“I loved Neil. I loved him a lot, but I never gave him—” Joshua broke off. “I never gave him all of me. I saved sex because I was afraid that being with a man wasn’t meaningful the way it was supposed to be. That it was a sin like I’d been taught. In the end, the guy I was with? It was meaningless because I didn’t love him, not because of his gender. Afterward, all I could think was that I’d betrayed Neil. So that’s the kind of man I really am. A coward.”
“Do you really think so?” Lee took Joshua’s hand, squeezing gently. “In your heart of hearts, is that what you think?”
Joshua felt hot tears behind his lids. What was wrong with him? Why was he confessing this to Lee, a virtual stranger, and then crying about it like some hurt little kid? Like he was back to being the old Joshua in Neil’s apartment, too young and dumb to love himself?
Lee squeezed Joshua’s hand again. “You haven’t misled me at all. You’re the man Neil fell in love with, and I see exactly why.”
Joshua wiped at his eyes with the back of his free hand and whispered, “Do you?”
“Yeah.”
Joshua cleared his throat, but he still couldn’t look at Lee when he said, “I’d like to go out on a date, if you still want to.”
Lee chucked his chin up, gazing into his eyes. “I can’t think of anything better.”
Chapter Three
January 2019—Atlanta, Georgia
Neil hated trucks.Alice didn’t understand why, but the sight of a semi-truck had been enough to set him off from the day he was born. It all came together one night when he was seven, and he presented her proudly with a comic book he’d made in his art class.
The comic was a gruesome thing, and it was accompanied by a note from his teacher requesting a conference to discuss it.
The opening scene of the book showed a man in a hospital bed with his chest open, his purple lungs and heart exposed for all the world to see. Next to him stood a man with a sharp knife, possibly a scalpel, and brown eyes. The dead man on the hospital bed was labeled with a very precise arrow and the word “ME.”
The next panel showed a man with light-brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a wide smile; he was labeled, unsurprisingly, “JOSHUA.” Then there was a drawing of a black dog labeled “MAGIC.” Alice touched the drawing carefully. She’d heard less about Magic than about Joshua over the years, but the dog wasn’t a surprise, either.
The next page declared it ten hours earlier. This was followed by a sequence of comic panels showing Magic and a man running on a sidewalk in a city, Magic breaking free of her leash, and the man dashing after her.
And then a truck. A semi-truck.
The next page showed Joshua crying, and the final page was back to the man on the hospital bed. This time he was missing some limbs. A green-scrub-covered surgeon off to the side clutched a heart. It was not a Valentine’s Day heart. No, of course not. This was her Neil, so it was a very detailed drawing of an anatomical heart, complete with aortic and thoracic valves and lots of blood dripping off the surgeon’s elbow. No wonder the art teacher wanted to meet with her.
It was times like this she was grateful that Jim was deployed again.
“You were hit by a truck?” she asked Neil, carefully setting the comic book on the coffee table, amidst his clutter of tech journals and gadgets.
“Yep,” he answered, looking up at the ceiling with pursed lips. “It sucked.”
“Yeah, I can see that it would.”
“Magic…” He frowned. “I think she died, too. I tried to save her. But I think I was too slow. I think if she’d lived, I’d know.” His lips twisted. “Poor Joshua.”
“Yes.”
“I guess you can’t expect to go up against a semi-truck and win. But I didn’t even think. I loved her and…” He sighed. “I wish I’d saved her.”
And again, Alice felt guilty. She knew now where he’d come from, and where he longed to be. Somehow, she almost felt like it was her fault that he was only a small child and not already grown man who could go find his Joshua and start his life with him over again.
“I think ‘sucked’ might be an understatement,” she said.
Neil chuckled, a rarity that warmed her soul.
“I don’t think Shakespeare had enough curses to cover it,” Neil commented and then went to his room to poke at his latest project again: an experiment that involved dealing with nanites and rapid cellular repair.
Sometimes she was afraid to ask.
July 2020—Atlanta, Georgia
