Too Stupid to Live(Romancelandia) (36 page)

“Yeah, the voting public makes that obvious,” Jurgen interjected, sounding almost normal.

“At the hospital they’ll give him a CT scan to check him for head trauma.”

Hospital
? What? “Where’m I going?” Sam asked her, but she didn’t answer. Instead Nik was back, hanging over his face.

“You don’t remember what happened? You got hit in the head with a baseball bat.”

Sam’s body felt weird, a little bit like he was on a carnival ride. “Are we in an airplane?”

“No,” Nik snapped. “The paramedics are moving you to the ambulance. You got bashed by a bunch of rednecks! You and Miller.”

“Miller’s here, too? Oooh, head rush!” Sam giggled. “Did I have something to drink at the bashing?” If he had, he needed to remember what it was, because it was making the headache recede. Not really go away, more like it was sitting in the corner and watching him rather than jumping up and down on his brain stem. Oh, the airplane was flying over gravel, he could hear it.

“Nikky,” Jurgen’s voice said from somewhere down a tunnel. “You need to take it easy on him.” Sam couldn’t see Jurgen, though. Dammit, that woman
had
blinded him!

Oh, wait, he’d shut his eyes again. “Nik, I think this’s my Dark Moment. D’you think my prince’ll come?”

Nik gulped and gasped. Sam felt shaking fingers on his cheek. “You’re not ’im,” he mumbled. He didn’t want Nik to get the wrong idea.

Nik sounded like he’d swallowed a cough. “I know.” He paused, then took a deep breath and spoke in a calmer voice. “Sam, you were beaten up and so was Miller. Do you remember that?”

“I might, actually . . .” Sam tried to grasp the elusive memory, but it slipped away on the back of a bubble, except it left a few scraps behind. He gasped, eyes flying open. “I got beat up by rednecks, ’s tragic.”

“Why didn’t you run!”

“Shhh, there’s no need to yell.” Sam focused on Nik. He was sort of bobbing up and down. “I didn’t run ’cause I’m Too Stupid to Live,” Sam answered, watching red and blue lights twirl slowly by behind Nik’s head. “I suffered from the foolhardy notion that I could help, like any good romance character should.”

Someone grasped his hand, holding it too tightly. “
What the fuck
are you talking about?” they shouted in his face, and it sounded like Ian. Sam blinked a few times, trying to focus on the head bobbing and weaving on the other side of him.

It
was
Ian.

“Oh, you’re here, thank God,” Sam said with a sigh. “But your voice is too loud,” he whispered, trying to encourage Ian to do the same. Having Ian here was a relief, but he was just so tired . . . The airplane came to a halt. Could they do that in midair? Wouldn’t they plummet to the earth? Oh, there it was jerking, but then flying again. This time when he came to a stop, there was a
click
. The airplane had been tethered, now. No more flying for it. Poor airplane was trapped.

“Sam, please, just . . . be all right, okay? I’ll come with you to the hospital and—” Ian interrupted himself with a weird, gulping noise, and something wet hit Sam’s forehead.

“We’re going to the hospital? Why?” He opened his eyes. Ian was blurry, now. “Can’t really see you,” Sam mumbled.

Ian turned his head and Sam heard Nik repeat what he’d said in a frantic voice. Another voice answered, a woman’s. Was there a woman here? “It’s okay. We’re leaving in a minute. Do you have a ride to the hospital?”

“Yes!” Ian yelled.

“Shhh,” Sam encouraged. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought Ian turned back to him. Sam tried to smile, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to be sure he managed it.

He felt something next to his ear, then Ian’s voice whispered, “I’ll be there for you, kiddo.”

Hospitals were incredibly boring, it turned out. Sam was stuck in a little curtained alcove, his head was pounding, and Ian wasn’t there. The walls were gently rocking from side to side, but Sam didn’t find the movement as soothing as it seemed like it should be.

It would have been nice if he could have lost consciousness, but he’d managed to stay awake—albeit incredibly high—the whole ride to the hospital, and during the stuff that happened once he got there. Some of it was blurry in his mind, but he remembered a guy saying something about “concussion” to the lady in the blue shirt. Then they took him for a ride on the wheeled bed and stuck his head into a gigantic steel donut. The whole time, someone kept erupting into giggles; he suspected himself.

He’d also begun to suspect the hospital was some alternate plane of reality.

Eventually, all the people who had swarmed around him before had left him alone in this curtained closet, with the lights dimmed and the drugs wearing off. He was still plenty high, but he could now recall some of what had happened with Miller.

Then he remembered Ian had broken up with him.

Except Sam wondered now if maybe that plane of existence—the one where Ian didn’t love him and didn’t want to be with him—had been more nightmare than reality.

A guy in those pajamas people wore in medical dramas pushed aside a curtain wall and walked into Sam’s little cubicle, interrupting his train of thought. Whatever he’d been thinking floated off like bubbles.

“You actually wear those?” Sam asked, too loudly. It made him wince.

The guy stopped beside him and beamed. “You’re making more sense,” he answered. Well, not actually answered, per se.

“Yeah, my head hurts,” Sam whispered.

“My name’s Urban. I’m your nurse.” He looked at Sam’s arm where the IV went in.

“My name’s Sam. My head hurts,” he said just above a whisper.

Urban smiled at him some more. “Well, once you see the doctor you can have more of the good stuff, and then it’ll feel better.” He started checking other things, writing on Sam’s chart, looking at various bits of equipment. Sam had no clue what Urban was doing and found he was strangely uninterested.

“Think I’m still on the good stuff.” He sure felt like he was on
something
.

“Yeah, that’s why I said you can have
more
.” His nurse winked at him.

Huh
. “Are you flirting with me?” Sam asked.

Urban raised his eyebrows. “I am if you want me to be.”

“Could you maybe find my boyfriend and bring him here?”

“And how will I know who your boyfriend is?” he asked coyly.

“He’ll be the guy you’d flirt with whether he wants you to or not. Oh, and his name is Ian Cully.”

When Ian walked in, he came straight to the bed and grabbed Sam’s hand. “Oh, squirrel,” he whispered, moving just enough for Urban to lower a rail so he could sit. Then he leaned forward and kissed Sam very gently on the side of his forehead.

“Is that where that guy got me?” Sam asked.

“Yeah.” Ian swallowed and gripped Sam’s hand tighter. He flicked a look at Urban, on his way out of the curtained cubicle “Kiddo, I’m so, so sorry you thought I was trying to break up with you. That’s not what I meant at all when I said I needed to think. I meant I just needed to, you know,
think
. Take some time to sort stuff out. I was . . . I was scared.”

Sam cleared his throat. “Because you were freaked out over thinking you might love me?”

“No!” Ian gripped his chin, not too hard. Not as hard as he normally did, which Sam appreciated. “Because of shit with my dad, I swear. It really was about me, not you.”

Sam sighed. “You know when you said that stuff it sounded like—”

Ian held up a hand. “Yeah, I got schooled by Nik in what it sounded like to you.”

“But you don’t want to break up?” Sam whispered.

“No, I swear.” Ian leaned forward and kissed him tentatively. “I
really
don’t want to break up with you. I just, I have a lot to tell you. There’s some stuff I need to say, kiddo.” Ian kissed him again, and looked at him as if afraid whatever awful thing he was about to say would make Sam dump him.

Sam could imagine very few things that would cause him to do that. “Like you have a wife and kids?”

“
What
? No, neither!”

“It was a joke,” Sam told him. Ian relaxed. “Sort of.”

“Okay, kiddo, are you listening?”

Sam lifted his head to listen.

Ian squeezed his hand. “I don’t have another boyfriend or a husband, I don’t have any STDs, I don’t have . . . what else are you worried about?”

“I can’t think of anything else.”

“Okay, it’s nothing like any of those things.”

“I think you need to just say it and put yourself out of your misery.” He dropped his head back on his pillow with a sigh.
Ow
. “Then I could stop worrying too.”

Ian took a deep breath. “I’m seeing a therapist,” he spat out.

Sam blinked at him, a couple of times. “And?”

“Hell,” he muttered, then added, “I have a screwed-up family.”

“Oh,” Sam said carefully. Then he reached up to stroke Ian’s cheek. “This is what you were so worried about telling me?”

“Not really, it’s just where I’m starting.”

Sam’s fingers moved back, combing through Ian’s hair. “How long have you been worried about this?”

“Hello,” someone said, barging through the curtain. “I’m Doctor Abanji.”

And so began a half hour of torture by the fine doctor Abanji, involving questions about who the president was and the date, then lots of prodding of his head and chest, and finally some of the “good” drugs Urban had been talking about. At which point, Sam began the giggling again. Urban remarked more than once on his trips in and out of the cubicle that it was “darling” the way Sam’s giggling made Ian smile and kiss him.

“Go away,” Sam giggled. “He’s mine.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I have my own at home. I’m thinking about getting myself hit in the head and seeing if he’s as sweet to me as your Ian is to you.”

Sam giggled. Urban turned and said something to Ian about police and interviews that Sam didn’t quite catch, but managed to make Ian act like a protective bear. “No, he needs to rest,” Ian barked at whatever Urban said.

“Oh, it’s my bear laird,” Sam giggled. Ian went red but kissed him again anyway.

Sam didn’t really remember what happened after that. He might have giggled himself off to sleep or something, but he zoned back in when he heard Ian’s voice, low but angry. “He can’t answer your questions right now. He’s not even conscious. Exactly. He giggles every time anyone speaks to him.” Sam could see him talking to someone standing just outside the curtain.

“I do?” Sam rasped. His throat felt dry and his head still drummed, but not as painfully.

Ian came back to his side, taking his hand again and kissing his head. “Hey squirrel,” he murmured, brushing Sam’s hair off his face.

“Can I have some water?” Sam croaked. Someone came up behind Ian and held out a cup. Ian gave the owner of the hand a dirty look, but took it and helped Sam drink from it.

“Sam, this is Detective Johnson. He wants to ask you about what happened, if you can remember,” Ian grumped.

It turned out Sam could remember a lot now. He remembered going into the alley with Miller, and the conversation they had—Ian finally cracked a smile when Sam told him about Nik being like a snarly little lapdog—and even the guys getting out of the pickup with the baseball bat.

“He has a bruise on his chest,” Ian interrupted when Sam said he was knocked down.

“I do?” Sam tried to look. Oh, he had one of those hospital gowns on. Ian helped him work it open enough to see the huge purple splotch to the right of his sternum, just above his diaphragm. “Whoa,” he breathed. “Can we take a picture?”

Ian growled, but Detective Johnson said, “We’re going to have to for evidence.”

“Evidence?” Sam scrunched his brows, then flinched from the sharp pain that caused.

“Kiddo, you were assaulted. They caught those guys, partly because of Jurgen. I imagine they’re all getting charged,” Ian said, looking over at Johnson.

“If we can find enough evidence to substantiate it, they’ll get charged with a hate crime on top of assault.”

“You mean like coming after me with a baseball bat saying ‘here, faggot-faggot-faggot’? Oh, and threatening to rape me with it?”

Ian growled again. Sam gripped his hand tightly as Detective Johnson answered. “That’ll pretty much do it, yeah.”