But the way Tim had kissed Javier, back in the truck outside the morgue…maybe Tim could also be persuaded to be interested.
“Is that a humidor?” Randy said.
Javier opened the wooden box on his father’s desk. A spicy tobacco smell rose from the wood. He took a cigar from the box and flipped it toward Randy. “Knock yourself out.”
“Oh no you don’t.”
Marianne stood in the doorway, barefoot, with the shoes Nelson had given her dangling from one hand. Her right foot was blistered and her left was bleeding. “You’re not smoking that thing in here as long as I’m around—or I swear to God, I’ll make it a point that when I puke, it’s gonna be directly on you.”
Randy held the cigar under his nose and sniffed it with longing. “It’s a good one, too.”
Again, Javier wasn’t surprised. Good? Like everything else Alejandro owned, it would be the best.
Randy craned his neck to look out the window, as if it might be worth slipping outside for—in a riot. “No cigar is that good,” Nelson told him. “Save it for later.”
Randy gave it another longing sniff, then tucked it into his jacket.
“Look at you,” Nelson said. He walked over to the doorway and took Marianne by the hand. He led her to the edge of the sofabed and sat her down. “You’ve got blisters on top of blisters. You’ve got to be careful with that. It could get infected.”
Marianne looked down at her raw feet. “It’s not so bad,” she said. Her voice was tremulous.
Javier took a look. It was bad.
“You can’t keep wearing those shoes,” Nelson told her. “They’ll just make it worse.”
“But the other ones dug blisters into my heels, plus they were killing my calves. I can’t go around without shoes.”
“We’ll think of something.” Nelson turned to Tim, who’d drifted into the room silently, and was lingering by the wall as if he wished to blend into the paneling. “Do you have anything we can use in the truck?”
“A pair of boots…but they’d be way too big.”
Javier glanced down at Tim’s feet. He had the biggest feet of anyone there. He then noted that Nelson was quelling a smile. Big feet…big everything. Maybe Nelson’s vulgar façade wasn’t altogether a pretense.
Tim looked as if he was embarrassed to be found without a pair of women’s shoes in Marianne’s size…just in case. “What about socks?”
“I’m not walking around outside in nothing but socks,” Marianne said. “And they won’t fit inside the shoes. My feet are too big for ’em as it is.”
“How about duct tape?” Nelson asked.
Tim brightened, and nodded.
Nelson smiled. “Duct tape, it is. And socks. And one of those first aid kits.”
“Which one?”
“Surprise me.”
Javier watched Tim slip out to the truck. Tim’s reaction to Nelson’s approval was palpable. Because he craved any sort of approval—or because it was from Nelson, specifically?
Tim returned with the items, then Nelson knelt before Marianne and cleaned her bloody, filthy feet with Alejandro’s spotless pima cotton towels while everyone else watched, strangely fascinated. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make me a pair of shoes out of men’s tube socks and duct tape,” she said. Her voice quavered.
“Okay. I won’t tell you.” His fingers were gentle with the antibiotic salve, which he followed loosely with gauze. “But I doubt we’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. So for now, just let your feet rest.”
Javier turned away as Nelson taped the gauze in place. Medical procedures of any sort made him uncomfortable. They hadn’t always…only since he’d woken alone in the hospital in Gaza with shrapnel in his face, and his life, as he’d known it before, was over.
None of them had managed to steal more than a few hours’ rest the night before—unless you counted Nelson’s drugged stupor. Once Marianne powered on the computer and determined there was no new update on the Voice of Reason and sent another email assuring her parents that she was fine, they closed the blinds and scoped out places to rest—Nelson and Marianne on the sofa sleeper, Randy on the sofa cushions now on the floor, and Javier and Tim on a pair of stiff couches in the conference room.
Javier assumed that sleep would take him quickly. Instead, he found himself staring at the trailer’s ceiling long after Randy’s snores began drifting in from the adjacent office. Moving quietly, he turned to steal a look at Tim, who’d also been up all night. Tim wasn’t asleep, though. He lay on his side, watching Javier solemnly.
“You can’t sleep, either?” Tim said.
“We should try.”
“I guess.” Tim continued to stare at Javier without making any effort at all to go to sleep. He seemed like he might just continue to stare, but then he blurted out, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“About…your eye.”
Of course. It all came down to that. Despite the kiss, Javier realized he’d been a fool for thinking it would ever be any different. “It’s not my favorite subject. I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Well, yeah, but….” Tim’s voice went loud and edgy as he sat up and swung his feet over the side of the couch. Randy’s snores faltered, and Tim stood up, peeked into the office, and carefully shut the door so he and Javier could talk. He seemed too agitated to sit back down, though, and he began to pace instead. “It seems like a pretty big detail to gloss over.”
“Fine, then.” Javier stood, too. “Now you know. So what’s the problem?”
“No problem. It just seems like you would have said…something. That’s all.” He sat down glumly and stared at his big feet.
Since Tim had been the one to refuse to describe himself, Javier had presumed the worst. He’d done his best not to imagine anything, specifically, while they steamed up the chat room together. Nothing but the feel of his hand on a stiff cock. His mouth against an ear. The tang of flesh beneath his tongue. The warmth of a tight ass.
Actually, he’d been pleasantly surprised by Tim’s appearance. Tim was rough around the edges, yes. But he was tall and lean, with a strong jaw and fierce eyes. Maybe Javier had been prepared for a pasty, pimply little man with soft, white hands. Probably, he had. And he’d been determined not to let it bother him.
He crossed to the other couch and sat beside Tim. Once upon a time, Javier might have known how to console someone, or at least go through the motions. But not now. And especially not for this reason. Nelson was the one who was strong enough to show tenderness—not him. “I see how you look at him,” Javier said.
“Oh God.” Tim moved to stand again, but Javier caught him by the sleeve and pulled him back down.
If Tim was so eager for full disclosure, he was going to get it. Javier might not have known where the conversation was headed at the beginning, but the more he turned the idea around in his mind, the thought of Tim with Nelson rather than him, the more it made sense. Nelson might act juvenile, but underneath, it seemed like he was the most selfless, the most decent, of all of them. And the last thing Tim needed was to have his heart broken again. Not that he spoke much about his last relationship. But where he began to mention it and then clipped off the words, the abrupt pauses spoke volumes. “It’s fine,” Javier said.
“What’s fine? There’s nothing that needs to be fi—”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
Tim cracked his knuckles, first one hand, then the other. Then he looked at Javier in exasperation and said, “What’re you trying to say?”
“When we came here, I was hoping we might work something out…but, it doesn’t matter now. I’ve changed my mind. I won’t stand in your way.”
Tim scrubbed at his face with his palms, and his hair stuck out at odd angles from his head when he’d finished. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Nelson.”
A sharp, bitter laugh escaped Javier before he could check it. But Tim went on, “When I saw him, I thought he was y
ou—and that’s what I liked about him. I saw him there, through the crowd, and he caught my eye, and he started running toward me with this purpose. And I saw he had a girl with him, Marianne. And I thought, that’s exactly what Javier would do. He’s strong—he’d take care of someone who couldn’t take care of themself. And then, when he got to the truck—he took a swing at some jerk in the crowd, some creep who just launched into him for no reason, and laid the guy out flat.” Tim twisted his knuckles, and managed to crack them again. “And the only reason I’d care about that was because I thought it was you.”
Javier looked at Tim hard to see if he was telling the truth, or if he just felt obligated to hold up his end of some bargain they’d never actually defined. But Javier didn’t know him well enough to know for sure.
“I mean,” Tim said in a rush, “it’s not that stupid of a mistake. If anything, I was being too unbiased. ’Cos there was this white kid I went to high school with named Juan, so I figured…. Not that I’d imagined you with blond hair or anything. Just that I didn’t count anything out. Once I saw him heading straight for the truck.”
Of everything Javier had imagined the awkwardness between them might owe to, race had been the least of them. “It’s hard to miss him.” Now, with the burden behind him of releasing Tim, Javier felt able to speak freely. “He’s hot.”
Tim continued to twist his fingers, though all the joints that could have possibly cracked had long since done so. “What he looks like has nothing to do with anything.”
Javier caught Tim in what was left of his peripheral vision and looked him over. No doubt, Tim thought so. Javier, however, knew better. He’d been handsome once. “I’ll still work with you on the Canaan project. Or not. If that’s what you prefer.”
“You think I have a problem with your eye? Yeah, fine, I’ll come out and say it. I do. But not the way it looks—I haven’t even seen it.”
What was Tim playing at now? No doubt he couldn’t stand the idea that Javier’s disfigurement sickened him, and so he’d worked himself up to deny it. “I don’t blame you—”
“Even though we hadn’t met in person, I can’t believe you would think I’d be so shallow.” He reached for Javier’s face. Javier wanted to flinch, but he forced himself to endure whatever was coming—because however humiliating it might prove to be, no doubt he deserved it.
Chapter 17
As Tim reached for the eye patch, he saw Javier almost flinch away—almost. But then he steeled himself, and allowed Tim to follow through with…whatever it was he was trying to prove. Which Tim hadn’t actually worked through, himself. All he knew was that those chats had meant a hell of a lot more to him than a few words on a monitor. He’d bared private parts of himself—no, not that private part—and the idea that Javier would think he was actually superficial enough to care one way or the other about something as cosmetic as a missing eye was, frankly, insulting.
A muscle leapt in Javier’s jaw as Tim reached around the back and found the tie—a stiff, unforgiving knot that he tried, and failed, to unravel. He picked at the knot for a long, awkward moment, and finally gave up and slid his thumb beneath the string, and worked it through Javier’s hair instead, to pull the whole thing off with the knot intact.
Javier angled his face down. Tim had steeled himself for the sight of a sunken eye socket, but Javier’s eyelid was in shadow. Even his eyebrow was scarred. Tim hadn’t been prepared for that, the contrast of Javier’s untouched eyebrow, black and beautifully arched, with the scarred one.
The right eyebrow was broken into three distinct segments by shiny, pale gashes as wide, at points, as an eighth of an inch. The scars passed over the eye, or through it, over the curve of Javier’s cheekbone, and down nearly to the corner of his mouth, which quirked up a bit from the way his face had healed. Kind of like he found something funny—which, undoubtedly, he did not.
The scarring wasn’t limited to the deep, damaging cuts. There were patches of skin that were pale, shiny and delicate, skin that had been burnt once. These pale shapes marred the skin just under Javier’s lower eyelid, and they extended back along his temple, almost to his hairline.
The part of his eye socket that was covered by the patch seemed unaffected enough by it, but there at his temple where the string for the ties began, a cruel ridge had pressed into the scarred skin. Tim put his fingertips to the painful-looking furrow. The skin there was hot.
How many times had he imagined himself touching Javier in the flesh? Too many to count. But none of those times were anything like this.
“How can you stand it?” he said. “Can’t you keep this on with elastic instead?”
Javier looked up, startled—and then Tim saw it clearly. Not just a scarred, collapsed socket, but an eye. “The first thing you notice is the marks left by the ties?” Javier said. Tim wasn’t sure if that was good, or bad. “And here I was, thinking nothing would ever shock me again.”
“Your eye is….”
Javier gave a grim almost-smile.
The eye was damaged, yes. A cloudy grayish blue hazed the surface, and the pupil was pale yellow rather than black. The pattern of the iris was irregular, with the ring of fine muscle strands that were usually arrayed like spokes on a wheel culminating in a knot instead, like a burl of wood.
“It’s still there.”
Tim leaned in, and Javier kept himself still—not just still, but ramrod-straight. As Tim landed the kiss, he felt awkward—even more awkward than he had in his fantasies. But it was something he needed to do.
Javier’s scarred eyebrow tickled Tim’s upper lip, and his eyelash, as he closed his damaged eye, brushed the lower. Tim kissed the eyelid gently, then sat back so he could see Javier’s face—his whole face.
He was beautiful. Tim didn’t usually think men were “beautiful,” but Javier was. His features were exotic: striking and dark. Only the strength of his eyebrows saved him from looking feminine. And one of those eyebrows was now in three segments, over the discolored eye set in the patch of blotched skin. Looking at that eye was painful, not because of its appearance, but because every fiber of Tim’s being winced in sympathy at the notion of something so painful happening to his own face, his own eye.
Tim had placed his hands on Javier’s knees when he leaned in for the kiss. He considered removing them, but didn’t.
They were both so still they were hardly breathing when the sound of someone clearing their throat made both of them jump apart. Tim turned toward the sound.
Nelson.
He sidled along the wall of the conference room, looking sheepish. “Don’t mind me…just taking a little trip to the bathr—whoa, your eye.”
Javier was clearly not happy about the intrusion, but it would have probably been more of a spectacle for him to cover his scars back up and tell Nelson to take a hike. Nelson was undaunted. He crossed to the couch where Tim and Javier sat facing each other, and dropped to one knee between them with a hand on each of their thighs.
It was so easy for him to touch people.
“Wow, are those chemical burns?”
“Yes.”
“Any vision left?”
“Light and dark. No focus.”
“So you keep it covered—why?”
Tim felt the tension drain out of Javier. “The doctors said my brain might adjust—I guess neurons can do that…but mine never did. It’s like I’m seeing clouds over everything. It’s better to keep the light out of it. Less distracting.”
Nelson’s tone was so matter-of-fact, it made the way they’d been acting seem silly. Both of them. Javier for guarding his scarred eye like a profound secret, and Tim for treating it like some kind of sacred relic.
Nelson glanced down, as if he’d just then realized he’d insinuated himself between them. Each of them now was touching—Nelson with a hand on Tim’s and Javier’s knees, and Tim’s hand on Javier’s forearm. Tim had noticed, but he’d been reluctant to think too hard about it, for fear that whatever was on the brink of
happening might veer from the course he hardly dared hope for. It felt as if the tension that had just drained from Javier crawled across the couch and seized him, instead. His heart started pounding so fast he was worried he might keel over. He was afraid to even breathe.
Nelson said, “Sorry…I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.” Only he didn’t seem sorry. And he didn’t take his hands off their thighs. He smiled first at Javier, and then at Tim, as if he’d just said something else entirely.
“Shameless,” Javier said. He looked at Tim, then. With both eyes. Although one of those eyes saw nothing but clouds…and the giddy thought floated to the surface of Tim’s awareness, now that time had ground to an interminable sustained moment, and everything had become completely surreal—that maybe being seen through a haze of clouds would be a good look for him. Javier said, “I was going to tell you to choose him—”
“Why choose?” Nelson said to Javier. “I’d expect that binary logic from the computer genius over here. Not you.”
“I’m a realist.”
“No—you’re a pessimist.”
Tim marveled over the idea that Nelson had referred to him as a “computer genius” and not a “computer geek.” And not sarcastically, either. He hadn’t realized Nelson had noticed him at the computer. He hadn’t realized Nelson had noticed he existed.
And he’d done nothing but notice Nelson—and try to rectify who Nelson Oliver actually was, to who Tim thought he was, initially, when Tim had attributed Javier’s chatroom personality to him.
Nelson seemed intrepid, but not forceful. Unabashed, but not defiant. That was all encouraging. But strong? He could hardly even be called sturdy, between the headaches and the medication. This fusion that Tim’s mind had created when he’d first spotted Nelson in the crowd, this alloy of Nelson’s looks and Javier’s personality—it didn’t exist.
The Starving Years Page 14
