A Heart for Robbie (5 page)

list, and then a thought struck him.

“Excuse me,” he asked the woman at the counter, who sat affixing

“Signed by the Author” stickers to the fronts of a stack of books.

She looked up with a smile, as if thrilled to be interrupted. Her

flaxen hair fell in sheets around her pale face, and her eyes, magnified by large lenses, were a brilliant blue.

“Can I help you find something?” she asked, her voice as bright as

her smile.

“Would you happen to have heard of an author named Julian

Holmes?” he asked, digging the name out of the back of his mind as he

remembered the conversation with Dane about the author whose son lay at

St. Mary’s. Her visage, already animated, brightened still further.

“Oh, of course. Julian comes in all the time. He had a signing here a

few weeks ago, in fact. His last while he’s getting ready for the birth of his son. He’s so excited.” She held up a small stack of books with the name

Julian Holmes across the front and a “Signed by the Author” sticker.

Simon took the first one off the stack and read the back.

In the far reaches of a small Arkansas town, an

unspoken evil has taken hold. Monsters conjured by mere

thought, demons summoned from Hell through the

subconscious, and the dead rising from their graves. Liam

Black’s parents had moved them to Tempest, Arkansas, to

get away from the carnage of New York City streets. Now he

faces the greatest danger ever, the beautiful Eve. While she

may look sweet and innocent in their junior bio class, Liam

suspects there’s far more to her than anyone sees. Is she the

one responsible for their classmates’ newfound ability to

transform thought into matter? Liam, armed with the ancient

knowledge hidden in the attic of his new home, is the only

one who can stop it.

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JP Barnaby

Interesting. The mix of dystopian YA with a twinge of horror, minus

a full apocalypse caught his attention. He decided to give it a shot, even though he wasn’t normally a fan of YA. It wasn’t every day that a gay

author wandered into the hospital where he worked. Maybe they’d get a

chance to meet, and he’d be able to at least say he’d read one of the

guy’s books.

“That’s the first in the Black Heart series. I think you’ll like that.

The characters are amazing,” she said with a swoon that didn’t quite mesh with selling a book.

Simon picked up the other books on the stack and set them aside to

grab the hardback book from the bottom. He turned it over and saw the

bookseller’s crush written in those handsome cheekbones and soft

grayscale eyes. Checking the front of the book, he noticed it was the third and most recent book in the series.

“I’ll take the first,” he said, because it would fit into an interior

pocket of his coat while at the club. The hardback, while beautiful and in excellent condition, would not. Plus, his bookshelves were already

overflowing. He should just take a picture of the cover and buy it on

Amazon for his Kindle, but bookstores were a dying breed. It felt nobler to support the store, like he made a difference, and being a paper pusher, he didn’t feel that way often. Sometimes, when he got a kid to nail a perfect spike on the court, he felt it, but that skill wouldn’t get them out of the life they’d been born into. He felt, deep down, nothing he did in life made

much of an impact on anyone.

She rung him up, and he declined the bag even as he slid the book

into his coat pocket. He still had two hours left before he could respectably show up in one of the clubs alone. Sitting at the bar by himself at seven in the evening reeked of desperation. He was, in fact, desperate, but he didn’t want it to show. So he walked to the end of the block and across the street to a Caribou Coffee. The coffeehouse had far more people than the bookstore.

Apparently, in the age of digital everything, patrons held caffeine in higher esteem than their own education or literary entertainment. A few people

sat reading, while the rest were laughing and sharing a future memory

with their friends. A twink took a selfie with his sour-faced boyfriend and Simon looked away.

He missed his friends on nights such as these: guys from college that

he hung out with in sports bars on the other side of the city, or a couple of girls from human resources that he’d do an after work-drink with

A Heart for Robbie

23

occasionally. None of them suspected the double life he led. Like a secret agent, hiding the most incriminating parts of himself behind smoke and

mirrors, Simon only let them see the parts of him that he felt were safe.

He ordered a hot chocolate, still rather full from dinner, and settled

into a halfway comfortable chair away from the noise of guys who were

far too energetic far too early in the evening. Simon smirked, imagining the willowy twink with the wild hands falling asleep midfuck while

riding some daddy, all because he’d started the evening earlier than he

should. Instead of worrying about them, he opened up the paperback and

started to read.

“SIR?” A young voice asked, interrupting the fight scene where Liam

battled a demon who held Eve captive in one of the circles of Hell, which happened to be conveniently located in a barn on the outskirts of town.

Simon looked up to see a gangly teenager with unfortunate glasses and a

slight case of acne around the side of his mouth. “We’re closing up in

about ten minutes.”

“Oh, thank you,” Simon said, surprised, as he pulled out his phone to

check the time. He had four missed texts and two calls he didn’t notice

because he was so engrossed in the novel. The hot chocolate, stone cold

after sitting untouched for nearly three hours, sat in the same place on the table. Time had stopped for Simon and put everything on hold, except life.

The empty coffeehouse loomed around him like an unfamiliar song.

Simon closed his eyes to get a hold of himself, disoriented from being in rural Arkansas for so long. It had been a long time since he’d been sucked into a book so completely he’d forgotten everything else.

In fact, he seriously considered skipping the club and going home to

continue reading until the tender hours of dawn. Sex wasn’t that important, was it?

He decided he would walk past Hydrate on his way to the L and see

if it still held any allure for him. Simon folded the corner of the page to mark his place and slid the book back into his pocket as he stood up. His legs and back ached from being in the same position against the seat for too long. One joint popped and then another. Finally, he took one step

toward the garbage and, not feeling any lingering pain, dropped his cup

into the hole and headed for the door.

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JP Barnaby

The weather had turned cold, and the March night slapped him in the

face when he stepped into it. A light Chicago wind whipped around him,

yanking his scarf over his shoulder. Simon knew he should have brought a hat. He always forgot it, probably a subconscious thing because it fucked up his already wild hair. Instead, he jammed his gloved hands into his

pockets and hunched his shoulders as he walked. The torrent of demons

and zombies danced through his head, bringing questions only future

reading would answer. Deep down, he knew vampires would come into it

somewhere. All of the clues were there, but he couldn’t figure out how

Holmes would introduce them without disrupting the rules of the universe he’d already established.

Hydrate came up faster than he’d expected. No line of people

waited, as sometimes happened during the summer. Apparently, no one

wanted to brave the blustery night even in the hopes of booze, dancing,

and sex. The door opened, and Simon looked around. A few guys sat at

the bar, laughing and talking while the bartender handed them drinks. It looked pretty dead, actually, but he couldn’t see the second bar or the

dance floor from the door. Maybe he’d find more action farther back. But the question remained, did he want to go in?

“Excuse me,” a quiet male voice said from behind him. Deep, but

with a slight Latino accent, the sound sent a shiver down Simon’s back.

He turned and looked into beautiful black eyes surrounded by the longest lashes he’d ever seen on a guy. He stepped out of the way, but his new

friend didn’t move. He simply stood there, looking at Simon. Simon

glanced around to see they were alone.

“Are you going in to get a drink?” Simon asked with a desperate

kind of hope.

“Yes, and I’m buying one for you too.”

A Heart for Robbie

25

Chapter 3

THE CONFERENCE room into which the assembled team of doctors

escorted Julian had a false friendliness he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

With an odd number of fake floral arrangements placed strategically

around the table, several haphazardly placed chairs, and everything

painted in perfectly coordinated, soothing colors, the room made Julian

feel that St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital in Chicago’s River North area

tried too hard to keep their patients’ families calm. Their doctors had

probably delivered some of the worst news imaginable within these walls, and Julian had a feeling from their grim expressions that this meeting

would be just as devastating.

“I think this is where Mr. Rogers came to die,” Liam whispered.

Julian glanced over his shoulder to see Liam standing behind him, a

horrified look on his young face. He’d brought Clay again. Apparently, he thought Julian needed gay boy love too. Right then, Julian would take all the love he could get. He’d return the love in spades when he wrote the

next chapter of their lives. They deserved it.

“Mr. Holmes,” Dr. Martinez started, her short black bob pulled

behind her ears and her brown eyes grave.

Julian pulled himself away from Liam’s sympathetic gaze.

“Call me Julian, please,” Julian requested for possibly the hundredth

time since arriving at the hospital nearly two hours before. They’d

introduced him to the entire neonatal team, the cardiac team, and now he was on display for a different team.

“Julian,” she amended. “These are Doctors Averitt and Dane, and we

have been working together on your son’s care since he was admitted. The cardiac cath revealed a serious deformity, known as a pulmonary atresia, 26

JP Barnaby

in your son’s heart. His right ventricle is underdeveloped, and several of the major arteries are also underdeveloped and misplaced. We would like

to do an initial surgery to install a BT shunt to bypass the ventricle until we can find a suitable donor. Julian, there is no easy way to say this. The shunt is a short-term solution. The only way to save Robbie’s life is with a cardiac transplant.”

Julian’s own heart constricted painfully in his chest.

“I… I’m sorry. Can we back up just a little?” he started, trying to get

a handle on his emotions. Even though he couldn’t feel it, he saw Liam

drop a hand on his shoulder. “His heart is deformed?”

Dr. Averitt nodded and pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase.

Very serious but disappointingly detached, he pushed his glasses higher on his pale nose and showed Julian a diagram. It appeared photocopied from

some kind of medical textbook. His graying blond hair fell forward just a little across his forehead as he spoke.

Julian’s mind refused to focus on just one thing, jumping erratically

from Dr. Averitt’s hair to Dr. Martinez’s name tag and then back to the

paper in front of him. He understood, intellectually, that his distraction came from shock and lack of sleep, and he tried harder to concentrate on the diagram of a heart Dr. Averitt held, even as he counted the stripes on his shirt.

“This drawing is of a normal heart,” he said, taking a black marker

and drawing a thick line near the bottom right of the heart, sectioning off a part. “In your son’s heart, this chamber, the right ventricle, is too small to be very effective. In order to help the heart pump blood the way it should, we want to put in a shunt here.” He drew a small tube from the chamber

above into the smaller ventricle. “That will buy him some time until we

can get him on the transplant list and find a suitable donor.”

“And a… a transplant will save his life?” Julian asked, balling his

hands into fists on the tabletop to try to contain the suffocating pain. He’d sat in the Pediatric ICU all afternoon and held Robbie. He refused to

consider the possibility that his son could die.

“If you elect not to put him through the trauma of a transplant, he

may last a year. The stress on his heart will continue to increase as he grows, and at some point, his heart will fail. With a transplant, there is a 60 to 70 percent chance that he will live to see five. With each successive A Heart for Robbie