Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
“Did he ever hit you?” I asked.
Christopher shook his head. “After the concealer thing, he told me he was covering up a couple of bruises from some guys who’d knocked him around because he was gay.”
I stiffened when I realized what Christopher wasn’t saying. I actually sat up a little, forcing Christopher to shift his position. He ended up sitting cross-legged on the bed alongside my hip.
“Being gone for weeks at a time because he was sick… concealer on his face…?” I shook my head in disbelief. “He knew he had AIDS.”
I hadn’t been able to keep the rage out of my voice. Christopher dropped his eyes and began winding his fingers together.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I murmured as I sat up even more, picking up Pip in the process. I handed the miffed kitten to Christopher.
“I wasn’t smart enough to put it together,” Christopher said after a few moments. “My feelings for him had started to get stronger, but I was nervous about having sex with him. He finally wore me down one afternoon while we were in my dorm room studying. It started off innocently enough with just some light touching and teasing. He told me how much he loved me and that he just wanted to be with me. I agreed but asked him to go slow and told him he had to wear a condom. He agreed. He even made a big show of putting it on so I could see. When he got behind me and started to push inside, it hurt a lot. All I felt was the burn. I thought it would get better if Peter just gave me some time to adjust, but as soon as he was inside of me, it was like something changed. He was rough and angry and at one point he even called me his ex’s name. It was over in minutes. When he was done, he said it had been fun and began pulling on his clothes. I could… I could…”
The shell that Christopher had cloaked himself in from the moment he’d started speaking began to crack. His voice was no longer even and disinterested, and he’d started to rock his body back and forth.
“Take your time, sweetheart,” I said as I shifted closer to him. I put my legs on either side of him so that I could pull him against my chest.
“I could feel something coming out of me. I thought it was blood. I thought maybe he’d torn something inside of me.”
“But it wasn’t blood,” I said softly. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep my voice calm and my grip on Christopher gentle.
“No, it wasn’t. Peter was still getting dressed, so I confronted him with it. He just smiled and said condoms sometimes broke. That smile… it made everything inside of me cold,” Christopher admitted. “I found the condom on the floor next to the bed. There was nothing in it, and there weren’t any tears, not big enough ones anyway for that amount of semen to pass through it.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
Christopher shook his head. “I don’t really remember. I showered. I know that. But everything else is a blur.”
“Did you go to the authorities?”
Christopher laughed harshly. “And tell them what? I’d had sex with my boyfriend, but I’d been too stupid to realize he’d taken the condom off at some point?”
“You are not stupid,” I said angrily as I forced Christopher to look at me. “And you are not at fault in any of this. You trusted him to protect you. You trusted him to take care of you. You were inexperienced and in pain, so what baseline did you have to tell you something was off when he put himself inside of you. You did everything right, Christopher.”
Tears began to shimmer in Christopher’s eyes, and I could only pray I wasn’t the cause. I dragged him back against my chest. I held him like that for a long time until we’d both calmed down a bit. Pip had wandered off in the meantime, but not far. He was curled up in the middle of one of the pillows.
“Did you go get tested right away?” I asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me to get tested. I just wrote it off as Peter being someone who liked fucking guys bare and didn’t have a problem using subterfuge to get what he wanted. He disappeared from the program a few days later. No one knew where he’d gone. A little over six months ago as I was nearing the end of the program, I shadowed a nurse who did hospice care. She’d go to different homes in the area to check on terminal patients who wanted to pass away at home rather than in a hospital or nursing home. Our last stop was this huge house a few miles from the university. The patient had AIDS and wasn’t expected to last more than a week.”