Talker's Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page A

myself at him. And, he had every right to expect….” Can’t finish that sentence. “And I was so excited. I was thinking, ‘Weehoo—tonight’s the night, I’m finally gonna get laid!’”
     
    Brian let out what might have been a laugh next to him, and Talker couldn’t look at him—couldn’t hardly stand his touch on Talker’s knee. Brian had been there the whole time. He must have said, “But I love you…” twenty times, and Tate knew… oh goddammit, he fucking knew how hard it was to put your heart out on the line like that, and Brian had done it for him, and done it repeatedly, and Tate had patted his head like a puppy dog and said, “Yeah, baby, too bad you’re straight.”
     
    “ You and Brian weren’t together at this time?” Dr. Sutherland’s voice was surprised—as he should be. Talker would have been ten-thousand kinds of fool to not know Brian really was Prince Charming, right? Turns out, Talker was twenty-thousand kinds of fool, because he’d walked out on Prince Charming to go get his cherry popped by Snidely Whiplash.
     
    And Brian saved him again. “Tate still thought I was straight,” he said softly. “My bad. I… I didn’t come out very convincingly at first.”
     
    The doctor frowned, as though knowing there was a story here and not sure if he wanted to chicken-walk into it, or stick to his guns. He finally just nodded at Tate to carry on.
     
    “I… I kept thinking about Brian,” Tate confessed. Brian didn’t know this. Didn’t he deserve to know this? “I… you didn’t see how he looked as I walked out the door. He….” An apologetic glance at Brian, who was looking at him like he held water in his cupped hands as they stood in the middle of the desert. “He looked at me like I was worth something. Like it hurt him to watch me leave. Like he was worried about me.” Brian made a tiny sound then—a sound almost like Sunshine the rat, except sadder. “So I decided to come home.”
     
    Brian sucked in a breath, and Tate risked a look at him. “You never told me that,” he muttered, his low voice broken like a fire grate.
     
    Talker shrugged. “It seemed like some useless information,” he said, and Brian shuddered, all over, and swallowed. Talker had seen Brian cry once, and only once. It had been the night they’d gotten together, the night Brian had shaved his head to a Mohawk and put on makeup and combat boots and tried to convince Tate that yes, his roommate was gay, and yes, dammit!!! he was very much in love with Tate Walker. So Brian was pretty good at keeping it low key, keeping it together, not letting anything hang out.
     
    But it was hard, a struggle, something that hurt to watch, as Brian swallowed and swallowed and willed his face into its usual placid, stoic expression. Finally, he got hold of the quiver in his lip and said, “Not to me. Not useless to me,” before he took Tate’s hand and kissed it, gently, and then looked away, to the same pile of tinsel that Dr. Sutherland had studied with such intensity a few minutes before.
     
    “So if you were going home to Brian, then what happened that night was….”
     
    Tate shrugged, and tried to make it nonchalant and ironic, like one of those suave movie actors, confessing to hidden, echoing caves of pain in their past with a few, carefree words.
     
    “A misunderstanding,” he said faintly. “It was a misunder-standing.”
     

     

     
    He looked down now at Brian’s shattered face and damaged body. His lips moved, maybe to use the word again, because God knew, it had Brian choking on his own bitterness back in the shrink’s office.
     
    “What?” Lyndie asked. She’d asked him who the bad guys were, and Tate moved his mouth again, maybe to tell her that it was “a misunderstanding,” but he couldn’t. Not when his lover was here, damaged and bleeding, unconscious and in pain. This was no “misunderstanding.” This was retaliation, from a twisted, violent