by Willa Okati
“Wrong tool for the job. Besides. I’ve learned a few things.” Tuck stomped the ground to make sure it was sturdy, no soft spots or hidden gopher holes. “I can do this.”
“Tuck.” Cade’s touch, a firm grasp of his shoulder, stopped Tuck. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Ah, hell. Tuck let out his breath in a long exhale. “I was going to buy us a house,” he said. “Some of that time I took was learning the basics.”
“Oh.” Cade almost visibly shrank in on himself, hunching his shoulders.
Not today, he didn’t. Tuck kicked Cade, easy-as-she-goes, on his ankle. “Hey. Don’t obsess. I mean it.”
“Try and stop me.”
Tuck snorted. “Can you blame a man for trying?”
And it’d worked, sort of. Cade wasn’t crumpling like a dead leaf anymore. He straightened up and nodded, and if he hadn’t forgotten, at least he didn’t let it take over his head. Tuck could tell.
“A pavilion,” Cade said, searching for the best way to start. Tuck let him do it. “They live in the next best thing to a mansion. I’d have thought they’d want to use the parlor.”
“Yeah, they could.” Tuck pointed himself toward the far edge of the yard, searching for—aha, there. It might have been a garage sized for a moped or a deluxe doghouse, but a place like this would come with its own discreet, elegant toolshed.
“But…?” Cade prompted when Tuck didn’t elaborate.
“They’re using the parlor because no one offered them another choice. There’re no churches doing same-sex ceremonies around here, at least not right now.”
“You checked?”
“Hannah told me yesterday. One of the guests is a friend of a friend of Megan’s who does commitment ceremonies.”
“Then why not the parlor?”
Tuck knew the difference between Cade being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn, and Cade when he was honestly confused. He took pity on the poor guy. “You recall what Hannah said about Megan and the Royal Whatsitcalled?”
“Doulton.”
“Right. If they held that wedding inside, Hannah would spend three days’ worth of time she doesn’t have to spare cleaning the house until it glowed like a saint’s halo and, dissertation or not, Megan would try to help. Now imagine the carnage.”
Cade’s lips twitched. “I doubt it’d be as bad as all that.”
“I’d rather not find out.” He lifted one shoulder at Cade. “Would you?”
“Game, set, match, I guess.” Cade nibbled at his lip. “Where do we start?”
Tuck blazed a grin at him. It made for a good look on him when Cade let things happen instead of fighting upstream every step of the way. “We could do it easy and cheap. Throw up a tent from a superstore. They sell sets of tin poles with a tarp.”
“Or?” Cade prompted, proving he still knew Tuck well enough to know that was just a prelude.
“Or we could do it right and give them a gift they won’t forget.” Tuck opened his arms, leaving the choice up to Cade. “Are you in?”
“For them?” Cade lifted his head. Tuck could still read troubled unhappiness down in the depths of him, but he was fighting it and doing a decent job. “I’m in.”
“Good.” Tuck enjoyed the moment for a beat or three, then turned to make his way toward the toolshed. “C’mon. Bet you we find almost everything we need in here.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then we improvise.”
Cade snorted, falling into pace with Tuck.
“What?”
“You never take the easy way out, not ever, do you?”
Tuck considered that. “You’re not wrong.”
“It gets you into trouble more often than not.”
“Also true. Still.” Tuck tilted his head back to raise his face, eyes closed, to the bright sky.
“You look like a kid when you do that.”
Tuck didn’t mind. “Feels good. You should try.”
“Maybe later.”
Tuck savored the sun on his face. “Maybe you will,” he said. “I had a good night last night. I want a good day today.” He turned from the skies, toward Cade, blinking the sun-dazzle out of his eyes. “Gonna deny us that?”
“Mmm.” Cade pushed his hands into his hip pockets.
“It’s got to get better from here,” Tuck said. “C’mon and play. Otherwise I’ll keep thinking about the girls mentioning earplugs, and ugh.” He shuddered.
“Oh God.” Cade stared at him in horror. “They didn’t.”
“Yes, they did. And as of now, they didn’t. I’m blocking it out of my mind.” Tuck pressed two fingers to his forehead and hummed. “Wedding or not, our sisters have no idea what sex is and have yet to engage in it. After they’re married, they’ll sleep in separate beds, and one day they may explore that strange thing called kissing before deciding they don’t like it.”
“My God.” Now that was a pretty sight, Cade struggling to keep a straight face. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“I am what I am.” Tuck patiently beckoned Cade on. “C’mon. Let me surprise you again.”
* * *
Just as Tuck had hoped, the good professor’s toolshed was stocked well enough to be a wet dream for an army of groundskeepers. The presence of a posthole digger had to mean she wouldn’t mind a few holes dug in her lawn. Tuck hoped.
Cade leaned on the frankly scary-looking and sort of medieval chunk of movable iron and yellow paint as he watched Tuck rummage through boxes and among tools neatly hung on wall pegboards. “You’re really not picking those at random,” he said slowly.
“Told you, ye of little faith.”
That earned him a frown, half-suspicious and half-intrigued. “Can you teach me?”
“Depends.” Tuck crouched, searching through boxes of nails for the size he wanted. “Can you learn?”
“I can try.”
“Then so can I.” Go figure. In its own weird way, this was…not exactly the same but pretty close to what he’d thought it might be like, him and Cade fixing up the house he’d meant to buy for them. He liked. “Start me off by giving me that plane by your elbow. I’ll need it to dovetail the joins.”
“The what? And we don’t have anything to join together yet.”
Tuck poked around further and grunted, pleased. “That would be where you’re wrong.” He popped back out to Cade’s questioning noise, waving a short length of wood at him.
Cade raised an eyebrow. “I guess the good professor did plan for absolutely everything.”
“Looks like three or four two-by-fours sawed into this length. It’s either for patch-up work only, or she’s building a real boy.”
“It doesn’t look like much.”
The doubt in Cade’s voice nagged at Tuck. He tried to shrug it off. “It’s enough to get started. Load ’em up.”
* * *
“Okay, now watch this. If we do it right, the good professor will never even notice. Like this.” Tuck knelt to cut a circle in the velvety lawn. A little careful maneuvering and he eased a near-perfect disk free. “Okay. Take that over where I set out the dirt trays. Carefully.”
Cade obeyed and then some, balancing the turf circle as carefully as painted eggshells. The thing seemed to fascinate him, with its roots woven and knotted together so densely a guy would think it’d stand up to a good bounce against a wall, but no, it wanted to crumble apart the second it’d been excised.
“How’s it look so solid and feel this fragile?”
“That I don’t know. Weird, huh?”
Cade squinted up at Tuck from where he’d crouched in the hot sun, his shirt off and tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. “I’d really thought you’d be going with four sticks and a bedsheet. But this is…”
“Something else, yeah.” Tuck leaned on the blunt end of a board safely planted on a tough patch of moss.
He wasn’t talking about the lawn. He’d damn near forgotten the lawn. What with all the stretching an
d bending, he’d discovered he could still feel Cade, as deep as Cade had gone. The man was an addiction. Tuck had gotten hard, somewhere in there, with not much way of hiding it in the loose pair of shorts he’d borrowed from Cade himself, and he didn’t bother trying.
Cade noticed. He shifted from foot to foot, as if he’d thought about moving back out of reach—but he didn’t.
He’d asked for a good day. Something benevolent out there had delivered in spades and not those hanging in neat lines on the walls behind them. The thought made him chuckle.
“What?” Cade asked, sounding as if his mouth had gone dry.
“I’m enjoying this,” Tuck said. He gestured to Cade. “Enjoying you.”
It should have been hard to see a blush under the sunburn developing on Cade’s cheeks, but Tuck knew his man and knew exactly what went along with that embarrassed hunch of his shoulders and the way one corner of his mouth lifted in what was almost a rueful smile. “God, you’re ridiculous.”
“Not so. How you don’t know how fucking gorgeous you are is a mystery to me.”
“Tuck,” Cade muttered. “I’m not kidding. Stop.”
The bright day darkened slightly. “Okay.” Tuck raised his hands. “But it’s still true.”
“Damn it, Tuck…” Cade took a breath. “I don’t want to hear it.”
And after that? Silence.
Super.
“Keeping up with you is exhausting sometimes,” Tuck grumbled, frustrated. “You know that?”
“Who do you think I learned it from?” Cade returned.
Well. Suck on that, why don’t you, Tuck? Clouds might just as well have covered the sun. Exhausting? Yes. And he felt it now like he never had before. A bone-deep weariness that made him want to lay down his head, and he didn’t know why. Everything had been going well. Hadn’t it?
Cade turned away, watching a point between the house and the yard. “Tuck?”
“You’re talking again now?”
Cade ignored the sharpness; Tuck was glad. He hadn’t meant to snap. Mostly hadn’t meant to. “I need to ask you something.”
Huh. Didn’t sound like he wanted to ask something fantastic, starting off that way, but hell. He owed Cade a freebie. Tuck bent to the task of cutting a new circle out of the turf and said, “Ask.”
“What kind of house were you going to buy?”
The knife fell from Tuck’s hands. “Say again?”
“You heard me.” Cade picked up a glove, the way he twisted it the only thing that gave away his uncertainty. Statues didn’t get the jitters.
“Yeah, but…I didn’t think you’d ever want to know.”
Cade shrugged.
Hell. Tuck rubbed his face, grimacing at the feel of dirt smears he left behind. “Nothing like this. I couldn’t have afforded it. Something big enough for both of us and small enough to feel like a home. With a yard.”
He watched Cade process that. Wish to God I knew what he’s thinking now. Should I go on?
He could but try. “I’d looked at a couple of places out toward Albany and points east and west of there.”
Cade frowned. “That’s a long commute.”
“You go farther every day from the Bronx to St. Bethany’s. Albany’s closer. And what city doesn’t need taxi drivers?”
“You’d wither up and die if you had to live outside the city.” Cade inched closer and closer to Tuck with each give-and-take in the conversation.
“Nah. I’d be okay as I could drive in for the Yankees games.”
“Tuck.” Cade touched him again, deliberately this time, light but stubborn, dark hand outlined on Tuck’s fairer, freckled arm. “You were going to give up that much for me?”
Tuck didn’t guess he needed to answer that. He did anyway, because he wanted to. “You’re worth it. Pass me those boards, would you? I need to take a test drive at this to be sure I remember how.”
“Tuck,” Cade said warningly, making it clear he’d picked up on Tuck’s attempt to change the topic and that he didn’t care for an attempt at being played.
Tuck sighed. “Okay. I’d have hated it that far out from the city. You’re right.” He’d go get those boards himself. He should have stopped talking then. He knew he should have. Just loaded up and gotten down to work; this was turning fast, and a smart man would back down.
He didn’t. Just kept running his mouth while he gathered hammer, nails, wood. “I’d have hated it, but you’d have loved it. Don’t give me that look. I know you. Always outdoors, running, finding open places. I wanted to give you somewhere you could exorcise those demons for good.” He threw down his tools, heedless of the grass. “Don’t look at me like that. Like it was wrong of me to want to give you a gift.”
Cade had paled, his lips pressed thin. “You don’t need to take care of me.”
“Bullshit I don’t. Someone should. You sure as hell don’t.”
Spots of red anger filled in some of the whiter hollows of Cade’s cheeks. “That’s my business. Not yours.”
“Again I say bullshit. Because I love you. And if you don’t get that by now, I’m sorrier than I can say. Leave me again if you want. That’s not going to change anything.”
Cade said nothing. Christ. Why hadn’t Tuck been able to do that? Why had he said those things?
Fuck it. Tuck knelt and set four of the boards into a useless square just to give himself something to do; something that’d hide how he tried to shunt away pent-up emotions so tangled he couldn’t even begin to make sense of them.
“Tuck.” Cade’s hand was abruptly on Tuck’s nape, holding him almost aggressively, meaning business and taking pretty clear pains to be sure Tuck got how serious he was when he said, “You should have said. If you’d told me the truth from the start—”
“Yeah,” Tuck said. “Don’t tell me what I already know.”
Cade let go of Tuck. “You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
Tuck’s mouth tasted bad. “Funny. I already knew that too.” He lined up hammer with nail and brought them together, hard. Bang!
Chapter Eleven
“Let me see.”
“You don’t need to. I’ve had worse slamming my hand in car doors.”
“Sure. That’s why you’re bleeding.” Cade wasn’t messing around. He twisted Tuck’s wrist to turn his thumb toward the sky.
“One drop of blood, if that.” He’d given himself no more than a scrape and a torn nail. Trust him, he knew it could have been a hell of a lot worse. His pride was the thing that smarted after all that bragging to Cade about DIY, and Cade going Mother Hen now did not help.
Suzie-Q whined and tried to stick her muzzle in the middle of the whole business.
“Calm down, girl. I’m fine.” Tuck bumped the top of her head with his elbow. “Go find Megan. Cade, you mind giving me my hand back now?”
Cade let him go after he’d held on long enough to prove some kind of a point. “Idiot.”
“What did you just say?”
“Stop trying to prove things to me. Okay? There’s nothing I don’t know about how hard you try. I just—I—” Cade pressed his hands over his eyes. “Just stop hurting yourself for my sake.”
Tuck glared at him. They knelt almost knee to knee, eye to eye, only just managing to keep their voices low. Who knew how that was possible. Tuck wanted to shout and swear just to relieve the pressure, and he wasn’t talking about the throbbing of his banged-up hand.
“Tuck?”
Shit. Tuck nearly had his second heart attack in as many days. Cade too, if the half-corkscrew jump he gave was any indication. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Do you want to not do that, Hannah?”
“Fair payback for this morning. Are you bleeding?”
“It’s not bad.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Hannah said. She wasn’t smiling. More upset than she should be for…
Oh, hell. Come on! Tuck very deliberately did not look at Cade. “We’re fine.”
“Sure you are.”
She wasn’t looking anywhere near Tuck’s injured hand. “Come inside with me. Cade, you stay out here.”
Tuck hesitated, trying to think and failing, before he did as he’d been told. What other choice did he have? Besides running away, and that wasn’t an option. Never had been for him.
* * *
Hannah kept her mouth shut. At first. Long enough to drag out the first-aid kit and point Tuck to a chair at the cleared end of the kitchen table. Then again, she didn’t so much have to say anything for Tuck to know the score. All he waited for now was for it to bubble over and prove this—all of it—had turned out about as useful as casting pearls before swine.
She sat with a thump across from him, bandages and tape laid out before her, and got to work. None too gently. She had an alcohol swab in her hand and wasn’t afraid to use it either.
He might have figured she’d wait for that moment before she spoke. And she wasn’t just angry. He’d seen Hannah angry. This was somewhere far beyond that point. “How long have you been lying to me?”
“Hannah…”
“How long?” She threw the swab, stained with Tuck’s blood, on the floor. Gone was the golden goddess who almost never stopped smiling. She still looked like an angel to him but more the kind who carried a flaming sword. “Tell me. How long have you and Cade been separated?”
“Goddamnit it, Hannah.” Tuck sighed. “Fuck it. Fine. Six months, give or take a week.”
She let his hand go when he wasn’t expecting it; he rapped his knuckles sharply against the table and winced, but she didn’t notice or didn’t care. “You’re an asshole, Tuck. You know that?”
Yeah. That, and tired again. So fucking tired. He lifted one shoulder. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“God.” Hannah sat as still as Cade, when Cade was in the mood, before she reached as sharply for the gauze-cutting scissors as their blades themselves. “You know, I wondered when you first got here.”
Tuck let her have her way with him. He deserved it. “I hoped you hadn’t. Wasn’t sure.”
“It wasn’t one big thing that gave you away. More like a bunch of small ones. Cade didn’t step up; you had to push him. Every time he said something, or you did, you’d give each other this little look like you were checking to see if you’d screwed up. He’d shaved his head. No way you’d have let him do that.”