by Amy Lane
Lance grabbed the duffel and threw it directly onto the couch, checked the pocket of his sweats to make sure his keys were in there, and shut the door behind them. Together, the three of them clattered down the stairs, Dex apologizing the whole time.
“Lance, I’m so sorry. This shouldn’t last long, man. I really appreciate—”
“Stop!” Lance laughed as they got to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s all good, brother. You’d do the same for any one of us—and you have.”
Dex shrugged. “Yeah, but he’s no Bobby.”
Ah, gods. Bobby, the big young country boy with the solid heart. That pity fuck Lance had given him had left a lasting impression, actually. When Bobby and Reg had gotten their shit sorted, Lance had needed to stomp hard on his own regret. Sort of like with Dex, he’d been so focused on his future, he hadn’t moved in on a possible here and now.
“Well, Bobby still stops by to check on the guys,” Lance said. “Gives them piecework with his construction firm if they need it.” He looked briefly at Henry. “You could probably take some of those jobs to tide you over.”
Henry looked interested. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Oh, this question was a little personal. “I, uh, take it you won’t be filming scenes?”
The horror on Henry’s square-jawed face spoke volumes, and Lance tried hard not to be hurt. Well, Dex was buckets full of awesome—he was allowed to have a redneck family member who wore his ass for a hat.
Dex let out an amused sound. “No scenes for Henry.” Unexpectedly, he put his hand on his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “And probably no relationships until he gets himself sorted out.” Henry shifted uncomfortably, and then broke Lance’s heart a little by biting his lip, the expression making him look about fifteen years younger and vulnerable as hell.
“No,” Henry said gruffly. “Probably not.”
Lance nodded, hopefully looking confident, but inside he was a little confused. He’d assumed Henry was straight. His posture, his judgy sneer, his horror when he’d realized what was going on inside the apartment—all of it had pointed to a straight guy thrown into his worst nightmare.
But this? This sadness, this discomfort—this wasn’t the judgment of someone who didn’t want to join the party. This was the judgment of someone who’d assumed the party wasn’t for them.
Looking at Henry’s extreme unhappiness and the self-loathing that seemed to radiate off him like sound waves, Lance thought he might be only a little right. Maybe this party wasn’t for Henry, but there might be some guy out there who’d throw him a hell of a happily ever after.
“I’ll take over from here,” Lance said softly. They stood at the bottom of the stairwell now, and Lance could see Dex’s SUV parked in the visitor’s spot near them, Kane in the front seat, fiddling with his phone.
Dex looked over at his husband and waved gamely, and Kane smiled. Then he shot Henry a glare that should have thrown a bolt of lightning through his chest.
Lance swallowed. He’d never seen Kane really pissed off, but given Kane’s size—the width of his shoulders, the thickly muscled thighs, the pure no-bullshit way he carried himself when he wasn’t goofing off—he’d never really wanted to.
Poor Henry. Whatever this guy had done to earn that glare, it must have been truly heinous. But not, apparently, unforgivable.
“You should go,” Lance said because Henry wasn’t backing down from that glare. He was matching Kane scowl for scowl, probably out of sheer cussedness.
Dex pulled his brother into a hug. “Text me tonight and let me know how you’re settling in.”
“That’s not really nece—” Henry argued.
“It is. It’s completely necessary,” Dex told him. “You don’t just spend two nights on my couch and get to disappear out of my life again.” Dex’s angel’s mouth made a funny little wobble. “I… you could be the only family I get to hold on to, Henry. I’m not going to let you go.”
Dex hugged his brother again, tighter, his windbreaker rustling against his brother’s denim jacket, then pulled away and turned toward the SUV before Lance got a look at his face.
He didn’t need to.
“C’mon,” he said to Henry, pulling him in the direction of the super’s office on general principle. Behind them, the SUV started up and backed out, but neither Henry nor Lance looked at Henry’s retreating brother.
“Where we going?”
“I’ll show you the super’s office, the vending machines, the laundry room, and then we’re going to borrow Billy’s car—” He jangled the pocket of the sweatshirt, where Billy’s keys sat. “—and go get pizza.”
Henry let out a bark of laughter. “Pizza?”
“Yeah. Mountain Mike’s—it’s right down the street. I’m a paid resident now, and I’m not going back to Little Caesar’s, no way, no how.”
“Resident?” Henry said, and Lance didn’t let the surprise bother him. “As in med school?”
“Yup. Student loans only get you so far. But, uh….” Oh, how embarrassing, secrets already. “Don’t tell the rest of the flophouse, okay? They think I’m still a student. I just get tired of explaining first-year intern and residency and student loans—this way they don’t get all weird because I’m a real doctor.” Lance wasn’t going into the rest of the happy psychological porn dance he did, not with Henry—not now, when he still remembered Henry’s palpable disdain.
“Yeah.” Henry let out a sigh and his shoulders slumped. “I’ve got some savings from the Army, and in the Midwest, it would have set me up for a couple of years. Not so much here.”
“And your brother didn’t want you to be alone.”
Henry grimaced. “No, sir, he did not.”
Lance let that one hang as they walked down the damp sidewalk. As a whole, the grounds were kept nicely—the shrubs were clean of litter and the grass neatly trimmed. The complex itself was, well, complex. Lance had lived here for three years, and he hadn’t figured out the rhyme or reason to the numbers on the different buildings.
The super’s office faced the street, with a buffer of a wide lawn, a fence, and a sidewalk. Across the parking lot were the dumpsters, and Lance told Henry that they kept the key on the peg by the door. The rule was supposed to be the first person who saw the trash was full took it out.
“How’s that work for you?” Henry asked, wrinkling his nose, as if he knew what to expect from a houseful of post-adolescent men.
“Not as well as you’d think,” Lance said, quirking his mouth in a smile, inviting Henry to laugh with him.
Henry rolled his eyes. “Sure. Do you keep a chore chart or anything?”
Lance wrinkled his nose back. “Uhm….”
And now Henry assumed a patient look. “Does the toilet need to be donated to science?”
“No respectable lab would take it,” Lance said, feeling embarrassment for the first time in ever.
Henry shrugged. “I can do that shit. I….” He sighed. “It’s why I joined the military. I like order.”
“How far’d you get?” Lance asked. “In the Army, I mean.”
“Staff sergeant,” Henry said, and Lance heard the faint ring of pride in his voice before his shoulders curled forward even more. “I miss it.”
“What happened?” Boy, was Lance curious—but not surprised when Henry shook his head.
“Can we not talk about this?” he asked plaintively. “Please?”
Lance took a breath and gestured. “Super’s office. By the way, avoid him if you can. He’s this sort of creepy asshole who likes to leer. Anyway, we usually pitch cash into the kitty and get a cashier’s check to give to him. Due on the first, late on the fifth.”
Henry nodded shortly. “Everybody pay the same?”
“People with actual beds in the bedrooms pay twenty bucks more a month than people on the couch and the air mattress.”
Henry grimaced. “How’s the couch?”
“Not bad. We actually replaced it last year, because it gets a wo
rkout.” Lance watched Henry’s eyes get big, and backtracked quickly. “Not like that! No! Seriously. We just like to be social. So, you know, movie nights, game nights, ‘sit on the couch and eat ice cream and bitch about our lives’ nights—the couch and the recliner and the kitchen chairs and the air mattress. Works for us.”
“So if I’m sleeping on the couch, who gets the air mattress?”
“Well, it’s been sort of like musical chairs. Randy, Billy, and I all pay for a bed, but the master bedroom has a queen and a single. So Cotton, Curtis, and Zeppelin all go random when it’s time to sleep. Zeppelin’s prone to bring home Johnnies guys to get busy, so he usually gets the queen-sized, ’cause it’s practically the guest bedroom. Curtis has the single unless Zep brings home more than one guy, and Cotton takes the couch or the air mattress, depending.”
Henry shook his head. “Oh my God. It really is porn-o-topia in there!”
Lance let out a breath, not sure if he could explain. “Yes and no?”
Henry just regarded him steadily as Lance turned around and took him back through the quad so he could see the gym, the clubhouse, and the pool, all of which were in fairly decent shape, although the gym was small.
“Your brother can get you a membership at the one up the street,” Lance told him. “They’ve got rocking equipment and a personal trainer that’ll blow your socks off. She’s straight, in her fifties, and doesn’t grab your ass—all of which are pluses. But she knows what she’s doing with nutrition too, and we’d die for her.”
Henry let a smile slip. “I may be working out a lot,” he admitted. “But yes and no on the pornotopia?”
“Zeppelin’s a very happy little slut,” Lance conceded. “And Randy will literally go down on you before you say hello. But Billy has a girlfriend and only takes a pity fuck when they’re on the outs. Curtis is pretty job-monogamous. He only films scenes and does the occasional roommate; he doesn’t really have his own lovers. Same here. Cotton is….” Lance let out a sigh. “Cotton’s the one I worry about most because he keeps looking for Mr. Right and he keeps getting Mr. ‘I hear you have a nine-inch dick.’ So we see him making these dates, and then he gets his heart broken. It happens about once a week. There’s a difference between filming a scene and sleeping around. And some of the guys do both and some of them don’t, but finding a guy outside of Johnnies who doesn’t assume we all do it all isn’t easy.”
Henry grunted.
“What?” Lance asked.
“I’m going to have to take your word on it,” he said.
And while part of Lance prickled—because what a dick!—a part of him appreciated the straightforwardness. “What? Every guy you’ve ever boned has been true love forever?” Lance asked acerbically.
Henry made a hurt sound then, almost like Lance had kicked him, and for a moment Lance was actually afraid. Was the guy going to deck him for assuming Henry was gay when every vibe he gave off said he was trying not to be? Was he going to protest?
Was he going to tell the truth?
“You said something about pizza?” Henry asked, his voice curiously devoid of any emotion at all.
“Yeah,” Lance said. “But first, look. I don’t care what you think of me, or of sex work, or of the damned apartment, but you need to listen. Because if I can’t get you to agree on this one thing, I’m calling your brother and kicking you out on your ear.”
Henry nodded at him to go on.
“Those kids in there currently buying stock in Kleenex are like my little brothers. They don’t always do the right thing, and they don’t always make me proud, but I love them, and I don’t want them hurt. Don’t say anything that hurts their feelings or makes them feel like crap because they can get that shit at home and that’s why they moved here. Do you understand?”
And then—oh God—the most intense thing happened. Henry’s blue eyes, each one with a faint bruising underneath, like from an old fight, grew bright and red-rimmed and shiny.
“I won’t hurt your little brothers,” he said after a moment, swallowing hard. “David has always done right by me. That’s the least I can do to repay him.”
“David?” Who? “You mean Dex?”
Henry scrubbed at his face with his palm. “I’m not calling him by his porn name,” he said, and Lance blinked.
“Oh my God. Yeah. Right. David.”
“Pizza,” Henry said almost desperately.
“Sure. Pizza.”
THERE WERE, in fact, two cars owned by Johnnies guys. Lance owned one, but he’d managed to find a guest parking spot and he didn’t want to lose it because those were like gold. Billy had the other, and it was in the actual numbered spot with the overhang, and nobody could take that away from him.
Besides, Lance had grabbed Billy’s keys, and since Billy was currently on the outs with his girlfriend and getting laid in Lance’s room, Lance had no problem with stealing his dented Kia and heading for Mountain Mike’s.
Henry looked around the car, at the schoolbooks in the back and the waiter aprons and spare clothes, and grimaced.
“Busy guy.”
“Well, porn only pays well if you’re famous at it,” Lance said. “If you’re in Johnnies’ top twenty, it pays the bills and more. But if you’re one of their workhorse guys, it’s a nice income boost, but it’s not living-on money unless all you do is fuck.”
“Hunh,” Henry said musingly. “I never thought of it that way. So, uh, my brother….”
“Was a fucking superstar,” Lance confirmed. “So was Kane. Usually people don’t last long in the business, though. Maybe a year, sometimes two. It’s a young man’s game, really.”
“You, uh….” Henry shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t look old, but, uh, med school—”
“Student loans, not just mine,” Lance told him, still not wanting to get into the other reasons, the personal reasons, that made porn so seductive, so easy to continue. “And I’m twenty-seven.”
“So am I,” Henry said, like that depressed him. “I thought… I thought I’d have my life together by now.”
“Hey, mine’s just starting out,” Lance said. “I make no judgments.”
“I do.” Henry let out a big breath. “My father taught me to judge and judge hard and judge mean. And I learned that lesson so well, I judged myself right into a fucking corner.”
“And then what?” Lance asked.
“I gnawed off my own leg to get out of it.” Henry let out a broken laugh. “I’m making no goddamned sense. Pizza. Meet the kids. One thing at a time, right?”
“Right.” Lance figured there’d be more than that; there had to be more than that. But unlike his brother, who had “Den Mother” written all over him, Henry seemed to be a much tougher nut to crack. A handsome nut—hard mouth, flat eyes, soldier’s bearing and all—but a tough one. In truth, Lance was expecting Henry’s first meeting with the guys to be a disaster.
He was pleasantly surprised.
The guys—he’d been right, Zeppelin had been in Curtis’s room, along with Fisher, who didn’t live at the apartment but had just sort of come along for the come—were all gathered in the living room, Cotton included, watching some sort of Hallmark romance movie and eating popcorn.
Lance walked in, followed by Henry carrying two XL pizzas, and they were suddenly the heroes of the hour.
“Oh my God!” Randy stood up, his obviously still growing frame showing ribs in spite of the almost continuous working out he did. “Is that food? Real food? Can I have some?”
“My treat,” Lance said dryly. “We’ve got a vegetarian and an all-meat.”
Cotton sighed, his brown-velvet eyes—surrounded by black lashes and black hair—were huge in his fair-skinned face. God, this kid looked fragile. Who let him turn eighteen and get naked with strangers? “No vegan?” he asked pitifully.
“Ta-da!” Lance pulled out a small gluten-free, vegan cheese and spinach special that he’d been holding in his free hand. “Vegan it is!”
“Woo-hoo!”
That suddenly bright look on Cotton’s face was all Lance needed. Yay! He’d made this kid happy. “You love me.”
“Yes, little brother, I do.”
“Plates?” Henry said, setting the boxes down and opening them up, then setting the bag with the napkins and parmesan cheese down next to it.
“Who needs plates?” Billy asked. “There’s napkins.” Billy was in his early twenties, short, muscular, Latino, and quiet. He was one of the few guys who’d been there for over a year, and he and Lance… well, they weren’t exactly brothers, but they had some of the same damage. Some of the same damage they didn’t share with anyone else.
“What’s a plate?” Zeppelin asked, shaking his sandy blond hair out of his puppy-dog brown eyes. He wore it down to his shoulders, and it was practically all he wore, almost all year round. Right now, his outfit consisted of a pair of holey blue briefs, and Lance rolled his eyes.
“A plate is a thing I’m going to make you hold in front of your balls unless you go put some shorts on. Guys, this is Henry. He doesn’t do scenes, and if you want to know if he does guys, ask him, but look at his muscles and his scowl first.”
He looked over his shoulder and gave Henry a game smile, and Henry scowled theatrically for his benefit.
And then he winked.
Lance saw it, but the rest of the guys couldn’t, and so when he turned that scowl on the rest of the household and they all straightened their posture and stared at him with a little bit of fear, Lance had to contain a smirk.
“Plates,” Henry reiterated, and then he gave Zeppelin a particularly hard stare. “And pants.”
And for all they were supposed to be adults, Lance hadn’t seen such scrambling to obey an authority figure since the second grade.
In three minutes there were six young men wearing clothes, gathered around the table with garage-sale dinnerware, getting out cups and gallons of milk.
Henry sat down at the table, but as he did, he told them, “A table’s a luxury on deployment. By all means, sit where you want—this is just me.”
