Cinnamon Muffins Chapter 20: Understanding is the Only Way Some People Know How to Show Love
Spoiler: Todd is still the dad friend of the group, and it shows <3
I hope you brought a cozy blanket to this chapter, because that’s the only kind of support you’ll need. I gave you an easy one <3
Here’s your reminder that you can support my ability to pay rent and have sweet little treats as I write by clicking this button down here:
I’ll let you get on with the chapter now. After this, just 9 more before we start How to Get Away with Marriage!
Collin squirms in Jax's glare.
Everyone is looking right at them, and Collin is a good liar, but he's also exhausted. And Jax looks real sorry about talkin’ so loud now that everyone's eyes are on them. Collin is so tired of lying.
"Look here now," he says with a skittering smile to the group of boys, as if this were some gradeschool confidence, "if I tell you this, you can't tell nobody. Not a soul!"
Everyone nods. Jaxson's eyes are endless, oilslick pools of worry, right down deep as the ocean.
Collin face tries on several expressions before he finds one that fits what he feels. "So ya know I've been spendin' an awful lotta time with you fellas these past few days—and it's been fun! Problem is, I didn't get a chance to…" Collin trails off.
He had meant to say that he didn't get a chance to ask his parents for permission before running off on Friday night to look for Taylor and Wes.
But Wes's fingers are doing a funny, anxious little rubbing motion, and Taylor offers a hand, and Wes takes it and starts fidgeting with Taylor's hand instead. It seems to calm them both down. If Collin says that he left that night to go find them, they'll go crazy thinkin’ it was their fault or something. It wasn't. Collin don’t know much, but he knows this ain’t nobody’s fault but his parents’.
So Collin rephrases, "My parents don't want me comin' back home no more."
"They said that!?" Jaxson cries, oilslick eyes lighting on fire with the kind of rage people only feel for the assholes who hurt their friends.
"Uh, not in so many words!" Collin answers quickly, "But you know how they are, and I ain't been home in a few days, and I don't— I can't—” His voice fails him, sinking to a whisper. “I don't wanna go back."
The room is a mosaic for several seconds. Everyone is trying to wrap their heads around Collin’s situation.
"They'll hurt you," Taylor understands instantly.
Collin nods.
Nobody moves, except for Wes's hands desperately trying to expend his nervous energy in fiddling with Taylor's fingers, trying to minimize the tics that are growing progressively more visible as the tension in the air escalates.
Taylor, maybe trying for a joke (Collin can still barely tell with Taylor), says flatly, "Homeless buddies."
And then Dalton snaps. In half. Like a rubber band. Collin sees the change in his eyes. In the tilt of his mouth before it opens. Dalton says, "No. No, you are not. Neither of you. Nobody is homeless." Collin is kinda too stunned to reply to Dalton's absolute nonsense.
"Uh, Dalton," Todd starts, but Dalton cuts him off.
"No, Todd! I can't fucking handle it anymore!” He shouts, throwing himself to his feet. “Nobody! Is! Homeless! And do you want me to tell you why?"
"Please do before Taylor's boyfriend has an aneurysm," Jaxson says, eyeing the way Wes's tics are entirely out of his control now that Dalton is yelling.
Dalton takes the hint, takes a breath, and says, "Nobody here is homeless because we're all together.” Taylor and Todd scoff affectionately, and Dalton laughs too. “Laugh at me all you want but the power of fucking friendship is gonna be how we fix this. I will share a six-by-ten studio apartment in fucking Kalona before I let anyone here sleep outside of a warm bed. I have a fucking line, guys, and I'm drawing it. You guys are not allowed to be homeless. Not on my fucking watch."
Taylor replies, "That's the most I've ever heard you curse in a thirty-second span. I'm proud of you." Dalton makes a face at him that Collin thinks might be exasperated, but it's hard to tell because he's almost laughing.
Todd says, "Dalton, your sentiment is super admirable and the power of friendship is great and everything, but I have two extra bedrooms."
"You do not," Dalton insists, "you have, like, six."
"No, it's just two. The other rooms you're thinking of are my study, my parents' offices, the studio, the reading room, and the sensory room."
Jaxson barks out a laugh. "Rich people are fucking ridiculous."
Collin is still stuck on the part where he told these people he had a problem, and their first reaction was to defend him. To protect him. To help him.
They're all still kids, technically, and they're all going through such terrible things. They're all still kids, even if just barely, and there should still be someone who was supposed to protect them. But that's okay. Apparently, kids can protect each other.
But Collin has missed a bridge in the conversation and now Dalton and Todd are initiating a game that they're calling "Overnight Hide and Seek."
"W-w-what's that?" Wes asks. The stammering clearly worries Taylor, who goes against all of the rumors Collin has spent his life hearing at school and wiggles closer to Wes like an attention-starved rodent.
"It's like hide and seek," Taylor explains, "but you sleep in your hiding spot."
"That sounds like the worst idea ever," Jaxson says, but he's laughing. Collin smiles too. He loves it when Jax laughs, sounds like warm water over cold gravel.
Todd launches into a more official-sounding version of the rules, and then they all scatter off to play.
Collin knows they're stalling. Sometime, they're going to have to confront all the bad shit that's happened to them. But instead, Dalton and Todd bring up a game they haven't played in years, and Collin starts to love his new friends.
Wes and Taylor immediately break the rules of Overnight Hide and Seek by hiding together. You are supposed to hide separately. That's part of the fun. But Wes is still a little jumpy about Todd's house, since he's only ever been there once, and Taylor is still a little jumpy about being away from Wes for an extended period of time, because Wes was recently jumped by homophobes.
Besides, Taylor says he knows the best hiding spot in the house. Wes tries to argue there's no way Taylor knows a better hiding spot than Todd, because Todd lives here, but Taylor says "trust me, I've never been found once" and Wes is forced to think about how Dalton and Todd claimed to have never seen Taylor sleep around them.
Seeing the spot, Wes still insists there's no way they could both fit in there. Maybe Taylor on his own, but Wes is kinda big. Taylor tells him it'll be fine, they can both fit— he'll make them both fit, for fuck's sake.
And Wes couldn't think of any other worries to pitch out there so now they're both shoved into an empty cabinet below the counter in the basement kitchen (which is definitely a kitchen, not a bar as Todd had tried to claim). There was already a pillow and blanket there before they climbed in.
"I sleep here every time," Taylor explains, "sometimes I just crawl in here to see how long it'll take them to notice that I'm gone. They still don't know about it."
"They've never checked here once!?" Wes exclaims.
"I mean, would you? It doesn't look big enough to fit a person on the outside."
It doesn't. Wes had been extremely dubious that even Taylor would fit, and he had almost refused to climb in at all. He's not exactly claustrophobic, but he is afraid of crushing Taylor. But there's enough room, barely, for both of them to lay pressed right up against each other. Wes can feel Taylor's breath on the side of his neck, and he's doing his absolute best to be cool about that.
It doesn't help that his brain keeps reminding him that he and Taylor are technically dating, and that he should get used to this.
How the fuck is Wes supposed to get used to this? He feels like he's floating, and like every nerve in his body is on fire, and like he could die right now and walk confidently into hell knowing he lived the best life ever if he just got to sit here in this cramped cabinet in Todd's basement with Taylor. The only thing tethering him to earth is the sallow throb of the scrapes on his cheek from the road salt, and the ache of his bruised ribs.
It's pitch black in the cabinet, so Wes can't see around him. If this were ten years ago, he'd be terrified, but even if the edges of paranoid anxiety are creeping into the peripheral of his thoughts, he'll stay here forever if it means he gets to have Taylor this close.
Taylor's arm reaches above their heads and his hand squeezes sideways to pull something out from the drawer a foot above them. A button clicks- a flashlight. Now illuminated by the dim yellow light of a dollar-store flashlight, Taylor's glaring at the door of the cabinet like it has personally wronged him.
Wes surprises himself by knowing what the expression means.
Smiling, because he feels like he's been let in on the big secret of Taylor's weaknesses, Wes whispers, "Thanks. I don't like the dark either."
Then Taylor glares at Wes like he has personally wronged him. If this were a week ago, Wes would be terrified, but even if the nail-bites of uncertainty dig at the peripheral of his thoughts, he knows Taylor wouldn't be this close to him if he was actually mad.
Taylor grumbles, "One of these days, you're going to realize that I'm a fuckup."
Wes rolls his eyes. "Feeling's mutual, dumbass."
"The fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"It means one of these days you're going to have to realize you're not the only fuckup in this relationship."
"I'm sorry I wasn't there," Taylor blurts. It catches Wes so off guard that he momentarily forgets what Taylor could be talking about. Taylor pushes on, voice catching and tearing like a poorly-knit sweater, "At the coffee shop. Today. I'm so— I'm so sorry."
"Taylor…" Wes doesn't even know how to respond. Even thinking about what happened today feels so overwhelming. He doesn't know how to process it himself, much less help Taylor process it. It hurts physically, but emotionally it's such a nebulous, strange concept that someone would want to hurt you for what you are, not just something you'd done. It's sad. And there's the guilt of knowing that if he'd reacted faster, been more alert, more paranoid, he might've been able to fight them off. And there's the fear of what if it happens again. And there's just too much for Wes to even think about without his consciousness escaping his body.
But he wants to be in his body right now, curled up next to his boyfriend, even if that boyfriend is about to cry. "Can I take off your hat?" is what comes out of Wes's mouth. He barely knows he's saying it. Taylor nods, face turned down and away from Wes in the only way it's possible to break eye contact in such close quarters. It means that Taylor's forehead is pressed to Wes's collarbone when Wes moves to take off the hat.
Then Taylor flinches, and Wes stops.
For one stomach-dropping second, Wes realizes that he knows so little about Taylor Macready. Then Taylor wiggles one hand out from under Wes and pulls off his own hat and shoves it under the pillow beneath both of their heads. He does it so angrily, but he doesn't pull his face away from Wes's collarbone. It makes Wes giggle. But this close, Wes can feel through some intangible sensory data that Taylor is fragile, so he gently, slowly (slow enough that Taylor has plenty of time to say no, or move) settles his fingers in Taylor's hair. Taylor doesn't move except to grab two fistfuls of the sweater Wes is borrowing from Todd, so Wes presses his fingertips farther into Taylor's scalp, brushing the hair up and down with fidgety rhythm.
Neither one of them is sure who falls asleep first, but by the time they drift off their aches are foreign and their cares untethered.
If you wake up first the morning after a game of Overnight Hide and Seek, as Todd does, you know that your chances of being the winner are pretty good. Overnight Hide and Seek has never been about winning though, it's just been about Todd trying to get Taylor and Dalton to go to bed at a reasonable hour when they have sleepovers on school nights, because even at ten Todd had been responsible enough to know that you need eight hours of sleep to be productive in school (or, at least, that's what his parents told him when he asked if he could stay up a few more minutes to finish a tv show episode he was watching). It had been much easier to get his friends to bed if they were separate, so Todd proposed Overnight Hide and Seek one Wednesday night when he was ten and they played every weekday-night sleepover until they were Freshmen and felt stupid playing any game that involved 'Hide and Seek' in the title.
Had Dalton or Taylor been the first to wake up, they would have immediately sought the other players out to proclaim their victory or to stubbornly poke them awake just to bother them, respectively. Neither Taylor nor Dalton knows the true purpose of Overnight Hide and Seek, so they just think it's some weird game that they play to win. Dalton hardly ever wins because he sleeps like a bear and hides poorly, prioritizing comfort. Taylor wins sometimes, when Todd is particularly exhausted. Todd wins when he feels like it. But the game has never been about winning, for Todd. It's been about getting everyone to sleep.
And everyone had needed to sleep last night.
It's one thing for Taylor to go pick a fight with some drunk idiot, like he did Wednesday (god, doesn't that feel like a fucking eon ago); it's another thing entirely for Wes to get the shit kicked out of him by homophobes at his own place of business. Similar level of injury (assumedly, Taylor has and will always refuse to take off his shirt to show you how bad it really is). Different emotional impact.
So Todd has a few options this morning: wake everyone up and play up the 'fun game' aspect of Overnight Hide and Seek, or make breakfast for when everyone else naturally comes to the kitchen (it would probably just be an ungodly amount of eggo waffles, because the chef doesn't come in unless Todd calls her when his parents go out of town).
He goes for breakfast, and peels himself out from where he's tucked himself into the curtained-off bay window in his room to throw on some socks and slip downstairs.
Everyone could probably use as much sleep as they can get, and even if Todd woke them up he wouldn't know what to say to them. 'Good morning, the world is still as cruel as it was when you fell asleep'? 'I hope you slept well despite your numerous accumulating injuries'? Breakfast is an easier greeting to give.
It's only when Todd closes the door to his room silently behind him that he sees Collin wringing his hands in the hallway.
"Oh," Todd says, a little surprised to see Collin separate from Jaxson. They had said everyone has to sleep separately, but Todd had kind of assumed Jaxson and Collin would break that rule. Collin turns and Todd greets him with, "You won."
"I did?" Collin whispers.
"Yeah, seems like it."
"Do we go find everyone else now, then?"
"Let's let them sleep," Todd suggests, "Wanna help me make breakfast? You were pretty good at pancakes last time, and we have more ingredients here than boxed pancake mix."
Infinitesimally, the slope of Collin' shoulders relaxes. He nods and follows Todd down to the kitchen.
The pantry is a separate room from the rest of the kitchen, and Collin hesitates at the custom-made, balsa-wood lattice of the door. "You can come in," Todd presses when Collin starts to wring his hands again.
Collin flinches at the invitation and lowers his eyes. "Does this door have a lock in it?" he asks. Which is an absolutely bizarre question to ask about a pantry.
But Todd recognizes the look in Collin eyes as the same one he hadn't known how to interpret ten years ago when Taylor came over for the first time and stared at Todd's parents like they wronged him personally until they left the room.
Instead of answering, Todd says, "What do you wanna make? I'll grab the ingredients while you cook."
Collin decides on scones ("Jax loves it when I make scones, but my folks don't always let me and his oven don't usually work") and Todd locates and retrieves the flour, sugar, milk, butter, baking soda and baking powder ("Aren't they the same thing?" Todd asks as he hands them to Collin. Collin replies, "Not quite, but I sure as heck don't know the difference"), sour cream, and lemon juice.
"Shouldn't we wake everyone up?" Collin asks while he shapes the dough into little shapes (the recipe said triangles but neither Collin nor Todd care very much about that instruction).
"They'll come to the kitchen when they're ready," Todd replies with a yawn, "Want some orange juice?"
"But what if they're stuck! Or lost!" Collin presses, "Yer house is pretty big."
Todd shrugs and pours his orange juice. "Dalton is going to be under the bed in the guest room next to my mom's office, because it's got the thickest carpet and the largest under-the-bed space. Taylor is in the cabinet in the basement kitchen, and Wes is probably with him. I thought Jaxson would be with you."
"I didn't wanna break the rules of the game," Collin mutters, moving the dough to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
"It's more of a suggestion really."
Collin puts the baking sheet laden with scones into the oven and washes his hands in the shiny, stainless steel basin of the sink. After bouncing on the balls of his feet for a minute, he takes a seat next to Todd at the island.
"How'd you know where Dalton and Taylor and Wes are?" he asks.
Todd smiles a tiny smile that he isn't fully aware that he's wearing. "Dalton always sleeps wherever's comfy. Since I hid in my room's bay window this time, that leaves his other favorite spot under that guest bed. Taylor always sleeps in that cabinet, has since we were kids. He's even got a pillow and some blankets in there. I make sure to take the out and wash them once in a while. Figured he'd bring Wes with him, but…"
"But what?"
"Don't tell them I know where they hide," Todd asks, "especially not Taylor. I get the feeling he wouldn't sleep at all if he knew that I knew about his hiding spot."
"Well why wouldn't he?" Collin wonders, "Wouldn't he feel better knowin' he's got you lookin’ out for'im?"
Todd shrugs, "I dunno. He never sleeps around anyone. He doesn't like to."
"That's pretty strange," Collin murmurs, not because he means it but because he feels he has to respond with something normative.
Todd watches Collin face crease for a moment with performative confusion before falling carelessly slack to stare at the granite countertops with wide, wide eyes. He gets the feeling that maybe Collin has trouble sleeping too.
A nice sweet little chapter, as promised <3 you have made it past the most graphic stuff ngl— congrats, if you’re here! we’ve got nine more chapters after this, and then we start how to get away with marriage! HTGAWM will need heavy edits, so i’m debating switching to a 2x/wk update schedule to give myself that time— thoughts?
anyways, scream at me in the comments! Nothing gives me more joy! :D