by Holley Trent
“Because… Just…” Gary growled and went tense again in Dean’s grip. “Lo worried that I just…latch on to whoever’s nice to me, but that’s not the way I am, really.”
“You talked to Lo?”
Gary nodded. “Before she left. She wanted to be sure that I wasn’t fixating on you just because you were nice to me, but I’m not.”
“What are you telling me, Gary?”
“That I like you, you asshole. And I like Lo. But right now, you’re the one standing here. I would know what to do with Lo. I don’t know what to do with you, because I don’t know if you’re capable of liking me back.”
Stunned as Dean was, he didn’t let go.
He understood what Gary was telling him. He understood how Gary might have been conflicted about what he was feeling. He just didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to do about the information. Or if he should do anything about it.
What would Lo do?
Gary had said he’d spoken to Lo. “Did…did Lo tell you to tell me this?” Dean asked.
“Call her,” Gary said. “She said to call her, so do that now, please.”
Dean let go of him to dig the phone out of his pocket, and Gary moved quickly away as if Dean was hot fire he needed to get away from.
Whether or not he thought Dean was dangerous, he was certainly affected by his presence.
His cheeks were flushed, pupils fully dilated, and he couldn’t move his hand over his crotch quickly enough to cover the obvious erection.
Holy shit, what’s happening here?
Dean dialed in Lo’s number, fumbling repeatedly and having to erase the errant numbers.
He’d never had a man confess attraction to him before. While he might have suspected Gary was even more openly sexual than the average man, actually hearing him say he was attracted to Dean framed the situation in an entirely new light.
Dean was flattered, and very confused.
“Hey, baby,” Lo responded on the third ring.
“Hey. Uh…”
Gary, blessedly, took the phone. “Lo, I told him. Tell me what to do so this doesn’t get weird.”
And she knew.
Dean dragged a hand through his hair and then tugged. She hadn’t said anything.
Does that mean she doesn’t care? She pawning me off on him?
“Lo,” he shouted, reaching for the phone, but Gary was more agile and moved away.
“He’s mad at me,” Gary said.
“I’m not mad. I’m trying to fucking understand what’s happening.”
“She said to give the phone back to you.” Gary held it out and quickly moved away before Dean could grab his arm.
“Lorena,” Dean shouted into the phone.
“Hey, hey,” she said. “Calm down.”
“What are you doing?”
“Listening to my husband shout at me, apparently.”
“No, what are you doing? What is this? You just left me to this.”
“Because I thought you’d be fine working things out between the two of you.”
“Is this your way of telling me you want a divorce? You’ve never had a problem telling me things before.”
“No! Listen to me. This isn’t about us breaking up. This is about Gary.”
“Obviously, this is about Gary.”
Gary stood near the window, shifting his weight from foot to foot and watching Dean with wide-eyed terror.
Dean pulled his hair again. Fuck.
“No, what I mean is that Gary needs us.”
“Explain.”
She muttered something softly and in Spanish.
Learning a second language hadn’t been high up on Dean’s to-do list in the past year, so he had no fucking idea what she’d said. “Lorena.”
“Ugh. I’m trying to figure out how to say this. This would have gone down so much differently if I hadn’t had to go back to work. I should be there right now, but I didn’t think he’d be able to wait to act. He’s too impulsive to keep that kind of stuff bottled up.”
“You’re not leaving me?”
“No, baby. I’m not leaving you. If anything, I worried you’d like him more and you’d leave me.”
“That’s not going to happen. You’re my…my Lo.”
“I know,” she said quietly, sounding somewhat chastened, “but I still worried. What’s happening right now is that he’s telling you he wants a piece of what we have.”
“A piece?”
“Yeah. And you’re the only one there right now who can give it. I don’t know if that makes you uncomfortable. I don’t know how you feel about…men, but now you know the score.”
Dean pulled the phone away from his ear and fixed his gaze back on Gary again.
He was still rocking nervously, that cocky swagger of his having apparently ridden off into the sunset hours or even a day prior. “That’s why you’ve been anxious all day?” Dean asked, careful to bring his volume back down to a level that the neighbors couldn’t hear.
Gary nodded.
“Jesus Christ.”
Dean could hear Lo sigh from down at his side. He put the phone back to his ear. “Sorry.”
“I’m off on Thursday,” she said softly. “I can fly down then. Can you manage until Thursday?”
“What am I supposed to do, baby?”
“That’s up to you. Be kind, though. I can’t say I know how he feels, but I think he feels whatever he does deeply. I believe he’s being genuine.”
So did Dean.
“Okay,” he said, both to Lo and to the anxious man in the corner.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“Dunno. Order a pizza, maybe, or run out and get some beer.”
“Call me before you go to bed.”
“I will.”
“Okay. I—”
“No, me first. I love you, Lorena.”
She chuckled quietly and said, “I love you, too.”
She disconnected, and Dean slid his phone onto the dresser top.
He stared at the wood grain for a while, gathering his thoughts and plotting what would happen next.
He wasn’t sure how he wanted things to unfold. Lo had said that she didn’t know how Dean felt about men, and Dean had never really given his sexuality much thought before meeting Gary. He’d never tried to examine his latent attractions or even wondered if they meant anything.
Like most kids where he grew up, he was raised to believe that boys liked girls and girls liked boys, and that was the natural order of things. But unlike many people he knew well from back in the day, he had an uncanny knack for being able to change his mind. He wasn’t afraid of learning or change.
He may have sucked ass at holding up his end of a conversation, but he thought he had a pretty good gut most of the time. Sometimes, it propelled him to take risks…like asking Lo to marry him.
His gut suggested that perhaps the time had come to take another risk.
He picked up the pizza shop’s menu left on the dresser from the last delivery and smoothed down the creases. “Maybe sausage tonight.” He cut a look to Gary, who was still standing in the corner. “They’re not using alligator sausage, are they?”
Gary gave his head a slow shake. “I don’t think so.”
“Sausage, then.” Dean called in the order and asked if the delivery guy could swing by the store to pick up a six-pack on the way. Apparently, they didn’t have anything better to do, and said yes. The grocery store was right next door to them, anyway. They could pick something up while the pie baked.
Dean shoved his hands into his pockets and craned his neck to peer at the ceiling. The motel had sent some workers over to patch the damage from the rain, and had hopefully fixed the roof, too. “I guess we’ll find out the next time it rains,” he said.
“This is Florida. It’s gonna rain, even if the weather system isn’t on the forecast,” Gary said.
“I used to hate it.” Dean sat on the edge of his bed and tugged the bows of his snea
ker laces. “The rain, I mean. Didn’t have a choice when I was a kid but to go work outside, anyway. Animals had to be fed.”
“You grew up on a farm like Ken, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I don’t have anything against farming as an occupation. Hard to make a living nowadays, even if you’re doing everything right, but that wasn’t the biggest deterrent for me. I just wanted to do something for a living where I’d be working under a roof most of the time. My parents hated that I left the way I did.” He leaned back against the headboard, brought his legs up to the bed, and crossed them at the ankles.
Gary was still in that corner.
“Sit down, man.”
Gary took the age-worn armchair by the dresser. Distant enough from Dean, but at least he wasn’t standing stiff and afraid. Dean wasn’t going to hurt him. Gary should have known better.
“How’d you leave?” Gary asked.
“Quietly.” Dean chuckled. “I guess that’s my style, huh?”
“Does Lo know this story?”
“Only because my mother told her. Ma makes every story sound like an accusation. I don’t know what her goal is when she does that, but anyway, Lo wasn’t too put off by it. She seemed more bemused than anything else.”
“You should tell her your stories yourself,” Gary said.
“I’d like to, if I can ever figure out where they should go in a conversation. I’m not good at figuring out what she would care about and when.” Dean shrugged. “Anyway, I guess everyone thought the day after I graduated from high school was going to be like any other day on the farm, but I’d already had my bags packed and was out on the dirt road waiting for my ride before anyone else got up.”
“You bounced without saying anything?”
“That was my plan. I wanted to avoid all the questions and judgments, but my mother got up and went outside to walk some mail out to the box, and my ride hadn’t gotten there yet.”
Gary cringed. “What’d she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. Put the mail in the box. Lifted the flag for the carrier. Walked right back to house to make breakfast, I guess. She must not have gotten anyone else up, because if she had, they certainly would have been out there asking what the hell I was up to.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Had a buddy in Raleigh who let me sleep on his sofa for a little while until I could find someplace else. Ended up crashing with a bunch of other guys from my trade school for a couple of years. Uncomfortable as hell with all those dudes in one house, but I didn’t care because I was doing the grown-up thing out on my own. Making my own way, and the only hogs I had to work with were the ones with gas tanks and wheels.”
Gary picked at the one cuticle he hadn’t torn all to hell and nodded. Kept nodding like he was in a perpetual motion loop, and he stared ahead at nothing in particular.
He was a mess.
Somewhere in the box of books Dean hadn’t unpacked during his last move, there were a couple of psych journals he’d ordered to give to his parents. They discussed various types of ADD and ADHD and how they presented. His parents hadn’t wanted to read the articles, but Dean had.
He wondered how many types affected Gary. He wondered if Gary even knew.
Gary stopped nodding and, looking at his hands, grimaced. He tucked his bloody finger into his mouth and sighed around it.
He knows what he does.
“When I left home,” Gary said after pulling his finger from his mouth, “my mother’s last words to me were, ‘You’ll be back.’ I believed her. I didn’t want to be what she wanted me to be, and that was scary. She wanted me to stay close to home for college so she could do that embarrassing hovering thing. She probably would have shown up at the school dining hall to cut up my steaks for me.” He chuckled and slid lower in the chair, massaging his temples. “I wanted to be on my own.”
“Can’t grow up if you’re not.”
Gary scoffed. “Yeah. A lot of times, I thought about pitching in the towel and heading back to let her figure out what I needed to be doing with my life. I would have let her clean me up and move me from point A to point B. Could have let her find me some desk job at the family corporation where I wouldn’t screw up too much because the people who worked under me would cover my ass.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Nah. Only because of Clint, though. He knew I was just as bad a Morstad as him, and that I had to do my own thing. He takes me in whenever I get to that…that place where I’m miserable and useless, but that’s not sustainable, right? I’ve got to act like an adult and do things on my own. I shouldn’t need a helicopter parent moving me from one appointment to the next, and my mother gets a perverse pleasure from being the one to micromanage my every move.”
“Sounds like she needs a hobby.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you need to simplify your life. Have fewer things to remember. Put yourself around people who don’t mind reminding you of the things you were supposed to be doing.”
Gary laced his fingers together and cracked each knuckle. “You know anyone like that?”
Dean turned his hands over. “Maybe I know a couple.”
He didn’t just feel an obligation to take care of Gary—because someone sure as shit needed to—but, he wanted to take care of him. His gut said “Yes” in the same way it had for Lo. Maybe their connection would be uncertain and scary, but Dean wanted the rewards of forging it. He liked having people to fuss over. It was one of the few things he was good at.
Thunder clapped too close, sending Gary leaping out of his chair and pacing in front of the beds, and Dean stared at the patched ceiling, perversely interested in its integrity. Perhaps he’d been absorbing some of Lo’s quirks, but some small part of him hoped that the damned thing caved in just so he’d have something to call the owner out on. Lo always found those a-ha moments so satisfying, and Dean thought that was cute.
Dean let Gary pace off his anxiety came until the pizza guy showed up, and then he shuffled to the door, gave the delivery man two twenties and thanked him for hurrying over in the rain.
He set the pizza box on the dresser and handed Gary a beer.
“If you weren’t here right now, I’d probably be in a dive somewhere pulling Cameron’s hair and smashing his face against the edge of a bar.” Gary stopped fiddling with his beer’s cap and rolled his denim blue gaze up to meet Dean’s eyes.
“You’re welcome, Gary.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
At Dean’s insistent nudging, Gary pulled his pillow over his head and whined, “Noooo, I don’t have practice today. Let me sleep.”
“It’s one a.m.,” Dean said, lifting the corner of the pillow. “Not daytime. Lo’s on the phone. Wants to talk to you.”
“Lo?”
“Uh-huh. Remember? She said to call before bed.”
“I don’t remember going to bed.”
“Because you drank all that beer, I guess. I didn’t think you were such a lightweight.”
“How much did I drink?”
“Four beers in thirty minutes. Also, you ate one slice of pizza.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Really.”
Gary flicked the pillow away and rolled over. He sat up slowly, waiting for the cues from his body to tell him he was as wasted as Dean claimed. Other than his bladder’s insistence that he empty it, and a bit of dizziness, he didn’t feel too fucked over.
He smacked her dry lips and made a face at the foul taste in his mouth.
Dean held the phone out to him.
“Wait, I gotta piss.”
Gary shuffled to the bathroom, shedding his sweaty shirt as he went, and sighing about the laundry. He’d only packed two dress shirts, and was going to have to get to a dry cleaner before the next series. Three back-to-back away games, and even if Gary wasn’t playing, he had to be there, shouting rah-rah shit for his team.
As he relieved himself, he wiped sweat from his brow and shouted into the bedroo
m, “Why’s the room so fucking hot?”
“Power went down for a couple of hours. Just came back on and the air conditioner along with it.”
“I slept through that? Shit.”
He’d probably been drinking all the beer so he wouldn’t pay attention to the thunder and lightning. While he could rationalize with himself that the motel had a lightning rod and he was safely protected from electrocution, once he planted the seed of potential danger in his head he couldn’t stop obsessing.
He finished up, washed his hands, and shuffled back into the bedroom with his damp shirts. He tossed them onto his laundry pile and held up a hand to Dean, telling him to wait. Gary had been wearing those belted slacks for too damned long.
Once those were on the pile, too, Gary took the phone.
“What’s she yelling at me about?”
Dean grunted and took a seat on the edge of his bed. “I think she just wants to say goodnight and make sure you’re okay.”
Oh.
Gary put the phone to his ear and flopped onto the bed. “Lo.”
“No! Get the phone away from your ear,” she said. “I’ve got you on video. You’re blocking the camera.”
“Oh.” Gary held the phone at arm’s length and nearly dropped the damned thing on his face. “Fuck, are you not wearing a shirt?”
He could see bra straps and the top of her delectable cleavage, but her shoulders were bare.
She blinked a couple of times. “That’s what I sleep in. Did you not notice when I was down there?”
He’d been trying hard not to.
“For God’s sake, don’t pan the camera any lower.”
“You mean like this?” She did exactly what he’d told her not to, revealing the bra she wore wasn’t much of a bra at all. It was one of those useless demi contraptions that pushed her breasts up into tantalizing mounds but left her nipples exposed.
Gary tossed the phone to Dean as if it was a hot potato.
“I’m in hell,” Gary said. “I died last night and I’m in hell right now. You’ll never convince me otherwise.”
Lo laughed that sadistic little chuckle of hers and said, “Baby, give him the phone back.”