St. Nacho’s 4:
The Book of Daniel
Z. A. Maxfield
www.loose-id.com
St. Nacho’s 4: The Book of Daniel
Copyright © August 2011 by Z. A. Maxfield
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eISBN 978-1-61118-438-9
Editor: Judith David
Cover Artist: Anne Cain
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Dedication
For everyone who has ever wanted a little St. Nacho's of their own.
Chapter One
I grinned when the waiter brought me a clean ashtray. It was a Monday kind of grin. It was an I-got-drunk-and-stoned-and-screwed-around-all-weekend, barely-crawled-out-of-bed lift of the muscles that parenthesize my lips. On a dog, you’d call it fair warning.
I’d been having a lot of Mondays like that. I’d even hit the trifecta of fucked-up Monday mornings the week before when I’d woken up in a stranger’s home in Santa Monica with no memory and a really kickass kanji tattoo on my right shoulder.
Really kickass.
I had no idea what it meant, but it looked good.
And maybe my brother Jake would have had a thing or two to say about that sort of shit if I let him in on it, like…maybe he’d have said I’m not a shallow guy and I’m just having a midlife crisis, but I am and I’m not, respectively. I was on the trail of tears to forty, newly divorced, newly out and proud, and I didn’t give a damn.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to do everything right, because I had tried. Hard. I’d made my mother happy when she was alive. I’d treated my wife well even though she left me for some other asshole, thank fuck. I’d let her get away with the house, her car, and an income, because I was not a monster. My father was a monster, and I knew what one of those was like.
So really, I was not a monster.
I was just a guy who finally, finally had the chance to get it right. And it was my turn to pick and choose.
My second vodka Mary had appeared on the table next to my good elbow while I’d been sitting there, eyes closed, drifting. Enjoying the buzz from my first drink and the warm flush of nicotine.
The sound of the waves hitting the sand behind me was soothing. It interspersed with children playing, the sound of two or three portable radios, and seabirds. As grim as the morning had started out, the day promised high temperatures. People had come early, prepared to stake out their territory and wait for the sun to burn off the clouds. I could feel its radiant warmth on my face and shoulders even though the light breeze off the water was chilly.
I ate my olive slowly, savoring its salty, bitter aftertaste. The chair was comfortable. I found if I crossed my feet at the ankles and slunk down a bit, it supported my head and shoulders and I could avoid that sprawled, knees-splayed appearance while I relaxed…
“Dan?”
“Hm?”
“Dan, are you asleep?”
I shook my head. Hell no I wasn’t asleep. I was just resting my eyes. Wasn’t I? A quick scan of my surroundings revealed my cigarette had burned to ash and my drink had a thick layer of water at the top.
“Shoot. Sorry, yeah, I think I was.” I pushed up in my chair to shake the cobwebs out of my brain. “Wild weekend.”
Jake sat down and shot me a smile I think he might have invented just for me. There was never any disappointment in that shy half-moon of perfect white teeth and lips. It had begun to appear on his face long before he’d even had those incisors that were evident now, when what his mouth revealed had been like the tiny white Chiclets in gimme-sized boxes of gum people handed out on Halloween.
“Where’d you go?”
“Santa Barbara. Up in the hills, nice place. You’d have liked it. We went to a place for brunch yesterday that was out of this world.”
“Yeah? Who’d you go with?”
I shrugged. “Some guy I met at Sandpiper. Stunning course. Really beautiful, first-rate golf. I want to go back sometime. Want to come?”
Jakey shook his head. “Golf. As if.”
“You mock now. Someday the golf bug will get you.”
“Hardly. Golf has to be the most effete, boring fucking game… Bunch of guys hunting for a little white ball. Oh, woe is me. The ball is in the sand. Call me when that sand explodes.”
“Do you actually want the sand to explode?”
He frowned. “No. But there has to be a happy medium between almost getting killed and I’m going to drive this little cart off a cliff just to make something happen. Anyway, how are you golfing with that?” He indicated my hand.
Yeah. My hand was still in a brace, still showing the effects of a brutal crush injury and several surgeries. The bones of my wrist were barely mended, the radius and ulna held together with titanium strips and pins and screws.
My bionic arm. Except—unlike Steve Austin’s—it was weak and pale and scarred and useless.
“I can’t hit the long-range balls because my grip is fucked-up, but I can still putt. I found someone who”—heaven help me, the memory of the three days I’d spent with Julio made me blush and shift in my seat like an adolescent boy—“likes to drive.”
“You went and just picked some guy up? Again?” Jake didn’t want me to think he was on board with me fucking around. To be fair, he probably wasn’t done reeling from the revelation that I was gay. I kicked his foot with mine, looking down at our hairy ankles. We wore nearly identical leather boat shoes; our legs were tanned.
What is it about living in a beach town that makes a guy go without socks? Before I’d come to St. Nacho’s, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had worn shoes without socks. Each time there’d been a reason, like I had fallen into a pool, or I was on a Caribbean island vacation.
This…this new boat-shoe-and-no-sock thing was just me not bothering anymore.
“So how’d you meet this…driver?”
“Oh, that’s a funny story, actually. I met him at Nordstrom’s. I had to go shopping. BreeAnna, the little woman, finally sent my clothes.”
“Yeah? It’s about damn time.”
Originally my housekeeper was supposed to pack up what little I was taking away from my twelve-year marriag
e to BreeAnna. I’d been buying things—like a pair of jeans or a pack of tightie whities at a time, as needed, thinking my clothes would arrive any day. But Bree fired the housekeeper when she realized I cared about the woman, and there followed negotiations through lawyers and a great deal of obfuscation. I’d waited for most of my clothes for four long months.
“It didn’t go quite as well as I expected.”
Jake’s face fell. “What happened?”
“She ran everything I owned through an industrial shredder first.”
“What the hell?” He motioned the waiter over and asked for a beer. I indicated I wanted another Mary.
“Well. I may be exaggerating a little, but nothing was wearable. She shredded my business clothes, poured paint on my casual stuff. Cut the toes off my socks and drew targets on my underwear. You have to admire her determination. If we’d put half that effort into the marriage it might have worked out.”
“You know that’s not true. You tried.”
Jake always believed the best of me. He needed to believe I’d treated BreeAnna with compassion and caring—to see me as basically good. But I’d picked a fragile girl and married her, knowing ahead of time that I could never, ever love her like she deserved to be loved.
Jake saw me as a man who did what was right and suffered for it. Except that’s not who I was, and I didn’t have the stones to tell him.
“I deserve nothing but contempt from her, and we both know it. I’ll buy a new wardrobe for each of us if that’s what it takes to get through this.” I reached for my cigarettes and lit one up. I couldn’t help it any more than I could help avoiding the sadness I knew I’d find in his eyes.
Smoke screen in the truest sense of the word.
The waiter brought our drinks and set them down on cocktail napkins. Afterward, he took my empties and replaced my ashtray with a clean one.
I nodded to him, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He winked before he left, and I wondered if he was one of the many, many young men I’d danced with here at Nacho’s when I first got to town. He might even be someone I’d taken back to the hotel Jake and I had lived in until we found our place. Fuck if I knew. I was newly single and ready to belly up to the Y chromosome buffet at that point, and my hunger apparently hadn’t abated just yet, or I wouldn’t have noticed how those tight black pants highlighted our waiter’s fine, firm ass.
“You’re such a hound.”
“Guilty as charged. And it’s working for me.”
Jake relaxed back into his chair with his beer. “I knew you’d cut a swath through all the gay men in this place, but I thought that arm would slow you down a little.”
I lifted my hand and looked at it. My fingers had been crushed and bore the alarming tracery of thin white scars. My wrist and arm were thin and pale, obviously cut open and closed over a number of surgeries. There had been skin grafts. I knew he didn’t mean it that way but it was a source of irritation to me—that wretched, noticeable imperfection. I’m hardly perfect but I’d traded on the gift of above average—some people had called them extraordinary—good looks and wads of cash for a long time.
“It’s not so bad. It’s a miracle they saved it. For a few days after the accident I thought I’d become some kind of campfire story, the guy with the claw for a hand who—”
“Don’t joke about that.” Jake pressed his lips together.
Chastened, I said, “All right.”
“I swear I’d have traded places with you in a second.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t want that. You know I wouldn’t.” No way in hell.
“I know.”
“So…” I glanced around. “Are we gonna eat or what?”
He shifted in his seat, glancing at the patio door, toward the restaurant where even now Cooper, the violinist who played during the dinner hour, was tuning up. I realized something was up.
“What’s going on?”
Jake smiled. “I’m expecting JT.”
“Yeah?” What a surprise. Jake and JT had been inseparable since the accident where I’d hurt my hand. It was kind of sweet really, if you liked that sort of thing. “His idea or yours?”
“His.”
It was hard to even look at him, he was so gone in love. If I’d cherished any notion that someday Jake and I would play the field together, share bachelor digs, drink too much and party and wind up owning a brothel in Cabo, JT had effectively disabused me of it. He was a decent, hardworking, and fairly sober family man. Jake idolized him. There was no downside to this except the obvious one: I wasn’t ready to relinquish my brother to JT, because I had all this newfound freedom—at last—and I wanted Jake to share it with me.
I took a drag off my cigarette and looked away. I know I’m a prick. Sometimes I shame myself. But even that might not stop me.
“So, why Nacho’s on a Monday night?”
“We both had the day off, and we thought it might be fun. Dinner with the family.”
I nodded. In that he was right. He and I were the only family we had.
My ears picked up the strains of some pretty tune. Cooper was playing the hell out of whatever it was, as usual. I’d once read a news story about a famous concert violinist who played in the subway as an experiment, but I’d never been privileged to hear anyone of his caliber up close, playing whatever I wanted. For a few bucks and a smile, Cooper gave you a musical experience you could never get anywhere else. It was like an immense, unexpected gift, and the people of St. Nacho’s were smart enough to cherish it.
Cooper’s violin was part of the magic of St. Nacho’s. Part of the sticky satisfaction Jake found here; what kept him grounded and caused him to open his bakery a couple of streets over. I was always glad to listen, glad to put my money into the hat and grateful for the experience, but St. Nacho’s didn’t suck me in the way it had Jake.
I liked the vibe of the place. I liked Nacho’s bar. I liked the beach and the bakery, but whenever I had the chance, I headed north to San Francisco or south to LA. I made stops in Santa Barbara for the music and the art. I went to Santa Monica for sex.
I wasn’t Jake. With the end of my marriage, I’d proved something important to myself about the kind of man I was, and I had my freedom to look forward to.
I’d told the last lie I was ever going to tell.
Jake stood up when JT appeared at the door.
Chapter Two
“Here he is.” Jake’s smile went critical and flooded the area around us with happiness. “Hi, babe.”
“Hey.” JT embraced my brother warmly and gave him a kiss.
“Dan.” JT turned to me and offered his hand. I took it with my bionic dexter and noticed he was gentle when he held it in his. He’d been the EMT to triage and treat me when they pulled me from the car after the accident, and while he’d seen a thousand injuries like mine—and far worse—he’d taken his time and been genuinely compassionate. I’d always be grateful for that. “Good to see you.”
“You too,” I answered. Gzzzzzzt. The lie detector in my head mocked me only minutes after I’d declared myself prevarication-free.
I looked behind JT and saw Cam Rooney walk in. I glanced up at him in some surprise. Both JT and Cam? To what did we owe the pleasure?
Cam raised a supercilious eyebrow—something you don’t expect from a brute like him—and stayed silent. It was no secret that Cam and I hadn’t exactly become BFFs. That was odd, really, and I’m sure he attributed it to sour grapes, since he was on the crew that cut my Lexus in half with the Jaws of Life, and I’d teased him about it. Not so. My gratitude for the men of the St. Nacho’s fire department was genuine; it was only Cam who chapped my ass. I had the feeling he didn’t think too much of me either.
The thing is, I was on constant alert around the man because he did something to my gut—something that made me go all boneless and vulnerable—and I knew if I didn’t protect myself, I’d fall into his blue eyes and drown. I might have let myself do just that if it were
n’t for the fact that once I sank to the bottom, I’d only be one of hundreds, thousands maybe who’d done the very same thing.
“Well if it isn’t the abominable fireman.”
Cam’s smile didn’t fool me for a second. “That just never gets old.”
“Cut it out, you two.” Jake buffeted me with his shoulder. “You’re like toddlers.”
“But he cut my car in half.” I am not above making a bad situation worse. “I want it back.”
“I suppose you’d like the use of your hand back too.” Cam pulled out his chair and sat down, startling me. “Must get pretty lonely without it.”
“You would know.” Jake always invited me, and JT always invited Cam. I assumed they’d given up any matchmaking aspirations because it seemed clear we couldn’t thaw out, but maybe they just did it because it added a weird kind of tension, like sweet and sour. Like every party needed contrast, and we were it.
I finally opened up the menu and glanced at the selections, although it was perfectly obvious what I would order. I always ordered the same thing when the four of us went to Nacho’s together—anything with shrimp in it—because Cam was allergic to shellfish. Why I did that, I don’t know, except he looked at my shrimp with longing, and I liked to get his goat.
St. Nacho’s was a small town, and there wasn’t a lot to do. Certainly nothing much more fun than finding myself the object of Cam Rooney’s undivided attention, even if it wasn’t the good kind. Jake argued that I spent too much time on things like that, but from the moment we’d met, and even after he’d saved my life, I’d had an unholy jones for the big blond fireman. Maybe the thing I liked was his corny fresh-faced charm. Maybe it was the fact that we were the two biggest players in St. Nacho’s.
Maybe it was because he looked at me like he knew exactly who I was and he found it disappointing. Even so, I shivered whenever he caught my gaze across the table.
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