by Anne Calhoun
“Incoming,” Steve said under his breath. “Say yes this time.”
Ben didn’t move a muscle, just watched her walk, tugging down her skirt as she moved. Legs to her ears, and as the Gulf breeze caught the silky fabric of her halter, flashing hints of perky curves. With her lifted palm turned outward she brushed her hair away from her cheek, the gesture simultaneously feminine, vulnerable, and flirtatious.
He couldn’t imagine Rachel doing anything that calculatingly female. Then again, he’d completely misjudged her. Twice.
“Hi,” Juliette said when she drew near, stretching the single syllable out.
“Hi,” Steve said in response, checking her out from heels to hair.
“I heard about the gas station,” she said to Ben, then looked back at the pack of girlfriends she’d brought to the bar. “My hero. After we close this place down we should party.”
“Sounds great,” Steve said.
Ben’s phone vibrated against his thigh. He pulled it from the side pocket of his cargo pants, saw the text disappearing into the background.
You alive?
His brother, asking a question he already knew the answer to, but Ben keyed in an answer anyway. Sam knew Ben was alive the same way Ben knew Sam was. While the connection wasn’t as tight as it was in high school, he still knew when Sam burned himself with the welding tool, or when he had a close call with a semi on the highway. Sam was the first person to call after the gas station incident, hours before it made the news. He knew. He just knew.
Yes.
“Maybe,” Ben said.
The corners of Juliette’s gleaming red lips lifted. “The SWAT team guys party, Ben. You’re not going to get in trouble for staying out late.”
He gave her an A for persistence, but there was the text from Sam, and then there was Rachel. He shrugged and turned back to the parking lot.
“I’ll be there,” Steve said again.
Juliette turned to Steve. “Bring a friend,” she said, with a sidelong glance at Ben. “One who likes to party.”
“No problem,” Steve said.
“Come on, Juliette!” Her friends, now standing in front of the door, waved her over.
“I’ll catch you later,” she said, then ran, in those heels, to the door and disappeared into the wall of noise inside the bar.
“Why the hell not?” Steve asked.
“How many guys in the department has she fucked? Four?”
“Five, last I heard, and six tonight, if things go good.” At Ben’s snort, Steve added, “You never turn down a piece of ass that hot.”
And hot she was, in all the right ways, with a thing for badges, but just because he could didn’t mean he would. Cops got all kinds of perks, and he’d played football for Texas before he was a cop. He’d been there, done that, and while Juliette hadn’t handed him the T-shirt afterward, the women who had were indistinguishable from her.
“I’m not interested in lining up behind half the department,” Ben said. He ran his thumb over his cell phone screen, keeping it awake, waiting for Sam’s return text.
“You feeling okay?” Steve said.
“Fine,” Ben said. Just fine. Rachel and Sam and the Bar H, and spring thunderstorms rolling in from the Gulf every other fucking night. “I’m fine.”
Steve sent a couple of texts then went back to Facebook, and for the next hour, the typical Saturday night at No Limits continued. Normally Ben drifted with the music, noise, laughter, but tonight flashes of Rachel punctuated the noise with silence. Crickets, the leaves in the trees, the faint sound of water over rock. The hot, involuntary sounds she made when his touch brought her alive. The look in her eyes, dazed and astonished and oh-so aroused when he swept her hair over her breasts.
She’d been nearly silent the whole time, dropping deeper into sensation, into herself as he showed her what her body could feel and do. He loved to talk dirty during sex, but the image of Rachel looking over her shoulder to say oh yeah, you like that baby? while he fucked her from behind made him huff out a soft laugh.
He almost wished she had. She wasn’t what he expected for an almost virgin, and she certainly wasn’t his typical, experienced lay. When he told her to make it happen for him he expected her to just ride him. Bite her lip tentatively, maybe. Be uncertain and ask for guidance. Not that sex was rocket science, or getting a guy off after an hour of foreplay was all that difficult.
Instead she’d given him the hint of slow, sweet pain that drove him crazy. The edge of her teeth. Her nails, stinging in his shoulders not because he was driving her to the edge but to hold him where she wanted him. She’d taken him apart then set him on fire.
His response was to practically shove her out of the truck like a one-night stand he regretted. He never treated women like that. Never.
Three guys left the bar, no big deal, but the two girls they supported between them caught his eye. The women had come in alone a couple of hours earlier and now they were leaving, stumbling drunk. He didn’t need special anti-terrorist training to read the looks the guys exchanged. He stepped off the curb and crossed the lot, intercepting the group at a Challenger.
“Evening,” he said. “You know these ladies?”
“Yeah, sure,” two of the guys said, trying to keep the women on their feet while the third said, “No.”
“Which is it?” Ben asked as he reached out and tipped one woman’s chin up enough to see her glazed eyes, dilated pupils.
The two who said yes shot the third a glare. “We met them inside. We’re taking them home.”
“Conscientious of you,” Ben said, then turned back to the woman. “Ma’am? What’s your name?”
The woman’s head turned to him, moving like it was on a slow, rusty crank. The man standing next to her tried to remove his hand from her arm, and she sagged at the knees. With a curse the guy held her up again.
“What’s her name?” Ben said.
“Sharon,” her escort replied.
“I’m Sharon,” the other woman slurred.
Ben quirked an eyebrow. “Where do they live?”
In the silence that followed, not-Sharon hunched forward and threw up. “Jesus,” the big one said, stepping away.
“Right,” Ben said. “Get them over against the side of the building.” After the men all but dragged the women to a sitting position on the curb by the bar, he said, “She has to be sober enough to consent. No, you’re done,” he added when the guys walked back toward the bar. “Go home.”
“You can’t stop us from going back in there.”
Ben gave a sharp whistle. The bouncers and Steve all looked up. “They’re done,” he called and got a single nod in response. “Sure I can,” Ben said easily. “Get in your car and go home.”
“Asshole,” one of the guys muttered under his breath.
“Step over here and repeat that,” Ben said.
The smaller, smarter guy urged his friends into the Challenger, but not before one of them spat on the ground at his feet. Ben just smiled.
He stayed by the women until the cab arrived, then helped the driver pour them into the back seat and gave him the more sober woman’s address from her license. The rest of the shift was uneventful.
Until Juliette and her posse emerged as the bar closed. “You sure you don’t want to come over? Marta and I have something special in mind for you.”
This was what he did. Comfortable. Routine. Same old same old.
His phone vibrated. He pulled it out to see his brother’s response: Prove it.
“Got something to do,” he said to Juliette. “Another time.”
Galveston’s streets were near empty as he drove up Seawall Boulevard to the Kempner Park neighborhood. He passed a patrol car driven by a young, yawning cop, who raised one finger in response to Ben’s half
wave. Sam’s house was dark when he backed into the driveway, but the garage-turned-workshop at the end of the driveway was lit up. Ben strode up the driveway, along the paving stones arcing to the workshop door, and let himself in.
Sam shot three final nails into a sheet of drywall, then rose from his crouched position. The last time Ben had been here Sam was working on a couple of new pieces of metalwork art, but those materials and tools were neatly arranged at one end of the workbench. Electrician’s tape, wiring, outlets, and plate covers now occupied center stage, with more drywall stacked at the back of the space. Sam wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and tiny burns marred the skin of his forearms.
“My brother, conjured out of the dark,” Sam said lightly as he crossed the workshop to stand in front of Ben.
They were so identical their mother couldn’t tell them apart. People asked if standing in front of Sam was like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t. Mirrors only showed the external similarities. Standing in front of Sam was like being known. Being seen. Sam was true north, gravity, air.
Or had been, back when they were kids.
“Beer’s in the fridge.”
“Thanks.” Ben helped himself, then sat down on the cement floor with his back to the exposed studs. His breath eased from him as his back sang with relief at the absence of weight. He tipped back the Shiner Bock can. Ice-cold beer slid down his throat, into his stomach.
“Long night?”
“The usual,” Ben said.
“What time is it?”
“Three.”
“Hope I didn’t keep you from something.”
“Just bed.”
“Your own bed? Alone?”
He huffed. “Yeah.”
“Call Gawker.”
He slid Sam a look. “You were no better.” Until Chris. Sam now wore his ring and his monogamy like badges of honor. Given that he and Chris had to go to Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage was legal, Ben understood wearing the ring.
Sam shrugged. “The right one is all it takes.”
Silence. Ben knocked back another slug of beer, then looked around the garage. Old sheetrock lay stacked in one corner, while rolls of new insulation and coils of wire lay in another. “What’s with the demo work?”
“We’re rewiring the garage to 220-volt so I can run more stations when the kids come for art therapy.”
“Got a contractor?”
“It’s no big deal,” Sam said. “Take out the old wire, install the new.”
Chris had worked in renovations and contracting before switching to landscape design, but he wasn’t a licensed electrician. Sam was a psychologist. He’d met Chris on job sites working his way through college, then grad school. Ben bit back his natural response, which was that every year Galveston EMTs transported some guy who electrocuted himself trying to save a buck. They were usually DOA.
Sam didn’t even need to look at him to know what he was thinking. “The last time the social worker was here, she looked at all the exposed wiring in the garage like we were letting Jonathan frolic with knives and scorpions,” he admitted.
Jonathan. The kid who’d been removed from his meth-addicted mother’s house at one, and shuffled through several stints in foster homes in the last five years. The kid with attachment issues and behavioral problems. The kid Sam and Chris had fostered for six months and were determined to adopt. The road still wasn’t easy for anyone, especially gay couples.
Ben saw the hope in his brother’s eyes, the exhaustion lining his face, and his heart clenched hard. “I get it,” he said. “Just be careful.”
“Coming over for brunch later?”
Sam and Chris hosted a weekly Sunday brunch attended by a revolving door of people—fellow artists, neighbors new and old, strays they found God only knew where, including some of the homeless people Ben picked up in the city parks and drove down to the shelter. He had a standing invitation, but rarely made it to the potluck madhouse that stretched from just before noon until the sun went down. “Mom and Dad going to be here?”
His brother’s shoulders stiffened as he carefully laid the nail gun on the bench at the back of the garage. “Probably,” Sam said. “And Katy, and Alan, and the girls. Our family will be there. All of them.”
Their sister, a year younger, had married right out of college, and was now raising two blond little girls who wore so much pink they looked and smelled like bubble gum. “I’ll probably be sleeping,” he equivocated.
“Still on Katy’s shit list?”
“Yeah.” His sister lived in a world of sweetness and light, where a steady stream of juice and hair bows, cookies and cooing smoothed everything over. Ben dealt with black and white. In his world, some things were unforgivable. Including their father driving Sam out of the house at sixteen when he came out of the closet. Sam had disappeared onto the streets, and for two years Ben had lived with not knowing where his brother was. Sam was gone, escaping a father who thought his son’s homosexuality could be cured by a summer at a gay reeducation camp. When Sam left, their father never mentioned his name again. It was as if Sam never existed. Which meant Ben didn’t exist, either.
Thanks to a tight twin connection he knew Sam was alive. Sometimes he knew when Sam was in danger or trouble or pain. When that happened, not being able to help or protect him drove him nearly insane.
In December of his freshman year at college, Sam had turned up outside Ben’s dorm in Austin. He wore ripped jeans, a silver-studded belt, a flannel shirt, no-name shoes with holes in the toes, half-empty army surplus duffel at his feet. He was thirty pounds thinner than when he’d left, with a nervous twitch and a smoking habit that took him years to quit. They talked about where he’d been, a little. Never what he’d seen. Never what he’d done. Ben pieced most of that together in high-def nightmares that got worse after he got through the Academy and started working the street.
No fucking way was he forgiving their father for what he’d done. When he left the house the day they turned eighteen, he’d sworn he would never go back, not even for the old man’s funeral. “For someone who thinks I should be more forgiving,” Ben said, “Katy’s got a death grip on a grudge.”
“Withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.”
What a semi-load of bullshit. Sometime later, when Sam was in college or early in grad school, Sam had reconciled with their father, but he’d always been able to see the good in someone. “You’d think you were a psychologist or something,” Ben said not-so-lightly.
Sam refused to be drawn into the argument. He lifted the cooler’s top and pulled out a beer, then sat down across the garage from Ben. “What’ve you been up to?”
Another shrug, another smile. “Went to a bachelor auction last weekend.”
“Be still my beating heart,” Sam drawled. “What the fuck for?”
“I was on the block.”
“Get out.”
“I was,” Ben protested.
“Why?”
“When I got SWAT Rogers moved to my spot in Vice. He had to work the night of the auction, and since I beat him out for the team, he said it was the least I could do.”
There was a long moment while Sam tipped back his beer, then looked at him. “I hope a skinny blond chickadee with enormous tits and the sex drive of the Energizer Bunny bought you, because you’re into that kind of thing.”
“Not exactly,” he said wryly, thinking of Rachel. Barely a handful anywhere, humid electricity on the outside, razor-sharp and dangerous inside. Shuddering in his arms as she learned what sex was. She’d just be learning about the ache that came a day or two after a really good fuck, the desire to do it all over again. Scratch the itch once and it never really went away.
“You can’t catch a break these days,” Sam said.
B
en finished his beer and pondered what he had caught, a dark-haired, whiskey-eyed virgin who abruptly left everything she knew. Decision made and executed. Time to lose her virginity? Man purchased, decision made and executed. Except . . . she wasn’t cold or unemotional. In the back seat of his truck she’d felt everything. She’d explore sex with the same single-minded focus.
She came with the intensity of a lightning strike. By now she’d want it again. Bad.
Hot, dirty possibilities bloomed in his mind. He could show her how good sex could be, that indescribable moment of luscious wet heat when his cock breached her soft opening, teach her to kiss, covering the nuances from a good-bye peck on the cheek to a mouth-meld that meant I want to fuck you now, yes right-goddamn-against-this-wall now to the heated connection that came from kissing and fucking until the pleasure melted your brain. He’d imprint himself on her body, in her body, deep in her mind, teach her how to be female to a male.
He wanted more. He was the only man who knew what she’d been, and he surely knew exactly what she faced. A native guide, as it were, to the land of disposable.
You’re so civic-minded, Harris.
He picked up his phone and sent her a text. Maybe she’d see it, maybe she wouldn’t, but he wasn’t calling her like this was a date or something.
11 a.m. my place if you want something to do on Sunday morning.
He sent his address in a second text, then got to his feet. “I can’t make it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got plans.”
“Sure,” Sam said, a bite under his easy drawl. “Another time.”
“Another time,” Ben repeated, stepping back before Sam could hug him. He headed for the door, remembering how they’d slept in the same bed until they were ten, curled around each other like puppies in a box. Their father had destroyed more than Sam’s childhood.
“Later, my brother,” Sam said.
Ben strode out to the truck and found Sam framed in his rearview mirror when he pulled out into the street. Sam was his mirror, but the mirror was cracked.