Love Him Steady

by E M Lindsey

  “Are you okay?”

  Lorenzo realized his emotions were playing out on his face, and he took a breath. “I’ve been going through some stuff. It’s stupid.”

  “I very much doubt it’s stupid.” Jayden patted his shoulders twice, then urged him up. “Let’s do a wash, and then I’ll give you a trim. After that, Raphael can fix your face up, and I’ll get you styled when you’re done.”

  “Okay,” Lorenzo said, his voice low and raspy. Once upon a time, he paid for services like this and didn’t think twice about them. Salon workers existed in his periphery as necessary indulgences to pass the time or to get him looking better than he could on his own before a gallery opening or art showing.

  He’d never bothered to consider their opinion of him. He simply paid a tab, added a tip, and went on with his life. Now, with Jayden’s dark eyes watching him and assessing his worth—he wasn’t sure he’d be able to withstand the judgment.

  “You’ll feel better after this.”

  “Why do you care?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  Jayden laughed as he eased Lorenzo’s neck back onto a towel, then turned on a low stream of warm water. It was instantly soothing, along with the fingers dragging against his scalp, and his eyes closed. “Well, first of all, you’re paying me.”

  He didn’t wince, but it was a near thing.

  “Second of all, I like when people leave my shop feeling good about themselves, not just about their hair. That’s why I do this. Trust me, if I wanted to get rich, I’d have gone to medical school or something.”

  Lorenzo chuckled. “Or porn.”

  Jayden’s fingers spasmed, then he laughed. “You’re Rocco’s brother. I forgot.”

  He managed a half-shrug from where his shoulder was pressed up against the basin. “He’s good at it, and he makes a ton of money. And he’s happy.”

  “That wasn’t a judgment, love,” Jayden told him. He began to massage shampoo into his hair, and Lorenzo couldn’t stop the small groan. “I liked his work before he showed up here.”

  Lorenzo twisted uncomfortably. “Can we not talk about that, though?”

  “Fair,” Jayden said, chuckling again. “My point is that I do this because seeing people leave here feeling good about themselves gives me life. And I know that sounds like some hipster, feel-good bullshit, but it’s true.”

  “I believe you,” Lorenzo said softly. And he understood it in a more profound way than he was expecting. He was a glorified ATM to a lot of his friends, but part of that was knowing he was able to make their lives better—easier. The fact that Gabby was going to have opportunities that she never would if it hadn’t been for those checks meant something important to him. And the price of their shallow relationship wasn’t enough for him to want to stop.

  He just didn’t know how to translate that into something more than what he’d been doing. Something with substance.

  “So, what is it you do?” Jayden asked when he started to add the conditioning treatment. The scalp massage was almost enough to send him onto a plane of euphoria, but he breathed through it.

  “Nothing. I mean, I owned a couple of art galleries and…I don’t know. Did that, I guess?”

  “That’s not nothing,” Jayden said. “Art is important.”

  “Yes, but I never got it. I tried—but…it just never made sense to me. I wanted to feel like I deserved to have this life. But…”

  “It didn’t make you happy?” Jayden tried.

  Lorenzo shuddered when the warm water cascaded over him. “It made me miserable. Then Rocco came home in love and happier than I’ve ever seen him, and I wanted that.”

  “I hope you find it.” Jayden eased him up and dried his hair with quick swipes of the towel. Stepping in front of him, he began to drag fingers through the wet locks again, then he shook his head. “You don’t need a trim. You need to relax. Go across the room and undress, then get under the sheet on the table. Raphael will meet you there in a minute.”

  “I…”

  “Trust me,” Jayden said, soft but powerful. “Okay?”

  Lorenzo’s breath trembled, but he nodded. “Okay.” If only he felt like it was.

  Lorenzo wanted to blame the fact that everything was puffy and a little pink on the facial, but he knew better. He knew it was the fact that the moment Raphael’s fingers dug deep into the tense muscles of his neck, everything burst loose like a dam breaking. Tears cascaded down his cheeks, and a sob lodged in his chest, and he felt pathetic and small as pieces of him shattered.

  Raphael hadn’t batted an eye, though. He let Lorenzo fall apart and then knit back together as he rubbed him down and then gently massaged his hands as the wafting clouds from the steamer mingled with the tears on his cheeks.

  He calmed down in time for Raphael to add the moisturizer, then give his brows a trim, and then he was sent back to Jayden who kindly didn’t mention the fact that he was splotchy and subdued and had very little to say at all. He was grateful that neither Raphael nor Jayden tried to refuse payment, and he was also grateful when Raphael followed him to the corridor and used the stair banister to rise from his chair before he took Lorenzo’s arm.

  “You owe me dinner.”

  Lorenzo chuckled and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You’ll have to bring it to me though. I fucking hate these stairs.”

  “I can do that.” Lorenzo’s breath still held a faint tremble, but he was starting to feel human again. Still cracked on the inside, still bleeding a little, but maybe that’s what he needed.

  He knew, in reality, he wasn’t nothing. He wasn’t a nobody. He was a person who deserved true and honest affection and kindness just like everyone else, even if he didn’t earn it the same way other people did. He was a good man, even if he was a shallow one.

  When he got back up to the apartment, he saw a text from Wilder letting him know he’d be there to pick him up at five since it was going to be a bit of a drive to wherever this date was taking place. Lorenzo desperately wanted to ask, but no one had ever gone out of their way to try and surprise him before, so he was nervous and excited—which cobbled together to form a ball of anxiety that sat heavy in his gut.

  He’d never had a real friend before, and even though he was crushing—knowing that he couldn’t have him wasn’t enough to put a damper on how much he craved his presence. Having a friend was enough—without strings, without obligation. It was new, and it was damn near everything.

  He managed to get his eyes and skin calmed down enough that he didn’t look a total mess, and he wasn’t sure what to wear, but he didn’t think Wilder was going to go black-tie, so his jeans and button-up seemed fitting. He slid bare feet into his loafers, added a bit more product to Jayden’s careful work, and made it down the steps in time to see Wilder’s car pulling up.

  He glanced at Raphael who was looking at him with a smirk, and he ignored the man’s double thumbs up as he pushed the door open and headed down the steps. Wilder was leaning against his open car door, and his mouth softened into a grin when Lorenzo stepped out.

  ‘Nice,’ Wilder signed.

  ‘Thank you.’ Lorenzo climbed in the car and let the familiar scent of Wilder wrap around him. It was sweet, like his bakery, but it was also a little woodsy from his soap, and it was the oddest blend and yet so perfectly him, Lorenzo couldn’t get enough of it.

  He breathed in deep as he put his seatbelt on, but when he looked up, he saw Wilder staring at him with a frown. “What?”

  “Were you crying?”

  “Shit,” he breathed out, then shrugged. “Yes? It was a weird day.”

  “We don’t have to do this if you—”

  “No,” Lorenzo said in a rush, then stopped and bit his lip. “I mean, I need this. Unless you wanted a reason to cancel, and then we can…”

  “Lorenzo,” Wilder said very softly, and it may have been one of the very first times Lorenzo had heard Wilder use his name. He said it almost unsure—like he hadn’t used the name a lot,
like he wasn’t confident in his consonants and vowels. And it was the best thing Lorenzo had heard in a long time. “I want to go out to dinner with you.”

  “Okay.” He breathed out a sigh. “I promise it’s nothing bad. I’m trying to figure shit out, and it’s not easy.”

  “I get that.” Wilder put the car in reverse, and soon had them on the road—the street sign indicating the freeway just a few miles off. “I’ve been there.”

  Lorenzo hummed and glanced at the trees whipping by as Wilder picked up speed. “It’s just weird, you know? I have a break for the first time in my life—no obligations, no people, no nothing. And somehow, I feel worse.”

  “Right after my ex went to jail,” Wilder said after a pause, “I went home. I had to do some physical therapy for some of my injuries, and I had mental therapy because all of that fucked me up pretty badly.”

  Lorenzo let out a small growl. “I’d like to put his face through a glass window for that. Which is probably wrong of me to say, but…”

  “It’s not necessary, but thank you,” Wilder told him softly, smiling. “The truth is, I thought the years right after the incident were going to be the worst—and they were hard. But it didn’t get bad until I moved to Cherry Creek.”

  Lorenzo frowned. “Seriously?”

  “It took me a while to realize that going from living with Scott to living with my parents meant I was still in survival mode. My mom was even worse when I came back, and my dad was more checked out than he’d ever been. My sister was never home, and I was stuck in the same loop I’d been in as a child. The same loop that sent me into Scott’s arms in the first place.”

  Lorenzo swallowed thickly. “I’m sorry.”

  Wilder waved him off. “It’s okay. I just didn’t realize it until I got to Cherry Creek, and I was suddenly safe. I was on my own, and there was no one left to fight—no one left I had to prove myself to. I wasn’t some useless disappointment. I wasn’t anyone’s punching bag. The quiet safety gave room for all the things that had been silenced by chaos to rise to the surface, and I had never been so overwhelmed before.”

  “How did you get through it?” Lorenzo asked. His pain wasn’t anywhere near what Wilder had been through, but the ideas all made sense. Lorenzo had been lazy, but he had never been still before now—he had never been in a position where he didn’t have to use himself in order to feel worth.

  “I just let it hit me. I let myself rely on my new friends for the first time ever.” He smiled, and it reached his eyes, the brown color almost gold in the fading dusk. “I let myself be weak—and I let myself fall apart. It was easier to put myself back together after that.”

  Lorenzo felt a breath leave him like it had been punched out. “I don’t know how to.”

  “It takes time,” Wilder said. “Theo was kind of my touchstone for a while. He came around even when I didn’t want him to, but I always felt better when he left. He used that analogy, you know, about those Japanese vases with the gold?”

  Lorenzo shook his head. “I don’t know that one.”

  Wilder raised his eyebrows. “I’ll show you sometime. But there’s this practice in Japan where they repair shattered pottery with liquid gold—and somehow it makes all the fractured pieces even more beautiful. He said putting yourself back together after shattering apart was like that. You’ll always have the scars, but they don’t have to make you feel ugly.”

  “Oh.” The word left him in a breathy rush, because he could see that in Wilder—even if he didn’t think any amount of precious metal could ever make what he had inside worth looking at.

  “He reminded me a lot of what my therapist had been saying to me this entire time. It’s okay to feel shattered—it doesn’t mean you are. You’re just put back together in a different way—but it’s not worse.”

  “Is it better?” Lorenzo asked.

  Wilder grinned. “I don’t know, but I like to think so.”

  An hour into the drive, Lorenzo realized they were going to Denver. He’d been more than once—he’d even been a patron for a showing at the art gallery, but he hadn’t done much more than smile pretty then get bombed later at some restaurant he couldn’t remember the name of.

  He and his friends had boarded a plane first thing in the morning, and the most he remembered about the trip was blueberry mojitos and throwing up purple in the airplane bathroom nearly the entire flight.

  He found it hard to put into words, driving into the city like this, seeing this place with entirely new eyes. There were no obligations, he reminded himself. Wilder didn’t expect anything from him except that he was there—that he existed in this moment, and he tried to enjoy himself.

  And for as light as it was, it almost felt impossibly heavy.

  His eyes fixed on the mountains ahead, the way they marred the landscape, the way they wrapped around each city like a protective wall. He hadn’t noticed them before—hadn’t bothered. Now, he couldn’t get enough.

  “It’s gorgeous here.”

  Wilder chuckled. “I’m from Illinois. It’s just flat—the occasional hill. It’s green—endless fields of it. But nothing like this. We never traveled when I was a kid, and after Scott…” He trailed off and shook his head. “It was hard to look around at all of this and accept that it’s real.”

  “Have you been up to the mountains?” Lorenzo asked. He touched his fingertip to the window and traced a jagged line of the peaks.

  “Once or twice. Theo tried to get me to ski last year, but it was just a fucking mess.” Wilder grinned. “The cold triggered my vertigo, and I tumbled down one of the hills. I was done after that.”

  Lorenzo winced. He’d been skiing. A lot. Utah, France, Canada. He’d done so fucking much, and none of it felt like it had any meaning, because he’d taken it all for granted. He’d never absorbed any of the gifts he’d been given, and here was a man who was overwhelmed by the sight of mountains. It was something so simple, and yet, Wilder saw it in ways Lorenzo would probably never understand.

  “Anyway,” Wilder said, interrupting Lorenzo’s train of thought, “I spent so much of my childhood doing outdoor shit, I’m happy not to anymore.”

  Lorenzo chuckled. “That’s fair. It’s like me with the beach. It was just always there, and as much as I love the ocean, I think I’m craving something new.”

  “This is definitely a far cry from the ocean,” Wilder said, and Lorenzo couldn’t do anything but agree.

  He didn’t just mean the mountains though, but he didn’t say that part aloud.

  As they got into Denver, Wilder carefully made his way down a bunch of side streets, and eventually pulled into a dirt parking lot where he paid a fee and then found a spot at the far end. He turned the car off, then turned the light on, but he didn’t move to get out.

  “So, there’s this thing that I’ve always wanted to do here. Um.” He suddenly looked very young and almost shy as he bit his lip and rubbed the back of his neck. “You have to book tickets like months in advance, but Ronan had a hook-up, so I jumped on it.”

  “Okay,” Lorenzo said slowly. “Is it weird? Is it like some zombie escape room or something?”

  Wilder laughed, shaking his head. “No. It’s this dinner thing at the aquarium. They have this massive dome where the fish and sharks and stuff are all swimming over you—and you get to eat, and then take a night tour… It’s, I don’t know. Maybe dumb? But I thought it could be fun.”

  Lorenzo’s heart was thrashing against his ribs to the point it almost hurt, and he had to breathe through it for a moment. “I like it.”

  “Yeah?” Wilder still looked unsure. “I’ve always kind of been obsessed with marine biology stuff—I could just never you know, get the biology part in school. But I know you’re actually from the coast so this might just seem boring and old.”

  “I love it,” Lorenzo said, and he wondered if Wilder could hear the intensity in his tone—because it was heavy, and it startled him. But it wasn’t a lie. This was Wilder doing something fo
r him, but he was sharing it with Lorenzo—not his friends in town, not anyone else. It felt like a moment, and god…he wasn’t sure he deserved it. “Thank you for this.”

  Wilder lifted his hand, hesitated, then reached out for Lorenzo and squeezed their fingers for a minute. “You deserve nice things, you know. And not for what you give back. Now come on, we need to go check in before they give our tickets to standby.”

  Wilder got out of the car after that, and started walking off like his words hadn’t just stripped Lorenzo bare and left him there to face his own reflection alone.

  Chapter Ten

  Wilder wasn’t expecting to be as nervous as he was, but the moment he set his sights on Lorenzo, his heart leapt into his throat. Lorenzo looked gorgeous as he stood there on the porch step in his tight jeans and shirt tailored perfectly to his body. His hair was styled, and his glasses stood perched on his nose, and he looked every bit a man who could have graced the pages of a magazine.

  When he got in, though, Wilder immediately noticed the way his eyes were red-rimmed and the way the edges of his nostrils were pink. He’d been crying—and Wilder found a sort of confusing and all-encompassing wave of protectiveness rising in him out of nowhere. It took all of his self-control not to demand who hurt him and to take what little bits and pieces Lorenzo was willing to offer.

  As they drove to the city, Wilder was overcome with self-doubt about the date. He’d found the courage to ask Ronan if he could still get tickets to the Aquarium At Night event, and he only breathed easy when Ronan produced the tickets like it was nothing.

  Wilder had Dmitri call and place the reservation time, and then it was a matter of keeping himself busy so he didn’t pace a hole in the floor. By the end of the afternoon, he’d taken out his hearing aids, put Dmitri in front, and turned on music with a heavy beat he could feel in his fingertips as he worked with new flavors for the following week’s specials. It wasn’t enough to keep his mind from wandering, but it was enough to keep him from staring down the clock until it was time to get ready and go.