Fool's Gold

by Sarah Madison

  Rich huffed at that, then eyed him with a professional glance. “Food, meds, bed. That’s what you need. Did you take something for the pain?”

  Jake nodded, too depressed to argue.

  “Good. Lie down and ice that arm until the food gets here.”

  Jake nodded, too depressed to argue. He went over to the bed and pulled back the covers. “Wake me when the pizza arrives.” He dropped the ice bag as well as the towel and crawled into bed, conscious of how much everything hurt. Tomorrow was going to suck in so many ways.

  The sudden intake of breath behind him when he dropped the towel was probably just his imagination anyway.

  The pizza delivery guy came, but Jake never even stirred. He was flat on his stomach, one arm outstretched over his head, his face turned to the side. He’d pulled the bedspread partway around him, but Rich got a blanket to cover Jake’s bare back and shoulders before answering the knock at the door. He couldn’t help but admire the expanse of golden skin laid out before him like a banquet of forbidden food as he unfolded the blanket and draped it around Jake’s sleeping form. He picked up the sodden bag of half-melted ice and left it in the bathroom sink.

  Rich paid the delivery boy and closed the door. His stomach rumbled as he carried the warm box with the heavenly aroma of melted cheese and fresh-baked bread to the small table near the window. Glancing at Jake’s inert form, he debated letting him sleep, but he knew from past experience that the position, enticing as it was, would play hell with Jake’s back tomorrow, particularly after the kind of fall he’d taken today. Not to mention, he’d barely eaten anything all day. He needed to refuel.

  Whose bright idea was it to institute the look-but-don’t-touch policy?

  The arm sprawled over Jake’s head was already showing a dark bruise along the forearm, and it looked like the elbow might be swollen as well. Damn it, after dinner, he’d have to insist Jake ice that arm. It was a measure of how played out Jake was that he didn’t do so before he passed out. Hopefully, it was nothing more than bruising, but once they got home tomorrow, Rich would demand a doctor’s appointment.

  Watching Jake sleep had been one of his favorite pastimes when they were together. Rich had always been an early riser and a light sleeper—Jake was the one who’d slept like the dead. Self-conscious in the awake state, Jake was rarely comfortable with anyone’s frank admiration. The only time Rich could take his fill of staring had been when Jake was out cold. Back then, Rich could only afford a cheap little camera, but he’d always been taking pictures: of the horses, of the landscape, of Jake when he could get away with it. Rich had dozens of photos in his digital files of Jake sleeping, which Jake had thought was weird. If he’d caught Rich focusing on him, he’d always pull a face and stick his tongue out. Over time, he’d become more at ease when Rich took photos of him. He came to accept it, as if he knew Rich and the camera both were making love to him.

  Rich had come very close to deleting every photograph after the accident. He suspected if he’d been more mobile, he probably would have done it when his emotions were still raw and reeling. In the end, he wound up deleting most of them with the exception of a cherished few.

  Jake smiling to someone off-camera, the sunlight catching his eye and turning his irises to gold. Jake walking Puddle Jumper back from a cross-country schooling on a brilliant autumn day, horse and rider with their heads turned toward each other, as though having a conversation, in quiet communion together. Jake in a shadbelly and top hat, conferring with Tom over a program held in white-gloved hands.

  In almost every professional, non-horse-related photograph he’d ever seen of Jake, his black hair was slicked down, giving him the look of a prep-school boy, but this was how Rich remembered it best: bed-tousled with a heavy wave over his brow that defied gravity, and pieces that stuck up in all directions. It was as though his hair personified the two sides to Jake: the clean-cut rich kid with the pampered upbringing versus the wild rebel who refused to play strictly by his father’s rules.

  Up close, he could see time hadn’t quite stopped for Jake, as Rich had once thought, but she’d been extremely partial to him just the same. The extra years had matured an already handsome face and taken him from mere attractiveness to outright jaw-dropping gorgeousness.

  The sum total somehow superseded the individual parts to add up to a face that Rich could look at every day for the rest of his life. It wasn’t fair.

  Well, life isn’t fair.

  Rich didn’t have any photos of the two of them together in his collection. Rich had been the photographer, the one always snapping pictures. He wished he had just one really good picture of them as they were then. Just one.

  He’d been close, very close tonight to telling Jake exactly what had happened all those years ago and why he had shut Jake out of his life. What good would that have done? No doubt there would have been a big falling out between Jake and his father, which was the last thing Jake needed as they headed down to the wire for the selection process. It wouldn’t change anything anyway. Worse, he didn’t want to contemplate what Jake would think of him for taking the bribe. You can’t go home again.

  Once, a long time ago, Jake had been home to him.

  A small part of him resented the fact that Jake had taken him at his word, had never questioned why Rich would dump him when they’d been so good together, that Jake had never come to see him, to try again. Had he really thought so little of Rich that he wouldn’t even try to talk to him, to reason with him?

  Maybe he just wasn’t that into you.

  The thought settled like a little jagged splinter of ice in his chest, a cold pang at first, then burning the more it burrowed in. Maybe the emotion had been all one-sided. Maybe Rich’s appeal had lain more in the fact that the relationship was a massive “fuck you” to Jake’s dad than in any real feeling toward Rich on Jake’s part here. Maybe that’s why it had been so easy for Jake to walk away—and why he’d made a bid to renew it again this evening. This could all be another play in the decades-old war Jake had going on with his dad.

  What could he possibly see in Rich now? A nostalgic longing for old times? Rich glanced down at himself as he stood beside the bed.

  So he wasn’t as thin as when he was competing, but he’d practically looked like a junkie in those days. He’d had the metabolism of a teenage boy back then. Plus, working with horses was a never-ending series of physical tasks. He was in decent shape now, all things considered. Up until recently, when he’d begun driving back and forth to coach Jake, he’d been working out regularly, and he had the arms to prove it. The pain was something he’d learned to live with most days. Really, as long as he was on his feet and moving, it wasn’t noticeable most of the time. It was only when he tried to sit, to lie down, to rest, that it became a thrumming hum that was hard to ignore. His leg was a wreck, but on good days, he accepted it for what it was and assumed others would as well. He’d dated now and then, but nothing had stuck. With a shock, he realized it had been at least three years since the last time he’d even thought of asking someone out.

  Under the blanket, Jake stirred slightly, and Rich’s attention was drawn to the way the covers draped over his ass in a smooth mound. If he could turn back the clock, would he have made different choices, knowing what he knew now? Would he have chosen Jake over the security of money? Hell, at the time, he’d thought what he was doing was best for Jake. He couldn’t help but wonder what their lives would have been like if he’d turned Donald Stanford down cold.

  Jake would have lost everything: his home, the ability to keep riding at the Olympic level, and what was left of his family, both in terms of his actual relatives and the family he’d built through Foxden. Donald Stanford would have pulled his sponsorship completely, taking with it the horses Jake rode and all the people Jake knew and loved. Although Rich had been the more seriously injured of the two, Jake had been hurt as well. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to ride for anyone else right away. With no money between them, Ri
ch pictured Jake taking a soulless job just to try to pay the mounting bills. It would have killed their relationship as effectively as rat poison—a slow bleeding to death of their love for each other. No, it had been better this way.

  Maybe you just didn’t want to put Jake to the test. Maybe you’re afraid he wouldn’t have chosen you.

  As though sensing Rich’s intense perusal, Jake shifted with a stifled groan as he tried to move and was pulled up short by unexpected pain. Repressing an urge to poke Jake with his cane like some grumpy old man, Rich decided that as Jake’s coach, he had every right to approach the bed. He leaned down so he could speak without startling Jake into moving suddenly.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “Go slow, and stop if you feel any sharp pain.” He stretched out his hand to touch Jake but thought better of it mid-action. His hand flapped awkwardly like a bird trying to decide where to land, and he withdrew it abruptly.

  “Did someone get the number of the bus that hit me?” Jake grunted as he inched himself up in stages onto his elbows, and Rich tried not to think about how similar it sounded to the noises Jake had made during sex. Too similar. That was a memory he’d have to shake from his head now.

  Jake hissed when he put his right elbow down, and he turned within the covers, winding them around him in a tangle as he rolled onto his back to avoid putting more weight on his arm.

  “It was the 4:10 from Kryptonite,” Rich said. “Nonstop express.”

  When Jake rolled over, Rich retreated to a safer distance. No matter what he did, he had to maintain some degree of propriety, even if that meant not acting completely naturally around Jake for now. In another lifetime, he would have sat on the bed until he made sure Jake was okay and could shift himself without help. Now it was too much like fondling an open bottle of whiskey when he’d sworn off all hard liquor.

  Jake chuckled and then winced as he tried to sit up. He let himself fall back to the bed. “You’re going to have to go on without me. See that the mail gets through. Warn the sheriff. Tell Annabelle….” His message to “Annabelle” went undelivered. Jake covered his eyes with one hand, while letting the other fall dramatically to his chest.

  His lightly furred chest. The one Rich wanted to lean down and map every inch of with his lips, committing the taste of skin, the firmness of muscle, and the scent of him to memory once more.

  “If you can joke about your imminent demise in the desert, then you can’t be as bad as all that.” Rich’s voice was crisp. How like Jake not to have the slightest inkling how very tempting he was, sprawled out on the bed like some sort of centerfold model. “Pizza’s on the table. I’m headed to the drink machine for some soda. Want anything?”

  When he didn’t answer, Rich glanced back. The light of amusement had gone out of Jake’s eyes, leaving them with that bleak, feral-cat expression Rich knew all too well. The one that said he didn’t expect anyone to fill his empty dish anyway and that was fine by him. Rich held his ground, his hand on the doorknob. He wouldn’t give in. He couldn’t. This was what was best for both of them.

  “Nothing for me, thanks.” Jake made to sit up, pulling back the covers to free himself from the bedclothes.

  Remembering Jake’s naked state, Rich ducked his head and hurried out the door.

  They fell on the pizza like starving animals, eating in silence until they’d emptied the box. After that, Rich had turned on the television and scrolled through the channels until he found an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Jake fell asleep before Picard could tell anyone to “make it so.” Rich himself was nodding off by the third commercial.

  Jake was out cold, so Rich stripped down to his T-shirt and briefs. He draped his pants over the heater so they would dry, but turned the thermostat down so they wouldn’t roast during the night. His bare feet made no sound on the carpet as he went back to his side of the bed. He stood for a moment, watching Jake sleep.

  We’re both adults here.

  Jake slept like the dead and wasn’t likely to wake before morning; Rich knew that from past history. Exhaustion trumped pain for the time being, so Rich had hopes of falling asleep without too much tossing and turning.

  He slipped under the covers and lay on his back with his hands clasped over his chest. Once he turned off the bedside lamp, the room was plunged into darkness.

  Don’t think about it.

  Yeah. Good luck with that. Don’t think about Jake lying next to him, so close Rich could feel the heat emanating from his bare flesh. Don’t think about what it would be like to inch closer, to reach out and stroke the skin along his back up to his the nape of his neck. Don’t think about what an eager and responsive lover Jake had been, or what it had felt like to have Jake inside him. Don’t think about how much he missed Jake, or what he would give to be able to go back eight years and take the other fork in the road.

  Don’t. Think.

  Rich woke slowly, conscious of a pounding at the back of his head from a too-plump pillow. Although his head was at the wrong angle, everything protested when he made a slight shift in position. The room was dark, too dark to see anything, and he felt its strangeness almost instinctively. At home, he would have seen the light from the digital readout of his clock by the right side of his bed. Here, there was just a thick blackness. Heavy weights lay across his pelvis and abdomen, and something pinned his right leg down as well. For a brief moment, panic surged through him at the notion that he was trapped in the truck again, but in the next instant he became aware of the mattress beneath him. How could his cats possibly squish him so? Awareness dawned when he moved his hand and came into contact with Jake’s strong arm draped across his middle.

  This was how the two of them had always fallen asleep together. Rich on his back, wearing Jake like a warm blanket. For someone who disdained human contact while conscious, Jake had a positive genius for seeking it out when asleep. A light buzzing sound reminded Rich that Jake snored, even though he vehemently insisted he didn’t.

  Whenever he and Jake had spent the night together and Jake’s snoring had awakened him, it had always made him smile in the darkness. Touching Jake lightly had usually been enough to make him turn over and the snoring had ceased. Sometimes, however, Rich had stared at the ceiling, satisfaction curving his lips slightly as he reveled in the knowledge that Jake was lying beside him, and he was soaking in the warmth of Jake’s body and listening to his ‘not-snoring’ slumber. He’d allowed his respirations to slow to match Jake’s own, content in the moment, knowing that life didn’t get any better than this.

  Lying here now, these should have been happy memories for him. At the very worst, memories tinged only with a bittersweet acknowledgment of what had been and was no longer. A lesser man might have taken advantage of the situation, of Jake’s unconscious need for contact, of the thin line between sleep and wakefulness, of guards down and cocks up. Instead, Rich became aware of a growing heat, suffocating in the extreme, as Jake’s limbs weighed him down and held him in a position that was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Rolling out of Jake’s embrace wasn’t an option. Since the accident, sleeping on his right side was impossible.

  It had to be sometime in the middle of the night. The room was pitch-black, and even with the heavy curtains, there would have been a thin beam of light along their edges if the sun had been up. Rich’s hand was folded between him and Jake, and he had lost the feeling in his fingers. Jake’s arm lay across his abdomen, and though he could move his left arm, he couldn’t reach his phone to check the time. Jake’s leg rested on his pelvis, and an ache started somewhere deep in Rich’s back, protesting at the locked position. Jake had bent his lower leg to place it between Rich’s shins, effectively preventing all but the slightest movement.

  He could try to hold this position. He could just lie here in the dark and close his eyes, hoping the warmth and Jake’s respiration would lull him back to sleep. It would be a kind of self-torture as he remembered those past times when he and Jake had touched, licked, and fucked
each other sated and senseless, but it would be a kind of exquisite exercise in martyrdom, allowing him to both punish himself for what he’d lost and feed his fantasies with what lay inches away. He wanted so badly to be the boy he’d been, the one who could lie for hours in Jake’s arms.

  But he couldn’t do it. Like riding a horse these days, holding this one position for so long, with Jake’s weight crushing him to the mattress, had set up a grinding sense of rigid strain, and he shifted minutely, trying to ease the discomfort. He fidgeted with his free hand to adjust his pillow, trying to alter the angle beneath his aching neck. The heat coming from Jake felt like it was smothering him, and something almost like panic built within. He felt trapped, unable to breathe, unable to move, as though he’d been bound in a straitjacket. Every desire said to fight it, even as he lay still and tried to breathe his way through the increasing sense of agitation. In the end, he had no choice but to move.

  He eased his way out from under Jake, hearing the soft murmur of protest as Jake lost his warm support. In general, Rich hated getting out of bed. Everything hurt—even placing his feet on the floor hurt. This time, however, it felt like a blessed release. Jake sighed and rolled away from him, curling onto his opposite side without waking.

  Rich pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. If only he could get some fucking relief. Just an hour would be enough, he told himself, knowing he was lying. An hour’s freedom from pain would never be enough. He wiped his face, yawning so hard tears came to his eyes, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to wipe them away.

  Stealthy exploration in his bag uncovered the bottle of extra-strength acetaminophen he always carried with him. God knows where the other meds were hiding in the depths of the duffle. He uncapped his water bottle and winced at the loud crackle the thin plastic made when he applied pressure to its sides. Fortunately, Jake never stirred. Wiping his eyes again, he cautiously got back into bed, resisting the urge to mold himself to Jake’s warm body. Instead, he hunched down, cold and miserable, as he tried to will himself back to sleep.