Talker's Redemption (6 page)

“Talker,” Tate said, wondering if he could get a glass of water. His mouth felt gritty, like he’d been chewing latex.

“Talker? Really?”

Lyndie bristled and looked like she was going to go after him again, so the blond guy put his hands out and backed down.

“Okay, Talker. I’m Detective Melville—”

“Like
Moby Dick?”
Really? Anything that blew through his spasming brain was fair game? Good to know.

But it seemed to put Melville at ease. “Yeah, you read it?”

“English thirty-A, Introduction to American Lit, Professor Kay Glowes. What was your question?”

Lyndie looked behind her shoulder at him, her lined face contrasting with the wealth of dyed black hair that rippled down her back. She smiled wryly, and for a second, just a bare second, Tate felt like he could hold it together, and then he realized that it was Brian’s smile, and his hands started shaking all over again.

“Okay, Talker, who took English thirty-A, why were you laughing a minute ago? I’ve got to tell you, man, it didn’t sound sane.”

Jeremy
spoke in… class today….

Brian’s shoulders shook, and it looked like he was laughing, but he was wiping his eyes with the back of his hands like a little kid. “That doesn’t mean you wanted it!” he said, his voice so gruff and choked it practically tickled Tate’s toes.

“I told everybody I wanted it!” Tate snarled back. “I told
you!”

“And you don’t get to change your mind?”

Tate had never seen Brian angry before, and Brian’s shout almost unmade him. “Don’t yell at me!” He cringed, hurt. Brian darted his eyes from the door to Talker to the shrink, and he still seemed to know that the only thing Talker wouldn’t forgive was if he bailed.

“Well then, don’t laugh about it,” he said after a moment, hiding his face in his hands. “You asked to be treated decent, like a person. Don’t laugh about it.”

“C’mon, Brian—you’ve got to admit, it’s a little bit funny.”

Brian looked at him with swollen, red eyes and tears and snot and pain running down his pretty, American-boy-freckled face. Suddenly he got self-conscious and used the inside of his plain T-shirt to wipe himself off. He held up his hand to Talker’s cheek, the damaged one, and wiped with his thumb. His hand came away wet and his thumb was smeared with the eyeliner that Tate used on both eyes to hide the fact that the lid on his right side was slightly misshapen. He’d lost some vision in that eye, but not all. He’d been lucky.

Jeremy spoke in… spoke in….

“Look at us, baby,” Brian pleaded. “Look at us here. Are we even a little bit funny?”

Class today….

“It was
funny that you thought Trev was my boyfriend,” Talker said, thinking that he
couldn’t
think. They already knew, right? They knew it was Trev. They knew Brian had beat him up first. Maybe, if they knew Brian had a reason, maybe if they knew
that,
then Brian wouldn’t get into trouble. Maybe if they knew how afraid he was, how afraid he was, how afraid he was… oh God… how long could he hold it together?

“He’s not your boyfriend now? Or he never was?”

Talker started to shake, shake hard. “He never was,” he muttered. “Never my boyfriend, never even my friend….”

“
C’mon
, you sweet little bitch, c’mon….”

“Jesus, Trev, use some fucking… ouch! Fucking ouch! Some fucking lube, goddammit! Ouch… fuck, Trev, it fucking hurts! Stop it!”

“Just like you want it!”

“I don’t want it! No! Stop it! Dammit!”

And the little voice in his head, the one that screamed when his heart was jagged, shrieking…
Jeremy spoke in…class today….

“
Yeah
, kid? How are we supposed to believe that? What can you possibly say to convince us…?”

“
What
did you say, Tate?”

“C’mon, Doctor Sutherland!”

“The guy was hurting you, wasn’t he? He was hurting you, and you asked to leave, and you were fighting him, right?”

“He had me pinned! He’s really strong, almost as strong as Brian, but Brian tries not to hurt anybody, and I couldn’t move my neck or my shoulders and it hurt….”

…spoke in, spoke in… Jeremy spoke in….

“He wanted
to fuck me, but I didn’t want him....” Could he make this reasonable? Could he even make sense at
all?

“Yeah? Fucking convince us!”

“So what
did you say?”

Jeremy spoke in… class today….

Detective Melville
was trying to stop his dark-haired partner from getting in Tate’s face, and Tate was trying to claw his way through the back of the wall and get to Brian.

“You don’t like our version of it, Talker, you’ve got to give us another version, okay?” Melville’s voice was gentle, but nothing in Talker was gentle right now, nothing in Talker was gentle that night with Trev, nothing in Talker was gentle talking about it, nothing was gentle, nothing was peaceful, nothing was—

“STOP IT! I SAID NO!”

His
throat was raw, because he’d screamed it, and the stucco/Plexiglas was sliding past his head like a child’s playground ride, and he thumped to his ass as a queasy miasma soaked through his vitals, inescapable and horrible. “I said no,” he repeated weakly. “I told Trevor ‘No!’”

And then he leaned over and puked all over Detective Henries’ shoes.

The
confusion was exquisite.

Henries was trying to claw his way out of his shoes and screaming obscenities at Talker, Melville was yelling at him for clarification, the nurses had all scattered for some towels and a mop bucket, and Lyndie….

Lyndie was crouched right next to him and leaning her forehead against his temple and humming. Talker was humming too.

“‘Try to forget this’,” he muttered and heard Lyndie hum in counterpoint. “‘Try to erase this… from the blackboard….’”

“That’s a sad song,” Lyndie murmured, and he nodded.

“You know that one?” he asked, a little surprised. The chaos jumbled around them, but he and Aunt Lyndie, they were good.

“I do,” she said softly. “How ’bout you listen to mine, okay?”

After a minute, Talker managed to tune out everything but her soft humming. Jeremy’s screams for attention were drowned out by something he’d heard a long time ago but couldn’t place.

“Pretty song, Aunt Lyndie,” he murmured, and she rubbed her temple with him again.

“Used to sing it to Brian, right after his parents died,” she murmured. She kept her voice low, and her mouth right near his ear, so it was like a bubble, just the two of them, Talker, and this nice woman who had defended him like a mama bear. “I’m not religious, you know, but the tune is pretty, and the idea that God dances, that’s pretty too. It used to make Brian feel better when he was sad.”

There was a sudden quiet, and Tate wondered if the chattering of his teeth could echo down the corridor. “It’s w-w-working, for me ttt…ttoo,” he said after a tight, strung-out moment. He relaxed his jaw just a smidge. “Do you think they’d let me get up and shower?”

Lyndie glared up at the two surprised policemen who had stopped shouting and were just looking at the two of them, like they were trying to get in their bubble. “Yeah, baby—I think puking is a pretty good way of getting them to back the fuck off. But the nurse asked me if you wanted a sedative first, what do you say?”

Talker blinked. His shakes were easing up, and the black spots in front of his eyes were starting to clear. “I don’t want to be a victim,” he said quietly. There was a doctor coming down a corridor with a vial and a syringe, and Tate had to say it louder.

“I don’t want to be a victim!” The silence became listening, and he looked at the doctor. “Please don’t dope me up. Brian’s still waiting for surgery… I’ll… I’ll clean up. I’ll get changed. I’ll… Jesus… oh Jesus, I’ll calm the fuck down. Just… don’t stick that in my arm.” He shuddered and looked at Lyndie pleadingly.

“I’m not afraid of needles,” he said, and she nodded her head soberly. “I’m not. I… you know,” he said conversationally, “I spent a year in a hospital when I was a kid. I’ve been back. I don’t like them, but, you know, I can deal. I just… I don’t want to be out of it here. I don’t want… I don’t want the world to have the upper hand.”

Brian’s Aunt Lyndie nodded and glared up at the cops. “Did we hear that, detectives?” she asked, her voice brittle. “No sedatives. No bastards yelling in his face. He wants a shower and a little fucking respect, and then maybe you’ll get an answer we can all live with. Talker didn’t hurt anybody, right?
He
was the one who got hurt, and you two bozos need to remember that!”

“We’re sorry, ma’am,” Melville said, backing off. He cast a baleful look to where Henries was trying to wipe off the tops of his shoes with a towel held by the faintly amused nurse.

“You fucking should be!” Lyndie snapped, and then she stood and offered her hand to Tate. Tate took her up on it and stood, and then turned his back on the cops and the corridor and the chaos. Lyndie took him past Brian’s room, and then up to a bemused nurse. “He says you’ve got shower cubicles?”

The nurse nodded, gave them directions, and then, to Tate’s eternal gratitude, produced some scrubs and some sample shampoos from the nurse’s station. Lyndie set him up at the shower, and told him she’d be back in a minute, and he got to spend twenty minutes in a cubicle, covered in blessed, glorious, hot water, pretending the world didn’t exist.

Sort of.

He was
coming unglued on Sutherland’s nice couch in his nice clean office, and Brian was holding him.

“You said no,” Brian whispered.

“I did.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I shouldn’t have….”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“You know better.”

“I know the truth.”

Tate looked up, feeling wretched and vulnerable. “The truth is, I didn’t see you. You were right there, and I didn’t see you. I don’t know how you can even look at me, after that.”

Brian grimaced, and his blue eyes flickered away and then back. “Of course you saw me. You’re the only person in my life who ever has.”

Brian’s
eyes had been so wide, the first day they met, as Tate had looked for a place to sit on the bus. They’d been wide, but they hadn’t been filled with disgust or pity or irritation that, oh fuck, they were going to have to sit next to Tate-the-tattooed-twitch or oh-my-god-not-that-fag-with-the-face look. His cornfield-sky eyes had just been wide, and lonely, and his pretty face had looked pleased to be singled out, in spite of the fact that everything else about Brian had been made to blend into the landscape he moved through.

Tate really
had
seen him. He had. Whether Brian was straight or gay, that wasn’t how Brian was meant to be seen. Whether his heart was as sweet as rain? That was what Tate had needed, and it was that rain, that cleansing, scalding rain that washed over Tate now.

Tate came out of the shower feeling shaky but resolved. He’d just bared his soul and lost his lunch in front of the entire world, with his lover unconscious at his back. He could live through everything.

He hoped.

“Hello, Dr. Sutherland,” he said, feeling poleaxed and surprised.

“Hey, Talker.” The shrink was sitting patiently outside of the shower in a folding chair, knitting.

“Do you make all those funky cardigans? I thought it would be your wife or something?” Tate had a bag with his soiled clothes under one arm, and was using his other hand to hold up the falling waistband of the aqua-colored scrubs, and it should have been a bizarre question, but Dr. Sutherland must have really liked him, and not just been saying that, because he smiled.

“My wife knits too.” He held out a foot encased in a VERY brightly colored wool masterpiece. “She makes socks.” Sutherland stuffed his needlework into the satchel at his side and then stood up and started walking down the corridor with Talker.

“What are you doing here, Doc?” Tate asked, but he had to admit that the man’s wide-legged, big-bellied gait was comforting in the sterile white hallway. It would be easier to wait for news if he was there.

“Brian’s aunt called me. I guess she found my number in your wallet when you went to shower. She seemed to think you might need some moral support.”

Talker squinted. He realized that the man’s hair wasn’t in its usual queue, but hung to his shoulders in a snarled mess, and that his cardigan (a handsome one in a dark gray color) was misbuttoned. “You got here pretty fast. Jesus, how long was I in the shower?”

“A long time,” Sutherland said gently. “But I only live about five minutes away.”

There was a pause, and Talker had to swallow, because the guy had to have been worried about him to come out in the… fuck. Was it morning yet?

“I don’t want to talk about it again,” he said after a minute. “I got it all out in the office, and then… tonight….” He shrugged. He was pretty sure Lyndie must have told the doc all about it.

Suddenly the doctor was closer than he usually stood, and his arm stretched up and looped around Tate’s shoulder. He smelled like baby powder; the doc must have showered before he got called out of bed to look after his two boys.

“No worries, Talker. The detectives are going to have to question you again in an hour or so, and we still need to wait for news on Brian. You don’t have to say a word, okay? But Lyndie was worried, and she seemed to feel you were worth the trouble, so here I am.”

Tate nodded and blinked, hard. “All right,” he said hoarsely. “Have you seen Brian yet?”

Dr. Sutherland’s careful breathing was his only giveaway when they got to Brian’s room, but he was shocked, Tate could tell.

“The swelling’s pretty bad,” Lyndie said softly. She was sitting quietly, working on her own yarn work, and Tate had a brief moment of disconnect, imagining what Brian’s aunt and his shrink might say to each other:
“Yes, I prefer the hookie thingie, with the yarn that has all the fuzzies on it!” “I’m a big fan of pointy sticks myself, and I like my yarn plain, like all my sweaters.”

The noise in his head faded, though, and he got another look at Brian’s face. It looked like another bandage had been added, and he looked at Lyndie in confusion.

“They lanced the bruise by his cheekbone and the one over his eye,” she said quietly, her hands growing white around her hook and her yarn. “They said it looks worse than it is.”

Talker nodded and fought the quiver in his lip, and then he sat at Brian’s bedside. Dr. Sutherland dropped the side rail for him, and he just sat, holding Brian’s good hand in his own, in the fugue-like silence that was punctuated only by the vital-sign monitors and Brian’s deliberate breathing through his newly-broken nose. Talker started dreaming a little as he sat there, exhausted, wired, and frightened. They weren’t the bad dreams for once. It was like his body had shut down the capacity for the bad dreams in this fraught moment of peace, and all he was left with were the good ones.

“
What
?” Brian had just woken up, the morning after their last session with Dr. Sutherland. It had been an exhausting night—they’d had to work and everything, and they had literally plodded up the stairs, took turns in the shower, said “hi” to Sunshine the rat, and fallen into bed.

But this was morning, and the light was shining through the window like an ice pick, and Tate had woken up to find that Brian was right where he had been for the last six months, snoring just loud enough to be totally embarrassed if he knew.

Talker hadn’t told him yet. It was like a secret thing that only he knew. (Well, Tate and Virginia, since she’d been the only other one Brian had ever had sleepovers with. Since Virginia had also helped Brian to bust out of the closet, Tate would do her the favor of pretending she never existed.)

There were other secret things that Tate knew. He knew there were five freckles on Brian’s left cheek that were slightly darker than the others, and four on his right. He knew that Brian was really proud of the four studs in his ears and the one in his nose because he thought he was pretty boring and average and the studs did something to alleviate that. Tate knew that Brian was sort of a snob about people—he didn’t like people who were too loud or who made noise just to get attention, or who said mean things to make people laugh. He knew that Brian hated pirating music because he thought of musicians as artists like his Aunt Lyndie, and he hated to cheat them.