by Rhys Ford
Dallas Yates was everything Jake needed to deny himself. There was no question about the man’s sexuality. As he removed a few of the wider grates from the front of the building, Jake overheard Dallas and Celeste joking about their differing tastes in men, coffee, and most important of all to hear them talk, the amount of hot sauce considered acceptable on a toasted plain bagel smeared with cream cheese.
His guts were churning, and the sensible part of his brain said to let the panels go, let Dallas and whatever friend he dragged in to help him dig them out. There was time to go home and shower, then see his dad if he left right at that exact moment.
But his feet refused to move, and his neck hurt a bit from craning to see around the piles of clutter for a hint of black hair and gentle smile.
“Shit, there’s a… what are those purple-ink copying machines they used to have a long time ago? With the rollers?” Dallas called out from behind a bookcase. “There’s one back here. I feel like I’m digging through some sick and twisted time capsule. What the hell is that word?”
“A mimeograph.” Jake waded farther into the mess, trying to reach the window on the far wall. “You might want to consider renting a dumpster and a trash slide. If we can get to this window, we can use it to funnel a lot of the debris out. Probably not furniture but maybe a lot of the small stuff.”
“That is an excellent idea, and thanks for volunteering. You don’t have to do this, you know,” Dallas replied. “I mean I appreciate you coming up here to help me look, but I can hire people, especially considering my help decided to bail on me. I love her, but sometimes Celeste is a fricking princess. Had the nerve to tell me it smells worse than wet puke and cat piss up here.”
It was good he brought the woman—man—up. There’d been a pause in his brain when he first saw Celeste, a glitch as his mind fought to reconcile her slightly masculine features with her lush body and come-fuck-me voice. He’d never been around someone like Celeste, and his thoughts were tangled, a web where Jake wasn’t quite sure if he was the spider or the fly.
“Hey, can I ask you something? About Celeste?” Jake heard Dallas grunt a “sure” from somewhere deep in the room. “She’s… I mean it’s she and her, yeah? I’ve got that right?”
“You got that perfect.” Dallas’s head popped out, and he fussed at a bit of sticky dust trailing across his face. “Why? What’s up?”
“I’ve just never been around a… I mean I don’t even know what to call her. Not a lot of real women in my life, much less….” Jake stumbled over his tongue. “Fuck, not real. I don’t know the word. I’m fucking this up. I don’t know how to talk about this. About her. About any of it.”
“Celeste is definitely a real woman for all intents and purposes, and the word you’re looking for is biological woman. And ask away. How are you going to know if you don’t have that discussion?” Dallas swiped at his face, smearing the mess around in his hair, picking his way out of the rubbish pile he’d been standing in. “Well, even that some people will get pissy about, but discussion is always good. I can’t keep up most of the time. Now I just ask what pronoun people like to use and go with that. Transgender…. It’s what the T is in the string of alphabets we call ourselves. Well, I think there’s a T. It keeps changing. I used to think it was transvestite, but hey, I learned.”
“Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but how’s that different from a drag queen?”
“Oh, loads of differences. A drag queen is… well, it’s a lifestyle. Its own culture, really. Once Bombshells and Beauties is up and running, you’ll see. Drag kings too. I know a couple looking for a place to showcase.” He studied Jake long enough for him to get uncomfortable, then asked, “Really? No women? What about… dating and all that?”
“Yeah, no. I don’t… date.” There wasn’t time… wasn’t room in his life for another person, least of all a lie like a woman. His stomach twisted in on itself, bile curling around the desire Dallas sparked in him. “Dad’s sick, really sick, so most of my spare time goes to taking care of him, doing paperwork, running things down for him. Look, about Celeste, I was just… back when I met her, I wanted to make sure I used the right words. That’s all. She and her… got it.”
“You’re doing fine. Celeste was born male, and at some point in her convoluted, messed-up childhood, realized her body felt wrong. So, after a lot of internal debate and some… let’s just say inflamed, destructive familial relationships, she chucked the idea of being a guy and decided he needed to be a she. So there you go, my sister, Celeste.”
The dust bunny was still on Dallas’s cheek and forehead, despite his flailing to get it off, and Jake trudged over to help him. Plucking the gummy mass was harder than it looked, and Jake steadied himself on the sliding piles, unwinding hair strands from the tacky web. After getting it loose, he shook the web off, and Dallas’s smile blinded him.
“Thanks. And a life without women. I can’t imagine. I’m surrounded by them, in one form or another.”
“I mostly live at the shop, and there’s not a lot of women who weld or do metalwork. It’s really… well, guys are assholes for stupid reasons. Joan worked with us, and she finally painted all of her tools pink so the guys would stop taking them to fuck with her.” He shrugged at Dallas’s disgusted sigh. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t me. She was there for about three months. Then she left for a job near her parents’ house in Seattle because they’d watch her kids for free. That was… about two years ago.”
“So no sisters? Any siblings?”
“No, just me and my dad.” Guilt gnawed on Jake, and he patted his pocket, debating calling to check on the old man. “You?”
“Well, besides Celeste….” Dallas stepped closer, and Jake stood stock-still, unsure of which way to go. “There’s Victoria, my real sister—”
“Biological sister.” Jake risked a light tease and was rewarded with a soft chuckle. “Because, you know… real.”
“Oh hello, petard, my old friend. Let me hoist myself up onto thee.” Dallas shook his head. “Ah, Jake Moore, you’re turning my world around on me. But yeah, two biological siblings, my older brother, Austin, and my younger sister, Victoria. Our parents were a bit on the… wild side, so we’re named after where we were conceived. Aus and I think Vick’s name should actually be Telferner, based off of the stories we heard, but my mom’s denying it. I think she just didn’t want to name her kid Telferner. And what in God’s name is that smell? It’s like we’re right on it.”
Jake’s boot nudged yet another tower of papers, and they tumbled, spilling over Dallas’s feet. It proved to be a keystone in the rubbish pile as a stack of heavy boxes tipped forward, and Jake shoved his shoulder into Dallas as a five-foot-tall section of the room turned into a river of debris.
“I don’t… crap. Move!” Something hit Jake’s shin, then his knee, pushing the joint forward. They fell, nearly buried beneath the rubble, and Dallas fought to get free, his legs kicking at Jake’s belly. “Hold on, wait. You’re… oof! Stop.”
“Sorry, panic. Was buried under sand as a kid… and now I feel like an idiot.” Dallas turned over onto his side, slowly extricating himself from the pile. “Can you get out?”
“Yeah, I’m just….” Jake spotted something near the fallen mound. Something oddly shaped lay on the now-exposed, grimy industrial-tile floor. It was gray, a darker hue than the once-white tiles in the checkerboard pattern. He blinked, but the shape didn’t change.
Instead, as the dust began to settle, the shape became more distinct, better formed in his mind.
It was curved, nearly balled up into itself, and at first he thought it was a part of a mannequin, something left behind from the building’s days as a clothing store, but its toes—long, withered toes—were brown, caked with dirt, and marbled, with thick, jagged nails. The foot was filthy, a gray mass of bone and skin surprisingly plump considering its resting place. Then Jake followed the length of the foot up to a leg and the moving pad tossed over the lump beyo
nd that, its olive green cover stiff with what looked like gallons of dried blood. He blinked, and the one mewling cell of Jake’s brain still functioning picked up on the sound of Dallas’s retching a few feet away when the decaying body’s rank smell fully hit them.
“Okay, yeah, Celeste’s right,” Jake mumbled, jerking his feet out from under the fallen papers as he struggled to get his phone out of his jeans. “This is a hell of a lot worse than wet puke and cat piss.”
Three
THE DAY’S heat pressed down on Jake, leeching out every bit of energy he had left in him. The cops battered at him, coming one way, then another, trying to get answers out of him… answers he didn’t have, and all the while, his eyes kept drifting over to where Dallas Yates stood, talking to a fierce-looking female detective with a gun on her hip as big as the chip on her shoulder.
California wasn’t giving up its daylight, the long hours toward dark stretching out before them as if Maui hooked the sun again and held it from sinking past the horizon. Traffic was slow along the main street, cars ambling to a crawl to study the collection of cops, police cars, and yellow crime tape circling the building. There was nothing to see, nothing anyone could see. A dark van with blacked-out windows and a coroner’s logo on its sides waited by the back door for someone to bring down the man they’d found. To hear the cops talk, it would be hours before that happened. Digging out the deceased was their top priority, and for all intents and purposes, they were treating the whole business as a crime scene.
Death never kissed Jake as it had that afternoon. His mother’s death was brutal, and by the time he’d reached their home in East Los Angeles, the machines keeping her alive were still. His father hadn’t waited for Jake to get there. Hadn’t given Jake time to say good-bye. Her bed was empty and cold before Jake pushed his way into the hospital, frantic to find the small, quiet woman who’d slipped him bread and cheese when he was locked in his room and who’d washed the blood from his back after yet another zealous beating.
“Funny. Now I’m waiting for death to come get the old man, and instead it comes knocking on this guy’s door.” Shoving his hands into his pockets, Jake rocked back onto his heels and listened to the buzz around him. A quick call to the hospital reassured him his father was asleep, worn out from physical therapy and general bitchiness, but he worried anyway. “We don’t even know who the poor bastard was.”
Jake couldn’t stop thinking about the drowning pool he swam in some nights when the loathing covering his soul grew too heavy. The roof of his abused mouth healed slowly. Shreds of skin were slick, tickling reminders of how close he got to the darkness, how easily it seduced him into wanting to end the aching pain in his chest. What troubled him most was no one knew who the man was. He’d died, alone and possibly slowly if the cops speculating he’d been buried alive by the rubbish were to be believed. There was too much blood for that, or at least that’s what it looked like then. In the passing hours, he was now questioning what he’d seen, but one thing was for certain. He stood on the stoop of someone’s passing and was struck by the loneliness of the man’s death.
“That’ll be me one day. Fucking dead alone until someone finds me by accident.” He stared up into the canopy of a large tree behind the building. “Fuck.”
He was scared. Somewhere in his soul, Jake knew there was nothing but fear in his bones. He was too frightened to act on his desires, to breathe sometimes, and just when he was ready to put an end to the paralyzing terror running through his veins, life tapped him on the back of the head to remind him it wasn’t quite done with him yet. His fear peeled him apart, exposing the pulp of his pain to the raw, cold truth of the world’s steely teeth.
Most of all, he was scared of living. That much he knew. He’d dipped his toe into its raging waters once, and his world became a storm of hellfire and anguish. It was asking too much to dare living again. It was safer to remain behind the glass walls he’d built around himself, but his heart yearned to be free.
A simple damned afternoon spent in Dallas Yates’s company and he wanted more. Needed more.
But Jake knew, deep down inside, he wasn’t going to get it, and it wasn’t fucking fair.
“That kind of life… it’s wrong, Jacques,” his mother would murmur in her accented whisper after he’d retreated to his bedroom to lick his wounds after a long day of dealing with life and his father. He missed the weight of her tiny body against his and the smell of lavender in her long, dark hair. “You need a woman, bébé. It is how life is. This thing you have—this sickness you have about men—it will never lead to love. Men cannot love men. You will see this. You will understand this when you are older. For men, it is only sex. Two men—it will only be about sex. You will fall in love with a man and he will only hurt you, use you, and then… he is done and will toss you away. And it will kill me to watch you do this.”
She’d been right, his mother. He’d been tossed aside, just as she’d predicted.
And she’d died because he’d stupidly fallen in love.
It was hard watching Dallas. It was hard not to watch Dallas. There were parts inside of Jake screaming to burrow deep into the man, submerging himself in Dallas’s warmth and vibrancy, while his mind knew better. He had nothing to offer a man like Dallas. Hell, he had nothing to offer himself.
“Yeah, remember what happened the last time? Went all that way and for what? Just to find out my mother was right… and then.” God, the horrific then after he’d bared his heart, hoping to be loved, and had it handed back to him in tatters. The then that followed was… he couldn’t get past that point. The tree’s bark bit into his skin through his T-shirt, scraping at the keloids on his back, and Jake welcomed the bitter bite of silvery pain. “Your dad’s right. That fucking asshole’s right. Remember that. No one wants the likes of you, Jakey boy. Keep that in the front of your head when you get to thinking otherwise.”
But the what-ifs kept rearing up, ugly-headed cobras looking for a piece of untended flesh to sink their fangs into and spread their poisons, rotting Jake away.
Dallas Yates stirred things inside of Jake he wasn’t prepared for. The man’s casual, sexy smile riled up emotions Jake buried a long time ago, emotions he couldn’t afford. There were bits and pieces of Dallas’s life so outside of Jake’s norm he struggled to understand them.
And one of those outside-the-norms was heading straight for Jake, having just crawled out of a taxi cab, then been waved off by Dallas as he followed the cops back into the building. Swinging a canvas bag loaded down enough to weight its sway, Celeste smiled at the sea of blue lapping at the edges of the building and continued to stroll across the parking lot, putting every bit of sass she had in her walk.
Celeste was the definition of complicated. She undeniably was a woman, but there was something more. Nothing Jake could put his finger on. She reveled in her womanhood, saturating it to high contrast until the colors of who she was bled together. There was no one thing Jake could point at to say what pushed her nearly to the point of being too much, but it worked. Celeste threw everything she had into being… well, Celeste.
Her smile was broad, squaring off her chin and tightening her cheeks. Her hair had changed—again—but then it had every time Jake saw her. This time she’d gone for a sleek black bob, and unlike every time he’d seen her before, she was wearing flats. With her black yoga pants and button-up shirt, she was channeling a mean Audrey Hepburn… if Hepburn had Marilyn Monroe’s curves.
Quite a few cops’ eyes followed Celeste’s trot across the parking lot over to the tree Jake took shelter under. Her hips swayed, a coquettish bump and grind of jiggling flesh and attitude meant to make a man take notice. Most men did, or at least the ones standing around waiting for the dead to be carried downstairs and taken off to parts unknown. Celeste should have stirred something in him. Jake would have killed for a tingle of any reaction to the woman, but there was nothing there.
Life would have been so much damned easier if he could scrape up th
e faintest bit of arousal for a woman’s smooth flesh and curves, but his body craved another man’s hardness and the bite of rough fingers into his hips.
“Hello, darling,” Celeste purred up at him, holding out a bottle of nearly frozen solid water. “God, look at you. All hot and sweet. Here, I brought something to cool off with. You look about dead on your feet. Oh crap, sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up—does anyone know the guy? The dead one?”
“No clue who he is. Or if the cops know, they’re not saying,” he replied. “Thank you for this… the water. It’s damned hot.”
The bottle was iced over, burning his hand from the cold, and he tucked it under his arm, thankful for the chill it ran down his side. Cracking, the ice shifted, breaking apart from the heat of his body against the plastic, and Celeste held out another bottle.
“Here. Do the other one too.”
“I’m sweaty,” he protested softly. “It’ll get all over.”
“Just how I like my water to taste, with a dash of a gorgeous man. Like a twist of lemon.” Celeste didn’t smirk, but her mouth twisted into an odd smile. “Honey, you are absolutely beautiful standing there with a blush over your cheeks. It’s like no one flirts with you.”
“Not so much, no.” Handing over the partially thawed bottle to Celeste, he shrugged. “I work with about twenty guys in a shop. Not much flirting going on there.”
“It’s probably all very macho, grunting and farting.” Her smile still teased, but her expressive eyes went flat and guarded.
“Sometimes,” he agreed, opening the other bottle. “Not always. Lots of older guys. Evancho likes hiring guys with families. Some of the guys are assholes, but most are okay. I just avoid the assholes.”
“Do they give you shit about being gay? I’m going to be—”
The buzzing in Jake’s ears drowned out Celeste’s chattering, and the air grew too thick to suck in. Jake blinked through the numbness spreading across his face and chest, but he couldn’t feel anything other than the heavy stone in his belly, pinning him in place. He concentrated on breathing, forcing himself to pull in a breath, then exhale it, fighting to get control over himself—over anything—and not be swallowed up in the surreal quicksand of panic he floundered in.