On Call Collection

by P D Singer

  The tears came then, blinding me, so I didn’t see Dante come close, only felt his strong arms drawing me to my feet and embracing me. Against the firmament that was my beloved, I dashed my despair and grief, and he held me until the storm abated.

  “Oh, Keith. I am so sorry.” He rocked me gently from side to side, and I wept, for John, for his parents, who might never understand what they’d cost themselves or why, and for myself, for not being able to head off this tragedy. I’d replayed our appointment over and over in my head, wondering where I could have put better words, and what they might have been.

  I lifted my head from his shoulder, the worst of the storm finished, though the ache in my heart would be there a long, long time. Dante’s cheeks were wet. I thumbed one dry and licked the tear track away on the other side. In spite of my own disgustingly drippy state, he kissed me. “I know you tried.”

  “For all the good it did.”

  Another tear slid down his face. “At least you were there for him that little bit.”

  I knew his family had had a bad time initially with Dante’s coming out. Even now, years later, his parents weren’t exactly reconciled to it, although they’d been more accepting of me since the thermonuclear chili heartburn incident at church. Dante’s father hadn’t had a heart attack after all, something I’d been able to differentiate without hauling him to the hospital. “Was no one there for you?”

  He shook his head. “No, I pretty much had to cope alone.”

  “How’d you manage?” Did you ever think of killing yourself? I did.

  “I studied all the time. All the time. Best possible excuse for no social life and it paid off by getting me into vet school. And it kept me from thinking about things too hard.” He grabbed a handful of tissues out of the box on the breakfast bar that divided the little living room from the kitchen, handing most to me and keeping one. “Except when it didn’t.” He shook his head sadly. “Growing up black, gay, and middle-class has got to be a lot easier than growing up black, gay, and ghetto, and no one accused me of being a sell-out for studying.”

  “Does anyone accuse you of being a sell-out for being with me?” I’d come close to pushing opinions on inter-racial couples back down certain throats with force.

  “No one that matters.” He put his arms back around my shoulders. “I grew up and quit listening to what ‘they’ say.” He brushed my light brown hair out of my face. “I love you—that’s the only important thing.”

  “I love you, too.” I held him tightly. “John should have had his chance at this.”

  “He should have.” Dante settled me on the couch against his body, my head on his shoulder. “There’ll be someone else you can help, Keith.” We sat quietly, long enough that the cats nested in our laps. A few more tears leaked out to stain Dante’s sweaty T-shirt. I fell asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.

  Peg feet marching on my groin followed by the thud of Harpo hitting the floor woke me. Dante’s eyes were open slightly; either he’d been wakened as well or he’d been content to hold me all this time. He rubbed his cheek against my hair; I left mine pressed against his chest, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. The room had gone dark with the passage of the sun and the air conditioner hummed in the background. Soft chittering from a cage by the wall showed Mandy the sugar-glider was awake; one of the cats meowed from the kitchen. All the sounds meant home to me, and love.

  “How long do you think we’ll be together?” I murmured, not wanting to move.

  “Forever, if you want.” He kissed the top of my head—it was all he could reach unless I sat up. “Will that work for you?”

  “Forever sounds really good.” I reached up to stroke his cheek. “Forever, us only?”

  “Us only.” His full, soft lips found my fingers. “It’s been us only, it stays us only.”

  “I’d marry you if Colorado allowed it, Dante.” Forever would have to be on terms we invented for ourselves. It’s what we’d been doing so far.

  “I’d say yes.” He nibbled my fingertips some more.

  “Think you can hit a human vein?”

  That got a soft snort. He brought my hand to the cat in his lap. “I can get blood out of that, so I think so.” Domino’s jugular pulsed under my fingertips. I wasn’t so sure I could get blood out of that vein; it was pediatric size and I didn’t do that many blood draws these days. “Why?”

  “Why are we still using condoms?” We hadn’t abandoned the safe sex habit completely, at his insistence.

  “Because one of us has been waiting for the other one to say ‘forever?’“ He scratched under the cat’s ear.

  “We just said it. Let’s go get some blood.” I jumped up and pulled him to his feet. The cat leaped away, letting me have a full body hug. “Then dinner, then bed, where I’ll show you what you have to look forward to for the rest of your life.” I had to hold on to him; just saying all that pulled the blood from my brain, making me giddy. Dante, mine forever.

  The drive to my office was as silent as the drive back from the funeral, though in a different way. We kept casting shy glances at one another, full of “what if’s.” What if one of us came up positive this time? What if we couldn’t make it work forever? What if something happened to one of us? I didn’t want to say any of that out loud, not here, not now, but my heart was in my throat. I’d only lived with someone once before and it had been disastrous. Dante had his own set of relationship traumas. The last had been just over a year ago, and it might have left the sort of aftereffect that would keep us in latex forever. It had brought him to my office and my life, sick with cat scratch fever, not quite six months ago.

  I unlocked the dark office and turned on only enough lights to get us to the treatment room. I pulled two phlebotomy kits out. Before I could ask who got first stick, Dante held his arm out, his dark eyes calm and trusting. A hint of worry played around his mouth, and I thought again of his self-described “wildness” before we’d met. Drunk and bareback with someone who wasn’t sufficiently trustworthy left him sweating out a seroconversion that fortunately hadn’t happened yet and might never happen. We weren’t still using condoms waiting for a declaration. We were using them because Dante insisted that he wouldn’t do to me what his unlamented lover had done to him. I figured I’d fight it when the time was right. Like now.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do just the cheek swab?” I paused before attaching the needle to the gold topped vial. “Your last possible exposure was over a year ago.”

  “Keith, I want to be sure. Really sure.” He tapped his antecubital vein with two fingers, improving the target, though it stood up in a ridge behind the tourniquet. His veins looked like fire hoses—I could probably hit one without the tourniquet on, but I understood nerves. The needle punctured his skin; we watched the rich, dark blood well into the vacuum vial as if it contained the secret to the universe. In a way, it did.

  Perhaps I should have had Dante draw me first: he was a little awkward with his arm bent over the gauze to stop the bleeding. But he was good as his claim: he slipped into the vein with the needle as deftly as ever he’d slipped into my body. We labeled our samples and marked them STAT, then left the tubes in the lab vault, where a courier would collect them for processing. I shut the vault door and stepped into his embrace.

  “Now we wait.” He bit his lower lip.

  “Dante.” I stroked his mouth, trying to get him to release that plump lip from the canines that pressed dents into it. “The results aren’t going to change ‘forever,’ only what we do during our ‘forever.’“

  That got me a small smile. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I’m not sure who needed the sex and the holding more that night, me for my grieving, him for his worries, or if we were equally matched because of how I’d suggested turning our lives upside down. I needed to do something to make up for my failure with John. Dante made love to me very slowly, very thoroughly, and sheathed, keeping me face to face, his eyes on mine.
He wore me out enough to undo the effect of the nap, letting me sleep dreamlessly in his arms. When I woke extra early the next morning, I started looking for volunteer opportunities, but clicked off the browser before Dante could see the sites I’d pulled up.

  “Are you going to be okay to see patients today?” he asked over breakfast.

  “I have to be.” Swallowing the last of the coffee I was drinking for pleasure and only a little for assistance in keeping my eyes open, I tried to reassure us both. “You can bet I’ll be extra vigilant.”

  We headed downstairs together, and he kissed me goodbye in the waiting room of his first floor clinic. His first patient of the day came in when I went out, carried in a plastic crate by a woman whose face was saying ‘aw’ as I held the door for her. Guess she saw us through the glass, and it made me happy that someone else, a stranger, could be happy for us. John had needed moments like that.

  My day contained no surprises of the patient sort; no one needed an ear or a shoulder for the news I gave them, or for the news they gave me. The printer chattered now and them, spewing out blood counts and protimes, cultures and sensitivities, but not the lab work that mattered most to me. Toward four o’clock, though, two sheets printed off that I practically snatched out of the printer before it finished clattering, and dashed into my office to read behind a closed door.

  My heart pounded harder now than it had yesterday during our run. Even though I was quite sure I knew what the results would be, what they should be, I breathed deeply to calm myself, ensuring that I would read what was printed and not what I wanted to see. All the same, I checked twice before I picked up the phone, and again while the hostess wrote down our reservations. Then I called Dante.

  “I’m taking you out to dinner,” I told him. “Dress nice.”

  “Ah-hah!” His warm throaty laugh tingled my spine.

  “Don’t ‘ah-hah’ me, just put on a jacket.” I couldn’t blame him for drawing some conclusions, but did he really think I’d take him to some dive diner if the news wasn’t good? “A tie only if you want it.”

  “What time?”

  “Seven.” I’d tried to allow enough time for a quick shopping trip, and maybe a quickie and/or a shower. “We’ll need about twenty minutes travel time.”

  “I might be a little late, but that should work.” He rumbled deep in his throat, a sound I loved to hear. “I’ll hurry.”

  He drew “ah-hah” conclusions and I was left with “huh?” I should have asked if he had surgery scheduled, but he’d have said something if he’d needed to watch an animal’s recovery. The last patient I had scheduled left happier than she’d come, because while I tried not to slop my bad moods onto patients, I wasn’t nearly so careful with good moods.

  Dante wasn’t there when I got home, but the cats added their bit of panache to my black slacks, carefully leaving some choice hairs on my legs once I’d dressed. Dante caught me with the sticky lint roller in hand. He was already dressed, looking good in a pale yellow oxford cloth shirt under a navy jacket. If I hadn’t planned something special for us, I’d have peeled it all off him then and there.

  “Ready?” He held me close, a fine, firm hug, slightly lumpy in a couple of places, and with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Clever man. He parked it in the fridge to chill. “Where are we going?”

  “Cassis.” I pointed my little Acura toward Boulder.

  On the way, Dante placed his hand on my knee and looked at me with serious eyes. “I don’t want to spoil your presentation, but—”

  “All good.” Our dinner wouldn’t be the wonderful event I wanted it to be if he was doubting his “ah-hah” conclusion. “You don’t mind if I go through with the plans anyway, do you?”

  He leaned back against the head rest and closed his eyes, a smile visible in profile. I had to quit looking sideways when we reached the twisty road up Flagstaff Mountain. The elegant restaurant was built into top of the mountain, with three levels overlooking Boulder and Denver. I’d asked to be seated at a window, but somehow I didn’t think I’d be admiring the view outside as much as the view across the table.

  “I’ll enjoy that.”

  “You like getting romanced, don’t you?” This was the man who’d put champagne on ice for later.

  “Of course.” He squeezed my leg.

  I’d keep that in mind for the years to come.

  We tried to keep dinner conversation normal, but we both had a tendency to trail off our words and forget our trains of thought, and after the first amazed glance, we didn’t really look at the panorama that lay below. If it wasn’t our states of mind creating brain cramps, it was the food. My salad of wild greens, garnished with dried fruits and wet walnuts, had a seared foie gras on top.

  “You aren’t supposed to make that noise when I’m not involved,” Dante muttered.

  I let the morsel on my tongue slide down my throat. “I’m sharing only because I love you.” I held out a bite on the end of my fork.

  “I see what you mean,” he finally came to enough to say. “What is that?”

  He probably wouldn’t approve of it on humanitarian grounds. “Orgasm on a plate. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Tonight, we eat it.”

  He sat a little straighter. “Don’t you think I should know before?”

  Dante’s shadowy ex-lover said “Trust me,” and created the havoc we were still trying to recover from. I might have earned his trust, but I’d done it by being trustworthy. “Goose liver. Foie gras.”

  He went silent, and I could practically hear the gears turning. Then he opened his mouth for another taste, and I was never so glad to share a delicacy. “Do you want half?”

  “One more bite. It’s pretty rich.” He accepted the next morsel with every sign of enjoyment, and I heaved a sigh of relief and ate some frisée lettuce to clear my brain. He had every right to know what he was getting into, even if it was a guilty pleasure sort of food.

  “I’m sorry. But people tend to turn it down just from knowing.” I did look out the window now, at the shadows that crept down the mountain toward the plains below; the sun was setting to the west, on the other side of the Flatirons.

  “You have to know to make a real choice.” Dante reached his fork into my plate, but captured one of the wet walnuts.

  The entrees were set before us when he asked me, “Any more thoughts on moving to Angola or wherever the need is greatest?”

  “Yeah.” I sliced off a bite of the polenta with wild mushrooms. “I think I had the right idea but the wrong execution.”

  “Oh?” Dante invited me to tell him more, but his mouth was full of buffalo tenderloin.

  “I have to do something, but there’s need much closer to home.” The asparagus had been grilled with balsamic vinaigrette—it kept me from giving details for a moment.

  “So I don’t need to sell the practice after all?” His smile had relief in it, but also humor; his eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “No, I’m not going to drag you to the Sudan for a year.” I knew a nurse who had done that, and she’d come back full of stories and with a profoundly different understanding of the world.

  “If it’s only a year, I’d find a locum tenens.” Dante turned his head suddenly, and I followed his gaze; a trio of deer picked their way across the meadow outside in the dusk. “I wouldn’t sell if we were coming back.”

  I wondered what kind of animal would wander through camp in the Sudan; my nurse friend had mentioned incursions, sometimes by predators. “You were serious about going.”

  Dante put his fork down and rested his hand over mine. “‘Whither thou goest, I go’.” His dark eyes held my gaze, giving me the sort of palpitations I wouldn’t treat. What kind of response could I make to that? I curled my fingers into his, oblivious of the other diners.

  Before I got maudlin, he gave me an extra squeeze and turned his attention back to the food. “So, if not the Sudan or the Philippines, then what?”

  “Well, it could be some Third World country, on a s
hort term basis, one of those working vacation things. Go for a week, repair everything you can repair, hit the beach for a couple days after, knowing you did some good in the world.” That was still a viable option. “You might do Goat Clinic for a week.”

  He laughed. “My goat textbook is gathering dust on some high shelf in my office. I’ll drag it down.”

  We finished our meal on a lighter note, declining the luscious offerings on the dessert cart. Instead of going directly back to the car after, I took Dante to the stairs at the edge of the patio. It led us to a veranda outside a banquet room, unused tonight, and a major reason I’d chosen this restaurant. We had a glorious view of the cities laid out below us, glittering in the near dark, matched by the few stars bright enough to show this early. We could hear the other diners as a muffled background, with only the occasional bark of laughter as a distinct sound, and only enough light to see in black and white.

  “About that presentation.” I pulled the lab reports out of my pocket and offered them. “We are both negative, Dante.”

  He took the papers but didn’t try to read them in the dimness. Tucking them away in his own inner pocket, he looked out over the cities and said nothing. I lay my hand on the small of his back and waited. He’d talk when he was ready.

  “And we’ll stay that way?” There was a little choke in his voice.

  “Yes, we will. If it’s only us, we will.”

  “Then we will.” He turned now and drew me against his body. I found his mouth and brushed my lips softly over his, wanting to savor every small texture of him, from his smooth-shaven chin to the damp inside of his lip. We explored each other slowly, carefully, much more carefully than we had the first time we’d ever kissed, ever touched, and if I picked up any momentum at all, we might never be welcome back at this restaurant. That would be a shame, because I’d made a note of the date and figured we’d need an annual reservation. The crisp prickles of his hair, clipped close to his scalp, and the subtle spiciness of his cologne mingling with his skin were working on my resolve, though, so I pulled back.