Jesus, he was tired of that taste in his mouth. It felt like a family of raccoons had taken up residence behind his back teeth, and all the ice chips in the world couldn't wash away the taste. He tried moving his arms, but it seemed they were still being uncooperative, along with the rest of his body. What he really wanted to do was get up and pee, but apparently that wasn't going to happen any time soon.
His eyes opened despite his desire to fall back asleep, but his body didn't seem to give a damn about what he wanted. Blinking to clear away the clouds, his head was inclined just enough to see across the darkened room. In the chair last occupied by Viv sat a sleeping Martin, slumped over with one hand supporting his head.
Poor kid must've drawn the short straw, but Jack didn't have a lot of sympathy. He'd spent his fair share of midnight vigils when Martin had been shot, so he figured this was just the universe's way of leveling things out.
He didn't want to wake him but he also didn't want to lie there alone without some kind of diversion. And what the hell—Martin was there to keep him company, so he'd better not complain.
"Hey." The word came out as an indecipherable croak, so Jack coughed and tried again. "Hey, Martin. Wake up."
Martin's hand slipped and his head bobbed forward before he caught himself. He squinted in Jack's direction, then his mouth spread in a slow grin.
"Hey, how you feeling?"
And that was something else Jack was damn sick of—people asking the most obvious question ever. But before he could come up with a civil response, Martin started to laugh.
"Sorry," Martin said. "Dumb question. I remember being asked that ten times a day and all I wanted to tell people was that I felt like crap and I wanted to go home."
"Yeah," Jack agreed, "that pretty much sums it up."
Standing up, Martin stretched his arms over his head and yawned. "Man, those chairs are uncomfortable. They sure don't encourage anyone to stay too long."
"What, you taking off already?" Despite his desire to go back to sleep, Jack felt unaccountably hurt. But his emotions had been all over the place for so long, he didn't know which ones to trust.
Martin was shaking his head as he took a few long strides around the room, rolling his shoulders beneath his black sweat shirt. "Nah. I'm just a little stiff. Getting too old for this kind of thing, you know?"
Jack grunted. "Tell me about it."
Martin returned to the chair and sat down with a sigh, reaching for a stack of magazines and pulling one off the top. He turned on the small light beside the chair and settled back.
"Viv told me you really liked Vanity Fair, so I guess that's where we'll start."
"No way," Jack protested. "I hear one more word about Britney or Ashlee or Paris and I'm pulling my own plug."
Martin grinned at him and held up the Sports Illustrated so that Jack could see its cover.
"Thank God," he muttered, "You're a lifesaver."
"Look, you got off easy with Viv, so letting her torture you with a gossip rag is the least you could do." Martin flipped through the pages. "Okay, pick your poison. Baseball, basketball, NCAA or NASCAR."
Jack rolled his eyes. "None of the above. I don't know, talk to me. Tell me the office gossip, it's got to be more interesting that any of that."
Martin set the magazine aside and crossed his arms over his chest. "You're asking the wrong guy. I'm always the last one to know anything. Okay, except for you maybe."
"Come on, you gotta know something."
"Uh, okay, let's see. Reggie made varsity again, so Viv's already complaining about the cost of new shoes. Sam, well you know more about her than I do—"
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know, I guess you two seem to be getting along well these days. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great. She's got a lot going on, so anything that helps her out is a good thing in my book."
"Yeah," Jack muttered. He really didn't want to talk about Sam. "Danny? And Elena? They on again or still off?"
"Off. Very much off."
Something in Martin's tone hinted that there was more to the story. "You sound pretty sure about that."
Jack could feel Martin's discomfort from across the room. "Yeah, I'm sure. Whatever they had once has been dead a long time."
"Doesn't mean they can't get back together. C'mon, don't you have even a little bit of romance in your soul?"
Martin leaned forward, clasping his hands together between his knees. "Trust me, Jack, it's done."
The light went on behind Jack's eyes. "Ah, I get it. One of them found somebody new."
Martin nodded, his gaze on the floor.
Jack shifted, biting back a moan. This was far more interesting than the Final Four. "Let me guess which one. Yeah, okay, my money's on Elena."
Martin lifted his head, a crooked grin briefly revealing his dimple. "Yeah? Why?"
"You kidding me? Jeez, look at her. I'm lucky half the guys in the department aren't panting after her. So who is it? Somebody I know?"
"Sorry, man, you're off base on this one."
"I'm—oh. Danny's got a new girlfriend. That makes sense, the guy's a horndog. Elena gives him the cold shoulder, he wouldn't waste any time."
"Not so much the horndog anymore," Martin said quietly. "He's settled down."
"Settled down? Our Danny Taylor? How the hell did I miss that? Who's the lucky girl? Anyone I know?"
Martin grabbed the magazine and started rolling it into a tube. "Look, he's got the late morning shift, you can ask him yourself."
"All right, fine. Geez, you're right, you're a terrible gossiper. So tell me about you."
Martin looked up. "Me?"
Jack yawned as sleep began to tug on his consciousness. "Yeah. I haven't heard anything lately about your love life, so you seeing anyone?"
"Uh, yeah, sure. I've been with someone for a while now."
Jack yawned again and shifted carefully, favoring his right shoulder. "You sure keep it on the down low. Is it serious?" Martin hesitated and Jack closed his eyes. "Look, with all these good drugs in my system, I'm gonna forget anything you say, so don't worry about me spilling any secrets."
He heard a soft laugh. "Yeah, it's serious. We're talking about moving in together."
Jack nodded slowly, eyes still closed. "That's good," he slurred. "You need somebody. You all do."
If Martin replied to that, he never heard it.
The next time he awoke it was a nice, slow easing into awareness. For the first time he wasn't fighting back pain or tensing at the thought of moving, so he let himself just lie there, becoming acquainted with the sounds in the room. There was the soft beeping of his monitor near his head and somewhere, maybe down by the foot of his bed in the corner, someone was having a whispered conversation.
At first he just assumed that it was medical personnel, but there was something decidedly intimate about this conversation. The whispers were punctuated with soft laughter and little pauses, a completely different rhythm than what he'd expect to hear from doctors or nurses.
He cracked open his eyes just a little, not enough to bring any attention to himself. He didn't want to interrupt anything, but was curious to find out what was going on.
His room was still dark and the corridor seemed deserted. There was a little shaft of light from the hallway leaking into the doorway, just far enough to touch the two figures tucked into the shadows at the foot of Jack's bed. Once his eyes got used to the dark, Jack realized that there was indeed a very intimate moment occurring in his room, but he couldn't make out the players.
The way he was angled in the bed, he couldn't tell if the visitor's chair was occupied, but he figured that it wasn't, given that the two people in the room were pretty comfortable standing inside each other's personal space against the wall. He did manage to tip his gaze high enough to see the time on the digital clock and it told him that it was only a few hours since he'd last been awake. That in turn let him assume that the one of the participants was probably Martin, and that made Jack perk up even more.
Still, he didn't want to give away the fact that he was awake. And that took a lot of discipline when he realized that the person who had Martin pressed to the wall, holding him there with his body weight, was another man.
Well, hell, no wonder Martin didn't want to talk about his personal life.
There was another quiet laugh and Jack focused his concentration on listening, feeling no compunction whatever about eavesdropping. Squinting just a little, he could tell that the other man was a little taller than Martin, but it was too dark to make out his features.
"Okay, you made your point," Martin was whispering. "Next time Viv calls for volunteers, don't be nice and take the crappy shift."
"And?" the other man whispered.
"And?"
"Yeah, and?"
"Oh, yeah. Don't leave without waking you up to say goodbye."
Oh, brother. This was more than Jack wanted to know. He still hadn't wrapped his head around Martin being gay—or bisexual, whatever—and now here he was listening to some kind of post-pillow talk. He realized that he could've made it known that he was awake, but that would've embarrassed the hell out of Martin and Jack really wanted to know who the other guy was.
Ten seconds later, he got his wish.
"Look," the other man was saying, his voice rising a bit. "I know you were being nice and letting me sleep, but we've talked about this."
No way. It couldn't be—Danny?
But it was, and he was still talking. "I need you more than I need sleep, right?"
"Aw, damn it, Danny," Martin murmured, and by God if he didn't lean in and lay a kiss on Danny right then. And not just a quick peck on the lips from what Jack could see. Hell, it looked like it was a freakin' tonsillectomy. It was over quickly, the two men separating far enough that Jack's fuzzy brain filled in the details of Danny's profile, giving him visual proof to support what he'd heard, but it still didn't make sense.
Or did it?
As the conversation dwindled back to whispers, Jack thought about what he knew of these two men. Martin and Sam hadn't worked out and neither had Danny and Elena. And there'd always been a connection between Martin and Danny, once they'd balanced out the testosterone levels. Sometimes that connection had frayed, but there was no denying that when the two of them were in a room together, they seemed more aware of each other than anyone else. Jack had never put it in those terms, comfortable with just thinking that they'd become the kind of close buddies that could share a joke without saying a word. They were always making little side bets and challenging each other, and more often than not they ended the day walking out together, debating something that no one else gave a crap about.
But how the hell did that translate to sleeping together? That's the part Jack couldn't figure out. Up until five minutes ago, Jack would've bet his pension that both men were as straight as he was, but he was obviously far off the mark on that one. Even now, they were holding on to each other, so entwined that they cast only one shadow.
Jack's imagination backed away from picturing them together in that way, but he was beginning to realize that he wasn't all that uncomfortable with the concept of them being together in theory. In fact, as he watched them pull apart to the point where they were only holding hands, he decided it was something he could live with, as long as they didn't let it interfere with their work. That thought led to another, one about how he ought to just start passing around numbers everyone could wear so he could keep track of all the hookups going on beneath his nose.
And that made him laugh.
He was pretty sure he disguised it as a cough, and the noise made Danny jump about a mile. Before Jack could pretend that he was just coming awake, Danny was out the door and Martin was by his side.
"Jack? Hey, Jack, you okay? You want some ice?"
"No," he croaked, "I'm okay. You still here?"
"Uh, yeah, I was, uh, just stretching my legs again."
Jack grunted and shifted to get more comfortable. "What time is it?"
"Going on four."
"Yeah, okay. Listen, why don't you go get some coffee or something? I'm probably gonna crash again here in a about two seconds."
"No, I'm okay, Danny just brought—I mean, I'm good."
Jack hid his grin by rubbing his hand over his mouth. Good thing Martin wasn't called on to go undercover all that often.
He decided to pretend he hadn't heard the slip. "Huh? No? Okay, whatever." Now the need to sleep was becoming real, and Jack wanted to tell Martin to go find Danny and tell him it was okay, but that was suddenly beyond him. He ran his tongue around his dry lips as his eyes drooped closed.
"Why don't you take off?" he muttered. "This must be boring as hell."
He heard the creak of cheap vinyl as the glow from the lamp bounced against his closed eyelids. He opened them just enough to see Martin sitting in the visitor's chair, his ankle crossed over his knee, a large Starbucks cup one hand and a paperback in the other.
"No need," Martin replied. "I'm all taken care of."
"Yeah," Jack sighed, finally succumbing to the welcoming darkness. "I guess you are."
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