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“Oh my God, what?” Christopher said in surprise.
I nodded. “My parents were like that. Straight to the point.”
“What did you do?”
“I emptied out the suitcase, took it downstairs to the kitchen where my parents were making dinner, and that was it. I told them I liked boys as much as I did girls. They hugged me, told me they loved me, and then started asking me questions about my love life,” I said.
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
I smiled. “Theywere amazing.”
Christopher reached across the table and took my hand in his. “Can I ask how you lost them?”
My gut automatically tightened like it always did when I thought about how my parents had lost their lives. “They were vacationing in the Big Sur area. They’d rented a really nice house where they were planning on hosting some of their friends from their college days. The place had to be worth around five million bucks or something, but apparently the rental company couldn’t be bothered to put up a few carbon dioxide detectors. My parents went to sleep that first night and never woke up again.”
“Rush,” Christopher whispered, then dropped his eyes and shook his head. His fingers were tight around mine.
I pulled his hand to me and dropped a kiss on his fingers. “They went together,” I said. “That brings me a lot of comfort.”
Christopher nodded. He wiped at his eyes before lifting them again. The waitress chose that moment to return with our dessert.
“Wow,” I said because the dish was huge. I handed Christopher a fork and said, “Would you do the honors?”
He smiled and took the fork, then proceeded to cut the cake until the hot chocolate filling began oozing out of it.
“Bon appétit,” Christopher said as he held up his fork. I touched my fork to his and then dug in. As delicious as the dessert was, seeing how much pleasure it brought Christopher was a thousand times more satisfying. I couldn’t help but wonder when the last time he’d indulged in anything was.
I waited until Christopher had seemingly finished before I took a chance and broached the topic I’d been thinking about ever since Christopher had told me what Peter had done to him.
“Christopher, why didn’t you call your uncle and Con when you found out about Peter? Why have you been going through all this alone?”
Christopher’s expression tensed as he leaned back in his chair. But to my surprise, he didn’t remain silent.
“At first I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t. So I just pretended it wasn’t even a thing. I went on with life as usual. It took a whole month for me to get up the nerve to get tested and then another two weeks to make the appointment to get the results. I didn’t tell anyone because I knew I was fine. I didn’t feel sick, so that meant I had to be fine. But I knew as soon as I sat down in that chair and looked at the lady on the other side of the desk that I wasn’t fine.”
Christopher paused, seemingly to collect himself. Unlike when he’d talked about his decision to isolate himself from the world after the attack in the club, this time around his voice broke here and there, proof he wasn’t disconnecting from his emotions.
“The clinic gave me a ton of information about the next steps, but everything was a blur. I didn’t cry, I didn’t tell them they’d made a mistake and they needed to test me again… it was like that night at the club… I had no control, no fight in me. As strange as it may sound, that actually helped. As a nurse, you have to learn to keep a certain level of detachment from your patients even as you’re giving them the best care you can. So I decided to do that. I detached from it.”
Christopher reached for his coffee and took a sip. I could see that his hand was shaking. Since I wasn’t sure if he wanted to be touched or not, I simply let my boot slide up against his shoe underneath the table to remind him he wasn’t alone now.
“I kept up my normal life of studying while Positive Christopher did what he was told and began seeing doctors and counselors and taking all the pills they gave him. It took a while for me to accept reality and really begin to participate in my treatment. When I started to understand what viral loads were, it became this waiting game. My viral load was around thirty thousand copies when it was first checked.”
“Copies?” I asked.
“Yeah, the virus copies itself. It reproduces.”
I’d been trying to remain calm, but the more Christopher talked, the more agitated I became.
The virus was fucking reproducing inside of his body? Possibly even right now, even as we spoke?
“Is that high?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Christopher responded. “Basically, the higher number of copies means the disease is progressing more quickly. It can get as high as a million copies.”
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Christopher responded.
