Page 30 of Rushed: Christopher

“What happened when you left home for school in North Carolina?”

“I kept doing everything I’d been doing. I got my own dorm room instead of sharing, I scheduled my classes for during the day so the campus would be busy when I walked to class, I ordered groceries online and only ate in my room. I didn’t participate in any activities, I didn’t go to parties, I never left my room after it got dark, and I became hyperaware of my surroundings.” Christopher paused before adding, “It became like this twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job.”

“That kind of life couldn’t have been sustainable,” I said. I was horrified at the prospect of the sweet, smart, kindhearted Christopher locking himself away from the world.

“I needed it to be,” Christopher responded. “I figured I’d eventually get to a point where I felt more comfortable with the campus and the other students in my nursing program, but things got worse. By the end of my first semester, I was borderline agoraphobic. I’d stopped sleeping because I was convinced someone would come into my room. I was lying to my family about everything, and I’d stopped going home, even for holidays and the summer. I told everyone I was taking extra courses. Uncle Micah and Con came to visit a couple of times, and I managed to convince them I was loving college life each time. I was able to keep my grades up with no problem, but the stress was starting to make me sick. It was hard to keep food down, and after a while, I just wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t hide my appearance from my family, so I just cut off contact more and more. I blamed it all on school and studying. Last fall when I started the second semester of the program, I tried to start taking better care of myself. The curriculum included classes with a lot more hands-on training, which meant working with patients and shadowing other nurses.”

“How did you do it?” I asked. I was still trying to make sense of the isolated life Christopher had forced himself into.

“It was hard at first, but having a routine helped. Most of the other students in the program were women, so it was easier to be around them. Several of them lived in my dorm, so I would walk to and from the hospital with them, and it didn’t take long for them to start inviting me to things like coffee after class, study sessions, stuff like that. I hadn’t really realized how lonely I’d become until I started hanging out with them.”

“What happened?” I asked after several minutes of Christopher going silent. He looked tired. Instead of prodding him to respond, I stood up and went around the island. I held out my hand and waited.

It took Christopher a painfully long time to make a move. When he finally did, I let out a sigh of relief. Christopher tucked Pip in the crook of his right arm and took my hand with his left one. Neither of us spoke as I led him up the stairs to his room. When I pulled the covers back off the bed, toed my shoes off, and then got in it, I fully expected Christopher to panic. But to my surprise, he crawled in next to me. When I urged him into my arms so he could rest his head on my chest, he did it without hesitation. Pip ended up on my chest too, though he had Christopher’s hand to support him so he wouldn’t topple off during his nap.

“His name was Peter,” Christopher began on his own. “He transferred into the program a few weeks into the second semester. The girls I hung out with immediately accepted him into their circle. Our circle, I guess. I told myself I needed to keep my distance from the group, but I really didn’t want to. It felt like the group was the only normal thing in my life. Peter wasn’t a big guy or anything, so I guess that helped. It was clear that he was gay early on because he’d talk to the girls about his past boyfriends. He was pretty much an open book, and he seemed to know that I needed him to keep his distance. Eventually I started to feel safe enough to participate in the conversations, but I made sure I was never in a situation where I was alone with him.”

“But something changed,” I said. As much as I loved the feel of Christopher’s weight on my chest, I couldn’t really enjoy it because I knew what was coming.

Christopher nodded. “It was right before the holiday break. We were meeting up before everyone went home for Christmas. It ended up being a setup.”

“A setup?” I asked in confusion.

“Yeah, um, the girls made it so Peter and I were left alone for the coffee date. They’d decided to play matchmaker, and each one texted excuses for why they couldn’t come for coffee that day after Peter and I were already there. When I realized what they’d done, I started to panic, but Peter was the one to call the whole thing off. He apologized to me because even though he really liked me, he was still trying get over his breakup with his last boyfriend.”

“So he supposedly took the chance of you guys getting together off the table,” I said.

“And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Christopher murmured. “I’d always been better at listening than talking when I was younger, so it was easy to be a sympathetic ear. His boyfriend had cheated on him back in Ohio where they’d both grown up, so Peter had decided not to go home for the holidays so he wouldn’t end up running into him. When he found out I wasn’t going home either, Peter suggested we keep meeting for coffee. But he didn’t push, and when I turned down his offer to walk me home, he didn’t seem bothered by it. So we met up each day and even found a Chinese restaurant near campus that was open on Christmas Day.”

Christopher fell silent for a long time. “He was so easy to talk to. I don’t even really know when things changed. There was just this one day that I needed to tell him about the attacks. I didn’t know why. I hadn’t talked to anyone about them before, but I felt like there was this heavy weight on my chest and I couldn’t breathe anymore because of it. He actually cried for me. We started spending more and more time together after that, and a couple months into the second semester, he told me he loved me. We hadn’t done much more than hold hands at that point. He said he wanted to take things slow for me. He’d kiss me on the cheek or the forehead but never on the mouth. I didn’t really understand why, but I didn’t want to risk losing him, so I never asked him. Looking back, there were other warning signs that something wasn’t quite right.”

“Like what?” I asked. I was running my fingers through Christopher’s hair at the same time that he was tapping one of his fingers softly on my chest. It took me a while to realize he was timing the tap to my heartbeat.

“He’d blow up at me sometimes for no reason at all. He’d disappear for a week or two at a time claiming he was sick, but he wouldn’t let me see him. His physical appearance changed too. He looked more and more run-down, and he’d often lose track of a conversation. I once saw some concealer on his chin, but when I asked him about it, he flipped out.”

“Did he ever hit you?” I asked.

Christopher shook his head. “After the concealer thing, he told me he was covering up a couple of bruises from some guys who’d knocked him around because he was gay.”

I stiffened when I realized what Christopher wasn’t saying. I actually sat up a little, forcing Christopher to shift his position. He ended up sitting cross-legged on the bed alongside my hip.

“Being gone for weeks at a time because he was sick… concealer on his face…?” I shook my head in disbelief. “He knew he had AIDS.”

I hadn’t been able to keep the rage out of my voice. Christopher dropped his eyes and began winding his fingers together.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I murmured as I sat up even more, picking up Pip in the process. I handed the miffed kitten to Christopher.

“I wasn’t smart enough to put it together,” Christopher said after a few moments. “My feelings for him had started to get stronger, but I was nervous about having sex with him. He finally wore me down one afternoon while we were in my dorm room studying. It started off innocently enough with just some light touching and teasing. He told me how much he loved me and that he just wanted to be with me. I agreed but asked him to go slow and told him he had to wear a condom. He agreed. He even made a big show of putting it on so I could see. When he got behind me and started to push inside, it hurt a lot. All I felt was the burn. I thought it would get better if Peter just gave me some time to adjust, but as soon as he was inside of me, it was like something changed. He was rough and angry and at one point he even called me his ex’s name. It was over in minutes. When he was done, he said it had been fun and began pulling on his clothes. I could… I could…”

The shell that Christopher had cloaked himself in from the moment he’d started speaking began to crack. His voice was no longer even and disinterested, and he’d started to rock his body back and forth.

“Take your time, sweetheart,” I said as I shifted closer to him. I put my legs on either side of him so that I could pull him against my chest.

“I could feel something coming out of me. I thought it was blood. I thought maybe he’d torn something inside of me.”

“But it wasn’t blood,” I said softly. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep my voice calm and my grip on Christopher gentle.

“No, it wasn’t. Peter was still getting dressed, so I confronted him with it. He just smiled and said condoms sometimes broke. That smile… it made everything inside of me cold,” Christopher admitted. “I found the condom on the floor next to the bed. There was nothing in it, and there weren’t any tears, not big enough ones anyway for that amount of semen to pass through it.”

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