backdrifter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
backdrifter) wrote2009-07-03 10:00 am
backdrifter) wrote2009-07-03 10:00 am
Entry tags:
83931
He never hated hospitals, really. But he’d never hoped so fervently before to not find himself in one.
The first thing he was aware of was the cheap hospital ceiling, a styrofoam and tin affair in repeating white tiles. In combination with the fluorescent lighting, it was blinding, at first, and he instinctively raised an arm against it, the bandage on his hand feeling scratchy against his forehead.
With the movement came an awareness that something was holding down his other arm, and he turned his head to look. “Horace?” he rasped.
Horace was sitting in a chair beside the bed, slumped over onto Respa’s arm and snoozing. At the sound of Respa’s voice, he woke with a start, blinking rapidly. “You’re awake,” Horace said, voice still gravelly with sleep. It was all he said.
Respa didn’t reply, his arm falling back to his side as he looked at Horace. Really looked. Horace’s blond brows were knit with concern, his mouth slightly ajar with anticipation. And in his eyes, Respa found—what?—more concern, yes, but there was something deeper in his eyes that Respa wasn’t sure he wanted to investigate just yet. It wasn’t lust anymore, that was for certain. He turned away.
“Talk to me,” Horace said gently. His hand squeezed Respa’s forearm.
Respa said nothing.
“Talk to me,” Horace repeated, his thumb now brushing the skin it hovered over. Respa shivered, and the hand withdrew as if burnt.
“Please,” Horace cajoled, “you have to talk to me.” His voice cracked, and Respa finally looked at him again. Horace was starting to cry, of all things. He was clearly making an effort not to—no matter how sentimental he got, Horace was still a man’s man—but the tears came anyway, gathering in little herds at the edge of his chin before making the leap to the linoleum-tiled floor.
“You don’t know what that was like,” Horace said, sniffling and pushing his fingers into the corner of his eye, “for me to come home and find you almost dead.”
Dead. Ryan was dead, that was right. That was why he was here. His heart had been lying dormant until then, and now it blazed awake, painful and angry. He bit his lower lip hard, his canines threatening to draw blood.
“I don’t know why you did this,” Horace said, “but whatever it was, it wasn’t worth it. Please, please believe me.”
Respa ignored him again.
Thankfully, the doctor came in then, bearing the prerequisite clipboard. He said something quietly to Horace, who nodded as he relinquished his seat to go wait outside. The doctor didn’t sit, though, choosing instead to watch Respa from the foot of the bed. This wasn’t Dr. Chenault; this doctor was black, with a recently waxed head and big arms. He gave Respa a brief smile. “Well, the good news is you’re alive,” the doctor said. “I’m Dr. Benedict.”
Respa snorted, but Dr. Benedict seemed unfazed. He flipped through the pages on the clipboard, as doctors often did. “It says you were last in St. Luke’s for some fractured bones and lacerations, and you a Dr. Chenault. Is that right?” Respa nodded slowly, unsure of what the doctor thought he was accomplishing, considering he obviously had the information right in front of him.
Finally the doctor sighed, rubbing his left temple. “I’m going to be honest with you, Mr. Wilkins. You did a lot of damage here. You didn’t come close to death, but we did have to pump your stomach, as well as pull all that glass out of your hand. Your knees are just going to be scabby.”
Dr. Benedict took the seat beside the bed. “A psychologist is going to be coming in later today to evaluate whether we need to place you on suicide watch, but if I had to guess, I would guess that her answer will be yes. What you did to yourself—and to your partner—was serious.”
“Partner—!“
“If you’re placed on suicide watch, Mr. Wilkins, then I can guarantee a few things. You will be placed in the psychiatric ward. You’ll still have a few freedoms, but otherwise you will be checked in on every 15 minutes, and if you wish to leave the ward for any reason, then you will be escorted by staff—and only if they or I approve.” The doctor leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers loosely knit between them. “Your life is not something to be taken lightly.”
“Uh-huh.” They were the first words he’d said in what felt like days, and his throat protested in kind.
Dr. Benedict sighed again, seeming to realize that he wasn’t going to get much out of this patient. He pushed himself upright, paused at the door to bid him goodbye, and left him alone.
Beyond the glass door of the hospital room, Horace sat curled up in a waiting room chair, knees hugged tight to his chest, heels barely gripping the edge of the seat. He watched Respa with puffy, red eyes, and the sight of someone grieving over his near-death unnerved Respa too much. He watched the ceiling in turn, at least when Horace was looking. Sometimes Horace would start to uncurl, would walk to the door to Respa’s room and rest his fingertips on the doorknob, but a nurse always came along and told him to either sit down or go home.
The psychologist came later that day, as promised. She was stern in hunter green wool and tortoiseshell glasses, as if trying to cancel out her obvious youth. Fresh out of school, Respa guessed. She tucked her wavy brown hair behind her ear as she sat down, the only sign of nervousness she let slip. “I’m Dr. Goldfarb,” she said, holding out her hand. When Respa only looked at it, she withdrew it as if she’d never offered it at all, and scribbled something quickly on her legal pad.
“You can call me Dina, if that would make you more comfortable,” she tried again. “Is there anything you’d prefer to be called?”
Respa watched her for a moment, taking in her body language. There was such raw earnesty in her eyes, and such a drive to succeed. To fix him. He was a project. He chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, and then finally croaked, “My name is Respa.”
Another quick scribble. The psychologist—Dina—smiled briefly at him before leaning back in the chair. “Okay then, Respa. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
“About myself?” he asked, surprised. He’d been expecting, well—
“You were expecting some lecture like I bet Dr. Benedict gave you, weren’t you?” Dina said with a wry smile. “I’m not here to lecture you, Respa. I’m here to listen to you, and help you.”
“I guess.” A little miffed that she’d read him so easily.
“Anyway, yes. A little bit about yourself, Respa.” Her writing hand twirled her pen upright, ready for more scribbling.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said, looking at the ceiling again.
“Well, let’s start with the basics. Your name is Respa, now how old are you?”
“Doesn’t it say on the little chart thingy you got from Dr. Benedict?” he asked, nodding at it on the side table.
“It does, but I didn’t really look at it,” she said with a shrug. “I’d rather hear it from you.”
“I’m twenty-four,” Respa said, hardly believing his own words. “I’m twenty-four years old, and I was born on April twelfth, 1988. I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I was sixteen, and on this last birthday, I think I was homeless, actually.”
“You think you were homeless?” Scribble, scribble.
“I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly paying attention to a calendar while I was out on the streets,” he snapped. “Does it matter? I know I’m twenty-four, okay?”
“Calm down,” Dina said, writing yet another note. It must have been shorthand, because each return to the page seemed like she’d made only three or four marks. “I’m not judging you, Respa.” She looked up. “What about your parents?”
He stiffened. “What about them?”
“Well, are you in touch with either of them? Where are they?”
“You’re awfully fucking nosy.” He made a point of turning on his side, back to the psychologist.
“I take it you’re not close with your parents.” That fucking pencil scratching the paper again. He was going to eat that pencil and then spit the splinters out at her.
“Um, no, I’m really not,” he said, voice mocking. “Didn’t they put that in your little doss—dossy—”
“Dossier, and no. I don’t know, actually, because I want to make a fresh start with you, Respa. No preconceived notions.” No pencil this time.
“Well then,” he said, sitting up to look at her again, “you should know that my father shot me when I was eighteen, and I have no clue where my mother is. She could be dead, she could be in a loony bin somewhere. She was out of her head the last time I saw her, and that was six years ago. So no, I’m not fucking ‘close’ to them. Either of them.”
“Ah.” There went the pencil again. “Do you have any other family?”
It was such an innocent question, and he knew it was. He knew it was stupid to get mad at the poor woman for asking him about his relatives—something other people could do without problem—but he didn’t want to tell her about Tanya, about Kathy, didn’t want anybody to know because in return, he didn’t want Kathy ever finding out he existed. Her piece of shit father.
“No,” he said at last. “None.”
That one lie set him up for a host of others, and he wasn’t inclined to correct it. The hunger in Dina’s eyes to fix him never dimmed; in fact, it only brightened with each session. He told her nothing about Ryan, and in fact told her his life story as if Ryan had never existed. According to Dina’s notes, Respa had had brief and altogether unsuccessful relationships with scene girls in high school, and he’d tried to kill himself out of a feeling of uselessness (which wasn’t entirely untrue). Tanya didn’t figure into the picture, either.
Dr. Benedict told him, after a few months, that things were looking up, and he would probably be going home soon. “Dr. Goldfarb says she likes your progress,” he said. Of course she liked his progress. For Dina Goldfarb, he’d perfected the art of the “sincere” smile, learned that she found it encouraging when he segued into trivial topics of conversation.
But Ryan’s death was still constantly on the news, still recent and bizarre enough that the media had built a one-ring circus around it, and the aides who checked in on him every fifteen minutes thought having the news on would keep him distracted. Every mention of his name, every flash of his mug shot was another slice out of his self. It was only a sense of—responsibility?—to Horace that kept him from making a second attempt on his own life. Guilt too, maybe.
Horace. Horace spent every free minute he had at the hospital. When he wasn’t allowed in the room, he sat outside and watched Respa. Otherwise, he sat at his bedside and talked to him about mundane things like who had said what really dumb thing at work, all the while holding Respa’s hand. Respa let him.
On the day of his release from the hospital, he sat in the corner while Dr. Benedict showed Horace the bill, and told him that Respa had further—and mandatory—sessions with Dr. Goldfarb. Watching Horace offer up his credit card for sacrifice hurt his pride; he held a child’s status, financially speaking. It hit him, too, that his attempted suicide had, in the end, made him even more of a burden than he had ever been before. There was no Dr. Chenault now to swoop in and sign away his bills.
If Horace was bothered by the enormous charge on his credit card statement, though, he never showed it. He signed the bottom of the receipt with a flourish, and then walked over briskly, holding out his hand with a big smile. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on.”
So Respa took the hand, and walked home without letting go, either. The apartment was hardly different than he remembered; there was no duffel bag packed with his things waiting by the door. In fact, with the exception of the clothes Horace had picked out for him to wear out of the hospital, his drawer in Horace’s dresser was exactly the same.
“My stuff’s still here,” he said, blinking slowly at Horace.
“Of course it is, where would it go?” Horace asked, already disappeared into the kitchen. “Clothes don’t just pick up and walk away.”
He came into the kitchen, and simply leaned against the doorframe, looking at the linoleum. There was no sign of the shattered French drinking glasses, or the broken wine bottle. Nothing to tell the casual viewer that someone had made a halfway successful try at killing themselves here.
“I’m sorry about your glasses,” Respa said, still staring at the cream-colored linoleum. “I know you liked them.”
Horace had been washing dishes, and now his shoulders tensed, drawing back as the rest of his body stilled. “My drinking glasses?”
“Are you still mad? I’m really sorry about them,” Respa said, wrapping his forearms around his waist in an unconsciously protective movement.
“I’m not mad about the drinking glasses,” Horace said. Still not moving.
“And, um, I know the wine was expensive. I’m sorry.”
“You think this is about a bottle of wine?” Horace whispered, still staring intently at the semi-gloss wall. “You think I’m mad, Respa, over a bottle of Yellowtail?”
“I…maybe? I don’t know?” He dug his fingers into the sides of his ribs nervously. “Are you sure it isn’t the glasses? Did I knock down something else?”
“You stupid fuck!” Horace suddenly howled, whipping around to pull Respa’s hands away from his elbows, to hold them aloft in viselike fists. “You think I give a shit about fucking glassware, about a bottle of wine? There are thousands, fucking millions of those things! I couldn’t care less! I can always go out and buy another motherfucking set of drinking glasses, Rez, but I can’t buy another you!”
Horace panted as he glared, his knuckles whitening around Respa’s wrists. The tips of Respa’s fingers tingled.
“Sure you could,” Respa said softly. “Try any street corner in Hell’s Kitchen.”
The open palm that struck his face came as a surprise, and somewhere in the back of his brain it registered that it was an oddly feminine move coming from Horace, but foremost in his thoughts was that it hurt. He’d grown strong enough that a slap wasn’t enough to send him to the floor, but his head whipped to the side, and he staggered for a moment.
“Stop with this self-pitying bullshit!” Horace shouted before Respa could even recover. Horace forced him upright by the shoulders, and then gripped the sides of his head, so Respa couldn’t escape his gaze. “Wahh, I used to sell my body, wahh, I think so little of myself! Wahh, wahh, wahh! Big fucking deal!”
“It’s not—”
“Shut up! Just shut up, Respa, I’m so fucking tired of it! Sometimes I swear to god, it’s like you want to just sit in the past and wallow in it! That is not what is happening right now!”
Horace released his head, panting, but never once did he break their eye contact; it was Respa who looked away.
“I want you to think about that,” Horace said, crossing his arms as he stared Respa down. “Think about what I just said to you, like really think.” He uncrossed his arms, and moved toward the bedroom. “I’m going to bed.”
Respa perched himself on the edge of the couch as Horace left the room, feeling for the first time in a long time like an intruder. He drummed his fingers nervously on the cushions at first, looking around, and then he reached for the throw blanket folded on the corner of the couch.
“What’re you doing?” Horace asked, popping his head out into the hallway.
“Going to sleep?” Respa guessed, since he didn’t know what else Horace could think he was doing.
“So come to bed,” Horace said, nodding to the room behind him. “Come on.”
“But I thought—”
“Just because we had a confrontation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly an exile, Rez. Come to bed.”
So Respa followed him in and pulled on pajamas, still suspicious as he sat on his side of the bed.
“Relax,” Horace said, waving him down onto the mattress. “Come on, I wanna get some sleep tonight, and you acting like a wild animal is not contributing to that.”
Horace turned off the bedside light—click-click—and Respa obeyed silently, although he yelped in surprise when a strong arm flung itself around his midsection and pressed him close.
“I don’t have much left, Respa,” Horace whispered into the dark at the nape of his neck. “I’ve got you, and not a whole lot else. Think about that, at least.”
The first thing he was aware of was the cheap hospital ceiling, a styrofoam and tin affair in repeating white tiles. In combination with the fluorescent lighting, it was blinding, at first, and he instinctively raised an arm against it, the bandage on his hand feeling scratchy against his forehead.
With the movement came an awareness that something was holding down his other arm, and he turned his head to look. “Horace?” he rasped.
Horace was sitting in a chair beside the bed, slumped over onto Respa’s arm and snoozing. At the sound of Respa’s voice, he woke with a start, blinking rapidly. “You’re awake,” Horace said, voice still gravelly with sleep. It was all he said.
Respa didn’t reply, his arm falling back to his side as he looked at Horace. Really looked. Horace’s blond brows were knit with concern, his mouth slightly ajar with anticipation. And in his eyes, Respa found—what?—more concern, yes, but there was something deeper in his eyes that Respa wasn’t sure he wanted to investigate just yet. It wasn’t lust anymore, that was for certain. He turned away.
“Talk to me,” Horace said gently. His hand squeezed Respa’s forearm.
Respa said nothing.
“Talk to me,” Horace repeated, his thumb now brushing the skin it hovered over. Respa shivered, and the hand withdrew as if burnt.
“Please,” Horace cajoled, “you have to talk to me.” His voice cracked, and Respa finally looked at him again. Horace was starting to cry, of all things. He was clearly making an effort not to—no matter how sentimental he got, Horace was still a man’s man—but the tears came anyway, gathering in little herds at the edge of his chin before making the leap to the linoleum-tiled floor.
“You don’t know what that was like,” Horace said, sniffling and pushing his fingers into the corner of his eye, “for me to come home and find you almost dead.”
Dead. Ryan was dead, that was right. That was why he was here. His heart had been lying dormant until then, and now it blazed awake, painful and angry. He bit his lower lip hard, his canines threatening to draw blood.
“I don’t know why you did this,” Horace said, “but whatever it was, it wasn’t worth it. Please, please believe me.”
Respa ignored him again.
Thankfully, the doctor came in then, bearing the prerequisite clipboard. He said something quietly to Horace, who nodded as he relinquished his seat to go wait outside. The doctor didn’t sit, though, choosing instead to watch Respa from the foot of the bed. This wasn’t Dr. Chenault; this doctor was black, with a recently waxed head and big arms. He gave Respa a brief smile. “Well, the good news is you’re alive,” the doctor said. “I’m Dr. Benedict.”
Respa snorted, but Dr. Benedict seemed unfazed. He flipped through the pages on the clipboard, as doctors often did. “It says you were last in St. Luke’s for some fractured bones and lacerations, and you a Dr. Chenault. Is that right?” Respa nodded slowly, unsure of what the doctor thought he was accomplishing, considering he obviously had the information right in front of him.
Finally the doctor sighed, rubbing his left temple. “I’m going to be honest with you, Mr. Wilkins. You did a lot of damage here. You didn’t come close to death, but we did have to pump your stomach, as well as pull all that glass out of your hand. Your knees are just going to be scabby.”
Dr. Benedict took the seat beside the bed. “A psychologist is going to be coming in later today to evaluate whether we need to place you on suicide watch, but if I had to guess, I would guess that her answer will be yes. What you did to yourself—and to your partner—was serious.”
“Partner—!“
“If you’re placed on suicide watch, Mr. Wilkins, then I can guarantee a few things. You will be placed in the psychiatric ward. You’ll still have a few freedoms, but otherwise you will be checked in on every 15 minutes, and if you wish to leave the ward for any reason, then you will be escorted by staff—and only if they or I approve.” The doctor leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers loosely knit between them. “Your life is not something to be taken lightly.”
“Uh-huh.” They were the first words he’d said in what felt like days, and his throat protested in kind.
Dr. Benedict sighed again, seeming to realize that he wasn’t going to get much out of this patient. He pushed himself upright, paused at the door to bid him goodbye, and left him alone.
Beyond the glass door of the hospital room, Horace sat curled up in a waiting room chair, knees hugged tight to his chest, heels barely gripping the edge of the seat. He watched Respa with puffy, red eyes, and the sight of someone grieving over his near-death unnerved Respa too much. He watched the ceiling in turn, at least when Horace was looking. Sometimes Horace would start to uncurl, would walk to the door to Respa’s room and rest his fingertips on the doorknob, but a nurse always came along and told him to either sit down or go home.
The psychologist came later that day, as promised. She was stern in hunter green wool and tortoiseshell glasses, as if trying to cancel out her obvious youth. Fresh out of school, Respa guessed. She tucked her wavy brown hair behind her ear as she sat down, the only sign of nervousness she let slip. “I’m Dr. Goldfarb,” she said, holding out her hand. When Respa only looked at it, she withdrew it as if she’d never offered it at all, and scribbled something quickly on her legal pad.
“You can call me Dina, if that would make you more comfortable,” she tried again. “Is there anything you’d prefer to be called?”
Respa watched her for a moment, taking in her body language. There was such raw earnesty in her eyes, and such a drive to succeed. To fix him. He was a project. He chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, and then finally croaked, “My name is Respa.”
Another quick scribble. The psychologist—Dina—smiled briefly at him before leaning back in the chair. “Okay then, Respa. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
“About myself?” he asked, surprised. He’d been expecting, well—
“You were expecting some lecture like I bet Dr. Benedict gave you, weren’t you?” Dina said with a wry smile. “I’m not here to lecture you, Respa. I’m here to listen to you, and help you.”
“I guess.” A little miffed that she’d read him so easily.
“Anyway, yes. A little bit about yourself, Respa.” Her writing hand twirled her pen upright, ready for more scribbling.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said, looking at the ceiling again.
“Well, let’s start with the basics. Your name is Respa, now how old are you?”
“Doesn’t it say on the little chart thingy you got from Dr. Benedict?” he asked, nodding at it on the side table.
“It does, but I didn’t really look at it,” she said with a shrug. “I’d rather hear it from you.”
“I’m twenty-four,” Respa said, hardly believing his own words. “I’m twenty-four years old, and I was born on April twelfth, 1988. I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I was sixteen, and on this last birthday, I think I was homeless, actually.”
“You think you were homeless?” Scribble, scribble.
“I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly paying attention to a calendar while I was out on the streets,” he snapped. “Does it matter? I know I’m twenty-four, okay?”
“Calm down,” Dina said, writing yet another note. It must have been shorthand, because each return to the page seemed like she’d made only three or four marks. “I’m not judging you, Respa.” She looked up. “What about your parents?”
He stiffened. “What about them?”
“Well, are you in touch with either of them? Where are they?”
“You’re awfully fucking nosy.” He made a point of turning on his side, back to the psychologist.
“I take it you’re not close with your parents.” That fucking pencil scratching the paper again. He was going to eat that pencil and then spit the splinters out at her.
“Um, no, I’m really not,” he said, voice mocking. “Didn’t they put that in your little doss—dossy—”
“Dossier, and no. I don’t know, actually, because I want to make a fresh start with you, Respa. No preconceived notions.” No pencil this time.
“Well then,” he said, sitting up to look at her again, “you should know that my father shot me when I was eighteen, and I have no clue where my mother is. She could be dead, she could be in a loony bin somewhere. She was out of her head the last time I saw her, and that was six years ago. So no, I’m not fucking ‘close’ to them. Either of them.”
“Ah.” There went the pencil again. “Do you have any other family?”
It was such an innocent question, and he knew it was. He knew it was stupid to get mad at the poor woman for asking him about his relatives—something other people could do without problem—but he didn’t want to tell her about Tanya, about Kathy, didn’t want anybody to know because in return, he didn’t want Kathy ever finding out he existed. Her piece of shit father.
“No,” he said at last. “None.”
That one lie set him up for a host of others, and he wasn’t inclined to correct it. The hunger in Dina’s eyes to fix him never dimmed; in fact, it only brightened with each session. He told her nothing about Ryan, and in fact told her his life story as if Ryan had never existed. According to Dina’s notes, Respa had had brief and altogether unsuccessful relationships with scene girls in high school, and he’d tried to kill himself out of a feeling of uselessness (which wasn’t entirely untrue). Tanya didn’t figure into the picture, either.
Dr. Benedict told him, after a few months, that things were looking up, and he would probably be going home soon. “Dr. Goldfarb says she likes your progress,” he said. Of course she liked his progress. For Dina Goldfarb, he’d perfected the art of the “sincere” smile, learned that she found it encouraging when he segued into trivial topics of conversation.
But Ryan’s death was still constantly on the news, still recent and bizarre enough that the media had built a one-ring circus around it, and the aides who checked in on him every fifteen minutes thought having the news on would keep him distracted. Every mention of his name, every flash of his mug shot was another slice out of his self. It was only a sense of—responsibility?—to Horace that kept him from making a second attempt on his own life. Guilt too, maybe.
Horace. Horace spent every free minute he had at the hospital. When he wasn’t allowed in the room, he sat outside and watched Respa. Otherwise, he sat at his bedside and talked to him about mundane things like who had said what really dumb thing at work, all the while holding Respa’s hand. Respa let him.
On the day of his release from the hospital, he sat in the corner while Dr. Benedict showed Horace the bill, and told him that Respa had further—and mandatory—sessions with Dr. Goldfarb. Watching Horace offer up his credit card for sacrifice hurt his pride; he held a child’s status, financially speaking. It hit him, too, that his attempted suicide had, in the end, made him even more of a burden than he had ever been before. There was no Dr. Chenault now to swoop in and sign away his bills.
If Horace was bothered by the enormous charge on his credit card statement, though, he never showed it. He signed the bottom of the receipt with a flourish, and then walked over briskly, holding out his hand with a big smile. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on.”
So Respa took the hand, and walked home without letting go, either. The apartment was hardly different than he remembered; there was no duffel bag packed with his things waiting by the door. In fact, with the exception of the clothes Horace had picked out for him to wear out of the hospital, his drawer in Horace’s dresser was exactly the same.
“My stuff’s still here,” he said, blinking slowly at Horace.
“Of course it is, where would it go?” Horace asked, already disappeared into the kitchen. “Clothes don’t just pick up and walk away.”
He came into the kitchen, and simply leaned against the doorframe, looking at the linoleum. There was no sign of the shattered French drinking glasses, or the broken wine bottle. Nothing to tell the casual viewer that someone had made a halfway successful try at killing themselves here.
“I’m sorry about your glasses,” Respa said, still staring at the cream-colored linoleum. “I know you liked them.”
Horace had been washing dishes, and now his shoulders tensed, drawing back as the rest of his body stilled. “My drinking glasses?”
“Are you still mad? I’m really sorry about them,” Respa said, wrapping his forearms around his waist in an unconsciously protective movement.
“I’m not mad about the drinking glasses,” Horace said. Still not moving.
“And, um, I know the wine was expensive. I’m sorry.”
“You think this is about a bottle of wine?” Horace whispered, still staring intently at the semi-gloss wall. “You think I’m mad, Respa, over a bottle of Yellowtail?”
“I…maybe? I don’t know?” He dug his fingers into the sides of his ribs nervously. “Are you sure it isn’t the glasses? Did I knock down something else?”
“You stupid fuck!” Horace suddenly howled, whipping around to pull Respa’s hands away from his elbows, to hold them aloft in viselike fists. “You think I give a shit about fucking glassware, about a bottle of wine? There are thousands, fucking millions of those things! I couldn’t care less! I can always go out and buy another motherfucking set of drinking glasses, Rez, but I can’t buy another you!”
Horace panted as he glared, his knuckles whitening around Respa’s wrists. The tips of Respa’s fingers tingled.
“Sure you could,” Respa said softly. “Try any street corner in Hell’s Kitchen.”
The open palm that struck his face came as a surprise, and somewhere in the back of his brain it registered that it was an oddly feminine move coming from Horace, but foremost in his thoughts was that it hurt. He’d grown strong enough that a slap wasn’t enough to send him to the floor, but his head whipped to the side, and he staggered for a moment.
“Stop with this self-pitying bullshit!” Horace shouted before Respa could even recover. Horace forced him upright by the shoulders, and then gripped the sides of his head, so Respa couldn’t escape his gaze. “Wahh, I used to sell my body, wahh, I think so little of myself! Wahh, wahh, wahh! Big fucking deal!”
“It’s not—”
“Shut up! Just shut up, Respa, I’m so fucking tired of it! Sometimes I swear to god, it’s like you want to just sit in the past and wallow in it! That is not what is happening right now!”
Horace released his head, panting, but never once did he break their eye contact; it was Respa who looked away.
“I want you to think about that,” Horace said, crossing his arms as he stared Respa down. “Think about what I just said to you, like really think.” He uncrossed his arms, and moved toward the bedroom. “I’m going to bed.”
Respa perched himself on the edge of the couch as Horace left the room, feeling for the first time in a long time like an intruder. He drummed his fingers nervously on the cushions at first, looking around, and then he reached for the throw blanket folded on the corner of the couch.
“What’re you doing?” Horace asked, popping his head out into the hallway.
“Going to sleep?” Respa guessed, since he didn’t know what else Horace could think he was doing.
“So come to bed,” Horace said, nodding to the room behind him. “Come on.”
“But I thought—”
“Just because we had a confrontation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly an exile, Rez. Come to bed.”
So Respa followed him in and pulled on pajamas, still suspicious as he sat on his side of the bed.
“Relax,” Horace said, waving him down onto the mattress. “Come on, I wanna get some sleep tonight, and you acting like a wild animal is not contributing to that.”
Horace turned off the bedside light—click-click—and Respa obeyed silently, although he yelped in surprise when a strong arm flung itself around his midsection and pressed him close.
“I don’t have much left, Respa,” Horace whispered into the dark at the nape of his neck. “I’ve got you, and not a whole lot else. Think about that, at least.”