Title: Fibonacci
By: Pru
Pairing: Nick/Greg
Rating: R
Warnings: Drug use, prostitution

***

Greg likes to think it's one of those patterns in nature, like Fibonacci but with narcotics.

It goes like this: codeine, percocet, oxycotin, and when all of that got lost in a blur of doctors who had narrowed their eyes and prescribed group, Greg had gone to their trashier sisters on the strip. He wears their brown and purpling bracelets on the insides of his thin white arms and he doesn't think about Stanford or Berkley or how he was on chart number 9829834739824 of his master's thesis.

"It's like the square root of negative one," Greg says to the officer across from him.

He's heavyset, ugly brown suit, screams Jersey all over. Greg's seen a million carbon copies of this guy named Brass: been written up over and over again in their sloppy handwriting, spent the night in cells and got let out in the morning. It's a polite fiction. Prostitution is a victimless crime; vice control works. These are things taxpayers and mayors like to tell themselves.

"Please explain the relevance," Brass says in an even voice.

It's the kind of even voice Greg hears maybe three times a month: calm and smooth and right before the snap--the flash of a gauche gold watch and the stud of diamond cuts on the side of his jaw, so he's wearing a new purple ring around his eyes, matching bracelets on his wrists, scrapes on his knees. He knows how to move with a hit now, though--to take it the best he can.

"It's imaginary. Think about it this way," Greg says, and he leans forward, "you guys broke Nick's door."

There'd been shouting and the splintering of wood. Like thunder and Greg had frozen for a second, curled up on his side in Nick's bed and thought not again until he realized he didn't feel the heat of fire or the sound of shattering glass and finally, finally breathed--

"You guys broke Nick's lamp. You guys tossed his apartment. I--" he points at his own chest "--am still broke and a lady of the evening--"

"You're not a lady," Brass growls, and Greg knows he's pushing it.

"--hey now, no need for insults," Greg says, and softens his voice like he's getting on his knees, like he knows what's coming and there's no need to fight him for it. "The point is: I didn't take any money, I don't have any of his stuff. He just let me crash there for the night--nothing more to it."

Greg knew Nick was a CSI, which is kind of a cop, so. Greg knows cops, tries to school his face into innocence. He thinks he needs to be able to say, "We didn't do anything. Nick Stokes isn't like that," and really mean it--or at least not sound sick doing it.

Sometimes, when he's too tired and sick of sitting in the same jail cell for the same solicitation and prostitution charges he's sat around for a dozen times before, he'll be a cocktease and an asshole, suck on his fingers through the bars and make bedroom eyes, the slut face. Tell the guy on duty that he wants it so bad. But the look on Brass' face tells Greg if he tries any of that shit he's being beaten to a bloody smear in that room and nobody's going to care.

But even if he's strung out and fucked up and lying about being clean he can put volatile chemicals together to make a boom, and he blinks hard, twice, and asks:

"What happened to Nick?"

"Why don't you tell us," Brass says.

It makes something in Greg's head start to hurt, like the yawning, sucking ache of withdrawal, where every inch of his skin hurts and he can feel it like sunlight creeping over his shoulders. He opens his mouth and tries to move his mouth but his eyeballs hurt now, too, and all he can think is that there has to be a reason the Las Vegas PD broke down Nick Stokes' door after Greg answered his phone and it has to be more than that Nick's been watching the Discovery Channel with some charity case twink off, off, off the strip.

"We had coffee. And pancakes at this all-night diner," Greg tells Brass.

He suddenly wants to offer up details, everything, what kind of coffee, the kind of pancakes, the waitress with the nametag missing a letter who had given Greg and up-down before she'd given him an extra stack and Nick had given her a thank you, ma'am smile so bright it could be seen in California.

"We got back to his apartment at eleven and it started raining so he said I could just hang out," Greg says, and his throat hurts. "Is Nick okay?"

"What happened after you got back to the apartment?" Brass asks, and his face is too tight, falsely impassive Greg can feel his skin crawl in dread.

"Nothing," he says honestly. "Nick works--you know this--he works the night shift at the crime lab. He said he had to work." Greg runs his fingers through his hair and looks at the table all bare and scarred and gray under his other hand. "I didn't--he left, I don't know, a couple minutes before Leno's monologue. I watched him drive out of the lot from the window."

Brass says, "Okay," and gets up.

"Look--I just. What happened?" Greg asks, because Nick's his friend and Greg's been in love with him for forever now, since his whole life, always wanted somebody who watched Animal Planet and cried over penguins and made toys in his time off. "Is he okay?"

Brass stands in the half-opened door, and a man with curly, graying hair and precise glasses is staring through the tempered glass outside, one finger over his lip thoughtfully. Everybody is rushing, and the sleek, worn-in high-tech of the Vegas crime lab is buzzing, blurring--everybody's faces are dark with worry and Greg can feel it in the air, in all of their veiled and suspicious glances.

Brass puts the pressure on his left foot, then his right, glances sideways at the man in the window and turns back to Greg before he says, "We're going to have to ask you some more questions," and leaves.

*

It's nearly two hours later before anybody else comes in, and it's a woman with intense eyes, brown hair, a sad mouth.   Greg doesn't move, just sits still in the uncomfortable chair and lets his stomach roll, tells himself that Nick is fine, that nothing bad could ever happen to Nick, who is golden in every way that matters.

"Am I being sprung?" he asks, but he can hear his voice shaking.   He wants to ask, Where's Nick?    What can I do to help?

"No," the woman says.   She looks at him for a long moment, unmoving, before she says, "I remember you.   I remember you from a case."

Greg doesn't remember her.  

"I've never been picked up by crime scene investigators before," he says, slipping back into the familiar comfort of being a mouthy slut.   "My crimes of passion are generally pretty obvious."

It doesn't rile her, and she goes on.   "About a year ago.   Nick questioned you about a body we found in a dumpster.   You worked the same area."

Greg winces.   He remembers that.

"I still didn't kill that kid," Greg says.

"You were never a suspect," the woman says, frowning and leaning against the door to the interrogation room.   "I remember you--you're smart."

It's been a long time he's been insulted when people say that with surprise, but it's strange to hear it with clinical indifference. Greg rolls his shoulders, says, "We're not born into this line of work, you know.   Once upon a time--somebody loved me."

Greg watched Toy Story 2 at Nick's house, that first time he'd come over with a split lip and a black eye and Nick had said, "Oh, geez, Greggo," like he'd meant it, and let him in, hushed him and cleaned him up.

She actually smiles.   "Nick liked you."

Greg can't hide his flush at that.   "Nick is a good guy."

"Yes he is," she says quietly, looks down, looks back up, and when she does, she says, her voice pitched low and as intense as her eyes, "Look--Sanders, if you know anything--"

"What is wrong with you people? " Greg bursts out, furious and finally at the end of his rope.   "In the past ten years Nick has been the only person who hasn't treated me like a piece of shit to come on--why the fuck would I do anything to him?"

She won't look at him.

"Where is he?   Ask me questions--ask me details about the coffee or the pancakes--ask me the name of the fucking waitress.   Ask me about fucking chemistry--don't ask me what I did to him!"

His voice echoes in the room for a long time before the woman breaks the silence.

"Nick disappeared from a crime scene he was investigating."

Greg feels everything slow to frozen before he curls his hands around the edges of the table, mouth set in a tight, angry line.   "That's impossible.   Nick says that there's always an officer on the scene, too.   Nick has a gun.   He--he had his gun when he left."

"The officer with him didn't see anything," she says, and she sounds as angry as Greg here.   She looks out the window, suddenly, and says, "I'll be back," before she darts out, and Greg follows her with his eyes to see the gray-haired man back again, his considering gaze.

Greg waits until the woman and the man have disappeared down the hall before he puts his face in his hands and gasps for desperate, desperate breaths.

It's been a long time since Greg was doing time on his knees in alleyways but he still has his off nights; no never really means no when you're giving it up for cash--but he's better now than when he first met Nick, aware enough to be scared and sick and dizzy with worry.

There'd been a body in a dumpster and Greg had been inside a police line, then, feeling a cop add bruises to his already-bruised arm as he jerked Greg toward the investigators, a man and a woman who'd climbed out of a slick black SUV.   The type of car Greg would notice and price, adjust for dick inflation, and say $40 instead of $25.

"I already told you I didn't do anything," Greg snarled, and stumbled a bit when the cop had released him like Greg was contagious--stumbled right into somebody's chest, and by the time Greg noted the steadying hands and was ready to slap them off, he looked up and was paralyzed by an apologetic smile instead.

Greg still remembers Nick introducing himself--"I'm Nick Stokes, Las Vegas crime lab, I just wanted to ask you some quick questions."--and how he'd smiled self-deprecatingly, the way he'd said, "Hey, thanks for the heads up," when Greg pointed out that whatever they were trying to get from the alleyway would have been too degraded from the bleach in the pressure washing it'd gotten the night before.   How later, after the police had asked Greg the same ten questions about ten thousand times, Nick had strolled up and said, "Hey, guys, lay off, all right?" and asked if Greg wanted a cup of coffee, if he liked pancakes, because Nick knew a great place and to follow him.  

"I know how this works," Greg had said.   "You don't have to wine and dine me.   Cops get freebies."   And it was kind of hilarious in retrospect the way Nick's eyes had widened in unexaggerated horror, how he'd said, mortified, " I meant coffee!   Real coffee!" and how Greg had been so shocked stupid all he could say was "Oh."

*

"Greg Sanders?"

When Greg pulls his face out of his hands, he sees the gray-haired man, spectacles gleaming, looking down at him with the same impassive interest as all the others.   He says, "Did you guys find Nick yet?"

"No," the man says, sliding himself into the chair opposite.   "But we're following some leads.   My name is Gil Grissom.   I just have a few questions."

"God," Greg says and rubs his face.   "Then follow the leads and stop coming in here to harass me--I don't know anything.   You're just wasting your time."

Greg keeps telling himself that Nick has a gun, knows how to use it, probably spent his childhood in Texas learning how to shoot animals and faggots.   It doesn't really help since Nick watches Animal Planet and makes friends with gay hookers, and Greg can't even imagine Nick pulling a trigger--all he can see is Nick dead like the body in the dumpster, glassy-eyed and graying, nothing underneath the skin.

"We found some things in his apartment--"

"When you busted down his door," Greg snaps.

"When we busted down his door," Grissom agrees, and places a bagged and folded t-shirt onto the table, a toothbrush, a Black Sabbath CD.   Grissom stares at him.   "Are these yours?"

Greg winces, reaches out and touches the plastic.   He'd been sneaky, really, leaving little things.   The t-shirt is his: a Def Poetry Slam shirt he got his freshman year of college.   The toothbrush Nick gave him, the first time Greg had showed up with blood on his teeth and come in his hair, looking nearly as bruised as he felt.   The CD Greg lifted and left, put it unobtrusively alongside Nick's John Coltrane and Hank Williams.

"Yes," he says, hoarse.   "But Nick doesn't know I left these things at his house."

"But you were friends?" Grissom asks, and there's no other meaning in that sentence so far as Greg can tell, and that alone is fairly extraordinary.

"He just lets me crash sometimes," Greg starts to babble, paranoid.   "It's nothing."

What if they stop looking for Nick?   What if the cops find out Greg's been there, start drawing their own incorrect conclusions?   Nick loves penguins and makes toys and he gives Greg Batman band-aids and they can't leave him alone and missing because Greg has been leaving his things lying around, trying to pretend Nick's house is also his own.

"You have a toothbrush," Grissom points out.   "It was in a cup in the bathroom--that's usually not nothing."

"God, if you knew Nick at all," Greg pleads, "you'd know what a softie he is.   He just saw me rocking a busted lip and a black eye and wanted to do the good, charitable, straight Christian thing.   He read me the Bible the whole time."  

Greg knows he sounds insane, and only wishes he still had the track marks to go with the incoherent ranting; or maybe that would hurt more than help.

"Mr. Sanders, your relationship with Nick isn't on trial here," Grissom tells him and pauses long enough to cock his head thoughtfully to the side.   "Nobody has been following Nick in the last few days?   Has he been getting strange phone calls?"

"I don't know," Greg admits miserably.   "I don't--I haven't been around.   I only see him once, twice a month or so.   I don't--I don't want to overstay my welcome."

He knows just enough to be a liability, and not enough to help.   Fantastic.

"Okay," Grissom says, and stands up.   "You're free to leave.   Thank you, Mr. Sanders."

"What about Nick?" Greg asks, tasting bile in the back of his throat.

Grissom considers him for a long moment before he rifles around in his pocket to produce a battered business card and writes something on the back.   He hands it to Greg, says, "Call us tomorrow, when you can," and leaves.

*

Greg spends the entire morning parked behind Lucy's counter, knee jerking up and down and biting his nails down to the quick, staring at her black, wall-mounted telephone.   Lucy's out back shouting at the delivery guys and calling them names that Greg--in half a decade of tricking--has never heard before.  

The windows are open and the last of last night's smoke is filtering out in faint, low-hanging clouds and Greg putters around emptying ashtrays and lining up bottles of liquor, cleaning his way through the bar the way he used to in his lab after hours.   When it was just him and a mountain of silent pipettes and humming equipment and his thoughts--only now Lucy comes back in and says:

"Why the long face, prettycakes?"

"You went straight," Greg says nervously.   "I was thinking of going straight."

Lucy purses his lips and looks at Greg meaningfully.   Greg knows that Lucy suspects, that he thinks Greg's found some old guy with deep closets and pockets--but Greg has never told.   Nick is his secret, and Greg has always been bad at sharing.  

"I also got off of smack," Lucy says flatly.

Greg glares.   He could get off smack.   "Can I use your phone?" he asks.

"Wasn't going to stop you," Lucy says gently, and closes one large hand over Greg's shoulder for a moment before he heads into the back room again. Once upon a time Greg met Lucy when he was still Lucky and worked a block down from Greg--but now the skin on the inside of his arms are smooth and clean and scarred-over but untouched, and Greg feels a kind of hollow jealousy at that he doesn't have the words to describe.

It takes him three tries before he manages to dial the crime lab's phone number, and another hour before he gets a person on the line.

"Hello?" he says, wondering if he sounds ridiculous or strange or if anything in his voice is giving him away.   "This is--I'm Greg Sanders.   I'm calling for Gil Grissom?"

It takes another fifteen for Greg to be transferred, for hold music to play briefly--Goldberg Variations, Greg thinks--and then finally, finally, Grissom is on the phone and Greg can hear the smile in his voice, the exhausted relief, and listens with a shuddering breath as he says:

"Yes, Mr. Sanders.   We found him--he's going to be all right."

*

The news channels don't start picking up the story until a few hours after Greg has ended his phone call with Grissom, hands shaking so badly he misses with the receiver twice.   They show footage of the sheriff talking solemnly about the dangerous work Las Vegas PD takes on, and every television in Nevada is showing Nick's face, flashing his million-dollar smile.   Greg can't blame them--he couldn't look away either.

*

"He's at Desert-Palm," Grissom tells him, voice even and calm on the phone line.   "His family flew out to stay with him, but I think he'd like to see you, too."

Greg manages to say, "You think so."

"I do," Grissom answers, no affect in his voice at all.   "But you might want to brace yourself, he's suffered extensive injuries.   He looks pretty bad."

He knows it's inappropriate, but Greg can't help the upwelling of hysterical laughter, and it takes him a long time to choke out, "Mr. Grissom--I think I know a bit about looking pretty bad."

There's an amused silence, no pity at all.   "I imagine you do," Grissom allows.   "Visiting hours end at eight--you might want to hurry."

Greg thinks about going to the hospital, thinks about sitting at Nick's bedside and holding his hand, staring down at his face and saying, "You know, I think I love you," and saying it because he means it.   Greg's done every other filthy thing people have discovered how to do to one another in the name of love, but he's never done it for any of the right reasons.   He misses Berkley.   He misses Stanford.   He misses Nick.

But Greg takes a look at himself in the mirror of the dump he calls an apartment, that he shares with three other guys even younger than he is, and thinks he doesn't know how to look clean anymore, doesn't know how not to wear his scars and his past and his profession all over him like a second skin.   He knows he's being irrational, that he's one long, hot shower and a change of clothes away from looking like a normal person, but Greg will know, and Greg will see it, and it's like this whole experience has finally shaken something lose in his head.  

Because Nick--Nick did everything right and did right by everybody and this still happened, and while Greg always knew that whatever it was he was doing out in Las Vegas would kill him in the end--he's never really thought about dying .   Which is ridiculous, Greg knows.   He's a on-again, off-again heroin addict and an upper middle class rent boy--it's a statistical anomaly he's not already dead, not already one of Nick's cases.

*

Greg blows his part of the month's rent on a new button down shirt, nice, smooth khaki's from a chain store in the mall, and the 17-year-old boy at the register gives him a long and leering look that Greg ignores.   He goes home and uses up all the hot water and combs down his hair, shaves as carefully as possible and dresses with such persnickety nervousness that he keeps buttoning his shirt wrong, worrying that he's wrinkling it.  

He takes the bus to the hospital and keeps waiting for one of the guards to figure him out, to see through the Gap costume and recognize him from the Tenderloin district, for a nurse to cock a brow and mention the free clinic is on the second floor.   But instead they just point him down bland and yellowing hallways until he finds a small encampment of unnaturally attractive Texans, their voices like Nick's, rolling and sweet and mellow, swirling together, until Greg's so distracted he barely hears with a woman asks:

"Are you one of Nick's coworkers?"

She has gray hair and dark eyes and she looks tired despite the smile she's pasted to her face.

"A lot of his colleagues have been by," she adds, and her smile wavers.   "Don't be shy."

Behind her, the colony of dark-haired models turns to stare at Greg curiously, and it's enough to make his throat close up in panic, to make him want to stutter out an excuse and walk away again because he doesn't even know how to do this anymore--have a conversation with somebody under bright lights and without an exchange in cash.  

But Greg knows that Nick's just through door 406 in a private room, and he wants to see him so badly it makes his skin hurt, so Greg says:

"No--we don't work together."   He swallows hard.   "Nick's my friend."

"Oh," the woman says, and before Greg can lose his nerve entirely, she takes three huge steps forward and pulls him into a hug, fierce and tight and desperate.   She smells like apples and somebody's home, and Greg puts his hands on her back awkwardly, feels the warmth of her through her gray suit.   And when she pulls away, her eyes are shining as she says:

"The only people who came to see him were people he worked with.   We all--well, I worried he didn't have any friends at all."  

She takes his hand, but not to shake, just to hold, and Greg tries to remember how to do that, too, digs up a smile so she has something other than his shocked-stupid face to look at.   "I'm glad to meet you.   I'm Jillian Stokes--Nick's mother."

He blinks.   "You gave him encyclopedias," Greg says, suddenly, and before he can be mortified, everybody in the hall is dissolving into laughter.   And then Greg's surrounded by a sea of pretty faces, bright eyes, Texan drawls and handshakes and hugs, ushering him into the dim quiet of the hospital room--and Jillian's hand is still tight around Greg's.

*

Greg thinks this entire out-of-body experience is a little too much like that horrible Sandra Bullock movie that made no sense either, but he's pretty sure she was just poorly-employed, and not actually a male prostitute.   But it's nice to have somebody's hand to hold when he finally does see Nick: eyes shut and body covered in tubes, a clinical white sheet that doesn't hide anything--not the bruises or the dark, angry red bites.   Nick's mom keeps trying to reassure him, tell him it's all cosmetic and that Nick is just dehydrated, that he's been sedated, that the red welts are fire ant bites, but that he'll be fine.

Nick doesn't look fine, and Greg knows his distress is all over his face because everybody keeps hugging him, keeps reassuring him, and he's had his hands taken in so many other sets of palms he's feeling touch-drugged, dizzy with it.   Strange as it sounds, Greg's not used to being touched anymore--he's always been a conduit: something for his johns to work out their frustration or repressed gayness or abusive tendencies on, before they go home and touch with intent, their wives, their boyfriends, their pets and belongings.   But the eighty-seven billion Stokes that drift in and out of the hospital room, in and out of the hall, drag him in and out of the cafeteria and buy him coffee and tell him Nick's life story and pretend not to notice how shell-shocked he is--they're all touching Greg , and that's a radical concept.

"You know," Jillian tells him, her hands wrapped around a foam-insulated coffee cup, all the whorls of steam making her look a little ghostly, "Nick--he's always been in the middle of so many groups but he's always still been alone--" a pause here, shy "--I'm glad he has a friend, just for himself."

She smiles at him gratefully and Greg feels sick--almost as sick as the first time he went down on his knees in a gritty, rain-slick alley and lifted shaking hands to somebody's belt; he doesn't remember who, he remembers needing his next hit.   He's such a fraud, and once Nick wakes up, his whole family will know, too.

"I--we're not really--Nick has lots of friends," Greg finally manages to say, scraping it out of his throat.   This has to be true; after all, it's Nick Stokes.   This is harder than having been in the Las Vegas PD all day, harder than knowing Nick was missing and hurt, harder than seeing him, washed-out and frail on a hospital bed.   "We're--we're not really that close."

But Jillian doesn't frown or push him away or figure him out, just smiles again into her coffee, mysterious and female.   Greg thinks that after his dignity and his sense of self-worth and the limitless everything of possibility he misses, maybe he misses women the most: mothers, daughters, friends, colleagues, their smiles and their curves and the way they laugh at Greg, laugh with him, soft and with a secret.

And then one of Nick's army of attractive siblings is rushing into the waiting room, saying, "Mom!   Greg!   Hurry up, Nick just woke up!"

*

It's edging close enough to the end of visiting hours that the nurses are starting to give the cloud of Stokes evil eyes, but Greg gets shoved and moved and shuffled to Nick's bedside anyway, resisting the urge to ask somebody--anybody--for an emesis basin.   Nick sounds soft and far away and his eyelids are already sagging from the exertion of being conscious for just a few minutes, one still swollen shut from a fire ant bite.   And when--despite Greg's best efforts--he's floated next to Nick's pillow, one hand tight around the bed railing, he looks down at Nick's groggy, confused face and swallows hard.

"Hey," he croaks, and wonders if this is when it will all go down, and if it does, will the hospital call security to drag him out, or will he have the luxury of just leaving on his own.

Nick blinks his good eye at Greg, confused, blurry, and the room goes quiet for a moment--Greg can't tell if he's just imagining it, but everything's faded into a dim white noise.

"G?" Nick asks, hoarse.

"Yeah, Nick," Greg says, face and skin and eyes and everything hot, burning up.   This feels like rolling, this feels like the best part of E.   This feels like the fever-slick haze of detoxing at last, every single time he's tried to kick it.   "It's me.   It's Greg."

Nick's voice sounds like a smear of noise, but he does say, "Okay?"

Greg has to bite the inside of his mouth to focus himself, to keep from saying things he's bubbling over with, like thank you and I've never been so scared before and this makes my problems look stupid .

"Yeah, Nick," he says finally.   "But LVPD--they kicked down your living room door.   I think they broke your lamp, really trashed the place looking for you--I think they messed up your CD collection."

"S'okay," Nick mutters, eyes closing for real now, tired.   "Buy you a new one," he says, and then he's fast asleep.

They get kicked out of the hospital not long after that, and there's only so much loitering that can be done.   The brothers and sisters argue over who should stay and who should go and who's left their children to starve with nothing more than some wheat bread and peanut butter and the number for the local pizza place, which makes Judge Stokes--Christ, Greg thinks, a judge --start making disapproving noises.   It's almost an hour later before Greg almost manages to sneak away, before Jillian waylays him as he's creeping toward an elevator and says, "Thank you for coming to see him, Greg--you should come again."

"Oh," Greg says.   He knows he's going to start shaking soon, start looking like what he really is.   "I don't know if that's a good idea."

Nick's mother palms his cheek.   "It's a good idea, Greg," she tells him.   "You should come again."

And just like that, Greg finds himself nodding.   He remembers his own mother: California sweet and how she smelled like the ocean, the way she took him biking around San Francisco, taught him how to make bread when he was little--he misses her.

"You take care of yourself," she instructs him.

"I will," Greg promises.

"Okay, good," she says, pleased, and pulls him into a hug, a tight squeeze for just a moment before she says.   "Good."

*

Greg calls his mother from a payphone outside of an all-night diner on the strip.   She answers "hello?" and Greg says, "Hi.   Mom.   It's me," and she's crying before he finishes saying 'mom.'   She says she forgives him, that she's sorry they couldn't help more, that they miss him very much, and he should come home.   They'll send money, she promises, and Greg swallows hard around how much he wants to say, "Yeah, send money."   He won't spend it on rent.  

He says instead, "No.   Don't.   I'll--I just wanted to say hi.   I wanted to say I'm okay."

He's not, but Greg thinks he wants to be, and it's the first time he's been able to say that in a long time.

*

Lucy locks him into a bathroom at his apartment, and just to be a jackass, leaves Greg three buckets.

"You're a riot, you motherfucker," Greg says, but Lucy just ignores him and keeps the door barricaded.   It's easier than Greg remembers for a full day and a half--and then he busts all his knuckles trying to create a hole in the bathroom wall.

"Easy, shug," Lucy says, when he comes in later to help Greg out of his clothes and to put him into the shower, hose him down with lukewarm water and try to give him something to eat.   "Just take it easy."   Greg pukes it all up, partly out of spite and partly because he will never eat again.

Later--how much later?--Greg asks, "How many days?" and Lucy just gives him a tight smile.

"Soon, honey," he promises.

The third and fourth days blur together, a mess of sickness and bad smells and hurt that makes Greg curl up into himself, sit in the bathtub and rock back and forth miserably, looking for cold ceramic to press his face against.   It's two hundred degrees too hot and he's tired but he can't sleep, and every minute feels like an hour, even though Greg knows intellectually it's not true.   By the fifth day, Greg doesn't know anything anymore.

Lucy's a God damn liar, Greg thinks, lying on his back flat against the icy tile: this isn't soon at all.

*

A month later, Greg calls his mom again.  

This time, he says, "Actually, can you send me a bus ticket?"

*

Greg feels like a tourist for his first month back in San Francisco--but that's not all that strange, he's felt like a tourist in what's been left of his life since he woke up on the tenth day in Lucy's apartment.   "Hey, prettycakes," Lucy had said, pushing his hair out of his eyes.   "It's morning."

The hardest part of going straight is the strange middle place, where he doesn't feel addiction like a physical pain anymore--but he sort of misses the accessories: the needles and tourniquets and the companionship, really.   Also, weirder and even more disturbing, he keeps forgetting he decided to stop being a hooker.   Lucy reminds him constantly, steered him away, saying tolerantly, "Stop.   That's not you anymore.   You don't have to do that anymore."

It's weird to look at everything all new again, and he wonders if this is what it felt like to be seven years-old; Greg spends a lot of time at his parents' kitchen table, reading books from his youth, pulled from a slightly dusty bookshelf.   Nothing in his room has changed, and his mother had been watery-eyed when she'd told him so.  

The lab explosion at Stanford had been terrible, an accident--he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just visiting a colleague when the room had immolated from inside out.   Second degree burns all over his back and night terrors for weeks.   It's hard to work when you can't go near a fucking test tube and everybody cut him so much slack, kept slipping him meds long after his prescriptions ran out, saying, "We understand you're in pain."   And when they'd stopped doing that, Greg started making shit up, started haunting ERs.

"We knew you'd come back," his mother says.  

Her lips keep shaking like she wants to cry but doesn't want to upset him; Greg wishes he could let her hug him.   But it's been too much too soon, and he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to associate arms with anything else other than what he's done with himself for the past five years.

"I'm glad somebody knew," Greg says, feeling awkward and tired.  

She takes his hand, suddenly fierce.   "We always knew," she tells him, eyes dark.   "Your father and I--we always knew."

Greg had a conversation like this with Nick once before, too.   He remembers Nick saying that Greg should think about picking up a few classes at UNLV; Nick never said Greg should stop turning tricks or get off the smack--it was all implied.   Nick told Greg he should apply for cool jobs or work in law enforcement or teach high school chemistry, because anybody had to be better than who Nick had in eleventh grade--damning with faint praise.  

"You're smarter than half the guys on day shift," Nick had laughed, white teeth gleaming in the diner lights, lipping the edge of his coffee mug.   "You could come work for us--save me a lot of lab-related headaches."

"Please," Greg had laughed, still shy then.   "You don't even know if I'm qualified."

"Oh, I know," Nick had said, all smiles. "I know."

He closes his eyes and spreads his hands out along the green grass of the hill, and when he opens them again, he's looking up at the cloudless blue of the sky.

He says, "I'm gonna be okay, Mom," and "I mean it, this time.   I'm really gonna be okay."

"I know, baby," she answers.   "I know."

*

Greg writes Nick a letter, months later, sent care of the Las Vegas Crime Lab.   It says:

Nick--

I hope this letter finds you better than I last saw you, and tell your mother I'm sorry I didn't come back to see you in the hospital.   I would say, 'I wish you the best,' but I don't doubt you'll do that all on your own.

I know a lot of people must say this to you every day, but you changed everything for me. Thank you for really meaning coffee.

Greg.

He mails it on a Thursday, slides it into the blue U.S. Postal Service drop on the corner.

*

Epilogue

Greg keeps in touch with Lucy.   In part because Greg owes him money and favors in this and future lifetimes, but also because Lucy is a great source of Vegas gossip--Greg needs desperately to know whom Sam Braun has decided to marry this week.   What old strip casino's been plowed for what new hotel, if anybody else has been mauled by a white tiger.   It's only been a little over a year, but it's starting to feel far away, a little dreamy, and Greg sometimes wakes up and wonders if maybe he imagined Las Vegas--imagined the cuts on his knees and bruises on his mouth, the needles and need and even Nick.

And then in November, a week before Thanksgiving, Greg gets a package in the mail, in manila envelope with bubble wrap lining the inside--addressed to GREG SANDERS from NICK STOKES.   It takes some wrestling to get it open and his roommate smirks at him over his coffee while Greg scowls and stabs at it ineffectually with scissors.

Inside is a brand new Black Sabbath CD, still in its shrink wrap and a note:

Greg: Sorry I've been out of touch so long, but your friend Lucy (Lucky?) said you were doing good at home--I'm glad to hear it.   I looked around but couldn't find your copy of that Black Sabbath CD to send along to you; I guess they busted it when they busted my apartment--here's a long-awaited replacement.  

Best, Nick.

PS, you should email me--n_stokes@lab.lvpd.gov

Greg does, in between appointments during office hours.   All it says is:

To: n_stokes@lab.lvpd.gov
From: greg.sanders@stanford.edu
Subject: Black Sabbath CD

You knew I left it there?

Greg.

And when Nick writes back:

To: greg.sanders@stanford.edu
From: n_stokes@lab.lvpd.gov
Subject: Re: Black Sabbath CD

Damn, Greg.   Of course I did.

Greg puts his head down on his desk and covers his face and starts laughing until it hiccups into grateful sobs.   And when he gets home that night, long after everything's fallen dark and sparkling and huge overhead, there's another email waiting for him:

To: greg.sanders@stanford.edu
From: n_stokes@lab.lvpd.gov
Subject: if you come back to Vegas

Let me take you for coffee, real coffee.

*

Greg thinks about everything he'd been afraid of after the lab fire, thinks about everything he was afraid of when he'd left California for Vegas.   He thinks about everything he learned to be afraid of, afraid for, there--and how after all he's still here, eyes wide open.   He thinks that if he doesn't have the dignity and self-worth back yet, he has his family, he has his second chances.   In a way, he has Nick--and he might have more, later, when he's not so scared of wanting it.

And lying on his back on the balcony of his apartment, Greg knows he has this: the hugeness of the sky, the limitless everything of possibility--and he reaches up into the black and feels the wind on the skin of his palms.

The End

***