Page 38 of Shades of Henry
“Oh dear God!” Lance’s horror was eloquent as he carefully pulled out the last of the parking lot gravel from Henry’s shoulder. “Is there any other part that stings?”
“My knees?” Henry looked down and saw that the pebbles had sliced him open. One of the cuts was trickling blood again. “My pride,” he mumbled, because that was the worst part.
“It could not have been that bad.” But it was obvious Lance was only asking to make sure.
“So bad.” Henry shuddered. “Twice. I… oh my God. He’s not that much older than I am, but once he got the drop on me and grabbed my ear, and the other time—” Jesus. “—I swung first and he took me apart.”
“Poor baby,” Lance said, kneeling at his feet and working gently on those cuts on his knees. “And he still took you to the autopsy?”
Henry let out a sigh. “We seemed to have reached… I dunno. Détente. I… him and Cramer, they were pretty up-front. They told me I’d probably be brought in for questioning tomorrow, and my one and only answer needs to be ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ They seemed pretty on top of it. But… I don’t know.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “I… I wanted him to think I was worth it, that was all.”
Lance grunted. “That sounds sort of… stalky.”
Henry opened his eyes and let his mouth soften. “I want you to think I’m worth it more,” he said. “Besides, it’s not a sex thing. We’d kill each other. It’s more… this guy? This guy was… you know how everybody wants a hero? You want somebody to be like, somebody who is worthwhile to emulate?”
Lance nodded. “My attending physician—Dr. Schearer. He’s a really good guy. Decent. Kind. Enjoys the money, but that’s not why he’s there. I watched him treat this woman with schizophrenia today. He was the best. He made her feel valued, like she was important, and explained to her why she needed to take her medication. It was… you know, why people go into healing.”
“Any crushing going on there?” Henry asked. And while part of him was afraid of the answer, most of him knew.
“No,” Lance told him. “I’ve got… other prospects.”
Henry let out a breath and rested his hand briefly in Lance’s hair. “I know the feeling,” he confessed.
“We just have to clearmyguy for a murder he didn’t commit,” Lance said dryly, standing up. “And it would begreatif he didn’t piss off his lawyer while he was at it.”
Henry groaned. “Dude, if only.” Cramer had hardly looked at Henry, though. It had been all Henry and Rivers.
“You think this guy will forgive you for being a complete assbucket?” Lance asked. “I mean… it sounds like you need him on your side.”
Henry tilted his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. “God. I have no idea.”
Lance put a large gauze pad on each knee. “Wait, you said Galen looked him up? When we’re done in here, we can look him up too.”
Henry nodded docilely. “You know,” he muttered, “the cops are going to pick me up tomorrow probably. We need to tell the guys to call Galen and Cramer when that happens. I….” He took a deep breath. “Everybody remembered me throwing Sampson in the dumpster. And there he is again. It’s just too coincidental. I’m spot-on for it.”
Lance stretched his shoulders and began to remove his gloves, but he didn’t back up, and Henry drew some comfort from his nearness. “Any idea who did it?”
Henry felt a small thrill at the next part. Yes, the day had sucked, but the investigation—watching the way Jackson Rivers’s mind worked as he tried to figure out what happened to prove Henrycouldn’thave killed Martin Sampson—thathad been fascinating.
“Not yet,” Henry said thoughtfully. “But the autopsy revealed a puncture wound on his hip. Tagliare was going to get a tox screen, even though the blunt force head trauma is what did him in.” Henry shuddered. He hadn’t seen his one-night lover, not really, not when he’d been on the slab. But when Dr. Tagliare had shown him the guy’s liver—scarred and sickly brown from drug dependency instead of healthy and blue-red—Henry had suffered a terrible realization. That guy who’d picked him up, sweet-talking, funny, and yes, a monster in bed, had sore parts, parts that nobody could see.
Wounds nobody had healed.
Like the porn models Henry had been dealing with over the last few months. He’d known Cotton was lost, that Lance had his damage, that Curtis seemed just too cool and too all over it to be real. But seeing that… that wrecked body—a boy who was dying before he was dead—had shocked Henry.
Was that whohewas too?
His disdain—the disdain he used to cover thathewas the guy his father had hated, whether his father had known it or not—was that covering up his rotting parts?
Rivers seemed to think so. Maybe that’s why he’d been so pissed when he’d realized Henry had been lying. Maybe he knew about things that festered. He’d been shirtless when Henry and Galen had walked in—the scars on his body were an assortment of old and new. How much wounding could a person take and still come back whole?
“You okay?” Lance asked softly, probably because Henry’s brain was chasing its own tail and the silence had stretched on too long.
“Sure.” God, it was a lie.
Lance sank to his haunches andmadeHenry meet his eyes. “Henry, are you okay?”
“No,” Henry whispered, powerless. Shouldn’t you tell the truth to your friends?
