Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  And then it was Dex’s turn, and the small box was jewelry, which he expected, but… but not.

  “I thought it would be tags,” he confessed, floundering for words. There were two of them, one for him, one for Kane, and they weren’t tags or anything playful like that. “These are serious.”

  Rings. Two titanium rings with rounded brushed-black surfaces and a rainbow titanium beveled strip right down the center. Dex pulled out one of the rings and looked at the inside for engraving. Some of his awe disappeared. The inside of the ring said “Property of: Dex.” The other one said “Property of: Kane,” of course, and he looked at Kane again, wanting so very badly to put his on.

  “These are serious,” he said again. “These are real.”

  “And wrecking your house wasn’t?”

  Dex’s throat got tight. “Yeah. Yeah. But that’s just my house. This is my….” He trailed off, because Ethan was looking at him seriously, and Dex grabbed Kane’s hand and shoved the ring on. “This is my heart, asshole. I’m not gonna say you’re too young, and I’m not gonna tell you we’ve only been doing this for a couple of months, and I’m not gonna ask you if you’re sure. I’m gonna shove this thing on your finger and make you wear it, because you don’t give a guy a thing like this and take it back.”

  Kane took the other one from the box, and almost reverently took the class ring off Dex’s ring finger. Dex blinked. The inside of the ring said “Dexter Williams, Class of ’02.” Kane had seen it before. It was the only piece of jewelry Dex wore.

  “This is my place now,” Kane said and put the ring on, looking really serious indeed. “No one else is here.”

  Dex examined it soberly, and Kane grinned at him suddenly. “Don’t be so serious, Dexter. I’ll think you don’t like my gift!”

  “I love your gift, Carlos.” His voice was shaky and tense—and fervent. “But I think it’s going to make shit complicated, and you don’t do complicated.”

  Kane’s grin was positively evil. “Bring it the fuck on.”

  FISCALLY Kane hadn’t been able to quit porn. Dex had spent a week sorting his tangled finances and thinking that his strategy of taking out just enough money in cash and only spending that much had stood him in pretty good stead. If his sister hadn’t been siphoning money out of his account like a delinquent siphoned gasoline, he would have been able to sell his house and walk away.

  Hell—even if he couldn’t sell his house, Dex could support him through school and he could still walk away. But he couldn’t walk away and support Fabiola, and even if Dex thought Fabiola might want to learn how to support herself, he knew that jerking the rug out from under her meant jerking the rug out from under the baby, and that was never going to happen. Dex couldn’t even blame Kane for not letting it happen. But the fact was, Kane had started that ball rolling by making porn star cash. He couldn’t keep supporting them making night clerk cash, and Dex couldn’t support them either—not and keep his house, which was their home.

  So what porn started, let no commitment taketh away—and Dex was pretty sure he could live with that. He knew the business. He knew the difference between sex and love—hell, he’d lived the difference between sex and love for most of his life.

  But he knew for damned sure it wasn’t going to be easy.

  It was especially not easy when he went the day after New Year’s Day to set the schedule and call everyone to remind them that the next day, a Tuesday, was business as usual.

  He’d made the schedule, but he’d been working on fumes, and somehow (denial?) his brain had not made the connection about putting Kane on the schedule and shooting him while he worked. He sat at the little desk next to Kelsey’s, where he kept his computer and did all of his office things, and groaned.

  Kelsey, slightly rounder than she had been in early November but not quite pregnant looking, turned around and said, “What?”

  He grimaced, feeling embarrassed, his eyes on the schedule. He knew this was going to happen. He had a handle on this, right? Right?

  “Nothing,” he muttered, twisting the ring on his hand. It was familiar to have one there, but every time he looked at the rainbow winking from the middle, he felt a little warmer than he used to.

  But Kelsey noticed what he was doing, and her eyes got wide.

  “Nice ring!” she said and looked at him sideways.

  He grinned for a moment and then looked back at his computer, like looking at the schedule was going to not show Kane scheduled to do a tag team with two guys Dex didn’t know that well while Dex helped man the camera.

  “Thanks,” he said, and still, the awkwardness of the schedule couldn’t kill his pride. It was the first time someone had noticed. Ethan hadn’t said a word to anybody, and Chase and Tommy had gotten all of the attention over the holidays (and rightly so) because they’d told Chase’s girlfriend that they were going to take the baby if she still wanted to give it up. Dex had gotten them in touch with a lawyer—a really good lawyer who would get them as iron-clad a custody agreement as possible—and he and Kane had been content to sit in the background at Christmas dinner at Tommy’s. The same for New Year’s Eve, which had been at their place this year. Everyone had played Monopoly and Scrabble and drunk beer until the ball dropped, and then crashed on the couch, the loveseat, or with Ethan in the guest bedroom or even on the floor until the next day. (Dex told Kane as they were going to bed that night that it would be just a peachy night for the damned snake to get out, but the new enclosure did its job, and Tomas stayed happily ensconced in his big snake palace without terrorizing all the porn stars in the morning.)

  And no one had noticed the ring.

  Until now, when he recognized that he wanted someone to notice. Hell, he was dying for someone to notice, because that ring differentiated him from the two other guys who were going to have sex with Kane in a week, who didn’t have a ring and would never get one.

  “Does the ring mean anything, Dex?” Kelsey wheedled, and Dex’s grin erupted full force. He pulled the ring off and let her see it. When he heard her gasp, he actually closed his eyes, bit his bottom lip, and did a little happy dance in his seat.

  “Kane? Kane? Oh my God. Ohmygod! Omigodomigodomigod! Dex! Really?”

  Dex looked at her sideways, still smiling like any besotted blushing bride—or groom. “We haven’t had papers drawn up or anything,” he apologized, but he took the ring back from her as she stared at him in bemusement.

  “But you have rings?”

  “Yeah. And I remodeled the house for his animals.”

  Kelsey clapped her hand over her mouth. “Dex, that’s huge! Have you told anyone?”

  Dex shook his head, looked at the schedule, and sighed. “No,” he said, and she backed her ergonomically perfect wheeled office chair up and looked over his shoulder.

  “Oh, hells. Dex, have you told John?” she asked gently, and Dex shook his head again.

  “He knows we’ve been, uhm, yeah, that, but Kelsey, it was like… it wasn’t anything, right? And then it was everything. And we didn’t know how you make an announcement about that. Because when you go from it’s not anything to it’s everything, you know that it’s the real thing.”

  Kelsey put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Well, you need to tell John that it’s the real thing, hon. Otherwise you’re going to have to shoot his porn and edit his porn and market his porn, and no one’s going to offer to step in and do it for you.”

  Dex sighed and dropped his elbows to his knees, all the better to prop his chin in his hands. “Was it that obvious?”

  “That you were obsessing about how to deal with him in a scene you had to film? Only a little.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to pull my shit together about it. He’s got obligations, you know? I’ll be out of business school in a semester—he’s just starting. Until I’m making enough money to pay all his bills….”

  Kelsey looked at him as he trailed off at the obvious conclusion.

  “What?” he asked seriously,
and she shrugged.

  “You’re both the nicest guys in the world,” she said with a little laugh. “I mean… really good guys. You’ll make it work. God.” She dropped her hand self-consciously to her stomach. “If you can put up with that goofball, I can put up with this one, can’t I?”

  Dex suddenly found her problems much more interesting than his own. “What are you going to do, sweetheart?”

  She smiled. “Well, I’m going to keep her, and that should make you happy!”

  “It’s a her?”

  “Yeah. It’s a her. But I’m going to stay here. Here in my home. I talked to my mom about it when I went out for Christmas, but… well… I like Johnnies. So far I can’t see a reason to go.”

  Dex looked at her sideways. “Have we fired Scott yet?” he asked, thinking he needed to talk to John again about that. He’d said something right before he left, about maybe asking Scott if he could find another house—another business house—and John said he’d look into it. But then, John’s brain hadn’t been working too clear in the past few months, and Dex wasn’t sure how likely that was to happen.

  Kelsey looked down. “No,” she said lowly. “But he hasn’t harassed me either.”

  Dex shook his head. “Kelsey, until that guy has been fired from here, I’d still make plans to move.”

  Kelsey shook her head. “Dex, this place has the best health insurance in the county. Hell, maybe even the state. And it’s not like nobody here is on my side.”

  He still wasn’t happy about it, and she gave his shoulder a shove. “Buck up, little camper!” she said happily. “You’ve got a ring!”

  Dex looked at it just sitting on his finger, announcing that he didn’t have to be asleep or lost anymore, and that someone was out there who was going to keep him safe.

  “It’s a pretty cool ring,” he said, and she laughed, because yes. Yes it was.

  THE three days without sex were rough but sort of good too. Dex thought he’d spend them helping Kane do his prereading for his classes. Kane was appalled that there was such a thing. When Dex told him that college was like that, Kane had a semiserious argument about not going, and then Dex pointed out that the science department probably had lots of the critter things to take care of, and Kane was sold.

  “If they lose me in the first day, though,” Kane warned, “I’m gone.”

  Dex shook his head. “If they lose you in the first day, you start bringing a tape recorder to class, and then we listen to it together. Now, we’re reading this chapter”—they’d prebought the textbooks—“and we’ll see how it goes.”

  It went slowly. Dex found hidden reservoirs of patience that first night as he listened to Kane sound out each word on its lonesome. By the time they’d finished a page of reading, Kane had forgotten what they were reading about, and Dex realized that he really was in over his head.

  The next day he dragged Kane down to the student services department and made him take a reading assessment test. He was not surprised when Kane scored somewhere between a fourth- and a sixth-grade reading level on it. Dex was there when the counselor sat down with Kane and explained the results of the test, and Kane looked like he was going to cry.

  “See!” he said, shoving the test results in front of him in a loud scatter.

  Mrs. Hendrickson, a plump, comfortable woman with a loose bun of gray-blonde hair and a naturally smiling face, jumped a little, but she didn’t look surprised.

  “See! I told you this was a bad idea! I told you I was too stupid for this! You got me all excited about… about… fuck! I can’t even say those words!” Kane stood up and would have stormed out, but Dex beat him to the door.

  “Get the fuck outta my way!” Kane looked like he really might have decked him too, and then Dex would have been in trouble, because Kane’s body mass was way bigger. Dex couldn’t back down, though. He put his hands on Kane’s neck and pulled him close, touching foreheads with him, and waited until Kane’s breathing slowed down enough that Dex knew he’d listen.

  “You’ve got a scene in two weeks,” he said and watched Kane’s eyes widen at the change of subject.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So I don’t wanna watch you fuck other guys. I will. And you will. Because you’ve got responsibilities and that’s just who you are. But how often do you want to do that, Kane? Tell me. Give me a number. ’Cause… ’cause….” Dex shook his head. “I don’t want to count,” he whispered. “Not with you.”

  Kane closed his eyes. “But… Dexter, the only thing that got me here was the animals. How’m I going to study the animals when I can barely read?”

  Dex nodded his head like he had an answer to that. “We’re gonna go ask the nice lady with the test results, okay?” he said, and he prayed too. God, let Kane find a way out of porn. They’d only just found each other—it would be nice if that could last.

  Turned out, they had special reading classes that could help Kane catch up in a year. Turned out, they had biology classes that didn’t have a lot of reading. They wouldn’t transfer to the bigger colleges as science, per se, but they’d give Kane some elective credits, and they’d keep him interested.

  It turned out, there was a way.

  The day was exhausting, though, and after they got home and made dinner and showered, all Kane wanted to do was climb into bed and watch television. He curled over on his side, not even interested in holding Dex or anything. They both turned out the lights, and when the darkness was over them, they were separated on the bed, when this whole thing had started because Kane didn’t want any space between them at all.

  Dex gathered up his courage and rolled over to press his chest against Kane’s back. “What’s wrong?” he asked to the unhealthy silence.

  “I’m sorry I’m so stupid,” Kane muttered. “I… I gave you that ring, but you can give it back if you want.”

  Dex’s stomach went cold. “Why in the holy fuck would I want to do that?” He sat up in bed and turned on the light and grabbed his pillow and whumped it with as much force as he possibly could across Kane’s stupid fat head.

  “Hey!” Kane sat up. “Dexter, what in the fuck?”

  “That’s my ring!” Dex snapped, his voice treading the same thin thread that Kane’s had earlier in the day. Logically he knew what was going on. He knew why Kane would feel this way, why he would say something like this. Logically it all made sense. But Dex couldn’t think with his head right now. Not about this. Not about Kane.

  “But look at you, Dex! You’re almost done—you can do anything you want and—”

  Whump! “And you… you come deal with my shit and you take care of me and hold me together through my stupid bullshit family shit and now you want to leave me?” Whump!

  Kane rolled up into a little ball, and Dex smacked him a couple of more times on the head.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you, and fuck that!” Dex was standing up in bed shouting at him, not even sure how that had happened. He floundered for a moment, looking for words, and bounced on his mattress trying to find them.

  Kane looked up at him from under his arms, his brow puckered in an uncharacteristic show of concern. Suddenly Kane’s expression lightened, and he smiled faintly. “Having fun up there, Dexter?”

  Dex squashed his smile mostly flat. “Not so’s you’d notice. My stupid boyfriend just said something so totally boneheaded it makes me want to kick him!” Dex threw out his foot, trying to get Kane in the chest, and Kane grabbed his ankle and gave it a yank. It was a good thing the damned bed was so big, because Dex fell on his ass on top of it and not on his back on the floor, and Kane rolled over on top of him, his lower lip thrust out, his thought-pucker still there.

  “You realize you’ve called me stupid about six times,” he said.

  Dex scowled up at him, realizing the expression was as uncharacteristic on his face as thoughtfulness was on Kane’s. “Well, until just this fucking minute, I’d never heard you say anything quite that dumb.” Christ, his eyes were watering. “Fucking idiot.
You gave me a fucking ring and you want to take it back, like, what? Two weeks later? I hate you! You fucking gave me hope!” He pounded weakly on Kane’s chest, and Kane captured his fist in a wide-palmed, blunt-fingered hand.

  “I’m sorry, Dexter,” Kane said softly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  Dex’s anger and panic leaked out of him. “Well, you did. If I want to give the ring back, I’ll give it back. You want it back, you ask for it back. You ever say anything that chickenshit to me again, I’ll beat you for fucking real.”

  Kane chuckled then, still looking weary and as old as Dex had ever seen him. “You’d like to think so, but you haven’t been to the gym in weeks!”

  “Went this morning with you, asshole!”

  Kane grinned then and looked younger. “Yeah, well, when you’re as old and wise as I am, sometimes you get senile—mmmm….”

  Dex raised his head and made him stop talking. Kane wasn’t stupid, but sometimes talking wasn’t the smartest use of his mouth either.

  Kane

  KANE looked at the two guys in the room, their hands down their pants, their eyes closed. They were probably dreaming of the girls in the titty mags, and Kane wondered when he’d stopped being one of those guys.

  When had he stopped thinking about girls when he did this? Had it been when he’d moved in with Dex? No, probably before that. After his first few months, when he’d first started hooking up with Johnnies guys after hours—maybe that was when he’d started to think about a man’s mouth on his cock instead of a woman’s.

  But whenever he’d started to think about the world different like that, right now, everything in his brain was centered on Dex.

  This was Kane’s third shoot since they hooked up. For the first one, he’d been thrilled to get on the set and start fucking. He’d gotten used to sex every night with Dex, and being deprived for three days had made him ready to fuck fire hydrants, couch arms, and small animals. (Well, maybe not small animals, but he had been rubbing up against the countertop in a suspicious way the night before.) For that shoot, all he had to do was to get in the room, think about Dex, and he’d been good to go.