35
Orion
Sable was silent as I helped him into the passenger side of my truck.
He’d been withdrawn all morning, ever since the doctor came in to discharge him.
He’d been given a fresh inhaler from the hospital pharmacy, instructed to put it in a place that was easy to find, since that was how he’d ended up in this mess to begin with.
The situation didn’t get any better on the drive back to his apartment.
He turned off the radio at one point, listening to the sound of the tires against the pavement.
I wanted to claw my eyes out because he hadn’t said more than a few words to me since he’d woken up in the hospital.
Not that I’d expected much, he’d obviously called me by mistake.
When I’d answered the phone, he’d even asked for Victor.
My gut churned when he hadn’t said anything else.
There were a few sounds that sounded like gasping that came across the receiver.
I’d hung up so I could head to his apartment.
It didn’t matter that I knew he was pissed at me.
Something was terribly wrong. I wouldn’t feel right leaving things like that.
I’d been right to worry. Thankfully, his front door had been left unlocked. When I’d gotten inside, I’d found him in the middle of the floor with his phone next to him. I'd wasted no time having the nosey, but caring neighbor phone for an ambulance. He’d barely been breathing.
Now he looked much better, not completely back to his previous luster, but on the mend.
It would take time. I didn’t know what it was like to live with a breathing condition like that.
The doctor had said that a panic attack had triggered the asthma attack.
It wasn’t always something environmental that made it happen.
That must have been terrifying. The idea that you could freak out so badly that you lose the ability to breathe.
I wanted to get inside Sable’s head. What had made him panic so badly that that happened?
There were a few times that I was asked to leave the room.
I deserved that after everything. I had to earn the right to his privacy again.
He’d tell me when I proved that I was worthy.
Someone who didn’t tell you when they knew someone who was a dealer was in your business establishment didn’t deserve those things.
When we pulled up to his building, he still said nothing as he opened the door, sliding out of my truck. It was pushing my luck, but I turned off the vehicle following him inside.
I hadn’t gotten a great look at the place when I’d been in during the incident.
There was a stack of boxes in the corner that I’d missed, which had been knocked over.
Their contents were strewn across the floor.
Sable didn’t seem to pay them any mind as he dropped the little pharmacy bag on the counter before heading straight for his bedroom.
It was as if he hadn’t even noticed that I’d followed him inside.
His bedroom door closed behind him. It was as if he hadn’t realized he hadn’t shut the front door.
I’d have been fucking exhausted too if I’d had nurses coming in every two hours to check my vitals.
That was something I always wondered about with people in the hospital.
There was all this talk of rest, but they never actually let the person sleep.
At least they’d gotten the message that he wanted to go by Sable.
After saying something to the doctor, everyone addressed him by the correct name after that.
I liked seeing Sable relax every time someone called him by the name he’d chosen. There was the desire there to pick apart his history, to know why his legal name triggered him so badly. Maybe if I earned his trust again, I could talk him into looking into getting it changed.
“Sable?” I asked as I knocked on his bedroom door. He’d already stripped down to his underwear,curled up in bed, hidden under his duvet. He looked up at me with the glare that I’d been expecting since he’d woken up with all those wires and tubes attached to him.
“You really can leave now,” he said.
But there wasn’t a chance of that happening. Doctor Abrahms had mentioned that Sable would still need to be monitored at home. I knew he was mad at me, but he needed to get over it for the sake of his own health.
“Not happening,” was all I said as I pulled my two-day-old t-shirt over my head, crawling into the bed behind him.
At first he tried to roll out of my grasp.
I tightened my arm around his waist, pulling him into my chest. His whole body was pulled as tight as a bow—I wasn’t about to let him go.
He’d have to fight me for that. I’d never seen someone so out of it before—it had scared me.
As much as I loved Whitney, I’d never seen her in such a state, and I had to wonder if I had, would I have freaked out in the same way?
While I hadn’t known Sable for very long, he’d grown to be someone so very special to me.
I wanted to keep him as close as possible.
I’d fallen for him in ways that I couldn’t comprehend.
It had taken me years of getting to know Whitney to get to the point of wanting to be with her forever...
or so I’d thought. That was until I learned we were incompatible in our life goals.
So many of my problems would have been so much easier had I known how to just talk to someone, but I blamed my father. He’d been so goddamn toxic growing up—I’d watched him sleep around on my mom. Beat her. Beat me.
While I was making the realization that I was making a lot of the same mistakes, at least I wasn’t physically hurting anyone. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of how you could lay your hands on someone you supposedly loved in such a way.
“Whitney is pregnant.”
The words hung heavy in the air. It probably wasn’t the best time to say it, but maybe if I put it all on the line, he’d know that I was sincere, that I wanted to make an effort with him. I’d fucked up and now was the time to make up to him.
If I thought his body was tight before, it had nothing on how it was like stone now.
“What do you mean?” It was an innocent enough question, but I needed to stop hiding everything and be honest.
“When this all started...” I took a deep breath because it was hard to figure out the right words to use.
“Whitney had been trying to get pregnant for a while. I told you about how I didn’t want to be a dad, but I didn’t know how to tell her that.
It was the one thing she’d always wanted, and telling her no? That would have crushed her.”
Sable rolled in my grasp to face me. His eyebrows were scrunched in as he studied my face.
“Look, I’ll admit that I’m not great at telling people what’s bothering me.
Some of that has to do with my dad and the way he made me feel so inferior as a kid whenever I showed any type of emotion.
It’s a poor excuse, and I get that I have to own up to my own mistakes, but it wasn’t like I had the best examples in my life. ”
The way Sable was so silent as I spoke made me a little uneasy, but it also meant that he was paying attention. He still wore a look of confusion, but there was a softness there that hadn’t been there before.
“She’s been depressed. Understandably, because month after month her period showed up like clockwork, when it didn’t, she’d get her hopes up, only to realize it was a false alarm.”
Sable licked his lips before he spoke. “But how did you know it would be a false alarm?”
I slammed my eyes closed, taking a deep breath. It would sound so fucking terrible. What man couldn’t just tell his wife that he didn’t want to have kids and instead tricked her into infertility.
“Obviously, since she wanted to get pregnant, it wasn’t like I could toss on a condom.
She’d know. So I did the only thing I could think of.
I went out and bought two bottles of lube.
One was the standard water-based stuff, and the other was spermicidal.
And I get that it’s only like eighty percent effective, but I was desperate to do anything. ”
When I opened my eyes, Sable’s were as wide as saucers. Yeah, I knew what I’d done was fucked up, but I had to tell him the whole thing.
“So I poured out the regular lube and replaced it with the spermicidal stuff. We didn’t normally need it in the past, but she didn’t even question it when I started insisting on using it.”
“Jesus,” was all he said. He pushed from my hold, sitting on the edge of his mattress.
The distance between us felt like an endless cavern. If he never wanted to speak to me again for being a shitty human, I'd never be able to live with myself. I’d have to throw myself over the ledge of that cavern to end it all.
“It was one of the worst things I could have done. This whole mess could have been avoided had I just been honest with her.”
Sable looked over his shoulder at me—his eyes shiny with unshed tears. “You’re aware of just how big this is, right? Just what else have you been dishonest about?”
And I knew why he was asking that. It had taken him a lot to open up to me. I’d held back some pretty major things. I hadn’t told him about Jayden or how much I’d been hurting my wife. It meant there was room for me to hurt him, and it was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Nothing. I really do work in my father’s garage.
The reason I want out so bad is that he’s been selling drugs.
He dragged Jayden down with him.” I swallowed because I had to get this all out before I lost him for good.
“And then several weeks ago, I was watching movies with Whitney—we had sex. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized that I’d forgotten the lube. ”
“And now she’s pregnant.” Sable’s voice lacked any sort of emotion. I could tell he was doing the math in his head. How the hell did it seem fair that he was allowed to keep selling his body, but I wasn’t allowed to sleep with my wife?