by Amy Lane
Larx stood and grimaced. “We’ll try not to let that happen.” He let out a yawn and headed to the counter where he kept his water bottle during the winter. He filled it up from the cooler and took a couple of swallows before he set the bottle down and pulled his stocking cap from his kangaroo pocket. He took a couple of steps toward the door before looking up for the dog.
He sighed when he realized Dozer was still up with Jaime, sleeping on Kellan’s floor.
“What?” Mau asked, looking around.
“No dog,” Larx sighed. “You know, Tane says Berto is functional now—he just can’t go back to the house. If your dad doesn’t mind renting out the house completely—”
“Oh!” Maureen said, suddenly looking wide-awake. “That reminds me—”
A tentative tap on the sliding glass door shot Larx’s heart right up to his throat. He whirled around and confronted a pleasant, round face muffled by scruff.
“Elton?” he mumbled.
“Yeah. Sorry, Larx,” Maureen said as he opened the door. “I told him you were planning to run this morning, and he said he’d jog over and join you.”
Larx grunted and opened the door. Elton smiled winningly, which he seemed to do a lot, and Larx sighed.
“Hello—”
“Wombat Willie,” Elton said with a sweet smile. “Yeah. I know. I looked up what a wombat is, and, you know… I did knock up your daughter.”
Larx woke up enough to grin at him. “You’re awesome. Let’s go running. Try not to leave this old man behind.”
He stepped out into the cold and closed the door behind him, taking a few moments to stretch so he didn’t wreck himself. Elton stretched during the break, his breath smoking into the darkness.
“I used to hate running,” he said. “But Olivia was going every morning last semester, and I sort of picked up the habit.”
Larx frowned. “Where is she? We used to run together when she lived at home.” Christiana had preferred bicycling or swimming or something that involved less of a sweat-to-distance ratio.
“She, uh….” Elton sighed. “She’s real tired because of the baby and, uh….”
Larx tilted his head. “I didn’t see her yesterday until last night. Was she in bed all yesterday too?”
Elton closed his eyes and nodded, and Larx started to growl, low in his throat. “I think we should run by your house, don’t you?”
The young man at his side swallowed. “Okay, sir.”
“I think there’s something there we can’t forget.”
Aaron’s old house was about two miles away. In their early days, Larx would warm up for the first two miles, pick Aaron up, run three miles around the service track loop, drop Aaron off at his house, and then sprint home. If he left an hour before he was supposed to get ready for work, it gave him room for a nine-minute mile, and he usually ran around seven or eight. Once Aaron moved in, he shortened their run to five miles, and they ran it a little faster.
Wombat Willie ran a six-and-a-half-minute mile without breaking a sweat.
Larx could do it—but he hadn’t run in almost two weeks, and he was definitely sweating when they burst into Aaron’s house.
The place looked much the same as Larx had seen it when Aaron lived there, except cleaner. The mail wasn’t stacked on the polished wood table; the dishes weren’t dirty in the sink. The kids had dusted the place on Saturday before they’d moved their few possessions in, and Larx took a look around as they walked in.
“There’s a bedroom on the ground floor?” he asked, thinking hard.
“Yes, sir. And four up top. We think the ground floor one was used as a study.”
Larx nodded. “Yeah—it’s got a miniscule closet.” But Aaron had left his furniture there, and even his desk. At Larx’s place, Aaron used the small desk back in the corner by the fireplace in the dining room, and Larx worked at the table.
They’d managed to do a lot of work together, just knowing there was a friend, a companion, breathing nearby.
“What are you thinking?” Elton asked perceptively.
“I’m thinking that Jaime and Berto might move in. We’d ask Berto to keep the room on the ground floor and to medicate outside, but we could move the greenhouse back there for him, and Jaime could sleep up near you guys. Would that be okay? I don’t know how long it would last—”
“Naw, man. Jaime’s cool. Berto… well, he’s hurting, but….” Elton looked up the stairs with a suddenly adult posture. “You know, it helped her last week, to be there for Jaime. I think, maybe, having people around whose life isn’t all hunky-dory, it makes her remember how much she has to work for, you know?”
Larx nodded. “Stay here,” he warned, and then trotted up the stairs.
Olivia was a tiny ball in the corner of the bed, and Larx shored himself up.
“Olivia, wake up.”
“Daddy?” She rolled over and grimaced at him. “Daddy, it’s early!”
“And you left our house at six last night, crawled into bed, and haven’t been up to do more than pee in eleven hours. Get up.”
“Fuck off,” she snapped, and he didn’t even flinch.
He yanked the covers off, leaving her scrambling and indignant in her pajama pants. “Daddy?”
“Go put your sweats on, brush your teeth, and grab your hat. We’re running in five, and you need to hurry up so I can get home in time to leave with the kids. Move it, Olivia—I mean now!”
She glared at him, hurt and angry and miserable, and for a moment he thought he’d blown it. Oh Jesus, that part of her, the angry, resentful part of her, the part that said, “Fuck off!” when she’d never, ever, not even during the stormiest part of her adolescence, sworn at him, that would take over, and he would have broken trust with her forever.
Then she bared her dingy teeth and snarled, “Fucking fine! Fucking tyrant! I’ll be out in five minutes!”
Larx started going through her drawers, comfortable with her organization because he’d taught it to her. Sweats, T-shirt, hoodie, socks, panties, bra—he hadn’t flinched from these things when he was buying them at Walmart, and he wasn’t going to flinch from them now.
When she came out of the bathroom, greasy hair scraped back into a muddled ponytail, he had clothes set on the bed.
“Downstairs, ASAP,” he snapped. “We’ll have saltines waiting.”
“Why are you doing this?” she snarled. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because I love you, and we need a plan here. You and me, we used to plan when we went running, remember? So we’ll plan now. Two minutes, Olivia. I mean it.”
He stalked out of her room and slammed the door, taking the stairs with the speed of a skittish cat.
“You got saltines, right?” He’d given the kids food to start with when they’d taken their stuff to set up. Elton nodded, wide-eyed, and grabbed the crackers from the cupboard.
“Why’d you do that?” Elton asked as Larx set them on the counter next to half a glass of milk. It had been Alicia’s magic formula for morning sickness; he was going to take a chance on it being Olivia’s as well.
“Because you have to live with her,” Larx said, checking the stairs. She wasn’t there yet, but they could hear her thumping around. “We’ll go on a run, she’ll come home and tell you what an asshole I am and how she can’t believe she thought I was a decent father to begin with, and you’ll get her into the shower and maybe look up depression treatment nearby on my health insurance. And then you don’t have to live with her being pissed, and we can help her call an end to this bullshit.”
Elton regarded him soberly from those surprisingly sweet eyes. “That’s a real good plan, Mr. Larkin.”
“Call me Larx.”
“Okay. So, Larx, now that we got a plan for this, do you think we can maybe find a way to tell my parents I left school? I talked to the administration, and my roommate’s shipping my stuff, but that other thing….”
He shuddered, and Larx felt some of his irritation fade
from his body.
“We’ll talk about it when we run,” Larx said softly. “I think maybe you come pick me up, we come back and get her, and we do this regular-like as long as she can. We’ll have some time to talk then.”
Elton’s sweet smile flickered at his mouth. “You’re a good dad. Don’t worry. I won’t let her tell me what an asshole you are.”
Larx swallowed hard, because what he’d just done, yelling at his child when she felt like hell, that had been one of the hardest, worst things he’d ever done as a parent.
“It’s good of you to say so,” he said softly. Upstairs they heard a door slam, and they both looked up and watched Olivia take the stairs the same way Larx had just done.
She swanned into the kitchen, bolted the saltines and the milk, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and grabbed her gloves from the pocket of the coat hanging near the door.
“Can we fucking go?” she asked. “I have sleeping to do.”
Larx and Elton met eyes and nodded.
“Sure thing, my angel,” Larx said, and together they went jogging out into the cold.
TIME OFF
AARON HAD been hurt on the job a couple of times before. Once he’d been hit by a car—fortunately not head-on—and once he’d been grazed in the shoulder.
Both times what had hit him the hardest was not facing his own mortality; it was facing his own inactivity.
He was off the job for six weeks. He knew that. Logically, it took him a week to walk through the house and out and around the yard without getting winded. The doctor may have said he was healing fine, but he could feel his dissolvable stitches right up until they dissolved, and the man might very well have had the finesse of one of those guys who carves images on the head of a pin with a feather, but Aaron could swear he felt his flesh knit and resolve itself into scar tissue.
And that hurt too.
So he knew going to work was not an option, and while Eamon kept him briefed—Percy, for example, had a verbal warning, a written citation, and two weeks off without pay for drawing down on their civilian asset and not backing off—he wasn’t so much as tempted to go in.
But being inactive around the house was driving him batshit.
He couldn’t go running with Larx in the mornings, and that peeved him to no end. Aaron thought it was great that Olivia’s boyfriend had started going with him—Elton seemed to need some direction in his life, and hey, giving young people direction was the thing Larx did best. But Aaron was also jealous.
Supremely, stupidly, madly jealous of the young man who got more of Larx’s time than Aaron did. Aaron had thought his inner twelve-year-old could be staved off by action-adventure movies and the dog, but apparently that brat was on full-on whine in his head, going “But he’s my friend, not yours!”
The mandate was clear—no running in the icy mountain air for at least six weeks after a punctured lung, but Aaron was climbing the walls.
About two weeks after he came back home, the air was still frigid and snow was still dumping periodically in the Sierras. March didn’t always look like spring in Colton, even two Saturdays before Easter. It would have been a great day to sleep in, to snuggle, to catch up on movies and maybe clean the fridge.
Instead Larx’s alarm went off, and he literally fell out of bed. Aaron heard the thump and sat up, relieved when nothing in his chest or abdomen twinged beyond normal.
“Larx? Baby? You okay?”
“I’m your baby,” Larx said happily from the floor. “I like it when you call me that. It’s sweet.”
“Well, baby, you were up awfully late last night. You sure you don’t want to sit this run out? It’s Saturday.” Aaron longed for him to stay in bed, just this once. For two weeks Larx had been doing double Dad duty—taking kids places, planning their days, planning their meals. Aaron had been trying to help, but even though he’d gotten progressively stronger, he was still so limited. At this point even driving was purely theoretical.
In practice, every time the SUV so much as went over a pothole, he gasped and expected pain. Larx was jumping through hoops to orchestrate the family’s day so Aaron didn’t have to drive a fucking car.
It was humiliating.
And it was killing Larx.
The night before had been a school board meeting—nothing huge or earth-shattering, unlike the one in October—but still, important. Larx had gone and asked for a review of the district’s process regarding CPS, to see if there was any way possible a situation like Candace Furman’s was not repeated.
He’d been blown off—and his friend Nancy had to stand up and tell everybody at the meeting about Larx’s heroics three weeks earlier. He’d gotten a smattering of applause, and that was about it—according to Yoshi, who was a more honest reporter than Larx in these issues, anyway.
Aaron was getting a commendation for heroism—and he’d been wearing a goddamned vest.
The whole thing made Aaron want to just curl over his lover like Dozer curled over his stuffed bunny, but dammit, Larx wouldn’t sit still long enough to cuddle!
But it was Saturday morning, nothing was planned, nothing was pressing. They’d even talked about going to a movie after Larx poked around his winter garden—maybe taking Olivia and Elton so they could talk.
Because Olivia was working so hard—helping Jaime, making meals for him and his brother, planning the nursery, looking for her own online job. But reports about what was going on in her heart weren’t good. That was maybe the only reason Elton had been so excited about running—it gave him a chance to talk to Larx about depression and triggers and the things that seemed to send Olivia screaming into bed to haul the covers over her head.
Elton himself had started consulting work for a video game company—he was making enough to cover expenses, and he’d signed up for insurance under the company he was consulting for. Wasn’t permanent, but the pay wasn’t bad, and Olivia’s one source of joy was how much people seemed to want Elton’s work.
But Maureen had left the week before, and she’d spent part of her time keeping Aaron company when everybody went to school and part of her time trying to help Olivia fix up the upstairs of Aaron’s house—maybe they should start calling it his “rental property” now, since Jaime and Berto had moved in the week before—and getting Olivia into a better headspace.
“Dad, it’s horrible. I remember her from high school, and she was so bright and shiny. She knows how she used to look at the world, how she used to feel, but she can’t remember how to feel that way. And every time I talk to her about the baby—she just cries harder.”
But Aaron never saw that. Olivia greeted him with a quiet smile and food or discussion of curtains or help picking out baby equipment, because Larx wasn’t great at researching safety and Aaron was.
Larx’s daughter was doing all the “things” people did to prove they weren’t depressed.
Except feeling better—she was skipping that one.
And just this once, Aaron wanted Larx to not run off into the ether. Just this once, Aaron wanted Larx in his bed, to touch, to be Aaron’s and Aaron’s alone.
God. Even to pretend to have sex. Aaron’s blood pressure had just been cleared—they weren’t going to break any furniture or set any records, but finally they could talk about sex like it was a thing.
“You want me to come back to bed?” Larx asked, bewildered still.
Aaron scooted over to the edge and looked down. “Please, baby?” he begged. “For me? It would be really awesome if I got you to myself for a morning. Please?”
Larx’s eyes focused and his expression softened. “Yeah? Just… a lie-in?”
“Yeah.” Aaron felt his smile go lopsided. They were just gazing at each other, Aaron in bed, Larx on the floor. “I’d like to… you know. Touch you.”
Larx’s lips—usually sort of lean—made a plush little O as he thought about touching.
“C’mon, Principal,” Aaron begged quietly. “Come to bed with me.”
Larx pushed up and cl
imbed back in, shivering with reaction to being outside the blankets.
“If you think so,” he whispered breathily.
Aaron pulled his wiry body—thinner now than it had been a month ago—up against his own bulkier form. Oh! It felt so good to have his man in his arms. He loved Larx’s hard, runner’s muscles, his sleekness, the way he wriggled to be closer.
Aaron spanned Larx’s chest with his hand and whispered into his ear. “Some days, you just belong here with me.”
The sound Larx made was of total human surrender. “God. Yes. Can we… just today…?”
His phone buzzed, and he groaned.
“No!” Aaron protested.
“Let me tell him I’m bailing,” Larx muttered. “Here….” He reached over and grabbed it, pulling open the text box. “Not today, Elton. I have a man in my bed—”
“You are not!” Aaron laughed, although at this point he wouldn’t have cared. God, he missed their time together.
“Shit!” Larx sat up in bed, the change in demeanor so abrupt it was frightening.
“Shit what?” Aaron asked, sitting up too.
“Elton’s parents just landed in Sacramento. They’re renting a car, and they’ll be here in two to three hours.”
“Where are they going to sleep?” Aaron asked, shocked. “The roof?”
Larx let out a harsh bark of laughter. “That’s about it. Good Lord!”
He texted frantically for a minute and then slumped back into bed. “Apparently it’s news to Elton as well. They’re here to convince him to come back to San Diego.”
“Well, that’s douchy.”
Larx fell back against the pillows and gave Aaron a sideways look through long, dark lashes. “We have two options here,” he said softly. “We can run around the house like headless chickens screaming, ‘The in-laws are coming! The in-laws are coming!’—”
