Infected: Lesser Evils

by Andrea Speed

  Holden paused to sip his coffee and grimace, and Dylan stared at his profile, a brief flare of anger making him imagine that it might feel good to punch him. Of course he didn’t. “You working on that psychology degree?”

  “All hookers are psychologists. Some of us are just better at it than others.”

  Before Dylan could think of an appropriately scathing response to that, he saw the small figure of Doctor Rosenberg coming down the hall toward them. She wasn’t in scrubs, which may have been a good sign, but a visitor’s badge dangled from a cord around her neck, and if it wasn’t for the grim, determined look on her face, you could have mistaken her for someone’s grandmother. Dylan got up and met her near the elevators, Holden trailing behind.

  “How is he?”

  Rosenberg sighed explosively, and she ran a hand through her curled salt and pepper hair, as if trying to comb it with her fingers. “I’m gonna need you to sign some papers, so I can transfer him to the university’s hospital as soon as he’s stable. You good with that?”

  “Grand, if you answer my question. What happened to him?”

  Her lips, already thin, thinned even more, almost disappearing. She grabbed Dylan’s arm and pulled him aside, away from the crowds near the elevator. “He’s suffered a brain hemorrhage. He’s in surgery right now.”

  It was like someone had thrown ice water on him. Dylan was suddenly so cold he thought he might be getting frostbite. “How did it happen? How bad is it? Is he going to be all right?”

  “It’s unclear how it happened, at least for the moment. Coulda been an aneurysm, coulda been a result of skyrocketing blood pressure from a transformation, coulda been a result of a tumor, or some combination of them. Right now they’re closing off the bleeders and reducing the pressure on his brain. If all goes well, and why wouldn’t it, he should be fine. Well, within reason. That’s why I want to transfer him to the university hospital, so we can do the follow-ups.”

  “Follow-ups to what?” Holden asked. “Are you taking out those tumors?”

  So he knew about that, did he? Sure, why not? Holden probably knew as much about Roan as Dylan did, or possibly more. He felt an irrational stab of jealousy toward him, and realized he’d prefer it if Roan was sleeping with him. He could understand that, and it would seem like less of a betrayal than having this whole other secret life that Dylan wasn’t a part of in any form.

  Rosenberg looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected Roan to mention that to anyone. Yeah, Dylan was surprised too. “He was scheduled for a biopsy, so yeah, we can get that done, maybe take out some tumors if his body is up to the surgery.”

  “His body is up to anything,” Holden replied, almost dismissively. “His bones break and heal all the time. He’s physically resilient beyond anyone I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Yeah, I agree. But can his brain take the stress and strain?”

  She let the question just hang there, rhetorical and somehow damning. And it was—how could it not be?

  Roan could take a lot of damage, but his brain couldn’t, and that’s what would eventually kill him. The only question left was when. Dylan just hoped it wasn’t tonight.

  40

  Idaho

  SOMEHOW Holden hadn’t imagined he’d be spending the afternoon lying in bed with a hockey player, smoking a joint and watching a Mythbusters marathon, but things had been so weird lately, in retrospect it was inevitable.

  The Falcons didn’t have a game until Thursday night, which was good timing, as it allowed Grey to fly home for the wedding of “brother number two” (Grey was one of several, which might explain a lot), and it meant Scott had their apartment all to himself. He invited Holden over for lunch—lunch! Seriously!—and it was such an odd thing that Holden agreed, just to see what he had in mind.

  As it turned out, Scott really meant lunch. Scott made them grilled ham and cheese sandwiches with apple (he said a girlfriend’s mother once taught him to add apple slices to a ham and cheese, and he really liked it), with a side of rather intense salt and vinegar chips, and a decent Canadian beer. Holden told him, in all sincerity, “You’re fucking adorable.” Scott suspected he was being sarcastic, but no, he was serious—he’d made him lunch. No one made a prostitute lunch, certainly not one as homely and homey as this one. It actually was quite good; he made a mean ham and cheese.

  They talked about everything but what was or wasn’t going on between them. Sure, they had sex, but they didn’t talk about it beforehand. Afterward, neither of them was all that tired, so Scott pulled out a spliff from his nightstand and they watched TV, with Scott finding a Mythbusters marathon, which they both seemed to agree was acceptable to watch. When Holden asked if he wasn’t worried about the pot showing up in a drug test, Scott smirked, and said, “It’s not a performance-enhancing drug.” He then added they hadn’t made him piss in a cup for a long time, and it just wasn’t a priority.

  They were lying side by side, naked on his bed, just the sheet haphazardly pulled up, mainly to avoid any possible ash or ember somehow finding a tender spot. Holden took a toke, not actually sure why he was taking one, but the way it hit him he figured it was B.C. Bud, and you had to enjoy that stuff when you got it. “You toke a lot?” Holden asked, exhaling a cloud of smoke and handing the joint back. They were shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh.

  He shook his head. “Makes me break my diet too much. I just save it for special occasions.”

  “What’s the special occasion here?”

  “No game for a while, and my bruise hurts.”

  Ah. Scott had a big purplish-black splotch on the back and side of his right shoulder, which apparently came from being checked into a stanchion during his last game. It looked super ugly and painful, but also oddly endearing. Much like Scott’s room.

  It was kind of small, but relatively neat and austerely appointed, with a queen-sized bed on a plain metal bed frame, a dresser that looked like a Goodwill special, a bookcase/media rack that looked Ikea (save for the hockey pucks used as bookends), and gauzy but opaque curtains on the one window that let in filtered sunlight. The television was one of those smaller ones that could double as a computer monitor, and sat on the low dresser, beside a smattering of loose change and condoms from various clubs. On the screen, the Mythbusters guys were shooting guns into a swimming pool.

  “I broke up with my girlfriend,” Scott said, resting the joint in an ashtray shaped like a bear’s head that sat on his nightstand. The ashtray had something about Saskatchewan painted on it, so he assumed it was Canadian kitsch.

  “Really? Why?”

  He shrugged his bruised shoulder and shook his head, sending out contradictory messages. “I just realized that we didn’t have much in common, and didn’t even like each other that much. The sex was fun, but when we had to talk we could hardly stand each other. I think I knew last month I had to break it off before it went on too long, but I just never got around to it. I coast if allowed to, I’m kinda lazy.”

  “Says the guy who told me he spent two hours running on a treadmill this morning.”

  “That’s just endurance training. It’s part of my job. If I coulda gotten out of it, I would have.”

  Holden didn’t know if he believed that or not. It was possible that Scott was just exhausted by his own training regimen, so when he had no one forcing him to do it, he wouldn’t. That wasn’t lazy, that was normal. But was Holden going to tell him that? Nah.

  Scott picked up the joint, took a drag, and offered it to him again. Holden took it, but he only took a small toke before handing it back. He didn’t need much to feel stoned. Actually, just being in Scott’s little bedroom was enough to make him feel unhinged from reality. What was he doing here? “What do we have to talk about? You talk hockey, I talk hooking, but not the kind done with sticks.”

  Scott chuckled as he put the joint aside. “Are you kiddin’ me? We’re spending the afternoon doin’ nothing but getting stoned and watchin’ Mythbusters. I think I love you.”

>   That made him laugh. “Girlfriend wasn’t interested, huh?”

  “No. She wanted to go to nice places and be seen, and I told her I’m not good at that kinda shit, I’m just a suburban asshole from Burnaby, nice to me is any place where you don’t hafta eat food out of a bag. I mean, I’m not a caveman, but I’ve never gotten fancy restaurants. Why would you pay a hundred bucks for a steak the size of your thumb? Or worse yet, an eighty-dollar salad. Fuck me, I hate paying five dollars for a bowl of lettuce, and I hafta eat that shit half the time.” After a pause, he said, “I’m gettin’ hungry. You want anything?”

  “You could get me a drink.”

  “Beer?”

  Holden shook his head. “Nah. Something nonalcoholic, I don’t care what.” He was probably stoned enough as it was. He felt oddly warm and fuzzy toward Scott, which was a huge warning sign.

  Scott got out of bed and walked naked out of the room, and Holden enjoyed the view. Scott was one of those guys that looked so good naked it probably should have been illegal for him to wear clothes.

  What the fuck was he doing here?! Oh sure, curiosity had made him show up, but he should get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. He thought Roan was falling apart? He was falling apart. Holden was giving this guy freebies, and Scott could probably afford him. Since when did he ever have sex for free? The stress was getting to him.

  Scott came back with a quart of ice cream and a bottle of Vitamin Water. He gave Holden the bottle and sat back down on his side of the bed with the ice cream, which was vanilla fudge swirl. “Did anything blow up?” Scott was referring to the show, where stuff always blew up.

  “Not yet.”

  As soon as Scott tossed the lid aside and sunk a spoon into the ice cream, Holden realized it looked good. After Scott buried his spoon in the carton, he handed him a spoon.

  “Figured you’d want one anyways.”

  “Thanks.”

  As soon as they settled the quart between them and each took a spoonful—it was possibly the best ice cream Holden had ever had, confirming he was stoned—Scott asked, “How’s Roan?”

  “As well as can be expected, as far as I know.” He’d checked in on Dylan, but Holden got the sense that Dylan really didn’t want anything to do with him, so he was giving him some space. All he knew right now was Roan was alive, and that was all that mattered. At first, he thought maybe Dylan blamed him for Roan’s condition, but now Holden wondered if it was just the fact that Dylan knew Roan was keeping him out of a chunk of his life. That had to be a bummer, even if Roan was doing it with the best of intentions.

  “I heard it was bad.” Scott didn’t want to appear to be fishing for info, but he was. Scott was seriously into Roan, wasn’t he? Well, with his monstrous pheromone load, every guy who wasn’t a hundred percent straight and every woman who wasn’t a hundred percent gay probably went for Roan. He also had the lure of the exotic, which was inexplicable in a red-haired white guy, but it made more sense if you knew he was probably the planet’s only genuine shape-shifter. (Never mind that he just had the one shape he could shift into; it counted.)

  “It wasn’t pretty. But he’ll live. What doesn’t kill him leaves him pissed off.”

  “I thought the cliché was stronger.”

  “It is, but with him, it’s pretty much the same thing.”

  “I wouldn’t like him when he’s angry?” Scott replied, with a goofy grin.

  “No, nobody does. And he’s not even green or in purple pants. It feels like a cheat somehow.”

  Scott snorted a stoned kind of laugh before filling his mouth with more ice cream. It wasn’t until the show went to commercial that Scott asked, “You slept with him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a serial monogamist, and he’s always with some guy. He just won’t cheat.”

  “Why the hell not? He is a man, right?”

  This made Holden snicker, and he wasn’t sure why. Probably the pot, although Holden had thought something similar before. “Roan’s always been weird like that. Maybe all the cheating straight people he’s forced to tail got to him.”

  “See, I think I’d enjoy the show.”

  “Eh, no. Even if you do catch ’em in the act, imagine flabby white people who should probably never be naked making a really bad sex tape.”

  “Eww.”

  “See? If Roan hadn’t been gay before, that probably would have sent him over the edge.”

  Scott briefly rubbed his leg against his, and Holden wasn’t sure if it was just an accidental gesture or a deliberate one. He decided to ignore it, just in case.

  They watched the show, consuming about half the quart, before Scott asked, “So you don’t have a boyfriend now?”

  “Nope. Why have sex for free when I get paid for it? That’d be like a plumber going around an apartment building unclogging drains as a hobby.”

  The look Scott gave him was half-amused, half-incredulous. It probably struck him as unbelievably weird, which was fair enough. Holden didn’t expect civilians to understand. Up this close to Scott, he could see the stubble starting to come in on his face, like little slender metal posts beneath his skin, and for a moment Holden felt like touching his face to see if the stubble was really that hard. He managed to squash the urge. “You’ve never had a boyfriend? C’mon.”

  “Oh, I’ve had one. Two, actually, but that was in high school.”

  “Ah. So that’s where you got burned?”

  “I never got burned,” he snapped, way too defensive. Scott’s eerie blue eyes lit up at that, behind their pot glaze, because he knew he’d caught him. Holden rolled his eyes, and admitted, “Okay, neither breakup was enjoyable.”

  “The guy on the swim team?”

  He shook his head. “He dumped me for a club kid, but no, that wasn’t the worst. After that, I got involved with another jock, Ryan, on the football team. He was even more closeted than I was, he had some manliness issues, and then he started doing ’roids to gain mass. Something happened, I’m not sure what, but he was afraid some of his teammates might be suspicious he was gay, so instead he told them he knew I was gay and they jumped me one day after baseball practice.”

  “Jumped you?”

  “Beat the shit out of me, calling me faggot and fudge packer and every gay slur you can find written on the Internet. Ryan made sure to break my jaw first, so I couldn’t rat him out as a fellow butt pirate.”

  Scott looked as horrified as he could with a good buzz on, but there was also something stirring behind his eyes, that in-game look of his, one that spoke of an incredible intensity and an urge and ability to kill. “What the fuck did you do?”

  “Once I was released from the hospital? Not much. My father made sure I didn’t press any charges, because the boys were all from good homes, and he knew I’d pissed them off somehow. So as soon as my jaw was unwired, I was just sick of all the bullshit, you know? The lies and hypocrisy. I told my parents I was gay, and that was the end of that. I was out on my ass. But I survived, ’cause I discovered that’s what I do best.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Whose?”

  “The guy or your dad’s. Both.”

  Holden smirked. “You gonna go kick their asses?”

  In spite of the pot glaze, something glittered in Scott’s beautiful eyes, tiny shards of broken glass. You didn’t see it a lot, but Holden suspected that while Scott was slow to anger, when he finally lost his temper, it was a horrific explosion. “Somethin’ like that.”

  “If I wanted to kick their asses, I would. But my dad’s a pathetic piece of shit, not worth my time or yours. And as for Ryan, he doesn’t live in the state anymore, or at least I don’t think he does. He went to Montana or Wyoming—I can’t remember which, I always get those two states mixed up—on a partial football scholarship, and within two months he blew out his knee, I mean big-time. He lost his scholarship and dropped out of college, but I have no idea what happened to him after that. I don
’t much care either. I’m just glad the fucker never got to play football for anybody. By the way, it’s official you know, I hate all you fucking jocks.”

  “Does that include you?”

  “I’m not a jock anymore. Even when I was one, I wasn’t much of one. I mean, how much of an athlete is a pitcher? I just had to throw shit; no one ever expected me to hit homers.”

  “Did you?”

  “What, hit a homer? Maybe once, but for the most part I was lucky to get a double.”

  “So you a Mariners fan?”

  “Fuck no. As soon as I stopped playing baseball I never saw a game again. In fact, I used to think watching a full game was kinda boring; it was only good to play. Most sports are that way.”

  Scott’s smirk was oddly knowing. “Even my games?”

  “I haven’t seen that many, I can’t judge.”

  “Ooh, so cold.” As if to reinforce the point, Scott trailed his hand along Holden’s chest, and it was cold, from the ice cream container. Holden shivered a bit, even as he gently pushed his hand away.

  “So what’s your deal? Any boyfriends?”

  “Beyond Spencer, that Mormon lacrosse guy I told you about, I’ve never dated men. Women I date; men are just good for fucking.”

  “Wow, what did Spencer do to you?”

  Scott shrugged, glancing at the TV screen. “It wasn’t Spencer’s fault really, although that was pretty intense. I thought it would be okay since we were both interested in staying in the closet, but he had a shit-ton of issues, and it turned out he was a real basket case. I mean, he thought he was bad and evil and all that shit, just ’cause he liked guys, right? He wasn’t bi like me, he was full-on gay, and some nights I found myself trying to convince him that was cool, there was nothing wrong with being gay, for like, hours, and he was still messed up about it. I had to break up with him ’cause I just couldn’t take it, you know? I had issues, but not like him. He took it really hard… harder than I thought he would. I shoulda known, considerin’ how messed up he was.”