Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  Dex had been in the middle of taking a sip of milk, and now he got caught between spitting it out and choking on it. He ended up grabbing a pile of napkins and using it to wipe off his face, so he didn’t even have a reply. That was okay. Kane didn’t need one.

  “See? You need to go wash your shirt off anyway. We’ll go do that, and if we can still sit tonight, we can go out and catch a movie, you think?”

  Dex paused in the act of wiping off his shirt. “I think you’re a born fucking romantic. I also think you’re going to need another nap after you finish that last plate of potatoes.”

  Kane looked at it judiciously. “Maybe we can go running after we fuck.”

  Dex had to laugh. God. Well, maybe this was what having a regular boyfriend really was. “Yeah, I’m not complaining,” he said, and Kane grinned at him wickedly over his potatoes.

  Complain? Seriously, who would?

  Kane

  “YOU want I should come in with you?” Dex asked, his voice gentle, and Kane felt weak and sad as he looked at him in the passenger’s seat of Kane’s Navigator.

  “I’m just asking for the mail,” he said apologetically. “It’s not like we need a whole gay security force to ask for my own mail.” He’d insisted on driving today. For some reason it felt like he owned the problem more if he drove them to it.

  “If I’d called Tommy and Chase, then we could have had a security force,” Dex said pragmatically. “Or, you know, Ethan alone.”

  Kane nodded. “Yeah, Ethan’s ripped. Okay, like I said, I can handle it.”

  Dex’s hand, warm and surprising, covered his own as it rested on his thighs. “Carlos, you think I’m going to kick you out if I see your ugly?”

  Deep breath. Another. Kane turned his hand palm up and accepted Dex’s hand in his. Dex kept his nails nice and neat, and his hands were long and sort of arty.

  “No,” he said, looking to the front of the house again. Fabiola knew he was coming. She usually took the baby outside so he could see her and he didn’t have to go inside and be in the same space with the baby. He never really got the point of that. He fucked grown men in front of a camera—that didn’t mean he was going to start doing ugly things to little girls, and he couldn’t make his brain figure that out.

  But then, it wasn’t his baby, either.

  “Maybe she’s not feeling well,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Maybe she’s having a relapse. I called the doctor to make sure the baby was good, but… oh fuck. Goddammit. Dammit, Lola!”

  The garage door opened, and parked in the two-car garage was a small red coupe and a big silver Navigator, about five years older than Kane’s. A stocky Hispanic man in his thirties was getting into the Navigator and Kane wanted to throw up. Jesus, Lola—Hector? Fucking really? The Navigator pulled out, and Kane looked frantically at Dex, pulled the handle on the seat so it slid way the hell back, and ducked.

  Dex looked down at him crouched between the seat and the steering wheel and then looked back up. The Navigator had pulled up alongside Kane’s car, Kane was gesturing for Dex to roll down his window.

  Dex did.

  “What you doin’ out here?” Hector asked, and Dex pointed to the house across the street.

  “Waiting for my friend to come out over there,” he lied cheerfully.

  Kane wanted to kiss him.

  “Yeah, okay. Don’t wait too long.”

  “He’ll only be a minute,” Dex said.

  Kane wrapped his clammy hand around Dex’s ankle in thanks. He felt Dex shiver from the contact, and in a minute, the engine noise faded and Dex creaked in the leather seats of the Navigator as he twisted around to watch Hector drive away. “He’s gone.”

  “Thanks, brother,” Kane said, sitting up and throwing himself back against the seat. “I didn’t want to cause a fuckin’ scene, but if Hector saw me here, it would have been yelling and shit.” Kane closed his eyes and banged his head against the steering wheel. “Christ,” he muttered. “I just wanted to get my own fucking mail.”

  Dex turned his head back around and watched Lola’s buzz-cut supposed ex-husband drive away. “How bad a guy is he?”

  Kane glanced at him, all blond and pretty and shit. When Dex got into a fight with his ex, he threw CDs at him. “When I moved in with you, it was so Lola could get away from him. She’d just gotten out of the hospital when I brought her here.”

  Dex grunted. “Kane, if he’s that much of an asshole, why didn’t you name the snake after him?”

  “’Cause I like the snake.”

  “Who’d you name the snake after?”

  “A guy whose girlfriend I slept with in high school.”

  Dex grunted again. “None of this is making me feel any better about how much that snake likes my balls.”

  Kane grinned in spite of himself. Sure enough, Tomas had gotten out again this morning and had made himself at home in the warmth of Dex’s boxer shorts. Kane patted Dex’s lean thigh. “It’s ’cause you let off so much natural heat, baby. And you tend to sleep real still. If you thrashed around more, he’d just stick to the foot of the bed.”

  Dex laughed and took his hand again. “So, should we start from scratch? Let’s go get your mail!”

  Lola couldn’t even look Kane in the eye as she opened the door. She was still wearing a bathrobe even if it was in the middle of the day, and there was a faint bruise forming on her cheekbone.

  “Don’t start on me,” she muttered, letting them both come in. “Mama and Papa, they talk about you like you’re dead. Don’t you tell me how to live my life.”

  Kane grunted. “Can I see the baby, Lola?”

  Fabiola made a pained sound. “I just put her down, Carlos. She’s barely—”

  Kane walked quietly, Dex on his heels, into the baby’s room, which used to be the reptile room. To Lola’s credit, she’d put up pink contact paper as a border on the walls, hung up a mobile, and installed shelves in the room—it looked like a real nice place. Frances was lying in the middle of her crib; at almost three, she was long enough now to take up a good size of it. She was wearing a real nice little outfit, something with leggings and a skirt, in orange and brown, which girls had been wearing a lot this year. Her hair was a little longer—about a half an inch of fine, downy brown covered her scalp—and even sideways, Kane could see she was getting a little plumper. She was inhaling and exhaling like she’d been crying a lot. On every exhale, her quivery lower lip went “f-t-f-t-f-t-f-t-f-t,” and Kane just wanted to pick her up and protect her, keep her away from all of this bad stuff, make sure she was okay. He approached her carefully, laid his big hand in the center of her small back, and stood there for a minute, just breathing with her, waiting for her breath to even out and calm down. He looked up and Dex was in the doorway, nodding at him.

  Kane nodded back and took a couple more breaths, then ran a finger down the baby’s cheek and followed Dex out and into the living room.

  “My mail, Lola?” he asked, not even wanting to look at her. He was so angry.

  “Don’t sound that way,” she said, her voice weak. She handed a sheaf of envelopes to Kane, and Dex took them out of his hands and started sorting through them. Kane looked at her, relieved at Dex’s help, because he couldn’t focus on two things at once, and right now, she was the thing he needed to pay attention to.

  “How do you want me to sound? All excited that he’s in here beating you up where she can hear? In my house? The whole reason I let you live here was so he couldn’t find you. How’d he find you, Lola? How long did it take before you called him back up?”

  His sister couldn’t meet his eyes. “It was his mother,” she said quietly. “She called me up to ask me to Thanksgiving, and I went, and he was there. He followed me home. And he’s the baby’s daddy, Carlos. It’s not like I can just cut him out of my life!”

  “Why not? You cut me out of your life!”

  “That was different! You’re doing bad things!”

  Kane reached out to her, touched her bru
ised cheek with his finger, and remembered when they were kids and she used to throw him a Frisbee in the backyard for hours, or play tic-tac-toe with sidewalk chalk in front of their apartment. She’d been the smart one, the one who did good in school and never got in trouble, but she’d always had time for him, because they were family.

  “This isn’t a bad thing?” he asked, feeling something hot and horrible in his throat. He didn’t know how Dex could be afraid that Kane would see the ugly in Dex’s life. Kane knew about the ugly. The ugly was everywhere around him. With Dex, it was like they could be a little spot of pretty in the middle of all that ugly.

  Fabiola turned her head. “He’s my husband—”

  “You’re my sister. I don’t like seeing this, and I don’t like the baby being near it. I’ll sell the house, get you an apartment—”

  “The hell you will!” Dex said sharply, squinting at one of the envelopes in his hand.

  Kane looked at him, surprised. “Dex—”

  “No! She needs to let you see that baby, dammit!” Dex’s voice was weird, wobbly, and thin.

  “He’s making those movies—” Lola tried to protest, but Dex cut her off.

  “Yeah, I know. The movies. He’s making the bad movies—well, that’s great. If you don’t like the bad movies, why are you so excited to spend that money he’s making off of them? Kane, did you really give her access to your money?”

  Kane blinked. “Well yeah, Dex. She had to pay the doctors and the electricity and the garbage bill and all that other shit.”

  Dex’s eyes were narrowed and his hands were shaking. “Wonderful. I get it. She’s living in the house—on your dime—so she’s paying the bills, again, on your dime. She’s also grocery shopping on your dime? And going to buy clothes on your dime?” Dex glared at Lola for a minute. “And not at Target, either, huh? No, I’ve got bills from Pottery Barn and Baby Gap and Wet Seal—this is prime shit, Lola. You won’t let your brother in the house ’cause of what he does for a living, but you’re not too proud to live off of it, are you?”

  Kane grimaced. “Dex, Christmas is coming up and—”

  “Yeah. She’s buying the baby gifts and she’s buying herself gifts. Isn’t the house a gift, Kane? And what about you? Don’t you want to buy that baby some clothes and some toys and shit?”

  Kane’s heart fell. It was really one of the things he’d been planning to do in the next week. That and find Dex something, anything, that would be special without being stupid.

  “He’s got lots of money!” Lola objected. “I see those bills too!”

  Dex looked at her bitterly. “Yeah. He’s got lots of money. He does. But he doesn’t have lots of family. He’s got you and he’s got the baby. And he’s got the guys where we work. And now he’s got me. Did you even ask yourself what he was doing Thanksgiving, Lola? Did you even care who he was staying with?”

  Fabiola looked away, and Dex said, “Kane, get her bank card.”

  Kane looked at him in shock. “What?”

  “Get her bank card.”

  “I’m not kicking her out!”

  Dex shook his head. “No, no, you’re not. And you’re not cutting her off and you’re not gonna be the bad guy, ’cause that’s not in you. But this isn’t our last stop today, remember? We had plans. We had plans for you. Not me, not Lola, you. We’re gonna make that happen, if you still want to. You still want to, right?”

  Kane looked at him, suddenly remembering that they were going to Montana. What was he going to tell Dex’s parents if it didn’t get ugly? Yeah, I’m in porn. No, I got no plans for the future. Yeah, high school graduate, barely. What was he going to tell Frances when she got old enough? Yeah, sorry, baby. I’d like to hang out and be your uncle, but I fuck guys for money. No, I got nothin’ else. Here, have a couple hundred and go hang with your woman-beating pops.

  And then, pure as light, he had a vision of Dex the night before. Kane had taken him, slow, face-to-face, and Dex? Dex had buried his face in Kane’s neck and groaned and climaxed, the come splashing between their sweating bodies. It was not porn sex. In porn sex, you came for the camera, your body splayed and open and on display. But last night, it was Dex, his body covered by Kane’s, his eyes closed, his shoulders hunched forward, and in that moment, he was Kane’s, just Kane’s. No one else was going to see that moment, no one else was going to know what that felt like, because from now on, Dex was only gonna do that for him.

  Afterward Dex smiled tiredly, his eyes half-closed, and Kane planted little kisses over those eyes, over his cheeks, down his jaw, on his neck, even his ears. Dex fell asleep then, curled in his arms like Tomas, or Tree-Squirt when he was alive. Dex’s hair was sweaty against his scalp, but still bright and soft against Kane’s shoulder. His breath heated Kane’s skin right at his neck and chest in moist little pants. Kane looked at him—gold eyelashes fanned out on his cheeks; pink, full mouth slightly parted—and fought the urge to hold him so tightly he couldn’t breathe.

  That was his. Freely offered, happily given, Dex was his.

  “Yeah,” he said now, looking at those angel-blue eyes. Maybe they were even the color of the Montana sky, and Dex was gonna help him get there and see. “I remember those plans for the future.”

  Kane turned to his sister. “Lola, I helped with Frances’s doctor bills—I’ll keep doin’ that. I’ll buy your groceries and shit—I will. I can give you an allowance, and you can get a job and daycare or even go to the state until you get on your feet. I’m here for you. But I’m not Mom and Pop. I got plans for me. I need some of that money for me. I worked for it—”

  “On your back!” Fabiola snapped, and Kane nodded.

  “Some of it. But some of it was earned for showin’ up when I was supposed to and working out and watching my diet”—he ignored the soft snort from Dex because he knew it was just to make him laugh—“and being a nice enough guy to give other guys a hard-on, even if they didn’t like guys to begin with. And it’s okay work—more honest than you think. But if I ever want to do something different, I gotta take what I’m makin’ and put it into something else I want to do. And I deserve that, right?” Kane fought not to cry like the little kid he’d been, the chubby little kid who’d run to his sister when he’d been knocked on his face by the other kids because he couldn’t keep up. The little kid who spoke with a lisp in a new language because he wasn’t used to the way his mouth worked yet and had to work really hard not to get laughed at. Lola had known that kid and loved him. Why couldn’t she know him now?

  Fabiola looked away. “Yeah, Carlos,” she said after a minute. “Yeah. You deserve to do something else. You give me what you think is right. I got my papers in at Welfare.”

  “And he gets to visit the baby,” Dex said, and Kane looked at him, almost begging him to stop. His sister said he deserved to be happy. It was almost like a blessing from the frickin’ church! Why would Kane want to push it now?

  Fabiola looked at Dex for the very first time. “Who are you?” she asked, and Dex smiled, the kind of smile Kane used to watch him use on rookies when he was gentling them in, or on girls if he was trying to date them.

  “I’m his new family,” Dex said, and for the first time, maybe, Fabiola looked at the two of them, Dex at his elbow in his shearling jacket, taller than Kane, but also rangier and unassuming in spite of his absolute beauty.

  “You look smart,” she said, because she was smart, and she’d seen the way Dex was sorting through the mail even as he stood there, using crisp, efficient movements and quick scans of the content.

  “I must be, if I’m with your brother,” Dex said levelly, and Fabiola raised one corner of her mouth.

  “My brother’s a nice boy, but he’s not too smart. You probably just like him ’cause of his—”

  “Please don’t finish that sentence,” Dex said with deceptive mildness. “And don’t try to change the subject. Look—let him take her out for ice cream once a week. Let him take her to the park. Tell him what clothes she needs,
let him pick them out for her. I swear to you, Fabiola, your brother wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it was to feed it to his turtles, and the only part of him your baby would see more of than right the hell here is his big frickin’ heart. He just wants to hold the baby, see that she’s okay. She’s his family too.”

  Fabiola nodded her head. “Just don’t come here when Hector is here,” she said, looking away. “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “Why’s he even here in the first place?” Kane asked, trying to breathe through the rush of gratitude. He was gonna take that baby to see Santa. He was gonna buy her the fuckin’ world. He wanted to just hug Dex and pound his back until the whole world could hear the echoes, but he didn’t do that. Not here. Not for Lola to see and judge. He had Dex all to himself until his next shoot. He wasn’t ready to explode that all on the world now.

  Fabiola looked away. “You should know,” she said bitterly. “Just because it’s wrong don’t mean it’s not easy.”

  Kane wanted to protest about the wrong part, but surprisingly enough it was Dex who spoke up.

  “Most of us know that,” he said. “We’ve all had that, you know? The hard part is to say no and mean it. You let us know if you ever want to say no and need help, okay?”

  To Kane’s surprise, Fabiola nodded and wiped her hand under her eyes.

  “If he ever hits the baby,” Kane said, keeping his voice gentle, “I’ll either kill him or take her, okay?”

  Fabiola kept nodding and kept crying, and Dex bumped Kane with his elbow. “Give her the grocery money, Carlos, and give her a hug, all right? I think we all need some freakin’ space.”

  Kane nodded and pulled out his wallet and looked at Lola. “Can you get your bank card for me?” Dex bumped his arm. “Actually, get your wallet. I think Dex wants to make sure your credit cards ain’t on my dime too.”

  Fabiola gave a glum nod, and Kane wondered wretchedly if Dex could just tell him how much money he had and how much to give her, and leave out the details of how bad things had gotten when he hadn’t been paying attention.