by Amy Lane
“He made John schedule you for a scene with him,” Kane said, and he found most of his original anger surging back. “He… he just wants to fuck with you… God, he did it to Kelsey, he wants to do it to you! I don’t get it! It’s like Hector! Man, Hector wants to hit on girls and Scott just wants to fuck with people. Why do people get like that! It’s like those stupid fuckers who spend all day on the Internet and talk trash about anyone else on the fuckin’ Internet—I don’t understand!”
Dex was breathing hard too, and his face looked like Kane’s face felt—hurt and puzzled and desperately unhappy. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I won’t do it. Let me go talk to John. We’ve got to be able to switch this.” Dex looked up at Kane and shook his head. “Today was hard enough, baby. I don’t want to be on the other side of the camera again. I’m… I don’t think I’m that person anymore.”
Kane shook his head—he was agreeing with Dex, but it felt better to say no. “You can’t. You can’t. I don’t like doing it anymore, but I can do it because I have to. You can’t. You promised. It’s the only thing keeping me together.”
Dex nodded and turned, a surprising resolution on his face. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, walking away with some serious purpose.
He disappeared into the hallway, and Kane swallowed. God, he wanted to be in there.
“Kane,” Kelsey said, something secretive about her voice. “Kane, you want to be a fly on the wall?”
For a moment Kane thought she could really do that, and he was almost shocked out of his rage. Then he saw the intercom headphones and realized that she meant listening in on their conversation, and that was almost as good.
He walked over to the desk, and she held up one of the earbuds for him while she took the other, and then, very slowly, she hit the button on the phone intercom.
They heard the door to John’s office fly open and Dex’s irritated voice smack into the room.
“John, seriously, man. What in the fuck were you thinking?”
John’s voice sounded—well, wired. Suddenly Kane asked himself when was the last time he’d really seen John, and he came up with maybe a week after Chase had proved he was tough and stupid. God. Dex had told him John was getting wired, but Kane hadn’t thought it was this bad.
“Dex… man, what’s got you so… hey, did you see this? This bit with Kane? God, lucky you! He’s so fuckin’ hot! I’d like to get me some! And that Bobby kid—so hung. No, hey, don’t shut that off! Wait, what did you want to talk about?”
“Scott,” Dex snapped. “And me. Do you remember, John? Do you remember the fucking texts? The weirdo stalking? Did you completely fucking forget what I told you about Kelsey? Any of it? Any of it ringing a bell?”
“Man, get off my fucking back! I can’t be remembering all your fucking drama! All you guys, with the who’s screwing who and the I don’t wanna fuck that! Who do you think you—”
“I’m the guy who’s written the schedule for three years,” Dex said, and he sounded… flat. Patient, but flat, like he’d been doing this for a while. “I’m the guy who told you when I wanted off of it. You’re the guy who said I’d paid my dues. I filled in for Tommy a while back—it was a one-time thing, and I hired two more guys to fill in the ranks. Now I’m your go-to guy, and as far as I know, Scott hasn’t done you jack shit in the way of favors and the only reason he’s doing this is to fuck with me. I’m flat-out not doing it.”
“Uhm….” John trailed off, and there was the sound of someone blowing his nose nervously. “Uhm… you know. About favors….”
There was a beat. And another. Kane desperately tried to figure out what Dex might be understanding that he couldn’t.
Dex’s “Oh fuck—are you shitting me?” was more sad than surprised. “You let him sell to you? John! Jesus! What in the fuck!”
John couldn’t seem to stop talking. “It’s just that I was in for a lot, Davy—I was. I was in for a lot. Scott… he… he just gave me some shit and then he gave it to me on loan and then he just asked this one fucking favor, right? And I was like, well, Dex gets it, and I thought it would be okay, because I know you love this company, and if I had to pay Scott all off at once, it would break us. I mean, you know, just fucking break us—”
“How much?” Dex asked, and Kane and Kelsey looked at each other breathlessly. Oh shit. This was their livelihoods. This was their jobs and their families and the thing that was keeping them the fuck together. Apparently it had been Dex keeping them the fuck together all this time, and John who had been falling apart.
John hadn’t answered yet.
“How much?” Dex demanded again, his voice as loud and as angry as Kane had ever heard it.
“Forty K,” John said lowly. “Scott’s parents have the money. Scott’ll forgive the whole fucking thing if he gets one crack at you in bed.”
Kane heard the capitulation in Dex’s sigh, ripped out the earbud, and took off down the hall.
He wasn’t sure what they’d been saying as he threw open the door or how much he’d missed, but it didn’t matter. He ran into the room and snarled, “I’ll do it!” as Dex and John turned to him in surprise.
Dex shook his head, looking—well, devastated. Disappointed and frightened and just… well, wrecked. “I don’t think your ass is for sale, baby” is what he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s mine.”
Kane shook his head. “What’s he on for? Top or bottom?”
John looked at him, furrowing his brows like it was hard to remember. “Bottom? I think he said it wouldn’t matter, but I figured bottom.” For a moment John seemed to get his shit together. “I figured it wouldn’t be that big a deal!” he said accusingly, and Kane snorted.
“It’s everything, asshole! It’s the difference between Dex being a whore and me being a balls-out pussyfucker. You better make sure you make that trade!”
“Wait!” Dex said, looking at Kane unhappily. Dex had to see that this worked, didn’t he? That if Kane did it, Kane would control it. Kane would do a damned sight more than control it—Kane would make sure Scott never fucked with the two of them again is what he’d do. Kane might not have been that smart, but he knew a whole lot more than he used to about sex and power and pride.
“I have to,” Kane said implacably. If they were alone, or if he could even trust himself to be gentle, he would have put his hand on the back of Dex’s neck and given him a hard shake, just to get him to realize what he needed to do. “Sweetheart, it can’t be you. Don’t you see that?”
Dex blinked and smiled greenly. “Yeah. Yeah. I see. If you call him that in bed, I’ll rip your balls off.”
Kane nodded and shuddered, abruptly queasy. “God, yes! Fuckin’ shoot me while you’re at it!” Oh Jesus—talk about confusing the difference between fucking and love!
“So, okay,” Dex conceded. “Maybe. But before you even call him and ask him—and don’t tell him we talked, dammit, I don’t care how stoned you are—we’ve got a couple things to ask for.”
“Anything,” John said, nodding. “I’ll pay Kane extra—”
“You’re not paying me a fucking dime,” Kane snarled. “That would make it fucking worse!”
Dex nodded and without warning reached out and grabbed Kane’s hand. Dex’s hand was icy to the point of discomfort, and it was shaking. “You’re going to rehab,” Dex said quietly.
“Oh Dex—”
“I mean it, John. I fucking mean it. Before we walk out of here tonight, you will have signed up for a twenty-eight-day stint in rehab. I’ll drive you myself, or I’m calling the cops and Kane and I are walking.”
Suddenly John’s mouth crumpled, and he ran a hand through his stringy red hair. It was stringy, Kane realized, and John’s normally freckled face had broken out completely. He’d originally been thin, but now? Now he was skin and bone. God, he was strung out.
“You walk and this place folds,” John said, and his hand was shaking almost as much as Dex’s.
“I know it,” Dex said wi
thout vanity. “I know it. And I need something that says that.”
John looked at him oddly. “What?”
“I need a stake in the company, John. Don’t worry. I’m not going to buy you out. But I’m going for the rest of my degree this semester, and the last thing I need for that pretty piece of paper? It’s an internship. I have my name as a partial owner on this title, I don’t have to do that shit, and the next time you feel like risking this place for a key of coke, I have a way to keep the company going and you can go to hell.”
“Dex!”
“One hundred and sixty employees, asshole. One hundred and sixty people who depend on you for food, rent, and health insurance. If Kane hadn’t been working this last year, his niece? She wouldn’t have made it. Kelsey’s staying here because she thinks this place has her back. I’m not gonna let you fuck those people over, John. The first thing you told me was that this was just people having sex, and that didn’t make it bad. Well, they’re good people, and you almost fucked them. You give me twenty-five percent of the place and we can make sure that doesn’t happen.”
John gaped at the two of them, but Kane just looked at Dex. God, he was worth looking at. He was a good person—such a good person. He took care of his family.
“This is blackmail,” John said, faintly shocked, and Kane sneered at him in disgust.
“And selling Dex’s ass to Scott for drugs wasn’t?”
And of all things, that seemed to break through. “I didn’t—” he muttered. “I mean, I didn’t—that’s not what I meant—I mean, I—”
“You bought drugs from Scott, John. You bought them from Scott. I’ve been trying to get the guy fired, and you went and bought drugs from him, and why?”
Apparently John wasn’t arguing anymore. “It was personal.”
Dex nodded. “Yeah. One hundred and sixty employees, and you almost flushed their lives down the toilet, and why? It’s almost like a personal ‘fuck you’ to me! I don’t get it! You need to go to rehab and get your shit straight!”
“Friends don’t make friends go to rehab!” John whined.
Dex let go of Kane’s hand and walked very close to John. Close enough for John’s bloodshot eyes to have nowhere to look but Dex’s. “You go to rehab, John, and I’ll still consider us friends.”
John blinked, and his eyes flooded, and he sat down abruptly on the couch behind him. Dex sank to a crouch next to him, and John clutched his hand.
“Friends?” he said, his voice still bleary but coming down. “Yeah. Of course. Friends. Dex—I’ve been in love with you for years. We gotta be friends?”
Dex closed his eyes. “I didn’t know,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, John, I didn’t know.”
John grunted like he’d been hit in the stomach and looked up at Kane. “I don’t get it,” he said, and Kane could tell he wasn’t trying to be cruel. “I was just waiting, right? First you figured out you weren’t straight, and then I waited for you and Scott to be over, and then you were, and… I was waiting. And while I waited, you fell in love with Kane? In a million years I didn’t see it coming. How was I supposed to deal with that?”
Dex sighed. “I’m sorry. It sort of hit us by surprise too.”
John’s laugh was fractured and not really a laugh at all. “Yeah, well, surprise! Scott went into the drug-dealing business as an F-U to his old man, and I took him up on it.”
“Figures,” Kane muttered, almost to himself. It was common knowledge that telling his parents “fuck you” was why the douchefucker had gone into porn. That and the fact that his girlfriend liked it too.
“Rehab, John,” Dex said quietly. “You call Scott and make the deal. I’ll book you a room and call the lawyers.” Kane hadn’t even known that John had lawyers, but he guessed that must be the case.
John sighed. “I’m crashing, Davy,” he said, his voice lost. “You’d better get me the phone, ’cause if I don’t bump now, I’m gonna sleep for a week.”
“One more thing,” Kane said, and he moved behind Dex as he was sitting on the couch and put that hand on the back of his neck.
John looked up with a faintly ironic “hit me!” on his face. “Yeah?”
“Don’t call him Davy,” Kane said, knowing he sounded like a kid and not caring. “His name is mine too.”
John grimaced and looked at Dex. “He’s sort of a keeper, isn’t he?”
Dex looked up at Kane and grimaced too. “If we can make it through that thing next week, I’m thinking so.”
JOHN and Dex eventually picked up the phones and started dialing. Kane didn’t hear John’s conversation with Scott—he figured it would probably make him want to kill someone, so he left the office and walked Kelsey out to her car. Then he went back to John’s office, where he pulled out his book again and read quietly while the two of them finished up their business. After a little bit, and after Dex had Kane flush the little row of lines on the mirror down the toilet, John fell asleep in the editing chair. Eventually even Kane fell asleep on the couch, the book against his chest.
Dex shook him awake gently, and together they got John up and into his Lexus. Dex drove them to a place with really nice grounds in a crappy part of town, and together (Kane was there mostly to hold John up) they managed to check John into the private rehab clinic.
John whimpered as the nurse came with the wheelchair to bring him to detox, and Dex turned to him with slumped shoulders and eyes that squinted with exhaustion.
“You’re just gonna leave me here?” he begged, and Dex grimaced and sank to his haunches so he could take John’s hand.
“You’re gonna have to wait until this thing with Kane and Scott is over,” he said quietly. “Otherwise I’m probably too fucking pissed to be much of a friend, okay?”
John nodded and looked away. “After that?” he begged, and Kane had to give it to him. The guy wasn’t proud.
“Yeah,” Dex said softly. “Probably. I’ll be here. Maybe not Kane so much. He’s a stand-up guy, but with what we’re making him do, I don’t know if he can forgive us.”
John didn’t have an answer to that, so they let the nurse take him away.
When they got back in the car, Dex got back behind the wheel. Kane didn’t blame him—it was a nice car. They’d figured that they’d bring the car back to John’s garage the next day and check on his house plants and make arrangements with his cleaning lady to come a little more often to tend them and the fish and… God. Kane was always surprised at the size of the hole a man left when he was yanked out of the world.
“I may be pissed at John,” Kane said into the silent and cold dark, “but I’m not pissed at you.”
That was the thing about Dex. He just kept going like he understood exactly what you were talking about. “I’d be pissed at me. You’re doing the thing—”
“Yeah, but I’m doing it ugly, Dexter. Don’t think I don’t got a plan for doing something dirty with this douchefucker. Don’t think that he’s not going to walk away from this without feeling like he’s going to need a shower for a week.”
Dex looked sideways at him, his eyes colorless in the shifting lights from outside the car. “It’s nothing illegal, right?”
Kane snorted. “As if. No. You… I mean, I never wanted you to see me this way, right? I wanted to be a good guy. But I’m still the same guy who fucked guys’ girlfriends behind the portable buildings in high school. I still got that dirty in me. I don’t want you to see it. I’ll show it to Scott, ’cause he deserves it, but….” He trailed off. He had a plan. It was a simple plan, and it involved sex and humiliation, and those were two things he could dish out.
Maybe his sister was right about the porn. Maybe he was a whore. Maybe he was unclean. Well, if he was, the least he could do was keep Dex safe from other fuckers just like him. “I don’t want you to see it,” he said at last.
It was late, and the streets were almost empty. Still, Kane was surprised when the car swerved right there on Stockton Boulevard and Dex came to a halt dead
square in the deserted parking lot of a Subway sandwich place. He threw the car into park and pushed the parking brake, then grabbed Kane by the front of the shirt and jumped on Kane for a punishing, bruising kiss that left Kane plastered to the passenger window and Dex draped across the shifting console and mostly in Kane’s lap.
His mouth tasted… wonderful, and he was warm, and as the kiss faded and Dex fell limp into his arms, Kane realized he was exhausted. He wrapped his arms around Dex’s shoulders and hugged him until Dex mumbled something into his chest.
Kane let him up and looked into his shadowed, squinty eyes.
“I’ll look at you any way I want, Carlos,” Dex said, his voice soft and passionless. “I’ll see you dirty and I’ll take you home and clean you. I’ll be a part of your dirty if I have to, because I’m not letting you be dirty alone.”
Kane’s eyes stung, and he hauled Dex up to a final mauling, breathless kiss. “Thanks, David,” he said when the kiss was done. “Take us home now. I need to sleep with you next to me. It’s how I know we’re good.”
Dex let out a sad, tired little sound and sat up to start the car. “Kane?” he said once they were under way again.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing we’ve said or done today has made me want to give back the ring.”
With a faint shock, Kane realized it was still the same day he’d told Dex to keep his. And the same day Dex had given it back.
“Good,” he said, leaning his head against the car window. “That’s real good, Davy. I told you, bring it on.”
Dex
THEY started school three days later. Their classes were on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Dex turned off his phone for his three lectures, but in between? He spent his breaks texting to Kelsey to answer her questions, which she very nicely saved up for him. He got back to the house exhausted and ready to start his homework only to find Kane there at the kitchen table with his homework, reading alone under the one light in the dining room.
Kane didn’t look much happier with his head bent over his book and his eyes dark and shadowed, but suddenly home looked a whole lot brighter.