Tutus and Tinsel

by Rhys Ford

  “Rome knows. We talked to him about it because he had a nightmare a few months back. West reassured him we took care of it… that you and Deacon would take him in.” Angel picked up the kettle from its base and slowly poured hot water into the two mugs. “But that happened in the middle of the night, so it might be a good idea for all of us to get together and have that talk. It’s stupid, because I know most people don’t discuss these kinds of things with their kids, but Rome and Zig aren’t normal kids. They’ve had real shitty beginnings, and we have to shore up foundations as best we can.”

  “Which is why I am spending a Saturday afternoon sitting in a Scrooge McDuck vault of endless candy,” Lang pointed out. “There’s so much sugar in the air, I’m not even going to add sweetener to my tea.”

  Something happened among the crazed group around the table, and waves of giggles built up at one end and flowed down to the other. One of the mothers who’d dropped her son off earlier stepped over the dog in the doorway and cheerfully waved at Angel. Then she waded into the fray and rounded the table where her son worked. She hugged her kid’s shoulder and crouched over next to him. Then she glanced over at Deacon and smiled warmly when he glanced up. But she scowled a bit when he winked at Lang, his smile wicked enough to warm Lang’s cockles.

  “That gets old.” Lang saluted his husband with his steaming cup. “The women, not the winking. If ever his winking at me gets old, I want you to take me out back and shoot me.”

  “I don’t think West has ever winked at me. Your brother’s not a winking kind of guy. Ah, see now, she spotted the wedding ring. Body language changed. That’s always great to see. People respecting that.” Angel took a sip of his tea. “Do you remember her name?”

  “Never met her before in my life.”

  “Shit. I was hoping you knew her. I can’t remember her name either. The kid I know. He’s Steven. He has three goldfish and a turtle. He wanted a puppy and he couldn’t have one because Dad’s allergic, but now that his parents are divorced, he’s hoping to work the system to get one,” Angel filled in. “Rome likes him. We’ve had him over at the house a couple of times for video games and pizza.”

  “But you don’t remember his mom’s name.”

  “Nope. And now I’m in too deep to ask. Maybe Deacon knows. It’s driving me nuts. I just go around calling her Steven’s mom.” Angel picked up a chocolate chip cookie from a plate on the counter and studied it, clearly debating if he wanted to eat something sweet. “How do you think this is going? Think she’s going to add this to her list?”

  “She seems to really like it. It’s fun, pretty cheap to do, and well, we’re going to have a hell of a lot of candy left over. I noticed you brought over stuff that Rome likes to eat instead of things that would make good building material.”

  “Yeah, Necco wafers are great in principle, but they’re like someone put a latex glove over a communion wafer and sprayed candy-scented powder over it. If I’m going to be stuck with fifteen pounds of candy after one of these things, it’s going to be stuff I want to eat.” He laughed at Lang’s murmuring assent. “Sure, you can’t build roof tiles out of mini peanut butter cups, but I like chewing down a handful of frozen ones in the middle of the night. And don’t look now but your husband’s coming over. Why don’t you two head into the front room and kick West back here. He needs to put in some jail time just like the rest of us.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to?” Lang stretched over to put his mug in the enormous bakery sink.

  “Just remind him of all the corporate dinners he drags me to. He owes me. I’ve been to three this week alone.” Angel chuckled. “Besides, who do you think I’m eating those frozen peanut butter cups off of? It’s in his best interest for me to come out of this war with as many of those things as possible, because I sure as hell ain’t eating leftover Necco wafers.”

  “YOU SURE that’s a dog?” Deacon flopped on one of the spindly legged couches in the dining area of the Pizza Shack Bakery. It creaked under his weight and grumbled at being ill-used, but it held. Deke wiggled his sock-clad toes, arched his feet, and rested his heels on an arabesque coffee table. “Because I swear, I thought I was seeing things for a moment.”

  “Yeah, it’s a dog.” Lang tapped Deacon’s leg and nudged him to make room. Sighing dramatically, Deacon shifted over and gave Lang space to sit next to him. Lang tucked Deacon’s shoes beneath the couch, settled carefully into the corner, and then yelped when Deacon pulled at Lang’s knees and looped his legs over Deacon’s lap. “If this couch breaks—”

  “Angel will comb through the thrift store and grab another. He and Zig live for that kind of shit,” he grumbled, sounding much like the creaking tufted velvet couch beneath them. “The only reason Zig wants me to go with them is so they can use my truck to haul their ill-gotten booty.”

  “You like it,” Lang retorted. “Just like you love going down to the farmers’ market and haggling. I’ve seen you all go at it. I saw your face when Zig bargained down that motorcycle. You were about to burst open with pride. That thing’s going to cost thousands of dollars to refurbish, and there you were grinning like a little kid with a year’s supply of free ice cream.”

  “Babe, she picked up a ’48 Harley WLDR for thirty-five bucks. You bet your ass I’m proud.”

  “It doesn’t have an engine attached to it,” he pointed out. “It’s in pieces, and you don’t even know if all the pieces are there.”

  “So it needs a little work,” Deacon countered. “Remember, we came to a deal. She helps me restore it, and whatever I put into it, she pays me back when it sells. And the engine’s there. It’s just resting. Once we get it fired up, it’ll be a piece of cake to put together, and it’ll probably pay for that car she’ll want when she’s sixteen. Or at least a good chunk of it.”

  “She’ll probably be sixteen by the time it’s done, and then the two of you won’t have the heart to sell it, because you spent all that time working on it together.” Lang kissed the corner of Deacon’s rueful grimace. “Just like that tiger-oak armoire you brought home.”

  Deacon shrugged, jostling Lang. “It looks really good in the front foyer though, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it does,” Lang admitted. A wave of melancholy envy struck Lang, and Deacon reached up and smoothed his brow with a soft thumb stroke. Lang kissed the plump of Deacon’s palm, bit lightly, and laughed when Deacon pulled away. “Honestly, I never knew how much my father didn’t do with me and West when we were kids until I saw you with Zig. I would give anything to have that kind of relationship, you know?”

  “I never knew my father,” Deacon said softly. “My family—Zig’s too I guess—they’re really shitty people. When I found out about her, first thing I thought was that I couldn’t let her grow up like I did. I wanted her to have solid ground underneath her feet. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew in my gut that she needed to know how to be a kid. So much of my fucking childhood was spent trying to find food or staying one step ahead of eviction notices. That kind of stuff wears you down, eats away at anything good inside of you until you don’t care who you hurt so long as you have more than what you started with when you woke up that morning.

  “I wanted more for Zig than that.” He skimmed his fingers down Lang’s throat and across his collarbone with a light, intimate stroke that left a trail of heat behind it. “Moving up here was the best thing for us, and finding you was the cherry on a cake I thought I would never have a taste of. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, right after Zig. Both of you saved my life, resurrected my soul, and I wake up every morning thanking God for giving me a second chance. And your dad might have been an asshole, but you had your grandmother, and she loved the fuck out of you and your dick of a brother. She’s the one who built a foundation.”

  “I don’t think she would’ve put it that way, but yeah, she did.” Lang smiled against Deacon’s fingers when they coasted across his lips. “I think she would’ve liked you, and I know
she would’ve adored Zig. If you think we have a hard time with West spoiling her, Grandma would’ve been a thousand times worse.”

  “Today was a good day,” Deacon murmured. “I’m going to need to soak in a hot bath to get all the sugar off of me, but she had a really good day today. Every day we go forward, I see less and less of the shadows in her eyes, and it does things to my heart.”

  “I see less of them in yours too,” Lang whispered as he leaned in to steal a kiss. “I don’t know what made you choose Half Moon Bay as a place to find a new life, but I can tell you this, you brought me a new life as well.”

  Despite Deacon’s complaints about the candy, there was more than a hint of cinnamon on his tongue when their lips touched. The slow simmering heat of their kiss deepened, and Lang had to remind himself it would be inappropriate to climb onto Deacon’s lap and unzip their jeans—inappropriate and probably unsanitary, considering they were in a bakery, but it was close.

  “Eww, could you guys not do that here?” Zig’s loud voice crackled over Lang’s heated arousal and plunged it into an icy bath of a reality where they shared the building with ten kids, five adults, and a fluffy black-and-white dog. “If the two of you can stop sucking each other’s faces, it’s time to judge the houses. I don’t want to brag, but mine’s the best. Rome is trying to bribe the guys into saying his is, but we all know who brought it home.”

  “You know, she might look and move like you,” Lang said as he rested his forehead against Deacon’s, “but I swear to God, she gets her ego from West.”

  “And her timing too,” Deacon agreed with a laugh. “Come on, babe, let’s go judge us some houses so we can blow this Popsicle stand and put this one down as a guaranteed holiday tradition.”

  Four

  “THE BLUE spruce for the foyer of the great room will come in later this week, but we always grabbed trees for the other rooms ourselves.” Lang’s glasses were slightly steamed over, probably from the long hike through the Los Gatos forest. “Of course, mostly that was me, West, and my grandmother choosing the trees and her gardeners cutting them down and carrying them, but it was fun picking them out.”

  Deacon exchanged an eye roll with Zig. Lang’s childhood experiences were lean in paternal influences, but his grandmother made every effort to balance out his father’s lack of affection with an abundance of attention and coddling. It would have been an enviable life if Deacon hadn’t known that most of Lang’s time was spent at his parents’ homes, pitted against his acerbic twin, and always found lacking no matter how much he accomplished. Still, the holidays with his grandmother sounded like a fairy tale, and Deacon adored hearing how much in love Lang had been with his life in Half Moon Bay.

  He only hoped Zig would feel the same as Lang did in twenty years.

  The tree farm they’d driven to this year was farther out than the one they’d gone to before, but they’d been in a rush last Christmas, trying to settle into their new lives without bumping into one another’s space. It was a different vibe this year. Their roles were established, and Zig felt more stable and comfortable. Her social aggressions had lessened to the point where Deacon didn’t worry that an afternoon phone call was someone from the school with a report of a fight or a tussle with a teacher.

  Sitting between him and Lang on the heavy tailgate of his old truck, Zig swung her feet back and forth, her heavy combat boots speckled with damp pine needles and flecks of candy-apple-red paint from the time she spent in the spray booth at the shop learning how to do slow, even passes over the gas tank of a motorcycle. She’d gone classic Zig for their trip to the farm, despite Lang telling her to dress comfortably. Instead she wore the leather jacket West had given her, a pair of cheetah-print leggings, and a gray camo shirt emblazoned with a unicorn and embellished with spots of glitter and rhinestones. The outfit took her nearly half an hour to pull together, and they’d cooled their heels in the great room, waiting for her to come down. When Zig finally was ready, she’d stomped down the stairs and then swept out of the house, urging them to hurry up as she climbed into the back seat of the long-cab truck.

  “Her idea of comfortable is definitely not mine,” Lang muttered as he locked the door behind them. “Her feet are going to hurt after walking around between the trees.”

  “Then she’ll learn,” Deacon explained. “Because she also knows I’m not going to carry her unless she’s got serious blisters. Mistakes are sometimes made, babe, and she’s got to make them.”

  She’d proven Lang wrong, but it didn’t seem to cross her mind to tell him “I told you so.” Darting among the trees, she’d inspected each possible candidate for her bedroom and finally settled on a three-foot-tall fir. The tree for her fathers’ bedroom took longer. She dismissed anything too spindly because she planned to decorate it with every ornament she’d made for them.

  “I think we got some really great trees.” Zig leaned back on her pine-sap-stained hands. There were a few needles in her hair, and she fussed and tugged her knitted beanie down over her forehead when Lang tried to pull them out. “I really like the one I got for your room. Do you think we can hang some of the ornaments we make on the big tree too? We can hide them really deep so no one can see them.”

  Zig’s words injected a searing poison through Deacon’s chest. Lang had pointed out subtle deprecating remarks to Deacon in the past year or so, eroding slivers of doubt that Zig whispered every once in a while. He hadn’t noticed them until Lang’s perceptive words touched on a habit he and Zig shared.

  “Baby, you don’t hide anything you make. And we sure as shit are going to hang those ornaments where people can see them. Besides, you make some really pretty ones.” Deacon had to look away, unwilling to be seen crying in the middle of a clearing where people were dragging trees out to strap them on their cars.

  The tight hug Lang gave Zig made her squeak, and even if she fussed at her hair being played with, the impromptu embrace got her to good-naturedly grouse at her fathers. “Unlike the tragic dinosaur accident you had last year,” she crowed.

  “It was a reindeer,” Deacon countered.

  “It looked like a rampant triceratops,” Lang interjected. “I told you the dough was too thick. It puffs up a lot.”

  “Look, if you’ve got something mechanical, I can fix it, but ask me to make anything pretty that isn’t made out of metal, and I’m a lost cause,” he replied and briefly tickled Zig’s side as she poked at him. “How about if this year, you guys are in charge of rolling things out, and I’ll just decorate.”

  “I’m hungry.” Zig jumped off the tailgate and splashed into a small puddle. “Can I go get the food?”

  “I’m on board with that.” Deacon shifted and moved the larger tree to the side in the truck, but its springy fragrant branches simply bounced back and returned to dig into Deacon’s spine. “How about if I grab the bags, and you guys go find us an open picnic table?”

  “Okay, but I’m going to grab the wipes first,” Zig announced. She stomped her way out of the puddle and then back in again. “You know Dad’s not going to eat anything unless the table’s wiped down.”

  “I have a solution for that.” Deacon slid off of the tailgate and held his hand out for Lang, who took it and used the leverage to clear the puddle that had appeared after the rain they endured while hiking through the trees. “I brought a plastic tablecloth and duct tape so we can wrap it around the table legs.”

  “Did you bring anything for our butts?” Zig stopped in mid pirouette and cocked her head at him. “Because we’re still going to have to wipe down the seats or he won’t sit on them.”

  “I’m standing right in front of both of you,” Lang sniffed. “And I’m not that delicate. I don’t need the benches scrubbed clean before I’ll sit on them. I’m sure they’re fine.”

  As he retrieved the thermal packs from the back seat of the truck, Deacon heard Zig say, “There’s bird poop.”

  There was a long pause, and Deacon struggled not to smile, especially since
Lang stood facing him. It didn’t take a mind reader to see Lang contemplating what he could say without seeming delicate, so Deacon let go of the grin he’d been holding back and said, “Well, I’ll sit on a lot of things, but poop isn’t one of them. Grab some wipes, and let’s go to town.”

  THE FRIED chicken was spicy and crispy, and the corn on the cob was covered with butter, crema, cotija, and pepper seasoning and left Lang’s fingers slightly greasy but tasty enough to lick off. Or suck clean, as Deacon was doing to his own in his seat across the picnic bench. Lang never imagined that watching a rough-and-tumble motorcycle mechanic licking his fingers clean would be the most erotic thing he’d see during a pre-Christmas weekend, but it was a contender with the sight of Deacon pulling himself up out of the pool wearing a pair of tight red boy shorts on a hot July afternoon.

  They were sharing a table with a Hispanic couple who’d come up from the city with their two children, young girls about Zig’s age who laughed at her mostly there Spanish and offered playful corrections when she was totally off-base. The thermal packs kept the chicken and corn hot, and there was more than enough to share with the Sanchez family, who offered up the Korean BBQ ribs and japchae they’d purchased down the road. They had a small discussion on the wisdom of eating before they hunted for a tree, and Lang disagreed, only because he knew Zig liked to nap on a full belly. The Sanchez children apparently were the opposite, fueled up and raring to go once they’d been fed.

  Thrilled with new friends, the three girls raced around the clearing, embroiled in some game only they knew the rules of. From what Lang figured out, it was a bit of chase, tag, and trivia questions gleaned from an app on Zig’s phone. Whatever they worked out was apparently hilarious and highly entertaining, and it kept them busy long enough for Gayle, the girls’ mother, to eat without being barraged with questions. The conversation fell to motorcycles once Larry discovered that Deacon owned Reid’s, and Lang helped himself to another drumstick because he knew they’d be sitting at the table for a while.