In Pieces

by Alexa Land

  I silenced him with a kiss, then said, “It’s the second-greatest present I’ve ever gotten.” I grinned at him and added, “The first, of course, was you.”

  “Do you really like it? You promise?”

  “It’s absolutely wonderful.”

  He looked relieved, and smiled happily. “I was thinking you could keep it here at the cabin. The visibility’s so much better in Tahoe than in the city. But, you know, only if you want to.”

  “Great idea.”

  “Want me to set it up for you?” He looked like a kid on Christmas, his face alight with happiness. And yet he was this excited about giving a gift, not receiving one. That was so like him.

  “Yes please.”

  We sat cross-legged on the bed and unwrapped the big telescope together, then went to work assembling the fairly complex stand. “The moon’s almost full,” he said as he concentrated on deftly attaching two small pieces to one another. “Wait until you see it through a telescope, it’s amazing. I think the sky’s clear enough tonight, we should be able to get a good look at it.”

  Kieran launched into an account of all the great things he was dying to show me up in the heavens. He was animated and absolutely adorable, his enthusiasm infectious. I leaned back, propping myself up with my hands behind me, watching him and grinning happily.

  He loved me. This gorgeous, amazing, wonderful man loved me. I was so incredibly lucky.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was kind of sad to see the apartment so empty.

  Charlie obviously felt the same way. He scooped up my hand and looked around the vacant living room wistfully as he said, “There’s so much history in this place. It’s hard to say goodbye to it.”

  It was the end of March. It had been over two months since my art show, and I was moving out of the apartment I’d shared with Charlie and Dante because the lease had just run out. For two years before that, it had belonged to his then-boyfriend Jamie, so Charlie really did have a lot of history here. Far more than I did, and even I was having a hard time letting go of this place.

  “But onward and upward to better things, right?” he said. I had leased a building from Dante in the Marina district, just two blocks from Charlie and Dante’s home and new restaurant. The ground level was a light and airy gallery space, the second floor a pretty apartment that was about to become my new home.

  The past couple months had been incredibly hectic. I divided my time between working on my school project with Hunter, and painting, and trying to get the gallery ready for business. And of course, Kieran. He and Charlie and Dante had been incredibly helpful with all the work that needed to be done to get the gallery up and running.

  I’d also been attending twice-weekly counseling sessions at a clinic addressing trauma-based phobias. Progress had been slow. I still wasn’t able to swallow anything besides water and crackers (and, um…the other thing), but I felt good about the fact that I was doing something about it. I held out a lot of hope that sooner or later, we’d have a breakthrough.

  I also volunteered one afternoon a week with Jeffrey at Havilland House. I had been reminded of just how much the Havilland meant to me when I’d gone by there a couple months ago. It felt good to be giving back to the place that had helped me when I was at rock bottom.

  Their new location was a former warehouse in the same neighborhood. It was actually even bigger than the old place. It was also up to earthquake and other safety codes, and its purchase had been funded in large part by my anonymous donation.

  As for the thing that had brought me back to the Havilland in the first place, the case had gone cold again. I still carried flyers with me everywhere I went, and had put them up all over town, not just in the rough neighborhoods, but in the affluent ones as well. They had yet to produce any viable calls to the police tip line, even after I included a sizeable reward. But giving up wasn’t in my nature. I was going to keep canvassing, keep asking questions. Someone had to know this person, even if he’d just come into the city briefly and left again, as I was beginning to suspect. It was just a matter of time.

  “Come on, let’s do one last lap,” Charlie said. We circled the living room, then went through to the kitchen hand-in-hand.

  “Remember that ridiculous livestock pen that Dante set up in here for Peaches?” I asked, and Charlie burst out laughing.

  “Worst dog ever. I’m sure he and my father are very happy together,” he said.

  A lap through the bedroom made Charlie grin. “A lot of memories in this room.”

  I smiled and said, “Yeah, for Kieran and me, too.”

  We finally headed to the front door and paused for a long moment, taking one more look before pulling the door shut behind us. “Goodbye to the past,” I said.

  And Charlie added, “Hello to the future.”

  I stopped in the lobby on the way out and used my key in the mailbox. A big manila envelope was waiting for me, with a Georgia postmark. My father and I hadn’t been in touch since our talk in the hospital. Maybe we were both worried about disrupting the delicate truce between us. From what I heard, his visit a couple months ago had ended with Dante’s cousins escorting him and his men to the airport and (hopefully politely) asking them to check in next time they decided to make an appearance in San Francisco. That was a lot better than running them out of town on a rail, which had seemed like another way that could have gone.

  I opened the flap on the envelope, and glanced inside. It was full of photos, and I could tell at a glance they were pictures of my mother. I swallowed the instant lump in my throat and pulled out the single sheet of paper included with the pictures. It said:

  Dear Christopher Robin (did you notice I used your full name?): I thought you might want some pictures of your mother, since you said you didn’t have any. I’d packed these all away in a storage unit after she died, along with her paintings and the rest of her stuff. It was just too painful to look at. Anyway, I thought you might like them. If you want any of her other stuff, let me know and it’s yours. Call me sometime. I don’t want to have to trespass on enemy territory again just to get to visit with my own son. Love, your father.

  If I looked at these photos now, I was going to start sobbing right here in the lobby of my now former apartment. I returned the letter to the envelope and folded down the flap as Charlie asked, “You ok, Christopher?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “What’s in the envelope?”

  “My dad sent me pictures of my mom.”

  “Oh wow.”

  “I’m going to look at them later, when I can devote a big block of time to losing it.”

  He nodded at that, and gave me a hug before leading me by the hand out of the building.

  Charlie dropped me off at my new apartment, and upstairs I found Kieran sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, a big set of instructions on his lap. I’d returned the furniture from the old apartment to Dante and Charlie, then gone to Ikea. My new stuff was cute and practical and affordable – and in about a million pieces. Kieran and I had been slowly working on putting it all together. He actually loved this kind of thing, he had a handyman streak a mile wide.

  “Hey baby,” he said when he saw me, his whole face lighting up.

  “Hi, sweetness.” I put the big envelope on a chair and bent down and kissed him before asking, “So what’s this going to be?”

  “A coffee table and two end tables. They’re pretty straightforward. And guess what I just finished building?”

  Given the way his eyes were sparkling, I went with, “The bedframe?”

  “Bingo. Want to go test my construction?”

  “Well, I think we really should. For safety’s sake, we should probably subject it to rigorous earthquake testing, tons of shaking and rattling.”

  “Safety first,” Kieran grinned.

  “Exactly.”

  “Race ya,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be fair, you’re in a seated position,” I said.

  He fl
ashed me a huge smile, then rolled backwards and leapt to his feet before taking off at a run for the bedroom. I laughed and gave pursuit. Right before he got to the bed, Kieran circled back around, lifted me off my feet and carried me the last couple yards, and we both fell onto the mattress together. “It’s a tie,” he announced.

  “That backwards roll was a pretty slick move. Did they teach you that in police training, Officer Nolan?” I asked with a grin, brushing his hair back from his forehead. And he still was Officer Nolan. He’d received a month’s suspension and a formal reprimand for letting a suspect go. His punishment would have been much harsher, apparently, but his record to that point had been exemplary. That worked in his favor, as did several ringing endorsements from some of his fellow officers. He still had the idea of law school in the back of his mind though, and had begun researching programs, though he wasn’t fully committed to the idea just yet.

  “Nope. I actually think I learned it from watching the Karate Kid. Are you impressed?”

  “Very.”

  He let go of me and bounced up and down on the bed a few times. “So far so good. But I’m thinking we should subject it to some rigorous stress testing, just to make sure. Although just to warn you, there’s somewhere we need to be in about an hour, so this should be a stress-testing quickie.”

  I smiled at that and rolled over on top of him. “I can do that.”

  Just then, the bed crashed straight down onto the hardwood floor. We started laughing, and peered over the edge of the mattress. All four legs of the frame were sticking straight out at ninety degree angles. “Fail,” he said, and we both burst out laughing again. “Ok, so, I had a few bolts left over when I finished this. I thought they were extras. Turns out, not so much.”

  “That’s really unlike you. Usually this DIY stuff is a no-brainer.”

  He smiled at me. “I was a bit distracted today.”

  “Oh yeah? By what?”

  “You’ll find out later,” he said cryptically, and swung out of bed. “Let me see what I did with those bolts.”

  I sat cross-legged on the area rug in the bedroom while he set the mattress aside and went to work on the frame. After a while, I ventured, “So, you know…I was thinking. You spend the night with me every single night. And you’re doing so much work to fix up this new place, make it a home. Do you think…do you think maybe you’d like it to be your home, too? I mean, I know you have a lot of responsibilities with your brother, and with your house, but…I don’t know. Maybe…maybe you might want to move in with me,” I said quietly, studying the pattern in the rug.

  He crawled over to me on his hands and knees and tilted my chin up, kissing me gently. And then he said, “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too. I like my house, I grew up in it, after all. But it’s such a negative environment these days, given Brian’s moods. I can’t see you and me ever making that our home, not as long as he chooses to live there.”

  He sat back and crossed his legs like I was, then added, “I do have a responsibility to Brian, but the fact is, he never actually lets me help him. He’s so prideful, and so stubborn. The only thing he lets me do for him is grocery shopping, since he never leaves the house.” Kieran was quiet for a moment before he said, “I keep trying to figure out how I can make Brian get help. He’s in desperate need of counseling and physical therapy. Also, his doctor said he’s a good candidate for prosthetics, and I wish I could get him to see what a positive thing that would be.”

  “Maybe he needs some tough love. Have you tried yelling at him?”

  He grinned at that. “I have, as a matter of fact, but he just laughs it off.”

  “I could try. He hates me anyway.”

  “Oh no. I don’t want to put you in a position where he can verbally abuse you.” The couple times we’d gone by Kieran’s house since we’d been together had been met with a lot of hostility. Brian hadn’t accepted the fact that his brother was gay, and he sure as hell hadn’t accepted the fact that I was a part of his life now. So we pretty much just avoided going over there.

  “It’s not right that he’s verbally abusive to you, either.”

  “I know.” Kieran thought about it for a few moments, then said, “Even if I moved out, I could still do the shopping and cleaning for Brian, and check on him regularly. And I’d continue to work on the house. It’d just become more of an investment property. I guess that’s sort of what it is now, anyway. It hasn’t felt like home in a long time.”

  “It hasn’t?”

  He looked up at me and gave me a beautiful smile, punctuated by his one dimple. “Nope. Home is wherever you are.”

  I grinned at that, then leaned forward and kissed him. “Only you could pull off a line so unapologetically sweet.”

  “Which is a nice way of saying I’m sappy.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Sweet, sappy, same thing.” His smile made his eyes sparkle.

  “So, if you’re officially moving in, don’t you think that big main wall in the living room would be perfect for your mom’s art prints?”

  “Yeah, it would, actually.”

  “That reminds me, I got a huge surprise in the mail today. My father sent me a bunch of photos of my mom, and a note saying he has the rest of her stuff, including her paintings. He says I can have them.”

  “Oh my God, Christopher, that’s incredible! Where are the paintings?”

  “In a storage unit in Georgia. I guess I’ll have to go back there to get them at some point. That’s going to suck. But I’ll be so happy to see her paintings again.”

  “I’ll go with you, of course. And we don’t have to linger. We can get what you want from the storage unit and leave Georgia immediately.”

  “I should probably stop off and visit my dad, though,” I said. “You know, now that we’re entering this whole new era of not screaming at each other and pointing guns and so forth.”

  “We can do that.” Kieran watched me for a moment, then asked, “Do you regret giving all his money away, now that you and your dad are kind of getting along?”

  “No, not in the least. I did the right thing with it. Havilland House helped me, and I’m so glad that I was in a position to give back to them. Besides,” I added, “every penny of that money came from illegal activities. Blood was shed for it, I have no doubt about that. For that reason, I really never would have used it for myself. But using it to help people…that kind of feels like restoring balance to the universe or something.”

  “You’re one in a million, Christopher,” Kieran said, smiling at me. He actually looked proud of me, and that felt so good. “Or should I say, one in thirty-two million.”

  Someone knocked on the door then, and I kissed him one more time before going to answer it. Hunter looked surprised to see me, but immediately covered it was a blinding smile. “Hey there,” he said as I stepped back and let him in to the apartment. “I didn’t think you’d already be finished cleaning your old apartment.”

  “I just got home about fifteen minutes ago. So, you came by to not see me?” I asked with a grin.

  Kieran had appeared behind me, and said, “He came by to see me. He needed to borrow something. And here it is.” He handed a sealed-up bulky brown paper bag to Hunter, and then shot him an are-you-kidding-me expression when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  Hunter tucked the bag under his arm, his smile still set to stun. “Yup. Just borrowing something.”

  I rolled my eyes and grinned at both of them. “Man, you two are transparent. What are you up to? Does this have something to do with whatever you have planned for this evening?”

  “No.” They both said it in unison, so quickly that I burst out laughing.

  “Smooth.” I turned to Kieran and said, “Last time you took me somewhere that was a surprise, it ended up being my gala debut art show with half of San Francisco in attendance. This isn’t something like that, is it?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  And Hunter blurted, “It’s so much
better.”

  Kieran gave him an oh-my-God-shut-up look and said, “Don’t you need to be somewhere, Hunter?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Hunter reminded him. To me he said, “Christopher, it was lovely to see you. I look forward to seeing you again, next week when I’m meeting you on campus.” For some reason, that made Kieran press his eyes shut and run a hand down his face.

  “I’ll walk you downstairs,” I said.

  And Kieran chimed in, “I’ll go with you.”

  Hunter rolled his eyes dramatically and stage-whispered to Kieran, as if I couldn’t hear him, “I’m not a total spaz. I won’t blab about anything.”

  Kieran’s latest in his looks-for-Hunter collection seemed to say oh-my-God-I-want-to-smack-you-right-now. But he managed to pull up a smile, and said, “See ya, Hunter.”

  “Bye Kier. See you whenever.” That earned him a you-can’t-be-serious look.

  I chuckled and said, “Well, this has all been immensely entertaining. Come on Hunter, let’s go before Kieran bursts a blood vessel.” To my boyfriend I said, “See you in as minute, baby,” and left the apartment with my friend.

  When we got downstairs, I said, “Am I not allowed to know what’s in that bag?”

  “Shhhh. No questions.”

  “Ok, fine. So, how are you, Hunter? What’s new?”

  “Good. Actually a lot’s happened since you saw me two days ago. My agent convinced me to hire a body guard.” He actually looked pleased about that for some reason.

  “Oh my God! Are you ok? Has the stalker done something?”

  “A note was left at the Man-on-Man offices. It might not even be from the same guy. But it made my agent all paranoid, so he convinced me this is a good idea.” He smiled when he said that.

  “And…you’re happy about this why?”

  “Because I provided my agent with a very specific list of requirements for a body guard.”