“Piss off, Brix. You can spout as much self-deprecating crap at me as you like, but you’ll never convince me that you deserved this.” Calum shut the engine off and slid abruptly out of the van, slamming the door. Brix stared after him, frozen, but then the gravity of all he’d told Calum sunk in. I told him.
For a long moment, it didn’t seem real, but Calum’s absence made his bones ache too much for him to linger in the cold van. He got out and trailed Calum to the front door. “Are you angry with me?”
Calum sighed. “Of course I’m not. I’m angry that you’ve had to go through this, especially on your own.”
Brix opened the door and tried to put himself in Calum’s shoes, reverse the situation, but his brain was too tired to make sense of what he found, and two days without sleep sunk in. He stumbled. Calum caught him.
“Bed.”
Brix didn’t argue. Letting Calum lead him upstairs and sit him on the edge of his bed had begun to feel normal. He bent to untie his boots, but Calum beat him to it and eased them off his feet. Dude, you don’t have to undress me. I can do it. But the words didn’t find their way to Brix’s tongue. Instead, he raised his arms so Calum could slip his T-shirt off, then forced himself to stand and swap his jeans for comfy trackies.
Calum disappeared. Brix’s heart followed him, but his body couldn’t comply. He crawled into bed, so tired his head was spinning, even as he strained to hear any sign that Calum had come back. For too long, there was nothing, then the bed dipped behind him and Brix found his head suddenly in the warm, soothing safety of Calum’s lap.
“Will you tell me what it’s like?”
Brix opened his eyes. “‘What it’s like’?”
“Living with it.” Calum stared down at him. “Does it make you ill?”
“Not often. Most days I forget I have it.”
“Really?” Calum’s gaze turned quizzical. “I don’t get that.”
Brix steeled himself, then relinquished the best pillow in the world and sat up, spinning around so his legs could wrap loosely around Calum’s waist, a move that seemed to surprise Calum, until Brix took his hands. “It doesn’t make me ill. I’ve been on the medication for years now. My viral load is undetectable, and my CD4 counts are good. In fact, I reckon it’s the meds that give me the most gip, more than the disease.”
“The meds . . . you mean Truvada, right?”
A few years ago, Brix would’ve been surprised Calum had heard of the magic blue pill that kept him alive, but times were changing fast, and for the better. “Aye, I take Truvada combined with another drug. Three fat pills a day, two red, one blue.”
“And the side effects are nasty?”
“Only if I don’t pay attention. You gotta take them regularly, with food, and leave off the binge drinking and shit. Truvada’s a bitch on an empty stomach. Hurts like hell and gives me vertigo.”
“That’s why you get dizzy sometimes?”
“You’ve noticed, eh? Thought I was better at hiding it than that.”
Calum grinned a little, though it was strained. “Most people don’t stare at you as much as I do, remember?”
The theory made sense if Calum stared at Brix half as much as Brix did him. “You can stare at me all you like.”
“Noted.” Then Calum’s grin faded. “What else do the meds do? You’ve seemed really tired since I came here. Is that the virus, or the meds?”
Brix shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I do get tired sometimes, and a nasty bout of flu most winters, but so do lots of people who aren’t living with HIV. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s in my head. I just try to look at the numbers and go from there.”
“The numbers . . . you mean your blood counts?”
“Aye. The viral load measures the level of HIV in my blood—how many copies of the virus I have, and the CD4 count monitors my immune system . . . how well my body is coping with the infection.”
Calum nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of that before, but I’ve never known what it meant.”
“Neither did I until I had to, Cal. Don’t look so guilty.”
“I’ll stop feeling guilty when I understand what it all means for you. Humour me, yeah?”
Fair enough. Brix delved into the bank of knowledge he’d accrued over the years and laid it out as best he could. “Because the medication works for me, my viral load is low—undetectable, remember?—which means I’ve got fuck-all HIV active in my system. My CD4 count is high—twelve hundred last time—which is good . . . normal, like yours, probably.”
“Like mine? So you’re healthy?”
