Truth and Consequences

by Sarah Madison

  I could feel the heat coming off John’s skin as he stood next to me, and it made me suddenly shy. “You want to hang out for a while? Watch some television?”

  He glanced at his watch. “For a little while. Not too late, though. I’ve got to leave pretty early in the morning if I’m going to beat the traffic. They want me at the Richmond office this week. I’m going to have to go back to DC at some point too.”

  I let him pick the show. We left a lamp on. Otherwise the only light was from the flickering images on the television. I was cozily comfortable sitting with him on the couch in his mother’s basement, watching a cop drama and making fun of the fictional detectives. I wanted to be closer to him, though, and slid my hand down his thigh and along the inside of his knee. I just wanted to touch him. To reassure myself that he was real and he was here and everything would be all right. He brought his hand up to brush the hair against my neck. I wanted to arch into it like one of the cats getting their back rubbed, but I didn’t. Instead, I found my eyelids drooping at the slow scritching of his fingers on the back of my neck.

  I must have dozed off. I woke as John was in the process of easing his arm out from under my head. I’d left a wet patch on his white cotton shirt where I’d drooled. That’s me, Super Sexy Dude.

  John snorted softly. He was smiling at me, even as he was still extricating himself from my sleepy clutches. He clicked off the television with the remote, leaving the tableside lamp as the only source of light. It spilled in a warm glow over the hideous plaid upholstery on the couch. If there’d only been a lava lamp, it would have felt very 1970s.

  “Don’t go,” I murmured.

  “I have to.”

  Maybe I just wanted to believe it, but he sounded regretful.

  “No. You don’t. You’ll be up at first light, anyway. If you sleep at all, that is.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew them to be true. I just didn’t know how I knew. Anyway, this wasn’t about sex anymore. This was about wanting someone next to me. About laying my head on his chest and hearing the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. About knowing I wasn’t alone in this situation.

  He got very still, like a wild animal at the sound of a passing car. Then the tension slowly oozed out of his muscles, as though he’d made a conscious effort to relax them. “You’re remembering more.”

  “Maybe.” I spoiled the nonchalant effect by yawning like a three-year-old past his bedtime.

  He got to his feet, held out his hand, and helped me to mine. “I do sleep better when I’m with you.”

  The cats were disgruntled at being shoved off the couch so we could unfold it, but they came back to explore the newly created bed space. Cautiously, like deer creeping into an open field at dusk, they stepped on the unfolded mattress, sniffing curiously as they prowled about.

  “I’ll be back,” John promised. He gave me a peck on the cheek and went upstairs.

  To get his things, I presumed. Or maybe to say good night to his mother. The Flynns didn’t strike me as being big on hugging. They seemed as prone to family affection as a clan of Vulcans from Star Trek. I couldn’t shake the impression that John was going out of his way to demonstrate to me that he did care about me, even if he didn’t feel free to declare it openly in his mother’s house.

  I set about making up the bed with the things Mrs. F had provided and wishing I could remove my head from my shoulders and be done with that god-awful headache. Rummaging around in my bag, I dug out the bottle of painkillers I’d been trying not to take. They tended to give me insomnia, especially this late in the evening, but I was desperate. I should have taken something at dinner, at the very first indication of pain. Always better to prevent pain than to try and stop it later.

  I washed down the pills and got ready for bed, stripping down to a T-shirt and briefs. The sheets were deliciously cool. I climbed in with that shivery delight of knowing I would soon get warm, but I wished John would hurry up just the same. The cats settled themselves at my feet, but looked up sharply, ears swiveling toward the door when John finally came back downstairs.

  “Here.” He draped a beaded bag, warm from the microwave, around my neck. I couldn’t help it. I groaned blissfully as the heat soaked into the rigid muscles around the back of my head. I watched with half-closed eyes as John went about getting ready for bed. I’ll say this much—the man stripped down nicely. The track-and-field trophies made perfect sense. I could picture him on skis, climbing mountains, rappelling down cliffs. His body was lean, his torso almost ridiculously long. He was hairier than I was too. Not too much, though. Just right, as a matter of fact. A nice triangle-shaped patch across his chest that tapered away, only to reappear on his lower abdomen as a kind of landing strip into his briefs.

  I was momentarily distracted by the puckered scar just under his left collarbone. A bullet wound, and an old one at that. Seeing the wound gave depth to the notation I’d read in John’s file, made it more than just a dry summation of an incident report. A little to the right and it would have gone right through the subclavian artery, and I wouldn’t be admiring the man stripping down in front of me. Which would have been a shame because oh, that ass…. When he turned away to lay his pants over a chair, I got a perfect view of that little peach of a runner’s ass. Gorgeous. If I didn’t feel like crap, I’d want to pinch it, just to see if it was as firm as it looked.

  Damn, Parker, you’re a lucky man.

  When John turned around, he was wearing a twisted smile. “What are you looking at?”

  “You. I like watching you undress.”

  He made the sort of noise usually described in books as humpf and pulled back the covers so he could slide in beside me. The lamplight glittered off a silver chain around his neck, and I caught sight of the tiny silver cross hanging from it. There was a story there, but I just couldn’t bring myself to ask about it that night. My head was pounding.

  Rachel. The cross had belonged to his sister, Rachel. Yeah. Definitely not asking about that tonight.

  “I can’t sleep on my left side.” I indicated the cast and hoped I didn’t sound as pathetic as I suspected.

  “Neither can I.” His smile was a faint ghost of his normal one as he tapped the scarred shoulder. The lopsided shrugs made more sense now. “Turn on your right.”

  I did as he suggested, and he leaned across me to switch off the light, plunging the windowless room into stygian darkness. I felt him settle in behind me. The springs of the lumpy mattress protested with his movement. Blessed heat from his body enveloped me, and he draped his arm across me. The way his body molded to mine effortlessly told me a lot that I hadn’t been able to fully comprehend before. There was muscle memory there, in the way his arm came to rest on my abdomen as though arriving at the end of a long journey, the way his hips tucked around mine, and the way his breath stirred the hair on the back of my neck.

  His cock pushed up against me in a sleepy, half-interested way, and I found myself smiling in the dark. Because, okay. It was real. It wasn’t just some stranger giving lip service to what I wanted to believe. I knew this man, even if I didn’t quite remember him. His fingers tightened briefly around mine. My last waking thought was that maybe he needed the contact as much as I did. We slept.

  Chapter Four

  BY THE end of the week, I’d had enough.

  I said as much as soon as I came upstairs and into the kitchen.

  “Mrs. F, I’ve had enough. May I borrow the keys to your car? I have to get out of here.”

  Jean looked up from her morning paper, startled. She was already dressed, with her makeup on and every hair immaculately in place. She had a cup of instant coffee at her elbow, along with a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal. I stalked to the stove top and looked down at the glutinous mass of oats remaining in the pan, wrinkling my nose. On another burner, a kettle of hot water sat steaming. There was a partially emptied coffee cup and a plate with some greasy crumbs beside the range.

  “I’m guessing John had coffee and toast for breakfast again.”
I wrinkled my nose once more, this time adding a lip curl as well. The oatmeal smelled burnt.

  “I tried to talk him into some oatmeal, or even a bowl of cereal, but he said he was in a hurry and would get something at the office.” Jean pointed at the box of cereal on the kitchen table, complete with the athlete of the week on the front and the promise of eighteen of the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. I was willing to bet the cardboard container tasted better than the cereal itself.

  “Secretariat didn’t win the Triple Crown on a Big Mac and fries.”

  “What?” Jean laughed, reminding me again why I liked her so much.

  “Something my granny used to say. Which translates roughly into ‘you can’t do your job without the right fuel.’” I had visions of John sneaking several slices of pizza from the break room at the Richmond office. And he probably didn’t need to run extra laps later to burn it off. I’d discovered in the past week that “leaving early for the office” for John meant getting up at a ridiculous hour to go running, coming back to the house, showering, grabbing a pitiful excuse of a breakfast, and dashing out the door.

  He didn’t sleep with me every evening. That first morning, I’d woken up when he’d started getting dressed. But as the cats were still on California time, and the room was as dark as a sarcophagus, the cats and I had fallen back asleep as soon as he’d left.

  Over the last few days, however, the cats had adjusted to Eastern Standard Time and had demanded breakfast at the first sign of human movement. If John wasn’t there to wake me with his careful dressing in the dark, sometimes that wasn’t until quite late. I wondered if he was sneaking upstairs to mess up the bedding in his old room to leave the impression he was sleeping there every night. He certainly kept his duffel bag there.

  I was reminded of Oliver as he’d been when I first found him—a little tough street cat who would show up for food and a little stroking but pretended he didn’t really live with me. Like I had with the young tom, I was tempted to snag Flynn by the scruff, collar him, and claim him as mine. For his own good, naturally. The street life is dangerous. But what worked with cats didn’t necessarily translate to humans, damn it.

  At no point did Flynn show any signs of wanting sex with me either. He could have been just another roommate, except for the way he touched me at times. He’d place his hand on my thigh while we were reading or watching television together, or he’d brush the back of my neck with his fingers, as though he were stroking one of the cats. The odd thing was, he always seemed to know when I needed the reassurance of that touch, even if I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

  He hadn’t yet told me the story behind Rachel’s murder. I had the strong feeling he didn’t want to discuss it in Jean’s house, but when were we ever anywhere else? My frustration was mounting, and I don’t mean just sexually.

  I spent my days like Leeloo from The Fifth Element, absorbing large chunks of Wikipedia at a time, whiling away the day until John came home from work—once I’d caught up on our caseload, and read the entire FBI manual, that is. But I could take only so much force-feeding of information. I was only human, after all. I alternated dozing at random intervals and being bored out of my mind. Unless I had physical therapy, I typically got up late, since I frequently had trouble sleeping at night, though I still had a tendency to doze off at odd moments during the day. I would feed the cats and settle into rebuilding my life one piece of information at a time. On therapy days, Jean drove me to the rehab center, and I stopped by the neurology department afterward. It made a nice change from sitting on my ass reading all day long.

  The weird thing was that while I could read a lot of things online, sometimes a migraine would strike without warning, usually when I attempted to look back through my old search history. Clicking through lots of pages and links felt like someone was stabbing me through the eye with an ice pick. I went through the images on my phone a little at a time. Too much work with the touch screen, and the migraine growled softly in the background, reminding me to quit while I was ahead.

  Most of the pictures were like looking at someone else’s vacation photos—kind of interesting at first, but then rapidly boring when I had no context for them. Some were obviously work related, and I made the mental connections based on the cases I’d caught up on. There were a few of John, usually taken when he wasn’t looking, but he seemed to be hard to catch clearly. A bit elusive, like a wild animal at a watering hole that knows where the National Geographic camera is mounted.

  On nontherapy days, around lunchtime, I would head upstairs and cobble together some sort of meal containing too many carbs and not enough fresh veggies. I was often discouraged and exhausted after lunch, and used that as an excuse to kill several hours watching some movie or television show I was sure was vital to my cultural background. Well, you never knew, right? It was possible that I would eventually be called upon to save the day by quoting Pinky and the Brain. Lord knows, the state of politics in the US was enough to depress a guy to death. Especially a gay man who believed in things like marriage equality, a woman’s right to affordable birth control, and some decent gun control regulation, for fuck’s sake. It was eminently soothing to watch something I’d seen before and liked and could quote line by line if desired. The very act of watching the same film over and over, anticipating the next scene, the next line, the facial reaction of this or that actor, silenced my brain for a while. Besides, Captain America was mighty damn fine to look at too.

  I could only devote so much time to mind-numbing projects, however. Behind everything I did was a persistent itch, a feeling that I wasn’t doing enough or reprogramming rapidly enough to prepare myself for some unknown something that lay ahead.

  On my third day out of the hospital, I took over the daily preparation of the evening meal. I couldn’t help it. Jean’s idea of cooking dinner seemed to begin and end with Campbell’s soup in the recipe. After enduring two more meals in which the food was unevenly heated and nearly inedible, I was beyond being polite about it. One evening I tried to draw Charles out over his food preferences, but he’d bluntly declared that he would hire a cook when he and Jean got married. Jean had flicked a sharp glance in his direction and had put her fork down beside her plate. She had eaten nothing else the rest of the meal, and her normally bright conversation was brittle and abrupt. John had tried to bore holes in Charles with just his eyes, something I could have told him from past experience wouldn’t work. Charles hadn’t even noticed. I wondered what Jean saw in him, and hoped it wasn’t money and status, because I could see her drinking again if she married this jerk.

  Charles came over most evenings but showed little signs of thawing toward me. You know what they say about men, hearts, and stomachs, though. When Jean kindly asked me one morning if she could pick up anything for me from the store, I’d handed her a list.

  “Cilantro?” She’d frowned as she peered at my lengthy shopping list. “Can you get that in the aisle where they keep the powdered spices?”

  Manfully repressing a shudder, I’d gone to the store with her. Lord knows what she would have brought back without me to guide her. She’d been a good sport about it, though, and had kept me company while I got dinner started that evening: grilled halibut with cilantro garlic butter and asparagus as a side.

  She’d been doubtful about my choice. “Charles doesn’t really care for fish very much.”

  “Neither does John,” I’d said, dredging up an unexpectedly clear memory of an uncooperative John standing in my kitchen telling me the same. My reaction had been “tough shit.” “They’ll clean their plates tonight, though. Trust me.”

  And they had. John had come into the dining room, late as usual, loosening his tie as he moved toward his chair, his head tipped back and nostrils flaring as he tested the air. He’d locked gazes with me and had given me Smile Number Two, the dead sexy one that made me think about sweeping the table clear of dishes and taking him right there. Or begging him to take me. Either wou
ld have worked for me. The way his eyelids had lowered and his gaze burned into me, I’d thought maybe some of my desire was apparent on my face. Or maybe it could be smelled in the air, like a dog in heat.

  He’d slid into his seat. “Smells wonderful.”

  “Lee made dinner tonight.” Jean had been quick to give me credit, even though I’d suggested to her she keep mum about who’d done the actual cooking. I’d had to laugh when she’d pointed out no one would believe her if she’d claimed to have been the originator of the feast.

  “Lee, eh?” Charles couldn’t have made his distaste more plain, but when dinner was over, his plate looked as though it had been licked spotless.

  From then on, the kitchen was my domain. I still struggled to get up in time to fix John a decent breakfast, though. Even on the one morning I managed to get into the kitchen as John, fresh from his shower and smelling maddeningly delicious, cruised in to fill his stainless steel travel mug full of coffee, I wasn’t able to persuade him to wait the four minutes it would take me to make him a loaded omelet. After that, it was harder to make the effort to get up in time to see him off.

  But by the end of the week, I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t just sit around like a 1950s housewife waiting for John to come home each day. I’d caught up on my files. I’d been in touch with our boss, Assistant Director Harding, and had consulted on a few of my outstanding cases, even though I was on medical leave. Harding seemed relieved to find my knowledge as intact as ever. Even if I didn’t regain all my memories, I thought I’d be able to fake my recovery enough to return to work, given time.

  I didn’t seem to have very many friends at work. Oh sure, people contacted me because they needed some piece of information and were too lazy or incompetent to look it up themselves, but I’d received very few messages wishing me a speedy recovery or commiserating with me on my injuries. When you get the silent treatment like that, you can’t help but wonder if it’s because you’re gay or just an asshole.