Excerpt from Turns

Copyright ©2006 Treva Harte

Washington, D.C., 2054, 2 a.m.

C.J. woke up with an ache in his swollen knee and one in his equally swollen cock. Burning hell, this was an outrage! He was a skill player. Everyone knew injuries came with the territory, but even a player with a bad knee should have someone to take care of his hard-on.

He slowly maneuvered himself further up on the bed, trying not to jar anything, but needing to move. It wasn’t just pent up sex. This was different from the usual restlessness you got when you woke up at two in the morning. His skin felt itchy. Hot. He didn’t know how to name the craving inside him. How do you describe the sudden ache to be something, someone else? To crawl out of your skin and leave it behind?

“You’re losing it. Cabin fever has hit bad, superstar.” C.J. stared down at his fingers, suddenly clenched into a fist. Leave everything behind? There was nothing wrong with being Christian Joyce. Burn it, people would slit throats for the chance to be him. So he had a little injury? People recovered from worse accidents all the time. Of course recovery was a bit more urgent in his case than most people. The team playoffs rested on his ability to get healthy. That’s why many, many doctors had worked on him after the knee snapped. Many, many doctors for a long, long time.

But all that was over. Now he just had to wait until he recovered and he’d be back on the field, back in the money… the big, big money… and back to his enviable life.

All it took was toughing it out a few more weeks. C.J. knew his lips were curling back into something that was more like a snarl than a smile. He was tough. He’d done more difficult things. Waiting on that elusive recovery was easy. Cake. All cake.

His stomach rumbled, distracting him from everything else.

To hell with cake. He licked his lips and shut his eyes. Pizza. Good, old-fashioned pizza, just like the ones Mom used to make from Grandma’s old family recipe. Nothing fancy, but nothing artificial. Just loads of fresh tomato sauce oozing out of that perfect crust, hot cheese trailing in long, fragrant strings when you lifted the first, hot slice off the pan. He’d never been able to wait until it cooled and he’d always burned his tongue. It had been worth it. He salivated, caught up in the memory of taste and smell, of pungent herbs and spicy pepperoni, a memory strong enough to make a man forget anything that hurt, including a throbbing knee and cock.

C.J. opened his eyes and glanced over at the bathroom. Now that he was awake for sure, he knew what he needed to do next, although it was almost too much effort on his own. He’d refused to hire a nurse to watch over his every move. He didn’t want people to see him like this and then turn and sell the news to gossip zines. He especially didn’t want people to watch and wonder if he could damn well make it to the toidy by himself.

Of course, he didn’t enjoy the painful half-crawl out of bed without an audience, either. Delaying the inevitable, he stayed in bed while he punched the code into his portable unit to call out.

“Grandpa John’s.”

“I want a sausage pizza with extra cheese. Real cheese. No, wait. Make it pepperoni.”

“You got the money, we got the pizza with the real cheese. Even pepperoni.”

“You deliver?”

“Not hardly. Who delivers pizza anymore? We can’t afford it.”

“Listen, I’ll pay extra.”

“Store policy.”

“But I’m Christian Joyce!”

“And I’m the Queen of the May, funny boy. Listen, you pick the pizza up or you don’t get it. We already have lines out the door. Place closes in an hour.” The unit clicked off.

He glared at the lazily blinking box. But he wanted a pizza! Food. Was that too much to ask? A few weeks ago he could have had any delicacy he wanted without asking.

Lips thinned, he stretched over to pick up the business listings disc. Pain snarled up his leg as he jostled it, but he willed it away, refusing to pause until he snapped the listings disc into place. He wasn’t going to let some spindly pizza maker thwart him. Maybe he couldn’t get the store to send him pizza. Maybe he couldn’t get to the pizza himself. But he could still get pizza.

Errand runners… He stared down at the rows upon rows of possibilities in the listings.

They were scruffy, desperate little street rats, the lot of them, only a notch or two above the typical homeless. He’d made use of enough of their services in the past few days and didn’t like any of them. But for a large enough fee he could find an errand runner to head for hell and back again. Pizza should be easy.

C.J. stared down at the list of names flashing in front of him.

There. That one had an address close by. He pressed the code.

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