It was quiet a beat, and Tango took another drink.
“He’s sort of a bastard, your Aidan.” Ian sighed again, and this one sounded like it was loosening something inside of him; a key turning in a lock. “But he’s a good friend to you.”
Afraid agreeing would only turn Ian into a shithead again, Tango said, “Maybe you should drop ‘Shaman.’ Maybe it’s too much like having her in your life again.”
“Hmm. Maybe. You think she’s dead?”
“I know she is.” The awful cold lump in his stomach was dissipating. In part from the vodka, but mostly because of Mercy. Because he knew that his friend hadn’t let any of them down tonight; he’d done what Tango couldn’t. “Mercy’s very good at that sort of thing.”
“Of that I have no doubts.” He hummed quietly to himself. “Bikers,” he mused. “Of all the places I thought you’d end up, it was never here, with this lot.”
“They’re not such a bad lot.”
“I know that, darling.”
A few cars slid past on the road; it wouldn’t be long before morning rush hour.
Tango sat up, bottle resting on his thigh, and looked over at his…his friend, he guessed. He had no idea if labels would ever fit the two of them. For the first time in all of their history together, Ian looked tired. Peaceful, the sharp lines of his face blurred by the long night.
“Thank you,” Tango said, quietly, and Ian’s brows flicked up in silent question. “I wouldn’t have survived The Nest without you. You…” He swallowed hard. “You could have picked a lot of boys, but you picked me. So thank you.”
Ian’s head rolled toward him, expression hard to read. “Of course I chose you; you were always special. Just not for the reasons Carla thought you were.”
His eyes burned and he looked away, took another hit off the bottle.
In a small, vulnerable voice, Ian said, “Do you think it will be better now? Since she’s gone?”
“I hope so.”
Ian sat up, and leaned against Tango’s shoulder, the warm pressure a comfort. It felt like apology and gratitude. Like friendship. Like letting one another go.
They watched the sun come up.
~*~
Whitney had planned on staying up all night until the guys got back. But sometime in the middle of a slice of Bea Walsh’s orange marmalade cake, she slumped down into the corner of the couch and drifted off – a fact she didn’t realize until someone took her hand in theirs and startled the shit out of her.
“What?” she shouted, jerking awake, and found Tango kneeling on the floor in front of her, trying not to laugh at whatever stupid face she was making. “You’re here,” she said. And then she realized that yes, he was here, and he wasn’t covered in blood, and he obviously wasn’t arrested, and he was smiling up at her like she was something really special, like he loved her. “You’re here!” she repeated, and launched herself off the couch and into his arms.
“Morning.” His voice was a little rough, but she could hear the smile in it. “How was your night?”
She pushed back, hands on his shoulders. “How was yours?”
His gaze slid away from hers. “Productive.”
“Is she…”
“Yeah.”
“Did you…”
“No. I…” His eyes came back, guilty. “I let someone else help me with that.”
She exhaled in a shaky rush. “Oh good. I’m glad, baby.” She hugged him again.
It should have been strange – congratulating someone on the death of someone else. But Whitney had done some thinking during the night. Some serious, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life soul searching. At her lowest point, when everyone else was dozing (or in Maggie and Ava’s case, battling each other at double solitaire like the energized, supernatural creatures they were), and she’d been asking herself if she could do this over and over – waiting for news, wondering if her boyfriend was bleeding out somewhere – she’d never even considered leaving him. He was in her bloodstream now. Her love had reached a point past reason or question. She loved him, end of story.
But what about the rest? How could she rationalize the club, and the things it did in the dark of night?
She’d stepped out onto the front porch, breath pluming in the cold air, and watched the dancing, skeletal shadows of tree limbs tickle the snow. Whoever had built this house had spent a lot of time deciding on the perfect location, the spot with the best view. Because the farm lay beneath her, larger somehow, dressed all in white, the horses tucked away snug in their stalls, the world silent and restful.
She wondered if Emmie ever watched her farm like this, in the moonlight, and regretted the decisions she’d made that had led her here. If Ava looked around her little house, cluttered with kids’ toys, and wished she was writing in an expensive office somewhere. If Maggie ever got tired of the vigils. Even if they felt that way…they were here. They were happy. They wanted to be here.
It had come to her then, on a frigid little gust of air. The decision to make wasn’t about staying. Wasn’t about enduring. It was much simpler than that. If you loved them, if you couldn’t bear to love anyone else, then you stayed. And you handled each crazy, impossible, scary night as it came.
And then she’d laughed to herself, because she wondered if everyone inside had argued the same points to themselves.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“Yeah. Let’s do that.”
~*~
Ian pulled off his hat in the elevator and shook out all his long hair, scratched his scalp with tired fingertips. He knew he looked rough, and that he smelled like vodka, and all he wanted to do was fall face-first into bed and sleep for a week.
But he had his suspicions that there was a not-boyfriend waiting for him upstairs.
Lo and behold, there was.
Alec was moving around the kitchen when Ian entered, wiping down the counters with a damp paper towel and going to the oven to crack the door and peek inside. He looked very domestic, and very young, and…so blessedly normal. He’d never been a dancer, or a stripper, or a hooker, never been forced over a table by a fat man with a little boy fetish. He’d been raised by loving parents, gone to school; maybe he’d been in a fraternity, a club, the swim team. So many ordinary little things American children took for granted, things he’d been denied.
Ian wanted to know all of it, suddenly. Wanted to bathe in the delicious stories of normalcy. Wanted to hear every boring detail of Alec’s boring life.
“Something smells good,” he greeted, his voice low and rough.
Alec glanced up like he wasn’t surprised to see him; he’d heard the door open, after all. “That’s the coffee cake,” he explained. His smile was pleasant, but not all that warm. “It only needs another five minutes or so, and then it can come out.”
“You bought coffee cake?”
“I made it. From scratch.”
“You…what?”
“I also dropped off your dry cleaning, vacuumed, did some grocery shopping for you,” Alec said, tossing the paper towel in the trash and coming to stand in front of Ian. “I also turned in my two-week notice.”
“You what?”
“I’m quitting.” He flashed a tight smile. “I’ve found another job. It pays better, actually. I’m not going to work for you anymore.”
Ian could only stare, open-mouthed, like a bloody idiot. Alec leaned forward and kissed the corner of his slack mouth. “Think about what you want, Ian. And call me when you do.”
Ian listened to him leave, the smell of lemon cleaner and homemade coffee cake filling his lungs.
“Well,” he said to his empty apartment. “Shit.”
Thirty-Four
“How are you liking your NA meetings?” Dr. Jones asked, nudging up her glasses again with a knuckle.
Tango breathed a hollow chuckle. “I don’t think ‘like’ is the right word, doc. They’re going. And it’s…I dunno. I think it’s good to hear other people talk about it. The cravings.”
>
She nodded sagely. “That’s the hardest part about dealing with addiction: feeling like you’re alone.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t even realized that – the lonely in his craving part – until his first meeting, sitting hunched in the back of the rec center gym, hat pulled low over his eyes. “I actually, um, did like you said, and let Whitney come to my last meeting.”
“Good!” She beamed at him. “I think that will really help, letting her be a part of your recovery. If she can empathize, then she can be a good sounding board when you need to talk things out at home.”
“Yeah, she always is.”
Tango had started therapy with Dr. Tabitha Jones three days after Christmas with the expectation that he would hate every second of it. Instead, he’d showed up to the clinic to find a warm and inviting office that smelled like cinnamon, full of overstuffed furniture, a tropical fish tank in one corner. Dr. Jones was a small, fashionable woman who always wore bright colors that offset her dark skin. She liked blueberries and nibbled on them during their sessions. Had a passion for gardening and college football. Meeting with her was like catching up with an old family friend, and nothing at all like therapy. Before he knew it, it was February, and Tango had been seeing her for two months.
“You guys have plans this weekend?” Dr. Jones asked. “It’s supposed to be unseasonably warm on Saturday.”
“Just the usual,” he said, smiling. “Maybe go for a ride. Have lunch out somewhere.”
Her smile was warm and proud. “Sounds nice.”
“It is.”
~*~
“Okay, guys, there’s just a few minutes left, so start cleaning up.”
Whitney jerked, startled by her instructor’s voice. She’d been so absorbed in her sketch that she’d lost track of time. Again. That happened pretty much every class.
Today’s model was a member of the cross-country team, lean and hard with precisely-sculpted muscle, blonde, with a gentle face. He reminded her of Tango, a little, minus all the ink, and she’d found drawing him to be rather simple; she’d found she liked the challenge of committing all of her boyfriend’s ink to paper.
She gave her sketch one last critical glance, then stowed it in her portfolio.
“See you next week,” Megan said on her right.
“Yeah, see you!” Whitney said back.
She loved her life drawing class. In fact, she loved it so much she was starting to wish like hell she’d actually gone to college. She didn’t think too much about her dashed art school dreams – her parents had passed and she hadn’t been afforded the luxury of higher education; she didn’t dwell on it – so long as art was just a private hobby. But in an academic setting, surrounded by other artists, she started to want things she couldn’t have.
Which was just stupid, because Tango was doing so well, and they were both working, and paying their own bills, and she loved him so much. Madelyn was two months sober, and the girls were happy, and Whitney had this whole new biker family…
No. She couldn’t complain. Not about something as silly as art.
It was a brisk night, but the promise of an early spring lingered in rare undercurrents of warmth on the breeze. Whitney shivered pleasantly as she climbed into her car in the dark parking lot, and didn’t look over her shoulder in quiet distress as many times as she used to.
It filled her with indescribable warmth when she pulled into the alley and saw the glowing windows up above in the apartment. Her heart skipped like a schoolgirl’s as she hurried up the iron stairs and let herself inside.
“Hi!” she called.
“Kitchen!” Tango called back, and she found him standing beside the table, contemplating a piece of big white poster board.
She slid an arm around his waist and cuddled up against his side, his arm landing across her shoulders. She took a moment to appreciate the clean laundry smell of him, reach up and tuck a stray lock of his new undercut back behind his ear; she’d liked his long hair, the feel of it through her fingers, but the shaved sides and back of his hair did things to her stomach, left her a little breathless. And don’t even get her started on the long pieces on top.
“What’s up?” she asked, looking down at the poster board.
His voice was pleased when he said, “I’ve got a project for you.”
“A what?” Her eyes roved across the poster and she started to recognize what she was looking at: the blocked-off sections, the explanatory text, the quick doodles. “Is this a storyboard?”
“Yeah.” His hand squeezed her shoulder. “Ava wrote a children’s book. These are all the pages. She wants to know if you’ll illustrate it for her.”
“She does?” She glanced up at his face, incredulous, and found him smiling. “Are you serious?”
“Completely. She’s got a contact at the school who’s going to do a printing for her, and she thought maybe, if you weren’t too busy–”
“Yes! One-hundred-percent yes!”
He chuckled. “I already told her you would.”
“Oh my God.” She tucked her face into his shoulder, shaking a little with delight. “This is…this is amazing. I never thought…” Her voice cracked and she closed her mouth, blinking back sudden hot tears.
Tango put his other arm around her and hugged her properly. “That’s kinda our theme song, huh? ‘I never thought.’”
It was. She had a feeling it always would be, too.
~*~
“No. We’re not doing that. Absolutely not.”
“Oh come oooonnnn.” Alec hung his head off the edge of the bed, craning his neck back all the way, so the vein stood out in his forehead and he could look upside down at Ian where he lay stretched out on the rug. “It’s romantic.”
“Firstly,” Ian said, holding up one finger. “Just because you’ve seen it in every terrible romance movie doesn’t mean it’s actually romantic. Two.” Another finger. “For a man who didn’t know he was gay six months ago, you sure do like being the sappy one in this relationship.”
Alec laughed; it was a light sound, free of angst and heartache and all the dark things Ian brought to the table. “That’s because I lo–”
“No,” Ian said, not unkindly, and Alec’s laughter faded into a soft smile. “Please don’t say it.”
“Not yet, huh?”
“Not yet, no. Getting there. Soon.”
Alec’s arm reached back off the bed and the very tip of his finger touched Ian’s nose. A little affectionate boop.
“You’re impossible,” Ian muttered.
“Yep.”
The doorbell rang.
“At this time of night?” Alec groaned, sitting up to check the clock. “Really?”
“Bruce!” Ian called, still tired and sweat-damp, and enjoying his expensive taste in rugs.
“You kicked Bruce up to his own apartment hours ago, babe.”
“Shit, I did. Alright.” With a sigh, Ian sat up and went to his dresser to find pajama pants. He caught his reflection in the mirror, grimaced a little at his sex-wrecked hair and tried to smooth it without success. He tugged on his robe and headed out of the room as the doorbell rang again.
“Coming! Jesus. Hey, no strawberries while I’m gone. I was serious about that.”
“God, you’re boring,” Alec lamented behind him. “What if they’re chocolate-dipped?”
“Still no!”
There was a sleek little modern sofa table right beside the door of the apartment. Ian pulled open the closest drawer and withdrew the Colt 1911 hidden within. With his other hand, he threw the locks, cracked the door and…
The bottom fell out of his stomach.
It wasn’t an angry drug buyer, or an employee, or the building super. It was a woman, tall and slender, her dark hair shimmering in waves down her back, her face pale and lovely, high cheekbones and huge eyes. Their mother’s eyes. His sister’s eyes.
It was impossible. When he’d seen her last, she’d been just a little girl, in school uniform and pigtails.
But…
The gun clattered as he set it on the table with shaking hands. “Janie?”
Jane gasped and pressed her knuckles to her lips – she’d done that as a child, unmistakable – and her eyes filled with tears. “Ian?”
“I…” He tried to swallow and couldn’t. “Yes, it’s me,” he rasped.
“Oh my God.” She flung herself at him, and he caught her around the waist, overwhelmed by the sight, and sound, feel, smell, and sheer presence of her. “It’s you, it really is!”
Her hair brushed like silk against his face, and he wanted to crush her against his chest. Wanted the floor to swallow him, because how could he explain anything about his life to his little sister?
“How did you find me?” he asked.
She pulled back, crying freely, tears sliding down her cheeks. “There was this man,” she said, voice strained. “He went to the house to see Mum. Albert Something. Some sort of horrid biker or something. And he said he knew where you were, if we’d like to–”
Ian couldn’t decide if he wanted to kill Albert Cross, or send the man a gift basket. He hugged his sister again instead.
Behind him, someone softly cleared his throat. Alec, it was Alec, dressed again and watching the reunion with curious, but soft eyes.
Shit, here went nothing.
Ian towed Jane into the apartment and closed the door. “Alec, this is my long-lost sister, Jane. Jane, this is Alec…my boyfriend.”
Jane’s smile was blinding. “Oh, how lovely.” She held out a hand to Alec. “It’s wonderful to meet you.”
Alec smiled back at her, warm and genuine in that way that had first landed him his job, back before Ian’s stunted little world was turned upside down. “I’ve been told I’m not an expert about it yet, but I can make some tea if you’d like some.”
“Brilliant.”
Ian leaned back against the closed door and let it hold his weight, his muscles turned to jelly.
“Well,” he said, smiling. “Shit.”
~*~
Loverboy (Dartmoor Book 5) Page 40
