Chapter Nineteen The Blood #2
“You’d been stalking him ages, eh?” Rahul asked. There was some sort of clarity in the air, a kind of stillness that comes about after battle. It felt like a place of truth, as though neither of them could hold anything back or deceive in this sacred space. It felt like a place for answers.
“Mm,” Michael grunted, twin jets of smoke expelled from his broken nose.
“That night you first met. Did you really save him?” He didn’t know why he wanted to know. He didn’t know why it mattered. But somehow it did.
Michael made a noncommittal motion with his head then winced. “He didn’t fight anyone, but he did pass out in an alley. I couldn’t leave him. I didn’t want him to know I’d been following him, so I made up a story.”
“Thanks for not letting him freeze to death in an alley,” he said and found he meant it. He tongued the split in his lip, tasting fresh iron, and covered it with the taste of smoke.
“Best not to tell him the whole truth, I think,” Michael muttered, shaky cigarette falling away from his lips. “It’d only upset him.”
“And you care so much about upsetting him.” The bite back felt empty and neither one of them acknowledged it, as if they were both ashamed anything as base as sarcasm should have made its way to this holy place of honesty.
When the memory of its presence had dissipated, Rahul said, “I never want to see you again. And I never want Julian to see you again.” Michael’s eyes closed in acceptance, and for some reason that sparked the last embers of anger that remained in Rahul’s heart.
He continued, voice a gravelly growl. “If I so much as get a whiff that you’ve tried to contact him, or that you’ve been somewhere he might’ve seen you, or that the fucking ghost of you’s been to visit on Christmas fucking Eve, I’ll kill you.
And this time, I’m not letting you off with a fucking warning. You get me?”
“That’s fair,” Michael said, watching the cigarette butt that he rolled back and forth between thumb and forefinger. “I --” he began, then stopped himself, thinking better of it. “Yes. That’s fair.”
Rahul stubbed his cigarette out in a tacky puddle of blood next to his glass-bitten hand before hauling himself painfully to his feet.
He nearly tripped over an upturned armchair and paused, recognizing a dark shape beneath it.
He freed Julian’s parka and brushed from it shards of glass that sparkled like glitter in the half-light.
He smiled to himself, though pain blossomed from his lip anew.
He’d rescued the old thing from Michael’s clutches and it was no worse for wear, proving that Michael’s hold was transitory.
He held the coat to his nose and inhaled the scent of lavender and cigarettes.
You’re gonna be all right, old friend. We’re going home.
He bunched the parka into a protective bundle under his arm and spared Michael a final word.
“Sort your life out, mate.” And he limped his way out of the flat, this place that had been both refuge and battleground.
This place of truths and of redemption. Leaving, he felt cleansed.
He felt worthy now to return to Julian, and do so with a prize in hand.
Through blood and pain he’d been reborn.
He’d been reborn someone who deserved to be with Julian Collier.
* * *
The sky was lightening outside the sliver of basement window when Rahul finally crawled back into bed beside his boyfriend.
After laying the parka carefully over the back of a chair, he’d showered in the still-damp shower stall, trying to scrub the blood from his skin, his hair, his moustache.
He’d studied his reflection in the little mirror over the sink.
The angry, throbbing eye that’d swollen completely shut.
The raw, red split in his lip. The bruised, scraped cheek -- not broken, only painful.
He looked, objectively, as though he’d gone toe-to-toe with a juggernaut and lost. And he’d never been more proud of what he saw in the mirror.
Every wound was a badge of honour, every drop of blood earned in service of something greater than himself.
This was not the face of a coward, of a man who let his best friend go to the bed of another because he was too bloody scared to tell him he loved him.
This was the face of a man who fought for what he believed in, who fought for the person he loved, who stared danger in the face and laughed.
This was the man he’d always hoped to become.
He wished he could’ve phoned his father to tell him.
Aren’t you proud of me now, abba? Because I am.
He tried to slide under the covers as gingerly as possible, yet Julian stirred almost immediately, waking like a startled hare. He caught sight right away of Rahul’s face in the wan morning light and his sleepy, confused expression crumpled into one of despair.
“You promised,” he said, voice strained as his chest heaved. “You promised you wouldn’t --”
Rahul reached out, trying to pull Julian close but the latter fought him, shoving his hands away.
“You promised. You promised you wouldn’t go there. Rahul. You promised.”
“It’s okay,” Rahul soothed, closing his hands around Julian’s slender wrists. “I took care of it. I took care of everything.”
“You promised.” His voice was a small, fragile thing, what little strength afforded him now bleeding out like the air in a punctured balloon.
Rahul kissed the backs on his hands, his bony knuckles, his sweat-slicked forehead. “I took care of it. He’s never going to hurt you again. I promise. Shh. Shh.”
Julian reluctantly let himself be soothed, and soon his tension-strung body sagged, head against Rahul’s shoulder and his breathing ragged as he struggled to keep tears at bay. “So he wasn’t…”
“No.”
“And you…”
“I took care of it.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”