“I gave him CPR,” Gabriel breathed, unable to lift his face for fear that the tears he was refusing to release would jump at the opportunity. And I fucking broke his ribs, his mind finished the rest of the statement. He had completely forgotten about the possibility of Arius sustaining injuries from CPR. He hadn’t heard any bones break, hadn’t felt the cracking his CPR trainers had told him about. Arius had seemed fine afterward…
Manny was giving him a reassuring look. He reached out and lightly touched Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’ll check, alright? I can tell you already, the sternum and the 1-6 ribs are most at risk for breakage during CPR. This bruising reaches all the way down the sides of his core, so CPR can’t be the worst of the cause. But I’ll check for broken ribs, alright?” He stood up.
Gabriel watched as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Then Manny was carefully drawing up Arius’s shirt, that deep bruising becoming visible again. Gabriel looked away as Manny began gently feeling along Arius’s sides. He refused to watch as Manny pulled the shirt up a little farther and carefully felt across Arius’s chest.
It was over when Manny snapped off his gloves. “There’s swelling, so he may have cracked ribs,” the doctor boy explained. “But there are no full fractures, and hopefully not much deep internal bleeding. Whatever all this is from, it’s definitely not all caused by CPR.”
Gabriel swallowed and forced himself to raise his head. He took a steady breath. “Then what would cause that?” He still didn’t dare face Manny.
The boy beside him shrugged slightly. “I dunno. I was hoping you could tell me.”
Gabriel shook his head, finding he was again having to squeeze his eyes shut. Amid talk about broken bones, an assailant gripping Arius around the waist and holding him down seemed trivial. Medication seemed equally out ruled.
“Aunt Rosa went home to get some things.” Manny’s voice lifted a little as he watched the twenty-two-year-old, perhaps hoping the change of subject would lighten the atmosphere. “I didn’t want to speak before she does, but she probably went back to cook you two something.”
It was such a sweet offer. So kind, Gabriel felt his heart plumet. He was bone-weary, perhaps, and that was the reason his dull vision clouded with tears. He raised his hand in a weak gesture, turning still farther away, should any of those unwelcome water droplets escape. “Arius can’t eat like ninety percent of normal food. I got him some gluten-free crackers, though, and he likes these.”
“He’s gluten intolerant?” Manny was staring up at him when Gabriel looked back.
“And lactose. And deathly allergic to half a dozen things. Mildly allergic to a dozen more.”
“Oh…” Manny glanced down at his patient. Then, nodding in agreement, “Alright, well let me clean his piercings and this cut on his lip before we wake him up, okay?”
“Sure.” Gabriel watched as Manny took a cotton swab first to Arius’s bruised lip, then to his ear where the retainers were. The doctor-boy was working over trifles, and it almost seemed a purposeful effort to distract Gabriel from the damage beneath Arius’s shirt.
“Oh.” Manny paused, swab in hand. “He has a nostril piercing, too. Didn’t even notice at first.”
“He doesn’t,” Gabriel muttered. He took a careful breath, brushing his hand past his face. Get it together, he told himself forcefully.
Manny frowned, pausing again. “Looks like one…” His finger lightly touched the side of Arius’s nose.
There was nothing there. A speck of dirt, maybe. A few darker pigments on Arius’s skin. “He never got his nose pierced,” Gabriel murmured. “He has a tongue piercing and maybe four or five ear piercings.” Illicitly, his mind finished. Faint amusement twitched in his gut, so desperately welcome amid the overwhelming swamp of other emotions.
“Well…I don’t know…” Manny had a mischievous grin on his face as he stood up and disappeared briefly to another part of the store. When he returned, he had several small metal jewelry pieces in hand. “Is he more of a studs person or a hoops person?”
Gabriel grimaced slightly. “I have no idea. Studs, I guess.”
“You don’t happen to know what gauge his piercings are, do you?” Manny blinked up at the ceiling for a moment. “16 is common, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Gabriel replied.
“This one looks like a 16,” Manny muttered, eyeing a little ring he held. Then, shifting a stud between two fingers, “We’ll go with a smaller one just in case, though.” He slid a latex glove on, then wet the little jewelry piece in rubbing alcohol. When it had dried, he dampened the tiny mark on Arius’s nostril with a little disinfectant.
“It’s not a piercing,” Gabriel repeated.
“Swear it looks like one,” Manny returned, voice full of concentration. Leaning in to get a better view, Manny gently pressed two fingers to the side of Arius’s nose. Then, as gently and easily as if that tiny hole had been there all Arius’s life, Manny slipped the stud all the way through. “Ta-da.” He leaned back and gave Gabriel a grin.
Gabriel was silent, but his mind was loud enough with swears and exclamations. When had Arius gotten a nose piercing?!
Manny seemed to find Gabriel’s expression amusing. He laughed lightly. “We should wake him up, now. When he revives a little, I’ll offer him some jewelry for the rest of his piercings. The stainless steel jewelry never sells, anyway.” Then, eyes flashing up at Gabriel, “He doesn’t have any metal allergies, does he?”
“I…I don’t know,” Gabriel breathed, eyes still locked on the small stud in Arius’s nostril. “He does use stainless steel, though, so that shouldn’t be a problem…”
“He doesn’t have a nickel allergy?” Manny checked.
“No, I know for sure he’s not allergic to nickel.”
“Cool. Help me get him up against the wall, now?”
Arius’s breathing became noticeably more labored as Gabriel lifted him upright and leaned him into the corner of the wall. Again, his eyes flickered open, only to drop shut again. “Arius.” Steadying the boy, Gabriel shook him a little. “Arius, wake up. You have to eat.”
Behind him, Manny disappeared again. The doctor-boy returned a moment later with a cup of water. “See if you can get him to drink,” Manny instructed.
Gabriel lifted the cup to Arius’s lips and tipped it carefully. A little stream of water ran down Arius’s chin, washing out a tinted red from the cut on his lip. Gabriel tipped the cup a second time, soliciting a soft gasp from Arius, but still failing to get him to swallow anything. As was so typical of that boy when offered help he really needed, Arius turned away from the water. But then, as if subconsciously realizing he was, in fact, thirsty, he turned back. He let Gabriel pour a little water into his mouth, and he swallowed it with effort.
“Good,” Manny praised hopefully.
Gabriel tipped the cup again, this time with his hand gently steadying Arius’s face. The shape of that jawline under his touch sent strange sparks up Gabriel’s nerves. Like firecrackers. Or crawling ants. Shit, I’m so tired, he told himself.
Arius swallowed another small mouthful. His eyelids lifted a little, and for the first time, his hands twitched at his sides. Unsteadily, Arius raised his bandaged hand and caught the plastic cup. He would have spilled it, had Gabriel not kept a firm hold. “Arius.”
Those beautiful dark eyes lifted to Gabriel’s face, focused for a moment, then shifted across the space around him.
“Arius,” Gabriel repeated, one hand still on the water cup, the other lightly holding Arius’s face. Those eyes returned to him, searching his face for a moment. “Ari.” Oh my god, just let me hear your voice, Gabriel had the urge to say. But he forced it back. “Arius, you should drink, yes?” He raised the cup to Arius’s lips again. The boy drank a little more, then turned away. His hand pushed the cup aside, and his pretty eyes lowered to the floor, almost closing again.
Gabriel put the cup down and reached for the crackers. Manny was watching Arius intently as Gabriel opened the cracker box and tore open the packaging within. Before Gabriel could offer the food, however, Arius finally spoke. “How did you find me?” The words were faded, little more than a weak whisper.
Gabriel’s fingers froze on the cracker packaging. He glanced up at Arius, then quickly looked away again. “I went looking for you.”
Arius let out a pent breath and turned away.
Gabriel looked at him then. “You don’t know how to lose a fight, do you, Gabriel?” Arius’s words rang back through his mind. “You don’t even know how to fail.” He was right, maybe. Right in that Gabriel didn’t know how to let go of his pride. He avoided even the possibility of having to do so. Few things had ever been worth the threat of rejection. “Arius, I fucked up.” Gabriel’s voice was tense, eyes fixed on the boy in front of him. “I said a lot of shit I didn’t mean—didn’t even think about how it would hurt you—I was just angry, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
Arius glanced back at him. Those dark oval eyes shifted across Gabriel’s face, as if searching for proof of insincerity.
“I—I didn’t even ask you if you were okay,” Gabriel confessed, voice breaking and fading to a whisper. His eyes darted down across Arius’s gray tee shirt. “I swear, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I just…I didn’t know how, Ari. I didn’t know how to—to—” Gabriel lifted his hands out in an empty gesture, face flushing at his own loss for words. “Ask,” he finished breathlessly. He had wanted to know. There was no way to express how he had felt in the hours following that incident in the shelter: lying awake beside Arius, listening to the boy breathe, feeling a new wave of adrenaline at every foreign sound on the street, every foreign shadow that moved.
Pretty brown eyes lowered from Gabriel’s face. “Arius.” And those eyes shot back up to Gabriel’s blue ones.
“Arius, the…the…” Again, Gabriel found himself at an unusual loss for words. He made a small gesture toward the boy’s tee shirt. “The bruising,” he finished, voice quiet. Almost involuntarily, he glanced over at Manny.
Arius’s arm moved automatically to his waist, and his hand gripped his side. Those beautiful brown eyes fixed Gabriel with a stare that almost seemed threatened.
“What’s it…What’s it from?” Gabriel’s voice croaked slightly, and he brushed a hand past his nose.
Arius shot a glance at Manny, then looked away. It came through, uncomfortably vividly, in that moment. Arius’s pale face, the dark discoloration at the corners of his pretty eyes, the way his vision wandered and skidded, how his wet hair stuck to his face like sharp, black quills. “I don’t know,” the boy whispered.
“You don’t know? Are you serious?” Gabriel’s voice was quiet, gaze searching Arius’s face for a sign of confirmation.
Arius raised his shoulders in a weak shrug and let his head drop back against the wall. “It just started hurting.”
“You should eat,” Manny spoke up. He took the crackers from Gabriel, then easily extended them to Arius.
The nineteen-year-old received the gluten-free snack with a glance at the box they had come in. Then, his shoulders relaxing slightly, he lifted one of the wafers to his mouth and took a small bite.
Manny seemed to approve. “Take it slow.” He smiled. “I’ll go find some blankets.”
When Manny had disappeared, Arius looked up at Gabriel again. “Who is he?” he whispered.
Gabriel made a half-hearted attempt at a clueless shrug. “He and his aunt own this shop. I think they may let us spend the night here.” Then, when Arius turned quietly back to his cracker, “Arius, I’m sorry.”
Silence lasted for a painstaking moment. “Are you?” Arius’s voice was still a whisper. He stared into Gabriel’s eyes like he was testing for a lie.
“Yes, why would I—” Gabriel began, but he was cut off.
“Because of what you said. You made it sound like it was my fault.” The statement was hushed. Arius’s expression was so unmoving and grave, Gabriel found it almost intimidating to look at. And yet, those dark eyes were smarting. “Like I chose it, like I let it happen.”
For several seconds, Gabriel found himself gaping for words. “Arius, I don’t know how to explain—” He broke off, lowering his eyes to the floor and blinking quickly. “I was scared. And angry. I—I didn’t know how to deal with it. H-How to approach it—” He shook his head. I still don’t, a small voice in his racing thoughts reminded him. “I know it wasn’t your fault. I know that, Arius. The way it came out, it was just…”
“Yes, okay, alright.” Arius seemed to flinch. His gaze lowered to the floor. “It’s fine.”
“No, Arius, come on…” Gabriel’s voice drained into silence as Manny reappeared, a large, folded blanket in his arms.
“I only found one,” The doctor boy announced. “But it’s big, at least.” He set it on the ground. “Aunt Rosa should be back any minute now, I would think.”
And, as if on cue, the shop door opened, and the woman in mention entered. She put her umbrella aside, balancing a large basket on her arm. She walked up to where Gabriel and Arius sat and set the basket down between them. “Supper,” she announced. Then, beckoning to Gabriel, “Come aside for a moment, I want to talk to you.”
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