Page 58 of Constantly Cotton
Falling Leaves
“YOU CANbreathe now,” Cotton said, his voice only shaking a little.
“You did fine,” Jason told him, wanting to reassure him somehow—pat his hand, kiss his forehead, something. But Cotton’s hands were encased in poly gloves, and he’d sterilized all the materials he’d needed. Very carefully, a stitch at a time, he’d removed the stitches from Jason’s side. Jason was surprised to realize they weren’t the stitches from the bullet wounds. Instead, they were stitches from where the flesh had been split to lance the infection underneath. The scars weren’t little puckers with the eruption of scar tissue beneath, but instead were bumpy tears, the imprint of the stitches very apparent.
“Yikes,” Jason said, looking at his flesh in the mirror. He had other scars—a couple of knife wounds, some bullet grazes—from his time deployed before he’d been promoted, but these were thick and deep and inexpertly tended to. “That’s not pretty.”
“You were being operated on by two PIs and an ex-porn model,” Cotton said tartly. “It was never going to be.”
Jason frowned. “I don’t remember that. It was sort of a blur.” He gave an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry.”
Cotton shook his head, rounding up the last of the bandages into a waste bag and setting the scissors and clamps aside to boil later. Jason had seen him do this and had been impressed. For a guy who professed to have had no working knowledge of medical procedure a month ago, he was damned sharp about it now.
“It was awful,” Cotton muttered. “You were out of it, and Lance was in the middle of surgery and couldn’t come. It was Jackson, Henry, and me, and all we knew was if we didn’t do something, you weren’t going to make it, and if we called an ambulance, you’d probably get shot or imprisoned.” He shuddered, looking away, but Jason could see his face was pale and his eyes red-rimmed.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, drifting a soothing touch down Cotton’s backside. “That must have been so brave of you—”
“I was terrified,” Cotton said flatly, finishing his cleanup and turning toward Jason. He didn’t come close enough for Jason to touch, though. Instead he leaned against the counter as though he was trying to be casual. “None of us knew what to do, and you were in so much pain, and your temperature was going up and up and—”
“Hey,” Jason murmured, standing up and moving toward him.
Cotton shook his head, but not like he was saying no, and not like he was trying to shake off Jason’s touch, but like he was trying to shake off the memory.
“Hey,” Jason said, crowding him, sensing the need for comfort like an ache under his own skin. “I’m okay. Look at that. You saw me at my worst, and now I’m all better, and you helped do that. Isn’t that amaz—”
“You almost died!” Cotton burst out. “I didn’t even know you then, and I was afraid. And now I know you, and I know it could happen again, and most of the time I can forget, but I’mterrified,and what if I lost you?”
Jason went still, the part they hadn’t spoken about in the last week catching up with both of them, but Cotton shook that off too.
“No, not that you go away. What if I don’t know you’re out there? I can be okay if I know you’re out there, that this guy who really cared about me is out there, but his stupid job saving the universe is taking him away. Igetthat, but what if you’re not out there? How do Iliveif you’re not out there in the world?”
His voice broke, and Jason pulled him close, his own eyes stinging. “You live,” he hissed harshly, although his hug was gentle. “You live. Whether I’m out there or not, youlive. Because leaving you is going to be like ripping my arms off, and my lungs, and all the other things, and the only thing keeping me from bleeding out is going to be knowingyou’re okay. So you find a purpose, you start school, you fall in love again, but youlive!”
And there it was, the unspoken thing between them, what they both knew to be true.
“I willneverfall in love again,” Cotton sobbed against his chest, and Jason held him tight, his own shoulders shaking, and he made a promise when there were no promises to be made.
“Me neither,” he whispered. “You take all the lovers you need, but I will never fall in love again.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” Cotton said brokenly. “So you need to live too.”
“Okay,” Jason said. Oh, this was worse than the first promise, but he’d make it if he had to. “I’ll live knowing you’re out there.”
“Me too.”
And that was it, all the words either of them had, and for a moment they just held each other in the bathroom, the scars on Jason’s body forgotten.
It was the scars on their hearts that were going to be much harder to bear.
AN HOURlater Cotton and Jason made it all the way around the lake, partly at a run.
September was nearing the end of her dance, and the mornings were becoming sharper and more bracing, the afternoon shadows stretching longer and darker, but in the heat of the day, when the sun was pressing hard on their heads like a flatiron, the lake still beckoned, even if it was chillier now than it had been when they’d first arrived.
But Jason had pushed Cotton to take his stitches out just so he, too, could go swimming in the damned lake, and this time, when Cotton left his shoes and T-shirt and small daypack on the shore, Jason left his too, and together they whooped and hollered and screamed as they jumped into the freezing water.
A few minutes later they were treading water as their teeth stopped chattering, and Cotton shook his head. “I swear, it’s gotten colder in this last day. I’m not sure I want to jump in tomorrow!”
“Don’t care,” Jason panted, grinning. “I had to watch you swim with Daniels, Briggs, Medina, and then Perez, Klausner, and Goldfarb. Dammit,onceI wanted to get to be the one half-naked with you in the lake.”
