Glass Tidings

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Concrete would have melted under the force of that dark-eyed glare. “She’d have told you if she stopped in the shop today. You can ask her yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I believe you.” Eddie’s snort cut Gray off before he could protest further. And, okay, yes. He hadn’t shown a tremendous amount of faith in Eddie on this one subject. But didn’t all the other stuff he’d trusted Eddie with count for anything? He was sickeningly sure it would not. He tried anyway. “I’ve trusted you with everything. My house. My store. You have to see why I’d worry about—”

  “No.” Eddie shook his head sharply. “You don’t get credit for being a decent human being when you’re assuming I’m a criminal.”

  “I—”

  “Just stop. I get it. You figured I’m flat broke, which is a step down from my normal baseline poverty. Plus, I’m the kind of guy who thinks he’s supposed to fuck guys who offer him a place to stay. So it’s barely a step from there to taking bribe money to keep my mouth shut about a crime that put a girl in the hospital.” Eddie zipped up his bag and threw it on the bed.

  “I don’t think that. I don’t,” Gray insisted, confused. Eddie was so angry. More so than Gray could understand, and not understanding felt incredibly dangerous right now. He edged forward a half step. “But . . . why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I thought about it, okay?” The words ripped out of Eddie on a river of pain. This was more than just anger at Gray somehow. “He fucked up, that kid. And he knows it. He’s punishing himself worse than anyone else ever could. So yes, I thought about not telling Christine, but it wasn’t about the money. It was about the kid. And I knew you wouldn’t believe me. That you’d put on your dad voice and get all lecture-y because you can’t resist telling me how wrong I do stuff.”

  Gray wanted to feel unfairly accused, but the first words out of his mouth when Eddie had brought up the boy . . . had been “lecture-y.” Yeah, and in my dad voice too. Fuck. He’d screwed this up so badly. And maybe some of Eddie’s shouting was born in the guilt he obviously felt about not telling Gray sooner, but that wasn’t even important right now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing automatically. Anything to put a pause on this train wreck of frustration and anger barreling out of Eddie, whose dark, wet eyes shone with unhappiness. “I have bad habits. I’m working on—”

  Eddie didn’t even acknowledge his words. “I know we don’t think the same. But that kid’s gonna spend the rest of his life not belonging here. He’ll always be an outsider. And I didn’t want to listen to you tell me he wouldn’t be.”

  Even if Gray felt he deserved the benefit of the doubt, he squashed those uncomfortable feelings because he had to deal with this. Immediately. Eddie didn’t know it, but he wasn’t talking about the kid anymore, and Gray needed to convince him he belonged here before Eddie left at the worst time possible.

  “Please. Just, wait. It’s Christmas Eve.” He focused on keeping his voice calm, but heard the wobble as he kept talking. “I made a deal with Christine. She’s bringing us lasagna. So you wouldn’t have to cook. I . . . have a gift. Just don’t leave.”

  He had more than one gift. He’d gone stupidly overboard. Another book. Some specialty glass he’d paid a ridiculous amount to get overnighted. The gingerbread Victorian house from the shop Eddie was always touching.

  The one that reminded Gray of his own home.

  He’d realized he was trying to bribe Eddie to stay with him and didn’t even care how embarrassing that was.

  Eddie’s eyes were shuttered tight now. Blank.

  “It’s not about gifts. I think you only want me to stay because you don’t want to be left behind. Again.” Eddie was watching him closely. “You’re still unhappy all this time later because you wanted Brady to stay.”

  Ouch.

  Gray exhaled forcefully. “Yes, but not like I want you to stay. I wanted him to stay because I was afraid to be without him, not because I loved him.”

  Then he froze as his final words spilled between them like shattered glass on the hard floor.

  Eddie’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Not because I loved him.”

  Neither of them moved. Eddie’s pulse thundered so loudly in his ears he had to watch Gray’s mouth to make sure he wasn’t saying anything, because Eddie had gone deaf.

  Watching Gray’s mouth had never been a hardship.

  Missing Gray’s mouth was going to be the hardest thing ever.

  “You might have loved him,” Eddie finally said after a minute of breathing roughly and staring. Gray opened his mouth, and Eddie lifted a hand. “And you sure as shit can’t know for sure that you . . . you know.” He couldn’t say the words. Love me. “You were with him for years. And I’ve been crashing in your house for a month.”

  “It’s only crashing if you leave.”

  “I have to leave.”

  “Not yet. You don’t have to leave yet.”

  Eddie knew what Gray meant. He could stay here until spring. Blow off Texas for the winter and head out when the first faires of the year opened as the snow melted and the heat returned to southern states.

  His head throbbed, and he broke out in a sweat.

  No. Too hard.

  It would be too hard to leave in the spring. Or worse, too hard watching Gray get tired of him being someone who couldn’t be sorted into the neat and organized boxes that made up Gray’s carefully inflexible life. His rough edges were never going to be smoothed down enough to fit in here.

  He shook his head. He couldn’t make the break a clean one though. Even if he knew he should. Leaving them with a possibility for maybe, someday was irresistible.

  “You need time, and I need to get my head straight.” Gray started to protest, but Eddie spoke over him. “I’ll come back to see you again and maybe you’ll be free. Maybe I could stay longer next time.”

  “If you’re not going to stay forever, I don’t know that I want you to come back at all,” Gray said flatly, making the break for them both.

  Eddie nodded. Gray had already been jerked around by one guy who couldn’t anchor his life to Gray’s. He didn’t need to go through that twice. “That’s fair.”

  “It’s not. It’s not fair at all, but neither is you leaving in the middle of the night when I’m asking you to stay and work this out.”

  “Ahh, that’s just me being an asshole.” Eddie looked away. This was why he normally left in the middle of the night without saying anything at all. “I can’t wait until morning. Saying good-bye to your face is bad enough.”

  “Leaving in the middle of the night isn’t the asshole part.” Gray’s face was stony. “Leaving at all is.”

  Eddie knew it. But staying was impossible. Staying was way out of his league. That Gray didn’t understand that just went to show how little Gray knew him at all.

  He slung his bag over his shoulder and left the room.

  When he walked down the stairs, he listened for the creak of footsteps following him, but nothing trailed behind him except silence.

  Hitting the road again was like sliding into a pair of old, worn-out shoes. For the first couple of miles, it felt great, and you wondered why you’d ever bothered to try something new. New shoes? Terrible idea. Pinch your feet. Give you blisters. Never again. But by the end of the day, everything ached, and yeah, maybe your toes had plenty of room and you didn’t have any blisters, but your back screamed and your heels hurt and you remembered you’d gotten rid of those old, crappy shoes because they weren’t giving you support anymore. Maybe they’d been a good fit when you first got them, but you needed something better now. Plus, you didn’t even really like that style anymore.

  Eddie’s metaphorical traveling shoes started to fray even before he caught the Megabus in St. Louis. By the time they were passing through Memphis and Little Rock, streetlights glowing yellow at midnight and fading by dawn, his imaginary footgear had some big fucking holes in it and Eddie’s whole body ac
hed with . . . something.

  The pointy end of a carved oak walking stick poked him in the shoulder.

  “What are you all moody for?”

  The idea of trying to explain the past month exhausted him. He’d shown up on Rhonda’s “doorstep”—aka the welcome mat on the dirt beneath the door to her Airstream trailer—and she’d barely raised an eyebrow before jerking her head toward the flat grassland behind her pickup truck. As always, she’d parked in a prime far corner spot in the giant meadow that was the Rennie wintering grounds in Texas. She hadn’t asked him any questions for the past four days, and he’d been just as glad not to have to answer any. His brain felt squeezed flat, explanations beyond him.

  Also, he’d really beat the shit out of that shoe metaphor.

  “I think maybe I’m an asshole,” he muttered instead.

  Rhonda barked a laugh from her seat on the green and white lawn chair under the camper’s awning.

  “Of course you’re an asshole. It’s part of your charm.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said sourly, leaning back on his elbows on his blanket because yes, he was stupid enough to sit on the ground on his own blanket instead of in Rhonda’s second lawn chair, which she kept around specifically so friends could sit in it, but there was something wrong with Eddie’s brain, which equated sitting in a goddamn chair with becoming dependent on someone else. Holy shit, you are for sure an asshole. “I think the noncharming parts of me are extra asshole-ish.”

  “You have noncharming parts?” Rhonda said dryly, kicking her feet out and crossing them at their plump ankles. “I never noticed. Must’ve been someone else who called my customers ‘fucking empty-skulled dipshits.’”

  Eddie’s voice doubled in volume as he jackknifed to a sitting position. “They let their kid reach for the flame. Who lets their kid play with a blowtorch?”

  “Easy there, Smokey the Bear. I was on your side, remember?”

  “Yeah.” He settled back down onto the blanket. She had been too, even though she could’ve gotten in real trouble with the faire operators. “Thanks.”

  “Seems like maybe you got someone else on your side these days too, huh?” Rhonda pretended she was staring at some girls across the way who were practicing a juggling routine as she casually dropped her little question like a hand grenade on the grass between them.

  Which was kind of a breach of their . . . agreement. He’d almost thought the word friendship, but Eddie didn’t make friends on the circuit. That was what he’d always liked about his semi-hobo life and why he and Rhonda worked so well together. She’d never tried to “fix” him. Or at least that was what he’d told himself he liked best about her. But he was starting to think a lot of the things he’d told himself were bullshit.

  “I did, yeah.” Because it was true. Even if he was still pissed at Gray for thinking for one second Eddie would take the money. Fact was, they’d only known each other for five weeks and Gray had no reason at all to think Eddie wouldn’t do something shady. And despite thinking it, Gray had come to him first. Not gone to the cop. He’d come to Eddie because, Eddie was starting to think, Gray had believed Eddie would do the right thing if Gray talked to him. And that said something, didn’t it? About what Gray really believed, deep down? “The guy I was . . . working for, he was a good guy. Yeah.”

  “It sounded like you had a pretty sweet gig up there,” Rhonda said, reminding him he didn’t need to start from scratch with her. She already knew most of the story.

  Part of it anyway.

  “Yeah, I was making some pretty cool stuff too, in this sort of studio I . . . we got set up in a garage.” He’d show her some pictures on his phone maybe, because he was actually kind of proud of a couple of the pieces he’d done. Bigger than anything he’d done on the circuit. Different. More like . . . art. Maybe. Not that he was an artist. But maybe he did more than just churn out crap like an assembly line. “And working at the shop wasn’t too terrible. No BFA.” Big faire accent. He grinned. “And the travelers were nice. One gave me a coat.”

  “I was kind of surprised to see you here.”

  No criticism implied or felt. Rhonda had a gift for making neutral statements that just sat there and didn’t judge.

  Which was what made it easier for him to admit, “I fucked up. Got mad. Took off.”

  Rhonda shrugged, big shoulders rolling under the shiny fabric of her Denver Broncos football jersey. “So you took off. So what? You go back.”

  Eddie snorted. “You’re the only one who’d say that.”

  “No, I’m not.” Her voice was sharp enough to demand his attention. “Pete at NoCal and Ginger at Middlefaire’d say the same damn thing.”

  Eddie opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. It was true he’d fallen into a yearly routine in the past five or six years, making commitments in advance to the shop owners he liked best and sticking with them for entire seasons at certain faires. When he was first on his own, he’d spent so many years hitting the road as soon as someone pissed him off that he’d come to think of himself as unreliable and unlikable. But it was true he hadn’t split midseason in a long time.

  “They count on you. Would keep you on the road with them year-round if you weren’t such a prickly shit about never sticking with the same gig for more than a couple of months. And tough titties for them, because I’m keeping you for Bristol,” Rhonda grumbled with a determined frown. “But you don’t let them down. And you always come back.”

  “I think maybe I fucked up.”

  “So fix it.”

  Fixing anything seemed impossible right now. “How?”

  “Far as I can tell, you been taking care of yourself since you were way too young to be doing any such thing. You figured it out. Pretty sure you can figure this out too. I’m thinking a bus ticket and some groveling ought to do it.”

  Eddie was thinking maybe she was right. And that particular maybe made the iron weights tugging his heart into his stomach loosen their grip for the first time in days.

  “Well, shit,” he muttered, annoyed with himself already. He could see that there would come a day when he didn’t look at every dollar spent for no good reason as a painful waste of security, but today wasn’t that day. Buying another bus ticket back north was gonna make him wince, and he expected it would be Christmas again before he stopped being pissed at himself.

  “Watch me show up on New Year’s Eve and find him out for the night with some trick,” he said sourly, because that would serve him right for being such a fuckup.

  Rhonda waved away that possibility with the flip of a hand.

  “Hey, if you’re gonna bail on me this summer, let me know now, okay? Prying Big Mike away from the Galbraiths is gonna take me some time. And beer. And begging.” Rhonda scowled at the idea. “Pretty sure he’s been shacking up with them too.”

  “I’m not gonna bail,” he said automatically, because reliability was going to be his new thing, right? Then he paused to reconsider.

  Shit. Was he going to have to bail? For all Gray pretended he didn’t need anyone, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see the man was wrecked at the idea of being left. What if he couldn’t deal with Eddie taking off for months at a time?

  Then you’ll find another way. Maybe he can come with you. Or you can stick to faires in the Midwest and come home during the week. Or just do the shorter ones.

  Before his brain had a chance to pick apart all of those ideas—no way is Gray going to camp for weeks on end, and the big faires are where I make bank, and and and—Eddie made himself stop.

  They would find a way. Eddie had made any number of fucked-up situations in his life work. And Gray had found a way to make peace with the limits of the life he’d chosen for himself. They would both figure out ways to make this thing work.

  Assuming Gray still wants your ass after you ditched him.

  He will. Have faith. If you’re there to stay—and you are, tons of couples deal with time apart because of work—he’ll want you back.
/>   “I’m not gonna bail,” he repeatedly, firmly this time.

  “Good. Need to borrow some cash for the trip back to your man?” Rhonda asked, because she never hesitated.

  “I’m set. Thanks.” For once, cash wasn’t his problem. He’d earned good money off his sales to Gray. There was still a debt to settle here however. He looked Rhonda in the eye. “And thank you for always making a place for me.”

  “You work hard and rarely complain,” Rhonda said, smiling at him as she pulled her long, wild hair off her face and tied it in a literal knot at the back of her neck. “You’ll always have a landing pad with me if you need one.”

  “I know. I mean, I just figured that out. And I know that it’s more than a landing pad. You’ve made room for me for years now, and I’ve been thinking this whole time that I haven’t had a home in forever. But I have. We might not look like a regular family, and a campfire and a caravan might not be everyone’s idea of a home, but they’ve been mine and I’m grateful for it.”

  Rhonda’s cheeks turning pink with pleasure made the entire awkward speech worthwhile, even if she mostly growled and poked at the fire with her stick in return.

  See, that was the problem with being all in-their-face and obvious with what you felt about shit. Everyone got awkward as fuck.

  Under the awkward, though . . . under the awkward was a big warm ball of something good smushing up behind his ribs, and that felt pretty great.

  Maybe it was okay to be obvious about feelings sometimes.

  “I picked up some of that ale you like at the store in town,” Eddie said, reverting to the tried and true for recovery purposes. “And I sure have been missing that brisket joint you love so much.”

  “Done. I’ll order, you pour.”

  Rhonda liked to keep certain standards and drinking beer from a bottle did not meet those standards.

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said, smiling as he held open the door to the Airstream.

  Because that was an even trade, based on their relative bank accounts. He brought something she liked, and she’d give herself permission to toss her diet for the rest of the night under the pretext of celebrating his return. Manipulative, yes, but if it made both of them happy, who was he hurting?