He wasn’t just trembling, he was shivering. He hadn’t relaxed again after their talk in the night—only leaned up against the wall where he was for the remaining hours. Gabriel gently laid his hand on Arius’s shoulder and gripped that shaking frame for a moment. “Arius. Wake up, we gotta go.”
He wasn’t asleep. Arius turned his head from against the wall and looked up at Gabriel, eyes dull and unfocused in the dim morning light. A single, incoherent syllable escaped his bruised lips, and his eyes nearly dropped shut again.
“Arius, come on. It’s time to go home, yes?” But Gabriel felt his own hurry slip his mind as his eyes settled on something out of place on the side of Arius’s face. Hesitantly, Gabriel gripped the boy’s chin and turned his head gently to the side.
It looked like faded pen marks. Like ink rubbed into skin. Small, vine-like lines crawling across Arius’s skin like tree branches. The marks were concentrated on the underside of Arius’s jaw, but reached up over his cheek and all the way down the side of his neck to his shoulder.
“Arius…” Gabriel’s face drew into an uncertain frown. “What is this?” His thumb moved briskly across the marks a few times.
Arius unexpectedly dropped his head into Gabriel’s hand. His trembling frame slumped forward, relaxing suddenly.
Gabriel caught him like a reflex, heartrate leaping. He quickly stabilized Arius’s head against his shoulder, then immediately grasped the boy’s side supportively. For several frozen seconds, he sat there rigidly, unsure if Arius had just passed out.
“Ari…?” Gabriel’s hand shifted carefully toward the boy’s face, finger blindly feeling out the shape of that beautiful jawline, then hesitantly caressing aside strands of dark hair. “Arius.” He was still breathing, at least. The harsh, uneven movements sent spiraling chills down Gabriel’s back. The warmth against his chest felt like a bonfire. Arius was too hot, breathing too effortfully.
“Ari. Ari, I—I need you to walk, okay?” Gabriel could feel his voice about to break seconds before it did. He lifted Arius’s head, fingers in the boy’s tangled hair, eyes searching the exhausted face in front of him.
The nineteen-year-old was still conscious. But the unresponsive look on his face suggested he was hardly more capacitated for it.
Starting to shake a little himself, Gabriel leaned Arius back against the wall. He got up on wobbly legs and started for a clothing rack. In the dim light from the window, Gabriel shoved aside hangers, the soft squeak of their movement on the metal rack sounding through the quiet. He slid a dark hoodie off its hanger and took it back to where Arius sat.
Gabriel gathered the hoodie, then pulled it over Arius’s head. It was like dressing an unconscious person, pulling the boy’s arms through the sleeves, sliding the hood over his head, adjusting the fabric across his jaggedly heaving chest.
Gabriel gripped Arius under the arms and pulled him to his feet. Holding the nineteen-year-old against himself, Gabriel started for the door. “Come on, Arius. We’re going home.”
“This house is actually empty.”
Gabriel grinned up at his friend, hand patting the table beside a pile of literature notes on the coffee table. “It’s actually empty,” he confirmed.
“I know Moni has that speech competition,” Becca agreed, smiling back. “And your mom is taking Amana to the dentist, obviously. But what happened to Arius? I was expecting him to be here, at least.”
“He’s in tutoring.” Gabriel took the first lined paper off the stack on the coffee table. “You gonna help me with this?”
“Arius in tutoring? I thought Amana was the one with the tutors.” Becca sat down on the floor across from Gabriel and glanced over his note pages. She lifted his textbook off the carpet.
“This is different. Algebra.” Gabriel raised his eyebrows. “With Ms. Ambridge. It’s become a thing, apparently.”
“I see. And your mom isn’t nervous we’re here doing something devious in this empty house?” Becca cocked an eyebrow at her attractive counterpart.
Gabriel smirked, eyes scanning his own handwriting on the page he was holding. “Don’t think she cares so long as we’re ‘safe’ and whatnot.”
“Seriously? Geez, I wish my mom was like that.” Becca laughed.
A small silence followed, and Gabriel’s eyes flickered up and met Becca’s for a moment. He passed his tongue across his lips. “Becca.”
She looked up at him.
“We know it’s not like that between us, right?”
Becca’s face wrinkled into a critically amused expression. “Gabe, um…yes. We…We all know about your…‘situation.’”
If she had been attempting to settle him, she did exactly the opposite. An uncertain frown darted across Gabriel’s face. “My situation?”
“Yes.” Becca smiled faintly, seeming to recognize she was treading sensitive ground. “How…all the cute, funny, smart, sexy girls who look your way never…quite…seem to…catch your attention…”
“I’m not gay.” The three words were firm, stone hard.
“Gabe, me and the others—we’re not like your mom. You don’t have to feel like you have to hide anything from us.”
A brief smile lifted the corners of Gabriel’s lips, heart pounding as subtly as the lies he told. “Thanks. I appreciate that. But I’m still not attracted to guys.”
“Okay…” Becca gave him a cautious look. “Well, so long as you understand that we would accept you no matter who you find attractive, we’re all good.”
They were growing. Stretching. Spreading. Like slowly-expanding prongs on a vine. The marks on Arius’s neck had started crawling up the side of his face, deeper down the trench of his shoulder, expanding over his collar bone. They couldn’t be wiped away, they felt neither cold nor unusually hot, and they were worse every time Gabriel looked at them.
Gently replacing Arius’s hood so it concealed his neck and face, Gabriel ran his hand comfortingly across the other boy’s back. Arius was so tense, it felt like touching a statue. Leaning against the bus window like he was asleep, the nineteen-year-old had not moved since boarding. He was in pain, Gabriel knew. But there was nothing Gabriel could do but sit there and fester in his anxiety.
Was it bruising? Some strange bruising along Arius’s blood vessels? Clots and pooling might be able to cause color like that at the surface of the skin. In the capillaries, maybe. But it was so dark, it was like there was dye in Arius’s blood.
Gabriel ran a hand through his matted hair and let out a tense breath. He cast a quick glance toward the front of the bus, then immediately reached out to stabilize Arius’s shoulder as the large vehicle bumped slightly.
There was an elderly person sitting two benches behind them who almost seemed to be watching them. With shades on under a low-drawn ballcap, Gabriel could not be sure what the old person was looking at. But he couldn’t shake the chilling feeling he got every time he caught sight of that person through the fish-eye mirror at the front of the bus.
Gabriel turned his attention back to the feverish boy beside him and carefully slipped his hand across Arius’s shoulders. It was both sickening and reassuring, the feeling of Arius’s weak, returning breaths. “We’re almost home,” Gabriel whispered. His other hand crinkled the coated paper of a bus route map lying across his knee. They were still five hours from the stop closest to home. When they got there, Gabriel could borrow someone’s phone and call up a college friend for a ride. They would be home in ten minutes by the time they got to that stop. C-1248. Strange, how familiar that number sounded when Gabriel had never once used this bus line before. Must be Déjà vu.
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