Wicked Games: Chapter 1

August 2022
Bentham, Maine


Sören Sigurðsson was pissed off.

He'd just returned home from the dentist. Nobody liked going to the dentist, unless they had some sort of masochistic fetish about it, but today's visit was worse than he was expecting. He had gone in for what he thought was tooth pain and it turned out to be a gum infection instead. It was, in fact, gingivitis, the first stage of periodontal disease. Reversible, but he would need a series of deep cleans followed by more frequent maintenance, for the next while.

He was only forty-two - he'd be forty-three in November - and a bit young for this... but he knew early periodontal disease was one more "gift" of Ehlers-Danlos. His body was breaking down more and more, and he was tired of it. He resented the unpleasant dental work coming up, because his body betrayed him in so many ways.

To add fuel to the fire of his bad mood, his cab had been an hour late - which kicked up his anxiety. Then the cab had run into traffic on the way back from Portland, which had made him even later. His tuxedo cat, Snúður, greeted him at the door, meowing like he hadn't eaten all day, even though Sören had only been gone a few hours and fed the cat before he left.

"Jaeja," Sören said, cane clacking on the hardwood floor as he made his way to the kitchen. Snúður led the way, tail high in the air, meowing every few steps. Sören couldn't help smiling a little at his cat - but also felt guilty for being gone so long. He knew he shouldn't feel that guilty, but he doted on his cat, who didn't like him being gone. Not that Sören left the house much these days.

Sören opened up a can of food... and his thumb bent the wrong way with a crunch - the one day he hadn't worn his finger braces because of metal and x-rays, and of course this happened. Sören swore under his breath, tried to get the food dished out for the cat, and then, swearing some more, found a bag of frozen peas in his freezer and sat down on the couch to ice his hand. Today was already bad enough, dealing with yet another fucking sprain from his hypermobility felt like adding insult to injury.

He looked at the time. It was almost five. As if on cue, his stomach growled - it didn't help that he was hungry, which was making him more irritable; he hadn't eaten before the dentist appointment. But he still felt too hopped up on adrenaline to make himself something to eat just yet. He needed to calm down first.

Sören decided on a bath. With his newly sprained, smarting thumb, it was a bit of an ordeal to get undressed and take off the braces he wore to help with joint support with the hypermobility, but he managed, and took out his special lavender bath salts to spoil himself a little. He took a long look in the mirror - the sleeve tattoo of flames going up his right arm, the ocean waves on his left arm, his sad brown eyes, full lips framed by a short dark beard, matching the short dark curls atop his head that would be a mop when he used to keep his hair on the long side, before the first few threads of grey began to show themselves. He had a little bit of a dad bod at his age and level of inactivity, though that bothered him less than the top surgery scars - EDS meant he tended to scar badly from fairly minor injuries, and his top surgery scars were hypertrophic, prominent enough that they looked new even though it had been six years. At least his boobs were gone, but the scars made him dysphoric in a different kind of way.

Now they just made him angrier. Yet another way his body had betrayed him, thinking back on how he'd been forced to live as female for the first thirty-two years of his life, all the years he'd felt cheated out of. It didn't matter that many said "life begins at forty", he'd felt old and exhausted by the time his life had truly begun.

"Fuck," Sören said. He used the guard rail to climb into the bathtub, and sank down into the water, hoping to wash the day away.

The heat and the bubbles soothed away some of the tension. Sören leaned back and flexed his toes with a deep sigh, letting his mind go blank, relaxing a little, breathing in the nice lavender scent. He thought about ordering pizza later, so he didn't have to try to cook with his sprained thumb, at least not till tomorrow - he had veggies he needed to use up for a lasagna. But tonight, he was taking off from the world. He worked from home as an album reviewer for Rolling Stone - sometimes they paid for him to go to concerts as well - and he had a couple new albums to listen to and type up a review before the week was over, but he would put that on hold, too. Maybe watch a movie. Maybe -

From across the bathroom, in his jeans pocket, Sören's cell phone rang.

Sören sat up and scowled. Should have turned my fucking phone off. He was not in the mood for this. He knew it could be important - like the dentist's office, or his doctor - but right now, this was his priority.

He leaned back. "Fuck it," he muttered, deciding to ignore it till his bath was over. The phone stopped ringing... and then a few minutes later it began ringing again. Once again Sören sat in the bath, trying to ignore it... and then there was a third round of chiming and buzzing.

With a growl, Sören grabbed onto the guard rail and pulled himself up. He climbed out of the bath and stepped onto the towel. He walked across the towel, dripping, over to his pile of clothes. He pulled out the cell phone just in time for the annoying ringtone and vibration to stop, but his notification showed that all three calls were from the same number. Sören didn't recognize it and dialed it, against his better judgment.

"Hello," came a voice with an American accent that Sören couldn't place. "Is this Katie?"

"Wrong number."

Sören almost threw his phone. He'd gotten out of his bath for that. Just as he was about to get back into the bath, Snúður appeared at the door, meowing for attention.

Sören let the bath drain, toweled off, put his clothes in the laundry hamper, and headed to his bedroom to get in his pajamas. It was one of his older pairs, that Sören hadn't replaced yet - he disliked clothes shopping - and as if things hadn't already gone to hell enough today, the pajama pants ripped over his right knee.

That was it. Sören threw the pajama pants across the room, and then he flopped back on his bed with a growl that scared away the cat, even though he would never hurt an animal. "Sjitt! Þessi fokking dagur getur farið til helvítis! Fjandinn allt! Allt er vonlaust kjaftæði, allan tímann!" Sören had moved to the US the minute he turned eighteen, to get away from his abusive aunt and uncle - though he'd been tempted to move back to Iceland after Trump became president, and hadn't because his aunt and uncle were still alive - and he used English so much that it was rare he blew up in his native language. But here it was. He was like a kettle boiling over.

Sören got a fresh pair of pajama pants - the last clean ones he had before he'd have to do laundry; he was not looking forward to going to the laundromat with a sprained thumb - and then he got up, grabbed his cane, and hobbled as quickly as he could to the kitchen. He began making chamomile tea to try to further calm himself down, but he was getting angrier and angrier and angrier. He recognized it - he was having an autistic meltdown.

He needed some safe way to blow off steam. He decided this called for Deftones, his favorite band. He queued up their White Pony album, turned his stereo on as loud as it could go - and with his surround sound, it was quite loud. He lived in a two-bedroom duplex, and the one next to his had been empty for the last three months, though within the last week new people were moving in, but they were only there intermittently and Sören hadn't seen any sign of them. So it was probably safe to blast his music. Not that he really cared, feeling this exasperated.

When you're ripe
You'll bleed out of control
You'll bleed out of control...

He put "Elite" on repeat - he had a tendency of playing songs on repeat when he was in a mood - and he calmly drank his chamomile tea as Chino Moreno screamed. An hour later, he felt somewhat better, though now his stomach was really growling.

Time for pizza.

Time to be a sad old fuck who eats pizza alone. Sören glared at his laptop as he placed the order.

The next day, Sören went to the laundromat. It was a few days sooner than he would have liked, but having to use his last pair of clean pajama pants after the rip made it a necessity.

It was one of the worst days for it. It was a hot and humid late August day. Sören had moved to Maine in 2013 after he left his ex-husband - he and Seth had lived in California - and part of the draw had been milder weather, but now with climate change Maine felt hotter every year.

Sören took the bus to the laundromat. He didn't drive due to a combination of hand-eye coordination issues, and trauma from Seth having put him in a car accident. Not driving made his life inconvenient, never moreso as when he had to haul his laundry on the bus. He used a mesh laundry bag inside a wheeling suitcase so he could maneuver his cane with his other hand.

What Sören hated even more than taking his laundry on the bus, were the looks he got whenever he took the bus. At least he knew most of those people weren't clocking him as AFAB - he'd come out as trans in 2013 after he left Seth, and had started T in 2015, and had the top surgery in 2016, and though he was said to be "pretty" with his lips, he had a beard and he was five-ten barefoot; he was stealth. But the cane he walked with after having repeated knee injuries from hypermobility, attracted unwanted attention, mockery and pity. Sometimes he could zone out with his headphones and ignore everyone till he got to his stop, and sometimes he couldn't. Today was one of those days where he couldn't, and glared back at the people staring at the tattooed guy with the cane, the elbow and finger braces and the suitcase.

The bus stop was a block away from the laundromat. EDS made it harder for Sören to regulate his own body temperature and by the time he arrived at the laundromat he was dripping sweat. The increased heat and humidity inside the laundromat was almost unbearable, and Sören was going to have to stay here for the next few hours to get his laundry done. He had a bottle of Gatorade in his messenger bag along with a plastic bag of laundry detergent pods, and once his clothes were in the wash, he downed the Gatorade right away. He was still parched, and went across the laundromat to the vending machine for another one, this one cold. He cringed at the prices on the vending machine. He made decent money from Rolling Stone and the occasional sale of his paintings and pottery - art was what he really wanted to do with his life, but reviewing music was what paid the bills - but he had grown up in poverty due to his guardians' alcoholism and he erred on the side of being thrifty...

...like letting his old pajama pants go for years and not buying new ones. Sören heaved a gusty sigh as he sank back down and stared up at the TVs. Fox News was on. Maine was a liberal state but there were still pockets of MAGA people around here. Sören shifted uncomfortably in his seat and reached for a magazine - there was a Rolling Stone. He always felt weird about seeing his name in print.

Not as weird as if he was still Sigrit Sigurðsdóttir. He'd taken the name Sören after his great-grandfather, when Iceland was still under Danish rule and Danish names were more common. It also seemed fitting, for Kierkegaard, when Sören had struggled with suicidal levels of depression since he was an orphaned, abused, bullied child. Sigrit felt like somebody else's life, but he was still traumatized enough that his lonely little life in a sleepy town in Maine, an endless series of small aggravations, felt like a major improvement.

Time wore on, and Sören got an iced tea and fought the urge to throw things at Fox News. Even American liberals were too conservative for him, with his Nordic socialist background, but the MAGA crowd was the worst. His laundry couldn't be done fast enough.

Finally, he had clean clothes. He felt agitated from hours of sitting in the hot, damp laundromat with Fox News blaring - his hypervigilance wouldn't let him wear headphones in a public place - and the sweaty walk to the bus stop. He felt sticky, he smelled like gym socks, and he was exhausted from being out all day. And now he really had to pee, from all the Gatorade and iced tea.

There was a note on his front door. Sören braced himself, hoping this wasn't from his landlord - he really didn't want to deal with twenty-four hours notice for maintenance workers, with the week he was having - and it wasn't. The note was on pale blue paper, in black ink written in an old-fashioned cursive hand that surprised Sören.

Hey man, I love Deftones, but I didn't love hearing them for an hour on full blast yesterday. Could you keep it down?

-Mark

Sören's jaw dropped. So that was his new neighbor. Sören glanced over and saw a black Toyota Tacoma truck sitting in the driveway.

Sören thought about knocking on the door to apologize - he really didn't want problems with his neighbors - but he'd been around people all day between the bus and the laundromat and his anxiety was getting the better of him.

Sören went to the bathroom, took a shower, then he put on fresh clean pajamas and fed the cat and had some sparkling water as he checked his e-mails. He needed to get to those album reviews, and he was going to have to be more quiet about it.

When he'd decompressed a bit, he started dinner. He'd been planning a homemade veggie lasagna as a treat to himself for getting through the dental appointment - and now, the news that he was going to need a lot of them. He put on the first of his to-do list - Megan Thee Stallion's Traumazine. He mostly listened to metal and hip-hop - his "brand" as a reviewer was as a hip-hop head - and he had been impressed with Megan Thee Stallion's work thus far; his claim to fame was making a Bohemian Rhapsody mashup of "WAP" to troll the obnoxious Ben Shapiro. Even though he kept the music at what he considered a normal volume, he still felt a touch of paranoia about this Mark guy in the duplex next door. Once again, he thought about going over to introduce himself and apologize, but he would have to put on pants. Fuck pants, he thought to himself.

He had enough to make two lasagnas, however, and that was what he did - working more slowly than usual because of his sprained thumb. He hoped that the gesture would be appreciated, for all the trouble he was going to.

He re-listened to the album when it was done - he usually gave an album at least three listens before he wrote a review - and once again he felt that stab of anxiety about whether or not having songs on repeat was annoying Mark.

After the lasagnas were ready, he let them cool, and then he put one in a covered dish and scrawled on a post-it note:

Sorry about the noise. Enjoy!

-Sören

He took the lasagna outside, walked around to the other duplex, put the lasagna on the COME BACK WITH A WARRANT mat - the mat made him smile - and then he rang the doorbell and shuffled off as quickly as he could, before Mark could see him in pajamas. Then he turned off the lights and drew the curtains, just in case Mark decided to come over to thank him, even though he knew it was ridiculous to pretend to not be home when he'd just had music going and had just rung the doorbell to drop off a fresh lasagna.

Snudur climbed on him for pettings, and then tried to beg for lasagna. "You're such an attention whore," Sören said affectionately as he threw one of Snúður's toy mice to distract him. Snúður trotted back with the mouse in his mouth and bounced on him with a chirp, making Sören spill food on his shirt. His clean shirt.

Of course. Sören got the mental image of Sisyphus rolling his boulder uphill, but at least his cat was cute about it. "Attention. Whore." Sören threw the mouse again. Then he chuckled, thinking of Megan Thee Stallion. "There's some hoes in this house."

Not that he'd been one himself, for some time. He'd dated women exclusively after the divorce from Seth, but his last relationship had ended badly two years ago after the pandemic started, and in any case he wasn't sexually attracted to women - he strongly preferred men, but it had been "easier" to date women as a masc AFAB guy... until it wasn't. He ached for queer male love, and on days like this where he was eating yet another lonely dinner and wished he had someone to cuddle with and rub his back, that ache was especially sharp.

Sören paused his dinner to give Snúður a hug, savoring the moment of Snúður's loud purr and kneading, Snúður rubbing his wet nose against his face. Everything felt like hopeless bullshit, but at least he had his cat.

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