It was painfully ironic. He'd wanted Jones to hate him for so many other things that he did wrong. Betraying his principles daily at work, ignoring him and just generally acting like a bastard. Jones forgave him for things that any one would, and probably should, have taken issue with, without batting an eyelash. But now, in an unprecedented first, Jones had decided to get offended by something. Something that existed only in his own imagination, no less.
Jones thought he didn't care about him. That he didn't matter to him. To be fair to him, it would be easy to arrive at this conclusion, as Dan was uncommunicative at best and a sullen prick at worst.
No one had told Jones that he was in the hospital and the little DJ had been worrying himself to a stick in the dark, thinking that Dan had just left him. Why would they tell him anything? No one else knew that they were... what ever it was that they were. They had no way of knowing that Jones would indeed care either way if Dan lived or died.
When Claire had come to stay with them, Dan had told him that she didn't know that he was the way he was. He was so far in the closet that he couldn't even call himself gay out loud. Not that he was homophobic, he just didn't want any of the stereotypical bullshit that came with the label. He didn't want anyone wondering who was the "man" and the "woman" in the relationship (they were both men. That was sort of the point.) or people tip toeing around him with PC terms as if he gave a shit.
Jones had seemed all right with it at first, though he did make jokes about wrecking his back fucking on a couch, and wondering aloud if he would ever tell Claire that they were together so they could at least get part shares in the bed.
It was cruel and unkind to Jones, keeping the whole thing under wraps the way he did. He wasn't ashamed of his relationship with a man, he was ashamed of the way the world would look at them after he came out, and in a perverse way had wanted to protect Jones from the ignorance of the world.
"So, say you get a plus one to a wedding and you had a boyfriend," Jones asked, one lazy Saturday morning in bed, looking steadfastly at the wall, "you'd still go alone or take some woman you knew about?"
"I don't want people making assumptions about me." Dan answered uncommittedly, "Anyway I don't have a boyfriend do I?" He meant the last part as a sarcastic aside, but it came out more like a genuine question.
"I dunno, do you?" Jones asked, looking him straight in the face, his blue eyes burning holes in Dan's brown ones.
"Look, I don't want people to look at you and think you're my bit of stuff," said Dan, dropping the polite fiction that the hypothetical boyfriend was not in fact Jones.
Jones screwed up his face and hit Dan with a pillow.
"Your bit of stuff! Get lost, you're my bit of stuff," he giggled and attacked Dan's neck with his teeth and tongue.
The fact remained that had he been upfront about himself, Jones would not have had to wait two weeks before he found out from Claire what had happened. Jones might have been all right before, but now everything had changed. He thought that Dan didn't consider him important enough to be included in his life, that he wasn't good enough in Dan's eyes. The exact opposite was true. Dan thought Jones was too special to be included in the shit and mire that was the rest of his life. Unfair? Yes. It was never good to put someone on a pedestal. Especially, when they were led to believe you thought they weren't good enough for them because of it.
Claire stormed in and sat down in the chair beside the hospital bed heavily.
"What the fuck, Dan? I swear, I can't wait for you to get better so I can put you in here again myself!" she was fiddling with a box of cigarettes, scowling at the 'Thank you for refraining from smoking' notice on the opposite wall.
"Did you honestly think I'd mind? I can't believe you can be so selfish!"
"Hello, Claire," Dan said weakly, propped up in bed with pillows.
"Don't 'Hello, Claire' me," Claire snapped, "What were you thinking," she continued in a hiss
Dan looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
"Am I supposed to know what you're talking about or is it a game where I guess and you shout at me if I get it wrong?"
Claire fixed him with a firm gaze.
"What is Jones, Dan?" she asked, "Because I know he's not just some mate that lets you stay with him for free."
Dan looked at a patch on the wall to the right of his sister's head.
"Well! Dan, I don't care if you're gay or bisexual or whatever, but there is no excuse for the way you've treated Jones." She continued to give him her school teacherly glare.
"He's... we're.... We haven't talked about it," he said, which was half-true
"Dan, you are a complete idiot," Claire gasped at blew her nose noisily. She left the hospital ward rubbing her eyes. Everyone was doing that lately.