Accidentally Yours: A Friends-to-Lovers Gay Romance (Superbia Springs Book 3)

by Rachel Kane

  It was like a literary avalanche had hit the room. Books were everywhere, clearly knocked around, lying on the couch and rug, stacks knocked over on the table. An explosion of words, pages, covers.

  “What happened?” he asked, getting an arm under Alex. He instantly became aware of the warmth of Alex’s bare skin, and, because he was a good person, furiously suppressed Noah’s suggestion from last night.

  Look at us, just two single guys alone together, one wearing nearly nothing…

  Yeah. No.

  “The French Revolution,” Alex said sadly.

  “The…what?”

  “Claude Manceron’s The Wind from America, second volume in his series on the French Revolution.” Alex pointed at a book on the floor, its black cover torn in half. “I guess I wasn’t watching where I put my crutch, and the whole world slid, and…” Sadly he gestured around. “I guess my stacking skills left everything perilous. God, there’s so much to clean up. And I haven’t even opened the store. I just can’t move around in here, why did I ever think I should live in this tiny place, why—”

  A more charitable person might’ve called this loft apartment cozy.

  But Alex had bookshelves on nearly every wall, the shelves were overflowing; he had stacks on tables, on chairs. There was little room to maneuver.

  That meant they were still standing very close together, even now that Judah wasn’t holding him.

  Very, very close together. So close Judah could reach out and slip a hand into those pajama bottoms—

  Get your mind out of the gutter! Stupid Noah with his stupid suggestions! If Alex suspected that Judah had thought about that, Judah would never live it down. The embarrassment would roast him until he was crispy and golden, a big dumb rotisserie boy.

  “Do you need help?” asked Judah, trying to focus.

  “No, no. Now that you’ve got me back on my feet, I’ll be fine. Maybe if you could pick up the Manceron and put it on the table on your way out—”

  “No, I mean, do you need help?” Judah said, and Alex looked up at this different inflection.

  “How so?”

  How to put it without offending him? “I’m not sure this is a safe place for someone in your condition.”

  “Condition? I’m not pregnant, Judah, I’m just in a cast.”

  But it quickly became clear, watching Alex try to maneuver around the room, that he was going to have problems, constantly having to change directions, backtrack, turn, take a tentative step forward.

  “It’s fine, I’m fine, put your hands down, I don’t need help. Just…just move, let me get past the couch—actually, will you pick that up, it’s nothing, I don’t even know why I have it, a book of Victorian poetry, just the worst, set it on the couch.”

  Judah moved ahead of him, clearing a path. “Is this enough room?”

  Alex held his crutches close to his body. “It’ll have to be. My payment for being a hoarder, I guess. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, I’m not a hoarder, not really. This is just overstock I couldn’t fit in the store. Warehouses are expensive. I just thought… God, I could use some coffee. You didn’t bring coffee, did you? My head is still fuzzy from the pills yesterday.”

  Alex suddenly blushed for reasons Judah couldn’t fathom. “I could make coffee,” Judah said. But when he headed for the tiny kitchen, Alex halted him.

  “Not there. No room for it in this place. I brew it downstairs.”

  “Oh, no problem, let’s go. I’ll help you open up the store.”

  Yet when they left the apartment, after Alex had thrown on some clothes (“I can dress myself just fine!” he’d called from the tiny bedroom, filling Judah with a mix of regret and thankfulness), the bookseller hesitated at the top of the stairs. “Hmm.”

  “Need a hand?”

  “They’re just so narrow.”

  “But you made it up last night, you can make it down today.”

  Alex grimaced and blushed again. “Toby might have carried me. I don’t remember.”

  “Oh.” Judah thought for a moment. “Should I carry you down?”

  “What? God no! Absolutely not. I will come down under my own power. I just…need to figure out…” First one crutch tip touched the stair, then the next, then both were taken away, as Alex apparently did trigonometry in his head to see how to make it down. “It’s the damned cast, more than anything.”

  “Would you please let me help you?”

  5

  Alex

  There are few things on earth quite so humiliating as helplessness. Oh, it’s charming enough in babies and puppies. We love to see a newborn giraffe hobbling on its wet lanky legs. But a full-grown man who requires another full-grown man to carry him down the stairs, like the fainting heroine of some gothic novel being saved from a castle aflame?

  That was fucking humiliating, and Alex kept his eyes closed tight, almost as tight as the grip he kept on Judah’s neck as he was carried down. He held his breath as well, although that was more because he didn’t want to be caught inhaling. His face was close to Judah’s throat, and if Judah were to think he was inhaling his scent, Alex would simply die, right here.

  “I’m not going to drop you,” said Judah.

  “You might.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And yet—”

  “We’re nearly there. You’d survive the fall.”

  There would be no dignity in showing fear, and Alex did not make another peep, as Judah—surprisingly strong Judah—brought him down to earth and set him on his feet. Well, on his foot. His casted hoof still hovered an inch or so above the earth.

  “One sec,” said Judah, and he ran back upstairs to get the crutches.

  Where did a man like that get his energy? They’d been friends for months now, and yet Alex still thought of Judah as a stereotype, the geek, the science fiction reader. Someone who cared more about the latest cinematic space opera trilogy than, say, taking care of himself. And yet here he was, bounding down the steps with the crutches as though he had all the energy in the world.

  Interesting.

  Make a muscle for Toady, Judah—

  Oh god, not that memory again. At least Judah had the decency not to bring up Alex’s wretched performance from yesterday. Crutches were exchanged for keys, and Judah opened the bookstore door wide for him.

  “So what’s in the box?” asked Judah, filling the coffee pot from the water cooler. “I mean, I know it’s books. Heavy ones.”

  “Very heavy. Apparently I have a hairline fracture of my big toe, aside from the much larger fracture of my ankle,” said Alex. “But then, given the contents of the box, perhaps I should’ve expected a smiting from the gods.”

  “Whom the gods would destroy, they first drop a box on,” said Judah, and Alex had to keep himself from laughing in surprise.

  Was that a Longfellow joke? He didn’t dare ask. If it turned out Longfellow was one of Judah’s favorite poets or something, he’d never be able to look at him the same way again. People had these tastes, these favorites, and even though Alex tried his hardest, sometimes he judged them when they’d chosen an author he didn’t like. The wrong writer was a dangerous guest to harbor in your heart.

  He pulled the tape off the box and lifted the cardboard flaps. “Behold,” he said, lifting up a crisp volume, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, then reaching in again for a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

  Judah looked from one book to another. “Are they…connected somehow? Same universe?”

  “They are connected by being banned. The Superbia school board publishes a list every year of the books they refuse to stock in their library, and refuse to teach in English classes. And I thought what a great idea it would be to gather all those books here, and put them on sale for the kids who were curious what they were missing out on. I was going to call it the Problematic Faves section.”

  Judah grinned. “Now that’s a good idea. Kids’ll read anything you forbid
them to.”

  “And there’s so much forbidden. Not only classics, but some really good books with young-adult LGBT themes—Not Your Sidekick…Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe…I don’t know, I just hate the idea of Superbia kids growing up as restricted as we were. Ask Mason sometime what school was like around here. Pretty rough.”

  “How are you going to get all of the books from the box here, into a display over there? You can’t carry the box.”

  “Hmm, no, I can’t. But I can take a few at a time. It’ll just take longer.”

  Judah stared at him with a maddening sympathy, as Alex tried to pick up a stack of books while holding his crutches in the right place at the same time. He finally got things situated, books in the crook of one arm, crutches pointed in the right direction—when one of the crutches slipped out and fell, and he nearly lost his balance.

  The only thing that saved him was Judah, who quickly swept the books back on the counter and kept Alex upright, his hand tight against Alex’s flank.

  “Seriously, I think you need help.”

  “I’m not a millionaire, Judah. I can’t just hire someone to run the store for me while I convalesce.”

  “I know. But…I could help.”

  “No, you have a resort to open. Besides, I don’t need your guilty hangdog expression haunting the store. You didn’t hit me! The accident was my own damned fault.”

  Besides, your hands are on me, and it’s making me uncomfortable because it’s kind of nice, almost like we’re dancing, and I don’t have any room for that right now. Certainly not with a friend. I don’t need to fracture the friendship the way I fractured my stupid ankle. Because I am clumsy of hearts, isn’t that what Ian said?

  “How are you supposed to manage?” asked Judah. “You can’t get up the stairs to your own place. It’s dangerous up there. What if I hadn’t come by?”

  “I suppose eventually I could have crawled to safety, leaving behind all my dignity and self-respect…”

  “Seriously, Alex.”

  He put the books into Judah’s hands. “Fine. But after you put the display together, you’re done. I can run this place myself.”

  “Wait,” said Judah, holding up a book. “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? They banned that?”

  Alex rolled his eyes. “They said it promoted sorcery and portrayed graphic violence.”

  Judah perused the back of the book. “I mean, I haven’t read it since I was ten, but I don’t remember a lot of violence. I remember wondering what on earth Turkish delight was. I think I thought it was some kind of gyro.”

  “You should hear my parents talk about what it was like when they were teens. Rock music, banned. Video games, banned.”

  “Not video games!”

  “The Superbia Beautification League nearly got the town council to ban Halloween one year, and might’ve gotten away with it too, except half the parents in town showed up to complain.”

  Judah set the book carefully on the display. Alex couldn’t complain about how he was handling the books. He was a natural, angling them so they could be seen both from the window and inside. Almost perfect, although Alex might come through later and adjust them just a bit. Just a tiny bit. And Judah wasn’t rough with them. No bent corners, no broken spines.

  A man who understood how to handle a book. That was rare. Almost as rare as a man who understood how to handle Alex. He watched the way Judah would lift a copy, weighing it in his hand before setting it down, and wondered, without meaning to, what those hands might feel like on Alex’s cheek, on his shoulder…on his ass.

  Clearly your morning painkillers have got you in a state.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the pills, maybe it was just loneliness.

  As Judah studied the cover of another book, though, he looked back up at Alex. “So…I have a question for you, and I’ve put it off because I was busy destroying your life, but maybe it’s okay to ask now that things have calmed down a little.”

  “That’s ominous,” said Alex. He found Judah’s sudden serious expression worrisome. Was this going to be a personal question? He hoped not. After the experiences of yesterday, after being found on the floor today, helpless, he didn’t need anyone probing into his personal life. It was one thing to sit here idly wondering about Judah’s hands. A man had to keep some kind of pride.

  “It’s about lions, actually,” Judah said, gesturing at the book.

  “I’m a bookseller, not a zookeeper.”

  “Not just any lions. You know a lot about local history. Do you know if Superbia Springs ever had two lions on display?”

  “I know Silas Cooper had some peacocks, but—”

  “Sorry, not real lions, statues. Bronze statues. Insanely detailed and kind of beautiful ones, very…geometrical. I don’t know how to describe them. Wait, I don’t have to, here, let me show you.”

  He flipped through his phone and then showed the screen to Alex.

  Alex gasped and laughed. “The monsters!”

  Childhood fear is a funny thing. At the time it can be absolutely petrifying, but for an adult, the memory of that fear could be chilling and entertaining at the same time. I can’t believe I was ever scared of that, mixed with that moment of hair standing on the back of one’s neck, the hint of real fright.

  “You know them?”

  He took Judah’s phone. “Oh my god, I hadn’t thought about them in years. Did you say lions? I guess I could see that. They don’t look like any lions that exist in the real world, that’s for sure.”

  “I kind of love them,” Judah said, and the warmth in his voice was unmistakable. “I found them in the basement.”

  Alex nodded eagerly. “That’s where I saw them too. Oh god… You know all about the house by now. How your great-great-uncle Silas built the place—”

  “Right. Then the resort went out of business thanks to some local skullduggery and was abandoned until we inherited it. Is that when you saw them?”

  “I can’t even believe you found them. We used to be so scared of Superbia Springs when we were kids. That’s where you went if you wanted to dare your friends to do something stupid. And the stupidest thing I ever did—well, the second stupidest—was to take a dare to go inside.”

  It had been one of those summer nights that last forever, where you stay out all day and well into the evening, your body sticky with dried sweat, muscles gorgeously sore from a day of swimming and running and lying under that sun, the welts of mosquitoes and fire ants decorating your legs, the littler kids out with jars to catch lightning bugs, and eventually talk had turned to the old Cooper place, Cooper’s Folly, as the abandoned, ramshackle Superbia Springs had come to be known.

  Cooper’s Folly was peculiar on the childhood map of town; all roads eventually led to it, all conversations eventually spoke of it. Y’all wanna go bust some windows at Cooper’s Folly? Y’all wanna see The Old Widder Woman? Boys with their cracking voices slipping between a childhood chirping and a manly tenor, not landing on either side just yet, scratching bites and gazing toward the house as though it could be seen through hill and forest.

  Yes, of course. Yes, any boy on a summer’s night wanted to go see the Old Widder Woman. Everyone claimed to have seen her standing at the windows, her white dress glimmering with a light all its own, but young Alex doubted whether that was true. He’d said he’d seen her, but he knew that was a lie, and he had to wonder whether everyone else was lying too. The stories varied: She was a confederate bride in a wedding gown; a mature woman in a thin tattered shift; an old woman lost inside a voluminous housecoat. She’d lost her husband in a war—which war was never clear, and those boys who had suggested he was a soldier in the Civil War had received a history lesson from Alex, who knew the house was built in 1925. But even that twentieth-century year had seemed impossibly distant, on the last night Alex would ever take a dare.

  It was Mason who had suggested it. Toby—christened Toady by Alex when he was very young—had come along even th
ough everyone knew he’d never do anything brave.

  “Let’s see,” Mason said, “To go into the house, I’ll give you..a dollar thirty-five of my allowance…and three cars.”

  “Three, no way,” said Alex, his eyes locked on the shadow-shrouded house. The last of the evening sun was behind the place, peering through the windows, making the house into a red-eyed silhouette.

  He gulped, hoping no one would see how afraid he was.

  “You better not,” said Toady. “I’m gonna tell Mama if you go.”

  Some brothers would counter with sharper threats: I’ll break every bone in your body if you tell. But Alex had already found his place in life as a quiet, thoughtful boy, more often on the receiving end of schoolyard violence than the giving end, and if it weren’t for big Mason being around to protect them, he might have slid into the role of permanent victim.

  “If you tell,” Alex said, “I’ll tell her why you insisted on washing your own sheets last week.”

  Toady blushed, the red barely visible against the orange light the sun cast on his skin, and said no more.

  “Four cars,” said Mason. “And a pack of gum.”

  “Big Red?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Can you get some?”

  “Are you really going in there?” whispered Toady. “What if the Widder Woman finds you?”

  “She’s not real,” Alex said, eliciting gasps from both his friends. “It’s all made up.”

  “Johnny Phillips said—”

  “Johnny Phillips used to say Santa Claus stayed around at his house for an hour every Christmas Eve to drink beer with his dad. You believe anything he says?”

  They all had to agree the Santa story had gone too far.

  “Tell you what,” said Mason. “If you’re feeling brave…”

  Alex was not feeling brave, but he’d gone too far to back down now. “What?”

  “I have a ten-dollar bill in my bank. You go down in the basement, and it’s yours.”