Lonely Hearts

by Heidi Cullinan

  Actually, he acknowledged as he opened the door with his keycard, Damien was more hen, the one to get in Baz’s face about stupid decisions. Marius did more silent judging. He did his shepherding around the edges. What was weird, though, was neither one of them had lit into him once he’d come to the reception after fucking Elijah. Damien had raised an eyebrow, and Marius was decidedly full of glances with heavy meaning, but nobody had sat him in a chair and said, “Hey, what the hell were you doing with Elijah Prince?”

  He wasn’t sure what it meant that they hadn’t.

  Frowning, he stripped out of his clothes and into a pair of boxers. He was tugging the waistband into place as he caught a glance of Marius sprawled on his bed, hands behind his head, an enigmatic expression on his face.

  Baz sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. Fine. Say what you’ve got to say, and stop making me crazy.”

  “Get yourself ready for bed first. I got your light out already.”

  Baz glanced around the room, and sure enough, his portable lamp sat on the desk beside Marius’s overnight bag. It was tricked out with a special red bulb which, while not exactly a standard treatment for photophobic vision, helped Baz. The red light made his life look like hell’s boudoir or old-time-photography darkroom, but it meant he could take off his goddamned glasses and remove his contacts without the wrong flash of light giving him a five-hour migraine.

  “Thanks.” He saluted Marius and went to the bathroom.

  Getting ready for bed was more than brushing his teeth and maybe scrubbing stray jizz from his face. To start, he had to plug in his light. Once that was done, he removed his glasses and got to work.

  There were the pills first—antidepressants, antiseizure meds, a gazillion vitamins and an assortment of painkillers that had joined his crusade post-bullet. After he sloshed those into his bloodstream, he washed his hands, set up his tray and took out his contacts. In most photophobia cases, they would have been enough to stop the light sensitivity, but not for Baz. Sometimes he could go with just contacts, but not for long and only in certain circumstances. He had a habit of tipping his glasses down to wink, but that almost always meant it felt like someone put an ice pick into his head.

  He didn’t have simple sensitivity. He had seriously fucked-over retinas, especially his left eye, and by rights he shouldn’t have been able to see anymore at all. Vision for Baz had come after a zillion surgeries and a couple experimental treatments his uncle had flown him to Switzerland to receive.

  The contacts, in addition to being his first, most important shield from too much light, were also his corrective lenses. Once they were out, he was raw in every way. His actual sight wasn’t too bad, just a little blurry with a hint of astigmatism. The light was everything—or rather, a tiny bit of it was way, way too much, because he had no filter. It varied from day to day, his sensitivity, but at his best moments he was still a vampire. The glare from a computer screen could burn like acid. The glow of a bedside lamp could cut into his skull. The flash from a smartphone could make him pass out from pain.

  Sometimes, tonight being an example, even the red light stung. He cleaned his contacts—eight hundred dollars a pair—and set them aside to marinate. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, did a few stretches to see if he could unkink his hip. When it didn’t work, he dug his TENS unit out of his shaving kit and hooked it up.

  He regarded himself in the mirror, taking in the blurry sight of himself without his sunglasses, with electrodes glued to his hip and shoulder. He wished he could make the contacts work alone, because he looked better with his actual eyes, he thought. He remembered Elijah bitching about not being able to see them. A lot of people thought he was a poser to wear shades all the time, and that was fine because they didn’t know. Though it meant the only people who ever saw him this way were Marius, and occasionally his mom, if she came into his room at night when he was home. Since he rarely went home, it was mostly Marius.

  For another month, anyway. Then it would be nobody.

  He wondered if Elijah had liked what he’d seen, in the moment Baz had taken the sunglasses off.

  Putting his darkest shades on, he grabbed the battery unit in one hand and unplugged the lamp. “Incoming,” he called through the bathroom door.

  “Ready to receive,” Marius replied.

  They’d developed the call-and-answer technique over the years whenever they were on the road together, this ritual of Baz undressing his eyes and Marius preparing the outer chamber with red light. Once Baz had been faster than Marius. They’d both missed a choir performance—the whole reason they’d been out of town in the first place—because Baz lay in bed sobbing from pain, Marius hovering beside him with ice packs and whispered apologies. Ever since, Baz didn’t open the bathroom door without his sunglasses on and a shout to make sure he didn’t step out into a world of hurt.

  The hotel room glowed red from two Marius-replaced bulbs, one on the desk and another by the bedside. Any other lights in the room were unplugged, and light switches were duct taped firmly into the off position. As Baz cracked a bottle of water from the mini bar and collapsed onto the bed, Marius scuttled into the bathroom and applied the same procedure to the switches in there. If one of them needed the john in the middle of the night, they’d do it in the dark or use Baz’s portable light. All the tape and red lights would stay in place until Baz had his contacts in again.

  Marius returned to the main room and flopped on the bed with Baz. “Okay. De-cloak, then tell me what the hell is going on with you and Elijah Prince.”

  Now Baz wanted the damn glasses as cover, which was probably why Marius had waited to grill him. With a sigh, Baz folded the shades up and set them on the bedside table and rested the TENS unit on his chest, the regular pulse of the electrodes a soothing backdrop. “Nothing’s going on. We hung out. We fucked. End of story.”

  Marius’s response was to raise an eyebrow.

  Baz stared up at the ceiling. “Seriously. Move along, nothing to see here.”

  “I noticed he was extra colorful.”

  “Yes. We had a little weed, and he had a Xanax. He seemed stressed. Don’t worry, he’s had both before. Well, I’m assuming about the marijuana because he handled it like a pro. It’s not as if I was corrupting him or anything.”

  “Did I say you corrupted him?”

  “You’ve got your I’m disappointed in you, Baz voice on.”

  Marius grabbed one of Baz’s spare pillows and crammed it under his neck as he lay on his side and regarded Baz thoughtfully. “To be honest, I’m more worried about you than disappointed.”

  Baz blinked. “What? Why?”

  “Because you’ve been obsessed with Elijah for a while, but this is the first time you’ve engaged with him. And you don’t seem to have him out of your system.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Marius shrugged. The red light erased all the shadows and made his skin seem to glow like a god’s. “I don’t know. This is new territory. Usually I’m worried about the other guy.”

  Baz sighed. Turning off the TENS unit, he yanked the electrodes off one at a time, wincing as the adhesive occasionally resisted giving way. “I worry about Elijah. Which, when I told him so, pissed him off. Told me he wasn’t a princess and could take care of himself.”

  “Why do you worry about him?”

  The shadowy memory filtered into Baz’s brain. “I met him before Saint Timothy. On one of my benders in Saint Paul—before you started going along as my nanny. I took a cab to this house party, but it was pretty skeevy, so I did a circuit and left. Except on the way to my cab I heard somebody cry out in the alley beside the house.”

  Marius tensed, half sitting up. “Oh fuck. You didn’t.”

  “What was I supposed to do, whistle so I couldn’t hear? Of course I went in. Turned out to be a group of losers from the party and the
entertainment one of them had brought, who wisely refused to go inside when he realized what kind of assholes had hired him.”

  “Elijah.”

  “Yes. I threw a hunk of concrete at one of them, called 911. That sent them scattering, since they didn’t want to be picked up for solicitation. Of course, the cops tried to hang it on me, but I’d already called my uncle while I waited, and the arresting officers received a pretty high-ranking phone call before they could so much as produce a pair of cuffs. I got Elijah off too. Put him on a bus, gave him all the money I had on me and told him to go the hell home.” His nostrils flared, and he shut his eyes. “Which was fucking stupid, obviously, given who I sent him to. I should have…done something else.” He didn’t know what, but his stomach still turned when he thought about Elijah’s parents.

  “So you feel guilty because you saved his ass? Wouldn’t taking a bullet for him cover at least a little?”

  “I don’t feel guilty. Well—I do. But that’s not why.” He sighed. “I don’t know. I’m better when I know he’s okay. I didn’t mean for tonight to get so out of hand.”

  “He’s going to live in the White House with you. Did you fan flames you can’t control?”

  Baz snorted. “Are you kidding? He blew me off after. Fucking danced with anybody but me. Didn’t so much as look my way.” Marius laughed, and Baz threw a pillow at him. “Shut up. It’s not funny.”

  “The fuck it’s not. Sebastian Acker, heartbreaker first class, has been sent home without supper.”

  “I did so get supper. I got goddamned dessert. Cream-fucking-filled.”

  “Yes, but no return trip to the buffet for you. I hear there’s an informal I got fucked by Baz support group. Maybe they’ll let you in.”

  “You’re enjoying this far too much. You’re supposed to be on my side, remember?”

  “Oh, I am. I happen to think this is the best thing that’s happened to you in a long time. You might build some character out of it.”

  Baz indicated his naked chest, zigzagged with surgical scars, some of them angry and recent. “I got the goddamned character-building badge, thanks.”

  Marius’s expression didn’t dim, not with pity, not with shame. He simply continued to stare patiently at Baz, waiting for him to stop pouting.

  This was his best friend.

  Baz shut his eyes against the pain that had nothing to do with light and everything to do with the impending first of July and his best friend’s removal from his daily life.

  Marius’s hand fell on Baz’s ankle. “I am not. Leaving. You. Stop fucking acting like I’m shipping off to Afghanistan.”

  “Can you be gay so I could marry you and be done with it?”

  “Yes, because my orientation is the only thing standing in the way of our marital bliss.”

  “True. I shouldn’t wish myself on anybody.”

  Marius’s massage of Baz’s ankle became a sharp slap. “Jesus. You want to talk about a goddamned princess. Stop pouting.”

  “Sorry.” Baz arranged himself on the bed beside Marius and gently tweaked his nose. “You’re a saint, you know?”

  Marius tweaked him back. “I do.”

  “I keep trying to do this on my own. I do want to graduate, eventually. I just…don’t know how. To do real life. I don’t want to end up in my parents’ house forever. But I don’t know what else to do. How to be. Only with you and Damien.” And you’re leaving.

  “You’ll figure it out. We’ll help you.”

  Baz was pretty sure he was beyond hope. The thought depressed him. He teased the stubble on Marius’s jaw. “I’d get tits and a pussy for you, if you’d marry me.”

  Marius slapped him away. “Stop. You’re so trans insensitive.”

  “You know I’m good in bed. It’s been a few years now, but I bet you still remember the New Year’s Eve when you were drunk and—”

  With a growl, Marius leapt on Baz, wrestling him as he clamped a hand on Baz’s mouth. Baz giggled as they fought, as Marius cursed him out for being an ass—and it was good, right up until Baz’s giggles tripped over into hysterical tears.

  Marius didn’t miss a beat, only shifted from holding him down to simply holding him, cradling him tight and whispering over and over again while he pulled Baz’s face into his shoulder, that everything was going to be okay.

  Chapter Four

  When Elijah lived on the streets of Saint Paul, he’d have done anything to have a regular job with regular money and a legitimate roof over his head. As little as five months ago, he’d lain in his dorm room with his parents threatening to cut him off or rebaptize him into hell, and he’d bartered with any listening deity for any way out, any way at all.

  Now it was the end of June. He had a pristine bedroom in a subdivision. He got a hug from the pastor’s wife every morning, a promise he could stay as long as he needed, and cookies each afternoon because she thought he was too thin. He had friends checking in from their home bases. He had a job, as regular as rain, and the only time he had to get on his knees to make money was to open a case of canned tomatoes or pull rogue forks out of the automatic dishwasher.

  Elijah was grateful all day long. But sometimes he felt more panicked and stifled than he had the night he’d returned to South Dakota and begged his parents to let him come in, lying about how Jesus had led him home.

  He scolded himself when he felt that way. Did he hate being beholden to everyone? Hell, yes. But unless he wanted to sleep under an overpass and wrap himself in righteous indignation and independence, this was his way out. He was safe now. They all told him this, over and over and over. He understood they weren’t lying. This wasn’t some bait and switch and they’d get angry and threaten him if he didn’t do what they wanted. That was his parents’ shtick, and they were safely packed away.

  So why, he wanted to know, now that he was warm and safe and getting a cookie tummy, did he wake up in cold sweats and sometimes cry himself to sleep?

  He never asked anyone the question, but Pastor Schulz, his temporary host and live-in counselor, didn’t need an invitation to read Elijah like a book, and he didn’t wait long to say what he thought about the latest chapter.

  “You’re panicking because you’re safe now.” Pastor crossed his leg over his knee. They were in his study at the house, having an impromptu session after Elijah almost dropped the stack of plates for the table during a panic attack that came out of nowhere. “You’ve had a rough set of circumstances for a long while, but you’re smart and capable, and you knew it wasn’t safe for you to react to the horror of your situation in real time.”

  “I do feel safe here.” Elijah huddled deeper into the afghan Liz Schulz had tucked around him on the love seat. “I know I’m okay. I’m sorry I can’t act like it.”

  “As I’ve told you before and will tell you as many times as you need to hear it, Elijah, I have no expectations of your behavior. There are no conditions on your staying here. I know you’ll move in with your friends before the end of the summer, but you’re welcome here until the moment is right for you. October, December—whenever that is. It is my pleasure, and Liz’s, to help you as long as you want our help, and our only motivation in doing so is our desire to show compassion to a child of God who needs extra love right now.” His thin white eyebrow raised toward his Friar Tuck-like bald head as he added, “I admit I itch, for selfish reasons, to remind you what your parents and their community advertised as Christian behavior was anything but.”

  “Trust me. I didn’t need a map to figure that one out. Just a Bible with all the bits left in.” Elijah worried the corner of his bottom lip in his teeth and stared at the frothy white shag throw rug on the floor between them. “I don’t like how I’m freaking out when I’m okay.”

  “This is the time to be gentle with your vulnerable self, not scold him for perceived bad behavior.” Pastor picked up his teacup and frowned ab
sently over the top. “I think sometimes you’d have done well with a small vacation away from Saint Timothy this summer, to let yourself truly unplug.”

  “Well, Giles and Aaron offered about seventy times. And Mina. And Walter and Kelly. Damien and Marius too. Practically everybody tried to adopt me.” Except Baz. Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since the wedding. Elijah poked his thumb through one of the crocheted holes in the afghan. “I wanted a job, though. I know people keep chucking money into my fund, but…it makes me feel weird if I’m not contributing too.”

  “Whatever makes you safe is the right choice for you right now.”

  Elijah did feel safe with Pastor and Liz. They felt like grandparents—not his real ones, because his fruitcake mom and dad hadn’t sprung from the sea—but what grandparents should be. They were Mr. and Mrs. Norman Goddamned Rockwell, live and in person. They were Christian, yes, but quietly so. Pastor didn’t wear his clerical collar unless he was going to campus. The most in-your-face aspect of their faith was how they prayed before meals, but it was a trancelike murmur of Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, may these gifts to us be blessed, amen and nothing more. Sometimes Liz would kiss Elijah’s forehead and whisper, “God bless you, child,” but it didn’t seem like a burden. More of a benediction.

  Except the more Elijah thought about what Pastor had said about how he was panicking because he was safe—well, he’d buy that, but there was more to it too. Sometimes, when Elijah was able to peel away the guilt from his reaction, he realized he was also restless and trapped by the tidy bows wrapped around his life. Yes, the cookies and lace-edged linens were wonderful. But not a lot of sex happened when you lived in the campus minister’s spare bedroom. He’d had a few offers on his Grindr account, but he couldn’t bring himself to sneak away to fuck, so he didn’t get laid.