Shades of Henry (The Flophouse Book 1)

by Amy Lane

  Henry stalked to the bathroom and stripped without thinking about bringing a change of clothes with him. He just jumped under the pounding water, not caring that it was cold at first.

  He really didn’t want to talk about it.

  That talk with Davy had distracted him from the events of that morning. For a minute there, he’d actually been glad to see John and Galen. Galen had taken charge of the police inquiry, and John had begged a ride from Lance back to his house so he could get his own car. The last Henry had seen of Lance had been a rather troubled wave as Lance hopped into his CR-V in his hospital scrubs. And after that, Henry’s day had been something of a roller coaster.

  The minute the cops had let him go, Galen had chivvied Henry into the car with barely enough time to have one of the guys (Cotton, still in his briefs!) run up and grab his wallet and cell phone. They’d driven then—do not pass go, don’t catch your breath—to a criminal defense attorney, while Galen nitpicked every last ounce of the story from Henry.

  Sort of.

  Because Henry was not going to tell Galen about sleeping with his brother’s ex-boyfriend. As far as he was concerned, nobody had to know about that but Lance.

  Gah! And now Davy and Kane. And his lawyer, and that goddamned PI. The best laid plans….

  “Henry, you can’t hide in there,” Lance said from the doorway.

  “You wanna make a bet?” The water had grown hot and then cold again, and Henry’s bruises were starting to cramp up. Reluctantly, he turned the shower off and was taken aback when Lance presented him with Henry’s own towel—soft and fluffy from the laundry, a giant blue-striped beach towel that covered all the things—through the gap in the shower curtain.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled, feeling stupid. He dried his face and his hair, and then toweled off enough to wrap the terrycloth around his ribs so it could drop to his knees. He peeked around the corner and found Lance there in his scrubs, his black bag clutched in one hand and the other hand on his hip.

  “Are we going to come out and get checked over like a big boy?” Lance asked, lips pursed in disapproval.

  Oh for fuck’s sake. “I’ve been looked over,” he said mutinously even as he took a step out of the shower.

  “By whom?”

  “By the forensic specialist in the morgue where they took the body?”

  “Toe-Tag?” Lance said, gaping. “You met Toe-Tag?”

  “Dr. Tagliare?” Henry had liked the guy—he’d been no-nonsense, kind, and informative. Unlike some other people Henry could mention. “Little guy, with lots of ear-hair? A very zen sort of approach to the world? Yeah. That was him.”

  Lance’s eyes raked over his body. “You are bruised everywhere! Now sit down and let me take care of the eyebrow and those knuckles. And for God’s sake, tell me what—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” Henry said almost desperately.

  “I don’t care!” Lance roared, and Henry was so surprised, he sat flop-bott on the lid of the porcelain throne.

  “Okay.” He wrapped his hands around his knees. “What do you want to know?”

  Lance scrubbed at his face with his free hand before setting up his bag on the small counter by the sink. Carefully, he took out a little silver tray and set up some stitching equipment and some bandages and ointment on it.

  “Let’s start with who hit you?”

  Henry grimaced. “That would be the private investigator who came with the lawyer Galen hired.”

  Lance paused, frowning. “Isn’t Galen a lawyer?”

  Henry let out a breath. “Yes, but as he was so careful to inform me, he’s a corporate attorney. He said I needed a criminal defense attorney, and he’d read up about a guy who took… I don’t know. Underdog cases. So we drive to the offices, and they, like, just moved there. They were still painting when we walked in.”

  “They?”

  “Well, the actual lawyer guy, Cramer, he’s in the back, doing lawyer stuff, I guess. But he’s got this guy named Rivers, wearing, like, beat-up cargo shorts and no shirt. When he finally did put on a shirt, it was so ragged, you guys wouldn’t use it to sop up jizz. Anyway, he’s the PI who works for Cramer, and he’s a fuckin’ piece of work.”

  Lance snorted and slid his gloves on. “Define ‘fuckin’ piece of work.’”

  Henry blew out a breath, trying to describe Jackson Rivers. “Well, I guess he and Cramer are boning—”

  Lance pulled back and looked at him. “Are you trying to sound offensive, or are you just pissed off?”

  Henry regarded him unhappily. God, trying to explain what happened—the way Rivers had insisted on the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and anyone who didn’t play it his way wasn’t worth his time…. That rankled.

  “I just—why’s everybody got to know the big gay secret?” he asked almost tearfully, his conversation with his brother still raw in his soul. “Why does anybody have to know I slept with the guy in the fucking dumpster? Why’s that important? What does that prove to anybody?”

  Lance leaned over closely and began to apply ointment to the cut over his eyebrow, then to the one on his cheek.

  “It proves you’re human, Henry,” Lance said quietly, his breath fanning Henry’s cheek in a way Henry had hungered for since that strangely intimate night on the couch two weeks ago. Since the other interlude the night before. “What did Rivers think it proved?”

  Henry swallowed, remembering their confrontation. The first thing Rivers had done, besides been kind and funny and try to be his friend, was to go talk to Reg about the confrontation two weeks earlier. Reg wasn’t stupid—he’d heard Henry call Scott “Martin Sampson,” and the truth had come out. But not before Henry had stepped on Jackson Rivers’s last nerve.

  “He knew I was lying,” Henry said. “And he just kept at it and kept at it, and then I told him but….” God, he sounded like a little kid. “I pissed him off. He’s… I guess he’s got his own issues. He’s got scars all over his body, Lance. I mean, I’ve seen guys scarred up from deployment who didn’t have anything on this guy. So I yelled, and he asked me to let him out of the car, and I got mad because….” God.

  “Because…?” Lance put the butterfly bandage over his eyebrow with such tenderness, Henry almost didn’t feel the ping when the edges of the skin were drawn together.

  “Because he was like you. Not like you, exactly….” Henry grimaced. He was so tired. That conversation with his brother had been his last straw. He knew all his yearning shone through in his eyes, the way he liked Lance’s almond-shaped eyes, his decisive eyebrows, the kind twist to his full lips. “Not as pretty,” he finished weakly. “Not as… as sweet. But he wanted to be my friend, and I drove him away because apparently I don’t know how to act around nice people. Anyway, he got out of the car, and I lost it, and….” And this was the really humiliating part.

  “You decked him?” Lance asked, horrified.

  “I’m so stupid.” Henry wanted to bury his face in his hands.

  “Oh my God. You hit your lawyer.” Lance’s eyes were as round as his mouth.

  “I hit my private investigator!” Henry protested. And then, glumly, because apparently he’d already proven his maturity level hadn’t improved much since he’d gone cow-tipping on a cold November, he said, “But my lawyer knows about the fight. After we… finished fighting and did the bro-bullshit-make-up thing, we went to look at Martin Sampson’s body, and Cramer was waiting at the hospital with Dr. Tagliare.” Henry sighed. “It was obvious Rivers had wiped the floor with me. God. Everybody knows I had a one-nighter with the dead guy, and now you know I got my ass kicked by a guy I outweigh by about thirty pounds. I should have been the one in the dumpster and saved everybody the fucking trouble.”

  Lance flicked him on the forehead, which was probably the one spot on his face not injured. “Shut up,” he said thickly. “You have no idea how worried I was about you.”

  Henry swallowed against his need to grab Lance and never let him go. “I’m sorry I w
orried you,” he said softly. “I… it’s been sort of a fucking day.”

  They stared at each other for a fraught moment before Lance turned his attention to Henry’s battered body again.

  “You have gravel in your shoulder!” Lance exclaimed. “I thought you said you’d been treated!”

  “Tagliare cleaned me up enough and gave me some hospital scrubs so I could look at the corpse,” Henry said, exhausted. “I don’t think he saw the shoulder thing—it was covered by the scrubs.”

  “Oh dear God!” Lance’s horror was eloquent as he carefully pulled out the last of the parking lot gravel from Henry’s shoulder. “Is there any other part that stings?”

  “My knees?” Henry looked down and saw that the pebbles had sliced him open. One of the cuts was trickling blood again. “My pride,” he mumbled, because that was the worst part.

  “It could not have been that bad.” But it was obvious Lance was only asking to make sure.

  “So bad.” Henry shuddered. “Twice. I… oh my God. He’s not that much older than I am, but once he got the drop on me and grabbed my ear, and the other time—” Jesus. “—I swung first and he took me apart.”

  “Poor baby,” Lance said, kneeling at his feet and working gently on those cuts on his knees. “And he still took you to the autopsy?”

  Henry let out a sigh. “We seemed to have reached… I dunno. Détente. I… him and Cramer, they were pretty up-front. They told me I’d probably be brought in for questioning tomorrow, and my one and only answer needs to be ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ They seemed pretty on top of it. But… I don’t know.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “I… I wanted him to think I was worth it, that was all.”

  Lance grunted. “That sounds sort of… stalky.”

  Henry opened his eyes and let his mouth soften. “I want you to think I’m worth it more,” he said. “Besides, it’s not a sex thing. We’d kill each other. It’s more… this guy? This guy was… you know how everybody wants a hero? You want somebody to be like, somebody who is worthwhile to emulate?”

  Lance nodded. “My attending physician—Dr. Schearer. He’s a really good guy. Decent. Kind. Enjoys the money, but that’s not why he’s there. I watched him treat this woman with schizophrenia today. He was the best. He made her feel valued, like she was important, and explained to her why she needed to take her medication. It was… you know, why people go into healing.”

  “Any crushing going on there?” Henry asked. And while part of him was afraid of the answer, most of him knew.

  “No,” Lance told him. “I’ve got… other prospects.”

  Henry let out a breath and rested his hand briefly in Lance’s hair. “I know the feeling,” he confessed.

  “We just have to clear my guy for a murder he didn’t commit,” Lance said dryly, standing up. “And it would be great if he didn’t piss off his lawyer while he was at it.”

  Henry groaned. “Dude, if only.” Cramer had hardly looked at Henry, though. It had been all Henry and Rivers.

  “You think this guy will forgive you for being a complete assbucket?” Lance asked. “I mean… it sounds like you need him on your side.”

  Henry tilted his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. “God. I have no idea.”

  Lance put a large gauze pad on each knee. “Wait, you said Galen looked him up? When we’re done in here, we can look him up too.”

  Henry nodded docilely. “You know,” he muttered, “the cops are going to pick me up tomorrow probably. We need to tell the guys to call Galen and Cramer when that happens. I….” He took a deep breath. “Everybody remembered me throwing Sampson in the dumpster. And there he is again. It’s just too coincidental. I’m spot-on for it.”

  Lance stretched his shoulders and began to remove his gloves, but he didn’t back up, and Henry drew some comfort from his nearness. “Any idea who did it?”

  Henry felt a small thrill at the next part. Yes, the day had sucked, but the investigation—watching the way Jackson Rivers’s mind worked as he tried to figure out what happened to prove Henry couldn’t have killed Martin Sampson—that had been fascinating.

  “Not yet,” Henry said thoughtfully. “But the autopsy revealed a puncture wound on his hip. Tagliare was going to get a tox screen, even though the blunt force head trauma is what did him in.” Henry shuddered. He hadn’t seen his one-night lover, not really, not when he’d been on the slab. But when Dr. Tagliare had shown him the guy’s liver—scarred and sickly brown from drug dependency instead of healthy and blue-red—Henry had suffered a terrible realization. That guy who’d picked him up, sweet-talking, funny, and yes, a monster in bed, had sore parts, parts that nobody could see.

  Wounds nobody had healed.

  Like the porn models Henry had been dealing with over the last few months. He’d known Cotton was lost, that Lance had his damage, that Curtis seemed just too cool and too all over it to be real. But seeing that… that wrecked body—a boy who was dying before he was dead—had shocked Henry.

  Was that who he was too?

  His disdain—the disdain he used to cover that he was the guy his father had hated, whether his father had known it or not—was that covering up his rotting parts?

  Rivers seemed to think so. Maybe that’s why he’d been so pissed when he’d realized Henry had been lying. Maybe he knew about things that festered. He’d been shirtless when Henry and Galen had walked in—the scars on his body were an assortment of old and new. How much wounding could a person take and still come back whole?

  “You okay?” Lance asked softly, probably because Henry’s brain was chasing its own tail and the silence had stretched on too long.

  “Sure.” God, it was a lie.

  Lance sank to his haunches and made Henry meet his eyes. “Henry, are you okay?”

  “No,” Henry whispered, powerless. Shouldn’t you tell the truth to your friends?

  Lance leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “We’ll get clear of this,” he promised, and Henry’s eyes burned.

  “Why? I mean, what possible reason do I have for staying out of jail? What am I doing on God’s green earth that does anybody any fucking good?” The bitterness, erupting like that, should have been a surprise, and morbidly he thought of Martin Sampson’s liver. Was this why it was called venting your spleen?

  But Lance was apparently a healer, through and through. He cupped Henry’s cheek, the touch making him suck in a breath. Oh, touch. Once upon a time, he’d been touched. Not a lot, not in public, but someone had wanted to touch him.

  “You ride herd on a bunch of hormonally hyperactive models who need someone to remind them that the real world doesn’t revolve around their dicks.”

  Henry smirked and used the end of his towel to wipe his eyes. “That’s important,” he said thickly.

  “I can’t do it myself,” Lance said. He rubbed under Henry’s eye with his thumb, not saying anything when it came away wet. “Now I’m going to leave you to get dressed, and the guys and I will make you something good for dinner, okay? No cleanup duty for you. And someone else can get the trash tomorrow!”

  “That’s awesome.” He grimaced. “But, uh, Lance?”

  “Yeah?” Lance stood and started straightening his black bag.

  “I, uh, didn’t bring in any clothes. My duffel’s in the corner of the living room.”

  Lance laughed softly and closed the bag. “Brush teeth, comb hair—I’ll be back in a sec.” Then he washed his hands and exited, leaving Henry to brush his teeth and comb his hair and try to get his act together.

  Two minutes later Lance appeared with a pair of soft shorts, tighties, and a tank. He set them on the back of the toilet, using his hand on Henry’s back to establish space, and then moved back. He paused for a moment, then caught Henry’s eyes in the mirror, and planted a soft kiss on the back of his neck.

  He straightened and winked, leaving Henry alone and yearning.

  The tighties he’d brought were Henry’s.

  The shorts and
the tank were Lance’s.

  Henry put them on and didn’t say a word.

  That night, after dinner and some television, the guys disappeared into the back. Zep and Fisher (who had not yet paid rent, as far as Henry could tell, but who did contribute to all the household chores) were going back to have really noisy sex. Curtis came out right before the “Oh God, yes!” started.

  Lance was sitting behind Henry in the corner of the couch, Henry between his thighs.

  One arm was wrapped around Henry’s chest, and had been since they’d sat down.

  None of the guys had noticed—none of them had so much as looked at them funny—but as Curtis emerged from the hallway, rolling his eyes, the intimacy suddenly occurred to Henry, and he moved to get up.

  Lance kept him where he sat.

  “’Ssup?”

  “Lance, can I, you know, use your bed? Randy’s in the, uh, threesome bed, Billy’s sleeping in my bed because he can sleep through fuckin’ anything. Cotton’s in Randy’s bed, and, you know, you and Henry have the couch and the air mattress. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Lance said casually. His arm never moved from Henry’s chest, and Henry fell into it, bought into the pretend, that togetherness, comfort, was that easy.

  “Thanks, man. I’ve got a summer-session class at 8:00 a.m. I appreciate the chance to sleep.”

  “No worries,” Lance said. “What class?”

  “Physics 5-C. It helps with kinesiology, and it really helps with the study of prosthetics.”

  “Yikes!” Henry said. “Keep at it. It’s good to have a goal.”

  “Yeah, well, I won’t always be this hot and DTF. Gotta find something I’ll want to do afterwards.”

  “Yeah,” Lance said. “When you’re super fuckin’ old like me.”

  Curtis cackled and then paused. “Uh, Lance—you’re still on the schedule six weeks from now. You, uh, still want that shit?”

  “I’m not sure.” Henry didn’t have to look at his face to know Lance had assumed that carefully neutral look he used when he was trying not to talk about himself.

  “Bobby still films scenes sometimes,” Curtis said quickly. “Just, you know, I could use the cash.”