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Jimmy wakes and he's there, the he he feels he might come to remember, later, though now with the room and its daylight and sounds all mixed together, with everything that's trying to push itself into his brain, the sensations crowding around him and demanding he wake up...
He can't. The man, a fine Nordic blond, sits with his shoulders hunched and looks down at the sheet beside Jimmy's hip. His mouth is still, his hands folded in his lap. He can't, not the way he feels he should.
*
Jimmy wakes. He isn't sure he'd call it wakes exactly, he cracks open his eyes and sees the light-coloured man floating in greyish light filtered through the window behind him, flickering glimpses between his sticky eyelashes. For a moment Jimmy thinks they're both sealed in an aquarium, a dirty fishtank with the water drifting thick and musty around his thoughts.
Or one of them is, one on either side of a snot-smeared pane of glass.
It's hard to keep him in view. It's a constant strain, this struggle to keep his head up, to see through the murk. He lets himself sink.
*
He has a hand on Jimmy's hand. For how long, Jimmy couldn't say. It wasn't till he felt his hand lifted, tilted at one side with an odd gentleness, that he realised and the movement sends a wash of rage to fill his throat. The fuck is this faggot doing?
His hand's tilted and he slides beneath so Jimmy's hand lies between two palms. The man's pale lashes droop lower, his eyes close and he breathes in slow, in and in as if he's trying to fill himself and lift, to float away. Only, his hands are still on the bed, still folded. His fingers lifted Jimmy's hand and enclosed him, held him — hold him — firmly, deliberately, no questions or pussy-footing around. No floating fucking anywhere. Jimmy's terrified.
Something spasms in his chest, a flinching of his whole body away from this man and his lowered gaze and his hands. It feels like Jimmy wrenches his hand free, manages to curl himself into a ball of limbs in the centre of the bed. He pulls more than hard enough to do it but the man doesn't blink and his fingers, his bruised hands cover all of Jimmy's, just the same.
*
He wakes and he's on his side. Scarcely warm liquid trickles across his back and pools under his shoulder. A nurse holds a cloth to his chest, but she's looking above him, at whoever's behind him. She doesn't speak but her eyes hold the look of a sceptic, wary and doubtful. Behind him someone says, "It isn't everything." He says it. Jimmy hasn't heard his voice before this, can't say for sure he's even here, only that he's sure he sounds like this.
Water slops between his shoulderblades and the voice says, "Ink is just ink." The voice is tight and even, each word forced through carefully gritted teeth, but the hand. The hand with the cloth isn't scrubbing, it moves over his skin (ink, he remembers ink) with even strokes, the way he'd polish the hood of a cherished car. The nurse watches and the man speaks again, slow and distinct.
"He is not a bad person," he says and Jimmy wants to turn his head, he wants to move his hand behind him in a gesture his mind hasn't quite formed yet. He wants to see the look on the man's face but he slips limb by weighted limb back into sleep.
*
He wakes, more completely now and the man has his blue eyes on Jimmy's. He has a nervous tilt to his mouth, his face looks soft, hopeful, like he's expecting something but he's a little scared. Jimmy squints at him and the man smiles, small and secretive, like a boy whose imaginary friend has appeared at his side. There's a flush of pink high on his cheeks and something about him makes Jimmy smile.
His throat closes, clicks around something resistant, something he tries to swallow and can't shift, leaving him gasping, empty and panicking now as the smile cracks and fades from the man's face. He coughs and it raises a mechanised flapping from whatever's roosting beside his head. A woman murmurs and the man raises his hand and Jimmy shuts his eyes tight. His throat feels like drowning must, stripped raw, hollowed out yet full. His head throbs and his eyes sting and fill with red, then black.
*
His hand's cold, an outdoors chill must've seeped through his gloves — Jimmy assumes he goes outside, though he's never seen him leaving — each digit feels cold and distinct, the pads round as small stones yet not so smooth. He's moving, rubbing as if it's Jimmy's hand that needs warming, swiping back and forth with his thumb, fingers scratching and circling. Jimmy wants to tell him he's warm enough already, he's warm up his arm, to his shoulder and beyond, warmth trickling over to fill his ribs. He feels a rush of heat like he's bending over a bonfire. He's warm and the man's hands are still cold, his fingers are still tracing the lines of his palm and Jimmy lets his head tip back, breathes deeper and searches in his thoughts for something that feels as if it's there, under the surface of his skin.
*
He's tired, Jimmy can see the grey-blue smudges under his eyes, a puffiness to his face that doesn't belong there, makes him look washed up, like a wino loser or something. He wants to tell him, you look like shit, man, grin and needle him till he makes his little boy face, his believe-it-or-not smile. Jimmy makes a smile around the tube in his mouth, a grim looking thing, he suspects, but he needs to. He needs to see him smile.
*
They took the plastic tube out today, the pulling made Jimmy want to puke his insides out and left his mouth tasting bitter and Jimmy blinks at the space where the chair was, where it's been pushed back from his bed so the curtain sags where his visitor's shoulders would've been. All the coughing has his eyes watering and a few drops spatter the bowl his nurse holds to his lips. Jimmy spits and tries to swallow and everything hurts, it burns too much for anything but a shaky breath, and another as he stares at the curtain, at where the door might be.
*
He's here. Jimmy's awake when he steps around the curtain, dressed in a sweater, his hair combed and he looks awkward and sweet, like a high schooler with a dance to go to, with somebody's father to impress.
"Hi," he says as he sits on the edge of the chair.
Jimmy can't think of a word for this, of any explanation for this man at all. He works a sound from his empty throat but it isn't a word and this disappoints him. He clicks his teeth shut.
"Hi," says the man, leaning slightly, stiffly forwards. "It's Lars."
He's hard to read and Jimmy concentrates as closely as he can on his eyes. He looks tense, questioning but there's a teasing, playful edge to him that Jimmy may, he thinks, have seen before. The half-smile fades as Jimmy watches and he gives a split-second shiver, folds his hands in his lap and looks straight at Jimmy, his eyes wet and defiant as he says, softly as he would to a child or a timid horse, "I'm Lars."
When Jimmy smiles at him, for the moment before Jimmy reaches out his hand to him, this strange Lars person shivers again, bites a flash of white into his lip and shuts his eyes for a second or two, a couple of tears escaping before Jimmy gets a clumsy hold on his hand, before Lars is grinning and Jimmy, without the faintest trace of a reason why — why this, why him — grins just as widely in return.