Hal froze. One moment he was rutting against Luke’s hip and working on what would no doubt be a spectacular hickey. And the next he was stiff and still. His mouth pulled away from Luke’s skin. “Oh shit,” he said in a choked voice. “I…”
He sat up. Pain flickered across his face, but he kept going, moved away from Luke, thumping back heavily on the couch cushions.
“Hal?” Luke nudged his glasses, heartbeat strong in his lips, and his hands, and his cock. “Are you – hey, Hal, it’s okay.” He sat up and smoothed his shirt down. Reached for Hal. “It’s–”
Hal flinched away from him. A tiny movement of his shoulder, but enough that Luke’s hand settled on empty air.
Luke felt like he’d been slapped.
“I…” Hal wouldn’t look at him, stared mindlessly at the TV. “I’m sorry, I…I can’t–” He surged to his feet, wobbling.
“Hal.” Luke heard the desperation in his voice. He reached for his friend again. “Hal–”
“I can’t,” Hal said again, and walked across the room. Stepped into the bedroom and shut the door.
Luke stared at the closed door, and waited. Five seconds. Ten. Thirty.
“Hal?”
He heard a muffled sound from the bedroom, but the door stayed shut.
“Hal?” One more time, just to be sure. A whisper.
But Hal didn’t answer. Because Hal…didn’t want him.
Hal was rejecting him.
Luke had told him, finally, told him that he loved him. So much.
And the answer was “I can’t.”
His heart went to pieces slowly, long spidery cracks blossoming across its surface, its meat whitening to marble. But the tears came quick and sure, hot down his cheeks. The sobs rolled up from deep in his belly, and he buried them in a couch pillow, tried not to let Hal hear him.
He cried himself to sleep, and the next morning, when he woke, puffy-eyed and empty inside, Hal was gone.
~*~
Sadie sits down cross-legged on the floor in front of him, between the coffee table and the couch. Sunlight strikes her dark hair, paints auburn rivers through it. “Hi, Lukey.” She shoots him her slightly-crooked smile, thirteen and still-precious, the way she always is.
Luke pushes upright and it’s like moving through molasses. His brain sticks to the idea of Hal leaving, of the devastation of what happened last night. His dead sister’s presence heightens his misery, sharpens it to an acute physical pain.
“Hi, sweet girl,” he says through an aching throat.
“Hi, bubba.” She curls a strand of hair around her finger. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, you know. Sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”
A frown mars her smooth forehead. “Why?”
He exhales. “Hal left. I think he hates me now.”
“But…he didn’t leave. He’s right here.”
Luke glances around his sad apartment, knowing what he’ll find. “I don’t see him.”
“Ugh,” Sadie huffs. “Not here. You’re asleep. Wake up, dummy. He’s waiting for you.”
“Asleep…?”
The Russell Senate Office Building. The man…the bomb.
Oh.
Oh, oh, oh.
“Bye,” Sadie says, and she and the apartment vanish, replaced by a deep gray void. He floats. He hurts.
Is he dead?
Is Hal here? Sadie said he was, but…
He registers voices, somewhere beyond the flat landscape that holds him hostage. Quiet murmurs, low beeps, shushing of fabric. Hospital sounds. He knows them, but he can’t understand why he’s here. Why he…
A glimpse of light, through his fluttering, gummy lashes. And once he catches it, he doesn’t want to let it go, fights off unconsciousness with fists clenched and teeth bared.
A squeak of shoe treads on the tile, a rustle. And then a hand, big and gentle and comforting, on his forehead, smoothing his hair back. There’s Hal; that’s him. He’d know those fingerprints anywhere.
“Hey.” His voice sounds intimate and choked in Luke’s ear. “Hey, man, you there? You waking up?”
The bomb, Luke remembers then. Not with any coherence. He remembers the flash, and the heat, and the way it felt like his ear drums sizzled into crispy black fragments. The absence of sound. One glimpse of Hal’s panicked face.
“Is he awake?” someone else asks, a little farther away.
“A little.” Hal’s voice catches and jerks. Worried, so worried. “Luke? You there, sweetheart?”
“Ugh,” Luke manages, though his throat feels raw and bloody.
“Good,” Hal says. “That’s really good.”
Luke feels Hal’s lips against his forehead, and then the darkness comes rushing back.
~*~
The next time he wakes up, he realizes that’s what he’s doing. The fog lifts and he forces his eyes open, and he’s aware – partially – of his surroundings.
He’s in a hospital bed, IV lines snaking down to his arm, TV murmuring quietly to itself: a Friends rerun. He glimpses dark, nighttime sky through the cracks in the blinds; feels the chill of AC and the insistent throb of his own heartbeat inside his skull. It’s a double occupancy room, but he’s alone. At least, there’s not another patient with him. The curtain divider is pushed back and Hal, fully-dressed, dozes on the bed closest to the door.
Luke blinks the crust from his eyes and takes a minute to look over his best friend.
Hal’s jacket and suit coat lie at the end of the bed, so he’s left in his rumpled shirtsleeves. He’s lost the tie somewhere along the way. He needs to shave, and his hair sticks up at crazy angles, like he’s been running his hands through it again and again. His shirt, Luke sees when he squints, is flecked with blood. The bags under his closed eyes stand out dark and hollow.
Luke passes the end of his tongue over his lips, finds them chapped and cold. “Hal,” he croaks, and though the sound doesn’t carry, Hal snaps awake in an instant.
“What?” He jackknifes upright on the bed, head swinging. “Are you – what is – are you okay?” He blinks and Luke can see his eyes struggling to focus.
“Hal,” Luke says again, a little stronger this time.
Hal does one last scan for threats, and then finally looks at Luke’s face, his own a roadmap of raw emotion. He shoves off the bed, wobbling – he’s tired, so exhausted, needs a real bed and real sleep – and comes to Luke’s side, hands cupping his neck like something fragile. “Are you okay?”
Luke swallows, and it hurts. “Matt?”
Hal lets out a breath. “He’s fine. He and the family are back in Virginia.”
“But you–”
“Diego and Lee are with them. I had to be with you.”
Luke swallows again. He feels sick. “But it’s your job to–”
“I had to be with you,” Hal repeats, muscle twitching in his jaw. He looks like he wants to hit something, or cry maybe. Or he wants to hit something so badly it’s going to make him cry. Either way, it’s ferocious.
Luke might want to cry too if everything didn’t hurt so terribly. “How long have I been here?”
“Two days.” Hal’s thumbs flick up, and he rubs at the underside of Luke’s jaw.
“Any brain damage?” Luke tries to joke.
Just like Hal tries to smile. “No more than you’ve always had.” His breath catches and he leans in, tucks his face into Luke’s throat. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. So sorry. I never shoulda–”
“No, no,” Luke says. “Shh. None of that.” He feels the wet slide of tears on his skin, pooling in the hollow of his throat.
15
Luke stands in front of the full-length mirror in the en suite bathroom in his boxers, grimacing at his reflection. His glasses were broken in the bombing, but he can still see that he looks a mess. A dozen little lacerations – from shrapnel, Hal explained – pepper his face and throat, and along his clavicles. His right side bears a leopard-spot mosaic of bruises, black and blue and dee
p purple, from where he landed hard up against the side of a building. The blast threw him, apparently. He hit his head and was out cold. He inhaled acrid smoke and his lungs and throat and sinuses are blistered. His voice sounds like something from a strangled frog. And even in just two-and-a-half days, he’s managed to lose weight here in the hospital, his ribs and hipbones stark like white paper corners under his beat-up skin.
“You picked a handsome one,” he deadpans, seeking out Hal’s gaze over his shoulder in the mirror.
Hal still wears the same worried, mother-hen expression he’s worn since Luke first opened his eyes. “Don’t trash-talk my boyfriend,” he says, and it isn’t a joke at all.
Luke sighs. “How many others were hurt?”
“Ten,” Hal says. The corner of his mouth twitches.
“Fatalities?” Luke’s stomach sours, but he has to ask.
Hal’s gaze skips away, toward the door. “One,” he says, quietly. “Too bad it wasn’t the bomber.”
“No, justice never works like that,” Luke says, tone vicious. “That evil fucker.”
“Yeah,” Hal agrees, but his expression stays stuck on guilty.
Luke frowns to himself. Leave it to Hal to try and pin this whole disaster on himself.
He turns around the plucks at the hem of Hal’s Virginia Tech hoodie. “Hey.”
Hal won’t look at him.
“Matt’s alive,” Luke says. “Nine other people are alive.”
“You’re alive.” And Luke knows down in his bones, without the reassurance of it being put into words, that his is the most important survival in the eyes of his friend – his…his love.
“I’m alive. Yeah. You aren’t Superman, you know. You can’t keep everyone safe.”
Hal nods, a jerky movement.
“When can I get out of here?”
Hal clears his throat. “I’ll go find your doctor.”
~*~
Duffels fill the cargo compartment of the Jeep, but Luke makes no comment. Hal gets him all settled in the passenger seat and walks around to get behind the wheel. He hums quietly, distractedly, in contrast to the droning voices of talk radio.
“…talking about the explosion on Wednesday…” the host says, and Hal punches the dial, changes it to a pop station.
Luke hurts all over. The bruises, yes, but all the soft bits of flesh and connective tissue inside his body, too. His muscles have whiplash; his organs still reverberate from the impact. An explosion isn’t really about the fire and the smoke. It’s the percussive blast; the relentless waves of force rippling through the atmosphere, hitting bodies like buses, like something solid and massive.
Luke settles his head back against the rest and contents himself with watching the landscape roll past. Hal drives them out of the clogged arteries of DC, through the fringes, and then beyond. Luke figures out where they’re headed a moment before the Welcome to Virginia sign flashes past.
Trees crowd the road, orange maples and yellow pecans, flicking loose leaves to spiral toward the windshield. Driveways marked with painted mailboxes snake through the expanding fields and copses. The landscape comes from a previous time; they could be driving through the colony of Virginia, rather than the state. DC’s bustle seems an age ago, several miles behind them.
Luke cracks his eyes against the dappled shadows that fall across them through the windows. Squints at the quaint, colonial city-center that he reads is Leesburg from a roadside sign.
Hal takes two right turns out of the center of town, venturing into pastoral vistas, and finally turns in at a crushed gravel drive flanked by stone pillars and a split-rail fence, wagon wheels propped up as decoration. The pastures lie brown and dormant, bush-hogged for the season, dotted with ancient oaks. The gravel crunches under the tires, and they travel around a long, smooth bend in the drive to arrive at the house, nestled in a pocket of gardens and oaks, cars parked in front of a detached carriage house.
The house is a red brick colonial, black shutters, white trim. White columns in front. A big, sprawling house that manages to look functional and timeless, rather than pretentious.
Hal parks alongside a low-slung, mean-looking car in front of the carriage house and kills the engine, sits a moment with his hands on the wheel, staring up toward the house.
Luke isn’t loving the idea of getting out – all that movement – so he sits too, waiting. “Did Matt grow up here?” he asks.
“Yeah.” A smile touches the corner of Hal’s mouth. “Will too.”
Luke sees them, sepia ghosts moving across the grass. Little Will with a missing tooth and hair shining beneath the sun, rips in the knees of his pants. Chasing Finn, the two of them laughing, the sound bright and clean in the autumn air.
Hal takes a hand off the wheel and sets it on Luke’s knee, squeezes. “Let’s go in.”
~*~
There are more ghosts inside. Hal produces a key and lets them into a foyer floored in old, foot-polished boards, an iron chandelier hanging overhead. Luke spots the library – larger, better-stocked than the one at the townhouse – to the left, through open French doors, and to the right a parlor with a wood-burning fireplace. Wide baseboards and crown molding, solid wood doors, potentially original wallpaper, a smell of age that isn’t unpleasant – something woodsy and grounding.
“Sandy?” Hal calls.
“Back here!”
She meets them at the doorway of the kitchen – a massive flagstone room with modern appliances, original timbers in the ceiling, and a hearty plank table. She rushes right up to Luke, takes his face gingerly in her hands and turns his head to each side, her gaze half-clinical, half-stricken.
“Luke, sweetie.” She tsks. “Should you be up and moving around? Why don’t you sit.”
“I’m fine.” But she’s already steering him toward the table, pulling out the bench for him, like he’s an invalid. Which he is, sort of.
“There were bad sightlines at the hospital,” Hal says, voice flexing with work muscle.
Luke shoots him a startled glance once he’s seated. “Sightlines, Rambo?”
Hal, incredibly, scans the room with hooded precision, scoping the place out, looking for threats. “Your face was all over TV. The media’s calling you Will’s biographer, linking you to the family. We can’t be too careful.”
“I’m on the news?” Luke asks, feeling slow and stupid. He wishes he wasn’t full of prescription pain meds.
There’s a remote control on the table, and Sandy picks it up, turns on a small flat-screen TV mounted above the fireplace – because even the damn kitchen in this place has a fireplace, a gorgeous field stone number with cast iron kettles sitting on its hearth.
It’s already on one of the big news networks, and there, staring at him out of the screen, is his own face. An old photo someone must have dug off somebody’s Facebook page; someone’s arm rests around his shoulders, but the rest of the person has been cut out of the picture. Luke sees his black-framed glasses, the bright blue of his eyes behind the lenses, his little impatient smirk because he hadn’t wanted to be in the pic with everyone.
“New York journalist Luke Keller,” the reporter voiceover says, grave and professional, “currently writing a biography of Senator Maddox’s father, William Maddox, infamous for striking a peaceful protestor earlier this month–”
“Peaceful my ass,” Will’s gruff voice says from behind Luke somewhere; he hadn’t heard him come into the room. “Guy was a douche.”
“Hush,” Sandy says.
“Authorities tell us Keller was released from the hospital this morning and left in the company of Breckinridge Security personnel, the same security firm hired by the Maddox family.”
The shot cuts to one in-studio, two reporters sitting polished and perfect at the desk: a woman in a blue dress, and a man in a striped blue tie. “You have to wonder,” the man says, “what someone’s thinking with this level of security in place. I mean, you see Senators with staff following them, pages and assistants, b
ut Maddox has had all this beefed up security from day one. Makes you wonder if he needs it, or if he’s trying to prove some kind of point.”
“Trying to make the American people paranoid, you think?” the woman asks, brows notched. “Or do you think there’s any truth to his allegations that he’s received death threats?”
“I don’t know,” the man says. “But it starts to make you question things.”
“They’re saying he hired someone to detonate the bomb,” Will says.
“Suggesting it,” Sandy corrects, voice tight. “The bomber hasn’t been caught. They’re trying to say that…” Her sentence dissolves in a short huff of breath. “Jesus Christ, I could strangle someone.”
Luke feels blood pounding through his ears as he stares at a collage of photos, put up on the screen one after the next. More pics of himself, obtained without permission; photos of Hal and his friends: the whole Breckinridge crew; photos of Matt smiling and waving at someone in the halls of the Russell building…while another senator behind him scowls at him in obvious distaste.
“Where…” He has to wet his lips. “Where did they find…”
Hal’s hand lands on his shoulder, his squeeze firm and comforting. “That’s just what they do.” His voice ripples with tension. “They hunt people down, and splash their lives all over the nightly news.” Then, more quietly: “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Luke whirls on him. Tries to, anyway; dizziness hits him and he nearly falls out of his chair. All the muscles in his torso grab and he bites his cheek to keep from screaming in shock and pain. “How is any of that” – gesture to the TV – “something you should be sorry for?”
Hal ducks his head, breathing hard, nostrils flared. “I was the one who got you down here. Wanted you to do the story. It’s my fault.”
Luke feels a smaller, lighter hand on his other shoulder. “It’s nobody’s fault,” Sandy says, firm, like she expects them to listen. “It’s Washington fucking DC. It’s fucked up.”
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