He could only stare.
“What?”
“Olivia,” Diego called out.
She peered around the bulkhead. “What can I get for you, sir?”
“Do you think it’s possible we could have complete privacy for about ten minutes?”
“Certainly, sir. Just press the call button if you need anything.”
Olivia was far too experienced and professional to react to his request with anything more than hauteur.
Diego nodded. “I think I have this particular thing covered.”
She gave him a small smile before retreating.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Healey asked.
“Stand up.”
“Um. Air turbulence . . .”
“I’ll be gentle.” Diego crooked his finger.
“I don’t know if I should take the chance.” But he stood, leaning precariously before making his way to Diego’s seat. “I don’t want to get my dick torn off.”
“I don’t want to hold it. I want to suck it.”
“Okay. Wow.” Healey shivered. “YOLO, whatever.”
Diego repositioned his legs and pulled Healey closer. He took Healey’s hands and placed them on his shoulders before unfastening his belt buckle, which was slim this time. Silver and elegant. The fabric of Healey’s trousers felt great to his touch.
“What can I do?” Healey asked.
Diego met his slightly off-kilter gaze. “I’ve got this, honey. You can just remain in the upright and locked position until I bring you in for a landing.”
“A-ha.” Healey squeaked when Diego took his zipper down and mouthed his balls through his briefs. “I’m never flying commercial again.”
“That’s how it starts.” Diego sucked in a deep lungful of warm most air. “Christ, you smell good.”
Healey’s briefs were very brief. The head of his cock surged above his waistband while Diego nibbled the fat column of his dick. God, he wanted that cock in the worst way. Wanted it every way. He was done feeling crappy about sex. Done thinking all the good stuff was in his past.
This is the good stuff. This. Right now.
His dick didn’t care, but the rest of his senses were still perfectly fine. Healey was beautiful. Diego loved his man-scent. His crisp pubic hair fairly crackled beneath Diego’s fingers. He tasted of salt and sweat and the sweetness that simply oozed from him.
The rumble of Healey’s voice sent shivers down his back.
When he gripped Healey’s hips, excitement made his fingers tremble. Not precisely from sexual arousal, but Diego couldn’t discern between the arousal and excitement anymore. He wanted Healey. Wanted to suck him, fuck him. Mark him.
He leaned over and did just that, pulling up a bruise in the hollow of Healey’s hip. Healey hissed, either with pain or passion.
When Diego had no breath left, he thumbed the mark. Healey’s hand came up to increase the pressure. He liked things a little rough, he’d said, and he proved it then.
“I love that, baby,” Healey urged. “Use your teeth.”
Diego licked and bit. He regressed, turning Healey around and going caveman on his pert ass. Smack!
Healey groaned. Someone definitely liked that.
Almost frenzied, Diego left a cluster of slight pink bite marks and fingerprints on his pale, faintly freckled skin. So fucking pretty. Warm to the touch.
Next time he’d use his mouth and his tongue and his Frankencock Monster until that sweet pink hole was goddamn full . . .
Healey turned and gripped Diego’s head between his hands. Desperation looked good on him. Diego wrapped his lips around Healey’s dick and sucked him in. Moving slowly at first, he savored each stroke of his tongue over the slick, lumpy-veined, gorgeous length. He went down on Healey with reverence. With precision, and passion, and awe.
He needed this. Needed to suck and slurp and worship this cock. He needed the moans and sobs, and that final sweet burst of seed that filled his mouth.
Healey cried out.
Diego pulled Healey into his arms. Enfolded and held him. As much as he’d ever need an orgasm, he needed to redefine what it meant to be a whole, human man.
Now he could see without question, without ego or artifice or pride. He was a man. He was the man who made Healey Holly burst, and gasp, and sigh. His sexual reality had changed, but it wasn’t over. It was only different. He could have a man in his life, in his heart, in his bed, and he wanted that man to be Healey Holly.
Healey ran questing fingers over his lips. “Something funny?”
Diego shook his head, too moved to speak.
Healey’s fingers continued to explore—his chin, his neck, the hollow of his throat. Lips followed.
Blue eyes, half-dazed, fluttered open. “So fucking good, Diego.”
“See?” Diego swallowed past the thickness in his throat. “No turbulence.”
“You don’t think so?” Healey’s gaze found his.
“Let’s make you respectable.”
Healey smiled. “Good luck with that.”
It wasn’t easy putting Healey’s clothes to rights, considering Healey kept trying to crawl inside Diego’s skin while he did it.
“Does wearing a suit make you more affectionate?”
“I don’t know.” Healey used his hair to tickle Diego’s shoulder. “Does it?”
“Knock it off,” Diego teased. “Olivia will be back any minute with food.”
Cheeks pink, eyes shining, lips full and moist from Diego’s kisses, Healey stood before nearly falling back into his own seat.
“You are something else.” Diego didn’t know what, but it didn’t matter.
Healey was his.
Since 1972, the sign said, Gladstones has been serving the freshest fish in Malibu. The restaurant was right on the beach.
Diego wanted to wait in the restaurant’s bar while Cecil’s driver Cameron took Healey up the Pacific Coast Highway to see Ford at the Nautilus Center.
“No offense,” he’d said. “But I’d rather have something to look at for an hour than the back of Cameron’s head.”
It was late afternoon when they pulled away from the restaurant’s parking lot. Healey’s last view of Diego—sitting backlit against the Pacific, wind playing with his slightly stubborn hair, lingered. It anchored him.
Fog crept onto the land. The atmosphere was exactly right, emotionally—as if someone from Wolf’s Landing had scripted the scene. At sunset, the fog-shrouded coast would appear gone completely.
Healey shivered. Sometimes things he had to do were hard. He had no idea what to expect, and for someone like him . . . maybe that was the worst thing. If you couldn’t plan, you couldn’t prepare. You couldn’t protect yourself from wrong answers, bad calculations, and failure. Most people who knew him, figured him for a happy-go-lucky-type, like his pop.
And he was. But he’d been through tragic things and terrifying things, too. And his way of coping was to learn everything he could about every problem ahead of time, coupled with the certain knowledge he was smart enough to figure out solutions. When he didn’t know going in what was going to happen, that’s when things fell apart for him.
At last he found himself outside the very expensive, very private residential treatment center where Ford waited for his trial. Healey braced himself for whatever he’d find.
But first, he had to pass through a level of security he’d rarely seen before—one that, in key areas, featured fingerprint identification and ballistic glass.
Outside the steel and glass building, tree-shrouded gardens fielded enough greenery to camouflage its primary function—rehab for celebrities suffering from all manner of “work-related exhaustion.”
Inside, the building looked like the campus of any post-millennial dot com business, but without the aura of productivity. It was possible those companies took their cues from forward-thinking wellness centers, but it was more likely this “campus” took its lead from Google. An administrator—a man who clearly consid
ered any visitor of Ford Robertson Keyes a VIP—took Healey into an office with a floor-to-ceiling ocean view to introduce himself and explain the rules for visitations.
He offered to take Healey to see Ford personally.
At reception, Healey was asked to empty his pockets into a secure locker, to give up his phone and any other electronics. He was briskly and efficiently searched. They walked down three pristine beige marble hallways before going through a set of automated glass doors and into a courtyard with outdoor seating and unlit fire pits.
Ford sat at a fancy bistro table on the wide veranda overlooking the churning waters at the foot of the cliffs below. An eight-foot glass wall separated him from the edge. He wore blue scrubs under a hoodie featuring a stylized Nautilus shell logo on the back. When Healey approached him, he saw the words Relief, Respite, and Recovery embroidered beneath it. Ford had what looked like a chai tea latte. Next to that, some chocolate-dipped madeleines were fanned out on a white china plate.
The view was spectacular here too.
The man who’d led him here melted away to give them privacy. The many cameras, with their ever-changing angles, followed their every move, destroying the illusion.
Healey’s first thought, despite the monitoring device on Ford’s ankle, despite the vacant apathy in Ford’s eyes, was how can I get a room at this establishment?
Ford didn’t rise to greet him. He didn’t look up.
In fact, Ford didn’t react at all.
That was the final straw. The final insult.
Final, final, final . . . and still Healey could not let things go.
Suddenly, like a thunderclap headache or a really bad case of food poisoning, his entire body rebelled against the idea of being here. Nausea roiled in his gut and the bright sun blinded him. Sweat popped out on his forehead and trickled down his neck. Stinging sweat, prickling all along his skin.
He was exactly like his dad after all.
He was here to fence with windmills—here because it wasn’t in his nature to give up, especially not on a person he cared about. Despite that, despite the sick-making frustration of loving someone who could not love him back, he couldn’t simply leave.
What was it going to finally take?
The thing between him and Ford hadn’t been romantic love for a long time. Not since the real Ford started bringing randoms home to mess with his head.
Now, it appeared his Ford had left the building entirely.
You couldn’t love someone who wasn’t there.
Or you could love. He did. He still loved Ford. But Ford couldn’t love him back even if he wanted to.
Healey sat in the chair opposite Ford, sick with sorrow.
“A plate of cookies . . .” Ford emptied out the pocket of his sleep pants onto the table, studying a pill that clattered on the clean marble surface after he shook it from his hand “. . . three nasty tissues and a risperidone. I think that’s what that is. For your thoughts. And don’t spare me. I deserve whatever.”
“No, you don’t.” Healey sighed. “Neither of us deserves any of this.”
“It’s possible I do. Likely, even. I’ve never been a good person.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Healey made the familiar argument. Like perfunctory sex, he went through the motions even as Ford sighed. Even as Ford let him explain something Ford lived with every day. “The brain is a fragile ecosystem. The body is a machine. A single cell mutates, and things go wrong. It’s not because you’re bad. It’s not anybody’s fault. It just is.”
“I’ve been reading the Bible—the New Testament, where Jesus heals the sinners.” In the microsecond before he could rein in his thoughts, Healey must have let his true feelings show, because Ford exploded. “Fuck you. Fuck you! You don’t know everything.”
The cup flew, flinging foamy tea everywhere.
Healey got down to pick up the pieces, and while he did that, he took several deep, calming breaths.
“You’re right. I don’t know everything. Just because I don’t believe, doesn’t mean—”
“Don’t handle me, Healey.” Ford put both hands up like claws, as if he was going to spring and rend Healey to bits. “I can’t stand it when you do that.”
“I’m sorry.” Healey clasped his hands together, unafraid. If Ford came at him, he’d deal with it. “I want to thank you for seeing me. I know you didn’t want to. I appreciate you letting me come here today.”
Ford snorted. “It’s not like I had a choice. It was a condition of the . . . thing. Whatever. They said I had to see you. My lawyers.”
Lawyers. Plural. Wow. “Regardless of how it happened, I appreciate it.”
“What do you hope to achieve here, Heals?” Ford’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t save me. You never could.”
“No,” Healey agreed, “I can’t save you.”
“Remember when we met?”
“I do.” But maybe he didn’t.
Was it drum circle, or Quidditch?
Or had Ford just passed by his dorm room and seen him alone and come in? The fact was . . . he couldn’t remember. But Diego—how Diego looked the first time he opened the door to the house that once belonged to Pop—Healey remembered that.
Remembered the shock of recognition. Not that he’d ever seen Diego in his life, but . . . he remembered feeling like he knew him. Or was it just the house he knew, and now . . . was he making connections that weren’t there? He blinked.
“You’ve met someone.” Ford’s words weren’t a question. “I can see it all over you. Happiness looks like yellow frosting.”
“You’re the one I’m holding in my heart right now. You’re the one I’m looking at, right now. What color frosting is that?”
Ford sighed again. “Blue.”
“Make it warmer,” Healey begged. “Make it purple. I love you, Ford. I never stopped loving you.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to know. What I feel is about me. I love you. I will be here for you if you ever need me. If you let me know what I can do . . .”
Ford blinked his wide brown eyes slowly, disconcertingly. It fell into an eerie cadence. Almost like normal human behavior, it was at the same time decidedly medicated and mechanical.
“What about the yellow-frosting man?”
Healey shrugged. “That’s separate. Make my frosting when I’m with you purple, then it can be separate. Different and separate.”
“I guess having someone new means you won’t blow me anymore.” He bit his lip. “Imma miss that.”
“Sorry.” Healey shook his head. “That’s for him now. But love is a separate thing. The love is still yours. I’ll never take it away. It’s not a resource issue like land or food. The more I give away, the more I’ll have to give.”
“The gospel according to John . . . Lennon. My God, Healey.” The old Ford made a brief, astounding comeback. “How did we end up here? I’m the smartest kid in coloring class.”
Healey had no answers for him. Some mischief made Ford reach out and pluck the pin from Healey’s hair.
“That’s better. Relax.”
“All right.” Healey removed his jacket.
“Nice threads.”
Healey gave the fabric a rub. “They’re Nash’s.”
Ford snorted. “Pull the other one.”
“No, really. This is his. The suit, the shirt, this cuff link.” He gestured to the sleeve over his unbroken arm. “My stuff is still—”
“At our place?” Ford winced. “I think Beryl cleaned out our apartment.”
That wasn’t good. He hoped she’d simply put his things in storage but very much feared she’d tossed them.
“There was nothing there I need right away.”
Ford turned his face. “I hate sad things.”
“I know.” On instinct, Healey took Ford’s hand between his.
Ford didn’t react. “It was always going to be good-bye between us, wasn’t it?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t know. I guess.”
“I thought maybe we should be like Thelma and Louise . . .”
Healey’s turn to blink. “They died.”
“Spoilers, hello.” How did Ford convey such pain with laughter? “Now you tell me?”
A long time passed before Healey could make himself speak. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked. “For us to go out in some . . . blaze of glory?”
“I don’t know what I wanted.” Ford gave eye roll like a CW network soap star. “I certainly have no idea what I wanted that night. Except . . . maybe . . .”
Healey waited. “Yeah?”
“I wanted to believe it wasn’t going to end.”
“I’m so sorry.”
What they’d had was fated to end—no matter what—before Ford tried to get them both killed.
But it was over now, sure as fuck.
Healey imagined that kitten monstrosity from the flight down in its white sparkly cat carrier, only marked S’s Cat—simultaneously dead and alive.
That’s what happens when you drink on the way to visit people in fancy rehab centers.
Ford leaned forward. “If you say one word about Schrödinger’s fucking cat, I will call security.”
Healey started guiltily. “What?”
“You were thinking it.”
“So now you’re psychic?” But he had been thinking it. “Okay, fuck, you know me pretty well, don’t you?”
“I should think so.” Little by little, pressure increased on Healey’s hand. “I never wanted to lose my best friend.”
“But it’s complicated, right?”
Ford nodded. “I’ll be here for a while, you know?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get your own lawyer?” Ford let go of his hand and folded his neatly, almost primly on the table.
“I have someone helping me out right now.”
“Yellow-frosting man?” The blank expression was back in place.
“His stepfather is an attorney. He’s going to advise me. I don’t know what will happen.”
Ford craned his neck first one way, and then the other. Healey recognized the move as a technique he’d learned to weigh his thoughts, rather than blurt out the first thing.
“I’m sorry I broke your phone.”
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