Promises to Keep

Remember when Hutch was finally allowed to go in and sit with Starsky during Sweet Revenge? This snippet begins there.

*~*~*

Even with Starsky lying near death not twelve inches from him, Hutch kept up the illusion, the lie that everyone else saw and believed as the truth.

He faltered for a moment – hand raising to touch – but the knowledge that Dobey and Huggy were only a few feet away put his hand firmly back into his lap.

And it wasn’t that touching Starsky would raise any suspicion – it wouldn’t. They’d been partners dealing with injuries for too long for anyone to think anything of that.

Hutch simply knew that once he enclosed the lax hand into his, he wouldn’t be able to let it go again, and they’d ask him why, and he wouldn’t be capable of lying anymore.

Hurtling from his mouth would fly the names of so many pseudo-lovers, of hotels well outside their jurisdiction, revelations of fingertip touches in empty hallways and stolen kisses in dirty alleys. The truth behind the double rings Starsky wore, the huge one Hutch wore.

How easy it was to blend and disappear once inside the piece-of-junk cars Hutch drove.

Why they stayed at each other’s places so very often.

If he touched Starsky, everyone would know.

Hutch didn’t want to face them alone, or risk Starsky waking up to find his life had been exposed without being able to stand with him and defend their love.

He thought back to that drunken night when Starsky asked him to move to San Francisco.

“Someday.”

Now he wished someday had come and gone.

Connected to life via tubes and wires and stark white whiteness, Starsky deserved better, and all Hutch wanted to do was give his man that.

His man, and his alone.

He wasn’t going to give him up, give themselves up, to anyone.

So he didn’t touch, and he didn’t speak. He looked Starsky over, listened to the doctor, listened to Dobey, and held himself together.

He only trusted “me and thee” and right now “thee” needed all the strength Hutch could muster up for him.

And it was only in the dead of night, when the lights were turned low and the nurses turned away as if he didn’t exist, only then would he touch, hold, kiss, and speak, saying the things he could never say enough.

And finally, one day, after being bullied back into a living existence via electric paddles and Hutch’s determination, Starsky woke up, and whispered, “I dreamt of San Francisco. And you were there.”

~end
July 12, 2007