by Amy Lane
“Yeah,” he muttered when they finally got to the barn, “your dad was right. This shit ain’t for pussies.”
Dex looked at him with that grin—God, Kane was starting to treasure that openmouthed ear-to-ear smile more and more. “When’d he say that?”
Kane shrugged. “I dunno. Every time he breathed in and out when I was in the room?”
Dex turned around and gave Kane’s scarf—something dark and brown and soft that Dex had just sort of put in his luggage—a tug. “Don’t be intimidated. This shit is all he knows. He obsesses about where to put the sheep because it’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to think about, okay? Doesn’t make him not a good man, but it doesn’t make you a worse one.”
It took Kane a couple of steps before it sank in. “Did you just say I have to think hard? ’Cause I’ve got nearly thirty videos to prove thinking ain’t what I do hard.”
Dex stopped suddenly and looked him in the eyes. “If you ever tell me you’re dumb, Kane, I swear to Christ I’ll deck ya. And then I’ll top ya for a month.” Dex shook his head and started trudging to the barn, muttering, and Kane had to make himself blink because his eyes dried out.
Scream For Me Gently
Dex
THE tool barn was just like Dex remembered it when he was a kid. It was bigger than the house, and dark, but also neat and orderly. He made his way through the stacks of spare engine parts and the upright organizer drawer that held everything from the head gasket to a tractor that was parked near the entrance to a set of wheel bolts to a car his father had sold after Sean had been born. All of it was organized, right down to the placement of spare parts alphabetically from the front left of the shed to the back right—axles, brake lines, carburetors, door handles, electronic ignitions, and so on. Dex kept his gloves on as he turned on a light. Montana wasn’t known as spider country, but he’d always been a little afraid of them in here. (He was glad, in fact, that Kane’s critters hadn’t included tarantulas. He knew some people kept them as pets, and he was pretty sure that’s where he’d have to draw the line.)
The single bulb flared to life so Dex could find the bank of lights on the wall near the workbench and turn them on. They flickered fluorescently overhead, and Dex started to hunt.
“Okay, sailboard… sailboard… S… or B?”
“D,” Kane said practically. “For David.”
Dex looked at him and then looked over the piles of parts, set up as close to order (the smaller parts in those stackable drawer things, with labels) as one man could make them, and sure enough, there it was. Right next to two doors from a Ford pickup and one from a Dodge Charger.
“Or D for Dex,” he said thoughtfully, and Kane snorted.
“What?”
“Isn’t David his son?”
Dex thought about it. “Dex was a better son,” he admitted. “Dex was going to stay here for his father, I was going away. Dex was the quarterback, I was the receiver—”
Kane snorted, and Dex smacked just enough of his head to catch hair.
“We didn’t get that far,” he said sternly, and Kane made a sound.
“You didn’t what?”
Dex looked away. “It was a day, Carlos. A day. We had a… a spare two hours on our way home from town. About all we knew before we hit that fucking deer is that we wanted to do it again.”
Kane let out a pained sound. “But… but why Johnnies, if that’s all you knew?”
Dex took a breath and then another. God. It was a good question. It was a fair question, after the terrible discomfort of the last two days. That didn’t make it any easier to answer.
“’Cause,” he said after a minute of restlessly searching the cannibalized banks of real-life leftovers for an answer. “’Cause, I told myself that… that it had happened because it was Dexter, my best friend. That it wasn’t something in me, it was something in him. I didn’t know how to find a new best friend.” He swallowed. “I didn’t. No girl I was with was doing it for me. One of them suggested Johnnies for kink, and I thought, ‘Well, I already have that kink. And there’s never going to be another Dexter.’ So that’s why I took that name. ’Cause there was never going to be another Dexter, and David was always gonna be empty, but Johnnies, that would come close.”
He still couldn’t look at Kane. He couldn’t. It sounded so… so young. So lost.
Kane had taken off his gloves in spite of the chill that wasn’t hardly scratched by the oil space heaters that came on with the lights. His fingers were cold as they fit under Dex’s chin and jerked Dex’s face around to make him look Kane square in those chocolate-brown eyes. Yeah, there were the muscles, the dimples, the little flat bottom on the square chin and jaw, but truly, everything a man needed to know about José Carlos Ricardo Ramirez was in those eyes.
“How’d that work out for ya, David?” Kane asked evenly, and Dex managed a limping smile.
“Better than I thought in October,” he said softly, and Kane put both hands on his shoulders to bring him in for an almost chaste kiss.
“Yeah, well, you were always David. I didn’t know that brown-haired kid in those pictures. I knew you. I’d recognize that grin in a blizzard. Your eyes? I mean, on the website it says blue—but your eyes are a better color than that. The guy who was nice to me on my first day—hell, on my first scene? That was always David. It was David I knew would let me sleep in his spare room when I needed help. David’s name is on all that school stuff that’s got us going to cooking class. David’s the name on your diploma. I mean… you’re my Dex, but that doesn’t mean you’ve ever been anything else.”
Dex smiled and blinked hard. His eyes were watering—he told himself it was the cold and used his palm to clear away the moisture. Kane wasn’t having any of it. He framed Dex’s face with those big blunt hands. Dex’s father would have said they were pansy’s hands, because they were smooth and moisturized, but Dex knew better. Dex knew they could hold him down and master him and ground him. He knew they were powerful, confident hands, and that they’d never, ever do anything to hurt Dex in any way.
“You can’t do this now,” Kane said, and Dex nodded, because just hearing the words made him want to get control of himself. “You do this now, I fuck you in the corner. I fuck you in the corner, we’re gonna get caught, ’cause you’re loud, Dexter—no two ways about it. You get caught, we’re not gonna be able to make the sailboard, and that’ll suck, because right now, I’m thinkin’ that alone will be worth the plane ride, you hear me?”
Dex found himself grinning in spite of all the nice attention his body was paying to hearing Kane say things like “fuck you in the corner” and “you’re loud.”
“It’s gonna be awesome,” he said, and then he stepped into Kane’s arms for a hug, because he needed one.
Kane held him for a moment, tight, like he’d held on the night before, until they both shivered in it. “Let’s do this shit, ’kay? I need to fly with you in the worst way!”
“Yeah.”
IT TURNED out to be not that hard.
Dex took the wheels off first and then had Kane look around for stuff that could be a fin and a rudder. They found one better—an old sled left over from when Dex’s parents were kids, with the rudders still intact. Dex wrenched a little and pulled the skids off the sled, then used the drill and the press and some hot glue and clamped the runners onto the bottom of the sailboard and set it up with a couple of vice grips to dry.
“We can get some rope out of the tack room in the barn,” he said as they were wrapping it up for lunch. “I’m thinking if we use that steering apparatus but sit back further on the sailboard, it’ll be easier to steer.”
Kane nodded his head and took Dex’s word for it, mostly, and Dex took a quick look toward the door of the barn and pulled Kane in for a kiss. They separated just as they heard voices, and both of them were busy moving the whole apparatus from the workbench to a set of sawhorses when the door burst open. Dex looked over and saw Henry and Malachi pushing and pulling at
each other and laughing excitedly as they touched.
Dex and Kane made eye contact. You didn’t work in porn for any length of time without knowing your touches. They weren’t just touching like friends horsing around. These were very specific touches Dex was seeing between his brother and his brother-in-law.
He spoke loudly. “Hey, guys! We were just going in for lunch. You guys coming in, or you want Mom to make you some sandwiches?”
Both the men on the far end of the garage looked up, startled, and Dex met their eyes evenly.
“We’ll… we’ll have some sandwiches later,” Henry said, smiling gamely.
Dex knew that smile. When Henry was ten, he cut off the hair of Debbie’s favorite Barbie. That was the same smile he’d used when he said he didn’t do it.
“Yeah,” Dex said. “Okay. We’ll tell Mom that.”
Malachi’s face was flushed and his breath was coming in little pants. As Kane and Dex passed them, Dex saw that his eyes were dilated and he was standing oddly—probably sporting wood.
“Maybe lock the door,” Dex said, keeping his voice expressionless. “It’s kind of freaky when people just bust in here.”
They walked out the smaller door next to the big one used to drive the tractors in, and Dex heard the bolt shoot home behind them. He looked at Kane, expecting to see judgment in his eyes for pimping out his brother to his brother-in-law, but how could he explain? He hated them—hated them both, because Debbie didn’t fucking deserve this.
“They got everything to lose, don’t they,” Kane said, and Dex grunted. Yeah. Kane was smarter than everyone thought.
“Everything,” Dex muttered. “That doesn’t mean they deserve to have it, but they got so much more to lose.”
“But the army doesn’t kick you out anymore,” Kane said hopefully, and Dex sucked frigid air in through his teeth.
“They don’t give you a parade either. But it’s more than that. Right now they serve together. They go back and they’re a couple, and that’s not gonna happen.”
Kane grunted. “God. And it’s not like your parents are gonna accept either of ’em with open arms… especially….” Kane couldn’t say it.
Dex swallowed. “Chase… God. I cannot even imagine how much worse that whole thing would have been if he’d known about the baby beforehand.”
Kane grunted. “Yeah. Probably no trip to the hospital, but….”
“But no Tommy either.”
They were quiet for a minute, and then Dex said what they were both thinking. “And there might not have been a trip to the hospital, but you can bet your ass there would have been a trip to the morgue.”
Kane let out an explosive burst of air. “Jesus, Dexter, and I’m the one everyone says needs to watch his mouth.”
Dex patted him on the back. “Sorry, baby. Sometimes you just gotta look the fucked-up in the face.”
“Yeah,” Kane replied glumly. “Except it’s gotta be hard seeing it in the face of your baby brother.”
Dex swallowed hard, and all of the triumph of the sailboard completely dissipated. “You know something, Carlos? You are the one who needs to watch what he says.”
Kane’s pats on his back were just as sincere as Dex’s had been. “Sorry, baby. Looking the fucked-up in the face just makes it look more fucked-up.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, and not in the good way either.”
NOBODY asked where Henry and Malachi were over lunch—apparently they were going to the tool shed to fix a nail gun to use with the fencing by the road, and Travis already knew to give them sandwiches to bring when they went out to the barn. Kane and Dex met eyes when they heard this and then simply let the matter drop.
Kane had nailed the issue—Henry and Mal had too much to lose. Dex and Kane weren’t going to help them lose it.
They pounded down lunch and then got their gear on to go back outside again.
“You found the sailboard all right?” Dex’s dad asked, and Dex smiled at him.
“Yeah, Dad. Under D for Dex.”
Dad nodded. “I figured you’d find it there.”
“Why wasn’t it under D for David?” Kane asked, and Dex’s father looked surprised, like he didn’t expect Kane to talk ever.
“’Cause it was Dex’s idea.”
“It was my idea,” Dex said with a wink to Kane. “I just didn’t expect Dex to follow through.”
“Yeah, well, the follow-through was never your strong suit,” Paul Worral grunted.
“He’s getting his degree this semester,” Kane defended, and Dex wished he could grab the guy’s hand, because he sounded like Tomas the snake did when you reached into his cage too fast.
“Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.” And with that Paul Worral stomped out of the house, leaving Kane making growling noises at the closed door.
Dex grabbed his arm and ignored the look Cathy sent him from the entryway as she stood there with a bag of sandwiches and the censure his mom was sending him from the kitchen as she started clearing the table. “It’s complicated with family,” he said quietly. “You know that. C’mon. It gets dark in, like, two hours. If we can’t get the wind to take us back, it’s gonna be a long and cold walk home.”
BUT oh, that thing was just as fun as Dex remembered it.
Kane sat in the middle, arms around the mast, keeping his head down as the sail played above it, and holding the front steering apparatus by the rope they’d gotten out of the stable. Kane had spent half an hour rolling the sail up and repositioning it on the open bolt that circled the mast while Dex bored out the skids and bolted them to the board. Otherwise the damned boom would have taken his head off.
Dex stood on the back of the board and propped the tiller with his ankle while holding onto the sail. They didn’t try for sailor’s jargon—Dex just barked out simple orders.
“Left! Left! Over up that hill but not toward the tree! There you go! Whooee!” Because the hill was steep both ways! On they raced, over a landscape made unfamiliar by time and snow but along a path Dex could have walked (or sailed) in his dreams.
He knew the exact moment the sailboard passed off his parents’ property and onto Dex’s parents’, but he wasn’t sure how he knew.
Maybe he just recognized the little stand of evergreens by the burial plot, but that didn’t explain the lifting of his shoulders, like he had sails for wings there too.
With a little bit of effort, the two of them leaned to their left and steered to the right, kicking up snow and letting the sail collapse in a suddenly hushed heap. Dex tied the boom upright so the thing wouldn’t take off without them, and laid the board on its side, and then grabbed Kane’s hand through their gloves.
The top was barely visible through the snow, but Dex got down on his knees, glad the snow was dry so it didn’t seep through his jeans and long johns, and dug away the snow in front of the headstone until you could see his name.
“Dexter Allan Williams,” Kane read, his voice rasping. “God, he was so young.”
“Not too much younger than you,” Dex said, and Kane rolled his eyes.
“Young enough,” Kane said seriously. “Think about it—he never had a kid or owned a snake or lived out on his own. He never got to say he loved you—that was pretty young.”
Dex smiled and stroked the shiny granite of the headstone, then turned to Kane. “You’ve gotten to do those things,” he said soberly, and Kane nodded without any irony at all.
“The ‘I love you’ part needs practice,” he admitted. “That’s why it’s not good to go out young. You got to say that shit a lot before it sticks.”
Dex nodded and felt his face, his shoulders, his neck, everything relax as he gave up the burden of being anyone but himself, put it to rest on Dex’s headstone, and let Kane see the real him, just like Kane had seen all along.
“I love you,” Dex said, feeling it so hard it threatened to burn out of his chest. “I love you so much. You saved me, Carlos. I was so lost, and you just… just tied m
e to the ground until I remembered how to walk my own path… you saved me.”
“Yeah. You’re the one who let me sleep in your bed until it stuck. I love you too. You got to promise me I get to say it a lot when we get back home, okay?”
Dex nodded, and he didn’t care that they were two men standing on a lonely ridge and that anybody driving or riding by could see him. He just cared that they’d exchanged vows of a sort, and they needed to seal it with a kiss.
Kane captured his mouth first and then cupped the back of his head and pushed forward. Dex liked it when he did that, liked being moved, positioned, liked knowing what he was doing was right.
He opened his mouth, felt the warmth of Kane emanating out, and the lonely stone in the middle of his chest began to warm for the first time since the airplane had left the ground. The kiss deepened, intensified, became passionate, until Kane forgot what they were doing and slid a cold glove still caked with snow under Dex’s jacket until it touched bare skin.
Dex gasped, then laughed, and Kane did too, looking heartily embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” Kane muttered, and Dex smiled and kissed him on the chilled cheek. They’d both worn their scarves over their faces as they’d ridden, but once they stood up, they’d unwound them, and the cold didn’t take a coffee break while you kissed your boyfriend senseless under the iron-gray sky.
“Here,” he said softly and then turned toward Dexter Williams’s grave. He moved forward and crouched, talking softly, and Kane let him have his privacy.
“Hey, Dex,” he said softly, and the name sounded funny when he was talking to someone else. “I hope you like him. He’s not much older than we were when this happened, but I think that’s okay. I think a part of me got stuck here, right here on this hill, trying to say good-bye to you. He’s sort of a shock when you’re not paying attention. He busted me loose and set me free. I hope you don’t mind if I keep the name. Maybe the best of you can live on, and me too, if people know there’s a Dex out there who’s fearless. Just as long as Kane knows I’m David, I’m fine with that if you are.”