Talker's Redemption (8 page)

“Gaaahhhh, fucking dammit, Talker, would you fuck me already?”

Well. Didn’t get much clearer than that, did it? Tate’s cockhead was mostly unscarred, and it looked, well, perfect, right up against Brian’s pucker. It looked… miraculous, pushing through it. Unbelievable. Fictional fucking. Brian stopped making noises and kept very still, and his breathing grew very even. Tate realized Brian was forcing himself to relax. He reached out a hand and stroked Brian’s flank and then the small of his back, and kept pushing, gently and inexorably. This was not the time to chicken out.

“How you doin’?” Tate asked softly. He was almost there almost there almost—
pop
!

“Gawwwww!” Brian half-screamed into the pillow, and Tate would have yanked out then, if he hadn’t been afraid it would really hurt if he did that!

“’S good!” Brian gibbered. “’S good! Keep going! Crap, keep going!”

Talker managed slow. It was a big triumph, going slow. He… he… oh God… slow. Slow until he was buried. Slow until he couldn’t go anymore, and Brian’s body clamped down on him, and he had to stop, and there they were, merged, joined, orificially engaged in intercourse, and just shaking with the effort and the pleasure and the weirdness of it all.

“Uhm… Talker?” Brian’s voice was quivering just like his body.

“Yeah?”

“Man… you gonna move soon?”

Talker’s grin was tight and shaking too. “You gonna grab your cock so we can both come?”

“I could do that… nnnngggg….” That last part meant he probably had. Talker pulled his hips back until he was uhm, right, you know, yeah there, and then he thrust them forward, hard enough for Brian to feel him. They both groaned, and he did it again.

He kept doing it, slowly at first, but then faster, and harder, and then (gasp) then (moan) then (aaauuuggghhh!!!) he was pumping as fast as he could, without finesse or holding back and Brian was screaming into the pillow in a good way, his hand flailing on his own cock without any sort of rhythm that Tate could feel, but Tate couldn’t control that, couldn’t, could only control his own fucking. God! He was fucking! Tate was doing it, he was doing the fucking and—

He looked down and watched his own cock disappear into his lover’s body for the hundredth time, and what he was actually doing pushed him over the edge. He closed his eyes and let the world explode around the darkness in a firework-scatter of white. Beneath him, around him, Brian convulsed, screamed, and then tightened and pushed so hard that Tate was expelled in a rush of come.

Tate collapsed over his back and Brian collapsed to the bed with Tate on top of him, both of them panting and half-laughing, half-groaning in aftermath.

Brian shifted, and Tate rolled off of him, and they were face to face like children again. Brian’s stomach was clenching and fluttering, and Tate wondered if he was flexing his asshole to make sure everything was where it should be.

“You okay?” Tate asked, splaying his hand on that clenching abdomen, and Brian met his eyes and nodded.

“Great!” His eyes and his nod were fervent, and Tate grinned. “You?”

“On the fucking moon!” Tate answered. Brian’s eyes darted for a moment, and his expression indicated deep internal thought. “You’re sure you’re good?”

“Yeah… just… you know. If I go running to the bathroom in a minute, don’t take it wrong, ’kay?”

Talker giggled. He couldn’t help it. He was as susceptible to bathroom humor as any other guy. “Gotcha. Forgiven.”

Brian grinned. “So, are you happy? We’ve had… you know….”

“Orificial sex!” Tate quipped, and Brian nodded.

“Yeah, ‘orificial sex’—we’ve had it, and, you know, we’re, like, ‘orificial’ now.” Brian sobered, and looked searchingly into Tate’s face. “There’s nothing wrong with us. Nothing lacking. You don’t have to apologize for us anymore. We’re great.”

Tate blinked hard. God. All that time in the shrink’s office, and Brian would get to the one thing that hadn’t been said.

“We’re awesome,” he said back. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Before that promised sprint to the bathroom, they had time for one long, wet, sloppy, sweaty, shivering-bodies-in-the-morning-cold kiss.

“
Tate
,” Lyndie’s voice was gentle. “Tate, honey, wake up. The detectives need to speak to you.”

“Bwaah?” Tate sat up and wiped drool off the corner of his mouth with his damaged hand. The rough tissue caught at his lips and he looked at it unhappily—he’d gotten barf on the woolen half-glove he usually used to cover up the half-clenched fingers, and he hadn’t asked Lyndie’s boyfriend to bring him another one. Speaking of which—

“Where’s Craig?” he asked. He really wanted to go see the detectives wearing actual clothes.

“He’s going to be a little late,” Lyndie said. There was a hesitation to her voice, and Tate was going to ask why, but then Brian’s fingers tightened over his.

“Talker?”

Tate managed a smile from somewhere south of his stomach and north of his ankles. “Bruiser?”

A faint laugh. “Haven’t you gone home to sleep yet?”

And now it was time for truth. “We need to see if you’re going to need surgery,” Tate said, squinting at the bag of fluid by the bed. It wasn’t his imagination; the urine was getting darker.

“What are you wearing?” Brian squinted, and Tate blinked owlishly back. His line of hair was flopping sideways, over the white side of his scalp, and his eyes were naked. Brian never cared if his eyes were naked, or if he’d left his piercings off so you could see the flawed shape of his ear. Brian just cared that he was okay.

He had to be okay.

“Scrubs,” Tate said, and he tried for the laugh. “I sort of threw up on the police—got messy.”

Brian’s least-bruised eye got wide. The inside of the white part was filled with blood. “Jesus, Talker, what happened?”

Talker shook his head, and looked away. “I didn’t notice, you know? You beat the shit out of Trev, and I didn’t notice.”

Brian groaned—and not in the good way Tate had just been remembering. “Don’t tell them shit, Talker,” he rasped. “Man, let them arrest me. They don’t need to know. It’s not their business.”

God, look at him. He was pissing blood and could hardly see. His arm and shoulder were plastered and screwed together in some hideous way that probably hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, and he was still trying to protect Tate.

“It’s my business,” Tate said after a moment of just looking his lover in the (swollen) eyes. “Look, baby, I know why you beat up Trev. I thanked God every day that he didn’t show up, because I might not have made it if he’d ended up in the club, looking at me, trying to touch me… I swear….” Brian knew. Brian had checked on him every night after The Worst. Date…, fuck it. After the rape. After the fucking rape. Brian had opened the door to Tate’s darkened room and listened for his breathing. Tate had pretended to sleep, but he’d heard. Tate knew that he wouldn’t have made it, if Trev had walked in.

Talker made himself face Brian, as he hadn’t been able to face anything else these last months. “You saved my life, Brian. You know it. I know it. You took Trev out to protect me. Now it’s my turn to do the same for you.”

“Mr. Walker?” The blond detective, Mr. Moby Dick himself, was looking in, and Tate gave up on some dignity-saving clothes and nodded at him as he stood at the door.

He stood and lowered his face to Brian’s, barely brushing lips, because Brian’s were split and sore, and mostly just rubbing their breath together. “I love you, baby,” he said softly. “Don’t do anything scary while I’m gone.”

Brian grunted and then said, “Aunt Lyndie, go with him.”

“Aunt Lyndie’s staying with you, Bruiser,” Tate said, brushing that wheat-colored hair away from his battered face. “But I’ll take Doc, if that’ll make you feel better.”

“Doc?”

“Yeah, he came in to check on us. It was solid of him. I think we’ll keep him around for a while.”

Brian managed a little bit of a smile, but his eyes were sagging shut, and Tate had a date with a couple of cops. He rubbed Brian’s wrist with his thumb and then turned to go.

“Doc?” It was as close to a plea as he would ever get, and bless Dr. Sutherland, he knew it too.

“Absolutely, Talker. Let me get my knitting.”

The
detectives had secured a small conference room somewhere far enough away from the Trauma ICU that Tate knew he’d have to ask for directions back. Dr. Sutherland panted by his side, and looked relieved to sit down in the offered chair, with an offered glass of water.

Tate took the chair, wished desperately for a soda, and downed the water in one gulp.

“Do you smoke?” the blond detective asked. “We could take this outside if you wanted a smoke.”

Talker frowned at him. “You can’t run track and smoke,” he said with a shrug. He crumpled the paper cup in the working two fingers of his right hand, and the detective followed the movement.

There was a horrible silence in the room then, and Tate watched the realization—he could practically see the guy’s eyes track from his scarred, damaged hand, up his arm, to see that the tattoos on his arm covered scars, then up to his neck, where the scarring was shadowed by the creases in his neck, and then up to his face, and then his head, where the line of his Mohawk was dictated by the line where his hair would actually grow—aha! Epiphany. The only time he hadn’t hated that epiphany had been when Brian had made it. Brian had been nice to him anyway, before he knew the “why” of the tattoos and the hair. Brian had sought out his company, in spite of his own shyness and reservation. Brian hadn’t shown any pity or awkwardness.

“
Ouch
.”

“Yeah, it hurt. My mom fell asleep with a lit cigarette and a bottle of whiskey. My blanket was soaked in it.”

“She make it?”

“No.”

“My folks neither.”

Leave it to Brian to find the most painful (or was it second now, or third?) moment from Tate’s life, and to find the way it made them the same
.

“
What
happened?” the detective asked, and Tate swallowed, wanting more water. Enough, maybe, to drown out the sound of his heart in his ears.

“Fire,” he said briefly. “Did you have something you wanted to talk about?”

The detective widened his eyes and said, “You don’t like hospitals?”

“You don’t like getting to the point?”

“Jesus! I was just trying to make conversation. I was waiting for Henries, if you want to know. He was trying to get the puke out of his shoes.” There was a wry twist to Detective Melville’s mouth, and Tate got the feeling that if he could have, Melville would have told him “Nice shot!”

Talker sighed and decided to take a risk. “Is there any way I could talk to just you?” he asked after a moment. He felt foolish and weak, but Melville seemed relieved.

“That would be fine,” he said. “Do I have your permission to record this?”

Tate looked at Doc Sutherland, who looked uneasy. “He hasn’t done anything,” the doc said. “Tate’s a victim. Brian is a victim. I hate the way this feels.”

Oh, God bless the man. Tate nodded. “Look, how’s this: I tell you what happened, you decide what we need to do. Because the only thing you and puke-shoes got right is that Trev’s not the stopping kind, right?”

Melville put the tape recorder back in his pocket. “I hear you,” he said. “Okay, just talk to me. They call you Talker, let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

Tate sighed and looked away. In the distance he could hear music, and for a moment, he let the taupeness of the sterile conference room wash over him, and he hummed a few bars of Aunt Lyndie’s hymn, because it didn’t shred his throat the way “Jeremy” did. When he spoke, he spoke into a thoughtful silence, and he had to jerk his body back in real time.

He didn’t even notice that he made the other two people in the room jump.

“I was raped,” he murmured, as though he’d always been able to say it. “About eight months ago, I went on a date with Trevor Gaines, and he thought we were going to do it, and I chickened out, and he raped me.” He swallowed hard, because this next thing was something Brian knew without words and Doc Sutherland had been trying to tell him. “It almost killed me. Not the thing, but….” He shuddered, still lost in the taupe of the wall across from him. “The fear, the loneliness—all of it. I….”
I danced in the morning when the world had begun….

“Tate,” Doc Sutherland said gently. Tate jerked, but the doc didn’t look surprised. “Buddy, we need you to focus.”

“Is he okay?”

Tate wasn’t sure what he’d been doing when his head had filled with Lyndie’s little hymn, but it seemed to have freaked the nice detective out.

“Is Brian here?” Tate asked back, only partially rhetorical. “Is Brian here? Is he holding my hand? Is he telling me it’s all good? Because if that’s not happening, then buddy, I’m not all right. See,”—and suddenly he felt totally and completely focused—“that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I was not all right when Trev was done with me. I was…”—suicidal—“just so fucking lost. And every night, I’d come home, and I’d think… I’d think, ‘You know? I’ve got a razor in my drawer. It wouldn’t take very much, and then… then I’d just be cold for a while, and it would all be okay.’”

Doc Sutherland’s hand started rubbing warm, soothing circles on his back, and Tate let him. He couldn’t look at Melville—just couldn’t.

“And the only thing that kept me from doing it, from getting up and finding the razor, was that I knew Brian would be checking on me. He’d check on me every night, you know, because we were roommates and he was my friend, and I had no idea he’d been breaking his heart over me for months before I just kited off with fuck-face-douche-nozzle Trevor Gaines. And even that didn’t matter, because he still… just needed to see that I was okay. And because he’s the one who would have to live with it if I wasn’t, I just kept being okay.”

Melville made a throat-clearing sound, and Tate turned to him, begging him inside to just please, just listen, just… just shut up so he could get this out. Doc Sutherland saved him. Oh God, maybe no one was around that night with Trevor, but Talker was starting to understand that maybe that night had been a fluke. Maybe he had people who would have been around if they could have, because right now, Doc certainly did ride to the rescue.

“Be patient, Detective,” Doc said quietly. “He’s getting to it.”

Maybe Melville was a decent guy—or maybe he just really didn’t want his shoes puked on—but he backed off.

“See,” Tate said nakedly, looking at Melville and thinking,
I bet he has kids. I bet he has a son, and he’s wondering what it takes to make a good kid into a pathetic fuck up who would puke on a cop’s shoes and ink his face like a freak. Take a good look, Detective. I’m all I can be.