“Manny!” the woman called the moment she opened the shop door. It was more of a yell, rather like the woman was summoning a herd of cows, not her nephew. “He’s not my nephew,” she unexpectedly confirmed. She raised her eyebrows, folding her umbrella with a swift jerk of her wrist. “He’s actually the son of a close friend. But I call him my nephew. As good as. He’s staying with me for a week, so good timing, I suppose.” She gestured to the back of the shop and gave Gabriel a glance. “There’s a mop station back there. Closest thing to a shower I have here. I’ll find some dry clothes for both of you.” When Gabriel did not immediately move from the doorway, she swung her arm at him in an exaggerated wave.
The mop station was small and worn, but impressively clean. Tucked away in its own little closet-like room with a washer and a dryer, the place provided a semi-private space. Gabriel carefully sat Arius inside the gray-white drain box and leaned him against the wall. A second time, those beautiful brown eyes opened for a moment—this time for a few seconds longer. Neither recognition nor even any cognitive reaction showed in Arius’s face before his eyes dropped shut again.
He was cold. Hand on Arius’s face to support the boy’s head as he drew the oversized sweatshirt up around softly sculpted shoulders, Gabriel felt nothing but cold under his fingertips. Shivering himself, he pulled the soaked sweatshirt off and dropped it onto the floor nearby. The only reaction Arius offered was a small, stiff breath that briefly lifted his toned chest.
The bruising spanned all the way across the left side of Arius’s ribcage. Dark purple and rosy red marked the right side also. The affected area encircled his waist, encroaching up along his abdomen almost to his chest. For several gaping moments, Gabriel simply stared at the damage. Impossible. The conclusion settled like a gavel. The attacker at the shelter could not have done this much damage.
Gabriel caught himself extending a hand to lightly touch the area before the idea of doing so suddenly rang odd in his head. It looked like Arius had been kicked in the ribs. Kicked in the ribs repeatedly.
“Impossible,” Gabriel decided again, whispering the word aloud. He carefully rested Arius against the wall, laying his head in the corner. Then, stiffly, he switched on the faucet beside the mop station and waited while the water temperature warmed up.
There was only one other plausible explanation for the bruising on Arius’s abdomen. The nineteen-year-old had stopped taking his medication.
Impossible, Gabriel told himself yet again, shallowly glancing back across Arius’s discolored skin. He can’t be taking a bad turn already. He’s only been off his medication for a day. No, it would have been a day and a half. Arius was supposed to take a medication dose every twelve hours. But thirty-six hours was still far too insignificant to explain the damage on Arius’s abdomen. Right?
Arius turned his head to the side and nearly slumped over before Gabriel caught him. Finding his hands on Arius’s bare shoulders left Gabriel with a strange, startled feeling crawling up his nerves. Reminding himself he was hungry and tired, the twenty-two-year-old lifted the hose and began rinsing dirt and bits of garbage out of Arius’s hair, off the side of his face, the sweet spot where his neck met his jawline…The way the water ran off his shoulders, glistened across his collarbone, ran along the contours of his chest…
I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired, Gabriel told himself. He blinked and forced his vision to blur out on the lower part of Arius’s chest, where those chill-stiffened nipples would be, where those perfect pectorals met the abdomen, where the taper of Arius’s slender waist would begin. Then, somewhere below that…
“Hey...?”
Gabriel nearly had a heart attack at the sound of a foreign voice. His eyes shot up to see a face peering in at him from the doorway. Dark hair and strikingly green eyes met Gabriel, finished off with a sheepish smile of greeting. “I’m Manny,” the stranger introduced himself. As if to prove his good will, he raised the stack of folded clothing in his arms. “Aunt Rosa said you…maybe…needed some help?”
He looked young, maybe Gabriel’s age. But by the way he knew what he was doing, he must be much further along in his med track—meaning, he was probably older. Arius lay where they had moved him—on a mat by the wall in the corner of the thrift store. Still drifting between lucid and unconscious, Arius was again unresponsive.
“His blood sugar must be low,” Manny decided after a careful examination of his patient. “Dehydrated, too. Is this an IV mark?” Manny gave Gabriel a sheepish expression when the twenty-two-year-old did not immediately answer. “It just kind of looks like one. A blown one, actually. Its location and the way it looks like a needle hole aside from the tear marks.” He was gently disinfecting the small incision with something on a cotton swab.
“It is,” Gabriel muttered. Arms crossed over his knees and seated on the floor beside Arius’s mat, he felt his mind drift back into worry. “He…He fell. With the needle still in...” The rain outside filled the dim space on the thrift shop floor in the small silence that followed.
Manny gave Gabriel a hesitant look before seeming to brush his curiosity aside. “I would run an IV if I had the equipment here.” He sat back on his folded legs, hands on his thighs for a moment. “As much as I would like to let him sleep, we should probably wake him up so he can eat something.”
“I’m not sure he’ll revive,” Gabriel whispered. His thumb tripped across his lower lip, and his vision traced the floor.
“He will.” Manny smiled. “We can sit him up by the wall, keep him warm and make the space around him as stress-free as possible. He’ll come back to us.”
Gabriel glanced at Arius’s cracker box, sitting on the floor and still slightly damp. “Yeah,” he agreed listlessly.
A small silence followed. Manny squinted at the wall. Then, as carefully as if he was stepping out onto a flimsy bridge, “So…the…the abdominal bruising…?” A single finger moved in light indication of the gray tee shirt clothing Arius. His venture was more of a direct question than even a conversation starter.
Gabriel’s throat went dry when the first two words that came to his head were “sexual assault.” A sudden feeling like he had to vomit rose in the back of his throat, and he found himself swallowing and turning away.
“He…doesn’t…” Manny seemed to be speaking as delicately as he possibly could. Head tilted to one side and eyes cautiously watching Gabriel, “Have…broken ribs…does he?”
Broken ribs. Like some kind of magic curse, Gabriel’s mind flashed back to that moment in the clinic. His hands folded over Arius’s chest. Arms straight, elbows locked, counting off chest compressions through the screaming silence in his head.
“I could…check…” Manny offered carefully. “I just…didn’t want to touch the bruising unless you weren’t sure either way…”
“I—I don’t know.” Once started, there was little way of stopping it. Gabriel felt hot liquid seep up behind his eyelids. Face completely averted, he lifted his sleeve across his vision and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Hey.” Manny’s voice dropped to a whisper, the gentlest compassion in his careful tone. “My aunt and I are not going to talk to the police about anything that is said here. You can…You can tell me what happened, if it helps.”
For a long, tremulous moment, Manny’s offer hung in the air. Trust. Manny was offering trust. And yet, for the first time in his life, Gabriel realized he had no idea if he could trust the person in front of him.
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