Lonely Hearts

by Heidi Cullinan

  The radio played a slow, sad song, a bright tenor apologizing for being too late, begging his lover to say something, anything, acknowledging he didn’t want to give up but it was probably over all the same. It cut into Baz, highlighting his emotions and pouring salt in his wounds. As the song swelled to its apex, Baz scrambled for new words, another apology, a plea, anything to fix this. He turned toward Elijah, ready to spill his guts, say anything to make them okay.

  He stopped as he got a good look at his faux-boyfriend. Elijah seemed tense—nervous, not pissed. Skittish, the same as he’d been in heavier traffic. Except there was nobody on the road here, just a few cars and semis. Baz wanted to ask if Elijah was okay, except it was a stupid question because obviously he wasn’t. He abandoned his apologies and tried instead to work out what was wrong and how he could fix it.

  Elijah punched the dashboard screen with his finger, switching the radio off.

  “I can’t.”

  Elijah’s knuckles went white, his arms shaking. He stared at the road ahead as if it might suck him in.

  Baz sat up straighter. “Elijah? Are you okay?”

  “I can’t. I can’t.” His breathing got short and fast, his hairline peppered with sweat—and he took his foot off the gas. The car behind them swerved, honking as it sped around the rapidly slowing Tesla. Elijah paid it no attention, shaking his head as he locked his arms and kept his feet off the pedals. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

  Holy fuck. Baz glanced at the lane behind them—the few other cars were moving over, but at some point they’d slow too much and get hit. He put a tentative hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  “I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, baby. Except right now I need you to give the car some acceleration so we don’t get rear-ended and die.”

  A snort-sob escaped, but Elijah didn’t shed a tear. His whole body trembling, he halfheartedly depressed the gas pedal, bringing them up to fifty miles an hour.

  That would do.

  Baz scanned ahead and saw an overpass, and an exit. “There. Pull off up there, and we’ll sort it out. Okay?”

  “No. I don’t want to talk. I want to go…” for a moment his face broke into misery, “…to Liz and Pastor.”

  Baz ached for him, long, hollow columns of grief down his neck and into his gut. “I’ll get you there. I promise. Make the car go for me, get us to the off-ramp, and we’ll make a new plan. You can have a cigarette. Or five.”

  The car sped up slowly, despite the fact it could get to sixty-five miles an hour in four point two seconds. Elijah wiped furiously at his eyes, but Baz still saw no sign of tears. “I don’t want to get off here in the middle of nowhere. But I think I need to sleep. Have…have a Xanax.”

  Yes, even with his shit vision Baz could see a panic attack threatening. “The hotel isn’t far. The one I’d already booked.” The words I’ll get my own room formed on his lips but wouldn’t pass through.

  Elijah nodded stiffly. “Fine. As long as it’s close.”

  It was. Fifteen minutes and a cigarette for each of them later, they pulled into the parking lot of the Stoney Inn. It was decorated like an overgrown cabin, all rock and wooden beams and prints of moose and fir trees. As he’d booked it, Baz had thought it was funny, but in that moment its quirkiness was a balm. It was a PlugShare stop, and the business of pulling in backward to the particular spot and dragging out the charging cord gave them some cover from the awkward. So did the cheesy, moose-and-pine-filled lobby and the cheery female receptionist who handed them their keycards. Baz worried all the way up the elevator that maybe he shouldn’t have booked the Premier Suite, too much of a reminder of his family’s bullshit which had started all of this, but no. The Stoney Inn’s best room was still pretty tacky and lowbrow. Thank fucking God.

  As the door to the room shut behind him, Baz clutched the handle of his suitcase, tracking Elijah as he moved around the room. He wracked his brain for the right thing to say. To do. To offer. Everything ran out of his head. He needed to see Elijah’s face. Close enough to read it, to see if he was as walled off as he’d been at the party. To find out if the mini breakdown on the interstate was his last gasp before he sealed himself off forever, or if Elijah had experienced the same cracking apart as Baz.

  When Elijah turned around, Baz held his breath, the sad pop song’s chorus ringing in his ears. He blinked against the glare from the room lamps, squinted through the dim of his sunglasses. Saw the tic in Elijah’s cheek, the hurt, the fury in his gaze. Let the breath out in a rush, riding out a shiver.

  Open. Not closed off anymore. There was still hope.

  Chapter Ten

  Elijah could still taste the fear in his mouth.

  It didn’t make any more sense now than it had in the car, but it was there, hovering like a hellbeast on the edge of his vision. Something about the dotted line on the map indicating the shift between Illinois and Wisconsin had undone him. As if, when he crossed it, darkness would fall. The more he’d told himself the thought was ridiculous, the worse it got, until the metallic, bitter tang of panic overcame him.

  If it hadn’t been for Baz talking him through, he wasn’t sure what would have happened.

  That pissed him off, Baz rescuing him again. It had felt so good to brush him off, knowing Baz was ready to get on his knees to grovel. Elijah had reveled in the power. He hadn’t figured out how he was going to leverage it at school, but he’d worked up this great mental proposal about getting in the dorms and fucking the White House entirely…and then the goddamned dotted line had done him in.

  Now here they were, in Baz’s moose hotel. Baz had passed him a bottle of water and a pill, but otherwise they were standing exactly where they’d been since they walked in the door. Elijah in the middle of the room, Baz off to the side. Baz poised and ready to slay dragons, Elijah weak enough to let him. His arguments about a dorm evaporated as Xanax bled into his bloodstream. Fuck getting out of the White House. It would be a miracle if Elijah could talk himself out of letting Baz take him to bed.

  “I hate you,” he whispered, clutching the strap to his bag he hadn’t been willing to relinquish, as if holding on to it meant he still might leave.

  He waited for Baz to argue, and when Baz remained quiet, Elijah gave in to the fury he’d been sandbagging since the removal of his place plate.

  He dropped the bag and marched forward. “I seriously fucking hate you. I can’t believe I keep letting you do this to me.”

  Baz said nothing, didn’t move.

  A dim voice dragged out logic, pointing out it had only been a dinner, and Baz was right, nothing bad had happened. This fact, combined with Baz’s willingness to accept his shunning, only fueled Elijah all the more. “You always abandon me. You always will abandon me. God, your friends fucking told me you would, and I said I knew, and then I did this. Well, I’m done. Fuck you. Our fake relationship is over. Thanks for getting a suite. I’m sleeping on the couch. Tomorrow we’ll go to Saint Timothy, and—”

  “It wasn’t fake to me. And I don’t want it to be over.”

  Elijah faltered, opening and shutting his mouth a few times before he could reply. “Excuse me?”

  Baz let go of his suitcase. “It was real for me. It still is. I spent the whole dinner worrying about you, trying to figure out a way to get to you. Mom was using me to butter up some rich lesbian, and it worked because Moira loved how I was fussing. Which I hated, because I wanted to be buttering you up. To show you off, then laugh about what a joke the party was while we listened to RuPaul on the way here.”

  It was sweet, and it sounded genuine, and it brought back panic in a choking fog. “What, you were going to give me your ring and ask me to go steady?”

  “Maybe. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Maybe I needed to be freaked out about not being with you to realize.”<
br />
  “Maybe you had too much to drink and need to lie down, sleep this attack of boyfriend off.”

  The voice of reason reared its head again, scolding Elijah for being too harsh, but he couldn’t help it. This was too close to things he didn’t dare let himself admit he wanted—and anyway, it didn’t seem to matter how much shade he chucked at Baz. It all bounced off his titanium skeleton.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch. But when I wake up, I’ll feel the same way.”

  Elijah began to scramble, reaching blindly for any buffer he could find. “We don’t know how to boyfriend. We can barely friend.”

  The distance between them now was basically an arm’s length, meaning Elijah could smell Baz now. Spicy and sweet, bare hints of tobacco and sweat. “We did boyfriend all weekend just fine, when we were pretending it was fake.”

  Mayday. Man all battle stations. “It’s only Saturday night. The weekend is barely half over.” When Baz’s sideways smile made him dizzy, Elijah shut his eyes. “Stop it. You can’t nip off a few good lines, grab my dick, and we’re fine. We can’t date. Maybe we could fuck occasionally. But that’s it. Anything else is ridiculous.”

  A shiver ran through him as Baz’s body brushed his, hands skating over his arms. “Let’s be ridiculous.”

  Elijah didn’t wrap his arms around Baz, but he did turn his face up to be kissed. Except the kiss didn’t happen. Baz ran his nose along Elijah’s eyebrow instead.

  “You make a good point. We should slow down. No grabbing anything. Work on a friendship, let the physical yearnings fuel the fire.”

  Now Elijah grabbed him. “The hell I went through all this and you’re not putting out.”

  A kiss, featherlight, on his forehead. “I thought you were sleeping on the couch.”

  Fuck him for dragging logic into this. “After. I’ll go to the couch after. Or do me on the couch. I’m not particular.”

  “If I do you, you sure as shit won’t have the energy to crawl to the other side of the bed, let alone the next room.”

  Elijah thought, seriously, about telling him to fuck himself, but going to sleep alone while his freakout still echoed in his head wasn’t something he could handle. And he wanted to get done. By Baz. Needed it, almost. But he was still sore about losing all the power he’d found during the dinner. It had been cold and awful, but it felt safer than this. He wanted some cover back. “You can fuck me, but only if you don’t wear your glasses.”

  Baz paused. Elijah held his breath. Maybe I went too far.

  Then Baz’s hands slid up Elijah’s sides, and he nodded as he kissed Elijah’s cheek, the corner of his mouth. “Sure thing. But you have to let me do some maintenance first.”

  He let go of Elijah, hauled his suitcase onto the table in the mini-kitchen and started unzipping. Seeing the red lights, remembering what Baz had said about his light kit and why he traveled with it, Elijah felt like a bag of limp dicks. “Never mind. Keep them on.”

  “I have to do it eventually. Might as well get it over with now.” He began flipping off lights, switching out bulbs, taping switches into the off position. “I’ll keep my contacts in until right before we go to sleep because it’s too much of a risk otherwise. But yes. I’d appreciate looking at you without my personal dimmer switch.”

  Elijah wrapped his arms around himself, trying to be angry as his control slipped away. “Did you do this at your mom’s house too?”

  “The bedroom has a few Baz-centric things worked in, since it’s the one I use when I stay. But yeah, I taped things down and swapped bulbs, usually while you were sleeping. This is a little more intensive here, since I’m starting from scratch.”

  The more Elijah watched him work, the more he felt like a douche for his demand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  In the middle of pinning a curtain, Baz glanced over his shoulder at him. His smile was weary, not dazzling. “It’s okay.”

  Elijah could not stop his fucking mouth. “I’m sorry for being a diva. I’m just pissed. Scared. I don’t know why.”

  “It caught up with you. I get it. It’s no big deal.”

  It was a big deal, and Elijah couldn’t shut up about it. “I flipped out over the stupid state line on the map. It wasn’t about you, or the stupid dinner or your too-fancy house. It was dotted lines. I’m a fucking mess. You don’t want to date this.”

  That was too much confession, and it combined with the memory threatened to bring it all up, until Baz put aside the clips and faced Elijah. No pity, no judgment, only calm as he leaned against the window.

  “When I first came home from the hospital, I was still pretty banged up. My eyes were healing from the surgeries, and I wasn’t used to the way my body was different. I felt like a helpless alien. One day I was in the kitchen with my mom. She was making me a smoothie in her Vitamix—a culinary-grade high-powered blender I swear could puree a tin can. She’d decided a blueberry smoothie was going to boost my immune system or some shit. So I sat there while she made it. Or rather, I sat there until she turned the fucking machine on.”

  His mouth thinned briefly into a line of self-depreciation. “I couldn’t see well, only shapes and shadows, the dark glasses making things weirder, and she kept yammering on over the top of the noise about antioxidants. I snapped. Fucking screamed, swore and shoved the blender off the counter. Blueberry everywhere. Six hundred dollar blender, dead. Knocked my glasses off, stepped into a sunbeam and gave myself one fuck of a migraine. Over a fucking blender. To this day I can’t stand to be in the same room as those machines when they’re running. Nobody beat me with a blender, but I can’t handle them.” His hand on Elijah’s tightened. “I get it. You don’t have to apologize. And you’re not a mess. Or, I guess…we’re the same kind of mess. And yes. I do want to date it.”

  Elijah closed his eyes. “What if it doesn’t work out and we’re stuck in the same house?”

  Baz put the last clip in place on the curtains and moved into the bedroom, where he applied the same treatment to the curtains, lights and switches. “If it doesn’t work out, we’re adults. We can be civil to one another. Except it’s going to work out.”

  Elijah sat on the edge of the bed, watching Baz finish light-proofing the room. It didn’t take long, and then he was done. After taping off the last switch, he stood in the red glow of the bedroom. He walked up to Elijah, loomed over him.

  Took off his glasses and set them beside the bed.

  They stared at one another, bathed in crimson, and though they were both still clothed and all that happened was Baz removed his glasses, Elijah couldn’t help thinking they were both more naked than they’d ever been. He’d glimpsed Baz’s eyes several times now, but never like this.

  Unable to take it, Elijah averted his gaze and started to undress. He’d feel better once they were fucking, he thought, but as Baz pulled off his shirt, Elijah couldn’t help giving himself a good look, because they’d never undressed in the light before, red or otherwise. And honestly every time they’d fucked Baz had remained at least partly clothed. This wasn’t a frenzy, and Elijah had time to indulge.

  The network of scars across Baz’s skin shouldn’t have surprised Elijah, but it did. Chest, back and hip—most of them were old, though of course the ones on his shoulder were still raw and fresh. When Baz caught Elijah inspecting them, his lips flattened briefly. “Sorry. Little bit Frankenstein.”

  His gaze settled on the angry red pucker of skin where the bullet had gone in. “The new scar makes me upset, is all. It’s my fault.”

  Baz sat on the bed beside him. “The fuck it is. That is entirely on your dad. You aren’t responsible for anything he did. You said no. You walked away. They chased you.”

  “Yes, but I tricked them. I acted like I was converted for two years. I got a year of college out of them.”

  “You did what you had to do to survive. That’s not yo
ur fault.”

  He shut his eyes. “I wanted retribution. I knew how much it would piss my dad off, which was why I did it. I wanted to poke the bear. When I did, he swiped at you.”

  “No. He swiped at you, and I got in the way. On purpose.” Baz tipped Elijah’s chin up with a finger. “You want to blame yourself for his shit, you have to get through me. I’m the one who took the bullet.”

  Elijah let out a shaky breath. “Why did you do that?”

  Baz didn’t answer. He stroked Elijah’s cheek and ran a hand along his shoulder, over Elijah’s back, lingering on the waistband of his jeans. Nudged Elijah to his feet, helped him out of the last of his clothes, lured him gently into the bed, under the covers.

  They didn’t kiss, barely embraced, only lying beside each other on their individual pillows, neither able to bridge the space between them.

  Elijah focused on Baz’s body, visible from the waist up above the sheet. Except for the scars, his skin was smooth. Un-landscaped. He had tufts of hair on his chest. In the red light, the scars stood out. He was pale, skinny, too tall and defeated. He didn’t look like the man who kept scrambling Elijah’s circuits.

  This wasn’t the flirty man-whore who had pulled his hair in the back of the Tesla. This was somebody else. Not Baz. This was the guy on the pill bottle. Sebastian Percival Acker.

  Elijah crawled closer. Moving in concert, Baz turned over so Elijah could put his head on Baz’s chest. He teased the patch of hair between Baz’s nipples. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea for us to date. Not for real.”

  “We can call it whatever you want. All I know is I don’t want to stop being with you once we go back.” Baz rested a hand on Elijah’s hair and threaded his fingers hesitantly. “I get tired of being alone. I think you do too. We could be alone together, instead.”

  Yes, that was a pretty thing to say. It made Elijah’s body hurt with want. He pushed the yearning away. “We’re too messed up. You know how Sid and Nancy ended.”