by Jerry Cole
As soon as he walked out the door, he gasped. He tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t. There were bottles all over the coffee table — bottles of beer that he didn’t care about, bottles of expensive wine that he did care about and had been saving for a special occasion. The sectional had been taken apart, which Jason found a little surprising, and all the bedding had been ripped off. But the really striking part was the way Blaine looked, his arms and legs all bent at a weird angle that told Jason he hadn’t just passed out and something was wrong. Seriously wrong. That, and the drool dripping down his chin, and the vomit on his carpet.
Jason ran to the bedroom and took his phone off charge. He unlocked the screen, vaguely aware that he didn’t need to do that if he was going to call an emergency number, then clicked the call button once he had punched in 911.
The 911 operator asked him a bunch of questions he couldn’t answer and he felt like an idiot about. After a three-minute conversation, according to his phone, but a conversation that lasted forever, as far as he was concerned, the operator told him that he was dispatching an ambulance to his address.
Jason sat down on the sofa and looked down at Blaine. He wasn’t dead, because the operator had made him check that he was breathing. But he was also cold to the touch, and his breathing was shallow. And Jason had no CPR or first aid training of any sort, and he had felt helpless and stupid. Then, when he had found the bottle of antidepressants that he kept in the cabinet in the bathroom under Blaine’s hand, covered strategically just so Jason wouldn’t be able to find them, he had gone from feeling helpless and stupid to being incredibly angry.
He was already angry that he had decided to trust Blaine in the first place and that he had destroyed his house, but the fact that he had planned to apologize to him, let him believe that things were totally fine and then tried to kill himself in his house with his medication, all while Jason wasn’t looking — there was nothing that was okay about that.
He wanted to move Blaine, but the operator had told him not to move him. She had told him not to touch Blaine at all after he checked his pulse. Jason sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose and swallowing. He hadn’t wanted to walk into any of this shit. In the last week or so, his only problem had been his almost certainly unrequited crush on one of his students. Then Blaine had walked back into his life and everything had gone to shit.
He looked at Blaine, breathing shallowly on his carpeted floor, and shook his head. He would take him to the hospital, make sure that he would be okay, and then he would forget about him. He had no responsibility for Blaine, no matter how much Blaine was trying to trick him into believing that he did.
***
Jason hadn’t expected the process of checking Blaine into the hospital to be an easy one, but he had to admit that he didn’t expect it to be this hard. In truth, he expected that he would be able to just drop him off, go home and clean up the mess that he had made. He was more worried about his house than he was about Blaine, which made him feel like an awful person. But he couldn’t help himself.
Blaine had gone to his house, made it seem that he had nowhere else to go and then tried to kill himself with his alcohol and his drugs. Then he had made sure that Jason would be the person to find him, even though he probably knew that it would scar Jason for the rest of his life and didn’t seem to care about that. Again, years after the fact, he had proved how little he cared about anyone that wasn’t himself.
And certainly how little he cared about Jason.
Jason didn’t think he was an idiot, but Blaine had shown him how wrong he was. When the hospital had wanted to check in Blaine, they asked him a bunch of questions about him — all of which he thought he didn’t know any more, but he did. He knew Blaine’s blood type, he knew he was allergic to Tramadol. He also knew that he had taken all of his Xanax and there were twenty left in the bottle. The doctors probably thought it was a miracle that he had survived, but they weren’t telling him anything because he wasn’t next of kin.
What they were making him do was hang around and do nothing, just in case something happened. One of the nurses had left the room that they had put Blaine in and had told him to hang around for as long as he could. He had almost asked her if he could just go home, but he hadn’t wanted to seem heartless in front of a person that was trying to save Blaine’s life.
She was doing her best. The fact that Blaine was a dick shouldn’t interfere with her professional aims, or so Jason thought.
He hadn’t even looked at the time when he got a phone call from the gym. He realized that he hadn’t eaten since he got up when he saw the incoming call and sent it to voicemail.
It had been hours, and hours, and all he had done was sit there and brood. He needed to eat something. Blaine could stop him from going to work, but surely Blaine couldn’t stop him from eating. That would just be ridiculous. Except that was exactly what he had done, even though Jason had promised himself that he would never let him interfere with his life again.
He sent his phone to voicemail. He didn’t want to deal with the undoubtedly friendly people at the gym telling him that he wasn’t there or asking him if he was okay. And he didn’t want them to ask him why he wasn’t there because then he would have to go into a lengthy explanation, and they would all be really nice to him. He wasn’t sure if he could deal with people being really nice to him then.
He was brimming with anger and he was sure that whoever was in the slightest bit nice to him would get the brunt of his anger. That was the last thing that he wanted. It was only Blaine who deserved to hear how angry how he was, and he would never get to, because the moment that Jason walked out of the hospital would be the very last moment he ever thought about Blaine ever again.
When his phone rang again, he sent it to voicemail immediately, then he looked for anyone whose phone number he might have that went to class. He ended up on finding Ceecee’s number and texting her that he felt sick and wouldn’t be showing up. He ended the text with a feeble apology, and then he turned off his phone.
He wasn’t sure what else he could do in that situation. He wasn’t sure what he could answer. “Hey, yeah, I’m at the hospital with my ex who randomly showed up and tried to overdose on my depression medication and my expensive alcohol,” didn’t really seem like a thing he could say to even those coworkers that he considered friends. He sat back on the seat and looked up at the ceiling, crossing his arms over his chest and waiting. For the time being, there was nothing he could do.
That powerless feeling wasn’t going to go away unless he did something. But there was nothing he could think of, so he closed his eyes and tried to decide where he would eat, instead, and what he would be able to stomach under the current circumstances.
Chapter Eight
Taylor didn’t mean to memorize Jason’s phone number. It wasn’t his fault that he was gifted with numbers, though. He couldn’t help himself if digits came naturally to him, even when people dialed them quickly in black receivers in front of him.
He had always had a knack for numbers. That was why he had always been so good at math. If it hadn’t been football, it would have been math. Academic scholarships were less competitive. He hadn’t wanted to go into football. It had kind of just fallen into his lap, after the accident with Landon. There was a new coach and he was only supposed to fill in for him for a couple of weeks, but then he had scored, and they had won. Which, as far as Taylor was concerned, was a fluke.
Then he had scored again. And again. He wasn’t interested in being a quarterback, and had only joined the team because his father was strict and required that he was at least in one non-academic related extra-curricular.
Taylor had offered to get a job, but his father had scoffed and told him that his one job was getting into a good college. Which he had done. Thanks, in no small part, to football.
His father knew that was where his football career aspirations ended. Taylor always thought it was a little ironic, that his incredibly nerdy aspirations
had led him to being part of a bigger team. He had learned a lot from playing football, and that wasn’t something that he could just deny. The value of teamwork, true camaraderie, planning and ambition. The guys on the team would fall on their sword for anyone else on the team. They cared and they all depended on each other to a degree that Taylor had never seen before. They thought of each other as brothers. Taylor thought of himself as the outsider, but there was no way he could deny that there was a bond there and that his teammates looked after him.
All he had to do was look at the way they had all behaved when he broke his arm. Especially Elliot. He had been so kind and so cool, always going out of his way to help him, even while he did his best to keep calling Taylor a nerd. And he had even helped him with his weird Salsex instructor conundrum.
He hadn’t been right, of course. Only now, as Taylor worried about what was going on with Jason, could he place his feelings for him. He liked him. And not just as a Salsex instructor, though he had to admit that he was fantastic. He truly really liked him, to the point where it was difficult for him to get Jason out of his head to think about other people that he might be attracted to. The thing was, when he had first seen Jason, he had thought that he was an attractive man, but otherwise unremarkable. He remembered what he was wearing. Skin-tight black leggings -- Taylor guessed they were leggings, though he wasn’t exactly sure what they would be called on a man -- and a white shirt with the words Salsex Instructor on them. It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected the instructor to be fit, it was just that he hadn’t expected him to be as fit as he was. He had been very wrong, both about how little work Salsex was and about the instructor himself.
It wasn’t just that he was good looking, though he was. He had huge eyes and an easy smile. Beautiful eyebrows, which he had never noticed in anyone before, regardless of the gender that they were. Straight nose, pale skin, beautiful lips. Kissable lips, now that Taylor thought about it. Perfect teeth, and it was easy to get a smile out of him. He also liked the way he laughed.
In fact, now that Taylor was thinking about it, there were a lot of things about Jason’s physical appearance that he liked. But what had first attracted him to Jason -- and there was no way to get around this, it was a hundred percent attraction -- had been his personality. So effortlessly cool and charming, like no one he had ever met before. He had seemed interested and eager to help Taylor without making it seem like he wanted anything from him, something that Taylor had to admit he missed from his pre-football days.
He hadn’t even recognized him, or if he had, he had been super cool about it. He wasn’t sure which one he appreciated more, but he sure as hell did appreciate it a lot. And now he hadn’t even shown up to class and Taylor was worried, because from what he heard, that just wasn’t the way that Jason acted.
The gym hadn’t really cared until he had pushed someone who worked there and while the rest of the students seemed to be hoping that he was okay, they weren’t really doing anything. The student who had gotten the text didn’t even say it to the entire class, nor, as far as Taylor knew, even texted Jason back. No, all she did was tell her friend, who told her friend, who eventually told everyone else. And then everyone knew that class was off, but no one knew what had happened to Jason.
Taylor couldn’t even start to name everything that was wrong with that. He also needed to know that Jason was okay for slightly more selfish motives. Maybe, if he saw Jason again, he would be able to explain his feelings to himself better. Seeing Jason again could be the difference between things changing for him forever or remaining the same. It wasn’t as if Jason could know this. It wasn’t as if Jason could know anything, really, about Taylor’s feelings toward him. If that’s even what they could be called, since Taylor had no vocabulary to really talk about Jason.
Jason, the Salsex instructor.
Jason, the guy he liked -- lusted after? Had a crush on? Was jealous of? All the above? If Jason had been a multiple answer exam, Taylor knew that he would fail it. And he hated failing exams.
He needed to know more about Jason so that he could pass. And the only way to find out more about Jason was by getting close to him.
He knew that it was probably not the proper thing to do, but he couldn’t help himself. He walked out of the gym and dialed Jason’s number on his phone, not quite sure knowing what he would say if Jason picked up. Luckily, he didn’t.
The phone sent him to voicemail after the first, connecting ring. Hello, this is Jason Mailer. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks!
Taylor suddenly felt a little worried. Leaving a voicemail was not likely to be a good idea. Wouldn’t Jason wonder where he had found his phone number? Would he have to explain himself? It wasn’t as if he could just talk to him. But he was already leaving a message, and hanging up after just breathing would probably come across as weird and threatening.
He had to make it seem like calling him was normal, even though Taylor knew that it wasn’t and Jason was very likely to think that it wasn’t, either.
“Hey, Jase,” he said, then felt like an idiot. The clock was ticking and he hadn’t found what to say. He should have prepared for this, but it had been years since he had felt like he had to prepare for a phone call. He was good at talking on the phone. At least that was what he had thought until right then, when he was speaking into his phone and fumbling, making an absolute fool of himself. “So, um, this is Taylor.”
He was about to express concern for Jason, ask him why he hadn’t shown up to class. But before he got a chance to do that, a female recorded voice interrupted him. If you would like to leave this message, hang up now. Otherwise, press —
Then his phone ran out of battery.
Chapter Nine
“Are you sure?”
The nurse that was standing in front of Jason seemed to be losing her patience with him, but he couldn’t stop asking her the same question. She was a scary woman, probably weighed twice what he did and looked like she never took any shit from anyone.
Once she gave him the all clear, he would be able to go home and forget. Well, no, he would be able to go home and clean. Then he would try to forget, at least. Blaine was supposed to get discharged and then Jason was supposed to be able to go home.
Go home, forget, get something else to drink.
Go home. Not be in the hospital anymore. Try to forget any of this ever happened.
But he couldn’t do that if Blaine wasn’t discharged and the nurse had just told him that Blaine wasn’t going to be discharged.
“Yes, Mr. Mailer, I’m sure.”
“But the -- but the doctor just came out here and said he was fine,” Jason protested.
“Yes,” the nurse replied. “Physically, Mr. Roth is fine. Like I said, there’s nothing else I’m able to disclose, but his emergency contact isn’t answering the phone and the hospital would be in your debt if you could please contact his next of kin. Are his parents living?”
“As -- yeah, as far as I’m aware,” Jason replied.
“Do you think you would be able to get in touch with them?”
“I can try,” Jason said. “But after that, I really need to go home.”
“I understand,” she said, sighing. “I don’t expect you to be responsible for Mr. Roth’s care in any way. But you’re his friend, right?”
“Yes?”
She raised her eyebrows, and Jason stopped feeling like he had a choice in how much he could share with her.
“I’m actually his ex,” he said. “He showed up at my house and apologized for being so shitty to me. Then I told him he could stay the night, because he looked absolutely terrible, and then when I got out of bed he had downed my bottle of antidepressants, which are SSRIs, in case you were wondering, and all of my alcohol. All of my alcohol. As if that wasn’t enough to kill him. He had to also inhale my one bottle of antidepressants left.”
“Oh, wow,” she replied. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It�
�s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I told you. I mean, I told them what he’d taken when they first brought him here, but I shouldn’t have told you everything about me and my stupid night. I’m sure you have better stuff to do with your time.”
“Mr. Mailer, I’m sure this is very difficult for you to do,” she replied, obviously choosing not to address anything that he had said. “But if you could please get in touch with any of his living relatives, that would be incredibly useful.”
“He’s an adult, can’t he be released on his own recognizance?”
“Mr. Mailer,” she repeated, an edge that he hadn’t heard creeping into her voice. “This is not a police station. It is a hospital. As a hospital, it is our duty to care for the people who come in here. You brought Mr. Roth into the hospital, so I’m sure that you must care about him, if only just as another human being. I have already gotten in touch with the social worker and one will be here as soon as possible, but the hospital is understaffed and it could take a while. When she gets here, I would like for us to have all our ducks in a row. I’m sure you understand that I have other patients to attend to, so I really do need to go. Look, Mr. Mailer --”
“Jason is fine,” he said in a thin voice.
“Jason,” she continued, her voice softening. “I understand that you’re angry with Mr. Roth. And you have every right to be angry. You did the right thing by bringing him when he was in a crisis situation and you need to continue living your life. The easiest way for you to do that is for you to find someone who can take care of him so that this doesn’t weigh on your conscience any longer. Does that make sense?”