Talker's Redemption (3 page)

Lyndsay’s arms came around Tate’s shoulders, and he shivered into her hug. Brian’s Aunt Lyndie had spent the last six months trying to make herself into the family that Tate had never had. Feeling those thin arms around his shoulders made him suddenly feel safe. Safe enough to be weak.

“He looks really bad,” Tate said, his voice wobbling. “They think he’ll be okay, but his nose is broken, and his shoulder—they’re talking about going in to bolt shit back together and he’ll be in a sling for a while. They’re…” deep breath. “They’re still waiting to see if he’s going to need surgery for his insides.”

Brian’s face had been cleaned of the blood, but it was still swollen and blood-filled and unrecognizable. Brian, Talker’s beautiful, perfect Brian, and his face was never going to be the same.

“
You’re
beautiful.” Brian’s voice from the side of Talker’s bare thigh sounded reverent, and Tate had been forced to cover his eyes, just to let his lover see his disfigured genitals.

“Man, don’t bullshit me.” Not Brian—not Talker’s Prince Charming.

Brian shifted up in the bed and Tate felt fingers gripping his chin fiercely and forcing Tate to look Brian in his cornfield-sky eyes. “
You
are beautiful.
You
are perfect. Let me look at you and love you, Talker. Don’t shit on what I’m saying because you’re embarrassed or ashamed. I love you, so you’re beautiful, okay?”

Talker nodded, willing Brian to go back to looking at his shriveled testicle and scarred thigh and cock, because as ugly as he thought they were, they were nowhere as naked as his face right now. Brian ignored that and caught his mouth in a kiss, and by the time the kiss was done, and Talker was arching his bare body against Brian’s hand, Talker was willing to concede to anything, anything, as long as Brian kept touching him, kept kissing him, kept believing he was beautiful, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

“As long
as he lives, he’ll be fine,” Tate said in the now. The memory was snugged securely in Talker’s chest. He looked at Brian’s savaged face, stitches over his cheekbones, his forehead, along the line of his swollen jaw. There was heavy plaster on his newly pinned and bolted arm and shoulder, and bandages around his torso, his stomach, and one of his thighs. In that moment, the movement of Brian’s chest was the most beautiful thing in the world, and the memory became true.

Lyndie dropped a kiss on the shaved side of his head, and he shivered again in her arms. “Why would someone do this, Tate? I still don’t understand what happened….”

Tate looked up in that moment to the glass outside the ICU room. There were two cops out there, the kind in the suit and tie and not the uniform. For a minute, he wondered why a kid getting beat up in a darkened parking lot would rank a detective instead of a green beat cop.

The brown haired one, the older one, looked at him darkly through the glass, a corner of his mouth pulled up in a sneer. Aha. Brian didn’t rank because he was Brian—he ranked because he was
gay
Brian, and this could be a hate crime.

Awesome.

Lyndie made a sound—a distrustful sort of sound—even as she kept her arms around his shoulders, and Tate had to appreciate her once more. Lyndie was as excited as he was to see the police. Maybe artists would know first hand how much fun it was to be an outsider dealing with authority.

“What are they doing here?” she asked, and Talker squeezed her hand.

“Trying to find out who did this,” he said, and then his mouth went dry. He swallowed hard and tried to put off the bad for another minute. “Where’s Craig?”

Craig Jeffries, also in his fifties, was a stolid, quiet, pleasant man who liked to sit and watch sports on television when he wasn’t at work or fixing up Lyndie’s little cabin. He’d moved in with Lyndie the year before, and Brian liked him and liked the fact that his beloved aunt, the woman who raised him, wasn’t alone.

“He’s parking the car. Why, is there something you need?”

Talker nodded. Mostly, he needed to get Lyndie out of here for the grilling, but he also really needed a favor. “Sunshine is at home. She’s under the heat lamp, Aunt Lyndie, and Brian made her a blanket, but shit’s freezing and power is going off. Could you make sure she’s okay?”

Lyndie nodded and pulled out her cell phone, texting pretty rapidly for a grown-person, and then she smiled when she got the response.

“He’s got a key too. He’ll check on her and come back with some coffee and something to eat. We should know something by then, and Craig and I will take you home.”

Talker swallowed. “Could you just bring me a change of clothes? They’ve got little shower cubicles here somewhere. I’ll just shower and come back. I don’t want to go.”

Lyndie “hmmmd” and kissed his cheek—the one with the scars and tattoos—and he couldn’t make himself afraid of her if he tried. “’Kay, baby. You stay the first shift, but we’ll be back. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you too.”

She pulled up a chair next to him while they waited, and both of them kept a wary eye on the detectives and Jed through the glass. Jed had his arms crossed and his lower lip thrust out. He looked the picture of mutiny, and Talker’s stomach roiled. Oh God. Jed wasn’t giving Brian up, but… but… oh shit. Letting Trevor go? That just hurt. Just fucking rankled and stank to high heaven.

Oh shit. Shit shit shit shit shit….

Talker started shaking, shaking so bad his teeth shook, and Lyndie, who had taken out her yarn and a crochet hook from a big tapestry bag at her hip, put them down and grabbed his hands.

“Talker… Tate… baby… you have
got
to calm down!”

But it was too late. The detective, the younger one with hair so blond it was transparent at the line of his pink and sunburned neck, had caught his eye as though he expected Tate to say something. Tate was suddenly the object of attention from everybody who had been standing outside of Brian’s little room, and he had to fight the very real, very immediate urge to urinate. He hated cops. Fucking hated them. Hated the way they asked questions like they were your friends, hated the way they judged you. All those foster homes, all those cops—they’d come, they’d asked questions, they’d looked at Tate like he was the reason they were there, he was the reason the fucking people he’d ended up with had been more interested in their check from the government than in Tate. And then, in high school, it had been constant.

“
What’re
you doing here, skater boy?” The hands shoving Tate against the dusty brick of the school were hard and indifferent. Tate’s scarred cheek would sting for the rest of the day.

“Gonna steal something?”

“Just skating.” The skateboard was his ticket to freedom in those days—before he found out that in order to fly, all he needed was his own two feet.

“Don’t you got no place to go? C’mon, freak, get your ass home.”

Home was a foster family who wanted to help, but that he was too tired to talk to. It was just so much easier to take that board down the pipe rail of the stairs and pretend he never had to land.

He’d
had no home to get his ass to, not until Brian. Having the track coach single him out and tell him he was going to join the track team because, dammit, that way he just might live to adulthood, had been one of the few positive defining moments of his existence.

And, well, it had lead to Brian.

Brian grunted, the sound yanking Tate out of his fugue so violently he bumped Lyndie’s jaw. She didn’t move, but she did look up at Brian’s ruined face and say, “Baby?”

“Hey, Aunt Lyndie.” Brian’s voice, usually low in his throat anyway, was just a rumble of gravel, slurred through swollen lips.

Lyndie moved up to the side of the bed, but she didn’t let go of Tate’s hand. “Hey, Baby, you gonna live?” Her voice trembled, and Talker squeezed her hand, since he had it. He remembered that Lyndie raised Brian because her only other family had been killed in a car crash when Brian was six. As strong as she was trying to be, even Lyndie needed some faith.

The thought propelled Tate up, because he couldn’t give back to Lyndie if he was a pathetic, sniveling mess on a hospital chair. He gave the cop, still studying them through the window, a defiant, fuck-you glare, and moved up next to Lyndie, so Brian could see him.

“Talker,” Brian murmured. His face relaxed, and it was like knowing Tate was there let him feel better.

“God, Brian! Who did you think you were there, Matt Damon?” Talker tried to make his voice light, because heaven knew, what he wanted to do was howl.

“More like… Nathan Fillion,” Brian croaked and Talker had to laugh a little. Captain Mal on
Serenity
had fought an epic battle and had come out looking… well, not quite as bad as Brian did right now.

“Well,” Tate said bitterly, “you should have been trying to be more like Shaggy and Scooby and just bailed when the bad guys showed up.”

Brian’s swollen lips turned upwards and then sobered. “I wouldn’t let them get ya, Scoob,” he said, and then he seemed to relax some more, and as they watched, he faded out into the happy oblivion offered him by the clear tube in his arm.

Talker swallowed. “That’s not very Shaggy-like of you,” he whispered, knowing Brian wouldn’t answer. Of course it wasn’t. Brian may have had longish blond hair, but he’d never been a coward.

Lyndie bumped his shoulder and then looked up to where the cop stood, his attention taken for a minute by something Jed was saying.

“Who were the bad guys, Tate?” she asked softly, and Talker’s knees went weak. He teetered as he stood and held on to the rail of Brian’s bed to keep from falling. Lyndie let go of Brian’s hand and helped him back to the chair, then crouched next to him and rubbed his back repeatedly while Talker stared at the whirling lights in his vision. God, he hated this. Hated the fear. Hated the feeling of being a small black hole in the big gray vortex of a winter sky.

“So, if
it wasn’t that bad, Tate, tell me about it.”

“The Worst. Date. Ever.? What’s to tell?”

Dr. Sutherland arched an eyebrow and Tate wondered if his scarred cheek washed unevenly with color, or if it was all lost in the tangle of tattoo and twisted skin. But it wasn’t the flush that bothered him. It was Brian’s stoic silence, as though he were prepared to sit there, forever and ever and ever, just to wait for Talker to get his shit together.

“It was stupid,” Talker said, rolling his eyes. “Hella fucking dumb. It was… a misunderstanding, you know? I mean, when I left the house, I was practically throwing myself at him. And, he had every right to expect….” Can’t finish that sentence. “And I was so excited. I was thinking, ‘Weehoo—tonight’s the night, I’m finally gonna get laid!’”

Brian let out what might have been a laugh next to him, and Talker couldn’t look at him—couldn’t hardly stand his touch on Talker’s knee. Brian had been there the whole time. He must have said, “But I love you…” twenty times, and Tate
knew…
oh goddammit, he fucking
knew
how hard it was to put your heart out on the line like that, and Brian had done it for him, and done it repeatedly, and Tate had patted his head like a puppy dog and said, “Yeah, baby, too bad you’re straight.”