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The television’s been selling the same vegetable chopper for thirty-four minutes now but Rust figures he lost track somewhere roundabout the quarter-hour mark, maybe around the time they brought out the onion dicer attachment. It’s half past two in the morning but when he looks at the numbers on the clock they’ve gone fuzzy like fluorescent green algae, too overgrown now to make out anything distinct in the dark living room.
He should’ve taken his pills an hour ago but they still sit in their little shot glass tumbler on the coffee table next to a glass of water that sweat itself to death before he so much as touched it. Rust’ll hear about that in the morning, maybe, though he’ll have to watch Marty throw accusatory looks in the direction of the handful of pain medication first, like it’d somehow gone and betrayed them both. He’ll probably fuck off to the kitchen at first light and mash them into applesauce with the tagalong threat of a good spoon-feeding, but Rust hasn’t pushed him that far.
At least not yet.
For now morning feels like the kind of destination you can’t quite catch in dreams, always ahead but never in reach, and Rust has lived with his Body long enough to know that he’s working steady on the slow-burning wick of a low grade fever.
Marty’s been pushing ibuprofen tablets through him like candy but they only ever tend to work when you take them, and the pusher in question went to lay down in the bedroom three hours ago and hasn’t been back since. A low-pulsing ache has set up camp along the seam still stapled together through Rust’s middle and it feels like it might glow rosy-orange if he pulled open Marty’s old bathrobe to look, flared heat shining through the scar like a flashlight between his fingers.
For the moment he sits half-slumped over the arm of the sofa with a pillow pressed between his legs and stomach, sucking in shallow breaths one at a time through the thin veil of nausea when a familiar shadow steps into the blue light casting off the TV.
“I’m gonna start hand-feeding you those pills,” Marty says, close enough now that Rust can feel the sleepy warmth coming off him. “One at a time, pop your head back like a fucking Pez dispenser.”
“Not how that shit works,” Rust rattles out in something like a cough, clutching one edge of the pillowcase to his stomach while he lets the softness press into all the tender spots there in a welcome pressure. He closes his eyes and wonders how he might look right now, with a pillow crammed between his knees and his head bowed low in the light of an infomercial. ”Go back to bed, Marty.”
“Maybe I can’t sleep,” Marty murmurs, reaching over to pluck the shot glass off the coffee table so the pills clink together against one side. “And I ain’t going anywhere until these are gone, so you’d better sit up and open wide.”
Rust doesn’t move while he listens to Marty pick up the tea glass and wipe the water ring into the air, focusing on how his breath warms and dampens the pillowcase pressed close to his mouth. Each lungful coming and going almost sounds like a word if he listens. In and out. In and out.
There’s also the sound of joints creaking faintly and then the arm of the couch is dipping lower under added weight. “Hey,” Marty says from somewhere near his elbow, and even with both eyes closed Rust can see him worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “You’re, uh, shaking again.”
“M’alright,” Rust says, even though he isn’t really. “Fucking—pills, man.”
Marty draws himself back up to full height with a low swear and pushes the shot glass into Rust’s hand until he wraps trembling fingers around it. “Yeah, and now you gotta take ‘em. We’ll both feel better once you do.”
One green capsule, one yellow tablet, two oblong ibuprofens and something small and pink like a crushed freshwater pearl. Rust necks them dry in one straggling swallow, ignoring the omnipresent glass of water to let the aftertaste burn ochre in the back of his throat.
“C’mon,” Marty says while the TV flickers over them both. “Can’t stay out here.”
“The fuck am I gonna go?” Rust says, trying not to clamp his teeth too hard down around the words. They taste like bruised metal on his tongue, clattering and knocking around the enamel while chills coil and snap in his gut. “Just let me be for a minute.”
“See, that’s the fuckin’ problem,” Marty says, reaching down to gently pull the pillow away until Rust is sitting hunched in the shape of a bent scarecrow, curled in on himself like a lonely claw. “Do too much of that and look where we end up.”
There’s that we again, We, and Rust is too busy letting it flap around like a killdeer in his head to pry himself out of the two warm hands that ease around his middle and start helping him off the couch.
“Need to get you warmed up some,” Marty says, slinging his left arm low around Rust’s waist and tucking him in close, and isn’t it funny how they fit together this way, an odd pair of thieves in the dead of night. “Got an idea.”
Rust doesn’t argue until he sees they’re hobbling one step at a time toward the bathroom at the far end of the hall, and even then he wonders if he’s got enough corner-cut scraps of pride left to pull together and try.
“It’s working on three in the morning,” he goes to tell Marty like that might’ve been consequential to him in another life, though the words land weak somewhere in the neck of the other man’s t-shirt, pushed out through the tension caught between his teeth. “Don’t go running any water, ain’t nothing that can’t wait ‘til tomorrow.”
Marty laughs a little winded but his right palm spans broad and firm around the jut of Rust’s hip, and if they were anywhere else Rust might wonder something about feeling lightheaded for a different kind of reason, the shape of Marty’s palm searing there like a slap he’d been waiting to weather.
“Well it’s a good thing it’s already tomorrow,” Marty says, fumbling on the light when he reaches one arm into the dark doorway ahead of them. “Besides, you still stink like hospital soap and I’ll be damned if I didn’t just finally get that smell out of my sheets.”
Rust knows it well, something cool and white with an added drop of blue that coats his tongue like thin plastic. Too many weeks in one small sterilized room and he thinks it’s probably seared and soaked permanent into his skin now, oozing out in that balmy-bitter smell like a second sweat.
And Marty doesn’t want it in his bed.
“I’m staying on the couch,” Rust says when it dawns on him, even as he lets Marty ease him down onto the closed toilet lid. “Told you before, I ain’t gonna go and put you out of your own damn bed.”
“You ain’t putting me out of nothing,” Marty says with a dismissive half-snort, leaning over into the tub to stopper up the drain and jimmy the faucet. He tests the water with his hand and then turns back to shake open a towel, eyes briefly flickering over the robe still sashed around Rust’s waist. “You got anything on underneath that?”
Rust lets his lids sink and listens to the water run, missing the tinge of pink flush that burns high along Marty’s throat. “No,” he says, trying not to tremor with another chill. “Marty—”
“It don’t matter, I’m only asking in the interest of convenience,” Marty says, checking the rising water again before folding the towel on the side of the tub, a soft blue buffer between bare skin and cold ceramic. He clears his throat and holds out one hand so the tip of his middle finger skims the line of Rust’s shoulder. “C’mon—be warmer in the tub.”
Rust unknots the sash and lets the robe fall open as he slowly stands, holding onto Marty while he shrugs out of the soft cotton. He’s healed up enough now that the bandages taped over his forearm and stomach are long since gone, but the sleeve catches a little along the sutures in his bird’s wing before the robe drops and lands in a pile on the floor.
The bathroom air is damp with steam but he shivers where his bare feet touch the tile, already leaning forward into the warmth clouding above the tub. Marty holds him steady while he steps in one foot at a time, heat sloshing idle around his ankles, and it takes some effort and more than one low swear but eventually he’s settled down against the back of the tub, both knees poking up like lonely islands through the water.
Marty picks up a dry washcloth and produces a plastic cup from under the sink, the former conveniently dropping like a wayward paratrooper somewhere in the vicinity of Rust’s crotch while he fusses with the water temperature at the other end of the bath.
“How’s that?” he asks, pulling the plastic shower curtain closer to the wall while Rust pushes the washcloth under water, letting it stick and shape around the milky white of his upper thighs.
He sinks a little further in the hot water, feeling the warmth lick up his lower back while a small tide laps over the angry pink crescent still threading his stomach together. Something about the sight and the echo of the running faucet teases a thread of memory loose, one he hasn’t touched in twenty years or longer, about a long strand of red kelp that had washed up on a beach in Houston.
Sophia had immediately pointed it out from where she was perched in his arms, a warm bundle of sea salt and sunblock with her caramel-colored curls kissed gold by the sun. Her tiny toddler voice had somehow rang over the crash of the waves, one small hand like a sea star on his shoulder. Ooh daddy, she’d said, looking down at the streak of bright red on sand as fine as powdered sugar. What’s that?
“How you feeling, Rust?” Marty tries again, eyeing the other man while he pulls fraternal twin bottles off a ledge on the wall to sit on the side of the tub.
“Better,” Rust rasps, blinking back into the bathroom. And maybe it’s the truth this time with the warmth slowly bleeding into his chilled bones, a painkiller and antibiotic cocktail starting to soften out all the hard edges of the room.
And then Marty’s hands in his hair, finger and thumb feather-light at his temples, carefully pushing dampened waves away from his face.
“What are you doing?” Rust asks, not quite startling but not leaning forward into Marty’s hand, either—and all this should be strange, he thinks, or in the very least on the short end of something shameful, but all he really feels is the anchor-tied pull of fatigue and how much he’d prefer it if Marty didn’t stop.
A shade of his partner from seventeen years ago would’ve spooked and bolted, wouldn’t have gotten this far to begin with, but the one here and now only snorts and moves to slow the faucet before filling up his plastic cup with water.
“Washing your damn hair,” Marty says, not sounding so much righteous or burdened as he does slightly sleepy. He touches the crown of Rust’s head again and clears his throat, suddenly gone a tinge more bashful now that he’s had to stop and restart his momentum. “I—I’ll leave you alone in a minute, just thought you could use some help with this part.”
Rust tips his head back and lets his lids sink low, line of his throat working easy. “I could.”
Marty sits on the edge of the tub and pours water over Rust’s head until his hair is stuck in slick waves around his shoulders, one hand held firm at his hairline to keep it from getting in his eyes. That’s an old remnant pulled from the graveyard of fatherhood, Rust thinks. Something Marty used to do with his shirtsleeves rolled up, both girls splashing suds in the floor while he rinsed too much pony-pink shampoo out of their hair and bundled them up for Maggie to put in pajamas down the hall.
He knows, because he used to do it too.
But the slow trickle of the water and Marty’s fingers on his scalp keep most everything else at bay, and Rust feels lulled despite himself, sunk down in an amber fog of honey-citrus. He doesn’t hear himself when the little noise rumbles low in his throat, but Marty does, quickly leaning away to palm the back of his neck while he fills up the plastic cup for another rinse.
“Just about done,” he murmurs, patiently washing conditioner out of the ends of Rust’s hair despite the spots of color in his cheeks. “Let you clean up some on your own, give me a holler when you’re ready to get out.”
When he leaves the bathroom door cracked and disappears down the darkened hall, Rust pulls the washcloth away from his front and reaches up to rub both eyes, letting a small sigh through his parted lips. He sits motionless in the water for a moment, swallowing against the welt caught in the back of his throat before making slow work of soaping up the cloth and washing his thighs and chest, down around the edges of his scar.
He calls for Marty when he’s done, barely anything more than his normal speaking voice, but it doesn’t take long before he hears soft footfalls in the hall and the bathroom door is easing open.
Marty fishes a comb from one of the vanity drawers and leaves it like a promise on the counter, shakes open another towel and holds it out like he’s more ready to catch a baby than a full-grown man. “Take it easy,” he tells Rust while he helps him stand from the water, not minding the damp handprints left around his sides and shoulder. “Pain meds should be kicking in by now.”
Still swaddled up in a towel, Rust sits on the edge of the bed in the big bedroom across the hall and lets Marty run the comb through his hair, working out tangles one by one before drawing it in longer sweeps from root to tip. The bedside lamp cast their shadows long across the floor, and Rust drags a foot through them, almost waiting for the dark shapes to blend and smear together.
“Why are you doing all this?” he asks, slurring just a little while Marty uses a hand towel to squeeze the ends of his hair dry. The ceiling fan’s making goosebumps crop up on his legs but there’s a fresh set of sweatpants and a t-shirt folded next to him on the bed, dryer-spun into softened old age.
Marty’s eyes are anywhere but Rust’s but he doesn’t stop his drying, working up to the crown of the other man’s head. “Ain’t no big thing,” he says, like he didn’t have to nearly carry Rust through the front door their first night home. There’s a long pause while he finds the next few words, hand-picked from the rolodex in his head. “Not sure if this might’ve ever crossed your mind before, but friends help each other out in times like these.”
“Yeah,” Rust says, still watching their shadows through his lashes. “Suppose they do.”
And so he lets Marty help him into the sweats one leg at a time, doesn’t even complain when he fusses with the pillows behind his head and asks too many times if he needs more covers. The clock on the nightstand reads 3:42, and when Marty twists the lamp off Rust is already halfway gone under the hard pull of sleep.
“Marty,” he says, struggling to stay awake when he sees a shadow move toward the bedroom door. “Come over here and get in bed.”
There’s a long moment of quiet and all the dark starts bleeding together too much to pick out shapes, but then the carpet is shushing under bare feet and Rust feels the mattress dip down on one side, bed frame creaking as Marty eases under the sheet.
They lie together with a wide ribbon of space between them, and Rust figures he’s had enough darkened void in his life up until this point, so he uses his last thread of energy to turn over and reach for the other man through the blackness. One hand touches down on soft cotton t-shirt and the swell of a rib cage, and he knows then that Marty had been facing him in the dark.
Neither man says anything as they shift closer and wedge together in the middle of the bed, but Rust uses his final waking thought to listen to the voice in his head whisper thank you.
Funny, how it sounds like Marty.