A Story in Two Parts

LaVieEnRose

“You have to go to the doctor,” I said, looking at the thermometer. “I think you're going to die.”

“What?”

I raised my voice. “You're dying!”

“I am not.” Justin was on his back on the bed at the loft, leaving sweat stains on my nine hundred dollar duvet cover because he was too hot to get under it. This was a little before he lost all his hearing, back when he was still lipreading and relying on the aids, a month or two before we got married. Roughly his twenty-fourth birthday, if that helps. We're going on a journey through time, children.

I looked at his hand twitching. “No, I think you're dying.”

He huffed out a breath and sat up. He'd texted me all pissy half an hour before, telling me Deb was sending him home early from the diner and he needed the tips tonight and this was such bullshit, and I figured he'd been having trouble with the vertigo or maybe with his hand and Deb had taken pity on the poor soon-to-be-Deafened lad, but then he walked in here looking like he'd come from a goddamn sweat lodge and I'd touched his forehead and practically fucking burned myself. Lindsay had made me get a thermometer the first time Gus stayed with me as a baby, so I had it for this foundling as well. It had been useful on numerous occasions, because as I know I've mentioned before, Justin is absolute fucking shit at telling when he has a fever. It just turns off whatever part of his brain it is that he normally uses.

“It's a cold,” he said.

“Yesterday you were fine and today you have a fever of a hundred and three. That's not a cold.”

“So it's the flu.”

“Or it's something with your disease. I'm going to call your neurologist.” Obviously nowadays I don't make Justin's fucking appointments for him, but you have to remember that at this point he couldn't talk on the phone but couldn't sign well enough for an interpreter, either, so he wasn't independent the way he was before he lost his hearing or the way he is now, just stuck in this shitty limbo. I just wrote you a whole nice story about how functional we are? We were getting by, back then, but we were limping. We were not functional.

He looked cute with his hearing aids, though. I miss them sometimes.

“My disease does not cause fevers,” he said.

“Could be a reaction to your meds,” I said, which was, as you will see, ironic.

“What?” Remember that?

“Could be a reaction. Sunshine, lie down, Jesus, you look like you're going to pass out.”

“I maybe don't feel so good.”

“I can't believe you fucking went to work.”

“What?”

“You shouldn't have gone to work. Lie down. I'll get you some water.”

His neurologist's office was closed, so I was planning to just call in the morning, but he kept getting worse and worse as the night went on and it was freaking me out. I'm good at a lot of things when it comes to Justin's health, but I don't do well when I'm watching him slowly deteriorate and I'm doing nothing to stop it., when it feels like he's being slowly and physically pulled from me minute by minute. And maybe I was a little more anxious about it that usual that night, because maybe it was a fucking microcosm of what we'd been going through for the past goddamn year, just sitting and watching and waiting while Justin's hearing dwindled down to nothing, which at that point felt fucking catastrophic, and nothing, fucking nothing, could stop it. Not to stretch the metaphor too thin or take all the subtlety out of our little plot, but I have watched enough hits come barreling towards my boy that I cannot stop. Enough.

So that night was hard. Justin and I weren't anyone's definition of new at that point, but it was still five years ago so all that progress we've made at, you know, communicating with each other, and I'm not talking in a language way, just in a...not being a fucking trainwreck way, was still excitingly to come, and I was lacking a lot of experience I'd get later when it came to taking care of Justin and putting shit wrong with Justin in perspective.

So I hadn't reached my peak, and this was far from the worst I would ever see Justin and, of course, far from the worst I'd already seen him even at that point, due to the lack of blood pouring from his brain, but it was rough. He had awful nightmares, which he'd been struggling with since he got his prognosis, and he was vomiting and shaking out of his skin with chills, and just like every time he gets really sick his shitty lungs and shittier hand were giving him nothing but trouble. He had a migraine from the fever, which I couldn't get down for the life of me, and the hearing aids were making him miserable so he took them out, but he was too dizzy and confused to focus well on my lips so he wasn't getting much at all.

At one point I just sat on the floor of the shower with him and held him, and that was okay, that felt like I was doing something, but most of the night I spent trying to keep him still in bed when the shivers shook the whole platform and trying to bring him back to reality without words after nightmares and trying to get enough fluids in him to replace what he was losing in the sweat and vomit and fucking tears.

So I ended up taking him to urgent care as soon as it opened. I called Cynthia and told her to cancel my morning meeting and got Justin a bottle of water and bullied him into putting his aids in and got him out to the car, where he rested his forehead against the cool window and panted the whole way. I ran my fingers down his spine and just...at this point was so fucking convinced that this was related to his condition, that something really fucking bad was going on.

And then of course they stuck a swab up his nose as soon as we got to urgent care and told us it was just the damn flu. Drama queen. They didn't give much of a shit about the whole situation with his ears and basically shrugged it off and talked to me instead of him, which didn't piss us off back then like it does now, but the words “asthma” and “flu” together seemed to get them all very excited. They strapped him into a nebulizer treatment to try to get his lungs back in the saddle, and I'd never seen one of those before at that point—Justin did them when he was a kid, but I wasn't all acquainted with them like I'd later be when he got pneumonia after he was burned or bronchitis after California or a couple hideous asthma attacks for no goddamn reason at all—and it kind of freaked me out. I hadn't really been worrying about his breathing because whatever, he always wheezes when he's sick, but they were treating it like a big deal and the mask looked like it might hurt and I was just fucking gutted that I'd let it get this bad, frankly.

But Justin was calm, looked like he liked it.

“Is it good?” I asked him, and I was quiet because I felt like a fucking idiot in front of the doctors, but quiet didn't really work with Justin at that point.

He couldn't say his catchphrase with the mask, so he just wrinkled his eyebrows.

“The mask,” I said a little louder. “Is it good?”

He nodded and gave me this little smile underneath it, and I took his hands.

“I'm sorry,” I said, for some goddamn reason, and when he gave me his little 'what' look again I just kissed his forehead.

The doctor made all this noise about Justin being high-risk, which was not news to me in any sort of macro way but still not something I really enjoyed hearing, and said since he'd been sick for under forty-eight hours he could get started on Tamiflu, so now you know where this little story's going. Justin of course was worried about his allergies, and he was having a lot of trouble following what the doctor was saying anyway, but they assured us it wasn't an antibiotic and there was no reason to believe he'd have any problem with it whatsoever and, you know, other such complete bullshit. And that point Justin was on a ton of different medications to manage his condition and he'd reacted to easily half of the ones we tried and had to pull, but most of the reactions were mild or at least manageable.

Justin fell asleep in the car on the way to the pharmacy, so I left him there and went in to grab the prescription. Cynthia called while I was waiting in line and told me the meeting I'd tried to cancel had refused to be cancelled, only postponed, and whatever the fuck client it was, who can remember, had insisted on seeing me this afternoon.

“Remember when I told you last year Justin was going through a major health crisis and I'd need to fucking stay home sometimes?” I said, on my way back to the car.

“Yeah, but I figured he'd have left you by now.”

I tossed the pharmacy bag on Justin's lap and he awoke with a start. “Still alive?” I asked him.

He opened the pill bottle, using the inside of his wrist instead of his hand. “What?”

“Are you still alive over there?”

“Yeah.”

“Think you could come to Kinnetik for a few hours?”

He whined and swallowed the pill.

“I know, but I have to go in.”

“Just drop me off at home,” he said. “You have to stop and get a suit anyway.”

“Yeah, start a new medication in the loft by yourself, that's a good idea. How about if I drop you off at Debbie's?” I said, dripping sweetness. “Let her fuss over you. Feed you soup. Fluff your pillows.”

“Ugh, fine. I'll go to Kinnetik. Don't let anyone talk to me.”

“I never do.”

I waved Ted off with warnings of “Contagion! Contagion! Be gone!” and deposited Justin on my office couch. This was before the New York office, where I keep pillows and blankets in the closet as a matter of course, but I'd snagged the blue blanket he liked from home when I was grabbing my suit. “All right.” I kissed his forehead to get his temperature and gave his glassy eyes a once over. “You need anything?”

“No, I'm okay.” He gave me this small smile.

I put a bottle of water in his lap and said, “Try to get some sleep. I should be done in an hour. Conference room C if you need me.”

“B?”

C, I signed, and he smiled a little and coughed into his elbow. “Back soon.”

So I went to conference room C shook hands and slapped backs and presented some shit and otherwise charmed the pants off—in a metaphorical way only, this time, my poor partner was on his death bed and these guys were like sixty—whoever the fuck these clients were, they're not important. What is important is about half an hour later Justin appeared outside the glass doors of the conference room, and I knew he wouldn't be bothering me if it weren't bad.

What's up? I signed through the door.

My throat's closing up. Our signing was pretty shitty back then, but that one's pretty straightforward. Throat. Strangle.

Fuck.

Ted said, “Bri, is everything—”

“Someone call 911,” I said, and I strode out to the hallway and pulled Justin down to the floor. “Hi. You're going to be fine, understand?”

Justin nodded, but his eyes were wide and God, his breathing was fucking terrible, I don't even know how he made it down the fucking hallway. He was working so goddamn fucking hard trying to suck air down a throat that almost swollen entirely fucking shut.

And my job was to stay entirely fucking calm, which is honestly my default state when something's wrong with Justin. I just...I don't know. You know how Justin says black isn't its own color, it's all the other colors at once, or whatever? It's like that. Too many feelings at once and it turns into nothing. Or maybe I'm just genuinely fucking good at something for once without it being some sad example of my emotional baggage, but let's not get our hopes up. “Someone's calling 911,” I told him, with a glance towards the room where Cynthia was already on the phone and the clients were bumbling around. “Do you have your epipen?”

He wasn't following. He was too freaked out. “I don't...”

I pointed at my lips. “Look at me. Epipen.”

He tried to talk and it just came out as this awful choked noise, and my fucking genius who at that point was not comfortable code switching and who was in the middle of a horrible fucking reaction still thought to switch to signing. I don't have it.

“That's okay, there's one in the car. Not a problem.” I snapped my fingers at Ted in the conference room and he came rushing out.

“Holy shit, Justin, are you—”

I put my keys in his hand and tried to turn my head so Justin couldn't read my lips. “Get the epipen from my glove box and fucking run.”

He nodded and sprinted off, and I gave Justin an eye roll like he was overreacting and casually caught his wrist so I could keep tabs on his pulse. He had these awful hives all the way up his arms. “Paramedics are going to be here any minute, they're close,” I said.

Justin pulled in these weak little breaths, watching me with this pure naked terror that made my stomach ache. Every breath pulled in the skin at the base of his throat, because he was pulling in air so forcefully, he was trying so fucking goddamn hard to keep breathing.

He could do this for two more minutes, maybe.

“Throat's probably going to be sore tonight,” I said, even though I knew he couldn't pay enough attention to know what I was saying. “I'll think about what would be good for dinner. Although it's possible they might still have you in the hospital. You never eat the hospital food, we need to find something there you don't hate. I keep telling you their lasagna isn't half bad.” Come on, Ted, come on.

“Bri...”

“I know. You need to stay awake, though, okay? Ted's coming back with the epipen and you've got to do it, I don't know how.” I of course knew how, but he wasn't getting any fucking permission to lose consciousness.

Justin whimpered, one hand clutching his throat.

“I know,” I said. “Look at me. I know. I know I'm acting like a cavalier son of a bitch but I know, okay?”

He nodded frantically.

“I'm right here with you. I see you. I'm here.”

He grappled around for my hand and I laced my fingers through his. He squeezed, hard, and I nodded encouragingly and squeezed back.

“I know, Sunshine. I'm here.”

And then so was Ted, thank fucking God, panting and dripping in sweat and looking almost as bad as Justin, to tell you the truth, but he's at a bit of an inherent disadvantage in that comparison. I was all fucking ready to stab him, but Justin shook his head and held out his hand for it, so I let him do it. He likes to be in control when he can.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen him use his epipen, and obviously I've seen it and done it since, but it always amazes me how instantaneously it works. It's literally a second every time, less time than he even leaves the needle in for, before he gasps in that first breath. I hadn't realized how fucking gray he was until the color rushed back into his face and oh God, okay, he was going to live, he was not going to die in the fucking Kinnetik hallway from a goddamn flu medication, okay, okay.

“Jesus Christ,” Ted was saying next to me. “Holy shit, what the fuck happened?”

I said, “I need you to clear out the hallway and the path to my office, and then wait outside for the paramedics and direct them there when they get here. No fucking rubberneckers, all right?”

“Yeah, of course. Justin...”

“He's fine,” I said. “I've got him.” I took Justin's wrist. “Okay, Jan Brady, you ready to get up?”

Justin squinted at me. “Did you say Jan Brady?”

“Yeah, good job.”

He kept looking at me blankly.

“She had an allergy episode,” I said impatiently. “I'm gonna haul you up, okay? Hang onto me, I know—you're shaky, I know.” His legs were jittery as hell, from the reaction and the epinepherine. He gripped my arm and I slipped my arm around his waist. “There you go. Not much further. Paramedics any minute, I'm telling you.” I helped him down to the couch and sat down next to him. “Okay, all alone finally. Come here, fuck.”

He nodded and put his arms around my neck, and I buried my face in his shoulder and listened to him wheeze. I could feel his heart pounding up against my chest, and he was shaking so hard, and he was holding on to me and he was here.

“You okay?” I said into his ear.

He nodded, and I gave him a squeeze and let him go. He immediately pulled the blanket around himself, shivering.

“Christ, I completely forgot you have the fucking flu,” I said. I put my hand on his forehead. “Oh, Jesus. Hey.”

“Hi.”

“You're going to get so fucking spoiled this week, you hear me? You want a TV? New computer? Hey, we're getting married, you want to get married?” Yeah, so I was babbling at this point.

He squinted at me. “What?”

“You can have anything you want.”

He shivered. “Can I have another blanket?”

“Okay, I don't...fuck, I don't have another blanket.”

“Okay.”

“I'm sorry. Shit.”

“It's okay.”

“Fuck.”

“Brian.” He took my hand. “It's okay.”

“Your breathing's getting really bad again.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The paramedics showed up right then, though, thank fucking God, and they gave him another epipen on the spot and took their sweet fucking time taking his pulse and his temperature—104.2, can you fucking imagine, on top of this shit—before they had me help him out to the ambulance.

“You're a lot better company than you were last time we did this,” I said to him, as they slipped an oxygen mask over his mouth.

“What, conscious?”

“Yeah.”

Everything went pretty smoothly once we got to the hospital; if there two things hospitals know how to handle, it's flus and allergic reactions. I was all over everyone's ass making sure they didn't give him anything he hadn't had his whole goddamn life, and I called Jennifer and told him what was going on and let her and Ted handle spreading the word to the family. I knew the loft would be full of food by the time we got home, which was a small favor, though fuck if Justin was eating anything more complicated than cereal and apples for a few days until his allergies calmed down. Once he gets really triggered like this he reacts to fucking everything for a little while. During hayfever season he can't eat half the shit he usually can because he's so reactive, and we both have to switch to shampoo with no smell or he'll sneeze his little head off.

I got up on the bed with him after I was finished making phone calls, and he sighed a little and leaned into my shoulder. He had a light oxygen mask on still but his breathing was pretty okay, just softly wheezy like it had been in the morning. He was getting fluids and Benadryl by IV, and his hives were mostly gone. He was just feverish, mostly, and so tired. He had this red flush around his eyes and nose and over his cheekbones, and I thought about this song Justin had been listening to a lot, blasting through his headphones so loudly I could hear it from across the loft—you're not ill, and I'm not dead, doesn't that make us a perfect pair?

“God, you are so fucking beautiful,” I said to him, and he smiled a little through the mask.

**

So that was Justin's first encounter with Tamiflu, and definitely the most exciting, but since, when it comes to Justin, nothing is ever simple and nothing is ever finished, and if you'll allow me one more moment of sappiness, thank the fucking goddamn celestial expanse for that, never finished, never finished...well, in this case it's a bit unfortunate because it means there's a part two.

This was a few years later, January or February of 2010, just before he turned twenty-seven. We'd moved to New York in late winter the year before, so this was our first time living through he whole thing. It's not that it was colder than Pittsburgh, because it wasn't, it was just the sheer goddamn number of people packed into every indoor space, germy shoulder to germy shoulder, everywhere you went. Justin and I got flu shots, we always do, but a kid sneezed in his fucking face on the subway and sure enough, two days later he was stretched out on the floor cushions giggling that the lights bouncing off the walls looked like elephants, delirious little motherfucker.

It wasn't his worst flu by any means, wasn't that fucking swine flu shit people were dying from, but it kept him out of work for a while and gave him his first tonic-clonic seizure since the bashing, besides the one he probably, but not definitely, had when he had that sinus infection and I was out of town. Now, these days, I've done every kind of seizure under the sun, and sure, Justin doesn't have a ton of tonic-clonics, a few a year a maybe, but we've got a lot of years under our belt at this point. I could do them in my sleep. There's the fun exciting worry he's going to stop goddamn breathing—well, he never breathes during them, which isn't fun, but he usually starts back up as soon as he's done—but for the most part if he's not pouring boiling water on himself or cracking his skull on the floor, a seizure is a seizure is a seizure.

Back then I was pretty fucking freaked out by it, and I blame him for what happened next, because stress lowers the immune system so it's his fault that I got sick.

Justin catches every fucking thing that comes his way, and look, I give him a lot of shit about how I need to put him in a bubble, but I get it. Epilepsy like he has is goddam brutal on the immune system. Every seizure he has, even the tiny ones that he has every day, put way, way more stress on his body than he lets on, than he even fully notices at this point. It's frustrating at the end of the day sometimes when he's stupid and slow until I remember his brain fires astronomically more signals per day than it's supposed to. He doesn't have fight left for viruses.

That's him. I have plenty of fight for viruses, and living with Justin is probably some sort of biological experiment. The same way Daph's around sick people all the time at work and hardly ever gets anything, I rarely catch anything from Justin. And honestly, I'm not careful. A stranger shakes my hand and I want to boil myself, I'm in the shower before a trick even leaves, and Christ, nowadays I can't even believe I used to go around kissing people on the mouth, but with Justin...eh. We practically live in each other's pockets, and I think any pretenses of squeamishness where the other one's concerned vanished somewhere around my second week of radiation.

So, anyway, I never get sick from him—anytime we're both sick it's almost always me catching something first and isolating myself the fuck away from him in some hotel room and still, somehow, giving it to him—but this time I did. It didn't hit until he was through the worst of his flu, which was great and all, but it added to the strangeness of the situation, where I was sick and Justin wasn't and I wasn't fleeing the premises. I was still kind of on edge, convinced he'd find some way to catch it back from me or something. Give me a break, my entire life philosophy is fucking based on keeping Justin away from sick people, and here I was being the sick person.

Wear gloves, I said to him.

“Oh my God, shut up.” He kissed my cheek and pulled the sheets over me. “You are the worst patient.” This was before that whole 'no English in the bedroom' thing.

I grabbed at him. Come here.

He got into bed beside me and curled around me from behind, and I was very glad he couldn't hear the little sigh I did. “I called our doctor and got him to call in a prescription for that flu stuff,” he said, his chin up on my shoulder so he could see my response.

What flu stuff?

“The stuff that almost killed me a few years ago.”

I shook my head. Don't need it.

“Don't be like that, this sucks.” He kissed my cheek. “Cut it short while you can.”

If I get medicine you're allergic to you'll probably take it by mistake, I said. You're pretty dumb.

“I don't use your shaving cream that gives me hives. I think I can manage not to take your meds.” He pet my hair. “I'll go to the pharmacy in the morning and pick it up.”

You're not going to the pharmacy, I said stubbornly. It's full of fucking sick people.

He went to the pharmacy, the bastard, before I was even awake the next morning, and he shook me awake gently with the pills and a glass of water. Go wash your hands, I told him.

He rolled his eyes and went to the bathroom while I took the meds. “I told the pharmacist I'm allergic,” he called into the bedroom as he did, way too fucking loudly, and even though I had a headache, God, I'm such a sucker for when Justin's just Deaf as shit. “He said it's not an issue, but that if I'm nervous we shouldn't have unprotected sex until you're off of it. I told him my husband's basically a condom ad.”

I can't even imagine having sex right now, I said.

“That's a first.” He toed off his shoes and looked so fucking warm and soft that I was making fucking grabby-hands to try to get him back in bed. He shushed me and crawled in beside me, dropping kisses on my neck and collarbone. “Fever doesn't feel too high,” he murmured.

Yeah, I'm fighting it off.

“My big strong man.” He kissed along my jaw. “You want me to fuck you?”

Yeah, but I'm all sweaty and gross.

He shook his head, hands already slipping under the covers. “It's hot. Primal.”

I tilted my head back on the pillow, and his lips were on my throat in that way I can't goddamn resist. Okay.

Justin doesn't top all that much, doesn't do it with most of his boyfriends. He used to do it more when he was younger, but I think that was more about proving something to himself and, honestly, to me. There's a stigma, and Justin's a confident and enlightened fucker but if we've learned anything from the saga of the internalized ableism, no one's immune to this kind of shit. There will be more on that later, but for the time being we'll just say that Justin doesn't top as much as he used to because he doesn't actually prefer it, but God, what a waste, because he's talented as hell. Not that he's not a goddamn master artist from the bottom, don't get me wrong, but I'm happy to give him the chance to showcase his entire repertoire once in a while. I mean, everyone remembers Picasso for the paintings, but I like that little penguin drawing, you know?

And it's just nice to lie there when you're sick, to feel wanted and sufficient and sure, loved. Maybe it's not so bad to be Justin after all.

He cleaned me up afterwards, and I let him, and I felt sick and sleepy and safe. He took my temperature and gave me some cough medicine and I just...kept letting him.

You're my best friend, I said at one point.

He snorted. “You're delirious.”

I am so fucked over you.

What's it like?

Not bad, I said, and I hadn't been letting him kiss me on the mouth before that, but I did then.

I whined until he lay down with me, and he stretched out on my chest, sweat gluing our bodies together. It occurred to me that he was still kind of sick, and I tangled my fingers in his hair and felt him breathe until I fell asleep.

I woke up feeling muggy and shitty. Justin had closed the curtains and turned the lights off before we fell asleep, but the light in the bathroom was on, glowing under the door. I didn't hear the shower running, but when a few minutes passed and he didn't come back, I was worried he was sick again. I dragged myself up, coughing, and tried the door, since it's not like I could knock. He was standing in front of the sink, rooting through the medicine cabinet.

I stamped on the floor until he looked over. Hey, are you...holy shit. He had this huge swath of hives across most of his chest and all the way down one arm and over that side of his face. And they were worse than his usual hives, more like blisters, like when he was burned.

I'm trying to find that calamine...

Yeah, sit, hey. Did you take Benadryl?

He nodded, sitting on the edge of the tub. I can breathe okay and everything. How are you feeling?

I'm fine, Christ. I took out his epipen just in case, even though it made him flinch, and found the bottle of calamine. Okay, come here.

I don't...think you should touch me.

I studied him. Are you okay? He didn't look like he was panicking.

No, it's not a PTSD thing, I... He held out his arm. “It's exactly where I was lying on you. See? I was on top of you on my stomach, I had this cheek down...”

I blinked. It's the fucking Tamiflu?

“I think it's in your sweat.”

I took one!

“I know,” he said sheepishly.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and started laughing, and then I couldn't stop. Jesus Christ, who has allergies like this? What the fuck even is this?

He threw a towel at me. You're so mean to me.

I fucking told you I didn't want to take that shit. All right, put the lotion on, I'm going to go strip the sheets off the bed. I'll sleep in the office until this shit is out of my system.

No, you're sick, I'll sleep in the office.

I don't think so, allergy boy. Are you gonna die if I kiss your head?

He glared at me. No, but you might.

I laughed and gave him a light kiss on the forehead. Come on. We're having cereal for dinner.