Chapter 4: Room 302, Round Two
Hank drove Connor home with the windows cracked, the morning air cold and tasting of exhaust. Neither of them spoke much. At a red light Hank reached over and rested his hand on Connor's knee, just left it there until the light changed.
"You'll come back later?" Connor asked.
"Few hours. Sleep first. Then I'll bring you back."
"Okay."
"You okay?"
Connor looked out at the street, the wet asphalt shining under the last of the gray. "Ask me that when I've slept."
"Fair enough."
Up in room 302, Niles sat in the plastic chair with Gavin's hand in both of his. The room had gone quiet in the way hospitals do when the corridor noise dies down, just the monitor's slow beep and the hiss of the vent. Gavin's face was slack in sleep, bruised-looking under the eyes, the IV tape pulling at the skin of his forearm.
Niles hadn't slept in over a day. His body ached for it, the craving under his skin screaming louder than the exhaustion. He sat there anyway. He counted Gavin's breaths. Fourteen a minute, steady, and every one of them felt like something he'd been given back.
Gavin's fingers twitched. Then his eyes opened, unfocused, swimming until they found Niles.
"You're still here." His voice was gravel. "Huh."
"Where else would I be?"
Gavin stared at him for a long moment. Something shifted in his face, the softness curdling into something sharper. He pulled his hand free.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"That." Gavin pushed himself up against the pillows with a grunt of effort, wincing at the pull in his chest. "The sitting there looking sad shit. Holding my hand like I'm gonna die. You don't get to do that."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means I woke up on your friend's kitchen floor, Niles." Gavin's voice climbed. "I woke up with Hank shaking me and my own puke on my shirt and I couldn't remember how I got there. And you were just gone. You walked out."
"You told me to get out."
"I didn't mean it!"
"How was I supposed to know that?" Niles was on his feet now, the chair scraping back against the tile. "You said never come back. You said it, Gavin. You looked me in the eye and you said it."
"So you took the whole bottle of pills and whiskey on the way out the door? That was the plan?" Gavin's laugh came out cracked and wrong. "Classy. Real classy."
"That was you, not me."
"Same thing!" Gavin jabbed a finger at him, the IV line swinging. "Same damn thing, and you know it. We're the same. We're both so busy trying to die that we can't even do it right."
The words landed hard. Niles went still, his jaw working.
"Get out," Gavin said.
"No."
"Get out, Niles."
"No." Niles crossed the room in two strides and gripped the bed rail, leaning over him. "You don't get to kick me out. Not this time. I stayed. I'm right here. You don't get to punish me for that."
Gavin's eyes were filling, furious, wet. "You want a medal? You stayed? Big deal. You left first. You always leave first."
"I'm not gonna apologize for needing air."
"You don't need air, you need to feel like shit, and you found a way to make it my fault again." Gavin's voice broke on the last word. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, angry at himself for crying. "Do you know what it did to me? Walking around that apartment for three hours thinking, okay, this is it, he's actually done with me this time. Three hours. And then nothing. Black."
"You could've died."
"So could you!"
They stared at each other. The monitor counted the silence between them.
Then Gavin's face crumpled, all the fight going out of it at once. "I was so scared," he said, small and raw. "I was so scared, Niles. I thought I'd never see you again."
Niles sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight. "I'm right here."
"You're a bastard."
"Yeah."
"You're selfish and stupid and you smell like cigarettes and the river."
"That's fair."
"I hate you."
"I know." Niles reached out and brushed Gavin's hair off his forehead, his thumb trembling against the damp skin. "I hate you too."
Gavin grabbed his wrist. Held it hard enough to hurt. "Promise me. Not the sorry kind of promise. A real one. You don't walk out. You don't disappear. If you're angry you scream at me right here in the room and then you stay."
"I promise."
"Swear it on Connor."
Niles's breath caught. There was only one thing in the world he held more sacred than Gavin, and Gavin knew it. "I swear it on Connor."
"Okay." Gavin exhaled, long and shaky, and his grip loosened. "Okay."
Then he yanked. Not gently. He pulled Niles's wrist and the rest of him came with it, over the rail and onto the narrow mattress, and Niles let himself be dragged, careful of the IV, careful of the bruised ribs, until he was stretched out beside him in a bed built for one. They fit anyway, pressed chest to chest, legs tangled, the rail digging into Niles's back.
"Ow," Niles said.
"Shut up."
The heart monitor beeped faster. Neither of them cared. Gavin tucked his face into Niles's neck and breathed him in, cigarettes and river water and the copper smell of long hours and fear, and held on with both arms like the room might try to take him back.
"If you fall off this bed," Gavin mumbled against his skin, "I'm not catching you."
"You would."
"Yeah," Gavin admitted. "I would."
The nurse found them like that twenty minutes later, both asleep, Gavin's monitors chirping quicker than they should, and she checked the numbers, looked at their faces, and turned the volume down instead of separating them.
They woke in the early afternoon to a nurse changing the IV bag, and she said nothing about the arrangement, just nudged Niles's hip with a tray and told him the cafeteria was still open. When she left, Gavin stayed pressed against him, but the quality of it had changed. His hand had wandered. His fingers were curled in the waistband of Niles's jeans, idle, deliberate.
"Move over," Niles muttered.
"There's no over. It's a hospital bed."
"Then move down."
Gavin shifted, and the movement put their hips together, and neither of them pretended it was accidental. The monitor's pace ticked up. Gavin felt Niles harden against his thigh and grinned, sharp and mean, into the pillow.
"Look at that. Twenty-four hours of near-death and you wake up horny."
"Shut up. You started it."
"Prove it."
Niles grabbed his jaw and turned his face up and kissed him, open-mouthed and rough, tasting like the hospital's chalky water. Gavin gave ground for exactly one second, then surged back, flipping the power balance with a fist in Niles's hair, dragging his head back to bare his throat. Niles hissed. Gavin bit the tendon of his neck, sucking a mark into the skin.
"Nobody's gonna see that," Niles said, breathless.
"They will. Good."
"You want the whole floor to know?"
"I want everybody to know," Gavin said, and rolled his hips, dragging his cock against Niles's through two layers of cotton. "I died yesterday, basically. I think I'm owed."
Niles's hands went to his hips, pinning them down against the mattress, holding him still. "You're owed rest. You're owed food. You're not owed anything else until you're not gray in the face."
"I'm not gray."
"You're gray."
Gavin twisted a wrist free and shoved it between them, palming Niles through his jeans, squeezing hard enough to make his breath stutter. "Gray people don't do this."
Niles grabbed his wrist and pulled it away, and for a moment they just grappled, silent, the IV line swinging, Gavin's monitor complaining in steadily quicker beeps. Neither of them would yield first. Niles was heavier and stronger; Gavin was meaner and knew exactly which buttons existed. He leaned up and said, against Niles's ear, "You swore on Connor. So you're not leaving this room. Which means I've got all the time in the world to wear you down, Niles. All night if I want."
"You're in a hospital bed with a hole in your hand."
"And you're still gonna be the one underneath me by the end."
"Bold words from a guy who can't even sit up without wincing."
Gavin smiled. It was the smile he used on marks, and Niles hated how well it worked on him. "Then be gentle with me," he said. "Asshole."
Something in Niles's face cracked open at that. He looked at Gavin for a long moment, his thumb tracing the tape on the back of Gavin's hand, the bruise under his eye, the hollow of his cheek where the whiskers had gone soft.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Okay."
He worked Gavin's sweatpants down off his hips, slow, careful of the IV, and Gavin lifted for him without being told, which was itself a kind of surrender. Niles got two fingers into his mouth and slicked them thoroughly, and Gavin watched the whole thing with heavy-lidded eyes, lips parted, wanting to make some crude comment about how Niles had learned that somewhere and with whom, and not managing it.
The first finger went in slow. Gavin's head tipped back against the pillow, throat working, and the monitor jumped again.
"Relax," Niles murmured.
"I am relaxed."
"You're clenching like a fist."
"I will bite you."
"Promises." Niles curled his finger and Gavin swore, low and filthy, spine arching off the mattress. "There it is."
"Shut up. Shut up, don't stop."
He didn't stop. He worked him open with a patience that bordered on cruelty, second finger, then a third, and Gavin's fight bled out of him degree by degree, his hands fisted in the sheet, hips pushing down onto Niles's hand, curses tumbling out of him in a cracked whisper. He tried to grab Niles's belt twice. Both times Niles pinned his wrist back to the mattress and kept going until Gavin's thighs were shaking.
"Niles. Niles, I swear to god, if you don't fuck me right now I will get out of this bed and find someone who will."
"You're not getting out of this bed."
"Then do your job."
Niles sat back and got his jeans open, dragged the condom on with shaking hands, and leaned over him, braced on the rail, the metal cold against his forearm. He pushed in slow, an inch at a time, watching Gavin's face the whole way, and Gavin's expression came apart like wet paper, all the arrogance gone, just open mouth and wet eyes and his whole body pulling Niles in.
"Oh, fuck," Gavin breathed. "Fuck. Okay. Okay, keep, keep going."
Niles bottomed out and stopped, buried to the hilt, breath ragged. "Still gray?"
"Shut the fuck up and move."
He moved. Slow at first, long dragging strokes that made the bed frame knock softly against the wall, and Gavin clutched at him with both arms, heels digging into the small of his back, meeting every thrust as best he could from flat on his back. Then Niles shifted his angle and found the spot again and Gavin's whole body jolted, and after that it stopped being slow. The bed knocked in earnest. The monitor was a rapid unbroken beeping, absurd and loud, and neither of them reached to turn it down.
"Harder," Gavin gasped. "Come on, harder, I'm not glass."
"You nearly died yesterday."
"Then maybe I want to feel alive today, you, fuck, you bastard, Niles, please."
That word did it. Niles lost the last of his careful pace and fucked him properly, gripping the rail for leverage, the metal flexing under his hand, sweat dripping off his jaw onto Gavin's chest. Gavin raked his nails down Niles's back and grabbed a handful of his ass and hauled him deeper, still fighting for control even now, even like this, trying to set the rhythm from below, and Niles laughed, winded and helpless.
"You can't," he panted. "Just lie there and take it."
"I hate you."
"I know. I know you do."
Gavin got a hand around himself, three rough strokes, and came with a bitten-off sound, spilling over his own fist and stomach, his body clamping down hard enough to drag Niles over the edge with him seconds later. Niles groaned into his neck and shuddered through it, hips twitching, and then just collapsed, careful even half-dead with release to roll his weight off Gavin's bruised ribs.
They lay there. The monitor settled back to its lazy beep. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattled past.
"We're gonna get caught," Gavin said eventually, staring at the ceiling.
"Worth it."
"Shut up." A pause. "Yeah. Worth it."
They lay tangled until the IV bag ran dry and a machine started complaining. Niles peeled himself off the bed first, tucked himself away, and cleaned Gavin's stomach with a handful of tissues from the box on the tray table.
"We're disgusting," he said.
"Speak for yourself."
"I smell like a river."
"Your smell," Gavin said, apropos of nothing, eyes half closed. "I like it."
Niles looked at him. Then at the bathroom door. Then back.
"You want a shower."
"I want a shower."
"You can barely stand up."
"So help me."
Niles got the nurse on the way in, a young one who flushed when Gavin asked, in his sweetest tone, whether hydrotherapy was medically indicated. She signed off on it with an eye roll and a warning about the sutures on the back of his hand, and left them to it.
The bathroom was a closet with a shower stall bolted in the corner, a plastic fold-down bench, one flickering fluorescent tube. Niles got the water running while Gavin sat on the closed toilet lid, stripping his shirt over his head with a wince. The tape on his hand. The livid yellowing bruise across his ribs. He looked like a war casualty and knew it.
"Stop staring."
"Can't help it." Niles knelt and worked his sweatpants and boxers down. "You look like shit, Reed."
"Romance me harder."
Gavin gripped Niles's shoulder getting up, swayed, and Niles caught him around the waist and steered him into the stall. The spray hit them both. Niles still had his jeans on, and Gavin laughed, ugly and genuine, as the denim went dark.
"You're an idiot."
"You planned that?"
"You're so easy."
Niles shoved him under the water and stripped wet. The stall was too small for two grown men, shoulders bumping the cold tile, steam stacking up fast. Gavin braced a hand on the wall and put his head down into the spray and let it hammer the back of his neck.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay, that's better."
Niles reached past him for the soap, a thin hospital packet of it, and worked it between his hands. Then he put his hands on Gavin.
Slow. That was the thing that undid Gavin, the slowness. Niles soaped his shoulders first, dug his thumbs into the knots, and Gavin's head dropped forward with a groan that had nothing performative in it. Down the spine. Over the bruised ribs with a hand gone feather-light, tracing the edges of the discoloration like he was mapping it.
"Doesn't hurt," Gavin said.
"Liar."
"Hurts. Don't stop."
Niles didn't stop. He soaped his arms, careful around the IV tape, turned his hand over and cleaned between his fingers one at a time, absurdly thorough, like Gavin was something being restored. Gavin watched him do it through wet lashes and said nothing at all, which for Gavin was a kind of nakedness worse than the rest.
"You're doing the nurse thing," he said finally.
"I'm doing the shower thing."
"You're doing the I-almost-lost-you thing."
Niles's hands stilled on his hips. The water ran down between them. He tipped Gavin's chin up with a knuckle and looked at his face under the spray, eyes red-rimmed, scrubbed raw and younger without the sneer on them.
"Yeah," he said. "Maybe I am. You got a problem with that?"
"...No."
"Didn't think so."
He washed Gavin's hair after that, worked the cheap soap into a rough lather, massaged his scalp with both hands until Gavin made a sound against his collarbone that he would deny in court. He tilted him back to rinse, shielding his eyes with a palm.
"Close your eyes."
"I did three minutes ago, genius."
Gavin turned then, and it wasn't romantic the way anyone watching would say, it was graceless, feet slipping on wet tile, one hand fisted in Niles's soaked shirt. He kissed him with water running into both their mouths, and Niles backed him into the wall and kissed him back until his spine hit the cold tile and he gasped.
"Careful," Niles said.
"Fuck careful."
"Yesterday you nearly died."
"Yesterday I nearly died, so today I want to feel something that isn't dying." Gavin's hand slid down Niles's wet stomach and closed around him, and Niles's argument dissolved. "You gonna tell me no?"
"I should."
"You won't."
He didn't. He got his hand around Gavin instead, and they stood pressed together in the spray, fists working in the slick water, kissing between gasps, the little stall filling with steam and breath. Gavin's knees were the weak point; Niles could feel them going every time he twisted his wrist on the upstroke, and he used it, ruthless, until Gavin's forehead was dropped against his shoulder and his hips were pumping, shameless.
"Niles."
"Yeah."
"Don't stop. Don't you fucking stop."
"I'm not stopping."
Gavin came with his teeth in Niles's shoulder, biting down to keep quiet, shuddering through it while Niles held him up one-armed against the wall. Niles followed seconds after, groaning low, hips jerking into his own fist, and they stayed there under the water panting until it started going cold.
"Cold," Gavin managed.
"Yeah."
The water died. Niles toweled him off with the two thin hospital towels like he was handling wet paper, dried his hair, his shoulders, between his toes, same stupid thoroughness. Gavin sat on the bench and watched him wring out his own ruined jeans.
"Your jeans are done."
"My jeans are done."
"Everything you own is done."
"Everything I own is in a river," Niles said, and Gavin laughed so hard he had to grab the rail.
Back in the room the nurse had changed the sheets, which was its own kind of comment. Gavin got into the clean bed and Niles got in beside him, damp, half dressed, smelling of industrial soap.
"Gonna be here when I wake up?" Gavin asked, already going under.
"I swore on Connor."
"Yeah." A yawn. "That too."
Niles counted his breaths until he slept. Fourteen a minute. Then he let himself go under too, with his hand splayed flat over Gavin's heart, feeling it beat.