Simple Gifts

by L. B. Gregg

  “Are you still there? Why are you so quiet?” Sunny’s voice permeated my consciousness. “Jason? Are you okay? Where’s Robb?”

  “Sunny. For God’s sake. I’m fine. And I told you, Robb’s here. He commandeered the bar. He kicked everyone out, and he’s closing. He’s a hard-ass, but a very capable one.”

  “That’s him. Capable. At all costs. He’s also a dick who won’t answer his phone and, uhm, someone here doesn’t like being ignored.” Mrs. Sharpe chimed in, but Sunny spoke over her, “You’re really okay? Mom said you left the hospital without the doctor’s approval and that Robb is your guardian angel. She’s not happy. I should have gone with you. I’m more angelic than Robb any day. I’m so sorry. My brother split before I could get into the car.”

  I tread with care. Something about having Robb here with me instead of Sunny, my closest friend, felt right. “It’s a small truck, Sun. Better for you to be at the lake, with your parents.”

  “Now you’re just being mean.” She snorted. “But you’re really okay? No fracture or anything?”

  “I’m fine. I have a cut and a bump. No big deal.” Spots floated behind my eye, and a yawn popped my jaw. I needed to get upstairs to bed or sleep there on the floor. I could have used the chair and desk, but my bed was softer, and my cat needed attention. “Everything worked out for the best, and now I have a medic on call in case I rupture an aneurism.”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “I gotta go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Promise?”

  “No. I have to work. I have a business to run.”

  “Fine. I’m so sorry. For everything. I should have told you.” She whispered, “But I can’t believe Robb’s staying with you. In your apartment. Alone. Overnight.”

  “There’s not much I can do about it, is there?”

  Mrs. Sharpe mentioned something else. “Okay. Okay!” Sunny said. “Mom wants you to know she has your Christmas present, and she cleaned the blood off, and you have to come by tomorrow. She won’t hear otherwise. Her words exactly.”

  “Great. Tell her thank you. I’ll do my best. Now I really need to go.”

  “Wait! Don’t worry.” She snuffled into the receiver as if she held it too closely, and I knew she didn’t want her mother to overhear. “Jason. Robb’s seen a lot of things…really awful things…and he’s changed. Okay? Just remember that. But inside? He’s still the same guy you used to know. He wanted to see you. And I promise, you can trust him. I do.”

  “I’m not worried,” I lied easily through my drug-induced haze. I’d been too tired and concussed earlier to consider the ramifications of Robb physically in my apartment, alone, with me. But as I pocketed my phone and considered Sunny’s words, her anxiety spread like a catching disease. Fortunately, the office door popped open, and Robb knocked some sense into me.

  “You ready to go? Your guy Donnie’s closing shop.” He barely glanced at the office as he bullied me toward my apartment door. “Power will cut off in the next hour or so.”

  The lights flickered as if he’d ordered them to. Freezing rain pecked at the windowsills in the back hall. I unlocked the door, and we entered a chilly hallway, leaving the heat of the bar behind. I led Robb to the third floor on worn stair treads that creaked underfoot. Weak light illuminated a cluster of cobwebs, and I squelched any embarrassment. I don’t like to dust. Also, I had bigger troubles ahead.

  Damn Sunny all over again. Now I was worried.

  I’d lived in this building since the fall after high school graduation, when I’d been promoted to bartender. Long before he sold me Riley’s—on payment plans and percentages and prayers—he’d let me move into the upstairs apartment, offering me a place of my very own.

  Robb clomped at my heels. What would he think of my apartment? He’ll think you’re just as much of a fruitcake as ever. Sure, he may have wanted to see me, but maybe he’d change his mind once he got a look at the real me. My furnishings were meager, and the walls were painted a joyful sky blue, but it was the collection of paper sculptures, and the—

  “Is there a problem? You’re awfully quiet, and you’re dragging your feet. Are you dizzy?” He joined me on the landing. A window faced the alley, where lights from the center of town glowed orange through the snow. My apartment door waited, so I found my keys.

  I stalled.

  “Jason? Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine. Quick question. Do you like astronomy?”

  “What?” Robb closed the distance between us, and I caught a whiff of spice, pine, and wool. He reminded me of a lumberjack, not a soldier. He’d left his parka down in the bar, and his sweater sleeves were pushed to his elbows, his shirt collar lay open, and the sight of his pale Adam’s apple had me biting my lip.

  His finger brushed the back of my hand, and I fumbled the key. Sick or nervous or not, the fleeting contact snapped across my skin like an electrical shock. His touch thrilled me.

  “Jase?”

  I stared at his fingertips, familiar yet strange, and the air between us shrank until I couldn’t breathe to speak. Honestly, with a single stroke, he robbed me of thought.

  I pulled away, but he said, “Hey. It’s okay,” in a disturbingly husky voice that I recalled too well. He took the key from my palm, and I almost fell down the goddamn steps. I wanted to bolt—living up to his expectations—but he grabbed my borrowed shirt in his fist, and my heart fluttered against his knuckles. His breath warmed my cheek. “Steady.”

  Mother. Fucker.

  A smile hid inside the rough tones of his broken voice, and the sound eased my troubled mind while stimulating other less troubled areas. I knew that voice. I’d heard it before—in the dark of night, in the backseat, under the stars, in the boathouse, in his bedroom, behind the bleachers. And I’d hear him say steady again in the dark tonight, as I lay alone in my cold bed.

  And, bang, I knew why he wanted to see me. He still wants me. He hasn’t let go, either. He came to see me.

  I would have stumbled a second time, but Robb had me. Jesus, he had me good. “You need to lie down.”

  I really, really did, but I could not for the life of me move to unlock my own front door.

  “You good?”

  “Yup. Fine.” I squeaked, and he let me go. Robb fit the key into the lock, and I stifled a groan.

  What the hell kind of drugs had they given me at that hospital? I swear I’m tripping.

  The sound of my apartment door swinging free sobered me. “No, wait! My cat—”

  In a flash, Norm vanished into the stairwell, but that was the least of my worries.

  “What the hell…?” Robb blocked the doorway. “Holy crow. Are those stars?”

  I froze at the threshold of my home, not that Robb noticed. He wandered in, face tipped heavenward to better see the strange beauty of my apartment’s contrived night sky. Above his head, paper starlight shimmered down from a black-lit galaxy. Orion, Sagittarius, Ursa Major, Canis Minor, Scorpius, Gemini—the constellations hung in painstaking precision, glowing on purple pinpricks, lighting the darkness.

  Accurate and overly detailed, I’d crafted every star, made each scrap of paper, and creased every fold. The project had taken years but, voilà, origami universe.

  Robb wandered, and the stars led him through the apartment, straight toward my bedroom as if they guided a wayward captain home after years at sea.

  I shook that idiocy from my head, and on leaden feet I trailed after my overnight guest. Hot blood colored my cheeks. “I know my apartment is a sort of odd.”

  “No.” He turned to look at me, and I banged into his chest. “Did you make all of these?”

  “Well, yeah. Who else?”

  “I swear, the sky looks exactly like this in the desert. Clear and wide and the stars go on forever. Only not as colorful, or so close.” He tapped a tiny pointed star, and it spun on a delicate silver thread. “This one was done in pieces, right? How the hell did you make them so small?”

  “Pr
actice.” I left him marveling over my freakish masterpiece and flipped the bedroom light switch. There were a couple pair of jeans on the floor, and the simple maple bed lay unmade, but otherwise, a portion of the Milky Way flowed from my window, over the bed, and disappeared in the closet. Pretty much business as usual.

  Robb followed me, nosing into my private life with ease. “Where did you learn to do this?”

  “I thought you remembered everything?” I wouldn’t bore him with a retelling, but the only real memory I had, before I became a ward of this fine state of Connecticut, was making my first paper crane when I was maybe four or five. We were in a bus station, my mother and I. We’d gone inside to keep warm and to pass the time, and she showed me how to crease those tricky paper folds. I could still see her blonde hair falling across my cold fingers as she worked. Make a wish, Jason baby.

  I ducked into the bathroom to brush my teeth and made a point not to look in the mirror. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like who I saw.

  I wasn’t a hoarder, or a drug addict. I didn’t collect model trains or dress mouse skeletons in homemade clothing. But there were a lot of pieces of folded paper hanging around my home. Thousands of them. Maybe more. Robb must have noticed the paper vignettes lining every shelf, the nursery rhyme families, the pointy nativity, and the kaleidoscope Narnia. From his perspective, the place must look like a glorified scrap bin.

  I could have fallen through the floor.

  Instead, I finished brushing my teeth.

  “Hey.” Robb gripped my shoulder, and I flinched and dropped the toothbrush. My stitches pulled. I swear I’m not a total wimp, but I’m not a soldier either. And embarrassment hurt more than all my injuries combined. “You okay?” He frowned, and I shoved his hand away.

  “No. I’m mortified. I haven’t shown anyone my apartment before—except your sister—because I know I’m a little weird. I mean, obviously.” I stomped back to my room.

  “We’re all a little weird. But this place? This isn’t weird. This is art.”

  “This,” I nodded toward a mini Jupiter floating buoyant on invisible wire, “is a hobby. Anyone with access to the Internet can make a do-it-yourself craft project. I take things to the extreme.”

  “No. You take things to a new level. You’ve built your own origami universe.”

  “Exactly.” How easily had Robb narrowed on the truth? “My own private Idaho.”

  What had begun as a desperate attempt to retreat from a shit reality grew into a way for me to fill an ever-deepening void. I’d moved from foster home to foster home from age six to sixteen. Most of the time, all I’d had were the clothes on my back and a paper sack from DCFS with a cheap toothbrush and a Christian coloring book. From my earliest memories, I used every scrap of paper I could find to create the things I most wanted and could never have—a pet, a friend, a family. A home.

  Pathetic.

  Robb’s knowing eyes searched my face. “I’ll never forget when you made the cranes for me. I carried them with me. And I wrote you, to say thanks, but you never responded.”

  “Yeah, well…some things are best left in the past.” The thought of seventeen-year-old me desperately folding a thousand paper cranes for a lover who’d leave anyway, absolutely gutted me. “We were just dumb kids. It meant nothing.”

  “It meant something to me,” Robb admitted quietly. He balanced Jupiter on a single fingertip and cast the planet into a gentle orbit. Flecks of glitter dotted the floor. “They carried me through some dark times.”

  I swallowed, and the sound filled the room. I couldn’t go there. Not now. Not tonight. “There’s a blanket and pillow in the hall closet. Couch is in the living room.” Duh. Sleet tap-danced on the roof, and I yawned with enough emphasis my eyes watered. I skirted under a pint-sized paper moon and peeled off the itchy hospital shirt. “I need to crash.”

  Robb watched me undress. “You really are the vault, aren’t you? Locked down so no one can get inside.”

  “Yup.” And why did he care? I kicked off my shoes and screw the Orphan Handbook, I dropped my trousers and crawled into the cool comfort of my bed. I lay still and, as the center of my own universe, the room spun appropriately around me.

  He didn’t leave. “Thanks for letting me stay the night, and for letting me unload earlier.”

  “No problem. Thanks for taking care of me. I’m just happy to be home.”

  “Yeah.” He lingered in the doorway, clearly at war with his thoughts again. “I can return the favor if you need me to,” he said simply. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I can be the vault, too, Jase. I’m pretty much a better listener than I am a talker, anyway. Always have been. You can still trust me.”

  No. I couldn’t. And how could Robb ease my insipid fears and my self-imposed solitude now?

  “If you want…I’m right next door.”

  “Sure thing. Thanks.”

  I sank into the pillow and squeezed my eyes shut. Footsteps creaked down the hall, and the room slowed to a halt.

  Chapter Five

  He slipped down the hall with a soldier’s grace, on feet so light that had I not already been wide awake, shivering in my nest of blankets, waiting for the dead furnace to kick back on, I’d have missed him.

  “Go away.” Frosty air nipped my nose, and I burrowed deeper under the covers. My feet were blocks of ice.

  “You have sharp ears.” A purple shape filled the doorway.

  “The better to hear you with.”

  “Maybe you should have enlisted instead of me.” Robb stumbled over something, probably my shoes, and grumbled, “Power’s out. Aren’t you cold? I’m freezing.”

  “This happens all the time. Heat’ll be back by morning.”

  “That’s not an answer. Are you cold?”

  No sense in lying. “Of course I am. There’s no heat.”

  He hovered by the side of the bed, and a tiny light flared. Shadows played across his face, and I recognized his look.

  “Shine that flashlight in my eyes one more time, and you’re a dead man.”

  “You’re six hours post-concussion, and you agreed,” Mr. Calm answered. “Irritability is a sign of a worsening condition.” He had to be making that crap up. The light hurt, but no more than normal, and he was quick. “Good news. Your eyes are still blue.”

  I blinked the spots away. Robb joking? Suspicion clouded my mind.

  “Do you have a woodstove or something? A generator? A candle?” A blanket draped his shoulders, cape-like, and, ready for action, he rubbed his hands together.

  “No, I have a cat—but you let him out. I usually hunker down, with the cat, and wait. I’ve had worse.”

  “Yeah? Where? I’ve had worse too.”

  “Oh, here and there. I had this foster place once, and we went all winter with no heat—”

  The mattress dipped.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Robb perched on the bed, and my blood pressure spiked. For someone so slim, he sure took a lot of space. He made himself comfortable while I suffered palpitations.

  Why was I bothered that he sat so close? Easy. I didn’t trust myself alone with him. The years had flipped by, and I still wanted him.

  I couldn’t stop my heart from racing as he settled against the headboard. “We want to avoid hypothermia. I didn’t agree to stay the night so we could both die in our sleep.”

  “We’re not going to die.” My voice cracked. “You look hearty enough. I have stitches. I’m not going into shock or anything.” At least I hadn’t been until he made himself at home on my bed. He’d yet to touch me—not that I expected him to—and my whole body quaked. My crotch definitely warmed in his presence.

  The bed moved as he stretched full length beside me.

  “Now what are you doing?”

  “Relax. We’re conserving heat. Is there a problem?”

  “You’re the problem. You’re using the threat of hypothermia as an excuse to climb into my bed.”

  “Are you over
estimating your charm, Jase?” I know he smiled. “I’m cold. The power’s been off for hours, and my coat is locked in the bar. Slide over.” He sounded confident, and right then, I knew I was behaving according to his plan, which was so much like the old Robb, I slid over to make room for him.

  The covers lifted, and for the first time in recent memory, a man crawled inside my cocoon. His bare toe brushed my leg, and I shivered, but not from cold. No. Robb’s nearness electrified me. Always had. Thank God he still had his pants on.

  I didn’t have pants on.

  I imagined the fine hair covering his forearms and the dark fuzz on his legs, the dip of his hipbone and the deep line of his quads. He’d be muscled and lean, and at that delicious juncture where his thighs met, his skin would be delicate and pale. His familiar scent tickled my nose, and I forced myself to relax. I took a breath. “Robb. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, but you know I’m still gay, right? That hasn’t changed.”

  “A lot of things are different about both of us, but I never thought you’d switched teams in the interim. Despite some confusion with my father’s earlier message, I’m who I’ve always been. What’s your point?”

  “I’m just saying that when a man climbs into my bed, usually he’s got something specific in mind, and I can’t keep myself from reacting.”

  “You don’t think hypothermia’s specific?”

  “Quit fucking around. I didn’t hit my head that hard. What do you want? Tell me.”

  A yellow light flashed through my window as a plow struggled to clear Route Seven. The glow illuminated Robb as he turned to face me. His stare never wavered, and his steamy voice returned, the same one he’d used when we were on the stairs. “Exactly what you think I want, Jason. What I’ve wanted since I first saw you walk into the house tonight. You. Every time I’ve ever seen you, since the very first when you fell down the stairs and landed at my feet, I’ve wanted you. Always. I see you? I want to be inside you. Why is that?”

  He’d intentionally flustered me earlier. He’d wanted me, but Jesus, I had no idea he’d lusted after me at the lake. He’d been so busy glaring and tapping his teeth together and standing apart. When Robb left the house, maybe he hadn’t been running. Maybe he’d been following. He’d watched me while his mother had me in her clutches, and he hadn’t stopped watching me since.