Glass Tidings

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “Well, I’m a big believer in second chances right now, turns out.”

  Gray’s phone didn’t ring the next day. Or the day after.

  By day three, he had halfway convinced himself he’d imagined the entire thing. It almost had to be a dream, didn’t it? How else to explain that he’d brought a man, an artist, in off the street in the middle of the night and a month later had been filled with anger and grief watching him leave? Something like that didn’t happen to grouchy bastards who hermitted their lives away in an ocean of Scotch and old sci-fi novels.

  He might have convinced himself he’d hallucinated the entire holiday season, but Eddie’s delicate icicles and stained glass ball ornaments were hanging on his display trees in the shop.

  Plus, there was a teenager in his guest room still. And in his shop. The high school was on winter break, and it had seemed safer to bring the kid to the shop and pay him minimum wage to help with the post-holiday everything-must-go sale and packing away of any leftover goods until the following year.

  Even his years-long habit of total isolation showed lingering signs of corruption as people who should know better kept inviting him to do things with them.

  “You’re pretty bummed the glass man left town, huh?” Christine leaned against his front counter, picking at the pile of homemade potato chips beside the roast beef sandwich she’d brought him. Her current mission in life was to bribe Gray to keep letting Adrian crash in his house by delivering store-bought lunch and homemade dinners every day. A casserole dish of lasagna bumped up against the register.

  Gray shrugged. He didn’t know what he was. Relieved at the release of anxiety that came from having his worst fears realized again? Aching with the loss of the body in his bed, the chatter in his kitchen, the toes wiggling underneath his thigh while he read? Pissed at himself for having done it again, goddamn it? For having fallen for someone who was never, ever going to stay.

  Never one to hesitate at the sign of reluctance in a partner in crime, Christine punched Gray in the arm. “Hang out with me on New Year’s Eve. We’ll get the kid a babysitter, not that that won’t piss him off. Jane’s on the 6-to-2-a.m. shift at the hospital, so we’re doing our New Year’s the following day. I’m gonna be the loser at home by herself without her woman. We could go out, you and I.”

  He really needed to break her of that habit. Especially since he was pretty sure the only reason he hadn’t yet was because he was clinging to her roughhousing as some kind of replacement physical affection to blunt the edges of missing Eddie.

  “Come on. It’ll be like . . . well, it won’t be like old times, but it could still be good. We can get plowed and make my wife drive us home from the bar when she gets off her shift.”

  They’d formed a little queer club back in the day, he and Brady and Christine, for that shining, brief moment when Gray had been in love and out and partnered, before he’d pulled back from the world and everyone in it to hide in his Scotch and his books for most of a decade. The lure of rejoining the club was strong.

  They would drink and laugh and then, in the wee hours, Gray would still be the guy who got left behind when everyone else—when Christine—went home to their own lives.

  Gray had spent every New Year’s Eve for the past decade either working desultorily on some home improvement project or drinking himself into a stupor and passing out on his sofa. The temptation to do something different this year, if only to mark the changes Eddie had made in him, was strong.

  He considered his options: drink at home in front of an impressionable teenager (worst idea ever), repainting the guest room (next biggest-loser idea), or force himself to be social with Christine.

  In the end, two out of three—two and a half, really—turned out to be exactly what Gray needed.

  A second bottle of cheap champagne was chilling in the fridge, the remnants of the first in his and Christine’s flutes—with sparkling cider for Adrian—and all three of them had paint smears on their clothes, when his doorbell rang again in the middle of the night.

  Gray wasn’t nearly on his guard enough when he flung open the door to find Eddie standing on his doorstep at last.

  “You gave the kid my room?”

  Eddie’s voice rang with outrage as Gray tried to hush him and tug Eddie down the hall toward his bedroom simultaneously.

  Christine had packed herself up and sped out the door as soon as she’d followed Gray into the front hall to see who was at the door, still sober enough to drive herself home to meet her wife there later. Gray was pretty sure there had been some kind of introductions, such as they were, between Adrian and Eddie, although the haze of shock left him not entirely sure what explanation he’d given for the boy being at his house in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve.

  Had he mentioned that Adrian was basically living with him? The boy had spent a single night at home since showing up on Gray’s doorstep. That had . . . not gone well. They were going to try again before school resumed in another week, but in the meantime, the cooling-off period for the entire family continued with Adrian staying in Gray’s guest room.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” Gray said before he could stop himself. I hoped, though . . .

  “You didn’t think I might change my mind?” Eddie crossed his arms and glared at him.

  But Gray had spotted it, the wobble of uncertainty. The moment before Eddie managed to put on his performer’s face and his defensive anger, yelling at Gray because that was safer than waiting for words Eddie didn’t have faith would come.

  The wobble made it all okay.

  “I figured if you changed your mind, you wouldn’t be staying in the guest room,” he said, pushing up against Eddie until they had to grab each other for balance, Gray’s hands on Eddie’s hips, Eddie’s hands clutching his forearms. They needed to talk, but . . .

  First things first.

  Thank god for walls. He nudged Eddie back against the one behind him, because if Gray couldn’t lean against something, he was going to fall over when he did this.

  Kissing Eddie always made him dizzy. Especially when Eddie threaded his fingers through Gray’s hair and attacked his mouth, nipping and sucking like he could swallow Gray whole. He wrapped a leg around Gray’s hip, pulling them together until Gray could feel the hard length in Eddie’s jeans rubbing against his own. Eddie kissed him like he was drowning in Gray and didn’t care if he ever got a breath again.

  Gray wanted to drown with him. But there were other things he wanted even more. After another gasping, shuddering minute, he tore his mouth free and thunked his head against the wall.

  “Jesus.”

  Eddie tugged at his head. “Get back down here.”

  Gray slid his hands down and squeezed Eddie’s ass hard enough to make him yelp.

  “No. Wait. You need to keep that mouth away from me for a second and see what I did.”

  He pulled Eddie the rest of the way down the hall and into his bedroom, then waved at his dresser.

  Theirs, as of right this very moment.

  “What?” Grumpy Eddie refused to play along, although his tongue kept stealing out to run across his bottom lip, and Gray gave himself credit for kissing most of the mad out of him.

  Gray laced his fingers through Eddie’s and held on tight. There would probably be a fair amount of hanging on needed before Eddie would settle down, and that was okay. Gray could hang on forever. He tugged Eddie over to the dresser, pulled open all the drawers, then hauled them both over to the closet and opened the door.

  Half of every drawer was an empty space. Same thing in the closet with the horizontal rods, the shelves, the shoe rack. Gray had cleared out all of his summer clothes, packing them away in bins in the guest room closet.

  He was going to need to move those bins to another room if Adrian stuck around. Everyone deserved their own space, no matter how long or short they stayed. People needed to know they belonged.

  Eddie trailed his fingers over a half-bar’s
worth of empty hangers, clattering them against each other.

  “You did all this since I left?”

  “Well, Adrian helped. And Christine.” Meeting Eddie had come with the most unexpected side benefits, like dropping the pretense that he didn’t have friends. Even if it had been a close call as far as keeping them. “She bitched the entire time about listening to me go on and on about you. Thinks I’m an idiot for not going after you.”

  Eddie turned to look at him. Gray thought maybe he was about to smile. “What the hell, Grayson? Now you’ve got two strays. Place is getting crowded. You know this is not normal, right?”

  Gray knew what Eddie thought of normal. That it was a place he visited like a tourist wandering a theme park. He smiled. “Is that bad?”

  “Nah.” And yes, that was a full-on smile now. Eddie shook his head, grinning. “Not normal feels like home to me. I just have one question.”

  Questions were good. Questions were excellent when Eddie smiled at him.

  “What’s that?”

  Eddie moved close enough for Gray to feel the heat of Eddie’s body against his own skin. Or maybe that was just Gray spontaneously combusting out of sheer pleasure at the sight of this man.

  The hand Eddie slapped against Gray’s chest felt half-come here, half-back off.

  Eddie raised an eyebrow. “What happened to the super-loner thing you had going on?”

  “What happened to the ‘you need time to figure out what you want’ thing you said I needed?” Gray kept pressing forward against that hand, but Eddie pushed past him without even trying hard.

  Those hands on Gray would always have the power to move him anywhere they wanted.

  So much for not budging.

  “Well, I was gonna say that you could keep the shop open through April—do mini-sales for Valentine’s, St. Patty’s, and Easter—then come with me for the spring and summer faires. But if you’re insta-daddy, that ain’t gonna work.”

  Gray flinched. “Nothing is official here. This is a temporary arrangement.”

  Probably it wasn’t. And he wouldn’t throw the kid under the bus just to keep Eddie around. But yes, he’d fucking lie his ass off and pretend he would if it got Eddie to stick around long enough for Gray to convince him to stay for good.

  “Temporary, my ass,” Eddie muttered as knelt down and unzipped his bag, yanking T-shirts and jeans out of it by the handful and shoving them in the open drawer with a lack of attention to folding that caused Gray physical pain.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, hands on his hips, one ear cocked for noise from Adrian. As much as he’d hoped for this moment, he hadn’t factored in how awkward it could be to want to fuck your boyfriend until the bed broke while a teenager listened down the hall.

  He’d have to invest in some new headphones for the kid.

  “Unpacking.”

  “Now? You want to unpack right now?”

  Unpacking was good. It was just that Gray could think of about seventeen different things he could be doing instead of watching Eddie pull underwear and T-shirts out of his battered duffel.

  “If I turn my back, you might give away my space in the dresser to the next person who falls down and hurts themselves in front of you. Damn right I’m staking my claim right now.”

  Gray tugged him up from his crouch over the open bag. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to call people stupid when you’ve got a child in the house.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  And because Gray knew better by now than to think that Eddie—who had been so silent at first, only to unravel into the mouthiest, most argumentative pain in his ass ever—would actually do so, he pulled him close and shut Eddie’s mouth for him.

  Only to have Eddie push him away after a hot, quick moment and dance out of his arms, smiling.

  “Wait. I want to do a thing.”

  “A thing?”

  He was already chasing after Eddie, who slid out of his grasp, circling around the room.

  God. Chase. Yes. They could play this game.

  Eddie wasn’t playing though. He waved Gray off firmly. “Go do something. For a few minutes.”

  “You just got here, and I’m supposed to go clean the bathroom or something?” he grumped, willing to play at being put out because it exasperated Eddie so much.

  Speaking of which . . .

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.” Eddie rolled his eyes and shoved Gray out the bedroom door. “Scrub toilets while your boyfriend gets ready for sex. That’s superhot, Gray.”

  Boyfriend.

  That was a good word.

  Because he wanted to listen, Gray stood in the hall outside his own bedroom like an idiot, leaning against the wall and hoping the kid didn’t come out of the guest room to ask what the hell he was doing here.

  To no avail, though. He didn’t hear a damn thing except Eddie laughing once.

  “Ahhh, yeah. I think maybe I changed my mind.” Eddie’s voice through the door wobbled with laughter. “I feel pretty ridiculous.”

  “You’re not the one standing in the hall with a hard-on,” Gray muttered to himself, hyperaware of the teen thirty feet away.

  “What?” Eddie shouted, and Gray attempted to merge bodily with the bedroom door.

  “Nothing,” he said. Louder.

  “Okay, you can come in now.”

  “Thank fucking—” God. Oh. My. Fucking. God.

  Eddie. His Eddie. Standing like a . . . like a space pirate in the middle of Gray’s very ordinary bedroom, too-long dark hair loose, arms and chest bare under a leather vest, wearing what Gray assumed were breeches, and boots.

  Those boots.

  Tall, over the knee, with a wide-cuffed top. Battered black leather Gray swore he could smell from across the room.

  “You gonna get over here or what? It’s not exactly summer hot in here, you know?” Eddie said, rubbing his arms.

  Gray shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

  Eddie slapped his hands on his hips and glared at him, which didn’t help. At all.

  “Just want to look for a minute.”

  That got Eddie’s attention. He dropped his arms and took a deep breath that made his naked chest rise and fall beneath that leather vest.

  “So you do like it.”

  Enough looking. Gray stalked around the end of the bed. “Hold still and I’ll show you how much I like it,” he growled.

  Eddie’s yelp when Gray lunged at him dissolved into laughter as they fell onto the bed, legs and fingers and everything tangling.

  “You’re just angling to spend more time staring at my ass—”

  “At your everything.” He pressed his mouth to the side of Eddie’s neck, licking and sucking until heat bloomed under his tongue.

  “—in these pants.”

  “Honestly, it’s really the boots. And the vest. And the naked bits.” He nosed into Eddie’s armpit, then down his arm, tasting all the dips and angles he’d been afraid he would forget during those awful days after Eddie left.

  After Eddie left him.

  He bit the fleshy bit at the base of Eddie’s thumb at the memory.

  “Ow. What was that for?” Eddie asked, the fingers of his other hand stroking through Gray’s hair.

  “You weren’t here on Christmas.” He sounded like a grumpy bastard, he knew it.

  He was a grumpy bastard. Especially about this.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Being left is . . .”

  “Something I won’t be doing again. Ever.” Eddie pulled his face close, kissing Gray’s eyelids, his cheek, his mouth. “Worst week of my life. I am fucking miserable without you. You broke me.”

  There were words that had to be said in answer to that. “You made me whole.”

  Eddie rolling him over and kissing him until Gray’s breath came in rushes of dizziness made everything worth it. He needed more though.

  Promises this time. All of them.

  “That’s n
ot negotiable, you know. Being here on Christmas.” He tugged Eddie’s head back gently by that long hair. This was important. “We can be on the road the rest of the year, but I need you here for the holidays.”

  Eddie snorted. “Yeah, you are so not the ten-months-on-the-road type.”

  “I could be.” He could. He let go of his grip on Eddie’s hair and smoothed it back from where it hung in his face. “I could be anything you wanted.”

  “No, you couldn’t. I like that about you, more than anything.”

  “Okay, then.” He didn’t understand, but that was okay. That was what questions were for, instead of lectures. “So we stay here?”

  “Like I said. We can do both.” Eddie grinned and started stripping Gray’s clothes off. “I had plenty of time on the bus to come up with options and plans. I think you’re bored and that having ten months of the year off work is bad for your mental health.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “I do. Trust the year-round laborer. Breaks are great, but too many breaks makes you stir-crazy. Especially you.” He pressed a quick kiss to Gray’s mouth. “I think you should have more of a year-round store, even if it’s only weekends. Or through the winter months. However you want to do it.”

  “I was thinking of carrying more local art, actually,” Gray said, and his heart broke wide open again at Eddie’s smile. “A shop within the shop. I even had a name in mind.”

  “You did, hmm?”

  And really, he thought Eddie would have figured it out, but it was clear by the stunned look on his face when Gray spoke that Eddie hadn’t guessed at all. “I thought I’d call it Glass Tidings.”

  Someday, maybe, Eddie would hear words like those and not have to hide his face. Gray would wait happily for that day.

  “Yes. Please,” Eddie muttered into Gray’s chest, fingers gripping his arms tight like he might escape if Eddie let go. “Okay. That would be very okay. More shop time, some travel time with me if you can.”

  Gray didn’t want if this time around. And some things were not negotiable. “But you’ll be here. On Christmas.”

  Eddie’s nod dragged his hair across Gray’s chest, making his skin light up at the delicate tickle.