Blame the drugs, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly or making the best decisions. “It’s no big deal.”
“I’m not making a big deal out of it. I’m not freaked, but I need to know.” He squatted in front of me. “Tell me.”
“Will you stop?” I snapped, the irritability taking over. I wasn’t a nice person to begin with when I was in pain, my wounded pride made it worse, and the meds obliterated the filters that kept me from spilling that shit all over people. That wasn’t an excuse, but it was what it was. “It’s not your business!”
“It is my business,” he insisted, and I could see him getting tense, hear the edge in his voice. “If you can’t let me in on this, then there is no point to us even talking about spending more time together. I need to know what your body and health are doing or I can’t take care of you—”
I flung out the arm with the injured wrist, regretting it when the jolting movement sent hot flares of pain up my nerves. “No one is asking you to fucking take care of me!”
He drew back as though stung. “Yeah, you fucking well are if you want me to do the things you claim to want. This is my hard limit, Geoff. No exceptions. Either you level with me about this shit or we’re done.”
Growling in frustration, I thrust my sleeve up to my biceps and bared my arm for him. “Fine. It’s this wrist. It’s not necessarily anything we did. Sometimes this shit just happens. Happy?”
Robin’s carefully neutral expression pissed me off worse, but I let him take my arm gently. He didn’t touch my wrist, but even touching the arm sent molten zings of torture into the joint.
“When did it start?” he asked softly. When I didn’t answer, he looked up and took my chin, lifting it until I met his eyes. “Geoff? This started before I left, didn’t it? You were lying to me about why you got up.”
I jerked my head away and glowered at the wall.
He carefully turned my arm to look at the underside. There, along the antecubital vein, hematomas both fresh and fading discolored the visibly scarred skin. They were nothing he hadn’t seen before in Saugatuck, but now it seemed like he was seeing something else.
There was a reason some of my hemo acquaintances tagged their Instagram pics #notajunkie.
“I know these are just from infusing,” he murmured, a strange note in his voice. His face seemed like it’d lost a little more color. “Right?”
Of course, knowing why he was asking and not being insulted by it were two different things.
“What, you going to accuse me of shooting up?” I sneered, wanting to yank my arm away but unwilling to suffer the pain the motion would inflict. “You wouldn’t be the first to jump to conclusions.”
He muttered something that sounded like, “That would be just my luck,” but then he shook his head. “I saw your med stash. I believed you when you explained it. But I have to say—” He drew a deep breath, swallowing hard as his fingers swept past my track marks without touching. “Right now, seeing this, the way you’re acting, it’s poking some sore spots that haven’t had nearly enough time to heal.”
His expression as he stared at my arm was enough to make me get a grip and dial back the asshole a bit, despite the pain. He looked . . . raw. Like he was seeing something that wasn’t there.
Eventually he set my arm down very carefully and pulled back, springing to his feet as if he’d discovered his ass was on fire. “I’ve got to go.”
“What? I thought you wouldn’t have to leave for a couple hours. If you’re running away because of this—” I gestured with my good arm, my temper flaring again.
“I’m not,” he said quickly, then squeezed his eyes shut and hung his head. “Or I am, but not for the reasons you think. Geoff, I can cope with your condition. I know I can do that. I can give you what you’re looking for, but—” His jaw flexed, and I watched him pull himself together. “I’m not sure I should. I don’t trust—”
“Me?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Me.” He looked so bleak and conflicted that I had to tighten my grip on my anger and outraged pride. He’d asked me to expose this for him, the bleeds and the pain and all the parts that made me feel like I couldn’t have a normal life. He’d insisted on it, and now he was bolting? “Look, this is baggage. So I’m going to go, and we’ll . . . think about this. Once your wrist is healed and we’ve had a chance to let it settle . . . we’ll see.”
“‘We’ll see’?” I managed to pour enough derision into those two words that even I cringed, but that was about the weakest excuse for a brush-off I’d ever heard, and I’d heard plenty. “Fine. Go.”
He retreated toward the door, and I stared after him, absolutely furious and completely bewildered. All that arrogance of his, all the confidence he’d exuded since that first night in the club, they were nowhere to be seen. I was too doped up to make sense of it, how he could be acting this hurt and lost when he was the one fucking turning his back on me.
He hesitated by the door as though he would say something more, but I cut him off. “Just get out.” I shoved myself off the sofa to grab another bag of peas from the freezer. The cool air hit my overheated face like a wave of frost, and I shut my eyes, letting it soothe me until I heard the click of the front door closing.
I didn’t believe he’d really left, though, until I returned to the living room and found him gone. I stared at the door for a disbelieving moment. Then I picked up the prescription bottles and hurled them against it. Working one-handed, I hadn’t closed the Percocet the entire way. It popped open, raining pills across the room.
“Fuck!”
Geoff
I’m sorry I was an asshole. I don’t handle things well when I have a bleed.
It was the fifteenth or so text that I’d composed and would probably delete without sending. They tended to vacillate between apologies for my behavior (I really did crank the asshole-itude up to eleven when I had a bleed) and indignation that he’d walked out and hadn’t bothered to contact me.
I stared at it, my thumb hovering over the screen.
“You’re not going to get any points for playing the martyr.” Jace gave me a level look over his easel. I was putzing around his studio, unable to bear the silence of the apartment any longer. “So Robin has issues. Hallelujah. The dude was too perfect. He needed some fucking issues. It sucks, but it can be dealt with. You’re welcome to come with me when I drive the paintings up to him.”
It had been almost two months since Robin ran out of the apartment, and this was the most Jace had said on the subject. I knew he’d been in contact with Robin about the purchase of some work for the gallery, but I also knew he wasn’t about to step into the middle of my fucking mess. That was one of the best things about his friendship: he was a great sounding board, but he never veered off into being a busybody. Playing mediator wasn’t his responsibility.
I shrugged, trying to see something through the clouded glass of the window. “I’m not sure he wants me there. I mean, he’s the one who decided he couldn’t deal with . . . whatever.”
“Seems like you’re entitled to some answers, but you need to ask the right questions first. Which maybe you neglected to do before.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, man.” Jace glanced at me wryly. “You were totally convinced that any problems between you and Robin were going to come from your end. That it would be about your medical issues, one way or the other. You never bothered to find out if he might have stuff that would need to be dealt with.”
“That’s a lot of words to say I made it all about me.”
“Call it like I see it, dude.”
I sighed and drummed my fingers on the windowsill. We’d been friends long enough that Jace understood most of the self-esteem issues I had. My mother’s neuroses hadn’t helped any. I’d lost count of the number of times I started to feel like I was a part of things until she stepped in and reminded me I was different, weaker, less able to do what other people took for granted.
The hell o
f it was, she was both right and wrong. Yeah, being a hemo kid came with challenges, but most of the moms learned how to find a balance and let us have a sense of normalcy. My mom had rejected any well-meaning input as meddling. She’d been too afraid to loosen her grip. And I’d allowed it long past the point where I should have told her to back off and let me live my life.
Which I’d never really done. Not until the trip to Saugatuck.
But the fact remained: as much as I hated them, as much as I was learning to manage a sense of normalcy despite them, I did have limitations. My presence in Jace’s studio that afternoon was a perfect case in point.
I should have been at work. I’d finally leased a station in a body-art studio with the intention of building up a clientele and establishing a reputation. But my third day on the job, one of the other artists had left a box where it didn’t belong. I tripped over it and fell against a chair, starting a muscle bleed in my thigh that had put me in the hospital, and left me unable to work for over two weeks. I wasn’t sure when I’d be capable of standing and moving freely for long enough to resume working. I’d finally sent Jace to pack up my equipment and tell them to lease the space to someone else.
I would have to apply for disability benefits if bleeds kept me from working. Working for Rogier had paid well, even if it had sucked, but my savings from LA were quickly dwindling.
“Disability.” That one ranked right up there with “delicate” on my list of most-hated words. Especially now, after that brief time when I’d felt what it was like not to be seen that way.
I wished I was one of the men who could wear the bleeder badge with pride. I tried to do my part, to rally for the cause, for education and health-care reform and research to make our lives better. I wanted to be one of those guys who could take the fucking rotten hand we’d been dealt by our genetics and turn it into something positive. But I wasn’t.
I hated it. I hated that I’d spent the first quarter century of my life feeling that my mother’s anxiety was my fault. I hated that I’d tried so long, that I’d even felt it necessary, to compensate for my brother’s death. I hated that I had the joints of a man twice my age. I hated that every time I sat down to dose myself with factor, it felt like surrender.
I wasn’t in denial about my condition. I just despised it.
But Jace was right. I’d been so convinced that any impediment to what was happening between Robin and I would come from me that I’d never thought to find out if he had issues of his own. Not until he’d bolted.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d remained just a casual fuck. But something had changed, especially that last morning at the Dunes and again when he showed up in Chicago. I wasn’t ready to put a label on it. It could be hormones run wild, the thrill of something new and unaccustomed and incredibly, incredibly intense.
It could be. But I wasn’t betting on it.
So now I needed to figure out how to deal with the fact that other people had issues too.
Jace continued painting behind me as I went over this well-worn ground. Not pushing. Not judging. Just there, waiting for me to make up my fucking mind. Finally he murmured, “Probably easier to leave it be. If you go after him, you’ve got to accept that your hemophilia isn’t the problem for him. I get it. That’s got to be hella weird for you. I mean, how can anyone else be okay with who and what you are if you’re not?”
I turned and lifted an eyebrow at him, snorting. For a guy with such a carefree, laissez-faire approach to life, he was astonishingly profound at times.
He never so much as glanced up from the easel.
I looked away again. “I’ll think about it.”
Jace didn’t say anything about his meeting with Robin after he delivered the paintings to the soon-to-be-opened gallery, and I didn’t ask.
I wasn’t having any luck finding another space to lease in any studio I’d want my name attached to. A persistent thought nagged at me: namely, maybe a large city wasn’t the right place to establish myself. Maybe a beachfront town would be better. Tattoo shops always did well along boardwalks and such.
Of course, Saugatuck wouldn’t have the level of foot traffic as, say, Venice Beach, and they were far more buttoned-up than a city would be. The county was entirely conservative, and the locals too, despite it being a popular gay and lesbian resort town. Which would be perfect; there, my clean-cut appearance would be an asset. Reassuring to rich townies and vacationers looking to do something adventurous but not too scary. And if I could get a space where the tourist traffic was relatively heavy, the displays of my designs would do all the advertising I needed. I’d only seen one body-art studio while we were there, and they were outside of town. While they looked like they did good work, they weren’t on my level.
Finding a space I could afford would be a challenge. The issues with getting a loan were still with me, no matter where I went, and after the incident with the misplaced box, it was obvious I needed my own studio. Someplace I could organize to keep things safer for me. I had to be my own boss, because there would be times when I couldn’t work for days or even weeks on end.
Regardless of whether I ever made myself speak to Robin again, moving to Saugatuck would be a sound business strategy. If it gave me an opportunity to pursue things with him, that would be wonderful. If not, it would give me a chance to meet other men of a more down-to-earth sort than the big-city scene queens I was used to.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really rooting for option A.
“Geoff. Use the fucking life insurance money.” Ling’s annoyance was obvious. I was Skyping with her while I sketched a design. It was another inspired by Robin, as I imagined what might look good on him or suit his personality and interests. This one was less oceanic and more sanguinary. A dressage whip, like in the video I’d shared with him, crossed the back on a diagonal from right hip to left shoulder, and a single red drop hung from the end of the lash. At the waist on the right, a longer single-tail bullwhip sat coiled, and on the right shoulder, a pair of leather cuffs dangled as if from a hook overhead. The entirety was set against a rippled backdrop that, with careful shading, would look like purple velvet drapes.
It wasn’t even remotely discreet, and I doubted it would ever become reality, but it was where my imagination took me.
“That money is for an emergency.” I gave Ling a stubborn look.
“That money is for your future, to see that you are able to take care of yourself. What better way to do that than to start your own business and make it grow?”
“Starting a new business is a risky venture. What if it doesn’t work? I’ll have wasted the money, and everything that you and Mom and Dad sacrificed over the years so they could afford those insurance policies will be for nothing.”
Ling’s growl rattled the laptop speakers. “Jesus! Weren’t you just telling me you thought it was time you took some fucking chances?”
Verbal aggression was so unlike Ling that I nearly dropped my pencil. I stared at her in astonishment.
“Geoff—” She sighed, leaning her elbows on whatever table or desk she had her computer set up on. “All our lives, you’ve always been so careful and dutiful. Especially when it came to Mom. The way you took care of her, sacrificed things you wanted to avoid upsetting her . . .”
I glanced away, blinking. Remembering her without anger hurt. Despite how unhealthy our relationship had been, I missed her. “She was just so emotionally fragile. She needed it.”
“She wasn’t fragile, she was neurotic,” Ling said bluntly. “She used your desire not to upset her against you. She manipulated you into not doing things she didn’t want you to do. Everyone tried to tell her to back off: me, Dad, the counselors at the Hemophilia Treatment Center, the other hemo moms. She ignored us. Everyone could see it happening except you, and you wouldn’t hear anything about it. You didn’t owe her that. You weren’t responsible for David’s death, and you’re certainly not responsible for the fact that you have a genetic disorder. It’s
not your fault, and now she’s gone anyway. You don’t have to keep trying to placate her.”
I breathed a bitter laugh. “You wouldn’t accuse me of doing that if you knew how reckless I’ve been recently.”
She slapped her hand on the table beside her computer, and my speakers crackled with the loud bang. “Good! It’s about damn time!” Even on the blurry webcam, I could see her eyes blazing. “It’s long overdue. I’m not saying you have to go crazy, but some calculated risks now and then aren’t a bad thing.”
I wasn’t about to tell her how many of those risks involved sex. “Seems an awfully big chance to take for a thrill.”
Ling shrugged. “People do all sorts of crazy shit for thrills. Skydive. Cliff dive. Climb sheer rock faces without ropes. Swim Lake Michigan in the dead of winter. Drive Interstate 76 during rush hour. I’m pretty sure whatever you’ve been getting up to isn’t half as harebrained as most of that.”
I felt my eyebrow creeping up. “People drive I-76 during rush hour for thrills?”
“I can’t think of any other earthly reason to take it on.” She gave a negligent toss of her head. “So think about it. You’ve got the opportunity and means to establish yourself doing something you love, something at which you’re amazing. As the sole remaining person to whom you feel obligated, I absolve you of the fact that the money you’ll be using came at the expense of the digital cable, high-speed internet, designer jeans, fashionable footwear, personal car, and iPhone I could have had when I was sixteen. Now go forth and live.”
When she put it that way, who was I to refuse? As August inched toward September, I packed up everything I owned and uprooted my life for the second time in less than six months.
Robin
By the time mid-September rolled around and Geoff hadn’t contacted me—and I had been too chickenshit to contact him—I figured any chance of us working things out was gone. Which was a good thing, right? Considering how everything had gone that last time we’d seen each other in Chicago, I needed to give up this whole idea of us being together.
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