by Riley Knight
And maybe, just maybe, he would ask the guy to come with him. He could ask Bobbie, who would be more than happy to do it, he knew, but for whatever reason, Ben didn’t want to look at it too closely, he wanted Isaac with him.
TEN
The phone rang, but Isaac ignored it. There wasn’t much of a chance that it was anyone for him. People were calling the land line all the time, but it was basically his father’s business number, where the members of his father’s congregation called to get spiritual guidance.
In short, it had nothing to do with him. He glanced up when his mother crossed the living room floor, her feet making the old floorboards creak, and then went back to the book he was reading without much concern.
That was until the sound of her shriek pierced his ears like an icepick.
“Who?” There was a brief silence, and Isaac looked up at her, seeing her looking like she might fall over. Her skin was very pale, almost pasty white, and her gray eyes had gone wide with alarm, her mouth gaping open as though she struggled for air.
For a moment, Isaac was very sure that his mother was ill. Or, no, she’d just found out someone else was sick. Someone important. His father was home, so it couldn’t be him. Who else could it be? His mom had a sister, but they weren’t all that close, and his father had been an only child, just like Isaac himself.
His mother met his eyes, and then her gaze skittered away like a frightened rodent. Isaac frowned as he tried to get her to look at him again, but she was steadfast in her refusal to do so.
“Thank you,” she said and hung up the phone before turning back to Isaac. But her eyes, her frightened eyes, still wouldn’t go anywhere near his, no matter how he tried. “Isaac, take your dad’s car. We need milk. Right now.”
Isaac rose to his feet, marking the place in his book absently, tilting his head as he considered her. There was a strange sort of energy in her movements, like an animal who has been badly scared and isn’t sure if they’re going to fight or run yet.
“Mom?” Isaac asked, uncertain. She was acting strange, and it rubbed off on him, made him feel anxious for reasons that he didn’t even understand. She was usually fairly controlled, measured in her responses, but her energy was making him jitter inside.
“Just go! Now.” She walked over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, turning him and walking him with a moderate amount of force, marching him toward the door. But not the front door, which struck him as odd. The kitchen door, on the opposite side of the house from the front door.
All this over milk? Isaac didn’t buy it. And then there came a knock on the front door, and he gently, but firmly, pulled away from his mother and gave her a confused, hurt look.
“What are you trying to hide from me?” he demanded because it was abundantly clear that it was something. He searched her face, but her eyes continued to evade him.
He heard his father’s footsteps, and he turned away from his mother, who was clutching her hands together as if her life depended on it. Whatever that phone call was, it clearly had something to do with the knock he heard at the door, and he couldn’t imagine what on earth had her so worked up.
“Can I help you?” Isaac heard his father’s voice, but it sounded strained, forced, like he was pushing it out. Polite, yes, but only just.
“Yeah, is this Isaac’s house? I’m looking for him.”
Isaac blinked and then turned to look at his mother. So this was what she’d been hiding from him. That voice, he would know the low, drawling growl anywhere, that seductive, sexy purr.
It was Ben. Ben had come to his house. How that had happened didn’t matter that much to Isaac at the moment. He was too busy feeling buoyed up, like he was floating a good few inches off the ground, with elation. Never in a hundred years would he have guessed that Ben would actually come looking for him.
Was it possible, even if just barely, that Ben felt even a fraction of what Isaac felt? Did he want him even half as much as Isaac wanted him? He hadn’t been able to get Ben out of his head from the moment he’d seen him at the bar, wiping down the counters.
“I’m afraid he’s not available …” Isaac’s father started to say, and Isaac frowned a little bit as he pulled away from his mother and moved at a quick trot across the floor toward the front door. The farmhouse was old, but it was big, and he was suddenly sure that his father was going to send Ben away before he could get there.
The betrayal was enormous. His father had no right to be sending someone who came to see Isaac away. Until today, it hadn’t actually occurred to Isaac that his father would do something like that.
It would have to wait until later, though. He could deal with these confusing new feelings about his parents once he had gotten to the front door and stopped Ben from leaving.
“Oh, really? I don’t mind waiting until he is,” Ben said, and Isaac sort of fell deeper into this infatuation with him just from hearing that. His father could be sort of terrifying, but Ben wasn’t backing down an inch.
“I don’t think that’s going to work out,” Isaac heard his father losing that politeness to his voice more and more with every word he spoke. “He’s really not available right now.”
Isaac felt his air piling up in his lungs, straining for more oxygen as he actually burst into a run. He was running. In the house. That was something that he hadn’t done in years. Even as a child, he hadn’t been allowed to, and the punishments had always been very severe if he ever had.
“It’s okay, Dad, I’m here,” Isaac gasped, and turned his gaze to Ben, smiling at him. His whole attention had been focused on getting there, but now that he was, what did he even say? His smile turned somewhat shy, but then Ben, who had been looking grimly determined, gave him a grin that somehow seemed to make everything okay again.
“Isaac …” he heard the warning tone in his father’s voice. Knew, and for once in his life of obedience and submission, didn’t care. There was a sort of tension which crinkled up the corners of Ben’s eyes, and Isaac was absolutely certain that this was not a social call.
“What’s going on, Ben?” Isaac said and then became very aware of two sets of eyes, one fearful and one furious, fixed on the back of his head. Without even needing to glance over his shoulders, he knew what he would see if he turned back.
So he didn’t. He just reached for Ben, took his wrist, and walked out of the house. Let his parents stare. He didn’t think they would actually follow him, and as it turned out, he was right. When he finally did steal a look back, they were both still standing, framed in the doorway, the interior of the house black behind them.
It was a bit of a dreary day. Not raining, but with heavy leaden clouds that looked like they might decide to start dumping down at any moment. Still, it was nice just to walk, and as they did, Ben took his hand properly, his fingers slipping into Isaac’s like they belonged there.
Oh, but he was going to hear about this from his parents later. Holding hands with another man? Or maybe they wouldn’t be able to see properly from where they were standing. Regardless, it was a relief when they had moved far enough away that, when Isaac looked back, his parents were nothing but blurs. He couldn’t see them very well, and he doubted that they could see him either.
“I got a call,” Ben said, and Isaac just stared at him, because for one strange moment he thought that Ben meant that he’d been called to the ministry. That was the only call that Isaac had heard much about, especially since his mother and father had both been hoping that he himself would get a similar call. So far, that hope had been in vain, and Isaac sort of expected that it always would be.
He just wasn’t the pastor type.
“From the social worker handling Sammy’s case.” Ben clarified, and Isaac flushed a little. Right. That did make a whole lot more sense when he thought about it.
“What did they say?” Isaac asked, looking at Ben, not sure that he understood why Ben wanted to talk about this with him. As far as he knew, Ben had made up his mind to have nothing
to do with his little brother. Isaac might think that was a bad idea, but it ultimately wasn’t his decision to make, and he was aware of that.
“She wants me to meet him. Maybe consider taking him,” Ben replied, and he stopped to face Isaac, leaning against the fence on the far side of their property. From here, Isaac realized with the most amazing sense of freedom, he could only just see the house where he and his family lived, and there was no chance that they could see him.
He was alone. All alone with Ben. Blissfully, miraculously, alone.
“Are you going to?” Isaac asked, squeezing Ben’s fingers, gazing up into his face to try to read the expression which he saw there. There was conflict there, which actually surprised Isaac. He’d been so sure that Ben had already made up his mind, but it seemed like he still had some doubts about what the best course of action was.
“Yeah. If you come with me.” Ben drawled out the words, and it felt to Isaac, even though the clouds didn’t go anywhere, even though they were just as thick and pewter gray as ever, that the sky was utterly clear and a sunbeam bathed them in warm light.
Was Ben serious? It could be hard to tell sometimes, because the other man didn’t always say exactly what he meant, and he often seemed to try to understate exactly the thing that he wanted most. But when he looked into Ben’s eyes, he saw something like desperation, and he knew then that Ben had never been more serious about anything that he’d said to Isaac before.
“Of course I will,” Isaac told him. He wasn’t sure why Ben wanted him to be there, but it meant everything to him that he did. “I’d love to meet your brother.”
Ben smiled, and the expression made him look so much younger and even more gorgeous than he had before, which was saying something. He squeezed Isaac’s fingers, and Isaac couldn’t help but lean in, using his free hand to stroke down Ben’s stubbled jaw, then rise up onto his tiptoes to press his lips against Ben’s.
This meant something, didn’t it? The thought felt strange, foreign, to Isaac, but he couldn’t see any other reason that Ben would ask him. Maybe, just maybe, this meant that this meant as much to Ben as it was coming to mean to Isaac.
ELEVEN
It was just going to be easier for Ben to pick Isaac up and bring him into Austin, that much had been made completely clear. It was sort of terrifying, how hard Isaac’s parents had tried to stop their grown son from seeing someone who had asked for him. How controlling they had tried to be, in a way that would have made Ben uncomfortable if he’d seen it directed at a teenager, much less a fully adult man.
Truthfully, Ben had never seen anything like it. The way he had been raised, he very much doubted that his mother even could have reported on where he was most of the time, at least not after he’d been a toddler. He thought it was probably a good idea to have more control and discipline over your kids than that, but what Isaac’s parents had done had seemed ridiculous.
So, obviously, it had made more sense for Ben to pick Isaac up, and when Ben drove up, Isaac was already standing at the end of his parents’ driveway, casting anxious looks back over his shoulder toward the house. From most people, it would have seemed a bit paranoid, but Ben understood more where that was coming from now.
“Hey, beautiful,” Ben murmured, watching as Isaac pulled open the door and hopped in, honestly enjoying every movement of his tight, beautiful body as he hopped in and slammed the door shut with finality. “They let you out of your cage today.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but it fell a bit flat. Isaac did flush the most adorable, rosy pink color, something that Ben was starting to find was making him a little bit hard every time he saw it. In his life, there just had not been very many people sweet, naive, and innocent enough to blush just from being hit on.
It made Ben want to do it more. To compliment the gorgeous young man more extravagantly, to see if he could make that blush spread down his whole body from his cheeks. Of course, that would involve stripping the other man’s clothes off, something which he was more than happy to consider doing but which hardly helped him keep his growing arousal under control.
“They almost didn’t,” Isaac managed, his voice sober as his beautiful eyes skittered over Ben’s face. “Dad tried to tell me that he needed me at church, but the church office isn’t even open today. Mom tried to think of chores that she needed me to do. It was …”
Isaac’s voice trailed off, and Ben winced with sympathy. Isaac didn’t need to say it. Ben had an idea, just an idea, of course, and it was probably even worse than he thought, how bad it was.
“Forget about it for now,” Ben counseled. He found his free hand, completely on its own, without his conscious direction, slipping over the smooth leather of the seats, up onto Isaac’s leg where his hand rested. Isaac had such small hands. They seemed to get completely lost when Ben took them in his own, squeezing gently.
It was impossible for him to overestimate how damn much he wanted to take care of this man, to somehow fix his problems. But when had Ben ever been able to fix problems, his own even, much less anyone else’s?
Which brought him back to the thoughts he had been avoiding having all morning. He was going to meet his kid brother, and people were going to expect him to fix his life, too. It didn’t really seem so fair, especially not to this Sammy.
“Maybe we should …” Ben started, about to suggest that they could go on some sort of other date again. That he could blow off the meeting with the social worker, but then he saw Isaac’s brilliant, sapphire blue eyes, and thought about what the poor man had gone through to get here, and the words died in his throat.
“... Get going?” Isaac finished the thought, maybe differently than Ben had intended for it to be finished, but it worked. Ben nodded, turned on the one and only classic rock station that he could find on the radio, and then they were off.
* * *
A kid was sitting with a surprisingly young looking, pretty woman with an earnest, pale face and big gray eyes only partially hidden behind thick-framed plastic glasses. Either the woman was tiny, or that kid was some sort of giant monster kid because she barely looked taller than him.
The kid was supposed to be, what, eight? Ben was embarrassed to say that he didn’t remember, but that sounded about right. As they approached, Ben could see more than just the back of Sammy’s head, though he didn’t miss that the boy had hair the same color as his mother’s, a medium golden brown. It was, Ben noticed as he gulped in warm, sticky air, the same color as his own hair.
His brother. God, why was he here? What sort of idiot was he?
“Ben?” The woman rose to her feet, and nope, it turned out that she was just tiny. If she topped five feet, it wouldn’t have been by an entire inch. But she had a wide, seemingly sincere smile. The social workers he’d known as a child had all seemed impossibly old to him, and their smiles had been jaded, but not this woman.
“Yeah. Hey.” He shook the slender hand that was offered to him and then turned to look at the boy, who was looking at him with a sort of dull hostility in his eyes. His eyes, a shade of green like bright jade, the same color as their mother’s and, yes, the same color that Ben saw looking out at him when he looked in the mirror to shave.
There were differences in the young face which looked at him across the table. Sammy’s cheekbones were higher and sharper, his chin more narrow, his entire face more angular. Though maybe part of that was simple hunger. Their mother had never been all that good about keeping food in the house, and it looked like that hadn’t changed.
Still, if Ben had seen this young man walking down the street, he would have noted the family resemblance. He barely noticed as the social worker was talking, saying all the polite things that she was supposed to say, looking at his little brother and feeling something inside himself that he hadn’t been prepared for.
He had, at least on some level, been ready to consider living with this kid to keep him out of foster care. But he hadn’t been prepared for what it would feel like to look at a
living, breathing child and see so much of himself. Even the expression on little Sammy’s face was the same as he had felt on his own features so many times growing up.
Ben had learned to put on masks, to hide what he was thinking and feeling behind a smirk. Sammy hadn’t learned that, but Ben thought he saw the signs of it. Quietly, he settled down at the table, Isaac by his side, his eyes still fixated on his brother.
Even through that fixation, though, it was warm and comforting to know that Isaac was there, even though the younger man wasn’t saying anything. And then Isaac was smoothly engaging the social worker in conversation, in introductions, in small talk about the weather, which was awfully humid and hot for so early in the spring, didn’t she think?
Ben could have kissed Isaac for it. It gave him and Sammy time to size each other up, this younger brother that he’d never met before, hadn’t even known existed.
“I guess this is a bit of a surprise to you,” Ben realized. “Meeting me. I would have come sooner if I’d known …”
“I knew about you.” The boy’s voice was still clear and high and young. There was still innocence there, a naiveté that Ben himself knew that he had lost in his early teenage years, if not before. Sammy still had it, some of it, though. “Mom talked about you all the time.”
Ben shifted, as uncomfortable suddenly as if someone had replaced the seat of his hard cafe chair with a bed of nails. His eyes skittered away from Sammy’s, over the table, which was covered, he was glad to see, in the remains of food which the social worker had gotten for the kid.
He needed some feeding up.
His eyes fell on a notebook, just a simple, spiral-bound thing, but it had a picture of the X-Men on it. Ben grabbed mentally onto the idea like a life preserver, and he reached out and tapped the corner of it.
