Free The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

evidence anywhere on the premises that his contact with Marchent had been anything but consensual.
    Hour after hour, he lay there in the hospital bed, going over all these different factors. Every time he tried to sleep, he found himself in a hellish tape loop, rushing down that staircase, trying to get to Marchent before her brothers did. Had she known that the men were her brothers? Had she seen through their disguise?
    He woke up out of breath, every muscle aching from the strain of making that desperate run. And then all the pain in his face and gut would come back; he’d push the button for more Vicodin and fall again into half nightmare.
    Then there were the voices and sounds that kept waking him. Someone crying in another room. A woman arguing furiously with her daughter. “Let me die, let me die, let me die.” He woke, staring at the ceiling, hearing that woman.
    He could have sworn there was some sort of problem with the vents in this hospital, that he was hearing someone on a lower floor fighting off an attacker. Cars passing. He could hear them too. Raised voices.
    “Drug delusions,” said his mother. “You’ve got to be patient with them.” She was adjusting the IV for the fluids she insisted he needed. She stared down at him suddenly. “I want to run some more tests.”
    “What on earth for?”
    “You may think me crazy, Baby Boy, but I could swear your eyes are a darker blue.”
    “Mother, please. Talk about drug delusions.” He didn’t tell her that Celeste had said the same thing.
    Maybe I’ve at last acquired a distinctive and tragic expression, he thought mockingly, a little gravitas.
    She was staring at him as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “You know, Reuben, you really are a remarkably healthy boy.”
    And he was. Everyone said so.
    His best friend Mort Keller, from Berkeley, stopped in twice, and Reuben knew how much this meant, since Keller was facing his oral examination for the Ph.D. in English. This was the program Reuben had abandoned. And he still felt the guilt.
    “You look better than I’ve ever seen you,” Mort said. He himself had bags under his eyes, and his clothes were wrinkled and even a bit dusty.
    Other friends called—guys from school, guys from the paper. He didn’t really want to talk. But it was nice that they cared, and he did read the messages. The cousins from Hillsborough called, but he assured them they must not come in. Grace’s brother who worked in Rio de Janeiro sent a basket of brownies and cookies big enough to feed the entire ward. Phil’s sister, in a nursing home in Pasadena, was too sick to be told what was going on.
    Personally, Celeste didn’t care at all about his sleeping with Marchent. She was militant with the investigating officers. “What are you saying, he raped her and then she went downstairs and made out a handwritten will leaving him a five-million-dollar piece of property? And then the woman gushed to a lawyer on the phone about all this for an hour? Come on, do I have to do the thinking for all of us here?”
    Celeste told the press the same thing. He caught a glimpse of her on television, firing answers at the reporters, looking adorably ferocious in her little black suit and white ruffled blouse, her fluffy brown hair framing her small animated face.
    Someday she’ll make legal history, he thought.
    As soon as Reuben could keep some food down, Celeste brought himminestrone soup from North Beach. She was wearing the ruby bracelet he’d given her, and a bit of lipstick that was the same color as the ruby. She’d been dressing especially nicely for him all during this ordeal and he knew it.
    “Look, I’m sorry,” he said.
    “You think I don’t understand? Romantic coast, romantic house, romantic older woman. Forget about it.”
    “Maybe you should be the journalist,” he murmured.
    “Ah, now there’s that Sunshine Boy smile. I was beginning to think I’d imagined it.” She ran her fingers very gently over his neck.