6. LUCAS
LUCAS
Two weeks later...
“Great job today,” my partner, Rufus, said, slapping me on the back as he passed me behind our ambulance. “I’m jealous of your needle skills; I always seem to end up trying to insert the thing right when we hit a pothole and jabbing the patient wrong.”
I grinned over my shoulder at him. “I’m just better than you, man. Get used to it.”
He snorted good-naturedly. “Maybe with an IV, you are, but remind me, which one of us has a boyfriend?”
I’d been delighted when I met Rufus on my first day to discover that he was as queer as I was, though he was bi and not gay.
In a macho, adrenaline-driven profession like ours, acceptance of less-common sexualities was never a guaranteed thing, and we’d bonded over our relief at finding out that our partner wasn’t going to look at us funny or fear being hit on.
Rufus and his boyfriend, a cute twink named Jules, had been together for nearly a year at this point, and they seemed blissfully happy together.
And yes, I occasionally felt a pang of jealousy when I saw them steal a kiss or bend their heads together conspiratorially, but it was fine. I was fine.
Especially now that I had Max at home. He wasn’t my boyfriend—we’d never even so much as come close to kissing—but he’d slotted into my life seamlessly in a way where it almost felt like he was.
We’d hang out in the apartment chatting about nothing or teasing each other every day I wasn’t on shift or he wasn’t at PT, and we’d started cooking together, with me working at the counters, which were an awkward height for him in his chair, and him narrating recipes to me and giving me orders.
I’d bought Trivial Pursuit and we’d spent hours—seriously, have you ever tried to actually complete a game of Trivial Pursuit?
—trash-talking each other over it one weekend.
I’d eventually won, but he’d confidently declared that he’d be victorious in the re-match I owed him.
I enjoyed my job, but when I was at work, I spent a lot of time wishing I was at home, feeling his arm against mine as we sat side-by-side on the couch to watch TV.
Occasionally I caught myself daydreaming about the single shower where I’d helped him, and the way his body looked naked, and then I’d forcefully remind myself that I was providing him his housing and his support system, not my dick.
Not that he’d want mine, anyway; he’d shown no interest in me that way, and I knew that while my body and face were fine, they weren’t fine like his were.
Once he started getting out of the apartment more, he’d have men throwing themselves at him, wheelchair or no.
He was reluctant to get out, though. The few times we’d gone for a walk down the street so he could build up his arm strength for pushing, people kept gawking for a second before catching themselves and moving on.
His face would grow progressively redder and his jaw tenser, until eventually we’d give up and turn around and he’d hide in the apartment again until I forced him out for another walk.
He said he wasn’t ashamed of his disability, but I wasn’t too sure I believed that; part of him still seemed to think he was now less than.
I knew his occupational therapist had been trying to work on it with him, but the man was stubborn and once he made up his mind, it was made up.
“Dude,” Rufus said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Where’d you go?”
“Huh?”
“You were just standing there staring at the wall for like three minutes straight.”
I blinked and looked at him. “Oh. Heh. Sorry.” He didn’t need to know I’d been thinking yet again about Max.
“You were thinking about him again, weren’t you?”
Well, damn. He knew me too well. I tried to play it off like he was being ridiculous, but I didn’t think I was going to convince him. “Of course not! I was just...planning what I wanted for lunch today.”
He grinned and shook his head. “You were thinking way too hard for it to be about lunch. Just admit you have a crush on your roommate, my friend. Everyone else knows it.”
“What?” I yelped. “Everyone? Do you think he…?”
He wagged a finger at me. “Aha, gotcha!”
“Fuck you,” I said with a glare. “I don’t have a crush on Max.
” Because if I did, I was screwed, and not in a good way.
I couldn’t act on my attraction to him even if I wanted to; I wouldn’t do that to him and make him feel at risk for being kicked out if we hooked up and then broke up.
Not to mention that I lacked the balls to make a move on him even if that hadn’t been an issue.
Rufus studied me for a long moment, then put both hands on my shoulders and tipped his head toward me until our foreheads almost touched. “You do, and you should do something about it. He makes you happy.”
“I -”
“Gustafsson! Wright! Stop making out and get your asses in for the shift change meeting!” I looked up to find our captain standing in the ambulance bay doorway, glaring at us.
It wasn’t exactly that the man was a homophobe, but he also wasn’t the only one who seemed to have decided that if two guys who liked guys were working together, they were probably also banging and needed to be policed to stop that.
I blushed self-consciously, but Rufus just rolled his eyes and trotted to the door. “You got it, Cap. We’ll make out later instead.” He aimed a swat at my ass as I came up alongside him.
“Asshole,” I muttered, and entered the main building.
***
“I’m home!” I announced as I stepped into the apartment that afternoon. “Hey, what smells so good?”
Max rolled out of the kitchen to greet me. “Welcome home, schnookums,” he teased. “I’m making soup.”
I toed off my shoes next to the door and crossed the room toward him. “Oh, you shouldn’t have, but I’m so glad you did!” Some hot soup sounded fantastic after the long night and day I’d had.
“Sure, I should have. Though it was a challenge and a half getting the beef browned without being able to see into the damn pan.”
I winced. My kitchen wasn’t set up for wheelchair users, with the counters and stove all at the wrong height and blocking access for Max’s legs so he couldn’t get close to them.
It wasn’t like I’d deliberately rented a non-handicap-accessible apartment—I hadn’t even known Max when I rented the place—but I still felt guilty about making him live somewhere where he couldn’t do everything he wanted the way he wanted to do it. “Sorry.”
He rolled his eyes and turned back into the kitchen. “Don’t apologize; you didn’t design the place, and it’s not your fault I’m in this chair.”
“Sorry,” I said again, lamely, as I followed him. The soup smelled fantastic, rich and meaty with a hint of red wine and...was that rosemary? We had rosemary? I almost drooled. “This looks so good. Favorite recipe?”
“Maybe, depending on if it tastes as good as it smells. Found it online, and the directions didn’t look too hard, so I decided to give it a try. So far so good, I haven’t set anything on fire yet.”
“Please don’t,” I urged. “I like our apartment non-crispy. Not to mention that if we burn it down, we both are out a place to live.”
He grinned and shook his head. “I like it too much here to go live in a shelter. I promise not to burn the house down.”
Aw, he liked it here? I glowed a little. “Well, I like having you here, so we’re even.”
We smiled at each other for a moment, our eyes locked.
The moment was sweet and surprisingly non-awkward...
until my brain started whirring, informing me that long, lingering looks weren’t something roommates did.
I dropped my eyes and whirled away from him to the fridge, where I stuck my head a little too far in, trying to cool my heated cheeks, before grabbing a can of soda.
“So, uh…” I stammered, “how was your day?”
He wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction. “I’m going insane just sitting here all day.”
My heart sank. Of course he was bored. My apartment—my life—was boring. If he had any other options, he probably would have gotten the hell out of here weeks ago. “You could...take walks?” I ventured weakly, knowing how he felt about facing the outside world.
He just shook his head and sighed. “No, I need something to do inside. People outside look too much.”
Moving warily, because I knew this subject could go very wrong very fast, I touched his shoulder. “You know you’re going to have to get used to that at some point. You can’t become a hermit.”
“Try me.”
“Max, that’s not funny,” I insisted. “You need sunlight and fresh air and to make friends. You’d be a helluva lot less bored if you let yourself go out now that you can maneuver your chair well.”
He threw his hands up in exasperation. “I don’t need to make friends, I have you. And I can get sunlight and fresh air through the window.” He turned back to the stove, mumbling something under his breath.
I wasn’t sure whether to feel elated—I was his friend!
—or worried—he really was getting to be pathologically resistant to going outside.
I decided to opt for the positive. “I’m glad you think of me as a friend.
I think of you that way too. But Max,” I couldn’t help adding, not believing I was saying it even as it came out of my mouth, “I can’t be your world.
” Did I want to be his world? Yeah, sort of.
But not in a limiting way; more in a you’re my moon and stars kind of way.
With a scowl on his face that I could detect even from behind, he reached up to stir the soup a little too hard. A drop of it splashed out of the pot and down onto him, and he hissed as the hot liquid made contact with his skin. “Fuck!”
Before I could think about it, I was across the room and taking his hand.
“Let me look.” There was a red spot where the soup had hit him, and I practically dragged him over to the sink.
Turning the cold water on, I stuck his hand under the tap.
“First step is to stop the burning,” I recited, falling back on my training.