Chapter 18 Henry
Henry
Istared down at my phone screen, feeling the blood continue to drain out of my face.
Honestly, I was amazed there was still any blood there to drain.
Antibodies: reactive. I’d been fixated on those words for the past ten minutes, waking up my screen to continue staring every time it turned off.
I’d tested positive for HIV antibodies on the re-test I took last week.
That meant I had detectable HIV. Oh shit, if I had it, did that mean… fuck, I needed to call Jamison.
My hand was shaking. I brought up my other hand to try to steady it, but my fingers wouldn’t grip hard enough, and now both my hands were shaking, a fine tremor running through what felt like my whole body.
Shit.
Shit.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe they’d confused my test with someone else’s in the lab. I needed to call my doctor.
What if it wasn’t a mistake? Hell, I still needed to call my doctor.
My hand shook a little harder, but I forced myself to stick out my pointer finger and start pecking at the screen to navigate to my doctor’s contact information.
It took me three tries and a lot of backtracking after my shakes led to bad taps, but I finally connected the call and raised my phone to my ear.
Ten minutes later, I lowered the phone again, still shaking.
I now had an appointment for a consultation and viral load test for tomorrow.
Absently, I realized that that meant I was going to fall behind on my current commission, which had been scheduled for polishing tomorrow, but I didn’t have enough brainpower to devote to worrying about that right now.
I needed to call Jamison.
Fuck.
This was going to be bad. How did you tell your boyfriend, who might have transmitted HIV to you, or else you to him, that you’d tested positive and he needed to test again if he’d come up negative on his last one?
Hell, what if he’d come up positive and just…
neglected to mention that to me? No, he wouldn’t have done that.
We were in this together, and we both knew it.
Which meant he didn’t know. And now I was going to have to tell him.
Fuckkkkk.
I felt cold all over. Moving slowly, carefully, as if I was going to shatter, I lowered myself to the couch and pulled my fuzzy blanket over my legs.
That didn’t help my freezing hands, but it at least felt a little comforting.
I heard a mrrp and looked over to see Curie stirring on the other end of the couch.
Normally, I’d give her a smile and stretch out a hand for her to sniff, but I couldn’t move this time.
After we stared at each other, unmoving, for a long moment, Curie stretched her front and then her back legs and strode across the cushions to me.
She clambered into my lap, turned in a circle twice, arranged her tail just-so, and plopped down on my knees, apparently not bothered by the fact that they were shaking under her.
I managed to rest a hand on her back, and the warmth of her fur sunk into me comfortingly. I took a slow, careful breath in, then let it out, still clutching my phone to my chest with my other hand.
Positive.
A large part of me was screaming denials, insisting that all the other tests had been negative and so this was some sort of mistake. A false positive, a lab mix-up, hell, a prank by my doctor’s office. Something, anything.
The rest of me was coldly focused on next steps. Contact my partner(s). Do more research. Avoid all sexual contact because I was now death walking for anyone who touched me.
No. No, that wasn’t true, the logical part of my brain told me. I knew this. HIV was treatable to the point of undetectability. I could live a nearly-normal life; I could have sex, even sex without condoms, once I was on a treatment regimen.
Logic was losing the battle to panic. My hands were shaking harder. I needed to call Jamison.
I swallowed and looked down at my phone.
What was he going to say? Do? Would he blame me?
For all he knew, I’d been the carrier that night.
Hell, for all I knew, I had been. There was just no way to know for sure.
What if I had been the carrier? If this was all my fault, if I’d caught HIV from Ramsey’s cheating and just not known, and then brought it into the bedroom with Jamison?
He’d hate me. I’d hate me. Screw the future tense, I hated me now.
I didn’t know, couldn’t know, if it was my fault, but I still felt the guilt piercing me, gnawing away at my heart.
Biting my lip hard enough to draw blood, I started dialing Jamison’s number. I needed to do this. It was important. It might be the end of everything, but I owed it to him to not delay.
“Hey,” Jamison answered on the third ring, “everything ok?”
Did he know? Had he gotten his results too? “What?” I stuttered out. “Why do you…ask that?”
There was a moment of confused silence on the other end. “You never call me when you could text, Hen,” he said carefully. “So either something’s wrong, or you can’t type for some reason like you’re driving without voice-to-text access.”
“Oh.” My voice squeaked a little and I bit my lip again, tasting the blood my last bite had brought to the surface. Blood. I had to be scared of my own blood now. Conscious of where it was, what and who touched it. My blood carried the plague now. “Um.” My breath caught in my chest.
There was a clattering noise, and then a heaved-out breath from Jamison. “Breathe, Hen. What’s wrong? Are you ok? Do you need me?”
Something about his gentle concern pierced the cloud of false calm I’d gathered around myself, and I sobbed.
“Hen?” Jamison said again, concern heavy in his voice at this point. “Baby, tell me what’s wrong. Are you hurt?”
Hurt. Was I hurt? Well, sort of, but that wasn’t really the point, was it. The point was I needed to tell him I - we? - had HIV. I tried to breathe through my panic, but my breath caught again and I choked.
“Ok, I’m coming over,” Jamison said firmly, apparently realizing that whatever was going on was serious.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Try to breathe, Hen.
Talk to me.” I heard the sound of him picking up his keys, then the slamming of the door.
“Talk to me,” he said again, more gently this time.
“I…” I gasped out through another sob. “It…” I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t get the words out. They burned in my throat.
A car door slammed and an engine started. “It’ll be ok,” Jamison’s voice said, going hollow as his phone switched to bluetooth mode and connected to his car. “Whatever it is. Oh my god,” he gasped, “is it the cats? Are they ok? Hen?”
The cats. Could they get HIV? If I bled somewhere and they licked it up or something? I knew cats could have FIV, but did the disease translate from human to feline? Oh god, I’d have to find them a new home, I couldn’t put them at risk too. A broken moan burst out of my throat.
“Shit,” Jamison spat. “Fucking get out of my lane, you asswipe!” His hard voice turned soft again.
“Hen, I need you to breathe for me. Slow and easy. In and out.” He took exaggerated, audible breaths, clearly trying to encourage me to follow along.
And I tried, I did, but the air kept getting caught in my throat.
My hand clenched in Curie’s fur and I forced it to relax before I could hurt her, though to be fair she didn’t even seem to notice the changes.
She snuggled deeper into the crease of my leg and started up a rumbling purr I could feel under my hand and through my leg.
I closed my eyes, trying to sink into the vibrating sensation.
Things couldn’t be that bad if Curie was still purring.
My gasps slowed a little as the seconds ticked by, and I managed to pull in a full breath without choking on it.
“I need you,” I managed to whisper hoarsely to Jamison after a minute or two.
“I know, baby. I’m on my way, I promise. I’ll be there in a few minutes. Is your door locked?”
Door? Locked? I blinked, trying to process the words that came out of left field. “Uh…” Another sob caught in my throat, but I managed to look across the room at the front door and spot the deadbolt, which was flipped to the open position. “Not locked,” I rasped.
“Ok. Okay, good.” He did another one of those exaggerated, slow breaths. “You’re sounding a little better. Can you tell me what’s wrong now, Hen? Are you hurt? Are the cats?”
“The…the…test,” I managed to get out before the rest of the words disappeared into a sob. “Not hurt,” I choked out belatedly.
Tires crunched in the gravel of my driveway, and I heard an engine.
It couldn’t have been twenty minutes already, could it?
How fast had Jamison driven over here? What if he’d gotten into an accident?
My breath caught again and I pressed my fist to my mouth, trying to stop the panicked sob that I knew made no sense.
He was here, safely. Why was I having a meltdown - on top of a meltdown - about something that patently hadn’t happened?
And then my front door swung open and Jamison strode in at a near-run, throwing the door shut behind him absently and coming directly to where I sat, frozen, on the couch.
He punched a button on his phone, ending our call, and dropped it into his pocket.
“Hey,” he said softly, touching his fingertips to my hair.
“I’m here, baby.” He sank onto the couch next to me and took me in his arms. It probably made a ridiculous picture, the big bear of a man hiding in the shoulder of the twink, but as I shuddered and held onto him, I started to feel safe for the first time since I’d seen the test results pop up.
But I wasn’t safe, was I? And neither was he, and he didn’t even know that. I sucked in a shuddering breath and flexed my hand in Curie’s fur. “Need to tell you,” I managed to get out.