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As soon as he stepped into the condo, he knew something was off. It was dark because the shades were all drawn, and the air smelled stale. Luis had been gone the previous night, and Darius had stayed at the airport hotel the previous night with the rest of his crew because he’d been on the first flight out of LAX that morning. All of which meant Ricky had been alone for most of the night.
“Shit,” Greg muttered under his breath.
It didn’t take him long to find Ricky huddled beneath a mound of blankets in his bed. He must have rounded up every blanket in the apartment, but despite the thick layers, he was shivering. The hair around his forehead was damp, and Greg knew before he even touched Ricky that he was going to be warm.
“Hey.” Greg leaned over the bed and gently shook his shoulder. “Ricky.”
The only response he got was a groan, so Greg shook him again, using a bit more force to get Ricky to look up at him.
“Go away,” Ricky mumbled and tried to wrap himself tighter within his cocoon.
“You’re burning up, sweetheart.”
“I know. I’m sick. Leave me alone.”
Greg straightened up. Ricky had pulled down the blackout shade, and the room was too dark for Greg to see much beyond the mound that was Ricky’s body buried under the blankets. He raised the blind, and Ricky immediately hid his head.
“Fuck.” His muffled voice was full of outrage. “Are you trying to kill me?” He moaned in pain. “My fucking head.”
A feeling of dread settled in Greg’s chest. He knew little about what Ricky did and where he went, but he’d watched Ricky go home with enough different guys to know his list of partners was quite extensive. When Greg had first gotten sick, he’d experienced headache, fever, fatigue, a sore throat, body aches, nausea, and vomiting. All of his symptoms were consistent with the flu. Except he’d known. Deep down inside, he’d known it was HIV. And it had been his friends who insisted he go to the clinic to get tested.
“Ricky, I need you to tell me what else is going on. You’ve got a fever, a headache, what else?”
“Just leave me alone. I’ll be fine.”
A coughing fit interrupted anything else Ricky might have wanted to say. Coughing was more indicative of a cold or the flu, but it wasn’t necessarily so. They all worked in a petri dish of illnesses, and seasonal transitions seemed to make it worse.
“Oh, God, my head.” Ricky threw the covers off. “And I’m fucking burning up.”
“Have you had anything to eat? To drink? How long have you been feeling like this?”
Ricky eyed Greg. With his red hair and gray eyes, a smattering of freckles on his face, and the heightened color on his cheeks and in his lips, Ricky could have been pretty cute, but the baleful look he gave Greg, the narrowed eyes and pinched mouth, made him look more like a cornered animal.
“Just leave me to die in peace.”
Instead of leaving him, Greg sat down on his own bed and stared at his roommate as he debated the best way to approach this. Asking how many guys Ricky had had sex with in the past month or if he always used condoms was probably not the way to go. His phone vibrated with an incoming text, and Greg pulled it out of his pocket, then smiled at the message from Holden complaining about Brody. He typed back a response. They bantered a bit, then traded I love yous, which made Greg grin like a fool.
“That booty call looks like it worked out well,” Ricky said, then succumbed to another coughing fit. “Fuck.” He fell back onto his pillows.
Greg put the phone down on his nightstand and returned his attention to Ricky. “Not that I owe you an explanation, but it wasn’t a booty call.”
“Ah. It’s like that, then. Luis and Darius are going to be looking for another roommate soon?”
His first instinct was to deny it. He and Holden hadn’t known each other long enough to think about moving in together, but before he voiced his thoughts, Greg realized it wasn’t that far-fetched. He’d already been thinking about it in the Lyft.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Ricky said. “I can see it.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Another happy ending. Yay. Front-row seats to someone else’s fairy tale. Lucky me.”
“Is this still about Micah?”
Ricky huffed out an indignant breath that caused another coughing fit. Greg fetched him a glass of water from the kitchen, then helped Ricky sit up to drink it and settle back onto the pillows when he was done. Greg returned to his own side of the room.
“I know you all think I’m pathetic,” Ricky said while Greg’s back was turned to him. “It’s not just about Micah. He was just one in a long string of bad decisions.”
Greg nodded. Here was the opening he needed. “You know,” he said, “we’ve all made them. Guys who seem like they’re perfect only to turn out to be first-class assholes. That’s how I ended up HIV positive.”
“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
Ricky’s expression told Greg he was sincere in his sympathy, and although he understood the sentiment, he wasn’t sure that it was necessary. HIV wasn’t the death sentence it had been twenty years before, and Holden had shown him it wasn’t even a barrier to a relationship with the right person.
