Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
The shell that Christopher had cloaked himself in from the moment he’d started speaking began to crack. His voice was no longer even and disinterested, and he’d started to rock his body back and forth.
“Take your time, sweetheart,” I said as I shifted closer to him. I put my legs on either side of him so that I could pull him against my chest.
“I could feel something coming out of me. I thought it was blood. I thought maybe he’d torn something inside of me.”
“But it wasn’t blood,” I said softly. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep my voice calm and my grip on Christopher gentle.
“No, it wasn’t. Peter was still getting dressed, so I confronted him with it. He just smiled and said condoms sometimes broke. That smile… it made everything inside of me cold,” Christopher admitted. “I found the condom on the floor next to the bed. There was nothing in it, and there weren’t any tears, not big enough ones anyway for that amount of semen to pass through it.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
Christopher shook his head. “I don’t really remember. I showered. I know that. But everything else is a blur.”
“Did you go to the authorities?”
Christopher laughed harshly. “And tell them what? I’d had sex with my boyfriend, but I’d been too stupid to realize he’d taken the condom off at some point?”
“You are not stupid,” I said angrily as I forced Christopher to look at me. “And you are not at fault in any of this. You trusted him to protect you. You trusted him to take care of you. You were inexperienced and in pain, so what baseline did you have to tell you something was off when he put himself inside of you. You did everything right, Christopher.”
Tears began to shimmer in Christopher’s eyes, and I could only pray I wasn’t the cause. I dragged him back against my chest. I held him like that for a long time until we’d both calmed down a bit. Pip had wandered off in the meantime, but not far. He was curled up in the middle of one of the pillows.
“Did you go get tested right away?” I asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me to get tested. I just wrote it off as Peter being someone who liked fucking guys bare and didn’t have a problem using subterfuge to get what he wanted. He disappeared from the program a few days later. No one knew where he’d gone. A little over six months ago as I was nearing the end of the program, I shadowed a nurse who did hospice care. She’d go to different homes in the area to check on terminal patients who wanted to pass away at home rather than in a hospital or nursing home. Our last stop was this huge house a few miles from the university. The patient had AIDS and wasn’t expected to last more than a week.”
Christopher began to rock again despite being in my arms, so I took over and rocked both of us in the hopes it would help him get through the rest of his story.
“I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. I didn’t recognize him. Even when the nurse greeted him, I had no idea what was happening. It was like a wire between my eyes and brain had gotten cut. But he recognized me. He asked the nurse to get him some juice from the kitchen. Once she was gone, Peter started to laugh. He thought he’d missed his chance to see my expression when I found out. Turned out he liked telling the guys he fucked that he was positive, but he always waited a couple of months to give the disease time to progress. Said it was like fucking them all over again. But he’d gotten too sick before he could tell me. Turned out he’d infected over a dozen guys on purpose. He hadn’t lied about having a boyfriend who’d cheated on him. That’s how Peter got it. The boyfriend died within a month of learning he had it, and Peter figured he didn’t have much time either, so why not take as many guys with him as he could. Didn’t hurt if they also happened to look like his boyfriend.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
We were still rocking back and forth, but I had a feeling I was the one who needed it at the moment. I’d never felt such a bone-chilling need to hurt someone. Despite what I did for a living, I wasn’t a violent guy. But the knowledge that the fucker had put Christopher through all of this out of some sense of twisted revenge made me want to tear anything and everything around me to shreds. Christopher must have sensed my agitation because he sought out one of my hands and linked our fingers.