by Wendy Qualls
“Oh, they’re both capable of behaving,” Anita declared breezily. “Given the proper incentive. And something to do. Eric, could you please get Liam changed out of his nice new polo shirt before he spills something on it? Kimberly, you may help your Uncle Brandon set the table. And Paul, I could use a hand transferring the chicken dip to a serving bowl—could you grab me one? That top cupboard there. I hate how nobody designs kitchens for short people like me. It’s not like I’m the only five-foot-two person ever.”
“It means I can hide your Christmas presents on the top shelves and you’ll never find them,” Eric retorted with a grin, before pressing a kiss to the back of her head in passing and taking Liam from Brandon’s arms. Kimberly started talking a mile a minute, then, all about some TV show Paul had never heard of that she had conned Brandon into watching at least once before, and fifteen minutes later they were all settling down to some absolutely amazing lunch. The adults spooned the chicken and cheese mixture onto slices of freshly-warmed French bread and ate them as open-faced sandwiches; Kimberly and Liam resentfully dragged both their bread and their fingers through the puddle of chicken dip Anita had insisted on depositing on each of their plates. It was the kind of comfortable, home-cooked meal Paul hadn’t had in years, and he was generous in his praise of both the food and the company.
“You don’t get this much anymore, do you?” Brandon asked with a grin after Paul gave Anita another, perhaps overly, enthusiastic compliment. “I get the impression you cook more than I do, but it’s not the same when it’s only for yourself, is it?”
“Yeah, well, just because I can cook doesn’t mean I do.” Paul hadn’t realized how much he’d missed this kind of domestic scene. It had been the standard at home growing up, but then he and Danielle had gotten into high school and there were soccer games and youth group meetings and they’d never had time to eat together as a family anymore. Now the big family meal experience was reserved for holidays and whenever Danielle was able to get back home, and it was always awkward in a way it hadn’t been before he’d had such a big secret to keep. He took another bite. “I would say I need this recipe, but I know realistically I’d never have an occasion to cook a whole Crock-Pot of chicken dip at once. We don’t really even do potlucks much in my department.”
“Paul’s teaching at St. Ben’s now,” Brandon said. “And it kind of blows my mind that I’m old enough to have peers in positions of authority.”
“You and me both,” Eric quipped, and Anita smacked his leg under the table where the children couldn’t see.
“I have a teacher too,” Kimberly announced. “Her name is Miss Stevenson and she’s really pretty and she said I’m the best at counting in the whole class.”
“You are?” Paul asked, the distraction welcome. “Are you in kindergarten yet? Or is this preschool?”
Kimberly was happy to monologue for the rest of the meal, with occasional prompts from Paul and Brandon. Conversation only wrapped up when Liam decisively slammed his little palm down in his chicken dip and smeared it through his hair before Eric could stop him, and Kimberly started laughing so hard she lost her train of thought but didn’t want to surrender the floor. Anita scooped up Liam and shooed the rest of them outside to enjoy the sunny weather while she cleaned up. Eric led the way to the back porch, which had a patio table and chairs and a fair assortment of toys. Kimberly selected a purple ball that came nearly up to her waist and was off in the grass chasing it before the adults had even had a chance to sit down.
“So, St. Benedict’s,” Eric said. “What do you teach?”
“Psychology,” Paul answered. “It’s not a huge department, so I’ve got a random smattering of courses instead of just in my discipline, but my research focus is on human behavior. Specifically on logic and decision-making.”
“No rats in mazes?”
Not any more, thank goodness. “That was undergrad. Worked in the lab for two summers, literally running rats through a radial-arm maze. They smell, they take forever to learn anything, and the breed I had to use was known for biting whenever they got the chance. It was a miserable job.”
“So you decided to specialize in something with fewer rodents.”
“Oh, definitely. In cognitive psych, all I have to deal with in experiments is freshmen.”
“Let me guess,” Brandon interjected. “They get extra credit in your class?”
“Nope. One of the school-wide course requirements for Psych 101,” Paul answered with a grin. “It’s not like I’m the only one needing test subjects. If they don’t want to participate, they can write an extra paper instead, but nobody does that.”
Eric sat forward, looking honestly interested. “So, what, you’re running the college students through the mazes?”
“Almost. Decision-making scenarios.” Paul thought back to the research proposal he’d been tweaking for the last month. The one he should have been finishing up this weekend, since the deadline was in five days. “Right now I’m studying how emotion affects the decisions we make: Do you make less rational decisions when you’re angry or happy or bored or stressed? If so, why? The concept seems pretty simple, I know, but designing an experiment which gives useful quantitative data is harder than it looks. We make choices every day, and they’re rarely the ‘right’ ones from a pure logic perspective. Human emotion is a weird thing.”
“I don’t know,” Brandon murmured. “I find I’m kind of enjoying it right now.” He eyed Paul up and down and flashed a slow, sensual smile.
Eric rolled his eyes with predictable sibling annoyance at his younger brother’s expression, but Paul couldn’t find it in himself to care. He knew he had the exact same goofy grin on his own face.
* * * *
Paul stuffed his weekend clothes back in his duffel and tossed it in the backseat. Brandon packed with a little more care, but they managed to get on the road with no real complications.
They both sat in silence. Paul tried to find something on the radio, but all the stations on Brandon’s presets turned out to be on commercial. “So that was your brother,” Paul finally ventured.
“Yep. Creepy how much he looks and sounds like me, right? Everyone always says that.”
The lunchtime visit had wrapped up mid-afternoon when Kimberly threw a bit of a tantrum and Liam had needed his nap, but Paul couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so welcomed. Eric and Anita had seemed fine with hanging out to chat, which had eventually devolved into Paul and Brandon and Kimberly sitting on the floor playing with toy cars while Liam toddled around them babbling cheerfully in mostly-incomprehensible toddlerese. It was nice to sit there and just be. Paul had always had Danielle as a companion when they were kids, but he couldn’t remember his parents ever being as engaged with them as Eric and Anita were with their offspring.
“I did notice,” he said when the silence was about to get uncomfortable again, “that Liam’s hair sticks up exactly like yours does when you first wake up in the morning. I figured I shouldn’t say it, though. Might have made things a bit awkward.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.” Brandon shot him a sidelong grin. “I’m going to get teased enough about you already.”
“About that. Um.” Paul stared out the window a minute. How do I word this? “Not that they weren’t lovely, but… It seems like we went from ‘nice to see you again, let’s get off together’ to ‘meet the family’ awfully quickly. I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be honest.”
Brandon sobered, but he didn’t dismiss the tentative not-actually-a-question out of hand. “I didn’t mean for it to come off like that,” he said after a moment. “Although I see what you’re saying. You said some stuff last night that got me doing some thinking too. About how you were approaching your sexuality like it was this big forbidden thing. That you felt like you had to ‘pray yourself straight.’ And I thought it shouldn’t be like that. For you or for anyone. And if you were f
eeling held back by the idea that God couldn’t accept you as a gay person, I wanted you to see that not every Christian says that. Getting to play cars with Kimberly and hear Eric tell you all my embarrassing childhood stories—which you totally bluffed about already knowing, by the way, so screw you for that—that was all a bonus. I’m going to get teased, probably for quite a while, but I decided you were worth it.”
For one long moment, Paul let himself imagine it: himself and Brandon, living in some suburban house like Eric and Anita’s, coming home from work and kissing each other hello and grilling burgers on the back porch and who knows, maybe even a kid or two playing in the yard. The American dream. The thing he always assumed he’d have to marry a woman to get. They could join a church somewhere—an open church, where they’d be welcomed and not have anyone try to “fix” them—and he could finally stop hiding. Could he do that? Was he even capable of maintaining a relationship? It’s not like he had the best track record, and his parents would—
Hell. His parents would hate him forever. It wouldn’t just be some new freedom to “be himself,” it would be burning bridges with everything and everyone he ever cared about in his life to date. He’d have to give it all up for even a chance at the dream. He took a long breath and slumped against the back of the seat. I hate this.
“I’m sorry,” Brandon said abruptly. “I guess it was kinda presumptuous of me. To assume you could just turn it all around like that.” He kept his eyes on the road, but his grip tightened visibly on the steering wheel. “Not all churches are the same, so I totally won’t blame you if you want to tell me to go jump in a lake or something. I suppose if you grew up with a stricter religious background, it might make the more liberal churches look…well, fake, I guess. It’s okay.”
Paul stared at him for a long moment. Screw it—he’s here, I’m here, and I’m not going to balk now. “Come stay with me,” he said instead.
“Hmmm?”
“When we get back to St. Ben’s.” Paul hadn’t thought it through before he spoke, but he suddenly realized he very much meant it. “There’s no reason for you to be paying for a hotel room every night, and—” I want you in my bed with me. “—I don’t want to avoid my apartment forever. Staying there alone that one night was horrible, but I don’t want to let Christopher—or whoever—keep me from my own home.”
Brandon looked dazed. “You sure?”
I’m sure I want to wake up beside you every chance I get—and if those chances are running out, then all the more reason to keep you near me. “I’m sure.”
“That would be nice.” Brandon cleared his throat. “Let’s find somewhere to pull over up here and I’ll call the hotel.”
They stopped at a gas station at the next exit. Paul filled the tank, since it was only fair that he pay for gas after bumming most of his meals for an entire weekend, while Brandon looked up the hotel and called. He wasn’t technically supposed to be able to get a refund for that night, since it was a same-day cancellation, but having a corporate account got you little perks like that. He was wearing a smug smile when Paul got back in the car.
“Done,” he announced, and leaned over to place a chaste kiss on Paul’s lips. “I’m all yours now. Bodyguard, bed-warmer, and all.”
Paul didn’t want to admit to himself how nice that sounded.
* * * *
They got back to the apartment right as the sun was setting. There were still adequate groceries in the fridge from the previous week—mostly because they had been eating out so much—so Paul threw some cubed pork and apples together in a skillet with some walnuts and a bit of brown sugar and Brandon deemed it the best home-cooked meal ever. Which was patently not true, but by the time they sat down to eat they were both shirtless and more than a little turned on, and Paul could have been eating shoe leather for all he would have noticed. They left the dishes in the sink and spent the rest of the evening in bed.
It was fantastic.
Chapter 17
Brandon headed off to campus early the next morning. Getting up at seven required two cups of coffee and a lot of aggrieved muttering, but he came back into the bedroom to kiss Paul one more time before he left. “Meeting,” he grumbled. “It’s with all the people who need to give me permission so I can dig further into your Christopher’s records, so I’d better be charming.”
“He’s not ‘my’ Christopher,” Paul countered. And then softened under Brandon’s renewed kiss. “Thanks, though,” he added.
Brandon pressed a last, chaste peck to the top of Paul’s head. “May not be him at all, for all we know—although from what you’ve said, he fits the profile. Introvert, tech-savvy, and with a grudge against the school. I’m kind of hoping it is him, at this point; it would mean my half of the work will be a lot easier.”
“Your half?” Paul raised himself up to a sitting position and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Gah, sorry, still mostly asleep. You were in a hurry.”
“Not that much of a hurry.” Brandon nudged Paul over and sank down on the mattress next to him. “It’s only fair you should get the whole story, I guess. You know how you’re supposed to be my liaison with the psych department?”
Paul nodded.
“The original plan was for me and my team to go through everything on the university servers, file by file, and run each one by someone who should know what’s supposed to be there. It’s—if I can be blunt—a spectacularly stupid idea.”
“Why?”
“It would take forever. And so far, they’re only letting me look at most of what St. Ben’s has sitting around—I’m supposed to let my departmental liaisons look at any ‘sensitive’ files and report back to me if something looks off.”
Paul snorted. “I highly doubt Dr. Kirsner would approve of me snooping through anything like that. No wonder this is so hush-hush.”
“Like I said, a fucking stupid plan. I’m hoping to talk my way into getting unlimited administrator access, though, so I don’t have to go through intermediaries. Which would also be stupid of them to allow me, but it’s the easiest way to get on top of this, and someone up the chain is already not too bright because the president has administrator access anyway.”
“That’s bad?”
“You’ve met him, I’m sure. Do you really think a man like that needs to be able to make back-end changes to the official website? Or to go mucking around in the salary database?”
Paul thought back to his last conversation with the current St. Benedict’s president—the man was practically a Luddite. Albeit good at glad-handing and securing donations from rich alumni. “I see your point.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say he didn’t trust your IT department, so he demanded an administrative account so he could ‘keep an eye on things.’ He’s the president so, of course, no one will say no to him. I’m going to make another wild guess and say that he’s probably not very good at picking passwords.”
Paul blinked. “You think Christopher—or someone else—guessed his password? That’s all there is to it?”
“That plus the technical know-how and actual physical access to the server room, yes.” Brandon leaned in for one last, take-no-prisoners kiss, then forced himself up off the bed. “Right. Off to work. You enjoy your no-classes-until-eleven Monday morning schedule and I’ll see you tonight, all right?”
It wasn’t quite a “see-you-later-I-love-you,” but it felt close. Paul spent the next two hours catching up on housework and wondering whether he liked it that way or not.
* * * *
Brandon sent a text at 5:30 that he was in the car, but he didn’t get back to the apartment until closer to six. Paul had supper well on the way when Brandon walked in the door.
“Hi, honey, I’m home.” Brandon grinned and set his laptop case down next to the kitchen table. “That smells amazing. Probably sounds pathetic to say this, but I’ve been thinking about yo
u all day.”
“It’s mutual.” Paul gave the chicken another poke with his spatula. There was something comforting about being able to cook, even if he usually didn’t bother. Usually on a weekday evening—well, any evening—he was already sitting on his sofa and burying himself in a game and pretty much zoned out for the rest of the day. This afternoon, though, he’d zipped off campus as soon as his two o’clock seminar finished and swung by the grocery store on the way home. He wandered the aisles, wondering about what sort of fruit Brandon would like best, whether he drank skim milk more often than 2 percent, and whether he might prefer salmon to tuna. It had been a while since Paul last did a good stock-up-the-pantry grocery run anyway; he told himself it wasn’t entirely because he wanted to impress Brandon.
Still, though, by the time he got home he had all the makings of chicken Florentine and another hour (or two) until Brandon got back. Enough time to throw in a last load of laundry, finish cleaning the bathroom, and generally become shockingly domestic in a fantastically short amount of time. Paul knew he hadn’t done this much cleaning all on the same day since—
Since Christopher. Crap. Some of his all-day happy buzz melted away.
Brandon pressed a kiss on his lips right there in the middle of the kitchen, as if they’d been doing this forever. As if he could make this their daily routine. “Got a voicemail from my mother today,” he announced after they finally broke the kiss so Paul could stir the chicken and spinach mixture. “Anita called her and she’s decided she wants to meet you.”
Paul blinked and turned to look at him over his shoulder. “What happened to ‘it’s not like that?’”
“I told her we weren’t dating. She wants to meet you anyway.” Brandon pressed up against Paul’s back as they faced the stove, leaning his chin on Paul’s shoulder and wrapping his arms around his waist. “Mmmm—I love the way you smell, you know that? Anyway, she asked if I’d be willing to bring you along to the house party she’s holding the Saturday after next. I said I’d ask you about it.”