I shook my head, heart pounding. It was too soon for me to be having fancy vacations. It had to be too soon. There was no way I'd earned anything like —
"If it's all right with Ellery," he said cautiously, "and it won't stress either of you more, you can fly out and join him. It's a paradise there. We have a regular arrangement for Ellery to go there and rest. It's peaceful, the sand is white, the water's clean, and there are a lot of natural, local foods. Very healthy. I recommend it highly." He looked at me expectantly, but I didn't speak. "You two seem close lately. Would you like to ask him how he feels about you sharing his vacation, to be sure it's all right?"
I nodded, and he gave me a brief smile that touched his eyes, then excused himself from the room, giving me privacy before I broke down and cried. It was too much, too fast, and far more than I could ever deserve. I was a nobody, and generally an annoying one. Now I had Kevin, who was clearly ready to move heaven and earth for me, just because I needed a rest.
I had come very close to crying in front of him, and that wouldn't do.
Once I'd gotten my emotions under control, I called Ellery. He sounded just as he had before, and it came as a shock to me to realize he didn't know yet how much things had changed.
"Ell," I said commandingly, "put down the contracts and go pack. Kevin's fixed it. You're going to the island after all."
"What?"
"And . . . how do you feel about me joining you?"
He laughed, choked and close to tears. "Will you? I really wish you would."
#
Three days later, we'd both been whisked off to a beautiful island in the sun. They had coconut drinks, massages if you wanted them, beautiful clear water to swim in, and air conditioning in the rooms. We were spoiled rotten.
I felt guilty about being spoiled like this, but it did cut the stress and tension almost immediately.
Ell was looking haggard and frazzled when I first saw him. His hair was a wreck, and he looked like he'd barely slept in a week. The moment he got off the plane, he walked over to me. I opened my arms, and he opened his, and then we were holding on to each other. He sagged in my arms, not even trying to be strong. He just wanted to be held, poor guy.
"Tough time, eh?" I rubbed his back not quite briskly. It felt good to hold him. But I also didn't want him getting any ideas. Although getting ideas with a handsome guy I was fond of during a tropical island vacation actually sounded pretty fun.
We had rooms next to each other, each of them spacious enough to live in comfortably. There was room service, and fancy cooking you could order, and the resort did everything possible to pamper us. The people who worked there and Ellery seemed familiar and comfortable with each other. There was unobtrusive but strong security all over the place.
We rarely saw other guests, but when we did, I recognized some of them from the news or movies. They were famous, rich, and this was where they came to really get away from it all.
The island was all resort. It had once been a tiny, uninhabited island that flooded completely several times a year. It had been built up with concrete and sand had been hauled in. Surrounding wave breaks and artificial reefs helped protect it. Now it was a very expensive, very remote, and very beautiful tropical resort.
Ell and I did almost everything together there. We walked along the clean white sand, swam, wandered through the native and introduced vegetation, and got drinks at the little beachside huts.
A few tropical species of birds had come to live on the island, and we loved trying to spot them or identify their raucous calls. It felt like an adventure, and yet incredibly decadent. They gave us a chocolate baked Alaska as our dessert the first day we were there. It was shockingly good; all the food was.
I developed a nice tan fairly quickly, whereas Ell stayed deathly pale or else burned to a crisp. He put a lot of lotion on — and he often wanted my help putting it on his back. He ran around without a shirt on a lot, displaying his slender waist and defined abdominal muscles.
It was kind of hot, him standing in front of me, waiting patiently for me to slather stuff on the defined, slender musculature of his back. I had to work hard to keep my touch impersonal, to stay matter of fact instead of stroking him.
And he enjoyed it very much, clearly. Sometimes he slanted a little smile at me, not smug, not a smirk, but something just short of that — an awareness, an enjoyment, a slightly teasing attitude in his gentle, whimsical gaze. He wasn't quite laughing at me — not quite. I pretended not to notice — sometimes. Other times I whacked him with my beach towel and he yelped and danced away from me, laughing.
He was really almost a different guy when he finally got to relax. He stopped seeming like a frightened bundle of nerves who probably chugged caffeine until he was just short of the lethal limit.
"I've always been a worry wart," he confided to me, talking in a lazy, sleepy voice as we toasted ourselves on the beach, stretched out on towels and facing the achingly beautiful blue ocean. "I worried about everything growing up. I spent a lot of time under psychiatric care, if you know what I mean."
I didn't say anything. I breathed, wondering if he meant he'd been locked away, drugged, counseled endlessly . . . It made me shudder, the thought of him going through so much.
He stretched a little. "Everybody worries, but not everybody has a lot of their worries turn out to be factual. I did — and it was terrifying. When they, um, started the ESRB, I got tested, and it was a big deal. It was a huge change in my life. People took my worries seriously now, and wanted me to hone them. Instead of looking at a life in and out of institutions and on various antipsychotics, I was looking at a life with great pay and benefits, and respect. People actually believing what I said."
He sighed. "But I still worry, you know? It's really incredibly stressful knowing I have to pay attention to all my anxieties, cultivate and grow them, and let others in on the weird depths of their confusing inaccuracies. I'm not ranked high enough to be super-specific most of the time. Aside from those few visions, which are often as not highly personal in nature, there are so many vague . . . feelings.
"I'm worried right now about the guy who brings us room service. I think his name is Mike, but I can't remember for sure. I'm getting a vague, worried, uneasy feeling about him. Is he in danger? Is he a danger to someone else? I don't know. I don't know him well enough to risk telling him in case I send him off the deep end and he's scared of his shadow for the rest of his life, or it drives him to drink, or something else even worse."
He sighed again. "But I'm worried. I don't have anything specific enough to help — just the anxiety. And of course with contracts, it seems less personal but it doesn't make it any less important. The company has taken such good care of me, and when things work right, they can do important research, provide lots of health care and jobs, and generally be a benefit in the world. So every contract, every detail I have to go over is important — and that's almost immobilizing it's so stressful, to feel so responsible and yet not have the tools to know what's actually going to happen. I just have . . . feelings. Impressions. Fears and anxieties and niggling doubts. It's . . . it's terrible."
"I'm sorry." I was shocked he'd been under so much stress. And I understood a little better Kevin's fury about his being kept from his vacation.
"Getting away is a help," he admitted. "I don't have to do anything here. I just have to rest. Sun myself. Watch tons of bad TV." He laughed, a lighter and happier sound now. "And I get to do it with you this time."
He turned and looked at me, lowering his dark sunglasses and peering at me over the top. It was a very intimate look, filled with enjoyment and something soft, tender and cherishing enough to embarrass me and make me look away quickly. He laughed again, very quietly, a soft and happy sound. Delighted, almost.
Sometimes I felt like he was just waiting. Like that was his strongest weapon of all, and the one I was least able to counter.
#
We watched a movie sitting on my bed, whi
ch was huge and comfy and decadently soft, and ended up sprawled out, asleep. I woke up with him curled against me, trusting, warm, and alive.
He looked very hot indeed. Though he was smaller than I was and would always be slight, he'd worked out a lot and had gotten some really great muscle definition. I wanted to touch, to let my fingers linger on his abs, to stroke his arms, neck . . . and lower.
I turned away, and he came awake next to me, stretching like a cat, slow and languid. "Peter?" he asked me, laying a hand on my side sleepily.
"You should call me Pete."
He drew back, eyes getting a little wider. "Really? I like Peter." He tried to stretch out and lay a hand on my stomach, but I moved away before he could.
He made a disappointed little sound in his throat.
"Are you always flirty when you just wake up?"
He shrugged, then turned it into a stretch, arms behind his head. But he was watching me now, aware of my mood.
I knew that I appealed to him, but I felt angry and unpleasant when I gave it too much thought. The idea of ruining our friendship for some sex made me really upset. But we still both wanted each other, and he was being less and less shy about letting me know he was attracted to me.
There was nothing pushy about Ellery, but the awareness in him of wanting me didn't go away. Sometimes I felt it more strongly than others but it was always there.
And he was so damned patient about it. He withdrew if I wanted him to withdraw. He'd be my friend. He wouldn't nag or push endlessly.
But he wanted.
And I felt it now; I knew what it was in his eyes when he looked at me so warmly. The guy was halfway in love with me, and that sucked. Because it wouldn't work out, and he was basically the only friend I had right now.
I'd never been great at making friends. I was too restless and annoying, too aware of when other people weren't telling the truth. I needed to be able to lie better and put up with people's bullshit more convincingly if I wanted to make or keep friends. Or else only befriend really honest people.
Yep, tons of those around.
Even if I was being selfish, I really, really didn't want to lose Ellery. If sex messed up our friendship — and it always changed things — I'd be really depressed about it.
If one of us ended up falling in love, it would be even worse when it inevitably and painfully ended. No, I had no hope of anything good coming from these sorts of feelings, and I wished he'd knock it off.
"Hey." He touched my arm, and I turned back to him.
His gaze was serious, even solemn. "If you want, I won't tease you at all tonight — or tomorrow, okay?"
I felt myself relax slightly. Putting this discussion off . . . that meant a lot to me. "Okay."
He patted my knee, trying to be avuncular, I could tell. It felt a little condescending, frankly. "Okay. I won't jump your bones, or make remarks, or wink at you. Although, you know, you kind of started it."
"What?" I had not.
He grinned. "Almost everything you do is a flirt. You're a total flirter."
"That's not a word."
"I believe it is. Anyway, you do. You always — touch. And you make jokes that could be sexual a lot. And you called me 'sailor' the first day we met! If that's not fast, what is?"
"I meant your room décor," I said with as much lofty hauteur as I could manage. But I was blushing.
"O-kay," said Ellery, drawing the word out to show he didn't believe me. "If you say so . . . sailor."
And then he had the nerve to wink at me.
#
I had a question for Ellery.
"Do you ever feel guilty? I mean, we have so much — this vacation, the pay we get, the way they're taking care of us—" I shrugged, feeling unequal to the task of explaining myself.
"Well, that's a complicated question, and I have a lot of thoughts on the subject. Do you want to hear them?"
He slid his glasses down and squinted at me. We were stretched out in the sun, side by side again on the beach. It was relaxing, aside from the existential crisis.
"Sure. I'm not going anywhere."
He slid his glasses back down and lay back. I didn't let my eyes linger on his body. He was looking particularly fine this morning, although I didn't want to think about that. Relaxed and lazing in the sun in an almost nude condition was clearly his good side.
"Well, I've given this a lot of thought," he said in a languid fashion. "First of all, I do think if you have money it's only responsible and right to help people who need help — within what you can manage, and in responsible ways. There's a lot of good, responsible charities out there that help people in concrete ways and actually make a difference. I give to several of them.
"Secondly, is it too much? What we have now? I do feel very lucky. But I'm not sure I'd be here without some of these extraordinary measures. I can just as easily see my life going a different way, living as a homeless bum, muttering to myself and living in a cardboard box. Or worse — brain burned out on drugs that are supposed to fix my delusions, locked in a small white room . . ."
He shuddered delicately. "I've been closer to both than I'd like to admit. So, yes, I need help if they want me to do this job — and it is a job, whatever anyone thinks. It's even an important job. I might never save a life or create something or broker world peace, but I'm doing something that needs to be done — something that helps keep powerful people honest.
"The decisions these companies, investors, scientists, and lawyers make affect so much for everybody. It really does matter. And in doing my part to help keep them honest, I need extra help, extra support, and lots of downtime and rest. The money is one way to show I'm worth it, that they're going to do their best, or at least give me the resources to take care of myself. Frankly, I need all the help I can get." He laughed hollowly, sounding a bit hurt. "I don't do so well without it."
"I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to judge you or—"
"No, I know." He reached across and laid a hand comfortingly on my arm, giving it a squeeze. "I know you weren't, honey. But it's . . . it's complicated. I do feel guilty about having a lot some of the time. A generation ago, neither one of us would've had these opportunities. A few generations ago we might've just been killed. For being gay, or for 'witchcraft.' We're extremely lucky to live now, and I know it. But I do need the help, the rest, and people looking after me closely so I don't wear myself out completely." He added very softly, "And so do you."
"Probably," I admitted, thinking uncomfortably of my job at the police station. Everyone had thought it was so easy, such a cushy job, and yet it had almost killed me.
I came to a decision. "I'll try to give away enough of the money I'm earning to assuage my guilt and help people who need help, but still save up as much as I can so I'll be able to quit if I ever have to."
He nodded. "If they do their jobs right, we can work here forever. If we get enough rest and help, there's literally no reason we should ever have a physical, mental, or emotional breakdown doing what comes naturally to us."
I thought about that. "We could be here forever, if they treat us right, and if there's no pressing reason to leave."
"Like the company being crooked or something, trying to get us to lie about important things," he agreed, nodding.
"I trust Kevin. As long as he's here, I think we're golden." I sighed again, then stretched out a little more comfortably, wriggling into a good position and stretching my abs a little, hoping they'd get even browner in the sun. "I really do trust Kevin. He's an honest guy, and he tries really hard."
I caught a twitch of the mouth from Ellery, like he was holding something back — a grin, a laugh.
"What was that?" I said. "You're smirking."
"No, no. Hardly a smirk." But he was.
I reached over and pushed him, and he laughed then. "All right. I think it's cute that you have a crush on Kevin."
"I do not! And you accuse me of having a crush?"
Instead of getting embarrassed, or at
least having the decency to drop the topic now, he giggled. "Somebody's got a cru — ush."
"It's a perfectly professional relationship, and I—"
"Uh-huh."
" — like him a professional and appropriate amount."
Except I did sort of like being right next to him on a long flight so I could fall asleep against his shoulder. But that wasn't the same as a crush. I felt safe with Kevin, not excited and half turned on and nervous and sweaty and goofy the way you do about a crush.
Besides, there was never going to be any sexual interest there on his side, and I couldn't see myself feeling any for him, either.
For me, being wanted is a big turn-on. Hot guys are another. There was nothing wrong with Kevin, but I didn't find him hot, and he definitely didn't want me. His care and protection meant a lot to me, though, and I suspected it always would. He had a warm place in my heart, and I liked it when he took care of me. That wasn't a crush.
The new sassy and silly Ellery continued all day. Although he kept his word, he was still having a lot of fun teasing me about other subjects, and while he didn't go out of his way to flirt or, as he'd put it, jump my bones, he definitely didn't bother with an ounce more clothing than he absolutely required.
That was fairly normal, but all the same, I had to keep reminding myself not to notice, to look but not touch — or better yet, not to even look.
When we were ready to watch a movie that evening, after a wonderful day of swimming, sunning ourselves, laziness, delicious meals, and having a glass of wine together as we watched the sunset, I told him he should go ahead and pick the movie.
"I'm probably going to fall asleep anyway. I feel so lazy tonight." I stretched widely and yawned.
"You swam a lot today." He cast me a very affectionate look.
KEEP (Men of the ESRB Book 2) Page 15