by Andrea Speed
“Which explains your perfection of it.” He turned back to face Paris—the news team had moved on to the weatherman with the ill-fitting hairpiece—and shot him a grin, which Par returned in blinding affection.
“Damn right, baby. I’m the king of desperate displays for attention.”
“Which explains your shirt,” he responded, gesturing at it with his fork. It was a black T-shirt that said simply, in plain white letters across the chest, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. Hate me because I fucked your dad.” That had actually been a birthday present from Randi, which Par had absolutely loved, although Roan had to ask him to please never wear it to the office.
Paris grinned slyly. “This isn’t just a bid for attention. There were a couple of instances where this was factually true.”
“Please don’t bring up your sordid past now. I’m eating.”
“Sordid?” he repeated, then did it again, thinking it over. “Sordid. Is it wrong I like the sound of that?”
“Probably, but I won’t hold it against you.”
“See? That’s why you’re the best husband ever.” He leaned over the breakfast bar and planted a kiss on his forehead, and Roan gave him a tight, slightly sarcastic smile.
Par turned off the TV, since the news was done having anything interesting in it, and they finished breakfast in a mix of companionable silence and meaningless talk. Roan had a feeling they were talking around something, but he really didn’t know what it could be.
And then he did. They were piling breakfast dishes in the sink when Paris, facing away from him, said simply, “I’m doing it tomorrow.”
It took Roan a minute to understand what he’d said, and then another minute to hope he’d heard him wrong. But he hadn’t, and there was no mistaking what Paris meant. Unsure what to do, he finally put his arms around Par’s waist and rested his head on his shoulder, swallowing back a huge lump that had spontaneously formed in his throat. “Why so soon?”
Paris sighed and reached up and cupped the back of his neck. “I realized how close I was cutting it. I’ll be within the virus cycle’s high range starting tomorrow, and you know I could transform at any time after that. I thought I’d have more time, but it just got away from me.” Paris caressed the back of his neck for a moment, and Roan found it amazing Par was trying to comfort him. “So, because of that, I thought we could have some fun today.”
“Absolutely. What do you want to do?”
“Besides you?”
Roan laughed. “Yeah, besides me.”
“It sounds nuts, but I want to go to the beach.”
“Hon, it’s thirty-three degrees outside.”
“I don’t want to go swimming or anything. I just want to see the ocean.”
He kissed the side of Paris’s neck, once again noting how abnormally warm his skin was. Something in his mind wanted to rage about how unfair this was, but he didn’t allow himself to, because he wasn’t going to ruin Paris’s day. Nothing about this stupid fucking disease was fair, any more than life was fair. Was it fair that, of all the virus children born brain-damaged and ill, he somehow came out of it okay? Was it fair that while Paris was getting sicker and sicker, he was only getting stronger? He might actually have a fair shot at living an almost normal human lifespan—and the prospect of that terrified him. A large part of him thought he’d be much better off going with Paris, and he wished he could. “Okay then. Let’s get going.”
Paris glanced back at him, gracing him with a warm, affectionate smile that made Roan’s stomach twinge. How would he live his final day, if he knew it was? Roan wasn’t sure, didn’t know, and didn’t want to think about it.
They poured a thermos of espresso, then put on their coats and headed out to the garage. They took the Mustang, Roan driving so Paris could lean into him as he drove, Roan’s arm draped over his shoulders and Paris’s warm hand on his knee. The traffic wasn’t bad and got even thinner as they headed out toward the coast, as a cold November day was hardly peak time for the tourists. He was pretty sure Paris dozed off against him for a bit, his body radiating so much heat he hardly needed to have the car heater on, but Roan didn’t mind. He felt a surprising emotional numbness, but maybe it wasn’t that surprising in retrospect. After all, the world was ending; this was it. But it was one of those things that was so huge, so impossible to fathom, that it didn’t really strike you what was happening until it had already happened. Knowing that the world was about to be ripped out from under you wasn’t the same as finding yourself falling into a bottomless chasm.
The parking lot for the beach was almost totally empty, save for an old-style Volkswagen van, and once they got out onto the empty beach, they figured out who it must have belonged to. Way out in the blue-gray ocean they saw a lithe figure clad in a tight, full-body wetsuit balanced on a yellow surfboard, attempting to catch some of the meager waves out there. They decided he was fucking nuts, but more power to him, as long as he didn’t suffer from hypothermia.
It was beautiful here and peaceful, with the sighing of the waves and the cries of the seabirds; only the biting cold was a bit of a pisser. But Paris sat down on the hard-packed sand and began tracing a pattern in the beach with his finger. Paris had always had an artistic bent, but he never did much with it; as he’d told Roan when he showed him some of the drawings and paintings he had done as a teenager (his parents kept them all, and the Lehanes had a more abstract effort of his framed in their living room), he had never had any ambitions beyond getting laid as much as humanly possible. He just didn’t care about anything else. Roan figured he was exaggerating, but Paris did seem to suffer a terminal lack of ambition. As strange as it might sound, Roan actually liked that about him; it seemed very Zen.
Roan, who had no artistic ability to speak of, joined him, ending up making some sort of mandala pattern, as it was easy to draw spirals and circles. Paris looked at it and seemed to like it, and he joined him by drawing his own mandala pattern as well. What the hell were they doing? Roan had no idea, but bizarrely enough, they were having fun.
They had covered half the beach with loops and whorls, circles and geometric patterns, when the surfer paddled back to shore. He was older than Roan had assumed, in his early thirties, although he had shoulder-length brown hair, and the body encased in the black wetsuit looked impressively sleek. He looked at what they had done and said, “Cool. You guys artists?” He actually had the faintest trace of a German accent, which surprised Roan—he really hadn’t expected that.
“Only he is,” Roan said, pointing at Paris. “I’m just copying him.”
Paris denied that, but surfer dude—as Roan had mentally dubbed him—seemed impressed. He went back to his van and put his surfboard away and then came back, dressed in drier, warmer clothes and carrying a digital camera. He took pictures of what they had done, and as it turned out, he was an artist—a glassblower, actually. (Oh, the jokes Roan could have made, but didn’t.) They chatted for a bit and exchanged e-mail addresses so he could send them copies of the photos he’d taken. His name was Lukas, which actually seemed like the perfect name for a German surfer/glassblower wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and driving a VW van. Roan bet ten to one that the back of the guy’s van smelled like old bong water.
They all shook hands, and Lukas invited them to drop by the “gallery” sometime (not a proper gallery, just a small shop in a local market where he and a bunch of other artists attempted to sell their wares) before leaving. Once he was gone, Paris laughed. “Well, that was weird. It’s not every day you meet a German surfer.”
“And glassblower.” Roan chuckled and put his arms around Paris, pulling him close. “I think he was checking you out.”
“You’re just saying that to feed my ego.” He slid his arms around Roan’s waist and smiled at him.
“No. He was totally checking out your crotch. I was thinking of punching him.”
Paris’s grin broadened until it looked like he was going to laugh. “I can’t possibly love you m
ore.”
They returned to the car, and Paris snuggled against him for the drive back. They stopped at their usual Chinese restaurant and, because they were much-liked regulars, they got the best booth and the nicest waitress. He didn’t know if they knew they were gay; what they knew was they were great customers and they tipped really well. Ultimately, that was probably all they cared about. It would have been nice if things were always that simple.
During lunch, they both had one more drink than they probably should have, and picking over dessert, Paris told him, “I have stuff marked. I put it in the bedroom closet.”
Was it the beer? Or did this just not make sense? “What?”
“Everything else is yours. Do what you want with it. Except no throwing away my CDs, damn it.”
Now he understood what Paris was saying. He had prepared his things, what he wanted to give away to various people, and set them aside for Roan to distribute after his death. A detail that probably would have escaped Roan or would have been exceptionally painful. He wanted to ask Paris when he did that, but realized it must have been yesterday, when he was home, before he’d collapsed. Maybe that was why he’d collapsed—the fever and doing all that work might have taken it out of him. “I’m not going to throw away anything of yours,” he told him honestly. How could he? It would be all he had left of Paris. The thought of it made his throat threaten to close up again.
Paris reached across the table and stroked his cheek with the back of his hand, his look so kind it was almost painful to look at straight on. “I’m always going to be with you, you know. As long as you remember me, I will exist. Memory is a form of existence, life after death. Just do me a favor and try to remember only the good things.”
Roan couldn’t help but gasp at this. It was almost a laugh and yet also a reaction of shock. Yeah, he said he liked Paris because he was kind of Zen, but he’d never actually been Zen. Tears came to his eyes and he wiped them away as he asked, “Goddamn, how are you handling this so well?”
Paris gave Roan a kind smile and took his hand in his, giving it a comforting squeeze. “Because I expected to die years ago, hon. Hell, I wanted to. I was never going to have sex again, and I couldn’t trust myself around people; the tiger could kill again. I would have killed myself quicker, but I was too scared to do it. So I figured if I kept drinking and just waited, death would find me. It almost did too, before some private eye with a preternaturally sharp nose crossed my path.” He lifted Roan’s hand and kissed it, giving him a sweet smile. “So all this time has been a gift. I didn’t expect it, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve had so much fun. Thank you.”
“What the hell are you thanking me for?”
“For the good time, sailor.” Paris gave him a hearty grin with a white flash of teeth. “You should charge admission into your life. It’s a trip.”
“People would demand refunds.”
“Only if they’re complete pussies.” A couple walked past on their way to a table, and Roan’s first impulse was to let Paris’s hand go—you had to be really careful about showing affection in public places, because people could have the most astonishingly psychotic reactions—but Paris didn’t let go of his hand. And he was right—who gave a fuck? Today, nothing much mattered at all, beyond Paris. Besides, they could go psycho, but he could partially transform into a lion. He won. Again, he won the biggest fucking psycho sweepstakes.
“So what do you want to do now?”
His blue eyes glowed mischievously. “Go home and fuck our brains out.”
Now that was the type of cheap date that he liked.
So they went home and did just that. Paris was still the most beautiful man he’d ever seen, even though the ravages of illness made his ribs stand out beneath his skin, made his hip and shoulder bones jut out almost painfully, made his flat stomach concave. It occurred to Roan that he’d probably think Paris was beautiful no matter how he looked, because to him he always would be. He loved him so fiercely it honestly scared the shit out of him. He had not wanted to ever feel so much for anyone, especially after Connor, but somehow he had fallen harder for Paris than he ever had for Con. It was almost like he had subconsciously sabotaged himself... which wouldn’t surprise him, actually.
The good thing about living so far away from everyone was they had privacy no matter the fact that they had their bedroom curtains open, and while they fell asleep with the pale winter sun warming their skin, when Roan woke up, the sky was dark and sparkling with stars, and he caught Paris giving himself a B-12 injection. Well, why not? This was his last day to use them.
Paris now wanted to go out, hit Panic and maybe a more sedate bar on the way home, which Roan kind of suspected he’d want to do. What he hadn’t expected was that Par would insist on picking out his clothes. “Oh come on,” Paris said, clad only in a towel wrapped around his waist. They’d just gotten out of the shower, and Roan had just pulled on his boxers and had grabbed a pair of pants when Paris stopped him. “You’re such a hottie and you always hide it. I want to show you off.”
He sighed heavily, fixing Paris with a skeptical look. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a ‘hottie’. You’re just saying that because you love me.” Saying that made him feel a twinge in his chest that he ignored.
“No, not just because of that. The puppy still has a major-league crush on you, you know.” Paris put his arm around his waist and kissed his ear. “You have the most striking eyes I’ve ever seen, and you have the greatest arms. Once the queens at Panic get a look at your arms, they’re going to faint.”
Roan groaned in defeat. “You’re going to make me wear something sleeveless, aren’t you?”
“Just stay here,” he said, carefully not answering the question, and then went to search the drawers and closet.
“No half shirts!” Roan warned him. “And if you bring me anything spandex, I swear to your mother I’m flushing it down the toilet!”
Eventually he dressed Roan up in this sleeveless black muscle shirt that had see-through fishnetlike vents on the side, but since it was Paris’s shirt—of course it was Paris’s shirt; he didn’t own anything even partially see-through—it was a bit baggy and not all that revealing. Roan was able to pick out his own jeans, but Paris objected to him wearing a weather-appropriate coat. “You have to go with the black leather jacket. You’ve got this whole rough-trade thing going on.”
“I am not rough trade,” he snapped, but of course completely caved to Paris’s wishes. Par knew he would too, the bastard. Par, as if wanting to deliberately contrast with his dark wardrobe, wore a skintight white T-shirt and extremely pale jeans with strategically worn holes in them, although they were baggy enough that you couldn’t actually see how slender his legs and hips were now.
Once again, Mighty Mouse was on the door of Panic and was happy to see Paris, whom he let through instantly. He also looked Roan over and said, “Don’t you clean up nice?”
Inside the noisy, crowded club, that seemed to be the general consensus of the men who swarmed Paris like a long-lost brother at a family reunion. One of the twinks even said to him, “You don’t look so bad, y’know, for a redhead.”
He sat at the bar while Paris went to talk to the DJ who was working tonight, a whisper-thin but still nicely built black man wearing a magenta cowboy hat and no shirt (was it a rule that employees of Panic could not, under any circumstances, wear shirts?), and slipped him a folded-up computer printout. He knew it was the playlist that Paris wanted at his wake—he’d already let him know he wanted a wake at Panic. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted a wake here, so everybody could get bombed and “not be so fucking miserable.” Even in death, Paris wanted a wild party.
Roan folded his arms on the bar and rested his head on them as some kind of inexplicable dance remix of a Stone Roses song pounded through the club, causing reverberations he could feel up his legs. Why did time do this? Why did it move so fast when all you wanted it to do was slow the fuck down? He felt like he was waiting for his ow
n execution. Although he suspected it wouldn’t be so bad if it was his execution. He could fight that; he could go down swinging. But you couldn’t fight time, and you couldn’t fight this fucking relentless virus, or the effects it was having on Paris’s system. All he could do was stand by helplessly and watch, and he couldn’t tolerate being helpless. He had sworn that, once he grew up, he would never be helpless again. Oh, how life loved to stick in the shiv.
Suddenly he felt a warm hand on his arm, and he lifted his head to see that it was Toby the bartender, whose chocolate-brown eyes were almost liquid with sympathy. “You guys’ drinks are on the house tonight,” Toby told him, giving his arm a pat before withdrawing his hand.
Only then did Roan realize Toby hadn’t told anyone—he hadn’t told any of the others that he and Paris were infected. He was a good bartender, and he kept his clients’ secrets to himself. Roan would have thanked him for that, but something in Toby’s expression told him that wasn’t necessary. “You don’t have to—”
“It’s done,” he said, with a casual shrug of his shoulder. “Just take care of yourselves.” He was called down to the other end of the bar by a customer, and Roan watched him go. Did the manager set that up? He must have known Paris was in bad straits, since they had to set up the wake. Just from the looks he occasionally threw their way, he surmised only Toby knew.
Paris captivated all the men, but they couldn’t stay as long as he probably wanted, because in spite of the B-12, he got tired fast. Paris decided this was enough barhopping for him, so they headed home. Because Roan wanted to see if there was anything more about Braben, he listened to the local news update on one of the AM bands. The same scandal was enveloping Braben, and apparently the IRS was now investigating him. But as the story on him ended, one on his stepson began. Gavin had been charged with assault by three different women who claimed he had deliberately infected them. When the cops arrived to interview him, they found illegal drugs on the premises, including pot, Ecstasy, rohypnol, cocaine, and heroin. He claimed the drugs weren’t his and he had infected no one, but he was in the infected wing of the local prison. It seemed the sheer amount of illegal drugs found in his possession was enough for a federal charge. Had Jay set him up? Probably—Gavin was a user, not a dealer. Ironically, he’d probably do more time on drug charges than he ever would’ve for murder. Jay Bishop’s terminal fucking-up of the lives of Gavin and Clifford was probably complete. And if either of them got away unscathed, there’d be a new bear trap waiting around the corner for them, for as long as Jay lived. He seemed like a vindictive bitch.
