AU: Love (Josh)

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh took the plates back out to the living room, nudging boxes of chinese food away. Once his hands were free of desserts he began boxing up the leftovers, moving back into the kitchen so that he could place them in the fridge.

"I can't date, either." He ignored the question asked, his mind still on their earlier conversation. "But I don't think changing the medium I meet people in will help."

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean was used to working around other people’s conversations and working on two different levels. Such was the benefit of spending most of his life with telepathy. When his friend failed to answer his question about ice cream, he simply took that as an affirmative answer based on Josh’s typical habits, pulled the Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, and found the ice cream scoop.

The telepath carried the ice cream carton back into the living room, setting it down to scoop a healthy portion onto each of their plates. He didn’t bring the carton back into the freezer, in case either of them wanted seconds; Sean assumed that he would, at least.

Josh obviously wanted to continue this topic, considering the fact that Sean had given him ample opportunity to drop it. He would listen to whatever his friend wanted to say. “Is that so?” He asked, a polite inquiry. He was interested, since the younger man apparently needed to get this off his chest, and he cared about Josh. However, he didn’t want to put any pressure on the attorney, and so he kept his replies carefully neutral, as he would in a therapy session. “And why is that?”

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh dropped into his seat heavily, keeping his eyes carefully on his dessert as he answered, "because nobody else is you."

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Their conversation had taken a sudden and surprising turn. That, in itself, was remarkable, considering how difficult it was to surprise a telepath. However, Sean could honestly say that he had never expected to hear those words, as those words, acting as that explanation.

Not since they had stood in a different living room, in a different apartment on another side of the City, decades ago, when Josh had broken his heart by ending their relationship.

Truly, he had thought that the younger man had put their relationship behind them.

The telepath didn’t know what to say.

“That’s...true,” he replied softly, so that Josh didn’t have to wait with awkward silence. Perhaps that wasn’t much better than saying nothing at all, but he wanted his friend to know that he had heard him, and that he had taken his explanation to heart.

His heart which had started beating a bit faster. He was so unused to surprises, and he had never prepared himself to have this conversation.

Josh wasn’t looking at him, and so the telepath followed suit, dropping his gaze to his shoes briefly. He remained standing, as he would take his cues from his friend, and, should the attorney want privacy when he grew mortified, then he could disappear for a few minutes.

[Joshua Bernstein]

"I'm sorry," Josh swallowed, wishing he hadn't said anything. He had put his best friend on the spot, and for no real reason. To confess a secret he had kept close to his heart for years? A secret Sean most likely had already learned due to his power, only now he had to actually acknowledge it.

He would be surprised if their relationship didn't become strained after this; what did he expect Sean to do? Politely accept this and pretend nothing happened?

Well, that was how a great many of their interactions went, so perhaps subconsciously that was what he expected.

"Ahhh....how...how is the cake?"

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean descended into silence after Josh’s apology. Not because he didn’t want to acknowledge it, but because he still had no idea what to say in response. He could probe to find out what, precisely, his friend had expected when he blurted out that confession, but, truthfully, the telepath had no desire to probe. He felt so out of his element that he could not put forth an informed guess.

He needed a few minutes to compose his thoughts. As a result, he settled into the love seat facing the sofa, and he folded his hands in his lap. He bowed his head, eyes closed, deep in thought. Almost as though he was meditating, although he never did that with an audience, and he was acutely aware of josh’s presence across from him.

After a couple of moments of silence, he lifted his head briefly and glanced at his friend. “How long have you been keeping that to yourself?” His voice held no hint of accusation as he asked the question.

His question was sincere, as he wanted to know. It also served as a subtle signal to the other man that this had come as a surprise, and that he wasn’t reading his mind right now.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh poked holes in his cake, stabbing the fork through the soft chocolate center repeatedly. "A...few years."

He mumbled this answer, shoulders hunching instinctively. He felt awkward and pathetic; it would have been smarter to have kept his mouth shut. But at the same time, it was difficult to keep secrets from his friend indefinitely, and they had been on the subject of dating.

A subject he usually avoided. But the conversation hadn't been too painful, and so he had slipped up.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

“A few years,” Sean repeated. He had not expected that response any more than he had expected the rest of his friend’s confession. A few years.

A few years was a long time. Time filled with visits between Vermont and New York, where each of them took trips to visit the other for a weekend here and there, and where Sean came down for holidays since his family and Josh’s family were in New York and that made travel most convenient. Time filled with telephone calls every few days, and emails in between. Time filled with occasional letters or packages sent back and forth.

This had never come up.

He wished that it had.

It explained, in part, why Josh had shied away from dating, although it didn’t explain why he had dived head-first into using this dating website.

He should have sensed it, although Sean didn’t have the energy to try to figure out why he had failed to do so. He was typically more observant than that, and Josh was typically not great at concealing his thoughts or emotions.

All of that was secondary to the situation at hand.

He took a deep breath and asked, “What would you have me say?”

[Joshua Bernstein]

"Nothing!" Josh said with such haste he dropped his fork with a clatter onto the table. "You...I...I shouldn't have said anything, you don't have to...you don't have to say anything."

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean managed not to reach for the fork, which demonstrated restraint of his part, since such manners came as second nature to him. Instead, he let the fork remain where it had fallen, focused as he was on the conversation at hand.

Shaking his head, he replied, “I should say something.”

Obviously, Josh had mentioned this because he had wanted to discuss it. Even it he hadn’t thought through the logical consequences of his statement (which was typical of his friend). So typical of the other man. He loved him as much as he could love a brother - if they had been brothers - but if he could change anything about Josh, it would be to give him a bit of impulse control, enough that he would think before he spoke or acted.

He took a deep breath and then asked quietly, “Did you give any thought to what you would do after you said that?” Again, his voice contained no judgment, because he wasn’t making an accusation. He only wanted to know what the other man had been thinking, and, for once, he didn’t want to rely on his telepathy. That would be a headache for both practical and emotional reasons, and, suddenly, he didn’t have the energy to cope with that.

[Joshua Bernstein]

"Ahhh..." No, no he had not. "Well....eat cake and forget about it? Or maybe just...just...just laugh and hope things weren't awkward for the rest of your trip. I don't know. I just thought if I met people online it wouldn't matter that they weren't you, and if I dated enough of them one of them would....But it didn't work. I guess I just thought...if I told you...it would be like a spell and be broken."

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Of course Josh had hoped that nothing would be awkward despite confessing something as intimate and relationship-changing as he had said mere moments ago. That was typical of his friend, for better or for worse. The attorney didn’t think things through in his personal life, even though he proved more than capable of doing so in the professional realm.

“Attraction isn’t a spell,” he said quietly.

Perhaps that was why his friend’s relationships didn’t work out. Because he ascribed supernatural forces to something as simple - and yet complicated - as attraction between two people.

“Attraction is just attraction. It can be as significant as the world or just a harmless crush or something in between.” The telepath knew that it sounded like he was giving his seminar lecture, but that was safer than diving into the sheer depth of their relationship history. He looked back down at his hands. “If you compare your dates to other people, confessing that can’t change it on its own.”

This wasn’t a Twelve Step program. Admitting that he did it wasn’t the first step to having a free and clear relationship in the future. Not with their combined baggage from their shared history, and not with the way Josh experienced romantic and sexual attraction generally.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh was not sure that he agreed that attraction is just attraction. If it was so insignificant then surely he would feel it more often?

"I didn't mean a literal spell," He mumbled, turning his fork over in his hands. "But isn't admitting things supposed to...to change them?"

His typical M.O. of ignoring it hadn't worked out very well.

"Maybe I should just try harder to like my dates."

That line of thought was why he had agreed to meet with everyone who had asked, and it hadn't worked yet. But maybe that wasn't trying hard enough.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean hadn’t said that attraction was inherently insignificant; he had said that it was dynamic, and thus could hold the significance of the world or be hardly significant at all, depending on the context and the individual in question. He expected his friend to grasp this on some level, since he knew for a fact that Josh had experienced celebrity crushes before; Teddy Kennedy was both too old and too aggressively heterosexual for the attorney, and yet that had never prevented idle fantasies before.

Idle fantasies that Sean had never been jealous of when they had dated.

He then shook his head in the negative to correct his friend’s assessment. “Admitting to a problem is a necessary step for treatment, but it isn’t the solution. It demonstrates awareness of a problem and willingness to seek help; nothing more.” He let out a soft sigh. “And this isn’t a problem, exactly.” Not clinically.

Yet, their relationship could veer into the unhealthy, but Josh’s lack of attraction to the vast majority of other men did not constitute a problem that therapy could assist, any more than being attracted to other men at all constituted a problem. The mental health profession had moved away from that focus decades ago.

“It sounds like you’re trying hard enough. We aren’t compatible with a lot of people, and you can’t force that. All you can do is make yourself sick by trying.”

[Joshua Bernstein]

"But how is dating supposed to work if you can't just...try..." Josh gestured inarticulately for a moment before settling on, "better? There's some problem here, I just need to figure out how to fix it."

Probably not being over Sean was a large part of the problem. If he could get over Sean, then maybe he would be attracted to more people who weren't:

Celebrities.

Politicians.

Specifically employed as eye candy.

Nobody in the above groups were date material. They were fantasy material, and they were that way from the start. No labels had to be changed, no moving from friend to interested.

"You yourself just said other people date people they meet through friends, or were friends with first. I don't even know how that works."

See? Problem.