like
hospitals?”
“You don’t like getting to the point?”
“Jesus! I was just trying to make conversation. I was waiting for
Henries, if you want to know. He was trying to get the puke out of
his shoes.” There was a wry twist to Detective Melville’s mouth, and
Tate got the feeling that if he could have, Melville would have told
him “Nice shot!”
Talker sighed and decided to take a risk. “Is there any way I
could talk to just you?” he asked after a moment. He felt foolish and
weak, but Melville seemed relieved.
“That would be fine,” he said. “Do I have your permission to
record this?”
Tate looked at Doc Sutherland, who looked uneasy. “He hasn’t
done anything,” the doc said. “Tate’s a victim. Brian is a victim. I hate
the way this feels.”
Oh, God bless the man. Tate nodded. “Look, how’s this: I tell
you what happened, you decide what we need to do. Because the
only thing you and puke-shoes got right is that Trev’s not the
stopping kind, right?”
Melville put the tape recorder back in his pocket. “I hear you,”
he said. “Okay, just talk to me. They call you Talker, let’s hear what
you’ve got to say.”
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Tate sighed and looked away. In the distance he could hear
music, and for a moment, he let the taupeness of the sterile
conference room wash over him, and he hummed a few bars of
Aunt Lyndie’s hymn, because it didn’t shred his throat the way
“Jeremy” did. When he spoke, he spoke into a thoughtful silence,
and he had to jerk his body back in real time.
He didn’t even notice that he made the other two people in the
room jump.
“I was raped,” he murmured, as though he’d always been able
to say it. “About eight months ago, I went on a date with Trevor
Gaines, and he thought we were going to do it, and I chickened out,
and he raped me.” He swallowed hard, because this next thing was
something Brian knew without words and Doc Sutherland had been
trying to tell him. “It almost killed me. Not the thing, but….” He
shuddered, still lost in the taupe of the wall across from him. “The
fear, the loneliness—all of it. I….” I danced in the morning when the
world had begun….
“Tate,” Doc Sutherland said gently. Tate jerked, but the doc
didn’t look surprised. “Buddy, we need you to focus.”
“Is he okay?”
Tate wasn’t sure what he’d been doing when his head had
filled with Lyndie’s little hymn, but it seemed to have freaked the
nice detective out.
“Is Brian here?” Tate asked back, only partially rhetorical. “Is
Brian here? Is he holding my hand? Is he telling me it’s all good?
Because if that’s not happening, then buddy, I’m not all right.
See,”—and suddenly he felt totally and completely focused—“that’s
what I’ve been trying to tell you. I was not all right when Trev was
done with me. I was…”—suicidal—“just so fucking lost. And every
night, I’d come home, and I’d think… I’d think, ‘You know? I’ve got a
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70
razor in my drawer. It wouldn’t take very much, and then… then I’d
just be cold for a while, and it would all be okay.’”
Doc Sutherland’s hand started rubbing warm, soothing circles
on his back, and Tate let him. He couldn’t look at Melville—just
couldn’t.
“And the only thing that kept me from doing it, from getting up
and finding the razor, was that I knew Brian would be checking on
me. He’d check on me every night, you know, because we were
roommates and he was my friend, and I had no idea he’d been
breaking his heart over me for months before I just kited off with
fuck-face-douche-nozzle Trevor Gaines. And even that didn’t matter,
because he still… just needed to see that I was okay. And because
he’s the one who would have to live with it if I wasn’t, I just kept
being okay.”
Melville made a throat-clearing sound, and Tate