When Tony Met Adam (Short Story)

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “You look terrified,” Tony said.

  “I’m not,” Adam said. “Just get the fuck out of my house, kid, okay? You were good, but you weren’t that good.”

  And Tony knew he wasn’t going to win this fight.

  Not today, anyway.

  So he released Adam’s hands and climbed off of him, and off the bed.

  And Adam pretended to shift into a position that would let him go back to sleep, again giving Tony the back of his head.

  Tony touched him one last time—he couldn’t leave without at least that much—his hand resting briefly on Adam’s tousled hair. “I’ll see you in a few months,” he said, then he went back down the hall to where he’d left his T-shirt and sandals.

  And right as he let himself out, a half a second before the door closed and locked securely behind him, he could’ve sworn he heard Adam calling from the bedroom. “Stay alert.” Or maybe it was another “Whatever.”

  Either way, it was more than he expected, and it made him smile.

  Saturday, January 19, 2008

  Adam could hear the pounding beat of the music, even before he opened the outer door.

  But now it washed over him at too high a decibel level to even try to speak. So he merely nodded to the bouncers, who let him cut ahead of the waiting line and step into the crowded darkness of the club.

  The dance floor was packed, and half of the dancers already had their shirts off. And okay. Already didn’t exactly qualify. It was nearly one A.M. He was the late arrival. No doubt everyone here had been working up a sweat for quite some time. They were closing in on the size-up-the-possibilities-make-a-connection-stagger-home-together-and-get-laid part of the evening.

  Which was precisely why he was here.

  Fucking Tony Vlachic—getting inside of his head like that. Making him surf the news websites, looking for crumbs of information about terrorist activity in Afghanistan, trying to get a sense of exactly where the kid might be going and …

  It was stupid. He was stupid. But the kicker came when he checked his email and found a message waiting for him from A Vlachic, with a dot-mil ending to his email address.

  The subject header was empty, and the body of the thing said only Always do. T.

  He’d sent it from his BlackBerry—a response to Adam’s stupidly shouted Stay alert—mere seconds after he’d walked out Adam’s door.

  Adam had hit DELETE, because Jesus, the way his heart had leapt at seeing that email there made him feel sick to his stomach.

  Which was why he’d come here.

  It was that or finally take the plunge and move out of his freaking apartment. Because Tony had finally done it. He’d exorcised the last of Robin’s ghost. Apparently, it was all about timing. It had been long enough, and Adam was now finally ready to move on.

  But first he had to fucking exorcise fucking Tony’s fucking ghost.

  He threaded his way through the crowd, trying to squeeze his way up to the bar.

  “Holy shit, you’re Adam Wyndham!”

  He could barely hear the bellowed words over the music, but he could read the other man’s lips. He was extremely attractive, with blond hair, blue eyes, chiseled features, and a body that was ripped. But he had a recent-refugee-from-Oklahoma-so-now-that-he-was-allowed-to-be-gay-in-public-he-was-fucking-everyone-in-sight air to him that wore Adam out.

  Talk about star collectors.

  So Adam just shook his head and avoided eye contact, leaving the guy in the dust as he bellied up to the bar. He caught Roxie’s eye—she knew him well—and the spike-haired bartender delivered his usual, a Long Island iced tea, on the house.

  But the blond followed him—shades of Tony and why the fuck was Adam still thinking about him? Enough already. And maybe a collision with a star collector was exactly what he needed. So Adam turned to face him. He was almost angelic in his beauty, no doubt about that.

  So he smiled his intention as he tossed back his drink, letting the alcohol enter his blood stream as quickly as humanly possible without the assistance of IV tubing. He set the empty glass on the counter and held out his hand.

  “Back room?” he asked. He didn’t bother to raise his voice. The angel could read his lips, and if he couldn’t, then he didn’t deserve what Adam was offering.

  But heat flared in eyes that didn’t even remotely match Tony’s in shade, brilliance, intelligence, or wry sense of humor. But it wasn’t his eyes that Adam was interested in—rather his exquisitely shaped mouth. A mouth that smiled in such a calculating, self-satisfied way that it hardened and gave an edge to his beauty and made him look more devil than angel.

  Not that it mattered. Adam wasn’t looking for heaven. He had no misconceptions about ever finding his way there, either in this world or after.

  Although last night, with Tony …? For a moment or two, he’d had the illusion that he’d come pretty damn close, until reality slammed back down on him.

  But Tony was gone, leaving him empty again, in a way that he hadn’t felt since he’d read in some stupid Hollywood gossip rag that Robin Chadwick was getting married to the love of his life, up in Massachusetts.

  The angel took Adam’s hand and leaned close to say, “Come on, baby. Whatever’s bothering you, I’ll make it feel all right.” He tugged him from the bar, leading the way toward the darkness of the club’s back room.

  Monday, 4 February 2008

  “Really, guys, I’m fine,” Tony said, for what felt like the four thousandth time. Although this time when he said it, the words were contradicted by the fact that he somehow seemed to have face-planted in the dirt. He had some of the pervasive sandy stuff in his mouth and he tried to spit it out.

  And failed.

  He also failed when he tried to stand.

  “Oh, shit,” he said to Mark Jenkins—who came over to put a wadded up shirt beneath Tony’s head, and help him wash his mouth out with a splash of water from a canteen—because he clearly wasn’t fine.

  “Welcome back,” Jenk said.

  “Did I go somewhere?” Tony asked, taking a second sip of water, and this time swallowing it. Jesus, his throat was on fire, and his head throbbed with every beat of his heart.

  “Every now and then you vacate the premises,” Jenk told him, trying to hide his concern as he checked the wound that was now festering on Tony’s leg. “The vacating isn’t the problem. The problem is when you wake up and try to audition for So You Think You Can Dance.”

  “Shit,” Tony whispered again, as Dan Gillman appeared beside Jenk, taking a look at Tony’s injury. Unlike Jenkins, he didn’t manage to conceal his apprehension as he took over the bandaging effort. He could hear the sound of gunfire in the not-too-distant distance. Clearly they were in the middle of mixing it up with the bad guys again. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re the ones who’re sorry,” Jenk told him, as he used a wet rag to wipe what looked like blood from Tony’s face. Yes, ow, he’d definitely scraped himself when he’d come in for a landing. “But we just don’t have the manpower to keep you from hurting yourself every time you try to get up.”

  “Where’s Lopez when you need him?” Dan muttered.

  “Just do the best you can,” Jenk murmured back.

  “You should tie my hands and feet,” Tony said, and the look Jenk gave him would have been comical had they been damn near anywhere else in the world instead of the motherfucking middle of nowhere, in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Dan, however, looked as if he was considering it—tying Tony up to keep him from making a ruckus or just being a distraction. But the way he shook his head no was a strong clue as to just how much trouble they were in, considering Tony couldn’t crawl, let alone walk.

  The nearest hospital was a helo ride away.

  Or a long, dangerous hike through mountains filled with an enemy intent upon taking various and sundry parts from their dead bodies as souvenirs.

  That same enemy had rocket launchers that made calling for a helicopter extraction a
virtual impossibility.

  “What we need to do,” Jenk said, “is get you out of here.”

  “We both know that’s not going to happen,” Tony said.

  “So what do you suggest, Vlachic?” Dan asked. “We just let you die?”

  Tony caught Dan’s wrist with a hand that felt ridiculously weak. He could barely make a fist. “Anything you try is going to get you killed, too.”

  “If we stay,” Dan pointed out, “we’ll run out of ammo. They know where we are, and they know why we’re here. They know one of us is injured, too.”

  If that was the case, they were pretty much screwed.

  “Then leave me,” Tony begged. “And go. Please …”

  “We’re not going to leave you,” Jenk said.

  Tony pushed himself up into a sitting position while Jenk and Dan made noise about him staying down. But he ignored them and forced his shaking muscles to work. “Leave me set up with an M60. I’ll create a diversion so that the team can go—”

  “We’re not leaving you,” Jenk said again.

  “Mark,” Tony said, using Jenkins’s rarely used first name. “Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m not going to die. That if I don’t get to a hospital—”

  “We’re not going to let you die,” Jenk said.

  “Not the same thing,” Tony pointed out.

  “Close enough,” Jenk countered, then ended the conversation by scrambling away.

  Which left Tony alone with Dan, who wasn’t his first choice when it came to picking a confidant. But time was running out.

  “I know I’m not supposed to talk about this,” Tony told his teammate. “But the world’s going foggy again and … I need you to do me a favor when you get back to the States.”

  “You don’t need to—” Dan started, but Tony cut him off.

  “I do,” he said. “Because you don’t even know his fucking name, and I’m in love with him, God, I really am, Dan. I know this is freaking you out, and I’m sorry. And I also know it’s stupid, because we only had one night, and I know that he hasn’t been faithful, and … That it doesn’t matter—we didn’t make any promises. But I was going to show him. I was going to just keep coming back. I was going to be there, and now I’m not going to be—”

  “Yes, you are.” Danny wouldn’t stop pretending, and that was okay with Tony, too.

  He knew that they both knew better.

  “His name’s Adam Wyndham,” Tony whispered, and even though Dan was pretending to check his bandage again, he was listening. “And I just want him to know—to believe—that I was being honest when I told him that night meant everything to me. I want him to know that I was going to come back. That I wanted to come back. Will you tell him that for me?”

  Dan was silent, so Tony added, “Otherwise he’ll just never know, you know? No one will notify him. He’ll just think I moved on.”

  “You can tell him yourself.”

  “But if I can’t …”

  Dan looked up at that, finally meeting Tony’s gaze. “If you can’t, then … You don’t have to worry. You can count on me.”

  Monday, March 3, 2008

  Adam’s new apartment wasn’t half as nice as his old one.

  But when he’d called his landlord, a generally clueless man named Connor, to give notice, Con had let Adam know it was okay if he left early. Apparently he had a new tenant already on a waiting list for the place. So they’d come to an agreement that Adam would move at the end of February.

  Of course, he’d then immediately gotten cast in a movie, but that was really just a handy excuse. In truth, his shooting schedule was light and mostly at night, and he’d had plenty of time to go apartment hunting in the early afternoons.

  But he hadn’t. Not until the very last minute, when he’d had to settle for something less-than.

  But he’d done it. He’d finally moved away from the place that was filled with too many memories. Except, he still couldn’t go into his bathroom, even this new one, without thinking about Tony. Which was beyond stupid. The kid had been just another one-night hookup. A faded memory to pull out and sharpen if he needed inspiration while alone in his shower. Which was the full extent of Adam’s sex life these days.

  He’d been keeping himself to himself ever since the fiasco with the fallen angel in the back room at Big’s. He’d closed his eyes as the other man had unfastened Adam’s jeans and dropped to his knees, and maybe he could’ve enjoyed it if he’d leaned his head back and not looked down—and pretended the blond was Tony.

  But his touch was unfamiliar, which was usually a turn-on—new hands, new mouth, new man—except this time it wasn’t.

  And for the first time in his life, Adam didn’t want this.

  It was such a disconcerting thought that he almost stayed to see it through. But he was afraid that if he did, he was going to start to cry, so he pulled himself out of the angel’s hands and, without a word of explanation, he’d left.

  He was in such a hurry, he was still refastening his button fly as he came out of the back room which, of course, was the exact moment some asshole snapped his photo with a cell phone.

  Adam Wyndham spotted at a West Hollywood hot spot late last night, up to his old tricks was the caption when the photo was published online, on a high-visibility celebrity gossip website.

  And he suspected Tony must’ve seen it and made note of the date—the night after they’d hooked up—because he never sent another email. No Hey, how’re you doing. No I’m busy but safe. No I’ll be home in a month, so let’s connect.

  Which was a good thing. Or so Adam tried to tell himself.

  He went through various phases even as he continued to check his email, scanning for that dot-mil address, three or sometimes even four times a day. Most of the time, he felt self-disgust. Well, what did he expect from a star collector? Sometimes he felt indignation. Even if he hadn’t walked away from the angel at Big’s, so what? He’d made no promises to Tony. And forget about the fact that the idea of making those kinds of promises after one single, stupid night was absurd …

  One single, stupid but unforgettable night, with a man who cared about him.

  Or, more realistically, a man who was pretending to care about him.

  But out of all the memories that he still held from that night, it was the way Tony had touched him right before he left—his hand warm atop Adam’s head—that was the most vivid.

  He hadn’t been touched with such tenderness since he was a child. Since his mother had tucked him in at night. And even then, those memories were tarnished by his ability to conjure a very sharp picture of her face, distorted and mottled with anger, as she drove him from the house where he’d lived for his entire sixteen years. No son of mine … And You’re dead to me! Dead! All because he was honest when his sister found the gay porn magazines he’d hidden—badly, apparently—in his bedroom. He could’ve claimed ignorance, pretended that they were a horrible practical joke perpetuated upon him by the bullies at the high school.

  Instead, he’d told her the truth—that he thought he was gay.

  She spent the next week trying to talk him out of it, trying to convince him that he was wrong. It was just a phase. A reaction to being unpopular at school. She took him to the doctor. She took him to church. She prayed and she wept, and finally he snapped and admitted that he didn’t really think he was gay—he knew it. His good friend Carlos from summer camp wasn’t just his friend, he was Adam’s lover. They’d started having sex when Adam was fourteen and …

  Adam had found himself out in the street, locked out of his house, with nowhere to go. Carlos was already in college and unable—unwilling, really—to help him. He had a new boyfriend, and finals were approaching. Besides, guests couldn’t stay overnight in his dorm, so …

  Yeah.

  Adam had had to grow up fast, although lately, when he thought about his years on the street, during his latest monk-like musings, he was starting to realize that maybe he hadn’t grown up at all. Maybe he�
��d merely—barely—survived. Although Jules’s opinion on the subject, which he’d expounded upon liberally in those last few days when Adam finally moved out of the apartment they’d shared in D.C., was that Adam hadn’t survived. He was broken. Jules believed that Adam had been damaged, irreparably, by his family’s rejection and the desperate years that had followed.

  Of course, Jules had been mad as hell that Adam had not only hooked up with another man, but had spent nearly two weeks with him in Jules’s apartment, while Jules was out of the country.

  It was, undeniably, a bastard-asshole thing to do. Which was, in part, why Adam had done it. The mere slips of the past hadn’t made Jules kick him out. His transgression had had to be major.

  And it had worked. He could still remember the expression of total evisceration on Jules’s face.

  And okay. He was wrong about the whole no-one-had-touched-him-like-that-since-he-was-a-child thing. Jules had touched him like that, too—with genuine love and tenderness.

  But Adam hadn’t been able to accept such a gift at that time in his life. And, to be fair to his broken, dysfunctional self, Jules’s affection hadn’t been unconditional. He’d wanted something that Adam couldn’t give him. He’d wanted love that was combined with fidelity and honesty and commitment. At the time, all those years ago, Adam didn’t even know what those things were—not after spending so many years trading both body and soul for the fleeting security of a meal and a roof over his head. Sex was his currency, his power, his source of both immediate gratification and imminent self-loathing, and love only made it complicated, adding jealousy and fear, anger and mistrust into the mix.

  Which brought him back to Tony, who’d clearly seen that picture taken at Big’s and decided—rightfully—that Adam wasn’t worth his time.

  It was for the best.

  But now, this morning, as he was skimming a news article about the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, he came upon a phrase that made him flash both hot and cold as the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

  … similar to last month’s attack, in which two Navy SEALs were killed and three others were wounded.