Open Legs Said Daddy & His Best Friend I'm Their Biology Teaching Aid novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Normal Physiologic Response

In the parking garage Eli confesses two years of wanting, Gabe refuses him, and Kessling's complaint lands in the chair's inbox.

Gabe drove down to the third level of the hospital garage and parked in the corner beside a concrete pillar.

He turned the engine off and sat with both hands on the wheel.

Eli sat in the passenger seat with his jacket zipped to his chin.

The car smelled like coffee and the pine air freshener Frank had given Gabe as a joke ten Christmases ago.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

"You can yell," Eli said. "I would."

"I'm not going to yell."

"Then say something."

Gabe paused.

"I'm going to ask you one question, and I want the truth. Did your father put you up to this?"

"No." Eli frowned. "He texted me this morning. He was proud of me. That's all."

"Proud of you for what?"

"For doing something with my Thursdays. Why?"

Gabe looked at the pillar.

"No reason," he said, and he did not say anything else about it.

Eli turned in his seat.

"Gabe. Look at me."

"No."

"You didn't look at me once up there. Not once. You talked to the ceiling and you talked to the sink."

"That's called professionalism."

"It's called hiding."

Gabe's jaw tightened.

"You are twenty-four years old," he said. "You do not know what you walked into in that room."

"I knew exactly what I walked into."

Eli heard himself say it and kept going, because he knew he would never say it again if he stopped.

"I've wanted you for two years. Since my graduation. You were in the third row in that gray suit, and I walked across the stage and looked for you, and I haven't stopped looking for you since."

The garage was silent except for a car coming down the ramp somewhere above them.

"You didn't come to my birthday dinner," Eli said. "You sent a gift card."

"Eli."

"I knew why. I'm not stupid. You knew, and you stayed away."

"Stop."

"So today I signed a form. Because it was the only room where you'd have to touch me and say it was medicine."

He had imagined many versions of this speech in the shower.

None of them ended with his own voice cracking on the last word.

Gabe closed his eyes.

"I taught you to ride a bike," he said quietly. "I picked gravel out of your eyebrow. I held you at your mother's funeral when you were nine and you wouldn't let go of my sleeve."

"I remember."

"Then you understand why I can't."

"No," Eli said. "I don't. I'm not nine."

Gabe opened his eyes and finally looked at him.

It was a steady, tired look, and under the tiredness something in it was raw enough that Eli almost stopped breathing.

"Give me your wrist," Gabe said.

"What?"

"Your wrist. You're flushed and you're breathing fast. Give it to me."

Eli held out his left hand.

Gabe's fingers closed over the inside of his wrist, two of them pressing in, exactly where a doctor's would.

He looked at the dashboard clock.

"A hundred and twenty," he said.

"That's high."

"It's a little high."

"Now you," Eli said.

"No."

"You asked for mine. Give me yours. Doctor."

Gabe hesitated for the length of one slow breath.

Then he turned his right hand over on the console between them.

Eli took the wrist in his fingers.

The skin there was warm and the pulse underneath was hammering.

He did not need the clock.

"That's not a little high," Eli said softly.

Gabe pulled his hand back fast.

"That is adrenaline," he said. "I just stood in front of eleven residents and my worst colleague. I'm entitled."

"Sure."

"Don't say sure like that."

"What way?"

"Like you've won something."

Eli laughed, and it came out unsteady and surprised.

"Did I?"

"No." Gabe started the car. "You've lost a Thursday job and a tax bracket. You will not volunteer for this again. I'll find you something at the archive or I'll pay your rent gap myself, and this conversation stays in this car."

"I don't want you to pay my rent."

"Then you can starve with dignity."

"That sounded like a joke."

"It wasn't."

It sounded like one anyway, and for half a second the corner of Gabe's mouth gave him away.

Gabe's phone lit up in the cup holder.

He glanced down out of habit and went still.

Eli leaned over to see the screen.

It was a department email with the subject line: Formal Concern: Conflict of Interest, Teaching Session, Dr. G. Kelleher.

The sender was Dr. S. Kessling.

The recipient line said: Chair of Medicine.

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