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Carlos hears about it toward the end of a night shift.
He isn’t really meant to. He’s at the sink in the break room, rinsing out a mug before he places it into the communal dishwasher, and he catches just the tendrils of a conversation that’s passing by the open door. Two voices, both male, discussing something casually in the tone of voice one might use to discuss the weather or the score of the Rangers game.
“The kid was Captain Strand’s boy,” one voice is saying.
“The gay one?” the other voice asks, a note of derision in his voice that Carlos barely notices because it doesn’t penetrate through the instant bubble of dread that encases him.
There is no reason for his mind to jump to such dramatic places. For all he knows they could have just been on a call with the 126. For all he knows they’re doing nothing more than mocking his sexuality, which would not be as rare within these walls as Carlos wishes it were. But somehow he knows, even though he doesn’t, that it isn’t those things.
He drops the mug. It clatters into the metal basin of the sink. Carlos doesn’t think it breaks, but he doesn’t stop to check before he’s skidding out of the break room and into the hallway.
“Hey,” he calls urgently at the backs of the two officers who are now halfway down the hall.
They both turn, and Carlos recognizes them both but can only remember one’s name. The other one has only worked here for a month and Carlos has never been on an assignment with him. After a while, all the splotchy faces and buzzed haircuts start to blur.
“What happened to Captain Strand’s son?” he asks. He thinks he deserves a medal for how steady he’s able to keep his voice, as bile is rising in his throat.
“Who are you?” the one whose name Carlos doesn’t know asks, with an obnoxious expression on his face.
The other one, Jones, ignores his partner and tells Carlos, “He got shot. On a call.”
Carlos feels all the blood drain from his face. For all he knows it drains completely out of his body, sucked down by gravity like water in a sink, and leaks out all over the floor beneath him so he’s just a shell standing here, swaying in a dingy hallway.
“Reyes?” Jones asks, sounding concerned and taking a step towards him.
“Is he …?” Carlos asks, utterly terrified to hear the answer.
“He’s alive, as far as I know. Not in great shape, though. We were on the scene.”
“What is happening?” the other officer asks, as Carlos’s shoulders start to heave and panic ricochets through his chest.
“Reyes?”
A familiar voice, and a familiar hand on his arm. Carlos turns, looks into the troubled, frowning face of his own partner.
“What’s wrong?” Mitchell asks.
Carlos just shakes his head. He’s pretty sure if he tried to speak he would end up puking on her shoes.
She turns to the others, and Jones’s voice says, “I don’t know. We were talking about one of the fire guys getting shot on a scene tonight and he just started freaking out.”
“Strand?” Mitchell turns back to Carlos, and he nods numbly. “Shit. Where did they take him?”
“Austin Medical, I think.”
“Okay, come on.” She takes him by the elbow and leads him away in the other direction.
Over the rush of blood in his ears, Carlos hears Jones saying, “I guess they’re friends.”
His partner asks, “Friends?” with a suggestive smirking apparent in his voice, and Jones frustratedly complains, “Dude.”
Carlos doesn’t catch any more of their conversation, nor does he have the bandwidth to care about it. He’s led – dragged, more like – by his partner down the hall and through the bullpen, past offices and the evidence lock-up and out through a back door that the smokers leave propped open even though they aren’t supposed to. In an alley behind the precinct that smells like garbage and ancient cigarette smoke, Carlos stumbles backwards against a rough brick wall and only her firm grasp around the insides of his elbows keeps him upright.
“Reyes,” she’s saying sharply, shaking him a little. And then a little kinder, she says, “Carlos.”
He blinks to clear the smog from his brain and he looks at her. Her expression is urgent, eyes wide and mouth downturned.
“What do I do?” Carlos asks weakly. His voice and hands tremble, and he really thinks he would be on his ass on the dusty pavement right now if she weren’t half-holding him up with an iron grip.
Her head shakes, brow furrowed in sympathy. Sounding regretful, she says, “I don’t know. If it was your wife the brass would tell you to get over there right now, but I don’t think there’s protocol for …”
“Secret gay lovers?” Carlos supplies bitterly. Even that seems like too much to describe what they are to each other after the last time Carlos had seen him, and gone too far and ruined whatever fragile connection they’d established. Like a footbridge made of candy glass and Carlos had dropped a rock through the center of it.
“What do you want to do?” Mitchell asks.
“I can’t leave, there’s two hours left in my shift.” Carlos sniffs and holds his breath for a moment so that it doesn’t shudder pitifully on the way out. He can’t quell his mind from sending him in all sorts of horrible directions like a sling-shot. He’s always had a vivid imagination and he can picture it so violently clearly; TK motionless on the ground, blood soaking through his uniform and staining the asphalt. His team screaming around him, paramedics rushing over. TK’s head lolling helplessly as they move him, precious ribs cracking as someone sits across his hips on a gurney and pummels compressions into his chest.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Carlos wants to burst into tears, that’s what he wants to do. To maybe do a bit of screaming of his own, because he’s only just found this boy, and they haven’t made nearly enough memories together, and he can’t be taken away from Carlos this soon. He doesn’t want to be in that hospital waiting room. He doesn’t want to sit beside TK’s father and his friends, as they all wring their hands and worry and pray that TK will make it through emergency surgery. But he has to be. It sounds like just about the worst thing he can imagine but Carlos also can’t imagine being anywhere else.
He says as much, and his partner nods decisively. “Go, then.”
“What about – ”
“I’m pretty sure,” Mitchell interrupts, “that you just came down with a really terrible case of food poisoning, and you weren’t gonna be any use to anyone while you were puking all over the place, so I sent you home.”
“You don’t have the authority to make that call,” Carlos mumbles.
“Let me worry about that. Go on.”
For just another moment Carlos is frozen in time, paralyzed by fear, but then she pushes a closed fist into the center of his chest and he nods and takes strength from her, and makes himself put one foot in front of the other. He feels like he’s moving at the speed of a glacier, inching along the pavement toward the parking lot with his eyes barely able to focus on anything but the sight of his standard issue patrol boots stepping one after the other on the cracked sidewalk.
He shouldn’t drive. That much is unambiguous. He gives other people tickets for distracted driving all the time. For talking on their phones, for having a dog in their lap, for doing their lipstick in the rear-view mirror. It’s dangerous, it causes injury and death every single year. He shouldn’t drive. He does anyway, because getting to TK is more important than anything.
Carlos has been lucky. He hasn’t spent very much of his life in hospitals. He broke his arm when he was a kid, falling off a horse. He thinks those few hours in the emergency room were probably the longest stretch of time he’s ever spent in one. His family has been healthy. Elderly relatives have passed quickly and peacefully. He’s been blessed, really, until now. They can be places of healing and of miracles, but they can also be places of such awful pain and tragedy and sadness. They can be disorientingly cold and sterile and faceless. They’re the last place so many people see someone who they love more than life itself, and Carlos’s heart is beating so quickly as he walks down the hallway that it leaves him dizzy.
He passes open doors, the sound of heart rate monitors beeping, the varied background noises of coughing and nurses speaking instructively and the sound of tears. It’s so many things to contend with at once, overstimulating like he’s been shoved inside a pinball machine and is being bounced from surface to surface while lights and sirens and bells clang all around him.
Finally he spies a more open space up ahead, chairs and a nurses’ station and a small crowd of bodies. The first person he makes eye-contact with is Paul. And then the woman whose name he thinks is Marjan. And then others he recognizes; a paramedic, another few firefighters he’s seen in the field. He doesn’t know these people. Not really. They’re TK’s friends. That’s why they’re here. They love him, they’re worried about him, and Carlos only knows Paul, and even then only a small amount. They spent a single evening together, and most of it took place in a noisy club, the environment of which was not exactly conducive to getting to know somebody. They’re a family, and Carlos is the one who doesn’t belong.
When Paul sees him, he points with a raised finger, through a door to his left. Carlos tries to smile at him. He fails. He tries not to look at the rest of them. He thinks seeing their sad eyes and anxious faces would just further cement in his already spinning mind just how much he’s an outsider who maybe shouldn’t even be here. He doesn’t have any idea if TK would want him here. He doesn’t know if anyone else is happy to see him, either. He doesn’t know if half of these people even know who Carlos is, other than maybe vaguely recognizing his face or his car and categorizing him in their minds as TK’s occasional booty-call.
And maybe that is what Carlos is. Maybe that’s all he ever has been.
Adrenaline propels him forward when nothing else does. Around the corner through the glass doors, TK’s body lays motionless in a hospital bed, and his father is hunched over him, in a chair pulled up close to the side of the mattress. For a moment, Carlos can’t breathe.
Captain Strand seems to sense his presence, and he turns. “Officer Reyes,” he says, sounding entirely unsurprised to see Carlos.
Carlos doesn’t know what to say. The man is sitting next to the unconscious body of his wounded son, and Carlos shouldn’t be intruding.
“Would you like some time with him?” Captain Strand asks.
“I don’t want to impose,” Carlos hears himself answer. He hears the way his breath hitches over the words, a thousand different emotions spooled so carefully inside of him, tightly wound like a ball of elastic bands and every single one is about to snap.
“No, I think, uh …” Captain Strand pauses and looks back at his son. “I think he’d appreciate it.”
He pats TK on the arm. Carlos watches the way TK’s limb moves from the gentle impact of it, but it’s only physics. Captain Strand stands up, sighing heavily, and walking over.
He claps Carlos comfortingly on the shoulder as he passes by him in the doorway, and adds, “I know I would.”
Carlos takes his place in the plastic chair. It’s warm, because someone else was just sitting in it, but it still feels metaphorically cold.
“Hi, TK,” he whispers.
He’s still so beautiful. It doesn’t seem fair. It should definitely be impossible. He’s in a hospital bed with a bandage on his chest and tubes in his nose, and he can’t wake up. He should look sallow; his cheeks should be hollowed and his skin should be dull and lifeless. But he’s perfect. Any lines of worry are smoothed from his face, his dark eyelashes are fanned out preciously over his skin, his mouth is relaxed. He doesn’t look wounded or sick or like he’s trapped in there somewhere fighting for his life. He looks peaceful. Just like he’s asleep.
This is only the second time Carlos has seen him asleep, and there are agonizing twinges in his gut as he remembers how lovely TK had looked with his head on Carlos’s pillow. How serene and how innocent. Carlos had watched him for a long time after TK dozed off, just lied there next to him, listening to him breathe, watching dreams play out in the scattered twitching of his eyelids. He was beautiful then, and he’s beautiful now, even though this time he isn’t bravely letting himself fall asleep in Carlos’s bed and trusting Carlos to keep him safe. This time he’s in a hospital and he might not wake up.
“I don’t know what to say,” Carlos tells him. He sniffs and wipes his dripping nose. “I just saw you the other day. And you’re not gone, you’re right here in front of me, but I miss you. I miss you like it’s been months since I’ve heard you laugh.”
The slow, rhythmic beeping of the heart rate monitor is equal parts an irritant in the otherwise quiet room and the most beautiful sound Carlos has ever heard, because it means TK is alive. It means his heart is still pumping.
“I like your laugh. I like the way your nose scrunches up. I like how cute you are when you’re annoyed. I like how you play tough but you’re really gentle underneath, even though you don’t want anyone to know that. I like how brave you are. I like how much cooler you are than me, but I can still get you flustered so easy. I like so many things about you, and I never told you most of them because I didn’t think you’d let me. But you can’t stop me right now, can you?”
Carlos’s hands flex on the tops of his thighs. He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to touch TK. His skin is so tantalizing, Carlos always wants to have his hands on him, but this time TK can’t consent to it. He doesn’t even know Carlos is here. And it’s always been so important to him that TK be fully on board with anything and everything because he has suffered so much and Carlos refuses to be one more thing on the list of his hurts.
He only lasts a minute or two. He digs his short fingernails into the fleshy part of his palm and then he lifts his hand, letting it hover for a moment over TK’s forearm. Carlos holds his breath, because if he lowers it and TK is cold or clammy Carlos thinks the chances that he’ll be able to avoid bursting into tears are almost zero. But TK isn’t. Carlos slides light fingertips over his arm and he’s warm. Soft and familiar and so warm, so much life left inside him.
All the breath leaves his lungs in an exhausted rush of air. “You need to wake up,” he tells TK, leaning forward in his chair and curling his fingers in to press them against the vulnerable inside of TK’s elbow. With his other hand he reaches to TK’s face, drawing the backs of his knuckles slowly over TK’s cheek. It’s warm, too, and prickly with second-day stubble, and Carlos wants to kiss it so badly.
“You just need to,” he says again. “I know you like to argue and you hate to be what people expect. But tough shit, okay? You just have to come back. Nobody’s ready to live without you. They’re all here, all your friends, your dad. We’re all waiting for you and people have lives to live so you gotta stop keepin’ us waiting.”
TK’s eyelids flutter, just a little, just once, and then he stills again.
“I need more time, TK.” Carlos’s voice breaks and something brittle deep inside him shatters alongside it. “I haven’t convinced you to let me love you, yet.”
He lets his hand move, sliding up the soft inside of TK’s arm and holding it, fingers slotted underneath the sleeve of his hospital gown. He scoots forward a bit more in his chair and teeters on the edge of it, leaned as far over as he can short of climbing into the bed with TK. He desperately wants to do that, but knows he can’t. Even if TK were awake – no, even once TK is awake – Carlos still probably shouldn’t do that. They have a difficult time keeping their hands off each other, and TK has a bullet wound in his chest.
He smooths his other hand over TK’s hair. It’s so soft, and it feels so nice between his fingers, and it had smelled so good in the morning. On the one morning TK let him have. Carlos doesn’t know what he’ll do if he never gets another.
A hand touches his shoulder. Carlos looks up, and Paul is standing behind him.
“He’s gonna be okay,” Paul says.
“What are they saying, about him?” Carlos asks. Captain Strand hadn’t said, before he’d left Carlos alone.
“The bullet went through his lung, but they reinflated it,” Paul tells him. “I guess how long it takes him to wake up depends on how long his brain went without oxygen.”
Carlos nods and doesn’t respond. He looks back at TK. He stops stroking his hair now that they aren’t alone but he can’t seem to peel his hand away. TK’s skin is still warm under his palm and Carlos clings to that like an anchor in a storm.
“I never know what to say in these situations,” a woman’s voice says.
A man agrees, “Me neither.”
Paul tells them, “Guys, this is Carlos.”
He tears his eyes away from TK and looks over at the others. Belatedly, he notices they’re all in their street clothes. Presumably they were all on the call with TK, but went home to change before they came to the hospital. They, unlike Carlos, didn’t rush here in a blind panic before his workday was even finished. It makes him wonder how his partner back at the precinct fared in convincing their C.O. that Carlos was sick.
“Marjan,” the woman says, introducing herself. She points to the man beside her. “This is the Probie.”
“Mateo,” he corrects, with a small smile.
“Hi,” Carlos says. It sounds so little and stupid in his ears but he doesn’t know what else to say, so he turns back to TK.
“What happens if he doesn’t wake up?” Mateo’s voice asks.
“Probie,” Marjan sighs.
“I’m just asking.”
“He will,” Paul asserts. “He’s too stubborn to go out like this.”
He sounds a lot more confident about it than Carlos feels. Sitting here, holding TK’s arm in his hand, he feels like he can sense TK slipping away right here in front of him, filtering through his fingers like sand. No matter how he tries, Carlos can’t seem to grasp him tight enough to keep him. And maybe that’s always been the problem. Maybe he’s never known how to do that.
“You should all go home.”
Carlos looks up alongside the rest of them, and Captain Strand is in the doorway, leaning against the side of it. He’s looking at all of them with a warm, generous expression on his face, like he’s so humbled they were ever here in the first place. Carlos wonders how TK would feel about all of this. If he’d be happy his friends care about him this much, or if he’d be embarrassed by this much bother being made over him.
“You sure, Cap?” Marjan asks.
“They’re not gonna let you stay all night, anyway,” Captain Strand points out, gesturing behind himself toward the nurses’ station. “And somebody’s gonna have to fight fires tomorrow. The whole world can’t stop for this.”
Carlos thinks it should. He thinks it’s cosmically unjust that it won’t.
Paul touches Carlos’s shoulder again, squeezing it lightly, and Carlos brings his spare hand up to cover Paul’s for a moment before his touch is gone. He stays right where he is, rooted to the chair with his eyes trained on TK’s closed eyelids, as he listens to the others file out of the room. It sounds like Captain Strand hugs each of them. Somebody calls something to TK as they leave, that Carlos doesn’t quite pick up.
He lets his hand slide down, fingertips trailing down the inside of TK’s arm, and picks up his hand. It’s limp and heavy, and Carlos wraps it up in his palms and brings it up to his mouth, pressing a kiss to TK’s knuckles. He doesn’t intend on it but once his lips are against TK’s skin, he can’t seem to pull them away. The warmth of him is the only thing in this moment keeping him from losing it entirely.
On the other side of TK’s bed, Captain Strand is dragging another chair over. He sits in it, reaching his own hand out and letting his fingers rest against TK’s shin underneath the white sheet. To Carlos, he says, “If you want to stay, I’ll see if I can get them to make an exception to the immediate family rule. But you certainly don’t have to. I imagine you’re exhausted.”
Carlos shrugs one shoulder and can’t seem to tear his eyes off of TK’s perfect sleeping face. You’d never know, to look at him, the battle his body is waging inside. He looks like an angel.
“Did you work a full shift before you came over?” Captain Strand asks. Out of the corner of his eye, Carlos can see the man pointing a finger in the direction of his uniform.
Carlos nods.
Slowly, Captain Strand stands up. He walks over, around the foot of TK’s bed. He sits gingerly on the side of it, next to TK’s knees, and leans over to place a heavy hand on Carlos’s shoulder.
Finally, Carlos manages to remove his gaze from TK, and looks up into the concerned eyes of his father instead. They’re so much like TK’s. The same color, the same clarity, the same brightness.
“Officer Reyes,” Captain Strand says gently. Far too gently, far too understanding, and it tugs at Carlos’s already weakened heartstrings. “Go home. Get some sleep. He’ll be here when you wake up.”
“What if he …” Carlos begins, and then sucks the words back inside himself like a vacuum because speaking them aloud is just asking for the universe to hear him and take it as a dare. He clenches his jaw and drops his head.
“Carlos,” Captain Strand says kindly, and Carlos didn’t know the man knew his first name. “He’s going to be fine. I don’t know if you know everything my son has been through in his life but I promise you, he’s a fighter. He’s still here at all because he’s tough as nails. He’s going to wake up, and he’s going to be so happy to see you when he does.”
Carlos isn’t so sure about that, but he wants so badly for it to be true that he hangs onto it like a life preserver.
He manages not to cry until he gets home. Another feat of impossible strength Carlos thinks he deserves a medal for. He makes it all the way back down the hall, retracing his steps from earlier, and into the elevator and out through the lobby and down the sidewalk and across the parking lot. Moving a lot slower this time, as he rewinds time through the ghost of himself, reaching his car and starting it without making a sound.
He feels strangely empty inside, like he’s been vacuumed out and nothing but negative space exists within him, gray and cavernous. He barely pays attention but his car seems to know where it’s going, reversing course down busy streets and quieter boulevards. He’s not sure he blinks the entire way, or swallows or even breathes. He just floats, and pulls into his driveway without incident, and doesn’t fumble with the keys as he’s unlocking his own front door. His hands don’t shake, his heart beats steadily in his chest, until the very moment the door shuts behind him.
Before Carlos knows what’s happening he’s in a heap on the welcome mat. His chest is heaving and wretched sobs are ripped from his throat, tears pouring down his face like waterfalls and grief pouring out of him like a flash flood.
He isn’t sure how long he sits there. He isn’t sure how many minutes pass or how many times he thinks he’s caught his breath only to dissolve into the agony of it all over again. His legs are cramped and his feet asleep by the time he forces himself back up off the floor. He heads on instinct for the kitchen, and opens the fridge once and twice and three times thinking maybe by magic some new ingredients will have appeared that will pique his interest. They don’t, and he heads upstairs without eating anything.
Carlos strips out of his uniform, feeling sweaty and clammy and like he could use a shower but not bothering to even consider taking one. He leaves his clothes on the floor, and doesn’t lock up his sidearm or taser. Those he leaves, carelessly, on the top of the dresser. Carlos is positive he’s never done that before. He’s also far too drained to care. He falls down onto the mattress, not pulling the blankets back but just collapsing messily on top of them.
A few further tears soak into his pillowcase. His bed feels so strangely empty, even though TK had only shared it one time.
Carlos doesn’t sleep much, and the little he gets is fitful and laced with unsettling dreams of red rooms and shadowy figures and other things it wouldn’t take a professor of psychology to figure out. When he arrives back at the hospital, he finds Captain Strand nearly right where Carlos left him; asleep in a chair next to TK’s bed. He looks uncomfortable. Carlos tiptoes into the room, trying not to wake him, but the hydraulic sound of the door closing behind him does anyway.
“Morning,” Carlos says. He doesn’t say good morning, because TK isn’t awake yet, so it isn’t one. He smiles politely at Captain Strand and then he reaches down and picks up TK’s hand in his own, stroking his fingertips over TK’s fingers in silent greeting.
“Good timing.” Captain Strand stretches and then stands up. “I need some coffee. And maybe a toothbrush.”
“How is he?” Carlos asks, looking down at TK. To Carlos, he doesn’t look any different than he had hours ago, and he’s not sure whether or not he should take that optimistically.
“The same,” Captain Strand confirms. Like he had before, he pats Carlos jovially on the shoulder as he passes, and stretches his likely sore muscles as he exits the room.
Still holding TK’s hand, Carlos slowly sinks back into the chair he’d been sitting in the night before. He takes a slow, steadying breath, and looks at TK’s peaceful, perfect face. He wants to kiss his forehead, and reach over and shake TK’s shoulders violently until he comes to, and scream at the top of his lungs, and crawl into the tiny bed beside his lifeless form and hold it tenderly and maybe let himself starve to death if TK doesn’t wake up before that happens.
“Maybe when you wake up, we need to have a conversation about you constantly putting everyone who cares about you through the ringer,” Carlos tells him. He feels himself smiling a little, almost laughing, but it’s at his own expense. There is probably something to be said for the fact that by this point, Carlos is the one who’s violating the terms of their arrangement. TK was always clear with him about what this was going to be, and what it wasn’t going to be. Carlos is the one who couldn’t follow their rules.
The heart rate monitor beeping is still rhythmic and strangely soothing, even if it’s a little slower than it should be. At least TK is relaxed, while he’s trapped in there. As Carlos watches, a muscle in TK’s cheek twitches once or twice before it stills.
He threads their fingers together and looks down at them. TK’s hands are smaller than his. His fingers are more elegant; long and slender where Carlos’s are thick and clumsy. They look good together, their hands. A poetic interweaving of two things that are so different but seem to fit together so effortlessly, each bringing to the table what the other lacks. Making something complete, when they’re connected.
Carlos closes his eyes, and then squeezes them shut tighter when the burn of tears threatens behind them. His head hangs, heavy and exhausted between his shoulders.
“I know you haven’t heard from me in a while,” he says, in barely a whisper. He licks his lips and lifts his head, shifting his gaze up toward the ceiling.
He remembers being taught how to do this. He remembers his mother, with her rosary and her kind voice and her unwavering conviction, teaching him to kneel on the padded reclinatorio, to clasp his hands in front of him, to memorize the hymns. He can smell her perfume, suddenly, as if she were right next to him, guiding him through it.
Slowly, Carlos slides from the chair and sinks to his knees on the unforgiving laminate floor. He wraps both hands around the one of TK’s, prayer position but with TK in the middle of it instead of a rosary.
“I have a lot of complicated feelings about how people around here have interpreted you,” Carlos admits, “and the things they’ve done with that. It’s not always so easy to just pretend that doesn’t matter, even when I’d like to.”
The machine beeps, sluggish but even.
“I’m a decent person, aren’t I? I’m not perfect but I help people when I can, I risk my life to keep them safe. I stay humble. I respect my parents. I don’t know if that means I deserve any special treatment, but. I never ask you for anything. The last time I did I was 14 and begging you to make me straight, and we both know how that turned out.”
Carlos laughs a little at the memory, despite himself. It isn’t a happy one, but he’s come a long way since. Not as far as he would like to, but further than he ever thought he would, back then.
“I’m glad you didn’t listen to me. You were right, this is who I’m supposed to be.” Carlos exhales slowly, and squeezes TK’s hand inside of his grasp. “But I’m asking for this, and I do need this one. Please let me keep him.”
He’s startled by the sound of the door opening behind him, and his heart leaps into his throat as Carlos hastily stumbles back to his feet and drops TK’s hand. He sniffs, quickly wiping at a few errant tears on his face before he turns, sure he isn’t convincing in the neutral expression he tries to paste onto his face.
Captain Strand is back, looking a little more refreshed and alive than he had 15 minutes ago. He’s looking at Carlos strangely, somewhere between surprised and knowing, and he comes further into the room and crosses it to occupy the chair on the other side of TK’s bed again.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he says generously. “I haven’t prayed since I was a kid. But I did last night.”
“My mom would say that God doesn’t like it when we only turn to him for favors,” Carlos says heavily, slowly lowering himself back down to his own chair. He itches to take TK’s hand again, but he thinks maybe he’s done more than enough of touching him without his permission.
Captain Strand nods, and considers him. He doesn’t brush Carlos to the side or treat him like he’s overreacting or being dramatic. After a moment, he says, “I think TK’s mom would probably say something like … God doesn’t need us stroking his ego all the time. That he knows our hearts and leads us to what we need.”
Carlos clenches his jaw against yet another sting of tears in his eyes. He sniffs and asks, “She’s still in New York?”
“She is,” Captain Strand confirms. “We split up when TK was little. And she is not very happy with me, right now.”
“Why?”
Captain Strand shrugs, and smiles. “Because she’s a mother. And her son is hurt.”
“Right.”
Shifting his attention to his son, Captain Strand stands for a moment, leaning over TK and kissing his forehead tenderly. It makes something swell inside Carlos’s chest to see it, something that’s warm and sharp all at once.
“Good morning, kiddo,” Captain Strand says to him. “I forgot to say that, earlier. This strapping young man of yours showed up and I got distracted.”
A lump rises in Carlos’s throat; makes it uncomfortable to swallow. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t know you knew about me.”
“Officially, I don’t,” Captain Strand says, with a small smile, as he sits back down. “But we live in the same house so it’s hard to be unaware that he disappears for hours at a time. Going out after he thinks I’m asleep and coming home in the middle of the night. I’ve seen you pick him up. The dark blue sporty model, that’s yours, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And I’ve seen the way he looks at you, when you’re on a scene with us. Wasn’t that difficult to put some pieces together.”
“Right,” Carlos says again.
“So, you’re dating?” Captain Strand is raising a curious eyebrow at him, and Carlos shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
“I don’t know. Kind of, but also not. He didn’t want to define it.”
“Sometimes I think my son wants to be loved so badly but he doesn’t want any of the things that being loved actually means. He just wants to be able to tell people that someone thinks he has value.”
That thought makes Carlos unbearably sad all of a sudden, for both TK and for himself.
Captain Strand notices and apologizes. “I’m just thinking out loud. And running on hardly any sleep, you shouldn’t put too much stock into anything I say right now.”
Carlos whispers, “I never told him I loved him. I thought it would scare him off. Guess I was probably right about that.”
“Do you?”
Carlos looks at him. He sees no judgment in the man’s gaze, no distrust, no badly masked discomfort. Captain Strand is just looking at him, open and really asking the question, so Carlos sniffs and nods.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Well.” Captain Strand reaches out and lightly bumps TK on the forearm. “You hear that? You got even more reason to snap out of this. One more person out here who loves you, and needs you to wake up.”
It’s all Carlos can do, not to dissolve back into messy, undignified tears. He leans forward and takes TK’s hand again, despite the decision he’d made not to, only minutes ago. He curls his fingers around TK’s warm flesh, resting his own elbows on the side of the mattress and leaving his lips pressed into TK’s palm. On TK’s left side, Captain Strand is holding his other hand, and in his mind, Carlos repeats the sentiment TK’s father had just spoken.
There are so many people out here who love you, Carlos thinks, trying to imprint the words telepathically onto TK’s skin so he can feel them even if he can’t hear them. Come back to us.