One Night

Gabe never, in a thousand years, would have imagined that it would come to this. In the land of sickeningly sterile white plastic, he'd finally found an area in the heart of the labyrinth where everything was silent, where he could finally make sense of the knotted thoughts snared in his mind.

Surrounded by cold concrete walls that towered above him, he lay on a gurney that looked identical to the dozen or so scattered amongst the room. Only one of them was occupied, but he couldn't stand to let his eyes rest for too long on the thin white sheet that just barely shielded him from the remains of his life. All it'd taken was a single night, twenty-four fucking hours for everything to come crashing down around him; everything he'd held dear was destroyed just that quickly.

Seven months ago, he'd been saying the same thing, but a person can change. When Gabe first became immersed in the mess, he'd been a selfish man, caring only for himself and his pleasures. He had no use for other's, for a companion; after their body provided it's primary use, he was gone, a very faint whiff of cologne and sweat the only proof he'd even existed.

Not to mention the used condom in the trash can. No matter what the ratio of alcohol to blood was in his veins, Gabe always made sure he kept protection on himself. The last thing he needed was finding out in three years he had children strewn across the world, each the result of a drunken fuck that he couldn't remember.

The parties started to blend together in a frenzied whirlwind of drugs, booze and sex, each day mirroring the next. He started forgetting things. It started out minor, maybe leaving his house keys on his kitchen counter, but over time, things got worse. Things advanced to the point where Gabe breathed marijuana fumes instead of oxygen, where he never sobered up. He never had to deal with his head being torn in half by a relentless migraine the morning after, simply because there wasn't one.

And as the booze and pot and pills started morphing together into one, so did the sex. Gabe couldn't remember how many people he'd slept with; no individual faces stood out in his mind. Even the very release, the orgasmic high of sex was starting to wear off, becoming almost boring as he repeated it night after night.

When the condoms ran out, no one bothered to tell him and Gabe certainly wasn't about to notice. In his practical walking coma, he didn't really notice much of anything.

For nearly two weeks Gabe walked around with no protection, filling his veins daily with anything he could lay his hands on before settling into the cycle.

Booze. Drugs. Sex. Repeat.

People started to get worried; the rumor being passed around all the bands on the label was that he was a coke head, a crack fiend, that he was wanted by the mob. His friends started to avoid him, worried that his partying ways might spoil their reputation.

William didn't stay away. Even after people pulled him aside at parties, trying to distract him from the drunk who was twirling his way through the crowds, even after his own band tried to warn him about Gabe... Will couldn't stay away. There was just something about Gabe that attracted him more than anyone, that kept drawing him back, over and over again.

Gabe never showed any interest in William before; sure, they were great friends, but he'd never hinted that he wanted him in a purely physical way. And to be honest, William was glad for that; he didn't think that he had the will power to resist Gabe's advances, even if they were bound to put them both in a severe mess-up.

But then Gabe had kissed him and before he knew it, the cool night air was touching his heated skin and his body was torn and scraped against a grimy brick wall. Moans wracked his body, both pained and pleasured, as hair was tugged and fierce kisses were exchanged.

It should have been a single incident, a one time thing, just like every other person Gabe had conquered. After all, William was a boy; there was no way the incident could come back to haunt him. It was never to be spoken of again, a faint memory that didn't exist.

Two weeks later, and William started getting sick. He'd wake up in the morning and immediately rush to the bathroom, his stomach already churning rapidly. It was passed off as stomach flu and life continued as if nothing had ever happened; shows continued while the band members tried to ignore that William was still sick after a week.

The incident at the nightclub wasn't mentioned, no matter how many times Gabe and William bumped into each other, the former usually high and with a random groupie hanging off his arm.

A month later, William couldn't button up his pants. The instant he realized that no matter how much he sucked in, his stomach still bulged a little, he picked up the phone and called.

Gabe was drunk but the news that William was expecting still managed to break through his barriers and give him a well needed burst of sobriety. For nearly ten minutes, he had stayed silent, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, struggling to put together the pieces of the puzzle. William didn't hang up; he could hear Gabe's breathing, the small sounds as he opened his mouth to say a word and slammed it shut again.

"I'll be over in ten," he finally whispered before soundlessly setting the phone back into it's cradle.

The tears that came down his face burned into his flesh like a tattoo and for a few moments, he was terrified they would taste like vodka.

***

No one could explain how it happened. The doctors were dumbfounded to see that externally, William possessed all the reproductive systems of a man. But on the inside... he was a female, containing all the body parts; ovaries, fallopian tubes, and a uterus, where at only two months, a small fetus could be seen growing.

Gabe was sober when he sat beside William, grasping his hand tightly as William gazed at the sonogram with blank eyes, unoccupied hand trailing lightly over the small bulge of his stomach.

He was sober when William rolled over at midnight and announced he wanted an abortion. Gabe merely nodded, hands behind his head as he stared up into the darkness, his skin crawling as he so desperately pined for something, anything to take this nightmare away.

Yet a week later, when William came out of the abortion clinic with tears in his eyes, Gabe was still sober. He took the man who was still carrying his child back home and let him cry on his shoulder, staring blankly at the wall again.

"It'll be fine Bill," he murmured, weaving locks of William's hair around and through his fingers. "We'll get through this, I swear."

Then William decided to stop eating. Even as his belly expanded, to the point where it looked almost comical on his willowy frame, the rest of his body barely grew at all. His bony hips still protruded from his skin and his arms looked even more like that of a skeleton.

Gabe didn't realize what William was doing. He attributed it all to the special circumstances surrounding the pregnancy; never would he have suspected that William's daily intake of food was down to a mere five hundred calories, sometimes even less. Every meal that Gabe painstakingly slaved over while Bill watched television ended up in the garbage can or toilet bowl.

Even when Gabe walked into the bathroom to see William standing on the scale, triumphant smile on his face, he never connected the dots.

"I'm still pretty, right?" he'd murmured, eyes obsessively fixed to the number below.

"You'll always be pretty to me... and they're going to be pretty too," Gabe had said, rubbing William's belly as he peeked at the scale.

145 pounds. William usually weighed 130.

***

On almost the seven month anniversary of their child's conception, Gabe arrived home to see William bent over the kitchen table, belly brushing the edge of the table cloth as his nose skimmed along the surface, snorting as if he had a cold of some sort.

"Are you hungry?" Gabe asked, trying to ignore that when William turned around, the inside of his nostrils were coated with a very thin layer of white particles.

"Nope, I'm right stuffed," he grinned lazily, leaning forward to kiss Gabe's lips and landing on his cheek instead.

That night, the contractions began.

William's screams ran throughout the small bedroom, awakening Gabe the instant they began. When he finally managed to locate where they were coming from, William's fingers were already covered in blood that seemed only brighter as he held his hands before his snow white face. Before he fell over, he let the tips drag down his cheek, leaving tracks that matched his tears.

"I'm losing it, aren't I?' he whispered, lopsided grin plastered where a grimace had been only seconds before.

Gabe called the paramedics but by the time they arrived, William was already unconscious, blood seeping through his thin sleep pants and staining into the pale carpet. He only awoke once in the ambulance, grabbing Gabe's hand in his sticky fingers and pulling him down so that their contact was red stained lips to ear.

"I never wanted it."

Even at almost midnight, the hospital was still bustling with people, racing around Gabe as he simply stayed in the waiting room of the pregnancy wing, looking down at the carpet and listening to the symphony of noise around him. Mere feet away, he could see the door that marked where William was in labor, screaming his lungs off.

He didn't want to watch. He could already imagine too vividly what was happening, what was going to happen. No child was going to come home with them; William had already seen to that. It was so ironic that the same man who had come weeping out of an abortion clinic, saying he couldn't do it, had been more than willing to starve himself to achieve the same result.

Gabe knew that his child was good as dead. He just wasn't expecting William to be the same.

Nonetheless, when the head doctor came out of the room, white jacket smeared with blood in the shape of hand prints, he merely nodded and left the floor, lips a straight line that matched his unwavering gaze. For hours upon hours, he wandered the hospital's various wings, observing the suffering going on around him. When he took his hands out of their refuge in his pocket, little flakes of red fell to the floor, taking away what little of William he had left. Each floor and section brought about more waves of despair, but he kept on, trying to make himself feel better on the inside.

William could have died of a brain tumor or of lung cancer or of having a knife shoved into his heart. He could have had leukemia or alcohol poisoning but no, he killed himself.

All because he didn't want a goddamn abortion.

Gabe only stayed in the morgue so long, gaze flickering from the cold gray walls to the solitary covered gurney in the corner that he knew William was lying on. His fingers were itching to pull back the sheet and slide under, to join the stiff relic of the only person that had been able to break through his shell.

But he wouldn't allow himself to do that. Instead, after hearing approaching footsteps that were accompanied by soft voices and the continuous tone of wheels going across the floor, Gabe got up and sneaked back out to the outside world, the crisp air shoving it's way down into his lungs. The walk home was slow, taking nearly four hours, but he cherished it. It was the last time he'd be able to savor the smell of grease as he walked by McDonalds, inhale the exhaust released from a car.

The sun was already peeking above the horizon when he reached the front door of his apartment, legs screaming in protest and eyelids drooping. He steadfastly ignored both, forcing himself to walk into his bathroom instead of collapsing on the bed like his body so desired.

He found his target buried beneath mounds of fluffy white towels that had never been used, that still smelt like the store they were purchased at. He remembered buying them because he'd thought that they'd be easy to hide cocaine in; the drug would blend right in. During the good ol' days before that one night, all Gabe had cared about was his booze... and his drugs.

Gabe may have been drunk when he slept with William Beckett but he was completely and utterly sober when he pulled the trigger.