by John Inman
“Okay, guys,” I finally said, swallowing a lump as big as a softball. “Stop talking about me. I’m right here.”
Dario stepped back from the bed when Bucky trained his eyes once again on me.
“I think you pissed somebody off, Bobby,” he said.
I blinked back my surprise. “What do you mean?”
Bucky glanced down at the IV in his arm, gave it a careful jiggle with his other hand as if it was hurting him, and finally snuggled back into his pillow to study my face. Dario stood at the window, watching the two of us. When Bucky patted the bed beside him, I parked my ass on the edge of it and waited for Bucky to fill me in.
“So what happened?” I asked.
To my surprise, he took my hand. I noticed his fingernails were chewed down to the quick. Somehow the sight of those poor chewed fingernails made me pity the man even more. Life had really done a number on Bucky.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” Bucky said. “I was snorting some shit in the alley back of the Spaghetti Factory. Down on K Street. It wasn’t very good stuff, and I was kind of grumpy about it. Don’t you hate it when your seller starts pawning off inferior product? Crap, man, don’t they have any sense of pride? Any sense of fair trade? Granted they’ll never get listed with the Better Fucking Business Bureau or anything, but still, you’d think they’d show a little loyalty to their old tried and true customers.”
I sighed. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Getting to it, man. Getting to it.” Still he wasn’t in any great rush. He took a few seconds to sip from a glass of water sitting on the nightstand by the bed; then he passed a few precious moments picking his nose and getting his thoughts together.
Dario chuckled at my impatience. He moved around to the opposite side of the bed and sat on Bucky’s other side. If Bucky minded, he didn’t show it.
When Dario laid his hand on Bucky’s arm and asked softly, “Who hurt you?” Bucky twirled his eyes and clunked himself on the side of the head as if that was the only way to get his thoughts back on the business at hand. I had to bite back a laugh. Bucky’s action was so stoner-like, it was almost a Saturday Night Live parody of the way someone who’s dabbled with a few too many drugs would act.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I’m getting to it.”
He gazed at the two of us, first at Dario, then at me. He seemed to like what he saw. “You guys are really cute together.”
Dario laughed while I took a fistful of Bucky’s hair as if threatening to rip it out of his head if he didn’t tell me what he’d dragged me down here to tell me.
His eyes got big and round. “Whoa, man. Chill out. We’re getting there.”
I released his hair and patted it back in place, as if that were really a possibility, and finally—finally—Bucky got down to business.
“It was a woman,” Bucky announced, taking me totally by surprise.
“Who was a woman?”
“The bitch who stabbed me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, yeah, man. I told you, the shit I was snorting was crap. It might have been pure baking soda for all I know. I wasn’t even high. Do you think I hallucinate on a regular basis? It was a woman. A big mean ugly fucking woman. Trust me.”
It was my turn to clunk myself on the side of the head, trying to make sense of what Bucky was telling me, but I figured I could clunk myself in the head from now until next Thursday and still not understand what the hell he was saying.
“Bucky, you’ve lost me. Regardless of who perpetrated the crime—woman, Bigfoot, Elvis’s evil twin—I still don’t understand what your stabbing has to do with me. I’m glad you’re alive and all. I really am. But why did you call me down here?”
Bucky hooked his finger at me to coax me closer. When I was close enough to smell the stench of his breath, he whispered in my ear. “Just before she stuck the knife in, she told me, ‘This is for your buddy Robert.’”
“What was for your buddy Robert?”
Bucky rolled his eyes as if I were the one who’d drugged his brain into marmalade. “The stabbing, dumbass! The stabbing was for you. Then she poked me with her knife. The cunt.”
I sat there staring at Bucky like he was some sort of wildlife I’d never seen before. A new breed of frog or something.
It was Dario who made me finally understand. “Holy crap,” he said, reaching across the bed and laying his hand on my arm. “It was your stalker.”
I jerked around to stare at Dario; then I jerked back around to stare at Bucky. They were both staring back at me like I was a new breed of fucking frog.
“You have a stalker?” Bucky asked.
For some reason, that truth still embarrassed me. “Well, yeah. Sort of.”
“Sort of, my ass,” Dario said. “She sent you threatening e-mails. She’s probably the one who robbed your apartment. And maybe she’s even the one who attacked you that night in the rain!”
“You were attacked in the rain?”
The voice came from behind us, and Dario and I whirled to see Detective Stone standing at the door, obviously listening to everything we were saying.
“It was nothing, really. It was two months ago,” I explained. “During the big rainstorm, that night the power went out.”
“Where did this attack take place and what sort of attack was it?”
I couldn’t help blushing. That night was still an embarrassment for me. There I had been trying to protect Dario from his insane boyfriend, and I was the one who got popped out of the blue and landed with my ass in a mud puddle. And if what Bucky was saying was true, I’d been popped by a woman. Christ, the butch factor in that was practically zero.
Since I had momentarily lost the power of speech, Dario answered the detective’s question for me. “It happened a block from Sombreros, on the way to Robert’s condo right after the blackout started. A fist came flying out of the darkness and caught him in the chin. At first we thought it was my crazy boyfriend, but later I found out it wasn’t. It must have been the stalker.”
The detective dragged a chair out of the corner and screeched it across the floor to place it at the foot of the bed. After plopping himself down in it backward, with the chair back in front of him, he looked at the three of us as if he was maybe starting to run out of patience. He finally settled his eyes on me. “You talk about this stalker like you’re used to having one around. You mentioned a robbery. Tell me about that.”
This time I beat Dario to the punch. “A week after the blackout, Dario and I went to my cabin in the desert for the weekend. While we were gone, someone broke into my condo and stole my computer.”
“Did they take anything else?”
“No, just the computer.”
Dario jumped in. “The stalker had sent Robert threatening e-mails. Maybe he stole the computer so the cops couldn’t trace them back to him.”
“We don’t know that,” I said.
“We don’t know anything,” Dario snapped. “Except maybe if what Bucky says is true, then you’re in danger. We know that much now, don’t you think?”
Bucky had been following the conversation with his eyeballs bouncing from one to the other of us until, apparently, his thought processes had shut down altogether. Looking at him now, I realized his eyes were closed and he was softly snoring. I figured either the drugs the hospital had pumped him full of had finally done their job, or else Dario and I had succeeded in boring him into a coma.
When the detective noticed Bucky was unconscious, he quietly ushered Dario and me out of the room and led us to a secluded corner down the hall where no one was hanging around.
“I’ll get your friend’s statement later,” Detective Stone said. “When he’s awake. Tell me about this stalker, Mr. Johnny. I need to know everything.” I still couldn’t believe it was that important, but when you have a cop trying to pump information out of you, there isn’t much choice but to respond.
“I figure it was a reader. The e-mails started out flatteri
ng and finally worked their way around to being, if not exactly threatening, then disturbing. It’s something writers put up with. Actors and politicians even more so, I imagine. Anybody in the public eye. There are a lot of unhappy people out there, Detective, and some of them are a few bubbles short of a Lawrence Welk revival. This one, however, was watching me. I mean physically watching me. Up close and personal. I know because in one e-mail the stalker mentioned the fact that I had spoken to Bucky on the street, which I had. He must have been watching.”
As soon as I said those words, I pulled up short. Good lord, Bucky really had been attacked because I spoke to him on the street that night. In doing so, I had outed him as a friend of mine and consequently put him in danger. I gazed around the bustling hospital corridor. How did I know I wasn’t being watched right now? How did I know I wasn’t endangering Dario? Or even Detective Stone?
Dario interrupted my paranoia-fest. “If what Bucky says is true, it must have been a she, not a he.”
I was having a hard time believing that. “If it was a she who bopped me that night in the rain, then she’s got a mean swing.”
“Yeah,” Dario said, not looking happy. “She also has a knife.”
“Did you ever recover your computer?” Stone asked.
“No,” I all but snarled. “You guys wouldn’t even come out for me to file a report.”
A flash of humor lit the detective’s eyes. “Excuse us. Hmm. Too bad, though. Your young friend is right. Our experts might have been able to trace those e-mails if we’d had the computer to work with.”
“I had the e-mails traced back to their origin by a guy I hired. He didn’t learn anything.”
“Our guys are better,” Stone said.
“That must be why the computer was stolen,” Dario said. “The stalker knew he was going to escalate the attacks on Robert and thought he’d—she’d—reduce the chances of being caught by cleaning up some of her past indiscretions.”
I snickered. “Jesus, Dario. Who’s the detective here? You or him?”
Stone gave me an appraising stare. “Hate to say it, Mr. Johnny, but your friend is making more sense than you think he is.”
“Great,” I grumped. “Jeez, Dario. Here I thought I loved you for your body, not your mind.”
Dario froze. “Did you just say you loved me?”
“No,” I said, my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth and the blood creeping up the back of my neck. “I don’t think so. Why would I say that? We’re in the middle of a police investigation here. Why would I say I love you?”
Dario grinned. “You did. You said you loved me.”
“You must have misunderstood.”
“Don’t be a sap. I know English. I know what I heard.”
“Maybe you had a psychotic episode. Maybe you’re hearing voices. Maybe you’re insane.”
“Oh, shut up, Robert. You said you loved me. I fucking heard it.”
Detective Stone glanced at his watch, looking uncomfortable. “I think I’ll leave you two to sort this love shit out on your own. I’ll be in touch,” he said to me, pointedly ignoring Dario, and with that he was gone, heading back to Bucky’s room, where I assumed he was about to get his statement if he had to beat Bucky to a bloody pulp to get it.
While Stone walked away, Dario’s gaze never left my face.
“You said you loved me,” he said quietly for the fourth time as tears gathered in his eyes.
God help me, all I could do was gaze back at the man and nod.
MERCY HOSPITAL is located in the Hillcrest section of the city. It is San Diego’s answer to the Castro District in San Francisco. Less flamboyant, perhaps, but just as unapologetically gay. To say Hillcrest was where a fair number of homosexuals came to work and play and eat and live and drink and party was like saying a few assorted animals remained in residence at the San Diego Zoo. It was a massive understatement. In Hillcrest, gays were dripping from the tree limbs.
In other parts of the city, two gay men or women might be a wee bit uncomfortable showing too much affection to one another publicly, but in Hillcrest it was SOP.
Therefore, the moment we exited the hospital onto Washington St., stepping out under the streetlamps, Dario stuffed his hand in my back pocket. He snuggled under my arm as I draped it across his shoulders, drawing him close.
We wove a path through throngs of Saturday night revelers, but the humanity around us was merely backdrop. We had thoughts and eyes only for each other.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dario softly asked.
I sighed. “I thought I was too old for you. I still do.”
“I love you too, you know. And you’re not too old at all. You’re just right.”
“Are—are you sure?” Then I realized what he’d said. “Wait a minute. Did you say you love me too?”
Dario tilted his head to my shoulder, snuggling nearer as we walked. “That’s exactly what I said. I’ve loved you since the first night we slept together, Robert. There was no sex, remember? No big displays of affection. Not much of anything romantic at all. It was just you, holding me as I slept. Keeping me safe. Being there for me. And you’ve been there for me ever since.”
“I like being there for you. You make me happy. And you fuck like a rabbit.”
He laughed. “Now we’re getting to it.”
I nudged us to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk and cupped my hands to either side of Dario’s upturned face. “I woke up that night and found you crying in the bed beside me. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah. You comforted me until I went back to sleep.”
“Dario?”
“Huh?”
“What are you doing for the summer?”
A flash of sadness touched his eyes. He looked away for a second, then dragged his gaze back to me. “I have to go to LA and stay with my brother and his wife. Since I can’t keep the dorm room when classes end, I have no choice. I can’t afford an apartment with what I make at the restaurant. I thought if you still wanted to see me, I could do what I do now. Come down on the train and spend weekends with you.”
“I don’t want you to come down for the weekends.”
His face fell. In a heartbeat, his eyes misted up. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said. “Dario, I want you here all the time. Move in with me.”
He shuddered beneath my hands as if a chill had shot through him. “You want me to live with you?”
“Yes, baby. I want you to live with me. I want us to be proper lovers. You might as well say yes right now, because I’ll never be happy another day of my life if you don’t.” I leaned in to brush my lips over his. When I did I tasted a tear in the kiss. I wasn’t sure if it was my tear or his. “Move in with me. Be my lover. Don’t break my heart and say no. I don’t think I could stand it.”
He licked the taste of my kiss from his lips. There was a sharp light in his golden-brown eyes. A light of something that looked like hope. “I could keep my job at the restaurant and not give it up for the summer like I was going to do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
“Then I could move back to the dorm in the fall.”
“No. You’ll stay with me.”
“How will I get to school? The bus?”
“You can take my car. Or I’ll buy you a moped.”
“I’ll kill myself on a moped.”
“Then it’s settled. You’ll take my car. Do you think your brother will understand?”
“As long as I’m not with Lee, he’ll be thrilled. He’s a good guy, Robert. Him and his wife will love you. I know they will.”
He smiled. His chin dimpled. I thought he was going to cry, but he grinned instead, all the while fighting back more tears. “So—so you’ll be my lover?”
I laid my lips to his forehead, his cheek, his chin. I cupped his cute little ears in my hands. And while I did all that, my heart was thundering in my chest like a tom-tom.
“I’ll be whatever you want me to be. L
over, friend, sugar daddy, proctologist.”
He blushed. “I’ll definitely need one of those.”
Dario pressed his forehead to my chest.
I bent to whisper in his ear. “Say yes. Say you’ll do it. Please. I’ve never wanted anything this much in my life.”
He took a long tremulous breath and lifted his head to study my face. His tears were flowing again. I swiped them from his cheeks, using my thumbs like windshield wipers. Another pair of tears sparkled at the edge of his long, lush eyelashes. I kissed those tears away, one after the other, before they could fall. They tasted delicious.
“I’ll do whatever I can to make you happy,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Then you won’t have to do anything,” I answered, “because you make me happy already.”
I was struck by a horrible thought. “We’re forgetting about the stalker. This might put you in danger.”
He unfurled his body to its full five foot six and tried to look tough. “If your stalker messes with me, the next time she comes into Sombreros, I’ll spit in her tamales.”
“Well, that’ll teach her a lesson.”
We spent a good ten seconds gazing into each other’s eyes. My heart was so full of love I thought it might actually explode in my chest and send me squirting and blatting through the air like a punctured balloon.
Dario’s eyes blinked me back to reality. “I love you so much, Robert. I just didn’t want to be the first to say it.”
“I love you too. And you weren’t. I was. I said it first. It sort of slipped out, but by God, I said it. So is that a yes?”
He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. He nodded instead.
I wrapped my arms around him and rocked him against me. We stood there like that for the longest time as people flowed past, some eyeing us, some ignoring us, and still others smiling at the two gay guys, one short, one tall, dancing a slow dance in the middle of Washington Street on this balmy Saturday night.
I stroked fingers through Dario’s hair.
He pressed his face to my chest and mumbled, “Lover,” into my shirt.