Light as Air

by Mari Carr

  He’d been nearly eight before he realized that his uncle Silas’s marriage to Colby and Lucy wasn’t something lots of people did. Up until then, he’d always figured marriage was between two or three people who loved each other, and it didn’t matter if a man fell for a woman or another man.

  When Hope had fallen for both Wyatt and Clayton, the family had accepted the union without a blink. And he’d figured out in middle school that Bryant was into guys, not girls, and it hadn’t felt weird or wrong to him.

  Love is love. No matter what.

  His mother, Jody, had recited those words to him countless times over the years, and he’d taken them to heart, believed them as gospel truth.

  But TJ and Rosalia hadn’t been raised by Comptons. They were raised in a society that said marriage was best between two people, and for the even less open-minded in the world, those two people had to include one man and one woman.

  “Mind if I take a turn?”

  Doug jerked, surprised to hear TJ’s voice right behind him.

  “Of course not.” Doug stepped aside and watched as his best friend took Rosalia into his arms, the two of them dancing to “Marry Me,” as the station did a two-fer of Thomas Rhett songs.

  He backed away, dropping down into his chair, trying to calm his racing heart. His thoughts were taking him somewhere he couldn’t go in reality.

  Doug forced himself to look away from them, studying the fire, fighting to find enough air to fill his lungs.

  His eyes betrayed him, continually drifting back to the sight of TJ and Rosalia dancing. She wasn’t holding him as tightly, but they were still close. TJ didn’t have the benefit of a long friendship with her. The two of them were essentially strangers. But that didn’t seem to matter as they danced.

  TJ wasn’t doing a very good job, trying to hide his feelings. He was looking down at her as if she hung the moon. Something that wasn’t lost on Rosalia, who kept sneaking glances upward, her cheeks flushed. Every time she lifted her face, their lips were mere inches apart.

  What would Doug do if they kissed?

  The question rambled round and round in his brain.

  Would he walk away? Or move closer and join in?

  And how would they respond if he did?

  He looked away once more, and this time he closed his eyes.

  Doug didn’t bother to open them again until the song ended. Even then, he had to force himself to look their way.

  TJ was looking at him when he did, the question written in his eyes. They knew each other well. Too well. That closeness meant they could speak with expressions as well as words.

  TJ wanted to know if Doug was okay with the dance.

  He gave TJ a quick nod and smile and watched his friend visibly relax.

  “So…what, um, happens after, you know…” Rosalia looked from TJ to Doug, and he could see her struggling to ask something.

  “What happens after the dance?” TJ finished for her.

  TJ hadn’t released her yet, his hands on her waist, Rosalia’s on his forearms. Doug tried to decide if she was holding TJ at bay or keeping him close.

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

  “We kiss our dates good night.”

  TJ was a man of action. He tipped Rosalia’s face up with a finger under her chin. He held her gaze for the count of three, giving her a chance to step away.

  Rosalia didn’t move back. Instead, she shifted forward.

  TJ pressed his lips to hers in a kiss that was seventy-million light years away from friendly. His hands cupped her cheeks as he deepened the kiss, pressing her lips open, and Doug caught a glimpse of their tongues touching.

  Doug wasn’t aware of standing, of walking toward them, but he must have, because one second he was sitting by the fire, and the next he was beside them.

  When TJ released her, he took a step back, his eyes dark with hunger. He looked at Doug and tilted his head toward Rosalia. Just one slight motion, but it told Doug he was okay with what came next.

  Doug reached out for Rosalia’s hand, using his grip to tug her toward him. “I want to kiss my date good night, too.”

  Rosalia gave him a shy smile.

  “You’re so beautiful, Rosie.” He’d wanted to say that to her forever, but she hadn’t been willing to hear it. Not until tonight.

  He wasn’t sure what the difference was this time. Whether it was TJ’s presence or whether it had something to do with whatever was bothering her.

  Doug wasn’t in the mood to overanalyze it at the moment. He’d waited years for this chance, and he wasn’t going to blow it by thinking.

  He grinned at the thought, and Rosalia tilted her head, confused by the sudden change in his demeanor.

  He didn’t give her a chance to ask. Instead, he tucked his arm around her, placing his palm at the small of her back and pulling her flush against him. With his free hand, he ran his fingers through her wavy, thick black hair and kissed her.

  He felt like Prince Charming to her Snow White as she mewed softly, her hands wrapping around his neck. Like TJ, he wanted a taste of her sweetness. Their lips parted at the same time and he touched her tongue with his. She was delicious—chocolate and marshmallows with a hint of the hard apple cider she liked to drink.

  Doug could kiss her forever. He broke away, intending it to only be a second’s reprieve, so they could drink in some much-needed air, but Rosalia released him, taking two steps back before he could resume the kiss.

  “Rosie,” he whispered. He didn’t want it to end here. He needed so much more than just one kiss from her.

  She blinked rapidly as she glanced from him to TJ.

  “Thank you for the dances,” she said. “And the…” Her whispered words faded. “Good night.”

  Rosalia turned and quickly returned to her RV, leaving him and TJ standing there in her wake.

  “TJ—” Doug started, after they’d let a painfully long minute slide by without words.

  “No,” TJ cut in. “I know you, know you think you have to put words to everything that pops into your head, but we’re not talking about this.”

  Doug didn’t argue. In truth, he’d been about to suggest they sleep on what just happened, take some time to wrap their own heads around it before they talked it out. “Okay.”

  TJ nodded his head good night and headed for their tent.

  Doug returned to his chair. The fire was dying down, and he let the flames hypnotize him for a long while.

  If only the sparks and embers could burn away the heavy sensation that had just settled over him.

  So much for feeling peaceful.

  Chapter Four

  TJ lay back on the sleeping bag inside the tent. It was late afternoon, and he’d decided to do something he hadn’t done since elementary school. Take a nap.

  Not that sleep was coming easily.

  Or…at all.

  He’d been with the research team a month, and he had to say that so far, storm chasing was boring work.

  After the downpour the first night, the skies had cleared and September had treated them to nothing but sunshine and cool breezes. If he were at the beach, it would be heaven. But considering their entire purpose was to study severe storms and tornadoes, it wasn’t shaping up to be a successful trip.

  Regardless, TJ had been grateful for the time to gather his bearings. At least for the first couple of weeks. Doug had given him—covertly—a crash course on the camera equipment, all of which was far superior to the cast-off crap they’d used during high school. They had taken the beginner’s lessons away from the campsite at TJ’s request because he didn’t want the others—mainly Rosalia—to see how little he knew. It wasn’t based on the fear she’d let him go. Doug had emphatically reassured him that would never happen.

  Nope.

  It was based on the same thing that made too many of TJ’s decisions in life. Pride. He had too fucking much of it. And even though he knew it wasn’t a particularly endearing character trait, he couldn’t let it go. />
  Doug had also spent a few hours each day teaching him the video-editing software. While TJ found the editing concepts fascinating and was glad to learn it, it also drove home exactly how far Doug had surpassed him.

  In high school, they’d done the filmmaking together, and TJ had looked forward to those afternoons more than anything in his life. They’d go to Compass Ranch after school and spend hours taking video of the animals, the hands, the land. Once they had mastered the cameras and the editing software, they’d started heading to the football field to get footage of practice or the gymnasium to capture the basketball team.

  Because it was just the two of them, and they’d billed themselves as CPSN, they also had to take turns in front of the camera. TJ had assumed Doug would want that role full-time because of his fun-loving, center-of-attention personality.

  But that hadn’t been the case. Doug had insisted on sharing the spotlight, claiming most newscasts had two anchors. He forced TJ to climb out of his self-imposed shell and talk to people. At the time, TJ had hated it, hated having to make conversation with people when it was a lot easier—and safer—to just blend into the background. He had mastered disappearing up until high school. Hiding bruises from his teachers and friends, skipping school on days when the injuries were too visible, or he didn’t feel like he could fake being okay when he wasn’t.

  Doug always saw the stuff he was hiding. And their junior year, he stopped letting him get away with it. Not in an in-your-face way. That wasn’t Doug’s style.

  Instead, his friend showed him how to be a normal teenager without having to pretend. He invited him over for dinner several times a week so he could spend time with a loving family, agreed to start the journalism club with him so TJ would have a reason to stay out of the house and at school. But more than that, through CPSN, Doug had taken the sullen, quiet boy he’d been in middle school and taught him how to make friends. By senior year, they were two of the most popular guys in their class. Doug had walked away with the Most Likely to Become a Stand-up Comedian superlative, while TJ got the Most Changed Since Sixth Grade nod.

  And he knew his peers—even he—considered that change a positive one. Or at least it had been.

  When he was with Doug, he was laughing. It was the reason he’d walk through fire for the man. TJ’s ability to feel happiness would have most definitely been squashed completely by Thorn if Doug hadn’t constantly been around, ready to pick him up with a kind word or crack him up with some joke or prank.

  TJ had never seen himself following in his father’s footsteps until a couple years ago.

  Doug had taken off with the research team for a second spring, and TJ had been left alone for several months. It hadn’t dawned on him until Doug returned that he’d regressed back to the boy he’d been in middle school.

  Doug had made some dirty joke that had TJ doubled over with laughter, tears streaming down his face. And that was when he realized he hadn’t laughed—not even once—in all the time Doug had been gone.

  Worse than that, TJ had found himself sitting at the end of Slim’s bar alone a few times, drinking a beer under the guise of trying to catch his father coming in after whatever that week’s shitty part-time job, to stop him before he started tossing the whiskey back.

  As TJ lay there, he was forced to admit it wasn’t just his dad that had driven him into the bar. It was his own need to escape the loneliness, the depression, the heaviness that never seemed to leave him.

  Unfortunately, that awareness didn’t change anything during Doug’s last trip. When his friend was away, TJ plodded through the days, the same horrible routine of dreary work followed by mopping his drunk-ass dad off the floor and putting the man to bed as he suffocated TJ in all his hate—of Comptons and gays and basically every other minority on the planet. Then TJ would sit in the living room, wondering if his dad had left enough liquor in the bottle to send him to oblivion as well.

  Doug slid the zipper up and stuck his head in the tent. “Still not sleeping?”

  TJ shook his head. “Nope. But this might be even better. I’m relaxing.”

  Doug grinned. “That is better. Eric, Justin and I are going to take a walk. Rosie is in her RV doing something that looks really boring.”

  “Science is hard,” TJ said with a chuckle. They’d adopted that line the second day in camp, he and Doug saying it whenever Rosalia forgot who she was talking to and started saying stuff that sounded more like gibberish and Pig Latin than actual words.

  Every time they pulled it out, she rolled her eyes, giggled, and then dumbed it down for them. Rosalia was clearly a brilliant scientist, but she never made him or Doug feel stupid for their lack of knowledge about the weather. More than that, she built them up, constantly pointing out their incredible skill with the cameras, while declaring she had “no eye” for the amazing things they filmed. She simply asserted that everyone brought their own unique skills to the table and that was what made them a successful team.

  They teased her about pulling the boss card a lot, but TJ was certain she was exactly the type of person he’d love to work for one day.

  Whenever that thought crossed his mind, he recalled the job he’d left a month earlier at the lumberyard. Earl, the manager, had cussed him up one side and down the other when he’d called from the road, an hour out of Compton Pass, to quit at the last minute.

  TJ had been so focused on packing up and then questioning his sanity as they drove farther and farther away from home, that he’d forgotten all about the fact he’d been scheduled to work that day.

  “I’m planning to take some stills of the reservoir. Justin’s dropping a line in. Poor bastard is determined to catch a fish.”

  “Tell him bait might help.”

  “Last chance to come with us,” Doug said.

  TJ shook his head. “Happy here. Feeling sort of boneless. Wanna hang on to that for a while.”

  “See you in bit.” Doug waved and zipped the tent back up.

  TJ reached for his phone and fired up Rosalia’s YouTube channel. Whenever he could manage a few minutes alone, he’d click on her channel, watching her shows with captivated interest.

  It didn’t take him more than five minutes to figure out there was probably a huge contingency of her followers who were male and watching simply for her. She was fucking gorgeous on screen, but the camera didn’t capture a tenth of her true beauty.

  The more he got to know her, the more he understood Doug’s infatuation.

  Hell, the more he shared Doug’s infatuation.

  By tacit agreement, the three of them hadn’t discussed the dances or kisses. Not a single word was spoken, but TJ didn’t believe for a minute that they weren’t all thinking about that night. A lot. God, it was all he could think about.

  It also didn’t slow down the flirting. Doug didn’t seem capable of keeping his hands off her, always reaching out to hold her hand or tickle her playfully or ruffle her hair. As for TJ, he found himself feeling things he’d never felt for another woman. Protective. Possessive. He wasn’t sure how to batten those things down. He’d spent a lifetime holding everyone at bay. Everyone except Doug…and now, Rosalia.

  Coming here had been a mistake. And not just because it meant leaving his dad unchaperoned.

  As if that thought summoned a ghost, his phone rang. He recognized the number. It was Slim, at the bar. The poor man had phoned close to a dozen times since TJ left town—and his father no less than twenty—but thus far, TJ had ignored them all, not wanting to take the calls in front of the others.

  He’d regretted the few disparaging comments he made about his family lineage to Rosalia the first night he was here, almost instantly. Since then, he’d kept things light, casual, professional. Whenever the subject of his life came up, he deflected the questions and changed the subject. His hesitance to speak about himself hadn’t gone unnoticed and the inquiries eventually stopped.

  He clicked on his phone. “Hello.”

  “Thank fucking Jesus. Wh
ere the hell have you been, TJ?”

  “I’m in Kansas.” Rosalia had set them up at a state campground in Milford, claiming it was central to the research area and would make travel quicker and easier whenever a storm hit.

  “Kansas? But…well, hell. That makes sense, I guess. When you gettin’ back?”

  “December.” Even as he said it, TJ knew he’d never be able to stay here that long. Thorn would fuck something up and TJ would go back. He hated that about himself, but Thorn was the only family he had, and he’d made a promise to his mother. While the guy was a huge prick and pain in the ass, TJ couldn’t shake the sense of responsibility that told him Thorn was his to take care of. It wasn’t fair to set him loose on the good people of Compton Pass, so TJ tried to carry the weight alone.

  If Doug had shown up on his front door any other day than the one he had, TJ wouldn’t have made this journey, not for love nor money. Not even for friendship.

  But Doug had caught him at his lowest point yet.

  TJ had been sitting in the kitchen alone, staring at a bottle of whiskey and seriously considering downing the thing. He’d never gotten drunk in his life. Not once. He wasn’t a teetotaler. It was nothing like that. He had just spent too much time with a mean drunk. TJ was afraid to find out how consuming too much alcohol would affect him. He was terrified of losing control—of his faculties or his temper because of the voice in the back of his head that said once he took that leap, he’d never turn back. So he’d have a glass of wine with dinner or a couple beers by the campfire, just to be social, and that was it.

  That day, he was done fighting the inclination, the temptation. He’d wanted to get fucked-up. Wanted to drown every dark, horrible, stinking place inside him with the whiskey, wanted to use it to disappear from his miserable life.

  He’d actually had the bottle open and to his lips when Doug knocked on the door. The sound caught him so unaware, he’d dropped it, the bottle shattering loudly on the tile floor.

  Something about the shattered glass and strong smell of whiskey pulled him back to his senses.