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Billy still remembered the night White had gone into the bathroom at that motel and not come out again. On one of the few nights during that arduous trip across the country after Quiz Boys where they could actually afford to sleep indoors, White had ducked into the bathroom and it was fifteen minutes later when Billy became aware he was still in there. No faucet running, no shower, just dead silence. And for a brutal, heady moment he thought that White must have come to his senses about the whole thing and climbed out the window.
What was he doing here with this kid? How could this be worth it? Was the gas money worth the extra cost of food?
But when Billy started banging on the bathroom door White unlocked it and sure enough he was still in there, leaning over the sink with his nose pinched between his fingers and a river of blood steadily dripping down his chin. “What?” he’d said. It was the tone every adult used when they were sick of him.
“You’ve been in here a while,” Billy had said, eyes rapt on the dark red stain on his skin and the way it worked itself into the edges of his teeth.
“So? Take it outside. Natures porcelain throne. This one’s occupado.”
There was a baggy on the edge of the sink, still open, a bit of powder still inside. Billy wasn’t an idiot. He was a professional non-idiot, in fact, that was his whole schtick, and even a sheltered kid like him had heard the rumours about Stevie Nicks and the way cocaine could eat its way through cartilage.
“Do you need help?” he’d asked.
White had looked at him funny, a sort of confusion Billy hadn’t known him well enough yet to decipher, and then he’d shaken his head and waved Billy away saying, “I’ll be out in a minute. Go watch TV or something.” And then the door had closed and Billy was left sitting on the end of his bed twiddling his thumbs and worrying in the back of his mind that his manager was about to bleed out before they’d even made it to Colorado.
But White had survived. They had gotten to Colorado. The whole affair with the OSI and State and then he was back with White yet again only this time he was clean. “Hand over heart, I’ve kicked the stuff,” White had said, skin still angry red and peeling. He’d looked terrible, but his nose wasn’t bleeding. And with the memory wipe he couldn’t even remember why that was something to be concerned about.
These days he did know. He did remember. Bits and pieces at least. But it all came flooding back when he woke up one night to find the other side of the bed empty and muttered curses coming from a closed bathroom door across the hall. No clear memories of course, his memories were never clear even without OSI intervention, but he knew the tension in his chest and, as a doctor, he knew what a relapse was.
And besides all that, there was blood on White’s pillow.
Billy knocked delicately, feeling all of fifteen again, and said gently, “White? You okay in there?”
The door opened immediately and sure enough White was holding a wad of toilet paper under his nose where it was soaking up red fast. The sink looked like something out of Carrie and White’s hands looked like he’d just finished gutting a horse to sleep in on a cold desert night.
“Billy,” White said, sounding relieved and exhausted. “It won’t stop bleeding.”
“It’ll stop,” Billy told him, sounding less certain than he would have liked. He went in and took a seat on the closed lid of the toilet, casting surreptitious looks around the room for signs of white powder while White stared at himself in the mirror.
“Figures,” White muttered, pulling the toilet paper away experimentally. The blood started flowing freely down his lip again and he stopped it up quickly. “Twenty years in the driest place on Earth and I wind up with a nosebleed in New York.”
“You never liked to be predictable.”
“No one said anything about liking, I’m just trying not to drown here.”
“You have to pinch it.”
“I tried that it didn’t work.”
“You didn’t do it long enough.”
“You think I’ve never had a nosebleed before? You weren’t even in here, how do you know how long I was pinching for?”
“Trade places with me.”
White glanced over with a frown, careful to keep his chin over the sink, and then nodded, letting Billy sidle past him before sitting down. Billy took White’s free hand and guided his fingers into place just over the nostrils, making him pinch.
“Ten minutes,” Billy told him sternly. “Minimum.”
“I did ten minutes.”
“Your ten minutes isn’t ten minutes.”
White shrugged, unable to argue. Even without cocaine he tended to operate at a different speed to the rest of the universe. Sometimes that meant spacing out on the couch for two hours and sometimes it meant blasting through a weeks worth of coding in one night. He didn’t always get the code right, but he got through it.
Billy took a washcloth from a drawer under the sink and wet it, feeling dizzy from the amount of blood in the basin. “Are you feeling lightheaded?” he said.
“No.”
“Nauseous? Dizzy?”
“No and no.”
“Does your nose hurt or is it just the blood?”
“What is this, twenty questions? I’m fine, Billy, it’s just a bit of blood. It’s no big deal.”
Billy took the wad of toilet paper from him and, careful not to touch the blood on it, dropped it in the wastebasket. Then he used the washcloth to start cleaning the blood off White’s chin. It caught in dark pinpricks where his stubble was coming in, turning white hair almost black. Even with the pinch, a little was oozing out onto his upper lip. Billy wiped it up as he went.
“Probably allergies or something,” White was saying, doing his best to keep his chin still. “There’s so much dust in this house. I don’t think Horace has ever lived without a manservant and god knows Action Man isn’t doing any housekeeping.”
“You could clean up a bit,” Billy muttered.
“I’ve got a job, thank you.” His head started to tilt up and Billy pulled him back down.
“Don’t lean back, you’ll swallow blood.”
“I know that.”
There was blood in his teeth, just like that night at the motel. The sight of it pulled a sickness from Billy that felt close enough to vertigo that he had to close his eyes for a moment.
“You alright, fella?” said Pete, barely sounding concerned. “Hey, it’s not you who’s dying here.”
“I’m fine,” said Billy. “Just... remembering some stuff, that’s all.”
“Uh oh. Don’t tell Brock that. You’re supposed to be a goldfish in there.” He tapped the top of Billy’s head
“You’re not-” The question started before he could think better of it and when he pinched it off White looked up at him curiously. Billy sighed. “You’re not back on blow, are you?”
White looked like he could have laughed the question so bewildered him, but he was having a hard enough time keeping his upper respiratory tract functional so he settled for mild outrage. “No,” he said. “I am not back on blow. What, because of the blood? People get nosebleeds, pally, it’s normal. I’m not John Entwhistle for Christ sake.”
“What?”
“The Who. Cocaine overdose? Jesus, Billy, read a book.”
“No, I know who he is, I didn’t realize he died.”
“I’m begging you to pay attention to popular culture, the world didn’t start and end with Rusty Venture Boy Adventurer.”
“Says the guy who didn’t know Will Smith had another son.”
“They never talk about him! It was a previous marriage!”
“Boys?” came a call from the stairs.
“Sorry, Mom,” Billy called back.
Her footsteps creaked up the last few steps and she appeared on the landing in her nightgown. All three of the older folks had bedrooms on the second floor while Billy and White had the third all to themselves. It was easier for them to get up and down the stairs, they all agreed, especially after the stroke. Billy certainly didn’t mind the privacy, it made the whole ‘fake relationship’ thing a lot easier to manage when they had space to turn it off. Fortunately this moment was plenty intimate without having to fake it and the blood was distracting enough to Rose that she wouldn’t have noticed if Billy was drop-kicking White out the window anyways.
“Oh dear!” said Rose, hand hovering by her mouth as she took in the bathroom sink. Then she looked at the pair by the toilet, White newly miserable and Billy just wishing they could get back to the conversation they had been having before being interrupted by the Who. “Are you alright, Peter?” she said, keeping herself just outside the door.
“He’s fine,” Billy said. “It’s just a nosebleed.”
“Oh, now it’s just a nosebleed,” Pete muttered.
“I heard voices and I thought something might be wrong,” said Rose, like the discovery that something actually was wrong had shorted her out somehow. A flu she could handle. Burglars she could handle. A bloody nose wasn’t something you could take action against as the third man on the scene.
“Sorry, we’ll be quieter,” Billy said, resuming cleanup duty of White’s chin while White weakly swatted him away. “Go back to bed, we’re fine.”
“Are you sure? I could make you some tea, Peter, to help you feel better. Or some ice maybe?”
“I’m fine, Rose, thank you,” Pete said. “It’s stopping itself up now.”
“Okay,” she said. And then, after some hesitation, “You let me know if you need anything, I’m right downstairs.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Billy said. He listened to her descend the stairs and waited for the sound of a door closing before resuming. “I only ask because you used to get these when we were on the road.”
White rolled his eyes and pushed Billy away firmly. “It’s not blow. I don’t do that anymore. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Is it actually stopping?”
“Has it been ten minutes?”
Billy instinctively raised his arm to check his watch only to realize he was still in his pyjamas and the watch was on the bedside table. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Great, we got two broken clocks in here instead of one.”
A look came over White’s face, like a grimace mixed with disgust, and then he was on his feet and leaning over the sink again, spitting a glob of blood into the basin. He turned on the tap and attempted to wash some of it down the drain.
Billy couldn’t see his face from this perspective, only his hunched shoulders, and after twenty years in a trailer together that was a familiar enough sight but it still troubled him. He looked down at the washcloth, once an off-white and now an off-pink, and tried to decide where to put his concern because voicing it certainly wasn’t an option. So instead he said, “You seriously never got a nosebleed when we were in the desert?”
“A couple,” White admitted. “You get hit in the face enough during your pal’s botched arching and you’re bound to break a vessel or two.” He spit again. Not blood, just pink saliva. The taste. “Not from the dry, though.”
“I used to get nosebleeds all the time when I was a kid,” said Billy. “Allergies and pressure on my sinuses and... How many bullies do you think wind up becoming supervillains later in life?”
White chuckled. “I dunno, it’s a tossup between that and congress.”
“I bet there are government officials with secret identities. There has to be.”
“President by day, Level Four Arch at night. Screwing up society one criminal activity at a time.”
“If Scooby Doo taught us one thing it’s that the bad guy is always just some rich asshole in a mask.”
“Life imitates art, huh? Hey, pass me that washcloth will you?” White reached out for it blindly and when Billy gave it to him he ran it under the tap again before wiping at his mouth. “I hate the taste of blood,” he muttered. “Tastes like... bad choices and pennies.”
They sat in silence for a while, White periodically spitting into the sink, and just when it felt like ten minute had to have passed White said, “Go back to bed, Billy, I’m doing fine.”
Billy didn’t want to go back to bed. He felt weirdly alive with adrenaline that belonged in a different bathroom with a different iteration of Pete White, and he knew that if he went to bed now he would just have strange dreams he didn’t have the memory to explain and wake up feeling uneasy if not unwell. “No, I’m okay,” he said, setting his hands on his knees. His robotic fingers were twitching slightly and he tried not to look at them. “I don’t want you to pass out and hit your head or something.”
“Wouldn’t that be a way to go?” Pete’s free hand was grasping the side of the counter closest to Billy, the blood on his fingers dry and flaking. “Could you go get me my cup then? By the bed.”
“Sure.”
He hopped off the toilet, glad to have something to do, and fetched the glass from Pete’s side of the bed. He paused in there for a moment, looking at the dark stain on the pillowcase. In the still-dark bedroom it looked like a hole burned into the linen, falling through into a dark emptiness inside. Shaking himself out of that existential dog bait, he took a moment to remove the pillowcase and tossed it in the hamper on the way out the door. Rose would know how to get blood out of sheets, that was more her area of expertise than his.
White took the cup from him and filled it before raising it to his mouth. Then, without taking a sip, he groaned and set it down on the counter.
“What? What is it?” said Billy, ready for White to collapse where he stood.
“I can’t drink it without tilting my head back,” said White. “Has it been ten minutes yet?”
“Probably.” Good practice said wait fifteen, but they’d both had enough of this. They needed sleep and White needed to rinse his mouth out before his teeth became permanently red, something the goth in White probably would have enjoyed the idea of but which Billy didn’t much fancy falling asleep next to every night.
Tentatively, White let go of his nose. With a relieved sigh he said, “It’s stopped.”
While White cleaned himself and the sink up, Billy set about getting a new pillowcase and a few extra pillows from the linen closet. “No lying down,” he told White as he ushered him back to the bed. He’d built a veritable throne for him out of pillows and helped him settle into it.
“I’m not an invalid,” said White, but there was no bite to it and with his eyes closed it was clear he was in no real mood for a fight.
“Don’t gush blood in the middle of the night and I won’t treat you like one,” said Billy. He brought White a fresh cup of water and watched him gulp half of it down as he climbed back into his own side of the bed. “If you die while we’re sleeping I’ll be very upset,” he said in a stern tone.
White let out a tired laugh, the late hour and blood loss both catching up to him at once. “I’ll try not to.”
“Good.” Billy shuffled down to nestle into his pillow, still staring up at White where he was silhouetted against the streetlight coming in through the window, feeling like a medical alert dog waiting for signs of a seizure.
The silence stretched on between them and Billy thought White had drifted off to sleep. But then, in a very quiet voice, White said, “I didn’t know if you remembered that night.”
Billy knew what night he meant. He almost always knew what White meant about everything. One of the perks of spending every waking second with someone. And all the sleeping seconds too. “I remember it,” he said. “It was the scariest night of my life at the time.”
White’s brow creased and he smiled, his eyes still closed. “That can’t be true,” he said. “The dogs were way scarier. They literally bit your hand off.”
“Yeah, that was pretty scary,” Billy agreed. “But until then, I mean. All those nights on the road, that was the scary one. It was the night I started to think maybe...”
White cracked one eye open and looked down at him, waiting for the end to that thought.
Billy gathered the courage that can only come late at night and said, “...maybe we weren’t going to make it after all.”
He didn’t say in what way. That White might not make it through the journey without his heart stopping from all the crap he was putting in his bloodstream. That Billy might not make it without getting left behind in a motel somewhere either forgotten or abandoned. That the whole thing might have been a mistake and they might not make it to whatever dream a bright-eyed fifteen year old can cook up when he’s doing his best not to think about all the things he’s just lost.
White closed his eye again and turned his hand over so his palm was facing up. Billy reached out and took it. He almost always knew what White meant. White’s fingers, much longer than Billy’s, and freshly smelling of soap over pennies, wrapped around his hand in a familiar, cold grip. “We made it, pally,” said White, his voice dreamlike as he drifted along the edges of sleep. “Against all odds.”
Billy held on to that hand until it went limp and he knew White was asleep. He kept holding it even then. He tried to remember the way he used to see Pete White, his manager, his mentor, his sparkly-eyed inventor, and he couldn’t anymore. That was a different man. This man was one who sat on a couch and played video games in his boxers. This was a man who groaned about narrowly-missed high scores and malfunctioning teleporter pads with equal gravity. He bled the same, but this was a different Pete White and he was a different Billy Whalen.
But holding White’s hand and hoping he would be okay, he still felt incredibly young. That kind of thing didn’t ever go away.
Confident that White wouldn’t wake up, Billy moved in closer, pressing his forehead against White’s arm. For one night he could let himself be fifteen, and he could let that younger self have the Pete White he should have had, unaware of the things he had done to make him this way. They were both changed men after all, and newly innocent in that change.
Billy closed his eyes and fell asleep.