Uncommon Passion

by Anne Calhoun

  “Staying safe?” His brother’s blue eyes glinted like shards of a broken mirror.

  “Not my job, Sam.”

  “I heard about what you did.”

  Sam already knew about the gas station so he had to mean tackling the tweaking violent offender. “How’d you hear about that?” The situation made the news, but his role was limited to we apprehended the suspect, which was just fine with Ben.

  Sam looked at him like the idiot he was. “There are gay cops, Ben. Gay cops go to gay bars, where my friends hang out. Someone told a friend to tell me to check on my brother because while he’s always had a reputation, he’s not acting like a smart cop.”

  So much for the thin blue line. “I’m fine.”

  “She was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” he repeated, because repeating it would make it so. “Is that why you texted me?”

  “Yes.” Sam chucked an empty at the recycling bin that held only empty bottles of organic orange juice and Coke Zero cans, with a few Shiners thrown in. A very few. “Stop being stupid or I will kick your ass.”

  Ben actually took that seriously. Somewhere in the two years he was missing, Sam had learned street-fighting moves that didn’t spare eyes or throat or nuts. When he fought, he fought to maim. “It’s not stupid. It’s my job to go after guys like that.”

  “There are rules and procedures for calling for backup, or letting the dog take down the big crazy tweaking drug dealer. Jesus Christ,” Sam said again, and this time a laugh huffed out. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  He’d never been able to resist Sam’s laugh. “Fuck if I know,” he said. “He was built like a goddamn tank, and he knocked Montgomery right through a railing. Hitting him was like hitting a brick wall. Good thing he tripped over his own fucking feet.”

  “And despite this, you’re going home alone again?”

  Ever since he’d met Rachel. Normally everyone understood the rules. Going home with him wasn’t dating him. No one had any claim on him, and he gave the same courtesy. Whether a girl he’d slept with Friday night showed up at No Limits on Saturday with a male friend or a pack of girlfriends made no difference to him. He got booty calls, and considered them fair trade. When it was all over but the leavin’, usually the woman gathered up all the peripheral bits of her image. She’d slip on a watch, rings, earrings, find something to pull her hair back. Grab her purse and shoes and maybe a jacket. Then she’d walk out the door. Rachel was exactly the same whether she wore a pretty dress, jeans and a T-shirt, or nothing at all.

  Rachel had asked him to go on a date. Or hang out. What the hell was it?

  Dating was part of what she had to learn about. Good dates, bad dates, rejections, they were all part of the scene she knew nothing about. It was just like teaching her about sex. Except it wasn’t.

  “You’re taking an awful long time to answer that question,” Sam said.

  Ben shrugged. “Yeah.”

  Sam cocked an eyebrow, but went back to Ben’s errors in judgment. “She said you’ve always been reckless, but it’s been worse lately.”

  The song ended, and Ben changed the subject. “I haven’t heard you sing in a while.”

  When his brother sang, everything he’d ever felt or seen or done swirled on the surface of his skin, then flowed into the air. When Sam sang, everyone in the vicinity stopped what they were doing to watch. Ben had learned to play guitar so Sam had someone to accompany him, and to his surprise, actually liked it.

  Sam shrugged. “I fill in for a friend in a band every so often. Ever since we got Jonathan I want to stay home. How about you? Played much lately?”

  After Sam left Ben had put his guitar in their closet on the ranch and never picked it up again. Sam knew that, so the question rankled. “Too busy.”

  “How busy are you October nineteenth?”

  “Why?”

  “You know why, you stubborn motherfucker. It’s Dad’s fifty-fifth birthday. We’re throwing him a party.”

  Sam hadn’t forgiven their father by his fiftieth. Now, because he had, Ben was supposed to forgive and forget? No fucking way.

  He chucked his can at the recycling bin. “I’ll probably be working.”

  “That’s not a weekday, or a Friday night, or a Saturday night. It’s a Sunday afternoon months from now. You ask for the time off.”

  “I’m on twenty-four/seven call with the SWAT team.”

  “And you don’t get to ask for days off?”

  “It’s SWAT, Sam. I have to be out of the state to not get called.”

  He was lying. He knew it, and despite the effort he made to control his face, Sam knew it. Sam knew him.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, unless the state decides to serve warrants on violent offenders on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “Don’t count on me. Sunday’s a great day to serve warrants.”

  Sam didn’t find this funny. “You’d better be there, Ben. What happened is in the past, and this is months from now. Know who’s going to be there? Me, Chris, Jonathan, Katy and Alan and the girls, Mom, all her sisters, all of Dad’s brothers and sisters, and damn near everyone else he knows. You’d better fucking be there.”

  The silence between them vibrated until Ben heard a ringing in his ears. Sam huffed out a laugh. “Bring whoever this girl is who’s removed your screw-around gene. I’d like to meet her.”

  “There isn’t anyone.” It was just timing, and a virgin. A former virgin. A woman who chose him because she thought he wouldn’t care.

  Was that what he’d become?

  “I’d believe that if your reputation wasn’t the stuff of myth and legends.”

  “You know better than to believe in myths and legends.”

  “The thing about them, Ben, is that they may not be literally true, but they’re always true. That’s why they last as long as they do.”

  Ben had slept through World Religions. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever,” he said, and turned to go.

  Jonathan stood in the doorway, his bony knees sticking out from the hems of a pair of gray cotton shorts with blue sharks printed on them. Even Ben could tell the kid was half-asleep. Jonathan looked at Ben, then at Sam, then back at Ben. He’d done the same thing the first time they met—looked at Sam, looked at Ben, looked back at Sam—then said, “He’s not like you.”

  For a kid who supposedly had attachment issues, he was a pretty sharp judge of character.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Sam said. He crossed the garage to hunker down in front of the boy. “You remember my brother, Ben.”

  Jonathan nodded.

  “What are you doing out of bed?” Sam said, his voice gentle.

  “I wanted a drink.”

  Sam straightened and held out his hand. “Okay, let’s get you a drink. Hang around for a minute,” he said to Ben in a low voice.

  Ben leaned on the workbench and watched through the lit kitchen window while Sam got milk from the fridge. A couple of minutes later he disappeared from the kitchen window, then reappeared in the upstairs hallway. Enough time passed to tuck Jonathan in again, then he reappeared in the hallway window before pushing open the screen door to the backyard, taking the deck steps at a lope.

  “What’s up?” Ben asked, looking down at his folded arms.

  “Do you know anyone at DPFS?”

  He looked up into his brother’s face, into his own face, and read real anxiety there. “Not well. Why?”

  “They’re stonewalling us again on the adoption papers. I thought I’d see if you knew anyone who could tell us anything.”

  “Besides the fact that they’re overworked, you’re gay, and this is Texas?” Ben said.

  “Yeah. Besides that.”

  Ben huffed and shook his head. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

 
“Thanks,” Sam said. “He’s an amazing kid.”

  Stranger things had happened than Sam and Chris being allowed to adopt Jonathan, but Ben didn’t know how Sam could keep doing it, keep caring and loving and committing himself when he knew how much pain came from it. “I’d better get some sleep.” The buzzing in his head was back, intermittent, like a fly battering itself against a window, trying to get out.

  “Me, too.” Sam closed the garage door after him. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  He drove home thinking about how laughable it was to label Rachel Hill a victim. He understood the obstacles she faced, a labyrinth of paperwork just to get the documents and identification everyone else in the world took for granted, but he had no doubt she’d make it. Taking her to open-mike night was just something else to teach her. A date. A simple date. He could do that. Do that right, he amended. With a little effort, he could make this first time better than the last.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The setting sun painted the windshield of Ben’s truck in reds and oranges as it crested the top of the hill, then disappeared in the valley sheltering Silent Circle’s farm stand. Only a dust plume and the engine noise signaled his arrival before he made the left turn onto a dirt driveway sheltered by cottonwoods. Rachel was waiting for him on the bunkhouse’s front porch swing. She rose as he got out of the truck, carrying a wedge-shaped, paper-wrapped object in his left hand. Behind her laughter and talk rose from the poker game going on in the apprentices’ bunkhouse. Jess and a friend from Austin were beating the A&M boys pretty handily.

  Rachel had taken time with her appearance, including a shopping trip into Galveston with Jess, who was all too happy to help her shop after the scene in the parking lot. The dress, straight from the spring sale rack at Walmart, was made of white eyelet with wide shoulder straps, and daringly fitted to her curves at breast, waist, and thigh. As she walked down the stairs, wide pleats flipped around her knees. Her flat brown sandals closed with pink buckles brighter than her lip gloss. She’d loosely French braided her hair and tucked the end under so the plait ended between her shoulder blades; the relaxed style, gloss, and a hint of mascara and eye shadow softened her features just a little.

  Ben’s steps faltered as he took a long, slow look, and for a moment she thought she’d disappointed him somehow with the lack of color and revealed skin. Then his gaze met hers, and she saw a hint of wonder over a very masculine appreciation, as if his own response surprised him.

  “You look really nice,” he said, his voice low enough to blend with the dust settling behind his truck.

  “Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

  He looked like he always did, dressed in faded jeans and a western shirt. The shirt stretched over his broad shoulders and was open at the throat and cuffs. The hint of tanned wrist made Rachel’s stomach do a slow loop.

  He seemed to remember he held something, then offered the package to Rachel. “These are for you.”

  She smiled and blinked as she accepted the paper. A peek through the stapled paper showed roses. Pink roses. “You brought me flowers?” she said rather stupidly as her smile grew.

  Color stood high on his cheekbones. “Yeah.”

  This simple gesture made up for yet another returned letter. “Thank you. Come inside while I put them in water?”

  He followed her up the bunkhouse steps and through the screen door. The poker game chatter stopped when Ben ducked his head and stepped inside. He stopped by the door, his back to the wall, thumbs hooked in his belt. Rachel introduced everyone as she hurried to the kitchen, opening cupboards in search of a vase large enough to hold what turned out to be a dozen roses surrounded by baby’s breath and greenery.

  “Color me surprised,” Jess said in a low voice. She’d found a vase at the back of one of the lower cupboards.

  Rachel thought about this as she emptied the food packet into the cool water. “I’m not,” she said. He knew the moves. He just didn’t do the moves.

  “You should be,” Jess said, but added nothing else as she snipped the stems at an angle under running water before handing them to Rachel to arrange them in the vase. She set the vase not on the dining table, where it would be in the card players’ way, but on the battered oak coffee table that sat between the couch and two rocking chairs in the living area. Ben opened the screen door for her. Impulsively, she plucked one of the stems from the arrangement before she left.

  “You want me to check the does at one?” Jess asked, a hint of mischief in her voice.

  Rachel flushed and looked at Ben. He gave her an almost-imperceptible lift of his eyebrows that was no answer or guidance at all. This wasn’t a Sunday sex lesson.

  “Oh, no,” Rachel said. “We’re going to open-mike night at Artistary. I’ll be home by then.”

  “G’night,” Ben said to the rest of the apprentices.

  He gestured to the truck with his hand and opened her door. After she stepped inside, he closed the door and rounded the hood. Once inside he rolled up the windows and turned on the air-conditioning. “What’s with the flower?”

  Rachel traced the stem of the single bloom she held on her lap, carefully skimming the thorns. “No one’s ever given me flowers before,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave them all behind.”

  “No one’s given you flowers.” The truck roared up the dirt road to the highway and turned south, toward Galveston.

  “We grew them in the garden, so I’d cut them and have them on tables around the house,” she said, using her side mirror to watch dust lift in their wake. “But brought me flowers? No. I wasn’t in a room alone with a male, boy or man, other than my father and my pastor, until I left. We weren’t supposed to even think about the opposite sex, so we would keep ourselves mentally pure for our future husbands.”

  He didn’t say much on the trip into town, but she was used to silence. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked when they reached the outskirts.

  “The Strand.” When she nodded, he added, “I’ve been a cop for eight years. If I can’t tell you the best way to any given address in the city, I don’t deserve the badge.”

  She looked at him. He hadn’t shaved, so sunlight glinted off the dark stubble that covered his jaw and his eyelashes. The right word was brooding, she realized. Light seemed to glance off him, unable to penetrate the darkness shrouding him.

  “Because speed matters?”

  “Speed matters because if I get a call, bad shit is going down somewhere. No one calls first responders for a backyard barbeque unless a guy pulls a deer-skinning knife on his ex-wife and threatens to gut her in front of their kids.”

  Her eyes widened a little. “Is that a real example?”

  “Yesterday,” he said.

  She made a little noise to indicate she’d heard him as she studied him. He was tense, strung tight, but not as tight as she’d seen him. Something else lay under Ben’s terse response.

  The Strand’s streetcar rumbled by as Ben parked in the lot behind Artistary and came around to her side of the truck. When he opened the door he held out his hand, and Rachel put hers in it.

  “No,” he said, then nodded at the flower.

  Confused, she handed it over.

  He pulled a pocket knife from his jeans, deftly trimmed first the length of the stem, then the thorns. He held out his hand again. “Out you come.”

  Clutching her purse in her other hand, she gripped his fingers and set one foot on the running board, then the other on the blacktop. Heat simmered up her bare legs, but it wasn’t hot enough to stop shivers from running down her spine when Ben set his hand on her shoulder and turned her. He gently worked the rose into the loose braid, his fingers brushing her nape, ensuring the stem wouldn’t scratch her skin. When he seemed finished she lifted her hand and checked to be sure the flower was secure.

  It was.
“Thank you,” she said as she turned to face him. “I can smell the scent.”

  “I’m surprised you can smell anything over the asphalt cooking,” he said dismissively.

  She went on tiptoe and kissed him, just a sweet brush of lip on lip. “Thank you,” she said again.

  “You’re welcome,” he said more softly.

  They stepped into golden evening sunlight gleaming on the original hardwood floors. Bookshelves lined three walls and stood in neat rows in the back half of the store, while windows along the front wall rose from knee height to the loft ceilings, tiled with historically accurate white tin. In one corner glass cases held sandwiches, salads, fruit-and-yogurt cups, and an array of desserts ranging from flourless chocolate tortes and custard pies to truffles. Bench seating lined the front half of the store, and square wood tables and white-painted wrought-iron chairs clustered around the performance space created by speakers and a microphone. Only a few were unoccupied. Beside the stage artists carrying notebooks, iPads, guitars, and a wide range of other instruments checked in with the emcee.

  “Grab a table,” Ben said behind her. “What do you like?”

  “Anything but the egg salad or the roast beef,” Rachel said. She claimed the empty seat and put her purse on a chair for Ben. She peered over her shoulder, watching Ben order at the counter from the woman who owned Artistary. He carried over two sandwiches, three different kinds of salads, and cups of fresh fruit, more food than she could possibly eat, even if she was responsible for just half.

  He hitched his chair around and sat down. “So you don’t like egg salad and you don’t like roast beef.”

  “I like both,” she said as she examined the sandwiches. Thai chicken. His plate held ham and Swiss. “But I want to try something different each time I come.”

  Without saying a word he swapped half his sandwich for half of hers. Rachel added a bit of each salad to her plate, and studied the emcee, still lining up the acts.

  “How does this work?” Ben asked as he twisted the top off a bottle of beer.