by Gayle, Linda
Dylan fumbled for his key, then unlocked a door at the end of the hall and opened it. They darted inside. Just as quick, he shut the door and locked it. He stood for a silent second with one hand on the knob and the other on the dead bolt. And then he…laughed.
“Oh, man.” He turned toward Cam with a crooked grin. “Now I see what you mean about your eye mojo.”
The burning sensation of the call flooded away from him, and Cam shoved his fingers through his hair, scratching his still-tingling scalp. The danger had passed but left him antsy. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t let him shoot you.”
“He wouldn’t have.” Dylan approached and pulled his hands down gently. Cam twisted his face away. He didn’t know how much power still lurked in his eyes. “He’ll be all right, yeah?”
Cam nodded, his heart walloping against his ribs. “Yes. He’s only stunned.” Not too stunned to call him serpent, and that other name, which was highly inaccurate in any case. Still, Jose must know the old legends.
Before Cam could dwell on it, Dylan slapped him on the arm. “Then we’re good. Fuck, man, don’t worry about it. He threatens me almost every night. We fight like that all the time. It’s just a pissing match.”
“Pissing match?” Feeling off balance and out of his element—as indeed he was—Cam shifted his weight restlessly, wondering if he should stay or go.
“Like two roosters having a standoff in the hen house, you know? We both want to be the boss.”
“The boss? The boss of what?”
“Well, that’s a good question.” He looked around at his apartment—room, Cam mentally corrected when he turned to examine the space. It was just one room with scuffed wood floors. A streetlight illuminated one corner that held an air mattress covered with a dark blue sleeping bag and a rumpled sheet. A minifridge hummed in another corner. The sounds of traffic buzzed in through a partially opened window with grimy, broken blinds covering it.
“This is your place?”
“I know it doesn’t look like much. Hell, it’s not much.” Dylan set the Chinese food on the floor by his makeshift bed, then pulled up the blinds, letting in a breeze and a little more light. “Believe it or not, it’s a step up for me. Pretty soon I’ll be out of this dump, though. I’ve been saving up my pay from the clinic. In another few weeks, I’ll have a couple months’ security saved, plus the first month’s rent for a decent place. Then maybe I can get a better job too. You’d be surprised at how people write you off when they see this address on a job application.”
Small as the room was, Cam felt safe there. Safe with Dylan and in no hurry to go back into the hallway to confront the old man again. He crossed the empty space to stand opposite him at the window. “You don’t like working there?”
“No, I like it plenty. Dr. Martin’s been great. But, you know, business is crappy for her. Most of her clients can’t pay their bills. She’s the last resort for the hard-luck cases. Half the time, she ends up putting the animals down, they’re so far gone when they get to her.” He shook his head and stared out the cracked glass. “Lucky for me, I was another hard luck case she couldn’t pass up.”
“Why, what happened?”
“I brought in a box of abandoned kittens. She said as long as I came in a few times a day to feed them, I could keep ’em there. In between feedings, I started making myself useful. Cleaned the cages, swept the floor. Pretty soon, she gave me a few hours on the clock. It’s not much, but it’s the best job I’ve had since I came here.”
“What about your family? Do you miss them?”
“Nah.” He lifted the blinds to peer down at the street, then let them fall. “Haven’t talked to anyone for a few years now.”
“I can’t imagine being without my family.” At times, it sounded tempting.
Dylan crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. “Like that brother who wants to control everything you do?”
“He…” Isn’t my brother, he wanted to say. God, how he wanted to tell Dylan everything. To live with the weight of so many secrets on his shoulders was a curse of its own. Part of him envied Dylan his simple, uncluttered life. “He’s my mentor,” he said instead. “We travel together, and he teaches me how to be in the world. How to speak to others. History, philosophy, everything. He’s very wise.”
“And a fucking homophobe.”
Cam shook his head. “He isn’t. It’s just that I shouldn’t be with anyone.”
“For fuck’s sake, Cam, you’re twenty-one. Ain’t you even had a boyfriend before?”
“It wasn’t permitted. Besides, there wasn’t time. I was always on the move. I was allowed to be with others, in class. I spent three years at a private school in Bann with—” He caught himself before he said humans. “With others my age.”
“Didn’t you make no friends?”
He’d wanted to. Badly. But because of his eyes… Because he was a monster who could kill with one glance… “There were some I liked. But Tash kept me busy. Said it would only be asking for trouble if I got involved with anyone.”
“Tash.” Dylan drawled it like it left a bad taste in his mouth. Then he pushed off from the wall and ran his hands up and down Cam’s arms. “Well, Tash ain’t gonna come between us. Not here. Not now.”
“I told you, I can’t stay long. He does expect me back. I only told him I was dropping off Gertie.”
“What’s he gonna do, come looking for you? There’s no way he’d find you here.”
That was true, he supposed. “He’d be angry.”
“So what? How angry does he get? He don’t hit you or nothing, does he?”
The chain weighed heavily around Cam’s neck. “No, but… He’s hell to live with when he’s mad, and he’ll make my life miserable.”
“Well, then,” Dylan said with a smirky grin, “you seem pretty fucking miserable already. What’s a little more?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at you. You slink around like a whipped puppy with its tail between its legs. For someone who can fight, it’s like you got no fight in you. That’s no way to live.”
“It’s the way I have to. You don’t understand. There’s no way you could.” When he tried to walk away, Dylan grabbed his arm tight.
“Then explain it to me.” His fingers were like a vise. “Because it pisses me off to see you so beat down. Being sheltered is one thing. Being confined like a fucking animal is another.”
“I’m not an animal.” But the chain seemed to tighten around his throat, and he hooked his fingers around it.
“What is that thing, anyhow?” Dylan pushed his hand away. “What’s this, some kind of gimp collar?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Did Tash put this on you?”
“No, the brothers did,” he answered without thinking.
“There’s more of them? You got other brothers?”
“Not like that.” He’d said too much. His heart beat like a wild bird. He didn’t belong here, shouldn’t have come. “I have to go.”
“Why’s there no clasp?”
He stared at the floor, realized his feet hadn’t obeyed his command to move toward the door. “What?”
“On that chain. I was looking at it last night while you slept. It’s one continuous piece. No ends.” Dylan pulled down the neckline of Cam’s T-shirt. His fingers felt cool on Cam’s skin. “I never seen nothing like it.” He touched the gold collar, and a shiver flushed over Cam’s entire body.
Dylan rolled the charmed collar between his fingers, his knuckles brushing against the pulse pounding at the base of Cam’s throat. “Why’d they put this on you?”
“I can’t say.”
“Can I take it off?” His fingers tightened around it, testing.
“You must never.” Cam jerked away, eyes nearly meeting Dylan’s before he remembered and dropped them. “You must never,” he said more evenly.
“Why not?” Dylan approached again, backing h
im against the wall, trapping him with his voice, that voice that calmed savage beasts. He lifted a hand and stroked it over Cam’s chest, settled the palm over his racing heart. “What’s got you so scared, huh? You’re safe here.”
To Cam’s horror, a great ball of emotion rose up to choke him. He swallowed it down and knotted his fists by his side. The desperation with which he wanted this connection with Dylan rocked him to his core. It was unnatural, what he was feeling. Sinful. “You saw what happened to your neighbor. That’s nothing. Nothing compared to…what I can do.”
“I told you”—Dylan continued his gentle stroking, moving closer still—“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” Cam whispered just as Dylan kissed him. Soft, soft lips, light and undemanding. Then again, openmouthed, tongue touching Cam’s lower lip. Cam shivered, every ounce of his being focused on that light, damp pressure.
Just as he started to lean into it, hands sliding around Dylan’s hips, Dylan drew back. “Let’s eat. First,” he said, and with a sly smile, took Cam by the hand and gently led him like a lamb to the mattress.
Dylan lit a candle in a jar and set it off to one side while Cam tried to get comfortable on the air mattress. He blew out the match. In the yellow glow, Cam looked supremely uneasy, eyes darting beneath the hank of dark hair that fell over his forehead, his fingers lacing and unlacing. Probably if he could have gotten up and started pacing, he would have. The gold collar gleamed. Without a word, Dylan went to get plastic-ware for them and a couple of leftover microwave dishes he’d saved from the times he’d gotten frozen dinners. He pulled open the minifridge. “I got beer and water. Pick your poison.”
“Beer. Please.” That soft, lilting voice wavered with uncertainty. Dylan liked it. He planned to keep Cam off balance all night, tipping, teetering until he fell right into Dylan’s arms. He knew he’d nearly lost him a minute ago. Cam had been ready to run. This issue would need to be approached delicately, sidelong, with quiet steps and whispered words to convince Cam to stay. Dylan wanted more of those trembling kisses and fingers clutching at him as if Dylan was Cam’s lifeline. He needed to understand what had Cam so freaked. Okay, so maybe Dr. M was right and Dylan had a hell of a rescuer streak. So what?
He took the caps off the bottles of two Bud Lights and brought them over to the mattress. “It’s all right, baby. It really is. Your brother doesn’t know where I live, and if you’re worried about old Jose, trust me, even if he called the cops, they wouldn’t show. Only thing that would bring them down to this neighborhood would be a murder.”
“Are there many of those?”
“Enough. There’re a few gangs around here. Cops can’t keep a lid on ’em.” He shrugged and sat cross-legged across from him on the air mattress, which whistled under his weight. “Much as I don’t like Jose, him and that shotgun keep us safer.” He took a drink of his beer and watched Cam roll his bottle between his palms, his gaze focused on the candle in the jar. Gently, Dylan reached out and rubbed his fingers across Cam’s knee.
Cam startled a little, then visibly relaxed under the soft pressure. Dylan spread his palm over Cam’s thigh, stroking, watching his face, where a dozen conflicting emotions roiled. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
Cam closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t know what he wanted. That was the real message. Suddenly, Dylan didn’t care if they ate either. Nothing intrigued him more than this shy, complicated kid sitting across from him. But he knew if he rushed things, he might scare Cam off, so instead of doing what his dick demanded, he leaned back and opened the Chinese food bag.
“Can you get the plates? There—” He nodded toward where he’d left the old microwave-dinner dishes, and Cam picked them up. Dylan served out the rice and lo mein. The delicious odor filled the air, and his mouth watered. His little girlfriend-wannabe at the restaurant had charged him only five bucks for the whole thing. The meal came with two sets of plastic chopsticks, and Cam amazed him by taking a pair out of the cellophane and digging into his noodles like a pro.
“Whoa, Jet Li, you know how to use those things?” Dylan went for the fork, then changed his mind and unwrapped the other set of chopsticks.
“These cheap ones are a little slippery, but yeah. We lived in Thailand for almost a year. I got pretty good.”
“Can you catch a fly?”
“What?”
“Like in that movie. The Karate Kid. Ever seen it?”
When Cam shook his head, Dylan clicked his chopsticks together. “This boy is learning karate, and his teacher makes him catch a fly in midair with these things.” He stabbed at the rice. “At least I think it was that movie.”
“I haven’t seen many movies,” Cam said, his tone so wistful Dylan might have said he’d been to some wonderful exotic resort. “Not in the theater, anyhow. There’s never enough time.”
“No? What do you do, anyhow, with that brother of yours?”
Cam shrugged, chewing. “We travel, like I said. We train. We study.”
“Is he like you?” Dylan ventured around a mouthful of food. “With the eyes?”
Cam’s gaze lowered even farther, if that were possible, and his shoulders hunched. That question hit a nerve. Dylan didn’t think he’d answer, and then Cam nodded.
“Runs in the family?”
Cam took a long drink of his beer and swallowed. Then he nodded again. Cat got his tongue, apparently.
Dylan chewed his bottom lip before asking his next question. “Does he wear a gold collar too?”
Cam set down his plate. “Please don’t ask me these questions.”
Dylan put a hand on his leg before he could leap up, which it looked like he was about to do. “Hey. It’s all right. I’ll stop digging. It’s just… I want to know you.”
“There’s nothing to know,” he said shortly, not with anger but with obvious tension, then sipped at his beer again.
“Okay, man, it’s cool. We all got our issues, believe me.” He slid his hand away once he felt Cam settle again. He picked up his plastic fork, abandoning the chopsticks. “So, you told me a little about you. Now I’ll answer a question. Go ahead, shoot, whatever you want to know.”
Cam perked up. “How long have you been away from your family? How’d you end up here?”
“That’s two questions, but whatever. I ain’t told this story to nobody else for a long time.” Not since he’d had to swallow his pride and go into a homeless shelter for the first time. His blood still ran to ice when he remembered that night, one in what had become a long chain of bad nights.
“Go on,” Cam said, gesturing with his chopsticks. “Unless you don’t want to tell me. You don’t have to, but…I want to know about you too.”
Nearly every other person in Dylan’s life had taken his words and his heart and thrown them back at him, twisted and broken. Hell, for all he knew, Cam would do the same, but then, it wasn’t likely they’d be in each other’s lives long enough to draw that kind of blood. “You know how I asked you if maybe your brother didn’t know you’re gay?”
Cam nodded, chewing but clearly hanging on Dylan’s every word.
Between bites, Dylan said, “I asked because that’s how it was for me and my family. I hid it for a long time. I always knew, but my parents divorced when I was six, and I figured my mom had enough on her mind, trying to keep a roof over our heads. I thought she’d probably be okay with it, but then she met this guy I called Marvelous Marvin.” He took a swig of his beer, for courage as well as to dampen his tightening throat. This wasn’t easy shit to talk about.
“I suspect maybe he wasn’t so marvelous,” Cam said.
“You could say that. They met in church. He convinced her to marry him. Well, hell, he had a nice house, a good job. He could give her everything we’d been struggling for since my dad left us. I can’t blame her.” Or at least he didn’t want to blame her, not his mom. The weight of that betrayal still rode his shoulders, though.
“You don’t have to tell me more,” Cam murmured. He’d slid closer to Dylan while he talked. In the dim glow of the votive in the jar, his eyes looked luminous, unearthly. Dylan just wanted to fall into them and forget everything. Instead, he focused on his lo mein.
“Nah, it’s okay. I want to.” Cam covered Dylan’s hand with his own. The gesture moved Dylan to go on. “Marvin brainwashed her. My mom had always been a fighter. She laughed a lot, joked around. After a couple of years with Marvin, it was like she was walking on eggshells all the time.
“I think…I’m sure she knew about me. She used to drag me to church with her, and I started hooking up with the pastor’s kid. We were the same age, sixteen, both horny as hell. I guess he was my first real boyfriend. We’d go up to the empty choir loft during the service and make out. My poor ma, she thought I was doing the youth group. Instead, I was doing Josh Myers.” He couldn’t help a wry snort. Cam looked a bit horrified, and Dylan swallowed. “Anyhow, I’m sure she had plenty of sleepless nights worrying about what would happen if Marvin found out. And of course, he did.”
“How?”
“I told him. One night, he just totally pissed me off, and I told him I’d been blowing his precious pastor’s kid.” He sucked in a breath and let it out, feeling his heart thudding at the memory of what had transpired that night. “Like most every other day, I was mouthing off to him. I couldn’t help it. I hated the guy. He was so fucking self-righteous, always going on about how children should be forced to pray in school and how anyone who didn’t believe like he did should be kicked out of America. And of course, he had a special hatred for fags. His word, not mine.”
Dylan turned his hand over to lace his fingers through Cam’s. “Anyhow, we used to fight all the time over that shit while my mother slinked around, afraid to say anything. Finally, one night, I couldn’t stop myself. I told him what I’d been doing. Said I was proud of it too, and then I told him I’d been sucking Josh Myers’s dick in church. Oh man, that was the wrong thing to say to old Marvin.”
“What happened?” Cam tightened his fingers around Dylan’s.