Chapter 7: Bruises and Apologies
The next evening the living room smelled like it always did, old smoke and spilled whiskey soaked into carpet, and Niles came home to find the pipe sitting on the coffee table in plain sight.
He stopped in the doorway. Gavin was on the couch with his boots up on the crate they used as a table, ribs taped under his shirt, hand still stitched, a beer dangling from his good fingers. He didn't look up when Niles stopped.
"The fuck is the pipe doing out?" Niles said.
"Relax. It's in reach, not in the way."
"That's not where it lives. I hid it for a reason." Niles crossed the room and picked it up, turned it over. The bowl still smelled burnt, fresh. "Someone used this."
"Connor did. One hit. With my supervision."
The silence had a shape to it. Niles stood there holding the pipe like it had bitten him.
"You gave my brother drugs."
"I gave your brother an appetite, is what I did. Kid ate seven spoons of soup the night before like a trained seal. One hit off my pipe and the kid raided the kitchen at dawn. You think that's a coincidence?"
"He purged the whole thing. You know that, right? You were here. You watched him smoke and then you slept and he ate the entire kitchen and threw it up, and you're standing there calling it care."
"He did that on his own. That's his thing. That's been his thing for years before I ever..." Gavin's voice climbed. He set the beer down hard enough to slosh. "What was I supposed to do, watch him shrink? He came home at midnight looking like a coat hanger with hair. I did something that actually worked."
"It's a meth pipe, Gavin."
"It's what's in the house!"
"It's what YOU'VE been hitting since you signed yourself out of a hospital with a hole in your hand, you absolute..."
"Don't you start about the hospital." Gavin was up off the couch now, which took him longer than he wanted it to, one hand pressed to the taped ribs. "Don't you fucking start."
"You ripped out your IV. They told me on the phone. The nurse said, and I quote, he removed it himself."
"Yeah, I did. Fast, too."
"You had bruised RIBS, you had a laceration, they had you on a..."
"On a drip of saline and a schedule of pills I flushed, because half of them are what put me on that kitchen floor in the first place. Unlabeled, remember? You were there for that part, or were you too busy throwing your phone in a river?"
The words landed. Niles's jaw worked. Gavin saw the hit land and, being Gavin, pressed harder.
"That's what I thought. You want to lecture ME about self-destruction. You. Mr. die-young-together. You swore it, remember? Thursday. On this couch. You held my hand and everything."
"That's not the same thing and you know it's not the same thing."
"It's exactly the same thing, it's the WHOLE point of the thing, you sentimental..."
"You could have died."
"So could you, Tuesday before last! Neither of us did! That's the deal!" Gavin was shouting now, voice cracking on the deal, and his face had gone the ugly red it went right before things broke. "You don't get to renegotiate because I spent a night in a hospital gown."
"The pipe wasn't yours to give."
"Everything in this house is mine to give, I've paid for half of it with stolen money."
"You gave DRUGS to my little brother."
"He asked!"
"He's twenty-two and he can't eat and he'd take anything off anyone who was nice to him, that's not asking, that's just Connor. You of all people should know what that looks like."
That one landed somewhere below the belt and Gavin knew it, and there was half a second where it could have gone another way, and then Niles swung.
His fist caught Gavin's mouth and Gavin's head cracked back against the wall and the beer bottle went off the crate and rolled, glugging whiskey or beer or both into the carpet. Gavin came off the wall spitting blood, and he was lighter than Niles but he was faster, and his fist sank into Niles's stomach and then caught his cheekbone on the backswing.
"You fuck!" Niles grabbed a fistful of Gavin's shirt and drove him into the arm of the couch. The couch skidded. Somewhere in it, springs complained.
"You want to hit me, hit me, don't hold my shirt like a bitch," Gavin said through the blood in his mouth, and swung again, catching Niles's ear, and then they were down, both of them, off the couch and onto the carpet in the whiskey, Niles on top for a second, then Gavin's knee somewhere effective and they rolled, elbows and knees finding everything, the coffee table shoving back, the pipe spinning across the floorboards.
"You ripped out a needle with your teeth, you lunatic," Niles grunted, pinned, Gavin's forearm across his throat.
"I bit the tape, actually. The needle came out easy, your information is..."
Niles bucked him off. Gavin's shoulder hit the table leg and he hissed, ribs, and Niles was up and Gavin was up and neither of them was done.
"You scared me," Gavin snarled, wiping his mouth with the back of his stitched hand, blood smearing the bandage. "You stood on a bridge and you scared me and I couldn't do anything, and then I woke up in room 302 and you were THERE, and now you want to stand in this room and pretend you don't understand why I ripped out an IV. You understand it better than anyone alive."
"I understand it. I don't have to like it."
"You don't get to understand it and also be furious about it. Pick one, that's not how it..."
"I can do both, I've been doing both for two years, you dense piece of shit."
Gavin swung. Niles caught his wrist. They stood there breathing into each other's faces, Gavin's split lip dripping down his chin, Niles's cheekbone already purpling, the tape on Gavin's ribs coming loose at one corner, and neither pair of hands let go.
"You're bleeding on the carpet," Niles said.
"It's your carpet."
"It's OUR carpet."
"Yeah," Gavin said, and it came out wrong, too low, and he twisted his wrist out of Niles's grip only to grab the front of his shirt with both hands, bloody knuckles and all, and pull him in.
In the kitchen, the fluorescent tube flickered twice and held. Hank sat at the table with a beer he'd stopped drinking an hour ago and a fork he'd washed and set by the empty container, in case. Connor sat across from him, a sandwich in front of him, half gone, which was a number neither of them had ever gotten out of this kitchen before.
The wall shook. Something heavy hit it, then a voice, then a crash that rattled the mug by the sink.
"At least they're not at the hospital again," Hank said. He said it like a man reading a weather report. "That's a new record. Twenty-six hours."
"The wall's got a new crack."
"The wall's seen worse. Keep eating."
Connor picked the sandwich up. His hand shook a little and Hank watched the window, not the sandwich, which was its own kind of watching. Behind them the living room went quiet in a way that was worse than the noise, and then quieter still, and Hank looked at the ceiling and exhaled through his nose.
"Every damn time," he muttered. "Swing, bleed, bleed on each other, and now they're..."
There was a thump against the wall that wasn't a fist. Then another, rhythmic, and a groan that had nothing to do with pain, and the springs of the couch, loudly, giving up.
Hank picked his beer back up and put it down again.
"Eat your sandwich, kid."
Connor ate. The thumping against the wall kept its rhythm, and Hank stared at the window with the face of a man doing math he hated.
"I'm finished," Connor said. He pushed the plate back. Half a sandwich, gone, and his hands were steady now, which was its own small miracle.
"Good. That's good." Hank stood, collected the plate, and didn't look down the hall. "We're not going in there."
"We're not going in there," Connor agreed, and neither of them moved.
Through the wall the springs had found a tempo. Then Gavin's voice, raw and wrecked, saying something that ended in Niles's name, and Niles's answer, low, unintelligible, filthy by its cadence alone.
"I need a smoke," Connor said.
"Smoke on the porch. Not the living room."
"The living room's the only room with a working lighter."
Hank rubbed his eyes. "One of these days I'm putting a lighter in every room of this house like a fire code violation."
Connor went anyway, of course he went, and Hank followed because he always followed, and the hallway to the living room smelled like blood and sweat already, copper under the stale smoke.
The couch had moved a foot and a half from the wall. The carpet had a dark spot spreading in it that wasn't whiskey. Gavin was on his back on the cushions with his taped ribs rising and falling fast, shirt somewhere behind the crate, and Niles was over him, jeans shoved down his thighs, working into him in long punishing strokes, cheekbone purple, knuckles split, his mouth buried against Gavin's throat.
Gavin saw them come in and didn't stop. Didn't even slow. His grin was bloody and gleeful.
"Close the door or watch," he said. "I don't care either way."
"Christ," Hank said, and turned around and went back to the kitchen.
Connor stayed in the doorway with a cigarette unlit between his fingers.
Gavin's hand came up, the stitched one, and fisted the back of Niles's hair, dragging his mouth off his neck. "Bite me again. Harder this time. You barely broke it."
"You're bleeding all over everything."
"So bleed on me back. You owe me." Gavin hooked a leg over Niles's ass and drove his heels down, forcing him deeper, and both of them grunted. "Come on. You've been dying to since the bridge."
Niles looked down at him, at the split lip and the black eye blooming under his own knucklework, and bent his head. He found the place below Gavin's jaw where the pulse sat close to the surface, pressed his teeth in slow, testing, and Gavin's back arched off the cushion with a sound that had no shame left in it.
"Harder. I said harder, not romantically, you..."
Niles bit down. For real this time. Gavin's whole body seized under him, his hand yanking Niles's hair hard enough to tear some out, and his cock leaked against his own stomach, untouched, smearing precum over the faded ink there.
"Yeah," Gavin breathed. "Yeah, fuck, like that. Leave it. Leave the mark, I want to see it in the mirror tomorrow."
Niles pulled back and looked at what he'd done. The bite was a dark crescent already, skin broken at two points, welling red. Something in his face went strange and hungry, and he licked the blood off his own teeth, which was a thing he'd deny ever doing and Gavin would swear to forever.
"You're both psychotic," Connor said from the doorway.
"Family trait," Niles said, not looking away from Gavin's throat. His hips never stopped, driving in steady and deep, the couch knocking the wall on every stroke.
Gavin reached down between his own legs, wrapped his fist around himself, and stroked fast and graceless, blood from his knuckles smearing down the shaft. "Tell your boyfriend the kitchen's closed," he said to Connor, grinning at the ceiling. "We're gonna be a while."
Connor put the cigarette behind his ear and went. The door he left open, out of spite or accident, and Niles didn't reach for it.
"You wanna come in here and finish the fight?" Gavin asked, panting. "You wanna call me a junkie again? Go ahead. Say it while you're inside me, see if it lands different."
"Shut up."
"Make me. No, you tried that. You made it worse, you always make it worse, you hit me and now I'm so hard it hurts, what's that say about us?"
"It says we need help."
"Never said we didn't." Gavin arched up, met him stroke for stroke, his ribs taped and his throat bleeding and his hand flying. "Never once said we didn't."
Niles's rhythm broke. Got ragged, harder, graceless, his forehead dropping to Gavin's shoulder beside the bite, breath sawing. "I'm close."
"So come. I'm not made of patience, I'm made of stolen merchandise and spite."
Gavin came first, biting down on his own stitched hand to muffle it, coming over his fist and his stomach in long spurts while his other hand clawed welts down Niles's back. The clench of him pulled Niles under two strokes later, buried deep, shuddering, swearing into Gavin's bleeding neck.
They lay there. Sweat and blood and the smell of the carpet. The springs ticked as they cooled.
"Who won?" Gavin asked eventually.
"Nobody. Nobody ever wins."
"Then we go again later." Gavin's eyes were already closing. His hand found Niles's and held it, bloody knuckles to bloody knuckles, like the fight had been the handshake.
In the kitchen Hank was washing the same fork for the second time. He glanced up when Connor came back in.
"So?"
"Neck's bitten. Couch is dead. Nobody's at the hospital." Connor lit his cigarette off the stove burner, which Hank pretended not to see. "Living room's ours by morning. Probably."
"Small mercies." Hank dried the fork and set it back by the empty container, in case. "Sandwich stayed down?"
"Stayed down."
"Then tonight's a win." Hank picked up his flat beer, toasted the flickering light with it, and drank. "God help us all."