Had I loved Jessed? Or was I just remembering the emotion of a confused teenager? Maybe I wasn’t gay. Maybe this was stress.
Maybe he looked so much like Jesse that I….
Had to be. Because I didn’t love anyone. Not romantic love. Comfortable love. I knew what that was. I could handle that. Friendship, companionship—
Jealousy. Obsession. Awe. Heartache in the best way possible. His kiss. His touch. His smile. His strength. His fucking hot body.
Those were not symptoms of stress. Or comfortable love. Those were what I felt for Jesse.
Peter knocked gently. “Can I come in?”
“I’m busy. Washing jizz off my face.” I turned on the faucet for effect and peeled off my sweat-slicked shirt.
Peter looked like Jesse.
But Peter was nothing like Jesse.
The stark glare of my sterile bathroom surrounded me. “Are you in love with him?” I whispered to my haggard reflection.
No. I wasn’t in love with him. Another puzzle piece clicked in place. “Yes,” Peter had said. “But not yet.” I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me, but that was where this was headed. I had to get out of this circle of denial. If I had felt this for a woman, I wouldn’t have questioned it at all. Run, yes, questioned, no.
If I did love him, what then? Did men love each other? Was that even real? What if I loved him and he never loved me back? What if his kind of love was different?
Gay love. It wasn’t the same, right?
I looked at my reflection. “You’re gay. You’re gay. You’re gay.” It didn’t change anything. He didn’t—couldn’t—love me.
Being gay was irrelevant. You can make it about anything you want, but that won’t change the truth.
He said he was falling for me. Deep down I didn’t believe him. Fundamentally I believed that I was unlovable. And hadn’t that borne out with my mother and father?
Lying to yourself has failed you every time. Losing Peter would be the worst of your failures.
“You are fucked up,” I told the reflection. So get over being fucked up. “He’s going to break you.” Yeah, but isn’t it worth it?
“I have cake for your pity party,” Peter said.
How could I not love you, Peter.
“And pony rides,” he added.
“Christ. Is this how you treat Cai? No wonder he’s rebelling.”
“Cai doesn’t throw tantrums or sulk in the bathroom.”
I washed and dried my face quickly and threw open the door. “I’m not sulk—” Hello. Peter still hadn’t pulled his shirt back on.
He displayed himself, hands bracing on either side of the doorway. The shorts hung low on his hips. The missing button left a gap, revealing the edges of the clipped hair. Sculpted ridges along his hips formed an arrow pointing right to his groin. My mouth went dry and my doubts faded in a cloud of want.
“I just wanted…Look, you’re also sweet and funny and charming. And there’s a…goodness,” he fumbled with the word, “—you’re a good person. And not self-righteous about it.”
“And?” I said brusquely to cover that his words were making me lightheaded.
“And I can’t always see past those to the bad things,” he admitted. “And I have to, because you’re too dangerous to love.”
“I’m falling in love with you. Is that better?”
He dropped his hands from the door and backed away, brows furrowed, eyes wide. My hardwood floor stuck to his now bared feet. “There you go again. You made a decision, and it won’t even matter about the truth!”
“What’s the truth?” I stalked him across the bedroom.
“People don’t fall in love in two weeks!”
“A week and half,” I corrected. “You’re just scared. And you want me right there with you.”
“With good reason. What you’re feeling isn’t real. You’re wanting someone else, and you’re projecting him on me!”
“Don’t tell me what I feel. Maybe I don’t love you. Maybe I’ve just convinced myself I do. But despite all your faults, this is the closest thing to love I’ve felt. So maybe I’m in love with you, but not yet!”
He took another step backward and then another. “That’s the problem. You don’t think I have faults. I’m just Jess to you. The perfect—” He buckled backward onto the bed. I landed gently atop him. “—memory.”
I pinned his wrists. “You’re obsessive about Cai. Snarky. Treat people like you’re a parent. Bossy. Controlling. Sleep with men for money.” My knee split his legs apart, and I pushed between them. “Sleep with me for money! Use sex to deflect conversations. Manipulative. Act forty instead of twenty. Contradict yourself. Tell people what you think they want to hear.”
“That’s the same as manipulative.” He bit his lip.
“Bite your fucking lip too much,” I growled.
He lifted his chin and deliberately ran his tongue over the edges of his teeth. “You like it.”
The Solution To All Problems is a Blow Job
“Blow jobs are not going to solve our problems,” he whispered in my ear an hour later.
“I’m really tired. My ass and dick are sore. We can test that theory when we wake up.”
The air-conditioning ticked on, blowing against my sweat-dotted skin. I shivered and pulled his hand closer to me. He kissed and sucked at the slope of my shoulder, instantly sending needed warmth into my blood. “I have to take Cai to the doctor for his prescription in a few hours.”
I soaked in the details of a perfect moment. He held me close, my naked back to his bare chest. The metal ring from his nipple imprinting on my skin. His cock, soft and wet, lay against my ass. It all should have felt strange. It should have felt uncomfortable. But when I looked down at our laced hands resting against my stomach—men’s hands with long fingers and sprinkled with sparse hair—all I felt was the world finally tilting in place. Peter had righted the ground under my feet. I was normal for the first time in my life.
“He has a mother, Peter. She’s supposed to do those things for him.” He rolled away from me. Another shiver passed over my skin, coldness seeping into my bones.
“I take care of Cai.”
Fuck, were we ever going to get this dance right? Three steps forward, ten steps back. I flipped around to face him. “You’re indebted to Cai you mean.”
“Just go to sleep, Austin. It’s not your concern.”
“Tell me what he has over you?” I was ninety-nine percent sure of the reason, but I wanted to hear him admit it. I believed he needed to tell someone.
“He’s my brother. Even you can understand family.” He offered me his back, tugging the sheet up.
Ouch. Even me. The guy who had no family. I could snap back at him, but I didn’t want to fight again. I wanted to rewind the last three minutes to that feeling of rightness. Deciding to drop the subject, I folded myself around him. Time to lead some forward steps. “I’m done fighting with you.” I pressed my forehead against the back of his head, resting my fingers on his arm. He relaxed into my embrace and brought my hand to his lips, kissing the palm.
“Me too,” he said. “Done fighting any of it.”
“Tilt,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
“Exactly,” I said. Drifting off into sleep, I felt hope blanket around us.
Dreams Interrupting Fantasies
I awoke on my stomach with the bad taste of a disturbing dream lingering on my tongue and Peter’s fingernail promising interesting things as it scraped down my spine. “Lower,” I mumbled sleepily into a puddle of drool. The dream was quickly becoming a distant memory.
“Your butt cheek looks ravaged.”
“It had a brutal workout yesterday. It’s earned a little leniency in the attractiveness department.”
He sat back on my thighs and spread my cheeks. I thanked the pillow for not tearing between my teeth. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
My ass? Or what you’re doing to it? My mouth was not cooperating with wh
at I wanted to say. “Please.”
“Can’t. I have to go soon,” he said huskily. “I’m going to put some more stuff on your cuts and cover the stitches so you can shower. This is going to hurt.”
“I need to run before I shower. We can tape it up after.” Feeling like we were on shaky ground from last night, I wanted us to do something routine. “Want to run with me?” I asked.
I looked over my shoulder when he climbed off and watched him gather a box of plastic wrap, a tube and medical tape off the bed. It warmed me that taking care of me was the first thing on his mind. Or maybe the second, I thought, recalling the way his finger had dragged along the crease of my ass before he had slid off me.
Peter tilted his head, chewing his inner lip as he glanced at my bedside clock. “Cai’s appointment is at eleven. It’s nearly nine-thirty. When I get back? Should you be running with stitches?”
“Maybe not,” I admitted. But the thought of running with Peter, maybe even on a daily basis was appealing. More than appealing. I checked the clock, too. We’d had about three hours of sleep. Not even that could erase my smile. Rubbing my eyes, I untangled my legs from the sheet and swung them off the bed. “Did you go downstairs like that?” I asked, staring unabashedly at his naked body.
“Borrowed your jeans. Took them off again when I saw your bare ass.”
“I had a sheet on. How did you see my bare ass?”
He smirked, then offered me the backside view as he walked into the bathroom. My cock sent a waving hand to my brain. “Don’t even think about it,” he called over his shoulder. “It took twenty minutes to wake you up, and now we don’t have time.” The door clicked shut, and my smile fell.
Without Peter as a distraction, the dream from this morning was suddenly a heavy weight on my spirit. I had dreamt it just moments before I had fully awakened, when my subconscious drew me towards a memory rather than a fantasy.
Six months ago Marta and I were sat at her breakfast table. We had been surrounded by soft sunlight from the wide kitchen window. Asa had just turned three and was squirming in her mother’s arms. In the dream-memory everything was the same, except both of them were blurry, and only part of the conversation was clear.
Marta kissed Asa’s freckled cheek. “Håll dig lugn, mitt lilla barn.”
“Hole day lung, meet Lila Barn?” I asked.
Marta laughed. “This is good, Oz. You learn yourself Swedish.”
I smiled and stirred the coffee which magically appeared at my elbow. “What’s it mean?”
“Hold yourself still, my little child.”
Barn. Child. Barn lager. I’d never taken the time to find the name, but Marta had opened a store not too long ago. Dave’s nervousness came back to me from yesterday.
But barn could have meant anything—in any language. Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch. Come to think of it, I recalled seeing bairn as a Scottish word in a book once. So the word alone wasn’t causing the gears in my brain to shift into overdrive. It was a preponderance of the clues gathered into one nightmarish thought.
Alvarado, at the very least, smuggled illegal aliens into the country. The cash Luis and I were tracking was probably money being laundered through enterprises owned by, according to Peter, cops. Back when Peter saw the list of businesses on the computer, he’d only recognized a few. Was one of the businesses Marta’s?
There were too many coincidences to actually be coincidence. A foreboding itch started in the back of my head.
Dave had arrested Alvarado.
Dave’s strange visit the other day.
Dave’s nervous tapping last night.
Dave’s Swedish wife who ran a Swedish children’s clothing store.
Barn, the Swedish word for child.
What did lager mean?
Throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt, I hurried down to the living room to grab my laptop, only to freeze on the landing as I stared at the far wall.
Everyone’s a Critic
“Jesus,” I whispered.
Cai turned around, a rainbow of speckles dotting his face, arms and hands. A large streak of blue fit into the crease of his smile and there was a yellow blotch next to one dimple. “Um. Not finished. It’s not finished. The mural. The mural is not finished.”
“Jesus,” I said again, words failing me. Not finished, but no less spectacular. Or at least the third of it he had completed was. From across the room, the gothic style church looked as if each individual brick was painted in detail, including the grooves and cracks. They weren’t the traditional red or grey bricks, but a mixture of blues, reds and yellows which, like the rest of the painting, were surreal colors creating a realistic image.
“Stunning work,” Agent One said, leaning against the wall just outside the kitchen. His gun was holstered neatly against his ribcage, and he was sipping what smelled deliciously like coffee.
“Stunning,” I agreed. Since words were failing me, I wasn’t above borrowing. I smiled at Cai’s pleased bounce onto his toes. “Have you slept at all?”
“Um. Yessir?” His face turned an unusual shade of crimson.
“You’re a terrible liar, Cai,” I chided. The agent smiled into his cup. “That coffee?” I asked.
“I took the liberty.” The man nodded at my coffee maker. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“If you left some for me, I might kiss you.” The agent’s brow rose.
“Riley is gay,” Cai announced. Riley coughed, spilling his coffee down his chin.
“Interesting,” I said and narrowed my eyes at the man who disappeared into the kitchen to clean off his shirt. “Riley is also my age. Did you notice that, too?” In a moment so reminiscent of Peter that my heart ached, Cai bit his lip and turned his blushing face back to the wall. “Peter’s going to be down soon to take you to your appointment.” I nodded to the overalls where the blue material peeked through streaks and splatters of paint.
“Oh,” he looked down, “Lost the time.” He quickly cleaned his brushes and started to jog out of the room, stopping at the open partition to the kitchen. “Um. See you tonight?” His fingers toyed with a beaded necklace around his neck. Had that been there before?
“I’ll be here at ten,” Riley nodded.
“Great!” Cai grinned and tossed a wave before vanishing down the hall.
“He’s a sweet kid,” Riley said once the door to the back bedroom shut. The emphasis on ‘kid’ was a relief.
“Sometimes easy to forget he’s a kid.” I poured a cup of coffee and hesitated in the kitchen, eyeing the makeshift tarp over my coffee table. The laptop was still there from Tuesday.
“If you say so.” He held out his hand, his smile creasing the corners of his eyes. The lines spoke more to the frequency of his laughter than his age. “Agent Riley Cordova.”
I shook the outstretched hand. “Austin Glass.” It stung to have to drop the detective prefix. Had I already decided not to return to duty? No. “I’d love to shoot the shit, but I have some neglected work to look into.” After holding the coffee cup up in a gesture of thanks, I retrieved the laptop from under the tarp and sat on the sofa, feet propped up on the coffee table.
Cordova sat next to me, ankle crossed over his knee and an electronic reader in his lap. I spoke without looking at him. “The FBI afraid of the big bad homo molesting their straight agents?” The words were light but my fingers tapped my password with unnecessary force.
“It would be unprofessional and inappropriate to call you defensive and reactionary, Detective Glass.”
“So you’ll just imply it?” A rueful grin wiped the hostility from my face. I could get to like Riley Cordova.
“I’m implying,” he paused considering his words, “that you’re taking the defensive against perceived offense, not an actual one.”
“No coincidence you’re gay and assigned to this case?” I asked with an accusing tone, waiting for the laptop to boot up.
“No coincidence,” he agreed. “Mrs. Strakosha made some demands about th
e men on her personal security detail.”
Oh.
I was an idiot. Not that I was going to apologize. The sting of rejection from my colleagues was still sharp. The memory of dildos and lube rattling to the front of my desk drawer was a vivid reminder of where they stood. “Well, welcome to homo-land.”
He laughed and went back to reading. “Welcome yourself, Detective.”
I chuckled, opened my web browser and forgot about agent Cordova. After navigating to the search engine, I typed in ‘barn lager’.
Schizophrenic News
My first impression of the search results was that ‘barn lager’ was not proper Swedish, or Danish or any other language. The first entries were a mishmash of sites with one word or the other. Nothing sensible combined both words except a china pattern from Pottery Barn. My search led nowhere.
I navigated to an online translator service. The Danish translation of “child store” made sense. In Swedish and Norwegian it meant “child bearing”. None of it got me any closer to an answer. Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing. A small laugh escaped as I breathed out.
“Good news?” Agent Cordova asked.
“Very. I’m the king of wild accusations it seems.” I tapped the plastic trying to think of where to search from there. Maybe there was a beer place locally. I typed ‘barn lager Denver’, hit enter, and began to read down the page.
The ninth entry demolished my smile.
I almost missed it as I scrolled through the same results from the last search. The second-to-last link was in Swedish, and I was offered a button to translate the text. I clicked it.
Barnlager.com—We carry baby clothes, children’s clothes and toys made in Sweden—16th Street and Wynkoop, Denver
16th and Wynkoop. Smack dab in the middle of the 16th Street Mall. I opened up the site’s front page and skimmed over the pictures of toddlers in play clothes before delving deeper in. It took ten minutes, but I found what I was looking for on a list of importers. Asa’s Playground was midway down the page.
Shattered Glass Page 30