a riot in my chest
by templemarker
***
When the door shut, Spencer looked around the cluttered living room that, until moments ago, had been a place filled mostly with good memories. He walked over to the couch (where Jon had kissed him for the first time) and moved around some of the magazines on the coffee table. He sat down, stood up again, and didn’t turn off the lights when he went into the hallway. (Jon hated complete darkness.)
He ran his hands along the baseboard (that Jon had helped him paint) and didn’t look in the bathroom (where Jon had wandered into Spencer’s shower that morning, smelling of coffee and sweat and the faint memory of sex). He closed his eyes going into his bedroom, not bothering to look because Jon’s shoes weren’t on the floor, his jeans weren’t a haphazard pile next to them, and Spencer didn’t have to step over a dirty t-shirt to climb into bed and pull the covers (that still carried Jon on them) over his head.
Spencer was not a dumb guy. Everything about the last two hours of his life screamed over over over, and for the first time in his twenty-two years he let himself feel so deeply that he gasped for breath until he couldn’t breathe anymore.
***