Chapter 8: Bridge Oath, Revisited
The door of Niles's room didn't even have a lock anymore. Gavin kicked it open at half past midnight, still wearing the bruise Niles had put on his cheekbone, and stood there in his jacket with a bottle of whiskey in his fist.
"Get up. We're going out."
Niles was sprawled on the mattress in borrowed sweatpants, his split knuckles crusted brown. He cracked one eye. "It's the middle of the fucking night, Gavin."
"Yeah, and?" Gavin crossed the room, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and yanked his head back so they were eye to eye. "You bit a hole in my throat. Least you can do is come look at it where we met."
They took Hank's street to the river on foot, because Gavin said walking was part of it and Niles didn't ask what it was. The cold came off the water in sheets. Gavin had brought a flask as well as the bottle, tucked inside his jacket against his ribs, and he drank from the flask the whole way without offering.
The bridge showed up black against blacker sky, the old ironwork needling up into the dark, its trusses furred with rust that flaked off in orange clouds whenever the wind hit. Nobody had welded it shut or fenced it off. The city had just forgotten it, and the forgotten things always stayed the same.
Niles stopped at the foot of the ramp. "I'm not doing this."
"I didn't ask you to jump. I asked you to walk." Gavin was already climbing, boots ringing on the plates. His split lip pulled when he grinned back over his shoulder. "You coming or what?"
He came. He always came. The planking was wet with river spray and every step made a hollow boom that dropped straight into Niles's chest. Halfway across, Gavin found the spot. It was nothing, just a widening in the walkway where a lamppost had been cut off at the ankle decades ago, a fat rusted stump of iron with a flat top like a table. Two years ago a skinny kid with a stolen jacket had been sitting on it, counting cigarette butts, when a taller kid with shaking hands had asked him for a light.
Gavin set the bottle down on the stump with a click that sounded louder than the river.
"You remember this place?" he said.
"I remember everything about this place."
"Then sit down."
Niles sat. The iron was freezing through his sweatpants, cold climbing into his spine, and below him the water churned black and slow, big brown slabs of current folding over each other. He looked at it for two seconds and then made himself stop looking. Gavin saw him do it and said nothing, which was worse than anything he could have said.
He unscrewed the flask instead and took a pull that made his eyes water. Then he held it out. "Drink."
Niles drank. The whiskey hit like a struck match, blazing down his throat and out into his frozen hands. When he lowered the flask Gavin had the small folding knife out, the one he kept in his boot, and he was looking at his own palm in the lamplight that leaked up off the water.
"Don't," Niles said.
"We already did it once. Alcohol and words." Gavin ran his thumb along the blade, quick and careless, and a line opened across the heel of his hand, welling up dark in the dark. He didn't hiss. He held his hand over the flask's mouth and let three drops fall in, one, two, three, each one hitting the whiskey with a sound too small to be real. "This one's got teeth."
"Give me the knife." Niles's voice came out flat. He opened his own palm and drew the blade across it shallow, the sting waking him up like cold water. His blood fell into the flask and Gavin swirled it, held it out.
"Together, then."
They drank from the same flask, blood and whiskey and rust wind, and Niles's throat worked around the taste of iron and burn. Gavin took the flask back, drank deeper, wiped his mouth with the back of his bleeding hand and smeared red across his jaw.
"There," he said. "Notarized."
Niles laughed before he could stop himself, a short ugly bark that hurt his ribs, and Gavin's grin split his swollen lip open again so he was bleeding and laughing too. The wind came through the trusses and made the whole bridge sing one low iron note.
"You're insane," Niles said.
"You swore on Connor, not even a week ago, that you'd never disappear again." Gavin stepped in close, between his knees, and Niles had to tilt his head back to look up at him. "Friday I swore I'd go with you. This is me keeping it in front of witnesses." He glanced pointedly at the river.
"There's no witnesses, Gavin."
"There's the river. River's seen everything." He said it light, but his hand was shaking when he put it on the side of Niles's neck, thumb pressed under his jaw, feeling the pulse there like he was checking it was still running. "I died last week. Don't tell me you didn't hear about it."
"You woke up."
"I woke up because you were standing there looking like a ghost." His voice cracked a little on the end of it, and he covered it with a swallow from the flask. "So here's the thing. I'm not doing sober for this. I'm not doing it scared. I'm doing it here, where I found you, because this is the only church I ever believed in."
Niles caught his wrist. His own cut was still bleeding, and it left a mark on Gavin's sleeve that neither of them noticed. "You're shaking."
"You're shaking."
"Yeah, but I'm shaking from the cold."
Gavin's laugh came out wet. He bent down and kissed him, and it was clumsy and blood-flavored, both their lips split, the rust tang of the flask still between them. Niles's hand slid up under his jacket to the small of his back and pulled him in, and Gavin went willingly, knees hitting the iron stump on either side of Niles's hips, the whole bridge ringing under them.
"Everyone's gonna see," Gavin muttered against his mouth, which was a lie, because there was nothing out here but water and girders and a moon doing its best behind cloud.
"Everyone saw already. Hank heard the couch break."
"Fuck Hank." Gavin ground down and Niles's breath left him in a white cloud. "Cold's gonna kill me before you do."
"That's the oath working."
They got the jeans open between them, fumbling, fingers stupid with cold and whiskey. Gavin spat on his hand, his own blood in with it, and worked Niles rough and fast, no ceremony, his ribs complaining and him ignoring them the way he ignored everything. The wind went through the gaps in the planking and cut across their bare skin like wire, and Niles hauled him closer by the jacket so the only warmth in the world was between their bodies. Gavin braced one hand on the cold iron railing behind Niles's shoulder and rode him with his teeth gritted, every thrust booming down through the planks into the dark under the bridge.
"Don't look down," Gavin said, and Niles didn't need to be told; he kept his eyes on Gavin's face instead, the bruise Niles gave him, the blood on his jaw, his eyes shut against the wind. Below them the water moved like something alive, like something that knew their names, folding and folding over itself in the dark.
Gavin came with a shout that went out over the river and came back off the far bank, and Niles followed him a minute later, gripping his hips hard enough to bruise, both of them shuddering in the cold with the flask forgotten on its iron stump, two drops of blood still swimming in what was left.
They stayed locked together for a while, breathing hard, the wind drying the sweat on their skin faster than their bodies could make it. Gavin's forehead was dropped against Niles's shoulder. Their jeans were open and ruined and neither of them moved to fix it.
"Okay," Gavin said finally, voice scraped raw. "Confession time."
"That's not what the flask was for."
"The flask was for the oath. This is for the other thing." He lifted his head. His eyes were glassy with cold and whiskey and something looser underneath. "You bit through my fucking throat, Niles. I've got a hole in my neck shaped like your teeth."
"You liked it."
"That's the confession, yeah." He said it flat, daring him to make it weird. "I came so hard I saw the moon twice. So. Ask me what that means about me."
Niles didn't ask. He ran his thumb along the bite instead, over the broken skin, and Gavin's breath went ragged in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
"See," Gavin said. "That. Do it again and I'll get it up again, I swear to god, twenty minutes after coming my guts out on a rusty bridge in thirty-degree weather."
"You're sick."
"We're sick. Don't act brand new." Gavin shifted, wincing at his ribs, and settled sideways across Niles's lap like a cat claiming territory. "You like hurting me. I like being hurt. There. Married couples talk about this stuff."
"You're not my wife."
"I'm the closest thing you've got."
The wind slammed through the trusses and the bridge hummed that one low note again. Niles pulled the flask off the stump, drank the last of the bloody whiskey, and passed it. Gavin finished it and threw the empty hard out over the rail; they listened until it hit the water, a small clean sound swallowed whole.
"My turn," Niles said.
"Oh, this'll be good."
"I like it when you fight back. Not when you win." He watched the river instead of Gavin's face. "When you lose. When you go still and let me do whatever I want because you know I'm going to anyway."
Gavin was quiet a second. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I know. You get this look. Like you're deciding something. I hate how much I like that look."
"That's fucked up."
"That's the whole point, dipshit. That's what I'm saying." He jabbed a finger at Niles's chest. "Normal people want roses. You want me pinned and quiet. I want you mean and bleeding. We're not normal, we were never going to be normal, so can we stop pretending it's a problem?"
"Who's pretending?"
"You. Every time after. You get this guilt face like you broke a toy." Gavin caught his jaw and turned his head, forced the eye contact. "It's not broken. I'm not broken. Well. I am, but not from you. From everything else. From you I come out better."
Niles laughed, short and ugly. "You came out with a hole in your neck."
"Best hole I've got."
Down below, the water kept folding over itself, patient, unhurried. Gavin shivered, a full-body thing, and Niles wrapped his jacket around him without comment, the way he'd done a thousand times and would do a thousand more.
"You want to know the worst one," Gavin said into his collar.
"No."
"I want you to choke me for real. Not the sexy fake kind. The kind where it's close." He said it fast, like jumping off something. "The kind where I almost don't come back. Because then everything's quiet for a second. Nothing hurts. There's no Gavin Reed, no debts, no wrist scars, just dark. And I trust you with the dark."
Niles's arms went still around him.
"I'm not doing that."
"I'm not asking you to do it tonight. I'm telling you it's in the inventory." Gavin's voice was steady, which was somehow worse. "You wanted honest. Die young together, remember? I already gave you the version where I don't come back. Choking's just the preview."
"I watched you not breathe on a kitchen floor, Gavin."
"And I watched you stand on a railing." A beat. The river filled it. "We're even."
Niles exhaled slowly, white breath shredding in the wind. "The bite," he said. "The throat thing. It's not just you liking pain."
"Don't tell me what it is."
"It's a collar. You want marks nobody else can give you. So when I'm gone for three days, you touch it and know you're still mine."
Gavin stared at him. Then he pulled his collar aside, showing the crusted ruin of teeth, and grinned with his split lip. "See, this is why I keep you. Everyone else says I'm fucked up. You tell me what flavor."
"Come here."
"I'm already here."
Niles pulled him in anyway and kissed the bite, soft, careful, nothing like what came before. Gavin made a small sound into his mouth and let him.
When they finally separated, both shaking with cold now for real, Niles stood and hauled Gavin up by the wrist. The bridge boomed under them.
"Friday," Gavin said, straightening his jacket. "When you're gone Friday, I'm touching the neck thing. Just so you know. That's on you."
"Fine. When you're gone, I'm doing the thing where I decide something."
"You're disgusting."
"You're worse."
They walked back along the planking toward the city lights, two shapes limping through the iron dark, and behind them the river kept moving like it always would, taking their names downstream one more night.
Halfway back along the ramp, Gavin's boot skidded on a wet plate. He threw his hand out to catch himself and the iron took it, a jagged flange of rusted steel standing proud of the railing where decades of weather had chewed the metal raw. The blade of it went across his palm, deeper than the flask cut, and he heard it happen before he felt it, a wet tearing sound like paper.
Then the pain arrived and his knees went.
"Fuck." He hit the planking on one knee, cradling the hand against his jacket, and blood came through his fingers in a way that was nothing like the three neat drops in the flask. This was running. This was pump-driven, welling fast and black in the dark, dripping off the heel of his hand and pocking the wet boards.
Niles was on his knees beside him before the sound finished. "Let me see."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Let me see it, Gavin."
Gavin let him. The flange had opened the meat of his palm diagonally, from the base of his thumb almost to the little finger, and the edges were gaping loose the way cuts do when they go deep and catch on the way through. Niles looked at it and something went quiet and flat in his face, the look he got when he was deciding something.
"Okay," he said. "Jacket off. Arm up."
"I don't need a fucking tourniquet, Niles, it's my hand."
"Arm up or I carry you." He already had his own jacket off, the one Gavin was wearing, stripped down and wadded, pressing it hard into Gavin's palm. Gavin hissed and bore down against it, and the blood came through the fabric in seconds, warm then cold in the wind.
"It's the knife hand," Gavin said through his teeth. "You know what that means."
"It means you're holding the pipe with your left for a month."
"It means if I can't grip I can't work. I've got a pickup Friday. Four hundred in product changing hands and my hand is in fucking ribbons."
"Your hand is in ribbons because you put it on rusted iron at the exact spot where we had sex like animals. That's poetic, actually. I'll put it on your headstone."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
Gavin laughed, and laughing made the bleeding surge, and he stopped laughing fast. The world had gone slightly loud at the edges, the way it did when he'd given too much and hadn't eaten, and the river was right there, black and patient, and he caught himself looking at it the way you look at a thing you have a relationship with.
"Hey." Niles caught his chin and turned his face back. "Eyes here. You're not going anywhere."
"I wasn't."
"You were doing the thing with your eyes."
"I don't have a thing with my eyes."
"Everyone has a thing with their eyes here. That's what this bridge is." Niles pulled him up by the elbow, keeping the wadded jacket jammed against his palm, and got his own arm around his ribs. "We're walking. St. Mary's is twenty minutes. You know the way."
"Like the back of my hand." Gavin looked down at the hand in question, soaked dark, and giggled, an ugly drunk sound. "Bad phrasing."
"Yeah. Walk."
They walked. Gavin listed into him the whole way, the whiskey arriving all at once now that there was adrenaline carrying it, and he kept up a stream of talk that Niles recognized as the thing Gavin did instead of passing out. The cut needed stitches. Nine, maybe, the last one had been seven and that had been shorter. St. Mary's knew him by name. Room 302 had a bed with his shape still in it. He should bill the city for the defective railing, actually, that was public infrastructure, that was a lawsuit.
"Niles."
"Yeah."
"When we get there, you're not leaving. Not the parking lot, not for cigarettes, not for anything. I don't care what they say about the waiting room. You swear."
"You swore me off disappearing on Connor's name last week. I don't get a second name to swear on."
"Swear on the neck thing. Swear on the bite."
Niles was quiet for three steps. The iron railing ran beside them, backlit by the city, and the same flange that had opened Gavin up glinted there at shoulder height, wet and orange.
"I swear on the bite," he said.
"Good." Gavin's voice had gone thin. "Because here's the thing about tonight. The flask was supposed to be the scary part. Blood in whiskey, big theatrical oath, very us. And then the river took the bottle and the night was supposed to be done, and instead the bridge itself takes a fucking bite out of me on the way out the door. Like it wants a cut too."
"Stop talking."
"It's a toll, Niles. Everything down there takes a toll."
"Stop talking, Gavin. Save the blood."
"I'm serious. I think the bridge likes us. I think that's the problem."
They came off the ramp onto the towpath and the ground went from iron boom to gravel crunch, and Gavin's knees buckled properly at the same moment. Niles caught him under the arms and held him up, and for a second they were just two men standing in the dark with a soaked jacket between them, breathing.
"How you doing," Niles said.
"Peachy. Ask me again when I can count fingers."
"How many fingers."
"One. It's the middle one. That's on purpose."
Niles half carried him the rest of the way, up the bank, along the fence line to the road where the streetlights started and the ER sign glowed its tired red against the sky. Gavin's hand had soaked through the second layer now. At the doors, under real light for the first time in an hour, the cut looked worse than the dark had let it, edges gaping, blood still moving.
Gavin looked at it under the fluorescent glare and, for once, had nothing funny to say. Then the doors slid open and the warm air hit them both, and he gripped Niles's sleeve with his good hand, hard, right at the wrist.
"You swore," he said. "On the bite."
Niles pushed the door open with his shoulder. "I remember what I swore on."
The triage nurse took one look at the hand and stopped asking questions. A second one wheeled a chair out to Gavin before he could argue about it, and then they were in a curtained bay under bright light, and Gavin was sitting very straight and very still on the bed with his soaked jacket unwound from his palm, staring at the gauze the nurse had pressed into place.
"Wait here," she said. "Doctor's coming."
"Where would I go," Gavin said. "This is my vacation home."
She was gone. The curtain swayed. Niles stood at the edge of the bed with his hands jammed in his pockets, blood dried black up both forearms, and the fluorescent light made them both look like corpses that had been dressed by someone who hated them.
"I can see the gauze moving," Gavin said. "With the pulse. That's neat."
"Stop talking about it."
"I'm just observing the medicine happening."
Gavin's color had been bad since the towpath, gray under the blood, and it was worse now, a sweat sheen across his forehead that didn't match the shivering. Niles had seen a lot of people bleed. He had never watched the bleeding make the room quieter, but that was what was happening, the monitoring beeps from the next bay suddenly very loud, Gavin's chatter suddenly very thin.
"How you feeling," Niles said.
"Great. I'm thinking about the lawsuit again."
"Gavin."
"What."
"Look at me."
Gavin looked at him. His eyes were doing something Niles didn't like, a slow focus, a lag, like the effort of aiming them was a separate job. He opened his mouth to say something else clever and what came out instead was nothing, a breath with no words in it, and his shoulders dropped an inch.
"Hey." Niles caught his face with both hands. Cold skin, clammy. "Gavin. Eyes here."
"I'm fine," Gavin said, and it came out slurred at the edges, the consonants soft. "Just tired. It's been a big night. We got engaged on a bridge."
"We didn't get engaged."
"The flask was basically a ring." His head was listing. Niles shoved the call button twice and kept his hands on Gavin's face, thumbing back the eyelids, and Gavin let him, giggling at nothing. "You have very serious thumbs."
"GAVIN. Stay with me."
"I'm here. I'm right here, I'm just..." The sentence ended without finishing. His eyes rolled up, white showing, and his whole body tipped sideways off the edge of the bed before Niles could catch more than his collar.
He went down. Niles got an arm around his chest and took him to the floor with him, Gavin's dead weight, head lolling against Niles's shoulder, and the gauze on the palm had gone from red-dark to red-bright, fresh blood pushing through, squeezing out in a slow pulse between Niles's fingers.
"NURSE," Niles shouted. "Hey. HEY. Somebody."
The curtain ripped back. The triage nurse, then two more people behind her, a big guy in scrubs already reaching. They took Gavin off Niles almost gently and got him onto the bed, and then it was fast, hands and voices, blood pressure cuff, a second line of gauze, someone saying pressure's seventy over and dropping, someone saying get a bag going, and Niles was shoved backward out of the way into the curtain, which closed in his face.
For a second he stood there. Then he hammered on the partition with the flat of his fist.
"You swore on the bite," he said through the fabric. "You made me swear. So don't you dare, you hear me, don't you fucking dare."
Nobody answered him. The beeps were going fast now, quick and bright, quicker than a resting heart should be, and someone said Vitals? and someone else gave numbers Niles didn't understand, and he stood with his fists against the curtain and listened.
"Sir." The triage nurse was back, young, tired, one hand on his forearm. "Sir, you need to come out here."
"Is he dead?"
"He's not dead. He fainted. Blood loss, plus the alcohol, plus I'm guessing he hasn't eaten today." Her voice was flat and steady and designed for people like Niles. "They're putting two units of fluid in him and then the doctor's going to sew his hand. He'll wake up in a few minutes. This happens six times a night."
Niles let her move him. He walked out into the corridor on her hand like a dog on a leash and sat down when a chair arrived under him, hard, his legs just deciding for themselves. The waiting room was half empty. A vending machine hummed. Somewhere behind the curtain Gavin's heart was still beating too fast, and then, minutes later, slowing, the beeps spacing out, finding their rhythm again.
The nurse came back with a cup of water he didn't ask for.
"He's awake," she said. "Grumpy. Asking for cigarettes and a lawyer and someone named Niles, in that order."
"That's me."
"I figured." She looked at the blood on his arms, the way his hands were trembling, and something in her professional flatness slipped a degree. "You can go back in. Try not to shout."
Niles went in. Gavin was propped up on the bed with a fluid bag running into his left arm and his right hand wrapped thick and white, and his eyes were clear again, tracking, and furious about it.
"How much of that did you see," Gavin said.
"None. I was listening to you almost die through a curtain."
"That's very romantic. Write that down for the vows." His voice was still thin but the joke machinery was running, which meant he was back. He looked at the ceiling. "I went somewhere. While I was out."
"Don't."
"I was on the bridge. Down on the water, under it. Everything was quiet." He turned his head and looked at Niles, and his eyes were glassy but direct. "I'm not saying it was nice. I'm saying it was quiet, and I didn't mind it, and then I heard you shouting through the curtain and it was so loud I woke up just to make you stop."
Niles pulled the chair to the bedside and sat down hard. He took Gavin's good hand, the left, the one with the IV taped into the back of it, and held it against the bite on his own throat.
"Feel that," he said. "You're still mine. Nobody checked you out of that."
Gavin's fingers curled against the ruined skin. He didn't say anything for a long moment, and the fluid dripped, and the beeps kept his heart, slow now, steady, counted out loud by the machine like an oath.
"The doctor's coming to do stitches," Gavin said finally. "Nine. I want to watch."
"You're not watching your own hand get sewn, you'll pass out again."
"Then hold my hand and talk to me. That's the job." He settled deeper into the pillow, gray but grinning. "Tell me about Friday. Tell me the pickup's going to be fine and I'm going to work it one-handed and we're going to be rich, and don't stop talking until the doctor gets here."
Niles started talking.