Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (34 page)

Jeff looked at him over Collin's cell phone, which he'd snagged from the jeans that had simply lay where they fell the night before. “Sorry, Sparky, you
are
sick. In fact, you've got a fever. Tell you what— I'll call Shane and the kids from Promise House. They'll help Joshua take up the slack, and I'll drop Martin off before I take you to the doc's.”
“The whole world gets the flu,” Collin said plaintively, although he knew that wasn't true. He'd gotten his non-viable-virus flu shot like all the other good HIV patients, and if he had a cold and a fever now, his white count must be low, and that would mean….
“Aww, fuck,” he groaned, seriously put out. “I really don't want to fuck with my meds!”
No one wanted to fuck with his meds. The side effects of the huge chemical antiviral medications that he and Jeff took to stay healthy ranged from psoriasis to nausea constipation, to a permanently established just so, balanced so a guy could eat decent and his skin didn't turn green and his dick didn't fall off, he didn't want to mess with a good thing. God knew what tomorrow would bring if he had to fuck with his goddamned meds.
When all was said and done, it was a damned good thing Jeff was there to help him find out.
to diarrhea limp dick. and its nasty cousin, Once the meds were

Jeff: Don’t Worry, Baby

J
EFF
knew.

He'd felt Collin sleeping restlessly next to him that night, hot, sweaty, and uncomfortable, and when he woke up, instead of being sprawled possessively over the bed and over Jeff, Collin was in a tight little shivering ball.

Oh for the love of sainted crap.
For a moment, just a moment, Jeff, who was usually as dry and as practical about health issues as he was about everything else, actually spiraled into dizzy void of panic. Collin… oh Jesus. The boy who'd given him hope, who'd made him safe and taken his endless load of emotional shit, and oh, Christ on a cracker, who had allowed him to
feel
, as in, lay down your life on the railroad tracks for this person
feel
, for the first time in six years….
He was sick. And in Jeff and Collin's world, sick was a scary fucking thing.
It was all Jeff could do not to call Doc Herbert and drag Collin screaming in his underwear to Jeff's one source of medical comfort for the last six years. In fact, he deliberately walked into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and wet-combed his hair before he walked back into the bedroom, took a deep breath, and woke Collin up with a hand on his forehead.
He didn't tell Collin that he'd already taken his temp using the quick-acting ear thermometer that he'd bought when he'd first been diagnosed and was paranoid as hell.
It was 102.3.
He called Joshua, keeping his voice as mild as possible, but the older man wasn't fooled a little bit. “You want I should tell his mom? She's got his doc on speed dial.”
Jeff swallowed. “So does Collin,” he said softly. “I'll call her when we've got a plan and a diagnosis. They may need to switch up his meds.”
“Blargh,” Joshua said succinctly, and Jeff found that he could smile.
“You're telling me.”
Jeff found the number for Collin's doctor on speed dial, and suddenly his health care professional possessed his body and calmed him the fuck down.
“Yeah, I'll bring him in immediately. IV antibiotics—the whole thing. I am aware. Yeah—after you check his viral load we'll see about a new anti-viral. Yeah—I'll be taking care of him through this, no worries. I can call his mother. Don't worry—I've got it all under control.”
He clicked Collin's phone shut and turned around to find Collin looking at him blearily. “Jesus, Jeffy, do you ever.”
“Yeah, well, Sparky, age has its perks. There ain't many, but they're there.”
Jeff looked at him, as he lay there in the almost-delicate queen-size bed. His body was still tan, and he looked wrong, somehow. God, that body—it was so lean and tight and active and vital—it wasn't right to see it limp and helpless. It wasn't right to see that lean, tanned face all pale, with high spots of color in his cheeks. Collin was so strong, such a grown-up, such a young man to have all his shit together so tightly. No one should see him like this.
He rolled over and groaned, burrowing into the big, fluffy pillows that Jeff indulged in. His hair was a royal mess, and Jeff appreciated what it must take to grow it long and keep it clean and shiny. Collin, with all his man-quirks, had the occasional secret pocket of queen, and that bad-boy long hair was part of it.
God, he was dear.
“Collin, baby, I don't want you to worry about a thing, okay? I've got this all covered. No worries. I'm going to take care of you.”
Jeff moved closer to the bed and placed a solid kiss on Collin's temple, and Collin, who had been nothing if not a grown-up and a real man since he'd first made his move on Jeff, actually whimpered as he moved into Jeff's touch.
“I promise,” Jeff whispered, kissing his cheek, “I'm going to take care of you.”
There were so many things—but Jeff had been a meticulous planner, a creature of detail, for the last six years of his life, and even before that. You didn't get into med school without organization and thinking ahead and being able to make a goddamned list and keep a sane head.
Step 1: Call doctor. Check.
Step 2: Call work and have them cancel your appointments. For two weeks. Check.
Step 3: Call Collin's mother. Tell her you're taking him to Kaiser and that you'll call her later. Stay as calm as she is, like this is all routine. Pretend your hands aren't sweating and you're not thinking about how, dammit, you've fallen for this man, so hard, so deep, it's like falling off a building and punching a hole through the tarmac to the hidden black caverns of trust, pain, and fear beneath. Check.
Step 4: Call Shane, bless him, and try not to remind him that you spent two weeks last February finding ways to convince his skittish divabitch boyfriend that the family at The Pulpit was worth a gamble. Get complete cooperation from Shane about getting the kids from Promise House to come in and keep Collin's business running without him, and a surprise volunteer from Mikhail to come get Martin, which eliminated Steps 4 and 5, where you were going to try and find a way to convince Kimmy or Benny to come get Martin anyway and drop him off at the garage. Check.
Step 5, revised: Try not to let the quiver in your voice get away from you as you tell him thank you, forever and ever, and he says in that calm way of his, “No worries, Jeff. Take care of him. We'll be thinking good thoughts, okay.” Check.
Step 6, revised: Thank Martin in complete surprise when he shows up in the kitchen with a small overnight bag already packed and tells you that Collin is dressed and ready to go and that Martin would wait for Mikhail by himself. Check.
Step 7, revised: Accept his hug, and his comfort, and his whispered, “He's going to be all right, Jeff. He's going to be all right. Man, I've got faith, okay? You're both going to be all right,” with complete and total surrender. Abandon stupid list because your dead boyfriend's kid brother is letting you cry a little on his shoulder, and you feel like a big grateful, sentimental, worried wiener before you pull yourself together and remember that you've got a strong pink backbone and a set of hairy balls, and that someone you love (oh, holy shit, you really do) is counting on you to come through.
Check.

C
OLLIN
was a little better in the car—the ibuprofen helped bring the fever down just a notch, so he was a little more comfortable.

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled as Jeff tucked him under a warm flannel blanket for the trip. “You have to go to the hospital again.”
“Remember I work in one, Sparky,” Jeff said lightly, taking a sip from his coffee mug before he set it in the holder and got ready pull out of the condo parking lot. Martin had made him coffee while he'd been on the phone and trying not to panic. The thought of that kid's kindness and his solid, life-saving hug that morning made Jeff want to cry.
Oh, Kevin, you have no worries. Your little brother is already a fine man.
“I forget that sometimes,” Collin said dreamily. “I forget how good you are at taking care of people, because you never seem to take care of yourself.”
Jeff let out a weak laugh and took another sip of that wonderful coffee. Jesus, with all his other talents, Martin could put the baristas at Starbucks to shame. What the fuck was that all about? “I don't know if you've noticed, baby, but I'm all
about
taking care of myself, and I have the grooming product bills to prove it.” He set the coffee down and was surprised to find his hand in Collin's hot and sweaty one, even as he negotiated the car across Truxel to Garden Highway. Kaiser on Cottage, that was what Collin's mother had told him.
“That's not what I'm talking about,” Collin mumbled, and Jeff tightened his grip on Collin's hand.
“I know what you're talking about, Collin,” he murmured, suddenly too worried to be anything but completely sincere. “You're talking about what you've been doing for me for the last month. Don't think I don't know. But don't make me get all gooey about it right now, okay, baby? I'm going to take care of you, take care of this, and I can't do it if I'm thinking about all the fucking ways that you're wonderful and that you take care of me, because then I'd just be a blubbering ball of sobbing queen at your feet, and that's not what you need right now. You need Jeffy the strong, okay?”
“You're always Jeffy the strong,” Collin whined. “When do I get to see Jeffy the weak?”
Jeff swallowed hard and kept his eyes on the road. “Jeffy the weak is the guy who would have bailed on you to cry in his room while your mother took you to the hospital. As God is my witness, Collin Waters, you are
never
going to meet Jeffy the weak.”
Collin chuckled. As sick as he was, it was an awesome, earthy, groin-pounding sort of sound. “Aha. My insidious plan of following you around like a puppy and then sweating all over you is working.”
“God, Sparky,” Jeff half laughed, “you pretty much had me at „I can fix your car'.”
Collin swallowed and pulled his hand out of Jeff's to massage his throat and then his temple. Jeff saw that, realized the poor guy probably felt crappier than he had that morning, and pulled around a ninety-yearold woman reliving her golden years at the Del Paso intersection. This wasn't the greatest area in the world—Jeff was glad to speed through it.
“That's good to know,” Collin said weakly. “It could have spared me a whole lot of trouble.”
Jeff stopped at the light rail signal and turned to Collin, smoothing his hair back from his sweaty forehead. “Yeah, but now you've earned blow jobs for life,” he murmured, and Collin's grin promised. Promised health. Promised the long haul. Promised, if Jeff thought about it, everything that Kevin's live-for-the-moment grins had not.
“There is that,” Collin agreed with dignity, but he was closing his eyes, and Jeff was glad.
“Take ten, Sparky,” he whispered. “We'll be at the hospital soon enough, and you know those people. They're exhausting.”
“You sure are,” Collin mumbled back, and Jeff had to smile. Irritating brat, getting in the last word like that. He had better be all right, and that was all Jeff had to say about the matter.
A few hours later, they were back in Jeff's apartment, and Collin was hooked up to an in-home IV complete with fluids, antibiotics, and everything a health care professional needed to take care of the man he loved.
“Why are we here again?” Collin asked groggily. The antibiotics were working, his fever was down, but he wasn't out of the woods yet.
“You're here because there was an outbreak of the mutant vaccineresistant flu,” Jeff muttered, double-checking his bag and using the ear thermometer again with the handy little disposable cones. “One hundred. Good. Some Tylenol, some rest, two more days of antibiotics, and we might not have to spend another fucking minute in a goddamned hospital.”
It wasn't until Collin had been set up on a cot in the hallway, with the IV running, that it had hit Jeff and hit him hard how much time he'd spent in hospitals waiting for friends in the past year. Shane, Deacon, Collin—he was done with the institutions in general and the inside of them in specific. It wasn't like work anymore. Hospitals had abruptly become very, very personal places, and he hated them. His blood congealed in his chest, just froze up solid, at the thought of seeing Collin there for the next week, hoping his viral load hadn't suddenly spiked to the heavens, hoping acute HIV was not one blood test away.
And for a moment, he remembered all the hope he'd had when Kevin had shipped out, and he almost despaired. He almost stalked out of the hospital and gave up, left Collin alone to die the way Kevin had seemed to want to do, just so he didn't have to be there to watch the inevitable occur.
And then he'd asked himself how many times a guy needed to tell himself to sac up before that advice stuck. Seriously. Crick was twentyfive goddamned years old, and he'd been injured in Iraq, come home to face dispossession from the home he'd loved, and had just looked his lover's death in the face and come out on the other side.
Jeff, for all his high talk of being older and wiser, couldn't deal with one lousy goddamned fever? Oh
fuck
that. Seriously,
fuck that
!
Jeff had looked around, feeling his irritation at himself, his worry, his need to
do something
to prove he was up to it for the pale, sleeping man on the cot next to him, and realized that, ohmigod, there were an awful lot of people in cots in this goddamned hallway.
And that was when Jeff had taken charge.
On any other given day, he might have said the hospital was the best place for a sick man, but not Collin, and not this day.
First, he'd waylaid the first nurse he could find and begged, cajoled, and then just plain bullied her in the name of working there once a month as a float, goddammit! Into giving him a look at Collin's charts. His vision had blacked and his knees had gone watery in relief then, because Collin's viral load was only slightly elevated, and apparently this really was a case of a weak vaccine and a really wretched bug, and they could work with that, Jeff thought optimistically. They could definitely work with that.
But not here.
Jeff looked around the hospital again, grimacing.
Collin's immune system may have been doing its job, but the fact was, it
was
compromised, and now he was surrounded with sick people. Jeff could care for him just as efficiently as the nurses in his own home, and there wouldn't be any one's germs but Jeff's and Martin's, and, well, Jeff at least had been swapping spit with Collin for over a month, and their white cells were probably vibrating in tune.
He started making some more calls to Shane and to Amy and Jon, and then to Doc Herbert, and finally to Collin's mother, and by the time the doctor got there, Jeff had a plan.
The plan was to go home. Go home to Jeff's nice, neat little condo, with the two cats who could sleep in Martin's room for a while, and the television and the clean sheets and the sound system and the lack of germ-ridden sick people who could fuck up Collin's compromised immune system even more.
Home to where Amy would bring food for the three of them and help with the clean-up, and where Jon would come pick up Martin in the morning and drop him off in the evening, and where Natalie would come by for a couple of hours while Jeff used the gym and got out of the apartment and the sight of Collin's sleeping body and the worry so he could sac up and go back and do it all again.
Home to where Jeff could take care of his lover, could bitch at him, bully him, and beg him to eat, home to where Jeff gloved up and put his Physician's Assistant certificate to work and took him to the bathroom and kept him clean and generally didn't let him get sad, or morose, or depressed about being sick, and about it being a big deal, and about being afraid that his reward for surviving the killer of all flus would be an elevated viral load and a fusion inhibitor added to his cocktail after all.
Home.
Their home, wherever they were, wherever Jeff could go to sleep and know that Collin was breathing in, breathing out, and going to be okay.
On the third day, Crick came over before Martin got home, and Jeff blinked at him in confusion. “Don't you have your own man to take care of?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jeff, you think you could have called me and told me Collin was sick?”
Jeff pulled up a corner of his lip in thought. “Really? I told everybody else!”
Crick rolled his eyes and laughed and shouldered his way in with a Crock-Pot of something that smelled yummy. “Benny sends her regards.”
“That's sweet—but I repeat, doesn't your family have enough to do?”
Crick set the Crock-Pot down on the counter and plugged it in. It looked to be chicken and tomatoes and something wonderful, and Jeff closed his eyes.
“God… that smells a-maz-ing!”
Crick grimaced. “Does it? Because Benny has been working out her worry and stress by cooking health food, and honestly? I'm full. I'm full, and you want to know the kicker?”
Jeff found himself giggling. “You're craving steak?”
“And chocolate. Goddammit, Jeff, I might as well be pregnant!”
Jeff couldn't help it. It was the reason he'd glommed onto Carrick Francis in the first place. Crick could make him laugh about the damnedest things.
He burst into giggles. He giggled until his knees went out, and he found himself sitting flat on the floor, laugh-sobbing into his knees, and he was only dimly aware that Crick had sat himself down on the ground, game leg and all, right next to him and had wrapped an arm around his shoulders until the hysteria had passed.
“It's hard,” Jeff murmured, and Crick gave his own short bark of laughter.
“You're telling me.”
“But you know what would be harder?”
They both knew. Firsthand, the both knew.
“Not being able to do it at all.”
A few minutes later, Jeff had hauled Crick creakily to his feet and they were both seated on the couch and talking about the things in their lives that mattered most.
“He's going to be fine,” Jeff said positively. “He is. He probably won't even need a fusion inhibitor—”
“Are those bad?”
Jeff shrugged. “Another med is always bad, baby. The more meds, the more of a chance for a reaction, and then they have to adjust the cocktail and then… it's just a hassle, and it's scary and… and it can be a really scary thing.”
Crick swallowed and pulled his fingers through his longish, straight hair. “You never talk about it,” he said softly, and Jeff shrugged.
“What's to say? It's like… it's like Deacon. He may only have been sick in the last two months, but… well, if you two hadn't been watching for it, things would have been a lot worse.”
“Heart disease runs in his blood,” Crick confirmed, and Jeff's smile was ironic.
“Well, HIV runs in mine. Me and Collin—we have to be careful, just like Deacon. We have to eat right, take care of ourselves, take our meds. The flu isn't just the flu, ever—it's a trip to the doctor's and antibiotics and….” Jeff's hands waved and encompassed his home, temporarily turned into a hospital so his boyfriend could sleep restlessly, larger than life, in Jeff's bed, instead of being vulnerable and diminished somewhere else.
Crick nodded and took a bite of Benny's chicken soup. “It's better,” he said quietly. “It's better at home. I thought that when I was injured, and I think that now that Deacon's home. He has something to look forward to when he wakes up. He keeps walking into the stables. We won't let him work out yet, but the horses… he's just happy around them. I'd be going crazy this last week if he hadn't been there. It's like… like waking up next to him is—”
“The only way you know you're home,” Jeff said quietly, thinking about the sound of Collin's breathing.
Crick nodded and smiled, and Jeff looked soberly back.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked, thinking that Crick might understand this like no one else on the planet.
“Fire away.”
“When I opened that letter and saw what Kevin had done to me, on purpose, for a second… just a second, you know, I thought maybe he had the right idea—”
“Jeff!”
“No, no.” Jeff waved his hands irritably. “Hear me out. Not that I've never been tempted, but… but just that without his family, maybe I wouldn't have been able to take care of him, you know? I mean”—Jeff smiled weakly—“Crick, I was alone for a lot of years without family before I met Kevin. By the time you came along….” He shuddered. “I mean, Doc Herbert—he was good to me, and I love him and his wife to death, but… that feeling. That feeling where you fit. Where your brother can show up with a pot of soup that his sister made you and hear about your deepest fucking fears, right? I hadn't had that in so, so long. And when Kevin died, I was just so afraid—so afraid that part of me that could take care of other people would have failed him anyway. And I've been seeing it, these last two years with you and Deacon, but I swear….” Jeff put his half-eaten soup on the table and pulled his awkward knees up to his chest, wondering if it was a habit he'd caught from Martin or if it was just the sort of mood he was in.
“Until I was in the hospital and saw him there, looking helpless and vulnerable, when he's so… you know!” Jeff gave a strangled half-laugh. “You know what it's like, to see someone who was born to be strong, and their bodies just betray them in the worst way. And then it's up to us to take up the slack. And I thought, „Jesus, I can't let him down. I couldn't look myself in the fucking mirror if I let him down.' Right?”
Crick couldn't look at him. “I let Deacon down,” he said, his voice so quiet Katy's snores from the stuffed chair almost drowned him out. “He told me to take care of the family, but look at you—you couldn't even call me when things got crappy. I'm sorry, Jeff, I'm….”
“If you don't shut up, sweetness, I really will have to kick you in the shins, you know.” Jeff dragged a hand across his cheeks and thought that he really had landed on his feet when he met Crick. It had been a long time in freefall before that, but Crick, Deacon—if he hadn't felt safe enough with them, he might never have felt safe enough to let Collin in.