by Rhys Ford
“There’s a… it’s not a park, but there’s places to sit if you want. Over there, on the right.” Jake couldn’t think of what to call the spot of grass with benches in front of a bank building set back away from the street. It was a raised courtyard of sorts, accessible on either side by gradual sloping ramps, and he’d driven by the place during the day, stopping to grab lunch from one of the many food trucks surrounding the block. “Lots of lights and no one bothers.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Dallas nodded his chin toward a busy Korean BBQ restaurant, its door blocked by a crowd of people. “We just ate and that still smells fucking great.”
“Yeah, it’s good. Evancho’s taken a couple of us there after a job. To celebrate.” Jake’s stomach clenched at the thought of any more food. His nerves were fried, scraped raw from the walk and the worry chewing on his mind. “Gotta cross here.”
They did a quick run across the street, catching the final seconds of the red flashing numbers before the light turned against them. He reached the other side seconds before Dallas, his longer legs eating up the asphalt. The cerulean glow from a spa’s neon sign turned some glass shards pebbling the sidewalk the same color as Dallas’s eyes. Jake’s heart skipped more than a few beats when an SUV turned the corner too tightly. The car jerked to the center of the intersection, but Jake’d already made a grab for Dallas’s arm and dragged him to the curb. The breeze from the car’s passing kicked exhaust fumes and the sticky tar aroma from overcooked streets into Jake’s face.
“I’m good,” Dallas murmured, his shoulder brushing Jake’s, holding up the drink carrier in mock salute to the retreating SUV. “Fuck, that was close… but the lattes are fine… and the crowd goes wild with the save.”
“You’re kind of nuts. You know that, right?” The contact burned, but he was reluctant to let go. Dallas’s arm was firm in his grasp, sinewy muscles moving beneath his fingers. Releasing Dallas seemed like a great idea, but his hand had other thoughts. Letting go… hurt, but he let his hand drop to his side, then shoved it into his pocket. Taking the carrier from Dallas’s hand, he headed up the slope, and the LED clock on the bank’s front side flashed the time, nearly into the single digits and ticking. “Shit, it’s late.”
“You want to head back? I’m good if you are.”
Jake didn’t know how to take Dallas’s question. Face value meant concern for Jake wanting to get enough sleep in to deal with his father the next morning, but a very large chunk of his brain whispered malevolence, assuring him Dallas wanted to be rid of him.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll be fine.” He was going to be fine even if he only got fifteen minutes of sleep. “’Sides, we’re right here.”
Something odd burbled in him, something Dallas somehow tapped into, and now nothing Jake did could shove it back down. It started the day he’d first seen Dallas get out of his car to inspect the old, worn building across the street from Evancho’s, and then everything went to hell and gone as soon as he’d looked up from studying the windows’ ironworks to find Dallas watching every move he made.
Surprisingly, one of the benches overlooking the street was not only clean but cool to the touch. A lingering heat remained over the city, a blush of warmth trapped by a thin layer of clouds hanging above the streets. The sky was the peculiar citrus-tinted gray of a typical Los Angeles late summer, a few hardier stars gleaming through the patches in the overcast. Built a few feet up off the street, the courtyard leveled out a slight hill and stretched back a quarter block before ending at the skyscraper’s front door. The enormous round fountain near the entrance dribbled a thin tickle of water from its spout, more of out of a need to keep the lily pads filling its bowl alive than provide a cooling spray.
“This must be a great place to people watch during the daytime,” Dallas said, sitting down next to Jake on the bench. “Okay, maybe not during the summer, because hell, you’d cook.”
“They bring out tables and umbrellas during the day.” Jake handed Dallas one of the lattes. “Lots of food trucks in the area come here for lunch. Place gets crazy.”
“Damn, I needed to just sit and breathe after today.” Dallas’s soft groan of pleasure when he sipped the cold drink did funny things to Jake’s belly. “And you live around here?”
“Yeah, about a block north of the Tofu House. I’d have said we could go there for coffee, but I’ve got shit in the fridge.”
“Except for bad pad thai.”
“Man, that went in the trash.” He wrinkled his nose at the memory of the rancid noodles. “It wasn’t that great to begin with, but you know, a quick dinner, can’t argue that. The fish should be okay, right?”
“Yeah, we won’t be gone long, and there’s nothing in there that’ll spoil. Not like anything’s got mayo or something.” Dallas chuckled. “Shit, worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had was because my sister, Tori, left some potato salad out for a couple of hours, then put it back in the fridge before the family got home. Me, my dad, and my mom got sicker than shit, and Austin was all, ‘No, I’m fine. Why are you all puking?’ That asshole can drink five-week-old sour milk and nothing. My mom calls him her garbage disposal.”
“Must be weird having sisters and brothers.” There’d been no chance of a sibling after him. He’d never once thought about having one. It would have been too problematic, another person for his father to use against him, against his mother. Leaning forward, Jake rested his weight on his palms, curling his fingers around the end of the seat. “I can’t imagine growing up with other kids in the house. It was always just me.”
“Wasn’t too bad. Austin was an asshole, but that’s an older brother’s job. Like Tori was a brat. The shit we used to do to her…. I’m surprised my mother didn’t skin us alive and leave us out for the coyotes.” Dallas stared off across the street, seemingly drawn by the crowd gathered around the restaurants. “Not like she was an angel. Any chance she got, she tossed us under the bus. She’s Dad’s favorite. He says no, but she’s the baby… and a girl. Can’t imagine growing up alone. Who would you blame things on? What about you? You always live around here?”
“Nope.” He shrugged uncomfortably. The conversation was bringing up old memories, soiled images of a childhood he’d rather have left behind him. “My dad moved us around a bit, but I went to high school in LA. He got hurt on a job, so working was out, and where we lived was cheap. My mom started cleaning houses, that kind of stuff.”
“I did that in college.” Dallas nodded when Jake shot him an incredulous look. “Hey, my parents paid for a lot of my school stuff, but spending money? I was on my own. Got hooked up with some guys who ran a cleaning service, and I swear to God, I’d rather work my parents’ ranch than scrub another sorority toilet. How old were you when your dad got hurt?”
“I was… fourteen, I think.” Those years were hazy, lost behind nights spent moving out of motel rooms in the early hours of the morning and living in the back of a run-down camper one of his dad’s friends loaned them. It was also the first time he’d noticed how a man looked, his young, hormonal body flushing with uncontrollable urges at the sight of a bare-chested bricklayer working in the hot sun. “Dad could do some side jobs out of his friend’s garage, under the table kind of stuff. I helped him for a long time, then… went to school for a bit. Came home when he had his first stroke and then things kind of went… bad after that, so I stuck around.”
He’d come home from a few months of college to find his mother worked nearly to death and beaten bloody by the man who’d claimed to love her above everything. They’d fallen back into the same routine, a still too skinny Jake bent to his father’s will to protect his mother and his mother promising to do better, to work harder for a husband who did nothing but cause them both pain.
There were cold mornings, deeply cold behind heavy brick walls, when the bones in his hands crinkled and ached so much the shock of pain woke him up. Times when he woke up screaming because he couldn’t grow up fast enough in his sleep to get away fr
om the shadow framed in his bedroom door. It was hard to reconcile the looming monster who’d terrorized his life with the sunken-in albatross of a man now slung around his neck.
“You okay, Jake?” Dallas prodded quietly.
His face was wet, probably damp from something, Jake couldn’t imagine what. Then he wiped at his cheek, smearing a drop of salty tear over his lips. He was crying. Jake didn’t even think he had any tears left in him, but something about Dallas, the easy warmth of the man plumbed into grief he’d buried a long time ago. He didn’t want to think about his mom, or the dried splotches of her blood on the kitchen floor he’d found when he’d come home after… that night.
The cast-iron skillet fell, his father told the cops. She was short. It was too high, and he’d found his wife much too late to do anything for her. If only their son had been there to help instead of abandoning his parents when they needed him the most. He’d felt the cops’ censure, stood in the fire of their condemnation, and bit his tongue raw to keep from screaming at the old man who played the system as easily as most men pissed.
He’d failed her… failed the small, quiet woman who’d silently borne his father’s fists during the worst of his beatings. It was another nightmare he’d never wake from, a very real terror whose poisonous claws were sunk deep in him, so deep he’d never shake it loose. Jake owed her everything, even if it meant denying who he was—who he wanted—because when everything was said and done, his mother’s death was on his head.
“Yeah, I’m good.” If there was any moment he should be longing for the bite of the gun into his mouth, it should have been then. But Dallas’s fingers brushing over his knee changed something inside of him, and the only desire he felt was for another lingering touch, an arm around his shoulders or maybe even a quick embrace to get his heart going again. Wiping at his face again, Jake stammered, “Shit, sorry… I—”
“Don’t apologize for crying. Hell, only thing you should apologize for is feeling nothing.” The bench grew smaller under Jake, because it seemed like only a moment ago, there was enough space between him and Dallas for him to breathe. Now he couldn’t seem to catch enough air to get around the hard lump in his chest. Dallas shifted, and for a second Jake was terrified he’d sling an arm around Jake’s shoulders, but he only turned, their knees suddenly touching. “You miss your mom? She passed away how long ago?”
“Years,” he snorted with a hard huff. “I didn’t get to… say good-bye. She was gone by the time I got to the hospital. Then all I was left with was… him. And now, swear to God, man, once he’s gone, I have no fucking clue what to do.”
“It’s hard when you’re close to your parents.” Dallas moved the drinks to the ground, setting them under the bench. “Going to kill me when my mom or dad goes. I can’t even imagine what life’s going to be without them. It’ll fucking break me. I know it. Your dad… shit, I can’t imagine.”
“See, yeah that’s the thing, I’m not going to miss him.” Jake shook his head, hoping to loosen the pressure squeezing in on him, but all it did was make him a bit dizzy. “But I’ve been so wrapped up in making sure he’s taken care of, there’s nothing of me left. Oh, it’ll break me, all right, only because I won’t have any clue what to do after he’s gone… and I’m finally fucking free.”
Seven
FOURTEEN DAYS.
It’d been two weeks since Jake’s emotions punctured through the thick membrane of politeness and quietude he donned as armor, then just as quickly shut everything down again, pulling back into himself so quickly it made Dallas’s head spin. A few glistening tears across his cheeks and Jake Moore was done, hidden away before Dallas could do anything other than warble a few words of sympathy.
But every morning, Jake showed up for work, a soft-spoken, gorgeous reminder to Dallas that the world wasn’t always his oyster and he wasn’t going to get everything he wanted out of life.
“You moon over that boy more than I do chocolate,” Celeste grumbled in his ear, jerking Dallas out of his thoughts. “Seriously, just… do something. Anything. Go get laid. Buy one of those rubbery flashlight things. Get a dog. Better yet, get a cat. Easier to take care of, so when you die of boredom and sighing, I’ll inherit something I like.”
“You’re getting jack shit from me,” Dallas grumbled back. “Not one damned glass. Not even a fricking coaster. Don’t you have a bathroom you were painting? You know, the one you started back when your chest still had hair?”
“I’m taking a break,” she sniffed imperiously. “Besides, I’m being meticulous. You can’t rush genius.”
“The damned Sistine Chapel was done quicker than that fricking bathroom.” He laid down another piece of blue tape on the edge of a one-way mirror partition separating the bar area from what had been a kitchen. Stealing a quick glance at Jake’s silhouette on one of the front windows, he hissed at Celeste, “And I’m not fucking mooning. He’s not… look, he needs a friend, not some asshole hitting on him. Don’t give him any shit, sugar. He doesn’t need it. He’s got plenty.”
The heat wave cracked that morning when a pressure front broke and pulled in a marine layer cold and thick enough to clash with the oppressive hot air sitting over the city. A brief, torrential bit of rain hit the streets, steaming the neighborhood with a black-tar-scented haze, dropping the early-morning temperature to something less than hell’s doorway, and Dallas silently mourned Jake eschewing the tank tops he’d been wearing all week for a T-shirt.
After a week of removing all of the random wrought-iron bars inside the building, Jake spent his mornings scrubbing down the windows and prepping the clunky bars for removal. Frustrated by the delays, Jake was ready to take a torch to the offending bars on the outside and begin working on restoring the original ironwork. His boss, Evancho, visited a few times, pulling Jake off of the job when the temperature soared too high, curtailing Jake’s protests with a sharp grunt to get back into the shop where it was cooler.
It was sure as hell saying something when a fabrication shop was cooler than a SoCal afternoon, and Dallas grew used to shutting down at noon every day, then eating lunch with Jake under the huge tree in the parking lot behind the building. Despite the air being hot enough to blister the inside of his lungs with every breath he took, Dallas enjoyed the hell out of sitting on the open tailgate of Jake’s old Chevy truck. It’d become a standing date, and they’d spent the hour talking about every stupid thing on the planet, from movies they adored to which superhero was the best.
Sometimes they touched on darker things. It was hard not to press, especially when Jake grew quiet and still beside him. A gentle nudge with a soft word took away most of the shadows on the man’s face, but the soulful retreats and silences were bumps in their conversation Dallas hoped to eventually smooth over.
“He’s got plenty of something. Have you seen that ass? It’s like—”
“Cee, I love you with a deep love I only reserve for chocolate chip cookies, but I’m going to ask you one last time, stop. It’s Jake. He’s not….” Dallas took a deep breath, shoving down the irrational anger growing inside of him. He had no right to be possessive, but Celeste’s ogling was getting on his nerves. “Look, please. For the love of God, Serenity, and TV dinners, just stop.”
“Oh, sugar,” Celeste groaned softly. “You’ve got it so fucking bad.”
Trapped between needing to lie to himself and always telling Celeste the truth, Dallas chose the only thing he could say to his best friend.
“Shut up, Celeste.”
Celeste’s laughter continued to mock him as she sauntered back to the bathroom she’d abandoned earlier.
“She okay?” Jake pushed past the semiopen front door, nearly getting wedged against the wall. “Sounds like a hyena from outside.”
“Sounds like one inside too.” Dallas shook the feeling back into his fingers, cramped from laying down what seemed like miles of tape. “Explain to me why I’m doing this myself again?”
“Because it’s cheaper, and all
of the good painting companies are scheduled out until October?” Jake cocked his head at the guitar riff erupting from Dallas’s phone lying on the scratched bar top. “Shit, it’s noon already?”
“Crap, it is. Hey, what’d you bring for lunch?” After watching Jake eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for days on end, Dallas was hoping for a break in the routine. “Please tell me PB and J again.”
“Yeah, why?” The suspicious look on Jake’s face made Dallas grin. “What? It’s cheap.”
“Because it’ll keep. Come on. I’m buying us lunch today.” Dallas waved away Jake’s impending protest nearly as soon as the man frowned at him. “Man, we’ve been working in this sweat hole without a break for almost two weeks. You’re here all day today. I can at least grab you a lunch someplace with air-conditioning. Let me see what Celeste wants to—”
“Celeste has a hair appointment,” she called out from the bathroom. “And I’m not coming back. We’re going to bleach me out and go for a full red this time.”
“Isn’t her hair already blonde?” Jake made a face at Dallas. “Right? I thought it was blonde.”
“Wigs,” Dallas whispered back. “She’s been growing hers out after a tragic perming accident. I haven’t seen her real hair in months. It’s like a Kinder Egg every time I see her. I never know what I’m going to get.”
“What’s a Kinder Egg?” Jake’s smile when Celeste joined them in the main room lit up his face, and the grimace he gave her when she kissed his slightly dirty face was pure teasing. “And what’s the matter with your hair?”
Patting his face, Celeste murmured, “God, it’s good you’re beautiful. I’ll be back tomorrow to finish the bathroom. Don’t wait up for me.”