Wishful Sinking
📅 2014
【ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ sᴇʟғ ʜᴀʀᴍ ᴀɴᴅ ᴀʟʟᴜsɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ ᴀɴᴅ sᴇx】
“We shouldn’t have to feel fucked up just because we are fucked up.”
That’s what Leu said. It was a nice sentiment. Felt like fertile ground for…well, whatever the hell Kato and Leucosia were doing. Felt true enough, too.
Still, they were fucked up. They fucked up, or at least he did, or at least she thought so. It was aggravating, really, how she got him right up until she didn't.
“Why did you stop going by ‘David’?” she asked somewhere along the road, both too early and too late for the curiosity; having so easily gone with his real name from their reintroduction at Gabe’s hands that Kato ended up blindsided by his birthname’s presence on her tongue two months after it would have been appropriate to inquire after and an infinity before he’d ever want to address it again.
The name had become so foreign to him that it felt like she’d pulled a stranger’s corpse into bed to join them and he reacted with matching revulsion: Jerking away on instinct, his elbows locking as he sat bolt upright; his hips twisting his legs toward the edge of the bed lest he needed be ready to run.
“It just wasn’t me,” he spat instead of bolting. “And it was a lie, anyway. You know what it means? ‘Beloved.’”
She looked at him and he crumpled; hunching his shoulders. “I never was.”
“So you named yourself…” she prompted
“...Cunning.”
“How humble,” she joked, and rolled across his lap like a cat. She reached up and ran a fingertip along his jaw. “It fits. ‘Beloved’ would fit you now too, though.”
Butterflies; nausea. “Thanks,” he said without looking at her, “but don’t call me it.”
“Is it so bad to be loved?” she asked, less playfully, and scowled at his flinch.
“Yeah? I mean, in terms of defining myself, Leu, I’d rather play it safe. At least I know I’ll be smart long-term. Or I can play that part. It’s easier to convince people I'm clever than that I’m lovable.” Kato couldn’t keep his lip from curling; the concept felt dirty in some way; a sentiment like soured milk. “It’s safer, too. Anyone with sense would rather be the fox than the rabbit.”
Hurt flashed through her eyes instead of sympathy and she sat up, abandoning any tender tone to quip back, “Wow, good to know you see me as just a blip on your radar, then. And so utilitarian. Jesus fucking Christ.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he shot back. “Can you not make my problems be about you? I don’t need to feel worse that I have issues. Like, the fuck, do you want to call me David? Why is it a goddamn problem?”
“How about first you don’t let your problems make you treat everybody else like they don’t-won’t-can’t fucking matter to you long term?” she retorted, tossing her hair out of her eyes. “I was literally just talking to you! I thought maybe it’d be nice for you to hear me say it fits because I love you! God. I was just trying to make it something special for us, but whatever, clearly I’m not someone you feel safe with. So forget it.”
“The fuck, Leu? It’s not about you! It’s about me!”
She rolled her eyes and got out of bed, turning her back on him and retrieving her clothes. “Yeah, everything always is about you, isn’t it,” she said; something aggrieved in her tone bittering her words. “God forbid I try and love you. Sorry for trying to make your shitty childhood less painful I guess. Serves me right for wanting to make that little kid inside you feel fucking cared about.”
The flash of anger in Kato’s chest faded out into something heavy; guilty. “You are special,” he tried, touched by her sentiment. “I’m sorry, I'm not trying to hurt you. I don’t want anyone calling me it. I don’t even let Seth call me it, and he saved my life. You know? No one could earn it, ‘cause it’s not a privilege. I do appreciate like…you loving me, and wanting to…heal it.” The last words came out somewhat choked-up and he bit his lip regretfully over having made her feel stopped short and scolded.
“Yeah, okay,” she replied; her tone flat and her eyes impassive. She tugged her shirt over her head and walked away to scroll through her phone on the couch. She refused to look up at him when he’d gotten dressed and started over to join her.
“I really wasn’t trying to upset you,” Kato implored.
“Yup.” She still didn’t look at him, and he stood uncertainly in the middle of her apartment, abruptly unwelcome.
“Do you want me to leave you alone?” he asked, admittedly with some exasperation and his teeth half-gritted; anger reigniting in his chest, because what the fuck—he was trying.
“Do whatever you want,” she replied. Something icy bled through her attempt at a neutral tone and her body language read less as indifferent and more as irritated.
He rolled his eyes but tried to linger regardless, but she didn’t seem to want to talk to him, or touch him, or even let their eyes meet.
“Alright, clearly you don’t fucking want me here for whatever reason so cool. I’m out. Thanks for treating me like a cheap fuck I guess,” he eventually all but snarled, making for the door. He shut it on whatever protest she made, but couldn’t ignore his phone the whole bus ride home.
L: wow ur literally such an asshole |
L: u actually think its fine to make me feel shitty and rejected and then act like I’M treating YOU bad??? |
L: i told you i fucking loved you does that sound like a cheap fuck to you |
L: fine |
Kato chewed on his tongue and frowned.
I tried to fucking talk it out with you. I didn’t mean to make you feel shitty. You just shut down instead of listening to me | :K
L: so u slammed the door. very mature of u too |
L: fuck off |
She left it there, and Kato spent the next few days fighting the subsequent silent treatment, intermittently regretful and angry. He’d expected her to reach out and maybe apologize for getting all icy, but she didn’t. The ice stayed, and Kato suddenly felt like he was slipping—or maybe that she was; slipping away. Faced with her silence he ended up eventually resorting to an embarrassing assortment of texts and voicemails where he tried to convince her that he’d meant what he said in the bedroom; he wasn't “just saying” that he appreciated her sentiment in order to appease her; that he truly was sorry for making her feel shot down and rejected.
Eventually she came around, and her first message after days gone ghost lit him up like someone cracking the door of a solitary cell, even though most of what she said was about her exes. She’d tried so hard and so frequently in those relationships, she elaborated; she’d exhaust herself with loving and gift giving and trying to connect, only to end up swept aside, dismissed, or treated poorly. She’d been trying to connect with him, she emphasized, and he’d shot down her attempt and then gone and acted like love was beneath him.
“Can I come over so we can talk about this face to face?” he asked even though he was already grabbing his MetroCard.
She hadn’t said anything definitive about “them” in her texts; about their “togetherness,” and Kato could feel the rocky ground underfoot of being told to ‘fuck off’ and then being compared to her ex-boyfriends. His heart stayed pessimistically heavy even though she gave him a curt okay on coming over to try and fix it.
She’d unlocked the door for him and stayed curled up on the couch when he let himself in. He took care to shut the door softly behind him this time.
She looked like she’d been in a worse way even than him: Her hair seemed unwashed; her eyeliner slept-in and smudged; cheeks pink and somewhat swollen and grey-streaked by dried-in mascara tears that she hadn’t managed to wipe away completely. Kato eyed her long-sleeved shirt and the way she hugged herself and a lump rose in his throat.
“I know I fucked up,” he started, tentatively sitting on her coffee table, across from her. Their knees brushed. “I didn’t mean to shut you down.”
“You didn’t just shut me down. You made me feel stupid for even trying,” Leucosia said; sniffled; snarled. She frowned and finally looked up at him like a farm dog in a foothold trap, her eyes wounded. “I’d rather be lovable than basically anything else, and I wanted to be able to share that with you, because you were making me actually feel lovable. And then you went and acted like that was the stupidest thing somebody could want. It was really triggering. Everyone’s always made me feel stupid for wanting to feel loved but I thought you’d be different.”
“I am, I swear—I’m sorry,” Kato apologized; “I didn’t know…what was going on in your head: I really was too caught up in mine. You were right…I made it all about me. I didn’t mean to come off like that. I am different.”
She almost scoffed. “You don’t think I’ve heard that before?”
Kato had started to reach for her hand but aborted the tender gesture, stung. He withdrew his outreach and rubbed his own arm instead. “That’s not fair. I’m here, I’m trying to fix this.”
“Not fair? For so long I’ve been trying to find someone who could see me and love me for the real me, and to open up to people, even though every time I do, it’s like—it’s too much, or they don’t care, or they find some fucking way to make me wish I’d kept my mouth shut. But I felt like I found that with you, someone who could see and love me.” She sniffed. “And you made it all sound dumb and temporary. Why would you be different? If you think it's stupid to be loved and you think it’s never gonna last anyway, then why would you care? About me, about any of it?”
“I do care!” Kato objected. Tears had escaped the corners of her eyes but he couldn’t be sure he still had the right to cup her cheek and brush them away, so he folded his hands in front of himself instead, bargaining. “I care so much that I…I dunno, freaked out, Leu. That’s probably what happened, and I’m sorry. But it’s not that I don’t give a shit. I’m…I’m scared of wanting this to last, I guess, because what if it doesn’t? It’d kill me. So I said a bunch of shit. It’s like when you reached out and got all…real, my brain realized my guard was down and just fuckin’ spazzed out.” He swallowed. “I want to be…like, the antithesis to all the other assholes. I don’t want to be the next person to make you regret…trying.”
A heartbeat passed; two. Leucosia sighed and looked past him. “Well, a bit late on that,” she said, rather tightly. She scrubbed a hand over her eyes, smearing her makeup more. “But I don’t want it to be too late. It’s just so hard, Kato, I don’t want to always feel like too much! But when you can just go cold and cynical on me like that I don’t know how to trust that you won’t…just end up checking out and leaving, the same as everyone else.”
Kato finally took her hand, and even though he seized it maybe more tightly than he needed to, she didn’t pull it away. “I’m not the same as everyone else,” he said firmly. “You’ve gotta know that. And you’re not too much! It’s just that those guys weren’t enough. And maybe…maybe I’m not enough, too, sometimes. Or I’m too much of something inadequate. But I wanna treat you right—I’m sorry for shooting you down. And I’m sorry for getting pissed afterwards too and slamming the door…I suck, I know, but I’ll work on it. I’ll make it up to you. Just give me the chance.”
“How can I not?” She gave him a small, watery smile that just barely reached her eyes. “It’s a hell of a chance, though, you know.”
“I know.”
He knew. He knew and he was grateful that she was willing to let him try for it—fuck, he was desperate to do it right—she’d been through so much already and was giving him her all; risking giving him her all! At the same time, though…she clearly could rug-pull that ‘all’ out from under his feet whenever she felt so inclined. The last thing he wanted was to give her reason to.
So…he wrote her more songs. Snippets of poetry, too—heartened by how much she treasured them. She returned the favor and the two of them together felt Shakespearian, in a way. Lovers and sonnets. She laughed with him when he brought it up; that beautiful, silver, angel-bitten laugh.
“Aren’t we a little messed up to be Shakespeare characters?” she asked, lazily lacing their fingers. The blood on their wrists grew sticky as it dried, bonding them to one another by their cuts.
“Hardly. Have you read Shakespeare?” Kato replied.
“I missed a lot of school, remember?”
“Mm. Romeo and Juliet at least, though, surely.”
“Barf.”
“Too trite, okay,” he chuckled. “That’s fair. I won’t compare thee to a summer’s day, either.”
“No? What to, then?” She rolled over to lay on top of him, her hair falling like a veil around both their faces.
Shipwrecked, war-torn and ice-bound
she won’t let me drown;
winter found the night and sea
and she paves the
ocean wavesA silver shard of moonlight holds my weight;
I’m suspended
Above the cold abyss, unended
I’ll cross this ocean to the gold
horizon’s fold
“…A winter’s night.”
“Mm, crazy. That’s my pick for you, too.”
It wasn’t just Kato’s relationship that was blossoming: Broken Glass took off like nobody expected, with the exception, maybe, of Astra—who claimed she clocked it instantly as being “on some They’re Only Chasing Safety type shit,” which was a holy grail of a compliment and more hyperbole than truth…but maybe—just maybe—wouldn’t be quite so much so one day. They weren’t a worldwide sensation yet—or even a borough-wide one—but god dammit, Edge of Infinity certainly wasn’t nothing anymore. They were picking up listeners, and fans, and Bryluen was pulling in some favors so that they could shoot their first proper music video and people were actually getting hyped in the replies to Athena’s tweet about it. It was like a drug, or a rush, and Kato couldn’t stand to just coast on it. He wanted to climb.
He started working on their next album before BGJTLB’s first summer was even half over and teased his intentions online, rewarded by the new upwell of fandom and support that’d come with shacking up with Nightshrike.
Leucosia was right there with all the fans, of course—Kato wouldn’t be caught dead saying she wasn’t supportive—but despite his reassurances and his writing, she seemed rather anxious as time went on and work picked up. She missed him at a constant; needed him at a constant. Her already-fragile mental state took a nosedive and Kato found himself fielding a barrage of texts and calls, consisting mostly of vents about daily-life doldrums that Leucosia kept finding dire.
He tried to keep up and respond with due comfort, and offers to help if he could, and whatever else he could think of, and even though Leucosia seemed stuck in her convictions that everything sucked and nothing would change, she did call him sweet and thank him like a saint and told him she’d always be there for him, too, as though he was circling the drain alongside her and not trying to fish her out. The opportunity to dive into mutual misery danced along the outskirts of Kato’s consciousness, but he had shit to do that felt like maybe it mattered for once, and collaborative downward-spiraling failed to have the same allure as it usually did, which knocked him off balance a bit, in all honesty, and he already wasn’t a particularly balanced person.
“I’m sorry work’s been rough and all that bullshit,” Kato offered after the umpteenth call that week Leu hooked him on regarding her job being overwhelming and her mental health being in the gutter. “You need a break. Why not come to the studio or something? Hang with Gabe and all of us more?”
“I guess…”
The hesitation confused Kato—he knew it wasn’t necessarily what he was supposed to have offered—their usual would have been for him to come over to her place with liquor at least and the two of them would rage against the world together by way of themselves and indulge in the comfort of being so wholly known by each other. And he knew she was feeling down, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t still have their thing, and…
“C’mon, aren’t Gabe and you close?” he prompted.
“Yeah…” Leucosia hesitated again; Kato heard the soft lip-bite in her tone and imagined the half-anxious, half-sheepish way she would look up at him through her hair in person. “I dunno…is it so bad I want your full attention?” she asked.
Kato almost laughed. “Leu…you’ve got my full attention. I miss you, I was literally wishing you were here in front of me while listening to you talk. I want us to have our time alone together too. I’m just really psyched about what I’m working on right now and I want to, you know, include you in it.”
“I dunno…I don’t want to be in the way, I’m glad you’re enjoying your work,” she finally answered.
“Don’t be like that, Leu—you’re never in the way. Gabe will be glad to see you ‘cause I’ve been hogging you, and I fucking miss you anyway! Just come. Please?”
“Okay, okay…If you really want me there.”
Of course he did, and Kato seized the opportunity of having her at the studio with both hands. While they waited on the arrival of his band-mates, he reeled off his vision for Suburban Casualties and she listened, smiling, to his various concepts and infancy-stage lyrical work and his fretting about how everyone else in the band would play their part, because he wanted to really collaborate this time around instead of being a tyrant but it was hard to hand a song over to anybody else and let them mess around with it: What if they butchered the whole thing or tried to take it in some other direction?
“Which is what you’re helping me with,” Kato laughed self-consciously. “I can practice listening to feedback.”
“You’re sometimes okay at doing that,” she teased.
It was awesome. To have Leu there, and with everyone else—to shoot the shit together and get excited about the Broken Glass tour—because holy fuck, they were touring now! It wasn’t massive, just a week-long 5-stop jog a couple states in each direction; Massachusetts and Maryland as far as they’d be getting from home, but still! They’d be doing more later, Kato was certain of it.
Leucosia was, too; her grin seemed as insuppressible as his own, sometimes. “You deserve this so much. I’m so proud of you,” she said; “Don’t forget me while you’re busy making it big.” As thrilled as she was on his behalf, however, and as sure of his success, she was equally as certain of the fact that she wouldn’t be able to get the time off work to come along on the tour because her boss was a shitlord. She made up for her presumed absence by asking endless questions, starting out curious and supportive but gradually listing towards anxious, like maybe her joke about him forgetting her wasn’t all in jest: How long would he be gone? Were they doing backstage passes? VIP meet-ups? How would that work? What if there were groupies or something? How often would he text? How about call?
“Leu, I’m not going to forget you exist or something!” Kato exclaimed. “I…I need you. Okay? It’s super short, I’ll be back before you realize it.”
“Okay, okay…sorry for fretting. You’ve just already been too busy to talk to me and now you’re gonna be gone.”
“What are you talking about?” he protested, “I’ve been here for you this whole time; I haven’t been blowing you off when you text me about your day being hard—”
“No, I know, I just mean you’re distracted and I feel bad bothering you when you’re in the zone and everything—and now you’re going to be in the zone 500 miles away! I’ll have to find someone else to talk to about all my problems.” Leucosia twirled her finger beside her right ear in a “cuckoo” hand gesture and gave Kato a small smile, which he returned as a laugh.
“Ouch, you’ll replace me in a week, Leu? That's cold.”
She laughed at herself along with him and said he was right; he tried to kiss the anxious tightness of her smile away. She’d see she wasn’t losing him.
She kept coming around to support him despite her anxiety. Kato and Gabe decided to write and release a couple collaborative promotional singles, and she dropped by the studio to surprise him mid-session a month out from the tour’s start and Kato had lit up, as always, at her presence. He paused them all to invite her in and kiss her hello before getting back into it and hoped he imagined that her smile seemed rather flighty. Obviously they couldn’t sit and talk while he was singing, but when they weren’t recording anymore and started shooting the shit about the music and the tour, Kato tried to include her more—at least when they weren’t talking music-biz language that he couldn’t really expect her input on.
She offered shy smiles and warm comments and laughed when jokes or ribbings were thrown out, and patiently put up with them all bickering over mixing styles and Kato’s disdain for working with click-tracks, and she met his trepidation in conversation around signing to a record label with a laugh and “What, you want to wait and let them fight over you?” Gradually, though, her input and enthusiasm seemed to falter whenever talk turned back towards industry and left her with less to really say.
“Bryluen says the singles have been doing numbers,” Gabe said, spinning around in his chair with a broad grin. “She said we could maybe tack on another show or two upstate.”
“No shit?” Kato pumped the air with his fist, then offered it to Gabe for a fistbump. “That’s fucking nuts! We should! Isn’t that awesome, Leu?” He turned and found her looking subdued and small, tucked up on her own rolling chair and scrolling through her phone with her arms crossed.
“Leu?”
“Sorry, yeah!” she gave him a hurried grin and nod. “Woo-hoo! It’s great.”
“You won’t mind me being away longer?” Kato asked, tilting his head.
She gave him an apologetic sort of smile before hiding back behind her phone. “I don’t control you. I’ll just be double glad when you’re back.”
She spent the rest of the afternoon similarly withdrawn, so Kato pulled her aside when the session eventually dissolved and people started leaving.
“You okay?” he asked, pausing with her outside the studio door for a smoke. “You seem…I don’t know, off.”
Leucosia shrugged and picked a loose strand of tobacco off the filter of her cigarette instead of looking at him. “It’s nothing. Just got too in my head.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I dunno, K…I just…keep feeling like I don’t fit into your, like, world.” Her voice cracked slightly at the end of her sentence and she tried to patch it with a drag of her cigarette.
“That’s insane, Leu,” Kato protested, reaching for her hand. “You are my world, or at least half of it! I want you here, you know, sharing ‘my world’ with me. I don’t want you feeling like an outsider. I’m sorry there’s so much jargon and shit and that it gets technical sometimes, but that’s not you…not fitting in. That’s just the annoying fuckin’ job part of it.”
She rubbed her eyes. “Smoke. Stupid wind,” she sniffed. “Sorry I get like this. It’s just that all of you have so much, like, drive, and I’m always just…there. I dunno. Dumb.”
“No, I get it.” Kato looped his arm around her and pulled her to his side, leaning his cheek against the top of her head. “School, probably. Fucked both of us up: Taught us to feel like chronic outcasts instead of how to do long division.” He cracked a small smile. “I’ll try not to strand you with the music talk so much. You fit in, I swear.”