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“What did you do?” I asked.
Christopher shook his head. “I don’t really remember. I showered. I know that. But everything else is a blur.”
“Did you go to the authorities?”
Christopher laughed harshly. “And tell them what? I’d had sex with my boyfriend, but I’d been too stupid to realize he’d taken the condom off at some point?”
“You are not stupid,” I said angrily as I forced Christopher to look at me. “And you are not at fault in any of this. You trusted him to protect you. You trusted him to take care of you. You were inexperienced and in pain, so what baseline did you have to tell you something was off when he put himself inside of you. You did everything right, Christopher.”
Tears began to shimmer in Christopher’s eyes, and I could only pray I wasn’t the cause. I dragged him back against my chest. I held him like that for a long time until we’d both calmed down a bit. Pip had wandered off in the meantime, but not far. He was curled up in the middle of one of the pillows.
“Did you go get tested right away?” I asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me to get tested. I just wrote it off as Peter being someone who liked fucking guys bare and didn’t have a problem using subterfuge to get what he wanted. He disappeared from the program a few days later. No one knew where he’d gone. A little over six months ago as I was nearing the end of the program, I shadowed a nurse who did hospice care. She’d go to different homes in the area to check on terminal patients who wanted to pass away at home rather than in a hospital or nursing home. Our last stop was this huge house a few miles from the university. The patient had AIDS and wasn’t expected to last more than a week.”
Christopher began to rock again despite being in my arms, so I took over and rocked both of us in the hopes it would help him get through the rest of his story.
“I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. I didn’t recognize him. Even when the nurse greeted him, I had no idea what was happening. It was like a wire between my eyes and brain had gotten cut. Butherecognizedme. He asked the nurse to get him some juice from the kitchen. Once she was gone, Peter started to laugh. He thought he’d missed his chance to see my expression when I found out. Turned out he liked telling the guys he fucked that he was positive, but he always waited a couple of months to give the disease time to progress. Said it was like fucking them all over again. But he’d gotten too sick before he could tell me. Turned out he’d infected over a dozen guys on purpose. He hadn’t lied about having a boyfriend who’d cheated on him. That’s how Peter got it. The boyfriend died within a month of learning he had it, and Peter figured he didn’t have much time either, so why not take as many guys with him as he could. Didn’t hurt if they also happened to look like his boyfriend.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
We were still rocking back and forth, but I had a feeling I was the one who needed it at the moment. I’d never felt such a bone-chilling need to hurt someone. Despite what I did for a living, I wasn’t a violent guy. But the knowledge that the fucker had put Christopher through all of this out of some sense of twisted revenge made me want to tear anything and everything around me to shreds. Christopher must have sensed my agitation because he sought out one of my hands and linked our fingers.
“Rush,” Christopher said softly. “You can take them back… the things you said this morning. It’s okay, really. I… I need you to take them back.”
His request caught me off guard. Was he trying to give me an out? Did he really think anything he’d said had changed how I felt about him?
“Why?” I asked carefully.
He didn’t answer at first. For a while I thought he wouldn’t. But when he did finally speak, his words dropped me right between heaven and hell.
“Because I can’t do it. I can’t look you in the eye and tell you what happened this morning wasn’t real. So I need you to do it. I need you to be the strong one.”
CHAPTER TEN
CHRISTOPHER
It took a while for the fog of sleep to lift, which was a strange thing for me, probably because I didn’t sleep well to begin with. But something about the softness of my bed felt different this morning. I could hear birds chirping, and a soft, cool breeze tickled my feet where they were sticking out from beneath the bedding. Any other morning, I probably would have enjoyed it.
No, that wasn’t true.
I never opened the windows or drew back the curtains. I liked the darkness… it kept me grounded.
It keeps you from thinking about everything you’re going to leave behind…
I sighed and rolled on my back but didn’t make any effort to get up and shut the window or pull the curtains shut. My mind was already on the man who’d opened them in the first place.
I hadn’t expected him to stay. I hadn’twantedhim to stay because he would have just ended up being like the sunlight or the birds or the breeze.
Something I couldn’t have.
Not while I didn’t know what my future held.
I still couldn’t believe I’d told Rush everything.
Everything.
I’d even admitted that I was beginning to feel something for the older man. Something I’d been fantasizing about for a long time. In the days and weeks after the attack in the club, Rush had occupied a lot of real estate in my head. A lot more than he should have. I’d always attributed my feelings to hero worship, but from the moment I’d opened the door and literally seen the man of my dreams standing next to my uncle on my front porch, that dark place where I’d forced those memories to live over the past few years had lit up like embers. I’d tried to snuff them back out after Rush had left, but it hadn’t worked, and in the twenty-four hours since Rush had shown up on my doorstep a second time, every word he’d said, every touch of his fingers, had fueled those embers. And then his admission that he had feelings for me… well, those little embers had turned into a full-on inferno that I had no hope of coming back from.
