Chapter 13: The Four O'Clock Check
The clock ticked over to four and Niles didn't need it. His body had become a clock. He peeled his palm off Gavin's hand, worked the dead feeling back into his fingers, and fitted the thermometer under Gavin's tongue.
Gavin's mouth opened for it without waking. Niles counted out the seconds, lips moving, and the screen blinked and said one-oh-three point two.
Falling. He sat with it a minute, reading the number again as if it might change for someone who stared. One-oh-three point two. Down a full point from the peak. He let one long breath out through his nose and put the thermometer back on the nightstand, next to the glass, next to the basin with its gray slush of melting ice.
The hand next. He folded back the edge of the gauze in the amber dark. The stitches still clean, no red in the seams, but the swelling had gone down a shade too, or he wanted it to have. He pressed two fingers lightly alongside the wound and the heat there answered him, stubborn but not climbing. Holding. Okay. Holding was a number he could work with.
He refilled the basin from the bathroom tap, dumped the slush, cracked fresh cubes from Hank's bunker tray into it. The ice rattled loud in the sleeping house and he winced and stood still, listening. Gavin's breathing kept its slow shallow rhythm. Downstairs a bottle rolled and settled.
Back in the bedroom he wrung the cloth and laid it across Gavin's forehead, then a second one down the side of the neck. Gavin hissed at it even asleep, brow folding, and turned his face into the pillow away from the cold.
"I know," Niles said. "Sorry."
He sat on the floor with his back to the bed frame. His arm went up over the edge out of habit now, and his hand found Gavin's wrist, just rested there, two fingers where the pulse ran. Fast but not running. He counted it against his watch and wrote the number into the dark behind his eyes, next to the temperature, next to the four o'clock.
The window had gone from black to charcoal. An inch open, letting in the smell of wet asphalt and the first gray hint of the day. His eyes burned. He'd slept maybe forty minutes total, dozed against the frame, and every doze had ended with his hand twitching on Gavin's skin to check the heat. Some kind of alarm built into it. He didn't remember installing it.
The hour went around. At five he took the temperature again and it said one-oh-two point nine, and the falling felt real now, a slope instead of a trick. He wrote it into the dark. He changed both cloths. He made Gavin drink, holding the glass to his mouth, and Gavin swallowed twice in his sleep and twice more half-awake, eyes cracked open and unseeing, fixed on the ceiling somewhere beyond it.
At a quarter past five Gavin surfaced more than he had all night.
It started as muttering, the usual low water over rocks, the bridge, the count. Then it shifted. His hand turned over in Niles's grip and closed around it, weak as a bird, and his eyes half opened, glassy and aimed loosely at the dark.
"Niles."
"I'm here."
"You remember the deal." The words came out soft and slurred, steam off a fever. "Die young. Together. No funerals. Nobody buries anybody."
"I remember the deal."
"Because if I go first." Gavin's mouth kept moving, slow, drifting. "You take the boat. You buy the boat. I'm not paying for a boat, I'm dying, it's the one perk."
"You're not going first."
"It's in the contract." His eyes slid toward Niles, unfocused, but there was something behind the glass now, some part of him listening from under the fever. "You swore. On the bridge. You put your hand on the whiskey, you swore it."
Niles looked at him. At the flushed face, the sweat-damp hair stuck to his forehead, the bandaged hand holding his like it was afraid of the dark. The wire in his chest had been pulled tight for twenty hours and he was tired all the way down to the bottom of himself, and raw, scraped open, and the truth was sitting right there in his mouth where the worry had chased it all night.
"Yeah," he said. "I swore it."
"Say it."
"Gavin."
"Say it out loud. I can't," a breath, "I can't hold it by myself right now. Say it."
Niles leaned in close, close enough that the heat came off Gavin's skin into his own face, and he said it, quiet, into the amber dark. "Die young together. Nobody buries anybody. You buy the boat."
"There it is." Gavin's mouth pulled into the ghost of a smile. "Witnessed. The dark witnessed it."
"The dark's got nothing else to do."
"You sound like hell, Niles."
"You look worse."
"Good," Gavin murmured, and his eyes closed, and his grip stayed. "Even."
Niles stayed where he was, leaned over the bed, and didn't move off it for a long minute. Then he eased back down to the floor, kept the hand, and watched the window go from charcoal to gray. The fever had come down under one-oh-two when he checked at six. He checked the hand again and the swelling had loosened, the skin around the stitches no longer shining. He sat with his back against the frame and let his eyes half close and did not let them close all the way.
The cloths went on and came off. The ice went gray and he changed it. At some point the birds started up outside, ordinary and stupid, and the light through the curtain gap went from gray to pale yellow, and lay in a thin stripe across the foot of the bed.
At ten past seven a car came up the street slow.
Niles knew the engine before he knew why. Low rumble, a muffler that needed work, braking early. It pulled in and stopped outside the house and the engine shut off, and no door opened for a minute, just a shape sitting behind the wheel in the windshield's pale reflection.
Niles stood up. His knee cracked. He went to the window and looked down through the inch of gap and there was Hank's car, and there was Hank, gray hair, both hands on the wheel, staring at the front of the house like it might explain itself.
Nobody had called him since three thirty yesterday afternoon. Nobody had said come.
There was a paper bag on the passenger seat. Niles could see it from here, the corner of it, ginger ale bottles standing up out of the top.
Gavin shifted on the pillow behind him and mumbled something about the count, and Niles looked back at the bed, at the whole wrecked night of it, and then down again at the car.
Hank's door opened. He got out slow, one hand on the roof, and stood there a second in the cold morning air with the paper bag in his fist, looking up at the window. He didn't wave. He didn't knock.
He just started up the front steps.
Niles heard the door. Hank had a key from some months back, an arrangement nobody discussed, and it turned in the lock with the same unhurried scrape it always did. The floorboards gave him away, hall to kitchen, kitchen to stairs, a man climbing them slower than he needed to because he was reading the house.
Niles met him at the bedroom door.
"He's down to one-oh-two point one," Niles said. Kept his voice low. "Vomiting stopped around four. Ginger ale's staying. He said maybe ten words since five."
Hank stood there in the hall with the paper bag against his hip. His jacket was buttoned wrong, one side hanging longer than the other, and his eyes were rimmed the particular red of a man who'd been drinking until the numbers made sense and then stopped. He looked past Niles into the room, at the basin, the cloths, the thermometer on the nightstand, the shape of Gavin under the blanket.
"Who called you," Niles said.
"Nobody called me."
"Then how."
Hank lifted the bag slightly, a shrug hiding inside it. "Your last call. You hung up and I sat there doing the math. Sewn hand, hundred-and-four fever, no hospital. I figured you'd either call at four and wake me, or you wouldn't call at four because you were past calling." He stepped past Niles into the room, uninvited, and set the bag on the dresser. Ginger ale, two bottles. Crackers. A jar of honey. A thermometer, new, still in its plastic shell. "So I came for the version where you don't call."
"You drove at seven in the morning."
"I've driven at worse hours for worse reasons." Hank was already looking at Gavin's face, the flushed cheeks, the sweat-damp hair. He put the back of his hand against Gavin's forehead the same way Niles had twenty hours ago, and left it there, and Gavin stirred under it without waking.
"Careful," Niles said, and heard himself, and didn't take it back.
Hank took his hand away. He pulled the desk chair around with one foot and sat down in it, joints cracking, and looked at the room properly. The gray water. The towels. The trash can dragged to the bedside. He didn't say anything about any of it.
"You did the ice," he said.
"Found the trays."
"That was my ice."
"It was a good ice."
Hank almost smiled. It came apart before it finished. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and studied Gavin's bandaged hand where it lay on the blanket. "Show me the stitches."
Niles folded the gauze back without being asked. The swelling was down, the skin gone from shining to merely tight, and Hank looked at it for a long time with his jaw working.
"No red," he said finally. "No streaks going up the arm?"
"Checked at midnight and at four. Nothing."
"Smell it."
"What?"
"Lean in. Infection's got a smell. Sweet, wrong. You'll know it if it's there." Niles hesitated, then did it, and there was nothing, just sweat and the clean chemical ghost of the antiseptic from Friday. He shook his head. Hank sat back. "Then you held it. You held the whole night on ice and warm water and stubbornness." He looked at Niles then, really looked, at the twelve hours and the burned eyes and the hands that hadn't stopped working since yesterday afternoon. "You look like you got hit by it too."
"I'm fine."
"Sure. You've got forty minutes of sleep in you, maybe."
"Thirty-eight. I counted."
Hank reached into the bag and came out with the new thermometer, tore the plastic off with his thumbnail, and handed it over without a word about the old one. Then the crackers, which he opened and set on the nightstand within Gavin's reach. Then he sat back and did nothing at all, which for Hank was a whole speech.
Gavin surfaced around eight.
It came in slowly, the muttering drying up, the breathing changing gear. His eyes opened partway and found the ceiling, then traveled, and stopped on Hank in the desk chair.
"The hell," Gavin said. His voice was a ruin. "You live here now?"
"House call." Hank leaned forward. "How's the head?"
"Like a truck parked on it." Gavin's gaze moved to Niles on the floor, then back. "Who let you in."
"Your boyfriend's got a face that answers phones. He just doesn't use it." Hank stood, took the ginger ale bottle, twisted the cap off, and held it out. "Flat. Been open since six. Drink some."
Gavin looked at the bottle. Looked at Niles. Niles nodded, once. Gavin took it with his good hand, drank a mouthful, and his throat worked and nothing came back up, and the relief in the room was so plain it was almost embarrassing.
"Sit him up a little," Hank said. "Get a cracker in him when he can. Half. Then sleep." He was moving while he talked, gathering the damp towels, bundling them under one arm with the competence of a man who'd done this in worse rooms than this one. "I'll run these down. There's soup in the car, the kind in a can, the only kind worth a damn."
"You went shopping," Niles said.
"I went to the store at six a.m. like a functioning member of society. Don't tell anyone." He stopped at the door, towels under his arm, and looked back at the bed. Gavin's eyes were already closing again, bottle resting against his chest, crackers untouched but near. "You did good, kid," Hank said, and it wasn't clear which of them he meant, and he didn't stay to clarify.
Niles listened to him go down the stairs. The kitchen tap ran. A can opened. Ordinary sounds, the house filling up with morning around the sickroom like water around a stone.
Gavin's fingers found his again from under the blanket.
"You called him," Gavin said, eyes shut.
"I didn't call him."
"He just knew."
"He just knew." Niles turned the hand over, careful of the stitches, and held it. "Go to sleep. Half a cracker first."
"Slave driver." A pause, breath catching on the fever's last edge. "You're both still here."
"Yeah," Niles said. "We're both still here."
Gavin got his half a cracker down. It took him four minutes and most of his dignity, chewing like his jaw was borrowed, and then his eyes shut and his breathing stretched out long and even, and the bottle tipped empty against his chest. Niles slid it free and set it on the nightstand.
Downstairs, pans. Hank moving around the kitchen like he owned it, which in some sense he did.
Niles sat on the floor with his back to the bed frame and did the arithmetic one more time, because the arithmetic was the only thing holding him up. One-oh-two point one. Ginger ale down. Cracker down. Vomiting stopped. The hand clean. Every number pointed the right way, and every number was a wall he'd been leaning on for twenty hours, and now the wall was gone and there was nothing between him and the floor.
Hank came back up with a bowl on a saucer and stopped in the doorway.
"He's out," Niles said.
"Then you're done for a minute." Hank set the bowl on the dresser and pulled the desk chair around. "Sit. Not the floor. The chair."
"I'm fine here."
"When's the last time you slept?"
"Thirty-eight minutes."
"That's not sleep, that's blinking." Hank lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, careful of Gavin's legs, and took the wrist Niles had been holding. Checked the pulse with two fingers, unhurried. "Slow. Good and slow. Go on. I've got the watch."
"You don't know the schedule."
"Hourly checks, ice if it climbs, small sips. You said it out loud six times since I got here." Hank's thumb stayed on Gavin's wrist. "I've got it. Move."
And it was the move that did it. The word, plain, one syllable, permission shaped like an order. Niles stood up and his knees didn't want to and he stood anyway, and he made it two steps toward the door and then his chest just quit on him.
It came out of nowhere and it came out of everywhere at once. His breath went ragged, then went, and he put a hand out and caught the door frame because the room had started to tilt the way it tilts for the sick and not for him, and the first sound he made wasn't a word, just a crack, something splitting down the middle.
"Hey." Hank was up. "Hey, hey. Easy."
"I'm," Niles said, and couldn't finish it, and didn't know what the end of the sentence was anyway. His shoulders had begun to shake. He got both hands on the door frame and hung there like the frame was the only thing in the house that hadn't been up all night.
Hank didn't grab him. He came close and stood, near enough that Niles could feel the warmth off him, and waited.
"Twenty hours," Niles got out. His voice had come apart, into pieces, low and ugly. "Twenty hours and I kept saying one-oh-three point two, one-oh-three point six, like numbers, like it was a count, like it was product, and the whole time I was." His breath hitched hard. "He was so hot, Hank. His hand was so hot. And he kept saying the oath. He kept making me say it."
"Yeah."
"Nobody told me what to do if he didn't come down. I had a plan for if it went up. I didn't have a plan for losing."
"You didn't lose."
"I know I didn't lose." Niles dragged a wrist across his eyes and it didn't help, the water just kept coming, silent and stupid, twenty hours of it stored up somewhere behind his sternum and all of it pouring out now in the doorway where he could hear Gavin breathing steady ten feet away, which somehow made it worse. "I know. That's why I'm standing here like an idiot."
"You're standing there because it's over." Hank put a hand on his shoulder, heavy, and left it. "Twenty hours of holding it with your teeth. It's over and your body found out before you did. That's all this is."
"He said nobody's ever done this for him." Niles's voice broke on the last word and he let it. "He said it like it was a fact. Like weather. Nobody does this, Hank. He's twenty-five years old and nobody ever once."
"I know."
"And I was twenty-something too. When somebody did it for me. And I never said thank you, I never said a word, I just took it, and I've been trying to pay it back ever since and the debt keeps not shrinking." He laughed, wet and terrible, into his sleeve. "The debt keeps not shrinking."
"Sit down before you fall down."
Niles let himself be steered. Hank put him in the desk chair and he dropped into it like his strings had been cut, and he cried for a while, quietly, wrist against his eyes, while the morning came up yellow in the curtain gap and Gavin slept on untouched by any of it.
Hank stood there. He didn't pat him. He didn't say there there. He picked up the bowl of soup off the dresser and stirred it, slow, the spoon clicking the rim, some ordinary noise to anchor a room by.
"He's gonna wake up hungry," Hank said. "First time in two days. You want to be sitting down for that. He eats like a seagull on a good day."
"He's not going to remember any of this."
"He'll remember the cloths. They always remember the cold." Hank tested the soup against his own lip and set it back. "And he'll remember you said the oath out loud. I heard it from the hall at five. Whole street probably heard it."
"I said it into the room."
"You said it." Hank looked at him over the steam, blue eyes red-rimmed and level. "Good. Contracts need witnesses."
Niles wiped his face with both hands, the heel of his palms grinding at his eyes, and the crying ran down to a leak, then to a stop, then to the hollow washed-out quiet on the other side of it. His ribs ached from it. His jaw ached. He felt scoured.
"He's down to one-oh-two," he said, and his voice came back rough but whole. "If it hits one-oh-three again we do the ice, and the ice worked, it worked at three fifty."
"It worked. You've told me twice."
"Then I'm done talking."
"First time for everything." Hank pulled the second desk chair over, the one from the corner with the laundry on it, cleared it with one sweep, and sat down facing him. "Now eat something yourself. There's soup in the car and I'm not above force-feeding a grown man."
"You brought soup for a guy who can't eat."
"I brought soup because it's what you do." He broke a cracker in half and handed it over like a dare. "Half. Then you sleep in the next room till he wakes, and I take the watch, and when Gavin opens his eyes the first thing he sees won't be his boyfriend looking like an extra from a war movie."
Niles took the cracker. He looked at the bed, at Gavin's flushed face slack with real sleep, the bandaged hand resting open on the blanket like something finally set down.
"You're not driving back till he's on his feet," Niles said.
"That was never on the table."
Niles ate the half cracker. It sat in him strange and heavy, the first food since yesterday noon, and he chewed it slow and watched Hank dip the spoon into the cooling soup and keep watch over the both of them, and the shaking in his shoulders finally, finally went still.