by Jaime Samms
Reluctantly, he pulled out his phone and called Vance. He wasn’t about to go out onto the street with the screaming, frenetic throng by himself.
17
“HELLO?” VANCE hadn’t looked at the screen of his cell to see who was calling, so Len’s voice, slightly stiff and uncertain, caught him off guard.
“What’s wrong?” Vance asked. Concern bled in around the edges of his residual anger at Len, and he leaned back in his office chair.
“I’m stuck,” Len said. He sounded young over the phone, and there was a wild tinge to his voice that pricked all Vance’s strongest protective instincts.
“Stuck?”
“I’m at Jacko’s Guitar Magic.”
Vance closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the chair. What were the odds, of all the music and repair places within sixty miles, Len would have actually decided to take Kilmer’s advice and go to Jacko’s shop? Apparently, pretty good.
“What are you still doin’ there?”
“Brought my guitar to get fixed. We got to talking. But now I’m stuck. His repair guy called everyone he knew, and they’re waiting outside the door. I can’t leave.”
“Yes, you can. Just walk out the door, get into the truck, an’ come home.”
“Last time a fan accosted me, I practically maimed her. Vance….”
“Darlin’, you can do this.”
“They’re chanting and banging on the window. They keep trying the door like it’s going to magically unlock.”
“Okay.” He couldn’t ignore the plea in his lover’s voice, or the fact he was calling from Jacko’s. If it was a panic attack over nothing, Jacko would have made Len suck it up and do what he had to do, but he had obviously condoned the phone call when the man did not encourage dependency or weakness. So the concern had to be real, and the fragility in Len’s voice was certainly not faked. Len needed him, and Vance was helpless against the desire to answer the need. “Sit tight. I’ll send someone to get you.”
“Don’t hang up!”
“I have to hang up to make the call.”
The line was quiet for a few minutes, then Len spoke again. What he said was the last thing Vance expected, and yet, he couldn’t actually be surprised by it, under the circumstances.
“You slept with Jacko.”
“Over the phone, Len?” His heart thudded in time to some whispering grunge discord half heard in his head, a projection of Len’s disquiet.
“Every time I turn around, there’s another guy who knows what you are.”
“You make it sound like I’m a monster.”
“Just….”
“You come home, and we’ll talk about this.”
“How many?” Len asked plaintively.
“Len, I didn’t keep a fuckin’ list. I’m famous. I’m single—”
The phone went dead.
“Oh, fuck.” He ended the already closed call and slumped. “I was single, Len, for God’s sake.” He tried to dial his lover back, but the call went straight to voice mail. “You wait there for me, Len, so help me. Wait there for me!”
He hurried to the yard, found Kilmer, and handed him his keys. “I need you to pick up Maggie and her girls. I’ve got an emergency.”
“Now what?”
“High maintenance, Kil. That boy is going to give me a fuckin’ heart attack. Can you handle gettin’ the girls?”
“I’ll take care of it.” Kilmer shook his head as he walked off.
Vance hurried to the front of the house and did what he very rarely bothered to do, alerting his driver and two bodyguards from their office off the garage. “I need you, Dennis.” He nodded to the guards, and they got to their feet, straightening their suit jackets.
The young man smiled brightly. “Sure thing, Mr. Ashcroft. Where are we going?”
Vance gave him the address and climbed into the backseat while the muscle he’d roused got into the front. He hated the inaction of sitting, doing nothing for the half-hour ride to Jacko’s shop, but he needed to be sure he had a safe place to bring Len once they’d navigated the crowd. And there was a conversation to be had, which he couldn’t have while he was trying to drive. One of the men would have to drive the truck home.
“Get us there fast, will you, Dennis?” he said into the intercom that connected his comfortable compartment to the front seats.
“Yes, sir,” Dennis agreed from behind the wheel and pulled out onto the long dirt road leading to the highway. The drive was going to be torture.
LEN STARED out the door at the crowd of milling faces. They stared back, waiting for him to open the door. The anticipation was manic and made his heart skip around in his chest like a bunny on crack. He tightened his grip on the handle of his new guitar case and gripped the deadbolt.
“I still say you should wait, son,” Jacko said behind him. “If he said he was sending someone, then it’s best you hang on until the cavalry comes.”
“He also said he’s single, Jacko, so what fucking difference does it make? What the hell am I if he’s single? I need to be out of here.”
“And go where?”
“Who cares? Just—”
Jacko placed a hand over Len’s on the lock and gently but firmly pulled him away. “You listen to me, boy. Vance said to wait, you wait. Whatever else you may be, you belong to him, and you’ll obey him.”
“Fuck you.”
Jacko’s fingers tightened around his. “I’m going to ignore that outburst, but another like it, and I’ll have to let him know—”
“That I’ve been a bad boy?” Len jerked his hand away. “Why? So he can spank me? Or send me back out to the barn to shovel more of his shi—”
“That’s enough,” Jacko said, his voice low and firm. “You watch your mouth. Show some respect, boy.”
Len clamped his mouth shut and tried to ignore the shiver that coursed through him. It was all he could do to keep the Yes, Sir behind closed lips. Jacko had no power over him. The man was just an old, washed-up musician. He turned his back and seethed in comparative privacy.
“You won’t disrespect the man on my premises, is that understood?” Jacko asked.
Len remained perfectly, rigidly still and silent.
“Is that understood?” Jacko’s voice remained determined, but never unkind or hard.
“What does it matter to you?”
“It matters because he deserves your respect.”
“You think I don’t respect him?” Len set the guitar down, but kept his back to Jacko.
“I think you called him for help and hung up on him when he said something you didn’t like. I think if that’s what you call respect, you need a few lessons my old pupil is, for some reason, reluctant to teach you, but rest assured, I will. There are protocols, and a relationship in this arena that truly works follows protocols. Because it has to. Because there have to be rules and limits and parameters, and you have to respect those things the same as he does.”
“I don’t belong to him, you know.” Len crossed his arms and scowled at the crowd now settling in to wait. Some were sitting, backs against the store wall, asses on blankets and cushions like the ones handed out for the cold, hard plastic seats in ball stadiums.
“Is that what you think?” Jacko’s voice had retreated, and Len finally turned to see him settle back on his stool, the red guitar in his hands. “Because seems to me, the media has the right of things and you are using him, without even a thought for what you’ve left behind or what it might do to him or his career. They say you’re in this for yourself and what it can get you, and I would hate to think that’s true.”
“The media are a bunch of asshole liars,” Len spat.
Jacko’s lips tightened. A harsh twang sounded from the guitar. “So why are you with him? The sex?”
Len curled a lip. “That a problem for you?” Jacko didn’t need to know how sparse the sex was, or why.
Jacko laughed. “Not in the least, son. I’ve got what I need. Seems to me, you’re the
one could use a lesson or two in good behavior.”
“You don’t know shit about me.”
“I know a damn spoiled brat when I see one, and honestly, I can’t see what Vance sees in you.”
“He loves me!”
Jacko’s smile softened. “Then why on earth did you hang up on him and treat him with such contempt?”
Len rubbed his hand hard over his arm. “Because I’m a jerk.”
Jacko shook his head. “So stop behaving like a jerk, and start acting like a man worthy of someone as fine as Vance Ashcroft. God help that boy, but he wants you, and who am I to judge him for that? You”—he pointed a finger at Len, and even across the room, Len fancied he could feel the jab of it against his skin—“should start behaving as if you deserve it.”
Len furrowed his brow. “What do you know about any of this?”
“I know what I hear on the radio, what Tommy reads every day on the Internet. I know what the world thinks, and I know what Vance is like. I see in you what would draw him, and I can understand why he’d want to save you. He saves broken things, and God bless him, most of the time, manages to make them whole again. You might be his match in that department, but it won’t stop him trying, son. Least you can do is meet him part of the way.”
Len wished he had some biting response for Jacko. The man made sense, though, and the part of Len that craved containment responded to the dominant air about Jacko, despite Len’s attempt to hang on to his irritation.
When Jacko began to play, Len found a bare patch of floor and wall where the throng outside couldn’t see him and sat to listen. He didn’t recognize anything the older man played, but it was soothing and calm, and he liked it, even if it was completely without edge or grit. Eventually, he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting the sound wash over him and clean away some of the muck of emotion that always seemed to cling to him and grow thorns and barbs. He wished, for once in his life, he could be less prickly. Less angry. More like the men around him who could see the way things were and accept that it was all good.
Nothing was good that he touched, though. It had been that way as long as he could remember. Far back, even before Trevor, into his childhood when his father never smiled and his mother disappeared for days on end and his uncle… had the man been his uncle? He didn’t remember anymore. It was too far away in his childhood and too messy, and he hadn’t ever managed to say or do the right thing to make any of them happy. What if he spread the same taint to Vance that he had to every other person and thing he touched?
“You’re thinking loud enough I can hear you from here,” Jacko said softly.
Len looked at the old man and found Jacko watching him intently.
“I may not be the most gentle old cuss, son, but I can listen.”
Len lifted his knees and braced his arms on top, picking at the calluses once more hardening on his left fingertips. “You ever think about the first thing that ever went wrong in your life, Jacko?”
Jacko shook his head. His deep-brown gaze remained steady on Len’s face.
“I was eight.”
“Eight.” Jacko plucked a few quick notes and chased after them with a bass riff that vibrated in the room. “That so? Awful young to ruin the world, don’t you think?”
Len smiled, but the expression was thin and fell away quickly. “I had this uncle. Sort of.” He frowned, trying to remember. “He was a friend of my dad’s maybe, I’m not sure. He was sketchy. Dad tolerated him. Mom hated him. I was eight. What did I know? I went with him when he asked, and I let….” He shivered. “What the hell did I know, right? Dad’s friend said it was fine. I believed him. He left me with this other guy a couple of times. It wasn’t horrible. It just—” He shrugged and folded his legs, wrapping both arms around his middle. “It was what it was, right? My dad beat the snot out of his friend when he found out about it, though. And the guy he left me with….” Another, harder shiver ran through him from head to foot, and Len fixed his gaze on the floor. “My dad did awful things to that guy, and that was the worst part. That’s what I had nightmares about. I thought… eventually, he’d do that to me too. He could never really look at me after that. He stopped going after mom when she vanished, and finally, she just didn’t come back. Then he told me he had to move and I wasn’t going with him. He gave me to Child Services and left. Never looked back.”
He was quiet for a while, and the music wafted a plaintive trail through the thick morass of his story.
“I should look back on that and be grateful to him for protecting me, but….” Len chewed on his bottom lip and tried to focus on the blurring floor tiles. “He just couldn’t ever look at me after he found out. It was like I was some alien thing he couldn’t quite see properly. I was… ugly to him. I never even wondered what happened to him, you know. I guess maybe he went to jail for what he did, but I have no idea. I don’t even want to know. I just….”
For a long time, Len sat where he was, sniffling, listening to the gentle strands of Jacko’s music slip around the room and wrap him in a blanket of sound and invisible motion he could rock to. Maybe, if he absorbed enough of it, he could pretend all the blood and gore inside would be soaked up and cleaned away. That he could be something else. Something clean and better. Something that deserved the attentions of a man like Vance.
“Never talked about this before,” he said softly. “Never thought about it. But the dreams, all the nightmares I had before Ace were about that day my father… did that. I never cared about some old fuck touching me or taking pictures. But what my old man did, that was….” He shivered.
Jacko made a noncommittal sound and kept playing.
“Fathers and sons, Jacko. They always fucked up?”
“No.”
Len’s head shot up at the sound of the gravel-infused voice that answered his question.
Vance stood over him, face pale, eyes haunted. “My father was a good man.” He crouched. “Maybe yours was too, and he just couldn’t live with failing you like that. Maybe what he did was his atonement for letting you down.”
“I didn’t need him to maim some perverted stranger. I needed him to love me.”
Vance nodded and joined Len on the floor against the wall. “I know.”
Len rested his head on Vance’s shoulder and together, they listened to Jacko play and soaked in the heavy atmosphere. Len felt bloody and used and frightened all over again, and there was no comfort from Vance. Clearly, his lover had no idea what to do with the information. And if he didn’t know how to fix it, how could Len ever figure it out?
THAT NIGHT, in the dark next to Vance, who lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, Len’s nightmares were as bad as they’d been when he was a kid, dark and raw and terrifying, and sometimes, the blood belonged to that strange, long-ago man whose face he couldn’t remember and whose name he’d never learned.
Sometimes it was Len’s, and the image that finally catapulted him out of sleep, swinging wildly and feeling the hard bone of Vance’s forearms against his thin wrists, was one of Trevor falling under his father’s blows, disappearing under all that hate and anger.
Vance did finally hold him, though, if only to stop the flailing and save himself the bruises of another of Len’s sleep-boxing episodes. His deep, soothing voice, the soft caress of his hands over Len’s back were comforting, and for a little while, if he couldn’t sleep, Len could at least feel as though he wasn’t tearing into pieces.
When he’d calmed and Vance released his hard hold, Len rolled toward him and touched his face. “I want my cuffs back.”
Vance studied him in the light from the bedside table lamp. “I couldn’t put them on you when I wasn’t sleeping here. It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re here now.”
Vance was quiet a long time, and Len had decided the man was going to refuse the request, thereby implying he wouldn’t always be sharing Len’s bed, but finally Vance closed fingers around Len’s wrists and kissed his knuckles. “It
implies a lot of rules I don’t think you’ll like.”
“Such as?”
“If I cuff you every night before you go to bed, then you go when I say. You get up when I say. It’ll be a ritual. It’ll be a thing you don’t refuse, no matter how you might be feeling that day.”
Len twisted his hands and Vance let him go. With a sigh, Len rolled onto his back. “It’ll be a commitment you’re not sure you want to make.”
Vance didn’t respond, and Len turned over to put his back to Vance.
“Okay,” Len said. “Forget it.”
Quiet invaded the space between them, and Len had decided he was right when Vance finally spoke. It wasn’t about the cuffs, though, and Len’s spine went rigid at the question.
“How is it this happened to you and no one knows about it?” Vance asked into the darkness.
Len struggled to get his breathing back to normal and fight the influx of memories. He shrugged. He couldn’t claw out of the dark space between the dusty images to find words.
“I don’t get how this disappeared off the radar,” Vance said.
A hand touched Len’s shoulder, and a billow of fear wafted up to dissipate into the atmosphere of comfort Vance offered as he slid that hand down and around Len’s body. It made the memories sharper, but from the cocoon of Vance’s embrace, Len stared them down.
“I guess the social workers always knew. Probably my foster parents knew. I didn’t tell anyone, though.”
“Not even Trevor?”
Len shook his head. “Especially not him. I didn’t want to lose his family, like I lost mine. His dad was weirded out enough about Trev being gay. I didn’t want to give him a reason to kick me out. Trev’s mom was the closest I ever got to a real one.”
Vance hugged him, and Len sighed at the press of lips in the thick curls on top of his head. He rolled over to face Vance and closed his eyes, tangling his fingers up in Vance’s T-shirt.
“Ouch!” Vance squirmed and gripped his wrist. “Hairs.”
“Sorry.”
Kissing his head again, Vance settled back and lightly circled Len’s wrist.