Rare (7 page)

W
E
FELL
asleep that night entangled and sated, but all too soon, reality descended and it was time to load up and hit the road.

I borrowed Mick’s rickety old van to move our stuff. Apart from the couch and the massive bed, we didn’t have much. Lucky, really, because on the day, it was just the two of us. Mick was doing overtime, and Joe had finally gone back to Seattle to deal with his love life. With Charlie in California, there wasn’t really anyone else we could ask. Ash’s colleagues were all working, and I would’ve had trouble explaining to mine why there was only one bed.

Everything went smoothly right up until the last of our stuff was loaded onto the van and I realized I’d neglected to consider how Ash was going to travel to the new place.

In all the time we’d been together, I’d never managed to get Ash in a car or an elevator. He had serious issues with confined spaces; he wouldn’t even get on a bus. The L train was a bizarre exception to the rule, and the only reason he’d get on that was because he used to sleep on the subway in Philadelphia. For a homeless kid in a bustling, dangerous city, it was one of the safest places to sleep.

I froze with one foot in the van as I realized my mistake. Behind me, Ash let out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl. He slammed the exterior door to our old apartment, stomped passed me, and got straight into the passenger seat.
Well, okay, then
. I climbed in the driver side, eying him, and put the keys in the ignition. “You okay?”

Ash slumped down and pulled his hood over his face. “Just drive. If I can get on a plane, I can sit in a van for twenty minutes.”

I’d forgotten about that, and it was actually going to take the best part of an hour to drive to the new place, but I kept quiet. Lacking any better ideas, I gunned the engine and put the van in gear.

We drove to the new place in complete silence; me distracted by wrestling with Mick’s decrepit old clunker, and Ash by whatever was going on behind his hood. He was out of the van like a shot when it pulled to a stop, but as he leapt to the ground and his hood fell back, he didn’t seem unduly affected by his brief confinement. As I followed him to the back of the van, it occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t been as ditzy as me, and he’d prepared himself. He’d had a therapy appointment the previous day, and I’d learned long ago that as far as his work with Dr. Gilbert was concerned, anything was possible. Without her skillful probing, I’d probably never have known that somehow, inexplicably, he knew how to drive.

“
Pete
?”

“What?”

Ash shoved a box into my arms. “Do you need to take a nap or something?”

“No—” I caught myself before I could snap right back at him. Moving was stressful enough without us bickering like an old married couple. “I’m tired,” I said instead. “As soon as we get the bed in, I’m going to pass out.”

I was joking, but Ash nodded and looked relieved. He was used to me bitching when I’d worked all night, and he probably couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Shame it didn’t turn out as easy as all that.

Stupid fucking bed. I remembered buying it with my ex-girlfriend like it was yesterday. I’d known even then that it was going to come back to haunt me. We parted ways before she ever spent a night in it, but I still took her name in vain as we wrestled it into the building. We had to take it apart in the end, or rather, I did. Ash was too busy moving everything else and scowling at the musty green walls in the living room. I knew they’d be white by the end of the week. He had a thing for white walls.

I was way past the point of daylight rest by the time Ash appeared in the bedroom doorway with takeout, beer for me, and cherry soda for him. I accepted a cold bottle with a weary grin. “Okay?”

Ash hummed his answer and dropped down onto the floor beside me. “Yeah. I’ve unpacked most of it, but there are still some boxes in the spare room. I’ll do them in a bit.”

“Leave them. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Ash shook his head. He didn’t care for clutter. “Nah, I’ll do it tonight; it won’t take long. Hey, where do you buy a bed from?”

I swallowed a mouthful of Chinese pork. It was good, but I knew we were going to miss Mario’s, the pizza place we’d practically lived at in Lincoln Park. “A bed? Are you leaving me?”

Ash grinned. “Never. I want to put a bed in the spare room for Joe. I can put the futon on the roof, and I’ve got some money in that savings account you set up for me.”

Knowing him, he probably had a whole heap of cash squirreled away, but I’d teased him about that a few weeks ago; he wouldn’t put up with it again so soon. Besides, he was right. Joe had slept on our couch for far too long. When he dragged his ass back from Seattle, it would be nice to have somewhere to put him.

I peered into the container he was picking at. “You’ve got two choices: a department store or the Internet. What the hell are you eating?”

“Dragon Chicken.”

“Is it spicy?”

Ash licked his lips. “Yeah. I should’ve figured. I just liked the name.”

I rolled my eyes while he mulled over his options. I knew he’d discount them both. He hated computers, but he despised shopping even more. It took me a moment to realize he was indirectly asking me to do it for him.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” I said. “I suck at bed shopping. How do you think we ended up with that obnoxious thing in the first place?”

He ran his tongue over his lips again, and I knew I was fucked. I held my ground for a while, but he had his ways of persuading me. He brought a piece of hellfire-hot chicken to my mouth and pushed it in, then licked the sauce off my lips. Dinner was quickly forgotten, but later, as he dozed beside me, naked and serene, it wasn’t long before I reached for my laptop and ordered him the bed.

T
HE
NEXT
few weeks were busy. If I wasn’t working or schlepping across the city, I was fixing up some part of the new place. All things considered, we settled in well, but as I’d predicted, the commute to the firehouse was killing me. I lost count of the times Ash got up to find me passed out on the couch in my uniform. It worried him, I could tell, but there was no way around it. I had to work, so I had to travel.

I held that stance for weeks, until a call came in that made me question why I was fighting for a job that was sucking the life out of me.

We lost a baby that shift. It was a strangely warm day for the last days of fall. I remembered the sun melting away some of the fatigue in my bones. Then we walked into one of the most horrific cases of neglect I’d ever seen, and rather than puking my lunch into the gutter, like Mick did, I felt nothing. I accepted it, and
that
made me sick, eventually, at least.

The next day I got up with renewed conviction that something had to change. I was in the middle of signing myself up for an online nurse/medic bridge course when Ash wandered into the living room with a plastic box of art supplies. I shut my laptop with a snap. No point stressing him out until I was sure of my path. “What’s all that?”

He put the box down on the coffee table and opened it. “My school stuff.”

Curious, I pushed myself up from the couch and set my laptop aside. Ash had been acing his night course until his past caught up with him. He’d dropped out to concentrate on his recovery, and he’d never mentioned a desire to return. “Are you thinking of enrolling again?”

“Maybe.” He flipped through one of the books. “But not to do this crap. It wasn’t really me.”

I’d have to take his word for that. Art went over my head. Ash sensed my predicament and handed me the open sketchbook. “What do you see when you look at that?”

I stared at the drawing. It wasn’t done in his usual pencil style, though I couldn’t tell what he’d used. I looked at it long and hard until I realized what I was looking at, or, rather
who
.

I inhaled sharply. “Fuck. Is that…?” Ash nodded and confirmed that I was indeed looking at a picture of Daryl Hunter, the man who’d almost certainly sexually abused him. “But why? I don’t understand. When did you draw this?”

Ash pointed to the corner of the page. Shocked, I cursed again. The drawing was dated months before he’d flipped his shit, months before the horrors of his past collided with his present and we discovered that the man raping and murdering street kids in the park, right here in the city, was the same man who’d abused Ash in foster care.

“I must have seen him somewhere,” Ash said, reading my mind. “He was in Chicago then, wasn’t he?”

I nodded, suppressing a shudder. Knowing that creep had been within spitting distance of Ash all that time still made me sick. If the police hadn’t shot him dead, I would have killed the motherfucker myself. I took a silent deep breath, forcing myself to focus on the present. The past was the past. I couldn’t change it. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I was drawing him all wrong,” he said as if that explained everything. “If I’d drawn him the way I should have, I’d have known he was bad.”

I frowned, trying to unravel his words. “You think that if you’d been drawing the way you wanted to, you’d have figured it out sooner?”

Ash shrugged. “I doubt it’s as simple as that, but before, I’d always muddled through stuff in my head by drawing it. When I drew this, it didn’t work because I was trying to do it the way a book told me to. It wasn’t me.”

I didn’t get it, but I knew enough to know that art wasn’t something Ash
did
. It was a part of him, something he
needed
to do. His work was cathartic. There’d been times when it was the only way he could communicate. Though the sketch of Daryl Hunter horrified me, I was pleased that he was considering going back to school. For a while he’d seemed to lose the tentative confidence he’d had before he got ill. It was encouraging to see a glimpse of it now.

Ash left for work, and after spending a few hours reminding myself why I hated academics, I called it quits and headed out to see my mom.

It was good to see Maggie, even when I sensed her disappointment that I was alone. “Quit looking over my shoulder,” I teased her in
very
rough Italian. “You saw him yesterday.”

Maggie sighed and poked my arm. “But he’s so happy at the moment, I want to keep him.”

I laughed. “Well, you can’t have him; he’s mine.”

My mom sighed again, but she changed the subject and started prattling on about something else. The soft grin on my face remained, though. It was nice to hear that Ash was happy. I knew his mood could drop at any moment, but it was good to know the move had worked for him. It made every shred of fatigue worthwhile.

Maggie filled me with Italian peasant food before I kissed her good-bye and dragged my ass back out to work. It was a quiet shift—a few heart attacks, an overdose, a severed finger. I got covered in blood and called a prick, but nothing exciting enough to keep me awake; nothing rewarding enough to stop the ever-growing part of me that hated my job.

It was the early hours of the morning by the time I made it home. I crept through the apartment. I was still getting used to the new place and had to be careful not to sleepwalk straight into the furniture.

I found Ash fast asleep in bed when I got out of the shower. Like I did most nights when I came home late, I gazed at him for a long moment. Even when I was dog tired, watching him sleep was often all I needed to wind down, but I wasn’t feeling it tonight. I felt on edge.

As if he could sense my agitation, Ash shifted and rolled onto his side. He shuddered and made a sound halfway between a gasp and a cough. Alarmed, I dropped my shirt on the floor and shot across the room to get to him. I shook him. It was folklore that you should never wake someone from a nightmare, or perhaps it was sleepwalking, but I didn’t care. What was the point in him going through something like that if he didn’t have to? “Ash, wake up.”

He fought me at first, but as I knew he would, he jumped awake a few seconds later, bolting upright. “What? What? What is it?”

I took my hands off him, leaning away to give him space. “Nothing. You were having a funny dream.”

“Was I?”

I shrugged as I realized he didn’t look distressed, just uncertain and relieved. “I think so. Do you feel okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He seemed confused, and I felt bad for making him doubt himself. The recurrent nightmares he suffered were bad enough without me creating imaginary ones for him. “Sorry. I must have my night-shift crazy on.”

Ash flopped back down on the bed with a smile. “S’okay. Means I get to see you a day early.”

I slid under the covers and slung my arm over his chest, but as I did, I noticed again that something didn’t feel quite right. “Are these new sheets?”

“Mmm-hmm. Ellie sent them as a housewarming gift. They’re black.”

I considered that as I got myself comfortable. Predictably, Ash had painted the bedroom walls pure white a few days before. With the dark wood floors and black sheets, the room was going to look kinda funky. “Did you call her?”

The pillows rustled as he shook his head. “No. She was caught up when I spoke to her last.”

Under the covers, I found his hand and gave it a squeeze. Ellie was his best friend and she’d been gone for a while. Although I knew he didn’t talk about the big stuff with her, she had been a constant presence in his life. He had to be missing her, especially as he knew she was confronting something she’d spent her whole life afraid of.

Ash squeezed back and let go to put his arm around me. “Hey, guess what?”

I peeled open my heavy eyes. “What?”

“Joe’s back. And he’s not alone. He said he’s going to come by tomorrow, but I’ll be at the old shop till late. You’ll have to tell me if his girl’s as hot as he says she is.”

I chuckled, tracing my hand over his stomach in idle patterns. “No one’s as hot as he says she is. Those chicks don’t exist.”

I
WAS
on the verge of doing serious damage to the bathroom when Joe appeared the following day. The pipes were new, but they’d been badly fitted and didn’t work as well as they should. I’d spent the morning reconstructing the hot water system, and by the time Joe disturbed me, I was about to chuck the whole lot out of the window.