Hello, it is not Wednesday, but I am here with a little bit of a surprise! Like how my brain sometimes operates, I woke up a few weeks ago and really became interested by the pairing of Justin and Eli once again. For those of you who don't know, I spent most of 2020 and 2021 coming up with the story between these two characters - Justin being the eldest son of Jessie and James and Eli being the cousin of Misty's father. Just to remind myself of their story, I began reading Pikachu Tales uploads of them and remembered one I had not uploaded. Because it dated back to 2020, it was not on par with what I write now. So, I've spent the past couple of weeks rewriting it! It became a bit arduous towards the end but after reading it all through, it's exactly what I want :) I hope you enjoy! Time to revisit the toxic dynamic of Justin and Eli's summer fling :P
Out in the hallway of the unexplored block of flats, what greeted Justin made him feel like the world was distancing itself from him. Or perhaps it was he that was putting an invisible wall between himself and whatever it was that was out there. Whatever it was that was supposed to matter. It was all useless. Because, clearly, nothing could make sense ever again.
But then the emptiness gave way. A quietly dim light of perseverance like a candle wick that refused to go out stubbornly prevailed. Shakily as his right, ring clad hand was occupied with tugging at his own bottom lip, Justin forced himself to do something. Anything.
It was as though an invisible puppeteer was forcing him to keep continuing the story of his life even though for the past couple of weeks, every step he took was like an adventure into wonderland. Justin's body moved in a way that really could make any onlookers think that he was not in control of anything. He really felt that he was not. But he was alone.
With an unusual silence in his mind that was louder than if his thoughts were bellowing, he pulled out his phone. Puckering his lips to stifle anything that dared spill – everything that he did not know how to stop poking at – he pulled his phone out of the pocket of his black skintight jeans.
The looming clock on the wall of the hallway watched Justin, timing how long it took him to tap his thumbs on the screen. Dialing tones filling the empty hallway, the low Unovan sun bled into a single, tiny window. Few more seconds passed before someone prepared to speak on the other end.
They, however, did not have the chance. Justin, still driven as a puppeteer's pawn and failing to break himself free from this dynamic, showed that not all was lost by his fingers beginning to tug on his own lower lip all over again.
He was the one to find his voice first, his listless tones ricocheting around the desolate halls and through the swirls of his mind.
"Mum?" Justin mumbled into the phone that was being held against the flat palm of his hand. His voice had been stolen from him with the soured kisses that came before all this, but he told himself it was because of his fingers acting as a buffer as they continuously plucked his lip. He still managed to repeat once more. "Mum?"
For a single beat, Justin's finger hovered in the middle of his plump lower lip, fearing that he had lost the call as well. The line crackled. But then an oh so familiar sound. One so simple but it caused that dull wick to burst into a proper flame for a split second.
A sigh escaped the lips of Jessie on the other end, and it caused Justin to drop his mouth from his fingers though part of him believed they would be lost underneath his fingernails for good.
The expanse of the empty hall began to stop feeling like it was stretching out far in every direction as his ears welcomed the reply from the person he was calling.
"Justin?" Jessie spoke to her son all the way over in the Unova region after her sigh that was a strange blend of sharp and motherliness had been the only thing to sound initially. There must have been a thousand thoughts fighting for the spotlight in her head. But perhaps, just like Justin, maybe not anything existed other than going through the motions as they presented themselves. "Justin, is everything okay?"
There had been a halting of breath. But then words had come.
Justin had not needed to say who was calling and had been able to get straight into speaking his name for his mother. Nobody addressed Jessie like that. With an accent that since his early schooling years had been colored by places he had not yet traveled; the eldest Morgan son was hard to duplicate.
That was her boy on the other side of the line. But a lack of something existed in Justin's voice that made it seem like he could be an imposter if this were focused on too much. The halted quality to his voice was the reason that Jessie sighed a second time.
As she exhaled out of her nostrils and swallowed afterwards while still pressing her phone against her ear, she sighed for herself, and she sighed for her son. Breath escaped from her for all that she knew he was dealing with both openly and the things she suspected were adding a new wound to his heart, nick after nick.
Justin's lips curled into an upside-down u shape as he knew he was faced with the dilemma of lying to his mother. Words spilled out of him before he could stop them. The few sounds that had come out of Jessie had pushed the puppeteer to the far corners of the earth.
He was running the show once more.
"What are you doing right now? Do you have free time?" Justin questioned, his fingers moving away from his face completely and wandering over to the lone windowsill instead. His middle digit began drawing an obscure pattern in the dust. "I mean…" A restricted laugh then escaped his throat. Not expecting this, Jessie tried to focus more so on the words that came. "Do you have a lot of free time?"
Jessie knew that she must not sigh a third time, the air echoing what are you talking about? Jessie had a bit of a peculiar reaction that, in hindsight when I learn of this tale, I suspect was anticipation beginning to get the better of her.
I still wonder if she was occupying her own fingers similarly all the way in Kanto. Perhaps she was running her fingers through locks hued like a tart summer fruit. Justin imagined that her earrings felt a cool touch.
His mum was always cool. Even when her own emotions had her at their mercy.
"I'm just waiting for your dad to make up his mind what he's going to make for dinner. But knowing him, he will have to run it past your little sister first." Jessie deemed it important to tell Justin this. His mind did not stretch far enough to dissect why, his fingers swirling in the dust more vigorously. Justin not leaping to make a joke about Jorgie jolted Jessie into a stifled state of urgency. "Has something happened, Justin?"
It was his turn to cut to the chase. Even his distorted mind understood that if he lingered on the fact that everything always was happening these days then he would turn into a congealed sea creature washed up on the sand.
Something was always bloody happening to him, wasn't it? He did not how he was going to convince his mother that he was in any way okay.
If he were then there would be no phone call. And Eli would be wrapped around him rather than left on the mattress wondering why Justin suddenly needed air.
"I know it's a gigantic ask but do you think you could catch a flight to Unova?" Justin began. And then that laugh sounded again, the one so restricted that it sounded like a helpless bark. "I... I'm okay. I am okay." Jessie's heart fluttered in her ribcage as she listened. Nobody who was okay insisted it twice. "I'm okay. I just… I just need someone else here."
Justin's own confession caused the desolate hallways to stretch back out in front of him, the low light of the impending sunset throbbing whiteness onto the scene. If he looked down rather than across then the messy swirling pattern that he had made on the windowsill would have blurred.
Trying not to see anything, Justin's eyes felt the urge to squeeze tight so that is what they did. His expression was close to that of a smile because he contorted his face so tightly. But no part of him was bursting with joy. A fragment of him believed he would never experience any taste of ecstasy again.
He was bursting all right. Though at that point, Justin did not have a name to slap on what it was that he was riddled with. But to Jessie it was as clear as the day that her son was born minutes after his sister. So, for that reason, she did something that not every parent would do. She did what not every parent was able to do but would have surely done if given the chance to patch up a broken heart.
Laying to rest the pictures coming into her head that were assumptions – astute assumptions and the fear that her husband had been correct in his own concerns – Jessie had a turn to touch at her own bottom lip before they pressed together.
Justin did not know how long he waited until his mother silently nodded her head from the other side of the line. At that point in his life, he counted time passing by the ever-growing ache in the pit of his heart.
"Of course I will." Jessie finally told Justin and a weight that he had not even realized that he had been carrying evaporated immediately even if his shoulders did not move an inch. Continuously nodding her head to herself to push away all distress of how she might find her son when she arrived in Unova, an identical clock to the one in the apartment hallways was studied by Jessie in Kanto. "Just tell me where you are. And I'll be there."
That was it. Conversation over. The disconnecting sounds of both phones hummed though neither of them spoke to each other until hours later. But still, the clock watched on and counted the minutes while Justin held his phone pressed against the palm of his hand as though he wanted his mother's words and her devotion to sink down into his skin and trickle along his veins.
He has tried more than once to attempt to rid himself of that desperate need to rely on people who would surely stop being there eventually. But it was different with her. If he really took the time then he could have wandered into the tricky landscape, trying to piece together why his parents had raised him with such intentional stability but he sought people who would switch up on him as much as the tide altered its course.
But no time for all that. No time for anything other than the moment he was then in.
Justin let his phone at last seek refuge in his leather jacket pocket rather than held fast by his skintight jeans, assumedly with the intention of keeping it near his beating chest. That thudding sensation in the middle of his body travelled to his ears after he had hung up his phone.
As if he had been managing to keep any sort of nervous flutter under lock and key while speaking to Jessie – it had been the same for her - now that he did not have to mumble past his potentially pulsating throat, the rhythm in his chest started to elevate. He could feel it in all the places he tried to banish it.
The outside of Justin's throat was met by soft, slightly clammy pads of fingers. His Adam's apple felt a grazing touch as he tried to soothe himself. To no avail. He would relax when his mother arrived, he told himself.
Like a child reassuring themselves that their parent would pick them up from play group eventually, Justin forced a mantra into his head, reminding himself that things would be better towards the end of the day. Like an apparition that pointed its gnarled finger towards someone, selecting them to experience a doomed fate, his heart told him that things would never be okay again. But that stubborn flame was not just reserved for banishing numbness.
Justin's mind was warmed as if a match really had been lit at the reassurance that Jessie would come for him.
Out in the hallway and next to the only tiny window bleeding in light, Justin's heels moved him up and down. As he paced, his mantra continued.
It would be okay in the end.
It would be okay in the end.
It had to be okay in the end.
It would-
Words sounded in Justin's ears that were not his lips spelling out his own desperate hope. A door suddenly opened.
"Do you feel better after some air?" Eli came face to face with his pacing lover – or ex-lover – whoever they were to each other at that point – as soon as he too stepped out into the hallway. Those haunting eyes of his could not ignore the way Justin slipped mid step, flinching. "I know you said not to follow you but..."
Not taking another step further out into the hallway as between Justin leaving the mattress with him prior to get some air and the jerk that ricocheted through his young body there and then, Eli was sensing a clear message.
His hand rose to roam over the shaved parts of his hair to soothe himself.
Though at that point it was as if Eli were an eclipse that could not even be gazed upon, Justin did reply to him as he tried to straighten out his mishap, leaning against the windowsill in the hallway as if a sigh or a look from the other man could knock him flying.
But Justin could not look at him to know.
"I just came out here to..." the hand that was not propping himself up and the one that had a single pointer finger wrapped in a silver band began to gesture to the phone in his jacket pocket. As Justin's eyes fixated on Eli's undone shirt buttons, he could tell that he was nodding.
Dammit.
If he kept looking there then Eli was sure to get the wrong idea and how would he say no yet another time when he really wanted to say yes?
But gazing upon his face would somehow be worse for him.
"You had an important phone call to make. I know. I heard you." It was not only the pacing of his steel tipped boots that had alerted Eli to something that was going on out there. Though Justin had just been silently plotting all the ways he could get away with not looking at him, his gaze suddenly switched to the other man's face. "Who were you talking to, Justin?"
The clock on the wall foreseeing the events of the day must have observed that despite his prompt alteration of attitude, Justin had tried his hardest to not react to Eli, let alone roll his eyes. He succeeded in some ways; it should be noted.
But Justin's eyes twitched into a squint as they gave up and looked fully at Eli between slits, his tall, wiry frame embodying that of a rigid statue.
Eli had some nerve to highlight the fact that he had heard him chatting on the phone when he was the one with two mobile phones – a personal and a work one. And they were the ones that Justin knew about!
He had never asked to see what was on either one of them. He had trusted him.
Big mistake.
Justin's tongue that had once been sweet with Eli's kisses was now vinegary. His eyes remained narrowed as his expression contorted towards the other male. His countenance and thoughts did all the talking.
Oh, wouldn't you like to-
Upon future reflection I still view it as beautifully tragic as two people then with such turmoil muddying what was once so earnest between them could be as intuitive when it came to one another as their first romantic dalliance.
It was always their greatest triumph as well as an utter tragedy: they always knew what the other was up to because those wounds existed in them too, no matter how big or small.
Eli heard Justin's thoughts as if they were a soundtrack for their moment in time. At first his breath was the thing that sounded, his hand running so vigorously through the curls on the top of his head that his hand started halfway on his face and brushed over his forehead too.
He began to sense that true silent treatment was coming.
"Were you talking to someone important? I just want to know that you're okay." Eli tried to reassure the soon to be sulking male as best as he could. He once before wondered why Justin could stare at his bare chest but not his face but he was quickly unable to stand how his eyes were burning into his silhouette. He knew what was coming next. "Who were you talking to?"
While he had been anxiously waiting for Justin on the mattress with the dip in it where the other male had previously laid with him, he had not cared when he heard him speaking with someone. Not really.
And when he had asked him about it, he really had just been making sure everything was okay after Justin's abrupt desire for air rather than Eli's body continually pressing up against his.
But he could see what was coming.
That petulant attitude had taken Justin for his own all over again and he hated that. He hated it because it reflected how he could be with him. When they got caught together.
Eli could not stop it within himself. And he sure as hell could not stop the desire to be difficult from washing over Justin. All he could do is react in return.
And, unfortunately, it brought out an unseeingly side of him too.
Nobody, Justin moodily persisted, his lips that sometimes were used for other things decided their sole purpose was to grow swollen with a pout as he lingered by the lone window. His hands that inside of the bedroom had been used to hastily unbutton Eli's shirt stuffed into his jacket pockets.
They would not reveal anything else. Certainly not the sun kissed skin of the other male.
Eli bit down on his lower lip before sucking on his top one, his face twitching with irritation even though this gesture was an attempt to soothe himself. He then had a spark of inspiration, trying to lighten the mood that had befallen over the hallway like a sticky, humid day.
He just wanted his sunny boy back.
"Well, if you were talking to nobody and you were talking to yourself then I assume you're going slightly mad and should probably come back inside." Eli humored Justin. He did not move to poke him physically as he poked fun at him.
He might have taken a step back into his apartment behind him but he, however, attempted to reach out to run his hand over Justin's forehead. He flinched like Eli was a diseased creature and that stung.
When Justin became highly strung, it took a little while to, like his pale skin on a particularly cold Kanto day, warm him up again. So, Eli was surprised when he spoke to him even though he should not have been because his attitude still prevailed.
"Hilarious." Justin muttered, remaining in a fixed pose next to the window and with his balled fists concealing themselves in his jacket pocket.
Even he was aware that he was being slightly unreasonable. Making a mountain out of a mole hill. Part of him wondered if he was only continuing with his pout because he had started it and now, he had to see it through.
But the quieter part of himself knew exactly what it was.
He could not give in to Eli again. More so, he could not allow Eli to give in to him. It was as though the other man were a magnet though. Whatever he wanted, whatever he desired, Justin went sick with love – lust – and would do whatever, however and whenever.
He did not know what it was. But there was just something so electric about he and Eli together, whether they were actually fighting or fighting to hold onto a moment together a little while longer under the sheets.
Justin hoped that it was love. He needed it to be. Otherwise, he had been very stupid indeed.
Taking one last chance, Eli attempted to warm Justin up in one last way before he allowed the sense of rejection to bleed into his skin, adding an ache to his stomach that would then feel like he was being cut open from the inside out while the night was still young.
It was an almighty risk when Eli stepped past the threshold again, not only his hands reaching out to Justin as his whole body was drawn to him. It was as if his frame were a compass, and the other male was the only direction he ever wanted to point in.
"Please, come back with me..." Eli's voice quietened down to that deep, unintentionally sultry tone that rumbled out of him when he knew he was offering something that Justin could not resist. He could not resist. Justin's eyes fluttered shut, not as a final attempt to gain some control. "Nothing has to happen; I just want you next to me..."
Eli's body pressing up against Justin's narrower frame from the side, as he held him, his thick fingers inadvertently brushed up against where Justin had moments before offered his own touch to soothe himself.
Justin let out a bit of a groan, a bit of a mumble. It tried to be full of resistance. But his noise spoke of surrender. He did not have much to surrender to if Eli's words were truthful. He knew that they were. That somehow was worse!
Eli's hands after they stopped brushing against his gradually flushing skin were firm but the touch of his chin as it brushed against Justin's shoulder, nuzzling him, was tender. He believed that he was not after the one thing. He believed that he was not after anything from him.
Eli just wanted to be near him and Justin very much felt the same.
Until he suddenly did not.
The hallway might have been a little bubble that contained whatever had the potential to flourish between the two of them but outside of it existed a whole other world. Just outside of Castelia City might not have been as bustling as the eye of the Unova Region itself but it was still a very much happening place.
Other people existed in the world outside of Justin and Eli, let alone existed in the smaller city. Someone suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs with a key in their hand. As if it were then the compass, it seemed to point in the direction of the flat that Eli had previously come from.
While Justin's stomach lurched like he had been thrown off a rollercoaster ride, his body growing surprisingly stiff in the other man's touch, it was Eli to speak the name that was appearing like forewarning neon lights in Justin's head.
"Lucy." he plainly stated. As Justin's body remained as statuesque as his heart felt to be during the bewildering moments that they were apart, what surprised him more so than his own rigidity was the way that Eli had not let go of him.
Even as Lucy's own insides must have surely lurched in shock, Eli's arms remained on either side of Justin's slender frame, his chin digging into his shoulder as if he did not intend to let go. Not underneath watchful eyes. And not underneath quietly dumbstruck ones like Lucy's.
To this day Justin still does know what it was that riled him up so for the final time. Whether it was Eli's hands confusedly still on him as if they usually did not hesitate to abandon him if he had even the smallest idea that somebody could be taking a second glance at the two of them.
Perhaps it was Lucy's gaze. He hardly knew her to comment on her actions astutely, but he knew that he was not mistaken as he spied her nostrils quivering, whether she was growing riled up like he was, or she was hurt. He would not blame her for being hurt. And he did not blame himself for feeling that same sickness slicing through him.
He knew that what he had ignorantly assumed to be Eli's new rented accommodation seemed far too homely after just a couple of short days was too good to be true. It was different than the place that they had shared together back in Kanto.
That apartment reeked of somebody else even if he had not been able to smell any perfume. Eli then reeked of betrayal. As if Justin was inhaling that notion as a potent concoction, his eyes began to water.
For once, he was the one to push Eli away under the gaze of somebody else.
"Get your hands off me." Justin muttered with hotness streaking across his pale face, keeping his hands to himself and not removing Eli from him but dodging his touch with everything that he had left in him. "I don't know who you think I am, and I certainly don't want to know you anymore."
And as Justin moved towards the top of the stairs to leave, he knew that this needed to be the last time that he did this. He could not go back on his words anymore. Certainly, could not undo or contrast his actions after they had been so strong.
Shaky hands moving to her red swiped lips as she observed all of this, Lucy moved out of the way to let Justin go down. As Eli sprang into action and reached out to a spectral shape, in Justin's mind he had to be reaching out to comfort Lucy in some way.
Because he must have been dead to Eli if he thought all of this would slide.
Eli's eyes wide with desperation as he tried to call down to Justin, Lucy and the onlooking walls of the apartment building listened more than the younger male who was already pushing the double doors of the exit.
Damn those long legs!
"I didn't invite you here to..." Eli trailed off for a second, taking a moment to look over at Lucy who was wondering whether she should be checking on Justin rather than checking on Eli like she was doing that day. "Justin, I don't-!"
As Eli's now empty hand rose to try and catch Justin's attention, he knew that it was useless. He did not even know what he wished to say. Everything was such a mess. He just wished that things could go back to how they were.
But Justin had left. And Lucy was standing next to him, wondering whether to keep her own watering eyes to herself or look at Eli. Eli had no choice but to stop leaning over the banister and set free the breath that he was holding, looking over at her.
What choice did he have? He could not look at Justin anymore. And a part of him knew he must swallow the reality that he would never look at him again.
The silence that Justin left in his wake that day spoke more so than anything that anybody in the apartment building could muster. If his silence could speak, then it would surely scream. Perhaps Justin feared that if he opened his mouth again then he would scream. So, he chose to take an oath of silence towards his ex-lover.
It was still taking place when Justin's mother finally arrived hours later, and they settled into a hotel room together for just the one night. As he sulkily sat then under the same roof as Jessie, Justin knew that he had been mistaken. It was not a weight off his shoulders and a breath of fresh air into his lungs to be with her again.
The truth was, he was not sure how he was going to see any gaze of hers without fretting that it was a knowing look and keep within him everything that he was trying too hard to keep underneath the surface.
After an hour of being in the hotel room together, Jessie's son had hardly met her eyes and any response to any kind of conversation she tried to get going with him was as bland as if he had forgotten all his words on stage.
How was the flight over?
Fine.
Do you want the bed closer to the window or the other one?
Doesn't matter either way.
Have you looked at the menu and told the reception what you want for breakfast in the morning?
I'll do it later.
After Jessie had worriedly told her husband about her conversation with their son and began hastily packing while he watched over her with a little girl hugging onto his hip, she had been so afraid that she would find her son hysterical in the face of heartache.
Somehow it was worse that her child who had once been described as by his teachers as being able to talk the hind legs off some sort of creature had left any sort of talking ability wherever he had come from before checking into the hotel.
Though it was obvious.
James watching her pack with Jorgie on his hip and nuzzling into his neck and not been good for her. It felt like only yesterday that their shared boy was that age. Now he was more than six feet tall and had travelled the world many times without them but part of him was just as small as that little child.
That small part of him along with his then twenty-two-year-old self had cried himself to sleep many of the nights without Eli. And Jessie had not been able to protect either of them.
Jessie poured herself a helping of water from the dispenser that the hotel provided as it was unclear what she was doing there. Her son acted like nothing else other than the sight of his own lap existed. She rolled the cardboard cup in between her hands a couple of times for something to do before she wandered over to Justin's bed and where he was sitting.
Moving her cup of water to just the one hand, as if to connect with her son while he was so unreachable, her right hand reached out and touched each one of the belongings that Justin had placed on the ottoman at the end of his bed.
Unusual for him to unpack for just the one night. But surely, he too had needed something to do.
Her fraying manicured nails brushed the cold material of his deodorant can. It felt like yesterday that James had to borrow hers when he realized that his own kept winding up in his son's school bag. A stack of two of three books did not go unnoticed. A little excessive for a one-night trip. But Justin never knew when he needed to research – or escape – often within the same tale.
What caused her mouth to finally twitch into a smile was the way that the little plastic pot from the bathroom that was meant to hold his toothbrush had been removed from there and was now on the ottoman containing all his guitar plectrums.
A taste of home and a triangular fragment of him that he brought wherever he went.
Justin sensed his mother's every move though his eyes were fixed on his lap even if his curvaceous friend rested against his thigh, plucking the guitar's strings, and trying to coax any sort of melody out. When her lips quirked upwards, distracted by a habit of his that she had not noticed before, his gaze broke away from the black material of his jeans and fell on her.
It was easier to look at her when she was not looking at him. So, when the bed moved rather than his belongings as she joined him in sitting on it, his eyes fell away from her, and he went back to listlessly plucking at the strings of his guitar.
"Are you going to visit your friends at your record label while you're here?" Jessie wondered with her cardboard cup back in both hands. Justin who was in the middle of plucking strings suddenly plucked at the wrong note and that spoke everything that he felt about that. A mouthful of water bought her time before she defended herself, eyes slightly narrowed. "Well, you might extend your time here. What do I know?"
What do you know indeed, were the thoughts that ran through Justin's mind like a virus spreading. These words might as well have spilled out. But what was the use? He may have a petulant attitude at that point but even he could guess that Jessie knew a lot.
Perhaps not from his own recounting of certain tales. And his father, James, never would have dreamt of gossiping when it brought deep pain to his heart to see his son so torn. But how he felt with Eli – it was obvious.
Frustratingly, it had always been easy to read on his face, whether his dimpled cheeks were tinged with pleasure or how brow was furrowing, wondering how a love could be so strong but destined to hide in the shadows instead of broadcasted on stage like his most beloved creations from the heart.
At that point, he and Eli were no longer together. But Jessie knew nearly as much as Justin did how after a few choice words or a lingeringly haunting stare from him, Justin would pretend to others that his visit was being extended to pay a visit to the record label in Castelia City.
But the truth was far more clandestine.
Why on earth did his record label headquarters have to be so near to the home city of Eli? What once sent shivers down the spine of his that the other man used to trail with kisses felt like any room that he was in was caving in on him. Excitement and prosperity had been replaced by unease.
It was as if all roads were always meant to lead to him but how could that be? How could Justin – the musician who got up on stage night after night and looked as far as the faces in the back of the room and see them for who they truly wished to be – be with someone who loathed themselves? Who could not even touch his hand in public without acting like his fingers had brushed a secret he would never reveal?
Justin had been helplessly devoted for more than a month now. But that needed to cease.
"Did you know that Unova was the first international office that dad and I had for Simply J?" Jessie moved the conversation away from Justin's chip on his shoulder. The ache in his heart.
Following him plucking the strings for a little while more and gentle melodic tune sung bravely from his guitar, he could not stop himself from looking over at his mother.
As he gauged the situation, soon enough he could see that she was not trying to catch him out with her words. She was not trying to lure things out of him. They were just... talking.
For the first time since entering the hotel lobby with Jessie, Justin welcomed the opportunity to just talk. He nodded his head as he played, his left hand on the fret board rubbing up and down to coax out a sound that he always liked.
"Good place." Justin complimented as if Jessie and James were still lowly fashion designers and needed his stamp of approval. His mother's countenance could not have been clearer if she tried! Her eyes twitched and narrowed towards her son. But a mischievous grin pulled her lips apart. "Wonderful place, actually. Some of my favorite shows have been here." The beginnings of a grin came for the first time since they had been alone together as her appearance was contagious. "Beautiful place. Beautiful place."
Suddenly, as Justin repeated his own words a second time, a very unpleasant taste like that of a bitter boiled sweet had made its way onto his tongue. Though his fingers managed to continue plucking and playing, his body was lured back to that statuesque state, his mind too.
Justin hated this.
His fingers felt as if they belonged to an automaton and managed to keep moving but the thing that he loathed the most was that his eyes always gave everything away. Especially when it came to Eli. Him and all their time shared. And all their time not shared too. The long road of continual bliss cut short by one sudden goodbye. The goodbye that had not even meant to be one.
Most nights, Justin was kept awake but a perverse mixture of guilt and enticement.
How could he call Eli a coward for being unable to hold him close under the eyes of others when he had not had the guts to end things with the man he claimed to love? If he had not caught him sneaking out in the middle of the night, then who knows if he would have had the guts to cut ties with him to his face.
Jessie was not stupid. Not at all. She had seen with her very own eyes the spark that crackled between their palms as they shook hands for the first time, expressing their first hello. And now that Justin was right next to her on the bed, though his eyes fought to focus on anywhere but her, she was not naïve to the heartbreak that he was suffering due to that same man too.
Initially, her expression came across as steely, as if she were annoyed at her son for feeling things so deeply. This could not have been further from the truth. She gave herself her own telling off and encouraged her countenance to change.
"Justin…" A name slipped out of her and immediately Justin's creamy skin seemed to grow all the pallid. Before a mottled blush crawled over him like ivy, his pale skin had been so peaky it looked almost bruised with blue. He reacted as if another name was being spoken. It might as well have because at one point, he and Eli were as much each other as they were themselves. "What did you think was going to happen?"
If Jessie's words had been constructed to get her son looking at her then it worked! With cheeks appearing as they had been slapped, eyes glassy and his guitar letting out a revolting moan when his fingers fell off the strings for good, Justin's head snapped towards his mother.
His conversations with her surrounding his supposed severing of ties with Eli had been few and far between. How horrid when it had barely been more than a week since they sat in that coffee shop together, cups of hot drinks being the only thing between them as Justin earnestly confessed to Jessie how certain he was about that man's place in his life.
How did she of all people know such things? Was it really that obvious to everyone but him?
Justin had not eaten anything for hours, but nausea squirmed up his intestines and into his throat, causing him to discard his guitar against the bed as if he might need to dart to the bathroom at any moment.
His mottled neck and cheeks matched his curvaceous companion down on the floor as his eyes shook between his mother and the realization that stared at him straight in the face.
Everything was obvious to everybody else, and he was the last to know.
I don't want to talk about this.
Jessie's expression managed to be more what she wanted it to be the more that time passed. Her lower lip fell into her mouth, hearing her son's thoughts as if he had said them aloud. Rather than reaching out to him, comforting him, her own fingers went to each other, starting to pick at what was left of her nail polish.
She had left most of it on the airplane floor.
Jessie knew that Justin did not wish to talk. She believed him. But how much longer could she see him in this way? She had tried to placate her husband's unfiltered worry while she packed and remembered the times when their affection was true.
But Justin had boarded a plane. And for what? Well, she knew what!
That was not her son. He got on planes with a whole crew of people he loved to share music around the world. He did not do it for this. To end up hot cheeked and mute. Alone in a hotel room if he had not asked for her company.
Justin did not wish to talk. That was fine. He just needed to listen.
"You're too smart to not see what you're doing when you keep going back to each other like this. I know it seems exciting..." Jessie was forced to trail off and forgo her sentences when her son started to utter her name. However, unlike the first time and when he was calling her, it wasn't because Justin was trying to reach out to her. Quite the opposite. "Your feelings are too real to settle with falling into bed just to keep hold of each other." Justin had never wanted his mother to shut up more! "You need to figure stuff out. But that's not the way to do it."
Eyes like watery milk, Justin's cheeks felt stung like he had a fever as unlike his time with Eli, he could not run away from his mother's words. Perhaps if they had come from his father, they would have been easier to swallow.
Man to man.
Justin had spoken to him about what he found himself dealing with as much as he had felt able to. But there had been something that stopped him confessing to his mother. Perhaps because she had liked him. Yes, she had really liked Eli. And now Justin had banished him from both of their lives.
Well, he had tried.
Justin's wobbly gaze darted down to his empty lap, wishing he could look upon those feeble strings. Anything for a sense of normality. But then he focused on the blackness inside of his own eyelids as they closed.
It is true when they say we close our eyes to the most important things in life. When it came to Justin, he closed his eyes as truth oozed for him.
Perhaps it was the same for Eli. And maybe that was why they had ended up as deeply as they had.
Jessie was caught off guard when his vow of silence was not revisited.
"You don't know what you're talking about." Justin muttered. Even with his eyes closed, he did not need to gather Jessie's expression from the way that he felt her weight shift on the bed. Hurriedly but precisely all the same, he knew to get what he meant across. "You don't know what it was like… To... To... You don't know us." Justin needed a break. But then his words tumbled out like a weary acrobat. "You don't know him. I don't know him. Nobody does. He doesn't know himself."
After being so silent that Justin would go mute on her all over again, Jessie imagined in her mind's eye that after his initial words, he was sure to close off from her for good.
That had been the whole reason that her and her husband had given Justin the space to figure all this out. Perhaps wrongly. But they knew if they pushed too much – questioned too much – they would lose him like Justin was so certain that Eli could never know parts of himself.
Listening to her son, Jessie's lipstick smudged in the corners as her lips pressed together. Words came to her mind empathetically and if Justin had been really listening then he would have heard them.
But his mind left no room for anything else. It was already bursting with the absence of a love he had once stupidly believed could be for life.
It's hard to be with someone who finds it difficult to be themselves.
After Jessie's eyes thoughtfully blinked together, she could not stop more words from following them. She had always had a romantic heart kept stacked away inside a guarded one like nesting dolls. It did not sit right with her how in pain her son was. But there had to be a reason that he just kept going back again like a boomerang.
She wanted to believe that it was earnest and not a hole that his touring life usually filled.
Maybe after some time apart you could...
Though Justin's eyes had begun to crack open like sleepy eyelids adjusting to the brightness of a new day, he had not been attuned with everything that his mother was saying inside of her own head.
His next words, however, could have led any onlookers to believe that he had.
Heartbreak is universal and strangely, it ties us all together.
"There's nothing to figure out. It's over. It must be after coming here today…" A quick, glossy eyed look over to Jessie told her that was the most he would say about it for the time being. It was not an aha moment for her to realize they were on the same page. That flying over was a wakeup call for Justin, proving how deep in a web of goodness knows what he was in. "There's stuff I need to focus on rather than trying to be with someone who lives their life riddled with shame."
Jessie could have given her son a quick look in return, changing the mood of the conversation entirely by wordlessly pointing out that it was about time he wanted to focus on other things! He had moved into Eli's rented accommodation back in Kanto because it had a home studio.
Lots of things had been made over the summer but new music had not been one of them!
The atmosphere was desperate for something new, but Jessie kept her gaze to herself. And as she did so, though she knew that she would not dare share her thoughts this time, she could not help but see that Justin and Eli were not so different in some ways.
Justin's sexuality had not been a secret for many years. But still it was a part of him that was always holding its breath. Like he was afraid that he would collapse if he let go just that bit too much, if he admitted how deeply he felt everything at any given time.
It was different when he was on stage. When he was up there, he was everything that he was always meant to be. His breath poured out of him in the sounds of the raucous singing that he performed for a crowd.
He must be dying to get back out there, Jessie thought. Things would be different for him when his next plane ride was towards his purpose rather than his weak spot.
"If that's what you've decided then good. I hope that you can stick to your decision." Jessie began. Perhaps thinking that this is all that she would say, Justin's eyes flickered towards his mother in a brief way for a second time. He really was like a book when it came to Eli. No wonder he was too much of a risk to be with. "But..." It was Jessie's turn to take a risk. She would end up kicking herself for saying this. But she too needed his pain to be worth it. "It is obvious all this has meant something to you both. Otherwise, you wouldn't keep popping into each other's lives like this."
Justin's body jerked quite forcefully, inhaling a big breath inwards and leaning closer to the headboard behind him. He needed to sit with the words that his mother had said to him though he wished that he were doing anything but.
Oh, how he wished that he could be just making sweet music. But Eli had had taken everything from him.
Once his breath had been taken in, Justin's following reaction was to pull his knees closer to him on the bed, shaking his head in disbelief before chuckles escaped from him, telling Jessie what the reason for the swaying motion of his head was.
His eyebrows might have been plaiting together tightly but he was laughing, dimples slicing fresh wounds in his cheeks. The longer that Jessie watched this, the stronger the urge came over her to shake her son like he was shaking his head.
Why did he have to be so stubborn?!
It was a trait that even she was able to admit that had bled into him from her. But it was quite tormenting to come up against it in the form of a son.
Before she could grunt to express her agitation, however, Justin's lips parted to do something else other than falsely chuckle.
"Well, if he must come into my life again then I hope he actually likes himself at least a little bit." Justin began. Jessie's agitation may have begun to taper at the potential of getting somewhere with her son again, but she knew not to relax her weight on the bed. That damned dimpled smile appeared one more time. "It's exhausting. And quite frankly, it makes me understand his dislike."
Justin did not nod his head, but these words were punctuated with an invisible air of finality. He desperately wanted it to be the end. He knew how many times he had gone running back to Eli, but he needed catching a plane to Unova to be the grand finale.
The last exaggerated act to hold onto a love that could never be.
This was not what Jessie was hoping for. Perhaps she should be relieved as she had never found her son in that hysterical state that she had pictured in a thousand ghastly ways on the plane. But since their conversation Justin had felt... inaccessible.
She could see that he was not being honest with himself. She saw with icy sharp judgement that Justin and Eli were not so dissimilar.
But where would pointing that out get them? Where would it get him?
The toughest moment as a parent is learning to let go. To allow the beings you created with such intricate love to see things in the way that they saw them. And to not rub it in their faces when age and distance made them realize otherwise.
Both her and James just wanted their children to live. Living meant dealing with things going wrong and yes, heartache. They could not protect them from everything. They knew that it would be wrong to wish to, especially when it came to Justin.
It might hurt now but he was sure to write a damned good song about it eventually.
"Fine." Jessie conceded. Her word hung in the air and detailed how it was not exactly that. But it could be that. And that was what counted. Justin was able to follow her gaze fully for the first time since being in the hotel room, watching her toss her empty water cup in the trash and reach for something else instead. "Let's order some dinner, shall we?" She then read her son as accurately as she could read the dinner menu in her hands. "I'm ordering us both a pizza."
And that was final.
Justin might have tried to tell Jessie with his eyes and an absent growling stomach that he was not hungry, but it was no use. He could always let it go cold if he were really set on remaining empty.
Jessie dialed the phone to organize their room service and as she put through their order, silence befell on Justin again even if he had since grabbed his guitar around the neck. In retrospect upon hearing this tale, I cannot help but wonder if the same thing was going on further into the city, between Eli and Lucy.
Surely few words could be spoken between he and... whoever she was to him at that point. And if there were, how could they end up at any other point then where Jessie and Justin found themselves about half an hour later when the pizza had arrived, and they were eating silently.
Years have passed since this story took place but even as I think of it, I still find a little bit of comfort in the fact that silence echoed around both the lost souls in a uniting bubble. Perhaps despite how much they refused to see things from the other's point of view, they were both sat on the bed and eating pizza.
That is the funny thing about life, isn't it? You can feel like the earth is stretching out between you and someone, keeping the two of you at the opposite ends of the earth, numb fingertips unable to reach the other. But that notion could be shared by not only just the one person but everybody.
We can be united in our belief of being alone. United in our heartache. Though at that point in our lives, we begin to feel that nobody has ever felt that way before and never will again.
Like comfort, isolation can be its own bubble.
After some time of the monotonously silent chewing, Jessie grew agitated once more, this time by the lack of sound coming from her son's guitar. It resurrected the vow of silence, refusing to lend a soundtrack to their lives. She moved away from the bed briefly, reaching towards the radio to turn it on.
Click.
The silence dissipated.
When Jessie settled back on the bed with her son once more, slice of pizza in her hand and greasy boxes between them, she began to realize what a foolish idea it had been to try and fill the gaps of wordlessness.
The silence from Justin was suffocating as he did not place his guitar against his thigh while it rested listlessly on his lap, looking mournfully up at him. He forwent using his voice as an instrument also, not singing or even humming along to the tunes.
Justin most certainly did not laugh along with the impertinent small talk of the hosts, and he seemed not to glitter with the spark of inspiration as other musicians were being interviewed.
Looking down numbly at his blushing friend, the only sound that escaped him was the soft chewing of his teeth as he at least tried to eat his pizza.
Jessie knew she had to be done steering things a certain way, filling a silence that longed to prevail. If her son was going to mope, then he was going to mope. If he was going to scowl, then his face was going to return to the display of the toddler who he had once been as sometimes he did not get his own way.
If Justin was going to ache, then he would bleed out. But she would be there to mop him up and wipe him down if he asked.
He had stopped asking since the phone call now. So, she was off duty. Until duty called once again.
Rather than continue to fight the thoughts of wondering when she would be needed again – or worse, not needed as her son chose to drown his helplessness in silence – Jessie leaned across the bed to steal a slice of Justin's margarita pizza.
As she made this attempt, immediately she realized her concerns had been futile. Her naturally hardened expression altered like changing state was its sole purpose and her thick eyelashes fluttered, eyes blinking.
Justin had accompanied his vow of silence with determination to not look at her again, this time his whole face tilting away from her. But he was not doing so because he was trying to hide the fact that he had smeared pizza all over his mouth and had not had the chance to reach for a tissue to mop himself up.
He was not doing this because he was searching for a guitar pick, he might have dropped on the floor. It was not because he could not bear to look at his mother either.
What he could not take anymore was the fact that another relationship had broken down. With every beat of his heart that thudded in his ears, a voice from the darkest corners of his mind told him that it was his fault this time too.
Most recently, his relationship with Eli had been one vibrant with joy, exploration, and enthusiasm. In the beginning anyway. It was this that caused his head to try and turn away, to disguise the pile of his emotions. And it was this too that caused his tears to pool.
A single tear did not need to trail and drip down onto his open pizza box for Jessie to notice. She swallowed her gasp, and her hands instinctively tried to reach out to her boy.
"Justin, are you crying?" she asked. Of course, his initial reaction was to shield himself some more. His pizza slapped down into its box. Justin's hands were then used to try and quickly wipe away the tear before it made its journey downwards, as if he were stifling the greatest secret in the world. "Justin, you're crying."
Jessie's hands did not make it to her son's frame and hung about in front of her own body, for half a second fearing she could make things worse. That she had made them worse.
No, I'm not.
Justin's gestures spoke as his hands and his fingers continued pawing at his own face to hide his spillage entirely. His nostrils set free a mighty snort. His jutted chin leading the way, his head turned some more.
Like the last autumn leaf on a branch shivering and knowing that winter would cause it to rot, Jessie could see the way that Justin's lip trembled as he edged away from her. She watched the blank canvas of his forehead grow tarnished with lines. They spread to his puckered chin too.
Even if she had been blind, she would have garnered all this from him. We are so united in our pain, aren't we? But pain Justin did not wish to feel. Things had once been so wonderful.
As much as they continued to fight, he did not want to let his tears go. In the same way that he had never wanted to set Eli free - not really – he wanted to keep his tears near to him even if they were a burden to him. On them both.
"Justin…" Unlike her son, she spoke aloud, and she did not need to utter anything else to get his attention. But what she captured the most was because of her hands finally making their way to him. Her lips pressed together, deciding it was her turn to go silent and let her hands say it all as they cupped his cheeks.
The vow of silence in that hotel room would from then on be a distant memory. Words, however, did not tumble out of Justin. As the floodgates opened, it was the floodgates of emotion. His mother's cool touch against his pale skin, suddenly, he could not hold things back any longer. Tears began dripping down onto her hands. And then Justin was sobbing.
Still, that stubborn child within him tried to hide everything away, his icy cold touch rising to try and push her comfort away. But it was no good. Whether it was because her motherliness was stuck to him fast or the surrendering was quickly rendering him weak - or perhaps a combination of both – Justin's hands fell to his lap as soon as they lifted.
It was just no use.
Even if he had managed to shield his wet eyes from his mother, she would have known them to exist. She had mopped them up a lot since that child version of him had been the only one that existed. As he had grown older, he had grown more private in heartache.
Not anymore.
What plagued him could not be smothered. Love could not be smothered, even if he were then beginning to grieve that fact that he and love were never meant to be.
"W-Why does the thought of seeing him again make me want to absolutely heave…?" Justin cried out, his pale fingers knotting together in his lap in anguish. Before Jessie could even open her mouth, her brow plaited with concern – and strangely, love, in an unusual combination, he continued, the squeezing motion of his eyes causing more tears to spurt. "But the thought of never seeing him makes me feel even worse…?"
As Jessie's lips pressed together, that plait still in between her eyebrows and pads of her fingers attached to her son's cheeks, she knew what to say. Perhaps upon future reflection, she wishes she had taken more time.
But after Justin said what he needed to say, one of the lessons that she and her husband had both tried to nurture him with floated into her mind. A lesson he had not yet learned. And would not until the time was right for him to know it.
Jessie knew the time was right. To say it if nothing else.
"I'm here..." she began as if he were a weary little boy with a fever and she was at his bedside. Justin's swollen eyes with spiky eyelashes attached to the skin feebly opened all over again. "Just... Just don't talk..."
She did not need the words just feel to echo out.
One of Jessie's hands had moved away from Justin's lack of dimpled cheeks and brushed over his forehead as if he was an unwell little child. In her mind, more words circled through her mind but this time she did not say them.
Good, she thought to herself as Justin's wet eyelashes clapped together. Between his vulnerable words and her short ones in response, he had partially exorcised something he had kept rattling around in his gut. He can move on now. Whether he will eventually move on towards Eli once more or set them both free for good.
Though Jessie's touch upon her eldest son's brow had been a gentle caress, a level of protectiveness laced it that spoke of the fierce, motherly nature that often drove her. Her protection, however, was not needed.
Justin needed to feel, just like she had wished for him. He needed to cry. To sob close to her. He needed to go through all this to go where he was to go next. Wherever that was.
Wherever he chose to go next, he was sure to do it with great feeling. The desire to be silent would greet him once again – I know it would for an exceedingly long time after one particularly fateful day. But he had ridded himself of something that needed to go. Not Eli. Not quite yet.
It is funny how sometimes the great days of our lives are just merely days. We do not realize until time has passed the enormity of what happened. The path that began to stretch out in front of us, only understood when we finally decide to take a step in a new direction.
Justin knew that it was his mother that he needed to call in the same way that he knew that he could not allow things to keep going this way with Eli. We are so united in our heartache. Sometimes our deep, yearning journey to give and receive love whether it is for the first time, or the last time gives us great heartache.
But those are our stories. Whether we only look back at them during the quietest moments of the night when everybody else is asleep or like Justin, we turn them into songs and allow a crowd of strangers to caress our woes.
Jessie gave Justin more than just mere tales to take with him on that day. Within her willingness to cross the sea for him, to be patient when confronted with his silence and to hold him when he crumbled, she gave him a gift.
The permission to feel. Oh, how he needed permission to cry.
He would shed many more tears for the man that he once shed his clothes for, holding him close in the sun kissed light of a brand-new day. But then as life does even when you are riddled with heartache – a lost love – if it was even that – the days continues to pass. The seasons move forward.
And along with the turning of calendar pages, the tears that Justin needed to cry dried up on their own. They came back in a different way when Eli took on a new role in his life years later.
But that is for another day.
We tear so much out of ourselves in the name of what we hope is love, including our voices. What once ended in silence grew so loud. Not in anger. Or in desperation to be seen. Some voices are just meant to be heard. Some people not meant to hide in the shadows.
Just like Jessie chose to be in the right place at the right time to elicit what was needed for her son, some people are meant to come into your life and sometimes they are meant to leave it. But if you are just lucky enough – if the love really is there and their place in your life is true – they just might come back.
The Pokémon World is not so big. And an oath taken to be quiet – steps made to walk away – can be retracted.
Sometimes people are given a second chance. And a love once so contorted can end up lasting a lifetime.
The End.
There you go, thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed! :) So yeah, perhaps not quite a summer fling if Justin has ended up feeling so bad. They are definitely the definition of "the right person at the wrong time". But oof, they certainly do a lot of things wrong! I actually really liked portraying the difficult side of Justin here - and the passionate, push and pull nature of the two of them. I shied away from it a few years ago and toned it down a lot but not anymore! They really are a messy pairing during this stage of their lives. But a pairing very close to my heart from all the time Shannon and I spent developing their story. This chapter was inspired by the moment in Call Me By Your Name when Elio's mother picks him up from the train station. Among other things I mentioned, it was fun to portray Jessie coming to the rescue. I've written a lot about Justin's dynamic with his father but not so much her. So, that was fun :) Anyways, thanks for reading and perhaps you enjoyed a little bonus upload! I will be back on Wednesday to commence some Christmas uploads. Maybe see you then :3
Amy signing out!