Talker's Redemption (4 page)

“
You and Brian weren’t together at this time?” Dr. Sutherland’s voice was surprised—as he should be. Talker would have been ten-thousand kinds of fool to not know Brian really was Prince Charming, right? Turns out, Talker was twenty-thousand kinds of fool, because he’d walked out on Prince Charming to go get his cherry popped by Snidely Whiplash.

And Brian saved him again. “Tate still thought I was straight,” he said softly. “My bad. I… I didn’t come out very convincingly at first.”

The doctor frowned, as though knowing there was a story here and not sure if he wanted to chicken-walk into it, or stick to his guns. He finally just nodded at Tate to carry on.

“I… I kept thinking about Brian,” Tate confessed. Brian didn’t know this. Didn’t he deserve to know this? “I… you didn’t see how he looked as I walked out the door. He….” An apologetic glance at Brian, who was looking at him like he held water in his cupped hands as they stood in the middle of the desert. “He looked at me like I was worth something. Like it hurt him to watch me leave. Like he was worried about me.” Brian made a tiny sound then—a sound almost like Sunshine the rat, except sadder. “So I decided to come home.”

Brian sucked in a breath, and Tate risked a look at him. “You never told me that,” he muttered, his low voice broken like a fire grate.

Talker shrugged. “It seemed like some useless information,” he said, and Brian shuddered, all over, and swallowed. Talker had seen Brian cry once, and only once. It had been the night they’d gotten together, the night Brian had shaved his head to a Mohawk and put on makeup and combat boots and tried to convince Tate that yes, his roommate was gay, and
yes, dammit!!!
he was very much in love with Tate Walker. So Brian was pretty good at keeping it low key, keeping it together, not letting anything hang out.

But it was hard, a struggle, something that hurt to watch, as Brian swallowed and swallowed and willed his face into its usual placid, stoic expression. Finally, he got hold of the quiver in his lip and said, “Not to me. Not useless to me,” before he took Tate’s hand and kissed it, gently, and then looked away, to the same pile of tinsel that Dr. Sutherland had studied with such intensity a few minutes before.

“So if you were going home to Brian, then what happened that night was….”

Tate shrugged, and tried to make it nonchalant and ironic, like one of those suave movie actors, confessing to hidden, echoing caves of pain in their past with a few, carefree words.

“A misunderstanding,” he said faintly. “It was a misunder-standing.”

He looked
down now at Brian’s shattered face and damaged body. His lips moved, maybe to use the word again, because God knew, it had Brian choking on his own bitterness back in the shrink’s office.

“What?” Lyndie asked. She’d asked him who the bad guys were, and Tate moved his mouth again, maybe to tell her that it was “a misunderstanding,” but he couldn’t. Not when his lover was here, damaged and bleeding, unconscious and in pain. This was no “misunderstanding.” This was retaliation, from a twisted, violent soul.

“Revenge.”

The word was so quiet, for a minute the labored sound of Brian’s breathing silenced it.

Lyndie’s arm went around Tate’s shoulder, and she pulled his bald, Mohawked head down for a kiss. “I didn’t hear you, baby. Tell me again?”

“Revenge,” he said again, louder this time.

“Revenge?” But Lyndie sounded speculative—not surprised. “Somebody getting back at Brian?” she asked carefully, and Tate lost the same battle Brian had won, and his face crumpled like cellophane, and suddenly he was sobbing into Lyndie’s arms.

“Oh God… did everybody know but me?”

Sometime as he was losing it, crying as he hadn’t cried since the same night Brian had, the police officers tried to come in. He never saw the look sweet, fragile-seeming Aunt Lyndie cast over his shoulder to make them go away, but he had the feeling that it was that sort of danger in Brian that had brought them to this pass in the winter as it was.

“So, Talker
, you were in your date’s home, and what happened next?”

Tate shrugged. “We were sitting on the couch, watching a movie, and, you know, suddenly Trev’s all hands. And it’s not like I can blame him, right?”

“I can,” Brian said darkly, and Talker flushed.

“I told him, you know? Not in so many words, but I tried really hard to make it clear that I was looking for….” Talker blushed. “It. Sex. A good time. Whatever.”

“Love,” Brian muttered. “Be honest, dammit.”

Talker was surprised into looking at him, and his lips pulled up into a smile that he’d always hated because his teeth were crooked and his canines were prominent and his teeth were crowded, and no, foster kids didn’t always get taken to the dentist when their wisdom teeth grew in. “Well, if I was, I was looking in the wrong place for it, wasn’t I?”

Aunt Lyndie’s
presence was the right place for love, just like Brian’s was.

Talker calmed down after a while. The dreaded cops had backed off, and were waiting outside of Brian’s room with dark glances and a way of making anyone who tried to visit the room feel unwelcome—even the nurse.

The nurse didn’t “bustle”—in fact, a few years older than Lyndie, with lovely gray eyes in tanned skin, she seemed to radiate a sort of competent serenity, and Talker was grateful.

“With all of that,” she said, after “hmmming” over the pink fluid coming from Brian’s catheter at the foot of the bed, “you’d think this guy was the winner of the fight and not the loser.”

Tate bit his tongue to keep from blurting out, “Yeah, but he won the first one.” Instead, he focused on what she was doing with the catheter bag.

“He’s bleeding,” was what he actually did say.

The nurse turned to him and nodded, keeping her face calm. “Yeah—yeah, he is. But it’s not too bad. The kidneys are sort of fragile that way. They bleed a little with almost any trauma. Sometimes, even putting the catheter in turns the urine pink. So we’re not too worried, not yet.”

Talker nodded. “What are they going to do with his shoulder?”

The nurse sighed. “That’s a tough one. I think, when he’s stabilized a little more, and we’re sure his insides are going to hold up, they’re going to have to operate to repair the ligaments and some of the torn muscles there. That’s going to be an ongoing thing right there—physical therapy, the whole nine yards.”

“It’s gonna hurt,” Tate said quietly, and the nurse nodded sympathetically.

“No two ways about it,” she confirmed.

Tate couldn’t seem to stop stroking Brian’s hand. “He’s tough.”

Brian’s shoulder must have been in agony, that last year on the track team. He’d stayed—by his teeth and nails, but he’d stayed on and thrown, because he wanted the education. Tate remembered Brian’s last meet. Just picking up the shot had made sweat break out on his brow. He’d run and hefted, his body a sturdy miracle of muscles and grace, and the shot had flown like a shooting star. The throw had actually placed second, but it hadn’t mattered. Brian had fallen to his knees quietly as soon as it left his hand, and then, without fuss, he’d blacked out. It had hurt that much, and Brian hadn’t said a word.

The nurse nodded, and recorded something in the chart by the bed. “Well, I hope you’re tough too,” she said frankly. “It’s going to be a long, long haul.”

Tate swallowed, hard. Tough; he dressed tough. The black half-glove to disguise his disfigurement. The tattoo to hide the scars. The Mohawk to hide the fact that his hair grew patchy and uneven on one side of his head. The clothes and the spiked hair and the spiked collars. All of it, all of it, to hide the damage underneath.

“I’ll have to be,” he said through a raw throat. He didn’t have a choice. This was Brian, and Brian deserved to have his dreamboy there, which meant he needed Talker to hold fast, be steady. To be tough.

“So I
stood up and grabbed my coat.” He left out the part about Trevor’s hand down his pants, and how suddenly he couldn’t stand for Trevor to touch him. “I took two steps toward the door, and Trevor says… you know. ‘Where are you going? I thought we were having fun?’ That sort of thing.”

He was leaving a lot out, and Brian probably knew it. But it was so embarrassing—Trevor was such an ass, and Tate had
liked
him. But his actual words—“I know you want it, bitch. Where the fuck do you think you’re going? Man, just drop your pants and let me take that sweet little ass!”—they were just too humiliating. They were unnecessary.

Besides, they weren’t the words that mattered.

Lyndie
made a sound by his side, and Tate looked up to the doorway. The detectives were there, and Tate swallowed down a wave of black nausea. “Be tough,” right?

“Mr. Walker, can we talk to you?”

“Some….” It came out as a whisper, and he firmed his voice up a little more. “Somewhere else.”

The dark-haired one nodded, the bitter one who liked to sneer through the window, and Tate looked at him distrustfully. “Right outside here,” was what he said, and Talker stood up and moved toward the door to the little cubicle, wondering why his knees shook so bad.

Suddenly Lyndie was right there behind him, her fragile, long-fingered artist’s hand tucked into his, and Tate thought he might be able to make it outside of Brian’s room after all.

Still, once he got out there, he stood there with his back up against the glass, like he was trying to pass transparently through it to get closer to Brian.

“We’ve talked to Mr. Roberts,” said the dark-haired detective, “and we just want to make sure we have the whole story.”

“Mr. Roberts?” The name was unfamiliar. “Oh yeah. Jed. I forgot.” Talker swallowed and felt his Adam’s apple bob. “Last names don’t come up a lot in restaurant work, you know? I mean, I don’t think half the people there know my real name. So yeah. Jed. You talked to Jed. He was there. He’ll know.”

Talker half waited for Brian’s subtle touch on his shoulder or his hand, but it didn’t come, and… and… thereyago. He twitched hard enough to jerk his hand from Lyndie’s and bang his head against the plexiglass. He had to work hard to focus through the stars to see the detective with the fair hair who was looking at him with more concern than scorn.

“Kid, what are you on?” the dark-haired guy asked, and Talker twitched—less violently, but it was still a twitch.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “They’ll take away my track scholarship if I do drugs.”

“
You
got a scholarship? You must run like the fucking wind, do you know that?” The dark-haired cop sneered, and Tate felt his face twist into a grimace in return.

“I had to dodge a lot of foster parents to get this fast,” he snapped, and it was only partly a lie. He’d really only needed to run from the one.

But the anger was good—the anger kept him from wilting like a limp dick, letting down Brian, letting down Lyndie—hell, letting down Jed and even the nurse who’d seemed to feel like he’d be there for Brian when he was needed.

The cop rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, cry me a river. You want me to feel bad for you, or you want me to feel bad for the poor meat sack hoping his kidneys didn’t pulp when he got beaten?”

The idea that Tate was responsible for Brian’s still body in the next room sucked all the marrow right out of Talker’s spine. “I want you to make sure that never happens again,” Tate said hollowly, and his vision went gray around the edges. He remembered what it felt like to be the boy in the hospital bed. He’d
been
the boy in the hospital bed. He’d do anything to keep Brian from being that boy… anything.

“Oh God,
Dr. Sutherland. Do I have to finish it? You know what happened. I told you what happened our first day, right?”

They’d gone over session time, but then, they had Sutherland’s last session of the day. Talker was starting to think he’d planned it that way so Talker wouldn’t have an excuse to stop dumping out his spleen on the doctor’s coffee table.

“You said the word, Tate, but you didn’t connect it to yourself. You’ve been in here for six months, talking to me about The Worst. Date. Ever. Now for some people, that means the conversation was boring and they got stuck with the tab. For you, it means you could barely sleep, you started acting out in bizarre sexual ways, and the guy who loves you has lost twenty pounds.” Tate sucked in his breath and looked at Brian with tortured eyes.

Brian grimaced. “I haven’t lost weight, dammit!” he snapped. Then he looked disgruntled, which was something that happened when he couldn’t control his circumstances and was not exactly sure why. “But my chin got sharper. I think it’s a baby-fat thing. It’s like I turned twenty-two and my face grew up.”

Talker grinned at him softly and Brian grinned back. “It suits you,” Tate murmured, and Brian blushed, completely undone in that one small compliment.

“I aim to please,” he said, blushing harder. The doctor let them have their moment. Maybe he was as smart as he seemed, and he knew those little good moments made all the hard bad ones worth it.

But all moments had to end, and Sutherland’s voice was the sinuous voice of the serpent-traitor.

“You love Brian, Tate?”

Tate frowned at the intrusion, and he and Brian turned to face the doctor together. “More than anything,” he answered back, absolutely sure it was the easiest question ever.

“Even your pride? Even your pain? Are sure you really love him?”

Talker’s shoulders got tight, his skin stretching tautly over his right shoulder blade just to make the whole moment more uncomfortable.

“I’d die for him!” And he would. Say the word, there’s Tate Walker, lying down in traffic and throwing his worthless life away so someone as good as Brian could cross the street.

Dr. Sutherland nodded. “Good. I’m glad to hear it. Now would you tell the truth for him?”

Talker’s lungs turned to ice, and he fought off a terrible urge to pee.

“
Kid
, are you all right?” This was the officer with the fair-colored hair, the taller one. He looked younger than the dark-haired one, a family man, maybe. Maybe Talker reminded him of a son or something, but that was unlikely, since Talker had never really been anyone’s son, not since he was six, and wasn’t that a blessing?

“I’m fine,” he croaked, trying to focus, focus. When he was six, he’d learned to go to the place with the music in his head, thanks to that nice nurse with the Walkman, and the music was playing now, now that he was talking to the policemen who weren’t ever really his friends.