Amends (4/?)
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.
Chapter Four
After ten years of being a CSI, Nick’s certainty that any sight or smell could shake him was tempered only by his belief that there was literally no act of violence too disturbing or disgusting for human beings to do to one another. Standing in the kitchen of the Dew Drop Diner, he couldn’t remember how long it had been since his stomach had churned at a scene.
As far as Nick was concerned, David couldn’t finish too quickly with his initial evaluation of the body. The head had ballooned grotesquely, and Nick added face first in a deep fat fryer to the list of ways that he didn’t want to die.
Even without the teenaged corpse, the skin of which crackled monstrously as David eased the zipper of the body bag closed over its face, the crime scene was grim. The co-worker, who had pulled Mary-Jo Dugger out of the fryer, had burns up both arms, and she was standing in a pool of stale grease where the body had flipped out of the fryer onto the ground. The smell of cooking oil lingered in the air and coated the skin of everyone in the room.
The house was in darkness when Nick arrived home. Dumping his bag in the hall, he made for the kitchen. He could still taste grease from the Dew Drop Diner, and he knew from years of experience that the fizz of soda lifted most rank tastes off the human tongue.
He flicked the light on at the same time as Greg spoke, and the voice coming out of the darkness made him jump.
“Sorry.” Greg’s voice was flat. “For surprising you.”
He was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass and a vodka bottle in front of him. Nick took in the scene.
“Why are you sitting in the dark, Greggo?”
Greg shrugged.
Nick shifted uneasily on his feet, feeling the ache of his back from his night in the diner. “Is something wrong?”
“Why do you ask, Nick?” Something about how Greg said his name made Nick uncomfortable.
“C’mon, man. You’re sitting in the dark, drinking vodka straight up. You’re the very embodiment of ‘something is wrong’.”
Greg took a sip of his drink. Winced. “First, why don’t we have any decent tasting liquor in the house?”
“Because you and Archie finished off the last of the Glenmorangie.” Nick was impatient. “And second?”
Greg twisted round in his chair, so that he was looking Nick full in the face.
“You spoke to Wilkie about me and Andy?”
Nick blinked. “He told you about that?”
“No, man. He’ll keep any fucking secret you tell him. What he did do was email you some stuff on statutory rape and the impact on the victim.”
“You read my email?” Nick tried, and failed, to keep the accusation out of his tone.
“You left your laptop docked. I just wanted to print something off real quick.” Greg shook his head. “Not the fucking point, man. I trust you with my life and you run right out and discuss it all in painful detail with my friend? My friend?”
Nick took a deep breath. “I think we should wait until we’re both sober to talk about this.”
Greg’s eyes opened wide. “Oh please, Nick. Why don’t you patronise me some more? I guess I’m too fucking broken to have two fingers of vodka and be capable of conversing with the grown ups.”
“No one said you were broken.”
“I’m the victim of a crime, Nicky. You and Wilkie spent a fun-filled afternoon talking about it, remember?”
“I wanted to make sure I understood what happened.” Nick hesitated. “I wanted some sense of what’s normal.”
Greg spluttered into his drink. “So now I’m a case study in an abnormal psychology textbook?”
Nick felt his face darken. “Are you deliberately trying to misconstrue every damn thing I say? I didn’t have any relationships with boys or men in my teenage years, remember? I don’t have anything to compare your experience to.”
“And was Wilkie enlightening?” Greg’s eyes were accusatory.
“Yeah. He was helpful.”
“So, what did he say?”
Nick filled a glass with water, drops from the faucet spattering loudly against the sink, and sat down. “That the scene, and lack of out teenagers, means that a lot of young guys have similar experiences to you.”
Nick hesitated.
“And?”
“And that when they’re working with the young person, they try to encourage him to see it as something he needs to step away from, but that if it’s in the past they leave it there.”
“And was all this fun for you?” Greg’s tone was like ice.
“Fun?” Nick watched Greg pour another drink, sloshing some onto the smooth surface of the table.
He jumped up and tore a couple of pieces of kitchen paper off the roll.
“Here,” he held it out to Greg, paper rough under his fingers.
Greg looked at it balefully. “So now you’re literally clearing up my messes?”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “You’ve done the dishes, Greg. You’ve literally cleaned up my mess while I’ve been at work. So maybe you could stop reading some bad, controlling intent into everything I do.”
He realised that he was nearly yelling, and lowered his voice.
“No, it wasn’t fun. I hate that Andy might have hurt you, then or now. But I didn’t want to assume that it was one thing when it wasn’t that thing. I needed some perspective.”
Greg was silent.
“And I couldn’t think where else to get it.” Nick slid his fingers across the cool wood of the kitchen table towards Greg’s. Greg moved his hands further away.
“I’m sorry if I upset you by going behind your back.”
For a second, Nick thought that Greg was going to twine his fingers through Nick’s and that Greg’s anger would segue smoothly into a particularly Greggish kind of grumpiness, which could generally be lifted with ice cream and some good sex.
Instead, Greg reached into the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging over the back of his chair and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
Nick felt a burst of irritation.
“Is this a throwback to way back when? Getting in an adolescent snit?” Nick shook his head. “I’m feeling sympathy for your Mom right now.”
Greg separated the plastic wrapping from the cardboard and flipped the top, yanking out the silver paper covering the neat rows of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth. Flicked the lighter.
“Save your sympathy. It’s not like my Mom was around to see me being in an adolescent snit. We didn’t all get to grow up on Walton’s Mountain.”
Nick stood up and grabbed an ashtray from on top of the cabinet. They’d never even used these, but Greg had picked up three the last time he’d dragged Nick to Crate & Barrel. In case of guests, he had said, and even though Nick couldn’t think of anyone they knew that smoked, he liked the idea of the two of them hosting an after-party. Or the kind of bohemian dinner party that Greg reminisced about.
“At least use a fucking ashtray.” And he wished he could take the words back, because he never swore at Greg. Never. And he could hear his voice sliding all over the place, like he was skidding on ice.
“You’re acting like a child, Greg.”
“I often do, Nick.” Greg’s breathed out a thin stream of smoke. “You should know. You’ve had the benefit of the things I learned on my knees when I was a teen.”
“Fuck you.” Nick could feel rage humming through his body, a blast of anger that seemed to start somewhere at the top of his spine and rush along all of his limbs until it pounded at his fingers and toes. “Fuck you.”
Greg took a drag on his cigarette, the paper crackling as it burned.
“Oh really?” His voice was dangerous. “Fuck me?”
Nick was shaking. “Yeah.”
“Am I the one who fucking betrayed you? Who went behind your back to your closest fucking friend?”
Greg’s anger somehow diminished Nick’s, as if there was only able to be a certain amount of it in the room and they had to share it between them..
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Greg, I don’t-“ Every possible route that this conversation could go seemed suddenly to be laden with traps.
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t think that it was like you’re imagining it. I told James that your ages were so different, and asked him what that meant. I was real careful not to talk about anything more.”
“He’s my best fucking friend, Nick.”
Nick looked at Greg. Took in the hunch of his shoulders, and his fingers tapping relentlessly on the table like he was trying to crush his jitters into the gleaming wood.
“I’m not sure what you’re saying, Greg. Could you maybe tell me what you mean?”
Greg mashed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
“I mean that it’s not your fucking place to go to my friends and tell them stuff about me. How is that unclear?”
Greg was frowning.
“Greg, I’m really sorry. I’m sorry that you feel like I went behind your back.”
Greg’s smile was ugly. “Oh, you’re sorry I feel like you went behind my back?”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about, Greg.”
“I’ll spell it the fuck out for you, Nick.” Greg’s tone was sneering. “As you’re too fucking stupid to have grasped it the eight previous times. James is my friend and I would appreciate it if you didn’t discuss my private fucking business with him.”
Nick stood up. “I’m really not going to sit around here while you call me stupid.” Nick could hear the kitchen clock ticking. “I’m going to bed and we’ll discuss this tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you call James and tell him how unreasonable I’m being? I’m sure he’ll be sympathetic.”
“Whatever, Greg. Good night.”
Greg pushed himself out of his chair, palms on the table.
“You don’t just get to leave.” His voice was unsteady. “You don’t just get to fucking leave me.”
Nick turned in the doorway. “I’m just going to bed, Greg.”
“No! I want to finish this discussion.”
Nick paused. “Well, I don’t. We’re just going round in circles and I think it would be better if we talked about it in the morning.”
“No!” Greg had crossed the room in three strides and was standing so close that Nick could smell the cigarettes and vodka on his breath.
“Good night, Greg.”
“I said ‘no’.”
And time seemed to slow then, so that it seemed like a minute, rather than just seconds, before Greg’s hands were clutched round his upper arms, shaking him.
“Listen to me. You have to fucking listen to me.”
It felt like someone else’s hand when Nick put his squarely in the middle of Greg’s chest and pushed as hard as he could. Greg stumbled backwards, away from him.
It felt like someone else’s legs when Nick turned and walked away. He heard Greg’s broken sobs before he reached their bedroom door, which, in an instinct he felt ashamed of later, he locked behind him.
( Chapter Five )