Duty of Care

LaVieEnRose

I woke up to Justin, half-asleep and sexy and so warm, curled around me with his hand running up and down my stomach. Yes please. I tilted his face up and kissed him slowly, sinking in to the feeling of him gradually pushing into me, his legs and his fingers and his lips, as I woke him up.

I broke away eventually to let him catch his breath and trailed my lips down his neck. Hi, I said.

“Good morning.” He stretched like a cat, his back arched, and I wanted him like I cannot even explain.

Fuck, why bother trying. How are you feeling?

Better. That was every morning, lately. He’d gone from being miserable constantly to waking up okay and fading as the day went on, which at least was an improvement. Usually by the time he was crying or getting irrationally angry or looking at Wikipedia pages of most gruesome deaths it was late enough for me to corral him into bed. And then he’d wake up and say, better.

Good, I said. Then roll over, and his laugh was like little bells.

**

After I showered with Justin and got him all nice and medicated, it was time to head down to the other sick bed.

Having Evan very sick was strange. Not just because it was Evan and not Justin, though that was part of it; Evan really, really doesn’t like hovering, and Justin needs...not to be coddled, but to be watched, to know that someone recognizes that things could get dicey and they’re around to step in if necessary. And that, really, was what was strange, because when Justin’s really sick, it’s an emergency. It’s constant monitoring and medicating and fear and uncertainty and he’s so, so scared because he’s usually too feverish or postictal or under-oxygenated or all three to really know what’s going on.

But this...this wasn’t an emergency. Evan wasn’t particularly scared, and he didn’t need constant care or attention.

Really he just slept, and we waited.

He wasn't working anymore, and he had to get dialysis daily instead of three times a week, which essentially ate up all of his time, but at least he could sleep in the armchairs there. He was quiet and calm and had a very whatever happens happens attitude about the whole kidney situation that I found very annoying, but hey, if he could rest while Justin and I ran around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to figure out how we were going to get out of this one, so much the better.

I went down to the basement and sat carefully on the side of the bed, placing a hand on his back. He stretched and gave me a sleepy smile, and I handed him his hearing aids and his meds off his bedside table.

Doing okay? I asked him.

He nodded. Low fever, I think.

Yeah, I can see it in your eyes. I went to his dresser and got out some jeans and a hoodie since he was shivering a bit. Justin has one too. I'm going to kill you two if you caught something.

He stretched. “I think it's just a thing.”

Yeah, me too. Justin's not coughing, so, you know, call the Vatican.

“The what?”

It's where the pope lives. I tossed him his clothes. You need help getting dressed?

Just getting up, I think.

I took his hands and pulled him up; it's an adjustment not to have to worry about his joints when I do that. Justin's are always so painful. I went to his kitchen and did a little cleaning up while he got dressed. He's normally pretty tidy, but...yeah. He's so tired. And that's the kind of help Evan will accept more readily than hands-on stuff, so it works out okay. Meanwhile Justin loses his mind if you move his stuff.

“How is he today?” Evan said while he hopped into his pants.

He's good. He slept well and then I fucked his brains out.

“Good, good.” He wavered a little on his feet.

Dizzy?

“Yeah. Just really tired.”

Didn't like that. You just woke up.

He shrugged a little.

Well, you'll be able to sleep again soon. Dialysis in twenty.

“Is Justin coming?”

No, you get me today. He said he’s working on a project.

“Oh yeah?”

I didn’t ask any questions. Don’t want to jinx it.

“Yeah, seriously.”

I’m just glad that suck of a show didn’t put him off art entirely.

Evan got up the stairs okay, but he was tired enough that I didn’t want to make him walk to the subway, so after saying goodbye to Justin we took the car and I dropped him off in front of the dialysis center. By the time I got in he was settled in his chair, already half asleep. He used to look so much healthier than everyone else here. Now he fit right in.

Except that he had me with him, and we were signing, and we were laughing. Evan loves old photos almost as much as he loves Justin, so I’d had Jennifer send me some ancient ones of him and I brought along some that I had, and we made fun of Justin’s hair and clothing choices and lost our minds at the ones of him in his school plays. He was a five-year-old wise man in a Christmas pageant. Imagine.

He was talking in his sleep the other night, I said.

In English or sign?

English. It sounded like there was some problem involving sheep he was reluctantly in charge of figuring out.

Evan laughed with his head back. I love him so much.

Yeah, he’s okay. I’d like him more if he breathed better. He’d been struggling a little too much when we left, and it was annoying.

I kind of want him back on prednisone. He didn’t even come close to spelling it right.

I kind of do too, but it’s such an ordeal. I’m going to start making him do nebs more, though. He’s lazy and just uses his inhaler even when he has the time.

We’ve got to teach Martha how to set up a nebulizer.

That’d be a trick. Let’s teach her to do dialysis.

He laughed. I don’t mind coming in. These chairs are more comfortable than my bed.

I frowned and played with his hair a little.

His eyes were starting to fall closed. Justin’s scared, he said.

In fairness, he has PTSD. He’s usually scared.

“I don’t want him to worry about me.”

Yeah, tough luck. He doesn’t want you to worry about him either.

“Sure he does.”

I chuckled. Yeah, you’re probably right. I think after being sick for this long, negotiating people’s concern is the way Justin knows how to relate to the world. He doesn’t get to participate the way he wants to, but he gets to be watched, and that lets him know he’s still a part of people’s lives. And there’s also the fact that people who care about Justin should be worried about him. The kid’s a mess. So it makes him feel, well, loved.

And Evan? Well, most of the people who worried about him have disappeared. He's a little gun-shy when it comes to believing people are going to stick around, and...well, takes one to know one, right?

Understanding Justin, to the extent I believe any of this cosmic crap, I know is what I was fucking put here to do, and it's been fifteen years and I'm still confused as fuck by him half the time; he's a complex kid, and he changes every goddamn day, This is my big, lifetime journey, and don't get me wrong, I've said it before and I'll say it a hundred times: I am fully, deeply aware that I have very little to complain about here. I might not have the self-actualization to always act like it, but you've got to trust me when I say that I am absolutely cognizant of the fact that life with Justin is hallowed ground. That doesn't mean it's easy, and it doesn't mean I'm asking it to be. I'm just pointing out a contrast here.

Evan is easy. He's so easy, because he's just me dipped in sugar. I get him, instinctively, and I'm never surprised when Justin's frustrated with or baffled by Evan because God knows I've stepped on all the same land mines myself. The only time I fuck up with Evan is when I overthink and try to treat him like Justin. These two, they're light and dark, except I'm not really sure which of them is which, blond hair notwithstanding.

Justin challenges me every day, and God knows every night in bed, and I would have given up and stagnated and probably drunk myself to death by now out of sheer boredom without that.

And Evan is easy.

The point I am making is that I have the self-awareness at this point--thanks to both of them--to know that I would be lost without either of them.

So of course they both have to be viciously, horribly sick. Someone up there was really leafing through my lists of baggage, realized I was missing abandonment issues, and decided to throw these two at me.

Evan's blinks were growing longer and longer.

You should sleep, babe, I said.

He yawned. You'll be bored.

You're here to get your blood cleaned, not to entertain me. I tipped his head onto my shoulder and signed sleep in his face.

He folded into me, pulling his legs up onto the armchair, and I stayed as still as I could for a long time.

**

Justin didn’t show me what project he was working on—something on his computer, judging by the lack of paint all over my living room—but he was exhausted by the time we got back. His hand was all clenched up and his allergies were bad, which is as good a way as any to tell that he’s overworked himself. I got Evan settled in bed first with a snack and a movie that he’d probably fall asleep ten minutes into, and then I nudged Justin towards a shower and a bottle of Benadryl, and then we had lunch and shot the shit about Evan, the same way Evan and I talk about him when he’s not around. I wonder if that means the two of them talk about me. They better.

Justin left after lunch despite my better judgment to take Martha out for a walk, and with him gone and Evan asleep I felt restless. I answered some work emails and texted Emily about a few upcoming meetings, and I went ahead and made some meals for Evan that he could just microwave when he wanted them and stashed them in his refrigerator, and then I worked out for a while in the gym upstairs and had a shower and was seriously considering opening up Grindr for an early evening fuck when Justin came home, thank goodness, so I blew him in our bathroom and he thanked me with a brutal asthma attack about an hour later that frankly, any idiot could have seen coming—there’s a reason I hadn’t had him do the sucking—but it was bad and he was scared and all in all it wasn’t a great situation. Martha ran around the house and brought him every inhaler she could find—four—before finally settling down with her chin on Justin’s foot and whining anxiously.

Evan came lumbering up at some point, once I'd gotten Justin fucking breathing again, and I reassured him that it was fine and under control and nothing he needed to worry about it, all that shit, but in all honesty I was used to having him with me for things like this, used to having another set of hands and someone to bounce ideas off of, and doing this just the two of us was disconcerting to say the least. And what was I supposed to do if things went sideways and I needed to haul Justin in to the ER, just leave Evan here by himself? With no kidneys?

“He’s hurting,” Justin said, after Evan had gone back downstairs.

You think so?

“Yeah, I can tell.” He pulled in a shaky breath.

I was making, not to put too fine a fucking point on it, a great effort to not come apart at the seams love that night. It’s not that any one thing was overwhelming, it was just...everything, and I was so laser focused on every inhale from him that it was making me crazy every time his breath caught, and Evan didn’t usually sleep quite this much, and I hadn’t known he was in pain.

“You okay?” Justin asked me while he was putting lotion on his legs before bed, his voice hoarse.

Just all in my head.

He nodded and coughed. “Sign of the times.”

Yeah, sure is. Roll over, I'll do your back. I could massage out the muscles in his back, monitor his breathing, and not have to fucking talk. Kind of the trifecta at the moment.

He fell asleep there, with my hands on him, and I arranged him carefully on top of me and turned out the light and tried not to read into the fact that he felt a little warm. Justin runs warm. It's not usually anything to worry about.

Usually.

Remember earlier, when I said that I realize I have very little to complain about? This isn't contradicting that, because very little isn't nothing, and if I had to find something to pick at in this life I get to have everyday it would be that I'm not sure if I've really slept in the past ten years.

You don't sleep when your partner could have a seizure, or stop breathing.

So I pulled out my phone and scrolled through Grindr and read an article about this new development going up in the Bronx and other such noteworthy affairs and I did fall asleep, about an hour later, to the sound of him wheezing softly and fussing against my skin. But I woke up two hours later and he was struggling, and there was something going around the office, and he felt warm.

You see why you don't sleep?

I didn't know whether to wake him up. I never, fucking ever, know whether to wake him up.

And nights like this, I remember when I didn't used to worry. That first year, when he was fine, when he was a person who could get a cold or a flu and shake it off, when head trauma and seizures and white blood cell counts were so, so far away from what we'd think about, which was generally just harder, longer, more. I used to not lie awake in the middle of the night memorizing the stuttering of his breathing, waiting for a change. And there didn't used to be another boy downstairs with his own shitty immune system and even shittier kidneys who couldn't afford to get sick either.

I didn't think he was sick, not really. He was just a little warm. And I hadn't been to the office in days.

But there was something going around. People hacking into their damn hands like they never went to kindergarten. Remember when the words "respiratory infection" didn't make you feel like you'd been stabbed?

He was really struggling.

Remember when you didn't know him at all?

He needed to rest. He gets so, so goddamn tired. Just like Evan, it's fucking exhausting having a body that's not doing the simple shit it's supposed to do. Justin's lung capacity, when he's at his absolute best, is about sixty percent of normal. He runs around and paints his ass off and walks the dog and takes care of me and Evan and himself at sixty percent. He gets so tired. He fights through the seizures like you fight a riptide. Every single part of him is telling him to shut down, and he won't.

So I don't like to wake him up.

Sometimes he's just warm when he sleeps. It probably wasn't a fever. The wheezing and the asthma attack were from his allergies that get so goddamn bad, and he took Martha for that long walk outside today. Sometimes he has to go outside. He can't take being trapped.

He'd be so much safer if he were trapped.

Here's what I want to know: how do you justify taking any sort of risk when the possible consequences are this extreme? I'm supposed to feel bad that he can't work or go for a walk or see his little friends when the net result is that it keeps him alive?

But he has that fucking face when he wants something, and I'm not his fucking keeper as much as at this point I'd fucking love the relief of that, and...it was going around my office. He didn't go there. I brought it here.

If he was sick.

This is why you don't sleep, and on top of that, always on top of all that, was Evan, who hadn't come up for dinner, who hadn't come up to say goodnight, who had, as far as I could tell, been asleep for twenty of the past twenty-four hours, and if you think that wasn't freaking me the fuck out then I don't know how you've hung on to this story for this long.

How many hours do you have to sleep before you're not really alive?

So that fun question was floating in my mind, and I wanted to be down there with Evan—honestly, before the asthma attack, I'd been planning to stay down there with Evan tonight, in case he needed anything—but the thought of leaving Justin...no.

But I did eventually leave him, just for a minute. I moved him carefully off my chest, scratched Martha's head as I went past her bed, and went down to the basement. The lights were on, and Evan was sleeping on top of the covers, his neck craned in an awkward position, his phone in his hand and his hearing aids still in. So like, you see the kind of responsibility I have here, right? The contract I've signed to take care of these two, and what happens when I let something slide?

I woke him up gently. Hey, hey. How are you feeling?

He rubbed his eyes. “Not so good.” From him, that's a lot.

I couldn't very easily bring Justin down here—he comes with too many damn supplies, and the basement's not great for his allergies—and...well. I remembered what Evan had said, and our bed was definitely more comfortable than a recliner at the dialysis center, at least.

Come on, I said, and I helped him up and waited patiently while he wrapped his blanket around himself before I guided him up the stairs.

“Justin's okay?”

He's fine. Come on.

He figured out what was going on fairly quickly—this was, I am forced to disclose, not the first time I'd had this sort of psychotic break and needed them both in one place—and followed me to our room. Normally I'd put him on Justin's other side, since Justin charmingly drifts towards the middle of the bed anyway, but tonight he was hugging the side of the bed with one arm and his chest with the other, like it was hurting him, and....well, I wasn't exactly going to move him. So I crawled into the bed and brought Evan in on my other side. Justin immediately rolled back into me—still keeping that iron grip on his chest, I noticed—but Evan stayed on his own; he's cuddly with Justin, but usually only with me once he's already asleep.

“You okay?” I asked him, my arms full of Justin.

“Yeah. What's going on?”

Well, you know what they say about honesty. “Just worried about you today.”

He nodded. “I am too, a little.” He reached over me and touched Justin's shoulder, stroking his thumb up and down his bicep. “Heavy breathing.”

“I know.”

Evan nuzzled his pillow, his eyes already falling closed. “Y'got it? I'm sorry...”

“I've got it. You're fine. Go to sleep.”

I closed my eyes and listened while his breathing evened out and Justin's didn't, and I tracked the time passing with Justin's heartbeat.

**

He was, just like the day before, better in the morning. He stretched and smiled at me and raised an eyebrow at Evan burrowed into my side.

You fell asleep too early, I said. I got lonely.

“Uh-huh.”

I had to go into the office, and I almost hauled them both in with me, but Justin convinced me I was being neurotic with assurances that they would be fine here where there wasn't a virus going around and I wasn't supposed to be with them every second of every day and this is why we got the dog, Brian and lots of other annoyingly reasonable things like that. So I went, and they stayed, and I concentrated on not calling them every half-hour, and also not calling the hospital and hassling them to hurry up and get a kidney, and if they had some buy-one-get-one-free situation where we could throw in some lungs for Justin, so much the better. I just like...did advertising.

Emily poked her head in at about one. Hey. Justin's here.

Yeah, send him in. He okay?

Seems fine.

And he did. He came in, Martha at his heels, and leaned over the desk and kissed me. Hey.

Hey. Is Evan—

Evan is fine. He's awake and working on his English homework.

He needs to drop that class.

Let him have something. Can I use your printer?

Yeah, of course. Project finished?

He nodded. Can I pull it up?

I rolled my chair back from the computer. Be my guest.

He tapped around on my keyboard for a bit and finally maximized an image. It was this gorgeous, multi-colored portrait of Evan, laughing with his head back, his curls loose and wild, his arms crossed over his legs. I knew the photo Justin had used for reference, but God, it's incredible what Justin can do. How much more like himself Evan looked here than he ever could in any photograph. There's movement in what Justin makes, somehow. There's life.

HIS SMILE COULD SAVE THE WORLD.

YOUR GENOROSITY COULD SAVE HIS.

Find out more at kidneyfund.org

“I might need more from you than just your printer,” Justin said sheepishly.

I kissed him hard. I'll get it everywhere.

**

Another night, another round of Justin rubbing lotion on his legs, another nagging feeling that something wasn't right.

“Are you going to share with the class?” Justin asked me.

Do you think....if it's okay with Evan. Do you think he should move up here with us until he gets his kidney?

Justin's lips moved into this slow, beautiful smile. “Yeah?”

Yeah, I think so.

Justin wrapped his arms around his legs and rocked back and forth a little, watching me. His eyes were like oceans.

You wouldn't want to change anything either.