by E M Lindsey
He was neither, though he wasn’t sure that was a point in his favor. He wanted some of those things. He envisioned getting married someday, finding a person he connected with, someone who made sense to him. Someone who could make sense of him.
Most of his lovers found him odd and neurotic, and he didn’t love his flaws, but he had started to wonder if all those songs about finding people perfect just the way they were, were all bullshit. Either way, he’d take this over what his parents had.
He’d take lonely nights and lonelier mornings over thirty years of passive aggression and resentment. His parents would never divorce, but they’d die miserable, and he didn’t want to look into a deck of tarot cards and see that as his future. Maybe he wasn’t worth long-term to anyone, but he’d reach the end of his life knowing he had never compromised himself the way they had.
Pulling into his garage, Jonas killed the engine, then shut the door before getting out. He stepped in through the door which led to the kitchen, the tiled floors and constant AC keeping the place tolerable as summer raged. The heat came early and stayed late, and there was very little reprieve and no real seasons. It was one of the reasons he liked traveling whenever Peter ordered him to.
He’d be in Colorado for three weeks—maybe more, depending on how much work needed to be done, and he’d let himself enjoy the stark change that was the wide, cool Rockies and lush forests. He preferred being on the road to sitting in the office and hearing his father complain about the work he was doing. He preferred his solitude to watching the man look at him with burning resentment that he would never be able to out run.
And it still hurt. Even after all these years, it hurt. Peter Woods had an agreement with his mother to never publicly deny Jonas, mostly to protect his own reputation, and Jonas had suffered for it. He’d never asked for any of it—for that life, for the company, for the strange man who only ever looked at him with quiet hatred. But it was his life.
Maye not forever, but for now. Even if Peter did outlive him, Jonas didn’t think he’d last another ten years.
Jonas moved into his bedroom and pulled his suitcase out, his clothes easy to transfer. Even in his own home, he never felt entirely settled, and he wondered what that said about him. He lived like he was ready to bolt at any given second, but it was comical in the way he’d never had the courage to do it. No matter what opportunity presented itself, he always had an excuse to stay.
Usually it was to protect people. Once upon a time, Jonas had wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. He was never brave enough to become a doctor or a lawyer, but he wanted to know he made a difference to some people without all of the attention. He had never quite lost that, and a lot of his years working at Peter’s company was trying to minimize the impact his father had on small town economies.
He wasn’t always successful. Peter would bite off his nose if he thought it might spite Jonas’ face, so he could never make it look like the ideas were his own. Unfortunately, Peter was also clever. He hadn’t gotten to where he was without a sharp, calculating mind, and it made Jonas’ job even harder. It was why he wasn’t walking away from Cherry Creek now. He wanted his father to look at it like a bad investment, but he knew it wasn’t—not really. There was so much potential and if the right sort of people—the sort of people his father knew—got wind of it, the place would be overrun with vacation homes and commercial businesses. It would transform from the quaint mountain get-away and run the locals, who would no longer be able to afford their own rent, out.
He had seen it before. He lived with the guilt of his own role in the decimation of livelihoods—the thing that lined Peter’s pockets. It was why Jonas lived simply, why he couldn’t bring himself to touch what he’d earned and live at his means. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
Sitting on his bed, Jonas opened his laptop and stared at the website. In the year they’d been surveying the purchased land, Jonas had seen the town undergo changes. Someone had come in to revamp their marketing, and their economy was growing and tourism was up. But it had retained the thing that made it special, made it small. The mom’n’pop shops still dominated, and the Farmer’s Market was still the biggest draw every summer.
Peter would destroy that with a laugh on his lips and a glint in his eye, and he would go to bed at night satisfied with himself. And Jonas would let the guilt drive him further and further down.
He didn’t have a plan yet, but his father wanted him there for a few weeks to try and settle the locals, which meant he had time to come up with something. He had to find a way to make Cherry Creek seem pointless—invaluable, a poor investment. If he could get only one of his investors to pull out, Peter would start to panic and let the place go. He’d re-sell, and he’d move on, and Jonas would be able to breathe easy.
But the fact remained, he had little confidence in himself. His failures vastly outweighed his successes, and right now, he only had prayer on his side.
Chapter Ten
It had been years since Ronan had the ability to just wake up, roll out of bed, and start a pot of coffee. The idea of not considering his body was more of an abstract concept than reality, but his routine was made easier by the fact that his husband was either up before dawn, or sleeping in until noon. It left Ronan to himself, his thoughts, and his own assessment without Parker hovering.
Not that he ever annoyed him when he wanted to help. From the day Ronan sat in the hospital bed with Parker at his side, listening to his new team of doctors telling him what to expect and what the fuck Progressive-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis meant, he knew he’d be mostly on his own. Not physically, but Parker wasn’t the kind of partner to burrow into spaces Ronan didn’t want him.
His single demand from the moment Ronan had shed his guilt over the fire and Fitz’s scars was to marry him and vow he’d never walk away. He’d actually written them into their court-house wedding vows, which Ronan had patiently sat through in his hospital-issued wheelchair as his body slowly regained some of what the MS flare had taken from him.
“It’s not like I could get anywhere fast,” Ronan joked, but Parker hadn’t thought it was funny.
He didn’t seem to give a single shit that there was a judge standing there watching as he cupped Ronan’s face with his hand and kissed him long before they were given permission. “You know what the fuck I mean,” he murmured against Ronan’s lips.
And yeah, he did.
He repeated the vows back to his fiancé, who was quick to be named husband, and they spent the rest of the night getting creative with Ronan’s physical limitations, a bottle of Cialis, and testing the strength of the chair’s metal wheels.
They held up, and so did Ronan, and that might have been the moment he knew that whatever the disease, life, the future threw at him, he’d probably be okay. Years passed after that, with more ups and downs than Ronan cared to admit. He had frustrating flares that had him and Parker screaming at each other, and there were moments he just couldn’t take it, and Parker held him as he screamed and raged at the unknown for dropping this on his head. Mostly, though, there were quiet mornings like this one where Parker was off, probably in the kitchen making coffee, and Ronan was left in bed to tend to his own routine while he contemplated the latest Cherry Creek stress.
Normally, Ronan didn’t have to bother himself with what went on around town. Parker was one of the biggest gossips, so Ronan inadvertently knew everyone else’s business, but this time he was being dragged kicking and screaming into the fray. A year before, an investment company bought up half the land around the lake that bordered the preserve. For a while, it looked like nothing was happening. The for sale signs all went down, and then the town went quiet. Ronan had started to relax about it until the Mayor’s assistant called him and told him that the new landowners were sending a rep down to Cherry Creek to assess the value of the land. Ronan knew what that meant too. He was a recluse, but he wasn’t a fool.
The value of the land meant strangers coming in
. It meant new buildings going up, and corporations setting up shop. It meant the cost of living skyrocketing, and people who had been in Cherry Creek for generations packing up, selling, and finding home somewhere else because they couldn’t afford the luxury taxes on their land. Ronan had gone to the meeting with Rene with some trepidation and had left furious, going straight to Fitz because he was one of the few people who would understand why life suddenly felt like they were on stormy waters.
Logically, he knew it was good for business, but he didn’t want to soothe himself with logic. He just wanted to go back to a time when things were simple. When Parker first moved back with him, when they bought their first house by the lake, and things felt like they existed in a bubble.
The universe was cruel sometimes, even when it was at its most kind.
“Babe?”
Ronan groaned, flexing his fingers and trying to ease some of the numbness away. He was lucky, or so the doctors told him every time he went in for testing. He had the rarest form of MS and one that often moved quicker and more vicious than other types of MS. But his flares had been managed through the years, and even though they took a toll, he was still on his feet. For now. It meant that he walked exclusively with a cane, and more often than not with his crutches, but he’d take it.
“Are you up?”
Ronan pushed up to sit, then twisted his body and set his feet on the floor. He hadn’t flared in a while—not for months—and it was a godsend. For every bad flare, his disease progressed, and it was only a matter of time before he was forced to give up this job, but he was fighting time with his bare fists.
It was why the land developer was on his mind, why it was so much more than entertaining some city asshole for a few weeks. The stress was going to take him down. He was just hoping to minimize the impact when he finally fell.
With a sigh, Ronan reached for his cane and gripped the handle. It was an absurd, duck-bill sword cane that was only ever useful at home on their wood floors, and it was the first thing he touched almost every morning. It was part of his routine, part of him and Parker, and he wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Parker had showed up in his hospital room the morning of their wedding, brandishing it like the sword Ronan hadn’t realized it was. His husband insisted it would go with the tux he absolutely refused to wear in downtown Denver, but he did keep the thing pressed between his thighs, and used it to haul himself out of his chair and to his feet, so when the judge ordered them to kiss, he could do it with one arm around Parker’s neck.
Now, it got him from the bed, to the toilet, to the kitchen. But it made Parker happy and most of the time, that was all that mattered.
Ronan was half leaning over the toilet, one hand on his dick, the other on the counter when the door burst open and Parker shoved his head in. “Are you taking a piss?”
“Generally what I do in the morning,” Ronan grumbled.
Parker rolled his eyes. “Well, move your ass. Levi has bagels for the office today, and last week he fucking sold half of them because I was ten minutes late.”
“He sold half of them because you left your arm in the order window, and when he tried to make you take it, you forced him to throw it to you across the parking lot,” Ronan reminded him.
Parker cackled all the way back to the kitchen. “Worth it.”
Shaking his head, Ronan took slow, shuffling steps to the sink, but his legs were starting to come alive, or at least as alive as they ever were these days. He was stable with a single hand on the marble counter, and he used the other to wash his face and brush his teeth.
He felt more like a person and less like a bridge troll by the time he made it to the kitchen, and he sat in the chair by the window with a grunt as Parker dropped a bowl of sweetened grits in front of him.
“Coffee?”
Ronan rumbled something subverbal as he stirred the lump of butter in the center, then took a bite and hummed. The perks of being married to someone who loved him as much as Parker did—who paid attention to stupid, subtle things like how he liked his grits and what two and a half spoons of sugar meant in his own head.
He was happy. God, he was happy.
The thought used to terrify him, but it hadn’t for years.
He reached for the coffee just as Parker set it down, and he gulped down several, searing mouthfuls as his husband joined him. Parker sat away from the table, reading his phone with one hand, his bare foot propped up on the edge of the table holding his coffee mug between his toes.
It had been years since Ronan noticed anything outside of the ordinary with the way Parker functioned. He’d always been staunchly against wearing his prosthetic, and seeing him shoveling chips into his mouth with his right foot while his left hand was holding the Nintendo controller was just a part of everyday life by the time they were thirteen.
Watching him now lift a mug of coffee to his mouth with an impossibly flexible thigh was business as usual.
“What time is the developer guy supposed to be here?”
Ronan sighed into his grits and dragged spoon-shaped lines through the bowl. “Noon, I think? Rene said he’d call me if there was any change.”
“You sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
Ronan shook his head with a small grin. “You have patients today.”
Parker set his phone down and waved his hand at Ronan before taking his coffee mug from his foot. “I can just ask Eddie to fill in.”
“Jesus,” Ronan breathed out, mostly because he knew that if push came to shove, Parker probably would. Not for anything serious, and his assistant was a smart kid, but he was also a kid with zero certifications in anything. According to Parker, he barely had a high school diploma, and frankly he was a walking HIPPA violation. “You’re gonna get sued for malpractice one of these days. You are so fucking lucky I have an amazing 401k.”
Parker rolled his eyes and sipped his coffee. “Go get dressed. If you make me miss my bagels…”
Ronan pushed to his feet. “If you miss your bagels it’s because he’s still annoyed that you made him throw your arm—and then pretended to cry when it hit the ground.”
“He was just mad it made a kid cry,” Parker defended.
And that was true. Levi wouldn’t have cared except a little girl sitting at a bench eating one of his powdered doughnuts burst into tears and then swore she’d never eat at the Rugelach again. Ronan was pretty sure Levi’s grudge was going to be long and epic.
This was their life though, and he loved it. Beyond words, beyond reason. That strength renewed him carefully as he prepared for the day, and flare or not, he’d do everything in his power from letting this stranger change their little town.
Ronan felt twitchy as he sat in his office, drumming his fingers on the desk and waiting. He wasn’t normally an impatient man, and on any given day, he’d prefer one of his meetings to start late. He had a mountain of paperwork to take care of, and he’d been perusing resumes for the last week after posting the job online. The job didn’t require much, only that the person be over twenty-one and could pass a background check, but Ronan wanted someone who could be primed to take over for him in the future.
And more than that, he wanted someone who knew the area. He wanted someone who gave a shit about Cherry Creek and the people in it. It was a difficult ask because the town was small, and over the years, no one had shown even a scrap of interest in working with him. Granted, he also wasn’t the friendliest guy out there, but he wasn’t a monster. He supposed, mostly, people wanted something a little bit more than riding around the woods on an ATV, dealing with paperwork, and the rest of the government garbage that came with working for them.
But it was perfect for him. If only his body would stay on board.
Presently, his doctor had given him another five years before he’d have to retire, but it didn’t feel like a death sentence anymore. He had almost two decades under his belt, and if he could stay nearby and not give up his home, he’d call it a win.
>
The sound of tires on gravel interrupted his thoughts, and he let out a small sigh before reaching for his coffee. He tried to limit what he took in, but he was going to need the extra caffeine to get through the afternoon. It was a small miracle he was only on his cane that day. He’d never been the kind of man who hid his disability. Loving Parker from childhood had instilled in him a sense of both pride and advocacy since before he even knew what those words were. But there were moments—sometimes extending into days and weeks—that he couldn’t afford to look weak.
Standing up to a land developer who wanted to swoop in and take over their town- well, that was one of those moments.
Grabbing his cane, Ronan pushed to his feet and made it around to the front of his desk before the door opened, and Rene walked in. It was always a pleasure to see the mayor—a man prim and proper at first glance until you got him down to the bar, and his Scottish cursing and sleeve tattoos showed up at the bottom of a couple pints. But he was good at his job, and he loved Cherry Creek. He’d been in office for what felt like forever, and Ronan trusted him.
“Good to see you,” Rene said, tipping his head in a nod.
Ronan looked past him and did his best to assess the stranger. He was nothing like Ronan had anticipated, if he was being honest. In his mind, the man who owned Woods Development was older, with expensive suits and a Bvlgari watch and a car that was not meant to drive over rough terrain. He expected grey hair and wrinkles shallowed by Botox, and the orange tint of a fake tan.
This man was none of those things. Ronan was struck by the beauty of him before he was even aware of it. He was an inch taller than Rene, slender, dark curls that were clipped short but still a little wild. His face was round, and fresh, eyes dark behind thick-rimmed glasses without a trace of age yet. Ronan would eat his damn hat if the boy was older than thirty.