Page 40 of Any Given Lifetime
Chapter Fourteen
For the thirdtime in as many days, Joshua’s night was peppered with wakefulness and anxiety. His bed seemed far too big. His dreams, when he did manage to fall to sleep, were a hodgepodge of frustration, grief, and old, thwarted desire.
Joshua ran his hand over the pillow beside him, remembering the last few months of Lee’s life, when they’d thought the experimental treatment to stop the damage the nanites had wreaked on Lee’s vascular system had worked. There had been a lot of joy, a sense of pardon, and Joshua’s dreams had seemed innocent enough.
During that time, he’d had a reoccurring one of a beehive dripping with honey. The hive had swarmed, and the bees danced in the air around him when he approached, greeting him cheerfully with their secret message-bearing movements.
Later, he remembered that historically it had been believed that bees took the message of a person’s death to the gods. He wondered if somehow his subconscious mind had known that they were in the middle of a honey-sweet reprieve and that Lee was on his way out of life despite the apparent success of the treatment. It certainly explained his lack of surprise when Lee had collapsed during breakfast, his face going white as he’d bled out internally, dying in only minutes, while Joshua had held him and whispered to him not to be afraid.
Joshua groaned and rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes, remembering how Lee had apologized to him as he died. At the last, Lee had remarked with a kind of surprise, “I’m so cold, babe,” and then he’d been gone.
Even now, Joshua didn’t know for sure what Lee had intended with his apology—sorry that he’d been so enthusiastic about the nanite procedures? Sorry that he was leaving Joshua alone just like Neil had, or sorry that he was dying in Joshua’s arms? Whatever he’d meant, Joshua had told him it was okay. “It’s okay, I love you, don’t be afraid.” He’d said it urgently, over and over.
After Lee was well and truly gone, he’d managed to call 911. The paramedics had arrived, and Joshua had held Lee’s lifeless body tight for a last moment before the paramedics had asked him to move aside. They worked uselessly while Joshua watched, tears streaming down his face.
He hadn’t dreamed of bees again until the night after he’d met Neil Green.
It took forever for him to fall asleep, his mind replaying every moment of his conversations with Dr. Green and presenting him again and again with the uncanny resemblance to his Neil. The piercing blue eyes, the jawline and long neck, the way his fingers were shaped, and the color of his hair, the hold of his lips, and even the tense barbs that seemed to fly out of his mouth before he could think them through. How many times had Joshua heard him talk that way to lab assistants when he was angry?
As Joshua finally dropped off, his fingers fisted into the sheets on Lee’s side of the bed, seeking comfort from the memory of his husband, he found he was walking toward a honey-dripping beehive. Unperturbed by the buzzing of the bees around him, he knelt by the hive and let some of the honey drip onto his finger. He tasted its sweetness as the bees danced by his head, waiting for him to tell them something to take back to the gods.
The peace of the moment evaporated as Joshua searched deeply for words and couldn’t find them. There was something important—a message, yes, but maybe it wasn’t for him to deliver; maybe it was for him to receive.
Joshua listened to the buzzing as hard as he could. He felt the tickle of the bees landing on his ears and crawling into his ear canal, buzzing, buzzing, urging him to take what they had to give him, but he couldn’t decipher it. He didn’t speak their language.
Then Joshua woke in a panic, scratching at his ears to shake the buzzing noise away. Impotent and frustrated, he was lost and alone.
Two days later, he still felt the same way. The dream kept coming back whenever his body succumbed to exhaustion. He’d just woken from it again, and the room was barely lit with dawn.
Joshua sat up, stretched, and closed his eyes as he thought of Neil Green’s mouth. His cock throbbed with his usual morning wood, and he resisted the urge to reach down to jerk off. His resolve only lasted a few moments, though, as his mind went to the length of Neil Green’s throat and his familiar eyes.
What did it hurt to imagine? If only for a few minutes?
Joshua clenched his jaw as he palmed his cock, and then gripped it firmly, imagining Dr. Green’s challenging expression. In his mind’s eye, Joshua grabbed Dr. Green by the hair, tugged him forward into a kiss that was searing and hot, and then forced him to his knees. He could show Dr. Green a better use for his runaway mouth.
Joshua imagined Dr. Green eagerly opening his lips to suck Joshua in. The wet, hot slickness of his tongue and cheeks engulfed Joshua’s cock, and he didn’t last after that, coming hard enough that his ejaculate hit his chin and he was left gasping for air. In his imagination, Dr. Green looked unbearably smug and far too pleased with himself.
Even that made Joshua’s cock twitch again.
“Crap,” Joshua muttered, wiping the come from his chin with one hand. He brought it up to his mouth, sucking his own fingers clean.
He wished it was just the unexpected lust that he felt for Dr. Green that was eating at him, but it wasn’t. The resemblance was so overwhelming, the familiarity so unexpected and intense, that Joshua hadn’t been able to stop his mind from asking questions ranging from the improbable to the impossible.
Joshua showered and headed into his offices at the lumber company, determined to flip through the hard copy of the information sent to him from Emory one more time before calling to check with the Private Investigator in Atlanta.
Adair Pimberton came at the recommendation of one of his oldest contacts, so Joshua felt certain of her competence. She’d see to it that Joshua would know what kind of soap and laundry detergent Dr. Green used within twenty-four hours. She was that good.
Joshua hadn’t intended to go so far as to have Dr. Green investigated, but after the first sleepless night, he’d been unable to put his questions aside. He’d started looking over the proposal again, and it wasn’t a bad one necessarily—if he could put his doubts to rest on the nanite project, and satisfy his need to know more about Dr. Green at the same time, then it was a win/win endeavor.
Joshua justified it to himself by telling the board of the Neil Russell Foundation. “I’m still unresolved on the funding of the Emory nanite grant proposal. I just need a little more information on the kid who’s running the whole thing. He struck me as a potential loose canon.”
The fact that his need for information came mainly from his inability to stop wondering just who the kid really was, and if he was related to Neil or not, wasn’t something he felt the need to share.
In his obsessive thoughts about Dr. Neil Green, Joshua had even gone so far as to wonder if Neil had once been a sperm donor. While Neil had never seemed to express an interest in having children during the time he and Joshua had known each other, Joshua didn’t think it was outside of the range of possibility that Neil’s ego could have led him to donate his genetic material for the betterment of the future. Joshua couldn’t even completely dismiss the idea that Neil would have willingly donated to a childless woman he admired. He’d been a very loving man to his friends.
And then there were the other thoughts—the ones that no amount of liberally applied logic or daylight could dispel, making Joshua conclude that he’d gone around the bend, and was, at the very least, not entirely sane. Those thoughts all boiled down to one thing: somehow Dr. GreenwasNeil. Not someone like Neil, not a relative to Neil, but actually Neil himself. It was ludicrous.
Joshua sat down at his desk, unlocked the middle drawer, and pulled out the file folder again. It contained the written proposal as drawn up by Dr. Neil Green, and it was, strangely, a rather amusing read. Dr. Green was seemingly incapable of not inserting parentheticals such as, “Translation of all those big words in the previous sentence: nanites repair brain damage, people get better, hooray! Life extended! Now they can party into even older age.” Obviously, Brian Peters either had no control over the kid, or he hadn’t seen the final draft sent in to the foundation.
