Free The Green's Hill Novellas by Amy Lane Page A

proceeded to kiss Charlie, pull him down into the bed, and make love to him through simple touch and taste one last time.
    Putting Whim into the car hurt, but it felt like a more temporary hurt than just having him disappear. Whim kissed him on the forehead and promised to drive safely and begged him one more time to wait, just one more year, and Charlie promised. And then he was gone.
     
     
    THE YEAR seemed to slog by, and Charlie threw himself into his job. Counseling was grueling work. By the time he got the paperwork down, he found he’d been ignoring the students. And when he turned his attention to the students, he was suddenly ass-deep in paperwork. And none of it, none of it felt like a winning situation.
    He got a small parcel at Christmas—a perfect miniature of his bedroom, complete with a blue bedspread and a purring Texas the cat on his bed. When you blew on it, the wind chimes outside the bedroom window made the sweetest sound and Texas twitched his tail. Charlie put it on his shelf with the others and stood looking at the little parcels of Whim’s devotion to him for a long, long time. If Whim could make it a year, then he certainly could.
    In February, he went to a gay bar the day after Valentine’s Day.
    It was an unusual move for him, but his whole life had become Placer High School and the needy students and beleaguered administration, and even his band had become a point of stress because nobody had time to rehearse, and dammit, he just wanted company. He hadn’t had a lover since Whim, and that was unusual, and all of his friends had their own girlfriends or boyfriends or family. Mostly he just wanted someone to talk to on lover’s day. He would have tried the regular bars to look for a girl to talk to (he got along with women just fine—in fact, he missed his mother frequently now that he was out of the house), but this was Auburn and he didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of him. So Auburn’s one hole-in-the-wall gay bar was where he ended up, and he was just about to give it up as a bad idea when someone sat next to him.
    Charlie was surprised to find he knew the guy, and even more surprised that he was old enough to drink.
    “Jesus, Daniel,” Charlie said, “has it really been three years since you graduated?”
    “Five, Mr. Fratelli,” the kid answered, smiling a little over his beer. “But seeing you here is still like watching your dog sit up and talk.”
    It should have been a good conversation. Daniel had always been a quick kid, funny with the one-liners, happy and easygoing. He’d been in one of Charlie’s first theater groups, and he and Charlie had gotten along very well in that way some teachers and students can. Charlie had never, ever thought of him as more than a kid, a student, somebody to mentor, somebody to help.
    Daniel needed a lot more help now.
    He’d recently been diagnosed as bipolar. He had no health insurance, no job, and his parents were on the verge of kicking him out of the house because of his sexuality and his refusal to be discreet with his bed partners—even Daniel had to admit he’d been less than circumspect.
    When Charlie had asked him, alarmed, if he should be drinking, Daniel had given a fuck-it-all shrug. “Hell, with the meds, it’ll just make it easier for the razor blades to slide in.”
    Charlie experienced a horrible frisson of truth. He meant it. Just like Charlie had meant it the night he’d gone wandering the railroad tracks with a gun.
    Oh God. Whim. Charlie closed his eyes and wished so hard for Whim that he was surprised the elf didn’t just show up there in the bar, ready to take him away from the pain of the world and the hard choices it held. When he opened them, it was still Daniel sitting on his bar stool, smelling of alcohol and despair.
    “Don’t say things like that,” Charlie said softly, placing a careful hand on Daniel’s as it sat near his on top of the dirty bar. “Some of us care about you.”
    Daniel