Honey Red

by Liz Crowe

  Ian stared out into the inky blackness, taking in huge breaths of thick, fishy air. He did love this part of the country. Even the oppressive, soul-sucking heat of the July and August months when the place was devoid of most humanity because the rich people went north and the tourists stayed closer to the ocean. A hand on his shoulder made him jump, then smile, and he rose and allowed himself to be coaxed out of yet another failure funk at the talented hands, lips, and tongue of the young, eager bartender.

  “Fuck!” Ian yelped and sat up at the same time as his bedmate, banging the back of his head on the man’s chin. “What in the hell?” There was an alarm clanging somewhere, but his muddled brain couldn’t narrow in on it. He jumped up, shoved everything off his small bedside table in his search for the source, gripped his phone and saw a strange number – one that had apparently called him a dozen times before he even heard it. He reached for the water bottle and stood, ignoring the complaints coming from the pillows. He admired the view of the man’s form – the lovely ass that had provided Ian with so much release in the last months, his full lips and rough jaw, but shook his head, trying to focus. Middle of the night calls were never good. Everybody knew that. Panic beat a small pulse in his chest.

  “Hello?” he said and fell into a chair, boneless, shocked to his core, as terror enveloped him at the sound of the clipped words coming from the small nearby hospital. He ran a shaking hand down his face, looked up and saw his current lover standing in all his naked glory in the doorway, a look of curious concern on his handsome face. Ian sensed every ounce of blood drain from his face as the doctor kept talking, telling him words he refused to process. “I’ll be right there,” he said finally, if just to get the man to shut the hell up and let him think. He hit the end button and attempted to contemplate the fresh hand he had just been dealt.

  “What’s up?” the man asked him. Ian struggled to remember his name. Finally he hit on it as he rose and grabbed jeans and a brewery-smelling T-shirt from the couch where he’d shed them in his haste to bury his cock in the other man’s body.

  “I gotta go. Hospital…it’s…um…,” his throat closed up and his eyes burned.

  “Jesus, Ian what is it?” The other man—Allen, his brain engaged for the briefest of moments—grabbed Ian’s arm. “Talk to me. I’ll come with you. I can drive.”

  “Whatever,” Ian growled before downing a glass of water and popping painkillers and a piece of gum into his mouth, still unable to process what shit storm he was about to walk straight into, one of his own making. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Three

  A strange, thin wail broke through Ian’s fog of exhaustion. He rolled, pulled the pillow over his head and willed the bizarre dream out of his subconscious. His body ached from his hair to his toenails, a familiar feeling from the days when he used to work out daily to improve at his scholarship sport. But now…the weak noise got stronger, piercing his eardrums and making his heart pound with a distinctly unfamiliar anxiety. He rolled once more, onto his stomach, breathing in a lung full of the now ubiquitous scent of brewery. The ever-increasing sound, now a distinct shriek of fury, and the smell of his life working as an assistant brewer for the Charleston Brewing Company, all clashed around in his half-dreaming state. When the brain-numbing noise stopped, as if by a flipped switch, he sat straight up, his newfound radar pinging.

  Throwing off the covers, he stumbled over boots and jeans jumbled at the bedside, and nearly broke a toe on the doorjamb in his haste to get across the hall. “Shit! Fuck! Hell! God damn it!” He hopped and slid to a stop outside the second bedroom door.

  “Ian James Donovan, I did not raise you to curse like a sailor.” His mother stood, cradling a small bundle in her arms, frowning at him. She was already fully dressed, made up and coiffed as she always had been for as long as Ian could remember, even at this ungodly hour. “You’ll hurt the poor wee man’s ears,” she snuggled the impossibly tiny infant against her cheek. “Isn’t that right, young James? Papa must watch his language or fear for his immortal soul,” she frowned at him once more as she passed him in the hall on her way to the kitchen crooning sing-song nonsense into his son’s ears.

  His son.

  Ian slid down the wall, covering his eyes, ignoring the piles of half-packed boxes and general chaos that ruled his world. The room reeked of shit and sour milk. In the six weeks since he’d walked into that hospital a single man and walked out a single dad, he’d operated on less sleep and more stress than he’d ever experienced in his entire existence. But a renewed sense of purpose kept propelling him forward; a bizarre, almost counter-intuitive feeling of empowerment from the moment the small boy had been handed over to him, along with a mind-boggling hospital bill, kept him buoyant and focused. For that, he would be eternally grateful.

  The whole newborn baby thing—this was a nightmare of the highest order. The second he realized that the doctor who’d called him that morning was actually not kidding, that he was not being punked by a fellow beer slinger from the pub, he’d experienced two simultaneous emotions: terror and elation. As he held his son for the first time, all awkward elbows and hands and fear, and looked into the child’s deep blue eyes a calm had settled over his nerves. Until he got the kid home of course, and the crying started and did not cease until Ian’s mother raced to their rescue after Gavin told her the news.

  “Ian,” his mother called out over the baby sounds of bottle consumption.

  He looked up from an apparent nap right on the floor into her eyes. She smiled. “Go on son, get a few more hours sleep. I’ve got our little man here. We’ll be just fine, won’t we, my fine boy?”

  To her credit, Moira Donovan had asked no questions when presented with her third grandson. She was already missing the twins since Gavin’s ex had decamped to California with the two of them. Ian’s mother had walked in the door of his miniscule apartment, put down her suitcase and held out her arms for the baby. While he packed up in preparation for the trip back to Michigan with his son, Ian let her take over. He had to—he had absolutely no knowledge of what to do and had bungled making bottles (too hot) and changing diapers (too wet) to the point that the kid was red at both ends and had cried so much he was hoarse by the time of the ‘Grandma rescue’.

  As he drifted off, letting his fevered brain calm for a few more moments, he replayed the doctor’s words the second he walked into the neo natal intensive care unit. “Mr. Donovan, meet your son,” the man had said, without a single shred of irony. “He needs a name, and I need to know who will be responsible for this bill.” The nurses were a bit more sympathetic and let Ian hold the baby—too small to come home for at least a couple of weeks, but by all expensive testing accounts, healthy.

  “Jamie,” Ian had whispered, still in shock, that day. “James Gavin Donovan,” he’d recited to the woman writing it all down and making it official. Allen had taken one look at the baby, hooked up to all the monitors, laying in the middle of a huge plastic tent and had bolted, not that Ian blamed him. He’d stood and stared down at the boy for what felt like hours when one of the nurses had gowned and gloved him and handed his son into his arms.

  Once he’d figured out exactly what this all meant his first call was to Gavin.

  “Hey, uh, I need your help.”

  “Really,” Gavin had said. “Funny, I keep asking you to come home and help me with this brewery, and you keep saying no. Why would I be inclined to….”

  “Shut up a minute, Gavin, and listen. Carrie…I…we…shit.”

  “I thought she was long gone. What happened?”

  Ian recalled the very real sensation of needing to sit down and have a good cry at that precise moment. “There is…a baby.”

  “Holy shit brother. Is she, I mean…fuck.”

  “Yeah. And, no, she is not here. She took off, left my name and number with our,” he’d had to gulp back emotion. “Our son.”

  Gavin had blown out a huge breath then done exactly what Ian had counted on—he took over. �
��I’ll send mom,” he’d said. “And some money. And….”

  “I’ll come home,” Ian had blurted out. “I’ll work with you. I need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so my brother,” Gavin had laughed, making Ian both relieved and pissed off at the same moment—a typical reaction to his brother. “And if it took Crazy Carrie dumping a kid in your lap to get you to see the light and get your arse home, well, good for her.”

  He dozed, but woke within the hour, his newly discovered intuition telling him something was wrong. Sure enough, his mother was pacing, jiggling and singing to no avail. Jamie would not calm. Ian strapped on a carrying device that felt like a military issue parachute, but was really a simple baby holder. He plopped the whining boy into it and went out into the early morning light for the long walk that seemed the only thing that would calm the kid lately. By the time he got back his mother had the kitchen almost packed and a giant breakfast on the table for them both.

  “Thanks, Ma,” he said, kissing her cheek before gingerly unhooking the straps and laying Jamie in his crib, still in the carrier but finally asleep. He sat, ate his mother’s famous healthy start-to-the-day-meal and smiled, hoping now he could really start living and stop pretending. The moving truck was due the next morning and he was more than ready to get back home.

  Chapter Four

  “God damn it, Gavin, I can’t keep up this pace. Not and handle the new distribution contracts and every other fucking thing.” Ian sucked back another Red Bull, determined not to fail at this. The Ypsilanti Brewing Company that he had joined five years ago, bringing his fairly nascent commercial brewing experience and infant son into, was going gangbusters. And he could barely keep up. They needed more warm bodies. Someone had to handle sales on the back end now that a half decent pub manager was in place. They needed someone who’d work as hard as they did, for next to nothing and no insurance either, at least until they could wrap their heads around that commitment. He groaned and ran a hand through his hair.

  Gavin stretched and stood. “I know. I know we need more people, blah, blah, blah. I get it, but you get it, too, right? I can’t afford to bring anyone else into this yet. I’m stretched every month paying the five employees we have. We gotta sell more…”

  Ian held up a hand. “We will not sell more, Gavin, not unless someone besides me is managing both the brewery and the sales efforts. Period. And we fire the lame ass Traynor Company.” Ian named the distributor who handled sales of their products—or mishandled them, as he liked to say. “We need to cut them loose and find a better distributor while we’re at it.”

  “Ian, I know you don’t want to accept this, but there is no money right now for another employee. Stop asking me. And firing a distributor is practically impossible, as you know. Stop making it sound so fucking simple.” Gavin’s dark eyes were hard, angry. Ian tried to remain calm.

  Ian knew that his twin brother—the man who succeeded at everything he did no matter what—felt failure breathing down his neck. He’d failed at marriage, and he was teetering on the edge of something either really great or irreversibly terrible with this brewery venture. One thing Ian realized about his brother was that Gavin hated being less than perfect at everything, and these last few years had been a pure exercise in seat-of-your-pants learning curves, mistakes, and screw-ups. But Ian could sense that they were emerging into the light. He had a handle on their strengths and weaknesses and was focusing on three brews they bottled and had plans for one more of them before the year was up. But he needed help, and Gavin needed to make the lazy distributor snap-to and start really selling their product. Traynor Wholesalers was old school—had too much invested in the macro brews they represented and were a bunch of order takers, not sales people that Ian needed to get his new products into the market.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Gavin demanded.

  Ian stood putting his hands on his brother’s shoulders. It felt beyond strange being the one, instead of Gavin, who was calm, the one who could make the right choices for success, but he was resolved in this thing now. He wanted Ypsi Brewing to take the next step and knew Gavin was being tight fisted about another employee when he didn’t need to be. “Take off the bean-counter hat a sec, Gav. You know as well as I do that someone who really knows how to sell, who can come up with a coherent marketing plan that encompasses both the wholesale and retail side will be worth every penny. If we troll around up at EMU, I’ll bet we can find a starving MBA grad eager for a paycheck. Right?” He leaned down, tried to catch his brother’s eyes.

  “Yeah.” Gavin shrugged him off, sat, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. Shit.” He sighed and stared into the middle distance.

  Ian tried to rustle up some sympathy, but found only “It’s-About-Time-itis” with regard to his brother’s frustration. “Okay, so I’ll post an ad on Craigslist and on our website. I say we see what we get and determine salary value then.” He turned to his screen and started fiddling with recipes and checking fermentation temps before heading back towards the small lab.

  They’d turned the empty auto factory into a twenty-thousand square foot brewery, plus three thousand square foot pub that on most nights was standing room only. Ian was happy with his life, if a little lonely for adult companionship beyond what his brother and the sparse brewery staff provided. He glanced at his phone, noting the time and realized if he didn’t hurry he’d be late to get Jamie from the daycare…again. He grinned, picturing the boy’s eager face and bright green eyes. He was pretty much a small replica of Ian, right down to his knee-jerk temper and apparent need for constant stimulus and movement. He tossed his stuff in his backpack and headed out; convinced he could find a sales specialist and really get things rolling in a successful direction.

  “I met somebody.”

  Ian looked up from his appraisal of the new fermentation vessel’s temperature controls at the sound of his brother’s voice. He frowned at the odd expression on Gavin’s face. The man’s first marriage had been one of similar tastes, drive, and looks. Ian had hated her guts from the start. She was the worst kind of social-climbing fake bitch and had shown her true colors clearly in the last few years, keeping the twins away as much as possible from their father while demanding ever more in alimony and child support. Ian knew not having his sons around nearly killed Gavin on a daily basis and was only just beginning to understand how awful that must be. His nephews were in Michigan this month, however, spending time with their dad while their mother worked on snagging rich husband number two.

  “Cool. Who? Where?” He kept busy wrapping up the brewing day and ignored the small voice reminding him how much he still lacked physical grown up company. They’d had great response to their call for a marketing director in the last few weeks, and he was working on a group interview, but still wanted to make one more contact over at Eastern Michigan’s Business School. A couple more decent candidates would be ideal before he brought them all in for a group-think session so he could see who stood out from the crowd, but he was honestly happy for his brother. “That explains the goofy ass look on your face. I assume you’ve gotten laid?”

  “Maybe. It’s Alyssa…um…Alyssa Traynor. Met her on the job, actually.” Gavin ran a hand through his thick black hair. The two of them were about as far apart in looks and personality as fraternal twins could be. Gavin had their mother’s black Irish looks with hair as dark as night and bright blue eyes. Ian was green-eyed with wavy dark blond hair—that same hair that repeated itself on Jamie’s head and was in sore need of cutting. Kid could pass as a girl with his soft features and long hair. His mother nagged him nearly daily about it. Ian stopped musing, processed what his brother had said, then stared at him.

  “Traynor…as in Traynor Wholesale Company…as in our distribution partner…the one I want to fire because they suck?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Wow.” Ian put down the clipboard and crossed his arms over his chest. “Nice one. Hope she’s wor
th it.”

  “Oh, I think she is.” Gavin raised an eyebrow and stuck his hands in his pockets. “And she has invited you over to dinner this weekend. She has a brother at home with her right now. He’s a Marine Corps vet, from Iraq, and a little messed up, at least physically, but she’s determined to take care of him until he can get settled.”

  “A brother,” Ian said, slowly finally realizing what was going on. “A wounded warrior brother. No, thanks, Gavin. I’ll take a pass.”

  “I’m not setting you up with the guy. Jesus. For the record, I still think you should stick with girls, but since you can’t seem to make up your mind…I just thought since you haven’t been out or anything in a while, and Alyssa said her brother was…your type. Although you should know, he is blind from a firefight that got him discharged with a Purple Heart and a Navy Cross. He has a service dog that he’s trying to get used to as well as a new job as an internet security consultant. The shit they can do with computers now—it’s as if his being blind makes no difference at all in that respect. His name is Nick.” Gavin shrugged.