Tenderness Ch. 01

"Better." I whispered, squinting into his blurry face. "I feel a lot better."

"My name is Daniel Arceiro, call me Dan. Do you want me to get you something to drink? There's a vending machine in the hall and the nurse said that it was okay." He looked a little awkward, and while I couldn't be sure with my blurry vision, I had the distinct impression that he was blushing.

"Yes please." I whispered foggily. "Thank you."

He smiled, and did my heart beat a little faster at that smile? I think it did. "Water? Juice? Soda?"

"Juice please." I rasped.

He got up and practically ran to the vending machine. As he left, a nurse with frizzy red hair and pink scrubs walked in. She smiled at me while she glanced at my charts.

"Sweet guy, he never really left, and I think he slept here. My name is Marie and I'll just take care of you for now. The Doc says that you will be able to leave today, and he will come by in a bit with some information about your insurance and so on. On a scale of one to ten how bad is the pain?"

I shrugged and winced a little. "Um... I think about... seven."

She shook some small white pills into her hand as Daniel came back with a bottle of apple juice. Marie looked up at him and smiled.

"That's perfect Dan. Aaron, take your pills with some juice."

I took a few sips of the sweet juice to clear my throat and then I swallowed three small white pills.

"There you go." Marie said cheerfully. "Now I'm gonna leave, if you need anything you can press your call-button."

Daniel sat down in his chair with a sigh and I sipped at the straw in the wide mouth of the juice bottle.

"I want to thank you." I whispered hoarsely. "f-for everything."

I couldn't help it, I started to cry. I tried to turn my face away from this wonderful man who had saved me, I didn't want to cry in front of him. I felt so dirty.

"Aaron!" He cried, leaning forward a little. "Jesus Aaron, what's wrong? You were fine just a second ago..." He looked so confused.

"Please go away." I whispered. That sounded so terrible but I couldn't help it. "Please. I d-duh-don't want you t-t-to see muh-me like th-this."

I couldn't help flinching when he touched my hand with his big warm paw.

"I've seen you worse, and I don't want you to be ashamed." The shyness was gone, he sounded furious and his voice was trembling. "That fucker who hurt you, it's his fault, not yours."

I'd always hated crying. I hated how it made me look and feel, I hated how helpless crying always made me. I couldn't stop the sobs from where they boiled up my throat, deep sobs that hurt my chest and my heart and made all of my bruises throb. My mouth worked into an ugly sneer as I moaned with pain.

Daniel, he was afraid to get in too close, to touch me, to frighten me. But he held my hand, engulfed it in two of his large calloused palms. Stroking my hand, cradling it. That one touch was more intimate and loving then any of the embraces or kisses by my one boyfriend.

His voice was so gentle and soothing. My eyes were sore and gritty from crying so much. "I'm so s-sorry." I whispered.

His hands tightened briefly on my wrist, and the bruise there ached. I had a brief and foggy memory of that monster twisting my wrist behind my back hard enough to make my shoulder creak in it's socket, holding me against the wall. I moaned low in my throat.

"Please don't say that Aaron." His voice was thick and foggy and his mouth was working. "You said that last night. You said it over and over."

Marie came in. "What's wrong? What's going on?"

She saw my messy reddened face and I could dimly see the harsh frightened lines of her face smoothing out. "Sorry Aaron, but the police are here and they need to ask you some questions. Dan, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave, Aaron probably wants some pri--"

"N-No! P-Please don't g-g-go Daniel! Please?"

I was scared. They were going to ask questions. I felt foggy and lost from the drug kicking in (thankfully the pain was getting better) and Daniel was the closest thing I had to a friend right now.

Daniel enfolded both of my shaking hands in the big comforting nest of his. He looked up at Marie. "Am I allowed to stay if he wants me to?"

I closed my sore and gritty eyes. I waited for her to refuse, but she didn't. She just went to the door and let the officers in.

-------- DANIEL --------

Both of the police officers were trying to be gentle with him, I could tell. But they needed facts, and the facts were hard for poor Aaron to remember, and what little he did remember was blurry and inconsistent and very stressful for him. I held onto his hand, his cold little hand, and I could feel it shaking like a young bird in my hands. I felt sick while he was talking, but I tried as hard as I could not to show my revulsion or pity. I just tried to stay there, and keep him calm.

Both officer Reed and officer Kushner were giving me incredulous looks, and I couldn't really blame them. I felt like shit, and it looked very bad. It looked like I was crushing on (which I was) trying to befriend (which I was) and trying to seduce (which I wasn't, but was having some guilty fantasies about) a traumatized young rape victim. I felt like the scummiest rescuer in the history of all good samaritans.

I think that Aaron was a little bit loopy off of the pain medication, because otherwise I don't think he would have told us as much as he did.

He looked down at the coverlet which was pooled around his sternum. "I was working at the Purple Rain, and normally there are no guys, but that night there were two." He gave me a shy look. I saw Reed scowl a little. The scowl lightened with concern as Aaron cried a little, three hoarse painful sobs. "I w-was so-o stuh-stuh-stupid! H-he wa-was dancing and... and..."

Aaron was inconsolable for a minute or two. Reed and Kushner waited there, shooting daggers at me with their eyes as I tried to comfort him, rubbing his thin shoulder through the flimsy hospital gown and shushing him gently.

"He came up to the bar," Aaron's voice was little more then a hoarse whisper. "and he was flirting with me. He seemed so nice."

I clenched my jaw. I remembered, how Aaron had been laughing and giggling and looking so sweet and shy. Had the sick fuck been high? Or had he marked out Aaron for rape even then?

"I remember, I asked Jessie to take my shift a few minutes early, he asked me to come out back with him, and I thought he wanted to give me a kiss."

Kushner wrote something down on a pad. "Jessie who? Does she work at the Purple Rain often?"

"Jessie Dufrane. Ma'am? I don't remember a lot after that happened. It was very, very blurred until Daniel showed up."

I felt a guilty little thrill at hearing my name from his mouth. Even though his lips were swollen and purple and the voice was a rasp.

Reed shifted forward. "Try. You never learned this man's name, so you need to give me the best description you can and try to describe what he did to you. Did you injure him in any way? The nurse says there was some foreign skin found under your fingernails, did you scratch him in a visible area? Anything you can remember will help us to find this guy."

My respect for Reed grew a little, even though my heart was breaking a little. Aaron was so tired and hurt, and I wasn't looking forward to finding out what that sick man had done to him.

Aaron sniffled a little, but his voice came out clear. "He was tall, but not huge-tall. About six feet, maybe a little more. I'm about 5'7", and he was about half a head taller then me. He had spiky blonde hair, very light blonde, ash blonde. He had very bright blue eyes, bright indigo almost. He was muscular, and thin. He had average shoulders, not broad, but not thin."

Aaron gave me a look that almost broke my heart. He was so ashamed, so ashamed that he had dared to have a crush on the man who had raped him.

"He had a small scar on his chin. It looked like a bass clef." He saw the officers uncomprehending eyes.

I took a pen from the side of the table. "Its a small symbol in music. It's at the beginning of every line in a peice of music from a bass instrument. Bass guitar, bass saxophone, tuba, trombone, bass clarinet, they all have the bass clef symbol in front of them. This is what a treble clef looks like, which you've probably already seen, and this is what a bass clef looks like."

I drew the French violin shape of the treble clef and the simple curve of the bass clef.

Aaron was looking at me with wide eyes. "I played trombone in high school."

"Bass guitar." I said quietly.

Kushner cleared her throat and Aaron flushed a little.

"I remember scratching him. When I first went out there he...he stunned me by grabbing my hair and hitting my face into the w-wall. A f-few times."

I felt sick. His voice was breaking a little near the end but he took a few deep breaths to clear it. "I was a little more awake after a few minutes. He... he had me against the wall with my arm twisted b-behind me. I managed to twist away briefly, and I tried to crawl away, but when he grabbed my shoulder I scratched him. Right here."

He pulled his right hand briefly out of my grip to touch his chest, up high and to the right, just below his armpit. He put his hand back into mine.

"I managed to kick him once, at the knee, before he took my shoes off. He swore, and held onto his knee. It hurt him, but after that he st-started h-hitting me, and I don't remember anything after th-that."

Aaron cried a little. He was so tired from crying already that it was just a few hoarse little hitches in his chest.

After that the police were mostly done.

---

Aaron wasn't going to be discharged for another five hours or so, and he was very tired. I offered to give him a ride home to his apartment when he was done, and he accepted gratefully. He was so tired that he fell asleep mid-sentence.

"Thank you so much for all of your..." His sleepy little mumble deteriorated into a soft snore.

It was actually really good timing, because I needed to get some work done. I went out to the lobby, ordered a tuna salad sub and some coffee, went out to the car to grab my laptop and got to working.

I didn't look the part whatsoever, but I was an editor for the Star Tribune. I did most of my work away from the office, and I had nice flexible hours. I was a big hulk, half Italian, quarter Greek, and a quarter Ojibwe. One of my coworkers thought it was a compliment when she said 'you could be really sexy if you dropped a few pounds.'

Bitch.

Anyway, I stayed in the lobby, sipping and eating and getting as much work done as possible on my limited amount of sleep and high level of stress. I didn't get a lot done, I kept thinking about him, hoping he was okay.

After about two hours I gave up when I realized that Aaron had no clothes. It had been overlooked, and in a normal rape case I guess that the family would have brought clothes but no family or friends had showed up, and according to Reed, someone from the police station had gone to the ally to pick up his shredded blood-soaked clothes as evidence.

I went to the gift shop, and I managed to find overpriced shorts, a t-shirt that had the name of the hospital on it, and a pair of boxers that had 'nice bass' and a picture of a fish on the ass. I wanted to know his shoe size before I bought a pair of plastic thongs there. I put all of the things in a plastic bag and tried to get a little more work done.

-------- AARON --------

When I woke up my mouth tasted horrible. I felt tired still, and my head ached and the medication was starting to wear off. But I woke up with a smile on my face because Daniel was in the room, typing away at a laptop. He saw me and my heart melted just a little at his blurry smile.

"I got you a little something. Marie came in earlier to give you these."

He handed me a plastic bag and a small orange bottle filled with lozenge-shaped yellow pills. "She said to take one in the morning and one at night, but skip it if the pain isn't too bad and don't take more then one pill every eight hours."

I opened the bag and saw that he had bought me some clothes. They looked a little big for me, but that didn't matter.

"Daniel? Thank you, for everything."

It felt so wrong, having a crush on the man who had carried me to the hospital bleeding from my face and nose and rectum.

"No problem Aaron, really it isn't. Do you need some help getting up?"

I probably could have managed it, but I wanted to feel his warm gentle hands.

---

He seemed a little jumpy as I directed him to my apartment building. We had been talking about his work, and my lack thereof. I had taken college to become an English teacher, but my one disastrous employment had lasted four weeks before the superintendent noticed a rainbow bumper sticker pasted to my shitty little car. He had fired me, and then warned local school districts that I was gay. It was a point against me, and even in very liberal settings no one wanted the risk.

We stopped by my apartment building and Daniel put his hand over his face. I wished that I had my glasses so bad, even a few feet away, I could barely see his face.

"Aaron? Can I ask you something?"

I had heard the expression 'my heart was in my throat' before, but i had never felt it. I could feel my pulse in my neck and jaw. I didn't trust my voice, so I just nodded, and leaned in a little closer. I could see him a little better. He didn't have the lean wild sex appeal of the man who had raped me, he wasn't conventionally handsome either, but his face was spare and strong and his dark eyes were full of anxiety and liking.

"This feels so wrong, but it kinda feels right too. I know that we just met, and I know what you went through, but I really like you, and maybe we can be friends?"

He looked so hopeful, and I could read that he didn't just want to be friends. Maybe at first. I didn't care, I was just so relieved that he had dragged this shy wanting out into the open. It had taken the worst night of my life to find a kind, sensitive, lovable man.

"Do you have a pen? We can exchange numbers."

His smile was so wide, I probably would have been able to see it if I were blind.