Maz Monologue

"You both hate people." It was the first thing he could think of, and it came almost too abruptly. They would've both agreed with him too, Jack thought, but that didn't stop him from cringing a little at what would've been an insult to just about anyone else.

He set one mug in front of Jasper and perched sideways on his chair with the other cradled precariously in his palm, like a beer can, elbows on his knees, eyeing the boy across from him with new scrutiny. Maz wouldn't have approved. Even in a fantasy world where it was remotely possible he could've brought his attention to Jasper as a friend, let alone a significant other, he would've hated his sullen eyes, his bitter tongue. His quietness. He would've hated anyone who reminded him of himself.

He pursed his lips in mock thought. It was an easy question with an easy answer: Maz was hidden. He only spoke when he thought he needed to. He flinched when strangers touched him. Jack had watched him bleed carelessly and shake in the car after a fight, drunker than even Jack had ever been, his eyes blown weirdly wide and misty and catching everything and anything around him that moved, like a dog waiting to be hit. He was always bruised. He revealed pieces of himself erratically, which then appeared erratically: …show more content…
Jasper wasn't half as inexplicable as Maz - he didn't disappear like a stray for days on end, didn't wind up on Jack's couch in the middle of the night, looking on the verge of collapse without a word on the matter - but Jack worried. He worried when Jasper loathed his touching; when he was stiff and soundless in the bed beside him; when he looked so out of place among the Uptowns, so unhappy-looking, still, with everything he could've wanted laid out before him like that. When Jack's every push and pull led him no deeper than he'd gone with any other boy from a faraway city he'd only seen in glossy photographs and