When Tony Met Adam (Short Story)

by Suzanne Brockmann

  No. Please, God, no …

  He googled Tony’s name with his heart in his throat, and the first things that came up looked like some kind of qualifying lists for charity runs. Adam clicked a link, and yes, apparently Tony ran half-marathons—thirteen-point-one miles, holy shit—in his spare time.

  He’d also—according to his hometown paper, the Shoreline Times—graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. A picture showed a younger and significantly more slender Tony—his middle name was Michael—grinning broadly at the camera, with light and life dancing in his pretty eyes. There was a picture of him, as well, with much shorter hair, dressed in his Navy uniform, with an announcement about his acceptance into the SEAL’s BUD/S training, another announcing his graduation from the grueling program and his acceptance into Team Sixteen.

  And Adam didn’t know much about the Navy—other than that the uniforms could make damn near anyone look hot. But he did know that the average Ivy League college student didn’t enlist in the Navy upon graduation. It was bizarre. Maybe—maybe—they became an officer, but to just sign up as a grunt …?

  Who did that?

  Tony, apparently.

  Adam back-paged to his original Google list, scanned down it, and …

  Oh, sweet Jesus, there was an obituary. For Anthony Michael Vlachic, again from the Shoreline Times, and he clicked it with dread churning his stomach, praying that Tony had a grandfather or father with the exact same name, but the link took him to a page that was blank.

  “No,” he said. What the fuck …?

  But then a message appeared: Please excuse our construction dust. The page you requested is temporarily off-line as we update our website.

  “Shit!” He reached for his phone, flipping through his address book, because there was only one person to call at a time like this.

  Jules, with his FBI agent status, would be able to find out what Adam needed to know.

  Except the last time he and Jules had collided, the FBI agent’s good friends, Cowboy Sam and Wonder-Woman Alyssa, had deleted both Jules’s and Robin’s phone numbers from Adam’s phone. And he hadn’t inputted them again—at least not yet.

  Except now, when Adam went into his computer contact file, he couldn’t find Jules. Or Robin, for that matter. Which was beyond strange, since he knew he’d had a record of both their work and cell numbers, along with their home landline up in Boston.

  But their page had vanished—or rather, it had been erased.

  Perhaps even by Tony, when he’d spent the night at Adam’s. Sure Adam was a light sleeper, but Tony was a freaking SEAL, trained at moving stealthily. He could’ve gotten out of bed in the night, gone into the living room where Adam’s laptop was sitting in plain sight …

  Or maybe Tony had had nothing to do with it. Maybe Sam had made a discreet phone call, even before Adam had left Boston back in December, and one of his spooky friends had slid in through the crack under the door and done the dirty work for him.

  Sam was a real son of a bitch. But he was also a son of a bitch who knew Tony and was still tight with the SEALs in Team Sixteen, and therefore a great source of information.

  Adam googled Troubleshooters Incorporated, San Diego, and followed the link to the security team’s website, where there was plenty of contact information. He punched the main phone number into his phone and …

  It was picked up after only one ring by a woman. “Troubleshooters. This is Tracy Shapiro speaking. How can I help you?”

  “I need to speak to Sam Starrett,” Adam said.

  “I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting with a client,” Tracy said crisply. “I’ll connect you to his line so you can leave a voice mail.”

  “Wait,” Adam said, but she was so efficient, she’d already switched him over.

  “This is Sam Starrett,” came the recorded message in Sam’s standard cowboy twang. “Leave a message and I’ll get back to you ASAP.” Adam hung up before the beep and reached for his cell phone, just in case the receptionist had caller ID, which she probably did, because come on. This was a personal security firm, after all.

  He dialed Troubleshooter’s number again, and this time, when she picked up, he did his best imitation of Jules.

  “Troubleshooters. This is—”

  He cut her off, pitched his voice further back in his chest and added the almost musical inflections that made people respond as if Jules were telling the most fascinating story in the world. “Hey, Trace. It’s me, Jules Cassidy. I’m in a teensy bit of a bind.” He brought teensy up an octave and let bit of a bind drop back even lower than his normal register. Damn. He did Jules better than Jules himself. “I’m calling from a borrowed cell phone and, well, it’s a long story. Too long to tell right now. It’s something of an emergency, though, and I really need to speak to Sam. Is he around?”

  “I’ll put you right through, sir,” she said.

  Sam picked up close to immediately. “Hey,” he said. “Hang on just a sec, while I go into my office and …” There was a thunk while he must’ve closed his door. “What’s going on, Cassidy? Are you all right? Is Robin—”

  “He’s fine,” Adam said in his own voice. “And Jules is, too. At least as far as I know. I just … I’m sorry, but I needed to talk to you and …”

  “Who the fuck is this …?” Sam asked in a growl that was scary even with miles between them.

  “It’s Adam,” he said. “And I am sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I thought—”

  “Adam Wyndham …?” Sam asked with the same inflection that someone might say You puked in my car …?

  “Look, I haven’t heard from Tony in a really long time,” Adam tried to explain, “and then I read that there’d been casualties over in Afghanistan—”

  “It’s a war,” Sam said flatly. “There are casualties every fucking day. You’re really a piece of work, you know that, Wyndham? And I know you’re not an idiot, so you must know it’s illegal to impersonate a federal agent—”

  “So arrest me,” Adam said. “I don’t give a shit. I just need to—” His voice actually broke, and he had to blink back the tears that sprang into his eyes. “I’m going crazy over here, Sam,” he whispered. “Please. Have mercy on me. I need to know. Was Tony one of the SEALs who died?”

  “What?” Sam said. “Died? No one in the teams died.”

  Was it possible that he didn’t know? “The article said it happened last month,” Adam said, reaching for his computer mouse and searching for the link to the news story that he’d read and …

  “There was an ambush,” Sam told him, “back about a month ago, with one hell of a firefight. Tony was hit, but he’s not dead.”

  Tony was not dead. Oh, God, thank you, God … And Jesus, he was a moron. The article he’d been reading was from 2005. Except Sam had just told him—holy crap! “Tony was hit?” Adam asked. “What do you mean hit? You mean shot?”

  “It was no big deal,” Sam reassured him, which was stupid, because Adam knew being shot was a big deal. Jules had been shot, and it had scared the shit out of Adam, just thinking about how dead Jules would have been had that bullet hit him a fraction of an inch lower.

  “At least not when it happened,” Sam was still talking and Adam focused. “But apparently the wound got infected and … It was bad for a while there.”

  “Oh, my God,” Adam said. “Define bad.”

  “Bad enough to need a hospital. And since Lopez couldn’t get Tony to one, not until the CIC had the troops he needed to stage a counteroffensive to draw al Qaeda away from where they had the SEALs pinned in the mountains, well … Lopez brought the hospital to Tony. He and Izzy Zanella jumped in with the antibiotics and medical supplies the team needed, to hold out until the reinforcements arrived.”

  “Jumped?” Adam asked.

  The word meant just what he’d suspected. “Parachuted,” Sam explained. “Which is a fucking crazy don’t try this at home, kids stunt, at this time of year, in those mountains, with those what-the-fuck
air currents …?” He sounded both envious and impressed, former SEAL that he was. “You know, I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of this, but the story is about to break in the news—with no names, of course. Still, the public loves a SEAL rescue, and this was too good not to leak. Cosmo, Silverman, and Dan Gillman led the enemy on a wild goat chase down the mountain, creating a diversion by pretending they were carrying Tony out of there. Meanwhile, Tony was hunkered down with Jenkins, waiting for Lopez and Zanella to come surfing in with their medical special delivery.”

  Sweet Jesus. “Are they all okay?”

  “Mostly,” Sam said. “Silverman broke an ankle—disembarking from the extraction helo, after they finally got everyone out of there.”

  “And Tony?” Adam asked. “He’s all right?”

  “He was in the hospital, in Germany, for a while,” Sam told him. “But yeah. He’s gonna be fine.”

  Thank God.

  “He’s also home now,” Sam continued. “They all are, the whole team. They got back about a week ago, I think. And Adam?” he added, not unkindly. “I kind of suspect that if Tony wanted you around, he would’ve called you by now, you know?”

  Ouch.

  “Yeah,” Adam said. He did know. But it was okay, because Tony wasn’t dead.

  “Do the kid a favor,” Sam started.

  Adam cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Don’t worry, I’m not going to call him.” He just didn’t want him to be dead.

  “I gotta go,” Sam said. “I’m supposed to be in a meeting. I need to get back to it.”

  “Yeah,” Adam said again. “I’m sorry that I—I am sorry. And … thank you.”

  “Don’t do it again.” Sam hung up.

  Adam sat there, at his computer, for a good long time, just staring out the window, glad beyond belief that Tony was all right, and yet filled with an almost overpowering sadness that made him want to weep.

  But he didn’t. Because life was unfair. He’d learned that years ago.

  And even if life weren’t unfair, if he had a choice between Tony not being dead, and Tony calling him again?

  Adam would choose the option he’d gotten. No doubt about it. And no fucking way was he going to cry over something that he knew in his heart was a giant win.

  The lights were on in Adam’s apartment.

  That window that Tony had wondered about the first—and only—time he’d been here was blazing.

  He took a deep breath as he stood on the porch, exhaling hard before reaching out to ring the bell.

  He should have called or even emailed, but he knew if he had done that before coming over, there was a strong chance Adam would have shut him down. This way, the shutting would have to be done in person. Face-to-face. Man-to-man. Which was only one letter away from man on man.

  Tony had the utmost faith in his persuasive abilities to change that to to an on. All he had to do was talk himself inside and close that door behind him.

  This time he had three weeks. This time …

  The door opened and …

  Shit, he should have called.

  A stranger was standing in the open door. Mid-thirties and attractive in a blond-with-fashionably-nerdy-glasses-and-a-button-down-sweater way. He was sizing Tony up with surprised scrutiny and barely concealed hostility. “Who the hell are you?”

  Tony’s stomach lurched in a way that wasn’t all that different from his reaction to the powerful antibiotic he’d been on, even after being released from the hospital. It had turned his intestines into sludge and kept him on the verge of being dehydrated. Combined with the toll the actual infection had taken on his body, along with the exhaustion from traveling halfway around the world, it had made him spend his first week home curled up in bed, asleep.

  This trip to L.A. was his first real venture out, and his knees still felt a little wobbly. Particularly now. “Oh,” Tony said. “I’m sorry, um …”

  “He’s with me now,” the man said, with a raftload of attitude. “So cross him off your hit list.”

  “I honestly didn’t know,” Tony said. “I’ve been out of the country for months and … He didn’t know I was coming over here tonight. Really.”

  The man crossed his arms but didn’t say anything, so Tony kept going. Because God, if Adam had made a serious connection and was genuinely happy with this man, who seemed extremely upset by Tony’s appearance, he didn’t want to mess it up for him.

  “We only hooked up once, and it was a while ago. I just, um … I’ve been gone since then, and it was crazy to think he’d, you know … Wait for me.” He cut to the bottom line, resisting the urge to sit down on the steps and put his head between his knees. God, this sucked, in so many ways. “I really like him. He’s a good guy. A little nuts, but, you know, who isn’t? I’m just … Please, if you don’t mind, will you tell him that I stopped by and that I’m … happy for him.” He forced a smile, forced his hand not to shake as he dug in his pocket for his car keys. “He deserves someone who’s around all the time. I can’t give him that, I’m in the Navy and … Well. I’m Tony, by the way, and you don’t have to worry. I won’t be back. You can tell him that, too. If you want. Or don’t tell him anything, if you don’t want to. You can just pretend this never happened. I mean, it wasn’t like he was expecting me to come back …” He shook his head. “He wasn’t. So …”

  Okay. He’d probably said enough. It was time to go. It was definitely time to sit down, and it would be better to do that in his car instead of on the sidewalk.

  But before he turned away, the other man spoke.

  “I’m Adam,” he said, then rolled his eyes before Tony could even raise an eyebrow. “And yeah, yeah, I know. We get that all the time.”

  “It’s bound to happen,” Tony said. “Adam and Adam. I knew a Jason and Jason in college.”

  Now the blond—Adam-2—was back to being hostile. Or maybe he was quizzical, but it involved frowning. “It’s Adam and Steve,” he said. “Wait a minute. We moved in just last month. Are you—”

  “Steve,” Tony repeated, with a laugh. “Your partner’s name is Steve.” Holy shit.

  “… looking for—”

  “Adam,” Tony finished for him as his knees mutinied and the world swirled around him, and he sat down, right there on the porch steps. He looked back at Adam-2 over his shoulder, trying to force the spinning to stop. “I’m looking for Adam, who lived here back in January.”

  The blond man laughed now, too. “Wow,” he said. “I owe Steve an apology. I actually thought … And, wow, you thought …”

  “Nice to meet you,” Tony said, and as Adam-2 reached forward to shake his hand, the very last remnants of his hostility fell away. But it was replaced by concern.

  “Are you all right?” Tony heard the other man ask as if from a distance—right before the spinning stopped and the world went black.

  Adam almost didn’t take the call.

  The number on his cell phone was that of his former landlord, Connor. But he’d paid up all of his rent and had even had his security deposit returned, so there was no reason to hide from the guy. Besides, they’d been relatively friendly during Adam’s years living there. Maybe Connor was calling because there was some mail or a package that had gone astray.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Adam, how are you? It’s Con. I’m sorry to bother you, but I just got the weirdest call from … Well, his name’s Adam, too. He’s my brother Steve’s latest boyfriend. They’re living over in 108, you know, your old place?”

  “Yeah, Con,” Adam interrupted him, because the man could go on and on. “Sorry to have to make it short, but I’m just about to go into makeup.” Not quite a lie, considering he was due in makeup before the sun set, which counted as a just about in the earth-is-a-billion-years-old cosmic scheme of things. Until then, he was doing some shopping and getting some lunch. “If there’s something that you need …”

  “Oh, sorry, of course,” Connor said. “It’s just that Adam—Steve’s Adam—told m
e that one of your, um, friends came to see you, but you weren’t there, of course, because you moved out. But apparently, this guy—Tony Something—had some kind of, I don’t know. Medical event, I guess. Adam called an ambulance and then he called me because he thought you should know.”

  “Medical event,” Adam repeated, his heart in his throat. Tony had come to see him and had had a medical event.

  “Yeah, the way Adam described it, he just kind of checked out. I don’t know if it’s drugs or alcohol—”

  “It’s not,” Adam said.

  “I’m not judging. It’s not my business to—”

  “It’s not.” Adam spoke over him. “Tony was recently wounded in the war—the one in Afghanistan.”

  “Oh, wow,” Connor said. “I had no idea.”

  “Most people don’t,” Adam said. Tony had probably pushed himself too far, too fast. Driving all the way up from San Diego, to see Adam … God, he’d actually come to see Adam. “Which hospital did the ambulance take him to?”

  “Cedars-Sinai,” Connor told him. “You might want to get over there, to talk to the doctors, you know, make sure they know he’s not just some drunk who needs to sleep it off.”

  “Yeah, I will. Thanks for calling me. I really appreciate it.” Adam cut the connection and turned on his phone’s GPS, searching for Cedars-Sinai, which was on … Beverly Boulevard. Which wasn’t that far from his current location. He got his bearings and ran toward the street, scanning for a cab. There was nothing in sight, so he opened his phone again, and slowed to a jog as he scrolled through his recent history and found the number for Troubleshooters Incorporated. He hit TALK, and sure enough, after only one ring, good old Tracy picked up.

  “Troubleshooters. This is—”

  “Tracy,” Adam said. “Hi. You don’t know me. My name’s Adam, and I’m a friend of Sam’s. Well. Not exactly a friend. More like a nemesis, but okay. Whatever. Anyway, a mutual friend, a SEAL with Team Sixteen, was recently injured over in Afghanistan and I just got a call from another friend telling me that he’s—the SEAL friend—is in the hospital here in L.A., and it’s something of an emergency. I need Sam to get in touch with another SEAL named Jay Lopez, to ask him to call either me—” he rattled off his cell phone number “—or Cedars-Sinai Hospital because my injured friend might be unconscious and … Are you writing this down?”