Mine

by Mary Calmes

  “Trev?”

  I realized my mind had been drifting, and came back to the present, where Chris was standing there looking at me. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m gonna call Landry now, but I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can go back to the hospital. Are you pissed?”

  “No,” I assured him. “You were there last night, all night, until the hospital staff kicked you out, just like Jo. You were there, I know you love him.”

  He nodded. “I do, and I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, okay?”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  His smile was bright as I turned to Scott, who was standing with the front door open, ready to leave.

  “I’m surprised,” I said as I walked beside him toward his black Jaguar, “that there weren’t reporters at the end of your drive when I got here.”

  He grunted. “My father has friends in the district attorney’s office—he’s a generous campaign supporter—so the report of his arrest and arraignment wasn’t released until this morning. I suspect they’re going to start converging soon, and I have men meeting me at his hotel, and my assistant is taking care of security for the house and grounds as we speak. It’s probably best you and Landry are leaving today. It’s going to be a circus around here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Did you fuck the maid?”

  I looked at his profile, saw the muscles in his jaw cord; he was more upset than he sounded. “No, but I’m still sorry.”

  “I’m sorry Landry’s name will be included in the media dump.”

  “It’s okay. If we see any reporters when we get home, I’m sure Landry will use it to his benefit from a marketing standpoint. Buy the kidnapped guy’s jewelry, you know?”

  He chuckled and ended with a sigh. “I’m so sorry for all this,” he told me.

  “Did you fuck the maid?” I threw back at him.

  There was a snort of laughter and then a rare smile. “No, I didn’t either.”

  “So see, neither of us is to blame.”

  “No, we’re not,” he said as he turned at the end of the drive. We passed three news vans on the road.

  “Excuse me while I make a call,” he said.

  I listened as he spoke to his assistant, Candace, on speakerphone in his car and explained that they needed the security now. She assured him that they were on their way and she had already called Chris and told him that and advised him not to open the front door.

  “Thank you,” he told her.

  “Of course,” she said softly. “I’m at your father’s hotel in the lobby. I’ll see you soon.”

  When he hung up, I told him that Candace sounded hot on the phone.

  “She’s even better in person,” he informed me.

  “And?”

  He scowled. “She’s my assistant, and I, unlike my father, actually respect the people who work for me.”

  I couldn’t argue with his logic.

  At the hospital, I was happy to find Jocelyn already there, and, surprisingly, Hugh. Landry was talking to them, and when Scott came in, he lifted his arms for his brother. Up to that point, I had not thought that Landry and Scott were close, but the hug they shared said different. They spoke softly together, and I moved away, giving them their privacy as I faced Jocelyn.

  “So.” She nodded, her eyes glistening with tears. “Thanksgiving.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, reaching for her.

  She hugged me tight, leaning heavily.

  “Thank you for being here for Landry. Now that he and his father are done and with your mom basically bailing on him, you and Chris and Scott are all he has.”

  “My mom didn’t bail on Landry, she left her life here. She’ll be back.”

  They were all making excuses for her. “Its fine, like I said, he has you guys. It’s more than enough.”

  “He doesn’t give a damn about us,” she told me.

  “That’s not—”

  “Yes it is.” She was adamant. “And you know it is. He cares about you, he loves you, I can see the difference, I’m not stupid. But if we work on him, if Chris and Scott and I show him that we’re constant, I think we can eventually change his mind. Don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  Her smile was huge.

  After Scott left and Landry went into the bathroom to shower and change, Hugh went to get him and Jocelyn some coffee.

  “So what’s with that?” I asked her, tipping my head after her husband.

  “You know, I’m not sure,” she told me. “I called him last night when I got home just to warn him that he might have reporters skulking around his brother’s place where he’s been staying, and he just showed up back at our condo and we talked all night.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled at me. “I thought that we were done, you know? I mean, we’ve never been…. I’ve always loved him, but I’ve never been in love with him like you are with Landry and he obviously is with you. We’ve always been buddies, but not—”

  “Not honest.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, nodding.

  “But now?”

  “I don’t know. We talked two years’ worth in one night and then—” She paused and shrugged, blushing. “You know.”

  “Oh.” I arched an eyebrow for her. “You guys worked it out, huh?”

  “Oh God,” she moaned, face in her hands. “I mean, my mother’s life is falling apart and everything that happened and Landry and the kidnapping and this whole thing where I know we’re gonna be dragged through the mud, but… I mean….” She looked up at me. “He wants to trudge through it with me. How the hell do I deserve that?”

  “Maybe you were looking for something Hugh wasn’t providing, with Marc?”

  “But there’s no excuse for cheating.”

  “No, but there’s reasons for cheating. You’re just supposed to tell the person you’re with before you act on them.”

  She sighed deeply.

  “Unless, you know, you’re a sex addict or something and need to seek professional help.”

  She swatted my arm. “I am not a sex addict!”

  “Well then, yeah, you fucked up, but maybe with some counseling, some forgiveness, some great make-up sex, you guys can get through this. If that’s what you want.”

  “Ohmygod, I want,” she said, suddenly breathless. “I was so dispassionate at brunch that day, but the reality, once Hugh left, of him being gone—Jesus, Trevan, I didn’t know it was going to feel like that. I’m such an idiot.”

  “Only if you don’t recognize the truth and only if you do nothing about it.”

  She nodded furiously, and Hugh reappeared with coffee for the three of us.

  “Awww, shit man, you’re a fuckin’ saint.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at me before he put an arm around Jocelyn’s shoulders and drew her close to his side. “So, Thanksgiving, Jo says?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, watching her eyes fill. “Thanksgiving.”

  WHEN it was just me and Landry again, later that afternoon, waiting for the doctor to release him, he put his hands on my face and looked into my eyes.

  “What?”

  “You know, I don’t need my family to love me; I have you and your family for that.”

  “Yeah, but your mother—”

  “You are the only one who loves me unconditionally; you’re it, and you can never stop.”

  “Of course not,” I assured him, my voice bottoming out.

  His smile made my stomach hurt.

  I didn’t understand Cece Carter running away, taking a vacation like her family had not come apart at the seams, but Landry reminded me that as nice as she was, as warm, as kind, she was also the woman who had let him walk out of her life for eight years. She was not as emotionally invested in her children as my mother was in me or my sister.

  “But that doesn’t make her a bad person,” he told me. “It just makes her different. You can’t judge her based on your mother.”
>
  “This isn’t what you said when this all began,” I reminded him. “You said she didn’t care about you, didn’t love you, and that’s why you didn’t want to even come.”

  “And I was wrong,” he confessed. “I forgot what she was like, and I blamed her and my father for the separation, but the truth was it was just as much my fault as it was theirs. You can’t get blood from a stone, you know? All my life, I was searching for more. I needed more, and I wasn’t even sure what that was before I met you. But now I know that what I needed was to feel love, to hear it, taste it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your family—Jesus, Trevan, I get mauled every time there’s a get-together at your mom’s place. Your uncles make me sit by them, your aunts drag me into the kitchen and make me taste food, your cousins make me play baseball in the street or show me their new videogames or try and shock me with what they posted on their blogs. Your mother makes me play Escoba with them, and I’m still lost most of the time.”

  I chuckled, my hands closing around his wrists, and stared into the gorgeous blue-green eyes that I loved.

  “At your grandparents’ place, your aunts ask me to help in the kitchen, your grandmother sits and shows me her photo albums, and everyone includes me, and they’re loud about it, and they grab me and hug me… it’s amazing.”

  I nodded. My family, on both sides, they all loved Landry Carter.

  “I’m accepted and loved and no one gives a shit that I’m gay. The only thing they see when they look at me is Trevan’s partner. I’m the same as a wife or a husband. I’m just a part of the family to be loved and pushed around and told to get ice because no one else remembered to get it and we were the last ones there.”

  I nodded, too choked up to speak. He loved me, he loved my family… what the hell else could I ask for?

  “God!” he yelled suddenly, letting me go, hopping off the bed, starting to pace again. “Seriously! I want to go home!”

  I went to the nurses’ station to find out if anyone knew when the doctor would be in. Landry was very close to just leaving. They promised they would page Dr. Han again.

  He was fuming when I returned. “I have a life to get back to.”

  And he did. He was overdue to be leaving. He had wanted to be out of Vegas that morning, Sunday morning. In his original timeline, he was supposed to be on a plane instead of sitting in a hospital room. What was worse was that he was being kept from going, and Landry caged was never a good thing. Since Detective Baylor had given us the okay to leave town, he wanted to bail.

  When the doctor finally came in twenty minutes later, I thanked him profusely.

  There were a few quick questions for Landry, and then, finally, he was discharged. He was walking out the door as I thanked the doctor, grabbed his garment bag—he had grabbed his duffel—and ran to catch up with him at the elevator.

  Downstairs, I put him in a cab and we were on our way to McCarran Airport.

  “You okay?” he asked me, worried, like I was the guy who had been kidnapped and not him. “You don’t seem like yourself.”

  But I couldn’t talk, so I grabbed him instead and held him close, kissing his cheek as I shivered beside him. “I just wanna go home.”

  “We’re going,” he assured me. “Everything’s okay. But we might be there a long time depending on what flight we can get on.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You just want to hang out at the airport?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I just wanna be right there, ready to go.”

  “Okay, baby. I like that plan too.”

  I would be better once we were on the plane and gone. If I never got back to Vegas it would be too soon.

  WE ENDED up spending the entire day at the airport, walking around, eating, but mostly just talking which was nice. Landry and I never ran out of things to say to each other, and I told him about Gabriel and his family and he told me about Koa wood that he was thinking about having shipped from Hawaii. We bought magazines and made out in a bathroom stall, and shared ice-cream. It was a great day of hanging out. Getting on the plane was sort of anticlimactic.

  LANDRY was very concerned with the smell emanating from the refrigerator when we got home early Monday morning, just after nine.

  I went to make sure the radiator was on because you could hang meat in our apartment.

  “Gross,” he mumbled from the kitchen. “I think the oranges are moldy.”

  He was fine. He had been on the phone with both the women who worked for him, waking them up, I was sure, but they were both so happy to hear his voice that it didn’t matter. He was asking about sales and how some new piece was selling and how the fall promotion was going. The man had been kidnapped, his life had been turned upside down and inside out, and he was perfectly fine. He was actually very interested in going out for breakfast with me as well as others, having called Javier and Dave, Jeff and Tim, and Russell and whoever the flavor of the month was.

  “They might not be able to, babe,” I told him. “It’s Monday morning, after all. Everyone has to work.”

  This was not a consideration, and I was certain once I explained to everyone, they would change their plans to be there for him.

  “I’m dying to see the restaurant Gabriel’s setting you up in,” he said happily, dumping what was dirty into the hamper and hanging up what was clean. “Is April excited? I bet she’s excited. I bet she can’t wait to quit working at the bank and start training her staff and thinking up menu items. Oh honey, I’m so psyched for you. Your restaurant dream is finally coming true! We have to celebrate and have a huge party as soon as your mother gets back from visiting your aunt.” He sucked in his breath. “Oh my God, did you call your mother and tell her the good news? Does she know that her—”

  “Jesus, Landry, could you shut the fuck up?”

  “What?”

  His brain and his mouth were going a hundred miles an hour.

  “Trev?”

  I took his face in my hands, staring at him, studying him.

  He was looking at me like I was nuts. “Baby, are you okay?”

  “I am, but how can you be?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Landry.” I choked on a breath.

  He started laughing, and I shoved him down onto the couch. “You’re not—”

  “Love,” he said with a giggle, sitting up, “I understand that to you this is weird. I mean, I was kidnapped and held for ransom, and I had a SWAT guy on top of me when I heard them fire the shots into Brendan, and I should be freaking out, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I should be a puddle on the floor.”

  I nodded.

  “Because I’m fragile, I break easy, and I break a lot, right?”

  What was I supposed to say? “I’m just worried that—”

  “I’m gonna fly apart.”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded and bit his bottom lip before he made a face at me like he’d bitten a lemon. “Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.”

  I flopped down into the overstuffed chair beside the coffee table, just staring at him.

  “Listen, I know your life has been a little surreal over the past week, but really, my life used to be like that all the time. Everything changed constantly. I mean, my father traveled for work every week, my mother had so many social engagements I never saw her, and us kids, we were so heavily scheduled that we never even saw each other. I saw our housekeeper, our nanny, our chauffeur, but between school and sports and activities and friends… I didn’t have the kind of life you had. Once I left, once I left that life and came here for college, between working all the jobs I needed and friends and then parties and guys and everything else I was into—it was the same. It was a big blur. So what you have to understand is that only within the past two years, only since I’ve been with you, has there ever been a routine in my life. You are the only constant I’ve ever had. Do you understand that?”

  I didn’t, not rea
lly.

  “So we’re fine? I have my routine back, and I’ll go to work tomorrow. I’ll come home after that and make you dinner. When you get home, you’ll tell me about your day, I’ll tell you about mine, and it’s all good. I’m good. All that crazy that we just went through, all that shit, I can shake that off easy as long as this, this right here, doesn’t change. This, us, can never, ever, change. Do you understand?”

  I stared at him.

  “Do you?” he asked again.

  “Yes.”

  He smiled at me. “Good.”

  I watched him get up and walk to the bedroom. After a minute, he poked his head out.

  “I was thinking that when I see Dr. Chang tomorrow, when I go have her check me out like Dr. Han said I’m supposed to, maybe I’ll have her recommend a therapist for us to see and maybe make an appointment. I prefer going to somebody’s office instead of going to a clinic, and I know that’s sort of elitist of me, but that’s how I feel, okay? I mean, you just got a promotion; I actually have health insurance… let’s get somebody good to tell our problems to, okay? Or, you know, my problems.”

  I just stared at him.

  He giggled.

  “Lan––”

  “Oh c’mon, I’m not stupid.” He grinned at me, his voice low and husky. “There really isn’t anything wrong with you, but I am a little too fucked-up possessive sometimes. I can own that now.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “When I was lying on the cot in that hunting cabin, I got really scared that I wasn’t going to see you again.”

  I got up and was across the room fast, grabbing him tight, crushing him against me, holding him so I’d know he was really there with me.

  “And I thought,” he said softly, “that if I did get to see you again, I would commit myself to being the guy you really deserve.”

  “Landry, you’re better than I deserve.”

  “You’ve got that backward,” he assured me, snuggling against me, taking a deep breath. “But as long as you think so, I’m happy. The thing is, I know I can be a handful, but you just press on like it’s normal, and you never freak out like everybody else in my whole life has. It makes you different, and so because I want you to stay, I want to change some so you will.”