Infamous

by Jenny Holiday

  And he kept holding on, silently, waiting. For what? He had no idea. Maybe for some of Hunter’s pain to leach out of his body and into Jesse’s. He would gladly take it.

  It wasn’t just the kid who had died today. Hunter had been upset last night too, about his less-than-inspiring date and everything it signified. And he still had that stupid auction to get through this evening. It was a perfect storm of awfulness, and Jesse wished more than anything that he had the power to do something about it.

  But maybe, miraculously, he did. After a few moments of standing there feeling like he was hugging a marble statue, Jesse felt Hunter’s body started to relax. It began with a sigh. Then his shoulders lowered. Jesse stood unmoving, bolstering him, until Hunter’s hands came away from his face and his forearms pressed against Jesse’s chest. Jesse stepped back then, enough to allow Hunter’s arms to come all the way down, but the minute they did, he gathered him right back close.

  He didn’t want to let go yet.

  Maybe something about the surge of emotion he’d just witnessed was contagious, because when Hunter’s arms snaked around his waist, returning the embrace, Jesse was hit with a wave of something he couldn’t name. Some of it was sympathy, sure, but some of it, he thought, was relief. Selfish relief that he had the power to calm Hunter. That Hunter granted him that power. Whatever it was, it lodged high and sharp in his chest, harder and more solid than Hunter’s body against his own.

  Finally, Hunter pulled away and looked at him for a few moments, not speaking. Something happened to his face as he did so, though. It . . . settled. His eyes warmed. “You got your hair cut,” he said quietly, one corner of his mouth turning up.

  Jesse smiled. “I did.” He’d had several inches chopped off, leaving it about chin length, and had washed and tamed what was left so it was tidy. He was never going to be mistaken for a banker, but this was as clean-cut as he’d been in a decade. “I figured I was already wearing a tie, so . . .”

  “Thank you for doing this.”

  Jesse wasn’t sure if Hunter meant emceeing the gala or . . . what had just happened between them. “No problem,” he said, because it would apply to either.

  “There was a turtle down here.” Hunter turned back to the pond. “A big one.”

  Jesse leaned over to look, but there was only dark, murky, lily pad–studded water.

  “Jesse?”

  He straightened quickly, like he’d been caught doing something much less benign than looking for a turtle.

  It was Andrea Bingham.

  “We’re ready for you for the sound check. And the kids are here.” She paused and looked between the two men. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Right,” he said. “Yes.”

  He wanted to tell her to wait a minute. He wanted to tell Hunter to bail on the auction. To do what he needed to do to protect himself.

  He wanted to fix everything for Hunter. To stand next to him and hug him until all the shit went away.

  But then he thought back to their phone call last night, to Hunter’s simple, sad declaration about wanting someone to love him publicly.

  He pasted on a smile and aimed it at Andrea. “I’m ready now.”

  The gala went as expected. There was a certain predictability to these things. First, cocktails, which involved being shepherded around and introduced to donors. Which in turn meant having to explain a hundred times what a hospitalist was. Which was fine, if tiresome. Hunter reminded himself these people’s generosity paid for a lot of what happened at the hospital—and for the research that would someday help kids in ways medicine currently couldn’t.

  After cocktails, they were invited to take their seats, the salad course was served, and then the speeches started.

  The chairwoman of the hospital foundation board started. Then the CEO of the hospital itself. Followed by the hospital’s vice president of research.

  Because he was on the planning committee, Hunter knew each speaker had been allotted five minutes. None could manage anything close to it. Even though they all gave a speech that was simultaneously the same as they—or their counterparts—had given last year and basically the same as each other’s, they couldn’t help themselves.

  Hunter sighed and stabbed his lukewarm chicken breast.

  Forty-three minutes later, they were back to the chair of the board. She had a very exciting surprise for them. A special guest who had taken a break in his busy touring schedule and flown here to join them tonight.

  Hunter could practically see everyone yawning, even as a weird fluttering feeling overtook him. He suppressed a grin.

  “Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Jesse Jamison.”

  A current of electricity arced through the crowd.

  Jesse had definitely cleaned himself up. Put on the dreaded tie and the expected costume. Cut and tamed his hair. He could play the role. But none of those trappings had the power to mask his swagger. His essential Jesse-ness. The thing that made him a star.

  As he walked out to the podium, grinning knowingly, the crowd went crazy. The scions of Toronto industry, the ladies who lunched, the movers and shakers—they all whooped and hollered like teenagers at a Jesse and the Joyride show.

  After several unsuccessful attempts to calm the besotted crowd, he just started talking.

  “I came to the hospital initially for the wrong reasons.”

  That did it. No one wanted to miss what Jesse Jamison was going to say, especially when he opened with a provocative line like that. The room quieted instantly.

  Once he had their attention, he started again. “I came to the hospital initially for the wrong reasons. I was ‘doing a good deed,’” he said, making air quotes with his fingers. “Visiting a sick kid who was a fan. You’ll meet her later.” He paused and grinned. “Actually, maybe you should meet her sooner.” He stared into the crowd for a long moment. Hunter knew he had his speech on cue cards, but he didn’t seem to be using them.

  “I was going to talk about how I figured out pretty quickly that my involvement in the hospital wasn’t charitable. That I was gaining more than I was giving as I met the most incredible people. Nurses.” Jesse’s eyes scanned the crowd. “Doctors.” His gaze stopped—for a mere heartbeat, but it was enough—on Hunter. “And of course kids.” He paused, like he was trying to decide something.

  “But you know all that. You’ve heard enough variations on that already tonight.” He smiled at the crowd. “I’m not much of a speaker. I’ve always been better with music than talking. So I think maybe I’ll get straight to the point.” He glanced at the wings and nodded. “Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a band made up of current and former patients. They’re calling themselves— No, we’re calling ourselves Avery and the Abscess.”

  Hunter jumped to his feet along with everyone else at the sight of three girls making their way onto the stage to join Jesse. A curtain that had been behind Jesse rose to reveal a keyboard and drum set. Avery carried her guitar, and someone in the wings handed Jesse his.

  Jesse nodded encouragingly at the drummer, and she banged her sticks together and counted them in. “One, two, three, four.”

  The band launched into the Katy Perry song they’d been practicing for so long. It was much improved from its early incarnations, but it was still a bunch of kids plodding through it. It didn’t matter. What they lacked in technical skill, they made up for with enthusiasm. And you had to be dead not to be swept away by the message of female empowerment, of fighting and enduring, being sung by these girls who had endured so much.

  When they were done, everyone leaped to their feet, hollering and clapping. Hunter, who was seated at the same table as Andrea, caught her eye. She smiled at him triumphantly. Yep, thanks to Jesse, tonight a lot of people were going to be opening their wallets wider than they ever had before.

  Jesse had done it again.

  Jesse had never had this much fun in a tie. Admittedly, the bar was low, considering how many times in his life he’
d worn a tie, much less a bow tie, but still. After the first part of the program ended, and they paused for dinner, he asked if he could sit with Avery and some of the other kids and their families. He was supposed to sit at a table with the hospital bigwigs, but because he was Jesse Jamison, everyone scrambled to accommodate him.

  He’d met Avery’s mother, of course, several times. But to see everyone in a party setting was surprisingly buoying. Away from the machines and gowns and institutional green walls, the kids were giddy.

  Usually when he was at a fancy event like this, the only questions he got asked was what kind of clothing he was wearing or who he was dating.

  This was real talk. They talked about music. They talked about the kids’ favorite doctors—and their least favorite. They talked about missing school.

  They talked about death, and whether to be afraid of it.

  It all sort of blew Jesse’s mind. It was a living example of what he’d so inexpertly said earlier about getting so much more than he gave with this “charitable” endeavor.

  Then Andrea tapped him on the shoulder and cued him that it was time to start the auction.

  Damn it. That fucking auction.

  But what could he do? He followed Andrea to the stage.

  “Everyone’s all lined up over there.” She pointed at a clump of people milling in a makeshift holding pen to one side of the stage and handed him a program. “Go in the order on the program, as we discussed. Read each person’s bio, then open the bidding. I’ll be over on the other side of the stage herding them on and off.”

  “Right.” He eyed the program. First up was Juan Ramirez, pediatric anesthesiologist.

  Dr. Ramirez was a handsome guy. Jesse worked the crowd, and after a round of spirited bidding, Dr. Ramirez “went” for fifteen hundred dollars to an embarrassed but smiling young woman.

  “Winners will collect their dates after the entire auction is over,” Jesse read, trying to settle the crowd. “Next up, we have the emergency medicine specialist Dr. Ramona Pope,” he said, reading from the program as he’d been instructed to. “Dr. Pope has spent nearly a decade working in critical and acute care settings.”

  There were three more paragraphs after that, and they looked just as boring. “Okay, let’s translate that for those of us who haven’t been to a hundred years of medical school. I think that means Dr. Pope is like Doug Ross from ER. Remember that show?” Everyone laughed. “What’s the funniest emergency you ever had to deal with, Dr. Pope? Kids get weird stuff stuck up their noses, right?”

  Dr. Pope was a good sport. She smiled mischievously and said, “Not to mention other places. But I’d say the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a nose is a Barbie arm.”

  The crowd cracked up, and Jesse said, “What do you like to do when you’re not, you know, saving defenseless children?”

  “Kayak,” she said. “Also, I hate cooking, so if someone wants to cook me dinner as part of this date, I’d be super into that.”

  “All right!” he said, and he started the bidding, auctioning off the charming Dr. Pope for two grand.

  And on it went. He kept off script, ad-libbing, joking, and drawing the person on the auction block into bantering with him. The crowd was loving it, and Andrea was smiling and giving him a thumbs-up, so he even had official approval for his deviation from the plan.

  He tried not to glance at Hunter waiting off to the side as he went. This didn’t seem so bad. For the most part, everyone—auctionees and audience—was taking it in the lighthearted spirit in which it was intended. He had one surgical nurse who was extremely nervous. He couldn’t get her to loosen up, and the proceedings became a bit awkward.

  But Hunter wasn’t interpersonally awkward. Not at all. He had a sense of humor.

  But what the hell was Jesse going to say about Hunter?

  Hi, here’s my best friend. Yes, he is exceedingly attractive, isn’t he? Be nice to him—he’s had a rough day.

  Or: Here’s my best friend. He’s looking for love for real, so if the ladies in the crowd will kindly back off . . .

  Maybe: This is Hunter. He has a really big heart. Deserve it.

  The question was, was there anyone here who did? He scanned the crowd, unsettled. Then he went through the motions with bachelorette number seven, neonatal ICU nurse Kristi Farmer.

  “And next up . . .” He cleared his throat. “Hospitalist Dr. Hunter Wyatt.”

  Hunter walked out, smiling self-consciously and waving at the applauding crowd.

  Jesse still had no freaking idea what to say. He glanced at the program. As with the other listings, it was several long, boring paragraphs about Hunter’s educational background and job duties. With the others, he had suspected the bios didn’t do justice to the actual people in front of him. And he’d been right, hadn’t he, as evidenced by the fact that they’d learned Dr. Pope liked to kayak but not cook and Nurse Farmer had seen the musical Hamilton nine times?

  He’d suspected there was more to the others than was written on the piece of paper he held.

  With Hunter, he knew.

  He knew if you wanted Hunter to stop working, you had to physically drag him from his office. He knew Hunter was adorably clueless when it came to handyman stuff. He knew Hunter’s patience was so boundless he would examine every stray mark that appeared on Billy’s body at any time of the day or night and do it with a smile on his face.

  He knew what Hunter’s mouth tasted like.

  Well, shit.

  Everyone was looking at him expectantly.

  “So, Dr. Wyatt,” he said, “I have to start with the obvious question: what the hell is a hospitalist?”

  It broke the ice. Everyone, including Hunter, laughed. He seemed to relax a little as he answered too.

  “I’m getting tired of the usual questions, here, and Dr. Wyatt’s an old pal of mine,” Jesse said, to disguise the fact that his brain was actually completely devoid of questions to ask Hunter. “So let’s play a lightning round. Favorite food?”

  “Ramen.”

  “Lark or night owl?”

  “Night owl.” Jesse should hope so, otherwise all their midnight FaceTimes were going totally against Hunter’s natural tendencies.

  “Middle name?”

  “Edward.” Ha. Jesse had known that, but it always sounded so incongruous.

  “What would you be if not a doctor?” That would stump him. Hunter couldn’t imagine being anything other than a doctor.

  “Uh . . . nurse?”

  Jesse cracked up. That was such a “Hunter” answer. “Okay. Cake or pie?”

  “Cake.”

  “Invisibility or superstrength?” Jesse knew the answer already. There wasn’t much they hadn’t talked about during their late-night tête-à-têtes.

  “Superstrength.”

  Okay, how about one he didn’t know? “Boxers or briefs?”

  “Boxer briefs.”

  Damn. He could imagine it. He could imagine it very well. He cleared his throat. “Katy Perry or Jesse and the Joyride?”

  “Jesse and the Joyride, of course.” Hunter’s face lit up with a great big, guileless smile that cut off Jesse’s train of thought. Sucked all the intelligence—such as it was—out of Jesse’s brain.

  Should he ask anything else? He’d been thinking of trying to work in a nod to the fact that Hunter was gay, to signal as much to the audience. But they’d probably read the program, and to hear Hunter tell it, everyone knew anyway.

  Nah. Better to get this over with. Even though Hunter didn’t want to be here, Jesse was pretty sure he wasn’t having a terrible time so far. That smile suggested as much, right?

  “Okay, so let’s open the bid—”

  “Four thousand dollars!” a woman of about sixty dressed in a sparkly sequined gown shouted. There was a murmur in the crowd. The highest price so far had been four thousand, so to start with that figure suggested the bidder meant business.

  Was this the mother from the creepy mother-daughter team? The pet-food-char
ity woman who’d won Hunter last year and threatened to come after him this time? He glanced at Hunter, whose face had gone totally blank, like his smile of a moment ago had been a mask that had slid off.

  It was the same woman. Jesse could tell.

  He looked back over the crowd, trying to will someone else into bidding.

  “Forty-five hundred,” came a voice. He followed it to see a handsome man in a black suit and skinny tie. A young man. A man who looked to be of Middle Eastern descent.

  Faheem the nurse.

  It had to be, given the way the kid was grinning at Hunter and the way Hunter’s eyes had briefly widened in alarm before shuttering again.

  Damn it.

  The crowd, though, was loving it. They hooted when Faheem stepped forward, though Jesse couldn’t say whether it was approval or something more like glee with a slight edge of jeering to it. Jesse could sort of see what Hunter meant about feeling like the gay mascot of the event.

  “Five thousand,” said Lady Sequins.

  “Fifty-five hundred,” Faheem shot back.

  How the hell did a nurse have fifty-five hundred dollars to spend on someone who had already told him he wasn’t interested? Also, what kind of a jerk did that? The kid probably thought he was making some sort of grand romantic gesture.

  “Six thousand,” Lady Sequins called out, sending a withering look at her rival.

  Jesse glanced at Hunter. He was watching the proceedings with his lips pressed firmly together in what was probably supposed to be a smile but was actually more like a grimace.

  No.

  Jesse set the program down on the podium and walked over to Andrea, not looking at Hunter as he passed.

  This was not happening.

  Not on his watch.

  Where was Jesse going?

  As Jesse made his way over to Andrea, said something in her ear, and then strode off the stage, Hunter had to physically prevent himself from following.

  He had arrived at the gala unsure how he was going to get through the auction. Then Jesse had come, and he’d changed his mind to thinking he could bear it as long as Jesse was emceeing.