Uncommon Passion

by Anne Calhoun

  “Jesus, Sam,” he gasped. His brother landed an elbow to Ben’s gut, another to the side of his head before driving Ben back into the cement. He twisted, taking the brunt of impact from both their bodies into his shoulder and head, which knocked against the floor, then wrapped one arm around Sam’s torso, locking his arm at his side as he tried to contain the other.

  “Knock it—stop—goddammit!” he roared as they grappled on the floor. “You’re going to hurt yourself!”

  The garage door flung open. “What the fuck is going on out here!” Chris demanded. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ben! You hit him? He just got out of the fucking hospital!”

  “I didn’t—” Ben huffed out from flat on his back, then ducked an elbow. “I didn’t hit him!”

  Chris bear-hugged Sam’s waist and hoisted him right off the floor, then carried him a few feet back from Ben, but not before Sam’s foot landed in Ben’s diaphragm as he straightened. The kick knocked the wind entirely out of him. He went to his knees on the floor, trying to wait out the panic until his breath came back in one heaving gasp.

  Inhale felt like prayer.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” he shouted at Sam.

  “Do I have your attention?” his brother demanded as he shook free of Chris’s arms.

  Ben fingered his temple, pulsing with his rapid heartbeat and already swelling. “Yeah.”

  “How long are you going to punish everyone else for what I did?”

  He looked up at Sam. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Hands raised, Chris stepped between them, then he pointed into the identical faces. “It’s about fucking time you had this conversation, but keep your goddamn voices down,” he said, his tone as smooth and quiet as a blade. “I just, and I mean just got Jonathan back to sleep. You wake that boy up and I will put both your asses back in the hospital.”

  What conversation? Ben swiped blood from his mouth and glared at his brother. With his brows lowered and furious intent in his eyes, Sam looked like a Neanderthal, which meant Ben did, too.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Ben hissed. His head throbbed like he’d taken a hit from a sledgehammer. Sam didn’t need hand-to-hand training. His brother learned to fight on the streets, and he fought dirty.

  With Chris back in the house, Sam strolled up to Ben and gave him a taunting little shove. “G’on. Get mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Ben growled, refusing to get drawn into a fight with his brother.

  “Why not? You should be. Going easy on me because I’m a faggot?” Sam punctuated the question with a not-so-gentle push. “Or because it’s easier to be mad at Dad than me?”

  Ben stared at his normally rational, thoughtful brother while fear sucked his stomach through the cement floor. Concussions and other brain injuries could bring on changes in personality, and Sam had been out for the count for days.

  “Or is it because you’re a fucked-up pussy?”

  He’d let his brother get away with a lot, but that accusation hit too close to home. “Watch it,” he warned Sam, bringing his arms out sharp and hard to knock Sam’s next shove away.

  “Bring it,” Sam shot back, yelling in a whisper. “I’m not afraid to take risks.”

  “I take risks.”

  Another shove slammed Ben against the newly installed drywall at the back of the garage. “In situations where you end up in the hospital, sure. Get shot, get a pipe taken to your thick, stupid head, that’s Ben Harris, tough man. When the consequences are adrenaline rush or death you’ll risk everything we love to prove you don’t give a shit about us or how we feel. But you won’t risk loving someone.”

  The words landed with the same brain-stunning power as Sam’s first punch. Wounded, shredded, his soul battered, he shoved Sam, putting his full weight into the move. His brother stumbled back. “I’ve already lost my heart, Sam. Someone I loved more than I will ever love another human being again walked out of my life without a word, and that someone was you. So don’t you fucking talk to me about taking risks. Some of us don’t have anything left to risk.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth he would have given his life to take them back because he knew it was a lie. He’d left Sam for football and girls and the safety of popularity long before Sam left home. He’d abandoned the brother who talked for him, taken for granted that the person who knew him best, who was him, would always be there for him.

  Don’t go. Stick it out until we’re eighteen. Tone it down a little. It’s not much longer. Two years. We can make it, then we’ll be out of here.

  But Sam had to be Sam, had every right to be Sam. Ben was the one who’d failed him, and therefore failed both of them. He couldn’t take care of his own brother. How could he take care of anyone else?

  Sam straightened, then folded his arms across his chest. Ben blinked, looked away, covering the flinch with another swipe across his swelling mouth and fingers testing his bruised eye. The bare bulb overhead hummed in the silence stretching taut between them. He was the one trained to wait out a suspect’s silence, but faced with Sam and what happened all those years ago, he broke first.

  “It’s not your fault,” Ben said. “I wasn’t there for you.”

  “What?” Sam blinked. Shook his head like he hadn’t heard him right. “What?”

  Sam looked at him like he dropped out of the sky, his face in an expression Ben didn’t recognize in himself, or in Sam. He shrugged to cover his reluctance to say this out loud, to confess his shame and failure. But in the end, he’d do more than that to keep Sam now. “I didn’t listen. I kept telling you to just hold on until we graduated, to just tough it out. Stay safe. Don’t take any risks. But it was the wrong thing to do. You had to go. I know that now. It just . . . hurt.”

  “Jesus God, Ben,” Sam said, then swallowed hard. “Is that why you do this? Make it easy for people to leave?”

  “Sam, don’t ask me why,” he said. “Do I strike you as even remotely self-aware?”

  His brother rubbed his palm slowly over his jaw. A light dawned in his eyes, and the similarity to Rachel’s clear, golden gaze made Ben’s heart clench tight. “You didn’t fail me. If you hadn’t loved me so much, I wouldn’t have had the strength to go. Knowing you loved me even though I was gay meant I was never alone. You were the only good thing. I was the selfish one. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I left. I didn’t email or call, because if I did you’d track me down. I knew you’d leave what you had for me. After a while I figured you’d hate me for what I’d done. I hated me. For leaving.” He nailed Ben to the wall with clear blue eyes. “For everything I did after.”

  Ben didn’t look away. It took all his strength to not look away from his brother when he finally alluded to what runaways did to stay alive on the streets, to numb the pain of the streets.

  “And then I showed up outside your dorm and you got your football friends to let me crash with them off campus and you never asked—”

  “I wasn’t going to put you through it again.” He swallowed hard, but even so, tears trickled down his face, into the cut on his mouth. “You were back. Where you were or what you did was completely irrelevant. All I cared about was putting you back together so you wouldn’t leave again. I didn’t know how to be without you, Sam. I still don’t.”

  “Me, either.” His brother swiped a hand over his eyes, then put his hands on his hips and met Ben’s gaze. “You were there when I began. You weren’t my other half. You were me. But I had to know who I was without you. As hard as those years were, my only regret was leaving you. Every time you come over I’m so happy to see you, and it kills me because I’m afraid, fucking scared to death, that you’ll never forgive me for what I did. I left, but you never came back.”

  Ben eased to the floor, his back to the drywall. Sam sat down opposite him, mirroring his position. Knees up. Forearms
dangling. They sat in the silence that was never really silence, instead a charged communication happening on the cellular level. “I’m okay,” Sam said finally. “I am okay, Ben. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t, for a long time, but you hear me? I am okay. Come home. Please.”

  Ben cut him a glance. “You’d think you were a psychologist or something.”

  “Apparently I suck at it. I didn’t know you were blaming yourself.”

  “I thought I was blaming Dad,” Ben said.

  “Close enough. You’re just like him,” Sam said ruefully.

  Ouch. “Katy says the same thing.”

  Sam blew out his breath. “I know it wasn’t easy. Dad’s said as much. But he’s different now.”

  Ben rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know, Sam. Do people really change?”

  “Yes,” he said with a quirky grin. “Let Dad off that hook. The only thing he wants, the only thing he prays for, is that you’ll start talking to him again. He remembers when we used to walk the fence line together, back before all this started.”

  The thought brought fresh tears to Ben’s eyes. He wiped his face on his shoulder to cover them.

  “All anyone wants is someone to walk with them,” Sam said quietly.

  Rachel. So strong, and so alone. And he’d been teaching her to walk alone. He wanted to watch her do everything. Come apart under him, discover who she was now, who she’d be in a month, a year, a decade. He wanted to watch her live. Rachel was the kind of woman who’d be different every time he came home after a shift, and there was another thought he couldn’t shake—Rachel in his apartment when he came home, or maybe in a house they bought together.

  He’d tried to force her to disconnect, to treat life like he did, as a dip in the shallow end of pleasure. Meaningless. Empty. He’d done what he did with every other woman, made it hot and fast and rough, and she’d called him on it. His apartment was empty, missing even the promise of Rachel. His life was empty of that as well, and of Sam, even though Sam had been back for a decade. That’s what was inside him. Emptiness.

  “I made her leave,” he said. “I really did.”

  “How?”

  “I was me.”

  Sam, his brother, his twin, his heart and soul, knew what he meant. “So be someone better.”

  “I don’t think I can make up for this.” The cuffs. Shit. Fuck. The way her hands jerked at the end. Like she wanted to hold him. Fuck.

  “Be romantic,” Sam said dryly. “Be thoughtful. Jesus. As many girls as you’ve been with, you must know something about romance.”

  “Romance wasn’t what got me girls.” The uniform and an empty smile got him girls. Before that, it was football. The night after the conference championship game was an alcohol-soaked blur, but he was pretty sure there was a blonde, a brunette, and a raven-haired girl all on their knees at one point.

  Was that who he was?

  Christ. This was hopeless. He bent his head and ran his hands over his hair before linking his fingers at the base of his neck.

  “You know the story behind her name, right?”

  Without looking up, Ben shook his head.

  “Heathen,” Sam accused without heat. “In the Bible, Jacob loved Rachel and promised to work seven years to earn her. On the wedding night, Laban swapped Leah for Rachel. Jacob didn’t notice, did the dirty deed, and was married to Leah. Laban said he’d have to work another seven years to earn Rachel. Jacob loved Rachel, so he did.”

  “I’d notice,” Ben said, all the while thinking about Rachel’s father naming his baby girl something that would remind him of how precious she was, how special, how no man would deserve her. “I’m not that far gone. Fourteen years?”

  “Fourteen years. Figure out romance and you can probably knock some time off.”

  If Rachel could leave behind life at Elysian Fields, then he could leave behind a life of aimless debauchery. “We’re about to find out.”

  He got to his feet, crossed the garage, and held out his hand to his brother. When he was upright Sam didn’t let go, but instead pulled Ben into a hard hug. “I missed you, man.”

  He relaxed into the hug, into his brother’s heartbeat and breathing, familiar from the womb. “Yeah,” Ben said. “Me, too.”

  They parted, and this time it was Sam wiping tears on his shoulder. “Help Dad with the fences sometime,” he said. “Pick up your guitar while you’re out there. Time we started playing together again.”

  • • •

  His brother, as usual, was right. He had to get his house in order, air it out and sweep it clean before he invited anyone else into it. So he started with the obvious.

  He deleted any contact from his phone that was a woman’s first name only, or worse, a descriptive nickname.

  He talked to Linc, made a couple of recommendations for replacements, and quit No Limits.

  He lived with the great gaping hole inside him, dark and empty, oddly weightless but very specifically shaped, curving against the interior of his ribs, present with every breath and heartbeat. He carried it around, studied it, made peace with it. He went to briefings and did his job and let that darkness ride along. Because Rachel shouldn’t have to save him.

  As the summer progressed his awareness of it diminished, as if patience made it part of his lived experience when alcohol, anger, resentment, sex, and adrenaline only fed it. Then he went to where it all began. He went back to the Bar H to see his father.

  He knew what he was getting into. His father was a hard man, a successful rancher, and Ben had been pretty unforgivable. If his father didn’t throw him off the ranch, he’d spend all day out on the fence line with a man he hadn’t talked to in over a decade, but driving past the turnoff to the creek reminded him what was at stake, strengthening his resolve. He’d dressed for the job in work pants and sturdy boots, his gloves on the seat beside him. When he pulled up the dirt driveway, his father was walking from the house to the barn, dressed in a worn denim shirt with patches at the elbows. Time had bowed his shoulders a little, and when he turned to see who was coming up the lane, Ben saw wisdom and pain etched into his face.

  “You get a new truck . . . ?” His gaze widened, taking in Ben’s broader shoulders and tanned face as he got out of the truck, and probably the wary look in his eyes. “Ben?”

  “Dad,” he said. When the silence stretched longer than Ben could bear, he added, “Sam said you were mending fences today.”

  Tears gleamed in his father’s eyes, but what tightened Ben’s throat was the way his father’s firm mouth trembled. His father cleared his throat. “Yeah. I am.”

  Ben ignored them, and the ones stinging behind his own eyes. “Need some help? I’ll drive.”

  His father loaded a new spool of staples into the fencing gun. Together they tossed the wire, posthole diggers, replacement posts, crowbar, hammer, and staples into the truck bed and climbed in. “South pasture,” his father said, and Ben set off.

  The smell of new grass and earth rose into the late spring sunshine while his father pried out the rotten posts. Ben dug postholes for the new ones. His father held the post while Ben hammered it into place and tamped down the dirt, then leaned his whole weight on it to test it. He gripped lengths of barbed wire in his gloved hands while his father stapled them to the posts. The work was physical, required two people to do it properly, and other than grunts and half-spoken instructions back and forth, mostly silent as they made their way down the fence line.

  He kept waiting for the accusations, for the argument. Instead he got the quiet presence of a man who’d hurt, who’d learned lessons, who desperately wanted to make amends.

  They were better than halfway done when his mother brought out lunch, steaming hot meatball sandwiches, fruit, chips, brownies, and fresh lemonade. The tight squeeze of her hand, dotted with age spots, made him duck his hea
d as he thanked her. They sat on the pickup’s tailgate and ate overlooking the creek.

  “I always felt connected to this place,” Ben said, thinking about Rachel.

  “I hoped one of you boys might take it over,” his father said.

  Ben swallowed the last of his fresh lemonade before answering. “You never know, Dad. One of us might.”

  They finished the job as the sun set, bumping home over the hillocks as the sun bled red and orange in the rearview mirror. He stayed for supper. His mother brought him up-to-date on local gossip, but the only thing he remembered saying, over and over, was I’m sorry, words his father repeated while his mother wept.

  He promised to be at Sam’s on Sunday morning.

  Before he left, he went into the room he shared with Sam for sixteen years. It was a craft room now, where his mother made scrapbooks and knitted toys for his nieces, but when he opened the closet his guitar case leaned against the back wall. He studied it, the stickers on the case, knew it would be out of tune and in need of repair. But it was a good guitar, the one Sam bought for him with money he saved doing chores for the next ranch over.

  Could he be that man again? There was no point in playing the guitar if he didn’t bring passion and love and intensity to the music, throw body and soul into a song.

  He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know.

  It was time to find out who he could be.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  After crying in Rob’s arms, Rachel didn’t fall apart so much as disappear into the long, hot summer. More baby goats arrived as the weeks passed. Business at the farm stand picked up as the growing season progressed and the farm’s reputation grew. She planted and harvested, sold and educated, cared for the baby goats and litters of kittens.

  She continued to go to open-mike nights at Artistary, and used the long summer evenings to page through apartment guides, and browse roommate want ads online. Reinventing herself wasn’t a one-time thing. Every success, every failure offered the opportunity to adapt, but it required awareness. Patience.