There's This Guy

by Rhys Ford

  “You okay?” Jake’s rough voice pulled at Dallas, shocking him with its rolling warmth. “Dallas? What’s wrong?”

  Everything was wrong. As beautiful as Jake’s work was, what Dallas felt from it rubbed hard on every tender bit he had. His soul smarted where he’d shoved his fondness for Jake, hoping he could ignore his rapid-fire pulse and stomach butterflies every time Jake was near. Friendship was what he offered. It was all he could give Jake. All he should give Jake because that’s what was needed the most. Dallas knew that. He knew Jake needed a friend more than he needed anything else, but still, the part that wept at the base of Jake’s artwork screamed to protect Jake from any more pain.

  “Yeah, um… shit, sorry.” Jerked out of the sculpture, Dallas stumbled back, striking his heel on the bin he’d dropped. “I… um… the door….”

  “No, I’m sorry.” He flashed Dallas a rueful smile. “That’s my fault. Should have told you there was a step down.”

  Standing in a now-open slender bay door with his backed-in truck idling behind him, Jake was a mouthwatering vision framed by the light coming off the street behind him. His jeans were slung low on his hips, a little too big for his narrow waist, and his T-shirt rode up on one side, giving Dallas a hint of a tight, muscled stomach and a deep V cut angling toward his powerful thighs. He was a bit grimy from a long day spent working, and his dark hair stood up over his forehead, probably from Jake’s habit of running his hand through it while he contemplated how to do something.

  Dallas was familiar with that habit, as well as a few others. The hair tugging was usually accompanied by Jake biting at his lower lip, his hazel eyes glazing over while his mind turned over, then rejected possible solutions. He tapped his pencil or pen on walls or pads of paper when frustrated, sometimes chewing on the end of an eraser only to spit out tiny bits once he realized what he’d done.

  And the one Dallas loved the most, the soft contented sigh Jake made when something he envisioned turned out exactly the way he’d imagined.

  There were slices of his heart hoping for a day when he’d bring Jake to that sighing contentment, hopefully with their bodies drenched with sweat and aching from a long, languid stretch of muscles and pleasure. As hard as Dallas tried to keep those whispers as forcefully boxed in as Jake’s star-glutted storm, they kept slithering out, reminding him they were there with a clench of his throat or a tight ball of want in his belly.

  “Not for you,” he reminded himself with a dark mutter. “Not—”

  “I think I’ll be able to get the frame in, but if you can grab the other bin, I’ll be able to move the truck out of the way. Building manager doesn’t like me parked up on the sidewalk for some reason.” Jake grunted, wrestling with the metal scaffolding he’d cobbled together at Evancho’s. His arms bulged, straining his T-shirt when he hefted the framework, lifting it from the truck bed.

  “Shit, let me help you.” Dallas leapt over the bin, hurrying over to the open tailgate before Jake could pull the frame out any farther. His shoulder nudged into Jake’s, their sides brushing several times as they began to unload the piece. “Where are we going?”

  “Over there. That table.” Jake grunted again, a whistle of air followed by a huff. “Fuck, tailgate caught me on the leg. I’ve got that side. I’ll go backward. Just tell me when to stop.”

  The walk was awkward, a few missteps, then a cloud of laughter when Dallas got his foot stuck in the bucket Jake’d left on the floor. Positioned on the table, the frame rocked a little but steadied when Jake shoved a block of wood under one end, mumbling something about a stand or a base.

  “It looks like… I don’t know.” Dallas tilted his head, seeing a hint of something in the curves Jake had quickly soldered together. “Like… is it a woman? It is, isn’t it? Like a pinup. She’s got that… ‘paint me on the side of a plane and send me off to war with your boys’ kind of pose.”

  Jake stared at the frame, seemingly stunned, then whispered, “Crap, I know what to do with this now.”

  When Jake’s following silence stretched a bit too long, Dallas glanced over at him, not surprised to see Jake raking his hand through his hair. Endearing but frustrated, Jake shot him an apologetic grin, his dimples deepening, then cleared his throat. The desperate look on Jake’s face was a priceless struggle between politeness and obsession. A fervor ran through him, one Dallas recognized instantly. Jake was itching to work, probably on the frame they’d brought in, and Dallas sighed, pretending to be frustrated only to get Jake going.

  “Um… can you give me a minute? Just one minute,” Jake begged softly in his husky, sinfully rough voice. “One. Maybe two.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You go and—”

  “There’s beer in the fridge. And some cider. Really, not long. I’ve just got that one part figured out.” Jake cut him off and reached for a black composition book sitting on the table, then grabbed a pencil. From the disconnected haziness in Jake’s expression, Dallas knew he’d lost Jake to the tumbling ideas knitting together in his mind.

  “And Jake has left the building.” The urge to nudge Jake was strong, probably a leftover reaction following years of being a little brother. Even if none of the feelings he had for Jake were even remotely brotherly, he’d grown to enjoy the playful irritation he could bring out of Jake with a little teasing. “You go be… creative. I’m going to pick up the shit I dropped.”

  Dallas crouched over the bin, sliding the fallen pieces back in, then retrieved the other one out of the truck. After stacking everything together, he closed the tailgate, then contemplated Jake’s hunched shoulders and bent back, his hand scribbling furiously over a page. Glancing up at the trapped star-cloud one last time, Dallas stared at the ass end of Jake’s truck and the open rolling door it blocked.

  “Okay, building guy doesn’t like trucks on the sidewalk, but shit, Jake’s the only one on this side of the building. Does it really matter? So, move the truck? Don’t move the truck?” Asking Jake would jerk him out of whatever he was working on, and Dallas rather enjoyed the passion roiling through the man’s body while he sketched. “Well, back home, you just don’t drive a man’s truck. Not so sure what the rules are here in SoCal, but I’m willing to bet, still a sacred thing. Let’s just turn the thing off and close it up. Someone wants it moved, we’ll move it.”

  He shut off the engine and closed the truck’s solid tailgate, almost pocketing the keys before remembering they were Jake’s. Another grunt from Jake gave Dallas carte blanche to bring him a beer or put the keys in the fridge, Dallas couldn’t tell which, but the beer sounded great. So did collapsing on the enormous beaten-up couch sitting next to a coffee table on the other side of the long space.

  But the urge to poke around was growing stronger with every moment he spent inside Jake’s place. The kitchen was a good place to start, mostly because he was warm and there’d been a promise of something cold to drink in the middle of all of Jake’s mutterings about lines and pressure points.

  “There’s a reason you get other people to do the reno.” He groaned at the ache in his thighs when he banged his knee into the metal leg of Jake’s Formica table. “Because it beats the shit out you. Get the beer. Then maybe sit. Man, this place is stuffy, but the space is awesome.”

  He liked the brick. It was warm and in some places more honey than red. More importantly, there seemed to be a ton of books, sketchpads, and oddly sized sculptural pieces everywhere. The long room had a softness to it. Despite the spill of metal and welders taking up half the space, Jake’s place had a gentleness to it Dallas enjoyed.

  “Probably projecting, Yates.” He risked a glance at Jake, wondering if he’d mind if Dallas poked at the bookshelves for a bit. Curiosity would not only kill the cat but strangle Dallas on its way out, his mother was fond of saying, and standing in the middle of Jake’s apartment, the urge to investigate every square inch overwhelmed him. “First, to the fridge.”

  The beer was an odd collection of fancy microbrews, ciders, and a
single dark stout, leaving Dallas with a wish he’d thought to stop by a store and grab some food to put in the fridge before he’d headed over. He’d been too excited, too thrilled to see Jake’s space, and as silly as it sounded—as it seemed in his mind—the stuffy, kind of worn around the edges felt more like home than the sparkling modern apartment he’d purchased twenty floors above LA’s busy streets. He grabbed a couple of blue-labeled glass bottles, closed the fridge, then popped them open.

  “Beer.” Dallas nudged Jake’s side when he left an open bottle of Primo on the long worktable. “Don’t knock it over.”

  “Almost done,” Jake promised softly, his eyes never leaving the paper. “I just… almost done.”

  “Take your time, J. Mind if I look around?”

  He got a rumble from Jake, and Dallas took it as a yes.

  As much as he wanted to, Dallas refused to look at the sketches scattered over the tabletop, and God, he wanted to. It was one thing to see the piece Jake had standing in the middle of his work area but quite another thing to peer over his shoulder. The rawness in Jake’s face was… erotic, a glimmer of something special and wonderful Dallas didn’t have the right to plunge into. After patting Jake on the shoulder, he went back to the beat-up couch and took in all he could of Jake from the space around him.

  He could hear the city seeping through the now cranked-open windows. It had taken him a minute to figure out how the windows worked, but once he had, they moved smoothly, letting the somewhat cooling air outside into the humid apartment. Now with a slight breeze blowing and a promise of a brisk morning in the air, the place was rather nice.

  The furniture looked rescued, more frat house than Better Homes & Gardens, but it suited Jake. Unpretentious, serviceable, and clean, with the living area laid open to the workspace and flowing straight into a sleeping space dominated by what looked like a soft king-sized bed with rumpled sheets Dallas’s brain reminded him would smell of Jake. Dallas put the bed—and its Jake-wrinkled linens—into the back of his mind, where he kept the memory of his mother’s horrific attempt at corn chowder and the time he’d splashed astringent on his freshly shaved balls on a dare.

  “You’ve done some stupid things, Yates,” he grumbled, wandering over to look at the bookcases lined up on the long wall. “Let’s not add another one to the list tonight.”

  “Almost done… I feel like I’m losing this idea. Almost,” Jake promised again. Dallas kept his chuckle to himself right up until the moment Jake’s head jerked up and he swore, “Shit! The truck. I’ve got to move it—”

  “Keys are on the table. Right next to… I’m assuming that weird thing you’ve got holding your napkins is a flamingo,” Dallas called out, cocking his head to read the titles of the books on the shelves. It was an odd mix with a few surprising choices. Tugging at the top of a tall, slim volume, Dallas tried to extract the book from its tight prison. “Huh, who the hell owns an actual paperback of Buckaroo Banzai?”

  The truck started, a chum of rattles and roars, when Dallas finally got the book loose and started an avalanche of novels, knickknacks, and a wooden box Jake’d lodged in sideways between some cookbooks and a retrospective of Middle Eastern metalwork. Panic made Dallas grab the first thing he could, snatching an old chisel out of the air before it struck the floor.

  “Crap, not the box.”

  It was too late to grab the small wooden rectangle, but he tried anyway, lunging a bit too far and throwing himself off-balance. He got the corner of it, and it tumbled sideways, bouncing off the back of the couch. Then its lid flew open, spilling everything inside to the floor.

  Something hard and solid struck the cement, then skittered across the floor, coming to a rest at Dallas’s feet. His heart stopped, and the warm laughter in his throat turned to sharp-edged ice he couldn’t swallow to save his life.

  A gun. A handgun at that. Not something he’d ever have thought Jake would own. Not uncommon, especially considering where Dallas grew up, but still, not something he’d have placed in Jake’s possession. The area once was a flashpoint for a horrendous riot, but that’d been decades ago. Koreatown was now an urban sprawl with gentile and familial leanings, not the hotspot of potential violence it’d once been.

  If anything, the gun felt as personal as the sculpture, and Dallas felt dirty handling it, as if he were eavesdropping on Jake’s secrets. Bending down, he picked up the gun as Jake walked through the still open rolling door.

  “Hey, sorry. I—” Jake came to a dead stop when Dallas straightened, holding the gun up, its muzzle pointed to the floor.

  The apology in Dallas’s mouth never left his tongue, his words frozen at the sight of Jake trembling in place. The blood left Jake’s face, and he swayed, stepping back either in fear or shock. Dallas placed the weapon on the couch’s arm, lifting his hand away from it for Jake to see. He’d grown up around guns. Anyone who lived on a ranch as a kid had to at least know which end was dangerous, but he hadn’t figured Jake for someone who’d want one, much less keep one in a box, hidden away between books.

  Jake was terrified, and Dallas feared he was the one who’d put that fear inside those big hazel eyes.

  “Hey, I was looking at the books and….” Dallas struggled to get his words out past the odd squeeze in his lungs. “I just knocked the box off the shelf and it fell out. I’m really sorry. I mean, I shouldn’t have—”

  “Jesus, Dallas, the damned thing’s loaded,” Jake blurted out, and his hands shook when he put them on his thighs, then bent over, hyperventilating slightly. “God, you could have—fuck… you could have died.”

  “Hey, Jake, it’s okay. Come on, they don’t just go off like they do in the movies, but still… I’m kind of used to having you around.” He walked around the couch, reaching for Jake, but he pulled away, his back heaving with every struggling breath. “The loaded part isn’t okay because that’s not smart to do. Something could happen and things could go south fast. Suppose someone breaks in? I don’t want someone to kill you with your own gun, J.”

  Jake looked up, his lip bloodied where he’d bitten it. His face was bloodless and drawn, and he struggled, spitting out each word as if speaking hurt. “See, that’s the thing, Dallas. That’s what the gun is for. To kill me.”

  Ten

  HE WAS falling apart, tiny ashen flakes of Jake carried off on the shifting breeze, his charred core disintegrating with the weight of Dallas’s worry.

  The couch was a drifting raft of sanity in the churning tempest of Jake’s mind, manned by a cross-legged Dallas with gentle, too-warm hands on Jake’s thigh. His body thirsted for Dallas’s touch, burning with need under his jeans, and despite the achingly tight clench of worry and panic in his chest, his heart skipped and sang when Dallas inched closer, his knees brushing Jake’s leg.

  “I want to be this guy who waits and doesn’t push, Jake,” Dallas finally murmured. “But this time, babe, I’m going to push. Talk to me about the gun and then tell me what we’re going to do about it.”

  His voice was harsh, worn, and strained. Jake couldn’t risk looking at him. He was afraid of what he’d find in Dallas’s face. So many possibilities, but most of all, disgust and disappointment.

  It’d been easier when he only had to worry about his father dying, and then… the abyss of his life yawned before him, a darkness filled with uncertainty and loneliness. Now there were… people…. Dallas… for God’s sake, and now Jake didn’t know what to do, how to feel, and Dallas’s fingers stroking his leg made it hard for him to think.

  “Fucking talk to me, Jake,” Dallas insisted. “I just can’t… stand the thought of you doing this. Doing that. How bad is it, J? Am I a problem? Do I—”

  “No, not you!” Jake gulped, swallowing air. Fucking hell, Dallas was the only bright spot in his life at the moment, and as much as he wanted to draw closer, he feared Dallas would pull away. “No, you’re not what’s wrong. It’s… I don’t even know where to start.”

  Dallas’s pale eyes crinkled, a soft sm
ile lifting his mouth and plumping his cheeks. His gentle tone coaxed but held a bit of steel, hammered down and unyielding in case Jake feinted. “Start with the gun. And why. After that, we’ll figure out where it goes.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the porcelain penguin salt and pepper shakers sitting on the dining table. It helped not to watch Dallas, not to want to crawl into his lap or arms. Keeping his eyes on the penguins, Jake noticed a tiny chip on Salt’s beak, a little pink discoloration where the ceramic came through, and Jake briefly wondered if he’d done it or if it’d come that way.

  They’d been his mother’s, bought for a birthday or a Christmas when Jake’d been a kid. He’d mowed lawns and washed cars for a couple of months to buy her something nice. He remembered that part of it. He’d thought they were clever, his eight- or nine-year-old mind amused by a pair of black-and-white birds being used for black-and-white condiments. She’d had no particular love for penguins, but she’d exclaimed over them, murmuring in French and petting his hair back. There’d been a moment of innocent joy, and he’d held on to those shakers after selling off practically everything else to pay his father’s mounting bills.

  Practically everything. He’d also kept all her books and more importantly, the gun his father’d hidden in a closet, tucked away in a wooden box Dallas eventually tumbled to the floor.

  “I found the gun when I was clearing out the house. Things were getting too tight, and I wasn’t bringing in enough money to pay for the mortgage, and… shit. Then Dad got really bad. So I sold a lot of it, but I kept the gun.” He sighed heavily. The words leaving him were razors, slicing the soft tissues in his throat on their way out. “It just seemed…. I couldn’t let it go. I found it, in that box, and my mouth itched.

  “I… I wanted to die that night, when I came home after… fuck.” He was going to have to go back… back to the beginning, and he didn’t know if he could. “The gun… everything… everything went to shit when I… thought I could be gay. Outside, you know? Away from my parents. Away from… my mother. But it didn’t work like that, Dallas. It never works like that. No matter how much you want something to remain a secret, it always comes out.”