Gabriel sat back on the floor and dropped his hands to his sides. For a long moment, he stared at the dark shape in front of him. “Come on, Ari. Don’t be like this.” He tilted his head slightly, the urge crawling over him to drop his weight against the wall. He was so tired, he realized. Almost to the point that it became physically painful to keep himself upright and awake.
Arius’s arms were wrapped around his midsection like he was holding it together. Sighing, Gabriel reached out again and slipped his hand under Arius’s shoulder. He could feel the violent little tremors that immediately broke out across Arius’s body as he pulled him upright. Then, hand on his soft jawline, Gabriel turned the boy’s face to the dim yellow light coming from the window.
“Stop. Stop.” Arius blinked, then pulled slowly away. He crept back toward the wall and dropped against it. Lowering a hand to the floor to steady himself, he looked up at Gabriel. Those moist brown eyes looked like crystals in the darkness. He was still shaking.
“Your bruising isn’t getting worse, is it?” Gabriel asked, his voice effortlessly steady in the quiet. He heard the breath Arius drew in before responding.
“It just hurts.”
“What hurts?”
A ripple ran across Arius’s shoulders and chest, like he had almost raised his hand before deciding not to. “Everywhere. My face. My…My jaw. My head. My neck, my back, like—like…” He drew in another unnaturally heavy breath. “Broken,” he finished in a whisper, leaving Gabriel unsure if he had missed a few words in the middle.
“You have a headache?” Gabriel reached for a water bottle lying close to the supper basket Rosa had left them.
“No.” Arius had lowered his head against his knee, arms draped uselessly at his sides.
“No?” The plastic bottle crinkled quietly in Gabriel’s grip. “I thought you just said—”
“It’s not a fucking headache, Gabriel.” Arius’s voice sounded close to breaking, his words swinging from volume to whisper without the slightest hint of steady control. “It—It feels like—” Arius abruptly fell silent, neither raising his head, nor continuing where he left off.
“Arius, I have nothing to give you for pain,” Gabriel told him quietly.
Silence answered him.
“Ari.” Gabriel reached out again, fingers catching the soft tee shirt fabric covering Arius’s shoulder. “Ari, come on. What do you want me to do?”
“I—I don’t know.” It was a weak whisper. “Gabe—Gabriel, there’s…there’s nothing…nothing…” He was so tense as his voice drained out. And still, he did not raise his head.
Gabriel felt something sting at the corners of his eyes, and he glanced up toward the window. Silently, he bit his lip.
“Maybe…Maybe, we should have stayed there.”
Gabriel’s jaw loosened when he tasted blood. His eyes lowered to the floor. Then, cautiously, his vision moved back toward Arius. “What do you mean?”
“She…She always…said…told me…one more day. Even one more day.”
Gabriel watched as Arius’s hand slowly extended a few inches across the floor, fingers tense and curled like injured spider’s legs. “Mom?” he whispered.
“It’s not really worth it,” Arius admitted quietly. “I think…I think I always knew.”
“What bullshit are you saying?” Gabriel’s voice was still only barely loud enough to be heard. He could see Arius’s eyes, now. The soft light reflecting off them like stars, that beautiful face still half hidden in his trembling arm.
“The surgeries…The recovery weeks…All the medication, all the nights, the stigma…”
“Stigma?”
“God, Gabriel.” For the first time, Arius’s voice completely broke. The way he suddenly raised his arm could only have been to hide tears from the telling light of the window. “You fucking treated me like shit because of it. You fucking did, Gabriel. Did you think you were the only one?”
“I never treated you like shit because you were sick,” Gabriel said stiffly.
“‘Does she know? Have you even told her, yet? She won’t want to deal with all that, Arius. Really kinda nobody will.’” Arius had raised his head to stare straight at Gabriel through the darkness. Those eyes were glistening as he said the three sentences, each word delivered with such certainty, he almost seemed to believe he remembered word for word what Gabriel had said that day over two years ago.
No way he remembers exactly what I said, Gabriel immediately thought. Then, reinforcing his first thought, No way that’s exactly what I said. I never would have said that, I never even thought that. But what came out of his mouth was much less the denial and much more accepting of what a small part of him already knew to be true. “Geez, Arius, you’re still sore about that girl?”
“I never cared about not going out with her.”
His words made Gabriel suddenly feel cold. “What?”
“It was what you said that mattered. It’s what you said that I still think about.”
“Shit, Arius, why in the world?” Gabriel shrugged lightly. “I doubt I even said that, anyway—”
“You did. And it wasn’t the first or the last time you said something like it.”
Joshua Mickelson, Gabriel instinctively thought. His mouth dropped open, some form of defense or denial at the tip of his tongue before he suddenly realized he didn’t even want to bring up that incident in the high-school hallway or any of what had happened afterward. That email…Gabriel shut his mouth and looked at the floor.
“You’re right, though,” Arius whispered.
Gabriel’s thumb shifted stiffly across his lips, and his gaze darted toward the nineteen-year-old.
Arius drew in a small breath. “School, friends, love…I can’t do any of it.”
“You’re talking bullshit,” Gabriel murmured.
“Mom was never really concerned about how far I fell behind in school.”
“Yeah, because you had good reason to fall behind in school.” A stiff tremor ran down Gabriel’s back, and he sat up straight. “Because you did have surgeries and recovery time and nights you were in so much pain, you couldn’t sleep.”
“Nah.” Arius’s face tilted slightly, cradled where it was in his arms.
“What do you mean, ‘nah’?” Suddenly feigning he heard a mosquito whistling in his ear, Gabriel swiped a hand through the air.
“Even if I graduated. Even if I made it all the way through some kind of college degree…” Arius blinked slowly, those brown eyes lifting absently toward the window. “What’s the purpose? I won’t live long enough to build a career. And when I die, it sucks for any friends I made on the way. It sucks for anyone I ever got close to.”
“Bullshit.” Gabriel’s jaw locked for a moment. “None of your doctors ever gave you a life expectancy.”
Arius slowly raised his head off his knees and carefully leaned into the wall. He laid his head lightly against it, then watched Gabriel in silence for a while.
“Arius, we’re going to get home, okay?” Gabriel told him sharply. “We’re gonna find Mom, and we’re gonna get you back on your medication. Tomorrow, alright? We’ll be back in Cincinnati tomorrow.”
Arius said nothing. His face averted slightly, and Gabriel saw him close his eyes.
“Worth it,” rang back like a death toll in Gabriel’s head. Arius was fading far faster than Gabriel could possibly have imagined. The bruising on his abdomen, the pain he was in now, his sleeplessness, the wild trembling…
Fuck, we need to get home, Gabriel told himself silently.
“And now…the most important question of all.” Fallock carefully turned the page on his questionnaire pamphlet. “Was it worth it?”
“Worth it?” Dr. Aeirsah frowned faintly, her burning eyes fixed on the man across from her.
“Worth it,” he repeated. “For you, for Arius. Was his life worth it?”
Comments (0)
See all