Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Jesse had never fainted. Not once in his life. He didn’t faint. He held that truth to be self-evident.
His stomach was a freak of nature, a literal lead-lined miracle of gastroenterology. Jesse had seen shit that nobody should ever see, he’d only puked about it a couple times, and he’d never once fainted.
Except he did.
Right then, he did.
Jesse deadass fainted.
Didn’t know that he had until he came around, hella groggy and super confused.
Wyatt was nowhere to be seen, but Jesse was surrounded by another iteration of way too many machine guns, who dragged him back to his own damn emergency room and served him up on a woozy platter to Dr. Kohli, who Jesse was pretty sure was on hour thirty-six of a twelve-hour shift.
He took one look at Jesse, pinched the bridge of his nose so hard it had to hurt, and said, “Do I want to know what the hell Command did to you?”
“Brought the dead back to life?” Jesse said, which was a fuckass stupid thing to say.
Because hours later, eyes still strobing from all the penlights pointed at them, mouth still tasting like all the musty apple juice he’d been made to drink, butthole still tingling from the attentions of the ER’s most terrifying nurse and her favorite rectal thermometer, Jesse finally dragged his sorry ass out the door of the emergency room — only to be greeted by a fresh horror.
“My favorite loser!” Maddie arrived boobs first, like always, to a fanfare of her own making. “Fall over your own feet again, honey bun?”
Jesse scowled at her.
She smiled back at him, sunnily. “So hey. Got a question for you.”
Jesse kept on scowling at her.
“How much do you love me? That’s the question. And it better be a whole freaking lot, I’ll tell you that much for free.”
“I don’t love you at all,” Jesse told her. “I hate you. Viscerally.”
“Wow. That’s a ten-dollar meanie for somebody who’s only ever been nice to you.”
Jesse snorted so hard that he choked on his own spit. “You left me to die in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Are we forgetting that?”
But Maddie didn’t take the bait. Just grinned at him, sly and knowing. “Did a little swooning, huh?”
“That’s—” Jesse’s cheeks went hot. “How the fuck do you even know about that?”
An extravagant shrug. Maddie’s grin hitched up a few notches. “I know plenty. Just like I know that Mr. Hot Old Guy’s back from the dead.”
“How the fuck do you—” But Jesse bit down on the repeat question.
He didn’t even have to ask. Maddie’s roster was extensive and ever expanding.
She was probably fucking one of the crazy scientists, or maybe one of the guards.
Probably both, maybe even at the same time.
But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was Maddie’s grin — which Jesse didn’t like.
He really didn’t like it at all. “What the hell did you do?”
Maddie clasped a hand to her chest. “You wound me, dude. Who says I did anything?”
“Maddie,” Jesse began.
But Maddie cut him off with a snorting laugh. “Gave your deets to the silver fox. That’s what I did.”
Jesse short-circuited a second, just staring at her. “Huh?”
“He’s been released into genpop,” Maddie said. “A card-carrying senior citizen of Paradise. Figured you wouldn’t say no to a conjugal visit, so I gave him your address. You know, to the creepy white box you call home? He’s gonna swing by tonight now that Rolanda’s put the thermometer away.”
Jesse blinked himself back into normal operations. “Sometimes, I don’t completely hate you.”
Maddie slapped Jesse on the butt so hard that he did actually fall over his own feet. “That’s the spirit, shit for brains!”
* * *
It was way past sundown when Jesse finally made it through all the checkpoints and home. He cleaned, dusted, prepped in all ways applicable and imaginable. Then he paced while he stared at the door, like staring would summon Wyatt into being.
Didn’t, though. “Fuck.”
Jesse was nervous. Weird shit but he was. A low-level thrum of nerves had set up home in his belly and was refusing eviction, just straight-up squatting.
Why the fuck was he even nervous? This was Wyatt.
Jesse knew Wyatt better than he’d ever known anyone.
Wyatt knew Jesse just the same. Wyatt’s fingers and tongue and cock had all spent extensive time up Jesse’s butt.
That was a level of knowing someone that was pretty hard to beat.
In fact, that was a level of knowing someone that—
Rap-rap. Rap-rap.
The knock at the door made Jesse jump. Two heavy thumps and two skittering steps before Jesse yanked it open.
Wyatt filled the doorway, still. Fuck, he was a little bulkier maybe, and that shit was just unfair.
Jesse had dwindled like a gothic maiden during his own quarantine. Or that’s what Maddie told him, at least, and he couldn’t argue. He still wasn’t back to his fighting weight, but all the candy bars sure were helping improve the size of his butt.
“Jess?”
“Fuck.” Jesse shook himself. He stepped back. Caught his hip on the door handle. Hissed his displeasure. “Fuck. Fucking fuck.” Jesse took a breath that sure as shit wasn’t steady. “Come in. Please.”
Wyatt did, fighting and failing against a faint twitch of his mouth.
Jesse knew that twitch. He couldn’t fight his own involuntary reaction at the sight of it, the swell of hope that surged in his chest on the realization that Wyatt still found him funny.
Couldn’t hurt, right? Because this Jesse was just as much of a fucked-up doofus as the Jesse that Wyatt had known before, and Wyatt had liked that Jesse plenty
Wyatt came to a stop in the middle of the room. “Nice place.”
Which was a lie. A polite lie but still. Maddie wasn’t wrong. Jesse’s apartment was an unfinished white box. A bed, a microwave, a bathroom, some torn-up paper shades. That was it. Peak sterile vibes. A padded cell missing the padding.
Maddie had offered to help source a rug or a couch. Some curtains, maybe. Even just one single jizz drop of personality, my dude. But Jesse had turned her down.
He didn’t want anything that would remind him of the last place he’d thought of as home, the only place, really, that had ever felt like home.
But Jesse didn’t say that, not to Maddie then or to Wyatt now. Figured there wasn’t any way to put that weirdass sentiment into words without sounding even more unhinged than he already was.
So, “Thanks,” Jesse said instead. He shrugged, just for something to do with the energy fizzing like CO? under his skin. “It’s, uh, near work. The emergency room, where I work,” Jesse said. “As a medic,” he added, redundantly, then bit his lip hard enough to make himself shut up.
Wyatt’s hands were buried deep in his pockets. He nodded. “Makes sense.”
Silence fell. Kinda awkward but not so heavy.
It didn’t weigh down on them. Just held them there, staring at each other in the light of Jesse’s one lamp, in the middle of Jesse’s depressing excuse for an efficiency, standing less than five feet apart because they were probably both at least a little gay.
“Sorry I fainted,” Jesse said.
“Pretty understandable.”
“I don’t faint.”
Wyatt’s mouth tipped up just a little more. “Yeah, Jess, I know.”
“Like, I’m super unflappable,” Jesse said, because it was weirdly important suddenly that Wyatt understood, that he knew it, because he’d known it before.
Jesse didn’t want Wyatt to think that Jesse had changed, or not for the worse, at least. “I see people’s insides on the daily.
Their insides on the outside too, sometimes.
Just, you know, a whole lot of insides. I’ve seen ‘em. All of them.”
“I get that, bud.”
Wyatt stepped closer. Not all the way up into Jesse’s space, but close enough now that Jesse could feel the heat of him, and close enough that Jesse had to tip his head up a little to hold Wyatt’s gaze.
“I don’t faint,” Jesse whispered. Felt like a whispering kind of moment. “Like, at all.”
“I know,” Wyatt said. He reached out. His thumb skated soft over Jesse’s cheek. “I know, Jess.”
Jesse tipped his face into Wyatt’s hand, a magnetic pull. He let Wyatt take the weight of his dumbass head. And Wyatt took it, and held it, freaking cradled it.
“I missed you so much,” Jesse whispered. “God, so fucking much.”
All that Wyatt had been waiting for. He wrapped his arms around Jesse and pulled him in. Held him so, so tight. “Missed you more, bud.”
“Fuck,” Jesse said, more a breath than a word, and then they were kissing.
Hard and beyond desperate, Jesse clambering up into Wyatt’s arms, his legs wrapped tight around Wyatt’s hips, clinging on with a hunger that kinda scared him a little.
It was the intensity of it, that feeling, some crazy strong, zombie-adjacent urge, like maybe if Jesse could just crawl inside Wyatt’s mouth, then he could go set up camp between his ribs. Plant a flag. Never leave. Never let Wyatt leave. Not again.
“Bud, hey. Hey now.” Wyatt gentled him, softening their kisses.
Jesse whined about it, because of course he did, but he let himself be gentled, let Wyatt press their lips together, soft, and just breathe.
“I know,” Wyatt murmured. He ran his hand down Jesse’s back. “I know, bud.”
He sat down on the only place there was to sit, on the edge of Jesse’s bed, which was less of a bed and more of a mattress on the floor — but whatever. It was the place where Jesse slept when Jesse got time to sleep, so ipso facto and shit, it was Jesse’s bed.
Wyatt sat with Jesse straddling his lap. And Jesse emerged from hiding to blink down at him, just to try and take it in, this new reality where Wyatt was here and safe and, “How the fuck did you make it out of there alive?”
“I didn’t.” Wyatt shook his head. “God, Jess. I so damn near didn’t.”
“But you did,” Jesse countered. He thumped a fist to Wyatt’s shoulder. Found it as solid and unyielding as it looked. “What with being both outta there and, like, super alive.”