by Rhys Ford
There were too many holes in the five of them. Holes left by men and women who should have been there to protect them or, like for Luke and Mason, caused by them. In the few short clips he’d seen of Chris, there’d been an undercurrent of something strong and easy between the round-faced toddler and the people in his life. He smiled easily, laughing when a fat-bellied dachshund waddled up to him and licked his face. Gus didn’t know how to laugh like that. It was freeing, a touch of something magical he’d never had and so commonplace for the towheaded little boy who had his younger brother’s deep blue eyes.
He wanted to know what that felt like… to have someone see that kind of love when they saw him and to be a face in the crowd at all the stupid things kids went through… a face Chris wouldn’t have to wonder if he’d ever see because he’d know—without any doubt—Gus would be there.
“I’m his father,” Gus finally replied, touched at Bear’s short, knowing smile. “And I hope you all are ready to be uncles, because I’m also going to do my fucking best to be his dad.”
“COME ON,” Gus cajoled the massive coffee machine, tapping its side as it burbled and sang. “Just… hurry up.”
It’d been three in the morning by the time he’d finally crawled into his king-sized bed, set up under the split-up attic’s eaves. A small landing and two doors separated his original room from Ivo’s studio, but it was quieter than downstairs, especially since Luke and Mason were up at the crack of dawn to go save the world, with Bear hot on their heels to open up the shop. He had no idea where Ivo was, but the house was empty. He’d made a halfhearted promise to Bear to stop by 415 Ink before closing.
The dog began to snore in time with the coffee machine, his bellowing snorfles and rumbles rolling out from under the dining room’s long wooden table. Someone industrious had optimistically covered the cushions of the table’s mismatched seats with navy fabric, but the dog’s wheaten fur seemed to be winning out, speckling a few but practically coating the captain’s chair where Bear sat. Earl let loose a mighty crackle of a snore as the machine finally pushed out a steady stream of aromatic coffee, raising Gus’s hopes he’d get a cup in before nightfall. He was already dreading driving the beat-up SUV Bear kept as a family loaner car, and the thought of dragging himself down to the pier in a pink-champagne Explorer with half-scraped-off youth soccer and cheer stickers stuck to the rear window only depressed him more.
“It’s like the damned things grow back, Earl.” Gus glanced at the canine, but there wasn’t even so much as a nose twitch. “Jesus, dog. Have you no pride? Do you have any idea how stupid you look with your head sticking out of a blush rose car? And seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this coffee machine?”
He didn’t hear the door open or even the tread of footsteps on the house’s wide planked floor. Gus saw the light change in the kitchen. A shadow fell across the overhead oak and antique glass cabinets when a man’s head and torso cut through the soft beam near his head, and the morning went to shit when Gus recognized the man’s face reflected in a cabinet’s inset panels.
There was a special pain reserved only for when an ex-boyfriend walked back into a guy’s life. It was made worse when the rug and relationship were yanked out from under you without warning. Gus wasn’t sure if he’d really had a steady thing with Rey or if it’d been a one-sided, maybe-falling-in-love space he’d built in his own head, but the pain—the twisting burn of soured feelings and a scorched heart—was definitely real.
Gus never knew his marrow could wither in his bones or that his face numbed from the shock of his heart crumbling to ash inside his chest. Not until the moment he glanced up and found Rey Montenegro standing behind him. It became a struggle to keep from biting through his lip so he wouldn’t let a single damned tear fall… even as Rey’s reflection shimmered, his lashes growing damp with each blink.
The old glass wasn’t as perfect as a mirror, but it gave Gus enough for his memory to fill in what he couldn’t make out on Rey’s strong features.
Rey’s hair was longer than it’d been the last time Gus saw him, probably at some family thing where he only stayed for five minutes after Rey came through the door. He’d spent a lot of time running away, slipping out of back doors without so much as a word to the man who’d once took him apart with his lips, hands, and dick. His belly remembered those lips on the ridge of his navel, felt those teeth sink into the soft meat on the inside of his left thigh. His fingers had traced the small triangular scar on Rey’s jaw, the results of a childhood experiment on running with scissors, and he’d explored Rey’s full pout with eager lips, their naked bodies stretched out over a mattress they’d flung on the floor in the attic—the same mattress Gus wrestled onto a box spring and slept in last night.
Fuck… seeing Rey Montenegro hurt like hell, but aching for the taste of the damned man in his mouth was going to kill him.
“Hey, Ivo, tell me there’s room in the freezer.” Rey held up a pair of large blue plastic bags with the red logo of a pier-side fish market on their sides. The plastic rustled and something inside one shifted, tilting its weight, but Rey’s large hand was firm, clenched tightly around the taped-off handles. “They had a sale on Dungeness, and Bear said to grab a few for the house. We just need to find a place to put them.”
“Huh. Ivo? Really? You know something, Rey?” Gus snorted, shaking his head. Turning around, he swallowed the odd barb lodged in the back of his throat, then said, “As often as you’ve bent me over to fuck me, I’d think you’d be able to recognize me from behind.”
Six
FROM THE moment Rey spotted August Scott emerging from the smoke billowing out of his family’s burning home, he’d known the blond was dangerous. Framed by a crackling inferno, he’d been a too-young fallen angel, wings scorched from the heat of his sins and filled with the promise of a wickedness so dark a seventeen-year-old Rey couldn’t begin to imagine its depths.
And that’d been when Gus was only fourteen.
As an adult, he was devastating.
He’d never been beautiful, not like Ivo, but there was something about the quirk of Gus’s mouth and the masculine good looks of his face that drew attention. Rey’d seen more than one person be sucked in by Gus’s silvery wolfish eyes, his crystal gray-blue gaze shining with a piratical gleam, and the charismatic scoundrel stamped on his strong features was a lure not many could resist. Gus’s seductive magnetism was as much a part of him as his careless blond mane or the tightly packed muscles on his broad-shouldered swimmer’s build, his long legs moving with a powerful grace when he sauntered across a room.
It hurt a bit to see how guarded Gus was. His body language screamed distrust and wariness, his quick-to-smile mouth pulled into a tight line. Nobody could dance around a straight question like Gus, but he couldn’t tell a lie to save himself, not when his moods flowed over his face as quickly as San Francisco’s skies filled and emptied of clouds on any given day, but he always simmered with an erotic allure, a sinful iniquitous attraction begging to be plumbed.
Rey resisted. God knew Rey tried like hell not to fall into Gus’s honeyed smile or wonder how his tanned throat would look with a constellation of bruised nips along its length, but there was no stopping him from falling into the fire Gus seemed to have brought with him from that fateful night.
In the end, Rey’d been the one to burn them both, and he’d probably never see Gus smile for him ever again.
“You’ve lost weight.” Not knowing what the proper protocol was when running into an ex-lover in the middle of his family’s kitchen, Rey grabbed at the first thing he’d noticed. “You look… good, though.”
Gus was leaner, an old pair of faded jeans Rey tugged off of him more than a few times in the past now hung a bit lower, riding his hip bones and iliac furrows. There was a sparseness to his face, his cheekbones and jaw giving his features harder lines than Rey remembered. The ranginess looked good on him, throwing off a subliminal feral vibe practically begging or daring someone to tame him
.
The grunt he got back was less than pleased.
He’d interrupted Gus. That much was clear, the empty mug on the counter waiting for the coffee machine to finish filling its carafe. Gus was dressed, typical jeans and loose-fitting 415 Ink T-shirt, but his feet were bare, enough clues to know he’d be heading down to the shop at some point but wasn’t ready to bolt out of the door. There was a sketchpad on the table, a variety of graphite pencils scattered near a kneaded eraser, its lopsided curves marbled with faint dark lines.
A curly-haired toddler peered out of a photo on the table, its button nose and ocean-blue eyes enormous from the forced perspective in the shot. It looked like Gus had been about halfway through capturing the image before moving on to a blank page, tearing the unfinished drawing out of the sketch book and tucking it under a large plastic shaker the brothers left filled with dried chili peppers and garlic salt.
“Who’s the….” The child’s eyes were familiar, and when Rey glanced up at Gus, the resemblance hit him, and suddenly the sleep-clouded words Mason had rumbled at him in their apartment’s kitchen made sense. “Shit. That’s right. Mace told me you had a kid.”
“Of course he did.” Gus scrubbed at his face, a gesture Rey’d seen him do a thousand times before. “Jesus. What’d he do? Call you as soon as I went to bed so you guys could laugh over how much I’ve fucked up?”
“No, he told me when he came in this morning because he was going to skip our run. We split rent in Chinatown. Easier since we’re at the same station now.” He debated taking a closer look at the stack of photos nearly hidden beneath the smudged portrait, flicking a glance at his ex to gauge Gus’s mood, but for once, he couldn’t read the man’s expression. “I didn’t get a lot of details. Hell, I wasn’t even awake all the way. He came in before I had any coffee in me, mumbled a few things, then headed to bed. I didn’t put together what he said until I saw the picture. He? She?”
“He.” Gus mulled over something, then finally said, “His name’s Chris. He’s almost three.”
Three seemed… tight. Really tight and Rey tried to stop his mind from rolling the dates back, counting off the months and days since he’d been with Gus. Tight became improbable and then shifted to nearly impossible as the final numbers clicked down.
They’d been together then. Smack dab in the weeks Rey began to doubt Gus’s ability to be in a serious relationship. One too many blown-off dinners led to a brittle silence broken only when Rey finally grabbed the metaphorical bull by the horns and told Gus they were done.
He hadn’t expected Gus to stay. Not when he had a track record of running when things got rough, and sure enough, a few weeks later, Gus was in the wind again, rambling around the Southwest looking for fresh skin to dapple and probably new asses to fuck. He’d boomeranged in and out of the shop, hooking guest gigs in places Rey hadn’t even realized existed, but Gus always came home.
This time he’d come home with a kid. A three-year-old kid.
The reality of him being with someone else—a woman, even—knocked the wind from Rey’s sails, and he had to lean against the table, blindly looking for some kind of support as he stared down at the result of Gus’s infidelity.
“We were…. Jesus, Gus.” Rey bit back the anger surging through him. He had no right to it. They’d probably only been faithful in his own mind. At the time, the thought of Gus straying from his bed… from either of their beds… never even crossed his mind, but staring up at him was proof Gus hadn’t been in it to stay. They’d used condoms, but there’d been a time or two when he’d stupidly thrown himself into the moment. Pressing his hand against his stomach, Rey felt the sick rise up at the thought of what he could be carrying with him. “Fucking hell. We were—”
“Doing the math?” Gus pricked at Rey’s bubbling anger, practically daring it to spill over. Pushing off of the counter, he was a few steps away from being in Rey’s face, but the dog’s stretched-out body kept them at their distance. “You’re safe. We’re… safe, asshole. Chris was premature by nearly a month. I didn’t fuck around on you. Good to know you still got faith in me. Warms my fucking heart.”
“What the hell am I supposed to think?” He tapped at the photo, and Earl, sensing a brewing storm, scrambled to his feet to get out of the way. “Three years ago we were—”
“We were what?” Gus’s chin went up, challenging Rey. They were eye to eye, but Rey dominated the space, his heavier body a firm wall Gus wouldn’t be able to breach. Trapped between the counter and Rey, Gus stood firm, stepping into Rey’s space. “Together? Maybe in my head but in yours? The only time you were with me was when you were fucking me.”
His rage flared, churning and hot, but folded into the molten threads of heated steel was the rich, velvet want Rey felt for the man he couldn’t keep. It was hard to remember why he’d needed distance from Gus, especially when standing close enough to smell the lemon soap he liked to use and the clean tang of his line-dried cotton shirt. But it’d been necessary, especially when Gus broke the last promise Rey’d been waiting for him to keep. It’d been something stupid, nothing monumental, but it’d shown Rey where he stood with the man he’d almost given his heart to.
After that he’d spent the last few years giving his best friend’s little brother a wide berth, avoiding coming into intimate contact with Gus, convincing himself it’d been a flash-of-fire kind of affair, not the forever he’d not allowed himself to wish for.
It humbled and enraged him to discover the distance he’d painstakingly built up—the wall he’d crafted to keep Gus out—tumbled down with the mere brush of Gus’s body heat against his own flushed skin.
His hands itched. Literally itched to bury his fingers into Gus’s sun-streaked blond hair. He’d loved to wrap his hands into the soft silken mane and tug Gus’s head back, reveling in the hiss of arousal he could draw out. They’d been volatile, nearly dangerously so, and they’d come together in a passionate surge of primal urges and erotic pleasurable pains, pushing at their boundaries until Rey thought he would come apart when Gus lost control.
There was no mistaking his body’s reaction or the tantalizing memory of Gus’s long torso beneath him, clenching around his cock, and the salty-sweetness on his parched tongue when he licked up Gus’s spine before plunging deeper into his golden body. His dick knew Gus was nearby, aching and swelling with the memory of his heat, of his mouth and ass.
“You want to know when I got her pregnant? The same fucking night you told me to grab my stuff and get the hell out of your life because—what was it you said?—I wasn’t going to stick around anyway? Remember that?” Gus’s finger jabbed into his chest, bruising Rey down to his heart. “So I went out to some party, got fucking drunk off my ass, and Jules was there.
“And maybe we shouldn’t have hooked up, but right then I needed someone to touch me, for someone to tell me it was going to be okay—that I wasn’t fucking trash—and she did. She was there, Rey. She was there when I needed it and where you should have been. Should have been you telling me I was worth something. That I was worth keeping. Worth loving.” Gus grabbed at the plastic bags in Rey’s hands and yanked them free of his suddenly numb fingers. “So do me a favor, find the damned door you came in through and leave me the fuck alone. It’s what you’re good at, remember?”
GUS’S HANDS were done shaking by the time he and Earl shoved their way past a clot of tourists on the sidewalk and pushed past 415 Ink’s front door. The coppery rattle of the shop’s bell the door’s corner hit was a prelude to the sweetness of buzzing machines, low-murmuring chatter, and the occasional hiss of someone’s tender spot being run over by vibrating needles.
If the house in Ashbury was home, then the shop was his battlefield and playground. With the dog at his heels, Gus strolled onto the floor, his broken-in cowboy boots rapping a hard beat on the shop’s poured cement. There was a new face, a guy around Ivo’s age or maybe older, but the apprentice Bear took on—a former investment banker caught in an early midlif
e crisis—was still hanging around. His stall was spotless and, from the looks of things, stocked up with the basics, so he had to give the Noob credit—the guy was definitely earning his keep.
The walls had some different artwork up. Missy was missing, or at least someplace Gus couldn’t see her, but she’d swapped out some of her New School for a couple of Realism pieces she’d done, and from what the recent hire had up around his area, he leaned toward Neo-Traditional and Watercolor with a few Illustrative pieces thrown in for good measure.
Ambling past Ivo’s workspace to get a better look at the new inker’s pieces, Gus nudged his brother’s ass with a prod of his boot toe, toppling Ivo over from his crouch in front of his work cabinet. Laughing at his brother’s cursing, Gus drew up close to the inker’s wall, studying his sketches and finished pieces while the shop’s latest hire was in the back and, from the sounds of the laughter coming from the break area, having a good time with Noob’s inability to make a good cup of coffee.
Earl abandoned him for the pile of plump cushions in the waiting area, and as stupid as it sounded, Gus missed the heavy dog’s lean against his leg when he stopped. The warmth had been welcome, necessary actually, anything to chip away the glacial hardness in his guts.
As hot as his anger boiled at the sight of Rey, watching his ex walk off left him cold and dead inside. The numbness he’d carried with him on the road seeped through the cracks in his brain, stealing away any worth he’d scraped together. By the time he’d gotten the crabs steamed and into the fridge, the thought of any kid calling him Daddy brought puke up from his tortured stomach, and after a short but spirited battle with Bear’s mutt to get Earl’s harness on, Gus debated crawling upstairs, burrowing under the covers, and calling the day off. Instead he’d found his shoes and pushed himself out the door, still wincing at the off-pink SUV waiting for him at the side of the house, but he’d done it.