A Boy Who Came In from the Cold Ch. 10

Ant slapped the envelope into Mikkal's hands and snarled; "I guess you couldn't fucking wait for that, could you? I hope it's bad news!"

He tried to push his way out but the tall, blond Finn caught his arms easily and shoved him back into the room as Paddy was disentangling himself from Rayne. The boy had struggled to his knees on the sofa, still dripping with cum. Beyond him, Clay was still watching the scene through the lens of his small, hand-held camera.

"Ant, what the fuck are you doin' here?" Rayne exclaimed vehemently. His face was still flushed and for a moment he had the decency to look embarrassed.

"I could ask you the same thing," Ant huffed, righting himself and turning so that he did not have his back to any of the boat's occupants. "I waited up all night for you to come back."

This was a lie, but he figured that a little emotional blackmail was fair enough after the nightmare Rayne had put him through this week. When the boy said nothing in his own defence, Ant shook his head gravely.

"Your results came back. I thought you might like to know." He glanced up at Paddy somewhat more icily. "You 'did' know that he was waiting on the results of an AIDs test?"

"Jesus!" Rayne sighed disgustedly and pushed himself to his feet. "Thanks, Ant! Tell 'everybody' my business!"

"I know," Paddy McNamara said in a voice that was curiously devoid of sentiment. "Is that what's in the envelope?"

Ant swallowed and nodded his head. Mikkal reached out and handed the missive wordlessly to Rayne and for a moment there was silence as the boy turned it over in his hands. Clay even stopped filming and put the camera down quietly.

"Well... are you gonna open that or just stand there clutching it all day?" Ant prompted irritably, at last, when no one moved or said anything.

Rayne was still staring at the envelope as if he could make it vanish by the force of his will alone. He made a move towards the bedrooms but stopped when he saw Clay standing in the entrance to the corridor. The muscular black fellow was watching him expectantly. On the sofa, Paddy leaned forward with his forearms resting on his knees, hiding the swell of his impressive cock from view. He smiled at Rayne encouragingly. Mikka still leaned in the outer doorway, arms folded across his broad chest, his handsome face very quiet and serious.

Finally he turned to look at Ant, who was staring at him like a wounded animal begging to be put out of its misery. Rayne swallowed hard. His long fingers clenched around the envelope, creasing the perfection of that heavy, cream-coloured parchment.

"I... I need to think," he blurted out, then pushed between Ant and Paddy, running for the external door.

"Wait!" Ant turned to pursue him but PJ was already up, shaking his head at Mikkal as the Finn barred the way out. At once the tall, blond stepped aside and PJ McNamara caught Ant by the arm as he did so, pulling him back.

Rayne ducked through the open doorway and was gone.

"Let go of me! What the hell d'you think you're doing?" Ant fumed, trying to wrestle free but even though he was taller and stronger than Rayne Wilde he was still no match for PJ. The Irishman did not relinquish his hold until Rayne's escape was beyond doubt. Then, he steered the furious Ant firmly towards the sofa.

"Sit," he instructed.

"You fucking idiot!" Ant railed at him. "You're gonna let him open that on his own?"

"It's his to open," McNamara said mildly. "If he desires privacy, should we not respect that?"

Ant shook his dark blond head vehemently.

"You have no idea, have you? You just don't know what he's like!"

"He'll come back, Anthony. He has nowhere else to go." Paddy sat down beside him, maintaining a gentle, restraining contact. His hands ran over Ant's back and shoulders and his right thigh, stroking steadily as if the man was a frightened horse.

Blue-grey eyes met PJ's silver-steel gaze, wide and frustrated now.

"Aren't you concerned at all?"

"Of course," the bigger man assured him. "A great deal rests upon the contents of that envelope."

"And what if he decides to throw it in the creek?" Ant snapped, annoyed beyond measure by this pacific approach.

"Then he does not work on this movie. It is as simple as that," Paddy sighed wearily. "Anthony, he won't throw it away. He's smarter than that."

"What the hell do you know?" Ant raged, fighting the urge to punch this supercilious Irish bastard. He knew it would earn him a pasting – Mikkal and Clay were hovering, watching the argument intently and if he so much as raised a fist they would take him down, for certain – but it was oh-so-tempting. "You've spent a night between his legs! What the hell do you know about the way his bloody mind works?"

Paddy McNamara shrugged those beefy shoulders in acknowledgement.

"He's been with you for... hmmm, all of a week," the big man stated dryly. "I'm sure you know all his foibles by now. I suppose you've seen all the workings of his devious mind in that time, Anthony. You are the acknowledged expert on his behaviour and I bow to your superior judgement."

"You piss-taking Irish cunt..." Ant wrenched himself away from McNamara's wandering hands and rose to his feet.

In the background he sensed that Mikkal and Barclay both shifted subtly from casual poses to a more defensive stance. Their muscular arms hung loose at their sides but they were ready to leap into action. He did not care. Let them beat the living crap out of him! He was still going to go after Rayne.

"'I' know he's scared," he growled now. "I know that somewhere, deep down, behind that tough as nails façade he puts on, there's a frightened little kid curled up crying. And right now that little kid is probably pissing himself with fear, on his own somewhere, maybe reading the worst news he could ever imagine. Don't think for a minute that this doesn't mean anything to him."

"I don't think that," McNamara said patiently. "He'll come back, Ant. Of his own free will! I might not know him the way you do, but I do know that child won't be bullied or harassed into making up his mind. If you push him, you'll only push him away. And if you do that, my friend, I'll have Clay and Mikka break both your legs."

He rose to his feet with an easy grace and folded his arms across his burly chest, looking grimly back at Ant... who could not help himself. His eyes flickered down to that notorious, half-hard member nodding between McNamara's thighs and he felt a quivering in his loins that was part fear, part awe and part anger. The idea of Rayne being forced to spread for 'that'...! Ant was not sure if it turned him on or just made him feel sick.

"You're the bully," he declared, his mouth suddenly too dry. "If you hurt him, at all, I'll kill you."

PJ just laughed, a short, grim, self-satisfied sound that did not part his lips. In the hallway leading to the bedrooms, Barclay cracked his knuckles deliberately, but the Irishman shook his head at once.

"Go back to Daniel's boat and wait, Ant," he said in a pleasantly neutral voice. "Rayne 'will' come back."

RESULT:

Rayne ran as if all of hell was on his tail. The moment he was free of the boat he simply took to his heels and fled blindly up the pontoon and through the gate. His frantic flight took him across the promenade and both carriageways of the main road, causing three vehicles to slam their brakes on. A flurry of imprecations in more than one language followed him but he did not stop to listen, hurtling through the car-park behind the small row of bars on the strip and into the welcome shade of the apartments beyond. He did not look back, not even once.

The heat was intense, even this early in the day, and the shadows were a welcome relief. Rayne threw himself into a dark passageway that ran beneath the block of shops and apartments and did not stop until the light was almost too faint to see where he was running. He slammed into a concrete wall, his vision blurring before he made contact with the rough, cold surface, then turned with his back to it and sank to his haunches. His face dropped weakly to his knees as the breath tore out of his body in ragged gasps. Trembling with exhaustion and despair, he wrapped both arms around his head and the gasps turned to choking sobs that he could not control.

A thousand bright stars whirled and spun as they were sucked into the void behind his eyes. He could not think straight. Every hope and fear was raging lose around him and he just wanted to hide. The stink of the waste carts and the discarded junk from the flats up in the living world were ghostly intrusions that could not touch him. He had closed his mind to the reek of petrol and the cold, foetid, wetness of the floor beneath his thin boot-soles. It was quiet here, and dark, that was all he cared about. He could give voice to his emotions for just a few moments, safe from prying eyes, and that was what he did. Rayne wept as if his lungs would burst, rocking himself back and forth in the sordid gloom, until finally his breathing slowed and the retching sobs ceased. His heart gradually stopped hammering and he was able to think rationally at last.

The envelope in his shaking fingers was a crumpled wreck of a thing by the time he finally uncurled from his foetal huddle and sank onto the kerb, wiping his face with his free hand. Rayne stared at it, rubbing his nose dejectedly on the back of his wrist, wishing he could will it out of existence by the sheer force of his mind. For a little while he contemplated simply dropping it into one of the looming garbage carts and pretending to the others that everything had been fine. He knew that he could do it. The lie was just another bunch of words. Paddy wanted him enough to believe them. Ant would simply be happy that everything was all right. By the time they found out the truth...

Rayne gulped and swallowed a mouthful of tears, as sharp and salty as fresh semen. He tilted his head back against the wall blinking determinedly until the saline wetness subsided and his vision no longer shimmered in that dangerous way.

He had been so stupid, letting himself believe that he could play this role; convincing himself that he could easily walk away whenever he chose. It was no more achievable than resisting the craving for Junk. He had allowed strangers to get under his skin, imagining that he could cut loose from them with no effort, no withdrawal pains, and it was all another lie. If he had made Ant sick...

Rayne's fingers clenched around the envelope again and he forced his thoughts away from that nightmare. It could not happen. It 'would not' be that way. Ant had been good to him, he did not deserve to be punished. Rayne's breathing quickened again until he was huffing softly and painfully. If there was a god then he or she did not care who was good and who was not. A god who loved good people would never let someone like Ant get AIDS from a pathetic junky slut that he was only trying to help. A decent god would never have taken his mother from him when he needed her the most, or allowed his Uncle Brian to molest and rape him while he was still too young to know that he could object. If there was a god then he either hated Rayne Wilde personally or he did not care one way or the other for the fate of his creations.

Rayne struggled away from the wall, fighting his way to his feet and resisting tears as he paced back towards the source of the faint light in his subterranean nightmare. The anger drove him as it always had. If he could not help himself then no one would.

Maybe 'everyone' was evil. Was that it? He already knew that 'he' was corrupt. It was written all over him, after all. Every man he met could see it. All decent women recoiled from it. He was a miserable, cheap little whore. Maybe Brian had been right all those years ago. He was only good for spreading and fucking.

Rayne ripped open the envelope, feeling sick to his gut.

"Come on then!" he muttered huskily. "Let's find out! Let's end this!"

There were three pages of hand-written notes on eggshell blue foolscap. He sank against the wall, puzzling over the fine, slanting hand, his eyes tracing the curves and loops of the letters, picking out familiar words whilst his mind tried to fill the gaps. His name and date of birth were at the top. Mahmoudi's surgery details were embossed on the vellum, rough beneath his fingertips like butterfly eggs on the underside of a leaf. The rest was a list and he struggled to decipher the medical terminology. The first was syphillis, he was pretty sure of that. There were some figures and a single word on the right; 'negative'. For each entry he read abbreviations that made no sense. So many numbers; so many 'negatives'.

Rayne swallowed hard. Negative meant 'bad', he was fairly sure. He remembered it from school reports.

'Raymonde's attitude is dangerously negative.'

'Such a negative approach will surely never benefit...'

He turned over to the next page automatically but the words were swimming in front of his eyes again; 'negative', negative', 'bad', 'evil'... His fingers crumpled the page and Rayne stumbled on through the block and out into the daylight on the far side of the passageway. He was swallowed up into a crowd of happy, heedless holidaymakers and let them carry him forward, numb to their laughter and warmth and the occasional curious, questioning frown they cast his way.

'Bad.' 'Negative.' 'Contaminated.'

By the time a hand caught his arm and towed him into a space safe from the jostling of strangers he was blind with silent tears. He let himself be guided and coaxed into the shade and relative quiet.

"Jesus, Rayne! What's wrong?" Phil steered him to one of the cushioned benches in the back of the shop and made him sit down. "What happened? Did someone hurt you?"

He shook his head slowly, unable to speak, incapable of rational explanation. The pages of the crumpled letter dropped from his nerveless fingers and Phil crouched to pick them up. As Rayne sat staring into space, trembling and uncommunicative, he went straight to the door and pulled down the shutter. On the way back he scanned the letter curiously, searching for some clue to his companion's bizarre behaviour.

"Rayne," he ventured at last, sitting down next to the other boy and sliding a companionable arm around him. "You're okay. What's wrong?"

"I..." Rayne could not look at him. It took three attempts to get the words out. "I kill everyone, Phil."

"You muppet!" Phil ruffled his soft black hair awkwardly. "What the hell do you mean?"

"I'm a bad person," Rayne choked on the words, his head sinking into his chest. "I'm contaminated."

Phil managed a laugh and gave him back the letter.

"You reckon?" he chuckled wryly. "That's not what it says here."

Rayne blinked several times, his long black lashes jewelled with tears. Red-rimmed eyes sought out Phil's face.

"Wh-what do you mean?" he croaked incredulously.

"I told you," Phil stroked his hair again. "Can't you read, you head-case?"

"Yeah!" Rayne protested. "I can read 'English'! This is just... it doesn't make sense. But all the results... I mean... negative is 'bad' yeah?"

Phil laughed again and pulled him closer, kissing him impulsively.

"God, you're a muppet!" he said again. "Yeah... it 'can' mean bad... but it means 'no' as well. Nothing! Negative! Clear... do you get it yet? You're okay!"

Rayne closed his eyes for a few seconds, retreating into the sanctity of the dark again. His heart was still thumping but he was not sure if it was fear or embarrassment that drove it now. He still could not quite comprehend the enormity of the truth.

"How can I be?" he wanted to know.

"What did I say?" Phil chuckled, hugging him again. "You've got a bloody angel looking after you, Rayne!"

"Are you... sure?" the dark-haired boy was staring at the pile of rumpled papers in his hands again, utterly mesmerised.

"My parents are both doctors," Phil said, although he actually seemed rather embarrassed by it, as if admitting to living with serial molesters. He prised the pages out of Rayne's hands again. "You've nothing communicable," he translated. "STDs are clear. T-cell count is... okay. You're HIV negative... that's good." Phil paused and grinned at him reassuringly. "And bloody lucky! He wants to do a retest on renal function and he reckons you're borderline anaemic, which isn't great but it's not gonna kill you. Well, not if you take better care of yourself anyway!"

Rayne put his face in his hands and burst into tears of sheer relief. At last Phil took him up to the flat and left him there to pull himself together in privacy.

It felt strange to sit alone on the balcony of another person's flat, feeling the warmth on his arms and face, watching the bustle of happy human life down below whilst remaining curiously detached from it. As soon as he managed to stop the intermittent floods of tears, that came without warning and left his face looking like someone had screwed it up and tried to throw it away, he hunted down the bag he had left here during the previous evening. It was still hanging innocently enough on the bathroom door handle, exactly where he had put it before he took a shower. Rayne returned to the bed and sat down, rolling himself a joint with the reminder of the junk Mahmoudi had given him. He lit it with shaking hands. It still seemed strange to him that this time yesterday he had not yet encountered Paddy McNamara. Even Phil had known more about the man that he came bare inches from screwing with this morning.

The first hit quietened his racing heart and stilled his emotions. He held it in his lungs until his head began to swim, then breathed out slowly as the room tilted and he was swallowed into the comfortable embrace of Phil's extended sofa-bed. The rough, red coverlet still smelled of their heat and spilled sex and he turned his head to nuzzle it, rubbing his cheek on the heavy woollen cloth, breathing in the memory. The second pull took him right down to a tranquil place inside that he had been aching for since last night. He knew, or at least some rational part of his brain understood, that he ought to save at least half of this joint. If he smoked it all, the chances were that he would spend the next two days just lying here, staring at the ceiling.

Rayne sighed deeply, listening to the whisper of his breathing, then raised the roach to his lips, taking a third drag before he pinched out the glowing embers. It was enough, he told himself as he breathed down the swirling warmth of the heroin fumes; enough.

When his limbs stopped feeling like melted butter he rolled slowly off the mattress and tucked the dormant roll-up behind his ear as he stumbled onto the little balcony. For a while he leaned on the railing watching the people wandering by and soaking up the heat of the morning sunlight, then he collapsed exhaustedly into a deckchair and closed his eyes, forcing himself to contemplate the present.

He was clean. It was official. He could go back to the boat, rub Dan Leland's nose in his results, make this movie with PJ, pay back Ant and Johnno, and then...

Rayne frowned a little, unsure where the plot went next. He had allowed others to control his life for so long now that it felt strange to pick up the reins again. Of course, he would need to make some money, and find himself a place to live. And he needed a Dealer!

"You are such a fuckin' mess!" he told himself disgustedly.

*

"What are you good at?" Phil asked practically when he came back down to thank the other boy and voiced these concerns over a shared cigarette.

Rayne shrugged roundly, exhaling a plume of smoke.

"Dunno. I give great head!"

"You do, but you can't exactly put that on a CV," Phil pointed out. "I was thinkin' more in the line of GCEs and whatnot."