“We’re going to the hospital?Why?”He opened his eyes.Ian was blurry, now.“Can’t really see you,” Sam mumbled.
Ian turned his head and Sam heard Nik repeat what he’d said in a frantic voice.Another voice answered, a woman’s.Was there a woman here?“It’s okay.We’re leaving in a minute.Do you have a ride to the hospital?”
“Yes!”Ian yelled.
“Shhh,” Sam encouraged.He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought Ian turned back to him.Sam tried to smile, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to be sure he managed it.
He felt something next to his ear, then Ian’s voice whispered, “I’ll be there for you, kiddo.”
Hospitals were incredibly boring, it turned out.Sam was stuck in a little curtained alcove, his head was pounding, and Ian wasn’t there.The walls were gently rocking from side to side, but Sam didn’t find the movement as soothing as it seemed like it should be.
It would have been nice if he could have lost consciousness, but he’d managed to stay awake—albeit incredibly high—the whole ride to the hospital, and during the stuff that happened once he got there.Some of it was blurry in his mind, but he remembered a guy saying something about “concussion” to the lady in the blue shirt.Then they took him for a ride on the wheeled bed and stuck his head into a gigantic steel donut.The whole time, someone kept erupting into giggles; he suspected himself.
He’d also begun to suspect the hospital was some alternate plane of reality.
Eventually, all the people who had swarmed around him before had left him alone in this curtained closet, with the lights dimmed and the drugs wearing off.He was still plenty high, but he could now recall some of what had happened with Miller.
Then he remembered Ian had broken up with him.
Except Sam wondered now if maybe that plane of existence—the one where Ian didn’t love him and didn’t want to be with him—had been more nightmare than reality.
A guy in those pajamas people wore in medical dramas pushed aside a curtain wall and walked into Sam’s little cubicle, interrupting his train of thought.Whatever he’d been thinking floated off like bubbles.
“You actually wear those?”Sam asked, too loudly.It made him wince.
The guy stopped beside him and beamed.“You’re making more sense,” he answered.Well, not actually answered, per se.
“Yeah, my head hurts,” Sam whispered.
“My name’s Urban.I’m your nurse.”He looked at Sam’s arm where the IV went in.
“My name’s Sam.My head hurts,” he said just above a whisper.
Urban smiled at him some more.“Well, once you see the doctor you can have more of the good stuff, and then it’ll feel better.”He started checking other things, writing on Sam’s chart, looking at various bits of equipment.Sam had no clue what Urban was doing and found he was strangely uninterested.
“Think I’m still on the good stuff.”He sure felt like he was onsomething.
“Yeah, that’s why I said you can havemore.”His nurse winked at him.
Huh.“Are you flirting with me?”Sam asked.
Urban raised his eyebrows.“I am if you want me to be.”
“Could you maybe find my boyfriend and bring him here?”
“And how will I know who your boyfriend is?”he asked coyly.
“He’ll be the guy you’d flirt with whether he wants you to or not.Oh, and his name is Ian Cully.”
When Ian walked in, he came straight to the bed and grabbed Sam’s hand.“Oh, squirrel,” he whispered, moving just enough for Urban to lower a rail so he could sit.Then he leaned forward and kissed Sam very gently on the side of his forehead.
“Is that where that guy got me?”Sam asked.
“Yeah.”Ian swallowed and gripped Sam’s hand tighter.He flicked a look at Urban, on his way out of the curtained cubicle “Kiddo, I’m so, so sorry you thought I was trying to break up with you.That’s not what I meant at all when I said I needed to think.I meant I just needed to, you know,think.Take some time to sort stuff out.I was ...I was scared.”
Sam cleared his throat.“Because you were freaked out over thinking you might love me?”
“No!”Ian gripped his chin, not too hard.Not as hard as he normally did, which Sam appreciated.“Because of shit with my dad, I swear.It really was about me, not you.”
