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Twenty-Nine (And A Half)
There’s twenty-nine (and a half) reasons why Jason Orange hates Howard Donald.
1. He loses his keys. All the time. He gets himself locked out and it’s Jason who has to crawl out of bed and come to the door. He can’t remember where he put them down and it’s Jason who has to turn the house upside-down looking for them. It’s inconvenient and it’s absurd and it has happened every day since Howard first arrived in Jason’ s life.
2. His wires tangle up on the floor. Jason is the one who trips over them. Or who can’t find his own laptop wires amidst the mess. It’s maddening. And it ruins his ordered home. His tidy, chaos-free, structured home. Where everything had its place. Until Howard decided his place was with Jason, that is. Because from then on he did his best to make sure he was the only thing in the flat that had a place it could be found.
3. He can spend hours lost in a song and not notice Jason’s even there. And yet Jason can’t go anywhere without seeing Howard everywhere. Partly because he wants his place to be with Howard as much as Howard wants his place to be with Jason. Partly because the only thing he ever gets lost in is Howard. There is no song strong enough to pull him away from that.
4. When he cooks dinner it looks like someone planted a bomb in the fridge. No, it really does. It looks like a toddler was let loose, followed by dog, followed by bomb in the fridge and rounded up with a hurricane passing through the debris. Jason doesn’t know why he even lets him near the kitchen.
5. Jason has to do all his washing – if Howard does it, the house will only flood. Howard is incapable of doing simple chores like washing and ironing without causing some sort of disaster. So Jason tidied up after him, cleans up after him, washes up after him. He is no more than a slave sometimes, he thinks.
6. He makes the bathroom smell of hairspray and uses up all the hot water. Jason has to get up at 6 in the morning to have a hot shower. Everywhere Jason goes he’s mildly overwhelmed by the lingering smell of the aerosol mist and every time he turns on a tap he winces. Howard doesn’t seem to care. And Jason stopped mentioning it to him after about a year and a half.
7. He’s too stubborn to let Jason ever win. Even when Jason really has won. And he’s too stubborn to let Jason kick him out properly, to change his mind about loving him, to let anyone else even attempt to love him that much. Everything has to be done the stubborn, resolute, battling way. Decisions to be made turn into full-scale negotiations. Their interactions would make foreign ambassadors feel their deal-brokering skills were inadequate. There was no need for it. They were both stubborn people, Jason supposed, but he, unlike Howard, was more enamoured with the quiet life. And so he did all he could to appease Howard’s stubbornness. And he never kicked him out. He never even tried, ironically enough.
8. Howard breaks everything. Not on purpose, he’s just a little bit brutish sometimes. Jason calls him his caveman. Howard treats it like a badge of honour and breaks more things. Things Jason’s kept for years. Things Jason needs. Things Jason has specifically told him are fragile. He doesn’t always think before he does. He rarely looks before he leaps. And he always forgets to think about the ‘What ifs’ before putting something down.
9. He smokes – and presumes Jason won’t notice that his kisses taste of coffee and cigarettes. Jason’s tried to get him to quite. Multiple times. He tells Jason he has quit. Jason is pretty sure Howard knows, even as he’s swearing blind about packing it in, that Jason is well aware he still smokes. Jason stopped being grateful for him doing it away from the flat a long time ago. He doesn’t want Howard doing that to himself. And he doesn’t understand why Howard can’t see he’s pleading for him to stop as a sign of exactly how long he wants him to be in his life. A long time. Forever is the rough estimate Jason would give, if Howard would just ask.
10.They’re not allowed to go anywhere and keep a low profile. Howard has to introduce Jason to everyone. Anyone he’s met at work or in town, they have to be told. And they all give Jason this same look. And it always makes Howard hold Jason’s hand too tight.
11. Howard thinks he can fix everything. He thinks he’s some sort of handy man. He thinks that he’s actually making Jason less stressed with the trying-to-fix. But all he’s doing is making a mess, short-circuiting their flat, burning out their TV, rendering the speakers unconscious, forcing tears out of Jason’s resolve not to talk about things and bending their plumbing out of shape. Every week there’s at least one thing.
12. He can’t sit still for love nor money. He can’t do it. He fidgets and he paces and then he goes out for a drink (or a smoke) or phones around to try and get some work or begs Jason to go out with him somewhere whilst wriggling around on the sofa and dislodging Jason from whatever spot he had found contentment in, forcing him to move, forcing him to sacrifice another quiet night. He couldn’t really relax when Howard was being restless.
13. He’s always on the phone to someone or on a plane to somewhere. It’s part of the restlessness. Jason never knows if Howard will be there when he gets home. He never knows if he’s listening during a conversation or if he’s straining his ears to check if the phone is ringing. Howard’s a hard one to contain. And that’s frightening to a man who treasures knowing exactly what pillow he will be laying his head on at night.
14. He’s really bad at being ill. Really, really, seriously, incredibly bad. So bad that if he has to take a sick day, so does Jason. He can’t cope at all. He needs waiting on. Constant attention. Jason thinks he puts it on sometimes too. He acts like the world is ending whilst also insisting that he doesn’t need medicine. He is always convinced Jason is the answer, not painkillers.
15. He always puts his foot in it and says the wrong thing in awkward situations. He’s actually shy, so he can’t really help it. He just panics. But Jason’s always the one who has to charm-away the mess. And Jason’s pretty sure Howard relies on that. Coz he wants to get out the flat and meet people, despite his shyness. He takes Jason with him so that he can do that without putting people off him. Jason is his confidence. Jason gets tired of having to be confident all the time.
16. He promised he was going to find his own place in 1996. It’s now 2011 and in that time Jason hasn’t seen so much as one property circled in the paper. Is it still right to hate him for that though? Jason tells himself that 15 years is a long enough time for him to feel aggrieved, even if the 15 was where it was going to stop.
17. He makes Jason forget things. What he was going to say. Where he left his laptop bag. What he was supposed to be getting from the shop. Who he used to love. What he used to do when he fell apart and Howard wasn’t there to mend him.
18. His eyes see everything. It’s like he has to know. It’s like he can’t resist the temptation to know. He has to know everything about Jason, he can’t just let things be. Even when Jason is trying for all the world to let things be. He gets pushy and angry. And worst of all? No matter how angry he gets he doesn’t even leave. He doesn’t even have the decency to sleep on the sofa. He’s just there. Watching. Knowing more than Jason ever invited him to know.
19. He will never just be easy and eat what Jason eats. He can’t stand muesli , it’s always coffee not tea in his mug and actual vitamins are practically feared, never mind anything organic. It’s a miracle he’s in such good shape, really. Jason doesn’t let anyone place food orders with him the way Howard does.
20. He has the power to turn Jason’s day inside-out. His entire life upside-down. He uses it at will, without warning. A kiss here. A missed phone call there. A hand held briefly. A look. A slammed door. A ticket out. It’s decimating Jason right now.
21. He sees no value in fixity or labels. Anything that can try and make him sit still, basically. So he thinks nothing of getting that new place in LA without telling Jason. Jason, for his part, has a firm belief that home can’t truly be defined by any roof and four walls set up. He thinks of home as the place you feel at your safest and most content. Though continent hopping is still not something he can stomach, he is sure Howard is his home.
22. He hates that Howard is his home. He hates that Howard is his home and yet Howard can – and does – move wherever he pleases, whenever he pleases. Howard is his home and yet he still had his case packed just like that. How could that stubborn man who was too stubborn to let himself be kicked out, who Jason called his home, just get on a plane to a different life.
23. He always sleeps in late. Even when Jason needs him to be somewhere, he sleeps in late. Nothing can be done ‘til the afternoon as far as Howard is concerned. They are both night owls, true. But Jason knows that life needs to be dealt with too, something he’s sure Howard doesn’t realise. Nothing will budge him from his bed before the sun is high up in the sky. Nothing except leaving, that is. It must have still be dark when he’d gone.
24. He hates that he always has to make so much noise when he does anything. He has to drop the shampoo in the shower, has to swear at least once before getting out of bed, has to set the smoke alarm off when he cooks. Although he’d done none of those things this morning. This morning he’d woken without cursing. Showered without being clumsy. Avoided cooking, despite the fact it meant he had to eat muesli. So the nosiness must have been deliberate in the past. Jason hates that. Hates it hates it hates it. He was obviously good at silence really. He’d kissed Jason goodbye without so much as a breath.
25. Jason hated him for that kiss too. Coz it hadn’t woken him. Coz he’d still been able to taste the smoke on his lips when the sun came up. Coz it was a goodbye he wasn’t ready for.
26. This one’s a new hate. He hates that his handwriting is messy. Jason’s one of the few people in the world who is capable of deciphering it. And even he struggles. Jason presumes this is why Howard leaves no note. Not even a new contact number. And that is why he hates it. Coz he wanted some way of understanding why, or at least some way of keeping him in his life.
27. But then there is that other pet hate: Jason never knows what number to contact him on. Howard knows Jason’s number off by heart. He never calls it though. Jason does the calling.
28. Even when he’s being a dick Howard can still make Jason smile, completely ruining his composure, completely softening his seriousness, trying to make light of everything, trying to get his own way through his unique ability to twinkly-eye his path back into Jason’s arms. And the worst part? He’d actually tried to use it that night. The one night that someone who knew so much about him should have known he was not backing down.
29. Twenty-nine. The big one. The biggest one of all. Jason loves him. Always has. Always will. Full stop. Underline. Cross out, rewrite, spit-it-out, stamp-his-foot, fucking loves him. So that now Jason is numb to pretty much everything. Seriously, you could cut his arm off. He wouldn’t notice. After all, Howard pretty much performed an amputation by leaving, but did Jason wake up? No. Jason loves Howard in a damaged, broken, wounded kind of a way now. But it’s still love. And it’s still more than he feels for anyone else.
29.5 Maybe this is the real big one. This half-a-thought in the back of his head. The realisation that he can’t hate him for any of it. He can say he hates it, sure. He can even feel a little bit angry about some of it. But would he love Howard if he changed?
Still, there are twenty-nine (and a half) reasons why Jason Orange knows he still loves Howard Donald.
1. When he loses his keys he always comes to Jason for help, and always rewards him with a level of adoration Howard doesn’t show for anyone else.
2. He leaves his wires tangled as a battle of wills. They like to challenge each other in everything, the flat is no different. It’s turf war, of sorts. A test of Jason’s resolve. A test of how much Jason will put up with. Although they both know Jason will put up with it all.
3. When Howard gets really, truly, utterly lost to a song, it’s coz he finds something in it that reminds him of Jason. The bassline is like his heartbeat. The lyrics mimic the way he frowns. He tells Jason always. And then he tells Jason that he will always be his favourite song. He knows Jason’s lyrics off by heart.
4. The mess in the kitchen is only an unfortunate side affect of his sweetness. He cooks dinner to try and do something – anything – to show he cares. Coz he’s always convinced it’s not obvious enough. For all the battles and stand-offs they have, Howard’s soft. He’s got a gooey centre. And he needs Jason to know that. And Jason does.
5. The washing thing...Jason likes to do it. In weird sort of a way, despite the extra work, he likes to be needed. He likes to know he can do something. Coz he’s got a gooey centre too. And for all his attempts to be strong, he’s just as determined to show Howard he cares.
6. The hot water thing is not too much of a problem, Jason likes getting up early anyway. And the bathroom always smells of him for weeks after he’s gone. That hairspray smell gets into everything. It gets into Jason’s clothes. And Howard’s pillow. Now he’s gone for good, Jason’s more grateful for that than ever.
7. Jason admires the stubbornness, as frustrated as it makes him. He’s pretty stubborn too, after all. And he likes the idea that Howard would fight for him. He likes the idea that Howard wouldn’t just give up. He likes to think that before he left he was still fighting within himself, still that bit too stubborn to let go of Jason, that bit too stubborn to stop loving him. That way he’s still loving him, even from the other side of the Atlantic.
8. Jason needs a brute sometimes. He needs someone to bumble in and destroy the order. Coz he knows he can’t be allowed to get too far into himself. He can drive himself mad if he thinks about things too much. He can place too much value in some things too. He hoards. Well, he’s not that bad, perhaps. But he knows Howard helped him put perspective on it. No matter how many of those things got broken, Jason had still been happy because of Howard. If Howard ever got broken, Jason wouldn’t be so ok.
9. Jason would rather Howard just stopped the smoking. But at the same time, when you know someone’s lips so well you can identify the traces of coffee and cigarettes, you know you are someone they treasure.
10. Howard only introduces Jason to everyone because he’s so proud of being with him. He’s got it into his head Jason is some sort of prince who everyone wants a piece of, who is too good for mere mortals, who has, for some reason, chosen Howard. Jason lets him hold on that tight coz he wants Howard to know that he’s just as happy Howard chose him. He wants Howard to know his hand fits there: being with him isn’t some choice on a whim, it’s just what’s needed to complete the million-piece jigsaw that is his mixed up head, to make it all make sense.
11. Yeah, ok, he’s crap at fixing things. And the money Jason’s had to spend re-fixing the things Howard’s fixed is something Jason doesn’t like to think about too much. But Howard can fix one thing. The most important thing. Howard can fix Jason. He doesn’t hold him back to normal or kiss him back to normal or even talk him back to normal. He watches him back. He doesn’t say anything or try to invade Jason’s space. When Jason is broken Howard sits with him and lets him cry without any hint of judgement. Or wanders around the flat aimlessly with his headphones on loud and his eyes never more than ten seconds away from meeting Jason’s. He’ll put a herbal tea down in front of Jason and disappear for a while. He knows Jason will come to him when he’s stopped feeling like a single touch will break him. And Howard will hold him then. And slowly things will become right again.
12. Although it grates on Jason’s more patient nature, he realises he probably wouldn’t love him if he could sit still. He couldn’t love someone willing to just settle. He admired Howard’s need to explore, even when his restlessness got irritating, in the back of his mind, Jason would know it was just Howard’s determination not to miss out on a second of life. He wanted to live life by breathing it in, running through it, laughing at it, seeing the way it bent and twisted and flung itself around corners. Howard was only still when they kissed. He tastes life then.
13. The back and forth and the phone to his ear...it wasn’t really his fault, if Jason was honest. It was part of his work. And his work was just a part of who he was. He got a serious buzz off it and Jason would never have dreamt of denying him that. He loved the stupid grin he’d get on his face at the prospect of a new job. Whatever time of the night they called, whatever number of hours he would be spending on a plane, he wanted to do everything he could to make the gig. Jason loved the light it brought to his eyes. He was always so refreshed when he came back from his gigs.
14. Jason knew he could put up with the whining and the whinging when Howard was ill because it gave him the chance to take care of him. In fact, he was pretty sure that, part of the reason Howard made such a fuss was that he wanted to show Jason just how badly he would cope in the real world. The world outside the world the two of them had built up in that flat of theirs. Well, that flat of Jason’s that Howard had never moved out of anyway.
15. Quietly, as he listens to Howard stumbling and blundering into another awkward moment, Jason admires his shyness. And he admires the honesty too. Howard doesn’t try and pretend to be oh-so-cool and oh-so-savvy just to impress people. Howard wants people to like him, but he doesn’t want to be something he isn’t. Jason just can’t find a way to love people who pretend. And Howard doesn’t ever want to be the sort of person Jason can’t love.
16. Howard hadn’t moved out coz Jason hadn’t, other than the odd passing comment, made him feel like he needed to go. Clearly Jason didn’t want Howard gone. That much Jason had always known, coz every time Howard left (for a ten minute walk to the corner shop or a ten night trip to some nation full of clubs) the whole place reverberated with a foreignness that frightened Jason totally. He claimed to hate Howard’s permanence as a ploy to make sure Howard realised how good he had it. Although of course, Howard was all too aware.
17. Jason liked the forgetting. It was a pain when Howard kissed him mid-sentence and the chain of thought was forever lost. But that was nothing Jason didn’t need, he had too many thoughts after all. But he liked it when Howard made him forget the rest of the world. He liked it when Howard made him forget there was anything that had ever hurt him, it made it easier for him to surrender to Howard. He knew Howard knew that too.
18. There had to be someone in the world with eyes like Howard’s, eyes that could see right through Jason when Jason least wanted to be seen through. Because really, though he wouldn’t admit it aloud, Jason needed someone to know him that way. Because someone had to in order to make things right. It was something Jason struggled with, the letting people in thing. But Howard’s instinctive ability meant he could wander in any time, get the information he needed, work out a plan of action, judge the right amount of time to leave Jason be before he pushed him, come up with the right thing to say when Jason finally came to him of his own accord. And Jason always came to him eventually. Because he might as well tell him what’s going on with him, since he already knew.
19. You can’t hate someone for not eating their greens can you? Not when you’re both grown adults putting up some mask of maturity? The whole thing’s a bit childish. The thing about not eating his greens, it’s just another little-kid thing he likes to keep up to entertain himself. And Jason needs that. Coz he’s not childish enough. In his head he’s too old. Howard balances him out.
20. Howard really could turn everything topsy-turvy with the slightest move. That’s a lot of power to put in someone’s hands and fear and hatred grew out of that insecurity. Jason doesn’t like giving people control like that normally. But with Howard he didn’t mind. It scared him at first, but now he knows how good it can be. Because Howard could make his worst day his best. Howard could be the one good thing Jason could hold on to at any given time. The flat could have fallen down around his ears and he would have stood there, reminding himself it was ungrateful to cry at the loss, coz he still had Howard and nothing could touch that in significance. But then, on the other hand, hadn’t Howard finally used that power for evil? Hadn’t he just turned Jason’s life upside-down without a thought?
21. It’s hard to love: the lack of fixity, the lack of a need to label what they were. But Jason sort of understood Howard’s reluctance to say it aloud. They’d never talked about it. They’d not had that conversation where they worked out what they were doing. He’d just stopped sleeping on the sofa and started sleeping in Jason’s bed. Then he’d started holding Jason tighter. Kissing him on the cheek, then the lips, the everywhere. The closest Howard came to explaining any of it was when he told Jason he loved him. The reason Jason had accepted it was because he accepted who Howard was. And Howard was a person who feared damaging things. If he knew what they were it had the potential to be destroyed. If something was undefined, if there was never any certainty, if it was all left unsaid, then no one would be able to get a good enough grasp of it to break it.
22. Of course there are flaws in the plan. Howard and Jason hadn’t been able to grasp onto it enough to hold onto it at all. Which had broken it. But in the middle of it all, as angry as it makes him, Howard is still his home, he knows that. He has his limits. He feels secure in the life he has built here, that’s why he couldn’t go with Howard when he packed his bags and got on that plane. But even if he is on the other side of the ocean, at least Jason can be sure that he is still attached to him somehow. How can he hate that?
23. The lateness thing was comforting, in a way. It always made Jason look good. It always gave him at least an extra five minutes – he could be late by five minutes and still be on time compared to Howard. That was nice. That allowed him to relax a little sometimes without changing the way people saw him. Because he liked to be thought of as reliable, dependable. He prided himself on that. And Howard simply made it easier for him.
24. Jason likes the noise that follows Howard around. It reminds him he’s not alone. It reminds him that he isn’t completely lost to the world, he isn’t a total shut-in. He is neither friendless nor unloved. He’s just quiet. Howard’s loudness is an intrusion, yes. But it reminded Jason that he was happy on days when he fell that bit too silent. And it reminded him that he had someone around him, loving him, all the time. That’s why that morning was so unsettling. The silence provided no reminder and no reassurance. It told him it was over.
25. And yet that kiss didn’t. He can’t really hate him for the kiss. Because the kiss was a promise. Or he hopes it was. It was a reminder that he does still care. That he did try to stay.
26. Jason enjoyed being able to decode Howard’s scrawl. He treated it like a secret, appointed himself an expert on the mystery and encouraged Howard to leave as many notes as he pleased. Though there was no note this morning, Jason looked on that as a riddle to be unpicked in its own right. And Jason loves a good puzzle – that came of being one himself.
27. Howard knows where to find Jason, so Jason finds it hard to hold it against Howard that that doesn’t always work the other way. Jason knows that wherever Howard is he has that number, ready if he needs it. Besides, what good would calling him now do anyway? It would destroy Jason to have to chase him. Howard had always made him feel special. He shouldn’t need to chase someone if they valued him so highly, should he?
28. Jason can’t really justify hating Howard for making him smile. It’s all that’s got him through some days. And yes, some days it annoyed the hell out of him. Some days it ruined his point or made him lose an argument. But it always made him smile. And right now he’d kill to feel a smile on his lips that wasn’t foreign or forced.
29. But the biggest reason Jason loves him for his faults? It’s because he really, truly, love-of-his-life loves him. Always has. Always will. Full stop. Underline. Cross out, rewrite, spit it out, fucking loves him. He can’t argue his way out of it. Hate is just his way of blurring it.
29.5 Scratch that, there’s something bigger going on here than just love. It is, as everything in Jason’s life usually is, more complex than that. There’s something about the way they’re built that makes them destroy them. The perverse way they each loved in the other what drove them mad. He can find reasons why he loves it, sure. He can even smile, a little, at the thought that Howard could make him feel the entire spectrum passion had to offer. But Howard is still gone. And there is nothing about that that Jason can find to love.
1. He loses his keys. All the time. He gets himself locked out and it’s Jason who has to crawl out of bed and come to the door. He can’t remember where he put them down and it’s Jason who has to turn the house upside-down looking for them. It’s inconvenient and it’s absurd and it has happened every day since Howard first arrived in Jason’ s life.
2. His wires tangle up on the floor. Jason is the one who trips over them. Or who can’t find his own laptop wires amidst the mess. It’s maddening. And it ruins his ordered home. His tidy, chaos-free, structured home. Where everything had its place. Until Howard decided his place was with Jason, that is. Because from then on he did his best to make sure he was the only thing in the flat that had a place it could be found.
3. He can spend hours lost in a song and not notice Jason’s even there. And yet Jason can’t go anywhere without seeing Howard everywhere. Partly because he wants his place to be with Howard as much as Howard wants his place to be with Jason. Partly because the only thing he ever gets lost in is Howard. There is no song strong enough to pull him away from that.
4. When he cooks dinner it looks like someone planted a bomb in the fridge. No, it really does. It looks like a toddler was let loose, followed by dog, followed by bomb in the fridge and rounded up with a hurricane passing through the debris. Jason doesn’t know why he even lets him near the kitchen.
5. Jason has to do all his washing – if Howard does it, the house will only flood. Howard is incapable of doing simple chores like washing and ironing without causing some sort of disaster. So Jason tidied up after him, cleans up after him, washes up after him. He is no more than a slave sometimes, he thinks.
6. He makes the bathroom smell of hairspray and uses up all the hot water. Jason has to get up at 6 in the morning to have a hot shower. Everywhere Jason goes he’s mildly overwhelmed by the lingering smell of the aerosol mist and every time he turns on a tap he winces. Howard doesn’t seem to care. And Jason stopped mentioning it to him after about a year and a half.
7. He’s too stubborn to let Jason ever win. Even when Jason really has won. And he’s too stubborn to let Jason kick him out properly, to change his mind about loving him, to let anyone else even attempt to love him that much. Everything has to be done the stubborn, resolute, battling way. Decisions to be made turn into full-scale negotiations. Their interactions would make foreign ambassadors feel their deal-brokering skills were inadequate. There was no need for it. They were both stubborn people, Jason supposed, but he, unlike Howard, was more enamoured with the quiet life. And so he did all he could to appease Howard’s stubbornness. And he never kicked him out. He never even tried, ironically enough.
8. Howard breaks everything. Not on purpose, he’s just a little bit brutish sometimes. Jason calls him his caveman. Howard treats it like a badge of honour and breaks more things. Things Jason’s kept for years. Things Jason needs. Things Jason has specifically told him are fragile. He doesn’t always think before he does. He rarely looks before he leaps. And he always forgets to think about the ‘What ifs’ before putting something down.
9. He smokes – and presumes Jason won’t notice that his kisses taste of coffee and cigarettes. Jason’s tried to get him to quite. Multiple times. He tells Jason he has quit. Jason is pretty sure Howard knows, even as he’s swearing blind about packing it in, that Jason is well aware he still smokes. Jason stopped being grateful for him doing it away from the flat a long time ago. He doesn’t want Howard doing that to himself. And he doesn’t understand why Howard can’t see he’s pleading for him to stop as a sign of exactly how long he wants him to be in his life. A long time. Forever is the rough estimate Jason would give, if Howard would just ask.
10.They’re not allowed to go anywhere and keep a low profile. Howard has to introduce Jason to everyone. Anyone he’s met at work or in town, they have to be told. And they all give Jason this same look. And it always makes Howard hold Jason’s hand too tight.
11. Howard thinks he can fix everything. He thinks he’s some sort of handy man. He thinks that he’s actually making Jason less stressed with the trying-to-fix. But all he’s doing is making a mess, short-circuiting their flat, burning out their TV, rendering the speakers unconscious, forcing tears out of Jason’s resolve not to talk about things and bending their plumbing out of shape. Every week there’s at least one thing.
12. He can’t sit still for love nor money. He can’t do it. He fidgets and he paces and then he goes out for a drink (or a smoke) or phones around to try and get some work or begs Jason to go out with him somewhere whilst wriggling around on the sofa and dislodging Jason from whatever spot he had found contentment in, forcing him to move, forcing him to sacrifice another quiet night. He couldn’t really relax when Howard was being restless.
13. He’s always on the phone to someone or on a plane to somewhere. It’s part of the restlessness. Jason never knows if Howard will be there when he gets home. He never knows if he’s listening during a conversation or if he’s straining his ears to check if the phone is ringing. Howard’s a hard one to contain. And that’s frightening to a man who treasures knowing exactly what pillow he will be laying his head on at night.
14. He’s really bad at being ill. Really, really, seriously, incredibly bad. So bad that if he has to take a sick day, so does Jason. He can’t cope at all. He needs waiting on. Constant attention. Jason thinks he puts it on sometimes too. He acts like the world is ending whilst also insisting that he doesn’t need medicine. He is always convinced Jason is the answer, not painkillers.
15. He always puts his foot in it and says the wrong thing in awkward situations. He’s actually shy, so he can’t really help it. He just panics. But Jason’s always the one who has to charm-away the mess. And Jason’s pretty sure Howard relies on that. Coz he wants to get out the flat and meet people, despite his shyness. He takes Jason with him so that he can do that without putting people off him. Jason is his confidence. Jason gets tired of having to be confident all the time.
16. He promised he was going to find his own place in 1996. It’s now 2011 and in that time Jason hasn’t seen so much as one property circled in the paper. Is it still right to hate him for that though? Jason tells himself that 15 years is a long enough time for him to feel aggrieved, even if the 15 was where it was going to stop.
17. He makes Jason forget things. What he was going to say. Where he left his laptop bag. What he was supposed to be getting from the shop. Who he used to love. What he used to do when he fell apart and Howard wasn’t there to mend him.
18. His eyes see everything. It’s like he has to know. It’s like he can’t resist the temptation to know. He has to know everything about Jason, he can’t just let things be. Even when Jason is trying for all the world to let things be. He gets pushy and angry. And worst of all? No matter how angry he gets he doesn’t even leave. He doesn’t even have the decency to sleep on the sofa. He’s just there. Watching. Knowing more than Jason ever invited him to know.
19. He will never just be easy and eat what Jason eats. He can’t stand muesli , it’s always coffee not tea in his mug and actual vitamins are practically feared, never mind anything organic. It’s a miracle he’s in such good shape, really. Jason doesn’t let anyone place food orders with him the way Howard does.
20. He has the power to turn Jason’s day inside-out. His entire life upside-down. He uses it at will, without warning. A kiss here. A missed phone call there. A hand held briefly. A look. A slammed door. A ticket out. It’s decimating Jason right now.
21. He sees no value in fixity or labels. Anything that can try and make him sit still, basically. So he thinks nothing of getting that new place in LA without telling Jason. Jason, for his part, has a firm belief that home can’t truly be defined by any roof and four walls set up. He thinks of home as the place you feel at your safest and most content. Though continent hopping is still not something he can stomach, he is sure Howard is his home.
22. He hates that Howard is his home. He hates that Howard is his home and yet Howard can – and does – move wherever he pleases, whenever he pleases. Howard is his home and yet he still had his case packed just like that. How could that stubborn man who was too stubborn to let himself be kicked out, who Jason called his home, just get on a plane to a different life.
23. He always sleeps in late. Even when Jason needs him to be somewhere, he sleeps in late. Nothing can be done ‘til the afternoon as far as Howard is concerned. They are both night owls, true. But Jason knows that life needs to be dealt with too, something he’s sure Howard doesn’t realise. Nothing will budge him from his bed before the sun is high up in the sky. Nothing except leaving, that is. It must have still be dark when he’d gone.
24. He hates that he always has to make so much noise when he does anything. He has to drop the shampoo in the shower, has to swear at least once before getting out of bed, has to set the smoke alarm off when he cooks. Although he’d done none of those things this morning. This morning he’d woken without cursing. Showered without being clumsy. Avoided cooking, despite the fact it meant he had to eat muesli. So the nosiness must have been deliberate in the past. Jason hates that. Hates it hates it hates it. He was obviously good at silence really. He’d kissed Jason goodbye without so much as a breath.
25. Jason hated him for that kiss too. Coz it hadn’t woken him. Coz he’d still been able to taste the smoke on his lips when the sun came up. Coz it was a goodbye he wasn’t ready for.
26. This one’s a new hate. He hates that his handwriting is messy. Jason’s one of the few people in the world who is capable of deciphering it. And even he struggles. Jason presumes this is why Howard leaves no note. Not even a new contact number. And that is why he hates it. Coz he wanted some way of understanding why, or at least some way of keeping him in his life.
27. But then there is that other pet hate: Jason never knows what number to contact him on. Howard knows Jason’s number off by heart. He never calls it though. Jason does the calling.
28. Even when he’s being a dick Howard can still make Jason smile, completely ruining his composure, completely softening his seriousness, trying to make light of everything, trying to get his own way through his unique ability to twinkly-eye his path back into Jason’s arms. And the worst part? He’d actually tried to use it that night. The one night that someone who knew so much about him should have known he was not backing down.
29. Twenty-nine. The big one. The biggest one of all. Jason loves him. Always has. Always will. Full stop. Underline. Cross out, rewrite, spit-it-out, stamp-his-foot, fucking loves him. So that now Jason is numb to pretty much everything. Seriously, you could cut his arm off. He wouldn’t notice. After all, Howard pretty much performed an amputation by leaving, but did Jason wake up? No. Jason loves Howard in a damaged, broken, wounded kind of a way now. But it’s still love. And it’s still more than he feels for anyone else.
29.5 Maybe this is the real big one. This half-a-thought in the back of his head. The realisation that he can’t hate him for any of it. He can say he hates it, sure. He can even feel a little bit angry about some of it. But would he love Howard if he changed?
Still, there are twenty-nine (and a half) reasons why Jason Orange knows he still loves Howard Donald.
1. When he loses his keys he always comes to Jason for help, and always rewards him with a level of adoration Howard doesn’t show for anyone else.
2. He leaves his wires tangled as a battle of wills. They like to challenge each other in everything, the flat is no different. It’s turf war, of sorts. A test of Jason’s resolve. A test of how much Jason will put up with. Although they both know Jason will put up with it all.
3. When Howard gets really, truly, utterly lost to a song, it’s coz he finds something in it that reminds him of Jason. The bassline is like his heartbeat. The lyrics mimic the way he frowns. He tells Jason always. And then he tells Jason that he will always be his favourite song. He knows Jason’s lyrics off by heart.
4. The mess in the kitchen is only an unfortunate side affect of his sweetness. He cooks dinner to try and do something – anything – to show he cares. Coz he’s always convinced it’s not obvious enough. For all the battles and stand-offs they have, Howard’s soft. He’s got a gooey centre. And he needs Jason to know that. And Jason does.
5. The washing thing...Jason likes to do it. In weird sort of a way, despite the extra work, he likes to be needed. He likes to know he can do something. Coz he’s got a gooey centre too. And for all his attempts to be strong, he’s just as determined to show Howard he cares.
6. The hot water thing is not too much of a problem, Jason likes getting up early anyway. And the bathroom always smells of him for weeks after he’s gone. That hairspray smell gets into everything. It gets into Jason’s clothes. And Howard’s pillow. Now he’s gone for good, Jason’s more grateful for that than ever.
7. Jason admires the stubbornness, as frustrated as it makes him. He’s pretty stubborn too, after all. And he likes the idea that Howard would fight for him. He likes the idea that Howard wouldn’t just give up. He likes to think that before he left he was still fighting within himself, still that bit too stubborn to let go of Jason, that bit too stubborn to stop loving him. That way he’s still loving him, even from the other side of the Atlantic.
8. Jason needs a brute sometimes. He needs someone to bumble in and destroy the order. Coz he knows he can’t be allowed to get too far into himself. He can drive himself mad if he thinks about things too much. He can place too much value in some things too. He hoards. Well, he’s not that bad, perhaps. But he knows Howard helped him put perspective on it. No matter how many of those things got broken, Jason had still been happy because of Howard. If Howard ever got broken, Jason wouldn’t be so ok.
9. Jason would rather Howard just stopped the smoking. But at the same time, when you know someone’s lips so well you can identify the traces of coffee and cigarettes, you know you are someone they treasure.
10. Howard only introduces Jason to everyone because he’s so proud of being with him. He’s got it into his head Jason is some sort of prince who everyone wants a piece of, who is too good for mere mortals, who has, for some reason, chosen Howard. Jason lets him hold on that tight coz he wants Howard to know that he’s just as happy Howard chose him. He wants Howard to know his hand fits there: being with him isn’t some choice on a whim, it’s just what’s needed to complete the million-piece jigsaw that is his mixed up head, to make it all make sense.
11. Yeah, ok, he’s crap at fixing things. And the money Jason’s had to spend re-fixing the things Howard’s fixed is something Jason doesn’t like to think about too much. But Howard can fix one thing. The most important thing. Howard can fix Jason. He doesn’t hold him back to normal or kiss him back to normal or even talk him back to normal. He watches him back. He doesn’t say anything or try to invade Jason’s space. When Jason is broken Howard sits with him and lets him cry without any hint of judgement. Or wanders around the flat aimlessly with his headphones on loud and his eyes never more than ten seconds away from meeting Jason’s. He’ll put a herbal tea down in front of Jason and disappear for a while. He knows Jason will come to him when he’s stopped feeling like a single touch will break him. And Howard will hold him then. And slowly things will become right again.
12. Although it grates on Jason’s more patient nature, he realises he probably wouldn’t love him if he could sit still. He couldn’t love someone willing to just settle. He admired Howard’s need to explore, even when his restlessness got irritating, in the back of his mind, Jason would know it was just Howard’s determination not to miss out on a second of life. He wanted to live life by breathing it in, running through it, laughing at it, seeing the way it bent and twisted and flung itself around corners. Howard was only still when they kissed. He tastes life then.
13. The back and forth and the phone to his ear...it wasn’t really his fault, if Jason was honest. It was part of his work. And his work was just a part of who he was. He got a serious buzz off it and Jason would never have dreamt of denying him that. He loved the stupid grin he’d get on his face at the prospect of a new job. Whatever time of the night they called, whatever number of hours he would be spending on a plane, he wanted to do everything he could to make the gig. Jason loved the light it brought to his eyes. He was always so refreshed when he came back from his gigs.
14. Jason knew he could put up with the whining and the whinging when Howard was ill because it gave him the chance to take care of him. In fact, he was pretty sure that, part of the reason Howard made such a fuss was that he wanted to show Jason just how badly he would cope in the real world. The world outside the world the two of them had built up in that flat of theirs. Well, that flat of Jason’s that Howard had never moved out of anyway.
15. Quietly, as he listens to Howard stumbling and blundering into another awkward moment, Jason admires his shyness. And he admires the honesty too. Howard doesn’t try and pretend to be oh-so-cool and oh-so-savvy just to impress people. Howard wants people to like him, but he doesn’t want to be something he isn’t. Jason just can’t find a way to love people who pretend. And Howard doesn’t ever want to be the sort of person Jason can’t love.
16. Howard hadn’t moved out coz Jason hadn’t, other than the odd passing comment, made him feel like he needed to go. Clearly Jason didn’t want Howard gone. That much Jason had always known, coz every time Howard left (for a ten minute walk to the corner shop or a ten night trip to some nation full of clubs) the whole place reverberated with a foreignness that frightened Jason totally. He claimed to hate Howard’s permanence as a ploy to make sure Howard realised how good he had it. Although of course, Howard was all too aware.
17. Jason liked the forgetting. It was a pain when Howard kissed him mid-sentence and the chain of thought was forever lost. But that was nothing Jason didn’t need, he had too many thoughts after all. But he liked it when Howard made him forget the rest of the world. He liked it when Howard made him forget there was anything that had ever hurt him, it made it easier for him to surrender to Howard. He knew Howard knew that too.
18. There had to be someone in the world with eyes like Howard’s, eyes that could see right through Jason when Jason least wanted to be seen through. Because really, though he wouldn’t admit it aloud, Jason needed someone to know him that way. Because someone had to in order to make things right. It was something Jason struggled with, the letting people in thing. But Howard’s instinctive ability meant he could wander in any time, get the information he needed, work out a plan of action, judge the right amount of time to leave Jason be before he pushed him, come up with the right thing to say when Jason finally came to him of his own accord. And Jason always came to him eventually. Because he might as well tell him what’s going on with him, since he already knew.
19. You can’t hate someone for not eating their greens can you? Not when you’re both grown adults putting up some mask of maturity? The whole thing’s a bit childish. The thing about not eating his greens, it’s just another little-kid thing he likes to keep up to entertain himself. And Jason needs that. Coz he’s not childish enough. In his head he’s too old. Howard balances him out.
20. Howard really could turn everything topsy-turvy with the slightest move. That’s a lot of power to put in someone’s hands and fear and hatred grew out of that insecurity. Jason doesn’t like giving people control like that normally. But with Howard he didn’t mind. It scared him at first, but now he knows how good it can be. Because Howard could make his worst day his best. Howard could be the one good thing Jason could hold on to at any given time. The flat could have fallen down around his ears and he would have stood there, reminding himself it was ungrateful to cry at the loss, coz he still had Howard and nothing could touch that in significance. But then, on the other hand, hadn’t Howard finally used that power for evil? Hadn’t he just turned Jason’s life upside-down without a thought?
21. It’s hard to love: the lack of fixity, the lack of a need to label what they were. But Jason sort of understood Howard’s reluctance to say it aloud. They’d never talked about it. They’d not had that conversation where they worked out what they were doing. He’d just stopped sleeping on the sofa and started sleeping in Jason’s bed. Then he’d started holding Jason tighter. Kissing him on the cheek, then the lips, the everywhere. The closest Howard came to explaining any of it was when he told Jason he loved him. The reason Jason had accepted it was because he accepted who Howard was. And Howard was a person who feared damaging things. If he knew what they were it had the potential to be destroyed. If something was undefined, if there was never any certainty, if it was all left unsaid, then no one would be able to get a good enough grasp of it to break it.
22. Of course there are flaws in the plan. Howard and Jason hadn’t been able to grasp onto it enough to hold onto it at all. Which had broken it. But in the middle of it all, as angry as it makes him, Howard is still his home, he knows that. He has his limits. He feels secure in the life he has built here, that’s why he couldn’t go with Howard when he packed his bags and got on that plane. But even if he is on the other side of the ocean, at least Jason can be sure that he is still attached to him somehow. How can he hate that?
23. The lateness thing was comforting, in a way. It always made Jason look good. It always gave him at least an extra five minutes – he could be late by five minutes and still be on time compared to Howard. That was nice. That allowed him to relax a little sometimes without changing the way people saw him. Because he liked to be thought of as reliable, dependable. He prided himself on that. And Howard simply made it easier for him.
24. Jason likes the noise that follows Howard around. It reminds him he’s not alone. It reminds him that he isn’t completely lost to the world, he isn’t a total shut-in. He is neither friendless nor unloved. He’s just quiet. Howard’s loudness is an intrusion, yes. But it reminded Jason that he was happy on days when he fell that bit too silent. And it reminded him that he had someone around him, loving him, all the time. That’s why that morning was so unsettling. The silence provided no reminder and no reassurance. It told him it was over.
25. And yet that kiss didn’t. He can’t really hate him for the kiss. Because the kiss was a promise. Or he hopes it was. It was a reminder that he does still care. That he did try to stay.
26. Jason enjoyed being able to decode Howard’s scrawl. He treated it like a secret, appointed himself an expert on the mystery and encouraged Howard to leave as many notes as he pleased. Though there was no note this morning, Jason looked on that as a riddle to be unpicked in its own right. And Jason loves a good puzzle – that came of being one himself.
27. Howard knows where to find Jason, so Jason finds it hard to hold it against Howard that that doesn’t always work the other way. Jason knows that wherever Howard is he has that number, ready if he needs it. Besides, what good would calling him now do anyway? It would destroy Jason to have to chase him. Howard had always made him feel special. He shouldn’t need to chase someone if they valued him so highly, should he?
28. Jason can’t really justify hating Howard for making him smile. It’s all that’s got him through some days. And yes, some days it annoyed the hell out of him. Some days it ruined his point or made him lose an argument. But it always made him smile. And right now he’d kill to feel a smile on his lips that wasn’t foreign or forced.
29. But the biggest reason Jason loves him for his faults? It’s because he really, truly, love-of-his-life loves him. Always has. Always will. Full stop. Underline. Cross out, rewrite, spit it out, fucking loves him. He can’t argue his way out of it. Hate is just his way of blurring it.
29.5 Scratch that, there’s something bigger going on here than just love. It is, as everything in Jason’s life usually is, more complex than that. There’s something about the way they’re built that makes them destroy them. The perverse way they each loved in the other what drove them mad. He can find reasons why he loves it, sure. He can even smile, a little, at the thought that Howard could make him feel the entire spectrum passion had to offer. But Howard is still gone. And there is nothing about that that Jason can find to love.