Winner Takes All

Summary: Starsky makes a life-changing decision after Hutch almost dies from botulism.

Author’s Note: Originally published in the SHareCon 2022 zine.

You’re gonna be ok.

Looks like you turned up the big winner, huh?

Yeah.

I play our last conversation over and over in my head as I watch him sleep, and I have to keep reminding myself that I won. After all, I found him, didn’t I? That was our bet. We play a little game of hide-and-seek, and if I find him before 8am Monday morning, he gives me a mind-blowing orgasm and pays me two weeks salary. If he manages to evade me until then, I pay him.

He always did have more patience than me.

But if he dies from botulism toxin at any point before or after 8am Monday morning, he pays with his life and we both lose. Game over. Good luck next time. Only there won’t BE a next time, because this game can only be played once and it’s for keeps.

Oh Hutch, you stupid jerk.

We play other games all the time where we use a safe word. For example, whenever we handcuff each other to the bed, or carefully tie a blindfold over each other’s eyes, we always use one.

Mine’s burrito. His is succotash. Don’t laugh.

But in our arrogance over who was the better detective, we neglected to use one when we decided to play our latest game. And we also forgot the most important thing about our partnership—that we’re strongest when we work together.

It almost cost us everything.

“Hey, Hutch.”

I don’t know if he can hear me or not. Depends on if he’s awake. But since he’s still too weak to open his eyes, and he can’t talk on account of the tube shoved down his throat, the only way I can know is if he squeezes my hand.

The doctor said that botulism toxin, one of the most lethal substances known to man, slowly paralyzes the nerves, and that the antitoxin only prevents it from getting worse. It doesn’t repair any nerve damage that’s already been done. Only time can do that.

Time heals all wounds.

I thought about that afterwards. If Hutch had died— if I’d found him too late after he’d slowly suffocated to death—no amount of time would have healed the damage done to my heart.

That’s when I made up my mind.

“Hutch?”

I wait, and then I feel it. That slight pressure against my hand is all his muscles can handle right now. But his ears work just fine.

“I love you.”

There, I said it. I’ve never said the words to him out loud before. Not that he doesn’t know how I feel. But it’s how I love him that’s changed, and I need him to know.

There’s that faint feeling of pressure again.

“I love you and I want us to be together and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you until now.” I say it breathlessly, without pausing.

Another faint squeeze.

Hutch and I have been lovers for a long time, but it’s a friends-with-benefits type of thing. Usually it’s during dry stretches in between girlfriends, but sometimes it’s at the same time. Well, not literally, although there have occasionally been threesomes.

But what I mean is, I’ll be with a lady I’ve just met on a Saturday night, take her out to dinner, show her a good time in bed, and then it’s me and Hutch on Sunday, just the two of us with the whole day to do whatever we want. Usually, that involves getting naked at some point.

This weekend was supposed to be different, though. There were no women in the picture and we were bored, so we came up with an idea for a game of hide-and-seek. Hutch was still smarting after his piece-of-junk car cost us the collar of one very bad dude named Ray Pardee, and my partner got it into his stupid blond head that he needed to convince me—or maybe convince himself—that he was the better detective.

We started on Friday night just after we jacked off together in the police station locker room.

Hutch was in the stall next to me, our feet touching under the partition that separated us, and I could hear his breathing become faster as he neared climax.

As I jerked myself off to the rhythm of his breathing, I would periodically whisper just loudly enough for him to hear me.

Faster

That’s good

Almost there

We were alone, but if anyone had come in and heard grunting, they’d just think one of us was taking a dump.

Listening to him climax brought me over the edge, and I came just seconds after he did. He flushed and left the stall, and I followed a few seconds later.

The rules of the game were simple. At least, they were supposed to be. But he changed them without telling me, when he decided to wear a disguise.

He’s got a lot more self-control than me when it comes to sex, and he knew I’d be running around town all weekend with a giant boner while I looked for him. And I did, at first. But as soon as I heard about the contaminated soup on the radio, all the air went out of my tires and I forgot all about my prize. All I wanted to do was find him alive.

By the way, the two-week salary thing? That was just the icing on the cake. While I care a great deal about money, I don’t care about his money, and he sure as hell doesn’t need mine.

Hutch tells me all the time that he loves me. In fact, he even said it the other day when I was in the hospital pretending to be shot. He left a note for me and signed it, ‘Love, Hutch.’

If he’d died from the botulism before I found him, it would have been the last thing he ever said to me.

I’ve never said the words out loud to him or written it in a note in my careful handwriting. He knows I love him, because actions speak louder than words, but I convinced myself that his words meant that he loved me as a friend, his best friend in the whole world.

I refused to let myself believe they meant anything more than that, not even all those times when he moaned the words in my ear and sighed my name while we made love.

Oh my darling…

It was too much to let myself hope for, too dangerous to believe in. We had to keep dating women, I told him. We couldn’t ever let anyone find out about us. And we couldn’t afford to fall in love with each other. The price to pay would be too high.

I love you, David…

But it’s exhausting, having to lie to the world every day, having to lie to myself that I would be happier in the long run if I was married to a beautiful woman, raising a kid or two in a nice suburban house with a backyard and a white picket fence, just like Captain Dobey, just like Luke Huntley and John Blaine and all the other married guys we knew.

Tryin’—not very successfully, I might add—to convince myself that I wasn’t like Johnny Blaine, because John was gay and I’m not. John was into men exclusively–except for his wife, Maggie. But not me, no sirree. I’m into women, I really am. I’ve never had a sexual or romantic attraction to any man, ever.

Except Hutch.

You don’t think that’s possible? You think that people either like men exclusively or they like women exclusively? Or maybe you’re willing to entertain the idea that people can be attracted to both men and women at the same time, but you assume the attraction is more or less equal, because otherwise you can’t wrap your head around it.

Mmm…I love you so much…

Well, I’m here to tell you that the world isn’t as black and white as that. Not for me, anyway. And that sometimes—maybe it’s only one in a million times—you think you know who you are your entire life until that one blond stranger walks through the doors of the police academy and into your life and suddenly you become someone else.

I’ll be 36 soon, and for the majority of those 36 years, I’ve had one identity: I like women. Pretty women, young women, not-so-young women. Blondes, brunettes, tall, short, doesn’t matter. Busty, flat-chested, I’m not too particular.

But for a while now, that identity has been challenged. Because I also really like one tall, muscular, strong, gentle, blond, blue-eyed beauty of a man named Ken Hutchinson who one day, ten or so years ago, walked into my life with legs that go on forever, took up residence in my heart, and lives there still. And there’s no room for anyone else.

I like women…plus one man who I love more than anyone else in the whole world. So sue me. If you don’t like it, if you really can’t wrap your head around the idea that a man can be gay for exactly one other man on the entire planet, then that’s your problem to deal with, not mine.

My problem is trying to love the one man in the world who makes my heart go pitter-patter while not losing my job, my freedom, or my life. Or his.

Peter Whitelaw lost his job as a teacher, his income, and his livelihood. John Blaine lost everything. And I know what you’re gonna say. That John wasn’t killed because he was gay. That his murder wasn’t due to his sexuality or his relationship with another man, but that he was killed because he was a cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time who saw the wrong thing done by the wrong guys.

But the thing is, if he didn’t have to spend his entire adult life livin’ a lie, he’d never have ended up in that shabby, run-down, prostitute-infested sleazebag hourly hotel in the wrong part of town in the first place.

How does the saying go? It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.

I love Hutch, and I want to continue to love him for as long as we both shall live. But given our track record up ‘til now, I’m scared it won’t be very long at all. I mean, for chrissakes, he almost died because he ate clam chowder from a can.

So here I am, worried we’ll become victims if the wrong people find out that we like to suck each other’s dicks, even though it’s none of their goddamn business, and Hutch almost bought the farm because of some soup.

That kinda thing makes you think, ya know? You start re-evaluating your whole life and what you had planned for it.

And don’t think you’re being helpful by pointing out that if he’d heated the soup instead of eating it room temperature outta the can like he was born and raised in a barn that he wouldn’t have gotten sick. Because that’s a load of bull. The doctor explained it to me. From what I understand, which isn’t much, while the botulism bacteria can be killed by heat, the spores it produces, which in turn create the neurotoxin, are a lot harder to kill.

In other words, heating up a can of contaminated soup does precisely jack shit to prevent you from getting fatally sick. Not unless you boil it for at least 20 minutes, get a priest to exorcise it, hermetically seal it, and then throw the whole thing in the trash like it’s goddamn nuclear waste.

And on another note, while Hutch might have spent time in the barn on his grandfather’s farm as a kid, he also grew up in a 6-bedroom house with a butler’s pantry and a maid. He ate the soup because he said that seafood was good for the brain, and given the nature of our jobs and our unpredictable schedule, sometimes trust-fund boy has to eat junk food on the fly like the rest of us poor working saps.

I wonder if he’s still awake. He’s lying so still that it’s hard to tell sometimes. If it wasn’t for the heart monitor they got him hooked up to that keeps beeping steadily, and the sighing of the machine that helps him breathe, I’d have to continually stare at the slow rise and fall of his chest to reassure myself that he’s still alive.

Sometimes I stare anyway. I don’t even know how many hours I’ve been sitting next to him, holding his hand, or if it’s even the same day anymore.

“Hutch?”

That faint pressure again. So he IS still awake.

“I don’t wanna date women anymore. I don’t wanna waste any more time making love to anyone but you. You understand what I’m sayin’?”

A twitch of a finger but nothing more. He must be getting tired.

I rub his arm. “Go to sleep, babe. I’ll still be here when you wake up.”

###

Eventually, I nod off in the chair, but I sleep uneasily. I’ve got a crick in my neck and it’s uncomfortable as hell, but I don’t care. I’m not leaving him here alone when he can’t even open his eyes or ask for help.

Every so often, I go down the hall to the john to take a leak or wash up, but otherwise, I’m next to him.

I try not to get in the way of the nurses when they come in to change his IVs or take his vitals. Most of them smile at me pityingly, because they all know we’re cops and that Hutch is my partner.

But there’s this one nurse, Betty, who wears her straight dark hair pulled up in a tight bun and whose mouth is permanently set in a look of disapproval, the kind of mouth that doesn’t know how to smile. She refuses to look me in the eye. Because she knows.

People like her look down their noses at people like me and Hutch. They think they know us, know what kind of people we are, know what makes us tick. She sees me holding Hutch’s hand and stroking his cheek, and she doesn’t approve one bit. Perverted, sexual deviants. That’s what she’s thinking about us. But she has no idea. None of them do.

I wish I could kiss him, but the tube they got coming out of his mouth is in the way. But they gotta leave it there until he can breathe on his own. Only a couple of days, they say. The nerve damage isn’t too bad, they say.

My poor baby. I try not to think of how much he must have suffered, especially once Pardee got his hooks into him. By the time he realized he needed to go to the hospital, it would have been too late.

Suddenly, I feel him squeezing my hand, even though I haven’t said anything. I think he’s trying to tell me that he’s awake. The pressure is stronger than it was yesterday, I think. That’s a good sign.

“Hey.” I squeeze him back.

He squeezes my hand again. We’ve always been able to communicate non-verbally through touches and eye contact, but hand-squeezing is a whole new language, and I have no idea what he’s trying to tell me.

“What is it, babe?”

Another squeeze.

“Just take it easy, okay partner?”

But he doesn’t, and I feel him squeeze my hand again.

“You want me to get the doctor or nurse?” Suddenly I’m worried. What if he’s in distress and he’s trying to ask for help?

But this time, there’s no answering squeeze, no pressure at all.

“Do you want me to continue what I was sayin’ before?” I’m grasping at straws now, but I need to find out what he wants.

And then I feel it, the pressure.

I take a deep breath. “Hutch, I don’t care anymore if people whisper about us behind our backs, wondering why we don’t have girlfriends. If we have to, we’ll date women casually every once in a while, just to keep up appearances. I’ll do whatever it takes to be with you, I mean it.”

I stop there and wait. And after a few seconds delay, I get an answering squeeze back.

“I wanna be with you and only you,” I continue. “I almost lost you for good, Hutch, and I don’t want to waste whatever time we have in the future by spending it with other people. I don’t want to get married and have kids if I can’t do that with you.”

I pause. Another squeeze, firmer this time.

Then I get an idea. I take his hand and lift it, pressing it against my heart so he can feel it beating.

“You feel this, partner? It’s yours. My heart’s for you, Hutch.”

I feel a slight squeezing against my chest and I look at him, at his closed eyes, at the tubes coming outta him from more places than just his nose, and then I see it.

A single tear, rolling slowly down his cheek. I reach over and gently brush it away with my finger.

I continue holding his hand against my chest as I slowly run my other hand up and down his arm, until Nurse Betty comes in and glares at me and says in a brusque voice that she needs to change his IVs.

I gently lay his hand down on the bed and move away just far enough so she can do her job, but not far enough that she feels comfortable doing it.

After she leaves, I go out to the nurses’ station and tell the charge nurse that I don’t want Nurse Betty taking care of him anymore.

Then I go back to his room and hold his hand again. The warmth is reassuring. I try not to think of what would have happened if Pardee had left with Hutch before I got there, but I can’t help it. I picture myself sitting next to him in the morgue, holding tightly onto his cold, still hand, as the coroner and her assistants try futilely to pry me away.

“Hey, I made sure that nurse won’t be comin’ back. I think maybe I’ll go down to the cafeteria and get somethin’ to eat, okay?” For the first time since he’s been in here, I’m hungry.

He squeezes my hand and I squeeze it back.

“I’ll be back soon,” I tell him, and then I walk out of the room. When I return, Huggy is there waiting for me, having a one-sided conversation with Hutch. He’s brought me a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

“How’s he doin’?” he asks.

“He’s gettin’ better every minute,” I answer with a smile. It’s the first time I’ve smiled in I don’t know how many days.

Huggy knows, by the way. We never told him. But he knows. There’s a reason Huggy was signing up people to vote for Whitelaw for city council, and it’s not because Huggy gives a flyin’ fuck about politics.

Just as Huggy leaves, the doctor comes in and tells me he’s gonna turn off the breathing machine and remove the tube. He uses the word “extubate” and I wince at the sound of it. He says that Hutch’s vitals look good and he should be able to breathe on his own now.

I stand back to let him do what he has to, and when it’s done, he gives me a thumbs up. “He’s improving nicely,” the doc says. I thank him and shake his hand.

I sit down beside Hutch, on the bed this time instead of in the chair. There’s more room now that the machine is gone. I take his hand once again and hold it against my knee.

He still hasn’t opened his eyes yet. Maybe he’s just really tired, or maybe it’s one of those drips they’ve got going into his arm to sedate him. I miss seeing them, those baby blues of his. When I found him in Pardee’s car, there was something not right about him, something besides the fact that he was sick, really sick, but with all of the emotions that were swirling around in my head, I couldn’t quite place it.

And then I realized what it was. His eyes were all wrong. The blue was gone, replaced by a brown so dark it was almost black. For a brief moment, my heart fell into my stomach and I panicked, thinking the botulism did that somehow, but then it hit me. The sonofabitch was wearing colored contact lenses as part of his disguise. As if the brown hair dye and shabby clothes weren’t enough.

He looked strange, almost unrecognizable, and it unnerved me.

When we arrived at the hospital, I immediately started babbling to the doctors about the contacts and how they needed to take them out as soon as possible. Take them out now! I think I yelled. Don’t forget, I said more than once.

I might have begged, I’m not sure.

Exasperated, the doctor finally told me to stop asking. Said he and the nurse would take them out and asked if I wanted to watch. Yes, I answered. I needed to see the blue. So I sat there as the doctor forced Hutch’s closed eyelids apart while the nurse carefully removed each brown lens.

It was awful, and I wondered if it hurt. I wondered if Hutch wanted to flinch but couldn’t because of the paralysis. Or worse, maybe he wanted to scream because he forgot he was wearing them and didn’t understand why they were poking and prodding his eyes like that.

Maybe he was screaming inside and nobody could hear him. Or maybe that was me.

They wouldn’t even let me hold his hand while they removed them.

“Hutch?”

His hand twitches against my knee.

“So whaddya think about my idea, huh? You wanna do this? Just me and you, babe.” I pause. “Me and thee.”

I sit there in the silence and wait for what seems an eternity, and then I feel his thumb stroking my knee. It’s not a twitch, either, it’s definitely a stroke. It has purpose.

But then, as if to confirm what he’s already told me with his hand, he opens his mouth. And though it’s faint, just barely above a whisper, I hear it clearly.

“Yes.”

Turns out Hutch was wrong. We both won.

-The End-