by Amy Lane
Which would send Brandon plummeting through the floor if he tried to turn everything off.
He closed the door very carefully and scowled through his shower in the one-person cubicle.
Tino’s threat to move Taylor out forcibly could not be carried through soon enough.
WHEN Brandon came out, dressed and stomping down on his temper, Taylor was in the front room doing lunges, a five-pound weight in his left hand and a twenty-pound weight in his right. He was wearing running shorts and nothing else, and sweat sheened his body.
It took Brandon a moment to realize he was sweating because he was in pain.
He swallowed, and Taylor switched from lunges to triceps presses, sucking in his core and adjusting his form, the little furrow of concentration on his forehead enough to tell Brandon this wasn’t easy either.
Quietly—Taylor’s back was to him—he made his way to the kitchenette and the coffee machine, which had just finished brewing.
He poured a cup and doctored it with lots of milk and sugar, and then sat down to that pink pastry box with lust in his eyes.
“C’mon, Nica, c’mon, c’mon—”
“Touch the maple cream-filled and you’re dead,” Taylor muttered. He was on his back now, both weights held against his stomach with crossed arms as he did crunches.
“She bought two,” Brandon said, peering into the box. “Am I safe?”
“Yeah, sure. Two is good. There’s fruit and eggs in the fridge if you want. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two….”
“I figured we’d have donuts now and then get a big lunch on our way up to Truckee,” Brandon said casually, not surprised when he heard the weights thump on the floor.
“Truckee?”
“Yeah—it’s where my parents live. You said you’d come with.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay. I just didn’t know…. Truckee? Geez, kid, that’s a long way away.”
Brandon looked over at Taylor as he hefted himself to his feet and grabbed the weights. He staggered slightly as he set them down carefully in the corner.
“I’m sorry. Do you not want to go now?” He had to force the words out, but it was only fair.
Taylor glanced at him quickly and looked away. “No. Didn’t say that. If you’re sure you want me there.” In the daylight, in his shorts, the lost flesh and the scarring of his body were even more apparent. Was he embarrassed about that?
“I’d really like it if you came.” Brandon waited until Taylor made eye contact and nodded firmly.
Taylor shrugged and headed to the bedroom. “Save me a cream-filled.”
The shower started, and Brandon let out a sigh of relief. Prickly. He’d assumed it was all arrogance at the beginning. He was starting to see the self-consciousness, the regret, all of it thrown in the same well.
Didn’t make the water bitter, but it did make the taste… complicated.
Unlike, say, that of the éclair, which was everything Brandon had hoped for and more.
He was finishing up his second donut when the giant white thing that had planted herself between him and Taylor the night before bounded up on the small table. The coffee and donuts were at one end, kitty-corner, where the two chairs sat, and the cat plonked herself down on the other end, where her food bowl overflowed onto a place mat. Brandon regarded her like an old and respected adversary.
“You and me, cat, we’re going to have a talk about boundaries.”
“Yes, you’re violating hers,” Taylor said, coming in from the bedroom smelling like spicy bodywash and mint. He wore clean cargos and a tee, just like Brandon, but no flip-flops—tennis shoes instead. It hit Brandon that he never wore sandals, in spite of the California heat, and that these shoes probably had special inserts to help him walk. Brandon reassessed the man sitting down next to him, struck again by how much work he did just to be active in the world.
“What’s that for?” Brandon asked, indicating the light wrapping of gauze around Taylor’s head, covering his maimed eye.
“It needs to air-dry.” Taylor’s mouth twisted. “Thought I’d spare you the freak show.”
Brandon grunted as though struck and stood up as Taylor sat down. He knelt by Taylor’s chair on his right side and placed gentle fingers under that freshly shaven square jaw.
“Let me see,” he directed.
“No. Jesus, get off—”
“Taylor, let me see.”
“You just ate breakfast. It’s gross.”
“Shut up and please let me see.”
Taylor cocked his head, turning so his scarred side was less accessible. “Why?”
“Because you think it’s going to push me away. I’ll see it without the eye patch and I’ll stop my stupid little crush, and you won’t have to be responsible for me anymore.”
Taylor flicked a glare at him. “If that was true, I’d be shoving it in your face.”
“Which means you sort of like me around. Now let me see. You can let it air-dry like it should, and we’ll have it out of the way.”
Taylor grunted. “Fine.”
He pulled the gauze off, and Brandon saw the reason for the eye patch.
The scarring was extensive, but normally Taylor would have received a prosthetic at the hospital, probably before he’d been released. In fact, with the extent of his other injuries, he might even have healed from the original operation before he realized he couldn’t see.
But in this case, there seemed to be excess scar tissue around the seam where the lids had been sewn shut, and Brandon frowned as he gently skated his fingers along the periphery of the ocular orbit.
“Why no prosthetic?” he asked, trying to figure out what this other scarring meant.
“A bitch of an infection,” Taylor muttered. “Every time they tried to put a prosthetic in, the entire area just blew up with strep. They figured out later the materials had been contaminated somewhere else, but I was just done, you know?” He shrugged. “Give me an eye patch. Like Tino said, they’re dead sexy.”
Brandon smiled and, without thinking about it, brushed his lips against Taylor’s in a casual kiss. “They are. And this looks fine, you know. No scary monster here.”
There was, in fact, a lump of muscle—probably relocated from Taylor’s thigh—under the seam of the skin grafts of his eyelids. It looked like he’d closed his eye and lost all his lashes, but mostly it looked like a closed eye with lumps of tissue around it.
“The patch is my favorite,” Taylor told him softly. “I keep telling Nica I need to get a leather one with a diamond stud for special occasions.”
“That would be very cool,” Brandon agreed and kissed him again.
Different this time. Taylor opened for him, soft, vulnerable. No domination games, no prickliness. Sweetness. Brandon wanted more of it, and he pressed forward, gratified when Taylor pressed back. Brandon cupped Taylor’s face in his palms and stroked the inside of Taylor’s mouth with his tongue until Taylor’s moan of gratification resonated between them both.
Brandon could barely pull away.
He stood shakily and bent to kiss Taylor’s forehead. “We’re coming back here,” he promised. “We’re coming back here and we’re gonna finish that.”
Taylor’s expression twisted something in Brandon’s chest. “Please, Brandon. You don’t know what you’re—”
“I do. I mean, I may need a little assistance with the actual act—”
“Tab A, slot B or C—not brain surgery,” Taylor muttered, and to Brandon’s delight, he could see the flush spreading across Taylor’s cheeks.
He stroked a pink crescent gently with his thumb. “I know what I’m doing with my heart, Taylor. Please—please give this a chance.”
“You’ve known me, what? Two weeks?”
“I could know you for two hundred years and I think there’d still be more to know. Two weeks is a start.”
Taylor shook his head, obviously out of words.
“Here.” Brandon reached into the pink box and sat a maple-covered éclair on the n
apkin in front of Taylor. “Do you want milk or coffee?”
“Yes?”
“Combined?”
“Preferably.” Taylor cracked a smile, though. “You don’t have to wait on me.”
“Just eat your donut. Like I said, we’ll get lunch on the way up to Truckee, see my folks, and be back down before dark.” Brandon grabbed the other mug from the cupboard and started doctoring the coffee.
Taylor grunted. “Can’t wait. Why do you want me along again?”
Well, it wasn’t like Brandon was great at lying anyway. “’Cause it’s gonna suck. And you seem really strong. I figure you can help it not suck.”
Taylor’s mask slipped a little, and the expression on his face was oddly tender. “It’s gonna suck,” he said, but not like he was happy about it. “I can’t change that it’s gonna suck. But yeah. I wish… I mean, Nica would have been there for me if she’d known how bad it could get. I didn’t want her to know. So I can do this for you. It’s not a thing.”
Brandon set his coffee down. “It’s a huge thing. Now come on. It’s going to be 105 today, and the best part of that is, we’ll be out of town.”
“If we’re not here by nine, Marilyn will disembowel us in our sleep. You know that, right?”
The cat hadn’t moved except to wrap her paws possessively around her mostly filled cat food bowl. Brandon stared at her, and she stared back, yellow eyes imperious and unwavering.
“You know, most people don’t let the cat sit on the table.”
“Most people don’t have the healthy respect I do for their cat,” Taylor said grandly.
Marilyn turned her attention to Taylor, and Brandon could swear she held nothing but worship in her eyes.
Yeah, well, she’d have to get in line.
Or at least off the bed.
Chill and Shadows
BRANDON drove, and Taylor relaxed into the drive. The day remained hot, but Nica had dropped off Brandon’s Chevy truck. Battered and dented and not the original color? Yes. But it boasted an outstanding air-conditioning system, and Taylor approved.
Conversation flowed surprisingly well.
Brandon told him about kinesiology classes and about what he’d learned trying to be an engineer and about construction, and how he liked the physicality of it all.
“Yeah—physical therapist would be a good thing for you,” Taylor told him. “The folks in the rehab center, they were like you. Strong, enthusiastic.” He grunted. “Frickin’ relentless.”
Brandon smiled so widely Taylor wondered if the glare off his teeth blinded oncoming drivers.
“I do my best,” he said proudly.
The road narrowed, wound, and Brandon drove ably, without any of the fear people sometimes had on winding roads. Taylor opened the truck window a bit and let the fresh air, smelling of dust and forest, wash in. He closed his eye, turning his face to the sun, and enjoyed the sensation.
“You do that.”
He didn’t even startle at Brandon’s voice. “Do what?”
“I’ve watched you. Sometimes you just… savor. Like, you never know when you’re going to enjoy this again.”
“You don’t.” Taylor hated to articulate the obvious. “Kid, when I went away to the desert, I was so full of… want, I guess. I wanted a job, I wanted an education, I wanted to get laid. I wanted it all, and I wanted it now. And even when I was there, it was about one want after another. And one day we were on recon. I was in the back of a Humvee thinking, ‘I want to get back to the barracks so I can have dinner and plan my future, and maybe read a book before bed,’ and the next thing I know, my life exploded.”
“I’m so—”
“You’re not getting it. I was with guys that day. Good guys. I wasn’t thinking about how good it was to be with good guys—and I never saw most of them again. The desert was… I mean, it was ungodly hot, but sometimes it was beautiful and sometimes the people… they had whole different lives, and I never looked at them to see what their lives were like. I never got that do-over. And the list goes on. The things I could have been seeing, the things I could have felt, could have said, could have done. And then I was on my back in the hospital, and I had all the time in the world to want. I was almost crazy with it. I was a bastard, screaming and throwing tantrums, and then this guy gets put next to me—lost both legs and an arm. And I listened to him talk to his wife on the phone. You know what he wanted?”
“What?”
“To hold his baby, who had just been born. And it hit me. When he gets a chance to hold that baby in his one arm—that’s going to be the best thing in the world to him, because he’s lived to do that, all odds to the contrary. And suddenly I didn’t want anymore.”
“You have.”
He said it so softly that Taylor knew he got it.
“I’ve got a nice drive, a pretty sky, trees, and air that doesn’t smell like freeway—” He sniffed. “Okay, it smells a little like some of those truckers need to learn how to use their brakes. But yeah. I had my favorite donut this morning because my best friend brought it by, in spite of the fact that I tried to kill her husband last night.”
“Jacob loved it.”
Taylor smiled—couldn’t help it. “He did. But you see, right?”
“You have. You have good things in your world right now.”
Yeah. “Yeah.”
Brandon’s hand in his surprised him, but Taylor didn’t pull away.
“You have me.”
“For this moment,” Taylor admitted. “Yeah.”
“Enjoy it,” Brandon said, rubbing a callused thumb over Taylor’s knuckle.
“Yeah, sure.”
How could he not?
But Brandon needed to reclaim his hand eventually, and when he did, Taylor looked around the little town with interest.
Small buildings with façades lined the short curve of the main street, and Taylor saw restaurants and a diner—very picturesque and touristworthy. The area was beautiful. Many of the residents were simply there for the summer, or even for a brief vacation. Lots of people in the city kept a cabin or a time-share in the Sierra Foothills. Brandon had stopped and filled up in Auburn, and given the price of gas in Truckee, Taylor was glad they didn’t need to stop again. Instead Brandon drove about five miles past the town proper and turned left onto a gravel track that cut through the woods.
The truck jounced down the uneven road, and Taylor held tight to the hail-Jesus bar over the window, noticing that Brandon didn’t seem bothered by the divots at all.
Apparently learning to drive on an obstacle course was something you took for granted in Truckee.
Less than a hundred yards down the road, he hung a right, and Taylor actually gasped.
“That is the cutest, most normal-looking little house I’ve ever seen.”
Two stories, painted bright yellow, and pretty large. Taylor imagined five or so bedrooms and two large sitting rooms, just judging from the number of windows in the upstairs and downstairs.
“You didn’t expect normal?” Brandon asked, skidding to a halt.
“I don’t know. We’re in the middle of the woods, and you’re built like a lumberjack. I sort of expected you to be birthed from a log cabin by sort of popping out the chimney. This I didn’t expect.”
Brandon chuckled, a thing he did a lot and easily. Taylor wondered what living with him would be like. Laughter every day. It was something he’d seen with Nica’s family but had never imagined with his own.
“Yeah—I mean, people live here, right? There’s businesses and schools, same as everywhere else. My dad runs the propane supply company up here, and believe me, business is good. Mom’s a receptionist in the shop. They do okay. They made enough to put my brothers through school—”
“Not you?” But Taylor knew the answer.
“Not after I came out,” Brandon said, and some of his ebullience faded. “Which is why I don’t get why Garrett and Cliff haven’t come up and talked to him. Garland—that’s my boss; he and my da
d are friends—told me Dad looks like hell. You’d think they’d know or something.”
Taylor gave a short bark of a laugh. “Your dad’s probably a ‘man’s man’—doesn’t like to admit he’s sick.” Taylor had played football once with a hairline fracture in his wrist—hurt like hell, and when he’d finished the game, he’d been done for the season too. The doctor had asked him why he hadn’t complained, and his response had been “I can take it like a man.”
God, men were idiots sometimes.
Taylor didn’t see any reason Brandon’s dad should be any different than Taylor’s. He got out of the truck with the firm conviction that Brandon was too good for these people—but Taylor would stand behind him anyway.
“BRANDON!” With a little cry, the tiny, fit woman in her fifties launched herself at Taylor’s behemoth-who-wouldn’t-leave.
She had fair skin and dyed her hair a gentle orange. It had probably been Brandon’s auburn brown in her youth. Her face—pixyish and elfin, without Brandon’s wide cheekbones—boasted few lines and more freckles, and her expression when she saw her son hit Taylor right in the stomach.
The last time he’d talked to his mother, to tell her he was getting out of the rehab facility, she’d said she was glad he was okay but not to come home.
This woman obviously didn’t feel that way.
“Hi, Mom. I’m sorry we didn’t call—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I should have. Called, written. We just… I mean, your father just….” She swallowed and looked over her shoulder to the living room. “He’s a stubborn asshole, Brandon. Hasn’t changed. But I think he’s missed you.”
“Doubt it,” Brandon muttered. “Is he going to start yelling when I walk in there?”
She squinted at him like he’d lost his mind. “He never yelled at you before!”
“No, but you guys got weird.”
She stepped back and ushered the two of them into a nice suburban-style home—at odds, maybe, with the rustic setting, but cream-colored walls, hardwood floors, area rugs, and potpourri didn’t lie.
