Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Do you trust her?" Jordan asked quietly. "If she's choosing to stay with you, she's got a reason, she'd rather take the risk. If you still want to be with her, don't give up unless you have to. Being a man, that's ... something nobody else can define for you."

He rubbed a hand over his eyes, pressing his palm briefly against the right one, looking tired. "I'll be okay. Just ... regretting that things didn't go differently. That's all."

Jordan shook his head a little. "It'd been strained for a while. We didn't -- it wasn't anyone else's business if we were having trouble. Enough people were kind of weird about it anyway, they would've been happy to be smug assholes if they knew anything was wrong. We thought, I thought we could still patch things up. Work it out." He looked off into the night and rubbed a hand over his eyes again. "In the end, I realized that I couldn't see any way things would get better if I stayed, and if that ended up screwing up what they still had, I never would've been able to forgive myself. So I left. I'd rather see them happy together without me than see everything fall apart."

He took a careful, slow breath, looked at Melvin again. "I'm not going to get into the details," he said. "It wasn't entirely my fault, but it wasn't all theirs either. Just ... too many differences, after all. We're still friends, even if it's still weird and awkward and painful. It'll get better with time. I hope."

Jordan blinked at Melvin. "Guess we were keeping it quiet pretty well," he said, and wondered why that didn't feel better. "I thought it was pretty obvious that there was something wrong but that must have been because I knew there was." He sighed.

"Sure," he answered. "I'm not doing anything else." And company helped to keep him from getting too bogged down in his own thoughts, even if they were talking about it.

Jordan smiled painfully. "I'm hoping Rep will quit digging in his heels about that now." Do you think you can walk down the aisle and make promises, the way things are? And he hadn't been able to argue the point, hadn't tried to explain that he felt like he'd already made his promises, that that was why he'd never been too worried about the wedding itself. Maybe it was just as well. If they'd made formal vows already, walking away would have killed him.

He breathed in the smell of soil and greenery as they entered the greenhouse, obscurely comforted by a smell he associated with childhood, with visiting plant nurseries as his mother picked out plants and supplies for the garden, time spent wandering among rows of plants with Andy tagging after him and asking endless obnoxious questions. Sometimes you didn't know you missed something until you found it again.

It looked like Melvin had made a corner of the greenhouse into an impromptu living space. That made sense. When everything in your own room reminded you, having somewhere else to go helped; maybe the memories that lingered here were different, the kind that soothed the pain of absence a little. He took the indicated chair and accepted the glass Melvin handed him. "Here's to coping mechanisms," he said, wryly.

"If that's where the fight brings me," Jordan said, and took a mouthful of the liquor, swallowing down the guilt with it. Maybe if he'd been there more consistently -- he couldn't afford to get stuck in a loop of what-if and maybe, he reminded himself, and drank again, coughing a little after he swallowed. "I don't think they'll turn it down. We're still sorting things out, but we're not, well. I don't want to say there's no anger, but we don't hate each other. It's ... there's less strain, without the expectations. The history's still there, it's not, it's not fixed. But there's less resentment, maybe." He tipped his head back, closing his eyes and feeling the first creeping edges of a buzz settling in.

He sighed deeply. "Please don't repeat any of this," he said, opening his eyes again. "I don't think I really have to say that, but it's still none of anyone's goddamn business. I don't like people knowing how I feel about anything and everything."

"It was complicated," Jordan said, and sighed heavily. "It is complicated. I wasn't happy and I didn't actually realize it." He sipped the whiskey, more slowly this time. "It was good for a while. For a long time." He half-smiled. "Harrison's default setting is grumpy. You know him for a while, you learn the different variants of the grumpy face."

He nodded at Melvin's assurances and ran his thumb along the rim of the glass. "Didn't really think you would. Just being sure. If Rin was here, I mean, I'd expect you to talk to her, but that's different."

"He's not antisocial," Jordan mused, taking another drink and thinking aloud through the fuzz starting to affect the edges of his thoughts. "Just ... straightforward. Cynical, I guess." He doesn't trust easily. He wasn't drunk enough to say that out loud, was grateful for that.

Melvin sounded inclined to talk about himself and Rin, and Jordan looked over at him curiously. "Not like other couples?" he repeated.

"Nothing wrong with being a private person," Jordan shrugged. He sipped his drink, eyes distant. "All of us have things we don't want to let people see. For all kinds of reasons. Because it'll hurt, because we have our pride, because it just, because it doesn't match the rest of what people see. Like wearing clothes. We could walk around naked but we don't want everyone looking at that." A soft huff of laughter. "Well, all right, some people do, but that's literal nudity, not the metaphor."

He looked over at Melvin. "Are you embarrassed to be with her?" As though she wasn't dead, as though she was coming back, but that was how they were talking right now, that was how Melvin needed to deal with it. If he didn't settle how he'd thought of Rin, it would be all the worse when reality forced its way in.