New York Christmas (11 page)

hang on tightly through the breath-stealing pain. When Alex was shouting and helping and pulling him away there was another bullet fired. Daniel couldn’t see what had happened as a mask had fallen over his eyes, and with the single thought for what his parents and Chris would think, he allowed his conscious self to subside.

* * * *

Chris felt tonight had been different. No Daniel, for one. He had been called in early for his shift and never made it home. Chris really tried not to worry, but he had a serious investment in the other man, was emotionally tied to him in ways he had never imagined.

He’d had one phone call. Just past three am, his cell vibrated itself onto the floor before he was fully awake enough to reach for it. Cursing, he grabbed at it, seeing Daniel’s name on the display. He pressed buttons to answer but the vibration had stopped, clearly he was just barely too slow. It was okay, Daniel was probably leaving a message.

He waited until the phone indicated a message and he immediately tried to contact Daniel, but it went straight to voicemail. Damn. He scrolled to his own voicemail and connected: one message.

“Hi. I’ve just—jeez—Chris, I just wanted to tell you I love you. Sorry we don’t have more time.” Daniel’s voice was low and controlled and incredibly calm, but ice shivered down Chris’s spine and in seconds he was off the bed and pulling on jeans. He picked the cell up again, tried keying Daniel’s number, but again nothing, straight to voicemail.

He needed to call someone. Shit, he realized he didn’t even know what precinct Daniel was with, so twisted up in his own problems he had never really asked. It wasn’t near here, it was on the other side of the city—wait, Daniel had called his brother to find out where Chris was, maybe Andy would know?

Andy’s voice was slurred and sleepy, but within seconds he must have picked up on the confusion in his brother’s voice and then he was lucid and able to give some idea of how to go about finding Daniel.

“Why do you need to talk to him?”

“The message he left me—it seemed wrong.”

The coffee was lukewarm, and the somewhat suspicious looks he was getting from the guy in charge were enough to freeze what was left of the dishwater-strong caffeine in the plastic cup. It certainly wasn’t quality like he would get at Ame’s, but then he wasn’t exactly sitting pretty in the warm coffee shop dispensing caffeine and muffins to New Yorkers. In fact, he hadn’t set foot in Ame’s since he had left on a mission to find out what the hell had happened to his lover.

No one had helped him; no one would tell him anything. He was only informed that “Officer Daniel Bailey was on duty, and when he returned a message would be given to him.” It went from bad to worse when not even the cop he recognized from the second time Daniel visited the coffee shop would look him in the eye.

In the end he slid past busy, rushing cops and ended up in some kind of main office, placing his cell on the first available desk and talking loud enough so the cop flicking through papers actually listened to him.

“My friend left a message for me” was all Chris said, playing back the few words, wanting to shout,
see, I’m important to him
, but not really clear on how much Daniel’s colleagues knew of him being gay or not. He wanted to demand answers; surely they had some way of contacting Daniel, telling him that his friend Chris was worried. The cop at the desk, Johnson by the name on the badge on his chest, finally stopped filing the papers and glanced up. The entire room had fallen silent, uniformed and plainclothes alike, everyone just stopped. Chris looked around, tension coiling inside him. Something was wrong here. Reaching forward, the cop picked up the cell and then gestured for Chris to follow.

“Boss will need to talk to you.”

And now, an hour later, it was the blurry light of early morning, making everything seem surreal, and the hostage situation was a million times worse than anything that Chris had ever seen in the movies. Wasn’t there supposed to be an FBI guy, a clever-smart and wiseass FBI negotiator, getting the wife, Daniel, and Daniel’s partner out of the building?

Snow drifted steadily around the cordon of cop cars and tape, and still the situation had not been resolved. They were in a standoff, but Chris wanted to be doing something. Anything. The hostage-taker, Ansell Stewart, ex-Marine, allegedly had emotional problems—but didn’t appear to have any solid reason for taking his ex-wife hostage apart from some kind of mental breakdown. Daniel had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, answering an alarm at the offices. This much Chris had gleaned from standing in the small and changing crowd of people as close to the cordon as he could get.

His fingers were numb; he was exhausted, emotional, and was on the edge of grabbing a gun and going in himself. Forget what the experts said. Then he thought of Daniel, trapped in this rundown building, a complicated rabbit warren of rooms in the office block where the soon-to-be ex-Mrs Stewart was a cleaner. Suddenly he wasn’t so cold or eager to rush in and put Daniel’s life in danger anymore.

One of the cops from Daniel’s precinct had taken pity on him, fed him the limited information that he could, and had even supplied more of the police issue weak-as-piss coffee. There was some kind of commotion near one of the big white vans and friendly-cop gave Chris the thumbs up—clearly something was happening—maybe they were coming out and he held his breath, waiting.

It was over in an instant, a man being dragged out in cuffs, a woman—he could just about see through the sea of blue uniforms and cars. No Daniel. Where the hell was Daniel? Chris pushed past the barrier. He needed to see, gripped hard to friendly-cop’s arm. This was stupid, why wasn’t Daniel there? Cops were streaming in, weapons drawn, determination in their features, and then, someone was shouting, chaos unfurled in the crowd. Chris strained to see Alex, Daniel’s partner, stumbling out of the door, two others assisting, the group of cops parting in front of them.

“We need a paramedic in here.”

Saturday, December 22nd

Chris didn’t know what to do with himself. Hospital debriefing, sitting on cold, hard chairs with Daniel’s family when he pretended everything was okay. It was the 22nd, only three more days until Christmas, and he refused to believe that Daniel wasn’t going to be out of hospital for that single most important day.

It had all gone horribly wrong.

As the initial minutes passed the full story had been pieced together: Daniel’s partner Alex, the shorter, stockier guy from the coffee shop, helped to create the whole picture. He told Daniel’s family that if it wasn’t for Daniel he wouldn’t be standing here. The whole cozy scene was made so much more poignant by Alex’s three-year-old daughter clinging to her dad as he explained what Daniel had done.

Daniel had put himself in between the gun-wielding psycho and Alex.

Why would he do that?

The husband snapped, the gun moving, a blur of movement according to Alex, and suddenly it happened. A bullet leaving the gun, and it tore into Daniel’s thigh, high, nicking an artery. Chris’s lover bleeding out on the floor, the husband unconscious, the wife screaming. Alex had slapped her he said—just grabbed the gun and slapped the wife. The action was the only thing he could do to calm her down—he was adamant about that.

If the paramedics hadn’t been there on scene waiting on death or injury… the trauma surgeon minutes away at St Angels… fuck, it didn’t even bear thinking about.

Daniel’s family were in and out of the ICU, his dad all sharp comments and keen questions. Daniel’s mom was dry-eyed at first—
we told him he should never have joined the
police force
—and then a blubbering mess of hysteria when they stood next to their son’s bed and were told that he had needed a blood transfusion.

Chris wanted to smack her, just like Alex had smacked the hysterical wife, the violence inside him so fucking raw it was eating away at him. Of course Daniel should have become a cop, he loved his job, if he was going to die then his parents shouldn’t spend the last few hours of their son’s life blaming his life choices and saying Daniel had been wrong.

They didn’t really acknowledge Chris at first in the rush of grief and pain. He knew Daniel was out to his family, they had talked about that on their first date. Daniel commented it was funny that his mom and dad had actually had a harder time accepting his choice of career than his choice of sexual partner. There was a barrier between him and them Chris finally decided, and he was certainly not in the right headspace to care. As long as he could sit here when Daniel needed him he was okay with being ignored.

“How is he allowed in here?” Daniel’s mom finally snapped, pointing at him but talking at the surgeon as he explained their son’s chances of survival three days after surgery. She couldn’t cope with everything, that much was clear, and her anger and despair was being directed outwards at the nearest victim. Chris.

“I’m his boyfriend—” Chris had started, but the surgeon interrupted the impending argument in blunt, take-no-prisoners terms.

“Daniel needs everyone who means anything to him to be talking to him.” Chris looked at the surgeon gratefully and caught Daniel’s dad’s sympathetic gaze as the older man pulled his wife to him; at least he didn’t mind Chris being here. “We have stopped the meds that are keeping him unconscious. Now talking to him, explaining, just the sound of your voice—that is what is needed now.”

By unspoken agreement they took it in turns, hiding this somewhat casual arrangement behind excuses such as fetching coffee or water or needing a bathroom break. Chris had managed to go back home, even helped Ame a little in the shop, when Daniel was being kept unconscious to heal. Now he had been told that Daniel could wake at any time, Chris wasn’t taking chances on not being here. It was actually close to the end of the 23rd when Daniel’s eyelids fluttered and suddenly it didn’t matter about physical therapy or dealing with aftereffects or all the important clever-surgeon warnings that everyone had been given of what to expect. Even as he was pushed out the door and into the waiting area he knew one thing.

Chris had his lover back.

* * * *

“Daniel? Sweetheart?”

Daniel focused on the words and blinked his way back to full consciousness. He was floating and that was his mom’s voice.

“Mom?” In his head he added on a lot of questions.
What the hell happened?
Where
was Dad?
Was he at home?

“There was a shooting,” his dad said. That answered two questions.

“Alex okay?”

“He’s fine. You were very brave, Danny.” His mom was very close, so close he could smell her familiar perfume and then he felt his dad hold his hand. This was nice.

He was alive, Alex was okay, and his family was here.
Something missing. Chris?

Christian.

“Where’s Chris?” he mumbled around the cotton wool in his mouth. No one answered him and he fought through the fog to ask again. “Chris,” he said. He put every effort he could into sounding the word.

“After the doctor has seen you,” Mom said.

“Hello, Daniel, my name is Doctor Kavachik. How are you feeling today?”

“Sore,” Daniel said.

“A gunshot wound will do that,” the doctor deadpanned. Great, just what Daniel needed, a doctor with a sense of humor. “A couple of days bed rest and I think we can have you up and about. There’s not much more to add. The bullet nicked an artery; we fixed it; you lost quite a bit of blood and needed a transfusion.”

In Daniel’s mind that was quite a bit to add, but he wasn’t going to argue. The doctor continued. “You will need physical therapy as there was some muscle damage

and you appear to have fallen awkwardly with a lot of swelling on your left knee. All in all though, young man, you will be fine. I’ll be checking back in with you later.”

“Thank you,” Daniel managed. He watched his mom and dad talk to the retreating physician and then waited until they were both back at the bed.

“Did someone call Chris?”

He narrowed his eyes when both his parents glanced at each other and an uncomfortable look passed between them.

“Chris. My boyfriend Chris. Did Alex not get ahold of him?”

“He did Daniel. But…” His mom’s voice trailed away. Fear bit deep inside Daniel.

Did Chris not want to know now? Having a boyfriend who was in the firing line every day had to be hard and he couldn’t blame him, but the utter disbelief that flooded him was suddenly too much.

“But what, Mom?” He needed to know just how bad this all was.

“You know we understand that you are the way you are, son,” his dad began.

“Gay, you mean,” Daniel responded just as quickly.

“It’s just… he works in a coffee shop.” His dad shrugged like that single sentence explained everything.

“Sorry?”

“Darling.” Great, now it was his mom’s turn. “Just, we support you one hundred percent but wouldn’t you rather see if you could meet an appropriate someone at the club? Maybe take a short vacation at the Vineyard and check out who lives around the beach house?”

“What the fuck, Mom?”

“There’s no need to be rude, Daniel,” his mom said, affronted. “We’re only looking out for you. What happened to that nice young man, the broker?”

Daniel didn’t even want to go there about Malcolm, the asshole ex who’d lasted long enough for Daniel to find out that every time he looked at Daniel all he saw was dollar signs.

Suddenly agitated, he made to move in bed but the pain stopped him and he cursed loudly. “Forgive me my lack of freaking manners,” Daniel began. “I’ve just been shot in the fucking leg and I want Chris.”

“You love this man?” his dad asked gently.

“Chris. Christian Matthews. I’ve known him since college. I love him. Please find him and tell him I’m here. He’ll be freaking out.”

His mom looked at his dad again. This time there was a question in her expression. His dad nodded.