Gambling on Love

by Jane Davitt

  Too late, he remembered Gary saying the car held everything he owned. Snazzy suits, that crisp, educated voice, so different from the drawl Abe was used to—and a clunker of a car. They didn’t add up unless Gary had somehow lost the life that’d paid for his suits, and hit rock-bottom. In which case, Abe would cut him some slack out of pity. Some.

  The silence from Gary was chillier than the snowballs he’d pelted Abe with. Abe sighed. Apology time, he guessed, but he’d do it face-to-face in the pickup. Driven by the cold and the need to swallow his medicine quickly to get it over with, he walked toward his truck. His first step brought his foot down on a lump of ice, twisting his ankle and sending him lurching forward. He grabbed at the side of the Taurus and halted his fall for a moment, until his gloved hand skidded in the snow covering the metal. He went down hard, stumbling sideways when his ankle gave way, and struck his head on the edge of the bumper.

  The snow he landed in was soft and feathery, clouding up around him, frigid and beautiful. He couldn’t move, but there didn’t seem any reason to. He’d been wrong about the snow. It wasn’t cold at all. Felt warm. Cozy. It cushioned his cheek and he sighed, surrendering to the darkness surrounding him. His head throbbed, but the wetness tricking down his face was warm too. No need to worry, then.

  He didn’t remember closing his eyes, and he didn’t pass out, but events got a little vague for a while. He was jostled and tugged, and he heard Gary’s frantic questions, but when he tried to answer, his mouth didn’t work the way it should. The ground beneath him began to move, and he forced his eyes to open, blinking, bemused. Blood had trickled across his left eye, gluing the lashes together, but the blood had frozen, making it easier to break the seal. The viewpoint wasn’t one he was used to, but even with his head pounding relentlessly, he could connect the dots. He was being dragged along the ground, lying on a large tarp. His tarp, a once-bright yellow square dulled by age and use to a mellower shade. He recognized it the same way he’d know his own cat, Sailor, in a crowd of black cats.

  He raised his head a few inches and squinted up. Gary’s back was to him, his breath panting out, audible and visible, while he hauled Abe’s deadweight the few yards to the pickup’s passenger door. He was bent over like an old man, the corners of the tarp clenched in his gloved hands.

  “Stop,” Abe said thickly, the command weak and inaudible. He licked his lips, regretting it when the cold sucked the moisture away and replaced it with ice. “Hey!”

  Gary didn’t reply, clearly focused on hauling him along the bumpy ground. How he planned to get him into the truck was anyone’s guess, but Abe wasn’t interested in finding out. He had enough bruises as it was.

  With a grunt, he rolled sideways off the tarp into the snow.

  Relieved of its burden, the tarp became nearly weightless in an instant, and in a demonstration of something scientific—forward momentum? Drag? Abe couldn’t recall—Gary performed a neat face-plant, the tarp flapping in the wind behind him.

  Smiling hurt, but Abe did it anyway.

  Jesus, when he got home—if he ever got home, because given the way things were going, his truck would probably get hit by a meteor—he’d pour a generous shot of Jack Daniel’s and crawl into bed with it. He didn’t drink much or often when he didn’t have company, but he’d earned it.

  Of course, tonight he would have company, but he didn’t plan on socializing with Gary beyond giving him a hot drink and pointing him at the spare room. This might be an unexpected reunion, but it wasn’t a reconciliation.

  “I can stand.” He struggled to his feet, using the side of his truck as a crutch. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “You asshole.” Gary rose faster than Abe, his front crusted with snow. He’d opened the passenger door of the pickup, and the light from its interior was enough to let Abe see the glower on his face. “Next time, warn me when you want to get off.”

  “Wasn’t planning on there being a next time.” Abe put his hand up to his head, abruptly dizzy. “Okay, I might sit for a bit.”

  “No!” Gary darted forward and halted his descent, grabbing him around the waist and hauling him upright. “Get in the truck first. If you pass out again, I’m leaving you here and stealing your truck.”

  As a motivational threat, it didn’t work for Abe because he knew Gary wouldn’t follow through on it, but the panic in Gary’s voice kept him on his feet. He made it into the pickup under his own steam, batting away Gary’s hands.

  “I didn’t pass out, but unless you’re twins and didn’t tell me, you’d better drive.”

  He settled down in the passenger seat. It was firmer than the driver’s seat, because it wasn’t often occupied, and he missed the familiar hollows that conformed to the shape of his ass. The slam of the door next to him made him whimper, but he bit it back and braced for the second slam of the driver’s door, followed by the chug-chug-roar when the engine coughed to life.

  Abe closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see two wavering images of Gary sitting where he should be. He didn’t want to watch the snowflakes whirling down. He wanted to stare at the undemanding darkness behind his eyes and let his brain stop slamming around inside his skull.

  The pickup shook, a familiar quiver he usually welcomed. He breathed through his mouth and darted a glance at Gary through lowered lids. Gary’s profile didn’t tell him much. He closed his eyes again and rode out the jolts as Gary got the pickup moving and made the turn.

  “Drive a mile, mile and a half. You can’t miss the cabin. I left the lights on.”

  Sitting still, in the relative—everything was relative—warmth of the cab helped Abe to control the urge to throw up. Eyes still closed, he charted their progress. He knew this road, and even blanketed with snow, he knew each rut, each bump, each curve.

  With a quarter mile to go, he opened his eyes. He didn’t want Gary to overshoot the turnoff and have to back up. He took in his surroundings, hazily noting a tree stump coming up on the left, its exposed roots jutting out into the road, their shape softened by snow but still recognizable.

  He rolled his head gingerly to the side. “You making out okay?”

  “There’s no road.” Gary didn’t glance at him, his attention given to what lay beyond the whipping blades of the wipers. “I’m aiming for whatever space I can see that doesn’t have trees in it.”

  “You’re on the road,” Abe assured him. He was dizzy, but the brief rest had helped steady him. His momma had always said he had a head made of rock. “Keep going. If you’re driving slowly because of me, I can take it a little faster than this. I’m feeling better now there’s only one of you to look at.” One of Gary was enough.

  “I don’t know the road—if you insist on calling it that.” Gary hunched over the wheel, his spine a curve. It didn’t look comfortable. “I’m going as fast as is reasonable under these conditions. Stop backseat driving.”

  “It’s my fucking truck,” Abe pointed out.

  “And I’m fucking driving it.” Gary took one hand off the wheel and wiped at the windshield. “It’s freezing on the inside!”

  “I’ll stop breathing,” Abe promised him. “Or alternatively . . .” He reached over, gritting his teeth when his head protested the sudden movement, and turned the heater to a setting that would direct the warm air up over the window. It didn’t clear immediately, but visibility improved steadily.

  “Thanks,” Gary said after a few minutes had passed, his voice betraying his reluctance. “I should’ve realized what was wrong. I’m not usually this scattered. It’s been a rough few weeks.”

  “Don’t feel you need to share the misery with me.” Something nagged at him, something missing. He held up his hand, silencing Gary’s indignant response.

  Missing. That was it. Of all the sounds assaulting his ears, the grinding scrape of the plow through the thickly piled snow wasn’t one of them.

  “Shit, you’re not running the plow. No wonder we’re crawling.”

  Okay, for him to take this long
to realize that, he didn’t have concussion, he had brain damage.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Gary said defensively. “The plow was up when I got in, and I assumed, I mean—”

  “Lower it. It’ll make life so much easier.” Abe gestured at the joystick that controlled the plow. It was wedged down near the gearshift. “Use that.”

  “What? Oh, that thing. What do I have to do?” Gary glanced down, taking his gaze off the road for far too long while he fumbled for the controls, a frown puckering his forehead.

  After that, events seemed to overlap and bleed into one another, with Abe’s warning yelp coming at the same time as Gary’s overcorrecting yank at the wheel. Gary spit out a litany of “shit, shit, oh, fuck” that failed on eloquence but seemed to sum things up as the pickup fishtailed, then slid off the road straight into a tree. After the impact, the words became a distant buzz in Abe’s ears, because the crash left a white-hot pinball ricocheting around inside his skull, and his anguished moan of pain drowned Gary out.

  This wasn’t happening. If he held on to that thought, he could erase the last couple of hours by sheer force of will. Make it so he left town, say, twenty minutes earlier . . . no, an hour, best to be on the safe side. He’d have been home well before Gary reached the junction and—no, that wouldn’t save him. Gary would’ve probably missed the turn, kept going, and plowed his crappy car straight into the cabin, because there was nowhere else on this road. Fate, karma, whatever, but there was no way he and Gary would’ve missed each other.

  “Except then I could’ve told you to go ’way,” he mumbled and became aware of the fact Gary’s face was right by his and he’d said that aloud.

  “Are you okay? You’re rambling.” To his credit, Gary sounded worried, but that could be because Gary had figured out his survival depended on Abe’s continued good health. Too much to expect Gary cared what happened to him.

  “You killed my truck.”

  “It was only a small tree.” Gary settled back in his seat. “The plow might be a bit, ah, dented, but the truck should be okay. They’re built to take it.”

  “They don’t build them to survive you.”

  “Okay, because your face has blood on it and you’ve got a black eye coming, I’m letting that go.” Gary put the pickup into reverse, alternating between too timid an approach and fierce stabs on the gas that made the engine roar. The truck rocked, snow spurting up around it, but it didn’t untangle itself from the limbs of the tree.

  “We’re not moving much.” Gary’s tone lacked its earlier imperiousness. “I think something’s stuck underneath.”

  Abe closed his eyes to recreate what’d happened, separating out the kaleidoscope of images into single frames. The tree was small enough to have underbrush around it, competing for light. “I think there’s a bush or a branch wedged under us. We drove over it and flattened it out, but when we try to reverse, it springs up and jams. I’ll take a look.”

  “No way.” Gary turned off the engine. “You’re hurt and I did this. If you’ve got a flashlight or something, I’ll go.”

  Abe felt something approaching approval of Gary for the first time in eleven years. He took his heavy-duty flashlight out of the glove compartment and passed it over.

  Gary weighed it in his hand, took a deep breath as if he were about to dive into deep water, and opened his door, fighting the wind, which seemed to prefer it stay closed. The gust of chilled air that swept into the cab made Abe wince, but Gary scrambled out and the wind slammed the door for him.

  Alone, Abe took the opportunity to flip down the visor and look in the small mirror. Vanity wasn’t one of his sins, so his appearance didn’t trouble him. The cold had scoured his face scarlet and his lips were chapped, but he was more concerned with the source of the blood glued to one side of his face in a frozen snail’s trail. His hat had cushioned the impact a little, but not enough to stop his scalp from splitting. Head wounds always bled, but the cold had stemmed the flow. He tried to peel his hat back, but it was soaked with blood set as hard as oatmeal on a bowl. Trying to tear his hat free would start the bleeding again, so he let it be.

  The door opened and he flipped the visor back up, not wanting to be caught staring at his reflection.

  “S-saw?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a saw?” Gary asked, blinking fast to clear the snow that fluttered into his eyes. “There’s this thing jammed right underneath and I can’t get it out. I tried.” He held up a hand, exhibiting a torn glove. “If you’ve got a saw—”

  “Why would I have a saw?” Abe demanded. “I went into town to pick up supplies, have a beer with some friends, check in on my uncle so he’d have someone to talk to about his sciatica—why would I pack a saw? A shovel, yeah, I’ve got that, but why would—”

  “I get it, okay? No saw. Right.” Gary shuddered and sneezed, a sloppy explosion of sound and snot. “Jesus. Sorry.” He peeled off his glove and dug around in his jacket pocket. Abe watched, fascinated, while Gary blew his nose tidily, then lost the tissue as the wind tore it out of his fingers. Gary’s openmouthed surprise would’ve been funny any other time, but Abe was too cold to grin.

  “Get in.”

  “Huh? No, I need to try—”

  Abe leaned across the driver’s seat and grabbed a fistful of Gary’s jacket. He hauled hard enough to get his message across and Gary did the rest, clambering back into the pickup and closing the door. It wasn’t warm inside the cab, but at least they were out of the wind.

  “You couldn’t break it?” Abe asked. “Kick it free?”

  Gary shook his head and fitted his hand back into his torn glove, his movements slow and precise. He looked exhausted, as if his exertions had reduced his strength to something approaching zero.

  Abe didn’t sugarcoat it. “Okay, so we walk.”

  “I think we should stay here.”

  “I think you’ve got shit for brains, but I’m still not gonna let you freeze to death in my truck when we’re almost to the foot of my driveway, Fox.”

  Gary inhaled sharply, his lips compressed. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “I won’t if you get your ass in gear.” Abe forced himself to sound conciliatory but firm when what he wanted to do was yell. “Look, I was stupid enough to let you have your own way once tonight. If I’d made you leave your damn luggage, my truck wouldn’t be stuck, and we’d both be on our second cookie by now after a bowl of the best chicken soup in ten miles.”

  He stopped there. The more he said, the more he wanted to say, and what was boiling up wasn’t anything Gary would want to hear. The soup would be out of a can, but that didn’t make what he’d said a lie.

  “Cookies?” Gary asked, skipping past the main course to dessert. “You’ve got cookies?”

  Damn. Now he’d have to share them. “Yeah, I got some from a neighbor who makes extra for me.”

  “Chocolate chip?”

  “Ginger molasses. The chewy kind with the sugar on them, all gritty and sweet.” If he was baiting a hook, he’d use his juiciest worm.

  Gary tugged his hat down over his ears. “They’d better be worth the frostbite.” He turned to look at Abe. “Speaking of which, how’s my face?”

  Abe studied what he could see of it. He was conscious of the desire to see Gary in good light, stripped out of the bulky outerwear, his hair dry, his face free of tension. “Looks fine. Keep as much of it covered as possible.”

  Gary raised his hand tentatively to touch his cheek. “No more white patches? It feels so numb.” He worked his jaw. “Like I’ve spent the day in a dentist’s chair.”

  Abe took off his glove and turned his hand palm up. He hooked two fingertips under Gary’s chin, and tilted Gary’s face into the muted illumination of the two interior lights. “I think they’ve faded. It’s hard to tell in this light.”

  He was close to Gary, their bodies encased in bulky clothing, their exhaled breath mingling. How long had it been since his mouth was in kissing di
stance of someone’s, close enough to know what they smelled like? Too long. Abe didn’t have a clue what cologne Gary wore, but it reminded him of lemon pie, tangy and tart, with something else going on, a muskier scent he couldn’t label, but knew from sense memory he liked.

  He needed to get laid. Soon. Jesus, it’d been three months since the last time, and jerking off daily wasn’t doing anything but rub it in that he was alone. There was a joke in there, but Abe wasn’t seeing it. Not when his body was hungry for someone else’s hands on it.

  Abe shook free of his self-pity with a promise to himself to get out of the woods before his dick grew moss. He could drive over to Missoula or treat himself to a weekend in Billings and hang out at the Loft Club. Last time, he’d met a guy with a grin that said he was all that and more. By the time Abe headed for home, he agreed. Craig had been a generous helping of fun, willing to go along with everything Abe came up with and to teach Abe a few new tricks in return. They’d parted without exchanging more than a final kiss, Craig’s hands tight on Abe’s ass, but Abe hadn’t looked for more.

  Okay, time to stop daydreaming about hot mouths and tight asses and concentrate on avoiding hypothermia. If he was found frozen to death a quarter mile from his cabin, he’d hear the snickers from beyond the grave. He’d be remembered as the guy too stupid to come in from the cold, no better than a tourist.

  The storm entered another lull, and Abe spotted his cabin’s familiar lights in the distance. He drew his hand back from Gary’s face and pointed. “There. See? That’s where we’re headed.” The snow swept down again, but seeing the warm light of home had given him a much-needed dose of energy. He put some steel into his voice. “Time to get moving.”

  “You’re not lying about the cookies?”

  “I’d never lie about cookies.”

  Gary reached for the door handle. He hesitated. “On the count of three?”