Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  Dex chuckled and then groaned. “Crap. No sex for two weeks. God, you just reminded me how much that’s gonna suck.”

  “That’s the problem,” Kane grunted. “No sucking at all. Okay, here we are, slowing down and turning right. How much further do we have to go?”

  “About five miles.” Dex’s cock gave an enormous throb, and he wondered that he could even get a hard-on so close to home.

  Kane apparently had no problem with that, though. He made a sound of discomfort and took one hand off the wheel just long enough to adjust himself. “Two weeks,” he muttered. “We’re gonna have to find a quiet place in the barn, Dexter, because I ain’t gonna make it. So when do we get to your parents’ property?”

  Dex looked around, noticed the outbuilding his dad had built to hold supplies. “We’re here. As soon as we turned, we were on it—it’s to our left.”

  Kane grunted. “Wow. That’s a lot of… whatever the hell it is!”

  Dex shrugged. “Everything. It was sheep first, but they tear the hell out of the ground, so Dad just has a small flock of the kind with the real good fleece. He makes a lot of money for the fleece, and the little herd leaves more of the land for cattle, and we have a small herd of dairy cows and a bigger herd of beeves, and there’s some land we can farm, but Montana is a lot of rocks in the middle of all that flat, so not as much as you’d think.”

  Kane grunted. “Yeah, uhm, Dex? Whatever that word was that there’s a herd of, you’re not gonna make me say it, are you? I don’t know how I could work that one into conversation.”

  Dex laughed and pointed out three guys on horses, riding by the road. The horses were picking their way carefully through the snow, and the guys were in shearling coats, with Stetsons on over stocking caps, leather gloves, and probably long underwear on under their jeans. “Looks like Dad and the guys are out already. Maybe after we unpack, we can join them.”

  Kane made a disbelieving sound. “Me, on a horse.”

  “Yeah!”

  “In the snow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dex, do you not remember Cabo? It was warm, sunny, and frickin’ beautiful there, and it was all you could do to get me to wake up enough to fuck! I’m napping by the fire, if that’s okay with you. If your mom needs help in the kitchen, I’ll go help there.”

  “Oh.” Dex felt an absurd disappointment.

  “Oh what?”

  The car hit an ice patch and tried to buck. Kane apparently was not into letting that happen and told it to behave with an easy flex of the bicep. Dex, who worked out just as much as Kane, felt a sudden flush of pride. Oh yeah, Kane could drive a car in the snow. Dex tried to swallow it down. It wasn’t like Mom and Dad knew what Kane was to him, but Dex did. Kane was someone to be proud of.

  “I wanted you to ride a horse,” Dex said, not sure how to make this sound less lame. “You just… you get excited about shit like that. I thought, you know… it would be sort of a reward, for coming out here and dealing with this shit.”

  Kane looked at him quickly and then immediately back to the road. “Don’t get me wrong, Dexter”—the more Kane called him David, the more Dexter sounded like an endearment, like “sweetheart” or “baby” or “darlin’”—“I do want to see the horses. I just want to pet them in their stables. Is that so wrong?”

  Dex laughed a little. “No,” he said quietly.

  “I gotta ask, though. I know you made me pack the thermal underwear and the wool-flannel shirts and shit, but seriously. Is it always so fuckin’ cold here?”

  “Sometimes it snows in July,” Dex said with a smile, although his parents lived in the eastern part of Montana, so that was a little less likely.

  “Get the fuck out!” Kane said, clearly delighted. “Any other shit I should know?”

  Dex gathered himself up and waved at the three riders, who were urging their horses along the trail that led to the house. His oldest brother—at least Dex thought it was Travis—waved at him, and Dex waved back, smiling a little.

  “Yeah,” he said, something in his body melting a little. “Montana is on the continental divide. If you take a leak in Helena, it winds up in the Pacific Ocean, but when we piss out our coffee at my folks’ place, it ends up in the Atlantic one.”

  Kane laughed over that until they turned off the road into the driveway, and Dex’s greatest regret before he got out of the car was that he couldn’t haul that laughing, happy face near his for a kiss.

  KANE tried to keep him from unloading the car. Instead, he shooed Dex up to the porch while he opened up the back for their luggage. Predictably, Dex’s mom opened the door to greet him and then to chide him for not helping his friend.

  “Told ya,” Dex said as he grabbed his own suitcases out of the back.

  “White people,” Kane muttered, popping his wide mouth up until it dimpled on the side. “My mother would have had you eating by now.”

  “Give her a minute. You know us white people—first there’s suffering, then there’s food.”

  Kane’s low chuckle warmed Dex up as they threw their backpacks over their shoulders and grabbed a suitcase in each hand and made their way up the porch. Dex’s sister, Debbie, was there, holding out her hand for the smaller one.

  Dex eyed her with a grin. She had their mother’s blue eyes, blonde hair, and slender build—like he did, actually—but not the hours and hours at the gym to bulk up the muscles.

  “Don’t think so, little sister,” he said, bending forward to give her a buss on the cheek. She rolled her eyes but hugged him back. “I’ve got it. Here—we’ll just drop our stuff in the hallway and take it up after we strip off our boots.”

  Kane made a wounded sound. “We gotta take off our boots?”

  “We do if we don’t want them to rip up the floor inside. Don’t worry. I packed your slippers.”

  “I’ve got slippers?” Kane wondered as they set down their bags.

  “You do now,” Dex said grimly.

  “Nice, Davy—you buy your roommate slippers? Do you serve him breakfast in bed too?”

  Kane grunted and bent down in the hallway—which was really just a bare-boards entry platform with a double row of shoe racks and coat racks on either side—and started to unlace the pricey waffle-stompers Dex had made him buy before they left.

  “Yeah, you want me to get on back of a horse, David, you’d damned well better not make me take these things on and off more than once.”

  Dex saw in his head the thing he would do—pop the grumpy fucker on the ass, throw an arm over his shoulder and lean down and talk in his ear, make a crack about how quick Kane would get those things off if a blowjob was involved—all of those things he would do if they were by themselves, or with their friends even, or even with people who didn’t know them.

  “It’ll be worth it,” he said mildly, and Kane looked at him sharply. Yeah, so now they both knew what it had been like to be Chase, saying things in your own head when they were screaming to be said out loud.

  In the meantime, Debbie walked over to his suitcase and tried to heft it up. “Damn, Davy—what in the hell? You guys just picked those things up like….”

  Kane took off his jacket then, the simple flex of his arm straining against the knit of his long-sleeved shirt and the thermals underneath it. Dex looked over at his little sister and started to crack up as she almost swallowed her tongue.

  “What, Deb?” he said sweetly, and then he reached over and hefted the suitcase with little effort himself, and Debbie blinked really hard.

  “David,” she said, some of the fun leached out of her, “those are really heavy!”

  “Only if you’re teeny and pregnant,” Dex said, wiggling fingers at the little five months of baby bulge that barely showed under her sweatshirt.

  “No, they’re heavy for anyone. Mal’s in the army, you idiot—and I can pick up most of what he does. How come the two of you look like that?”

  “I told you, sweetheart, I work for a modeling firm—you think I don�
�t work out with the models?”

  Kane’s shoulder made a suspicious twitch as Dex rehashed the cover story he’d been using for the last nine years. Underwear modeling. He had enough stills of him with his shirt off for his parents to think it was true. He’d told them he was unsuccessful but that the firm had taken him on in the business part of the works. Close—damned close—to what had happened.

  But that little teeny splinter of truth he left in the wound? Oh yeah. That was a doozy.

  Deb looked at Kane again, her eyes getting bigger and more appreciative as he turned around in his stocking feet and picked up his luggage again. “I take it he’s a little more successful than you?”

  Kane slid his eyes to Dex, his expression a little bit inscrutable. “Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. Your brother could have been a top model, he just had better things to do with his time.”

  “Deb, Kane. Kane, Deb,” Dex said belatedly, and Kane gave her a quiet smile.

  “C’mon, Davy,” Kane said, “let’s dump this crap and meet the fam.”

  “David!” called his mother’s familiar voice from the kitchen. “David, make sure you bring your friend in here after you’re settled.”

  “Told ya,” Kane said. He popped his dimples again. “Nice to meet you, Deb. Back in a sec.”

  Dex chuckled softly as he led Kane down the hall to the attic stairs. He and Henry had shared the small room as they’d been growing up. Until Dex started high school, Henry had slept in the bed with him, and then there had been some general chaos about “Mom, David won’t stop whacking off!” Since David had been whacking off in the shower by then, this was really cover for the fact that Henry wanted to whack off, but it worked. The ruckus had generally made their mother uncomfortable enough to get Henry moved into Joey and Sean’s room, which was big enough for bunk beds and a twin.

  Dex brought them up the narrow stairs, their luggage bumping at their thighs, and walked into the room, ducking because the ceiling was made for a junior high kid and not a full-grown man. The raw beams were padded with insulation between them and then backed up by drywall. The drywall had been seamed and plastered but never painted, and Dex had covered it with posters—football teams, the occasional cheerleader. Henry had come along and plastered things with boobs all over the place, and those were still up there. Kane looked around and grimaced.

  “Whatsamatter?” Dex smirked. “You don’t like the décor?”

  Kane wrinkled his nose. “I mean,” he said, thinking hard, “I remember the appeal, but seriously—this is a little overkill.”

  Dex laughed, stacked his suitcases in the corner, and shivered. “God, I forgot how cold it is up here.”

  “Yeah, well, your parents want it to be a little colder. Dexter, what in the fuck is that?”

  Dex looked in the corner and grimaced. “That, Carlos, appears to be a foldout cot.”

  “For a kid in junior high,” Kane said, his eyes narrowed. “Do me a favor, Dexter, and pull that thing out?”

  Dex complied, but he couldn’t resist the reminder: “Hey, if you fuck up and call me Dexter in front of my parents, shit’s gonna get weird.”

  “The hell it will. Set it up. Good. Yeah, I don’t know why you’re waiting for me, I don’t know how it works.”

  Dex unhinged the thing in the middle and stretched its creaking frame out, looking in disgust at the thin mattress and the sleeping bag—admittedly warm enough but that smelled like mothballs. “Jesus,” he said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think they knew we were having sex and this is punishment.”

  “Yeah, not gonna happen.” Kane walked over to the suitcases and hefted his smaller one up, then his larger one, and then eyeballed the cot. “Hm… okay. I think the smaller one’s actually heavier. That’ll do it. Hold that end.”

  Dex did and watched him bemusedly as Kane hopped up on the queen-size bed holding the suitcase up to his chest and assessed the cot again, which was about two feet from the bed. Sometimes the shit that Kane did was just completely out of his—

  “Holy shit!”

  Dex’s gasp was masked by Kane throwing the suitcase at the corner of the cot, while Dex barely remembered to hold on to the other end of the cot with all his might. The clatter of the suitcase hitting the rusting iron frame came first—and the squeaky wail of the frame breaking at the hinges came next.

  “David!” His mother’s voice approached from the bottom of the stairs. “David! What was that noise? Are you okay?”

  “Fine, Mom!” Dex called down. “Fine. Kane just dropped his suitcase, that’s all. We’re fine, but the cot’s busted. It was a nice idea, but he’ll have to sleep in my bed anyway.”

  “Okay, honey!”

  Dex looked down the stairs, and there was his mother’s face, young looking in spite of her being nearly sixty, narrow, with a wide, plump mouth. Her graying blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt—and an apron. Dex’s heart gave a happy little thump in his chest, and the lie that he was telling seemed like nothing for the moment, because he got to see his mommy, and he was home.

  “We’ll be down in a sec, Mom! And I hope you’re ready, because we’re starving!”

  That face widened into a smile, and Kane looked over Dex’s shoulder. His hand on Dex’s/David’s back—warm and large and solid—was completely welcome as Dex’s boyfriend smiled at David’s mother. “We’ll be down in a minute, Mrs. Worral,” Kane said seriously, and Dex’s mom nodded.

  “Okay then—we’ve got stew and potatoes, I hope you’re ready!” And with that she turned around and left.

  Dex closed his eyes and leaned back just to feel Kane’s body behind him, and Kane kept his hand where it was.

  “Nice with the Mrs. Worral thing,” Dex said softly. Kane hadn’t even asked what to call her—he’d just seen Dex’s driver’s license and the name on the house and had figured it out. “And the cot….” Dex shook his head and turned back into the room to fix things up. He started by folding the cot, hanging iron bar and all. “Man, I was not ready for that.”

  Kane shrugged and helped him shove it in the corner, where it just sort of leaned there, the blue lining of the mattress peeking out between the bent springs. “Yeah, well, Dexter, like I said, anything that makes us not sleep in the same bed, that’s a bad thing.”

  Dex laughed and set up his smaller suitcase on top of the dresser, then grabbed Kane’s smaller one and did the same thing on the semisolid old maplewood kid’s desk that Dex had done his homework on through high school. “So why is it okay to call me Dexter?”

  Kane shrugged and dragged his bigger suitcase next to the desk, then stood it up on its end. “Because,” he huffed, straightening up, “that’s what you call the smart kids, Mr. I Got One More Semester to Graduate. You’re the brainiac in this scenario. I’m the bully who calls you Dexter.”

  Dex looked at the cot again and laughed. God, he wanted to sleep next to Kane tonight. He was so glad he could. “I’m the brainiac? Really?”

  Kane shrugged. “I’ll be the evil criminal mastermine if you want.”

  “Mastermind?” Dex clarified.

  “Yeah,” Kane said, nodding because they were done. “Yeah. I’ll be that.”

  “You’re on, buddy. Let’s eat!”

  Kane

  IT TOOK most of the rest of the day for Kane to learn everyone’s name. Part of it was that the brothers all looked a lot like Dex, and there were four of them, and Debbie’s husband, Mal, didn’t look far off from the lot of them, and that made five.

  Part of it was that the whole family tended to talk over each other—they all lived nearby, except for the husband and the brother who were serving together and on leave, but even then, Debbie stayed with her parents and filled them in on the gossip.

  Kane was welcomed with a smile and an invitation to sit down and eat when they first walked down the stairs, and he did just that, staking out the corner of the table farthest back in the kitchen, grateful when Dex sat clo
se enough to him so they could bump knees.

  Which they did.

  It got to be their communication, their sort of Morse code, as the chatter from the kitchen washed over them.

  “No, Dad,” the oldest brother—Travis? Yeah, maybe—was saying while his oldest, a string bean of an eight-year-old boy, crawled on his lap. “I don’t think we should move the sheep yet. Yeah, I know they got wool on them, but the barn’s plenty good for another day until it warms up a little.”

  Dex’s dad was a squat man, built like a fireplug. Two of his sons had his build, but none of them had his brown hair or green eyes. “Warm up? Warm up in December? Did you grow up somewhere I don’t know about? We’ve only got so much hay, Travis—it’s got to last until March or April or whenever the hell it’s going to not snow so damned much!”

  Kane watched Dex’s older brother send his eyes heavenward and count under his breath before he spoke next. “All right, Dad. You let ’em out now, and when we get sheepsicles like we did last year, you be sure to write ‘I told you so’ on the insurance claim, with my name at the bottom.”

  Kane would have laughed then, which would have been bad, because Dex’s father had done nothing but glare at him since the men came in from the cold. Instead, he bumped knees with Dex frantically and was soothed by Dex’s dancing eyes. Yes, it was funny; no, Kane wasn’t delusional; and yes, they could wait until later to talk about it.

  “Mom, you got any more stew?” Dex’s slightly younger brother asked, and Kane looked at him, sitting next to Dex. He was squarely built like their father and had the family blue eyes and blond hair just a couple of shades darker than Dex’s. He was sitting in the spot at the kitchen table closest to the stove, but Dex’s mom got up to get it for him anyway.

  Yeah, the only person at the table to say anything was Dex.

  “Geez, Henry, your legs broken?” Dex asked, and the young man turned slightly and shrugged.

  “Sorry!” he said. “What, you still haven’t shaken off that whole PC thing of California? What’s next—you’ll be trying to teach us to surf?”