to roll and Cohen still hasn't said a word, she looks over at him. She opens her mouth to say something, but Cohen jumps in first.
"There's a new episode of The Valley, right?" he asks.
Summer blinks. "Um, yeah."
"Put that on?"
"You want to watch The Valley?" Summer's eyebrows raise.
Cohen hated The Valley. He watched it with her, but never without dragging his feet about it first, whining about how overly dramatic and wannabe clever it was.
"Sure." Cohen looks at her with that same glazed over expression on his face. "Why not?"
"O-kay." Summer pulls up the latest episode of The Valley and hits 'play,' giving Cohen one more appraising/pissed off look from the corner of her eye.
oooooooooooooooooo
The Valley ends and Cohen says he needs to get home.
Summer walks him to her door, still feeling unsettled and irritated and honestly a little confused, racking her brain to figure out if she's the one who's done something wrong tonight, or if it was Cohen.
It was easier to solve that equation when she let herself be the monster.
She just doesn't get what's going on with him.
She'd asked him if he was feeling okay and he'd said yes, of course, but it was like he was looking right through her.
In a show of incredible restraint and goodwill, she attempts to go in for a kiss good-bye, but Cohen instead pulls her into a quick, stiff hug and glances a kiss off the side of her head before practically throwing himself away from her and out the front door.
She'd gotten more action than that at the fifth grade formal when she'd slow danced with Kyle Philips and his hand had left a sweaty palm print on the waist of her blue satin gown.
Summer sighs and slumps against the now closed front door.
"What the fuck was that?" she asks aloud. She'd hoped the swearing would somehow jar something loose to make sense of Cohen's display, but she's got nothing.
It was like one second he was himself and then the next he was...someone else entirely.
There's a soft knock on the door.
Summer jumps and whirls around, startled. She reaches for the door handle.
Cohen's standing on her porch, eyes wide and blinking weirdly and looking distinctly un-Cohen like. He looks at her and then looks away.
"Can we uh, can we talk?" He asks. He swallows and shifts nervously on his feet.
She opens the door wider, letting him inside.
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
Summer sits cross-legged on her bed, rapidly losing faith that Cohen came up here to explain himself, or to actually talk about anything.
Maybe this is just some kind of like, psychological warfare thing.
Instead of talking, he has his back to her, bent at the waist in front of her bookshelf, peering at the titles on the bottom row.
"Did you uh, wanna borrow a Traveling Pants, Cohen?"
"What?" Cohen turns around, continuing to blink weirdly. "Oh, uh, no." He laughs a little, tone higher pitched and weird.
"What's going on, Cohen?" Summer pushes up from the bed and starts to walk towards him, but he holds up a hand, stopping her in her tracks.
"Summer, I..." Cohen trails off, closing his eyes and exhaling a long frustrated breath. "I'm sorry," he says, his voice shaky and serious and also extremely un-Cohen-like. His eyes are open now, but he still can't seem to look at her. "There's just no terminology for this conversation that doesn't make me want to like, jump into a volcano."
Summer doesn't know what to say to that, but her heart is pounding in her chest.
"It's just…" Cohen rubs his hand over his mouth before letting his arm drop limply down by his side. "My grandfather, he um, he had a brother." He buries his hands into the pockets of his track jacket.
"Okay," Summer says softly, her own voice shaking a little.
"And he…" Cohen trails off, his fists inside his pockets meeting at the center of his chest. "I mean…" He gestures towards the tv. "He...uh..." Cohen wipes at his mouth again, face scrunching up. "Uh, like what happened to Cassidy."
Summer squints, her mind needing a moment to catch up to what Cohen is saying.
oooooooooooooooooo
Seth sees Summer's confusion, and then he sees the moment that she isn't confused anymore, the moment that she gets it, and he wishes that he didn't have to see her get it, and that he didn't have to see her half-step backwards before her half-step towards him, or her eyelids fluttering as she blinked, looking surprised and looking flustered and looking horrified.
"I-I'm...I'm so sorry, Cohen," Summer sputters. "Are you-are you okay?" Her hands fly to her mouth. "I'm sorry. Of course you're…" her eyes bulge and she winces.
Out of some bizarre somewhere inside of Seth, he laughs, just a little.
"It's okay, Summer. I'm okay, or like, okay-adjacent." He shrugs. "I've had a long time to get used to it, I guess." He rubs the back of his neck. "And I'm uh, dealing with it or whatever. I've been in therapy for a while now...twice a week." He shrugs his shoulders again.
"I knew your feet weren't that weird," Summer blurts out, and then she too, somehow emits a little nervous laugh. Her hands fly to her mouth again.
"Yeah, the uh, podiatrist thing was uh, one of my weaker cover stories," Seth admits, snickering. "I uh, I'm sorry I lied about that," he adds.
"No no, Cohen, I totally get it," Summer says quickly. "And I'm so sorry. I really didn't mean to lau-"
"No," Seth jumps in. "It's uh, it's good. I mean, it's better than..." he trails off.
"I just..." Summer's forehead creases. "I don't really know what to say."
"It's okay." The corner of Seth's mouth twitches. "There really isn't anything to say."
There's a beat of awkward silence.
"I'm sorry, Summer; I shouldn't have told you." Seth feels a shiver course through his body, his chest clenching, his head suddenly filling up with concrete, becoming much too heavy to stay upright even as it continues to stay upright. "It's too-it's too much to put on you."
"Stop, Cohen." Summer walks towards him. She reaches out and fumbles for his hand, still buried in the pocket of his track jacket, so she settles for awkwardly clasping his wrist.
Seth looks down at her hand wrapped around his wrist. He bites down hard on his lip.
"Cohen?" Summer tilts her head down, maneuvering herself so that she's all but forcing eye contact with Seth.
Summer's eyes are large and earnest, her cheeks flushed in a way they hadn't been two minutes ago.
"You get to tell me things about yourself, Cohen."
Seth looks away. He takes a step back, away from Summer's touch.
"Yeah, well, this isn't exactly my favorite color."
"No, it isn't." Summer pauses. "But to be honest, I feel like that's most of what I know about you. Your favorite color and your favorite books and what comics you like and what music you like." She tilts her head to one side. "Not so much about, like, you."
"So what, are you saying you're glad you know?"
"I am." Summer shrugs a little. "I want to know you Cohen, and it means a lot to me that you would trust me with this."
Seth frowns. He can't help but want to interrogate Summer more, can't help but want to distrust her reaction.
Trusting her reaction feels too dangerous, feels like throwing himself headlong into a false sense of security.
He's thinking about his mom.
He doesn't want to think about his mom.
He doesn't want to think about her, away in rehab, in a room he can't picture, and he definitely doesn't want to think about what happened that day, after his dad told her about The Trauma, the way she'd come up to his room, how she'd been shaky and her eyes had been red, but she'd hugged him close and she smelled like her rich lady shampoo and her rich lady perfume, and she'd cried softly into his hair and he'd finally let himself cry in her arms.
He doesn't want to think about that, or about the relief that had coursed through him when she'd said "Everything's going to be okay; I promise."
Those minutes, the time between when his dad had left his room and his mom had come up, had been agonizing, but when his mom held him, it had eased something heavy in his chest.
Nothing Steven had said would happen happened. Nobody blamed Seth or was mad at him. They didn't think he was crazy or disgusting or a liar.
Everyone still loved him.
But then his mom had left the room and whatever it was that had allowed her to hold him and to reassure him and to be with him must have broken somehow, because then it had felt like she couldn't bear to look at him anymore, like it hurt her too much to see him or to touch him or even to be near him.
He was disgusting.
He was crazy.
People were mad at him.
His mom was mad at him.
Summer is looking at him now, her face scrunched up in concern. He knows that look, on other faces and in other situations.
He realizes he must be faraway right now, but he's not sure how to get back, or if he even wants to. He doesn't know why he started this, or if there's any feasible way of taking it all back, like how he sometimes wished he could undo the conversation he'd had with his dad that day, somehow locked the closet door and just never come out of the dark and the alone and the quiet, and certainly never let anyone in.
"Cohen?" Summer's standing right in front of him suddenly, and she's fumbling again for his hand, and this time she's pulling him towards her bed.
Seth lets Summer drag him along, and when she perches herself on the edge of the bed and tugs lightly on his arm, he obliges her unspoken ask and sits down beside her.
Summer tucks her legs under her, looking like a kindergartener at circle time.
"You can tell me anything you want to about it," she says, eyes still so large and so earnest, like she's settling in for the long haul, like she wants this somehow, like this was the boyfriend she'd signed up for and cheated in a game of MASH to win as her spouse: nerdy and sarcastic and suffocating under the weight of a metric ton of sexual trauma. "I mean you don't have to," she adds quickly. "But you can." She squeezes his hand.
"There's not really much to tell." Seth stares down at his hand, fingers interlaced with Summer's.
Summer squeezes his hand again. She doesn't say anything.
"I uh, when my Nana was sick I had to go over there sometimes, like when my parents and grandpa were at the hospital." Seth swallows.
"Does anyone else know?" Summer asks.
Seth nods. "Yeah, uh, he moved out of the country for a while and I kinda just hoped I'd never see him again, but then he moved back." He clears his throat. And uh, when he was moving back, my dad figured it out somehow and it all kind of...came out from there, I guess." Seth's eyes fixate on Summer's thumb running back and forth across his knuckles.
"I'm really sorry," Summer says softly.
Seth shrugs.
"You're so strong to deal with all that and be like you are.." Summer trails off, seeming to catch something in Seth's shifting body language. "I said something wrong," she says.
Seth's head snaps up. "What? No, no. You haven't done anything wrong, Summer."
"I just want you to know that you can talk to me about any of this, anytime you want to, and you can tell me if I say the wrong things. I can handle it." Seeing the look on Seth's face, she adds "I mean it, Cohen. Even if I don't know what to say, I can handle it." She presses a hand against his face and rubs her thumb back and forth across his cheekbone. "This doesn't change anything with you and me, I promise."
Seth's lips press together and he looks away.
"I don't really see how that's possible," he says. "Before tonight, you thought the most pathetic thing about me was how many Friday nights I used to spend at home watching Survivor with my parents."
"This doesn't make you pathetic," Summer says sharply.
"Yeah, well, it doesn't exactly make me ruggedly masculine either."
"Is that how you think I see you? Pathetic?" Summer sounds like she's about to cry.
"What? No. That's-that's not what I'm saying."
"I guess I'm just confused. You were a little kid. It's not like there's anything you could've done..." Summer stops herself short. "I'm saying the wrong thing again."
"No." Seth shakes his head, frustrated with himself that he's put Summer in this position, lit the dynamite in her face and then made her feel bad while she scrambled to patch up the devastation. "I just...I don't know if I'd feel any differently if I were..." He exhales a sharp frustrated sound, shaking his head. "I'm sorry-I'm really not doing this right."
"It's okay," Summer says. "I don't think there's one right way to do it."
"This isn't how I wanted to tell you." Seth sighs. "I guess I never really wanted to tell you," he admits.
"And I really am glad you did." Summer squeezes his hand. "It really doesn't change anything. I know you, Cohen."
Seth snorts. "Do you really still feel like you do, after finding out about this?"
"Yes, Cohen. It doesn't change who you are, or how I feel about you." Summer tilts her head to one side. "And I don't want you to feel like you have to hide from me. " She brings their clasped hands up to her mouth and gently kisses his hand. "My stuff is your stuff and your stuff is my stuff." She gives him a little lopsided smile. "And I want to be close with you. You know, sometimes it feels like your brain is with me, but the rest of you is somewhere else."
He's sure it wouldn't make any sense to her, the feeling like that smile was stabbing him in the chest, the feeling like he was bleeding out right there on her bed.
Summer didn't want this stuff.
She didn't ask for this stuff.
She could press a bandage up to it in the moment, but she would realize it in time.
"I just..." Seth's mouth falters. "It just does change things. You don't...everyone always said it didn't matter, it wouldn't change anything, but it did. It's too much for people." Seth snorts. "And I get it, you know? Nobody wants to know about a thing like that."
There's a long stretch of silence between them.
"You just...you'll see me differently. I don't think anyone can help it." Seth's voice comes out in a rasp. He inhales a shaky breath. "It's just kind of what happens." He shrugs his shoulders. "Why do you think my mom's in rehab?" His concrete head suddenly feels light. "She couldn't-" he stops, his eyes suddenly feeling itchy and warm.
That's all he needs.
He gnaws on the inside of his cheek.
"Your mom...that's not..." Summer stops herself.
Seth almost manages to smiles a little, sure he knows where Summer was about to go with that, stunned that she's been doing this for five minutes and is already better than his dad at the cutting off of the trite reassurances.
Anyone who wants to say that Seth didn't have a heavy hand in his mom's descent into alcoholism was welcome to go toe-to-toe with Seth and his six years worth of corroborating evidence.
"I'm sorry that that happened with your mom," she says softly. "You can tell me about that too, if you want."
Seth nods slowly, staring down at the carpet, trying to get lost in the loops and swirls and snarls in the sea of brown fibers.
There's a crumb under Summer's desk.
He could get to work on solving that mystery too.
"So, um..."
Seth looks up at Summer cautiously.
"That time when we were..." Summer trails off, eyes shifting towards the other end of the bed.
Fuck.
"Uh, yeah." Seth coughs and looks away. "I'm sorry I-"
"No, it's okay." Summer looks a little mortified. "I shouldn't have-"
"It's okay." Seth shrugs, feeling his face flush. "I get having questions." He frowns. "I like having sex with you, Summer," he blurts out, then winces at how feeble and ridiculous he sounds. "I don't want you to think I don't, or make all that weird for you."
Make her afraid to touch him or to look at him.
Make her look at him and see no man, only egg, only damage and sickness and rot.
Make her see what he sees.
Summer nods slowly. "Okay." She bites her lip, looking like she's not quite sure. "I mean...are you sure it's okay? Because we don't have to-"
"Yes," Seth says emphatically. "I love being with you, Summer. I just...there are some things I guess I can't really do right now." He looks away, face hot.
"Oh." Summer bites her lip, her face screwing up a little.
Seth feels his jaw clench.
"I guess I just figured I was really bad at those things," Summer says.
Seth's eyes widen.
"Oh man, I'm sorry. I never wanted to make you feel like that. I just-"
Fuck.
When Dr. Max had asked him to consider how Summer might be making sense of all of his weirdness and his maneuvering when they were having sex with each other, for some reason it had never occurred to him that she would think a thing like that.
"Cohen, it's fine. I get it." Summer gives a little shrug. "Undoes the bruise to my ego anyway, right?"
Seth barks out a short laugh, surprised at the joke within all of the abject horror of what's happening.
"I never should've bruised it though," he says.
"Maybe you had to," Summer says simply. "I get not being ready to tell me."
"I don't know that I'm ready to tell you now," Seth admits. "It just kind of happened." He swallows thickly. "You know, I never actually told anyone before. I mean, like, because I decided to."
"We'll make ourselves ready, like, together." Summer smiles at him, reaching out and grabbing his hand. "What do you need right now, Cohen?"
Seth lets that question hang out for a while, not really sure how to answer.
It still feels like he's bleeding out, but somehow and simultaneously, on the like, extreme off-chance that he doesn't die from this, that weird part of him that's always been able to function relatively normally within an actual fucking train wreck is still operational, is still opening his mouth and responding to Summer and letting this whole thing play out like he hasn't just entirely upended his life on a fucking whim.
"Cohen?" Summer's voice is soft.
In a way, in a universe where he couldn't go back in time but could get what he wanted in the moment, all he really wanted was to lean back against Summer's giant fluffy pillows and stare up through the mesh of the canopy over her bed, and he wanted to hold her small body in his arms, feeling larger than her, feeling able to hold her, and then he wanted to close his eyes and not let himself fully feel or fully think about everything that had just taken place, every word he'd said and every word she'd said and what any of it meant.
He wanted to let it all fade to quiet.
"Cohen, you with me?"
Seth looks up into Summer's eyes, still large and still earnest.
"Maybe we could just sit for a while and not really talk about anything?" Seth ventures. "Or we could talk about The Valley," he offers, smirking.
"Yeah, Cohen? You've got notes?" Summer nudges his arm playfully.
"You know I've always got notes, Summer." Seth manages something like a smile at her. "Like, who are these people just hanging out at a house party for hours in their bikinis?" He throws up his hands. "No one was even swimming."
Summer laughs and rolls her eyes.
Without really talking about it or devising a strategy, Seth stretches himself out on Summer's bed pushing himself back toward the headboard and the sea of pillows, and Summer follows him, settling into his arms and resting her head against his chest, one small soft hand finding one of his and intertwining their fingers.
Seth closes his eyes and waits for Summer's rebuttal.