[ 2:03 AM ]
The darkness is murdered by brightness and whiteness. I try to shield my eyes, but my arms are too heavy to lift. Deciding I’m much too lazy to battle the light, I opt to keep my eyes shut.
“Wes?”
It’s Liza. I lick my lips, feeling how utterly dry and chapped they are. “It’s been far too long since I’ve heard your annoying voice,” I murmur. My tongue is so dry, too.
“Oh, thank god. Can you open your eyes?”
I try once again, then give up, all that ugly whiteness proving too strong. “Fucking bright.”
“Brad, honey, can you shut off the lights?”
I lift my head, daring to peek open my eyes again, despite the painful brightness. “Brad?”
Then the fluorescents go out. Now, only the screens of machines at my back and pale streetlight coming in from the window fill the room. From the light switch by the door, Bradley emerges to stand at the foot of the bed.
“You’re at Cavanaugh Grace,” Liza tells me, gripping my hand. I hardly feel it, for as cold as her fingers are. “Which is like a step up from grandpa’s basement, basically.”
“What a shitty hospital,” Bradley remarks.
“Anyway. You’re totally okay,” Liza goes on, giving my hand a squeeze. “Cracked a rib. I think your nose, too. Bruising. Ugly gash on your cheek. You look like some hot MMA fighter, so that’s kinda cool.” Liza runs a hand along said cheek. I wince, feeling a mild sting.
Bradley’s still by the end of the bed. He lays a hand on my foot, gives it a squeeze while he watches me. I return his gaze tiredly.
“I see you two have met.”
“We have,” says Liza. “We talked quite a bit while you were out, in fact. What’d we talk about?” She looks back to him, searching. “Oh! Right. We talked about our degrees. He’s an art major. I’m a college dropout major and fulltime booze-pourer. We’re basically twins.”
“Is my face that bad?” I lick my lips again, annoyed at how dry they are. “This is what makes me money. Can’t have it broken.”
Bradley comes up the side of the bed, closer now, as if he was scared a moment ago to see me too closely, and only now just mustered the nerve. “You look just fine, babe. Did you … see the wall?”
I look straight ahead. Hanging on the wall across from my bed, I see my own face, except it’s not quite right. After a minute of studying it, I realize it’s a print of the pic Bradley took of me right after we had sex on his roof. But he’s altered it, made it look like it’s painted with bright oils. My eyes glow in the artwork.
“You did that,” I say, stating the obvious. “Brad, it looks … I look amazing.”
“It’s you.” Bradley makes a tentative smile. “It’s all you, Wes.”
“Shit. I hope I still look that amazing.” I chuckle, then wince at the pain in my abdomen. “Hope the baddies didn’t totally fuck up my face, otherwise I’m staring at a high quality of awesomeness I’ll never have again. Hah. Shit.”
My joking aside, I study his eyes from across the room and find them somewhat … unamused. He’s scared, I realize. He resents what you do. He thinks he’s going to lose you just like he lost his dad. The look in his eyes presses me like a pillow to my face, suffocating me. I even feel myself growing short of breath.
Look for the beauty in him, a voice says. There is a beauty in everyone. Find it.
“Bradley,” I choke.
He lifts his eyebrows, his soft right hand suddenly grabbing mine. Here I am, splayed across a hospital bed, one of my hands claimed by Liza, the other claimed by the boy with the yellow hair.
“Your father …” I start to say.
He waits, his eyes gleaming in the dim, alien-green light from the monitors by my bed. All the rest of the words are stuck in my throat. I don’t have to tell him. I can keep it a secret forever. I can carry it to my grave so Bradley doesn’t have to know.
“What is it?” he prods me, waiting, his brow furrowing.
“Liza,” I say suddenly. “Can you please … give us a minute alone?”
She lets go as quick as if I’d burst to flames. “To be honest, I gotta piss so fucking bad.” Like that, she scurries out of the room. I hear her footsteps fade down the hall.
Now it’s just the two of us and the pale, sickly glow from the monitors. There are a million better times and better places I could pick to tell Bradley. One or two or three or fifty strangers just beat me up in the middle of a dark parking lot, the first time in my nine years that that’s ever happened, and I can’t unsee the darkness, nor unhear the silence of this horrible night. My eyes and ears have been opened.
Finally, the words come out: “I knew him.”
Bradley doesn’t react. I’m not even sure the crux of what I’m saying carried in those three brief, inadequate words. I knew your father. But can Bradley really imagine, in those three words, what I’m saying? Can he see the bed his dad and I shared? Can he imagine the hotel? Can he hear the creaking of bedsprings?
“B-Brad?”
He still doesn’t respond. It’s like he didn’t even hear me. Like he’s still waiting for me to say whatever it is I wanted to say.
The crazy Bradley, out-of-his-mind Bradley might have accepted this information with a maniacal laugh, shouted out something about how ironic life is, then made out with me and asked to suck my cock in the garden. But the Bradley I get tonight is a much sobered one. It’s a leveled one, a focused one, an earthbound one.
When his hands slip from mine, my heart falls through the floor. “Brad, I didn’t know. Please. Your dad was such a good man. He was so good to me. There are … There are hundreds of men, Brad, but I remember your dad. He was special. He was—Brad, please, I didn’t know—”
“It’s not your fault,” he says so quietly, yet it cuts me off just the same as if he’d shouted the words. He casts his eyes to the floor, suddenly unable to look at anything, lost in thoughts. That face of his, it’s the same one he had when I first met him at the bar. The staring-into-his-hands face. I’m supposed to be a healer, and I just punched this boy in the gut.
“Please look at me.” I’m begging him. “I didn’t know. Brad. It was nine years ago.”
Then I get what I asked for: his eyes meet mine, shocked, electric-blue and furious. “Nine years ago??” he exclaims.
I swallow hard, all the dryness of my throat and mouth holding hostage every intelligent thing I could possibly utter. I’m stupefied to silence. Dumbstruck. Every single word I could utter would only make this situation worse; that’s what I feel. I’m just digging the hole, on and on, deeper and deeper.
“He was … my first client,” I try to say.
“You were seventeen,” he says, working it out. “You were, like, a fucking kid. My dad paid to have … to have a fucking kid get him off? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I was on my own,” I fight back, my voice raising. “My dad kicked me out. I was on my own and I quit school and your dad saved my life, Bradley. Please, hear that. He saved my life. Rod helped me when I needed it most. Rod was not a creep. Rod—”
“STOP SAYING HIS NAME!!”
Then, as suddenly as he’d shouted, Bradley seems to have had enough surprises for a day. Abruptly, the boy I’ve fallen in love with turns and heads for the door. His shadow from the light in the hallway casts across the whole room, making him appear as tall as a giant. I listen to his stomping footsteps as they fade away … as he walks out of my life forever.
“Fuck me,” I breathe, aching all over. His departure hurt worse than the beating did.
Liza didn’t go too far. She’s in the room as fast as Bradley’s out of it. Coming to the side of the bed, she squeezes my hand, apologizes for his departure, then starts to offer her unwanted advice. I’m too lost in what just ensued that I can’t hear anything she’s saying.
He has to be able to accept it, right? Don’t we have something strong enough between us that can survive the disturbing facts I just lent him? His father was a generous man. His father was a good man. Isn’t this not-relationship of ours resilient enough to endure the truth?
“Wes.”
“I’m sorry.” I clench shut my eyes, drop my head to the pillow. “He was the best thing to have happened to me and he fucking left. He fucking left. They all leave after they cum. They get what they want and they cum and they fucking leave.” I clench my fists so tight, I feel every little bruise in my body. The robbers were generous too, I think bitterly to myself. They gave me so many bruises as parting gifts.
Liza lets go with a yelp. I guess I squeezed her hand a touch too tightly. “C’mon, Wes. Don’t worry about him. He’s from a whole other world. He’s a rich kid, Wes, he’s not one of us. He’s—”
“Don’t you ever want to reach higher?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Higher than Bobby,” I clarify, turning my head to burn her with my words. “He’s a shit. He’s been a shit for years. Why settle for the mud we trudge through when a diamond falls into our palm? We have to grow, Liza. We aren’t kids anymore playing house and having almost-babies and … and trying to make it work with deadbeats named Bobby.” I sigh, lazily recalling a client of mine who is also named Bobby. He’s actually pretty nice. He tips well. I’m a generous person. Yeah, sure, I am, but when am I gonna stop giving it all to the world and, instead, keep a bit for myself? Is that too much to hope for?
When is someone going to heal me?
“We broke it off,” she lets me know. I meet her eyes again, surprised. “The fucker’s moved out already. Yeah, yeah. Tried to make it work out this weekend, but really just put everything into focus. He’s not happy. I’ve been miserable for years. Some of us, Wes, I think some of us are just not meant for love.”
“I think you’re better off,” I tell her. “Both of you.”
She puts a hand up to my face, like mom, like nurse, like caregiver. Liza always was, from the beginning. She caresses it as if to ward away the bad dreams, rubs my ear. “Look at us. Liza and Wes. Aren’t we just a pair of fuck-ups, you and I.”
For some reason, I find her words funny. We both start to laugh, until I seize up in an ugly spasm of pain and yelp out, frightened. Then we decide to find that funny too, and the sound of our raspy laughter fills our ears, fills the hospital room, echoes down the long halls, worries the nurses at the desk.