Like Diamonds

LaVieEnRose

Long before he took a steel bat to the head, before the seizures and the PTSD and the memory issues and the panic attacks, miles and miles before he lost his hearing, Justin had allergies. He's the only one in his whole family with them, so God knows where his body got that bright idea, and Jennifer mentioned to me off-hand once that they were even worse when he was a kid, which to me seems scientifically impossible but I suppose she would know.

All of this is going to be important later. I'm not just spouting out trivia for the halibut, as my dear old man used to say.

It's also important that before any of that stuff I mentioned up there, back when Justin was just a bratty, fearless, brilliant adolescent, so we're talking about the kid who walked into Babylon and took his shirt off, who took himself out to Liberty Avenue on a school night, went home with sex god and total stranger Brian Kinney...yeah, yeah, you know the saga, I'm just making sure you're really picturing what a confident, untouchable fucker that kid used to be before Chris Hobbs stole that right alongside the endurance of his right hand, his ability to accurately assess whether a situation requires him to freak out, and his absolute confidence that he won't piss himself in public...

Way the hell back then, Justin was already embarrassed as fuck about his allergies.

I, in all honesty, thought it was a lot funny and maybe a little cute, though fuck if I would have admitted it to anyone at the time or even recognized that's what I was thinking, but look at all my fucking character growth in my old age. The maudlin garbage I am for allergic Justin is previously established—look, he bats at his eyes and paws at his nose and scrunches up his face and I don't know, it all just fucking works, leave me alone—and it used to be that the humiliation and the frustration kind of added to the whole effect, because I didn't used to worry about Justin being humiliated and frustrated. I didn't used to worry about him at all.

I don't know when I was really aware of them, because we met in September and I wasn't seeing him all the damn time until November, and he generally doesn't have a lot of problems through the winter. I know one night in the spring we were sprawled out on the bed, sticky and panting and laughing because right in the damn middle of fucking him he'd remembered something funny that happened at school that day that he'd wanted to tell me and he'd been fucking mid-groan and stopped to go “Oh man I forgot to tell you about my English class” and for some reason that just fucking cracked me up, him going from sex maniac to schoolboy in the blink of an eye, and we were still kind of chuckling over it. He'd been sneezy all that night, and when I'd met him at Woody's earlier he'd actually apologized for it, and I remember I said, “Why are you apologizing?” as an actual, non-rhetorical question, because it seemed so unlike him and was so entirely unnecessary, and he'd just shrugged and changed the subject.

Now I was lying there with him and I was about to stretch to the nightstand and get a cigarette, then I looked at him and his wheezing and figured that probably wasn't the best idea. I nudged his shoulder with my elbow, still laughing a little. “Where's your inhaler?”

He looked at me, kind of startled. “What?”

I repeated myself and, knowing the never ending irony of life, probably threw in a comment asking if he was deaf or something. He hauled himself up and dug it out of the pocket of his jeans, still giving me kind of a nervous look. I didn't dissect it at the time, obviously, and didn't realize any significance of it then, but I'm pretty sure that's the first time I'd even said the word. I noticed the lump of it in his back pocket one of the first times he came to the loft, but I never really thought much of it. He carried it with him sometimes and not others, and when he had it I took it as a sign that I should charitably fuck him on his back so he could breathe a little easier. He had a cold while he was living there and it took up permanent residence on the nightstand, but I never actually saw him use it. I'd never seen him use it.

He stood there holding it now, looking self-conscious as fuck.

I laughed. “Are you kidding me right now?”

He whined.

“You realize I had my tongue in your ass ten minutes ago? I think you can probably use your inhaler in front of me.”

“Brian...”

“Oh my God.” I hauled myself up. “You're in luck, I have to piss anyway.” I lumbered off to the bathroom and heard the hiss of the spray behind me as I went.

I just chalked it up to him being a weird fucking kid and didn't think much of it.

We won't analyze that too much right now, but like I said, this is all going to be important later. All you need to keep in mind for now is that there was shit under the surface long before Justin was having seizures, long before he lost his hearing, and long before...all right. No need to spoil the whole thing right away. We'll get to it.

**

So anyway, through the years, Justin's allergies were always around, and it's not as if they've never been an actual problem—there was the time at Debbie's when his throat closed up because the genius thought he'd try pesto, or the week he spent broken out head to toe in hives when our laundry service changed detergents, at this point too many drug reactions to count that somehow haven't killed him yet, and, obviously worse than any of that, the fucking snoring—but for the most part they're in the background. They made him kind of sleepy and soft in the summers and the mornings and added some background noise to the loft that I found I didn't hate, and they made him look simultaneously beautiful and like warmed over shit, with his puffy eyes and the whistle when be breathed, for the six months he spent living with the fiddler and his cat, which I didn't exactly appreciate at the time, but whatever. They gave him trouble when he was out in LA, the heat and the smog and the stress, and he spent his first week back kind of sick while he was still getting that out of his system, which was a good excuse for me to keep him in bed, which I didn't mind. And they were worse in New York than in Pittsburgh, because of the air quality and the fact that we're idiots who got an apartment by Central Park, but look, we like Central Park, and most years we caught the sinus infections before they gave him fevers and seizures so usually it was okay.

Except then came that spring where we finally got him to the allergist after I heroically reinstated our health insurance, because he inevitably has to go at the beginning of every allergy season because he forgets that what he feels like is normal for him and gets kind of panicky about it and also because he's sad and he can't breathe. The frustration isn't really cute anymore, if you haven't picked up on that, because surprise surprise, I do worry about him nowadays, and neither is the embarrassment, because we're still rarely more than ten minutes out of me having my tongue up his ass at any given time, and because any amount of embarrassment with regards to health stuff at this point is a fucking annoying waste of time, and if you'd sat through the number of lectures I have about ableism you'd be annoyed to see them ignored too.

And I couldn't figure that the fuck out. Why Justin and I could be having these fucking conversations about how illness is nothing to be ashamed of, how capitalism has determined our societal ideal of what it means to be a valuable person, all of this fucking enlightened shit this kid brings to the table, and then the next minute that was fucking out the window because I'd said the wrong thing or glanced at him the wrong way or had the fucking audacity to not know what to do.

Example. A few months before the incident we're here to discuss, back when we were in that awful phase of adjusting his meds after the pancreatitis thing...God, he was having four, five fairly major seizures a day, it was fucking brutal. I wouldn't ask anyone to go through what he was that week. His muscles were all knotted up and painful, and he had these horrendous migraines, and he was covered in bruises from his body fucking throwing itself around. It was awful. There's a reason he hasn't talked to you about that time and I doubt he will. I don't really want to either, but there's a little anecdote we need, which is that during one of the nights that week he seized in his sleep and wet the bed, which...look, was going to fucking happen at some point, and it was honestly strange we'd gone through three days of this sucking shit without it, and it's not as if Justin and I aren't well-acquainted with each other's bodily fluids at this point so I can't say I was all that pressed about it. The whole right side of his body was pretty shot after that, and he was only half-conscious anyway, so I helped him to the chair in the corner that he usually just uses as a depository for his fucking dirty clothes until he was ready to shower and stripped the sheets off the bed. He held his head, his elbows on his knees, and I crouched down in front of him once I was done.

Doing okay? I asked.

He took a shaky breath and said a “yeah,” that sounded more like a “no,” and not because of his voice.

I gave him a small kiss. Shower. Nice and hot. It'll feel good on your back. Ready?

He shook his head.

Okay. I ran my hand down his arm. Take a minute. Is this side back online yet, let me see...

He pulled away from me. “Stop.”

I guess that's a yes then.

“I can shower by myself,” he said, slowly getting out of the chair.

I watched him struggle to stand on his own. I...don't think you can, actually.

“Brian!”

Stop being a fucking diva and let me help you.

He breathed hard for a long time, working through something in his head that I wasn't privy to, and finally whispered, “Fine.” He covered his face through the whole shower, like if he couldn't see then he wasn't really there.

That's going to come back later too, as you know.

I figured he was just fucked up from the seizure, that he wasn't thinking clearly. Or that I'd messed up. Because that wasn't him, being ashamed like that of something that wasn't his fault. Not anymore, not after everything we'd been through. He couldn't still be that guy who wouldn't use his inhaler in front of me—I mean, he'll use his inhaler in front of me now—after ten goddamn years. This was the guy who read books about chronic illness theory, who gave his Deaf friends shit for avoiding the word disabled, who was out to change the goddamn world. So the problem was not him.

It was the circumstances, the seizure and the delirium and the pain, or it was me. Because you don't see this fucking iridescent kid and think that he's wrong. It's not something your mind is going to jump to, him being wrong.

You have to understand that.

I mean, Jesus, imagine me in his shoes, standing in the shower while my partner cleaned me up. Think about what a goddamn terror I would be, Sontag and all.

It really doesn't seem like he's going to be the one of us to mess up this situation, right?

I realize I'm giving away a lot of the punchline here, but Justin's already told you the plot of this little tale, so whatever. You already know where this is going. Let's just fucking get into it.

**

So, the allergist appointment. I didn't go with him; I don't tag along to his doctor's appointments as a general rule, only if it's an emergency and he can't get an interpreter or if it's something new and scary, and this was neither of the two. He came home with a bunch of new prescriptions, so I knew he'd actually fucking gone this time, and he was kind of charmingly nervous about the eye drops, and honestly they're hard for him to wrangle with his bad hand anyway, so I'm the one who put the shit in his eyes that gave him the worst reaction he'd had in years, whatever. I heard him having a rough time during the night, snuffling around and rubbing his face, but I just threw an arm over him and went back to sleep.

And then it was six in the morning and he was waking me up with a fucking vice grip on my wrist and telling me he couldn't see. It was pretty obvious right away that the eye drops were the issue, because the reaction was really focused on his eyes and he had these kind of heartbreaking red streaks down his cheeks where the drops had run out of his eyes after I put them in.

You can't see me at all? I asked. Look at me, look at me, nothing?

Yeah. Nothing.

“Jesus Christ, Justin,” I said out loud, because, you know. Why the fuck not.

He was already freaking out, so I got him a Klonopin with his regular allergy stuff along with a shitload of extra Benadryl, and I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital but he just about lost his shit at that, and I couldn't exactly blame him. Sitting at home in bed was scaring him enough, and honestly I was surprised he'd even accepted the meds I brought him. Asking him to sit on a gurney while strangers injected him with God knows what was a fucking of a lot to ask him, though of course I'd end up making him do it the next day.

I wasn't too worried at that point. The reaction seemed localized and he was breathing okay, and his pulse was good, and if it had been anywhere else on his body he would have slapped some calamine on it and gone to work.

He was just really scared, and that was hard to watch.

But I wasn't too worried, at that point.

He slept a lot that first day, which at that point I still had hope would be the only day, while I kept an eye on him and tried to get as much work done as I could. We were still in crisis mode after the whole Marcus thing, and I really, really couldn't afford to stay home today, but what the fuck could I do? I managed calls to the office and to clients in-between calling Justin's allergist, who told me to bring him in and I said no, and Daphne, who told me to bring him to his allergist and I said no, so then she sighed and told me to keep dosing him up with Benadryl and to put compresses on his eyes, so I kept doing that even though he hated it, because I have a pretty fucking high tolerance for doing things to Justin that he hates where medical situations are concerned, but even I wasn't dragging him out of the apartment when he was that confused and that vulnerable. Some things are a fucking bridge too far.

And again, we know of course that I would end up doing it, so whatever.

I was on the phone with Emily at one point, going over some billing statements I needed her to follow up on. She listened and took notes and got through all the business shit and then said, How is he?

Sleeping. Freaked out. It's kind of like when we were terrible signers and could barely talk to each other, but at least he could fucking see me then. I rubbed my forehead. Any tips?

She shrugged. I'm from a Deaf family. I've been signing since I was five months old. I've never had anything like this.

Yeah, but your eyes suck.

And I wear glasses, asshole. There was a crash out in the living room and I must have jumped or something, because Emily said, What?

Noise. I have to go. I hung up and went out to the living room, where Justin was on the floor tangled up in what used to be our glass-topped side table. “Why the fuck are you getting up on your own?” I said. I'd been talking to him a lot out loud that day, because, again, why the fuck not, and because it made me feel at least slightly less alone in this. I could only say about one word actually to him at a time, signing them on him or manipulating his hands to sign them himself, so it's not like we could have real conversations.

I got him to sign where and waited for his brain to click together that I was asking him where the fuck he was going, and then I took him to the bathroom to pee and get the glass out of his palm, because we didn't already have enough going on without throwing that into the mix. I could barely look him in the face. With his eyes closed like that he didn't even look like himself.

“You're okay,” I said softly, when he gasped as I prodded at his cut. “I know. You're okay, Sunshine.” When I was done I picked his chin up. There was some tears under his eyes, and but I couldn't tell if he was actually crying or it was just the reaction making his eyes water. I hadn't been able to tell all day.

But he nodded a little and leaned in and I kissed him, and he tasted the way he was supposed to.

**

I figured I shouldn't leave him unsupervised after that little stunt, so I moved my laptop to the bed and lay there next to him while we got some work done. He was less scared than he had been earlier and moved on to being bored out of his mind, and there wasn't exactly much I could do about it. I couldn't fuck him because I had eighty thousand tons of work to do and besides I tried it once and it sated him for all of twenty minutes, and what the hell else was he supposed to do, it's not like he could draw or read or mess around on his computer. I even tried googling “how to entertain Deaf blind people” in between updating spreadsheets, but the results were fucking depressing and depended on having at least some sight or hearing, which Justin didn't right then, or they were gardening, and he was still sneezing every thirty seconds as it was, or knitting, and good Lord spare me. So I dug through my wide assortment of office fidget toys and got him a can of Play-doh and a stress ball and whatever else I could think of. “This is like having a toddler again,” I complained to him, shoving his hands off me as I tried to work. Whatever, he didn't know.

Day turned into evening and he asked for a sleeping pill, which sounded like a bang-up idea to me. I'd put compress after compress on his eyes and they weren't looking any better, so it seemed like we'd be doing another day at home. If this kept up maybe I could convince him to come to the office with me and hang out on the couch, but Christ, how was I supposed to convince him of anything when I couldn't fucking talk to him?

And what about his job, and his life? What about his fucking paintings?

It's not that I thought this was going to last forever or anything but...how the fuck long was it going to last?

“I miss you,” he said, when I got him the sleeping pill, and that was kind of rough, because Jesus, of course he did, he was locked in his body. He missed everything.

But it was also the moment when I realized that I fucking missed him. That I hadn't had a conversation with him in almost twenty-four hours, and that was, apparently, too much for me. That it had been nine years since we'd gone this long without at least texting each other a joke or some shit. Nine goddamn years. How the fuck did I...

Look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't make connections with people because who knows if they're going to wake up one morning blind and Deaf and you're not prepared. I'm not saying that, because that would be ridiculous.

But also...it was pretty fucking scary to miss him after twenty-four hours when I was looking right at him.

And you know what? I fucking dealt with that. I took the fear of fucking commitment that that realization made rear its ugly little head and I dealt with it, and that's not what this story is about.

It's not, which is what made the stuff that came next all the more confusing.

But before any of that, I told him I missed him and gave him a sleeping pill and another triple dose of Benadryl and he slept for sixteen hours.

**

In the morning I made the requisite calls to Cynthia and Marie and figured it was time to fill in Gabriel and his mother. I didn't know how much detail he'd want Gabriel to have, if they were still in the stage where Justin wanted to come across as someone cool and sexy who didn't have his eyes swollen shut, so I was vague with him and I underplayed it to Jennifer because she can be panicky, and then I figured I better tell Molly because she gets all bratty when we don't tell her things, and she was the sensitive person we all know and love and wanted pictures to blackmail him with later, which I did not give her, because even I have my limits to how mean I'll be to Justin.

I was working in the office and thinking that I should probably get him up soon and give him more meds and make him drink something and half-wondering if Daphne would come here and give him an IV of Benadryl and fluids so he could coma his way through all of this when he called my name. He sounded freaked out, but he doesn't know how his voice sounds anymore so sometimes he calls me like something's wrong and then he just asks me if I want cheese in my eggs or some shit, so I wasn't too concerned at that point. And then I saw him.

So okay, at this point I'd seen Justin use his epipen twice, in two very different circumstances, once at Deb's for the aforementioned pesto incident when everyone was there and rushing around us freaking out and generally getting on my last nerve, and once at the loft, calm and quiet in the middle of the night. We never actually figured out what the trigger was for that. Both times, though, he did it himself, because he's a big boy and because even though I'm better now than I used to be after ten million blood tests and IVs with him, I might not be the biggest fan of needles. Neither is he, for the record, which is probably why both times I was the one telling him that he needed it, while he hemmed and hawed and pretended Benadryl could cover it while his breathing closed to nothing.

You don't forget how he sounds in times like that, that's my point. So while you can definitely make the case that I should have stabbed him with the thing thirty hours earlier when this reaction started, any idiot who knew him and had seen this before would have gone for the epipen the second they heard the way he was breathing when I walked into the bedroom. This wasn't much of a judgment call.

I searched the nightstand drawer first, and when I came up empty I went to the bathroom and started hunting through the medicine cabinet and the vanity, but I was rushing and it wasn't until I was already out of the bedroom that I realized Justin didn't know I'd been in there in the first place. He was yelling for me and feeling around the bed next to him like maybe I was there and he didn't know it, and of course I wanted to reassure him, but I also really wanted to find that fucking epipen and that seemed a little more vital.

Except Justin was panicking, Justin was getting worse, and eventually I growled, “Fuck,” and stumbled back into the bedroom, where I grabbed Justin's hands and slammed together in the harshest stop I could manage, because I couldn't look for something when he was screaming like that, I couldn't think when he was screaming like that, and he was not fucking breathing well enough to afford to be screaming like that, God, he sounded so fucking bad.

I told him I was looking, but that just confused him more because the dumbass hadn't figured out that he needed his fucking epipen instead of another dose of Benadryl, and by the time he realized it, by the time he asked for it in this broken voice, I'd finally fucking found it, still stashed in Justin's travel bag with some ratty spare toothbrush and a dried-out stick of deodorant, is this guy trying to die, what if I hadn't checked that bag, I almost put it aside without checking it, and I ran it back to him and pulled down his waistband, pulled the cap off, and pushed it into his leg until it clicked and he gasped.

Breathing.

“All right,” I said. “That's better, huh? That's better now.”

I started to pull it out but he reminded me to count to ten, so calm and rational and brave, and I pulled it out after and set it on the nightstand and thumbed off the tiny spot of blood on his leg. I looked at the hives on his cheeks and around his ears and down to his neck and I looked at his poor fucking eyes and I thought about how he really, really hadn't wanted me to put those eyedrops in two days before and...God. What do you even say?

Trick question, since I couldn't fucking talk to him.

I kissed his temple and whispered “I'm sorry,” in his ear, and he said, I'm okay, and the next thing I knew I was hugging him so hard I'm surprised his head didn't pop off.

“Don't do that again,” I growled at him. “You've been breathing since you were a baby, it's not that fucking hard.”

He was shaking a little, from the epinephrine and the loneliness and the goddamn terror, and I couldn't hold him tightly enough to make him stop. I kept readjusting my hold on him to figure out some way to keep him still, but I couldn't do it.

But he kept holding onto me.

“I know,” I whispered. “I know. Doing so well.”

Sometime in there I realized it was his birthday.

**

I got him back to sleep eventually, thanks in no small part to the shitload of Benadryl I was regularly feeding him, and I moved my work back into the bedroom so I could listen to him breathe but I was nervous and distracted every time he coughed or fucking rolled over. At one point I put my laptop to the side and closed my eyes and plugged my ears just to try to get some sense of what it was like.

It's fucking intolerable, asking me to watch him experience something I haven't. It had been intolerable for nine—ten—years since that night in the parking garage and it was intolerable now.

I told him once that he's supposed to be a smaller, better version of me. New shit isn't supposed to get him, and it continues to be goddamn unacceptable that it does, and the fact that I am supposed to sit here and...I mean, what the fuck is that? How the fuck am I supposed to lie around watching like some helpless shit while he goes through something I don't understand? Who the goddamn hell's idea was it that everything that touches him doesn't go through me?

I will never understand this goddamn world.

I will never understand how anyone could want to feel the shit I feel about him.

Intolerable.

But hey, like I said, I fucking dealt with it, like I fucking deal with it every day of my goddamn existence, I do it for the life and the smile and for eggs in the morning and theory discussions and cracking up in the middle of sex and the naked, unromantic fact that I cannot go twenty-four hours without him, and this isn't a story about that.

**

I called his allergist, who obviously told me to take him to the emergency room, because he's probably legally obligated to or some shit.

“I'm not doing that to him,” I said. “He can't communicate, he's scared out of his mind, he doesn't know what's going on. Can you just call in a prescription, please? He needs those...the ones that come in the cardboard pack that make him a raging asshole for a week.”

He laughed a little. “Prednisone.”

“Sure. Can you call it in?”

“Not without examining him.”

“I don't...think you're getting the depths of how isolated he is. I'm sitting next to him right now talking to you and he has no idea. He can't...I can't explain to him what you're doing to him, and we're talking about a guy who's having a massive allergic reaction to a medication you prescribed. So you want, what, him to just trust you implicitly, when the last time he was there, when he could actually talk to you, you nearly killed him?”

“Mister...”

“Kinney. And I can't even explain to him that you're asking that absolutely fucking ridiculous thing of him, because he can't communicate. You don't...” I took a deep breath. “You don't understand how much he likes to talk.”

“We need to see him,” his doctor insisted. “And we can give him a steroid injection in the office that will give him relief a lot faster than just the pills.”

I chewed my lip and looked at Justin on the bed. “You really should have led with that. When can you see him?”

**

One of the hardest things after Justin was bashed—I mean, not immediately after he was bashed, because at that point the hardest things were stuff like, you know, worrying that I'd fucking killed him, but a few months down the line when he was living with me—was getting him to leave the loft.

I knew it was important, that there was no way he was going to get better unless he got out there and fucking...saw that the world was the same as when he left it, but he was so much better when he was at the loft. It only took a week there, maybe two, before I was seeing flashes of the old him when we were alone, when he'd tell some joke or send me a sideways look, or he'd smile. And then I'd bring him out into the real world and he'd shrink back down, turn into that scared, miserable facsimile of himself.

And God, it wasn't even just that. As soon as I was out of the loft with him, all I saw was a million things that could fucking kill him. Everything was a threat. It was so much easier just to keep him home, where everything was familiar and predictable and controlled, and it's not like he was fighting to flee the coop. Until, of course, he was, and I had to hurry up and get on board with him going back to school and dancing on tables and drawing comics about the bashing and other assorted shit I wasn't ready for, but that's not really relevant here because we didn't really have to worry about Justin raring to go brave the world without his sight, because of course it ended up coming back the next day and because...because even Justin has his goddamn limits, okay? He has his limits. Let the fuck up on him, for God's sake.

Anyway. None of that's important. I just mention it because bringing him out of the apartment that day, bringing him to the doctor, it felt like when I used to make him walk up and down Liberty Avenue. He was terrified, and I saw something that could kill him everywhere I looked.

I'm telling you. Fucking intolerable.

He cried in the cab and told me he was mad at me, which you might think was difficult to hear but really wasn't, since I was pretty mad at me for this too, so it was nice to be on the same page as him for once in this fucking ordeal. Somehow despite the fact that his blood was mostly Benadryl at this point his hay fever acted up again from being outside the apartment, and that was just so goddamn sad to watch, this fucking trivial annoying shit on top of this un-trivial fucking torture. I handed him tissues and rubbed his back.

The waiting room was, for some reason, goddamn packed, and more than a few people winced when they saw Justin even though I had the hood of his ratty old sweatshirt pulled as low as it would go. I parked him in a seat and got his paperwork, but as soon as I sat back down with him the fucking stress of the situation started making me crazy, and I was staring at the paperwork blanking on shit like his middle name and his insurance number. “I'm losing my mind here, Sunshine,” I said to him, spreading my palm on his back. He had his feet up on the chair and his face hidden in his knees, the fucking picture of misery. I got up to turn in the paperwork and he jumped when I touched him when I came back, and I mumbled an exasperated “Sweetheart,” and did my name sign on his temple, the B and then the K against his forehead.

I can't breathe, he said, but as someone who'd just seen him not able to breathe, I considered myself an expert on that, and he was okay, just panicking. I tried to tell him that, made his hands sign scared, over his chest, but Jesus, how reassuring is that, do you think? Oh, you're scared and terrified and vulnerable as shit? Let me just make you sign the word 'scared' to add that to the mix.

He said, No, something's wrong, I can't...I want to go home. It's not safe here. I hate this. Please can we go home?

Justin hates hospitals like no one I've ever seen, but he's usually able to push past it, and on the rare occasion he's not I barely know what to say even when he can fucking see me. So I just put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him in tightly.

He said, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so goddamn pathetic.”

All right. So...just to make sure you're up to speed: he couldn't see, he couldn't hear, a couple hours earlier he'd needed a damn epipen, he was out in public with little idea of where he even was, and he was telling me that he thought he had a medical concern that needed addressing and telling me that, because he was in a place that knew smelled like antiseptic and medicine and other things he's fucking allergic to, he'd probably be safer at home. Sure, he was wrong, but he was working off the information he had, and he was being proactive about something he thought I needed to know to keep him safe.

Look, no one likes calling things pathetic as much as I do, and I'm honestly not seeing it anywhere in here.

So I was honest-to-God confused when he said that. I truly didn't fucking get it, not like I was going to get it later. I just tightened my arm around him so he'd know I was listening and waited for our name to get called. His name.

“Taylor?” the nurse called, and I gave him a little shake and pulled him up. The nurse started chattering at him, and I was cutting her off and explaining what was going on, which meant I wasn't paying enough attention to stop someone from shoulder-checking Justin on their way out. It's amazing how often that happens to him. I get that he's short and everything, but he's not fucking invisible.

I told the guy to watch where the fuck he was going and braced Justin's biceps while he calmed down. He'd put his arms around his head right away, which just...every once in a while I get this reminder that, no matter how much distance we get from it, no matter how much more pressing, immediate, actual shit is going on, it is always, always going to come back to the bashing for him. That's what's at the end of every road, that's what's been fucking done to him.

Look, there's nothing to do about it, it doesn't matter, it's just his life. But I'm telling you a nice and complete story, and that's what I remembered right then.

And it's something you need to get, if you want to understand Justin. He's playing on a different game board from everyone else. It's like what I was saying before, how after the bashing I could walk a street I'd walked a thousand times, nothing changed, but it was a different place if I had Justin with me. He's here with us, but he's not really with us. He's in this sort of...this PTSD alternate reality, and it's a lot like this world in a lot of ways, and it's not a problem, and we find ways to reach each other. But what'd he'd said to me a few weeks before this, that things are scarier for him than they are for most other people...that's not self-centered and it's not bullshit. He's living in a scarier world that looks like our world.

You have to understand that.

Anyway, I mumbled, “God, you're going to need a forty-eight hour therapy session when this shit is over,” and dragged him to the exam room.

He'd lost a little weight, because I hadn't been able to convince him to eat for two days, but we'd get that back. I showed him where the exam table was and let him get himself up there, because he's not a child, and took a spot next to him.

The nurse said, “Uh, you can just sit—”

“No,” I said, adjusting Justin's sweatshirt so he'd know I was there. “Do whatever, I'm just...I'm staying here.”

The doctor came in, and they took his blood pressure, which was still a little lower than I would have liked, and pried open his eyes to look into them. I came around in front of him so I could get a glimpse of what we were working with and also so, in case he had any vision through those fucked up eyes—God, they were red and weeping and miserable—he'd see me and not just his fucking doctor. But he didn't react at all except to wince when they were touched.

“I've never seen a reaction like this to these drops,” his doctor said.

“Yeah, well, he's allergic to Tylenol, he doesn't play by the rules.” I took his hands so he would stop signing make them stop at me. He started coughing when they put the stethoscope on his chest, and there was a wheeze at the end of it so I dug his inhaler out of my pocket and gave it to him. The nurse started setting up a nebulizer treatment, and I said, “Okay, yeah, he likes those,” and she smiled at me like she felt sorry for me, which was annoying but not entirely inappropriate, given the absolute bullshit of this situation, so I let it go.

“We're going to give him some steroid injections to bring down the swelling,” his doctor said. “And I would really advise you to ride this out at the hospital.”

I shook my head.

He sighed. “ I'll send you home with a prescription for prednisone, and some steroid eye drops, and an epipen to replace the one you used. And if you need to use another one, for the love of all that is holy, call 911.”

I nodded, even though I didn't mean it, and helped Justin out of his sweatshirt so they could do the shots. He knew what was happening as soon as he felt the alcohol swab on his arm, and...well, like I said, he doesn't like needles. He said, “No,” out loud, and he doesn't speak out loud in front of people who aren't me.

I took his hands.

“No, I don't want, I don't know what it is—” he said, and I whispered, “I know, I know, it's okay, I promise it's okay,” as they gave him the shot and he cried.

**

He was shutting down by the time we got to the pharmacy, like he does after a panic attack or a nightmare. He was also a shaky mess from being pumped full of drugs for the past two days, and it occurred me that the fact that he hadn't had a seizure from the epipen was probably the one stroke of good luck we were getting this year, so it was all downhill from here, so I wasn't surprised when I pidgin-signed my way through asking him if he wanted to stand in line with me or sit and wait he said he wanted to sit. But I fucking hated leaving him there, with strangers sitting next to him and coming and going and living their stupid little lives around him, and from where I was standing I could see four different drugs on the shelves that I knew for a fact would kill him, and I don't know, it's like I thought they were going to jump out and bite him or some shit.

I told you before; when he does bad, I do bad. That's the ugly magic in play here.

I got his drugs and checked them twice and came over to him and signed his name on his cheek. Our first ASL teacher gave him that name, because of his smile. Sunny little Sunshine, going into the class he had to take because he was losing his fucking hearing, terrified beyond all reason, losing the only life he'd ever known, smiling.

He wasn't smiling now.

**

He fell asleep as soon as we got home, which seemed more like a defense mechanism than anything, but I wasn't going to fight him on it. I tucked the blanket around him in a way even I could recognize as protective and set to work returning the handful of calls about him and the fucking bucketload from work, but eventually I couldn't put it off any longer. He had to get some food in him, so I gave him a banana because it was, you know, identifiable and easy, and punched out his first dose of prednisone. He asked what it was, so I fingerspelled it into his palm, over and over, but he wasn't getting it. I tried doing it into my own hand to see if I would have been able to figure it out, and no, it was just a bunch of half shapes.

He made a face as soon as he'd swallowed them, though, and said, “Ugh, I know what that was. Fucking nothing tastes like prednisone.”

I tucked his hair behind his ear. His breathing was still pretty junky, but he looked like maybe the swelling around his eyes had gone down a little, which was good since I was about to fuck with them. I took a minute to try to ground him, running my hands up and down his arms, letting him kind of paw at me, and then I took his chin in my hand and tilted his head back. He pulled away the second my finger brushed his eye.

“What are you doing?”

I let him feel the eye drop bottle.

“No, no no no, we're not.” He backed up from me as fast as he could, his back slamming against the headboard.

I took a deep breath and tried again, but he was not having it. I tried to explain to him that these weren't the same ones I'd put in him a few days before, because God, of course he was skittish about letting me put something in his eyes, but he fucking needed these, these were going to help, and he wasn't listening, but how the fuck was he supposed to listen when he couldn't see me?

I grabbed his chin again, and he pulled away so hard he fell off the bed, and in his efforts to get away he ended up backing himself into a corner, so it was pretty easy for me to put my legs on top of his and hold him still. He started hitting me, not hard or anything, just ineffectual shit trying to get me off of him, and I know he knows how to hit and it's like he wasn't even trying, like he was too tired and out of it to even defend himself.

He kept screaming no, telling me to let him go, and I just...went into a fucking trance about it, shoved it all down and did what fucking had to be done. He was crying, so God knows if the drops were even going to fucking stay in, but I held his eyelids back and put them in and held my breath while he sobbed.

I got off of him and scooted back some to give him some air. I tried signing a few things on him, but he was pulling back and away and I knew he didn't want to be touched right then, so I gave him space and listened to his hoarse, panicked breathing. I leaned against the bed and closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to swallow away the tightening in my throat every time he whimpered.

Finally he talked, and I was ready for the begging, the anger, the “I told you not to”s, the “this is my body”s, I was going to sit there and I was going to take it, but...well. That's not what happened.

“How the fuck do you stand this? What the fuck is wrong with you, why are you here? What the fuck kind of masochist are you to stay here with me? What's goddamn wrong with you?”

His voice didn't sound like his, and I'm not talking about his fucked up Rs or Ss or the fact that he was wheezing like a fucking thunderstorm, it was the pitch of it, the lowness, this anger I hadn't heard from him since...well, ironically, since he refused to be thrown out of the loft almost exactly seven years before, but more on that later.

I said, “Justin, stop. You can't throw this fucking pity party when I can't even yell at you for it.”

“I'm fucking useless!” he yelled over me, because how the hell would he know. “I'm a pathetic worthless goddamn excuse for a person, I'm fucking nothing, all I do is suck everything you fucking have out of you—”

“Shut up.”

“I take from you and take from you and I give you nothing, and now you can't even talk to me, I can't even fucking cross a room by myself—”

“You need help right now, people need help, people need help sometimes—”

“I'm fucking shit! Why are you here? Why haven't you fucking suffocated me with a pillow and just goddamn been done with it, what the fuck is the matter with you?”

“Don't even fucking joke about that, asshole.”

“What are you fucking waiting for? Do you think I'm going to be less of a fucking disappointment someday?”

“I'm not waiting—”

“Do you think I'm ever going to be anything more than a fucking complete waste of goddamn space? Give up! Fucking give up, Brian!”

All right.

So here's what you need to understand.

I had given Justin Taylor everything I had, and I'm not saying here what you probably think I'm saying, so hang on and just listen.

I'd given him everything that I had. I had bled for him, wept him, fucking ripped myself wide open for him, gone against every fucking thing I'd ever believed, left the only home I ever knew, turned my life upside down, felt fear and despair and goddamn passion the likes of which you fuckers will never see in your goddamn lives, I had ripped out pieces of myself for him to hold and protect, ripped out pieces of myself one by fucking one and traded them with parts of him, I was walking around with another fucking person's life inside my body and my life all the hell over there balled up and locked in a body that wasn't working, I am just trying to get you to fucking understand...

It's not that I resented it, it's not that I regretted it, it's not that I would do a goddamn thing differently, it's not that if I had more to give it wouldn't be immediately his, it's just that I didn't. I was sitting here watching him sob and think that I didn't want him and that he didn't deserve me, as if he didn't deserve a fuck of a lot better than goddamn me, and this was where ten fucking years had gotten him, this was how much I had managed to reassure and soothe and secure him. None. Nothing. I had done nothing for him, I had gotten him nowhere, he was telling me to smother him with a motherfucking pillow because he didn't think he was good enough to have me pry open his eyes and torture him, and even that, all of that, in and of itself would not have necessarily been a problem, except that I had given him everything I had.

Do you see what I'm saying now? There were no additional tricks up my sleeve. There was nothing new I'd thought of to try, there was no secret untapped part of me that I had not given him and given him in full. He needed more, and that would not have been a problem except that I did not have it. I had given Justin Taylor everything, and he needed more, and I didn't have it.

Just, you know. So you understand what was going on right then.

Then he started reassuring me that I hadn't hurt him, fucking trying to comfort me, and I swear to God in that moment I would have killed him to shut him up, I would have destroyed every part of myself that he was holding, but I couldn't get my mouth off of his skin.

**

His sight came back the next day, and I got out of that apartment as fast as I goddamn could. I went to Nova and drank everything I could get into my mouth and fooled around with a dancer on the couches and watched a drag queen hit a guy in the face with her stiletto, and then I drank some more, and then I went somewhere else and drank there, and then when there was nothing left to drink I went to Daphne's.

She's on call half the nights, which I didn't take into account when I was banging on her door at two AM, but turned out she was home.

She said, “Brian, what...”

I can't go home.

“...Okay. Come in.”

I stumbled into her tiny apartment and flopped down on her couch and listened to her bang around the kitchen. It seemed incredibly loud. She came with a glass of water. “What did you take?” she asked.

“Nothing, I'm too old for that shit.”

“Okay, well why did you drink, like, the East River? Justin's better, right?”

I sat up. “How do you figure that?”

“Well, you're here, and also he told me.”

“I should be here even if he's...not better,” I said. “I should have. I should have left him alone.”

“Okay, well that's idiotic.”

“He's going to leave me,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and sat down next to me. “He's not going to leave you, come on.”

“No, he's going to leave me. And you know what? He should. I hope he does.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I'm not good for him,” I said. “In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm actively bad for him.” I drank some water. “Do you remember...remember a year and a half ago, when he was thinking about having that...the surgery thing. The lasers.”

“What does that have to do—”

“I was talking to Michael about it, and he asked what I would do if it were me, would I do the surgery. I said of course I would, that I couldn't live the way Justin was living. I said I couldn't do it. But that that was me, that wasn't him. And Michael said...Michael says to me, how do you think you can be around him believing that about myself and think that he's...he's not going to believe that he's the exception, if you think being sick is something for you to be ashamed of he's not going to believe you that he shouldn't be ashamed.”

Daphne watched me. “Okay.”

“Okay well he's not the exception, I'm the exception, first of fucking all, like it's fine for anyone else, I just don't want...it's not for me, I'm not supposed to be on that side of it, I do the taking care of, but that's not...that's not even the fucking point, okay? It doesn't matter, that doesn't matter, because Michael was right. He can't be around me believing that and be okay with himself. I thought he could and you...Daph, the things he fucking said today.”

“He was upset. He wasn't thinking clearly.”

“How the fuck can I expect anyone to be sick in front of me?” I said. “I drilled it into his fucking head that...God, I threw him out of the loft, do you get that? When it was me, I threw him out of the loft. I did whatever the fuck I could to show him how fucking unacceptable it was for a person to need help. And now I think...what, I think that's undoable? It's not undoable. He should fucking run. This is not him, he is smart and sensitive and thoughtful and I am killing him.”

She watched me her, hand running through my hair. “People say stuff they don't mean when they're scared,” she said. “He didn't mean that stuff any more than you meant it when you threw him out of the loft.”

“I absolutely meant that,” I said. “I one hundred percent meant that, I thought he didn't deserve to have to fucking deal with a sick person and that I didn't have anything to offer him. I believed that with every goddamn part of me, and if I got sick again tomorrow I'd believe that again.”

“Brian,” she said.

“So how the fuck,” I said. “How the fuck do I pretend that I have any goddamn business being in his life? I'm infecting him. He doesn't believe that shit, he reads the books, he knows it's not true, but he knows I believe it. He's not embarrassed to be sick, he's embarrassed for me to see him. He should be with someone like you. He should be with someone like goddamn anyone else.”

She lay me down and pulled my shoes off, then my pants.

“He is good,” I said. “He is good with everyone else and I make him hate himself. I hope he leaves me.”

**

I did not, obviously, hope that he left me, so I went home with my tail between my legs and Justin and I spent a few weeks being inordinately nice to each other. It was very weird. I'll spare you the details.

I didn't really know what the fuck was going on with him. I knew why I was being careful as fuck, but I didn't know why the hell he was being careful with me. It was almost like he was...apologetic, or something.

He kept making meals. Like, the fridge was full of food, he'd gained back the weight he lost, we'd had dinner two hours ago, and he was asking me if he should make something.

Why don't you paint instead? I said. You haven't painted anything in ages.

Can I draw you?

Yeah, where do you want me?

There's fine. He fished out a sketchpad and sat in the arm chair, cross-legged and scrunched up because he never sits correctly on anything, and that was the kind of thing I was noticing in that period because I was sure that I didn't have much longer to notice them.

I stretched out on the couch and watched TV and listened to the soft scratch of his pencil against the paper. Way back the hell when, the first few times he slept over, I used to wake up to that sound and think someone was trying to pick the lock on my front door.

I heard the pencil stutter on the paper. That didn't happen, back then.

He cursed softly and massaged his hand.

I waved until he looked at me. You okay? I normally don't even acknowledge seizures this minor, but like I said, I was being nice to him.

He averted his eyes. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

I watched him, tonguing the inside of my cheek. Do you want the heating pad?

“No, I'm okay. It's nothing.”

I can—

“Brian.” He tilted his head to the side, the world's smallest smile on his face. “I'm okay.” He stretched his hand out and showed it to me. “See?”

Okay. Good.

He picked up his pencil and got back to work.

**

Who knows how long we would have gone being so goddamn cordial if Gabriel hadn't called me mid-afternoon one Saturday, when I was walking home from the gym. I frowned and checked the time on my watch, mumbled, “Well, I don't like this one fucking bit,” because Justin had just left to go to some matinee with him an hour ago, so I accepted the call really, really expecting to see an emergency.

Instead, there was Gabriel at the fucking grocery store.

Hey, I said.

Hey, how are you?

Uh, I'm fine. Was my watch wrong? Why the fuck was he at the grocery store and not the theater? Maybe they decided to skip it and just stay in and cook something. That sounded like Justin. What's up, everything okay?

Yeah, everything's fine. You know that soup Justin makes, that shrimp noodle one?

Sure.

What's the spice in that? He told me and I can't...

Oh, there's a ton in there, there's lemongrass and anise and cloves...cinnamon. I paused. There's something else.

Yeah, I'm blanking.

I snapped my fingers and fingerspelled. Cardamom.

That is it. Thank you.

Sure. I stopped at the corner to wait for the light. Not that it's not always a pleasure to see you, but wouldn't it have been easier just to ask him?

Probably, but he didn't answer his phone.

The walk signal flashed, but I didn't move.

He's not with you?

What?

I shook my head. Nothing. Uh, good luck with your soup, okay?

Yeah, thanks.

I hung up the phone and looked up at my building and decided that whole niceness thing was officially over.

**

He seemed kind of dazed when he got back to the apartment an hour or so later. He gave me a vague smile as he hung up his messenger bag. Hey. I thought you were going to the office today.

I was sitting on a stool at the counter, playing with a rocks glass.

He glanced at it. “Um...everything okay?”

Why wouldn't everything be okay?

“Well, it's two in the afternoon.”

Where were you?

He took a bottle of water out of the fridge and gave me a strange look. “I told you, I was—”

Don't. Do not waste my fucking time.

He didn't say anything.

Gabriel called me, I said. He wants your fucking soup recipe. And you didn't answer your phone. So where the fuck were you?

“I...”

You realize, I said, That I don't fucking give a shit what you do with yourself? Go swim in the Hudson, carry out a hit on someone in the Bronx, fucking...go to Staten Island, I don't care, you can go dive for nuclear waste in New Jersey for all I fucking care, just don't goddamn—

“Brian.”

If you're going to leave, can you just fucking do it already?

“What are you talking about? I just got home.”

No. No. Where were you?

I...I was at therapy, he said.

Do I look like a fucking idiot? Therapy's on Wednesdays.

He scuffed his shoes on the floor. “Lauren thought I should start coming in twice a week.”

I set my jaw. For how long?

An hour, same as—

No, how long have you been going to therapy twice a week?

Since the eye thing.

I forced myself to take a slow, deep breath. To prioritize. Are you okay?

He shrugged, scratching a couple hives in the inside of his elbow; save the fucking eyedrops from hell, the new prescriptions were helping, but there was no magic bullet. “I've been anxious. The nightmares have been worse, you know that.”

Not that you've talked to me about it.

“Brian...”

You know I don't fucking care if you go to more therapy.

“Okay, well, that's kind of confusing, since you're yelling at me about me going to more therapy—”

I have been nothing but the fucking picture of a supportive partner about this therapy shit and you goddamn know it. I am yelling at you about the fucking lying!

He sighed and walked around to the living room to sit on the couch, and I turned around on the stool, watching him. I didn't want to overwhelm you.

Overwhelm me?

Listen, after that whole...I put you through the fucking ringer this month, you know that. I'm just trying not to...you didn't need to worry about this therapy thing, so why worry you with it?

There was a whistle in my head, like a train. A fucking speeding train. What the fuck do I have to do to deserve to know things? Will you just tell me?

“Brian, what?”

What more is it that you need from me?

Nothing, what are you talking about?

No, you know what, it doesn't matter. You need to...look, you need to know this. I don't fucking have anything else. I have nothing more, there isn't...there's nothing more. So if this isn't enough, if you need...you need to fucking know that, I don't have anything else.

He continued looking at me like I was making up the signs I was using. “Brian, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

I can't be what you need me to be! I am fucking...I can't be anything more than this.

I'm not...I didn't ask you—

I can't fucking be a person who you won't lie to! I can't be a person who you won't always think kind of wants to smother you with a goddamn pillow! I've been trying it for goddamn years and it still hasn't worked, what the fuck do you think I'm going to figure out at this point?

“Um...can you figure out how to stop yelling at me when I'm really fucking confused?'

I ran my hand over my mouth. Yeah, okay.

“Okay.”

He shifted uncomfortably on the couch. I'm sorry I lied. I really didn't think...it just didn't seem worth the conversation. You said yourself, you don't care where I go.

Yeah. I had no goddamn fight left in me. I was so sick of sitting there waiting for him to leave.

He tucked his legs underneath him. Um...I love you?

I sighed. Don't. Not right now.

Not if he was about to get up and fucking go. If everything I had for him wasn't enough, I wasn't going to goddamn give him what I did have. And I wasn't taking fucking charity from him.

He pulled his lips into his mouth. I'm confused.

I mean, your brain doesn't work.

I don't think that's why.

Well, again... I ran my hands down my face. I need a shower. You want a shower?

Yeah, okay.

Come on.

We found ways not to talk the rest of the weekend.

**

So now we were past the niceness and we were just being plain naked terrified of each other and having a lot of sex, and who knows how long that phase would have lasted if not for another interruption from an even more unlikely source.

This one came around six o'clock on Monday evening. I was still at the office, getting briefed by Cynthia on a client meeting she'd had earlier that day; her official move from assistant to executive was all of two weeks away, and she was ready, though we still hadn't resolved our custody battle over Emily. She was telling me the deadlines the client gave her for their new campaign and we were working out if we could get the studio for a photoshoot and get our art department to do the editing in that time frame, but I was having a hard time concentrating when my phone would not stop buzzing on my desk. Eventually I sighed and said, “Hang on, let me make sure he's not dead.” He'd told me he was going to go home after work and paint there, so, you know, who the fuck knew where he actually was and what he was actually doing.

It wasn't him, though. It was a series of texts from the number I have saved as “The Bad Seed.”

briiiiiian can you bring me soup please I'm dying

seriously I am the sickest person in the world and my roommate is such a bitch

brian pleeeeease

i need that chicken soup from that place????

I put my phone down and mumbled, “Jesus Christ.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah. So we can do a photo shoot on Wednesday, and if we can get Spike to push back their deadline, we can tell the art department to bump that and—” My phone buzzed again. “I swear to God.”

“Do you need to—”

“No, it's just my sister. Shoot an email to Spike to and see if they'll push their deadline back a week, all right? And go ahead and book the studio time. We'll make it work.”

“Okay.”

I glared at my phone as it buzzed again. “I have to take care of this.”

“Good luck.”

“Jesus, I'll need it.”

**

An hour later, I was in one of NYU's freshman dorms with “that chicken soup from that place,” because if I'm good for one fucking thing it's being ineffectually helpful to sick Taylors.

Molly opened the door and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Oh, I love you. I knew you'd come.”

“Yeah, you don't look like you're dying. Get in bed.”

Her dorm room was the same goddamn disaster it always was. Justin and I helped move her in with all these fucking organizational shit from Ikea and her way of thanking us was to leave her drawers hanging open and her clothes all over the ground. Maybe she was sick because her roommate was poisoning her. I would.

She hopped up onto the bed. “No, I'm definitely dying. Hear?” She coughed and, okay, it was a real cough, but she still looked pretty damn okay. She was wearing jeans, for god's sake.

“You know, when last time you had a medical issue it was a damn seizure, you should probably be more clear with people before making them cross into a different fucking borough for you.”

“Oh my God, you live in Manhattan, you were coming anyway.”

I put my hand on her forehead. “You don't even have a fever, are you kidding me?”

“I do too! 99.8.”

“Jesus Christ. Eat your fucking soup.”

She dug into it and I put some laundry in a hamper because I couldn't fucking exist in this place as is. “I knew I should have texted Justin instead,” she said. “He's much nicer than you are.”

“Yeah, no one's debating that.”

“He would have brought me soup without all the fucking remarks.”

“He wouldn't bring you shit, because he has no immune system and doesn't go around spending time with sick people. I'm going to to have to to take some kind of decontamination shower.”

“Aha! So you admit I'm sick.”

I glared at her and picked a bra up between two fingers. “Yeah, I admit you have a cold.”

“Yeah, and it's terrible. It's the worst. It's the worst cold anyone's ever had in the history of existence.”

“You know, your brother complains less than this when he's actually dying.”

“Yeah, well, that's because he internalized all that 'Taylors don't complain,' garbage. Whereas I am being countercultural. I'm a rebel. I'm a revolutionary.”

I stopped gathering laundry. “What are you talking about?”

“Uh, I'm talking about the fact that what you think is whining is actually a political statement.”

“'Taylors don't complain,' what is that?”

She rolled her eyes and stuffed some soup in her mouth. I should have Justin make that shrimp noodle thing, I realized vaguely. It's the only thing I want when I'm sick. “Oh, you know. Dumb WASPy bullshit. Stiff upper lip and all of that. They drilled it into us when we were kids, so now I complain thoroughly and loudly and Justin...I don't know. Whatever it is Justin does.”

Remember when I said it was going to be important that Justin was weird about his allergies before he lost his hearing, before the bashing, before me?

Remember when I said he's a smaller, better version of me?

Maybe sometimes he's just smaller.

“It's not about me,” I said.

Molly rolled her yees. “No, duh, I'm the sick one, it's about me. Did you get me bread or something? Like a roll?”

“I have to go.”

“Crackers?”

“No! Call me if your fever goes up!” I called on my way out the door.

**

It's not about me, I repeated to Justin, twenty minutes later, panting in the living room where he was painting over a drop cloth.

He looked at me with mild curiosity. “You're home early.”

I wasn't out, I was—oh, hang on. I went to the kitchen and washed my hands, then came back and pointed at him again. It's not about me.

He put down his paintbrush and turned around. Okay, I'll bite. What are you talking about?

Remember when I threw you out of the loft?

You'll have to be more specific.

When I had cancer, and I threw you out.

Wow, what a fun memory to be surprised by. Yes, I remember.

I took his hands and pulled him over to the couch. That wasn't about you. That was my shit.

Oh, I'm very aware that that wasn't about me.

Shut up. All that shit you said, what am I doing here and what's wrong with me and I why was I still with you...that wasn't about me. That wasn't a you, Brian. That was a generic you. Right?

He studied me, his eyes narrowed. “What? Brian, of course it wasn't about you. Is that what—”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into a kiss so rough I'm surprised it didn't snap his fucking neck. His hands went up in surprise, and then one hesitantly, delicately rested on the back of my neck while I swallowed him goddamn whole. Took every fucking bit of him I could get.

He pulled back too soon, panting, his hand still on my neck. “Sorry, I...I can't breathe through my nose.” Looking down. Embarrassed.

“It's okay.” I kissed him once more, fast, and let him go. It's okay. Listen, I thought...this is my baggage, this 'man up,' bullshit.

I realize you want to be special, dear, but most of the world is raised with that baggage.

Okay, but you...you read books! You write ten paragraph emails to Ben on disability theory! You're supposed to be all evolved and shit.

He sighed and leaned back against the couch. You think I'm perfect.

I laughed. Do you know how fucking much you annoy me? I definitely don't think you're perfect.

“No, you do. You think that I'm like...that I have this inherent perfectness and every time I do something dumb or shitty it's some like...betrayal of myself. But all that dumb and shitty stuff is just me. I'm not a saint, Brian.”

I don't know. I kissed his neck. You look pretty good to me.

He sighed and lolled his head back. “I'm trying to be good.”

I know.

Going to therapy twice a week. Trying to be better.

I don't need you to be perfect, I said. I just need you not to fucking lie to me. Okay?

He nodded. “I know. I'll stop. I don't even realize it until I'm doing it, I just...” He shook his head. “I'll stop.”

Okay, and in return I'm going to make you a shirt that says 'Brian, this is not about you' and you have to wear it all the time.

That's a reward?

Yeah.

He nuzzled my cheek. “Okay.”

I tried very hard not to get distracted. Just fucking tell me you don't want to tell me something, I'll leave you alone. Just stop fucking lying.

“Okay.” He closed his eyes. “I'm trying. I'm just...fuck. I'm so scared of overwhelming you.”

Justin, I signed on his cheek.

He opened his eyes.

God, how do you not know this by now? I said between kisses. Fuck. Overwhelm me. What the fuck else do you think there is of me?

“Brian,” he whispered.

That's why you're here, I said. Believe me.

He looked at me, his eyes so big and blue and clear. Okay.