“Miss you, too, big guy. I’ll see you on Friday.”
A beatific smile crossed his face. “Friday.” He sighed. “Night.”
“Night,” I replied, and the connection dropped. I lowered my phone with a sigh of my own. I was tired too, but not enough to fall asleep quite yet. I eyed the ball of damp tissues I’d dropped on the floor, then the kitten that was creeping toward it. “Minnie, no!”
I supposed it was time to clean up and then crawl into bed with a book and my cats. There were worse ways to spend an evening.
18
Henry
Week 13 - Thursday
Istared down at my phone screen, feeling the blood continue to drain out of my face. Honestly, I was amazed there was still any blood there to drain.Antibodies: reactive.I’d been fixated on those words for the past ten minutes, waking up my screen to continue staring every time it turned off. I’d tested positive for HIV antibodies on the re-test I took last week. That meant I had detectable HIV. Oh shit, if I had it, did that mean…fuck, I needed to call Jamison.
My hand was shaking. I brought up my other hand to try to steady it, but my fingers wouldn’t grip hard enough, and now both my hands were shaking, a fine tremor running through what felt like my whole body.
Shit.
Shit.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe they’d confused my test with someone else’s in the lab. I needed to call my doctor.
What if it wasn’t a mistake? Hell, I still needed to call my doctor. My hand shook a little harder, but I forced myself to stick out my pointer finger and start pecking at the screen to navigate to my doctor’s contact information. It took me three tries and a lot of backtracking after my shakes led to bad taps, but I finally connected the call and raised my phone to my ear.
Ten minutes later, I lowered the phone again, still shaking. I now had an appointment for a consultation and viral load test for tomorrow. Absently, I realized that that meant I was going to fall behind on my current commission, which had been scheduled for polishing tomorrow, but I didn’t have enough brainpower to devote to worrying about that right now.
I needed to call Jamison.
Fuck.
This was going to be bad. How did you tell your boyfriend, who might have transmitted HIV to you, or else you to him, that you’d tested positive and he needed to test again if he’d come up negative on his last one? Hell, what if he’d come up positive and just…neglected to mention that to me? No, he wouldn’t have done that. We were in this together, and we both knew it.
Which meant he didn’t know. And now I was going to have to tell him.
Fuckkkkk.
I felt cold all over. Moving slowly, carefully, as if I was going to shatter, I lowered myself to the couch and pulled my fuzzy blanket over my legs. That didn’t help my freezing hands, but it at least felt a little comforting. I heard amrrpand looked over to see Curie stirring on the other end of the couch. Normally, I’d give her a smile and stretch out a hand for her to sniff, but I couldn’t move this time. After we stared at each other, unmoving, for a long moment, Curie stretched her front and then her back legs and strode across the cushions to me. She clambered into my lap, turned in a circle twice, arranged hertail just-so, and plopped down on my knees, apparently not bothered by the fact that they were shaking under her.
I managed to rest a hand on her back, and the warmth of her fur sunk into me comfortingly. I took a slow, careful breath in, then let it out, still clutching my phone to my chest with my other hand.
Positive.
A large part of me was screaming denials, insisting that all the other tests had been negative and so this was some sort of mistake. A false positive, a lab mix-up, hell, a prank by my doctor’s office. Something, anything.
The rest of me was coldly focused on next steps. Contact my partner(s). Do more research. Avoid all sexual contact because I was now death walking for anyone who touched me.
No. No, that wasn’t true, the logical part of my brain told me. I knew this. HIV was treatable to the point of undetectability. I could live a nearly-normal life; I could have sex, even sex without condoms, once I was on a treatment regimen.
Logic was losing the battle to panic. My hands were shaking harder. I needed to call Jamison.
I swallowed and looked down at my phone. What was he going to say? Do? Would he blame me? For all he knew, I’d been the carrier that night. Hell, for allIknew,Ihad been. There was just no way to know for sure. What if I had been the carrier? If this was all my fault, if I’d caught HIV from Ramsey’s cheating and just not known, and then brought it into the bedroom with Jamison? He’d hate me.I’dhate me. Screw the future tense, Ihatedme now. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, if it was my fault, but I still felt the guilt piercing me, gnawing away at my heart.
Biting my lip hard enough to draw blood, I started dialing Jamison’s number. I needed to do this. It was important. It might be the end of everything, but I owed it to him to not delay.
“Hey,” Jamison answered on the third ring, “everything ok?”
Did he know? Had he gotten his results too? “What?” I stuttered out. “Why do you…ask that?”
