Gambling on Love

by Jane Davitt

Logan snorted. “Mister, if this deal was any sweeter, my teeth would rot.”

  Gary walked over, his hair glowing in the harsh light of the overhead fluorescent panels. “I need a new map, and you need a popular car to break down. Three of the tires are in good shape, and there’s a new battery in there.”

  Logan’s mouth worked as if he had a mouthful of something he wanted to spit out, but after a moment he nodded and extended his hand. Gary shook it and smiled as widely as Miss July.

  “Why did you want the map so badly?” Abe asked when they drove away fifteen minutes later. “It was only a few dollars.”

  Gary hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t want it to be all one-sided, you know? He got a good deal there. I bet he makes triple what it cost him to haul it in and pay me.”

  “Add in time and labor,” Abe pointed out. “I’ve worked for Logan now and then. He puts in long hours and doesn’t make much. He didn’t scam you.”

  “You worked for him?” Gary tucked the map inside the door compartment. “What else do you do to keep busy, Abe?”

  “Lots of stuff. The caretaking isn’t a full-time thing, but there’s a plot of land with the cabin, and spring’s always busy dealing with fallen trees and such. Linda and Sarah like it natural, but sometimes you can’t leave it. In summer, when they’re living here and I’m back in town, I do odd jobs. I don’t make much, but I don’t need much.”

  “And do you get a regular spa treatment to scrape off the moss?”

  It might’ve been meant as a joke, but Gary’s tone was acid enough to make Abe grimace.

  “It’s not high-flying and exciting, but—”

  “It’s pathetic.”

  “No.” Abe smacked the wheel with his hand. “It’s not. It’s my fucking life and I’m happy with it. Don’t judge it based on yours. You were in an office, fucking around with meetings and appointments and people bitching at you or about you, and let’s not start on the rest of it. That life would kill me.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting it for you, but what you have isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Says you.” He pulled into the small parking lot of the diner; he ate there often enough that he knew the menu by heart. Like Logan’s calendar, it never changed. He’d been in there with Gary many times growing up, the two of them tucked away in a booth, eating burgers and fries with a complete lack of concern about calories or cholesterol, and washing them down with free refills of cheap, watery cola until they’d sloshed when they stood. “Before you ruin my appetite, can we save this conversation for another time?”

  Gary peered out of the window, ignoring him or possibly changing the subject. Abe was going with the former.

  “God, is this place still going? I thought Diane was retiring?”

  “She died.” Abe turned off the engine. “Her granddaughter took over. Tonia. She was a few years older than us, but you might remember her?”

  “Tonia Dark? Yeah. I didn’t know she could cook, though.”

  Abe opened his door. “Don’t know if she does the actual cooking, but the food’s okay.” The spaghetti sauce wasn’t as good as his, but he kept that opinion to himself.

  “You’re not a bad cook,” Gary said on the trudge across the lot. It’d been plowed, but it was slippery in places. Abe made sure he was walking close enough to Gary to grab him if he fell. “That mushroom risotto you did last night was incredible—and trust me, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to food.”

  Abe hunched his shoulders, uncomfortable with the praise even as he privately basked in the glow of a rare compliment. “It’s a lot of stirring. It’s not difficult.”

  A few minutes later, when they’d been seated and handed menus, Gary started in again. “You should open a restaurant.”

  Abe had set his menu aside, unopened, but that made him pick it up again. He wanted something to hide behind while he rolled his eyes.

  “I mean it,” Gary persisted. “A friend of— Someone I know did that. A sushi bar. It folded in a year, but—”

  “Exactly. Do you know how many restaurants make it? Not many. And the food I enjoy cooking wouldn’t work here, not even in summer with the tourists.”

  “So you have thought about it.” Gary didn’t look triumphant, but surprised, as if he hadn’t expected his random arrow to hit the bull’s-eye. “You’re that into cooking?”

  Abe shrugged, feeling too big for the booth, all hands and feet. “I like it, yeah, but that’s cooking for me, for fun. On a larger scale, with all the hassle of staff and customers, not to mention the investment I’d need, no. It would suck the fun right out of it.”

  “And your life’s so full of fun now? No, fine, we won’t discuss it,” Gary added before Abe could do more than scowl a warning. “One risotto doesn’t make a menu. Speaking of which, has this place changed at all? Jesus, even the daily specials are the same.”

  “If it changed, there’d be a riot.” Abe tossed the laminated menu aside again and smiled up at the waiter who’d come over to take their order.

  Davey was Tonia’s younger brother and shared his sister’s breezy confidence. “Abe! Long time no see, man. How’s it going?”

  “Not too bad.” He didn’t rate it higher than that. The way the last few days had gone, tempting fate was low on his to-do list. “Pretty busy in here.”

  Davey glanced around at the mostly filled tables. “Yeah, it’s been like this for the last hour. Don’t worry, we’ve still got plenty of food in the kitchen. What can I get you folks? Something to drink, or are you ready to order?”

  “Coffee for me,” Abe said. “I’ll have the hot chicken sandwich with fries, but swap out the veggies for some coleslaw on the side.”

  The vegetables were always lackluster heaps of frozen broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower, cooked to mush and doused with a pasty cheese sauce. Tonia, like her grandmother before her, knew her customers. The vegetables were there for form, but no one at the diner was looking for nutrition, only hot, plentiful food. The coleslaw didn’t go with the meal, but it was homemade, crisp, and tangy, and Abe loved it.

  Gary read the menu with an expression of fascinated horror. Abe gave his ankle a swift, accurate kick under the table and followed it up with a meaningful look. “You about ready?”

  Davey eyed Gary with curiosity but waited in silence, his pencil poised over his order pad.

  “Oh! Uh, coffee for me too, and I’ll have my usual.”

  Abe sighed gustily, gesturing to no one in particular. “He hasn’t set foot in here for a decade, and he expects people to remember his order. Let me see if I can fill in the blanks. Burger, medium, all the fixings, but put the pickle on the plate, not the bun, and a double helping of fries?”

  “You remembered.” Gary beamed at him, overdoing the mush as far as Abe was concerned. He turned to look at a grinning Davey. “Isn’t he adorable?”

  Abe supposed it was payback for the kick, so he took it with a pained smile. Davey simply snickered. “I’ve heard him called worse. Coffee will be right over. Enjoy your meal, guys, and welcome back to town, mister.”

  “You’ll have to try hard to embarrass Davey,” Abe remarked when their coffee had been poured into thick white mugs. They were hard to break but weren’t that easy to drink from. The coffee was too weak for his taste, but not so much he couldn’t drink it. “He serves food in a leprechaun’s outfit on Saint Patrick’s Day and an elf suit over Christmas.”

  “Good for him. Now tell me why you kicked me.”

  “You had this sneer thing going on.” He waved vaguely at Gary. “Like you were comparing the menu to one of the places you usually eat at. Sorry there’s no caviar or truffles in sight.”

  A guilty look crossed Gary’s face. “I didn’t—okay, maybe, but I didn’t mean to. It’s hitting home how nothing has changed around here, and I mean nothing. Time warp time.”

  “You’re wrong there.” Abe reached across the table and took Gary’s hand in his, not holding it for long, but not rushing to pull it back. �
��I couldn’t do that eleven years ago. Things are looser around here.”

  “Fine, but you take my point.” Gary picked up the saltshaker, playing with it idly and managing to spill some onto the table. Amused, Abe watched him pinch a few grains between his fingers and toss them over his shoulder. Gary always had been superstitious. There’d been this lucky quarter he treasured, a keepsake Abe thought of as Gary’s security blanket. “It’s stagnant.”

  “Change can be scary. Disruptive even. What you call stagnant, some people would see as a good thing.”

  “You know I don’t.” Gary took a sip of his coffee and carefully didn’t pull a face.

  “Sorry we still don’t have a Starbucks,” Abe said politely. “Are you getting latte withdrawal symptoms?”

  “Now who’s being an asshole?” Gary looked up from the table. “After we eat, is there time to go somewhere?”

  “Sure. We don’t have anything to do, so we can do whatever you want.”

  And didn’t that prove Gary’s point about how empty his life was.

  “I want to go by the old place.” There was a defiant set to Gary’s mouth that was unnecessary. “See what it looks like.”

  “Sure,” Abe repeated. He’d been expecting a literal walk down memory lane at some point. “We can do that.”

  “I’ll say thanks now. I might not want to later.”

  In an effort to lighten the mood, since it had turned cloudy out of nowhere, Abe pointed at what was left of the salt. “Speaking of superstitions—”

  “We weren’t.”

  “Do you still have that lucky quarter of yours?”

  Gary raised his eyebrows. “You remember my coin?”

  “Well, yeah. You carried that piece of metal around with you for years, and if you stopped, I’m interested in why.” He frowned, something occurring to him that might explain Gary’s defensive attitude. “God, you didn’t lose it, did you? Shit, I’m sorry—”

  “No, I’ve still got it.” Gary fumbled around inside his jacket and pulled out a small drawstring bag. “Want to see it?”

  Abe shook his head. “I might drop it, and you’d never forgive me.”

  “If you dropped it in here, it couldn’t go far,” Gary pointed out, but there was a hint of relief in the way he tucked the bag away. He gave Abe a quick smile. “That’s why we bumped into each other, you know. Because of my coin.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Gary patted his jacket, his hand over the pocket holding the coin. “I tossed it to decide which road to take and ended up going along that godforsaken track and . . . well, you know what happened.”

  “Jesus.” Abe put his hands flat on the table, his world lurching. It’d been that close a call? “I didn’t want to know that.”

  Gary put his hand out, concern clear on his face, and touched Abe’s arm. “Are you okay?”

  “You just told me we came this close to missing each other.” Abe snapped his fingers, the sound crisp and sharp against the hum of conversation and the piped music. “No, I’m not okay. You’d have driven through and past without me knowing it, Fox. I’d have missed you.”

  The enormity of it left him shaken, as if it’d actually happened. He reached out, those last words echoing in his head. Gary took his hand in a comfortingly tight squeeze.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got the coin to thank for it.”

  Abe laughed, then broke off, shocked at how unsteady he sounded. His back was clammy with sweat and his heart raced. He’d never had a panic attack, but he was having one now. With his free hand—a hand he forced not to tremble—he picked up his mug and took a revitalizing gulp.

  “Better?”

  He nodded, though he was still far from restored to normal, and drew back. He was tempted to walk out, take Gary home, and get them both naked to reassure himself Gary wasn’t a figment of his imagination. Davey was approaching with their food, however, and he’d given people enough to gossip over.

  He’d said without thinking that they had nothing to do, but that wasn’t true. He didn’t know how long they had together, or what would happen after their road trip, but until this interlude ended, he’d make the most of it.

  “I can’t get over how different it looked,” Gary said for possibly the third time. He headed for the fridge, opening the door with a yank. “Can I have a beer?”

  “Yeah, help yourself. You don’t need to ask.” Abe ran his hand over the countertop by the sink. It needed scrubbing. He’d neglected the place since Gary arrived. Sunday morning had been spent outside, plowing until the driveway and access road were clear, and when he’d come back in, Gary had been waiting. The look in his eyes had been enough to make Abe abandon his plans to shower before tackling some much-needed tidying.

  They’d spent the afternoon in bed, talking between kisses, the arousal building until they had to do something to quench it, the aftermath stretching out until it became foreplay again. Abe had fallen asleep feeling sated, tender in places, and happy, and awakened with Gary’s mouth on his dick, easing him from dreams to reality.

  It’d started the day off well.

  “They’d painted the front door green. We always kept it white.”

  From what Abe could remember, the paint on the front door of Gary’s house had been so cracked and peeled, the original color was impossible to make out. The difference now wasn’t so much the color as that the paint was smooth and fresh. He kept his mouth shut, however.

  “And the garden! Full of flowers.”

  “It was covered in a foot of snow, Fox. How the hell—”

  “You know what I mean! Tell me come spring, it won’t have flowers.” Gary’s voice shook. “It looked nice. It never looked that way when I lived there. Crappy little house in a crappy part of town.”

  “Hey.” Abe went to him and took the beer from Gary’s hand, putting it down. He touched his shoulder lightly, then his face. “Your mom couldn’t keep it looking the way it did when your dad was alive, but it was never crappy. And now there’s a family there who love it and are taking care of it. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”

  “It’s not. I’m being stupid.” Gary took a deep breath and visibly shook free of the memories. “We need to make plans.”

  The abrupt mood change left Abe floundering. “Plans?”

  “We need to get on the road. Oh, not today, it’s better to go in the morning, but—”

  “You want to go that soon?” Abe went to get a beer for himself, grateful for the chance to hide his face inside the fridge for a moment. “I don’t know. I need to find someone to look after the cat, and I’ve got to let Linda and Sarah know I won’t be around, see what they say.”

  “Jesus, you’re allowed to take a vacation, aren’t you?” Gary snapped. “It’s not as if you’ll be gone for long.”

  Abe absorbed the implications without letting his reaction show. So Gary saw them going their separate ways after the trip? Not how Abe planned it.

  “You want to drive down there, blow this money, then what? What happens next?”

  Gary screwed his face up irritably. “How do I know? I don’t. I’ll start over, I guess. Find a job, find a—”

  “Find another Peter?” It came out accusing, and Abe winced, but stayed with it. “I won’t let you do that.”

  “And you’re going to stop me how, exactly?” Gary squared up to him, eyes flint-hard. “If you think I’m coming back here to live with you in domestic bliss behind a nicely painted door, forget it. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that happy ending doesn’t work for me.”

  “I know you don’t want that, but there’s got to be something—” Abe took a gulp from the bottle he held, tilting it too far so the beer gushed out, choking him and spilling over his chin. “Fuck!” He wiped his face with the back of his hand, annoyed by his clumsiness.

  “You’re tied to this place. Your family, your job, your cat. You belong here.”

  He made it sound like a prison sentence, and for a moment, Abe saw it that w
ay. He caught a glimpse of the world Gary knew, a wide world, where oceans were something to fly or sail over, with new countries on the other side, waiting to be explored. He’d never gone anywhere. His parents had invited him to join them in Florida, and he’d refused. He’d claimed he couldn’t leave the cabin, but that was bullshit.

  “I want to say the hell with it and come with you for more than this trip, but you don’t know what you’re doing, Gary. I’d give up this job and follow you and we’d end up in a dive somewhere, fighting all the time and hating each other, because we were bored and broke.”

  “Way to see the dark side. We could both find jobs we liked, get a nice place somewhere fun with some life to it, and fuck our brains out every chance we get.”

  “Is that your happy ending?”

  Gary shrugged. “Throw in a lottery win down the line, and it’ll do. Don’t get me wrong, Abe. Meeting you again . . . God, I’m glad we did. I won’t lie and act cool, because you’d see through it. This whole thing has given me—”

  “If you say ‘closure’ or any other bullshit word—”

  “Fine, it’s given me some great sex. Is that better?”

  “Is that all?”

  Gary pinched his lips together as if struggling to hold back the words he wanted to say, but Abe wanted to hear them. He took shameless advantage of Gary’s vulnerabilities and moved in close again. With his hands cupping Gary’s face, he bent his head and kissed the compressed lips until they were soft and open.

  “Tell me you feel the same way I do,” he whispered. “Tell me you love me, because I’m not gonna lie, I’m in love with you. Always have been, can’t seem to stop.”

  “Shit, don’t do this.” Gary struggled to free himself, his eyes frantic. “Don’t say that to me.”

  Abe let him go, but he wouldn’t take back what he’d said. “I love you,” he repeated. “It’s not news to you. If you think I’m caught up in the moment or something, yeah. This has been a shock. I want to pinch myself every time you walk into a room or say my name. I can’t believe you’re back with me again. But that doesn’t mean the way I feel will change when I get over the surprise.”