Authors: Kallysten
“Multiple
organ transplant, at least.”
Eli
chuckled. “If you say so.”
“Maybe
even a multiple transplant in a case of situs invertus. Mmm, yes, nice...”
“Always
so romantic,” Eli murmured as he brushed a kiss to Calden’s brow, but Calden
looked like he’d already drifted into sleep.
Leaving
him was always hard, but Eli reminded himself yet again that Calden needed some
rest, and left the room. In the office, he looked for a few moments through the
mess in which Calden had found a notebook months earlier, but in the end he went
out. Between the note taped to the front door, written in Calden’s hand and
asking him not to go out if he’d just woken up and was alone, and the simple
fact that Calden was exhausted, Eli was fairly certain he had enough time for a
full shopping trip, and indeed when he came back and peeked in, Calden was
still in bed, deeply asleep.
Eli
put the groceries away before sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee,
a new notebook, and a pen. He thought for a few moments before putting the pen
to the first line of the first page.
You
asked me before when that first line became true, and I couldn’t answer you.
I’ve been thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and I still don’t know.
I’ve felt this way for as long as I’ve known you. Which is stupid, because what
idiot falls in love with the most arrogant student in the class? Maybe that’s
why I didn’t see it for what it was. Or maybe I didn’t want to jeopardize our
friendship and our work relationship. Either way, I didn’t recognize it in
myself, not for all the time we were friends, and not even when I fought so
hard to have you reinstated after your overdose. Others saw it, but not me.
Bryce saw it, I suppose. It’d explain why he was always so wary of you, why he
thought I’d end up with you sooner or later. I wouldn’t have cheated on him,
that’s not who I am, but when he first said the word separation, I didn’t
argue.
Lifting
the pen off the page, Eli reread what he’d written so far. He wasn’t sure that
was what Calden wanted from a new diary, and it’d be easy to tear out the page
and start over, but there was a reason why Eli’s thoughts had taken this path,
and he could see where the path led.
Not
what Calden wanted, maybe, but possibly what he needed.
I
didn’t mean to talk about him. I meant to talk about us. But now that I’ve
written this, I wonder—is this why you fear so much that I’ll leave you?
Because you know I left my husband of a few months to be with someone else? It
must make me look like a very fickle person. But you know me better than that.
I believed in you when everyone thought your career was over, when you yourself
thought you were finished as a surgeon. I hope you can believe me in return
when I say this: I love you, and I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.
Epilogue - June 2
nd
The
hardest part is waiting for Eli to wake up. He can get awfully grumpy when
Calden cuts his sleep short—or at least, that’s what Calden wrote in their
book. Eli penned in an answer, pointing out that not everyone has frighteningly
abnormal sleep patterns. Calden answered that there is nothing frightening
about it… and that conversation continued for a full two pages over a couple of
weeks.
Calden
paces as he waits, sitting at the piano and getting up again without playing,
practically bouncing from wall to wall with nervous excitement.
Finally,
finally
Eli wakes up, as the water running in the bathroom announces.
Calden starts the coffeemaker—the notebook says Eli likes it when Calden makes
coffee for him—but Eli comes down before the coffee is ready, and Calden can’t
bear to wait a second longer.
“What’s
going on?” Eli asks, yawning, as Calden drags him to the living room. “Can you
give me two minutes—”
“I
gave you almost eight hours. I was waiting for June second, and it’s been June
second for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes. Here. Sit down.”
Eli
looks pained as he sits on the sofa. “We don’t usually celebrate June second,
you know,” he says with a sad smile.
Calden
doesn’t reply and presses a couple of pages he tore from a medical journal into
Eli’s hands. Eli looks at Calden sitting next to him, then at the pages, his
eyes running briefly over them before he gives him a short nod.
“I’ve
read this before,” he says. “It’s one of the longest and most detailed studies of
a patient with anterograde amnesia.”
“So
you know about the maze,” Calden says, barely suppressing his grin. “And how—”
“The
patient solved it progressively faster, even though he had no memory of solving
it previously, yes. It’s the same principle as muscle memory. It’s why you can
learn new pieces on the piano and get better at them over a few—”
“Ask
me about my memory palace,” Calden cuts in, smiling widely.
Something
shifts in Eli’s expression, minute but still noticeable. Not hope; not yet. The
hope that hope is possible, maybe.
“Tell
me about your memory palace,” he asks quietly.
“Ask
me about the pond,” Calden says, his smile widening a little more.
“Tell
me about the pond.”
“Ask
me how many stepping stones were in the pond.”
“How
many stepping stones were in the pond?”
“Before
the illness? Seventeen. There used to be seventeen stepping stones in the koi
pond.”
Seventeen
memories linked to Eli. His favorite food. His middle name. The name of his dog
when he’d been a kid. The number of stitches it had taken to finish the
reattachment of his arm. The exact color of his eyes on a sunny day, their
color under a cloudy sky or under the fluorescent lighting at the hospital. Other
small details that made him who he was—that made him the person Calden loved.
Eli
blinks, licks his lips, and asks in a murmur, “How many are there now?”
It
took a long, long time. A text file on Calden’s phone lists the first day
Calden tried to create the memory cues, along with all the days after that when
he found nothing new in the pond and tried again, the first day when something—a
glimmer over the water more than anything else—appeared in the pond, and all
the small steps after that until now.
It’s
not a cure, not even a solution because Calden didn’t know it was there,
wouldn’t have known to look for it if his phone hadn’t told him to check.
But
it is… something. Progress. The proof that Calden’s brain might be trained to
remember in new ways—or not so new; he’s been using the method of loci for more
than half his life, after all.
“Twenty
stones,” he says.
His
hand shakes a little when he points at his left arm, then at the two lines on
his chest, framed by tattoos representing the molecules of chemicals associated
with love. The diagnosis should be in a different place of Calden’s memory
palace because it’s not strictly related to Eli, but correcting it now would
take more effort than he cares to exert at the moment.
“Twenty
stones, including three new ones linked to these tattoos. Three new stones.
Three new memo—”
He
can’t finish, not with Eli’s mouth pressing hard against his for a harsh,
desperate, all-encompassing kiss.
It’s
okay. They can talk about it later. They have all the time in the world. It’s
not like either of them is going anywhere.
The
end
Excerpt
When Jay reclined far enough
in his seat, making the bolts that held it down creak and complain, all he
could see was stars. The walls over his head and in front of him were solid
metal, like the rest of the Danaus, but here the smooth panels doubled as
screens. At that moment, they might as well have been glass. He had turned on
all of them—let Kar complain about wasted energy—and they reflected perfect
images of what lay beyond the hull of the ship.
They were too far from any
system Jay had visited while growing up so the constellations weren’t anything
he recognized, but stars were old friends, wherever he went. Distant and cool,
maybe, sometimes too silent, but always present.
“Receiving coordinates.”
Jay ignored the computer’s
announcement with a flash of satisfaction at his small rebellion. He didn’t
need to be there to receive that data. Kar had just been trying to piss him
off.
“And he did that quite well,”
he muttered to himself. “Jealous bastard. Just because he isn’t getting any…”
The flash of an idea burst
into his mind. He sat up abruptly, already grinning, and turned to the computer
panel to the right of the navigation display. The Danaus was a fine ship, but
rudimentary. Its systems had been outdated long before Jay had decided that
hacking was a lot more fun than programming. His instructor had disapproved,
especially after Jay had snooped in his personal files and found a few very
enlightening videos. Years later, his mother still blamed the incident for
Jay’s preferences as far as the gender of his partners was concerned. He was
the only person he knew who could match her stubbornness—and dared to.
He fiddled with the synchro
program for a few moments before he asked, “Computer, report on all life
systems.”
The computer droned on about
air, water, pressure and so forth. Jay ignored the words but focused on the
now-male voice, adjusting the pitch and speed, and even tweaking the system so
that the remnants of a Carellese accent colored certain sounds. He soon had the
perfect voice and stopped the computer in the middle of its inventory of all
the little things that needed fixing on the ship.
That list of things to fix
seemed to lengthen every time Jay heard it. Nothing life-threatening, but a
long list just the same. They needed credits, and a lot of them. He glanced at
the coordinates the Cisseis had sent them, wondering what they would be hunting
for this time. The name of the system felt vaguely familiar, but before Jay
could try to remember, Kar’s voice rose from the comm.
“Jay. The nexus is sealed.
Release and start us on a course to the coordinates the Cisseis sent.”
He didn’t acknowledge the
order, but he still followed it immediately. Kar could complain all he wanted.
The truth was, Jay and Will did their work, and they did it well.
A few pressed buttons caused
them to part company with the Cisseis. Jay looked at the coordinates again and
plotted the first jump. The navigation computer checked his data automatically
before revving the engines. The low, bone-rattling noise would be warning
enough, but he opened the comm anyway and announced curtly, “Jump in five.”
Five seconds later, he
executed the jump command. The Danaus seemed to lurch forward, then everything
was still for a split second. The arrival was the part Jay liked the least. On
a ship this small, the abrupt stop was often enough to make you stumble if you
weren’t careful. His chair creaked. He plotted the next jump—they would need
about twenty more to reach their destination, with a few minutes of rest for
the engines between each jump.
The ship was about to make
its third jump when Will walked in. He just had time to sit in Kar’s chair
before the Danaus did its lurch-still-shudder dance. Jay threw him a quick smile
in the middle of charting the next jump.
“So what was that thing about
the ballet?” Will asked when Jay angled his chair toward him. With his arms
thrown behind his head and grasping the edge of the chair, his biceps were
thrown into sharp relief against his short-sleeved shirt.
“The what?” Jay replied
distractedly. “Oh. Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing,” Will
insisted. He leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, and looked at
Jay intently. “Most of the time you pretend you’ve never even set foot on a
Prime Planet. And suddenly you spout something about going to the ballet? Do
you even like ballet?”
Jay’s irritation, which had
faded with the practical joke he had prepared for Kar, floated back to the
surface of his mind. Will should have known better than to question him—like
Kar should have known better than to call him Jake. That was his father’s name
and he would be damned if he wore it one more day. “Whether I like ballet or
not was not the point,” he said, the words coming out like cracks of a whip.
“And I didn’t go.”
He gave Will a look that
clearly warned him against continuing and pivoted toward the navigation
controls. A few seconds before the next jump, he revved the engines.
“You didn’t go, you had them
come to you.” Will paused. From the corner of his eye, Jay could see him frown.
“What was it you said? On your own terms?”
Ignoring him, Jay flicked on
the comm. “Jump in five.”
“What does that even mean, on
your own terms?”
He stabbed the jump control
with a finger and turned to glare. The look was totally lost on Will, who
answered it with his sweetest smile. Jay consoled himself when the smile
wavered as they jumped.
“Come on, now,” Will said
afterwards. “I’m just trying to understand. Understand you.”
His eyes and attention back
on jump calculations, Jay snorted. “You make it sound like I’m this deep
mystery. I’m not. I’m just like you. I wanted to fly. I am flying. End of
story.”
He frowned uncertainly at his
math and followed the cursor as the computer checked his work. Everything
cleared out, and he nodded to himself. As he started turning back toward
Will—he could never ignore him for very long—his seat pivoted under Will’s grip
on the back of the chair. Will stood over him, dark eyes gleaming.
“You’re flying on a small ship
that’s falling apart at about the same speed we put it back together, when you
could have bought the best starship on the Troen docks. You could have bought
an entire fleet of starships.”
And that, right there, all
this questioning, was the reason why Jay didn’t like talking about his past. No
one ever understood. No one could understand that hadn’t been born in the
Lodge. He wished he could have left his old life completely behind him, but no
amount of money would convince anyone to remove the five tattooed lines that
twisted around his neck, branding him as a member of the Lodge. You could run
away from the Lodge, but it never fully let you go. He understood why, of
course. Since his childhood, he had been trained, taught, molded into the
decision maker the Lodge needed him to be. He wasn’t just an investment, he was
also one of the wheels needed to make the entire system run smoothly—and never
mind if he thought that the system was flawed, granting unimaginable riches to
a few while leaving a billion others to scratch the surface of arid rocks not
to die of hunger.
Unconsciously, he raised his
hand to his neck and scratched at the tattoo, stopping only when he noticed
Will’s too-understanding eyes following his gesture.
“Fly the best starship money
can buy and then what?” He forced his hand back onto his lap, curling it into a
fist. “Go back every night to a mansion so big that I can barely find my wife
and kids? Decide every morning how many people will starve that day when I set
the price for grain? Spend my days with people whose deepest concern is whether
their new jewelry will outshine mine? Believe me, no Troen starship would have
brought me as far as the Danaus has.”
Will slowly straightened up
and crossed his arms. He tilted his head as he observed Jay, his expression
softening. “On your own terms,” he murmured, showing he understood now.
Jay nodded sharply and looked
away. He’d never felt more exposed in front of Will—including the times Will
had been seated balls-deep inside him. The feeling was new, and not as
unpleasant as he would have expected. He didn’t mind so much that Will was
trying to figure out more than what he liked in bed. That, too, was unexpected.
He had started returning Will’s interested looks because he had thought it’d be
a fun way to pass time, but it was quickly becoming more than that.
“You know, when I first got
onto this ship I thought you were just a pretty face,” Will said, unknowingly
echoing his thoughts. “The more I get to know you, the more I realize I
underestimated you.”
Not unpleasant, but just the
same, Jay brought the conversation back to known ground. “Sure you did.” He
cupped his groin suggestively. “I’ve got a pretty dick too.”
Will’s burst of laughter was
bright and warm as sunshine. “You most certainly do.”
Jay glanced at the controls.
The next jump was seconds away. He revved the engines. “I’d even say, I’ve got
a worshipable dick.”
Will snickered. “Is that even
a word?”
“You’re saying my dick is not
worshipable?” Without waiting for an answer, he flicked the comm on just long
enough to give Kar the five seconds warning.
Will grabbed the edge of the
navigation console. “I’m saying…” His voice trailed off when the ship jumped.
When they stopped again, he staggered a little but quickly regained his balance
and his voice. “You know what, you’re right.”
His mouth already open to ask
what he was supposed to be right about, Jay glanced at him, only to see him
drop to his knees. He laughed in surprise. “What are you…?”
He lost his words when Will
shuffled forward, sliding underneath the navigation console in front of him.
Already, Will’s fingers were dancing against his crotch, awakening his cock
with the lightest touch, even as he undid his pants buttons. Without realizing
what he was doing, Jay spread his thighs to give him more room.
“W—Will?”
Clever fingers slipped inside
his boxers and coaxed his dick out in the open. The contrast between the
gentleness of his fingers and the slight roughness of the leather gloves
covering his palm was always startling. Will glanced up from beneath the
console. To Jay, his eyes suddenly seemed as dark, as vast, as full of stars as
space itself.
“What does it look like I’m
doing?” Will said with a wicked grin. He flicked the tip of his tongue against
Jay’s semi-hard cock. “I’m worshipping.”
“Now?” Jay croaked, his hips
shifting forward without his consent.
Will gave Jay’s cock a light
tug, and it answered by hardening further in his hand. “Why not now? It’s not
like we’re in an asteroid field or something.” The flat of his tongue ran from
the base of Jay’s cock to the very tip and back. “But you might want to plot
the next jump before Kar comes in to ask why we’re not moving.”
Jay’s fingers clenched on the
edge of the console, and he looked down just in time to see Will’s tongue skim
against the tip of his cock and lap at the bead of precome there.
“Jump?” The word came out in
a strangled moan. Only when he heard it did he understand its meaning. “Right.
Plot ju—” He took in a shaky breath when Will nuzzled his balls through his
boxers. “—jump. Can do.”
He pried one hand off the
console to type numbers in. He had to close his eyes briefly to get a grip on
himself. Will had just licked a twisting path all over his cock and was now
blowing softly along it.
“Oh God.”
Will chuckled. With his mouth
closed over the crown of Jay’s dick, the vibration was sheer torture. He pulled
away with a wet pop to say, “The name’s Will.”
…