Make a Right

by Willa Okati

  Okay. Keep the shock to a minimum in front of the locals, especially this one. Tuck coughed and cleared his throat and managed not to twist around and stare. “Yeah. You like?”

  Was it his imagination, or did Cade’s arm tighten, almost a squeeze? Closer to a one-armed hug. “I think you’ve done good work here.”

  Huff went Alicia. Tuck watched the brief war between pride and indignation surrender to almost four thousand bucks. Tuck would be swallowing down sour bile right now if it weren’t for Cade’s arm around him when he needed it most. Even if he had no idea why—how—especially why, after the shitstorm in the parlor—

  “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I followed you.” Cade’s thumb feathered across Tuck’s waist. “You never were the one who learned the art of hiding.” He tilted his head to look at the array of boxes and plucked up the fedora before it disappeared into a hatbox—an honest to God hatbox—amid a swath of tissue paper. He dropped the hat on Tuck’s head and tugged it to a rakish angle.

  “I notice you’re not asking if I can afford this.”

  “No.” Cade tracked the debit card from swipe to the green “acceptance” light. He stood still, very still, arm hard as iron and warm as fire, and not quite unsteady but not exactly steady either. “You really were saving for a house.”

  “Like I said.” He snorted. “And I blew it all here.”

  “For them.” Cade drew in a slow breath. “And for me.”

  In answer, Tuck pulled move for move and took the key necklace before it disappeared in a bag. He offered it to Cade. “Like I told you before. That was all I ever had in mind.”

  Cade’s reaction was the last thing Tuck would have expected, but the one Tuck wanted most, even if it was for her benefit. Probably.

  He slipped that key around his neck and beneath the collar of his T-shirt. Tuck could see the shape of it under the soft cotton and how it rested in the center of his chest, close to his heart.

  Then he kissed Tuck. Once, but slowly, stretching on until the ticks of the clock faded away.

  Tuck forgot the woman behind him hard at work with her card terminal and ledgers, sucking his savings account all but dry. Nothing else mattered right here, right now, except Cade.

  Cade had something on his mind, for damn sure. He’d kissed Tuck to get his attention. Tuck knew and accepted the fact. Yet it was a kiss without anger. Such a strange thing, these days. Almost like a—no, it was a gift, and he didn’t know what he’d done to earn it.

  Cade placed his hand on Tuck’s cheek and fixed him with a steady gaze. Calmer than before. Still uncertain, still the littlest bit shaky. “I’ll wait outside for you,” he said. “I think, maybe…I think we can talk. The way we need to.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tuck didn’t so much have a plan for what should come next. Hell, he counted himself lucky he could think at all with Cade pulling this kind of stunt after all they’d been through.

  Hell, man. Fucking hell. It ought to piss him off. It kind of did.

  And he forgot it all when he hit the street, loaded down with boxes like he’d been on an all-day spendthrift bender, to see Cade waiting for him by his car but not alone.

  Nothing dramatic about the scene, not at first glance. Just a couple of guys in a hybrid, one of them leaning out the driver’s side and talking with Cade.

  No—not with Cade. At him. And Cade, he stared ahead of himself as if deaf, dumb, and blind. The guys might not even have been there; Tuck would have wondered if he hadn’t seen Cade’s fists clenched, knuckles white, and known how that meant Cade was walking a razor’s edge.

  No one got to do that to Cade. Not on Tuck’s watch.

  Tuck made his steps loud, stomping, and made his approach as if he were well ready and willing to rip the balls off those guys. Which, since it was true, came across well. “There some kind of a problem here?”

  “Shit! I told you,” the passenger in the hybrid hissed.

  The driver started to open his mouth. Then he looked up at Tuck. The Tuck who drove in rush-hour traffic without breaking a sweat, whose knuckles bore the scars of many a fistfight, who was not happy and would gladly demonstrate.

  He rolled up the window without a word and backed out, fast. Even dumb-asses had their moments of clearheadedness.

  Speaking of which… Cade had eased up just enough to catch the boxes Tuck thrust at him. “What was that all about?” He darkened with a thought. “Were they hitting on you?”

  Cade shrugged but not convincingly. “Not really. Just assholes. They grow in every city.”

  True, but Tuck couldn’t figure it. There’d been something cocky about those two, but unless they’d been able to ID Cade as one of the out-of-town queers just from word of mouth…

  Made no sense.

  “But they were hitting on you?” Tuck popped the backseat door and loaded boxes in, trying to think this through and not having much luck. He tossed his fedora in the backseat. Cade was okay with Thomas, but he went both nuclear and cold over those two clowns? Why?

  “I wasn’t encouraging them.” Cade had gone stone-faced again, not giving anything away. “They thought I was available.”

  “What were they, blind? They didn’t get that no means no?”

  Cade cast Tuck a sideways look that said it all. Tuck didn’t have room to talk about that. Not one bit.

  Anger leaked away from Tuck as if from a slowly deflating balloon. “I know,” he said. “Stones, glass houses.” He slammed the back door shut. “Not sure how you got here, but you want a ride back?”

  He flinched at Cade’s light touch on his back, between his shoulder blades. Cade was still taking deep breaths to settle himself, but it seemed to help calm him when he had his hand on Tuck.

  Again. It made no sense.

  “I told you we needed to talk,” Cade said. He nudged Tuck aside to stack his own armload of boxes on the seat, more carefully than Tuck had. “I meant it.”

  Right. No one ever set somebody up like that for a good talk. “Now?”

  “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  Well, then. Tuck counted to three, then ten, trying to get himself under control. Didn’t succeed at that either. He thumped the roof of the car once, frustrated almost past words.

  For fuck’s sake, this was what he’d been asking for all along.

  Maybe someday he’d learn to be careful what he wished for.

  * * *

  Cade waited patiently enough for Tuck to settle and start the car, and stiffly when Tuck idled the engine, temporarily lost in fast-moving thoughts. Fuck it. Might as well ask. “Are you okay?”

  There. Cade’s turn now.

  Cade started to answer, then stopped. “I don’t know.”

  Not what Tuck wanted to hear, but it beat getting no answer at all. “Will you be?”

  Cade drew his tongue across his lip. “I don’t—I will be.” He straightened his shoulders in an almost convincing attempt at shaking it off. “I will be,” he repeated and even tried to offer Tuck a smile. “That was nothing. Forget about it. Things happen. They were idiots. Horny and stupid.”

  “You think?”

  Cade bit the lip he’d just licked shiny and kissable. The air between him and Tuck grew thick and heavy. “I need to ask you something.”

  Fuck.

  “Were they the kind of idiots you drove around?”

  Tuck grimaced. He could have said the same thing Cade had. I don’t know. But that wouldn’t be the truth. “Sometimes.”

  Cade could have been a ghost in the seat beside him, but that was not the end of that story, and by God, he’d hear the rest.

  “Sometimes,” Tuck emphasized. “And when I figured that out, I kicked ’em out on the curb. That was part of the job too. Protecting the ladies.”

  Cade didn’t have to ask out loud; the quizzical and surprised lift of his eyebrows would have done it for him. “The people you worked for let you make that call?”

  “They told
me to make that call.” Tuck turned and rested his arm on the steering wheel to better face Cade. “And if the assholes didn’t want to behave, I’d get them out of the car on the toe of my shoe. Or my fists.” He curled one tight, showing off the calluses on his knuckles. “I’m not a smart guy. That’s your gig. I’m a tough bastard who goes with his gut.”

  The noise Cade made took a second for Tuck to identify as laughter. “God, is that you. All over. They trusted you,” he mused out loud.

  “Go figure.”

  Cade startled Tuck by reaching for him. Tentatively, but all the same extending that hand. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “The dress, and”—he reached for the key hanging around his neck—“and everything else.”

  “No, I didn’t. But I wanted to.”

  “That’s you too,” Cade said without explaining himself. He looked down at his hands, knuckles free of scars. “That was a lot of pent-up anger back there.”

  Tuck felt his face warming. “They had it coming.”

  “I meant at the store.”

  “Yeah? Trust me, so did she.”

  Did that amuse Cade? No way. But seemed like it did, from the way Cade glanced slantwise at him. “That wasn’t a complaint.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.” The ghost of a smile crossed Cade’s lips. “If you hadn’t let her have it, I would’ve.”

  “You would?”

  “Want to go back and test that theory?”

  The laugh burst out of Tuck. “Hell.”

  Cade shrugged. Tuck could believe him or not.

  Thing was, Tuck did. He wasn’t sure how that made him feel. No, that was a lie. He knew. This was pride. He threw the car into forward gear and rolled away from the curb, glad to leave the shop and the street behind them. “How did you even know where I was?”

  Cade brushed shoulders with him. “It wasn’t hard to figure out. Everything you think, you feel, it’s right there on your face. You got that look in your eye when you promised Hannah about her dress.”

  “I have a look?”

  “You do, and you know it.” Cade’s nudge closer to Tuck was on purpose this time. Tuck was sure of it.

  “You didn’t answer my question, you know. How’d you get here?”

  The smile was small and real. “I took a taxi.”

  Tuck would have facepalmed if he weren’t behind a wheel. “You’re not serious.”

  Cade drew an X over his chest. “As I’ve ever been.”

  “Follow that car?”

  “Not quite as dramatic. Like I said, I thought I knew where you’d want to go. By the time I made up my mind, there was only one place left you could be. I Googled the local shops. This was the only place that fit the way you think.” Cade raised an eyebrow at Tuck to ask if he could have the bottle of water in the cup holder between their seat.

  “It’s a couple days old,” Tuck warned.

  “It’s still drinkable.” Cade popped the cap and sipped. “You like the same things,” he said once he’d oiled his joints. “Old things. Beauty where you don’t expect it.”

  Tuck mumbled under his breath and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “It’s true.” Cade made to push his hands into his pockets, frowned, and let the gesture go. “It always has been.”

  Felt like they were closer now, somehow, than they’d been in over half a year. “What’s on your mind, babe?”

  “Everything that’s happened since we came here. Before then. None of it’s been—”

  Tuck picked up where he knew Cade would have left off. “Hasn’t been what you expected.”

  “No. Not even the past five minutes. You’re a wild card, Tuck.” Didn’t quite sound like a bad thing, the way Cade said it now. Still confused. Not angrily so. More…searching. “I mean, that first night—the one in your apartment—and the first night here—every time I think now I know where I stand, you…”

  Tuck kept his mouth shut. He wanted to help, but he knew when Cade had to get this out by himself.

  Not that knowing so made it easy.

  “If you knew the worst thing possible about me, would you still love me?”

  The fuck? Tuck eased off the gas and kept one hand on the wheel, everything else focused on Cade, even twisting quarter-sideways in the seat to get a better look at him. “’Course I would. You even have to ask that?”

  Cade picked at the label on his water. A long strip came free. “No matter what?”

  “Not even if you killed someone, babe. Then?” Tuck shrugged. “I’d help you hide the body. Bodies plural, if there were more than one.”

  “You would,” Cade said, as if to himself. He leaned his head against the seat. “But I wonder. I’ve always wondered. You know that by now, don’t you?”

  “Jesus, Cade,” Tuck said, starting to worry now. “What did you do?”

  “What I had to, at the time.” Cade closed his eyes. “More than one time.”

  “Cade…” So help him if Tuck knew what to do. He had to settle for laying his hand on Cade’s leg and kneading the tough muscle under soft skin. “Whatever you did, I don’t care. I can promise you that.”

  “Promises can be broken.” Cade dropped the bottle to lie forgotten in the footwell. “I care.”

  Tuck had to turn his attention back to the road to navigate a tricky curve. Damn foothills. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “I’m not sure.” Cade took the sort of breath that was meant to settle a man and only did half the job, but for once, that was mostly enough. “You make me want to.” His nudge in the side took Tuck by surprise. As did Cade’s light press of hand over his hand. “You make me want to,” he said to himself. “Maybe I’ll get there.”

  Damn this road for being tricky enough to keep Tuck looking out over the blacktop and not at Cade. “Then tell me what I can do,” he said.

  “There’s nothing.”

  “Then make something up, because you know I can’t sit here and be helpless.”

  “I know,” Cade said quietly. “Keep trying. If you still want to. That’s all. Keep trying. I didn’t think you’d need to be asked.”

  He hadn’t. Nor had he known how much he needed to hear that. Tuck turned his wrist awkwardly so he could interlace his fingers with Cade’s. “No stopping,” he said. “I promise.”

  “Even if—”

  “There is no ‘even if.’”

  Cade subsided.

  Tuck didn’t. “We’ve always been good together. You and me. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. Fucked-up and doing okay, before now. Marriage in America, man. Land of the free and home of the crazy.”

  “If anyone ever wondered about the divorce rate in this country…” Cade said drily.

  Tuck rolled his shoulders, trying to work out the stiffness from all this tension. “Don’t go there, Cade. Seriously, don’t.”

  Cade rubbed his thumb over the back of Tuck’s hand. “I’m being difficult. Don’t blame me. I learned from the best.”

  A laugh exploded from Tuck, sharp and short. “Sometimes I wonder if too much of me rubbed off on you.”

  “Tell me about it.” Cade sighed. “You make things happen that shouldn’t be possible. You always have.”

  Tuck rolled that one over. “Then we’re two of a kind, huh?”

  “Say again?”

  “I make things happen, sure. That’s me at heart. You ever stop to think you make things happen?”

  Cade hadn’t, and clearly it surprised him. Tuck could feel the questions permeating the space between passenger and driver’s seats.

  “You do,” Tuck said. He cleared his throat. “You make things happen to me. Just most of the time you’re coming from the opposite direction. So we make a circle. Like a wedding band.”

  He pulled to the side of the road. You couldn’t do this kind of stuff on the road, even if it hadn’t been the worst thing he’d feared—far from it—and for once, even he couldn’t pay attention to double yellow lines.

&nbs
p; “You said we needed to talk,” Tuck said. “‘We’ means me too. You okay with that?”

  Cade hesitated, but he nodded.

  “You remember what I said in the parlor? People who don’t love each other can’t rip each other to shreds like we have.”

  Cade didn’t deny it, and he kept listening.

  “It’s not over.” Tuck had to look at him head-on, even if the seat belt did half choke him and its holster jabbed him cruelly in the hip. “We’re damn good at fighting, you and me.”

  Dry hint of a smirk. “You don’t say.”

  “No jokes. That’s my job, and don’t. Not now.”

  Cade bowed his neck and rolled his shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

  “I wasn’t blaming you. Just saying. There’s a difference, even if you don’t get it.” Tuck tried out one of his old cocky grins. “Trust me on that one, at least?”

  Cade straightened some. Good enough for a start. And he was still listening.

  “Tell me the truth about something,” Tuck said. “Not what you think you should say, but the truth. Deal?”

  Cade went slightly still. Not quite statue, not quite human. That old flash of fear darted through him.

  He nodded all the same. “Ask.”

  “You and me, we never said good-bye. It occurs to me you would have.”

  The plastic water bottle crumpled in Cade’s hand. “I know.”

  “No good-bye means it’s not over. See? I know you. And you ask me why I push? I come back with smart-ass answers, answers that make you mad, and answers that I know will hurt you, but they all come from here.”

  Tuck thumped his chest and brushed his fingertips over Cade’s heart, over the key he wore. It looked as if it’d been made to belong to him and that he’d worn it for years.

  Cade waited, lips parted, eyes dark and wide. “What are you saying?”

  “I want you to tell me the truth. No pressure. No sarcasm. You still love me. I know because I still love you.” Tuck spread his hands wide. “Tell me if it is true, and then that’s all there is left to say.”

  Tuck waited. He’d know now. Where they were headed next. Down separate roads or together.