Microsoft Word - Talkers_Redemption_Lane.docx

He shuddered and looked at Lyndie pleadingly.
    “I’m not afraid of needles,” he said, and she nodded her head
    soberly. “I’m not. I… you know,” he said conversationally, “I spent a
    year in a hospital when I was a kid. I’ve been back. I don’t like them,
    but, you know, I can deal. I just… I don’t want to be out of it here. I
    don’t want… I don’t want the world to have the upper hand.”
    Brian’s Aunt Lyndie nodded and glared up at the cops. “Did we
    hear that, detectives?” she asked, her voice brittle. “No sedatives.
    No bastards yelling in his face. He wants a shower and a little
    fucking respect, and then maybe you’ll get an answer we can all live
    with. Talker didn’t hurt anybody, right? He was the one who got hurt,
    and you two bozos need to remember that!”
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    “We’re sorry, ma’am,” Melville said, backing off. He cast a
    baleful look to where Henries was trying to wipe off the tops of his
    shoes with a towel held by the faintly amused nurse.
    “You fucking should be!” Lyndie snapped, and then she stood
    and offered her hand to Tate. Tate took her up on it and stood, and
    then turned his back on the cops and the corridor and the chaos.
    Lyndie took him past Brian’s room, and then up to a bemused nurse.
    “He says you’ve got shower cubicles?”
    The nurse nodded, gave them directions, and then, to Tate’s
    eternal gratitude, produced some scrubs and some sample
    shampoos from the nurse’s station. Lyndie set him up at the shower,
    and told him she’d be back in a minute, and he got to spend twenty
    minutes in a cubicle, covered in blessed, glorious, hot water,
    pretending the world didn’t exist.
    Sort of.

    HE WAS coming unglued on Sutherland’s nice couch in his nice
    clean office, and Brian was holding him.
    “You said no,” Brian whispered.
    “I did.”
    “It wasn’t your fault.”
    “I shouldn’t have….”
    “It wasn’t your fault.”
    “You know better.”
    “I know the truth.”
    Tate looked up, feeling wretched and vulnerable. “The truth is, I
    didn’t see you. You were right there, and I didn’t see you. I don’t
    know how you can even look at me, after that.”
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    Brian grimaced, and his blue eyes flickered away and then
    back. “Of course you saw me. You’re the only person in my life who
    ever has.”

    BRIAN’S eyes had been so wide, the first day they met, as Tate had
    looked for a place to sit on the bus. They’d been wide, but they
    hadn’t been filled with disgust or pity or irritation that, oh fuck, they
    were going to have to sit next to Tate-the-tattooed-twitch or oh-my-
    god-not-that-fag-with-the-face look. His cornfield-sky eyes had just
    been wide, and lonely, and his pretty face had looked pleased to be
    singled out, in spite of the fact that everything else about Brian had
    been made to blend into the landscape he moved through.
    Tate really had seen him. He had. Whether Brian was straight
    or gay, that wasn’t how Brian was meant to be seen. Whether his
    heart was as sweet as rain? That was what Tate had needed, and it
    was that rain, that cleansing, scalding rain that washed over Tate
    now.
    Tate came out of the shower feeling shaky but resolved. He’d
    just bared his soul and lost his lunch in front of the entire world, with
    his lover unconscious at his back. He could live through everything.
    He hoped.
    “Hello, Dr. Sutherland,” he said, feeling poleaxed and
    surprised.
    “Hey, Talker.” The shrink was sitting patiently outside of the
    shower in a folding chair, knitting.
    “Do you make all those funky cardigans? I thought it would be
    your wife or something?” Tate had a bag with his soiled clothes
    under one arm, and was using his other hand to hold up the falling
    waistband of the aqua-colored scrubs, and it should have been a
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    bizarre question, but Dr. Sutherland must have really liked him, and
    not just been saying that, because he smiled.
    “My wife knits too.” He held out a foot encased in a VERY
    brightly colored wool masterpiece. “She makes socks.” Sutherland
    stuffed his needlework into the satchel at his side and then stood up
    and started walking down the corridor with Talker.
    “What are you doing here, Doc?” Tate asked, but he had to
    admit that the man’s wide-legged, big-bellied gait was comforting in
    the sterile white hallway. It would be easier to wait