Oh. That actually sounded…a lot less overwhelming. Noteasy, but less overwhelming. Still, I felt like I needed to protest. I pried his hand off my mouth. “You don’t need to -”
Jamison made a loud buzzer noise. “Ehhh. Nope. Like we already said, it’s not about what we need to do; it’s about what we want to give.”
“And honestly, bro,” Jamal added, “we’re going to tag-team the fuck out of you until we get what we want, so you might as well just give up. There’s two of us and only one of you. Give up and let us loooove you.” He made a heart with his hands and thumped it onto his chest and back out.
That was just comical enough to send a spurt of warmth to cut through the cold that felt like it had pervaded me since I got the first positive test result. It appeared I was going to be taken care of, whether I liked it or not, because these dumb idiots cared about me in spite of, well, everything. “Fuckers,” I muttered, but even I could hear that there was no heat in the word.
“I’ll take it.” Jamal slapped me on the back and looked back at Jamison. “Ok, so what’s the first step?”
23
Henry
Week 16 - Thursday
Jamison dropped me off at the LGBT+ community center for my first support group meeting, but still hadn't driven away even after I trudged as slowly as possible to the door. He was probably waiting to make sure I didn't flee.
After Jamal’s and his mini-intervention last week, they'd leapt into action. About twenty phone calls, a dozen emails, and a week later, I was supposed to join this support group tonight and then see an individual therapist for my first appointment tomorrow afternoon. Jamal and Jamie had argued back and forth on whether scheduling two in two days would be too much for me, but ultimately decided that it couldn’t hurt too much and might actuallyhelp, in that I’d be primed from group the night before to talk to the therapist. I had not been permitted to participate in that planning discussion.
At least, the priming thing was their theory. I wasn't sure I bought that, but I also wasn't going to try to argue it out with Jamison. Our relationship was unsettlingly tentative sincehe'd crashed back into my life. I still didn't want to leave the house, despite his urging, and while we talked on the phone most nights, when he'd suggested I come over to see the cats, I'd demurred, and I truly wasn’t sure if that was about not being ready to see him, not being ready to leave my house, or something else I hadn’t consciously thought to worry about.
But at least we were talking. So there was that.
Sighing to myself, I opened the community center's front door and put one foot in front of the other.
***
I looked around the room uncertainly. There were about fifteen chairs set up in a circle - and damn, that meant I couldn’t settle in the back of the room - and nearly as many people circulating among them, many holding paper cups of coffee and plates of dry-looking little pastries. I felt like I was at the world’s cheapest cocktail party.
No one had approached me since I entered, which had me waffling between gratitude at being left alone and feeling uncomfortably like a ghost, and I was lurking in a corner trying to be unobtrusive when one guy’s eyes landed on me and he smiled before heading toward me. He was of average size, kinda stocky, with bright blue eyes in a tanned complexion.
So much for being a ghost. I took an awkward sip of my own lukewarm coffee and tried not to look too insane as I tracked the man as he walked.
He pulled up a few feet from me and smiled again. “Hi.”
“Uh, hi.”
“I’m Hector and I facilitate this group. I’m guessing you’re Henry?”
I managed an uncomfortable smile. “That obvious I’m new, huh?”
“Eh.” He waffled his hand in front of him. “I know everybody in here except you, so that was sort of a dead giveaway. I think I talked to your…friend?...over email a few times, but he didn’t share a lot of details about your situation and he didn’t ask about how we work things in here. So I just wanted to take a moment before we start to pull you aside -” he gestured to the corner we were occupying - “and say that you’re welcome to contribute as much or as little as you feel comfortable. I know it can be overwhelming to walk into a group like this where people are gonna start trauma-dumping and meanwhile you’re gonna be like ‘Uh, my name is Henry?’”
That…was actually a surprisingly understanding take for someone whose job was presumably to keep us talking. My smile firmed up a bit. “I appreciate that. I’m not…a huge talker.”
“Sometimes you get as much or more from listening as you do from speaking.” He patted my shoulder. “Grab a seat and we’ll get started in a few minutes. I’ll check in with you again after.”
I nodded and looked around for an empty seat. The wooden folding chair creaked ominously as I lowered my weight into it, but it held and no one looked at me, so I was calling it a victory.
“Ok, hey guys,” Hector said, taking his own seat and clapping once. “Let’s get started. Does anyone know right off that they want to talk?”
A middle-aged man with a potbelly and a goatee raised his hand. “Yeah, hi guys,” he said, not waiting for Hector to call on him. “Uh, I’m Terry, he/him.” His gaze landed quickly on me and then darted away, and I got the impression the introduction was for my benefit. “I had my checkup this week and I just wanted to share that I came up undetectable for the first time since my diagnosis.”
A woman started clapping and slowly, the whole room joined in. “Fuck yeah!” someone called out in the midst of the applause.
Terry held up a hand. “Ok don’t get too happy, it gets angstier from here. Red wants to go bare because, he says, undetectable is untransmittable. And I just can’t…get myself there. And I don’t know if Ishould. Like, in theory it’s safe, yes, but when it’s a risk we don’t need to take, whywouldwe?”
Sympathetic noises. “Is he dead-set on it?” asked a dark-haired woman with a lined face. “Or was it just like, a casual mention? Oh,” she added, looking at me, “and I’m Trina, she/her.”
