by Leta Blake
Joshua’s eyebrows went up, and he blinked at Dr. Green.
“You look thirty instead of forty-two. Despite your recent turn against nanites, it’s clear to me that you’ve benefited from them. Free-radical-destroying mini-machines, great in moisturizers and fantastic for repairing damage to skin, but given too quick of an exposure and the wrong genetic make-up, the vascular system can’t handle them, and next thing you know? Aneurysm. Also known as artery-go-pop. I believe you’re familiar with that.”
Joshua clenched his jaw and remained silent. Dr. Green was clearly referencing Lee’s death.
Brian’s eyes widened, and he stared at Dr. Green like he was an alien. His mouth opened as though to comment, but Dr. Green plowed ahead, his words tumbling out like even he couldn’t stop them.
“But nanites could be used for so much more than that. I’ve been working on models that could repair human tissue previously considered too damaged to salvage. I’ve even been working on a way to get nanites past the blood-brain barrier. Deaths from catastrophic injuries could drop drastically if my research is successful.” Dr. Green pressed the palms of his hands together and tipped them toward Joshua in a gesture so intimately Neil-like that Joshua had to take another deep breath.
“Mr. Stouder,” Dr. Green said, his eyes piercing. “Are you still with us?”
Joshua swallowed. He sounded so much like Neil. Just a kid. Not a ghost. It was time to get a grip.
“I’m with you.” Joshua crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t forget I’m the guy you’re wanting to sweet talk into giving you a bundle of money for a project I’m not exactly sold on.”
Dr. Green narrowed his eyes even more and said, “As I was explaining, Mr. Stouder, in the most recent project I’ve been working on, the nanites can reverse severe brain trauma. They engage with glucose, merging and becoming part of the cell, in order to cross the blood-brain barrier effectively. At that point, they begin to repair pathways to allow for neural communication, or what we scientists refer to as the schnizzle in your nizzle, in order to—”
“The schnizzle in your nizzle?” Joshua scoffed. He turned to Dr. Peters. “Brian? Are you seriously asking me to give funding to a project on nanites, and let’s just leave aside my current issues on that particular subject, where the lead scientist—who, by the way, looks barely out of high school—refers to brain activity as ‘the schnizzle in your nizzle?’”
“It’s very old slang, Mr. Stouder,” Dr. Green said oddly. “I can speak in scientific terms only, if you prefer, but I doubt you’ll be able to follow me.”
Joshua didn’t think he could take another minute of this disconcerting likeness to Neil. The voice, the expressions, even the brutal straightforwardness. It was ridiculous, and Joshua couldn’t be expected to cope. He rubbed his face and said, “Sorry, Brian. That’s it. I’m out of here.”
Brian opened his mouth to speak, but Dr. Green interrupted, “Really, Mr. Stouder? You’re going to walk away just like that?” His body trembled, and his eyes blazed. There was something in his tone, something that made Joshua remember all too clearly that first day by his apartment door and the resulting ten-minute scolding he’d received from Neil. “I know you’re a country boy, but haven’t you learned over the years?”
Joshua paused. The arrogant little jerk was definitely taking it too far. “Excuse me?” Joshua asked again. “And just what do you think you know about me?”
“More than you know about me,” he replied.
“Neil,” Brian said in a strong tone.
Joshua narrowed his eyes, heart skipping. “What does Neil have to do with this?”
“Not that Neil,” Dr. Green said, obviously annoyed. “Clearly you didn’t do your homework, Mr. Stouder. He’s talking to me.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. My name’s Neil Green.” He crossed his arms over his chest.
Joshua gasped. The words punched him in the gut, and he blinked at the kid in shock. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
“You heard me,” Neil Green said, but his voice was soft now, tender, like he cared. “I doubt it’s a name you’d forget. Or maybe I’m wrong about that?” He tilted his head, his tone going so very gentle so that it tingled up Joshua’s spine. “Twenty years is a long time, after all.”
Joshua stared at him. “So you’ve done your homework on me. Good to know. Having a similar name to my dead lover means absolutely—”
Dr. Green laughed, a familiar sound that shook Joshua to the core. He blinked at Joshua almost coyly. “Lover? Isn’t that stretching the truth a little bit?”
His blood simultaneously drained from him and rushed so hard through his veins that he couldn’t hear or see straight. How the hell could Dr. Green know that he and Neil had never consummated their relationship physically?
Dr. Green’s bravado wavered, and he reached out to Joshua with regret washing over his face. Joshua recoiled. It was one thing to sit there looking like Neil, and being like Neil, it was another thing to throw Neil in his face.
Joshua pointed his finger at Dr. Green. “Maybe you can talk to other people like that, Dr. Green, but it isn’t going to work with me. I’m not impressed by your so-called ‘genius’ or your rude, inappropriate comments about my past or me. As for giving you money? I think you can pretty much assume you lost all chance of that when you brought up my dead lover, yes. So, Brian, if you want to call me when you find a head scientist who can summon a little respect—”
“Respect?” Dr. Green said. “I do respect you. I’ve always respected you.”
Joshua blinked at him, shook his head, and said, “You don’t know how to show it, Dr. Green.” Joshua stood up, leaning over to put his hands flat on the table. He peered into Dr. Green’s blue, and upsettingly familiar, eyes. “You’re just a kid, so let me spell this out for you. In the future, you’ll want to remember that the guy with the money has your balls in a vice. And they? Just got crushed. Have fun doing your research without funding.”
Joshua dusted his hands off and turned around.
As he left the room, he heard Brian bark something at Dr. Green, and Joshua was momentarily tempted to stay and see how well the kid took a verbal beatdown from his advisor.
Somehow, he thought Dr. Green would hold his own, but he headed toward the stairwell, got out of the building, and into fresh air as quickly as he could.
Chapter Twelve
Neil had never loathed himself so much as he did when he closed the Barren River hotel-room door on Brian Peters’ still talking face. He hadn’t heard a single thing Dr. Peters had said to him after Joshua walked out of the room, and he didn’t think he needed to hear whatever Dr. Peters was saying now. It couldn’t be harsher than what he was telling himself.
You blew it, idiot. You had this one chance, this one opportunity, and you blew it.
One chance for what? He’d never had a chance with Joshua. Not in this lifetime. He’d been an idiot to come up to meet with Joshua himself. He should’ve insisted they apply for grant money elsewhere, and if there wasn’t another foundation that would even consider something as experimental as what Neil was suggesting, then he should have insisted that Dr. Peters come alone.
But he hadn’t been able to resist the idea of being in Joshua’s presence again.
Neil ran a hand over his mouth. God, his stupid mouth. It was like he’d been possessed, and sentences had come burbling out before he could stop them. He’d never had something like that happen before in this life or the last. It was like all of his nerves had sharpened him into the worst version of himself, the one he only let slip to lab assistants who fucked up, and sometimes to especially shitty baristas.
Fuck.
He didn’t want to hurt Joshua. He’d never wanted to hurt Joshua. But the expression on Joshua’s face when Neil had made the anxiety-driven jab about Dr. Russell having never been Joshua’s lover had clearly struck at pain deep inside. Neil had wanted to swallow his own tongue, choke to death on it,
and not come back in another life remembering everything again.
Hell, if he could only be sure of that, he’d have offed himself a long time ago.
It was exactly like he’d known it would be. Painful, awkward, and, yeah, seeing Joshua, sitting beside him, watching his face move through various emotions as he’d regarded Neil had been terrifying, so he’d lost his mind and been an ass. At the time, it’d seemed better than grabbing Joshua, kissing him, and declaring himself the reincarnation of Joshua’s long-lost lover.
Lover.
God, Neil wished he’d been Joshua’s lover. If he had those memories, too, maybe he’d have been able to cope a little better. Maybe he really could have left it all behind when that truck barreled down on him and Magic. But instead he was stuck with all of this longing. The longing that had foolishly led him to apply for the grant and then come here with Brian.
He’d been an idiot. A foolish, selfish, heartless idiot.
Neil sat on the bed, head in his hands, and stared at his shiny shoes purchased just for this trip. He remembered getting ready for the meeting, the anticipation and fear that had rushed through him in an endless loop. He’d stared at himself in the mirror, looking at the line of his nose, the angle of his jaw, and he’d wished he were somehow ten years older. He’d wondered if Joshua would recognize him, if he’d see the similarities, or if he’d just be some dorky kid.
He could admit it now. He’d wanted Joshua to know. And yet the recognition in Joshua’s eyes had been horrible to see. Joshua had looked ill, like he could barely stand to look at Neil, and that had cut. Was Joshua so desperate to forget him after all? Had he moved on since Lee’s death to mourning for his husband more than he’d ever mourned for Neil? For a split second, Neil wished Joshua had never met Lee. The thought lacked generosity and love, but it was there all the same.
Neil fell back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and thousands of memories poured through him. Scottsville had seemed freakishly familiar when he’d driven into the town after the hour-drive from the Nashville airport with Dr. Peters. It was exactly as Joshua had described it to him all those years ago. A town frozen in time. After they’d arrived at the Barren River Resort, he’d stayed hidden in his room freaking out, waiting for the meeting to start.
The meeting that had just gone oh-so-very badly.
When he’d seen Joshua standing in the conference room, eyeing the table, with his hands stuffed into his pockets and his light-brown hair curling at the temples like it always had, Neil had thought his heart would hammer out of his chest. He’d heard people say things like that before, describing an intensity of hollow, ringing fear that he remembered from the truck accident, but now that he’d experienced it again, he couldn’t shake the reverberation of it from his body.
And then Joshua had seen him, too.
And his face…his face had said so much. Neil shivered remembering the way Joshua had paled, going green at the gills. Joshua had been horrified by the resemblance he saw, and Neil couldn’t blame him. There’d been times in the past, when he’d been hanging out drinking a coffee in the campus cafeteria, or looking up old, dusty books on reincarnation in the library when he’d seen someone who resembled Joshua. Someone with light-brown hair that hung down in their face—the way Joshua had worn his hair when Neil first met him—or someone with the same slope to their shoulders and bounce in their walk. And he’d hated that person. He’d never talked to any of them, and he never would, but he hated them for looking like Joshua, for making Neil remember in a visceral, aching way exactly the thing he could never have. The thing he needed to let go.
But he wasn’t an idiot. He recognized that he’d never had any idea how to let Joshua go or how to stop loving him. It seemed impossible. Loving Joshua was all he’d ever known.
His phone started beeping, and he pulled it out of his pocket. It was Dr. Peters, of course. He turned it off and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and crashed to the floor.
Neil rolled over, covering his head with a pillow when it kept on ringing.
Hours passed, and Neil ignored the knocking on his hotel room door and the sound of Dr. Peters calling to him through the thick wood. He couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t do anything else, either. He just lay there, scanning through memories from another time, and trying to figure out how he was going to keep on living if he couldn’t do his work, if he couldn’t block out thoughts of Joshua by diving into nanite research and experiments.
The sound of the privacy settings of the room being overruled brought Neil upright, and his mouth hung open as Joshua walked in, with Dr. Peters on his heels, as well as a few members of hotel security behind them.
Joshua’s eyes flashed annoyance and relief at once. Neil couldn’t tug his gaze away from Joshua, but he knew he must look a mess sprawled on the bed, his shirt rumpled and his hair rubbed every which way by the pillow. His face wasn’t schooled. His emotions were showing.
Dr. Peters was talking, but Neil didn’t hear him.
Joshua swallowed and took a step forward, reaching out toward Neil. “Hey, you had us pretty worried.” Joshua looked behind him, waved the security away. They stepped outside the room, but Neil got the impression they didn’t leave entirely. Turning back to Neil, he said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Neil tried to snap the words out, but he didn’t think he sounded especially convincing. His voice was breathy and strange. Horrified, he realized that Joshua thought he was a melodramatic teenage genius who was pouting about having lost the funding.
Joshua glanced back toward Dr. Peters, waiting to follow his lead.
Dr. Peters took several steps forward. His tired expression said it all. “Neil, I understand that you’re disappointed, but scaring us like this wasn’t necessary.”
Neil wiped a hand over his face. “I wanted some privacy. That’s all.”
Joshua looked momentarily startled, though Neil didn’t know why. But then he trained his face into an expression of concern again and stepped a little closer. “Look, I’m willing to hear you out. Things got a little uncomfortable earlier, and that was partially on me. How about we let bygones be bygones and give this another try?”
“Why?” Neil asked, standing up to try to feel more on equal footing with them both. His tongue moved and he made words, and as soon as he heard them, he wanted to grab them back from the air. “So that you can soothe the poor kid’s hurt feelings? My work will be fine. With or without you.”
Dr. Peters threw his hands up in the air and walked out of the room. Clearly, he’d had enough of Neil. Joshua watched him go but didn’t follow. Instead, he took a deep breath, shut the door to the room, and pulled up a chair. He turned it around backward and sat down. He eyed Neil speculatively from his shoes to crown of his head, and then sighed, unbuttoning his shirtsleeves and rolling them up.
Neil was speechless. He couldn’t take his eyes off Joshua’s forearms, the soft hair and skin he exposed. Memories of Joshua’s arms under his hands as they’d kissed came back to him. He scrunched up his eyes to shake those thoughts away.
When he opened his eyes again, Joshua had his arms crossed over the back of the chair, and he was studying Neil intently.
“Have a seat. I’m going to be upfront with you,” Joshua said as Neil let his legs give out to sit back on the edge of the bed. Joshua licked his lips and then cocked his head a little, his eyes focused intently on Neil’s face. “You look a lot like someone I knew once. I suspect you even know you do. It seems like you know an awful lot about me, Dr. Green.”
Neil said nothing.
Joshua nodded as though he had, though. “So, we’re going to have to deal with that. I didn’t give you a fair shot because I…well, I lost my husband two years back. A poorly researched, experimental nanite procedure led to his death. So, that, combined with the fact that you look like…well, you know who you look like. So I got upset. Like I said, I didn’t give you a fair shot.”
“There was no way to preven
t what happened to Lee,” Neil said, defaulting to his work. It was safer there. “When your husband started with the nanite treatment, we didn’t have a test for the genetic markers.”
Joshua nodded. “I know. And you’ve since developed one.”
“Yes,” Neil said. “I did. I developed it because of him.”
Joshua blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Well, your husband and about fifteen hundred other people. The future of nanite medicine depended on it. With the tests I’ve designed, we can be sure it won’t happen again. My propositions might be experimental, Mr. Stouder, but I’m not without a conscience. There’s always protocol to keep me in line, but I do give a damn about human beings. All creatures, really.”
Joshua’s expression softened, and he said with fondness, “Like I said, I knew someone like you once—he cared about human beings, too. And animals. Maybe a little too much.”
“Oh yeah?” Neil asked, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard. “What do you mean by that?”
“It got him killed,” Joshua said. “Maybe if he’d cared just a little less…”
Neil’s breath hitched. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“I’m sorry he died.” Neil felt like he was about to be swept from the face of the earth for even daring to say it. “Both of them, I mean. I can’t imagine how you felt.”
“It sucked.”
Neil recalled the expression on Joshua’s face when he’d first seen Neil, how much he didn’t want to be reminded of him. It reminded him of the torture he’d put himself through watching Joshua’s interviews over and over, memorizing every wrinkle, every smile. He thought of the years that he’d spent in Atlanta, growing up with Alice, being so much more than a little kid, and yet never enough to be with Joshua. Too young, too late, too dead. And then Joshua had been too happy, too married.
It was too much.