Prey (58 page)

“You can’t be serious.”

“What? Why not? I’m still a Canadian citizen.”

“You know how I feel about marriage. I don’t know why it exists; I’ve never seen anything but misery associated with it. Hell, I make a living on broken marriages, on spouses who cheat and lie to one another, who break prenups and cat around town with the Dallas Cowboys or their cheerleading squad, or both. I mean, if gays want to be as miserable as straights, fine, let ’em marry, but I think it’s a disaster no matter the gender.”

Paris was still grinning. “You’re such a romantic.”

“You just want a reason to get yourself a Cowboy. Or a green card.”

“Just think of how many people we’ll upset if we come home and claim we got married in Canada. Eli would probably have a stroke, and Stovak’s head would explode. I bet Doctor Braunbeck would stop offering us gorp.”

“That’s no fair. You know I do most things out of spite.”

“I know! And this would be the ultimate act of revenge.”

He was serious, wasn’t he? Weird. But time wasn’t on Paris’s side, and that’s why Roan had pressed him to reconnect with his folks. Roan tried hard not to think about it, but Paris’s last transformational period had probably been the worst one yet; he’d lost way too much weight (at the end of the cycle, he had looked like a starvation victim), and the pain was so bad they’d had to up his drug dosage to levels so ludicrous he ended up 364

Andrea

Speed

sleeping most of the day. He even missed three days of work after the cycle was over; Roan thought he should have taken the whole week off, but Paris refused. He was just starting to look like his normal self again.

He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t want to think that Paris’s assessment of himself as a “dead man walking” was correct, but he knew it probably was. He didn’t know how much time he had left now, but it couldn’t be measured in years. He couldn’t imagine life without him in it, and yet he knew realistically he was going to have to prepare himself for just that.

How did you do that? How did you brace yourself for the most important person in your life dying on you? And that was the tragedy that almost everyone faced at some point in their life. He just thought it would never get to him because he’d tried so hard not to let anyone get that close.

He preferred being alone, he really did… only now he wasn’t so sure. He kind of hated himself for it, and on top of that he hated himself for hating himself over it. He just couldn’t win.

Roan looked at Paris and wondered where they would go from here, and if there would be any light at the end of the tunnel before it collapsed on top of them.

Too bad there was really no such thing as a happy ending.

ANDREA SPEED writes way too much. She is the Editor In Chief of Comixtreme, where she reviews comics as well as movies and occasionally interviews comic creators. She also has a serial fiction blog where she writes even more, and she occasionally reviews books for Joe Bob Briggs’s site. She might be willing to review you, if you ask nicely enough, but really she should knock it off while she’s ahead.

Visit her web site at http://www.andreaspeed.com. She tweets at http://twitter.com/aspeed.