by Shea Balik
When Kyler didn’t say anything, Aaron glanced over at him to find this odd look on his face. It was a mix of wonder and something that almost seemed like fear. It wasn’t until he spoke that Aaron understood why Kyler seemed so afraid to talk about his own childhood.
When Aaron first met Kyler, he’d thought the man too uninteresting. But the more Kyler opened up to him, the more he was discovering that wasn’t the case at all. Aaron just wasn’t sure what, if anything, he was going to do about the emotions that were starting to stir for this plain, yet extraordinary man.
Chapter Five
There was something inspiring about the way Aaron freely talked about his past. Clearly the man hadn’t had it easy if all his family could afford were hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Yet, instead of shame, there was a fondness he heard in Aaron’s voice when he spoke of his parents.
That confidence Aaron had about who he was despite what he’d endured growing up gave Kyler the boost of courage to be honest about his childhood, too. “It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t afford to go to eat, as we were expected to grow our own food.”
As he spoke, Kyler hadn’t looked at Aaron, but he had to know what Aaron’s reaction would be to what he had to say next. So he screwed up the last bit of strength he had to gaze up into the man’s dark brown eyes. “I grew up in a commune.”
Aaron’s eyebrows shot up nearly into his hairline. The surprise was evident, but Kyler had to admit to having a difficult time deciphering the rest of his emotions. He never had been good at reading people. Kyler had no idea why he thought it would be any different with Aaron.
“It wasn’t like most people think,” Kyler rushed to defend, even though Aaron hadn’t actually said or done anything to make Kyler believe he thought it a negative thing. “I mean, yes, we made our own clothes, grew our own food, and for the most part, lived off the land, but we didn’t walk around naked or hold hands and sing all day.” Or at least most of them didn’t.
Sadly, especially in recent years, there had been more than a few who had tried to join their commune and do exactly that. What he never understood was, it was always the unattractive ones who wanted to be naked. Yeah, he was supposed to believe the body was a beautiful thing, but Kyler was a realist. Even with clothes on, he could tell Aaron was a sculpted masterpiece while Kyler was a lump of clay with little shape.
“So, there weren’t any orgies or passing around the bong?” Aaron asked.
Shocked that Aaron believed that’s what happened, Kyler glared up at the man to find the man’s brown eyes laughing at him. “I’m teasing,” Aaron said. “I imagine growing up in a commune had to have more than a few…” Aaron seemed to search for a word that wouldn’t offend Kyler. “Challenges,” he finally settled on.
Kyler gave a snort at the description. “That’s one way of putting it.” Hell would be another, but Kyler wasn’t going to tell Aaron that. This was the first time Aaron seemed interested in what he had to say and Kyler wasn’t about to ruin that by complaining. “It wasn’t that bad. In some ways, I was luckier than most.”
Aaron paused as he dug a spoon into a dish that had two flames on the card. Kyler wasn’t sure what it was as the name was foreign to him, but he knew he wasn’t about to try it. He still wasn’t sure how food could make a person cry, but it wasn’t something he was willing to risk.
“How were you lucky?” Aaron asked as he placed what appeared to be some sort of beans covered in a brown sauce onto his plate.
Maybe one day, after he made some money, he’d come back to Bliss, alone, and try some of the dishes with flames on them. That way, if he cried, at least no one he knew would see him. “We were a small community. We took care of each other.”
Kyler studied one of the cards that didn’t have a flame on it. It appeared to be a bread of some sort, but he’d never heard of naan. On the other hand, the card said it had raisins and cinnamon in it, so it couldn’t be too bad, right?
“Go ahead. Be adventurous,” Aaron encouraged next to him. When Kyler didn’t immediately take some, Aaron plucked up a piece with the tongs and put it on Kyler’s plate. “I promise, you’ll love it.”
Deciding to trust Aaron, Kyler nodded. When he looked up into Aaron’s gorgeous brown eyes, Kyler found himself lost. It wasn’t until an uncomfortable expression appeared on Aaron’s face that Kyler even realized he’d been mooning over the man.
Thankfully Aaron broke the seriously awkward situation by suggesting they join the others. If Kyler didn’t get his infatuation with Aaron under control he was going to end up making a bigger fool out of himself than he already had.
“There they are,” Jesse said as he and Aaron approached a table near the back of the restaurant. Kyler knew his jaw had dropped as he stared at all the people sitting there but he couldn’t seem to make it close. There had to be more than thirty people. That was nearly half of his entire commune.
His heart sped up as he stood rooted to the floor. There was no way he was going to be able to meet all these people. Kyler had a hard enough time talking to everyone in his commune and he’d known them his entire life. Small talk was a challenge for him. Who was he kidding? Any conversation was impossible.
Kyler had learned long ago that his brain didn’t work like others did. He didn’t understand what most people meant. Like how Jesse said food would make him cry. Kyler still didn’t get it. So how was he supposed to talk with all these people without making a complete fool of himself?
“Hey,” Aaron’s deep tenor filtered into his frozen mind, sinking into his body and warming the ice that had managed to flow through his veins. “It’s okay. These guys are great. All of them. Once they are your friends, they will stand by your side no matter what.”
As good as that sounded, Kyler just wasn’t sure he could trust it would happen. “What if they don’t like me?”
“That’s not possible,” Aaron murmured. “Trust me.”
Kyler wanted to. He really did. It was just Kyler had never been good at making friends. Sure, those in the commune tolerated him, were even nice to him most of the time, but it was obvious the way they never asked him to join them to hang out that they didn’t really want to be around him.
“Stop scaring him guys,” Jesse stood up as he admonished the group. When his dark, mascaraed eyes met Kyler’s, Jesse said, “It’s Vicar, isn’t it? His uptight Brithishness is making you anxious, isn’t it?”
Kyler wasn’t sure what in the world Jesse was talking about. He also didn’t want everyone to know he was too clueless to know what Jesse was saying. Thankfully, someone—he assumed it was Vicar—started arguing with Jesse.
“That is rubbish, Jesse Grant. I had not even opened my mouth to speak. How could my being British have been evident?” The man Kyler figured was Vicar, glared at Jesse. “If anyone scared him it was you with that ridiculous T-shirt you are wearing. Suggesting someone play in traffic? Utterly absurd.”
Jesse threw his napkin onto the table. “You take that back, Vicar Hunt.”
“Or what?” Vicar challenged.
Kyler had no idea what was going on, but he found himself not quite as anxious about meeting the others as he had been a few moments before. Admittedly, the fact that Vicar found Jesse’s T-shirt strange, helped, but it was more than that, it was that these men, as numerous as they were, clearly weren’t perfect. Maybe, just maybe, Kyler could finally find a place where he fit in.
“Or I’ll—” Jesse started but was interrupted.
“Gentlemen, and I use that term even though we know it not to be true.” The man who approached them wore a white chef’s jacket but looked nothing like Kyler would picture a chef to appear.
He couldn’t say exactly why, but Kyler assumed male chefs to be chubby and jovial. This man was tall with enough muscles to strain the seams of the jacket he wore, and instead of happy, he wore an icy expression that dripped with disdain. For reasons Kyler couldn’t fathom, this man clearly didn’t like the men at this table.
“Would you mind being so kind as to not cause a scene with your superfluous bickering while my clientele is doing their utmost to have a pleasant dining experience?” Kyler wasn’t sure, but he thought the man was asking Jesse and Vicar to be quiet.
“You can shove that superiority complex you have right up your ass, Tarquin,” Reed said with a cheerful smile that belied the words he’d just spoken.
At that moment, Kyler would have preferred to not be there. He didn’t like confrontation. Usually it was because he ended up being the one feeling like crap in the end. Admittedly, he wasn’t actually a part of this argument, but that didn’t mean he wanted to watch it either.
“Thank you once again, Mr. Bowden, for showing just how simple you Americans are,” Tarquin said dryly.
Jesse gave a long, drawn out sigh with a dramatic eye roll that could win an award. Then he looked up at Tarquin and asked, “If I give you a straw will you go suck the fun out of someone else’s day?”
All the warning bells in Kyler’s head went off as he opened his mouth. Yet no matter how much he knew he was going to regret it, he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “How does a straw suck fun?”
All eyes turned toward him and Kyler felt like a bug under a microscope as they stared at him like a freak. He should have learned by this point in his life to just keep his mouth shut, but Kyler had a knack for digging his grave that much deeper. “I mean, straws suck up liquid. Fun is an idea. So how does that work?”
Mouths dropped open and Kyler wished with all his heart the ground would open up underneath him and take him away from here. At this point, he wouldn’t mind being Dorothy and having a tornado sweep him up and take him to Oz. Anywhere was better than where he was.
Then, just as he was ready to bolt, Vail burst out laughing and said, “You were right, Jesse. I do like Kyler.”
The rest of the table laughed, some more than others. Kyler could feel his cheeks heating. He hated being laughed at, but he also was used to it. When a hand pressed against his lower back, Kyler looked up into Aaron’s concerned face.
“You okay?” Aaron asked quiet enough that the others didn’t hear him as they continued to laugh and encouraged Kyler to sit with them.
He wasn’t, but what was he supposed to say? It was humiliating to be seen as a joke in front of Aaron, but there wasn’t much Kyler could do about it now. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t a complete lie. After years of suffering through the same fate when he spoke with others, Kyler was used to the laughter. He would survive.
“Come on, Kyler,” Jesse called out. “You’re a hero. Dinner is on us.”
Startled by the statement, Kyler blurted out, “What?”
Jesse, Vail, and Reed all were pointing to a retreating Tarquin. But it was Jesse who said, “You got Tarquin to leave. For that, you deserve to be treated like a king.”
Kyler was confused. Then again, he normally was. In a crowd this big, it was no surprise he wasn’t keeping up with what was happening around him. Still, if it meant these people liked him, Kyler was willing to sit down and let them treat him to dinner.
After all, it wasn’t as if he could pay for it himself.
Chapter Six
Aaron shut off the chainsaw, took out his earplugs, and waited for the sounds of his surroundings to come back to him. It had been a long day. That wasn’t really true. But it had felt like it had been.
It had been five days since he’d taken Kyler to dinner at Bliss, and for some reason he couldn’t get the quirky man out of his mind. Nothing about his encounter with Kyler should have him feeling this way, and yet Aaron was racking his brain to come up with a reason why he would need to go to Nice ‘N Rosy just so he could talk to Kyler again.
Each day Aaron had to force himself to focus on the job at hand, which he hated to admit was becoming more and more difficult to do. Just yesterday, he’d severed the arm off a bear he was working on when he couldn’t stop his thoughts from straying to the way too innocent Kyler. He’d had to start all over as the piece he’d been working on had been a custom order.
Fortunately, the piece he had ruined had been a fairly large piece, so he’d be able to remake it into something a bit smaller when he had time, or that would have been money down the drain. But the error had put him behind in getting his work done.
And if the thoughts he had of the man weren’t bad enough, the dreams he’d been having of Kyler left him hard and aching each morning. As much as his body seemed to want to pursue something with Kyler, Aaron knew it wasn’t a good idea. His tastes tended to run a bit dark for most men to handle. For someone as sweet and naïve as Kyler, he’d likely have the guy running for the hills. If he wasn’t careful, Aaron would eat Kyler alive before he even knew what was happening. It was why he refused to give in to his desire to see Kyler again.
“Whatever that piece of wood did to you, I’m sure it’s sorry,” Vincent, one of the other artisans, joked. Vincent and his wife, Andrea, made outdoor furniture like rockers and swings.
Aaron had a couple of their pieces on his front porch. Hopefully, when Aaron had the money to build his dream house, he’d get several more for the wraparound porch he planned on having. But that wouldn’t be for another year or two.
“Huh?” he said, not having really heard what Vincent had said.
Vincent waved him off. “Never mind, it was a dumb joke. What’s got you looking like you’d like to take a swing at something?”
Not about to admit he was thinking about Kyler when he didn’t plan on doing anything about it, Aaron shrugged. “I screwed up this piece yesterday and had to start over. Now I’m behind and I’m trying to figure out how to get it done by tomorrow afternoon when the client comes to pick it up.”
“Anything I can do to help?” Vincent offered.
Aaron sighed. “Naw, I’m just going to have to work late.” Rubbing his hand over the nape of his neck to ease some of the tension working with the chainsaw had created, he asked, “What brings you by?”
“I just wanted to remind you that Neil is coming this weekend for a visit, and he was hoping you might need some help around here so he can earn some extra money.” Vincent glanced around Aaron’s workshop, clearly seeing the mess that it had become.
Neil was Andrea’s nephew. He’d been coming to visit his aunt and uncle for the past five years and spent most of his time hanging out with Aaron. After the first couple of days of Neil just watching Aaron work, Aaron had put the teenager to work, cleaning up, helping customers. Since Cedar Falls had started putting on craft fairs each month, he had Neil helping him there, too.
The kid was starved for male attention since his own father was no longer in the picture. Apparently, the guy had decided when Neil was five that he wasn’t ready to be a father and just left, never to be heard from again. Not even the private investigator Neil’s mother had hired had found him.
Even though Aaron had decided long ago not to hire regular help in order to save money, whenever Neil came to town, Aaron pried open his wallet and hired the teen. “Yeah, sure. As you can see, I could use the help.” With how distracted Aaron was with thoughts of Kyler, that was even more true. Customers were having to wade through sawdust and bits of wood just to look around as he didn’t have the time to clean up if he had any hope of getting back on schedule.
Vincent chuckled at the mess all around them. “You do make it an adventure for anyone who dares to come in here.”
Aaron shrugged. “What can I say? I like a challenge.” Those words were never truer than now. As much as Aaron was trying to stay away from Kyler, he also knew it was only a matter of time before the need to see Kyler again overrode his good intentions.
If he were honest with himself, that time was already there. Only his determination not to hurt Kyler was keeping him away. But sooner or later he knew that would no longer be enough to stop him from seeing the intriguing man again.
After Vincent left, Aaron got back to work, doing his best to keep thoughts of Kyler from dis
tracting him. He would have had a better chance trying to catch the wind.
* * * *
“What are you doing?” Jesse asked.
Kyler’s heart nearly jumped right out of his chest at being caught washing his hair in the back room of Nice ‘N Rosy. He’d only been working for five days, not nearly long enough to be able to afford a place to stay. With no money, Kyler had been forced to sleep in his car, not exactly the most comfortable place as it was a two-door compact car that didn’t allow him to lie all the way down. Still, it wasn’t as bad as having to sleep out in the cold night, not that it was much warmer inside the car, but it was better than nothing.
“I, um,” Kyler really wished he was better at lying. Spying a sprig of Baby’s Breath on the floor, Kyler said, “I got Baby’s Breath in my hair and couldn’t get it out.” Thankfully Kyler hadn’t taken off his clothes to give himself a sponge bath. That would have been impossible to explain away.
Jesse nodded as if it happened all the time. “Yeah, I swear that stuff is attracted to hair, clothes”—Jesse waved a hand up and down his body—“actually everywhere. When you’re done, I want to go over today’s orders, and then I’ve got a meeting to get to.”
“I’ll be right out.” Feeling guilty over lying to his boss, Kyler quickly finished before running a towel he’d brought in from his car over his hair. With no brush, Kyler just pushed his fingers through the mess to give it some semblance of order before heading to the front where Jesse was sipping a cup of coffee that Kyler assumed was his ritual caramel macchiato.
In the nearly week he’d been working for Jesse, Kyler had seen just how much one of those drinks affected the man. It was like a jolt of energy when it hit and Jesse went from tired and barely moving to a whirlwind of motion. Several of the men compared Jesse to an excited puppy.
At the moment, Jesse was able to sit on the stool, fairly calm, although his foot was starting to move, which meant the coffee was starting to do its job. Kyler figured he had a good five minutes before Jesse started bouncing around the shop. It was interesting to watch, although it often made Kyler dizzy when Jesse got a little too excited.
