Games Boys Play (30 page)

After twelve goddamned years.

Okay, Dylan didn’t date much—he
did
date. There was one chick he was with for almost a year, back when they first had Attack from Space. They didn’t seem to talk a lot, just kind of hung out in each other’s vicinities, but Brian had assumed they did more when they were alone. Apparently
not
. There’d been other women over the years, the occasional short-lived thing, half the time not even long-lived enough for Brian to get more than a glimpse of the girlfriend—and well, this explained
that.

The band and Dylan’s car and his bike and his travels had all seemed to take a higher priority, and Brian had just thought, okay, so he doesn’t have a raging sex drive, and until he finds a chick who knows her way around an engine or something…

Walking down the sidewalk at seven in the morning, he laughed bitterly. Near-asexual Dylan. Low-sex-drive Dylan. That’s what he’d thought, all this fucking time.

Jesus fucking Christ, he was an idiot.

If he had known…

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have
cared
. So the fuck what if Dylan was gay? Brian probably wouldn’t have agreed to getting tied up, but if Dylan had been out about being gay, he probably wouldn’t have
offered
to tie Brian up. Outside of that, though, who fucking
cared
if Dylan was gay? Why did it have to be a secret from
him?

He kicked a rock off the sidewalk and stepped down from the curb, pulling his car keys from his pocket.

He was going to go home, strip out of his rank clothes, take another shower with his
own
soap and shampoo, and then try to get some sleep. He didn’t give himself a high shot at success, but he’d been up for over twenty-four hours, so he could at least give it a try.

The oblivion of sleep sounded really attractive at the moment.

Maybe he could wake up from it and all of this would have been erased.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The ringing of his cell phone woke him.

He rolled over and ignored it.

After the fifth ring, it went quiet.

And then started up again. He pried his eyes open.

The room was dark from the blinds and thermal curtains being drawn. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping. His skin was coated in a thin film of sweat, and he’d kicked his blankets off the side of the bed.

The phone went silent for a few seconds, then rang again.

“Fuck!” He rolled toward the nightstand and grabbed the phone, expecting to see Dylan’s face on the screen, his stomach already pulling tight in anger at the thought.

It was his aunt Patty.

“Hello?”

“Oh, Brian. Finally! We’re on our way to Memorial.”

“What? Are you all right?”

“We’re on our way to Memorial Hospital. That’s where they’re taking him!”

His blood chilled. “Taking who? What happened?” He was on his feet, looking for his jeans on the floor, remembering he’d thrown them in the laundry basket.

He
did this. Whatever it was, he’d done it. He’d set it in motion. His knees threatened to buckle, and he gripped the dresser to keep him on his feet.

“I don’t know,” Patty was saying. “They didn’t know. Someone called from the scene of… A bystander, on his c-cell phone…
That goddamned bike
. I always hated that goddamned bike!”

He threw a pair of jeans from a dresser drawer toward the bed. A pair of underwear. Patty yelled—not to him—“Turn, turn! Right there!” To him she said, “Frank’s driving. There’s no way I could. They said he was alert, when they called me.” Socks. A fresh T-shirt.
Alert. What’s
alert
mean?
“They said he’d told them who to call, but they didn’t know anything other than he was alert enough to say that, and someone nailed his back wheel going through an intersection.”

Brian tried to get his underwear on one-handed. “I’m on my way.”

“Are you home? Call me when you get here. Goddamned red lights. Call when you get here, and Frank or I’ll come out and get you. Can you call Kelsey?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” Sitting on the end of the bed, he clamped the phone against his shoulder and tried to pull a sock on. He wanted to put down the phone and throw up. He had too much saliva in his mouth.
Shit. Goddamn it.

He dropped his forehead into his hand, listening to Patty. “I tried her already, but it goes straight to voice mail, so maybe you can try.”

“I will.”

“We’re at the parking lot now. Frank, let me off at the doors.”

“I’ll be right over,” Brian said, but she had already clicked off.

His hand shook as he pulled up Dylan’s half sister’s contact card and sent a call. It went to voice mail as he yanked his sock up. He tossed the phone on the bed and finished getting clothes on.

Boots. Keys. Wallet. Phone—the phone was still on the bed. He jogged back to grab it before hauling himself down to his car.

Kelsey’s number went straight to voice mail again while he drove through traffic, straight to voice mail while he gunned it down a road with no stoplights, straight to voice mail as he pulled into the hospital lot. He left a message, turned off his ignition, and climbed out of the car before calling Patty back.

Frank met him in the ER lobby looking tired and aged and smaller somehow. He clapped Brian on the back and said, “He’s all right.” Relief flooded from Brian’s scalp downward as Frank led him through a set of swinging doors. “He seems to be all right, at least. Scraped up and banged up, and he’s gonna be sore as hell when they let that morphine wear off, but it looks like the worst of it is a broken leg.”

“Broken leg?”

“They’re gonna do X-rays, but you can tell it’s broken just looking.”

They passed curtained-off areas, Frank slowing halfway down the hall before plucking one of the curtains back a little to peek in. “Yeah, here we are.” He held it open for Brian.

Patty greeted him with her arms wide, pulling him into a hug. He tried to get a look at Dylan over her shoulder, around her hair. “He’s gonna live, Bri. This time.” She drew back, her hands on his arms, her mascara smeared under her eyes. “Did you get ahold of Kelsey?”

He shook his head.

“Why she even has a phone if she’s going to keep it off all the time… I left her another message, letting her know her brother didn’t manage to kill himself yet. Look at him, though.”

He
was
looking—at the raw leg laid out on the bed, painful just to see. Dylan’s jeans had been cut open and folded back to his thigh, exposing bright red road rash, blood seeping through. There was a rip in the other leg of his jeans, but that was the only visible damage there. Both his boots had been pulled off, as well as the sock on the injured leg.

“Ouch,” Brian said, dragging his eyes away, up to Dylan’s hand resting on his stomach, a white clip over one of his fingers, its cord running to a machine by the bed. An IV was taped into the back of the same hand. A white hospital bracelet circled his wrist, and Brian could just see the edge of one of the half-moons his fingernails had dug into Dylan earlier, not as vivid now, all these hours later.

“Hey,” Dylan said quietly. He looked like one of the lines hooked into him had been busy draining all the color
out
of him. His dark eyes stood out on his pale face. Hair stuck to his forehead.

His other hand lay palm up by the rail. Brian slipped his fingers around it. “How’re you doing?”

“Still breathing, so I can’t complain.” He gave Brian’s hand a light squeeze, then drew his free.

“That goddamned bike,” Patty said.

“Those goddamned cars that don’t look where they’re going,” Dylan said right back. To Brian he said, “They’re gonna do X-rays.”

“Eventually,” Patty put in. “Why does that always take so long? They just wheel you into a room, five minutes later wheel you back out. I don’t see a crowd in the hall lined up waiting for X-rays, so why’s it always take so long?”

“At least it was my leg. I can play sitting down if I have to.”

“I don’t know,” Patty said. “I hope they x-ray your clavicle too. Maybe it
is
just bruised, but the look on your face when you move a little…”

“That’s the key word, Ma—I can move it. My whole shoulder fucking hurts, but that’s how it is when you land on it.”

“They should still check it.”

“If they think they need to, I’m sure they will.”

“Insurance’ll probably total the bike,” Frank said.

Dylan said, “Don’t let them take it till I get a look at it. I might want to buy it off them.”

“You’re trying to run me into an early grave, aren’t you?” said Patty. “If you’re going to get on another bike, it’s not going to be one that’s been in a wreck.”

Brian stood with his arms crossed, his fingers pushed into his armpits, just looking down at the bed rail. Dylan’s hand was at the very top of his vision, but he wasn’t looking at that. He was trying hard not to be looking at that. He pushed his fingers farther under his arms.

“Terri must have been so glad when you sold your bike, Brian,” Patty said.

He looked up, half-lost. “Yeah. I guess.” They hadn’t really talked about it. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d mentioned to his mom he’d sold it, and it had been a few years already.

Patty’s forehead furrowed. “Brian, what happened to your face?”

He’d forgotten. His fingers went to the bruise, and at the sight of the knuckles he’d hurt on Dylan’s wall, Patty rolled her eyes. “Honestly, you two. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with either of you. This one’s Evel Knievel; the other one thinks he’s Jack Dempsey.”

“You can put the insurance money into the Cutlass,” Frank said to Dylan. “Get the interior fixed up finally.”

“I bet statistically the chances of being in two motorcycle accidents are lower than the chances of being in one,” Dylan said. “And if some other asshole drives into me, what are the chances of being in
three
accidents?”

“Zero if the second one kills you,” Patty said.

The curtain behind Frank fluttered, then slid open.

“Look, it’s my ride,” Dylan said to end the argument.

“Going to X-ray?” the man in the scrubs asked, checking Dylan’s chart. “We’ll be back in about twenty, if you folks want to grab some coffee.” He unlocked the wheels of Dylan’s bed with the press of a foot.

Brian’s eyes met Dylan’s for a second as the bed was rolled away from the wall.

“Whatever you do,” Dylan said to him, “do not give her coffee.”

He nodded senselessly.

“Go find us some coffee,” Aunt Patty said to Frank. “I have to pee like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Get a coffee or something for you, Bri?”

“No, thanks, Frank. I’m good.” He walked over to the chair on the far side of where the bed had been and dropped into it. Deadened. Raw. An ache lodged itself against the back of his throat. He put his elbow on the arm of the chair and pressed his eyes against his hand. All the feelings he’d had in the car—the fear, the dread, the sharp, sharp ache—were returning, as if relief was pulling them back up with it.

What if Dylan
had
died? What if it had ended, just like that, with their fight, with everything out on the table and absolutely nothing settled?

He sensed someone standing in the opening and lifted his face, his hand sliding to cover his mouth instead of his eyes.

“You all right, Bri?” Patty asked, back from the bathroom.

He nodded. Nodded again.

“I don’t know about you, but I aged ten years on the drive over here.”

His muscles reflexively formed the requisite small smile.

“Mom?” Kelsey poked her head into their little area. “Hey. I had, like, forty-two missed calls and seven hundred messages on my phone. Where is he?”

Frank showed up with two Styrofoam cups of coffee.

“They took him to get x-rayed,” Patty said.

“So he’s gonna be okay?”

“Not when I get through with him, but yes, he survived the accident.”

“Hey, Bri.”

“Hey, Kel.”

“So what happens after X-rays?” she asked Patty.

Brian pushed up from the seat. “I’m gonna get some air.”

Patty rubbed his back as he passed by. He left them with Frank explaining that the doctor would know whether Dylan needed surgery or just a cast after the X-rays.

Trying to find his way to the emergency-room lobby, he managed to get turned around. When he finally found his way to an exit—any exit—he took it. Evening was coming on, the undersides of the clouds sprayed orange in the setting sun. He followed the perimeter of the building until he found the lot he’d parked in.

The air in his car was stilted and hot. He grasped the steering wheel, its heat radiating into his fingers.

Cameron—the singer for the band Dylan had had when Brian first moved to New Hampshire. He’d walked away from the band after some fight Dylan had never explained to anyone. Then there was that one tour a few years ago, the one Dylan had more or less drunk his way through, avoiding—or so it seemed to Brian at the time—the entire band as much as he could. The highlight of that tour had been Dylan hauling off and punching their rhythm guitarist in the mouth. Another fight that hadn’t had any real explanation. Had something been going on between them? When it came time to talk about who to take on the road for the next tour, Brian had been surprised Dylan wanted to hire Paul on again—and drop Keith, the drummer.

Paul, though. He was married. Ingrid even showed up at a few of their stops.

It didn’t make sense. Besides, if you were trying to hide the fact that you were fucking guys, you didn’t fuck your rhythm guitarist. No, you’d do it someplace else.

You might take it out of town completely.

Guy spends half his life, maybe more, on the road, comes home, disappears back to the road again, alone, hardly a heads-up to anyone, doesn’t have a lot to say about where he’s been when he gets back.

Well, Brian should have figured something was up with
that
, at least, but no—he’d just taken it as Dylan being Dylan.

He was an idiot.

The hospital building sat dark against the setting sun, the sky itself still light, still blue above the orange clouds. The security lamps were coming on, though. Darkness was on its way.