Chapter 9: Nine Stitches
The fluorescent light over the bed made Gavin's face look like something already dead. He sat on the mattress in the same soaked clothes from the bridge, shivering in intervals, while a resident with tired eyes sewed his palm shut under a portable lamp. Seven stitches. The needle driver clicked with every pass.
Niles stood at the rail of the bed and held Gavin's good hand through all of it, and he did not shut up once.
"So Friday's the pickup, right, that's already locked, Marcus is bringing the re-up at nine, which means I gotta be up at eight, which is fucked, but whatever. And the bridge toll guy, the cash one, he remembers my face now, so we gotta stop going over that one, it's three bucks every time like he's got a mortgage on it or something." Niles squeezed Gavin's fingers. "You hear me? Friday. Nine."
"I heard you the first four times," Gavin said. His voice came out thin. The needle bit in again and he watched it, not flinching, just watching, like it was happening to someone on TV.
"Because you never listen."
"I never listen," Gavin agreed.
The resident tied off, snipped the thread, and looked up over his mask. "Keep it dry for two days. No heavy gripping. And honestly, given how this one looks, maybe stop using your hands for whatever it is you people do."
"We will," Niles said, in the tone he used for lying to cops.
The resident left with his tray. The door hissed shut and the room went down to the monitor's beep and the hum of the lights and the river water dripping off Gavin's jeans onto the tile, tick, tick, tick.
Niles pulled the chair over with his foot and sat, still holding the good hand. Up close, Gavin's lips were faintly blue. Niles tugged the scratchy hospital blanket off the foot of the bed and dropped it over his shoulders without a word about it.
"Friday," Gavin said.
"Friday," Niles said.
"And the oath."
"And the oath."
Gavin looked at his own lap, at the sewn palm resting in Niles's grip, and was quiet for a second, which for Gavin was a record.
"You know what I was gonna say out there," he said. "On the bridge."
Niles's jaw tightened. "You said it."
"I said the oath. Not the other thing." Gavin's thumb moved against Niles's palm, slow, like he was checking it was solid. "You wanna know the actual truth? The whole night under there, after I woke up on your kitchen floor and before Hank found me. That quiet. The house being empty and no one yelling and no you."
"Gav."
"No, shut up, I'm being honest, it's a medical thing, they gave me fluids." Gavin exhaled through his nose. "That quiet scared me worse than dying did. I laid on the floor going in and out and the only thing I could think was that it was gonna be like that forever. No you. That's the part that almost killed me. Not the pills."
Niles didn't say anything for a moment. His eyes were doing the wet bright thing he hated, so he looked at the monitor instead, at the little green heartbeat that wasn't his.
"You're such a dramatic piece of shit," he said finally, and his voice cracked on it.
"Your piece of shit."
"Yeah," Niles said. "Mine."
He leaned in and kissed him, careful of nothing except the split in his own lip, and Gavin kissed back with his teeth, hospital blanket and river smell and all. The monitor beeped on. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattled past.
When they broke apart, Gavin was grinning, weak and mean and himself again. "This is a hospital bed, you know. Room 302. We've got history here."
"You've got stitches in your hand."
"In one hand." Gavin wiggled the fingers of the other one. "Fully functional."
"Seven stitches."
"Pinned it on the record, though. Against medical advice. I'm basically invincible now."
Niles stood, kicked the chair away, and looked down the length of the bed at him, at the soaked jeans and the shivering and the blue lips and the mouth. "You're freezing."
"So warm me up, or are you just gonna stand there being tall."
Niles climbed onto the bed. It was narrow, worse than the last time, and the plastic mattress protested under both of them with a sound like a dying goose. Gavin hissed when Niles's knee came down beside his hip, not from that, just the cold of the railing still in his bones. Niles got the wet jacket off him, then worked at the soaked jeans, peeling them down over hips that were sharper than they'd been two weeks ago.
"Watch the hand," Gavin muttered.
"I'm watching the hand."
Niles caught the bandaged wrist and pushed it up above Gavin's head, slow, deliberate, pressing it into the pillow. Held it there. Looked at him.
"Keep it there," he said. "You move it, I stop."
"That's evil."
"That's the deal."
Gavin kept it there. Niles stripped his own shirt one-handed and dropped it on the floor, and then he was everywhere else, no care at all, mouth dragging down Gavin's throat, over the bruise Niles had left there last night, teeth grazing the edge of it just to hear Gavin's breath catch. His other hand shoved the blanket down and pushed Gavin's knees apart.
"You're shaking," Niles said against his jaw.
"I'm cold."
"You're cold and you're hard."
"Multitasking." Gavin's hips tipped up off the mattress. "Niles. Come on."
Niles worked him open with thick, spit-slick fingers, unhurried about it in a way he knew drove Gavin out of his skull, one finger buried deep and crooked, then two, stretching him slow while Gavin swore at the ceiling. The bed frame knocked the wall with every shift. Gavin's good hand fisted the sheet; the bandaged one stayed where Niles had pinned it, trembling slightly with the effort, and Niles watched that instead of anything else, watched him hold still because he'd been told to.
"There," Gavin bit out, when Niles found the spot. "There, fuck, do that."
"I know where it is."
"Then quit showing off."
Niles pushed in with no more warning than that, slow on the first inch, then all the way, one brutal drive that punched the air out of Gavin's chest. The monitor spiked and beeped faster. Gavin laughed, wrecked, breathless, and wrapped his legs around Niles's back.
"There he is," Gavin gasped. "That's my guy."
Niles set a rhythm, hard and deep, hips cracking against him, one hand braced by Gavin's head, the other gripping his hip hard enough to print fingerprints. He kept his weight off the bandaged arm, kept the stitches out of it, careful there and nowhere else, exactly the way Gavin liked it. The whole room smelled like river water and sweat.
"Say it again," Niles ground out.
"Which part?"
"You know which part."
Gavin pulled him down by the neck, split lip stinging, and said it against his mouth. "Yours. Yours, yours, shut up."
The bed slapped the wall in a steady beat, loud in the hollow little room, and neither of them cared about the nurses' station twenty feet away. Gavin came first, with his sewn hand still pinned above his head and his heel dug into Niles's spine, and Niles followed with his face buried in Gavin's bruised throat.
After, Niles didn't pull out right away. He just lay there on top of him, heavy, both of them breathing, until the monitor had wound back down to its slow clinical tick.
"Friday," Gavin said eventually, hoarse.
"Friday," Niles said. "Nine a.m."
"And the quiet thing. Don't make me say it twice."
Niles shifted onto his side on the too-narrow bed, keeping his body pressed along Gavin's, and took the bandaged hand this time, gently, like it was actually injured. "You won't get it again. That's the deal now. You don't get the quiet."
"That's the deal," Gavin said, and closed his eyes.
They slept in fits, the mattress too narrow for two bodies and the monitor waking them every time one of them rolled. At seven a nurse came in with a blood pressure cuff and no comment about the second pillow she found wedged between them, and by nine a doctor with a clipboard had pronounced Gavin stable, sutured, and lucky, in that order.
"Against medical advice, last time," the doctor said, looking at the chart. "Today we're discharging you. Try to notice the difference."
"Big day for me," Gavin said.
Niles signed what needed signing, forged one signature that didn't, and wheeled Gavin's jacket out under his arm. The morning was thin and bright outside the sliding doors. Gavin lit a cigarette with his good hand while Niles fetched the car, smoke curling off the split in his lip, and when the car pulled up he climbed in with the grace of a man who had bruised every rib he owned.
"Whataburger," Gavin said, before Niles had the car in gear.
"Friday's pickup money, that's what's left."
"You have burger money."
"I have burger money," Niles admitted, and turned toward the drive-thru.
They were two blocks out of the lot, Gavin halfway through telling a story about his first hospital discharge at nineteen, when someone hit the hood of the car. Not a slap. A full palm, flat, desperate. North stood in the crosswalk in a coat over bare legs, mascara wrecked down her face, barefoot in someone's flip-flops in November.
Niles rolled the window down. "North?"
She came around to his side so fast she stumbled on the curb. She grabbed the window frame with both hands and hung there, and up close Niles could see she wasn't just crying, she was past it, shaking, the kind of crying that had been going on for hours.
"It's not a joke, Niles, I need you to actually listen, I'm gonna say it once." She wiped her face with her wrist. "I'm pregnant. Six weeks, maybe seven. I did three tests. I need two hundred and forty dollars by tomorrow, there's a place on Verner Street, the cash one, the clean one."
The car went quiet. Gavin stopped chewing.
"Does the guy know?" Niles asked.
"I don't know which guy." Her voice cracked on it and she pushed through. "Could be any of three, maybe four, I don't keep a list, Niles, I wasn't exactly taking applications. Doesn't matter. I'm not having it. I can't have it and I can't do this and I need the money."
"You got two-forty anywhere?" Gavin said through the window. "Clinics do sliding scale."
"Not on two days' notice. This one, this place, it's tomorrow or I'm on the street with it." She looked at Gavin, then at Niles, and her chin started to go. "I wouldn't ask. You know I wouldn't ask. I stood outside your house for an hour working up to this."
Niles did the math without wanting to. Friday's pickup, nine a.m., Marcus, the re-up. The money he'd been counting in his head for two days, folded into the glovebox right now. If he pulled two-forty out of it the buy would be short.
"Friday's the pickup," Gavin said quietly, watching him.
"I know what Friday is."
North had both hands over her mouth now, holding herself in. "I'll pay it back. I will, I swear, I'll work it off, I'll"
"Stop." Niles said it sharper than he meant to. He looked out the windshield at nothing for a second. Then he popped the glovebox and took out the fold of cash and peeled what Friday had cost him in his head. "Two-forty. Tomorrow, Verner Street. Somebody drives you."
"I'll drive her," Gavin said.
"You can't lift your own arm."
"I can drive, Niles. Pedals and a wheel. It's why they made cars." He took the burger bag off his lap and set it aside. "We'll go at ten. I'll sit in the waiting room and be a supportive presence, which is gonna be hilarious."
North looked between them like she didn't trust it. "This isn't a loan, this is you two just"
"It's a loan," Niles said. "Twenty a week whenever you have it, don't starve yourself doing it. And North." He caught her eye and held it. "You don't work the corner till this is done. Whatever that costs you. I mean it."
She took the money and folded it into her coat like it was something breakable, and then she reached in the window and grabbed the front of his shirt and pressed her forehead against his knuckles, and stayed like that for a moment, breathing.
"Thank you," she said into his hand, muffled.
"Yeah. Get in the car, you're freezing."
She got in the back with the burger bag she had no claim to, and Gavin drove them toward Verner Street with his bruised ribs and one working hand, talking the whole way, pointlessly, loudly, about the place he knew on Fourth that did piercings and never asked questions, filling the car up with noise so nobody in it had to be quiet.
Halfway there North laughed, once, wet and surprised. "You're talking so much."
"It's my condition," Gavin said.
At the door of the place on Verner Street, North stopped with the money in her pocket and turned around. "Ten tomorrow. You'll actually come?"
"We'll actually come," Niles said.
She went inside. Niles stood on the sidewalk and watched the door shut, and did the math again, and came out short no matter how he arranged it.
"Marcus is gonna burn me," he said.
"Marcus is gonna grouse. You tell him it went to a good cause and he'll grouse." Gavin leaned against the car, cigarette in his teeth, and looked up at the street sign. "Worst case, Friday, I know a guy who fronted once before."
"You know a guy who fronted once and charged you double."
"So it's double," Gavin said, shrugging. "North doesn't have a Friday."
Niles looked at him, at the stitches and the bruised throat and the cigarette, and didn't say anything for long enough that Gavin raised an eyebrow.
"Shut up," Niles said finally.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were gonna say something noble."
"Absolutely not. Get in the car, we still got a drive-thru problem."
They got their burgers. Niles called Connor from the parking lot, phone propped on his shoulder, and Connor answered on the second ring like he'd been sitting on it.
"You're out of the hospital already? Both of you?"
"Born lucky," Niles said. "Listen. Tomorrow, ten a.m., Verner Street. North needs a ride and Gavin's driving. Can you come?"
"Which one's Verner Street?"
"The one past the laundromat."
"North's place. Yeah, obviously." A pause, then a rustle of something, a lighter clicking. "Is she okay?"
"Tomorrow," Niles said, and hung up, because saying it twice made it more real.
The next morning came in gray and cold, the kind of light that made every parked car look abandoned. Gavin's car had a cracked windshield and a smell of old cigarettes that even the new air freshener, a pine tree Gavin had wedged under the rearview, only barely competed with. Connor got in at ten sharp, hood up, a thermos of coffee clutched in both hands that Hank had poured him and watched him drink half of before leaving the house.
North was already on the steps of the clinic, early. Coat buttoned to the throat, hair pulled back, mascara gone but the evidence of it still shadowed under her eyes. She spotted Connor getting out of the car and something in her face unclenched.
"Oh thank god," she said. "They're both unbearable."
"Only one of them," Connor said, and hugged her.
It was quick and hard, her cheek against his shoulder, and Gavin, leaning on the hood, made an exaggerated wounded noise. "See, when I get a hug it's an event, I gotta earn it with blood."
"You've never earned anything," North said, pulling back from Connor, but her hand stayed on his arm. "You look terrible."
"You should see the other guy. Actually you did see the other guy, it was Niles."
Connor looked at her the way he did at almost nobody, straight on, no smirk loaded. "Are you scared?"
"Yeah," North said, plainly, and it seemed to cost her nothing to say it to him, which was the strange miracle of it. Nobody in that house knew why the two of them worked, the dealer's best friend and the dealer's little brother, her fast mouth and his flat one, but they'd spent hours on Hank's back steps at three in the morning sharing cigarettes and saying true things. "But I've decided scared is fine. Scared can come with me."
"They gave me a cookie in the waiting room last time I was in a hospital," Gavin said. "It was shit. Lower your expectations."
The waiting room was small and smelled like disinfectant and somebody's hairspray. There were four chairs, a rack of ancient pamphlets, a television bolted to the wall playing a morning show with the sound off. North went up to the window with her folded cash and came back with a clipboard and a number, forty-one, and sat between Connor and the wall like it was a coincidence.
Gavin filled out his own paperwork on the adjacent form for no reason, narrating it. "Occupation. Entrepreneur."
"Consultant," Niles said.
"Recovery specialist," Gavin wrote.
Connor took the pen from him and wrote, in the occupation line, has a boyfriend, and Gavin looked at it for a long second and then, betraying nothing, did not cross it out.
They waited an hour. Connor bought coffee and a bottled water from the machine and gave North the water without being asked, and she drank it in small sips, and every time the door opened and a number was called her shoulders went up, and every time it wasn't hers Connor said nothing, just knocked his knee against hers, and that was somehow the whole conversation.
"Six weeks," North said at some point, to the middle distance. "It's the size of a grape. I looked it up at two in the morning. It's a grape and I have to work the corner tomorrow and this is the math."
"Yeah," Connor said.
"I'm not telling anyone else in that house. You know what Simon would do. He'd make it a moment. There'd be a moment."
"There's always a moment," Connor said.
"That's why you're my favorite," North said. "You don't do moments."
When her number was called she stood, and her hands shook once, visibly, and she looked at the three of them in their row of chairs, Niles with his jaw set, Gavin slouched and pale, Connor with her half-finished water still cupped in his hand like he'd been holding her seat.
"Go with her," Niles said to Connor.
"You can't, they only allow one," Connor said, already up. "Sit down, Gavin, you look green."
The hallway was fluorescent and quiet. North walked beside him and didn't take his hand, but their sleeves touched the whole way, and at the door a nurse said, "Just the one support person," and Connor said, "That's me," and it didn't even feel like a lie.
It took ninety minutes. Gavin bought chips from the machine and ate four and abandoned the rest. Niles went out to the curb twice to smoke and came back in both times without finishing the cigarette. When the door finally opened and Connor came out alone, the room stood up.
"She's in recovery, she's fine, she's asleep," Connor said. "She wants a milkshake when she wakes up. The strawberry kind, the cheap fake kind, not real strawberries, she was extremely specific."
Gavin was already looking up the nearest drive-thru. Niles sat back down slowly, like his strings had been cut, and then leaned over and put his forehead against Connor's shoulder for a second, wordless, which from Niles was practically a speech.
"She asked me to tell you," Connor said. "She said, tell them it went fine and don't make it a moment."
"Too late," Gavin said. "It's a moment. It's my moment now."
"Get the milkshake," Connor said.
They got the milkshake. They also got three more, because Gavin ordered for everyone, and when North woke in the recovery chairs by the exit she was handed a styrofoam cup of something aggressively pink and artificial, and she drank it with her eyes closed and said, "Perfect, that's exactly the wrong one," and Connor sat down next to her and stole the cherry out of it, and she let him, which nobody else alive would have been allowed to do.