Fire

Part 5

Brian

The fucking red haze was back.

The one that was like a red fog that took over every part of his brain and blocked out everything except the pain.

The pain could get through and when it did it blocked out everything else.

Sometimes the nurses would come by and then he could drift and it was a white cloud—no it was a gentle wave and he was lying on a raft and floating and it was the best thing he’d ever felt, but then the red haze would come back and he would want to cry again.

Sometimes it seemed that someone would notice and make the white floating return, but sometimes they were busy or something and he would lie there lost in the fog and it was worse than—anything.

He just wanted it to all stop, to go away so that he could be the way he used to be. He wanted to be able to breathe without it feeling like his lungs were still burning and he wanted to be able to sit up and he wanted to—he wanted to be well again. He wanted the tubes and the machines to be gone and to just be able to sit in his own loft with no one to bother and mostly he want there to be no pain. He thought that he remembered a doctor or someone telling him that he would probably never be like he used to be.

And he wanted to cry again.

Justin. Fuck.

Yes, he would like to fuck Justin, but Justin was fiddling the Fiddler and that was where he wanted to be.

And there wouldn’t be any fucking for him for a while anyway, if he were to believe the fucking doctors.

The condo—he had me go to stay there for a day or so but that didn’t work out because he was still too hurt to not have doctors and nurses around him all the time and there had been something else. Oh, right. Ethan had hit him and broken his shoulder again.

Well, fuck me.

Then he was back in the hospital.

He vaguely wondered if Justin had finally had enough melodrama.

Maybe this would be what pushed him over the edge and caused him to transfer to—what the fuck was it? Brown? Yale? No, Dartmouth, that was it—he was supposed to go to Dartmouth. Then his father would be happy and even overlook the fact that he was queer and liked it up the ass.

Well, even Dartmouth probably had some kind of art school. They probably did.

Justin would be fine.

Maybe he could get a refund from PIFA if that happened. Well, OK, probably not. Whatever.

The fucking red was coming back.

Shit.

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Ethan

OK, I know it. You don’t have to say it. I shouldn’t have hit the fucker.

You really don’t have to say it. I know. He’s hurt and he was probably in pain—he sure looked like shit, that’s for sure, but you have to understand.

I love Justin.

I think that I might love him, anyway.

He’s smart and he can be funny and he hangs on everything I say and believes everything that I tell him. Well, he used to, anyway. Until yesterday.

He would listen to me practice and hang out in the park to keep me company when I was playing the streets—he would cook dinner and he was almost always cheerful.

I heard that his nickname is ‘Sunshine’. It fucking fits him, you know? Damn—that smile. Have you ever seen anything like that?

And Justin in bed, you can’t believe how good that part of things is—was.

Fanfuckingtastic.

We would go at it for hours and then he would curl into me and wrap his arms around me and kiss me—God I love sleeping with him.

I liked to look at us when we were in bed. Him all light and happy and gold—like my name, and me all dark and brooding. Yin and Yang. Perfect.

I don’t want to lose him. I mean, I know that at some point I will probably have to go to London or someplace to work, but not yet. We could still have some time together. He could paint while I play and it would be good for a while yet. He could come visit me on the road and I could show him whatever city I was in at the time. It would be great.

Of course he still pretends that he’s still fucking Kinney when we’re in bed and I know that he looks for him when he’s working at the diner and that the shit is always in the back of his mind.

You know how weird that is?

It’s like having three people in the fucking bed—not that Kinney would mind that from what I hear.

Maybe that’s where Justin learned it from—oh, he never really told me what they actually did together, but I can imagine.

Fuck.

How the shit do you compete with rich, smart, beautiful and the best lay in the state?

True love? Right, with who? Whom? With Kinney or me? Both? Neither.

When Justin cums with me he says the fucker’s name. He doesn’t know he does it and at first I though that it was a fluke, but it happens all the time—just a whisper, but I hear it.

True love.

Yeah, right. It don’t pay the fucking bills.

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Justin

Shit.

I can’t believe what fucking Ethan did. I can’t fucking believe that he would do that—I can’t believe that anyone would do that.

He hit Brian when he was hurt and in pain and couldn’t even sit up. He hit him hard enough to rebreak his Goddamned shoulder and send him back to the hospital and into surgery.

You know, people don’t realize how strong musicians are—all that hand and arm movement. You ever see a pianist’s arms? They’re like fucking weight lifters. So is Ethan.

Shit.

I heard the doctors talking. They said that his shoulder would probably be OK in a few months, well, OK enough. Maybe not as good as it was, but he’ll be able to use it—it’s his lungs that are the problem They said that they’re probably permanently damaged and that he’ll always have to be really careful because he’s now more prone to infection and pneumonia and he’ll never—fuck, he’ll never be 100% again.

Oh, the good news?

The burns on his chest and his neck are healing well and they say he won’t need the grafts or anything. I don’t know all the medical reasons—they just said that they would be OK. Well, maybe not really OK, but in the scheme of things they’re minor. He’ll have some scaring, but nothing terrible and he should be able to cover most of it really easily with his clothes. The scars will even fade in time and you’ll hardly notice them. Unless you look.

Brian will see them like they’re lit up with neon, but they should heal without any surgery or anything, so that’s really good.

They said he was lucky with that.

You want to know what were the real shits with that? They were standing talking in his fucking room like he wasn’t even there and I looked at him and his eyes were open and he’d heard every fucking word.

You want to know what he did?

He just closed his eyes and pretended that he was asleep.

They turned around and tried to talk to him about it, but he just refused to receive anything that they had to say. He tuned them out and they were so stupid that they believed that he was still out.

Stupid fucks.

I don’t give a shit if they’re the best doctors around, they’re stupid fucks.

Yeah, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Don’t they fucking get it?

Brian is—was—an athlete. He might not have been really pumped like some of them are, but he’s a runner and he played soccer and he can dance and fuck for hours without even breathing hard. Or he could.

Fuck.

Ethan came up to me in the hallways at PIFA this morning.

I told him to fuck off.

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Debbie

God, everything is just such a fucking mess.

Brian.

I can’t even think about that poor asshole without wanting to cry.

He’s just had so much shit thrown at him. I should know, I threw my share.

And you know what? He always came through it—his parents, accepting being gay, the shit he took at school for that. He worked his ass off and put himself through college, got that big fancy job and made a big success of himself and he still eats breakfast at the Goddamned diner with his friends every morning. He’s wearing his fucking Armani suit and the others are in jeans, but he’s there right with them.

And now he has this to deal with and I’m not sure, but this might be the straw that breaks him.

He has so fucking much on his back. He has Gus and the girls, his crazy mother and sister, Mikey is always after him—I know, I love the little shit to death, but he’s a drain and if Brian didn’t catch him at least once a month, he’d land on his ass. They all go to him when they have a problem and he always takes care of them, he gives them money and time or a ride or a plane ticket or a computer. Whatever they need, he gets it for them without a word.

Now he’s lost so much that I’m not sure that he can fix it—his home, his health and now his love.

Right, that’s what I said. Justin.

Brian loves the kid, he as much as said so to me one night. You can see it anyway, he didn’t have to say a word, all you need are eyes in your head. We all knew but, probably before Brain did.

Well, maybe. He knows a lot of things that he keeps to himself.

Sure, Justin is there at the hospital and he’s doing everything that he can to try to help, but Brian won’t put up with that for much longer. You see, I know that asshole. He’ll let Sunshine do for him only to a point and then he’ll decide that Justin should move on—just like he decided that about Michael when he threw him off the cliff to David and when he threw Justin to Ethan.

I know Brian. I know how he thinks and how he works.

Pretty soon now he’ll decide that he’s a drag on Justin and he’ll shove that little kid right out he fucking door.

He’ll do it and he’ll tell himself that he’s doing it for Justin, just doing what’s best for him.

You know what’s strange? This time I might agree with him.

Justin is still only nineteen years old. Brian will never be what he was, if I’m hearing the doctor’s right—not like they never make mistakes, but fuck, have you seen him lately?

He looks like shit and he’s about to give up.

I see it and I never thought that I would in Brian. He never gives up. If he did he’d have caved in years ago.

Maybe he’s right.

I don’t think that Sunshine should be around for that.

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Craig

Yes, I heard.

I fucking heard, OK?

Kinney’s place was destroyed in a fire and Justin is playing nurse.

When I heard that my son had moved out his apartment or whatever Kinney lived in I thought that it would finally be over between the boy and that pervert, but what the fuck do I know?

Jen tells me that he’s always at the hospital and he even moved the fucker into Jen’s place for a while before he had to go back for surgery.

Shit. Like I need this. My kid is obsessed with a thirty-year-old child molester and now he’s trying to nurse him back to health.

Christ.

You know what I keep thinking?

How much simpler things would be if that fucker just died.

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Justin

Brian is shutting down. I can see it.

He’s giving up and he’s depressed and I’m so fucking scared.

I don’t know what to do. They have the shrinks talking to him and the therapists and they even brought in some guy who had his lungs fucked over too and not one of them made a single dent.

I’m so Goddamned scared.

I know he wants me to leave. I know he’s leading me to the Kinney Cliff again and I want to stay with him. I don’t want to go, I want to hold his hand and take walks with him and help him get better. I want to sleep with him and wake up next to him and I want—him.

I don’t want to jump off his Goddamned cliff.

I heard some of the shrinks talking and they said something about Brian being so depressed that they’ll need to keep an eye on him.

Fuck.

Oh, you want to hear another good one?

Fucking Vance brought in some new guy to be a partner. Brian found out when the fucker stopped by for a visit—you know ‘oh, by the way, Brian…you understand, of course. Nothing personal. Your office is still there for you. Well, I had to let Steven have the use of it, just temporarily, but I knew that you wouldn’t mind.’

Talk about your fucking timing.

When the asshole left Brian just closed his eyes and wouldn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the day.

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Brian

I think the thing with Vance is what really got me the most.

I mean, I know that I’m hurt and I know that it’s going to be a long time getting better—as much as I’m ever going to get better. I know that.

I’ve accepted that everything material I owned was carted away in trucks to a dump. I know that I can’t be a lover to Justin, or anyone for a long time if ever again.

I know that my family doesn’t give enough of a shit about me to even call the Goddamned hospital to see how I’m doing. They’d be quick enough if it was time to read the Goddamned will.

OK, I know all of this. I’ve got it. It’s as clear as the nose on my face as they say.

I’ve even started to accept the constant pain, like a toothache that’s always there except it’s my whole body—or enough of it, anyway.

My job, my fucking job. Somehow I was stupid enough to think that it would be there for me. I knew that they wouldn’t stop for me, I knew that—but he even gave away my fucking office. He said that my ‘things’ were safely put away.

Christ.

My ‘things’ are in a box in some fucking closet and fuckall knows when they’ll ever see daylight again.

Well, fuck.

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Justin

Tonight I went back to the hospital after working the dinner shift. It was about nine thirty when I got there and Brian was watching a Disney movie that was playing on the in-house system that the hospital has. I think it was an old Hayley Mills thing, the Moonspinners.

Really a bad movie.

He wasn’t really watching it, of course, it was just on and he was staring at nothing, depressed. I turned it off and he didn’t care. I tried to talk to him, but something must have happened today or he must have thought of something new to be depressed about. Maybe he was just having a bad night. I don’t know.

I couldn’t think of anything to say after a while so I asked if he would like me to read to him. He looked at me like—whatever.

We’ve been assigned Moby Dick in English. Didn’t know tat we had to take other classes than just art at PIFA, did you? Well, we do. We have to take a couple of English classes and history and there’s a math requirement.

So I started reading him the book. It’s pretty good, you know? And after a while, a chapter and a half, I think, he was asleep.

I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I took my shoes off and got up on the bed next to him, on his good side. I put my arm around his waist and slept there. At some point a nurse or someone covered me up with a blanket and I spent the night there next to him.

In the morning I woke up when I felt his hand on my neck and cheek. I was against him and he had his arm around me. At first it was just like we were at the loft and I forgot for a minute where we really were. I thought that he’d be pissed or make a snarky remark, but he just smiled at me, said “Good morning, Sunshine” and kissed me on the forehead.

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