“I know.” Jevon’s smile finally cranked up to the mega-wattage Rhys saw in his dreams. “I always feel like you get me, even when I can’t find the words to explain myself. I’ve never felt that with anyone else.”
Rhys had never felt anything that came close to how Jevon made him feel. To hear that even a fragment of it was reciprocated blew the stress clean out of his soul. “You can talk to me, mate. And not just about sex. Do me good to listen to something outside of my own head.”
“Introspective, eh?”
Rhys shrugged. “According to my brother, the fountain of all knowledge. He reckons I have one skin for work, one for hooking up, and neither is who I really am.”
“Everyone’s got skins, dude. You think I wake up in entertainer mode every day?”
Rhys chuckled but was saved from answering by the server coming back. “You order,” he said to Jevon. “I gotta take a leak.”
He retreated to the gender-neutral bathrooms, and by the time he returned, Jevon was alone again, twirling a straw in a rum and Coke. “So...” he said as Rhys reclaimed his seat.
“So, what?”
“How did you end up becoming a paramedic? It’s a pretty intense career choice.”
“It wasn’t really a choice,” Rhys said. “Not a conscious one, anyway.”
“Curious.”
“Scuzzy, actually.” Rhys gulped some of the rum-laced drink Jevon had ordered for him. “I was a terrible teenager, and it spilled out into adulthood until I wound up doing community service at King’s hospital. From there, I got a job as a healthcare assistant, then a place on a paramedic course. I quit briefly to work in a butchers—ironic, huh?—but I knuckled down eventually, and here I am.”
Jevon tilted his head to one side, spearing Rhys with a quizzical frown. “What’s scuzzy about that?”
Rhys shrugged. “It’s not my calling, I guess. I didn’t get into it to help people... I was trying to help myself. Save myself, I suppose.”
“From what?”
“Everything. My dad died a little while ago, and before that, he was in prison for some shit that went down at home. It took me some time to get past that.”
Jevon said nothing for a long moment. Just stared at Rhys like his bottomless eyes could burn a path to everything that had ever hurt Rhys. Like he wanted to take it away and set it on fire.
But he couldn’t do that. No one could. Rhys had started plenty of his own fires, and somehow all the bullshit still lived in the ashes. “Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered. “I’m not one of your kids that needs saving.”
More silence. But the server intervened with the food Jevon had ordered while Rhys had been gone. Two pizzas and a salad that looked like it belonged in the Tate Modern. And for the first time in days, Rhys was actually hungry. They dug in while Jevon explained between bites what he was doing with his life for the next few months.
“I swore down I’d only do a few birthday parties, but I’ve got four next week alone.”
Rhys chuckled. “You don’t like them?”
“It’s not that. Any chance I get to act the fool is fine by me, but it just seems kind of—I don’t know—hollow, I guess. Which is why they make us do it.”
“Who does?”
“The team who look after the entertainers at the charity. There’s a psychologist here in London who comes to visit us on site and checks in with us when we come home. He’s the reason we’re only allowed three-month stints in the camps now before they bring us home for a while. Before him, we had people bedded in for most of the year without a break, and not even soldiers do that.”
There was beauty in the comparison. Jevon and his coworkers fought wars of their own with laughter instead of bullets, joy in place of despair. But at what cost? Rhys had seen enough medics go under to know the risks were real. “Do you ever feel like not going back?”
“Not really.” Jevon toyed thoughtfully with a pizza crust. “It’s hard sometimes—lonely too—but I can’t imagine leaving those kids with nothing, you know? Even if all we give them is a few days of madness. It is getting harder though. Lots of governments are tearing the camps down.”
“I thought that was a good thing? The camps I’ve seen on the news look awful.”
“They aren’t great, but where else do people go? At least in the camps, the aid organisations know where to find them. And, it’s safe for them to look. We’ve done some street work, but I don’t fancy roaming the Albanian countryside on my unicycle. Getting shot ain’t my bag.”
Rhys shuddered. He’d seen a few gun shot wounds since he’d joined the chopper team, and the thought of Jevon getting hurt turned the dinner in his belly to dust. “When are you going back?”
“Second week in December.”