by Jane Davitt
It was ten thousand dollars, sure, but it was Peter’s money, no matter what the will said, and as far as Gary was concerned, Peter could order him to set it on fire if he liked.
He didn’t expect Abe to understand it or approve, and Abe didn’t disappoint him.
Abe straightened with a jerk. “And you’re doing this why? Wasting time going there—”
Gary smiled brightly. “Hey, it’s Vegas. Who doesn’t want to go to Sin City?”
“I don’t. It’s cheap, tacky, it makes people do crazy things—”
“Crazy can be good sometimes. You should try it.”
“I don’t want to.” Abe sighed, impatient, exasperated. “You’re nuts, you know that? Dancing to his tune for years and now this. Nuts. Forget the ten grand, Fox, and stay. Do something real.”
“Stay with you?”
“Yeah, why not?” Abe tossed the shovel aside and came closer. Big, strong, dependable Abe, laying his boring, mundane life at Gary’s feet along with his heart, just like he had when they were teenagers. Gary heard the violins kicking in. “We could try it, at least. We could get jobs in town and find a place—”
He stopped before Gary had done more than give him a pitying smile.
“It wouldn’t work.” Gary kept his voice soft, kind even. “Jobs? What jobs, Abe? There’s nothing here for me, and yeah, I’m counting you. You say we could make a go of it, but I’m not the kid you grew up with. He’s gone. I’m someone new. Peter saw to that. You don’t know me, and if you did, you wouldn’t like me much.”
“Peter.” It was a curse, not a name, said in that tone. Abe didn’t follow it by spitting, but he might as well have done.
Gary had painted that detestable image of Peter in Abe’s mind, and it wasn’t wrong, but it also didn’t help Abe understand why Gary still grieved the loss. Or why Gary had stayed with Peter in the first place. “Help me get back on the road, and when I’ve gone, go back to forgetting me again.”
“I’ve never forgotten you.” Abe raised his hand, cupping air, not Gary’s face, his expression so fucking patient it hurt to see it. He put his hand on Gary’s shoulder, linking them. “Don’t plan on trying. You’re part of my life, Fox. You’re my Peter, and I guess you fucked me up as good as he did you, but I still . . . I still love you.”
“You had a hard time saying that, didn’t you?” He wanted to kiss Abe, but that was separate from everything else going on. He couldn’t switch off the way his body reacted to Abe, but they had nothing else in common anymore, and he knew a relationship with sex as its foundation and nothing built on top of that was ultimately doomed.
With Peter, it’d been sex and money. Much more stable.
“I meant it. Don’t know you? I’ve known you all your goddamned life.”
Gary shook his head, snowflakes sliding wetly down the back of his neck. “We made friends with each other when we were nine. I left when I was eighteen. Sorry, but that’s more like a third of my life.”
“Don’t push me, Gary.” Abe didn’t look patient now. Furious, yes. Excitement curled tight in Gary’s gut. “And save the ‘I’ve changed so much’ crap. I see plenty I recognize. You might be able to walk into somewhere upscale and fool them you belong there, but deep down—”
“I’m trash?” Gary tried to keep the affront from showing but failed. “Jesus, Abe, way to kick me back into the gutter where I belong.”
“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say you’re better than that.”
“Better than what?” Gary wanted to grab Abe by the throat and drag him out of his rut. “You think this life is better than the one I’ve been living? It’s not. It’s different. I’m different. I know things now. I can talk about art, food, even politics without making an idiot of myself. I learned about investments, the market . . . Peter taught me a lot.”
“Don’t say his name like he was God. Don’t say his name at all, because I’m fucking sick of hearing it. Peter, Peter, Peter. Jesus, since when were you anyone’s puppet?”
“He got more of me than you did and you’re jealous. I get that. It doesn’t mean—”
Abe curled his lip as if he’d gotten a whiff of dead skunk. “I didn’t think it was possible, but congratulations. You’re more of a jerk now than when you left. Way to go.”
“I’m the jerk? Peter was part of my life—no, all of my life for years, and I miss him.” Gary snarled into Abe’s face, his words deadened by the silence of the snow-blanketed woods. “I won’t apologize for that. It’s only been a month since I lost him. Of course he’s on my mind. How dare you? And as for being a jerk back then, I asked you to come with me. I begged you to.” Even after what Abe said to the coach, Gary had begged. He’d replayed the conversation in his mind so many times, the memory was worn thin with handling and editing, but he recalled that part perfectly.
“And I didn’t want to! Why would I run away? My parents—it would’ve killed them not knowing where I was. Kind of like it killed me for years, not knowing where you were.” Abe sighed, his face softening. “We got caught, yes, and it was embarrassing, but the worst part was you leaving. You should’ve stayed, Fox. You should have stayed.”
Gary bit his lip, old guilt rising. He’d made excuses, cast Abe as the coward for pretending it was a one-off, for refusing to get on the bus with him, but he’d always known it wasn’t that easy to assign blame. Moderating his voice, he asked, “What happened, anyway?”
“Now you ask,” Abe muttered. “Nothing much. Sorry, were you expecting drama? I told my parents, and guess what, they already knew. We weren’t as good at keeping things under wraps as we thought. No one at school found out, not then, anyway—”
“Wait, that can’t be right. That snoopy bitch of a secretary was listening. When we came out of the office, she smirked at me. She knew.”
“I doubt it, but if she’d said anything, she’d have lost her job.” Abe sounded tired now. “She was always smirking. You saw what you were scared of seeing, Gary. No one knew. The coach and the principal kept it to themselves.” He frowned. “You were scared of her gossiping?”
“She knew my mom.” Gary couldn’t look away from Abe’s face and the concern in his gray eyes. “That’s the reason I came clean before I went. I was damned if anyone but me was telling Mom. People found out later though? About us?”
“Oh sure. Everyone was asking where you were, what’d happened. I said I didn’t know where you’d gone—and you never fucking called me or answered my emails, so that was true—and that nothing had happened, which wasn’t. Graduation came around and a girl—Kristy, remember her?—asked me to go with her to the grad night party. I told her no and I told her why.”
“Jesus.” Gary drew in a shaky breath. Kristy . . . yeah, he remembered her. Bouncy tits and brown, curly hair. “I can see that going down well.”
Abe shrugged. “A few people hassled me, and I had to punch one guy for calling me a faggot every time I walked by, but other than that, it wasn’t so bad.” He laughed. “One girl asked if you’d left because I’d come on to you, but everyone else connected the dots, so I guess I outed both of us.”
“You’re saying I left for nothing?” That was difficult to accept. He’d felt so fucking exposed, naked and helpless. Abandoned by Abe.
Running—leaving—had been a gesture of defiance, the start of an adventure in the big world. He’d justified it to himself, reworking the story so he was the hero. He’d even tried to convince himself he pitied Abe for not having the guts to leave, for being so frightened of the truth that he’d lied to protect himself from it.
The real truth—and he hated himself for it, deep down—was that he’d abandoned Abe too, leaving him to face the fallout alone.
Picking at the snow with the edge of his shovel, Abe cocked his head as if Gary’s question hadn’t been rhetorical. “No. Not for nothing. If it’d been the two of us, it would’ve been different. Bigger target.”
“They didn’t mind you being gay as long as you were
alone and miserable, you mean? Sounds about right for this town.”
“You don’t get to judge them.”
“The hell I don’t!”
“Sometimes, I wonder . . .” Abe’s expression turned inward. “That afternoon . . . such a fucking dumb thing to do. I’m not blaming you—I could’ve said no even if it meant putting up with you sulking for a week—but did you want to get caught?”
“What?” Gary was floundering in the deep snow again as far as the conversation went, everything an effort. He tried to remember what had been behind his fantasy back then and couldn’t. So long ago . . . “No! I wanted to blow you. Shit, Abe, don’t make it so complicated!”
“You’re a complicated man, Fox. Always were.”
“So you think I planned it? Did I also plan on you acting like it was a one-time accident? Plan on watching you turn your head away and act like you didn’t know me?”
“That didn’t happen.” Abe tipped his head back and studied the sky for a moment. “Shit, you can’t think I felt that way. I probably said some stupid shit in the moment, yeah, but I was eighteen years old, Fox. I was buck naked with a hard-on and your mouth on my dick when my coach walked in. How the fuck did you expect me to react?”
“I . . .” Gary suddenly pictured the scene from Abe’s point of view. Naked, defenseless. Aware that whatever else he’d done—even leaving the homophobia aside and focusing on the sex-in-the-locker-room part—he’d let down Coach. And Gary, who’d encouraged him into the situation, had been powerless to protect him. A little nervous babbling seemed understandable in that circumstance. “I guess that makes sense.”
“And if I said it was one time, I’m pretty sure I meant one time in the locker room.”
“Oh.” Fuck.
“Did you think— You know I didn’t stay here because I didn’t want to be with you anymore. You know that, right?”
Had he known that? He wasn’t sure anymore. “My whole life changed that day and you’re saying it didn’t need to? That’s a lot to take in.”
“No, I think you wanted to leave anyway, or you wouldn’t have done it. You always do what’s best for you, always. You always arrange things to suit yourself, and it’s all or nothing with you every time. Shit, you didn’t need to stay away for eleven fucking years, you know?”
Gary flinched away from the hurt in Abe’s words. “I’m—”
“If you tell me you’re sorry, I’ll punch you again.” It wasn’t said as a joke. “You can’t make up for eleven years of nothing. You owed me a call or a response to my emails, at least.”
“I didn’t have a computer. It was three years before I found out you could use one at the library for free, and by then . . . I don’t know. I picked up the phone plenty of times, but I never dialed. What could I say?”
Abe rolled his eyes, his disgust plain. Gary couldn’t blame him. “Damned if I know. Are we done here? Because my truck’s still fucking stuck and I don’t want to walk home again.”
“We’re done.” He watched Abe turn away, feeling the same dreary flatness he remembered experiencing as a kid when Christmas was over. It was all out there now, no more secrets, no more revelations. Every gift had been unwrapped, and look at that, he hadn’t gotten what he wanted, like every year.
Of course it would’ve helped if he’d known what he wanted. Abe’s impulsive—probably instantly regretted—offer to pick up where they’d left off wasn’t tempting. Well, Abe was, always had been, but Abe was a package deal, and Gary didn’t want his life narrowed to a few square miles and a few thousand people.
After his trip money ran out in Vegas—which would be within a few days now that he had to budget for car repairs—he didn’t have a clue where he’d go. Once, that would’ve scared him shitless. Now he was being forced to pick up a burden he’d set down five years ago. Better clothes, some trinkets he could sell if he had to, but with no job prospects and his one reference six feet under. Peter hadn’t set him up any better than his dad had, in the long run.
He made a sound, a pathetic, throat-caught whimper, and Abe looked back. Gary tried to smile, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Horrified, he realized his throat had closed up, tears imminent. No. No fucking way was he crying. He never cried. Not when he was alone, not when he was asleep, never.
“You still can’t do it, can you?” Abe shook his head. “Fox, I’m here. I’m right here. While you’ve still got me, use me. You want a shoulder to cry on, a warm body to fuck, I’m here. Stop trying to go it solo.” He pulled his gloves off and shoved them into his coat pockets.
“You hate me for what I did. For leaving you.” Gary swallowed around whatever choked him. “Why would you want to help me?”
“I don’t hate you.” Abe cupped Gary’s face in his bare, warm hands, tilting it up. “There wasn’t a day in the eleven years you’ve been gone I didn’t miss you, but there wasn’t a minute when I hated you. Love you. Always fucking did, always will. You don’t know that?”
“I know it.” Gary rested his forehead against Abe’s shoulder, unsurprised when Abe released him at once, his hands slipping down to Gary’s arms. “If I could love someone, and I don’t know if I can, it’d be you.”
“Who else would it be?” That was as close to arrogance as Abe had ever gotten, but Gary supposed he’d earned the right.
Abe’s lips, cool as frost in the first moment of contact, warming quickly, found Gary’s face, kissing his cheek, his temple softly, coaxing Gary to turn to meet Abe’s mouth with his. They stood, locked together, kissing without passion for once, saying hello wordlessly, doing it properly this time.
“Missed you,” Abe murmured between kisses. “Missed you so fucking much.”
“Yeah.” Gary recognized the inadequacy of his response, but he couldn’t find the words he wanted to say. He’d turned his back on this place, but Abe had stayed with him, regret and loss popping up at the weirdest times, sucker punching him. Missing Abe didn’t come close to covering it.
Abe’s kisses turned emphatic, demanding, and Gary met them with a yielding acceptance that felt right in that moment. Abe had earned it.
“Not gonna lose you again,” Abe told him. “You know that, right?”
Gary swallowed. Being wanted this fiercely was flattering, but he couldn’t let himself get carried away by emotion and lust. Making promises he couldn’t keep wasn’t a good idea.
“I can’t stay.”
“Forever, no, I get that, but what’s the goddamned rush?” Abe trailed his fingers down the side of Gary’s neck, pushing aside the collar of his coat. It was the touch, not the chill air that made Gary shiver. “This thing you’ve got to do, there’s no time limit? He didn’t say you had to be there by a particular day?”
“No. In fact, the letter he left said I should take my time getting there, but—”
“See?” Abe sounded triumphant, as if he’d won a victory. “Stay a week or two. Let me show you my life.”
“It won’t change anything,” Gary warned him, tempted even so. A break, a chance to rest—Abe.
“I know.” Abe slid his hand around the back of Gary’s neck, a possessive caress, confident enough that Gary had to wonder what Abe saw when he looked at him. “And how about Vegas? When you go I could, uh . . .”
“You want to come with me?” Gary’s voice went high with surprise. “To Vegas?”
“Yeah, why not?” There was a defiant glint in Abe’s eyes now. “I’ve never been, and you’re gonna need a ride. Your car’s toast, Fox. It’d cost more to fix it than it’s worth. We can go in my truck.”
Gary stepped back, breaking the hold Abe had on him. “Abe . . .”
Abe wiped his hand across his mouth as if he’d been punched there. “You know what? Stupid idea. Forget I said anything.”
“It’s not, but the longer we’re together, the harder it’ll be to split up again.”
Abe shook his head, either rejecting what Gary had said or shaking off the fantasy he’d conjured. Gary
wasn’t sure which until Abe spoke.
“It’ll be hard no matter what, Fox. Give me this. Please?”
Gary sighed and turned his hands palms to the sky, giving up. What the hell. “You got it.”
Abe smiled, his face relaxing, letting Gary see how tense he’d been. “Thanks.” He jerked his head at the truck. “Ready to get back to work?”
“If I have to.”
Abe fumbled in his pocket and drew out a small plastic bag. “I was saving this for later, but here. Have a motivational cookie.”
Gary took it from him, already anticipating the spicy, gingery sweetness. “How is it motivating me if you let me have it?” he said around his first mouthful.
Abe patted his shoulder. “You won’t want only one, trust me, and the rest are back at the cabin.”
“You’re evil,” Gary said with conviction.
“Mm-hmm,” Abe agreed and resumed digging.
Abe pointed across the street, slowing the truck when his hand left the wheel. “Remember that bar? It was a real dive, but it changed hands four years ago. It’s catering to the tourists now, all family-friendly, with paper tablecloths you can draw on with crayons.”
“Sounds like fun. Tell me that’s not where we’re headed?”
Abe increased his speed again, listening for any untoward noises. The truck had been easy enough to back out of the shrubs once they’d taken care of the branch, but he was concerned it’d been damaged, even after spending ten minutes under it with a flashlight.
“No. I want to take you somewhere I can put my hands on you without worrying that anyone’s looking.”
Gary made a sound that went straight to Abe’s cock, a hungry sound, as if he couldn’t wait. After returning to the cabin, Gary had showered, eaten a sandwich and three cookies, then fallen asleep on Abe’s bed. Waking him for sex had been tempting, but Abe had restrained himself. If memory served, Gary got grouchy when he was sleep-deprived, and Abe didn’t want to deal with coaxing him into a better frame of mind.