Amends (1/?)
Title: Amends
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg
Warnings: Underage sexual relationship and discussions of whether this is abusive. Discussions of canon child abuse.
Summary: When Greg's first boyfriend appears in Las Vegas, his reason for being there provokes some soul-searching.
Author's note: With thanks to podga , for a lightning fast, charming, and discerning beta. Any inadequacies or errors in this story are my own.
Amends
1996, San Francisco
He helped her in the window, even though she could have gone to the front door. Her parents might have freaked out if someone rang the doorbell after eight o’clock but his parents wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow at a 9.30 pm visitor.
One of her sneaker-clad feet caught the penpot sitting on the desk, as she clambered over it, and she winced as fibre-tipped pens and pencils were strewn across its surface.
“Fucking Dawson’s Creek,” Greg said, but there was no bite in his tone. “Encouraging all these teenage girls to go about the neighbourhood crawling in boys’ windows.”
She raised a darkly-pencilled eyebrow. “As if I’d watch that lame shit.”
“Amelia,” Greg mock-chastised. “I don’t think that’s the kind of language a lady should be using.”
And she smiled then, and flopped down on Greg’s bed next to him.
For all that they were best friends - best friends’ for-evah he could almost hear her say, sarcastically - there were some topics of conversation that it was impossible to broach with Amelia. The exact flavour of fucked up of her family, for one. He’d been to her house a few times the previous year, when they’d been assigned to work on an English Literature paper together in one of Mr Morris’s lame attempts to get people to mix out of their cliques. Even before her parents had realised that he was gay, the very air in their overly tidy house had vibrated with tension. Her father was, hands down, the most scarily austere man that Greg had ever met and her mother was like a woman carved out of ice. The oppressive atmosphere told in the pale pinch of Amelia’s face that wasn’t there when she was sprawled across Greg’s duvet.
She also refused to talk about school. She had been friends with the same group of girls through middle school and the first year of high school but something had happened that meant she’d spent most of sophomore year alone. Greg had seen her walk past Lizzie, Jane and Katy in the corridors and it was like they had never been a tight foursome that wore matching dresses to their sixth grade dance and colonised the table at the back of the library to work on their shared plans for world domination.
“Everything ok?” Greg’s tone was carefully noncommittal.
Amelia shrugged. He could almost set his watch by the amount of time it took her to relax once she was safely installed on his bed. Ten minutes after she’d clambered in his window, or sometimes been shown into his room by one of his parents, her shoulders dropped like whatever was jacking them towards her ears had suddenly gone away.
He changed the subject. “Can we go out this weekend?”
Amelia bit her lip. “I only stayed over two weeks ago.”
Greg sighed. “Your parents know that your virtue is safe from me.”
“That’s not it.”
He looked at her. “So what is it?”
“I can’t-. They don’t like-.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “I’ll figure something out.”
Greg looked at her pale face. “Awesome.”
He slid My Own Private Idaho into his VCR and Amelia crossed one cargo-panted leg over the other. He sat back against the enormous pillow that he’d propped against the wall, so that their shoulders were touching. She leaned slightly into him.
The movie started, but he wasn’t really paying attention.
Greg was pretty sure that there were other, scenier places that he and Amelia probably could have made it into, even with their lamentably bad fake IDs. But she liked the all night coffee shop, with its tattered band flyers lying on all the tables and posters lining the walls for club nights they probably couldn’t get into.
His mother had dropped him off on the way to a dinner with her editor. Amelia’s mother worked full-time in their home and she had once asked him if he wished his mom did the same. He had blinked at the question because Dr Astrid Hojem, love him though she did, was a Berkeley Law professor who specialised in human rights and international law, and that fact was as inextricably her as the taste of her infrequently made peanut butter cookies.
(When he’d come out to her she’d been sitting behind her immaculately tidy desk in her immaculately tidy study, clad still in her professional uniform of sharply tailored suits and stockings that swished like the hiss of rain on blacktop. She had smiled, fondly, as if he was telling her something she had already been apprised of and two days later he had been walking past her study when she’d called him in and presented him with some shiny books on adolescent homosexuality and condoms.)
He had always been told that his father was just as brilliant but to Greg he was so much fuzzier round the edges than his coruscating mother that it barely seemed plausible.
(When he’d come out to his father they’d been standing in the kitchen while his father made himself a cup of tea. He’d been reading the proofs for his latest book with a pen in one hand and Greg had to repeat himself twice before Matthew Sanders’ gaze sharpened on him and he seemed to take in what Greg was saying.)
Amelia glanced up from her coffee and the flyer for a gig that she had been checking out and then executed a perfect double take. She looked at Greg, eyes bright. “That guy is totally checking you out.”
Now, Las Vegas
“Andy called.” Nick frowned at the answering machine.
“Andy who?” Greg was still struggling in the door with an armful of grocery bags.
“Andy your ex-boyfriend who. He’s in town and he wants to meet up tomorrow night.”
Greg put the bags down and hit the answerphone button with his finger.
“Hi, this is a message for Greg. It’s Andy. Andy Williams. Um, I’m in Las Vegas and I wondered if you would be able to meet up with me for a coffee or something. It’s, um, Monday right now and I wondered if you were free Tuesday night. It’s kind of important.”
Kind of important. The words seemed to echo in Greg’s chest. He swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.
He’d been thinking in the supermarket how happy he was. Watching Nick choose vegetables, of all things, had elicited an almost physical rush of affection for his partner and contentment with their shared life together. Their new house. Their relationship. The fact that he was getting out more in the field. That moment seemed like unimaginable hubris now; less like counting his blessings and more like gloating over his good fortune.
Nick’s eyes were anxious as he looked at him. “Do you think-?”
Greg had heard so many people talk about these kind of phone calls. God. He shook his head. “If it’s that then you know we’re ok, don’t you? I mean, I’ve been tested at least twelve times since Andy and I split up.”
Nick wrapped his arms around Greg. “I know those tests are damn near 100 per cent accurate. I just know that Andy was important to you.”
“Yeah.” Greg’s voice was bleak. “First boyfriends always are.”
“Damn straight,” Nick whispered into his neck and Greg’s stomach lurched.
Greg fiddled with his fork.
Nick glanced at him. “Is the risotto too dry? We only had enough stock cubes to make the exact amount that the recipe called for, but it’s never enough. I added some white wine, but it’s not the same, is it?”
Greg smiled, perfunctorily. “It’s great, babe. It’s just-.”
Nick put down his own fork. “I understand.” He covered Greg’s hand with his own. “Would it help to talk about him? I mean, I don’t even know how you guys met.”
“Wouldn’t that be weird for you?”
Nick snorted. “I think my fragile ego can cope with hearing about the boyfriend that you had when you were 15.”
“We met at a coffee shop.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Greg felt like he was standing astride two tectonic plates as they shuddered and scraped along one another; his two lives colliding in an unpleasant burst of noise and sensation.
He pasted on a grin. “Yeah, some things never change.”
But they had changed. Things.
He’d called James Wilkes after Nick had fallen asleep on the sofa, because Nick was pure and untainted but Greg had spent more nights than he should have gasping in the bathrooms of clubs with some stranger’s hand in his pants or head in his fly. Spent so many hours in bed with men whose second names he didn’t even know - and sometimes their first names escaped him in the morning - and he needed the sound of James’s voice in his ear to reassure him that this wasn't cosmic payback.
“Wilkie?” His voice was shaking.
“Sanders? Is that you? Everything ok?”
Greg could almost picture James in his office at the GLBT centre, propping the phone on one shoulder as he raked through his messy desk looking for some essential file or piece of paper.
“I got one of those calls from an ex.” He let the silence tell the rest of the story.
James paused. “Did he say he was positive?”
Greg shook his head before he realised that James couldn’t see him. “No. Just that he had something important to tell me and that he was in Vegas and wanted to meet up.”
James paused again, and Greg realised, belatedly, that the fact they’d hooked up would mean that this was important news for James, too.
“You guys weren’t safe?”
Greg sighed. “Not all the time. I was a horny teenager. We got together when I was 15.”
He could almost see James frown. “And how old was he? I mean, how realistic was it that he would have been positive when you guys were together?”
Greg swallowed. “He was older.”
There was a longer pause this time.
Greg’s chest felt like the air had been squeezed out of it. “Wilkie, do you think there’s any risk?”
James cleared his throat. “Almost certainly not. You’ve been tested, right?”
“Yeah, at least once a year while I wasn’t in a relationship. And I’ve been safe. Or as safe as possible since I split up with Andy.” He tried to find the words. “But there have been a lot of guys.”
He could almost hear James’s relief humming down the phone line and realised that he should probably have explained this in a way that didn’t make his sometime fuckbuddy totally lose his shit.
“Greg, you know that it’s vanishingly unlikely that you’ve been tested multiple times and had false negatives each time?” His voice softened. “And that whatever happens you don’t deserve to be sick, right?”
Greg felt tears prickling behind his eyelids. “Yeah, I’m being crazy. It’s just that I’m such a whore and Nick isn’t and we stopped using condoms a while ago and I would fucking kill myself if I put him at risk.”
“How’s Nick handling this?”
“He’s asleep already.” Greg fiddled with the phone. “He knows how reliable those tests are. I was just- I mean, somebody has to be that 0.00004 per cent who gets a false negative.”
“If you want, you can call me after you speak to your ex, Greg. I know a lot of people who can help if it’s bad news. Even expediting another test to confirm your first results.”
“Ok.” Greg bit his lip. “I’ll do that. Thanks, Wilkie.”
“Sleep well.”
Yeah, right.
(Chapter Two)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Nick/Greg
Warnings: Underage sexual relationship and discussions of whether this is abusive. Discussions of canon child abuse.
Summary: When Greg's first boyfriend appears in Las Vegas, his reason for being there provokes some soul-searching.
Author's note: With thanks to podga , for a lightning fast, charming, and discerning beta. Any inadequacies or errors in this story are my own.
Amends
1996, San Francisco
He helped her in the window, even though she could have gone to the front door. Her parents might have freaked out if someone rang the doorbell after eight o’clock but his parents wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow at a 9.30 pm visitor.
One of her sneaker-clad feet caught the penpot sitting on the desk, as she clambered over it, and she winced as fibre-tipped pens and pencils were strewn across its surface.
“Fucking Dawson’s Creek,” Greg said, but there was no bite in his tone. “Encouraging all these teenage girls to go about the neighbourhood crawling in boys’ windows.”
She raised a darkly-pencilled eyebrow. “As if I’d watch that lame shit.”
“Amelia,” Greg mock-chastised. “I don’t think that’s the kind of language a lady should be using.”
And she smiled then, and flopped down on Greg’s bed next to him.
For all that they were best friends - best friends’ for-evah he could almost hear her say, sarcastically - there were some topics of conversation that it was impossible to broach with Amelia. The exact flavour of fucked up of her family, for one. He’d been to her house a few times the previous year, when they’d been assigned to work on an English Literature paper together in one of Mr Morris’s lame attempts to get people to mix out of their cliques. Even before her parents had realised that he was gay, the very air in their overly tidy house had vibrated with tension. Her father was, hands down, the most scarily austere man that Greg had ever met and her mother was like a woman carved out of ice. The oppressive atmosphere told in the pale pinch of Amelia’s face that wasn’t there when she was sprawled across Greg’s duvet.
She also refused to talk about school. She had been friends with the same group of girls through middle school and the first year of high school but something had happened that meant she’d spent most of sophomore year alone. Greg had seen her walk past Lizzie, Jane and Katy in the corridors and it was like they had never been a tight foursome that wore matching dresses to their sixth grade dance and colonised the table at the back of the library to work on their shared plans for world domination.
“Everything ok?” Greg’s tone was carefully noncommittal.
Amelia shrugged. He could almost set his watch by the amount of time it took her to relax once she was safely installed on his bed. Ten minutes after she’d clambered in his window, or sometimes been shown into his room by one of his parents, her shoulders dropped like whatever was jacking them towards her ears had suddenly gone away.
He changed the subject. “Can we go out this weekend?”
Amelia bit her lip. “I only stayed over two weeks ago.”
Greg sighed. “Your parents know that your virtue is safe from me.”
“That’s not it.”
He looked at her. “So what is it?”
“I can’t-. They don’t like-.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “I’ll figure something out.”
Greg looked at her pale face. “Awesome.”
He slid My Own Private Idaho into his VCR and Amelia crossed one cargo-panted leg over the other. He sat back against the enormous pillow that he’d propped against the wall, so that their shoulders were touching. She leaned slightly into him.
The movie started, but he wasn’t really paying attention.
Greg was pretty sure that there were other, scenier places that he and Amelia probably could have made it into, even with their lamentably bad fake IDs. But she liked the all night coffee shop, with its tattered band flyers lying on all the tables and posters lining the walls for club nights they probably couldn’t get into.
His mother had dropped him off on the way to a dinner with her editor. Amelia’s mother worked full-time in their home and she had once asked him if he wished his mom did the same. He had blinked at the question because Dr Astrid Hojem, love him though she did, was a Berkeley Law professor who specialised in human rights and international law, and that fact was as inextricably her as the taste of her infrequently made peanut butter cookies.
(When he’d come out to her she’d been sitting behind her immaculately tidy desk in her immaculately tidy study, clad still in her professional uniform of sharply tailored suits and stockings that swished like the hiss of rain on blacktop. She had smiled, fondly, as if he was telling her something she had already been apprised of and two days later he had been walking past her study when she’d called him in and presented him with some shiny books on adolescent homosexuality and condoms.)
He had always been told that his father was just as brilliant but to Greg he was so much fuzzier round the edges than his coruscating mother that it barely seemed plausible.
(When he’d come out to his father they’d been standing in the kitchen while his father made himself a cup of tea. He’d been reading the proofs for his latest book with a pen in one hand and Greg had to repeat himself twice before Matthew Sanders’ gaze sharpened on him and he seemed to take in what Greg was saying.)
Amelia glanced up from her coffee and the flyer for a gig that she had been checking out and then executed a perfect double take. She looked at Greg, eyes bright. “That guy is totally checking you out.”
Now, Las Vegas
“Andy called.” Nick frowned at the answering machine.
“Andy who?” Greg was still struggling in the door with an armful of grocery bags.
“Andy your ex-boyfriend who. He’s in town and he wants to meet up tomorrow night.”
Greg put the bags down and hit the answerphone button with his finger.
“Hi, this is a message for Greg. It’s Andy. Andy Williams. Um, I’m in Las Vegas and I wondered if you would be able to meet up with me for a coffee or something. It’s, um, Monday right now and I wondered if you were free Tuesday night. It’s kind of important.”
Kind of important. The words seemed to echo in Greg’s chest. He swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.
He’d been thinking in the supermarket how happy he was. Watching Nick choose vegetables, of all things, had elicited an almost physical rush of affection for his partner and contentment with their shared life together. Their new house. Their relationship. The fact that he was getting out more in the field. That moment seemed like unimaginable hubris now; less like counting his blessings and more like gloating over his good fortune.
Nick’s eyes were anxious as he looked at him. “Do you think-?”
Greg had heard so many people talk about these kind of phone calls. God. He shook his head. “If it’s that then you know we’re ok, don’t you? I mean, I’ve been tested at least twelve times since Andy and I split up.”
Nick wrapped his arms around Greg. “I know those tests are damn near 100 per cent accurate. I just know that Andy was important to you.”
“Yeah.” Greg’s voice was bleak. “First boyfriends always are.”
“Damn straight,” Nick whispered into his neck and Greg’s stomach lurched.
Greg fiddled with his fork.
Nick glanced at him. “Is the risotto too dry? We only had enough stock cubes to make the exact amount that the recipe called for, but it’s never enough. I added some white wine, but it’s not the same, is it?”
Greg smiled, perfunctorily. “It’s great, babe. It’s just-.”
Nick put down his own fork. “I understand.” He covered Greg’s hand with his own. “Would it help to talk about him? I mean, I don’t even know how you guys met.”
“Wouldn’t that be weird for you?”
Nick snorted. “I think my fragile ego can cope with hearing about the boyfriend that you had when you were 15.”
“We met at a coffee shop.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Greg felt like he was standing astride two tectonic plates as they shuddered and scraped along one another; his two lives colliding in an unpleasant burst of noise and sensation.
He pasted on a grin. “Yeah, some things never change.”
But they had changed. Things.
He’d called James Wilkes after Nick had fallen asleep on the sofa, because Nick was pure and untainted but Greg had spent more nights than he should have gasping in the bathrooms of clubs with some stranger’s hand in his pants or head in his fly. Spent so many hours in bed with men whose second names he didn’t even know - and sometimes their first names escaped him in the morning - and he needed the sound of James’s voice in his ear to reassure him that this wasn't cosmic payback.
“Wilkie?” His voice was shaking.
“Sanders? Is that you? Everything ok?”
Greg could almost picture James in his office at the GLBT centre, propping the phone on one shoulder as he raked through his messy desk looking for some essential file or piece of paper.
“I got one of those calls from an ex.” He let the silence tell the rest of the story.
James paused. “Did he say he was positive?”
Greg shook his head before he realised that James couldn’t see him. “No. Just that he had something important to tell me and that he was in Vegas and wanted to meet up.”
James paused again, and Greg realised, belatedly, that the fact they’d hooked up would mean that this was important news for James, too.
“You guys weren’t safe?”
Greg sighed. “Not all the time. I was a horny teenager. We got together when I was 15.”
He could almost see James frown. “And how old was he? I mean, how realistic was it that he would have been positive when you guys were together?”
Greg swallowed. “He was older.”
There was a longer pause this time.
Greg’s chest felt like the air had been squeezed out of it. “Wilkie, do you think there’s any risk?”
James cleared his throat. “Almost certainly not. You’ve been tested, right?”
“Yeah, at least once a year while I wasn’t in a relationship. And I’ve been safe. Or as safe as possible since I split up with Andy.” He tried to find the words. “But there have been a lot of guys.”
He could almost hear James’s relief humming down the phone line and realised that he should probably have explained this in a way that didn’t make his sometime fuckbuddy totally lose his shit.
“Greg, you know that it’s vanishingly unlikely that you’ve been tested multiple times and had false negatives each time?” His voice softened. “And that whatever happens you don’t deserve to be sick, right?”
Greg felt tears prickling behind his eyelids. “Yeah, I’m being crazy. It’s just that I’m such a whore and Nick isn’t and we stopped using condoms a while ago and I would fucking kill myself if I put him at risk.”
“How’s Nick handling this?”
“He’s asleep already.” Greg fiddled with the phone. “He knows how reliable those tests are. I was just- I mean, somebody has to be that 0.00004 per cent who gets a false negative.”
“If you want, you can call me after you speak to your ex, Greg. I know a lot of people who can help if it’s bad news. Even expediting another test to confirm your first results.”
“Ok.” Greg bit his lip. “I’ll do that. Thanks, Wilkie.”
“Sleep well.”
Yeah, right.
(Chapter Two)