Breaking the Rules

by Suzanne Brockmann

  It was hard, as he was lying there, not to think about Neesha, about the god-awful story she’d told him, about what had happened to her after her mother had died. Maybe it was something that she’d made up. Just something she’d told him to impress him or to make him sympathize. Or maybe, like the cop had said, it was a product of her delusional mind.

  But somehow Ben doubted that.

  And he couldn’t imagine the strength that she’d needed, that she’d had, to live as a prisoner for so many years—without hope of release.

  “Hey!” he shouted into the silence, his voice rusty from sleep. “Hey! Gay diabetic in here. One is a disease, the other is not. One can be successfully managed through diet and insulin injections. The other is unchangeable and fuck you sideways for thinking otherwise, you sons of bitches—”

  The door opened. “Is that any way to talk?”

  It was the man Peter had nicknamed Weird Don.

  “I’m a diabetic,” Ben said. “That means I need to check my blood sugar levels regularly throughout the day so I don’t fall into a coma and die.”

  “You have to get pretty sick for that to happen,” Don said, coming into the cell and closing the door behind him with a solid-sounding click. “A lot of boys come in here with ailments. Asthma. Eczema. Acne. It all clears right up when they learn to reject their unnatural yearnings.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like bullshit to me,” Ben said. “I wonder why. Oh, probably because it is bullshit.”

  Don came farther into the room, but he didn’t unfasten Ben’s hands. Instead, he moved next to the cot and stood there. And Jesus, weird didn’t begin to describe the way he was looking down at Ben. “It’s not,” he said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to untie me?” Ben asked, yanking at the plastic bindings and making the metal frame of the cot rattle. He glanced over at the camera, oddly glad it was there. “I need to go to whatever passes for the medical facility in this hellhole. To get tested and get some insulin—and some food—so I don’t throw up on your fucking shoes.”

  “That kind of language isn’t necessary,” the man chided.

  “Yeah, I think it is,” Ben countered, “because you don’t seem to understand what I’m saying.”

  “But I do understand your pain. I went through this program when I was your age,” Don said earnestly. “It helped me. God, how I hated myself …”

  “I think you still hate yourself,” Ben said. “But me? I think I can probably go now, because for the first time in a long time? I’m actually doing okay in the hating myself department. I met this girl a few days ago, and her courage astounded and kind of shamed me. And then I came here, and I met Peter Sinclair the fucking third, and I’ve never met anyone like him before, and you know what? I’m going to survive whatever you do to me. I’m going to say whatever I have to say, and I’m going to walk out of here, and I’m going to fool you and your asshat friends into thinking I’ve seen your stupid light, but when I leave, I’m going to be as gay as the day I walked in here—as gay as the day I was born. And after I leave, I’m going to be on a mission. I’m going to find my own Clark Volborg and we are going to live happily ever after, and in about ten years I’ll think back on this, and I’ll think of you with pity, because I’ll know that you’re still here, and that you still hate yourself—when all you had to do was listen to Peter, too, and understand that you’re not alone and there’s nothing—nothing—wrong with you.”

  It was possible Weird Don had heard none of that, because he said, “You know, you don’t have to leave. You can sign papers and stay.”

  “Fuck you,” Ben said, before he realized what Don had just told him—you don’t have to leave.

  And sure enough, as Don left the little room, someone else came inside and cut him free.

  It was the woman who’d bagged up his clothes. She held those bags now, as if she’d been standing there with them, in the hallway, all night long. “This way,” she said as he rubbed his wrists and rolled his shoulders, as he tested his very shaky legs.

  “I need a bathroom,” he said. “And some insulin—not necessarily in that order.”

  “You’ll have to wait until you leave this facility,” she said tightly as she led the way down the hall, her heels clopping loudly against the industrial tile. “And you can tell your parents that your tuition is not refundable.”

  With that, she pushed open a door and gestured for him to go through it, and holy God, it was the doorway to some kind of lobby, and Danny was standing there, looking like shit, but his eyes lit up when he saw him, and he said, “Ben!”

  And Ben’s knees crumpled and he hit the floor. And—great—he was pretty sure he pissed himself as his brother’s worried face wavered and faded and the world went black.

  “I hate this,” Eden said as she and Izzy waited in the car in the Crossroads parking lot. “I want to be in there. I want to know what’s happening.”

  She was practically vibrating with nervous energy, and Izzy knew that she was scared to death that something was going to go wrong, and that Danny and Jenn were going to come back out of that building without Ben in tow.

  He knew exactly how to distract her—if only they weren’t sitting in the car in the broad daylight.

  Or maybe what he really wanted to do was distract himself, and the best way to do that, other than the very obvious, was to mentally replay—moment by moment—the outrageously great shagging he’d given her after they’d gone into her bedroom last night and closed the door behind them.

  Or he could deconstruct the incredibly groovy good-morning greeting she’d given him after he’d gotten up to take a shower. She’d followed him, slipping past the shower curtain, stepping into the tub with him, wrapping her legs around him as he’d pinned her to the tile wall, beneath the rushing water.

  But like all good things, their shower eventually came to an end, and he’d dried himself off with one of her clean-smelling towels as he’d wandered into her living room.

  He’d realized immediately that he hadn’t given the tiny room so much as a single glance last night. The curtains were tightly closed, and he peeked behind them to see—sure enough—a slightly sagging bouquet of bright red roses—the bouquet he’d seen from down on the street.

  The card was still with them, and he reached and flipped it open. To Jenny, it read. Congratulations and welcome. Love, the girls at the club.

  Much better than a card reading, Thanks for last night. Love, Enrique, your most ardent admirer.

  Izzy let the curtain close again and turned back to Eden’s living room. It was furnished with sad and sorry pieces that looked as if they’d been retired—and none too soon—from a frat house. She’d valiantly covered the easy chair and sofa with sheets and blankets to conceal their years of wear. There was a bookshelf and an end table, both of which held a collection of smiling Buddha statues, no doubt belonging to the person from whom Eden had sublet the place.

  As he stood there, letting the hardworking air-conditioning circulate around his extremely happy genitalia, he’d found himself thinking of Nurse Cynthia’s matching furniture.

  Which Eden would probably have loved.

  And the crazy thing was? If that had been Eden’s apartment, with Eden cooking him dinner in that too-perfect kitchen, Izzy would’ve loved it, too.

  As it stood, Eden kept her own place as neatly tidy. The Buddhas were all dust-free—although the clothes he and Eden had shed upon arrival last night were still strewn in the tiny entryway that was open to the living room.

  He collected it all—and his wallet, too—rolling up the pants he’d bought for the occasion and trading them for a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals that he’d brought in his seabag. He tossed Eden’s—including her stripper thong—in a laundry basket that was just outside the bathroom door, blocking what was probably a linen closet.

  He stashed his bag just inside of Eden’s bedroom, wondering—briefly—what Dan was going to say when he found out that Izzy and his sister had reconnecte
d. As in Izzy’s tab A had again gone, repeatedly, into Eden’s slot B.

  But they’d blow up that bridge when they came to it. And what Dan thought about Izzy and Eden rehooking up was hugely secondary to what Eden thought about it.

  Izzy knew where he himself stood. For him, the pros far outweighed the cons. And while he acknowledged that he might not feel the same in a few days—or hours—when she decided enough was enough and shut him down. But right now? He had both feet planted absolutely in the fuck me again column.

  And Eden seemed to be in agreement.

  Although, they really hadn’t done much talking last night—aside from that wish-list discussion, which was part of the foreplay, and really couldn’t be taken all that seriously. Like he was really supposed to believe that giving him head was on her wish list? It was part of the hyperbole that came with passion-talk. Not that Eden wasn’t good at it.

  He just couldn’t take it too seriously.

  After Eden emerged from her bedroom in a sundress that he immediately wanted to take off of her, they’d set to work cleaning up the apartment for his majesty King Danny’s arrival. And then it was time to go. Eden had remained pensively quiet during their ride to the airport, so Izzy’d focused on both his coffee and navigating the unfamiliar streets.

  It was fine with him—the no-serious-talking. But he’d realized at the airport, after Dan and Jenn had climbed into the backseat of his rental car, that there were things that needed to be said—important things—without Eden’s two brothers listening in.

  To his surprise, she started the conversation. “She’s really nice,” she said. “Jenn.”

  “Jennilyn LeMay,” Izzy said, and Eden met his gaze.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Um …”

  “I won’t tell,” Izzy said, referring to Eden’s having borrowed Jenn’s name for her career at D’Amato’s. He didn’t need to spell it out. He knew Eden knew exactly to what he was referring.

  “Thanks.” She looked out the window again at the cracked tarmac, at the sign in the window of the auto-parts store across the street. FLOOR MAT SPECIAL! FREE FUZZY DICE WITH PURCHASE!

  “Do you get, like, a weekly paycheck?” Izzy asked, and she glanced at him again. “If you want, when you give notice, you can ask them to send your last check care of my apartment in San Diego. I’ll make sure you get it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Thanks. But no. They don’t pay me—I pay them. To work there. They get a percentage of my tips, so …”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s like I’m renting a spot on their stage.”

  “Wow,” Izzy said. “Okay. So, good. You can just give them notice with a phone call and …” Hmm. She wasn’t meeting his gaze. “You are going to quit working there. Or …?” He let his voice trail off and up.

  “Of course,” she said, and it was so obviously a lie that he laughed his disbelief.

  “It’s a little far for a commute,” he pointed out. “Five hours? Each way? At least?”

  Eden looked at him and apparently decided to cut the bullshit. “It’s not like I can get a job dancing in San Diego,” she said. “Someone would see me.”

  “Yeah, I thought that was the idea. A lot of people see you. Kinda hard not to see you, sweetheart, when you take off your clothes on a stage, in a spotlight, moving the way you do …”

  “I meant someone from the SEAL team,” she said. “And they’d tell Danny.”

  “And you want to earn a living doing something that you don’t want your brother to know about because …?”

  She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a wad of cash that was nearly the size of a softball. “Tens and higher,” she said. “These are my tips from one day of work.”

  Holy shit. “Let me entertain you,” Izzy sang. “They ever hire guys? Maybe you and I could be a team. And now, from San Diego, put your hands together for … Irving and Eden!”

  Eden laughed at that. “You won’t even take off your shirt when we make love.”

  And okay. She was going to refer to last night’s mad fucking as making love. It was good to know what to call it.

  And it was true, Izzy was inclined to leave his shirt on both for pickup games of basketball and for banging fair maidens. He had some pretty nasty scars on his chest as the result of a near-death experience with a terrorist who’d pulled the trigger of an AK-47 that was aimed in Izzy’s direction.

  He’d kept his shirt on last night, even though Eden had seen his myriad of scars before. He wasn’t sure why he’d bothered—it certainly hadn’t seemed to disturb her in the past, nor had she so much as blinked this morning in the shower.

  Well, she’d blinked plenty. And gasped a whole lot more.

  But not because of his scars.

  “Yeah, well,” Izzy said now. “The whole guy-thong thing is so overdone. So Chippendale’s. I thought with the T-shirt on, yet freeballing it, I could bring something a little different to the table. Maybe leave my socks on, too, for the complete dork effect. And then, you know, do some windmills with my man-parts since my sexy-dancing chops leave a lot to be desired …?”

  She was giggling. “Ooh, something new for my wish list.”

  “I think we’re onto something really big here,” Izzy said, grinning back at her. “Not quite a full monty because the shirt and socks are still on. Although let’s face it, if you’re on that stage, too, I could be singing and dancing like Justin Bieber and it wouldn’t matter, because no one would be looking at me.” He pitched his voice into a boy soprano falsetto. “I need somebody to love …”

  “Ooh, I love that song.”

  “And why am I not surprised.”

  Her smile faded as she held his gaze and said, “It’s been incredible. Yesterday and last night and …? I really did miss you, you know.”

  This was a harder lie for him to swallow than the one about quitting work at the club, but it wouldn’t do him any good to do anything but take it as she’d clearly meant it.

  As proof that he’d distracted her sufficiently.

  As a sparkly little memento from right now.

  Right now Eden could imagine that she’d missed him for all those months that she’d intentionally stayed far, far away. It was possible that she even believed her softly spoken words. It was probable that in this moment, she truly liked him. She liked talking to him, but better yet and lucky for him, she liked fucking him. Oh, wait, no—making love. She liked making love to him.

  And she’d continue to like it and him just fine until doing so was no longer convenient.

  “Seriously though?” she said, and he waited to see what she was going to say, because he had no idea what was coming next. “I was thinking I could stay on the schedule. At D’Amato’s. Just for a couple days each week. Consecutive days, because of the drive. For the next few months at least. See, I paid rent on the apartment through the end of July. It was the only way I could get it—to pay the full summer up front. I’ve been studying to get my driver’s license, and I was saving to get a car and … I was thinking I could drive up to Vegas, like, Thursday morning and be back in San Diego early Saturday morning. You know, after working a double Friday shift, too.”

  “Well,” Izzy said. “That’s, um …”

  “I’d earn more in those two days of dancing than I could make in two full weeks of work at some stupid McDonald’s,” she said.

  “So why not work in L.A.?” he asked her. “If you really want to continue to dance.” He used her word for it. “It’s a much shorter drive. I bet D’Amato’s has some kind of sister establishment in the greater Los Angeles area.”

  She was surprised. “Wow, I never thought of that. That’s … A really great idea.” She looked at him. “You’d … be okay with that?”

  “It’s far from my place to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do,” he pointed out. “Although, hot tip? Unless you really, really love doing it? You should find a different job.”

  “I love the money,” Eden
said bluntly. “And I don’t hate the work as much as I hated getting paid slave wages to douse myself in french-fry grease and cheerfully suggest supersizing orders for people who needed to take a deep breath and order a salad instead—while every male worker in the place grabbed my ass five times a day. Not Rodney. He was my friend. But I had more hands on me working there, in a single shift, than I’ve had in the entire time I’ve worked at D’Amato’s.”

  “Really?” Izzy asked, and she nodded. “Wow, that’s … a problem. I was going to say that, you know, there are other options besides fast food and stripping, but very few come with a bouncer to protect you.”

  “Are there other options?” she asked. “Because I haven’t found them. I cleaned houses for a while—until one of the clients came home early and offered to give me ten bucks extra to blow him. Don’t worry, I got out of there fast,” she added quickly as she saw him start to react. “I was safe, but I’m the one who got fired because he said he caught me stealing and that I tried to get out of it by propositioning him. And, of course, they believed him instead of me. Which is the story of my life.

  “I’m good at being a nanny,” she continued, “and even though it’s hard work for a lot of reasons, most of the time, women won’t hire me. I did find work with a single mom in Europe, after I left Anya’s, and Stacy—that was her name—she also paid my airfare back to the States. But the job ended when they returned to Chicago, because her mom lived with them, so … Ben thought I should try to target gay couples, you know, because there’s no threat in either direction? I’ve looked, but I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t want full-time, live-in, twenty-four/seven care. Which won’t work if I’m going to be living with Ben. But even if I could get a job as a nanny? Which hurts worse? Taking off my clothes while a bunch of losers leer at me, or taking care of someone else’s baby after burying my own?”

  She looked intently out the window, which usually meant she was fighting the urge to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Izzy murmured, which was such a flipping stupid thing to say. Still, he was sorry. Incredibly, completely sorry. And not just for her loss, but for his, too.