floral and fading

build;;

liam is a string bean; always has been. he’s exceptionally tall and thin, technically is under an average weight for his height, but it’s not really for lack of trying. he doesn’t have a ton of muscle tone, some very, very basic levels of definition in his calves and his upper arms. he’s never really actively worked out, so any build in terms of muscle gain or definition is rather limited. his legs have been referred to as giraffe legs, and it’s not entirely far off; his height definitely is made up of some pretty damn long legs. he’s got broad shoulders and a narrow waist, long neck. one could argue that liam has a dainty build to him, almost. 

but to put it very plainly: liam is very tall and very skinny. that about covers it.

scars / body differences;; { TW: bodily injury }

he’s got a few smaller, random scars on his legs and arms just from general “wear and tear” as a child, honestly - little nicks and cuts that left behind marks, but he doesn’t really remember where they actually came from.

playing football through high school came with a lot of rough hits. one of which, incidentally, was when he was sixteen, while he and his friends were messing around, playing an impromptu game without their equipment on. liam took a bad fall onto his elbow and suffered a compound fracture - the bone broke through his skin. he still has a scar from that injury and the followed surgery and stitches that came along with it. granted it was on his left arm, so there are tattoos over the scars now; one would have to have it pointed out to them to notice it, but it’s there.

he also had to have his appendix removed when he was eighteen, so he has the scar from that procedure on his abdomen as well.

piercings;;

liam has a few different piercings, but not a ton. 

( ears ) a regular lobe piercing on each ear. ( face ) a nose piercing in the right nostril; a lip piercing in his lower lip on the left side.

tattoos;;

what liam lacks in piercings, he definitely makes up for in tattoos. we’re not going to get into detailed specifics here, because there’s just way too many. however, it is worth noting that he has a full sleeve of random ink work done on the entirety of his left arm. he’s got about three-quarters of a sleeve in scattered pieces up and down his right arm, and he does intend to fill the rest of the gaps in and eventually have a full sleeve on that side as well. he has several random tattoos along his torso; notably a large eagle in the center of his chest, among others. he’s got a few random pieces along the backs of his hands, as well. some of his most notable and easy to point out tattoos are in fact the decently sized pieces on either side of his neck - particularly the vampire batman on the right side of it.

AGE 6 ( Las Vegas, Nevada ) --

It’s late and Liam’s supposed to be in bed. Mommy’s not home yet, and it’s one in the morning; he knows because he looked at the numbers on the digital clock sitting on the floor beside their bed - a mattress with no bed frame, settled in the corner of their small bedroom. He’s sitting up coloring, and Miss Tiffany hasn’t come to check on him in at least three hours, probably assuming he’s asleep, only he’s not. Which is why he hears the front door swing open. Loudly.

“That mother fucker.” That’s Miss Wendy; she’s always loud, says all the bad words.

There’s sniffling that Liam hears next, soft whimpers that make the six year old’s head lift, wide blue eyes blinking toward the closed bedroom door.

“We should’ve taken her to the hospital. Damn it.” That’s Mommy, he recognizes immediately. She sounds worried; she gets that way sometimes when he hears things he’s not supposed to hear in the apartment, but this isn’t about him this time.

Shuffling off of the mattress, Liam leaves his Batman coloring book and jumbo sized crayolas behind him, slowly easing the bedroom door open. The crying is louder now, and from where he’s standing, he can see that it’s Miss Jeanie that’s crying. He can see that she’s got small, circular red marks up and down her arm; ones that weren’t there before when she was home that afternoon. They look like they hurt, Liam thinks, those little red marks. They shine in the light, and he thinks for a second ‘I don’t think that’s right’ because his skin’s never shone like that before, never been so glaringly red before, either.

As he slowly creeps closer, he notices miss Tiffany scrambling with a first aid kit, and she’s muttering under her breath about ‘calling the fucking cops on that bastard.’ Liam’s not sure what that means or what’s going on, but he knows that something’s wrong, he can read that well enough.

“Calling the cops wouldn’t have done shit, they don’t give a damn. They wouldn’t-- Give me that burn ointment. Get the gauze out of the medicine cabinet. Fucking hell.” Miss Wendy is barking angry orders, which is once again not entirely unusual, but it’s a scene to behold all the same.

Minutes go by, the three women - Miss Wendy, Miss Tiffany, and Mommy - all skittering across the floor, taking care of Miss Jeanie, comforting her, cleaning the red marks on her arms, wrapping them in bandages. He hears more swears in those ten minutes than he hears in a whole week - whatever happened, it was bad, it was scary.

He’s hugging the frame of the doorway into the living room space when Stephanie finally turns around and sees him there.

“Liam,” There’s a crack in her voice, and the little boy shuffles impossibly closer to the wooden framing he’s already clung to as she looks at him with wide eyes and drops down to his level. “You’re supposed to be in bed, what are you doing up, it’s so late, Liam. You need to go to bed.”

Her words are hurried, rushed, blending together, and there’s tears in her eyes. Liam frowns - bordering on a pout, lips pursed and brow furrowed.

“Mommy, why are you crying?” He asks; and he’s concerned - Mommy doesn’t let him see her cry very often. He’s heard it sometimes, when she’s in the living room, or talking to one of the other girls, or when she’s taking a shower. But he doesn’t see it often. 

His small hands lift to touch her cheeks and Stephanie lets out a stuttering sigh.

“It’s okay, baby bear, Mommy’s okay.” She turns and kisses his fingers. “Everything’s okay.”

Liam looks passed her at where Miss Jeanie and Miss Tiffany have moved to the couch. Miss Wendy is outside, on her fourth consecutive cigarette. Miss Jeanie is still crying softly while she lays on Miss Tiffany who’s petting her hair gently and shushing her. It’s not uncommon for them, this sort of scene, but it is uncommon for Liam to witness it.

“Is Miss Jeanie okay?” The little boy asks, hands falling from his mother’s face. “Did she get hurt?”

Stephanie hesitates but nods her head. “Yeah, someone hurt her, but she’s okay. We’re takin’ care of her, okay? Don’t worry.”

“Was it John?”

Liam’s brow creases deeply as his mother lets out something of a whimper at his question. He didn’t mean to upset her more. Stephanie’s trying as hard as she can fucking manage to keep it together; because god, if it doesn’t absolutely fucking break her heart to hear that her child hears what they talk about in this house, what they’re doing. Even if he’s got the details wrong - there’s no John, only a John, multiple John’s. He had so little understanding of what was going on, and yet he had enough understanding to know that something was.

“I don’t want you to worry, alright?” The woman’s hand lifts to push back through Liam’s dark hair. “My sweet boy. Don’t you worry.”

Liam blinks at his mother, and while he doesn’t know what’s going on - doesn’t have a clue that the little shiny red dots on Miss Jeanie’s arms are cigarette burns, doesn’t have the faintest idea that Mommy and the other girls are putting themselves in different potential dangers every night, doesn’t remotely understand yet that this isn’t a normal life experience - he still nods his little head when his mother asks him. When she asks him;

“Do you promise to stay sweet forever? Never hurt anyone? Can you promise me that, baby bear?”

AGE 10 ( Las Vegas, Nevada ) --

Staying with Jeanie isn’t strange. They don’t live with her anymore, haven’t for a handful of years now, but she and Mom still work together so it wasn’t totally unusual for Liam to see her still. Wendy and Tiff were out of the picture now. At the respective times of their leaving his life, Liam had thought that was probably for the better.

He’s more aware of the culture of what his mom is doing now. More aware of the ins and outs of the process. More aware of the fact that it isn’t just about making money on a night with a John anymore. After all, it wasn’t the sex work that had her overdosing.

There was a ‘make yourself at home, honey’ that Jeanie gave him when he had first arrived. The uncomfortable feeling hadn’t kicked in right away. He knows Jeanie, she’s been there pretty much all his life. So the change of pace is unexpected.

By change of pace, it’s the way she lays her legs across his lap while they’re sitting on the couch. It’s the casual caress of the back of his head when she walks by him while he sits there. It’s the fact that she’s standing in the doorway to the bedroom he’s sleeping in after he’s gotten out of the shower and is in his underwear, about to pull a shirt over his head.

“You’re already so grown up, you know that?” She says, leaning in the doorway.

Liam thinks it’s a little strange, because why is she there? But he nods. He’s polite. And admittedly, he’s a little bit in a daze still, because his mom fucking overdosed this afternoon, and is spending the night in the hospital getting her stomach pumped, and he has zero fucking clue what tomorrow looks like following something like that.

He also has zero fucking clue why Jeanie is coming closer to him, why her hands are finding his shoulders and kneading there and she’s murmuring something to him about ‘being there for him.’ The connection isn’t there. He understands what they do, this job of theirs, but he doesn’t understand what Jeanie is doing. Because now she’s talking about Nick, some boy two grades above her that she knew when she was Liam’s age. They used to hide in one of the lesser used girl’s bathrooms at school and learn about each other. Liam’s young, but he’s not stupid, he knows what that means, he’s also realizing that this has little to do with him. Jeanie’s had some wine - a lot, actually, by the smell of it as she breathes in his space - and she’s under stress because her friend just overdosed, among other things, and--

He watched something on TV the other day; they used the word stressor. He wonders if that’s what this is. She’s downward spiraled into something she didn’t really intend to do, didn’t really plan for.

She doesn’t touch him more - despite small effort on her part; he’s not interested. Not only is it uncomfortable, but even any physiological response isn’t there. Whatever ‘growing boy needs’ she refers to don’t ignite a familiarity in Liam’s brain, they don’t ignite any curiosity, so she gives up. And he’s fine. He is. Because after that, she’s apologizing. She’s crying and she’s calling herself an idiot, and she’s saying that there’s something wrong with her and Liam, at his core, can’t agree with that, because having bad things happen in life doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with a person.

He knows that.

She shares the bed with him, and it’s strange but it’s not at the same time. He and his mom live in a studio apartment on their own now. They’ve shared a bed all his life. This isn’t his mom, though, it’s Jeanie. And the whole circumstance is confusing, and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do when her arm is laid over him and she’s sniffling gently against his shoulder, and looking for some kind of comfort from a child that doesn’t fully know how to offer it.

But he gently traces the familiar little circular scars on her arm with his fingertips until she falls asleep.

He tells Mom about what happened a couple days later.

And he never goes back to Jeanie’s house again.

AGE 15 ( Los Angeles, California ) --

There’s a gentle panting coming and going between Liam’s lips still as he’s coming back down, flopping against his twin bed. Isabelle stands from where she’s settled between his knees and flops back beside him. He should pull his pants back on and he knows it, but he’s lost in thought - as fucking weird as that might sound for a teenage boy who just got his first blowjob.

It’s one of those things, though. There’s been a number of moments where Liam can’t quite figure how he feels about something. He can’t quite figure if he likes something. This experimentation has been going on with Isabelle for about three months now, and he’s learning things. They both are. He makes her feel good, she does the same, but there’s... A disconnect. There’s something missing.

He wonders if it’s him.

He wonders if it’s because they’re only fifteen and maybe they started this all too soon. But then he thinks, no, no that isn’t it. Because sex is something he’s familiar with, something he’s become desensitized to. Maybe not from experience, but definitely from exposure.

Considering.

It’s over the course of the next handful of months that it starts to dawn on Liam that the reason it feels off is because he doesn’t actually want to be being physical. He is, though. Because that’s what teenagers do. Because girls find him attractive. Because the guys in the locker room are talking about it after football practice. Because it’s normal. It’s expected.

He’s still fifteen when he loses his virginity. And he doesn’t care. Granted, that’s always struck him as something that effects girls more than it effects guys, anyway, but he doesn’t care. He did it. He did it because he thought that was what he was supposed to do. That it was some sort of milestone. That he would get used to it.

For the span of a few days, Liam wonders if it’s specific to girls. There’s a party that someone from another school is having, and a couple of his buddies invite him along. He kisses a boy there, testing it out, seeing if maybe this is where the disconnect lies.

There’s messy, fumbling hands down the front of jeans, there’s the press of bodies back into the edge of a bathroom counter. There’s the heavy breaths and the shaky groans.

But there’s still not what Liam was looking for. There’s still not an answer.

Because he doesn’t hate the touching or the kissing or the sleeping together.

But he also doesn’t want it. Not the way he hears people talk about. Not the way his health teacher implies hormones make it all work for them. He doesn’t want it.

He’s not sure, at this point, what he’s supposed to do with that, though.

AGE 19 ( Los Angeles, California; UCLA campus ) --

“Why don’t you ever want to have sex with me?”

The question is nearly enough to startle Liam, but he manages to stay relatively composed, simply blinking blue eyes in his girlfriend’s direction. Liza’s got a stern, questioning look on her face, and he can’t really figure out why. Or figure out her question.

They had sex yesterday, is the thing.

So he says so, points it out. He can’t imagine that she somehow forgot considering it was less than twenty four hours ago. The brunette huffs in something like exasperation at the reply, however.

“You never want to have sex with me, though.” She argues.

Liam’s head tilts, he can’t quite help it. He’s not an argumentative person, not typically anyway, but there’s something in that accusation that doesn’t sit right. “If you think I don’t want to do it, but then we’re doing it anyway, I think we have bigger problems, Liza...”

“You know what I mean, Liam.” She snaps.

“Actually, I’m not totally sure that I do. Hence this conversation.” His voice is level; he’s not picking a fight, he’s stating a fact.

If he’s honest he’s not even totally sure where this is coming from. He and Liza had been dating for the last five months and things seemed to be going pretty well for them. They liked each other enough. She was loud and confident and took the reigns in their relationship a lot. That was how they ended up sleeping together after only a month of dating. Four months had gone by since then, and given her very open and vocal attraction to Liam, it was safe to say there had been plenty more since.

Which raised the current questions.

“Every time I want us to have sex, it’s me. I’m the one making that call, it’s me that has to suggest it or instigate it, or whatever.” Liza begins.

Ah. He gets it now.

And there’s no argument he can offer now, because he knows that she’s right. It had never really struck Liam as becoming a potential problem - and perhaps that was narrow-minded of him. The fact of the matter was that he didn’t desire what she did all the time, he didn’t have that drive.

Doesn’t. Still.

He likes Liza, he cares about her a lot; he wouldn’t have spent five months of his life dating her otherwise. There’s no arguing, though, that he’s different about their intimacy than he is. His attraction to her is different than her attraction to him. She tells him he’s beautiful all the time, that he’s hot, that he’s distracting to look at. Of course there’s other things in there, too, ones that don’t just have to do with what he looks like, but he correlates them now.

Because his attraction to Liza comes from the fact that she’s loud, that she’s confident, and herself. His attraction to Liza came from the fact that she made him laugh four minutes into a conversation with him. His attraction to Liza came from seeing her passion for her studies, the way she dedicated herself to the things that she wanted.

And sure, he likes that she finds him physically attractive. He can recognize that Liza is a beautiful girl - wavy brown hair, green eyes that lighten up when she’s talking about something she loves. But his feelings have never come from a place of physicality. His place in their relationship has never stemmed from physical attraction. He’s never cared much one way or the other about what they did with one another physically.

She does, though. She likes being physical with him. She likes the intimacy of their bodies together, of making one another feel good. She likes to express her feelings in a way that doesn’t require words all the time. And Liam doesn’t fault her for that - how could he? That was normal.

But he doesn’t feel those same things.

It’s not exclusive to Liza. Liam doesn’t look at other girls or guys and think that he’s missing something. He doesn’t think that maybe he might enjoy himself in that circumstance with someone else. It isn’t like that. It’s never been like that. He’s experimented, he’s gone out of comfort zones, he’s done things for people because it’s what they want, and he wants to keep them happy. It’s what he’s been doing with Liza, isn’t it?

So when she says that she’s done - that because he can’t explain it to her, that because there’s no ‘making sense of it’ - he apologizes. He says that he’s sorry, but he doesn’t fight to keep her there.

It’s not like he can give her what she’s really looking for.

AGE 21 ( Los Angeles, California; UCLA campus ) --

Liam’s been throwing a word around for about eight months now. He took a Human Sexuality class last semester - curiosity, some answers, maybe just a vague interest in what he could learn from the subject, he couldn’t figure. It was an interesting class, though. And it helped. In ways he didn’t expect. Because that was where this word came from.

He says it out loud to himself sometimes, getting a feel for it. Immediately after the subject came up in class, he’d done a deep dive on the internet. Maybe to see if it was real, if it was something people actually knew existed. Maybe to self identify. Whatever it was, that had kind of helped some, too.

He reads it in forums, talks to a couple people from them because he’s not totally sure that it’s something he wants to throw out in the open yet. It’s a big thing, throwing a label on yourself, giving people a definition of you. Liam knows that.

He’s been so focused on school and on work and on helping his mom that it hasn’t stressed him out much. 

He broke up with his third college girlfriend about a month ago, but he didn’t really feel it anymore. Things weren’t perfect there. Every time he thinks of Vivian his brain just circles back to this word he’s got now anyway.

Asexual.

He remembers it from Biology class, talking about plant cell division and shit. Which is embarrassing, because of all the things to remember when finally finding something he might identify with, it had to be fucking plants, didn’t it? There’s a lot on the internet about asexuality, and it’s all kind of on this spectrum, Liam’s come to find.

It’s the first time he’s really felt like he’s not fundamentally fucked up, though. It’s the first time that he’s realized that he’s not the only person in the world that feels - or doesn’t feel - this way. Which, deep down, he’s smart enough to figure that it’s pretty impossible with the sheer amount of people alive on the planet that he’s the only one. But seeing it made a difference. Hearing from other people who feel the same way made a difference.

He’s been really figuring this all out, this being asexual thing. He feels comfortable with it. For the first time it really is something he can put his finger on. He doesn’t have a sex drive. He doesn’t experience sexual attraction. It happens. He’s not the only one.

It’s nice. In a weird way. To feel like he knows why now.

He’s talked to this girl online; she’s nice, he calls them friends to himself. She realized when she was sixteen that she didn’t want to have sex. Liam relates to her in more ways than he thought he could. Her name is Heather, and she’s from Washington, and he thinks about going to Seattle to meet her someday. If only to thank her for giving him someone to talk through these things with. If only for being herself.

She grew up with a single dad, and Liam recognizes the mild irony in the fact that he grew up with a single mom. However, Heather’s dad is a contractor. He’s never been in close to the same positions that Liam’s mom has been - but how many people really had been, anyway? He tells Heather about his upbringing; what his mom used to do, where they used to live, the way that sexual intimacy has been like a static white noise that numbs the back of his mind. It’s there, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t do anything for him. He can talk about it, he can make himself do it.

But it’s not for him.

She apologizes to him, tells him that she can’t imagine living a life like that. She says ‘that must have been hard’ and Liam thinks that it wasn’t really. He didn’t have a hard life, his life was just different. He was still coming out on the other side alright.

Better now, with this.

AGE 26 [ current ] ( Chicago, Illinois ) --

It’s Pride Month and that’s always felt like a cool time for Liam. He’s got friends and has known a number of people of varying sexual identities and orientations, and it’s a happy time for them. He gets it. Feeling like celebrating your identity. Even if he didn’t for a long time.

He’s not wild about it. He doesn’t parade about, he doesn’t post on social media. He keeps the simple black band ring on his right middle finger. He doesn’t act any different than he normally would. If it comes up, it comes up, and he’s fine with that.

A few weeks back a girl in the bar really hinted at him that she thought they could ‘have a fun night together.’ It was bold, he’d given her that. He’d also, however, told her exactly what she was getting herself into. Or more what she wasn’t getting into, rather.

He’s not embarrassed to say it. It’s been years since he learned the word, since he found this name to a truth about himself. He’s felt freer, somehow, in that time. Having something to call it. Having knowledge of where these feelings - or lack thereof - have come from for most of his life.

It’s Pride Month and he knows that he’s got something to feel prideful for. He knows that he can stand up and shout from rooftops if he wanted to that he’s asexual and that it’s real and that it’s valid.

He doesn’t. He’s passed the point of really needing to.