Chase in Shadow

by Amy Lane

  “Aw, baby, I wanted to play with you!” she protested, and he got up and gave her the controls, kissing her on the cheek when she was aiming for his lips. She didn’t seem to notice, and her little oval of a face lit up at the greeting.

  God, Mercy—I just wish you were jealous, that’s all. I just wish you weren’t so patient, and then this would be over, and I could disappear in the room with the red door and have nothing to anchor me to the here and now.

  “That’s okay, Merce. I’ve got to go to the head.”

  He pulled out his phone when he was done taking a leak and hit text.

  God, Tommy. My house is full of people and I have

  never In my life felt so lonely.

  Serves you right, you dumb bastard. Did

  You enjoy your hello kiss?

  Fuck. It was like he had a secret camera in Chase’s living room.

  No. I wish I could have.

  Yeah, it would actually be easier on me if

  You had the possibility of loving her even a little bit.

  I love you, Tommy. I’m sorry it’s all I’ve got.

  I love you too. I’m sorry that’s not enough for you.

  It should be. It’s my stupid fuckery, you know that,

  right?

  Don’t do this to yourself. Please.

  I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

  EXCEPT when Chase woke up the next morning, Tommy wasn’t there. He texted him around nine after cleaning up the beer cans and the pizza mess and the ice cream bowls, because Kane’s hyperactivity couldn’t possibly have been fueled by anything but sugar, and he’d found a kindred soul in Kevin and they’d gone on an ice cream run at around nine o’clock at night. Usually Chase and Tommy met at the gym around ten; the text was a formality.

  Chase worried when Tommy didn’t return it.

  Tommy usually picked him up. Chase didn’t even bother with his workout bag. He texted Tommy again and backed his car out of the carport, driving without thinking to the little gray house with the Day-Glo orange trim.

  He had a key. He wasn’t sure when it had wormed its way onto his ring, but it had. It was plain silver—Mercy hadn’t even remarked upon it—and Chase barged into Tommy’s house without preamble. The kitchen was a hot mess—what was left of a half gallon of ice cream was melting, and a big, greasy pizza box, the kind that advertised the stuffed crust, was sitting in the middle of the table. Buster was up there, chewing forlornly on a piece of pepperoni because his bowl was empty, and Chase passed all that shit up and bolted for the bedroom. If Tommy was getting gangbanged in the bedroom, well then good for him, but Chase had this terrible gnawing, this empty thing going on in his chest, and sure enough, Tommy barely lifted his head as Chase crashed through the door.

  His room smelled like raw sewage, but Chase ignored the smell and came to crouch down by the bed.

  “Jesus, Tommy!” he mumbled. “What the hell’s wrong? You got the flu?”

  Tommy’s mouth lifted humorlessly. “Yeah. Got the flu. Couldja get me some water or somethin’, baby? Gatorade? Somethin’….” His eyes closed and Chase came back with the Gatorade and tried to wake him up. The third time he screamed “Tommy!” right next to his ear, he found his phone in his hand and he was dialing 9-1-1.

  He rode in the ambulance and tried to answer questions about the “stool” that they’d found all over Tommy’s bedsheets. Was it always so dark?

  Chase actually narrowed his eyes then. “How in the hell should I know—he usually flushes like a fuckin’ human being!”

  The paramedic sighed as he was putting a needle of clear liquid into Tommy’s arm. “Is your friend bulimic, Mr. Summers?”

  Chase blanched. “Yeah, he barfs sometimes when he’s trying to keep off weight,” he said quietly, thinking about the major-proportioned pity party he’d seen going on Tommy’s table. Jesus. It wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t alcohol. It was just a little obsession about weight. Tommy was perfect—it didn’t make a lot of sense really—but he’d been doing that before Chase even walked into his life. Chase accepted it. He did. Just like Tommy accepted Mercy. He didn’t like it. It scared the hell out of him. Oh Jesus… it did. It scared the hell out of him, and here, right fucking here, was the reason why.

  “What happened?” he asked, feeling his vision swim.

  “He got dehydrated. Took a shitload of laxatives and flushed the potassium and everything else out of his system that keeps his brain firing on all cylinders. We’ll admit him, pump him full of fluids, but you really want to help your friend here, man, get him to seek some treatment, okay?”

  Chase nodded, his skin broken out in wet heat from pure anxiety. It was good advice. It was, in fact, how Chase met Doc Stevenson.

  They admitted Tommy, and Chase produced Tommy’s insurance card. In fact, he’d brought Tommy’s whole wallet and a change of clothes to the hospital, and when he produced the card to the admitting nurse, he asked if mental health services came with it.

  He was promptly introduced to the resident shrink on call at Mercy San Juan, who shook Chase’s hand and said he’d seen him on campus.

  Chase tried to fit one more oddly shaped puzzle piece into the shattered picture his day had become. “Campus?” he asked dumbly.

  “Yes. I work pro bono at the student health services center three times a month. You’ve probably seen me puttering around campus at the college.”

  Chase blinked, thought about Tommy lying pale and still sleeping in the big hospital bed, and shook his head. “I’m probably too self-absorbed to notice you,” he said baldly, without apology. “My… my friend is here because he… he’s bulimic and he crapped his load out and he did a binge purge because he’s seeing a real douche fucker who won’t leave his girlfriend. He’s got the health card. Can you see him? Can you talk to him? He… he needed someone to talk to last night, and… and….”

  His head was aching. His head was aching and the big red door was crumbling behind it and Tommy had looked so small and he had done this, Chase had done this, he’d known Tommy had been vulnerable, he’d wanted to take care of him, but he hadn’t had the strength to leave Mercy and do it. He hadn’t ponied up. He hadn’t, and Tommy had needed him, and Chase hadn’t been there.

  Chase had thought that he hadn’t made any promises, but he saw it so clearly now. Texting to Tommy while he was hiding from his own girlfriend in the bathroom—that had been a promise, and the pain of that…. God, had Tommy been eating, stuffing himself so full he felt like stuffed crap while they’d been on the phone? Or had he been downing the laxatives, hoping that when he got it all out of his system, everything would be the fuck all right? It was late August, and around a hundred and three outside, and the air conditioner in the hospital was fighting that heat with everything it had. But Chase didn’t feel it. His skin was clammy, and his face was flushed, and for a minute he thought he wouldn’t be able to fucking breathe.

  Doc Stevenson was an older man, with a bald head and a white fringe around the outside, a white beard and a white mustache, and a T-shirt that said “Hugs not drugs” in pink letters on a navy blue background. He had jeans that bagged in the ass, Birkenstocks, and a man-purse at his hip that was leaking different colored pieces of yarn. But when he put his hand on Chase’s shoulder and very gently told him to breathe, it was okay, his friend would be okay, Chase actually, for the first time in his life, thought that maybe a grown-up knew what he was talking about.

  But that didn’t mean Chase didn’t have to clarify some important parts.

  “You’re gonna help him, right?” he asked, feeling a little bit desperate. The nice hippy headshrink nodded his head.

  “Yes, Mr. Summers. As soon as he’s conscious, we’ll sit down and discuss treatment for bulimia. Your friend looks to be in good shape—his muscle mass hasn’t degraded, this is mostly an emotional thing for him. We get to the root of that emotion—”

  “No worries,” Chase said seriously. “We’ll dig that root right out. That asshole ain’t ever gonna
get a chance to hurt Tommy again.”

  He visited Tommy before he left the hospital. He’d called Dex to come get him, and the guys had set up a visiting rotation, with Chase on the first watch. Considering they all knew that Tommy didn’t have any family but Chase and Johnnies, Chase thought it was really fucking human of them and that he worked with a first-class bunch of people.

  He wondered how they saw anything in him.

  But he had learned how to play perfect for too long to fall apart now. He sat in Tommy’s room and held Tommy’s hand when no one could see him. He’d already texted Mercy and told her he had a sick friend from work. He could say that now. He didn’t have to lie about a job; he could tell her honestly that he had a sick friend from work, and she was okay with that. So he sat there, and cried on Tommy’s hand, until Tommy woke up toward late afternoon.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled, “I’m so fuckin’ embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” Chase said quietly. “I’ll go back and clean the place up, okay? No one’ll ever know. They’ll think you got laid low by the bug or something—food poisoning. That’s what we’ll tell ’em. Food poisoning. No one has to know that I treated you like shit and you broke your fuckin’ heart over me, okay?”

  Tommy squinted at him. “My problems, asswipe. This had nothin’ to do with—”

  “Don’t lie to me, Tommy!” Chase’s voice rose and cracked. “Don’t fuckin’ lie to me,” he mumbled. “I’ve done some pretty shitty things, but I never lied.”

  “Not to me,” Tommy muttered, his voice bitter. “Only to yourself.”

  “Yeah,” Chase felt his pocket buzz and pulled the phone out. Dex was downstairs and Kane was coming up. Fair enough. He’d do it now.

  He stood up and leaned over, kissing Tommy full on the mouth, fetid breath and all. Tommy made a sound of protest when he pulled away, and Chase leaned his forehead against Tommy’s, crying and not able to stop it.

  “I love you forever, Tommy Matthew Halloran. But I’m too fucked up for you to fuck yourself up over. I’m gonna leave you here, and you’re gonna get better, and you won’t ever have to see me, okay? I’ll just not be a part of your life, and you can find someone who will be there when you need him, because I ain’t good enough to even clean up your puke.”

  “God, Chase!” Tommy’s hand came up to his cheek and Chase pulled away, wiping his own cheeks off with his palms.

  “I really do love you, you know.” Chase shook his head, because that was self-indulgent and he didn’t really get to do that, not anymore. “There’s a headshrink coming in to see you. He’s gonna help you not throw shit up. Listen to him, okay? Remember that I’ll love you if you get fat. I don’t give a shit. And the better person, the person who’s probably… aw fuck, I can’t fucking say it—anyway. Anyone who deserves you doesn’t give a shit if you get love handles or a bubble butt or what the fuck ever. So listen to this guy for me—”

  “I’m not doin’ shit for you!” Tommy snarled. He had a hospital sheet to use on his cheeks and for a second, Chase wanted to just bury his head on Tommy’s middle and use the same thing and sob out all this horrible, horrible razored redness pressing against his chest. But he didn’t deserve that either.

  “Then listen to him for you. Cause you’re a good person, and I’m a douchefucker, and I don’t want you hanging around no douchefuckers no more.”

  And Chase spun around and pushed blindly past Kane, who was standing in the doorway of the ICU cubicle, for once in his life still.

  He almost didn’t make it out of the elevator, and when he did, Dex had to honk his horn loud before Chase turned from his blind stumble into the parking lot and found Dex’s car.

  “You gotta take me to Tommy’s,” he said through the thickness in his throat, in his nose, and in his head. “I gotta clean up. When he comes home, he’s gotta know that the place is clean, and there’s not a fucking trace of me or what I’ve done to him fucking anywhere, okay?”

  “I’ll help,” Dex said reassuringly, and Chase shook his head.

  “He doesn’t want you to see.”

  “Yeah, Chase, but neither do you, and I’ve got a front-row seat.”

  Chase caught his breath and let it out on a sob.

  “What?” Dex asked, pulling up to a red light and looking at him in concern.

  You called me Chase.

  But he couldn’t say it, because he’d finally given in and wrapped his arms around his knees and started sobs that didn’t feel like they’d ever stop.

  THE cleanup was ghastly. Chase threw all the food away first—after feeding Buster, of course—and Dex came in from a run to the trash cans to find Chase hugging the reluctant brown cat and gazing sightlessly into space.

  “He loves this cat,” Chase said by way of explanation. “He’s sort of old. We should get him old-cat cat food. He’s going to be all Tommy has for a while.”

  “We can do that when we’re done,” Dex said, and Chase nodded, smoothing the whiskers back against old Buster’s cheeks. Buster purred into his hand and Chase rubbed his own nose against the whiskers, because the old cat liked that best. Tommy said it was because he was marking his people, and Chase would miss being one of his people. Yeah. The cat. That’s what he’d miss.

  Dex was so patient, too. He stood in the kitchen, the smell from the bedroom enough to gag a maggot, and didn’t say a word until Chase reluctantly put the cat down and went to grab a Hefty bag.

  “We’ll take the comforter to the dry cleaners’,” he said, talking to himself. “They’ve got one of those super-big washing machines, right? They’ll get the stains out. I’ll put the sheets in the washer to soak, and we can use some carpet cleaner on the mattress top and then leave it out to air.”

  “Yeah,” Dex said, as Chase made himself at home in a way that he never felt like he could do at his own apartment. “Whatever.”

  Chase looked up. “What?”

  “You’re just going to a lot of trouble to clean up for a guy you just dumped in a hospital room.”

  “Yeah, well, you love your way, I’ll love mine.”

  Dex grimaced, and Chase wondered if he was thinking about all of those stolen times with Scott, times that Scott had apparently decided were part of his porn life and not his real life.

  “He shoots, he scores!” Dex said ironically. “There any rubber gloves in there? Man, the smell alone is bad enough, I don’t want anything gross on my hands.”

  Chase tried to block the next part out. It wasn’t that he had a weak stomach; his stomach was pretty cast iron, actually. Feces didn’t bother him, and Mercy had been sick with food poisoning once and he’d had to clean her up, both exits, no waiting. He’d been scrubbing the walls of the bathroom—and doing laundry—for a week.

  This was different.

  The thought of Tommy lying here in his own excrement made him want to howl. Not Tommy. Chase—Chase deserved seven kinds of hells for being a coward, for keeping Mercy in the dark and Tommy on a short leash, for hurting people around him for fear of the big hurt inside him—but not Tommy.

  Chase scrubbed the mattress until it looked factory fresh. He gave Dex his credit card and had him go out and buy a wet and dry vac and made the beige carpet pristine. He scrubbed the bathroom, and threw his toothbrush away in the outside trashcan where Tommy would never see it, and vacuumed and dusted the weight room, taking his extra clothes from the closet and putting them in trash bags to take home. He was sorting through the CDs when Dex came back in from the dry cleaner’s and took the few he’d gathered out of his hands.

  “Leave them,” he said quietly, and Chase looked up, red-eyed, and shook his head.

  “He doesn’t need any reminders,” he said brokenly, and Dex put the CDs back in the rack.

  “Yeah, he does. They’re going to comfort him, okay? Just trust me on this one, Chase. You don’t strike me as a cruel guy.”

  Chase’s jaw tightened. “You have no idea,” he grated, and Dex turned around and snapped, “Bullshit!”


  Chase recoiled and gaped at him, and Dex scrubbed his own face with his hands.

  “Bullshit, Chase. I get why you’re doing this—it doesn’t take a genius, you know? I sat in your apartment last night and ate your pizza and played Halo with your girlfriend, and she’s great. She’s awesome. She’s fun and cute, and you know the only thing that keeps me from sleeping with her and putting you out of your misery so you can run here and make Tommy happy?”

  Chase blinked. “She’s a girl?”

  Dex nodded and put an ironic finger on his nose. “Bingo, asshole! She’s not my type. And you know what really sucks? She’s not yours either.”

  I’ve even stopped wishing she was.

  “Your profile says ‘straight’.”

  “So does yours. Most of the guys are. When they close their eyes and dream of ponies, their ponies have tits. I thought mine did too. Hell, last year, when I met up with you, had a smoothie, and thought you were a decent kid for a dumb jock, I’d mostly convinced myself I was in this gig for the money.” Dex sighed and flopped down on the floor next to Chase and wrapped a solid arm around his shoulders.

  “How come you’re even talking to me?” Chase asked him, shamelessly leaning on him even as he said it.

  “Because I know it’s complicated,” Dex said quietly. “I’m living complicated. Sometimes I think, ‘Jesus, if he would just fly away and get married, I could live my life again.’ But he won’t. And he won’t let me go. And it’s killing me. And even though I hate you for breaking Tommy’s heart, and ripping your own to shreds, I’m thinking, ‘Jesus. At least he’s trying. He’s trying to do the right thing.’ And I admire the hell out of you for it, because I think it just might kill you, and you’re trying anyway.”

  “I’m a coward,” Chase whispered, shaking against his friend’s arm. “I’m such a fucking coward.”