Glass Tidings

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Eddie ignored him at first. On the walk into town after lunch, Christine the Cop had passed him in her cruiser and had pulled over. To chat.

  Ha.

  Still checking in on him, more like. Every time she asked him how he was doing, Eddie couldn’t help but hear the subtext: I’ve got my eye on you, taking advantage of one of our upright citizens and bringing down the general level of class of the town.

  And yes, maybe Eddie was imagining things. With her cheerful hello and her red curls scraped back into a ponytail, the cop came off as more Welcome Wagon than Stormtrooper Patrol, but Eddie didn’t trust cops on principal. Especially ones who were there every time he turned around, like he was some kind of degenerate who needed babysitting or else he’d piss in the corner or something.

  Even after she drove off, waving good-bye cheerfully, irritation had bubbled under his skin all the way to the store. Most days he enjoyed the trip. Walking through Clear Lake felt like strolling through Disney World. At least, how Eddie imagined Disney World. A little surreal, full of all sorts of unusual shit to look at.

  But today, his skin itched and his urge to hit the road and escape all of these people who recognized him surged hard. Being anonymous had served him well for a dozen years now. His business wasn’t anybody else’s, and if anyone planned on having expectations in his general direction, they could just go and be disappointed together.

  Fuck this town and its uptight citizens brigade. Fuck this job, which he was taking way too seriously, getting all worked up by a couple of compliments and Gray’s willingness to take him on. Like the man wasn’t happy to have pretrained shop help who couldn’t argue with him.

  Over the top? Maybe. But fuck this town and everyone in it.

  If he’d sold enough stock—and what the hell was he going to do if Gray couldn’t sell his stupid ornaments and pay him like he’d promised? Complain to the town cop who was some kind of ex-high school beard? Yeah, right—Eddie would have been halfway to the highway by sunset. He recognized these bubbles of rage that sometimes boiled over in his heart. One of them was what had first set his feet on the road at sixteen, pissed off and eager for risk.

  Eddie worked himself up into a froth of frustration that spilled over at the sight of the lurking teen lingering in the back of the shop.

  “Hey, you!”

  His shout, too loud, like he didn’t know how to behave in proper society, turned the boy’s head like a shot.

  The kid’s face blanched white, and he dropped the embroidered stocking in his hands.

  Ah, fuck. Why don’t you go kick a puppy too while you’re at it?

  Stepping between the kid and the door he was about to bolt for, Eddie waved him forward. He could try to be less of a prick. Break out some of those killer salesman skillz.

  “Are you looking for something special? Present for your mom? Or your girlfriend?”

  The wrinkled nose gave Eddie his first clue that maybe his gaydar ought to be pinging here.

  Not that he was looking. Yuck. He was out of practice, that was all.

  “Come on. Give it up. No secrets here.”

  The kid flinched. Took an actual step back.

  Jesus. This was too much work. He’d been “on” for too many days in a row in this strange civilian land, and he simply did not have the patience to figure this boy out.

  How come nobody ever paid as much attention to figuring Eddie out as he did to the rest of the world?

  “You know what I want? To get out of this damn town,” Eddie muttered, then sighed as the teen took another step back. Whoops. No scaring the children. That was no kind of sales pitch. Where had his head wandered off to? He let his voice lighten. “You too, probably, huh? Have you started picking out colleges yet? As soon as I’m done with this artist-in-residence gig for Gray—the man who owns the shop,” Eddie explained, because the kid probably didn’t know who the owner was, “I’ll be heading out of town. My bank account took a beating this fall. All I need is some cash on hand and I’ll be on the road again.”

  Before he could regale the boy with tales of his wandering artist life and wow him with the übercool artist vibe, the kid nodded, dropped his gaze, and made tracks out the front door.

  Probably a good thing, before even that high school kid figured out that Eddie was full of shit these days. It wasn’t hard to guess where all of this pissed-off-ness was coming from.

  He’d stopped thinking about moving on quite a ways back.

  Now he was trying to figure out what might make Gray tick enough to mean it when he said he wanted Eddie to stick around for more than a little while.

  God, giving a shit was the worst.

  Gray opened his mouth half a dozen times during dinner on Friday night to ask Eddie what the hell was wrong. Something clearly was. He had heard it in the clatters and bangs of pots and plates against his kitchen counters as Eddie grumbled his way through meal prep. Discretion seemed the better part of valor. Or something. Maybe just staying out of the line of fire? If Eddie didn’t want to talk, Gray would keep his mouth shut.

  Which only meant he was totally caught off guard when Eddie pounced after they’d put away the dinner mess and made a beeline for the fireplace.

  “Your turn.”

  “My turn for what?” Gray sat back on his heels, pure satisfaction melting over him as the fire bit deep into the logs he’d arranged under Eddie’s strict and bossy eye.

  Something—Eddie’s toes, he was pretty sure—pushed at his lower back, rocking him forward in his squat until he caught himself with one hand on the stone hearth.

  “I told you my sob story. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have a sob story,” he answered automatically, knowing Eddie wasn’t going to buy that for a second. He’d already said too much.

  The loud snort behind him bore that out. “Yeah, right.” Eddie was clearly in no mood for Gray’s strong and silent shtick.

  Gray pulled the metal mesh safety curtains together, missing the measure of heat they blocked, but still scarred from his leap to catch the flaming log that had rolled out of the fireplace the first time he’d built the log pile on his own.

  That had been a near disaster. Not to mention the strip Eddie had peeled off him with a ten-minute harangue about fire safety and people who never got out of their safe houses and perfect little shops long enough to learn how to build “a competent fucking fire, Jesus Christ.”

  Eddie was still poking at him. Verbally, not toes. “I know you got some kind of story, holed up here in this big house all by yourself. Plus, you’re, like, the only gay dude for miles, and there’s no way there’s not a story behind that.”

  Gray winced, shifting his weight to one hip and stretching out his other leg, needing some extra space in his damn pants. Maybe it was the not-talking about it, about everything they did in the dark before Eddie slipped out of his bed, that made him so obsessed with thinking about it at every moment.

  Or maybe it was just Eddie, period.

  He didn’t know what his problem was, actually. At first, it was as if he’d drawn some kind of line in the sand and magicked it into keeping himself from crossing over it. He’d been so shocked that very first night, knowing he’d stared at Eddie’s naked body in his guest bathroom and wanted. And Eddie had noticed. Noticed and assumed the price for a bed in Gray’s house that night was sex, which meant Gray couldn’t touch him. Because he wasn’t the kind of guy who traded help for blowjobs, even if the guy he was helping offered. So he’d avoided even thinking about touching Eddie. About kissing him. About having Eddie’s body naked under his own and memorizing it with his mouth.

  Then Eddie had crawled into his bed three nights ago, and every night since, and still Gray couldn’t get it right. Because now he couldn’t stop thinking about Eddie and wanting to touch him, all the time. If he was awake, he was thinking about Eddie.

  When Eddie had offered, he couldn’t let himself accept. Now Eddie had made it clear the offer didn’t exist in the daylig
ht, and wanting that was all Gray could think about.

  He was a fucking mess.

  “It doesn’t burn any brighter if you stare at it, you know.”

  He gave Eddie the finger over his shoulder without turning around, but then stood up and made his way back to the couch. Eddie was on the floor, the same spot he’d claimed the other night, when Gray had spent the entire time clenching his fingers into fists to keep from reaching out and playing with Eddie’s hair.

  After he squeezed past Eddie to drop onto the couch with a sigh, Gray could’ve sworn Eddie leaned toward him, slouching until his head was practically brushing Gray’s knees.

  When he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine the heat radiating off Eddie’s body warming his leg.

  It felt like an invitation.

  A hand fell on his foot and wiggled it back and forth.

  “Sob story.”

  “No.” But he had to bite his lip to keep himself from smiling.

  “No fair letting me be all fucking pathetic with mine and not being pathetic right back.”

  Those long, thin fingers wrapped around his ankle and squeezed. Gray swore he could feel it in his balls. This wasn’t part of the deal. They weren’t supposed to touch now. His face burned, and he wanted to blame his extended fire gazing, but he was pretty sure it had started as soon as Eddie touched him.

  Gray was also pretty sure that would permanently be the case from now on.

  Touch from Eddie. Spontaneous combustion.

  Something was off about Eddie and his touches though, which was just another penny on the hesitation scale that kept Gray holding back. He was like those old-fashioned sinks with two separate taps, one for hot and the other for cold. There was no middle ground. When Eddie was “on,” in the middle of the night, words poured out of him like water, and the innuendo and the touching were nonstop and outrageous.

  But other times . . .

  At other times, Eddie withdrew. Shut down. The words cut off like someone flipping a switch, and every inch of Eddie’s personality pulled in tight inside himself. The closest he might come to touching Gray in one of those moods was letting his toes dig under Gray’s thigh if they were sharing the leather couch in the library.

  When Eddie was “off,” every fear Gray had about overstepping, his worries about taking advantage of a younger guy who seemed pretty down on his luck, came roaring back even as he had found himself constantly reaching out to touch Eddie’s face, his hands, his hair.

  “On” Eddie was one thing. Gray one hundred percent believed “on” Eddie would tell Gray “fuck off” or “come fuck me,” whichever suited his mood best at the time.

  But when Eddie shut down, Gray questioned everything. What if when Eddie was lively and flirting and trailing fingers down his arm, that was all an act? A false front, a role he played to entertain, because he felt like he had to?

  The fingers around his ankle slid up under his jeans. Blunt nails scratched at his shin. Suddenly it was hard to remember why he questioned anything at all.

  “Still awake?”

  Gray looked down. The fire was burning merrily now, crackling quietly, the light dancing. Strands of Eddie’s dark hair were stuck to his jeans, glowing gold where they curved and caught the light.

  Eddie was right. His story had left them out of balance, had left Gray knowing so much more about Eddie than Eddie did about him that it was impossible for them to interact as equals until Gray fixed things.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be just me in this house.”

  Eddie nodded, like he’d known that, and more of his hair slithered against Gray’s knee.

  “You were joking about using Grindr out here, and you weren’t wrong. There aren’t a lot of guys, and most of them are closeted. But I met Brady at a bookstore. In the gay and lesbian section. Standing in front of those shelves was like putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car.”

  “Like flagging top or bottom with your bandanna at a bar,” Eddie said, with a curl of heat licking around his words.

  Gray had heard about that in high school: secret codes used by gay men to announce their sexual preferences via colored bandannas with a hundred different meanings. Mostly it sounded like the kind of thing someone invented because it seemed like a cool idea, but no one really did.

  Then he’d made his way to his first gay bar in college. Not a hip young crowd, but an old leather joint with lots of guys twice his size with big beards, and Gray’s eyes had been opened in rapid fashion to the importance of making sure he understood the bandanna code.

  “You stick your bandanna in your right or left pocket, Grayson?” Eddie drawled, and Gray kept his mouth shut because he couldn’t remember which meant top and which meant bottom.

  Not that it mattered, in the end. Eddie was just tormenting him. He already knew Gray’s answer.

  “I’m . . . flexible.”

  “I like flexible,” Eddie’s voice teased. Gray wasn’t sure, but it felt like they were negotiating something now. “And just how malleable art thou?”

  “Uh,” Gray’s brain stuttered. Tell me what you want and it’s yours.

  Eddie dropped the fake English accent and leaned back against the couch. “Did you know that malleable comes from the Old French for ‘able to get hammered’? Such dirty minds.” Eddie shook his head. “The shit you pick up from Rennies.”

  “Do you want a sob story or a sex talk?” Gray asked. Pick sex talk! Pick sex talk! But that was just him trying to duck out of saying anything real, and Eddie deserved better than that, so Gray kept his mouth shut and let the man make his own choice.

  Eddie narrowed his eyes and slid down further until he was practically prone on the floor. “I think you like trying to torture me. Fine. Sex talk later. Sob story while I’ve got you willing.”

  Gray bit his tongue to keep from telling Eddie there was never going to be a moment where Gray wasn’t willing. For anything.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Brady was . . . well, he was everything,” Gray said simply. He let his eyes rest on the fire, so he wasn’t tempted to check if Eddie was looking up at him with the oozing mists of sympathy clouding his face.

  Gray had gotten used to those looks. After.

  “It was like a fantasy come true. Another gay guy in the middle of nowhere. Single. Good-looking.” He paused for a moment and then laughed at himself. “Not living in his parents’ basement. God, I sound so pathetic. Like I’d have fallen for any guy who wasn’t a total asshole, just because he was there. And it wasn’t like that at all.”

  Eddie’s voice came softly. “What was it like?”

  “Amazing. We were so in sync. We both wanted to stay in the area. Me because of the shop, and Brady because his mom still lives in the next town over. We took it slow at first, but after a couple of years, we knew. We were it for each other.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Sometimes Gray couldn’t tell when Eddie was being sarcastic about things he called nice. But he thought Eddie meant it this time. Something about his voice, gentler than usual. Gray agreed. “It was. We were going to fix up this house together. Do all the work ourselves. You know. YouTube it.”

  “You bought the house together?” The squeak at the end of Eddie’s question was outraged. “And he left?”

  Gray sighed. This was the part he didn’t like sharing.

  Humiliation never made for a rip-roaring good tale.

  “No, I bought the house after I sold my parents’ place, where I’d been living since my dad died. That was morbid as hell. I was glad to put an end to that era.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Easy words, but they made his heart warm anyway. “Thanks. Been a long time now.”

  “And your mom?”

  “Died when I was young. An aggressive breast cancer. They’d probably catch it earlier these days.”

  “So, are you, like, gonna die before you’re sixty or what?” Eddie sat up straight, fisting his hand in Gray’s pants and giving
his leg a shake. “Is this, like, a family thing?”

  It was stupid how happy it made him to see Eddie upset at the idea of Gray dying young.

  He shifted his hand to the long hair at Eddie’s nape, threading his fingers through the dark strands and squeezing the back of Eddie’s neck. Held his breath and hoped Eddie didn’t pull away.

  When Eddie leaned closer, pressing his skull into the curve of Gray’s palm, it felt like a benediction. Gray did his best to keep his voice level and unaffected.

  “No. My dad was already old when he married my mom. They had a twenty-five-year age gap between them. He was almost sixty by the time they had me.” His dad had died when he was finishing up high school, and all of Gray’s memories of him were fading around the edges like an old photograph.

  Eddie sounded slightly mollified regarding the unlikelihood of Gray dropping dead anytime soon.

  “So when you bought the house . . .” Eddie said, prompting Gray to continue.

  “I was in the position to buy,” Gray said, not wanting to sound like the bitter ex trashing the one who got away. “Brady wasn’t. But I thought it was understood. This was going to be our house. The work we’d do on it together would make it that way.”

  “Didn’t happen like that?”

  “Not exactly. I was getting excited about the house, and Brady was . . .” He swallowed the words. Ten years had eased some of the sting. Not all of it. “Brady was getting bored.”

  Eddie’s sigh was audible. As if he totally understood burgeoning boredom.

  “We used to go up to Chicago about once a month. Cruise Boystown, hit some good restaurants, just get out of the microscope.” He’d enjoyed himself, but Brady had done more than that. “I like it. But Brady . . . He loved it. He couldn’t get enough, always wanting to go back as soon as we got home again.”

  Talking about Brady while touching Eddie felt . . . strange, so he pulled his hand back to rest next to him on the couch. Not touching Eddie made him ache though. When Eddie leaned his head against Gray’s knee, the ache eased.

  “He made friends there. I guess you can call them friends. People who invited him to crash on their couches if he wanted to visit. And he did. I was trying to watch my budget because of everything I had sunk into the house, but I didn’t want to be the buzzkill boyfriend. So he kept visiting a lot, staying over extra days, cutting back on his hours at his job here. Eventually I found out that he’d picked up work in the city, and he just . . . stopped coming home.”