If I Must Lane

by Amy Lane

  Chapter One

  Joel very carefully taped the phone list on the refrigerator, and then his itinerary, and then the magnetic calendar with the dry-erase reminders, all in bold, black, square, print-block writing.

  “Ian… Ian? Ee, are you listening to me?”

  Joel’s roommate, Ian Cooper, pulled his head from whatever genius realm it usually occupied and aimed his slightly crossed blue eyes at the list. He nodded soberly and focused his Siamese-cat gaze over his crooked beak of a nose, and then smiled. That goofy, game smile was probably the only reason Joel had made it through five months as Ian’s roommate, but it did nothing to reassure him now.

  “I’ve got you, Joel; don’t worry, mate. I’ve lived on my own for a lot of years now. I’ll survive four days without you.”

  Joel wasn’t so sure. In fact, he was reasonably certain that Ian’s survival to this moment was a matter of sheer stinking luck.

  “It’s five days, and if you’re so sure it’s going to be easy, repeat after me: this is my itinerary in Colorado, this is where I’ll be and when I’m going to be there. Here’s my mom’s number, my sister’s number, my cell phone number, and when the returning flight gets here. Can you deal with all that?”

  “I have your cell number, you goofy bastard,” Ian protested, and Joel refrained from rolling his eyes. Yes, Ian did have his cell number, except it was in Ian’s cell phone, and Joel knew for a fact that Ian had needed to buy at least five new cell phones in the last four months.

  “This is just in case your cell phone gets lost or stolen,” Joel explained patiently, and Ian interrupted him with an earnest nod of his head.

  “But even if it gets lost, mate, I’ve got your number in the regular phone!” Ian smiled triumphantly, and Joel had to concede. Yes, his number was in both handsets of the house phone. Because Joel put them there. After he bought the house phone. After Ian had lost his third cell.

  “Okay,” Joel conceded after he looked twice at the kitchen table to make sure that both handsets were plugged in, charging, and not broken. (They’d had to replace one of them after Ian’s ill-advised in-line skate parabola/hyperbola experiment. For that matter, they’d had to replace the table too.) “So, the phones are set. Now, don’t forget Manky Bastard’s vet appointment on Tuesday.”

  Ian blinked, a sudden look of panic crossing his appealing features. He had one of those faces where the cheekbones left shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. Not even a goatee could make Joel’s broad-cheeked, square-chinned Hispanic face look anything better than plain in comparison to Ian’s narrow, Roman-nosed, Aussie profile. Typically, Ian truly didn’t seem to notice his own good looks.

  “Uhm, what day is it again today?” Ian asked apologetically, and Joel squeezed his eyes shut in an attack of good humor. Of course, his own looks weren’t the only thing Ian Cooper didn’t notice.

  “See here—this is the calendar. Today is Saturday, see? Big plane, says ‘Joel goes bye-bye’?”

  Ian’s giggle was as endearing as his open-hearted goofy smile. “Go ahead, treat me like a child, mate! I’m good for it!”

  Joel shook his head and resisted the urge to fall into that smile. “How long were you up with your paper?”

  Ian blinked, and because Joel knew him, he could see the light red patina of sleeplessness in Ian’s spring-blue eyes. “Haven’t been to sleep yet—Riemann, he was calling me, right?” Joel nodded. He knew. Ian was a genius—a certifiable, IQ in the stratosphere genius. U.C. Davis was willing to pay for Ian’s room and board, just so Ian would write them a paper and give a few guest lectures. Ian made the rest of his money working as a CPA for the faculty and their high-toned friends, which explained why he could replace things like cell phones and kitchen tables on a whim, because he was cracking good at it. It was the day-to-day that needed a little work.

  “I gotcha, Ee. Now try to focus here. The cab will be here in a minute. There’s frozen food in the freezer, milk, bread, and lunchmeat in the fridge, fruit on top of the microwave, and peanut butter and jelly in the cabinet. For Christ’s sake, eat! Right?”

  Ian nodded soberly. “I won’t make that mistake more than once, I promise.”

  Joel couldn’t even think about it; it made his stomach hurt. “I’ll hold you to that. Now Manky Bastard has been barfing more than usual. I made her a vet appointment on Monday. You’ve got to take her, E. I’ll give you a call to remind you, but you need to be able to find the phone and get your ass in gear, you hear me?”

  Ian nodded earnestly. “I hear you, mate. She’s been a good cat. I hate to see her feeling so sickly, right?”

  Joel’s smile softened. “Right.”

  And that right there was the thing that kept Joel from leaving, in spite of the chaos of living with Ian Cooper.

  Ian’s heart was as big as the goddamned sky. It was as simple as that. How could you desert a guy who would take in a mangy cat, give all his cash to the homeless people who abounded in the city of Sacramento proper, and who would, no matter how angry Joel got at his goofiness, simply smile that open-hearted, guileless, spring-blue smile and say, “You’re right, mate. I’m a disaster. I’m lucky you’re here.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Joel had his answer.

  He could leave Ian because his mother called him and asked him to visit before the holidays.

  Ian blinked at the door and the open, cheery expression he usually wore changed drastically. “Oh right,” he murmured. “You’re going.”

  “I’ll be back Wednesday evening,” Joel said, reaching up from his stocky five foot nine inches to embrace Ian’s rangy six four. It was a quick, “manly” hug, the type with the double-thump with the fist. “Don’t worry, I’ve got a Thanksgiving dinner ready to cook in the freezer, and I can catch a cab home—”

  “No!” Ian was neither dreamy nor sleepy now. In fact, his arms tightened for a moment around Joel’s shoulders. “I’ll come get you.”

  Joel didn’t want to contradict him—it would hurt his feelings—but he didn’t want to be waiting at the airport for hours either. “I’ll call you when I land,” he temporized, thinking that if he could get Ian’s attention when he landed, the wait wouldn’t be that long.

  Ian was a genius. “And I’ll answer that call at the gate!” he said with dignity, and Joel grinned, rolled his eyes, and grabbed his luggage. “Have a nice visit, mate!”

  “Take care of yourself, Ee!”

  “If I must,” Ian replied mildly, and then, as Joel disappeared out the door, he hollered “Take care!” at full volume.

  Joel tried to wince while Ian could still see him. It was six-thirty in the morning, and Ian probably just woke every last tenant in their three-story refurbished Victorian. Oh well, he would be out of the city before old Mr. Pomerantz could move his ass from bed to his doorway to complain.

  Chapter Two

  “I like the goatee, pappi, but you look skinny. You not eating enough!”

  Joel rolled his eyes at his sister—all big boobs, long stomach, and inviting hips. “You should talk, mammi, what? You stuff your bra with apples to keep that tummy so small?”

  Melody Martinez laughed and ruffled her little brother’s hair. It was late Sunday night, their mother was in bed, and they had lingered so long over dessert to catch up that they had done the dessert dishes and then just broken out the pie and sat, each of them with a fork, and finished it off.

  “No, I been working out, mammi,” Joel said now through a forkful of pie. “That’s where I met Ian.”

  “Your psycho roommate?” Melody took her own. Pecan, it was their favorite. Since neither of them planned to stay for actual Thanksgiving, their mother had chosen to go all out for the four days before they both boarded planes and left Denver, Joel for Sacramento and Melo
dy for Los Angeles.

  “He’s not psycho, Mel,” Joel said seriously. “He’s just focused.”

  “Yeah, psychos is focused you know! He probably stalking you at that gym!”

  Joel shook his head, remembering the first time he’d seen Ian Cooper. “The only thing Ian stalks at the gym is bodily injury!”

  Mel laughed, but Joel couldn’t.

  Ian had been so helpless under that barbell.

  Joel’s co-worker had introduced Joel to the family gym, and Joel was grateful. There was an eclectic mix of people there—hardcore weight-lifters with tattoos and motorcycles, toned business women working the machines, spry elderly people enjoying the yoga and arthritis classes, and even children running around the ball pit in the day-care. Joel, who had grown up in a Hispanic neighborhood in South Denver, had been reassured by the diversity. It felt like a real community, and not just a place to be stalked by gym bunnies.

  Those girls had never really appealed to Joel anyway.

  And the bulletin board added to the community, everything from free puppies to offers to carpool and, Joel hoped, roommates.

  When he’d first come to the city, he’d ended up in one of those prairie-dog apartment warrens, the kind where every apartment was the shape of a cracker tin and you could tell what your neighbor was doing upstairs whether you liked it or not. Joel might have toughed it out in one of those until he could afford to rent or buy a house, but he wanted to ride his bike to work. Since he had to move anyway, he was looking for something with… well, character. He’d driven around the city in his little hybrid, and he’d seen the neighborhoods with the Victorian-era houses. Some were high-toned, some were run-down, and some were in between, but they had seemed… eclectic. Interesting. They had character, and Joel was in a strange city on his second job. His first job had been in a cubicle; he’d made sure this one was in a big, open-air office with people who knew what the others looked like. He wanted character.

  Then the first chuffing sound penetrated Joel’s involvement with the bulletin board. He swung around to see a lanky man, shirtless, being crushed under a barbell that looked seriously overloaded for such a slender frame.

  Joel dropped his duffel bag and hurried over to rescue the poor bastard, and as he pulled the barbell up and rested it in the cradle, he was treated to an upside-down version of that sweet, goofy grin that would dominate the next five months of his life.

  “Thanks, mate. That ’bout buggered me.” The man was in his mid-twenties, like Joel, and his curly blonde hair was a spiky, sweaty, halo all over his long skull. Joel would learn that, with the exception of the sweat, it always looked like that.

  “Well, you need to make sure you always have a spotter,” Joel told him seriously.

  “Yeah, mate, if I must. Here, you want the job?”

  Joel was going to say no—he’d actually been on the way out of the gym—but that smile appeared, and it was so winsome and so trusting that Joel found himself standing over Ian and helping him with what appeared to be a ridiculous amount of weight.

  After a couple of sets, he had to admit that the weight wasn’t ridiculous. The strength in that long, rangy frame was the outstanding thing.

  “Thanks, mate,” Ian panted when he was done. He sat up and rubbed his face with a towel. “I was lucky you came along. What were you looking at over there?” He jerked his head in the direction of the bulletin board, and Joel looked over and grimaced.

  “A roommate,” he sighed. “I want to live someplace interesting, but I don’t have enough money for interesting. Just cheap.”

  The young man blinked, and his head went through a series of bird-like movements that Joel had come to associate with Ian thinking on the fly.

  “A roommate, you say?”

  “Yeah, a roommate. Why? You know someone who lives in a cool house downtown who wouldn’t mind a broke computer programmer in their spare room?”

  That grin again—except without the goofiness, it was full-on blinding. “Yeah, mate, me!” The young man had extended a long-fingered, bony-knuckled hand. “I’m Ian Cooper, and I’ve got a cool top-floor and a spare bedroom.”

  “So just like that, he offers you a room?” Mel was very carefully wiping the bottom of the pie tin with a manicured finger.

  Joel shrugged and grinned at his big sister. Mel was a buyer for a department store in L.A. On most days, she was one hundred percent Vogue, one hundred percent of the time. But during holidays, for family, she wore ratty sweats and piled her hair on the top of her head and ate whatever she wanted. In return, Joel wore his accent in his voice like a badge of honor, and together, they could be themselves.

  “I think he just doesn’t like living alone,” he told her honestly. Ian certainly didn’t need the money.

  Somebody’s phone was ringing, and Joel couldn’t find the damn thing. With a sigh, he started picking through the disaster in the living room. He’d just moved in the day before, and although Ian had made a good-faith effort to clean up, Joel had found him, a pile of dirty clothes in his lap, typing feverishly after about an hour of housecleaning. The man said he got distracted by his work, but until that moment, Joel thought it was probably just a charming personality quirk, not an impediment toward health, living quality, and good hygiene.

  With a grunt Joel tripped over a free weight and landed on all fours in a pile of blankets that smelled like sex and beer. The ringing got louder, and Joel reached under the oxblood leather couch to be rewarded by the tiny cell phone buzzing in the palm of his hand.

  “Jesus, Ian,” he griped, “don’t you have a house phone?”

  “What?” Ian looked up from his room blankly and then turned back to the paper he was typing—something about imaginary numbers and Riemannian geometry, and Joel was damned if he could follow half of what Ian said when he was talking about it.

  Joel rolled his eyes and sat on the floor, leaning against the couch, to answer the phone.

  “Hello. Ian Cooper?” The voice was educated, older than thirty, and female.

  “No, I’m sorry. This is his roommate.”

  There was a subtle pause. “Roommate?”

  “Yeah, roommate.” As if! “What can I do for you?”

  “This is Florence Kohl from U.C. Davis. I was just calling to remind Dr. Cooper that he has a lecture tomorrow.”

  “Does he know where it is?” Joel asked, looking around the spacious top-floor apartment a little desperately for a pen and paper. He’d already started a grocery list in his head: laundry hampers, vacuum cleaner bags, Swiffer, sponges, dish soap. He added “pen and paper” to it now, so he didn’t have to make the next list in his head.

  “Oh yes.” Florence laughed appreciatively. “Just get him to the campus around ten o’clock, and he’ll probably show up by ten-thirty.”

  The nice woman with (presumably) Ian’s paycheck in the palm of her hand rang off, and Joel took a deep breath and looked around. The apartment was gorgeous: oxblood leather furniture, hardwood floors, cream area rugs and a burgundy accent with white trim. And it was huge; the rent was a steal. The fact that it currently looked like a thrift store clearinghouse because of the sheer volume of clothes on the floor, in the corners, on the couches, and over the coffee table, and that it smelled like a monkey’s ass notwithstanding, the situation had potential.

  But first, there had to be some semblance of order. That was okay. Joel was good at order.

  “Ian,” he said, standing up and dusting off his hands, “buddy, you have a lecture to give tomorrow.”

  The effect on Ian was electric. He stood up abruptly, left his computer, and started running around his room, rifling through clothes, throwing items from the pile on the bed onto the pile on the floor, and digging through stuff in the pile on the floor and tossing it to the lone basket at the foot of the bed.

  “Oh fuck,” he was muttering. “I don’t have anything to wear!”

  Joel had to suppress a laugh. “Then what is all this shit on the floor?” he asked
with good nature, and Ian sent him a panicked look from his wild-blue eyes.

  “It’s not funny, mate. All this shit, it’s wrinkled! I’ve got to do laundry! I’ve got to find a laundromat! Jesus, I’ve got to get quarters!”

  He was so distraught that Joel couldn’t laugh anymore. “Ian… Ian… Ian!”

  Ian stopped so abruptly that he tripped over a dress shoe and fell sprawling on (what else?) a pile of clothes. Joel was over to him before he could pick himself up, crouching down to see if he would live.

  “Ian. pop… buddy… you okay?”

  Ian blinked up at him like a startled child. “I’m fine,” he said softly, and a troubled version of that smile appeared. “I hadn’t meant for you to see me lose my nut quite so soon. I’m sorry. I just- I completely forgot….”

  Joel looked carefully at his roommate, saw the bloodshot eyes and the dark bags, and recalled that Ian hadn’t slept the night before, he’d been so intent on his work. Joel took a deep breath, snagged a paper and a pen off the clutter that was Ian’s desk, and sat down to put his tidy mind to work.

  “All right, Ee. Here. This is a list of shit we need. I can pay you back for my half…”

  “No worries,” Ian assured carelessly, and Joel had rolled his eyes. He’d pay the guy back. He didn’t like being in someone’s debt. “No, really!” Ian assured him. “You’re helping me out of a jam here. Let me pay, right?”

  “Ian, it’s no big deal,” Joel laughed, and he was surprised when Ian’s long-fingered hand wrapped around his wrist and stopped him from writing. Joel looked up and met those spring-blue eyes. They were intent and laser focused, and Joel’s breath had caught in his chest.

  “It’s a very big deal,” Ian said seriously. “You didn’t sign up to be my keeper. I’ve made a piss-poor showing here. I appreciate it.”

  There was something naked in his eyes, something stripped bare. Ian was afraid of what Joel would think of him.

  Joel tried a tentative smile, although there was still something in his chest that wanted him not to breathe. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t doing anything else.” This was true. Christ, when was the last time he had a date?