by J. M. Colail
“What the hell is this?”
Julian managed not to spill the coffee on himself, but only because he dropped the whole cup, instead of reacting with just a jerk. His nerves must have been completely shot. A brown vial flew across the lounge and hit him in the chest, then rolled off of his lap and bounced onto the floor with an empty, plasticky tick-tick-tick. “I think it’s a pill bottle,” he said reflexively, watching as it rolled into the puddled coffee.
“It’s my mother’s pill bottle,” Jack snarled, stalking across the lounge. Julian noted detachedly that his eyes were red and wondered if he’d had a little too much caffeine.
“Okay,” he said non-argumentatively. Carefully, he placed his hands on either side of the chair, letting them rest in plain sight. He’d never really seen Jack angry, but it could just be a natural part of the grief cycle. Tiredly, he let his head fall back. If Jack needed to vent, he’d let him vent.
“It’s got your fucking name on it as the prescribing physician!” Jack hissed. “Dated months ago, Julian! What the fuck?”
Fuck. Fucking perfect timing, that was what this was. Julian didn’t have the energy to defend himself. “She accidentally dumped her prescription down the sink when she was visiting you,” he said dully. He tried not to flinch when Jack blocked out the light from the overhead halogen bulbs. “I wrote her a refill.”
“That was before we were even together!” Jack was not doing a very good job of keeping his voice down. Some of the nurses and other staff were starting to take notice. “You’ve known this whole time and you never said anything?”
“What exactly could I have said?” Julian countered, eyes falling closed. Could they have this conversation in the morning, maybe? He never had gotten that coffee. This was such a huge mess that it had to be a dream, anyway. Nobody’s real life was this dramatic. “Oh, Jack, hi, remember me, the doctor who stitched up your leg and gave you a boner in the exam room? Guess what? Your mom’s dying of terminal lung cancer. By the way, I think you’re hot. Want to go out sometime?”
The silence was deafening, so much so that Julian forced his eyes open again past the fog of sheer exhaustion. He must be getting soft; thirty-six hours had never been a problem before. He looked up. Jack was staring at him, fists clenched, eyes open, mouth hard. “You know what?” he said. “Maybe I was wrong about you. About us.”
That stung, even through the haze of conflicting emotions, but Julian couldn’t exactly come up with a counterargument. “Maybe you were.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to meet Jack’s eyes when he said it. One more emotion to add to the ever-growing pile.
“I don’t think I want to see you for a while,” Jack said at length.
Julian could only stare at his shoes in the spreading puddle of cooling coffee until he walked away. Then something inside of him splintered, and he pulled his feet up into the uncomfortable chair to press his face into his knees. If he were lucky this would all be some terrible dream.
“JULIAN, BABY, you look worse than Roz.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he sighed, sagging into her hug anyway. Roz had gone to bed early—no surprise there—but she did seem to be improving, bit by bit, as the days went by. Having their parents here certainly helped, since it had been agreed that she shouldn’t be alone for extended periods and Julian did have to go back to work. Besides, Roz needed a woman to talk to, and she was shy on lady friends.
His mother squeezed him tightly for another thirty seconds and then let go, holding him at arm’s length. “You’re sure there’s nothing you want to talk about? I know this can’t be easy on you.”
You have no idea, he thought. The last week had been nothing if not trying. Public exposure of his sexuality had been inevitable—several of the hospital’s nurses lived in town—but the fallout had been mostly in the form of strange looks. One of his patients had refused to see him, but on the other hand, he had a new pair—high school students—who had wanted to know all about the ins and outs of sex with another man. When they’d left, Julian had laughed himself silly for a solid three minutes.
He wasn’t quite sure if it was the only time he’d smiled genuinely all week. “It’s not Roz, Mom. I’m just… tired. You know?”
“Does this have something to do with that man you were seeing?”
We could keep it secret for months, but the whole town knows the second it’s over. With an inward wince, Julian turned and started going through the motions of making tea. “Jack. And yes. Or no. It’s complicated.”
His mother insinuated herself at his side, wrapping an arm around his waist. Julian let himself lean into her wiry frame, now shrinking with age, but still strong. She smelled the same as she always had, and her gray eyes were as kind as ever. “It’s okay,” she told him, patting his hip fondly. “I know complicated means you’re not ready to talk about it. I won’t push.”
Julian wasn’t even ready to think about it, but that didn’t stop him from rehashing everything every waking moment and several of the sleeping ones. “Roz so takes after Dad.”
That got him a smile. “That she does. I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to blunt-force-trauma the truth out of you yet.”
“I don’t think he wants to know that badly.”
“Honey, not even I want to know that badly, and no one needs to know more than I do. But at least you and Roz have each other.” Sara Piet took the last clean dish out of his hands and stacked it in the cupboard. “Are you sure you’ll be okay with just the two of you? Your father and I could stay another week.”
Julian shook his head. “You’ll get snowed in. We’re expecting a big storm. Besides, Dad’s arthritis is already driving him nuts. Don’t think I didn’t see him limping up the stairs last night. I see his physician upped his dosage again.”
Not that he wanted to get rid of them. Far from it, in fact, especially now that he’d had a sharp, unnecessary reminder of how mortal parents were. He was never likely to forget the pain of losing his birth parents, but right now what he really wanted and needed was to be left alone for a few days.
“Your father will suffer in silence if he knows what’s good for him. And I don’t know why we sent you to med school. Honestly, all you do is criticize us for unclean living.” She pinched his cheek and he rolled his eyes.
“I’m not exactly in a place to lecture anyone about that,” he sighed, kicking out a chair from the kitchen table and slumping into it. “Sorry. That was supposed to sound ironic, not bitter.”
“Julian, honey…. Are you sure you made the right decision? Staying away from him, I mean? You’re obviously unhappy, and I can’t help but think….”
He offered her a tight smile. “Jack made his feelings pretty clear, Mom.”
She ruffled his hair affectionately. Julian tried not to remember all of the times Jack had done that, with the same lack of calculation. Julian was there, so Jack touched him. If only things could have stayed that simple. “If you say so,” she conceded finally. “He obviously doesn’t know what he’s missing. Now, how about helping your dear mom pack? It’ll be fun.”
WHEN ROZ had moped for nearly two weeks, working only the classes she couldn’t pass off and heading to bed at no later than nine-thirty, Julian decided they both needed an intervention. He himself had spent a disproportionate amount of time these past days sitting in a corner booth alone at Brenda’s (never on a Saturday night), drinking Jack Daniels very slowly or, if it was before serving hours, eating pie. Brenda hadn’t asked him any questions, though she had known what was going on far longer than most if he was any judge. She did comment that last week, Jack’s performance had included new lyrics to that song of his everyone seemed to know.
“A Really Stupid Kind of Love,” Julian had supplied dully, and that had been that.
Now it was Friday night, at not quite eight o’clock, and Roz was looking like she wanted to flee back up the stairs and cocoon herself in her bedroom for another ten or twelve hours. This was pathetic, and unlike both of them, and Julian
was going to put a stop to it the best way he knew how.
Okay. The first thing he was going to need was a strategy. “Do you want to go out?” was not going to work. It hadn’t worked for the past week and he saw no reason for it to start now, and variations in the form of movie invitations and physical exercise had bombed. Similarly, “Get dressed,” its close cousin, had been striking out. There was one fail-safe he hadn’t tried yet, though, and he was banking on its success. “So,” he said bravely, crossing his fingers behind his back, “me and this club in Calgary have a hot date. Wanna dress me?”
Roz’s eyes didn’t exactly light up in the way he had hoped for, but her smile at least seemed genuine. “Sure thing, Beanstalk. Getting back on the horse?”
“Not tonight,” Julian rolled his eyes at her suggestive tone. “I just need to do something or I’ll lose my head. You know? Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but I’m not exactly used to sitting at home by myself anymore. Think of it as filling the void with dancing.”
“That thing you do is more like dry humping with strobe lights,” she said drily, “but I see your point. Now get upstairs and open your closet.”
Breathing an inward sigh of relief, Julian complied. After two weeks of waiting with baited breath, finally there was a sign that Roz might someday be her old self again. His world had shaken but not crumbled around him. Glory hallelujah. Julian threw open his closet doors and presented arms.
“Reporting for duty, sir,” he said sharply, saluting crisply as Roz entered the room after him.
“Smartass.” She peered into his closet and immediately started pawing through his shirts, tossing some on the bed as she went. “Lieutenant Piet. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to—” Roz paused, a pair of pants in each hand. “What exactly is your mission? Are you picking up, or are you just teasing?”
Hey! What kind of guy did she think he was? “Roz!”
“Teasing,” Roz answered for him, and tossed the leftmost pair back onto their hanger. “These,” she said, holding them out. She glanced briefly through the pile of shirts on his bed, then retreated into his closet for a minute. “I know you have a red T-shirt in here somewhere,” she grumbled, sifting through the folded shirts on the top shelf until she found the one she was looking for.
“Roz….” Julian looked down into the pile of clothes he was holding. Roz had bought the shirt for him almost a year ago. It was a size too small, which she said was how he should wear all of his shirts. As for the pants…. “I haven’t worn these since my undergrad!”
“More’s the pity,” Roz sighed. “You still have Patrick’s old biker boots in there somewhere, right?”
“Yeah, I think they’re in the Rubbermaid container with the summer shoes.” Julian watched in equal parts awe and horror as Roz fished out his old motorcycle jacket to complete the ensemble. Good grief, he was going to look like a tart. A really hot tart, but a tart nonetheless. If he’d ever gone out in public wearing that Jack would have—
Well. Never mind.
She brushed off her hands and looked down at her handiwork laid out on the bed, looking less preoccupied and more self-satisfied than he’d seen her in way too long. “Well. I think my work here is done.”
In for a penny, in for a pound, Julian supposed. He could hardly say he was surprised. Steeling himself, he opened his mouth to insist she be his bodyguard if she insisted on dressing him like such a slut.
“Give me ten minutes,” Roz said before he could bother. “There is no way I’m going to miss this. You’re going to cause a riot.”
She was down the hall before he even had a chance to be relieved, and back again before he’d managed to get his fly undone. “Thank you,” she said fiercely, her arms wrapped tight around him and her face in his neck. “Julian. Thank you.” He thought she might be crying.
Then she was gone again, and fifteen minutes later they were on their way to Calgary.
Chapter Sixteen
JACK SHIFTED the flowers to his left hand, unaccountably nervous. This was stupid. It was so, so stupid. He could do this. He shouldn’t be nervous. His heart should not be pounding, his throat shouldn’t be dry. He was strong, and he’d been through this all once before.
He knocked twice with his right hand, then pushed open the hospital door.
His mother was sitting up in bed, resting back on her pillows but otherwise looking as well as could be expected. The oxygen tubes running into her nose were reflecting the light at a funny angle, making it almost look like she had a sunny blonde mustache.
She was also in the middle of a conversation.
“Hi, Mom,” Jack said, wishing he didn’t sound like such a loser.
In the chair next to the bed, Julian flushed right up to his eyebrows and stood, stammering excuses. “I’m sorry, Flora. I’ll have to talk to you later. I didn’t mean…. I’ll go.”
Jack couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him as he brushed by. The contact still sent a jolt of electric energy through his system, but seeing Julian again here—hell, at all—left a sour taste in his mouth and a lead butterfly in his stomach. It didn’t help at all that Julian was walking stiffly, like he had sometimes after he and Jack had—well, anyway, Jack couldn’t have said how he felt about that, other than sick. He closed the door once the doctor had left. “You never told me he’d been coming to see you.”
“You never asked,” his mother rasped at him. “Those flowers for me or for Julian?”
Jack flinched and set them on the table. “No. They’re for you.” He sat, awkwardly, in the chair Julian had just vacated. “I didn’t mean for that to sound so snobby. I just didn’t realize he was still your doctor.”
“He’s not,” Flora said flatly. “He’s visiting. He’s good company.”
“Oh.” He folded his hands in his lap, unsure what to say.
“Jackson Strange,” his mother finally snapped, her voice so like its old self he almost forgot where they were. “If you aren’t the stubbornest man I have ever met I’ll eat that shit they serve as gravy. That boy didn’t do a blessed thing wrong except love you with everything he had and look how you thanked him! He is suffering, Jack!”
He hadn’t looked like he was suffering to Jack’s eyes. In fact he’d looked like he was getting along just fine, but he couldn’t exactly say that Julian looked like he’d been well-laid very recently to his mother. “He kept secrets from me, Mom. He made me believe he’d never met you before. He lied! He lied to me about you. How am I supposed to trust him?”
“Oh, you know damn well he couldn’t have told you a damned thing if he’d wanted to,” Flora bit out. Her slow words and frequent pauses let on that Julian wasn’t the only one who was suffering. It twisted Jack’s guts to see it. “There’s this little issue called doctor-patient confidentiality. It’s kind of a legally binding agreement.”
That was the crux of the matter, yes. Jack knew that, legally, Julian had effectively had his hands tied. That didn’t excuse it, and it didn’t stop Jack from hurting, and Julian hadn’t even tried to defend himself. What was Jack supposed to think? The whole thing had obviously been a sham from the beginning. If only he hadn’t gotten so involved in the first place, he could have saved himself a lot of hurt. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he finally asked, changing the subject.
It was something he hadn’t brought up until now, mostly because he was afraid of what the answer might be. His own mother hadn’t told him she was dying. Was it because she was afraid he wouldn’t come? Or because she was afraid he would?
“Jack, when your father died, you pulled away from us. From me, from your Uncle Pete, from your friends. I didn’t want you to do it again. I could see you had friends, you had that Star Hamilton, and your Roy and his little girl.” Her dry hand curled around his own. “I thought that if I just gave you enough time… you would find someone who wouldn’t let you pull away.”
Shit. It had been a setup from the beginning, and not the way he thought. “Mom…,
” he started, his throat suddenly close. There was moisture behind his eyes. “You would have been alone. At the end, you… you would have been alone.”
“But you wouldn’t have,” she said gently.
Oh, God, he was such an ass. He had taken his mother’s sacrifice and thrown it in her face when he’d gone off on Julian, and now it was far, far too late to take it back. “You asked him not to tell me.”
“I had to beg him not to tell you,” she countered. “Your Julian is a very persuasive young man. He said you had a right to know, a right to say good-bye, but I said you had a right to happiness, too.”
Jack had never thought about how hard keeping that secret must have been for Julian. “He lost his parents unexpectedly,” he said quietly. “When he was eight.”
“Oh, Jack.” When he could look at her, there were tears in Flora’s eyes, too. “I should never have asked him that. He hardly even knew you then, but he knew you wouldn’t take it well. I told him… what had happened with your dad, and he let it alone, but… it must have eaten at him.”
Yeah, Jack reckoned it must have. How had he managed to walk around with a secret like that? He had never slipped up, never let on. He’d certainly seemed as happy with Jack as Jack had thought it was possible for anyone to be. It was frankly astounding. “Mom, what else did you tell him?”
She gave him an approximation of a sly smile. “I might have mentioned what else you started getting into at that age. When I see fertile soil, I plant a seed.” For a second there he was afraid she was going to make a really terrible pun, but thankfully she refrained.
“Mom! You knew I was gay?!”
“Honey, I’m your mother.” She raised her palm to cup his cheek, her breathing obviously labored. “I probably knew long before you did.” She let the hand fall to the bedside.
He stared at her for a moment. “You never said anything.”