by Jack Parker
"Kim, what are you doing?" the words flew from his mouth as he tried to stop himself from reacting in a way that he just couldn't handle.
"I thought you were supposed to be giving the gym a break until you healed," Kim said.
Robin glanced around.
"What?"
"You've definitely been going," Kim's fingers were still touching his skin, "I can see a difference even from just a couple of weeks ago."
"Fucking hell," Robin closed his eyes and swallowed. He didn't know what to do or say. He wanted to beg her to stop but he didn't want to be rude. Worse than that, he didn't actually want her to. He clutched the chair tightly, his nails sinking into the leather. He knew what was about to happen. He couldn't believe it, but he knew it. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
And there it was. Shit, now he was really glad that he was facing forwards with the slanting chair covering the area that he really didn't want her to see.
The relief at Kim removing her fingers from his skin was short-lived when he realised that the problem wasn't going anywhere because he couldn't stop replaying it, and even thinking about it was making it worse. He was terrified of moving in case he revealed his predicament. God, he embarrassed easily at the best of times. This was the worst – this was the ultimate. He could not understand what was happening to him. Not physically and not emotionally.
The whirring of the needle was a beautiful sound. Oh, thank god for that the needle. That would make it all go away. Soon the pain would start and he'd forget all about stupid fingers on his stupid back and he'd be concentrating on the feeling of the needle against his skin instead.
"Robin, it will hurt less if you relax a bit more. Try not to be so stiff," Kim told him.
"That's easy for you to say," Robin mumbled into the leather as the needle whirred and the feeling of it against his skin finally burst through his consciousness. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply between each line. Each bit of ink delving below the surface helped to take his mind away from it. Each feeling of the skin becoming part of his design helped to remove the feeling of Kim's fingers from his mind. Slowly, gradually, the problem began to lessen and he started to relax just a little more. Kim noticed his shoulders becoming less tense as she worked.
"That's better Rob," she said, "block out the pain."
"The pain is not the problem," Robin mumbled but even as he spoke he started to flash back to Kim telling him to block something out before, but the last time it was in the reverse. She'd been urging him to remember the sensation of his first tattoo to block out a painful trigger and an agonising memory. And he had – he'd stared into her eyes; her deep, intense eyes and her words and her voice had reached right inside of him and carried him over the darkest of rivers. Her eyes and her –
Her beautiful –
Shit. There it goes again. What the hell? He shook his head a little, realised what he was doing and pretended he was trying to get some hair out of his eye.
"You need this cut, Dulux dog," Kim teased, running her fingers through his floppy fringe. He closed his eyes and almost let a strange sound escape from his throat. He couldn't understand it. Every time she touched him he felt his heart start to race. It literally felt as though it could beat right out of his chest. Maybe he was going to have another heart attack? That would have actually been a preferable solution to the alternative.
He couldn't handle the thoughts and emotions that were so alien to him. He turned his head to one side, away from Kim, and tried to concentrate on the feeling of the needle to block out everything else. He focused hard, overcoming everything that tried to squeeze into his thoughts and eventually, when a couple of hours had passed, the needle stopped and Kim's voice said;
"All done."
"That's it?" Robin said in surprise.
"Well, the outline," Kim told him, "we'll get you back in a couple of weeks when it's healed and get some colour in there." She stepped back. "Go and take a look."
In his blur of emotions and confusion Robin climbed from the chair, the scars completely slipping his mind, and took a good look in the mirror. Craning his neck around, the shape of the dragon across his back was graceful and smooth. It took his breath away.
"Kim, you're wonderful," he began, his eyes twinkling before the strength of his words made him feel awkward, "it's wonderful… you've done a great job."
"It'll look even better when we've got the colours in," Kim began as he turned back round but her sentence trailed off as she caught sight of his scars. It was the first time she had seen the severity of Keats's attack on him. Every last one of the slashes might as well have been a slash against her heart. The thought of him causing so much pain and damage gave her a terrible feeling of sickness in the pit of her stomach. Her crestfallen expression brought Robin's attention back to the state of his own body and he realised with horror that she'd seen it all.
There was a lump in his throat. It choked him and made him gasp for breath as he tried and failed to calm his disgust at what Kim had seen. A strange sense of panic overtook him as he grabbed his shirt and pulled it on quickly.
"Rob, wait, I haven't put the dressing on yet," Kim said quickly.
Robin froze. He didn't want to take his shirt off again so he just pulled up the back and leaned silently over the chair again. He closed his eyes and felt one tiny drop of water trickle down from his left eye to his nose and right down to the leather of the chair. She'd seen it now, there was no taking it back. The look of horror on her face was going to haunt him.
Why did it bother him so much?
"There," Kim said quietly as he finished sticking the dressing to his back.
Robin slowly got up from the chair and blinked away any remaining tears. He stared at her, unsure what to say. She seemed just as awkward and neither of them knew how to handle that. There had never been an awkward silence between them, ever. Finally Robin glanced down, shuffled a little and said quietly,
"Thanks so much, Kim. I really love it.
Kim's smile was strained.
"It was your design," she reminded him, "it's really beautiful."
Robin finally looked her in the eye. His smile was awkward.
"I suppose I'd better get out of here before your next customer lynches me."
Kim glanced at a slightly impatient man who'd been checking his watch for the last five minutes.
"Shit, yes," she said, "Forgot about him." She looked at Robin. "Call me later," she said, "let me know how your tat feels tonight."
Robin's smile grew a little less strained.
"I will," he said.
A very strange moment passed during which neither Kim nor Robin really knew how to say goodbye. That had never happened before. Finally Robin gave a tiny wave and seemed to slink from the tattoo studio as though he felt awkward and embarrassed to be there.
Kim felt a very strange sensation as she watched him go. She didn't know what it was. There was something churning inside of her that she couldn't put her finger on.
Fingers. She glanced down at her own. She could almost still feel Robin's skin against them. Her eyes rose back to the doorway but Robin had gone. She breathed deeply as she tried to work out what had changed between them. Something wasn't right. Something wasn't the way it used to be. But, as the impatient man cleared his throat and crossly indicated the clock on the wall Kim realised she would probably have to wait until later to try to work it out. It was time to focus on the job at hand – and not on the butterflies that just didn't seem to want to go away.
Chapter Four
"Shit."
Robin had said that word more than any other for days now. He was turning into Simon.
He stared at Simon's photograph on the wall as his mind went back over the same matters. It was difficult to think about anything else, and even on the rare moments that he did he found a dark feeling lurking in the pit of his stomach to remind him there was a big problem still to face.
It wasn't like Robin had ever doubted his sexuality, not even for a
moment. Well, there was a brief Gillian Anderson obsession but to be honest he was so obsessed with the show that he was practically in love with Tooms, let alone anyone else.
He'd always known that he was different - not in a bad way, just that his ideals and drives were different to most people's. It was something he always knew, bubbling under the surface. Then when his teens arrived and his hormones went crazy he found himself attracted to men. He never really questioned it. He just knew that was who he was, no question.
He'd never found women attractive before. He just didn't 'see it'. He tried to picture Kim. Did he find her attractive? He found himself shaking his head. He didn't… not really. Not to look at. She had all the bits he wasn't interested in – boobs, hips, all that stuff. She didn't have broad shoulders or a nice sized packet. This was making even less sense to him now than it ever had.
And the physical side… that was driving him crazy. It wasn't as though he'd ever been a particularly oversexed person as a whole. To Robin intimacy had to mean something. He was never in a rush to lose his virginity, he just had more important things in his life. He didn't really want to have intimate contact until he was in a relationship, and his family life had left him soured to that. He spent many years not feeling as though he ever wanted to fall in love. His parents were not a good example of what came from that. He had the occasional date but his heart was never in it. He spent his latter teens and early twenties concentrating on his education, perfecting his cookery skills and trying to get over the whole lion-taming phase.
It wasn't until Robin met Simon again at work that he allowed himself to see the other side of relationships and to fall in love. They'd known each other at university but lost contact. Meeting again had been fate – and they were both in the right place emotionally for a relationship.
And that was that. Robin never had eyes for anyone else. Simon was all he ever wanted, or needed.
Losing Simon hit Robin incredibly hard because he'd lost more than the love of his life. He'd lost his best friend too. He'd never had a best friend before. With a sigh, he realised that Kim was probably the closest thing he had ever come to a best friend, aside from Simon. Was that it, he wondered? Was he getting confused because the only other friend he'd had that close to him was Simon? Was that getting him mixed up? He thought for a time that it might be the reason. He considered it carefully and nodded. He was just confused over the close friendship – of course.
But that didn't really explain the behaviour of his lower regions when he felt her fingers touching his skin gently. However confused he might have been about their friendship there's no way that he should have reacted like that. Nor should he have let his mind consider…
…No, he wasn't even going to go there.
He shook his head and got to his feet, pacing around the room. There had to be a more logical explanation. It had been a long time since he'd had close human contact with someone. His last time with Simon had been almost 7 months earlier, just before he awoke back home. Since then he'd been starved of affection and intimacy. Hell, he'd even overacted to Alex a couple of times, but the situation was different – they were in an intense, confusion situation and worlds had been colliding. He felt as though he'd been picking up emotions from elsewhere. Maybe they all had. The whole thing still made very little sense to look back upon.
And if he was just lonely and craving affection then why hadn't his body overreacted when Kim kissed him on the barge? As she pointed out afterwards, not a flicker. She'd even seemed offended by it, although sometimes it was hard to tell if Kim was joking or not. She still teased him about buying her story that she'd been to a purgatory for tattooists after she was shot.
"Why did you kiss me, Kim?" he whispered the question that had been on his mind for days.
The kiss had been one of the strangest moments of his life. It came almost from nowhere and they'd done a very good job of avoiding the subject ever since, blaming it on the fear and the daunting situation they were in. But there was a part of Robin that wondered if there was more to it than that and, for the first time, he let himself wonder if Kim was feeling the same confusing things that he was torturing himself with.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. It was stupid and dumb. If Kim felt anything towards him she'd have said something that would have given it away. Besides, Kim was married and just as sure of her sexuality as Robin was of his.
"Have I been wrong all these years?" Robin questioned himself for the first time. Was there any way he could have been bisexual all along? It didn't seem likely, he was sure he'd have known by now, but the more he thought about it the more he had to admit that he was feeling things for Kim that could only be described as an attraction. How was that possible? It wasn't even a physical thing. Surely that was the basis of an attraction, wasn't it?
She was making his heart race and sending him into dangerous trouser territory, but she was still a woman and she didn't have the right bits, so why was he feeling this way?
Was he really gay? Was he bi? Had he just become so used to being attracted to only men that he'd somehow buried any attraction he'd had to women, and if so what did that say about him? He felt himself getting angrier, furious with himself for feeling this way and terrified of what he might find if he tried to answer those questions.
As scared as he was, he was driven to know. He had to find out, he couldn't carry on in this stupid, daunting limbo. As he felt his pulse rocketing and he found it hard to catch his breath he marched to the lounge and sat down purposefully in front of the TV. He grabbed the remote and pressed some buttons with shaking hands. Where were the free porn channels? Somewhere near the end, right? He took a guess and found them, channel after channel of half-naked women licking their telephones and trying to persuade the public to spend a ridiculous amount of money by calling them.
There were women of all shapes and sizes. Skinny ones, curvy ones, blonder, brunettes, redheads… the list went on, each displaying more skin than the last. Robin stared at them blankly, and - nothing. He shook his head. There was nothing there for him. He couldn't care less about boobs and booty. It didn't matter how convincing the women attempted to be at giving fellatio to their microphones, it did nothing for him. Nothing at all.
He threw down the remote, marched to the kitchen and grabbed the brandy. This wasn't like him, he really wasn't a drinker in the slightest, but he felt so confused and so angry with himself that he didn't know what else to do. He didn't even bother with a glass – he just took the bottle to the bedroom and took a long swig from the neck.
He choked a little and took another mouthful. He gave a gasp and wiped his mouth. He didn't like women in that way, he just didn't, he couldn't even force himself to in the name of research – he was every bit as gay now as he had been the first time he pinned up a poster of David Duchovny and spent a very pleasant night fantasizing about getting rescued from the clutches of some alien mutant by Agent Mulder.
He lay on the bed, shaking his head. He didn't like women. He didn't. He really didn't. There was no latent bisexuality that he was trying to deny for whatever deep-rooted psychological reason, he quite simply liked men.
He closed his eyes, almost relieved by the findings. There was no way that he should have been affected by Kim touching his back earlier. It must have just been loneliness. That's all it was. It had been seven months – and god, that was a long time. Anyone would be a little desperate for human touch after that long, surely, no matter where it came from. And he did feel so close to Kim, if he was going to get mixed up about anyone then it had to be her. He was feeling vulnerable with his shirt off, worried about those scars, draped over the chair with her fingers pressing gently against his skin, travelling back and forth, gliding up to his shoulders, moving along to explore his new-found definition. So gentle. Such a soft touch. Tender, almost. Yes, tender – that was the word. And it felt so good. So very good, he could almost imagine what it would feel like if her hand moved elsewhere. He could almost
feel that now. He could see it in his mind, her hands, maybe her lips. Maybe.
With a jolt and a gasp of dismay he realised he was suddenly in a sticky pool. The horror on his face and in his voice as he swore profusely did little to express his utter shock at what had just happened. He hadn't even realised that he was… well how did his hand get down there in the first place? He didn't realise what he was doing… He didn't…
"Shit! Fuck!" he cried as he scrambled off the bed and dropped his soiled clothes to the floor in a big heap. He stepped out of them feeling a level of revulsion at himself like he'd never experienced in his life. The guilt was chronic, it almost ripped him to pieces inside.
"Oh my god," he cried.
As he ran to the bathroom and tried to clean himself up something seemed to break inside of him. He'd stepped over a line that he didn't even know how to cross. The tears that fell as he showered were full of guilt and remorse for an act that he hated himself for. Which part made him feel worst – the fact Kim was a woman, the fact she'd been Simon's best friend in the nineties or the fact that he'd been thinking of someone else for the first time since Simon had died? Or even for the first time in years. He only ever thought of Simon, and now he felt as though he'd betrayed him in three different ways.
How was he ever going to look Kim in the eye again?
More than that, how was he ever going to look at himself in the mirror?
He sank to the floor of the shower, his head in a mess. This was far bigger than he knew how to deal with. It was killing him from the inside out and even the hot water couldn't wash away the indelible marks on his conscience.
Chapter Five
"Penny for them?"
Kim barely heard as she chewed on another crisp, her third packet of cheese and onion of the night. It reminded her of her early days in Gene's world, where beer and crisps made up 80% of her diet. It took three attempts for Linda to get her attention but finally she looked up.
