Broken Glass
The phone rang so long that Kel thought Stan might be out, a rarity these days. He was about to give up when Stan finally picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"Hey! Come on up here, I wanna take you out to lunch."
"Sure, you and half of Hollywood. What's up, Kelly?"
Kel rolled his eyes and sighed deeply into the phone. "I just told you - I want to take you out to lunch. Get over here."
"You're serious?"
"Of course I'm serious!"
"I don't know," Stan said, sounding a bit distant. "What if you have an emergency before I get there?"
"Well, then you have to wait for me, and we'll go to lunch as soon as I can get away."
Stan hummed. "Well..."
"Oh, come on, honey. Please?" When Stan didn't answer, he added, "I wanna share some good news with you."
"Oh, yeah? What is it?"
"It's good news."
"So tell it to me!"
"No, I want to see your face when I tell you."
"But you can't wait until you get home to tell me?"
Kel's enthusiasm began to drain away. "Okay, okay. I'll see you tonight."
Stan hesitated again. "You really want me to have lunch with you, huh?"
"Well, yeah, but if you don't want to come up, then I just don't get to have lunch with you."
"It's not that I don't want to, Sweet Baby. But I have a phone conference with the office today, and I don't exactly have transportation."
"I see. And the conference can't be rescheduled?"
"Well... probably... but I still don't have a way to get up there. My car isn't exactly handy, and who knows what state it's in now."
Kel's smile crept back on his face, little by little - he had a vague notion of the state of Stan's car. He wanted to spill the beans right there, but he also wanted to see the look on Stan's face when he gave him the news. "Well, how about a cab?"
Stan grunted. "I haven't exactly had a chance to get to a bank lately, Kelly. No cash, no cab."
Kel sighed again, this time quietly. He was getting frustrated. Stan almost sounded like a child trying to get out of going to school. "I'll pay. And I'll take you home afterwards, so you don't have to worry about unexpected traffic jams jacking up the fare."
"Hm."
"You're still not gonna come, are you?"
Stan chuckled. "Oh, baby, if you're gonna pout, I'd better call the office and tell them I'll be away from the phone."
"So you'll come?"
"Sure, I'll come."
"I usually take lunch at twelve, twelve thirty."
"I'll try to get there before one," Stan said, and hung up without saying goodbye. Kel looked at the receiver in his hand and shook his head with a small, exasperated laugh. One o'clock it is, then.
Losing a patient was always hard, no matter how callous Kel pretended to be around the residents and student nurses. He hadn't become a doctor to make a name for himself (though he'd apparently managed to do that, too). He'd become a doctor to help people, to save them. He'd accepted the prestigious position as head physician of a new specialty because he wanted to do the most good for the most people. Most of the time, he went home satisfied with himself, and the work he'd done. But there were days when his best wasn't good enough, and on those days, he'd go home and try not to cry.
And then there were days like this one.
Losing a patient was always hard, but losing a child... he was always devastated when he had to break that kind of news to a parent.
And he could never quite get the hang of dealing with the kind of trauma that let a patient bleed out on him. Sickness, he could handle. Blunt force trauma, while horrific, was something he could comprehend as possibly being beyond his control. But when a patient comes in with a heart so strong that it can literally beat the precious life force out of the body... irrational though it might be, Kelly always felt personally responsible for those particular deaths.
He peeled slowly out of sticky, blood splattered scrubs, and left the sad explanations to one of his colleagues. He stood in the hot spray of the communal shower, and wept for the little girl who wouldn't be going home with her parents anymore. When he was lobster red and his fingertips were wrinkled and soft and ready to peel right off the ends of his hands, he gave up the ghost and began the ritual to return to the real world. A fresh shave, a handful of hair pomade, and return to the street clothes, and he almost looked like it was just another day at Rampart. Almost.
He was tired. He wanted to lay down in his office for the rest of the day.
He walked slowly back through the halls, nodding slowly at each person who greeted him. They all paused to stare at him as he passed, as if he had a giant red letter on his chest. It was probably painted on his lab coat in blood. He ignored their stares. He'd hide in his office for a little while, pull himself together, and then come out to help someone else, and then they'd all forget his massive failure.
Joe met him in the reception area with a bright smile. Kel nodded slowly at him too, and moved on past him. But a touch on the elbow made him pause. He looked back towards Joe - not quite at him, not in the face, not yet - and prepared to fend off the professional condolences. "Bad one?" Joe asked.
"The worst," he said quietly.
"Um..."
Kel frowned, and finally looked into Joe's face. That sound was not the intro to the usual 'buck up, you did your best' speech that he so loathed at these times. "Okay," he said, bitterly. "What is it?"
Joe looked worried. "Well... it's just that I loaned your friend ten bucks. Don't worry about the money, I just - hey, maybe I should explain it to him?"
Kel spent less than half a nanosecond trying to figure out what the hell Joe was talking about, before he moved on towards his office. "I'm tired, Joe, tell me about it late-"
Joe stepped into his path. "He was pretty embarrassed I think," Joe said, lowering his voice when people in the waiting room started to look at them. "And kind of annoyed, probably because the cabbie was giving him kind of a hard time. He said he told you he didn't - look, just let me tell him about your patient, and-"
"Fuck," Kel hissed, as it all came back to him, and Joe fell silent. "No," Kel said softly, gently. "It's okay. Thanks, really. Stick around, I'll get you your money back in just a minute."
"Forget it, Kel. I mean it. I wasn't looking to collect." Joe smiled warmly at him. "I just didn't want you to walk into a minefield, ok? Especially not after I saw the look on your face." Joe patted him on the shoulder, and left him standing in front of his office door.
Kel found himself wishing he hadn't been so damned enthusiastic that morning. Or that he'd been more insistent on talking to Stan last night before bed. Or that he'd just settled for telling Stan the news after he'd gotten home. Now he was going to have to dredge some fake joy up so he could endure this lunch he most definitely was no longer in the mood to take. Hell. He opened the door, and braced himself for the greeting he was sure he was going to get.
"Where have you been!?" Stan was on his feet and making demands before Kel got the door fully open. "I told you, I don't have any cash on me, Kelly! Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to try to flag someone down to bum for cash, with an irate taxi driver hot on your heels? I told you when to expect me - now look at the..."
Kel tuned out him out with ease. He dragged himself to the couch and sank down on it, weary to the bone. He wanted to lay down, but the couch really wasn't quite wide enough for that. He'd have to curl up and let his knees hang off the edge. He probably should have just crashed in the staff lounge, where the couch was a three seater, and didn't have any arms to close in a six foot tallish outstretched body. Except he didn't want to hear his friends offering their platitudes and cliches. 'We can't save them all.' 'You did your best.' 'She's not in pain anymore.' God, he hated that one most of all. No shit, she's not in pain anymore. She's not in joy, fear, surprise, love, or anything else anymore either. And it was his fault-
A warm, heavy hand on the back of his neck filtered through his thoughts. "Baby?" Stanford's voice, low and soft in his ear, followed the sudden grounding of that hand. The tantrum was forgotten, and only gentle concern remained. "Baby, what happened? Did something go wrong?"
Kel's gut flip-flopped as he worked up the strength to answer. "I did."
The couch sank next to him as Stan settled into the seat. The hand on his neck slid down his back, slow and easy, until it rested just below his thumping heart. The other hand slipped over Kel's lap, searching for something, and latching onto one of his limp hands. They sat like that, silently waiting for... what? For Kel to speak? For Stan to ask for a raincheck? What?
"Do you want to talk about it?"
God, no. If he didn't want to talk about it with people who actually understood, there was no way in hell he was going to try to talk about it with a man with all the empathy of a pile of rocks.
Stan nuzzled the side of his face, and began to pepper his cheeks with soft, featherlight kisses. "You're wrong, you know. I know you are." Kel's teeth began to slide and grind against each other, seemingly of their own accord. "The only thing you did wrong today was believe you did wrong."
So. A bit more empathetic than a pile of rocks, then. Kel could feel his eyes starting to burn. He looked up at the bright fluorescent light, to try to keep the tears from spilling over his lashes, onto his cheeks, his hands, Stan's hand. He thought he'd gotten all the tears out in the shower. He should have stayed longer.
"You need to get away from here for a little bit. We should get lunch. You ready for lunch?
Kel shook his head slowly. His words were shaky with the effort not to sob aloud. "I feel like I'll never be hungry again."
"Okay," Stan said quietly, and held on tighter. "Do you want me to go? I can take the car, pick you up later. If you'd like." He began to rub small circles into Kel's back, pressing lightly with gentle fingertips when Kel began to flinch. "Or I can hang out here, in the office. Keep you company while you work. I've never seen you work..." He trailed off when Kel turned to look into his face.
"I almost gave you up," Kel said. He didn't mean to say it. Not out loud. But he couldn't seem to stop the words from leaving his lips. "No, I did give you up. I thought you didn't want me anymore, and I was so angry. I let go." He turned away, suddenly alight with shame and regret. "I let it all go."
The hand not on his back came up and touched his chin, tilting his face until he was looking Stan in the eye again. "I understand," he said gravely.
"I don't. I don't understand any of this. I don't understand you. Why are you being so nice to me?"
"What?" A flash of something - nerves? fear? guilt? - swept over Stan's face, before his face became stone. "What do you mean?"
"I mean... I don't know what I mean." Kel pushed out of Stan's arms, and circled around to his side of the desk. This was neither the time nor the place for analyzing a soured romance. "It doesn't matter why you're being so nice to me. What matters is that you are, and I'm grateful for it. Thank you."
Stan smiled awkwardly. He looked like he was trying to figure out if he was off the hook, or if he had even been on one. "Well, it's not a far stretch to be kind to someone who's spent the last twenty-something years with me."
"Is that what this is? Kindness to an old friend?"
Stan frowned. "Is that what I am? An old friend?"
Kel laughed humorlessly. "We're talking in circles, Stan."
"Maybe we should change the subject."
"Maybe." Kel picked up the lighter on his desk and flicked it on and off a few times. "I should feed you, since you came all the way up here."
"It wasn't that bad. Besides, I didn't come here for the cuisine. I came here so you could deliver your wonderful news in person, and see my face light up." Stan smiled, a sweet, winsome expression. "We can eat right here, get us some of that godawful hospital food that made me wish for the county lockup mess hall."
Kel chuckled. "You'll change your mind as soon as you see the lunch choices, I'll bet. Come on."
They wound up at a French cafe halfway between Rampart and home. Stan had turned tail before they'd even gotten to the food service - the smell alone was enough to send him racing for the hospital doors. Kel didn't care much either way where they wound up for lunch. His appetite hadn't yet returned, and after his odd confession, and Stan's odd evasion, he wasn't too sure that his news would be met with the kind of enthusiasm he'd thought it might be.
Stan seemed perfectly at ease, ordering soups and salads and sandwiches and deserts and drinks for both of them (though all Kel really wanted was a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of wine), and chatting up the young men working the tables. Kel was so nervous he was actually tempted to ask the girl at the register (the only woman working in the whole joint) if they sold cigarettes. He wasn't sure if the nerves was from the aborted conversation they'd just had, or the rushed conversation they were about to have.
"So," Stan said, when the first course arrived, "what did you want to tell me?" He smiled wolfishly, and speared a dark red leaf that looked like a child's crayon scribbling of a Christmas decoration.
"The charges have been dropped."
Stan stopped mid chew. "Huh?"
A slow smile spread across Kelly's face. "Oh, there's more," he said with glee, and laid everything out for a flabbergasted and giddy Stanford. Yeah, it had been worth the effort to tell him the news to his face.
Kel never got to deliver babies - most emergency births either happened before the mother made it to the hospital, or involved such delicate situations that they were shuttled directly off to Obstetrics. But a young mother-to-be who was waiting for news on her injured brother became the center of a waiting room drama when her water broke. The head was crowning by the time word reached the base station, and Kel went ahead and delivered the baby right there in the middle of the waiting room (to the horror of the administration, and the delight of the student nurses). The little girl was perfectly healthy, a little pink bundle of noise. Mother and daughter were bundled off to the nursery, the janitorial staff was called in to straighten the place out, and Kel clocked out with a smile on his face.
Maybe he wasn't such a failure after all.
The day had improved drastically once he'd gone to lunch, and closing it out with the birth of a new child seemed like the perfect punctuation. But he didn't plan on stopping there - the night was young yet, and they still had an anniversary to commemorate. He didn't know what they were going to do, or how (because he sure as hell wasn't spending that kind of money on a takeout meal for two again), but Kel had high hopes for the future.
There was some kind of event at the waterfront when he got close to home, and traffic was detoured to the seedier parts of town. He found himself driving past the bar where he'd first met a certain fireman, and his heart swelled with some bittersweetness he couldn't name. The memory of Captain Stanley's long, lanky form at his housewarming was both agony and ecstasy. They'd managed to be more than civil, to be genuinely warm to one another, to have forged something of a relationship based on mutual respect and care of their shared charges (both the paramedics and the citizens). But in so doing, they'd killed something precious, something that could have been -
Kel shut that line of thinking right the hell down. It was done. They'd moved on, successfully, and to dwell on the whys or the could-have-beens was to invite disaster. He kept his eyes on the road, and picked his way through the narrow sidestreets to his beautiful apartment.
He was surprised by how tired he was when he got out of the car. It was a good tired, like he'd run a marathon (something he'd done precisely once, and was more than content to never do again, thank you very much), or like he'd wrapped himself around a long lanky strang-
What is wrong with me? Kel practically fell into the elevator and forced himself to consider celebration options. They could walk down to the waterfront to find out what the event was that had everything all blocked up. They could walk in the other direction, towards the various bars that peppered the area. They could call for pizza or Chinese delivery. They could just get naked and Kel could let Stan have his way with him in all the other places they hadn't had a chance to 'christen'.
The elevator spat him out in the vestibule in front of the heavy double doors to his apartment. He put his key to the lock, and was surprised when the doors moved away from his hand before he could fully slot the key. He stared at the opening, alarmed. Should he go in? Should he go back to the lobby and talk to the concierge? Should he drive away to the police station, less than a mile from the building? He strained to hear sounds of a break-in, but if there was anyone hiding in there, they were moving stealthily through the unit, likely behind the heavy hardwood doors deeper within the apartment's confines. "Hello?" His voice sounded meek and frightened. He tried again, embarrassed. "Hello?"
Nothing.
Maybe Stan had run down to the corner market for some olives or something. Maybe he figured he'd be right back, and hadn't bothered with the key. After all, strangers who came into the lobby had to talk to the man behind the desk before they could approach the elevator. That was probably it.
There was an olive plate on the end table by the ridiculous blue sofa. Okay. Theory partially proven. But where was Stan?
Ashes in the fireplace. Odd that Stan would light it so early, and let the flame die out before Kel got home.
Wine in an ice bucket. Kel grimaced. They weren't supposed to be keeping wine in the house, not unless they were having guests. Not until Kel was sure he was alright.
Wine glasses on the floor.
Wine glasses on the floor.
Really?
Kel plucked the wine bottle from the ice and tipped it to his lips. Empty.
Insult to injury, really.
He saw one of the briefs that Stan had been working so furiously on while Kel was at the hospital. Hope began to bloom in Kel's chest - Stan had canceled a meeting to have lunch with him. Stanford was one of the most inappropriate people Kel had ever met. This could just as easily be a business dinner as romantic.
Kel had never thought of himself as jealous. He didn't like the idea that the description might fit.
Of course, none of that explained why the front doors weren't locked.
Kel's head ached. He needed some air.
He abandoned the mystery of the uninhabited living room, intending to step out on the balcony for a lungful of sea breeze, and froze.
On the patio table, the ugly bright orange patio table that he'd let himself be talked into buying, was one of the junior partners from the entertainment firm. And on top of him, was, of fucking course, Stanford.