by Rhys Ford
“She’ll come around one day,” Randy murmured, his voice low and consoling. “It takes her some time, and she might not always agree with me about things, but she tries. Your mom… tries. And she does love you.”
“I love her too.” He bit his lip, sitting up when his sister dove into the deep end of the pool, nearly hitting one of the other kids. “Jesus. How the hell do you not have a heart attack? It’s worse than cats. Gus is going to be a nervous wreck before Chris is five. Shit, Gus. Haven’t talked to you about him.”
Randy was silent for a while then he cleared his throat. “Who’s Chris?”
“Shit, okay. Let me tell you about Chris.” He sketched in a brief explanation, watching his mother police the pool with her dual-horned second-in-command. Leaving off the parts about talking to Gus about how he’d wanted to stitch their relationship back together, Rey explained about pulling Jules from the fire and how her mother brought Chris to meet his father for the first time at a social services office next to the hospital. “So that’s kind of where things are.”
“This little boy,” Randy started tentatively. “He’s—”
“Born a bit early, and yeah, she got pregnant the night I….” He stopped himself. “I keep thinking when we broke up when I pretty much just shut the door in his face. We talked about that. The other day—crap, five days ago—when he met Chris, I ended up catching them outside of their house, and fuck, I couldn’t have handled it any shittier than I did.
“I’ve seen him since then. Down at the shop or over at Bear’s for a long minute, but then he’s off before I can talk to him.” Rey sighed. “I’m trying like hell to build something back up but… maybe we don’t fit. Maybe I’m fooling myself with wanting him to give me another chance.”
“Want some advice?” His stepfather waved back at Sarah, who’d stopped long enough to grin at him. “From an old man who suddenly found himself with a wife and a kid when he least expected it?”
“Randy, you’re the closest thing to a dad I’ve got.” He saluted the man with his soft drink. “I will take anything you’re willing to dish out. Especially if it’s about my mom or how to handle my fuckups with Gus.”
“Okay, you and Gus are actually a lot like me and Donna.” He held up a hand when Rey snorted. “Hear me out on this. The situation is similar. There are things you share and like, but the differences sometimes seem too big to get around. See, kiddo, people are like three-dimensional puzzle pieces. Some people you fit with two sides, some three, and some… the assholes… none. Then there’s the people who fit nearly all of your sides, and those are the ones you keep. The ones you try to marry or maybe just call them brother. However it plays out, but then there’s those sides that don’t fit and seem too far away or maybe too hard to ignore. That’s when the work begins.”
“Yeah, I ran away from the work the last time. I didn’t do shit to meet him halfway. That’s where I fucked up,” Rey interjected. “Or at least, I think I did.”
“Then you probably did. You both have to decide if it’s worth going back in again. That’s the hard part now,” he continued. “Take your mom. I love her, but she doesn’t understand how Mace’s family works. She doesn’t hate them. She even likes a couple of the guys, but she doesn’t understand how deep their bond is. That they’re brothers. For her, if you’re not actually blood related, you’re not family, which is kind of silly considering you and I aren’t related but here we are, watching people we both love in the backyard of a house you didn’t grow up in. In my book, that makes you and me family. Right?”
“Yeah, it does.” He nodded at Sarah. “Even if you guys didn’t give me the brother I asked for when I was seven, but she’ll do.”
“I’m kind of fond of the Duckie myself.” Randy laughed. “I’m going to work on your mom understanding family means more than a marriage or a shared womb. She knows you’re gay. She gets that. But up until now, she’s not really had to deal with what that means to her, and she should. You’re going to be bringing home another man—maybe Gus, maybe not—but you’re going to get married, and you might want kids. Hell, Gus comes with one preinstalled. But your kids aren’t going to come from you both, and she’s going to have to wrap her head around having a grandkid she might not be related to. It might take her a bit, and she might screw it up a couple of times, but she’ll get it right. When it’s all said and done, your mom wants you to be happy, and that’s going to have to include loving everyone you love.”
“And Gus?” He tilted his head, giving his stepfather a quick glance. “What the hell do I do about him? I don’t know where to start.”
“You start by showing him how you fit together,” Randy said, reaching for his root beer. “And then you show him how you’re willing to compromise on the things where you don’t. Your mom and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. No one can, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to stick it out until death does us part. No one’s perfect. And if you sit around, waiting for that perfect puzzle piece, you’re going to die alone and without ever knowing the love you could have had. Gus, he’s not flawless, but he’s a good kid, someone you can depend on for the things that matter. He understands what family and love is, and you can’t ask for anything better than that.
“Now….” Randy stood and tossed Rey one of the horns. “Blow that up, put that on, and let’s feed these monsters before they eat your mom alive. Because if this doesn’t turn out to be the best damned unicorn party in the world, you and I are going to have to answer to our womenfolk over there.”
“WATCH THE hands! Watch the hands!” Ivo hissed at Gus, pulling his fingers out of the way when Gus plopped a couple of bricks into place on the grid. “I’ve got to work on someone tonight, and they’ve got loose skin.”
“They weren’t even close to you, asshole.” Gus shot his brother a disgusted look. “And like you’re the only one who’s going to be feeling someone up. Bear and I do a hell of a lot more loose skin than you do, ’cause you only like them young and tight.”
“That would sound so very wrong if someone didn’t know you.” Luke chuckled, rolling the sand-filled wheelbarrow over to where Gus and Ivo were laying the last of the pavers. Dumping the sand onto the tarp, Luke angled the basket around. “Ivo, quit messing with the edging and grab the shovel while I get another load of sand. We just have to fill in the spaces and tamp them down.”
“Like you know what you’re talking about,” their younger brother scoffed. “We’re doing this after watching a video.”
“I have The Book! Obey The Book!” Looming over them from the upper deck connected to the house, Bear held up a thick manual, its edges battered from years of wear. “And yes, we watched a video. Now shovel the damned sand, Ivo. Get this done and we can grill up those steaks.”
Bear’d spotted it in a used bookstore when they’d first gotten into the house, and it’d become their go-to source for everything from plumbing to leveling a doorframe. At some point, pages thirty-two and thirty-three got stuck together, but they weren’t looking to ever install another hot water heater. They’d found a how-to site online recently, which went a long way in cutting back on some of the mistakes they made, but The Book was still their house Bible.
It was just a pity the damned book didn’t have any advice on how to deal with an ex-something you still wanted in your life but weren’t sure you could handle it.
Late weekend afternoons on the winding streets of their neighborhood meant BBQs, a ball game played down by the school, and in the case of the brothers’ sometimes sagging house, a few hours spent propping the old girl up so she sat straight. With most of her drunken lean taken care of, Bear turned his eye toward other things, like finally tackling the sharp drop in the lawn near the fence they shared with a lesbian couple and their five snakes, including a rosy boa who’d taken a liking to one of Ivo’s metal garden sculptures when it escaped one morning.
The fruit trees they’d planted together hadn’t taken as well as the avocado pit Ivo shov
ed toothpicks into and nurtured on the kitchen sink. Luke finally convinced their youngest brother to either toss it or plant it after its plastic cup was knocked over one too many times. They’d thought the house and its overly shaded backyard was the wrong climate, wrong soil—wrong everything—for an avocado tree, but in typical Ivo fashion, the damned thing grabbed hold and refused to let go. Terracing the lower part of the lawn would give them another area to put seating, leaving a broad expanse of grass for Ivo’s hardy, stubborn tree.
When they’d started the project, a twenty by twelve foot stretch of leveled dirt sounded like a quick afternoon of work. In the two months since Bear first dragged them out back to work on his lower patio, they’d gotten most of it done and were determined to lay the final few feet of pavers down and cross the lower terrace off of their to-do list.
Standing up, Gus stretched his arms out over his head, exaggerating his height to make up for the inch Ivo’d somehow gained on him. His brother’s peacock-blue-and-purple hair hung down around his face, a trickle of lavender-tinted sweat staining the work shirt he’d stolen out of Gus’s clean-clothes pile. The T-shirt hung loose on Ivo’s arms but fit his shoulders as snugly on his brother as it did him. They were both mostly leg, and studying his baby brother, Gus wondered if he wasn’t also looking at Chris a few decades down the road.
The pavers forgotten, Gus stared at Ivo, a wave of sadness creeping over him. He never should have been the eldest of the original brothers. Puck’d taken that role very seriously, and when Bear’d stepped in afterward, Gus had been… relieved, but there was something—someone—still missing from their circle. His own face with a bit more naughty in it, or maybe that was just how he remembered things.
“You okay, man?” Ivo prodded Gus with his sneaker toe. “You look like a goose flew over your grave.”
“Can’t have.” He straightened up, pulling his sweaty, filthy younger brother into a one-armed hug. “I am the Goose, and I suck at flying, remember?”
“Dude, let go,” Ivo growled at him. “You’re like hugging a wet skink.”
“Coming through. Last load of sand. Move out of the way.” Luke trundled the barrow past them, nearly clipping Ivo. His shoulder bulged with the effort of maneuvering the heavy basket. “Sorry. I’m just going to set this down. No sense dumping it. Mace, bring the broom over.”
“Here, I’ll get the other shovel.” Mace shouldered past Gus, nudging him out of the way. “Go supervise with Bear on the deck. Luke can sweep.”
“I carried the sand!” Luke protested, blocking Gus in with the barrow’s tire. “How about if I shove—”
“Guys.” The deep, rolling river of bass from the deck should have sounded like a question, but the four men standing at the end of the paved lower terrace knew better. “Gus, go wash your hands so you can help me shuck the corn. And Ivo, who are you inking? Tonight’s supposed to be… us.”
“Mrs. Branson. Caught a deep ding on her upper arm from some orderly at the hospital a few weeks back. It needs a touch-up. Maybe an inch at the most. She bought me some rum to fix it.” Ivo leaned on his shovel, picking at a new tear in his jeans. “It’s across a geisha she got in Honolulu when Collins opened up his shop on Smith. Told her she should have you do it, but she didn’t want to bug you because it’s small. It’s good rum.”
“I take it that’s something special?” Mace drawled when Bear let out a low whistle. “The geisha. Not the rum.”
“Swear to God.” Gus rolled his eyes, not sure if Mace was teasing or dead serious. “Sometimes I just want to punch you in the face.”
“Sometimes?” Ivo slid in, then turned back to Bear. “Wanna come with? I’d rather you do her. I fuck that up and… dude, I’m not even sure I should do anything to it.”
“She’s about eighty? Thereabouts?” Bear chewed on his upper lip, staring out at the lawn, then glanced at Gus. “Shit… I go and I break the whole we’re supposed to be doing a night together.”
“Yeah, but you want to see it, and she’s what? Two hundred and twelve?” Gus teased, smirking at Mace’s muffled laugh. “Dude, go. You know you want to, and she probably wants you to. The three of us can clean up after. If Mace can still walk, because you know, he’s old and can’t do all this hard outside work anymore.”
“Fuck you, Goose,” Mason sneered. “Let’s see who—”
“Hell, I can hear you guys out on the street.” Rey ambled up the driveway, his foot catching at the unlatched gate before it swung back and hit him. Hefting a pair of anti-puke-pink bags with his mother’s cupcake logo on them, he stopped at the stairs leading to the deck. “Shit, I came to help. Mace said you guys would probably not get it done today.”
There was a God. Gus knew this for sure. A God who hated him, cursed his existence as if to remind him that he shouldn’t have been the one whose foot got caught, whose ankle shouldn’t bear a bracelet of scars, and it would be Puck who’d probably be the one aching to crawl down Rey’s mouth with a kiss, then drag him upstairs.
He’d come from his sister’s birthday party, that much Gus knew, tanned from an afternoon in the sun, with a bit of pink across his nose. By all accounts there was nothing exotic or blindingly gorgeous about Rey Montenegro. An attractive man with dark cocoa-brown eyes and tousled sienna-and-gold hair swept back from his strong face, Rey wasn’t hard on the eyes. He’d filled out a lot since they were kids, his chest and thighs thickened with muscle from his work.
Rey’d broken a few of his knuckles along the way to adulthood—his nose too—leaving them slightly off-kilter from a few brawls he’d probably fought at Mace’s shoulder. And as much as Gus loved the look and feel of Rey’s sensual mouth, he adored the skim of Rey’s massive hands on his body and the strength in his fingers when he dug them into Gus’s hips, gripping him tightly before pounding Gus apart in a long, hot, sweaty round of sex.
God, he missed the sex. Nearly as much as he missed them talking. And the cuddling under a thick layer of blankets while the cold crept through a cracked-open window because they’d been too lazy to close it.
“Cupcake?” Rey rattled a bag at Gus. “Mom loaded up on the devil’s food, but there’s a chocolate coconut one I snagged for you before Duckie ate all of them.”
“I can’t fucking believe you guys call her Duckie,” he muttered, wanting both the cupcakes and the man offering them.
“We call you Goose,” Bear reminded him, reaching over Gus’s shoulder and into the bag. Pulling out a clear plastic container with a chocolate-iced brown cupcake in it, he winked at Rey. Relieving Rey of the other bag, Bear headed down the steps. “Taking these to the other guys. How about if I pay for this with a steak.”
“Good deal, so long as you don’t burn it. I taste enough ash when I go to work. Let me put the rest inside where it’s cool.” Rey climbed the stairs, stopping when he reached Gus. When he leaned in close, Gus took a sharp inhale, drawing in the scent of coconut oil, soap, and root beer on Rey’s skin. Then Rey’s breath warmed his cheek and throat, stoking a fire Gus thought he’d doused nearly a week before. “Do you mind? Me staying? I can help you… cook, at least.”
The last was said with a long glance down Gus’s body, leaving him with no doubt about what the heat in Rey’s gaze meant or the promise in his low, dusky words.
“Yeah, you can stay. Why wouldn’t you stay? You’re Mace’s best friend,” he finally said, stepping back from the edge of the steps. “Come on, we’ve corn to shuck.”
“And you?” Gus felt the tug on his waistband when Rey caught one of his belt loops. “Friends? At least?”
“I don’t know, Rey, but whatever you are,” Gus said, nodding toward the bag his ex still held in his hand, “it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a cupcake to get past that.”
Twelve
“YOU EVER notice in almost every single historical romance, the guy always has hair longer than fashionable? All of them. And it wasn’t the style then. It was all terrified owl, then Ides-of-March number two, but al
l of these guys? Hair longer than was fashionable.” Ivo glanced up from the yellow-edged book he was reading when Gus walked into the shop’s art room. “Shit, if every guy has their hair that long, then it’s fucking fashionable.”
Gus stopped at the end of the table, or where the end would have been if Ivo hadn’t moved it aside to make room for the extra-wide armchair his brother dragged from Bear’s cramped office. Today’s ensemble was plain enough: cowboy boots and black jeans like Gus, but paired with a tank top covered in silky dark-blue-and-purple feathers, and at some point between going with Bear to fix an old woman’s tattoo and waking up to come to the shop, Ivo’s hair now matched his shirt.
“I imagine there’s all these pots of color in your bathroom, and you wake up every morning and think, which unicorn’s shit am I going to put in my hair today? Pretty Petal Petunia or Raging Blue Bonnie?” Gus put his sketchpad and tackle box down, then slapped his brother’s feet off of the corner of the table. “You get mud on what I’m working on, I’ll skin you alive.”
Ivo waited a heartbeat too long for Gus’s liking, then angled himself sideways in the chair, hooking his legs over its arm. His dark blue eyes were visible over the book’s overly dramatic cover of a half-undressed redhead in a mum-yellow dress while a piratical blond man in Regency garb clasped her shoulders and leered down over her nearly exposed breasts. The composition was a little muddy, it was impossible to tell where her hands were, and for some reason there was a Highland cow in its full shaggy crimson glory just over the shoulder of the green-waistcoated lothario, but Gus couldn’t figure out how the damned beast connected to the couple.