Necessary Medicine

by M. K. York

  “Well, you were asleep for most of it.”

  Eli rubbed his cheek, smiling at the memory. “True. What I wouldn’t give to sleep like that on call nights.”

  “Seriously, are you okay?”

  The waiter said, “Carmona, party of two?”

  “That’s us.” Eli neatly stepped toward the waiter and away from the question.

  * * *

  Dinner was unusually quiet. Neil kept watching Eli, trying to decide whether this was just being tired from the conference, or something else.

  He made an effort to pump Eli for details about the afternoon sessions, but those sounded innocuous enough. Had he run into anyone he knew? No, not really.

  Finally Eli put down his fork. “I think that’s all I’ve got room for. Are you ready to head back?”

  Neil nodded. They made their way back upstairs.

  Neil started repacking his suitcase, except for the things he was going to need the next morning. “Check out in the morning and haul our suitcases to the panels? I think the sessions only run until eleven thirty.”

  “That was my plan.” Eli toed off his shoes and sank back onto his bed as he started taking off his suit. “Thank goodness they make them with the wheels now.”

  Neil sighed, reaching up to knead at the back of his neck.

  Eli’s eyes followed his hand. “Still got that headache?”

  “Yeah. Mind if we leave the TV off tonight?”

  “Not a problem.” Eli hung up his clothes. He was standing in front of the closet, staring in at it, for a long enough moment that Neil looked up, ready to ask what the matter was. Before he could, though, Eli turned back around. “You know, I still owe you a favor.”

  For a split second, Neil’s mind raced with possibilities; what could he be—oh. The foot massage.

  Eli raised his eyebrows. “Would you like a neck rub?”

  Oh. God. Would he.

  “Sure.” Neil was proud of himself for not choking on it even a little bit.

  Eli nodded, as if to himself. “All right. Give me a second.”

  Neil flopped facedown on the bed and wished briefly that he had a nice hard surface to pound his head on. Of course this was his life. Of course.

  A minute later Eli came back out of the bathroom. He sat on the edge of his bed. “Do you want to just sit here? That puts you at a good angle for me.”

  Neil nodded and went to sit on the floor in front of Eli, between his spread legs, Eli’s knees almost touching Neil’s shoulders. Eli’s hands came to rest on Neil’s neck. Neil couldn’t suppress a shiver; Eli must have just washed his hands, and they were cool against his skin, the dampness catching as he ran his fingers over the borders of Neil’s trapezius.

  Eli didn’t ask him to take his shirt off, just started to gently knead at his stiff muscles. Neil could feel that his heart was beating too fast. He wondered if Eli could feel it in his carotids as Eli reached farther around the sides of his neck, fingers tracing over his scalenes lightly.

  He couldn’t help it after a few minutes; he moaned softly as Eli’s thumb found a nasty knot in his shoulder. Eli dug into it, and he groaned deeper, louder. Eli shifted above him. This wasn’t my idea, he reminded himself. Eli had volunteered. He must be used to the noises people made.

  And besides, Eli was a doctor. What was a body to him? Probably just another body. Thirty-three-year-old white male, generally well-appearing in no acute distress, in good condition, with potential fatigue-related muscle cramping in the neck and shoulders.

  Eli’s fingers drifted up to Neil’s face. Each fingertip pressing into his muscles, smoothing out the tension there. Neil leaned his head back against the bed, sighing.

  After what felt like a small eternity but, by the digital clock’s obnoxiously large red numbers, was about twenty minutes, Eli sat up and back, and his hands left Neil. “Did that help?”

  And if Neil hadn’t known better—that voice—it sounded like Eli was—he tensed.

  “Yeah,” said Neil after a beat too long. “That helped a lot.”

  “Good.” Eli’s voice was still too soft, too deep. He pulled his legs back up onto the bed, and by the time Neil was getting to his feet, Eli had his book in his lap.

  Like he’s hiding something, thought Neil, feeling almost dizzy. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be. But if Eli was—was hard, hiding an erection—the thought went straight to his cock like a bolt of lightning.

  “I think I’m going to get a shower in before bed.” Neil’s own voice had gone gravelly.

  Eli nodded without looking up. “Probably a good idea.”

  Neil managed to grab his bag and hold it at waist height on his way into the bathroom, and once he was in the shower, he gave up completely on pretending that he wasn’t already more than halfway to coming. He gripped his cock and started stroking, gracelessly, squeezing tighter as he shut his eyes and braced his forehead against the tile wall.

  When he came, he couldn’t keep himself from making a noise. It sounded obscenely loud, over the sound of the running water, and he darted a guilty glance to the door—if Eli had heard—well. Fuck. Fuck it all.

  He finished showering with shaking hands.

  He was getting dressed when he realized he’d run out of undershirts. Shit. He’d have to go without the next day. That was fine, he’d just wear—he had a long-sleeved tee in his bag he’d been planning on wearing for the flight back, anyway, but he couldn’t sleep in it, it would be too tight.

  So he had to emerge from the shower shirtless, wearing his sweatpants. Eli was staring at his book, and Neil wondered crazily whether Eli had even turned the page.

  “All yours if you want it.” Neil jerked his head back at the bathroom before flinching at his word choice.

  Eli looked up slowly, mind clearly somewhere else. “Hmm? Oh, yes. I might read for a little bit if that’s all right with you.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. Just turn out the lights when you’re done?”

  “Of course.”

  He couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. Eli was awake, reading, for maybe another hour, before he got up and padded into the bathroom and came back out, shutting off the lights along the way.

  Although Neil hadn’t heard the dry rasp of paper that meant pages were turning very often.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the morning, he heard Eli get up early and take a shower. Eli didn’t wake him, just slipped out of the room.

  He drifted off again, but woke up to Eli coming back into the room, the click of the door behind him. His alarm started to go off at almost the same moment.

  “Sorry,” said Eli. “Had trouble sleeping, so I went down and got us some coffee. Muffin?”

  Neil sat up slowly, dazed, sheet falling off his shoulders. A cold draft snaked over him. Why—oh, right, he’d run out of T-shirts.

  “Thanks.” He took one of the muffins Eli was holding out. Looked like blueberry. Eli set the cup of coffee down on Neil’s nightstand. Eli was wearing a plane-ready shirt, too, a pullover, so he wouldn’t be missing Neil’s nonexistent T-shirts, either.

  “We’d better get packed.”

  Neil nodded, and got up to brush his teeth and get dressed.

  It seemed so insane in the cool morning light. Of course Eli hadn’t given him a massage. (He had.) He must have been imagining that note in Eli’s voice, stifling and hot.

  He had to pause while he brushed his teeth, shutting his eyes against the memory of crying out while he came, flushing with a combination of shame and desire.

  Eli was finishing packing when Neil was done; Eli had paused and was tapping away on his phone. “All right,” said Neil. “I think I’ve got everything.”

  Eli nodded, still looking distracted. “Do you mind if I take a minute and meet up with you down
stairs? I just need to answer this email.”

  “Sure, no problem. I wanted to grab a bag of jerky for the flight at the gift shop anyway.”

  Neil made it halfway down to the lobby before he realized there was a shirt he’d kicked under the bed that he was sure he’d forgotten—he couldn’t remember putting it back in his bag. He sighed, took the elevator back up and pulled out his key card again. The lock clicked over as the green light came on, and he swung the door open.

  Eli was sitting, stock-still, on the edge of Neil’s bed, half turned away from him. Neil stared at him in silence. His heartbeat had gone into indisputable tachycardia, pounding, adrenaline flooding him in waves.

  Because Eli was holding Neil’s shirt. He was holding it, and there was just no question that he was smelling it. He had his nose buried in it and he was inhaling, and he looked almost like he was crying, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  “Eli.” Neil’s voice sounded raw.

  Eli’s eyes flew open, staring at Neil in a moment of blank incomprehension. His hands opened, nerveless; the shirt fell from them.

  Neil dropped his bag where he was standing. A couple of steps took him to the edge of the bed, and he fell to his knees in front of Eli.

  “Eli,” he said, more urgently. Eli jerked at his name that time and put out his hands to Neil’s shoulders, pushing him backward. Neil reached up and grabbed Eli’s hands in his.

  “No, no, no,” whispered Eli. His voice sounded shot, scratchy and awful.

  “Why not?” Neil tightened his grip on Eli’s hands. “I thought—I thought you were—”

  “Of course you did, because I never told you, never told anyone,” hissed Eli. “It never mattered—and no one ever needed to know—there was never anyone like, like you.”

  Neil had never heard him like this, never seen his face like this, twisted in something that looked like agony.

  “It’s all right,” said Neil, immediately. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Eli wrenched his hands free and stumbled up, sideways, away from Neil. He was breathing in huge gasping breaths, like a bellows.

  “It’s not okay. It’s—I’m an attending, Neil, that matters, that’s why not, I’m your superior and you’re, I’m too old for you anyway, it’s. There are too many reasons.”

  “They’re all bullshit reasons.” Neil scrambled to his feet belatedly. “We’re both adults, you’re not even—it’s only twelve years—”

  Eli was shaking his head, hard. “I—you know how I feel,” and Neil realized with a shock like a wave breaking over him that he did know, that if he went back and added up all the little moments he knew the equation. “But I’m an attending and we might have to work a case together, and do you know what people will say about me? About you?”

  “I don’t care what they say about me!” Neil stepped closer, crowding Eli back against the wall. Eli was staring at his face like he was hypnotized, and his hands came up to frame Neil’s face, stroking his thumbs down Neil’s throat. “I don’t believe you care—”

  He kissed Eli, and after a long breathless moment, Eli shuddered and kissed him back with a sound that was almost a sob. He sighed into Eli’s mouth as Eli’s hands tightened around the nape of his neck, pulling him in.

  Neil dropped his hands to Eli’s hips, dragging them together. Eli was getting hard, and Neil pushed even closer, rocked his hips against Eli’s. Eli broke the kiss to gasp, shaking, dropping his forehead to rest on Neil’s shoulder.

  “I don’t care,” whispered Neil into Eli’s ear. “I don’t—if you don’t want people to talk, fine, we’ll keep it quiet—”

  Eli’s hands tightened cruelly on his shoulders, and he snarled, “You deserve better than that. Better than me.”

  “I don’t want—” Neil stumbled as Eli pushed him back.

  “If you don’t care, that’s fine.” Eli’s face was flushed blotchy red, and he looked like he’d been punched instead of kissed. “I’ll care for both of us.”

  Eli grabbed his suitcase and yanked the door open. He was gone before Neil could recover, left reeling, staring after him.

  He managed to grab his bag and the dropped shirt, cramming it into a side pocket of the duffel, before jogging out to catch up to Eli just as the elevator doors started to close.

  “This isn’t up for discussion,” said Eli. His voice was hard.

  “Fine,” said Neil. “Fine.” He was bewildered and furious, and somewhere in there was a heady, unbalancing joy that he’d been right all along, that Eli had wanted him, after all.

  * * *

  They checked out at the front desk without looking at each other, settled the room-service bill with a minimum of words, and split up before they even made it into the conference. Neil couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Oh, look,” he said snidely, “there’s a session on emotional literacy. You should check that out.”

  Eli didn’t say anything, just walked off, spine stiff.

  Neil couldn’t remember a word of that morning’s sessions later.

  It wasn’t really luck that had them on the same shuttle to the airport; Liddell and Wei were on the shuttle too. They were all on the same flight back, and the hotel ran complimentary shuttles during business hours. Neil managed to maneuver to sit next to Liddell instead of Eli.

  He held up his end of the conversation, albeit with some difficulty, as Liddell mostly enjoyed listening to himself talk.

  At one point Liddell said, “Don’t forget to call my nephew when you get back! He’d like you.”

  Eli, in the seat ahead of him, flinched. Neil said, “I might have forgotten his phone number at the hotel. Maybe you should write it down for me again.”

  Neil felt a sting of guilt for the way Eli’s shoulders slumped, but he could bury that. Liddell, thankfully, didn’t have a pencil and paper with him.

  On the flight back, it turned out he was in a totally different row than Eli, far enough ahead that even if Eli had been looking for him, he would have had trouble spotting Neil.

  When their flight landed, Neil debated waiting for Eli, but he ended up walking ahead and catching a taxi by himself. The thought of being in Eli’s car was too much. And Eli would probably have vetoed it, anyway.

  He got home, and his apartment was just as empty and as still as he’d left it. He’d even been conscientious enough to clean out the fridge before he left, so there was nothing objectionable in it.

  He slammed the fridge door shut and leaned his head against the freezer handle.

  “Shit,” he said to the apartment. He had to laugh, despite the ugly pressing pain; that lightness was still there in his chest, like the fizz of champagne—Eli, Eli wanted him, too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Neil had to go back to work the next day. It was surprisingly easy, simple, really, to fall back into his familiar habits. There were rounds in the morning, interns to frown at when they screwed up the details on patients. His pager went off almost incessantly. His junior residents always needed something. He scrubbed in and did almost all of a hernia repair.

  Half a dozen times he picked up his phone and set it back down.

  * * *

  Neil wondered if he could get away with skipping the M&M conferences. His attending frowned at him in bafflement.

  “No,” he said. “Why, are you getting tired of hearing about how we screw up? Because let me tell you, we don’t stop screwing up. We never stop.”

  Neil sighed. “You’re right. I’ll be there.”

  Eli, though—Eli skipped that one. He hadn’t missed one in a long time. He was there at the next week’s, when one of his patients was on the discussion list. A man who had apparently had a silent arrhythmia in the middle of the night, and by the time Telemetry had figured out what was going on and gotten the team in, he was gone. Pathology showed v
entricular wall rupture with bleeding into the pericardium, cardiac tamponade, his heart choked by its own blood. Eli sat at the back of the auditorium, like he used to, before he’d gotten in the habit of sitting by Neil.

  He missed another one. Not that Neil was looking for him, for when he walked in the door. Or anything.

  Neil kept seeing silver hair on the street and his head would jerk a little, catching like a badly oiled mechanical joint.

  He didn’t go to the work group. Pete found him, predictably, the next evening, when he was on call.

  “So.” Pete was leaning against the break room door. “Roger said Chaudry said you skipped the work group.”

  “Roger can shut his fucking face.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t fight with Eli.”

  “I would love to tell you that.”

  Pete sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “But you can’t?”

  “That depends on how open you are to being lied to.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Then I can’t.”

  “Christ on a crutch. You two—I swear to God, I don’t know anybody else who can manage to fight with Eli.”

  Neil threw his hands in the air in frustration, biting back the first half dozen things that came to mind to say. “They should try sharing a hotel room for a week.”

  “Was it something stupid? Did he wash his socks in the sink?”

  “Stupid, yes, socks, no, drop it, Pete.”

  “I would like to know what you two idiots have cooked up. It can’t be that bad.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but your pal is a real piece of work. I’m quitting that fucking group for real this time, and I’d put money down that Eli’s going to be glad.”

  “Neil—” Pete hesitated, and then leaned in closer. “Did he say anything homophobic? I can’t imagine it, but—I would—I’d believe you. I’d support you, if you needed to make a complaint.”

  Neil realized with horror that his eyes were getting damp. He blinked a few times, furiously. “Against one of your oldest friends? Christ, you are sentimental. No. It’s fine. It’s between us. You can’t fix it, and it’s none of your business.”