Winter Heart

by B. G. Thomas

  “A thousand!” Wyatt cried.

  “I’m going to get you an IV,” she said, and Wyatt protested—

  “I hate needles!”

  —but Kevin calmed him enough to get it done.

  “Thank Asclepius, she was good,” Wyatt said tearfully afterward and then, “Gods, you must think I’m the biggest goddamned baby in the world.”

  Kevin told him, “No, no, not at all,” and before he could help it, he kissed Wyatt, and then to his surprise the nurse got a whole lot nicer.

  And then there were tests….

  The hours went by, and whenever she could, she let Kevin be there, but of course there was only so much she could do. Blood work and CAT scans and EKGs and nothing…. They couldn’t find a thing.

  And Wyatt’s pain did not abate, and it was only after they gave him one pain medication, and then another (was there a third?), and then (finally) morphine (twice), that Wyatt was finally able to doze off and get some rest.

  And then there was the matter of Wyatt’s friends.

  Wyatt wanted him to call them, then didn’t, then begged him to call Sloan, and then begged him not to, and it was while Wyatt was dozing that Kevin made the calls.

  “No,” he said, he didn’t think they could help, but he wanted them to know, and there was the weather and all and still…

  Each and every one of them showed up.

  The tears pricked Kevin’s eyes, and he had to fight to keep those tears in check—but oh, so wonderful that Wyatt had such friends. A cute redhead with a lot of freckles, who looked like he might be around thirty—his name was Sloan. Ah, the famous Sloan. His more rugged and hairy boyfriend, Max, was with him—obviously a protective type, and one of the lovers that were part of Wyatt’s crazy idea that there was some cosmic balance and only so much love to go around in the world. Roman and Jockster, Kevin knew of course. They called him Hodor when they got there, and they all reintroduced themselves to each other with their non-Festival names. So Roman was Scott, but he knew that because he’d gone by that the whole time he’d been at Camp and hadn’t taken on his Faerie name until the last night, and Kevin—well, Hodor—had been there for that. Jockster was Cedar in “real life,” which was a Faerie name unto its own. Finally there was Asher and his lover, a lovely Samoan named Peni.

  They all came, but they had to sit in the waiting room with nothing to do, and that’s why Kevin had told them not to come. Still, Wyatt had been pleased to hear they were there.

  “Tell them they should leave,” he slurred and dozed off again, and Kevin went back and forth. The nurse lady—whose name he’d finally found out was Doris—told him to tell anyone who asked that he was Wyatt’s husband.

  Husband.

  Imagine!

  “It’s not like we ask for marriage licenses,” she said, “and what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  Eventually she told him that they could send Wyatt home now—the pain had finally stopped, really stopped at last and not just been temporarily covered up by morphine—but Kevin wanted to know one thing.

  “Is it possible to have him stay? Because I’m telling you, there is something wrong. It’s serious. I’d like to take him home, he wants to go home, but what if this weather gets worse? He needs to be somewhere where he can be helped. If this gets worse. And if it’s the fact that he doesn’t have any insurance, I’m good for it.”

  She looked him deep in the eyes, and then she peeked through the curtain one way and then the other and finally whispered, “I’ll get him in a room.”

  And after that she did.

  Now there was just the matter of telling Wyatt’s family….

  CHAPTER FORTY

  LATER IT all sort of fused into a blur.

  One day turned into two, which turned into three, which turned into….

  Once the pain was gone, it was so much better. Wyatt wasn’t happy to be in the hospital. It wasn’t anything that had ever happened to him, and being away from home and hooked to an IV and the beeping machines and wake-ups in the middle of the night to get blood draws wasn’t exactly his idea of heaven. But less pain? That was a blessing that drowned out almost everything. And of course Kevin was there.

  Of course?

  He couldn’t believe how safe that made him feel.

  It was all so strange….

  With all the comings and goings of doctors and nurses, Wyatt managed to register some of what he heard and saw. It got confusing. Sometimes the morphine made him so foggy he would forget things that happened only moments before, and that could be disconcerting. Considering the alternative? That horrible, unbelievable pain? It seemed a small price to pay.

  And it did make him feel silly sometimes, and that made it easy to be nice to the nurses, who were only doing their jobs. There was one who seemed like a giant. He referred to her as “Big Nurse,” after the nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he thought she was going to be a problem. She was pretty mean at first, and he thought she didn’t approve of Kevin for one thing. But he made up his mind he’d win her over and flattered her outrageously.

  “I love those earrings,” he said on the first afternoon after she hadn’t been very nice about a blood draw. In fact, she had kind of harpooned him, and he’d wanted to smack her. He’d already told her he hated needles, and he was practically in tears for having to get what felt like the 175th one already.

  Her brows came together, and she reached up absentmindedly and seemed almost surprised to find them there.

  “Are those blue topaz or sapphires?”

  The corner of her mouth flickered. “Why…. Why, they’re topaz.”

  Wyatt nodded happily and pressed the little button on the control in his hand to administer some morphine. He had to wait between doses and had just noticed on the clock that it had been enough time—not that he was clock-watching or anything.

  “They really bring out your eyes.”

  She blushed then, the old battle-ax, and the corner of her mouth rose slightly despite herself. “Really?”

  “Oh yeah.” He turned to Kevin. “Don’t you think?”

  “I was just thinking that,” Kevin replied.

  Then she really was blushing. “I have some sapphire earrings that my mother gave me, but I’m afraid to wear them. Afraid of losing them.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’re afraid of anything,” Wyatt told her very seriously. “And besides, how can you enjoy them tucked away in a drawer?” He tried to focus on her name tag, but the morphine had something to say about that. “Janet?”

  “Janis,” she said. “Pope. I’m the head RN on this floor.”

  “I love that name,” he said. “Janis.” And then tried to sing a little bit of “Piece of My Heart.”

  “That’s who my mother named me after,” she said. “She saw her at Woodstock.”

  “You’re not old enough for your mom to have been at Woodstock, are you?”

  Now Big Nurse, aka Janis Pope, head RN of the seventh floor, was smiling. “You’re just pulling my leg now, Mr. Dolan—”

  “Wyatt,” he corrected.

  She brushed at her hair with both hands. “I was born in 1970,” she said. “The year after Woodstock, which was in 1969.”

  “Well, you’re living right, then. I wouldn’t have put you a day over forty. Thirty-eight even, right Kevin?” He snapped his attention back to the man who made his heart go pitter-pat and tried not to laugh at Kevin’s deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression.

  “Easy,” he managed with much aplomb.

  “You really do have beautiful eyes,” Wyatt assured her. “But I hope you don’t mind me saying this, they’re second to my boyfriend’s here.” And he motioned to Kevin.

  She bit her lower lip, looked back and forth between them, and then said, “No, of course not.” Then shading even redder, she all but dashed from the room.

  “You are incorrigible,” Kevin said, laughing.

  Wyatt shrugged and remembered the pain. He pressed
his morphine dispenser, but nothing happened. He had to wait. He guessed that was a good thing. He’d always been terrified of the idea he might become a drug addict. “She does have pretty eyes,” he said. “And the earrings are nice. I’d wear them.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Kevin said and winked.

  “We could wear matching ones,” Wyatt ventured and then held his breath.

  “Maybe,” Kevin replied and Wyatt let his breath out. “Although they’re a little flashy for me, don’t you think?”

  “I was thinking they were a little small,” Wyatt said with a slight toss of his head.

  Kevin’s smile was beautiful. “I think, for you, they might be.”

  What are you doing here? Wyatt wondered then. Why are you here with me?

  “We’d have to find matching stones,” Kevin replied and wow. Really? Matching stones? “But different sizes, okay?”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked aloud. And, “Why are you here with me?”

  Kevin got up from his plastic chair—it looked hideously uncomfortable—and came to Wyatt’s bed—which was pretty damned uncomfortable—and sat on its edge. “Did you want me to leave?” he asked quietly.

  “No!” Wyatt said. Gods, no. I don’t know what I would do if you left. In fact, one time he’d woken from one of his naps and the nurse who’d been on call thought he’d left. He’d almost panicked, when Kevin came in with two little cups of soft serve.

  “You’ll be thrilled, it’s peanut butter!”

  “How did you know I loved peanut butter?”

  “Oh, Wyatt! Why do you ask such silly things?”

  “No, I don’t want you to leave. I….” And then he did panic and couldn’t say, “I love you,” because he was afraid it was all a pain-induced dream.

  So then Kevin said it instead. “I’m here because I love you, Wyatt. I’ve loved you forever. I just finally realized it the last few days. I don’t know how I didn’t know.”

  “I love you,” Wyatt said, glad of the drugs so that he said what he was feeling, and if it was stupid for him to have fallen in love in one weekend, why then he could blame them, couldn’t he? “I do. And I don’t know how I didn’t fall in love with you the day you drove in the gate for your first Faerie festival—”

  “You don’t remember that day, Wyatt.”

  “—or the night you wouldn’t take me to bed when I wanted you so much.”

  “Did you, Baby Bear? Want me? Or were you just—”

  “I wanted you a lot…, Daddy Bear.” His heart skipped when he called Kevin that, and he heard Kevin’s breath catch, which made him hope that he liked it too. “And maybe for some of the ‘wrong’ reasons, whatever those are. Maybe because Howard made it okay for me to want. But I want you right now, and I wish we could. Right here. Right now.”

  Kevin kissed him then, long and hard, and Wyatt’s head swam, and it was better than morphine.

  Then, because he was feeling extraordinarily and uncharacteristically shy, as soon as Kevin sat back up he said, “And besides, it pays to be nice to nurses. They are underpaid and overworked and patients treat them like shit. You just have to make sure you never lie to them. Say what you mean because they will know if you lied, or they will find out, and then you’re fucked and not like I was fucked by you the other night.”

  Now it was Kevin who was blushing, and Wyatt liked making Kevin blush.

  THERE WERE no masses in the CAT scan, so if the pain was because of a stone, he’d passed it already—although Wyatt couldn’t imagine when. He hadn’t peed in a toilet in at least twenty-four hours. They wouldn’t let him, so he had to piss in this odd bottle-like thing with a handle that they called a urinal—which was not a urinal at all. They were measuring his pee flow, and it had taken everything out of him not to ask what kind of watersports they were into. He hadn’t. And if he had passed some kind of stone, wouldn’t he know? Wasn’t it supposed to be one of the most painful things a man could experience? Wyatt knew he was dreading it like a sentence in prison—because he knew what that would be like for a little fag like him, and it wouldn’t be at all like the hot gay porn movies from Raging Stallion or Titan or Steam Engine.

  So with Kevin asking the questions he’d been too afraid (or too confused) to ask, he discovered that the clear CAT scan meant that he didn’t have cancer, which he’d worried about until his boss, Katherine, got there and ordered him to get “that worry” right out of his mind.

  “Remember,” she said. “Don’t think about how you don’t want to be here—”

  (and how was he supposed to do that?)

  “—because the Universe only hears ‘hospital’ and gives you more of what you’re thinking about. Think about being healthy. Think about already being well. Think of yourself bathed in golden healing light.”

  Which wasn’t easy, but her words had impressed Kevin, and he’d held Wyatt’s hand and said soothing things and petted his forehead or hand or arm when the pain got bad—in other words, whenever the morphine wore off and he couldn’t yet get any more.

  “Your boss,” Kevin said. “She believes what I believe.”

  “I guess she does,” Wyatt said. “But she’s a witch, you know. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what you’ve been saying. When I kind of float away? And I’ve been thinking that your ‘ask, believe, receive’ was really exactly like spell work. That’s what I do, isn’t it? I draw my Circle and call on my gods, and use my herbs and crystals and wand and blade, and isn’t all I’m really doing asking and believing and waiting to receive?”

  “Yes,” Kevin said, his beautiful hazel-and-amber eyes flashing. “That’s exactly what I think. It’s why I’m just as comfortable in a Catholic High Mass as a Queer Gods Ritual at Festival.”

  Wyatt found out that everything going on had been wonderful and confusing and mystifying—how the heck had all this happened, so much and so fast?—and he wasn’t sure how he would have done it without Kevin.

  A man who said he loved him.

  Could it be?

  Could it be true?

  Wyatt woke up over and over again to find Kevin there. He could hardly believe it.

  When he woke up in his room that first time to find all his friends there, Wyatt had been amazed. Not just the FAB-ulous Four but their mates. And Kevin, thank Anubis.

  Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you….

  He introduced them all but found that had already been done while he’d been off in La La Land. And there were lots of curious looks and a mouthed, “Good going, dude!” from Jockster (which made him blush and laugh and… shit, that made him hurt!).

  It had all been like some corny but wonderful scene from a movie like The Broken Hearts Club, where Benji wakes up in the hospital after his overdose to find all his buddies there. Except Wyatt didn’t get scolded or asked why he’d done such a stupid thing because he hadn’t—thank the Goddess!—done anything wrong. Or Peggy Sue Got Married or even the end of The Wizard of Oz—and wouldn’t that be nice? If all this turned out to be a dream?

  But that didn’t seem to be the case—alas!

  Wait! No! Not a dream. He didn’t want Kevin to be only a dream.

  Oh, it had been good to see them and know that they loved him and that Howard…. Was. Fucking. Wrong! People did care about him, and not just those “stupid fags” Howard said he liked to get drunk with. Their spouses liked him too. And his boss. And according to Kevin, just about everyone at Men’s Festival.

  They asked what had happened and hugged him and asked him for jokes and told him a couple he could use later and wrote down lists and entertained him until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  And Kevin stayed.

  Kevin sat with him and helped him sort through things. Remember things. Decisions to make. There was stuff he kept… losing. Stuff he lost between pain and then pain’s end through the morphine.

  Kevin explained that the hospital people hadn’t found any blood in his urine in the emergency room, and all that had
something to do with him either passing or not passing a stone (he wasn’t clear on that), nor had they found any evidence of pancreatitis, which was the area in his body where he seemed to be feeling the most pain. The CAT scan definitely didn’t show any stones, although he guessed from what he could remember through the fog of morphine that he might have passed it partially already.

  “Does that mean the little fucker is sitting in my bladder,” Wyatt asked Kevin, “and I have the pain of pissing that out to look forward to?”

  “If you do, baby, I’ll hold your hand. Hell,” and Kevin turned bright pink, “I’ll hold your dick for you, Baby Bear.”

  Baby Bear.

  He was hearing Kevin use that name more and more.

  Wyatt blushed, and he didn’t even know why—because the dick holding didn’t bother him one bit, even if he was peeing at the time. Because, well, it would mean that big wonderful man was behind him and holding him up and not letting him fall.

  He sighed.

  “No comment?” Kevin asked. “I can’t believe you let that one go.”

  “Later,” Wyatt mumbled and faded into morphine land—with a bit of He said he loved me! traveling down into that faraway place with him.

  Thank the goddess he had drugs!

  Then, later….

  It seemed the doctors found some blood in his urine after all. Was this from another urinalysis? That report said “plus 2,” whatever that meant.

  They were now sure something internal was going on—oh, really? Really? He could have fucking told them that and he never went to medical school!—and it had nothing to do with his back. They were wondering about prostatitis now. Prostatitis? Wasn’t that something old men got? Kevin told him the doctors said that while he was a bit young for prostate problems, it happened.

  But how would that account for all his stomach pain?

  He felt as if he were forgetting something. That there was something he should be asking about, but if so, he couldn’t remember what it was.