by Con Riley
Only months before Aiden’s dad had died, his mom had called, sounding worried. It was audit time at his dad’s company, and he’d apparently been working too hard again. Aiden came home from college for the weekend and went to his dad’s office to see if he could help.
Getting off the elevator on the wrong floor had been accidental. But standing outside Theo’s office once he realized that he and Ben were in there had bordered on deliberate.
The offices had been deserted that Saturday afternoon. Aiden guessed that audit time meant extra work for all the managers, because Theo sat with his back to the partially open doorway, his head in his hands. Ben stood next to him, rubbing his shoulders with strokes that looked firm and soothing. His voice had been a low rumble that left Aiden paralyzed, standing to one side of the almost-closed door, peering through the gap.
Ben had told Theo off. It sounded as if he was angry that Theo was in the office on the weekend, and then he sounded concerned that Theo hadn’t eaten. His grumbles punctuated a back rub that soon progressed to foreplay. Aiden’s mouth had grown dry as he watched through the crack in the door while Ben got Theo to stand, then bend over the desk. The whole time he’d told Theo how much he loved him, and how much he missed him when he worked so hard, and how he knew a really good way to make Theo relax.
Theo’s laugh had been muffled. Ben had laughed too; then his voice had lowered, sounding husky.
“You want me to fuck you, Theo? You need me inside you to take your mind off this pointless paper shuffling that steals all of our time? Maybe I should fuck you for once, to bring back your good temper.” He’d rubbed against Theo’s ass. Aiden had told himself to leave, but then Ben continued talking. “You look so ugly when you stress so, tesoro. I’ll have to fuck you from behind. If I see your face, I will lose my erection.”
Theo had snorted, pushing back and shoving his hand underneath him. It was hard to tell from where Aiden stood, but he guessed he’d been unfastening his pants. Theo sounded breathless. “You’ll have to think of someone pretty, like I always have to.”
Ben’s laugh rang out. He humped his partner’s ass and rubbed his back as he listed the names of people prettier than Theo. The list went on and on, provoking laughter or growling from his partner.
Aiden had leaned against the doorframe, suddenly weak, wishing with everything he had in him that Ben would say his name, would think about him as he got closer, would picture his face right when he came, like Aiden so often did, picturing Ben.
Ben was shorter than Theo, but he sure seemed in control right until Theo turned quickly, scooping him up and pressing him against the wall. Aiden had stumbled away once he saw the expression on Theo’s face. Aiden knew they’d been together for many years, but Theo looked as if he still couldn’t believe his good luck.
Aiden’s father’s words about the sadness inherent in being gay blew away like wisps of smoke once Aiden glimpsed, for a moment, exactly what love between men could look like.
He knew Ben and Theo belonged together. He knew it. And Ben’s death had only confirmed that having something like that for himself was unlikely—what were the chances of meeting someone who matched him as well? Aiden had told himself that onetime deals suited him fine. Maybe other guys would have used their college years to try out a steady relationship, but not him. Once his dad was gone, leaving such a fucking mess behind him, he had neither the time nor the emotional energy to spare. Those excuses worked right up until Evan got himself a steady boyfriend, making Aiden question himself again. Then, just when he thought he’d found a place where he could finally relax by house-sitting for Peter, Marco had opened the front door for him.
It had been like seeing a ghost.
Now, living with Ben’s younger brother—who could have been his twin—only made everything harder. So much harder. It was bad enough seeing him every day at Peter’s house. Marco coming to Aiden’s mother’s home like this was completely inexcusable.
“Tesoro—”
“Don’t call me that.” Aiden hadn’t meant to yell, but Marco stumbled backward all the same, as if Aiden’s words had shoved him against the storage-shed door. “Don’t . . . just don’t.” He could hardly meet Marco’s concerned, confused gaze. The sound of a door opening made Aiden flinch.
Mom.
Fuck.
He closed his eyes momentarily as his mother approached. She rounded the corner, saw Marco, and almost dropped the ice-cube-filled glass she held.
“I didn’t know you’d brought a friend with you, Aiden. You should have said.” She stepped closer, frowning as she stared at Marco. “Don’t I know you?”
“Maybe you knew my brother, Ben de Luca. We are very similar, it’s true. I thank God every day that I do not resemble my other brothers—idiot giants, all of them. I’m Marco, Aiden’s housemate.” Marco kissed the back of Aiden’s mother’s hand, surprising her into a smile. He cast a glance in Aiden’s direction as if trying to read his mood. “I was about to help Aiden repair your mower.”
Aiden could hardly stifle his groan. His mom launched into the beginnings of a panic, worrying aloud, her verbal anxiety spiraling quickly, mirroring the way her free hand twisted around his as he tried to placate her.
Marco looked surprised. “I’m sure that we can fix it for you, Mrs. Daly. I did not mean to cause you any worry. A minor repair is probably all that is necessary.”
Aiden’s voice sounded hollow with exhaustion—unconvincing even to his own ears. “It’s fine, Mom.”
Marco stood behind her, facing Aiden, his expression shifting between confusion and concern all over again. He swallowed, then interrupted. “Could I trouble you for a drink, Mrs. Daly?”
Aiden’s mom almost immediately snapped out of her rising panic, her good manners compelling her to offer the glass she still held to Marco.
“I would prefer water. Shall I come inside with you?” Before Aiden could gather his thoughts, Marco had his arm around his mom, his dark head bent toward her graying one, steering her around the corner again. He chatted the whole way across the backyard, his huskily accented voice carrying until the back door squeaked again before closing behind them.
For a moment, Aiden felt grateful. Then he recalled that his mom would have been none the wiser if Marco hadn’t run off his stupid, beautiful-like-his-brother’s mouth in the first place. He knelt and wrenched off the mower motor’s casing, peering at its workings as if he had the first idea what he was looking at. When the door opened again, he didn’t look up. Marco soon knelt beside him, his hand tentative on Aiden’s rigid shoulder.
“I’m sorry, tes—” This time Marco stopped himself from using his habitual endearment, describing Aiden as precious. “I didn’t mean to cause a problem.” For once he sounded serious.
Aiden was too angry to speak. He continued to poke around, peering at the motor as Marco sat in rare silence. The next time Marco spoke, Aiden found that he couldn’t help but turn to look at him. He sounded completely unlike his usual self.
“I didn’t realize how much we have in common.”
His subsequent lapse into silence made Aiden speak up, asking, “What? What on earth can we possibly have in common?” He looked away again, glaring at the broken mower. Maybe he sounded indignant. He couldn’t help it. He was nothing like his housemate. Nothing. Marco was flippant and lighthearted to the point of thoughtlessness, seeing a reason to laugh at things that weren’t even funny. He was always laughing. And he ran his own business as if it were inconsequential, seeming to pay scant attention to it apart from Skyping with his brothers in Milan.
Marco spent every free moment trying to get under Aiden’s skin. They had nothing in common at all.
“I wanted to come to Seattle while my brother was still alive. I would have come sooner, only I worried about Mamma being on her own. When Ben died, I believed she needed me at home even more.”
Aiden turned to look at him.
“It’s true,” Marco continued, his expression troubled fo
r once. “How old is your mother, Aiden?” When Aiden shared that she was in her late sixties, Marco nodded. “Mine is a little older. I guess you could call my birth a menopause surprise. I told you that Mamma called me her good luck, didn’t I? That’s why she gave me my papà’s name. Fortunato means lucky, and it was at least a small part of him that I could keep forever. He died before I was born.” Marco paused, shrugging. “Mamma and I are very close.”
Aiden had known Marco was the youngest in his family, but he hadn’t known that his mother was significantly older, like Aiden’s own—she had waited until her early forties before adopting him—or that she was a widow too.
Marco continued, inspecting the mower engine, removing a few parts with movements that were precise and dexterous. “I talk with her every day. My brothers and their wives look after her, but I can’t help worrying about her still.” He sighed and wiped engine grease from his fingers onto the grass beside him. “I could have stayed in Milan, but Mamma says life has to go on, no? It has to go on, even if it’s different and difficult.”
Aiden swallowed, then swallowed again, trying to clear the sudden constriction in his throat. Life had gone on after his dad died. And it was different. Different and difficult, even five years later, in ways that Aiden still found hard to wrap his head around. Aiden swallowed one last time, and when he spoke, Marco’s expression changed. He’d never looked more like his brother.
“What are you doing here, Marco?” Aiden knew he sounded exhausted, and Marco’s answer only made him even more tired.
“Mamma sent me to say goodbye to my brother in the place where he was happiest. If I found any happiness here as well, she said I should take it.”
“I meant what are you doing here, in my mom’s backyard, right now?”
Marco’s smile was slow, as was the way he pivoted from his kneeling position next to Aiden to straddle him. He settled in Aiden’s lap as if it was something he did every day, wrapping his arms around Aiden’s neck and shifting until he was comfortable. Aiden could feel Marco’s fingers leaving smears of engine grease on Aiden’s cheeks as he held his head still and kissed him.
Aiden froze, torn between shoving Marco away and the sudden, surprising urge to hold him much, much tighter. His final question was a hoarse, low rumble. “What are you doing?”
When Marco whispered, “Exactly what Mamma told me,” Aiden almost kissed him back.
Chapter Three
Another creak of the door leading from the house to the backyard interrupted a moment that surely would have ended in disaster. As he shoved Marco from his lap, Aiden counted his blessings that he hadn’t gotten around to oiling the noisy hinges.
Aiden wiped his mouth. The back of his hand felt rough compared to the surprising softness of Marco’s lips. He rubbed harder, smearing away the sensation of Marco’s kiss and of the slick tongue tip that he’d been about to open up to. Jesus. What had he been thinking?
It was bad enough that his housemate had intruded on his private family space. If his mom had caught Marco kissing him like that—provoking a response from Aiden that left him blinking and breathless—it might have sent her straight into shock again.
His hand slipped from his mouth to his chest, rubbing where heartburn suddenly flickered as his imagination raced ahead, filling his head with horribly vivid detail. He rose to his feet, almost staggering. There was no way in hell that he’d ever want to see his mom break down outside their garage again—or anywhere, for that matter. Once in a lifetime was enough.
Marco sprawled on his back on the grass, looking shocked at Aiden’s sudden movement. Then he heard the approaching clink of ice cubes against glass and started to scramble to his feet too. He didn’t move fast enough for Aiden, who reached out, wrapping one huge hand around Marco’s forearm, almost lifting him clear off his feet as he yanked him upright.
This time Aiden’s mom crossed the yard carrying a tray holding freshly filled glasses, along with a bowl of chips. She sounded pleased when Marco blurted that he thought the mower would be an easy repair as he took the tray from her. Aiden watched relief slip across her features, much as it had every time her meds used to kick in. It had taken him years to figure out that their effect was a temporary reprieve from pain and that the pills had only stalled her recovery after his dad’s passing.
Truthfully, they hadn’t helped her at all.
In fact, it had been Joel who had left a list of bereavement counselors on Aiden’s desk at the store, drawing his attention to alternative strategies. When Aiden had ignored the list for weeks, leaving it on his desk, it had eventually disappeared. Aiden hadn’t even realized the piece of paper had moved until it turned up on the refrigerator door in his apartment kitchen, held up by alphabet magnets spelling out HELP.
Aiden had added meddling in private family business to his own list of reasons to dislike his brother’s boyfriend.
At first he hadn’t realized that Joel’s list had been aimed at his mother. He’d read the list of counselors and thought Joel had meant it for him, even though that seemed baffling. Why would he need a bereavement counselor? It had been years since he’d woken, scrambling to get out of bed, hurling himself down his hallway, certain that if he only hustled he could get home in time to stop his dad. In Aiden’s estimation, the time for counseling was long past. He’d gotten over losing Dad fine.
He’d had to.
Then he wondered if Joel had meant the list for Evan, and that had made him furious—incandescent in a way that had left him shaking. The last five years had been difficult, but he’d done everything he could to make things easier for Evan. Every fucking thing he could. He’d shielded his brother from . . . . He couldn’t even begin to think about it. Evan and Mom were his life. To suggest that his brother needed help was beyond insulting.
Seething, Aiden had torn down the list and trashed it.
He hadn’t been able to trash Joel’s third attempt to force him to see what was right in front of his face.
Joel had emailed him and then had sat by Aiden’s desk, his usual annoyingly amused expression absent, as he waited for Aiden to read it. His message had been bold and black, its font distinctive, making quite an impact. It comprised three lines that listed how badly Aiden had fucked up. He read them, and he blamed himself for being so dumb. Then he blamed Joel for having the nerve to point out his shortcomings.
Maybe he would have ignored that message too if Evan hadn’t stood behind his grim-faced boyfriend, as if Joel were a shield between them. That had hurt.
Aiden read those three lines over and over, and each time he did so, guilt pressed between his ribs like the blade of a stiletto, thin and sharp and painful. When Evan silently sided with his boyfriend—worry suddenly making Evan look as old as Aiden felt—that blade pushed in a little deeper.
Your mother isn’t getting better.
The medication alone isn’t cutting it.
Please let other people help her.
He’d burned with shame that day in his stockroom office, and that familiar heat prickled across his chest again as his housemate stood in his mom’s backyard and reassured her that he could solve her current problem.
That Marco—fucking Marco—could strip away his mom’s anxiety with only a few warm words made Aiden clutch at his own ribs, sure he’d find a dagger handle there, the pain was so sharp and familiar. He dropped to his knees again, clumsily reattaching the engine parts Marco had so easily removed. His fingers rebelled, withdrawing their cooperation as he paid too little attention to what he was doing, focusing instead on Marco’s conversation with his mother.
Eventually he replaced the engine casing, leaving it loose, and knelt in silence as his housemate talked. For one completely out-of-control moment, Aiden wanted to leap up and drag his mom away, or punch Marco in the mouth to stop him from saying things that might tip her over the edge into anxiety once again. Instead he bowed his head, turning a couple of screws over in his palm, listening with his eyes closed.
Marco guided Aiden’s mom to the patio table, where the final rays of evening sun struck, and set down the tray he carried. As Marco spoke, Aiden opened his eyes again and realized that it must be getting late. His watch said it was after eight thirty already. No wonder he felt so tired—he’d been at work since six that morning. He tuned in to Marco’s conversation just in time to hear him talk about his own mother.
“Of course, now that I’m here, I worry about her all the time. I feel guilty for leaving Italy. Sometimes I think I should go home right away. I like it here very much, but Americans are more difficult to understand than Ben ever told me.”
His mom asked what Marco meant, and Aiden turned to study them both as they sat close together.
“People tell me to have a nice day here, but when I stop to ask how their day is going, they look at me as if I speak a different language. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve spoken in Italian by mistake.” His shrug was small. “I don’t understand why people go to work so early or stay there so late.” His gaze held Aiden’s for a moment. “And why do people shop at night? Don’t people who work in stores have families to eat with?”
Aiden remembered the first week they’d house-shared together. Marco had been delighted to have company. At the time, Aiden had still wrestled with the way he’d glimpse traces of Ben in Marco’s expressions. He told himself to get over it—Ben had been one of a kind, and Marco was nothing like him, really. Even Marco’s excitement when Aiden got in from work seemed weird and oppressive. He would literally set foot inside the door to find Marco there, taking his work files from him, hurrying him to the kitchen, where he’d talk incessantly as he cooked until Aiden had to escape. It was as if he hadn’t spoken to a single soul all day, even though Aiden knew that couldn’t have been the truth. Marco talked to anyone and everyone, never seeming to run out of nosy questions.
