by J. M. Colail
Julian winced. Ouch. Talk about worst-case scenarios. “Heavy.” Like his limbs. How the hell was he going to get home to bed, Julian wondered? He supposed he could commandeer something to sleep in for a few hours and see if one of the nurses in the area was getting off-shift.
“Speaking of gossip….”
Oh, boy. Talk about kicking a man when he’s down. Julian blinked slowly, cautiously. “Yeah?”
The other doctor shrugged apologetically. “I know it’s not really any of my business, but you are the same guy, right? You had a, um, oh fuck it, you were seeing that engineer with the crazy hair? You had a giant fight up on the fifth floor a few weeks back?”
“Guilty as charged,” he admitted tonelessly. At least the guy wasn’t being a jerk about it.
“You guys still together?”
The question took Julian by surprise, so much so that he actually sat up straight. There was no way this doctor—Keegan, he thought he’d seen on his lab coat before he’d hung it up—was making a pass at him, now of all times? “After that?” he raised his eyebrows. “Come on; didn’t the grapevine get all the details? I knew his mom was dying and couldn’t tell him.”
“Right,” Keegan hedged. “Just—you know—curious, I guess.”
Okay, so maybe his motives hadn’t been selfish. He seemed to be withholding something. “Why?” Julian drew the word out, too tired to just let it be.
The other man shrugged. “Because he’s sitting in the waiting room two levels down with the kid’s dad, drinking coffee like he’s anticipating a shortage.”
The idea warmed Julian from the inside immediately, filling him with a drowsy kind of hope, but he forced it down viciously. “He’s probably just waiting to hear about Hallie,” he sighed. “They’re close.”
Keegan looked skeptical. “Whatever you say, man. He looks like he’s got a lot on his mind.”
“That, I can believe.” Slowly, Julian stood, scrubbed a hand through his hair, then belatedly realized he’d been rude. “Sorry. I should’ve introduced myself as something other than the sum of the last couple of weeks. Julian Piet.”
“James Keegan,” the other man greeted. “Nice to formally meet you, Julian. However, if you don’t mind, I stink and I’m running on caffeine, so I’m going to head home and crash hard.”
Julian smiled. “I remember what those days were like. Thanks for the chat. I’ll see you around.” He watched Keegan go with a faraway look in his eyes, then shook himself and headed for the door. Time to face the music.
“HI, GUYS,” Julian half-yawned, stepping out from behind the out-of-bounds doors and smiling wanly at Roy and Jack as they attempted to struggle to some sort of attention. “Sit. Hallie came through the surgery okay.”
He waited until they had deflated back into their chairs before continuing. “She’s going to need to be in the hospital a while. Her appendix had already ruptured by the time she was in surgery, and there will probably be complications; E. coli or strep or maybe both. Anyway, she could be here for a few weeks, so if you’ve got some vacation time, Roy, now would be a good time.”
“We were going to go to Disney World,” Roy said ruefully, sounding a little choked up. Then again, Julian’s overtired brain could have made that up. “Thanks, man. You didn’t have to come running and step up the way you did. I owe you an apology.”
Julian waved him off. “That’s my job. It’s Jack you owe the apology to, and I’m guessing with everything that’s happened tonight, he’s probably forgiven you by now. Hallie’s in room 1158 in the children’s ward; the nurse at the department desk will get you a cot so you can stay. I’m sure she’ll want to see you when she wakes up, but it might be a while yet.”
He barely registered Roy’s handshake and heartfelt gratitude before he was swaying on his feet as the older man walked away. Suddenly Jack was by his side, one arm around his shoulders. “Easy, Doc. You’ve had a long day. Let’s get you home, yeah?”
Oh, thank God, Julian thought. Home. “Yeah,” he agreed readily. “Lead the way.”
He didn’t remember getting into the truck, or falling asleep, or the drive home. He barely even remembered waking up. All he knew was that they were somehow—miraculously—now parked in front of the house, and Jack was getting out. The sun was out, which felt wrong, glaring unforgivingly across the fresh, crisp snow. “Come on,” Jack said, opening his door. “You look like you need to sleep for about a year.”
That didn’t sound like such a bad plan, actually. Julian slid out of the cab and allowed himself to be led into the house. Jack made him sit on the couch so that he could bend to undo his boots, and Julian watched him impassively as he did so, willing himself not to fall asleep here. Then Jack herded him up the stairs into the bedroom and stripped him out of the grungy scrubs, turned back the covers and helped him slide in. Julian heard him closing the heavy curtains and sighed, inhaling a noseful of Jack-scented pillow.
The next second he was fast asleep.
JULIAN SHIFTED, rubbing his face against the pillowcase, sighing and straining to hold on to the last vestiges of sleep. His eyelids fluttered, and he grumbled, turning to lie on his back.
He frowned. The mattress was… wrong. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.
“Rise and shine.”
Jack? God, had he gotten drunk after surgery? He sat up, slowly. That explained why the bed felt wrong. It had been over a month since he’d slept in it last. “Uh… hi.” He ran a hand through his hair, got it stuck, winced, and disentangled it again. “Did I skip a few chapters or something?” He remembered the surgery, and the ambulance ride to the hospital. He knew he must have gone out into the reception area to talk to Roy. But after that….
“You feeling any better?” Jack asked from the doorway. He was wearing a pair of raggedy sweatpants Julian knew well and not much else, and holding a glass of orange juice.
“Uh,” Julian stuttered. His body was just itching to get right back into its old habits, but he wasn’t going back there without a fight. Or some convincing encouragement. “Aside from the memory loss? Yeah.”
Jack passed him the orange juice and sat next to him on the bed. It should have been awkward, but somehow wasn’t. “No memory loss. I’m pretty sure you were asleep on your feet.”
Julian took a sip, then set the glass on the bedside table. “How did I get here? I mean, obviously—” he waved his hand around a little, aware that it hadn’t been exactly the question he’d meant to ask. “Why am I here?”
“Meaning of life? That’s a little beyond the scope of this conversation.” He looked a little uncomfortable. “I…. It was late, and I didn’t want to drive you home.”
They both deflated; then Jack went on: “And I wanted a chance to apologize.”
Julian froze. “For?”
“I blamed Mom’s cancer on you. That wasn’t fair of me; I know that you couldn’t have told me if she asked you not to.”
“Thanks.” He picked up the orange juice again, wrapping his fingers around it for something to do. All of a sudden he had the fierce desire to go back to bed and sleep until he forgot about the past, oh, several months. “For the record, I hated having to do it.”
“She might have mentioned that.”
Julian’s lip twitched. Knowing Flo, she’d probably mentioned it until Jack was sick of the subject. She certainly had a knack for bringing up the tough conversations again, and again, and again. “I can imagine.” Finally he stood up, swaying a little as his blood pressure evened out. “I should probably call Roz.”
He reached down for his scrubs, looking for his cell phone, and wondered exactly what had happened to them that they had ended up on the floor. The phone was in the breast pocket of the scrub top.
“Umm….”
Julian looked up.
“I might have called her last night. That is, this morning.”
He raised his eyebrows. Jack’s ears turned pink.
“What? I thought she should know Hallie’s operatio
n went okay.”
Julian kept staring. Jack took that as a cue to keep talking. “I sort of, um, indicated that you wouldn’t be going home. And I left a message for Dan that you weren’t going in to work.”
A reluctant smile tugged at the edge of Julian’s mouth as he glanced at the clock. It was quarter past four in the afternoon. “Good call. I hope you called in sick yourself.”
“Oh, yeah.” He grinned, though it looked a little anemic to Julian’s practiced eye. The grin faded under his scrutiny, and Jack’s good cheer subsided as well. “Julian, what happened to you?”
Julian flinched. Gee, I don’t know; my boyfriend told me he loved me and broke up with me in the same day? “What do you mean?”
“At the coroner’s office, when you were taking out Hallie’s appendix. You just… stopped, like you were somewhere else. You were looking right through her.”
Oh, you mean the time I had to do an emergency operation on a little girl on an autopsy table? Because that won’t screw with your head at all. “I was somewhere else,” Julian sighed, throwing his scrubs back onto the floor and slumping back onto the bed again. “Somewhen else.”
“You sure as hell weren’t in the here-and-now.” The words were flippant, but the tone was inoffensive.
Julian figured he might as well tell Jack the truth. If nothing else, it was high time he told someone. “When I was in my first year of residency, I fell in love with the first-year supervisor. Richard Warren. He was older—much older,” Julian amended at Jack’s obvious bristling. “We had an affair, which we kept quiet for the obvious reasons. But when the year was up, and he wasn’t my supervisor anymore, I wanted to stop hiding.” He shrugged. “Richard wasn’t ready. He said it would affect his job, his family, his friends. He told me that if he was important enough to me, I’d understand. I didn’t, or he wasn’t, so I broke it off.”
Yeah, okay, that explained exactly nothing. Time to relate the second half of the story. “Then, when I was starting my sixth-year residency, I was performing a surgery on a little girl about Hallie’s age, just a routine appendectomy. Hers flared up from time to time; it happens. Everything went fine, until I was closing. All of a sudden, her heart flat-lined. We did everything we could to revive her, but she died on the table. We didn’t find out until the autopsy that she’d had a congenital heart defect.”
Scrubbing his face with both hands, Julian soldiered on. “I was pretty wrecked, as you can imagine. I mean, patients had died before, but always when we’d known there was a risk, and I’d never lost a child. They sent me home to my boyfriend because I wasn’t in any state to be dealing with patients.” He felt his mouth turn down at the corners, the way it would if he were going to be sick. “I went straight to Derek’s and let myself in. Grabbed a beer from the fridge before I even started to look for him. I’m surprised I didn’t throw it at him when I found him in bed with Richard.”
Jack’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. “Richard your ex?”
“The very same,” Julian confirmed. He paused. Well, might as well have it all out in the open. “It gets worse.”
“I doubt it.”
Julian rolled his eyes. “Ye of little faith. They announced their engagement a week later. Derek was only a second-year resident.”
Jack whistled. “Ho-ly shit. That is worse. Derek was under his supervision the year before?”
“You got it.” Julian still didn’t know how he’d missed the signs. “Last year was not a good Christmas.”
There were a few moments of awkward silence, and then Jack’s hand settled onto his knee. Eventually, he asked, in a voice that sounded artificially light, “So what did you do?”
“Called Roz,” he answered, as though it were the obvious answer. It was, of course; there was no one else he trusted as much, and Roz had been close enough. And perceptive enough; thank God for that. “She was in London finishing up her degree. I must have really freaked her out. I was drunk when I called, and I think she thought I was going to do something stupid.” Julian exhaled slowly. “She showed up two and a half hours later with a speeding ticket and a suitcase and stayed with me for almost two weeks, just watching Baywatch reruns on the couch.” He smiled a little, secure in the knowledge that his “big sister” Roz loved him very much. “She missed two final exams and had to go back for a semester.”
Jack’s fingers tightened just perceptibly. “You guys are good for each other,” he said, staring straight ahead. Then: “Would you have?”
Blinking, Julian turned to him and gently removed the hand from his leg. There were enough emotions being thrown around right now. They didn’t need that, too. “Would I have what?”
The rejected hand and its counterpart twisted furiously in Jack’s lap. “Done something… stupid.”
Something permanent. Damaging. Had Julian considered it? Certainly. Had he been out of his faculties at the time? Oh, yeah. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I was so sauced that I probably wouldn’t have even managed it properly. But I try not to think about it.”
“Think I’ll take a leaf out of your book,” Jack said shakily. His face was devoid of all color, and Julian finally noticed the dark circles under his eyes. “While we’re on the subject.” He stopped, ran a hand over his face and leaned forward on his elbows.
“The subject?” Julian asked, hesitant. He wasn’t sure he was going to like where this was going.
“Ex-lovers. Of a sort.” Jack sighed. “I’ve never done this before, Julian. I’m not good at it. The closest thing I’ve ever had to a relationship is the ongoing affair I had with my college roommate, and that didn’t exactly go well. I never understood what went wrong until years later when a mutual friend pointed out that he’d been in love with me. I’m not good with feelings.”
God, if they were going to go with full disclosure…. Julian closed his eyes. “On my eighteenth birthday I met someone,” he hedged, swallowing. This story was never easy to tell. “Long before I ever met Richard or Derek. We fell in love. It was… easy.” He took a breath. “For me. I thought it was the same for him, and I know he loved me, but he wasn’t ready.” Overhearing that particular conversation was one of the worst ordeals Julian had gone through in his life, and as a surgeon, that was saying something. “I knew he wasn’t ready, so I left. But since then—with Richard, with Derek—I was just biding my time. I always thought that one day, everything would fall into place, that he’d be ready to try again.”
Now for the hard part. Jack was looking at his hands. Julian swallowed, his tongue thick. Letting go of that fantasy had hurt him deeper than he had realized. Apparently he’d been too busy falling in love with Jack to notice. “I haven’t even thought about him for months.”
Jack looked up sharply, the sudden light of hope in his eyes. Julian’s stomach clenched. “Listen, I have to ask you something else.”
“What is it?”
“Is there a chance…. I mean, do you still…. Do you think….” After several false starts, Jack flopped backward onto the bed in apparent frustration.
Part amused, part anxious, Julian wiggled over so they could look each other in the eye again. “Take two?” he suggested.
Jack’s eyes softened, and Julian breathed in sharply. “Exactly,” Jack said. “That’s it exactly. Can we, I mean, if there’s no one else… can we take it from the top?”
Julian let the relief and joy wash through him, but kept his face as much of a mask as he could manage. After all, it wouldn’t do to let Jack off the hook too easily. He might be tempted to try the same thing again. Better to make him sweat a little. “Exactly how many gay men do you think there are in this part of Alberta?” he asked, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
“Was that a yes?”
“There was doubt?” He settled down onto the bed facing Jack. “It was a yes,” he affirmed, warmth spreading out from his chest, making his fingers and toes tingle. “Just in case that wasn’t clear. A resounding yes. And now, I thi
nk you’d better kiss me to seal the deal.”
“I think that can be arranged.” Jack’s arm reached out to grip Julian around the waist, hauling him closer on the bed. Their bodies lined up perfectly just like they always had, and then Jack’s stubbly lips rasped over Julian’s, warm and moist and inviting. He lost himself in the kiss, reveling in sensations and emotions that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in far too long. Languishing in Jack’s touch, he let his lover take the lead, stretching his body from his fingers to his toes, maximizing the amount of surface area Jack could possibly touch. Jack’s fingers teased under the hem of his T-shirt, and Julian sat up, arms above his head so Jack could take it off of him.
A warm, flat hand pressed against the center of his chest and pushed him firmly back against the mattress again; then Jack’s face appeared in his field of vision. “What’s this?” he asked, gaze unfathomable as he traced a pattern on Julian’s abdomen.
The corner of Julian’s mouth twitched upward. That tickled. “What’s it look like?”
Jack bent his head to lick around the tattoo on the right side of Julian’s abdomen—located just above his appendix, in fact. “A caduceus,” he said around a smirk. “When did you get this?”
“The day before I saw you at the hospital,” Julian gasped, toes curling as Jack bit lightly into his hip bone.
“So that’s why you were walking funny. I thought you’d found someone to make you forget me.”
Julian’s answering snort of laughter was cut off prematurely when Jack wrapped a fist around his boxers and tugged them down sharply. “Never,” he denied, and was rewarded when Jack covered his mouth with an exuberant kiss. He’d just been trying to keep from rubbing anything—including his own clothing—against the bandage. Next time Roz got him drunk he was going to make sure he was supervised by a responsible adult. He glanced down when Jack broke the kiss to find him staring at the small black tattoo. “Are you developing a fixation or something? Get on with it.”