“Hi,” he said, breathless, his voice wavering a little. He tried to smile. “Did I come at a bad time?”
“Oh—no!” Ed ran his hand over his hair again. “I was just—I would have showered.” He took a step back and held out his arm. “Come in. Come on in. I'll just—I—” He dithered a minute, starting for the bathroom, then stopping and turning back to Laurie again. “Did you get...?” He stopped, blushing.
Laurie could not have stopped his smile even if his life had depended on it. “Yes. I got the flowers. Thank you. They're beautiful.”
Ed seemed pleased but still hesitant. “Good. I mean—after, I thought maybe it would look weird. It was a lot of flowers, and I didn't know—” He rubbed at his hair again. “I mean, we hadn't—We haven't said if we—I didn't know what—” He swore under his breath. “Fuck. I'm no good at this, Laurie.” He appeared to steel himself and looked Laurie dead in the eye. “Are we...dating? Or—”
Oh, Laurie could have flown to the moon, he felt so high. The smile was still there, so wide it hurt his face. “I'd like to,” he said, heart pounding again. “If you want to.”
“Yes!” Ed said, starting to answer almost on top of Laurie. He was smiling now too, a little uncertainly, but that was fading fast. “I just didn't—” His smile turned to a grin, and he jerked his head toward the bathroom. “I'm just gonna go shower up quick.”
But as soon as he turned to go, Laurie called him back. “Ed?”
When Ed turned back around, Laurie stepped forward and took his face in his hands. Giddiness bounced crazily inside him as he watched Ed's eyes hood and his whole body go soft.
“I've been working out,” Ed murmured, but his gaze was on Laurie's mouth. “I'm kind of smelly.”
There was some line here Laurie could have given, some flip reply about how he could use a workout too, but he wasn't deft at this sort of game. So he just pulled Ed's face down, shut his eyes, and kissed him softly on the mouth.
Ed kissed him back, not very softly.
“Laurie,” Ed whispered when they came up for air. He pressed his forehead against Laurie's and ran his hands down Laurie's back. “Laurie.”
Laurie kept his eyes shut and nuzzled Ed back. “Make love to me,” he whispered. “Please.”
In answer Ed kissed him hard and deep again, and Laurie felt the last of his tension leave. When Ed swept him up into his arms, he laughed, surprised, but then Ed's hands started to move on him, and Ed kissed him again as he carried Laurie across the room toward the bed. All thoughts of his mother, the studio, the benefit, and anything that wasn't making love to Ed Maurer sailed away as he sank into the mattress, opening his mouth, his legs, his body and took Ed all the way into his soul.
It started when Ed woke up on Monday morning as a nagging pull down the side of his neck.
He didn't even consciously notice it until he was in the shower, when he caught himself massaging the spot. It had bugged him off and on all weekend, acting up something nasty after they'd done all that moving, but he'd doubled up on painkiller, and the pain had gone away. He hadn't thought about it much after that. But now the pain was back, louder and angrier than it had been in a long time. He stopped, and for a moment he stood under the spray, an old panic blooming up from the place it always lurked. Then he pursed his lips and went back to scrubbing his chest with the bar of soap. It was probably nothing. He'd just slept on it wrong. He'd done that before, and he'd do it again.
Even so, he popped a few ibuprofen before he shaved, just in case. He'd just done too much on Saturday. It wasn't a big deal, though. It'd be fine in a day or so.
He made himself focus on good things, like how nice it was to get ready for work in a place that was clean, of how the pillow Laurie had clutched while Ed made him cry out before he came his brains out still carried the echo of his scent. He lingered over his coffee and cereal, thinking of Laurie while he stared at but didn't really watch a morning news program. Laurie worked late, but Ed was going to go over and meet him at his place at eight thirty. Which meant, he acknowledged, dick humming, that they were going to have sex. Again.
Ed smiled around the rim of his coffee cup and hummed to himself as he finished getting ready for work. He even rinsed out the dishes. Sort of. He'd do them later.
Before he headed out the door, he went back and took two more ibuprofen, finishing out the maximum dose. Nothing wrong with hedging his bets.
Even with the painkillers, though, he found himself rubbing at his neck a lot during the day, and by lunchtime it was really starting to worry him. He must have hurt himself on Saturday. That was the only explanation. And it timed out about right. It had hurt Sunday, but he'd ignored it and had some...well, the sex hadn't been rough exactly, but it had been intense. It was just too fun, thinking up ways to fuck Laurie without literally fucking him, and he hadn't thought about being careful of his neck. And that was the way it went. Once he woke it up, really woke it up, every little thing sent it screaming. Normally that would have depressed him, but not today. Not now. He wasn't going to get down about this. He'd have to take it really easy the next few days, that was all.
But by three in the afternoon his neck hurt so much he could hardly focus. He'd borrowed Aleve from a woman in the cubicle next to him when it was safe to redose (okay, a little sooner than that, but it was close enough), and he might as well have taken Tic Tacs for all the good it did him. At four he had to duck out of a meeting and put his head down at his desk while the colors exploded in his head.
At four thirty he gave up and called his mom.
She was, predictably, very upset. She came over with his father so they could take both him and his car, and as they went down the elevator, she told him six different times about how she'd already made him an emergency appointment at the clinic. Thankfully, his father overrode her when they got down to the parking garage and insisted on driving Ed instead of her, leaving her to bring along their vehicle. After murmuring thank-yous to his mom, Ed climbed into the passenger seat in his own car and hunkered down as his father ferried him silently back across the city toward St. Paul.
Dick Maurer was as taciturn as his partner was exuberant, and just being with him had long been a restorative for Ed. But today not even that was enough, and when they got caught in a traffic snarl and slowed to a crawl, Ed filled the silence with the thoughts gnawing at the edges of his mind.
“It's never been like this,” he said, hunching over and staring into the Mazda logo stamped onto the dashboard. “I've screwed it up before, but never like this, never over so little. It never got this hot this fast.”
“You don't normally work it all day long like you did on Saturday.” His father reached over and gently patted Ed's thigh. “You were a man possessed.”
Because he'd wanted to impress Laurie. And wasn't that a good thing? But his reward for cleaning up his place for the first man he'd cared about in a long time was to have this damn thing act up again. His hands tightened into fists in his lap. It wasn't fucking fair.
“Put some music on, son,” Dick said mildly, playing rudder. “Something fun to distract you. Don't go making this into something big before Dr. Linnet tells you it is.”
It was funny, because Ed hadn't quite figured out that this was what he'd been thinking until his dad had called him on it. But yeah, he was worried about that. What was the doctor going to tell him? What was wrong with his stupid neck now? What was the treatment going to be this time?
What else was he going to have to give up?
He did put the music on, and the song “Nothing Matters When We're Dancing” by The Magnetic Fields came on. That was when Ed realized the real thing he was worried about, the thing he was now almost certain they were going to take away, the thing he'd been quietly loving almost as much as the man who'd introduced him to it.
Shutting off the stereo abruptly, Ed stared into traffic and hated the whole damn world all the way to the clinic.
By some miracle they didn't wait long in the lobby, and before he knew it he was back in an exam room. His mom had come with him. His dad had tried to dissuade her, but she wasn't having any of it; she was going back with her baby because he was hurting. Though Ed grumbled on the outside, secretly he was glad. Here they did wait awhile, and Ed didn't protest when his mother took his hand in hers, running her thumb over the back of it soothingly.
The doctor's verdict was what Ed feared and wasn't, both at once.
“You've just strained it,” Linnet declared. “Working all day like you described when you aren't used to doing that is going to cost you. But this happened, Ed, because that muscle and the ones surrounding it are so weak. You didn't come to your therapy like I wanted you to—I know because I checked—and you aren't treating your body like it's been injured.”
“Work's been busy,” Ed grumbled, not meeting the doctor or his mother in the eye.
Linnet made a disapproving sound. “I've already given you my opinion on keeping a desk job. You'd do better with something with moderate movement on a regular basis. Have you been taking regular breaks like we discussed?”
Ed had not. It was a nice idea, getting up to stretch every thirty minutes, but even with a doctor's note, somebody taking breaks that regularly in a department constantly downsizing didn't stay to take breaks long. “I've been doing some ballroom dancing,” he said. He decided not to mention the athletic sex.
Linnet brightened. “That's good. Be smart about it, because yes, you can injure yourself dancing, and you can do a fine job of it too. But I'm for anything that keeps you moving. Is there any prayer you've kept up with the exercises PT gave you before you quit?”
“I've moved a bit beyond them,” Ed said, trying not to be testy. The doctor knew him too well, though.
“I know they're not what you're used to doing from training for football,” Linnet said, “but lifting weights is not rebuilding the muscles of your neck. You need to keep to their schedule for your recovery. Just because you feel like you used to doesn't mean you can go back to old times. I want you back on a regular PT schedule for the next month, and this time I want you to go. Mrs. Maurer, if you have any sway with him, I suggest you use it. And Ed, I want you off all physical activity outside of what they assign you for a few weeks. That includes weight lifting, dancing, and sex. And work.”
Ed looked up sharply at him—eyes only, because his neck was fucking killing him. “I can't be off work for two weeks!”
And the hell I'm telling Laurie we can't fuck for fourteen days.
He couldn't even let himself think about the dancing.
“Then you can look forward to having this kind of pain at increasingly frequent intervals, and probably with increasing degrees of pain as well.” The doctor braced his elbows on his knees and looked Ed squarely in the eye. “We've had this conversation before, Ed. I know dealing with this is hard for you, but this isn't a usual injury. If you'd hit just a few millimeters over, we'd be having this conversation as you sat in your wheelchair. This isn't something you're going to recover from. This is something you're living with. You'll get better at it, but you're going to live with it.” He paused, then added, “Have you given any further thought to my suggestion that you see someone to talk about what that's going to mean to you long-term?”
Linnet was talking about a therapist. And yes, Ed had thought about it. He'd thought about how it wasn't fucking going to happen. “I'll be fine,” he said gruffly.
The doctor handed him several scripts. “Here. You're going back on some higher-dose painkillers until this calms down. I've included something for anxiety too, because that helped you last time. And I want you making an appointment with physical therapy before you leave the clinic.”
Ed scanned the papers and saw his old friends Voltaren, Ativan, Skelaxin, and Vicodin. He grimaced, but he nodded too.
“And once you get back on your feet, keep up the dancing,” Linnet said as he shook Ed's hand when he rose to go. “Be sure to mention it to PT. They can work it into your plan.”
They swung by the pharmacy on the way home, where Ed picked up all the meds and a Diet Mountain Dew to wash them all down. By the time he hit the stairs to his apartment, he was so high he was practically floating up them. He ate the soup and sandwich his mom put in front of him with only the barest acknowledgement that he was doing so. But when she put him into bed, he remembered, and he sat up, pushing the covers away.
“Laurie,” he slurred, drooling a little. The room pulsed in and out of focus, but Ed fought through it, determined to get to his phone. “Have to call Laurie.”
Annette fought him, and when she couldn't take him, roped Dick into the act as well. “I'll call him, honey. Is his number on your phone?”
Ed tried to fight her, but he was so tired. I want to call him, he tried to say, but his lips felt numb.
I want to hear his voice
. But it was all he could do to keep himself conscious enough to get back into bed. He sank into sleep before his mother had finished pulling up the covers, and he dreamed sharp-edged narcotic dreams where he lay numb and broken on the ground, reaching out helplessly to Laurie as he danced into purple-tinted fog.
And then Laurie was there, touching his face, talking quietly. He sounded like he was underwater, so at first Ed assumed he was still dreaming. But then he felt the dull ache of his neck again, and things felt real. Maybe Laurie really was here. He couldn't quite tell. He hoped to hell it was real, and he reached out for him, thrilling when Laurie's cool hands closed over his own.
I was supposed to make love to you tonight, he thought as he watched Laurie swim in and out of focus, and out of nowhere, depression swamped him. He didn't realize he was crying until the tears ran into his nose, and then he was alarmed, because that was definitely not something he was ready for Laurie to see.
Someone pushed something small and hard and round into his mouth, and he tasted the bitter tang of a pill before a straw appeared to draw up water and chase it down. Then another pill came, and another, and another, and another—the full monty, which meant he'd gotten an Ativan too. He'd said no earlier, but his mother apparently had seen the tears. Well, Vicodin and Ativan would iron those out. No pain, anxiety, no depression. No nothing.