“You can have it. We have a lot of days left—we’ll get there. Right now, though, I want to keep playing this game, the one where you’re giving yourself to me.” The finger left, and Marcus’s cock nudged against the opening. “Tell me again. Tell me who your body belongs to. Tell me whose ass this is.”
“Yours.” Frankie lifted his backside higher so Marcus could see it better, so he could fuck it better. “This is yours.”
Marcus held the globes of Frankie’s ass. “What should I do with it?”
A wave of deep pleasure rolled through Frankie as he whispered, “Whatever you want.”
When Marcus pushed inside him, Frankie cried out, not so much because it hurt—God, he’d been stretched well by the same cock not even three minutes before—but because it was such a surprise. The way Marcus responded to that cry made him do it again, and again, and he wondered if Marcus liked the cries for themselves or because he knew the others would hear. Frankie wished he knew. He wished he knew all the things Marcus wanted most, and he wanted to be the one to give them to him.
He wanted to be the one to love Marcus that way.
This time his gasp was softer, and sadder, and something hard and tight pinched in the middle of his chest. No. He couldn’t be in love with Marcus. That was ridiculous and stupid, because he’d just met him and he had to go home and Marcus had to stay here and that was stupid, stupid, stupid.
But as Marcus drew Frankie’s limp legs over his shoulders and bent him in half to kiss his lips and brought them both to climax, Frankie knew, stupid or not, that it was true.
Chapter Eleven
THE WIND STILL blew the next morning, but it wasn’t half as bad as it had been the day before, and as such Marcus agreed with Arthur that it was time to go into town, restock some supplies, and get reports from their neighbors on how people were faring. After firing up the generator and making some breakfast, he got dressed and helped get the Ski-Doos ready.
Frankie, meanwhile, fussed with his appearance as if he were heading for a grand ball, not into Logan, Minnesota post-blizzard. It was more than a little ridiculous, but when Arthur and Paul tried to give him shit over it, Marcus shut them down.
“He gets nervous about how people perceive him,” Marcus explained as they lined up the three snowmobiles and attached the sled to Paul’s, loading the empty gas can first thing. “Plus, looks are kind of his thing, and he wants to do my mom’s hair.”
“Yeah, but nobody’s gonna give a crap about how his hair looks, even for that,” Arthur argued.
Marcus shrugged. “It matters to Frankie.”
When Frankie finally emerged from the house, primped and styled and carrying a small bag of supplies over his shoulder, Marcus had to admit the fuss had been worth it to him too. Frankie always looked good to him, but there was something about seeing him putting on the dog that really did it for Marcus. He had every intention of staking a claim on his temporary boyfriend as they went into town, and it definitely pleased him to know any local closet cases would be plenty jealous Frankie had landed on his doorstep instead of theirs.
It was thrilling too to have Frankie’s arms around his middle as they rode cross-country toward town, wind in their faces, the roar of the snowmobile drowning out the world. The landscape around them sparkled everywhere they turned, a beautiful wasteland of white. Few riders had been out yet in this area, and Marcus felt like an explorer out conquering new lands. If it turned out they had enough fuel to warrant it, he wanted to take Frankie out just the two of them for a ride before he left, to show him the Logan he knew and feel those arms closed tight around him the whole time.
Once they arrived in town, of course, that sense of pure isolation altered, and the reality of what so much snow and cold meant took away the joy and landed Marcus’s perspective right back into grim. The streets had been plowed, though not well. The state and county plows hadn’t reached them yet, though word was they were due by the afternoon. Only in a few places could regular vehicles get around, and even then they’d better have four-wheel drive. The town mayor was holed up at the café, working his cell phone in between answering people’s questions and repeating information as he received it. He looked harried and frustrated and overtired. The café itself was busier than it was in the height of tourist season, excepting that one time a bus had gotten lost.
“Most folks don’t have power,” Patty told them as she placed coffee and tea before them and pulled her pad out for their order. “The main line next to the power plant does, but they’re running on backup. The mayor talked them into letting us keep our access, since we can feed everyone and serve as a central location. Church is going too at the other end, giving meals away and running a makeshift shelter for those without backup heat.”
“When are they looking to get power back to us?” Arthur asked, not looking pleased by the news.
Patty shrugged. “Hopefully early next week is what I’m hearing. Right now what we need is fuel. Gas station on the north end is out, and the tanks on the south side won’t last the day.”
Rising, Paul took a swig of coffee and nodded at them. “That’s my cue to go fill up. Order for me, Arthur?”
“What about food?” Arthur asked Patty. “How are people doing for that?”
“Nobody has milk. Eggs are just about spent, but somebody an hour ago said they had hens and would get some eggs to the café by tomorrow. I’m sure hoping they make it up here with a truck of groceries by then, though.”
Marcus decided he’d ask the question they were all trying not to ask. “What’s our headcount?”
Patty’s grim expression told the tale. “Four dead so far. Two trapped in cars, one heart attack shoveling snow, one drunk idiot at the bar who thought he’d sleep it out in his vehicle and froze to death.”
Four. Marcus’s belly hollowed out as he realized that, had Frankie been knocked out in his car or unable to get to safety, that number could have been five. He reached over and took his lover’s hand. “Say, have they made a pass for vehicles yet?”
“Just getting started.” Patty pulled out another pad. “Why, you guys put the truck in a ditch? Oh wait—you mean Frankie’s car.” She smiled at him and put pen to paper. “Where’d you lose it, sweetheart?”
With the others’ help, Frankie gave her the location of his wreck on top of his description. “I have Triple A too, for the towing.”
Patty waved this away. “We’ll settle that later.” Pulling off the paper, she nodded to the other end of the café. “I’ll get this to Jed, and I’ll have him call you, Marcus, when he’s got it in the shop.”
After the café, they headed to the grocery store—technically they didn’t want to stop there until later, but given the way Patty talked, there wouldn’t be much store left by the end of the day. Truth be told, there wasn’t a whole lot of it when they arrived as it was. Most of the shelves were stripped, and they had to make do with weird dried things and canned bits of God knew what.
The emptiness of the grocery store scared Frankie, who wrapped his arms around himself and stared hollowly at the places where food should be. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Never. Once when I was little in Saint Peter we ran out of milk for a day. That was it. I can’t believe a whole store is empty, and that it’ll stay this way for days.”
“Nobody’s going to starve,” Marcus reassured him. “Certainly not us—even discounting red meat, we could feed you for another two weeks without batting an eye. Snow happens up here, and we get cut off, so we stock up. A lot of this”—he gestured to the shelves—“is because people panic. There’s always somebody who doesn’t prepare, a grasshopper to the other ants. But you heard Patty. The café has food. They’re feeding people, and I bet you there’s a lot of credit going on, but the mayor will see to it that the café gets paid one way or another. He’ll make sure, too, that the National Guard hears about it if people are seriously starving. There’s the church as well. It’ll be fine. We’ve done this before, and we’ll do i
t again.”
Frankie leaned into him, seeking comfort, then stopped, frozen, glancing around. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”
Marcus pulled him in close, his gesture possessive and blatantly suggestive. “Yes you did, and it’s fine. I’m out here. I’m not hiding, so neither should you.”
Frankie relaxed, but not all the way. “Sorry. I just get…nervous.”
Yes, Marcus knew that. He wanted to march Frankie up and down the aisles and down Main Street, hanging a sign over his head that said, I’m protecting this guy, so back the fuck off. Instead, he kissed his cheek. “Make sure there’s nothing here you need, and we’ll head over to the care center. You can meet my mom and see if there’s enough stuff there to do her hair.”
LOGAN MANOR TURNED out to be not quite as depressing as Frankie had been afraid it would be, but it was close. The outside of the building was squat and brick and, especially under the weight of several feet of snow, looked very much like a quiet place to wait to die. Inside it was much the way all homes for the elderly managed to be: set in the style of three decades past, alternately dim and too harshly lit, and smelling of stale death. The residents took up various places on the spectrum between slightly fogged and literally comatose, several reduced to sitting in dark corners of their room, moaning quietly to themselves and whoever might care to hear them.
The staff, however, was far brighter and kinder than Frankie had even thought to anticipate, particularly Kyle, the male nurse who was a John Inman if Frankie had ever seen one. They all greeted Marcus and the others with warm, friendly smiles, and when Paul and Arthur offered to help do some shoveling of snow and double-check their generator, they were met with enthusiastic thanks. Kyle meanwhile pulled Marcus aside, and as Frankie drifted closer, he realized the nurse was giving an update on Marcus’s mother.
“Today’s not the best day. Everyone has been upset by the storm, but your mother seems especially disoriented. For a while she asked for you, thinking you were bringing her dinner, then announcing you were late for an appointment to take her to a movie, but now she’s gone very quiet. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s slipped into a fog where she doesn’t know who you are at all, not right away.”
Marcus nodded through all this, clearly not liking the report but also not in the least surprised. “Do you think I could introduce Frankie to her, or would that upset her further?”
Kyle smiled at Frankie, giving him a wave and a soft hi before answering. “I’d say it’s fine to try.”
“Frankie is a stylist back in Minneapolis, and he wanted to do Mom’s hair if she were well enough for it. Is that something we could do?”
At this, Kyle’s smile became bright. “Oh, yes! She’s been going on and on about that the past week, almost the one constant thing she talks about outside of your visits. Sometimes she talks about needing it for work, but honestly I think she just wants to look nice and hates how Miriam cuts hair.”
“Do you think we could do a color too?” Frankie rustled the bag at his side. “We managed to pick up some box color at the grocery, but I didn’t know if you were rationing water or if you didn’t want to spare the electricity and so on.”
“Oh, no—we’re on city water, which is fine as far as I’ve heard, and our generator’s got no problems. We’re a makeshift hospital during the storm, you see, since the closest is in Pine Valley, and the clinic doesn’t have power. If we don’t have enough juice to let an old lady get her hair rinsed out, we’ve a serious problem.”
Frankie smiled. “Fabulous. Could I meet her?”
Mimi Gardner sat at her window as the three of them entered, a blanket tucked around her legs. When Kyle called out to her, she turned toward them, and Frankie’s heart skipped a beat. She was beautiful, the image of her son in so many ways, particularly around the eyes. Despite the fog of her disease, Frankie could see the bright spirit that still lived within her. It took no effort to imagine her managing a small-town library and running herd on Marcus and his friends. He did see the debilitation of her condition, however, and it made him ache. It also made him that much more determined to give her back some of what she had lost.
Marcus had crouched down beside his mother, who frowned and appeared confused by Frankie’s presence. “This isn’t Steve. I know I’m sick, but this isn’t Steve.”
“I know,” Marcus said, patience thinning. “I told you, I’m not seeing Steve anymore. This is Frankie.”
“Steve isn’t any good for you,” she told Marcus, giving him a stern look.
“I know.” Marcus took her hand. “Mom, Frankie is visiting from the Cities, and he does hair. He’d like to do yours for you, if you’ll let him.”
Mimi blinked up at Frankie. “You’re a hairdresser?”
“Yes.” Frankie smiled and pulled up a chair in front of her, trying to meet her gaze, but he was already distracted by the possibilities of her hair. “Mrs. Gardner, you have lovely texture, and the gray you have coming in is a beautiful silver in places. I bought a few boxes based on your natural color, but I have to tell you, I want to come up and see you sometime after New Year’s with this lovely product we have back in the shop. I’d love to do you in silver with black-and-white highlights. You’d be ravishing. They’d probably come put you in Revlon commercials if we weren’t careful.”
Mimi looked foggy, like she was slightly drunk, but as Frankie spoke about her hair, she beamed. “I want to look good for the Christmas party next week at the library. I look like a tired old lady, and I hate it.”
“You will be nothing less than the elegant grand dame that you are, Mrs. Gardner, when I’m through with you.” He turned to Marcus. “Hon, I’m going to send you out to the grocery and back to Patty with a list of cosmetics I want. If they don’t have any here at the care center, I’m going to need cotton pads or balls—pads are better, but balls will do—and some swabs. Brushes would be great, but they’re not sanitary and I don’t want to accidentally break any codes. You said there’s a salon in here? Do you know if they still have their Barbasol? Sterilizers?” he added when Marcus stared at him like he was speaking in tongues.
“The salon’s just down the hall.” Kyle bounced with his effort to bank his eagerness. “I can get it unlocked for you.”
“Great. I want to see it before I do anything else.” He took Mimi’s hand and squeezed it. “Don’t you worry, honey. You’re going to be the most beautiful woman at that Christmas party, and they’re going to talk about it for the rest of their lives.”
Mimi squeezed his hand back, her eyes damp as she smiled, and when Frankie turned to Marcus, his temporary boyfriend’s eyes were misty too.
Marcus pulled Frankie close, kissed him hard on the lips, then stood. “Get me your list so I can get started on it.”
“Take me to the salon,” Frankie told Kyle, and with a quick goodbye to a still dazed but excited Mimi, the three of them went down the hall.
THE SALON HAD clearly once been the hub of resident activity but now languished in dust and neglect. Kyle explained they’d lost the funding for a staffed stylist long ago, though Marcus pointed out to Frankie that the bigger issue was no one wanted the job. The three of them did a quick janitorial, Frankie pushing them to the standards he knew covered Minnesota law. Once he’d taken inventory of his supplies, he made a list for Marcus, sent him on his way, and opened for business.
He’d very deliberately organized the space to feel like a real salon, an oasis of normal in a house of creeping death, and it was with great pleasure he led Mimi into his temporary domain, treating her with the same care and courtesy he would the regular patrons of his chair in Minneapolis. Kyle and Marcus had given him a crash course in little and large things that might go wrong because of Mimi’s disease, but Frankie found the rhythm of a lady getting her hair done was one that her debilitations could not easily touch. Perhaps she couldn’t articulate exactly what she wanted, and perhaps her stories were disjointed and she pointed out several times that he wasn’t Steve,
but overall the process was the same as it always was—he put her in the chair, put on the drape, chatted about what he planned to do, and got to work washing her hair.
Something about the grimness in her situation pushed him to emphasize the normal all the more. He talked at length about the texture of her hair, giving her a mini-lecture about product and treatments and educating her on how mature hair needed to be treated. He knew she wouldn’t remember a word of it and that even if she did, she’d get the same industrial-grade cleaner on her head as everyone else when the nurses washed her hair, but it made him feel good to treat her that way, and she seemed to like being talked to like she mattered, like she still had all her faculties and truly would be going to a Christmas party.
Thank God his mother always wanted a trim when he visited, because he was so glad he had his Hattori and Kamikaze shears to do Mimi’s cut. He had, literally, paid more for the pair of them than he had his piece-of-junk car, but they were worth every penny and then some. The Japanese steel was exquisite, and both pairs of shears fit his hands like they were extensions of his fingers. The salon might be a dive, the chair might be lopsided, but none of it mattered when he had his shears.
Frankie chatted to Mimi as he worked, their conversation drifting in and out of real time, repeating itself and sometimes making angles he couldn’t even hope to process. They spoke a great deal, of course, about Marcus.
“You’re dating my son?” she asked several times.
“I’m seeing him while I’m here in Logan,” Frankie would always reply. “I live in Minneapolis, so anything long term won’t work out, but we’re having a lot of fun being together right now.”
Let It Snow Page 12
