Infected: Shift (5 page)

“Jasmine Hawley?” she repeated the name like it meant something, and then recalled it. “Holy shit, he was asking about Hawley?”

“The younger sister of his friend. There’s no rush on this. I’m off to the hospital tomorrow.”

She looked briefly concerned. “Are you—”

“Rosenberg wants to put me in a coma. She thinks that’ll keep me alive another month.”

She considered that, shrugging. “Might work. Worth a shot. Dylan know?”

“Not yet. I suppose I should go tell him, huh?”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “You’ve had how many relationships?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, Ms. Dominatrix, give me relationship advice.”

“That’s Mistress, Slave, and don’t you forget it,” she said crisply, before giving him a big, cheesy grin.

Weird friends and weird cases. At least his life had a recognizable pattern.

Roan stopped on the way home and got a pizza, as he felt like a pizza. He made sure it was vegetarian, even though he was dying for pepperoni, and he then had to figure out how to take it home on the bike. (Okay, that was a detail he should have worked out in advance.)

Dylan was up when he got home, but he was still in his underwear, drinking his morning (afternoon) tea. But since he hadn’t eaten yet, he was willing to have pizza with Roan while they discussed what Rosenberg had in mind for him.

Dylan was thrilled, or as thrilled with the idea of someone putting Roan in a coma as one could get. He honestly thought Rosenberg was trying to save him, and Roan was sure she
was
trying, but he also knew there was a lot of guesswork involved. It was desperation, pure and simple, and there were no guarantees whatsoever. But he let Dylan have his enthusiasm, because he owed him that much.

Dylan volunteered to go to the hospital with him tomorrow afternoon, and Roan agreed, although he didn’t know why Dylan would even want to come. They were just going to drug him until he was unconscious (which now, in retrospect, sounded like fun), and what was Dyl going to do, hold his hand? Of course, if it didn’t work, it might be the last time Dylan saw him alive, so okay, he supposed he understood.

Dylan called Ty, one of the other bartenders at Panic, and got him to cover his shift so he could take the night off. Again, he was acting like this was Roan’s last night on earth… but you know, fuck it. Roan decided he didn’t care. It was or it wasn’t; Dylan had a fifty-fifty chance of being right or wrong. Let him do what he wanted. Roan had already found his peace with all of this.

They had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed—nothing really remarkable, except the possibility he might actually be dead this time tomorrow night. Apparently someone else called, suggesting his life story might make fascinating viewing (ha!), and that led to him and Dylan discussing who they’d like to play them in a film. Dylan seemed horrified by Roan’s initial choice to play himself: Robert Carlyle, whom Dylan insisted looked nothing like him. Roan knew that. He’d just always liked him as an actor since
Trainspotting
, and of course, he was a Scot, which Roan kind of was (look at his mysteriously hard-to-pronounce surname).

Dylan picked John Barrowman to play Roan (Captain Jack? Flattering, but no, he couldn’t see it….), and Gael Garcia Bernal to play him. Now, Roan agreed Gael was kind of cute, but nowhere near cute enough to play Dylan, in his opinion, and also way too short. Roan figured if they could somehow lump Gael together with a younger Javier Bardem, they’d have the perfect Dylan.

They both agreed Taye Diggs would have to play Diego. Not that Dee actually looked like Taye, it was just that Dee would die if anyone else played him. They figured Fi would want Meryl Streep. Again, no physical resemblance, but Fi would insist on quality over resemblance. Holden could go either way on that—he’d either want a porn star or a British stage thespian playing him (one who wasn’t afraid of nudity in either case, and he’d probably insist the guy would have to at least be bi; straights would be kicked off by Holden personally). Roan was sad Jerry Orbach was dead, because he’d have made a perfect Gordo. Judi Dench with an American accent, a wig, and a foul mouth could probably carry off Doctor Rosenberg.

It was fun. They were amusing themselves immensely, until he idly wondered who would play Paris and all the fun went out of it. Just like that. Dylan initially chided him for being “no fun anymore,” then he must have guessed why Roan went all quiet, and he began talking about the strange people who wanted to buy any art relating to Roan that he had. Dylan had lied to them all and said he had none because none of them were pieces he wanted to sell, especially not to bizarro fetishists. Fame was a weird thing, especially when it was “freak of the week” fame. Roan just sort of hoped the new freak would hurry up and appear already, because he was getting tired of all the bullshit.

But then again, if he didn’t survive the procedure tomorrow, he’d have nothing to worry about, would he?

Holden
was a little surprised when Dylan answered the door in his boxer shorts, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Having stopped by Panic last night, he knew that Dylan hadn’t been up late working. “Is something wrong?” he wondered, looking beyond him to try and see the living room.

Dylan shook his head, yawning, “Roan’s in the hospital. I stayed there as long as I could, but eventually I got kicked out.”

Holden stared at him. “He’s in the hospital? Did he have another aneurysm?”

“No. Oh, you don’t know.” Dylan then made a sort of scoffing noise as he said, “Right, yeah, he barely told me. Come in, I’ll explain.”

Well, it couldn’t have been a huge emergency if Dylan wasn’t freaking out about it. Holden followed him inside, noting from a purely clinical perspective that he had a nice ass and a nice back. (It was long and lean, a little dimple near the small of the back, no overt hair.) If he wanted to do the high-class prostitute thing, he could probably make a mint. “Have a seat,” Dylan said, gesturing to the sofas as he disappeared into another room.

Holden sat, trying to decide what things were Roan’s and what things belonged to Dylan. The only things that seemed like Dylan were the painting now hanging up over the stereo—one of those bizarre ones, of a wall with a huge hole in it that appeared to be bleeding, like a crime scene detail with only the body missing—and the Bloc Party CD currently playing softly. Roan just never struck him as a Bloc Party kind of guy.

Dylan came back wearing sweatpants and pulling on a T-shirt of a Roy Lichtenstein-type woman crying and firing a machine gun while saying “It’s not you, it’s me….”
He had a feeling Roan had bought that for him, or it was one of Roan’s T-shirts; he was the wacky T-shirt master around here.

“Want something to drink?” Dylan asked, crossing to the kitchen. “I’m just getting myself some green tea.”

Green tea—oh boy! What a hedonist. But he was the Buddhist vegetarian around here. You’d think an artist/shirtless bartender at a gay nightclub would have a much wilder life, but he seemed to work hard to cultivate a lifestyle more suited to an ascetic. “No thanks, maybe later. So what’s up with Roan?”

“Doctor Rosenberg put him in a coma ahead of his transformation. She’s fairly certain it’ll keep him alive.”

“Oh.” There was a phrase you didn’t hear every day. How were you supposed to react to that? “It went okay?”

“Fine. When I was finally kicked out, he was sleeping… well, comatose. But his vitals were good, and there were no problems. He takes to drugs like a duck to water.”

Holden smirked at this, aware there was a bit of hollow anger in that last statement. “Sadly, yes. How are you doing?”

Dylan returned, curling up on the sofa across from him, legs tucked under him as he cradled the mug in his lap. It wasn’t straight green tea; there was a fruity scent to it, citrus and berry. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. “Honestly? I’m fucking pissed off.”

Now that he hadn’t expected. Dylan was such a mild guy that, in spite of being as gorgeous as he was, he was easily forgettable. In Holden’s mind, he just sort of blurred into the wallpaper. While his calm peacefulness was surely beneficial to Roan, who probably needed all the peace he could get, Dylan’s somewhat introverted nature left him an afterthought to many of Roan’s friends. He was the polar opposite of the bright explosion that was Paris. That was probably deliberate. “About what?”

“About Roan and his attitude. He’s acting like he wants to die.”

“He was put into the coma, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but only because Doctor Rosenberg didn’t give him a choice. He’s been acting like he wants to die since he found out about the aneurysm. He denies it, but… it’s just been freaky. It’s so irritating. I can’t even get properly mad at him, because I honestly believe he doesn’t know it. He’s living in denial or a Vicodin haze. One of the two.”

See, this was why Holden was so glad he didn’t do relationships. These little wars, these little deaths… was a regular fuck buddy and shared rent worth it? Didn’t seem like it. Give him solitude, a cold bottle of gin, a decent piece of Internet porn, and he was good. “Is this because he went after the neo-Nazis?”

“No, but that was one of the more flashy bits.”

“Tell me about it. And people don’t know he’s gay? My God, he was wearing a gun. Just pull it and tell ’em to freeze, don’t jump on ’em like a big flaming drama queen. Jesus.”

Dylan snickered at that, enjoying the joke. But his good humor faded fast, and he ended up looking kind of sad. “He’s never been a quitter. He’s not a man who quits easily or quietly. So why has he consciously or unconsciously decided to die?”

Paris. That was Holden’s first thought, and he knew Dylan was thinking the same thing and didn’t want to think it. He wanted some other reason than his boyfriend still being in love with a dead man. So Holden thought of another reason to give him, which sounded very plausible. “He’s burned out. He’s been told he’s going to die most of his life, and he hasn’t yet. So fuck it. He probably feels close to invincible as it is. He’s the closest thing to a superhero I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah. And there’s Paris.”

So Dylan said it. Good for him. “Roan pretends he’s not haunted by his ghost, but clearly he is.”

“Yeah. I really can’t compete with a dead man,” Dylan admitted, and it sounded like admitting defeat, which it was. He sighed and idly stirred his tea, the spoon softly ringing off the sides of the mug. The mug had a smiling cartoon bear on it hugging a heart, with the words I Don’t Understand Your Hostility Towards Me
encircling it. Holden knew that was Roan’s mug. Dylan made the decision to change the subject, and then he did. “So why the house call? You could have phoned.”

“Yeah, except my cell phone battery’s dead, and I just got in from Sea Tac late last night. I’ve spent the last few days in Vegas with my pilot client.”

“Really? Did he pay you, or—”

“Oh hell yeah he paid me. He also gave me a free ticket. Get this—he told the flight staff I was his nephew.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, and they seemed to buy it. Except for this queeny air steward who seemed to know instinctively I was a hustler and gave me the cold shoulder.”

Dylan squirmed uncomfortably, shifting on the couch and taking a sip of his tea before asking hesitantly, “Isn’t he the one who, um
—
”