by Cole McCade
Stop it.
He closed his eyes, until Wally’s voice was only another haunt in his darkness.
“I know that,” Wally said. “But that room is full of her ghost, nonetheless.”
“You don’t have to stay.”
Wally laughed again, faint and sounding by rote, as if he didn’t mean it and might never mean it again. “I’ve always been a bit of a night owl.” The rustle of movement, and Joseph opened his eyes to watch Wally stand, dusting those long, slim hands together. “You’ve plenty of books about. I don’t mind staying up. I’ll sleep when I go home.”
“You don’t—”
“—have to, I know.” Wally shrugged, turning away. “I would have even if you hadn’t asked. I want to.”
He almost let Wally go. Almost let it hang at that, and yet he couldn’t. He couldn’t hold off the question inside him, this strange and burning thing with its answers rooted far back through the years:
“Why?”
Wally paused, looking down, his long lashes sweeping toward his cheeks, his gaze pensive. “Odd question, isn’t that?” Then a smile, thrown over his shoulder: a smile that might as well have been a shield, a mirror reflecting nothing, a Mona Lisa guarding so many, many enigmas. “Eat your cinnamon rolls, Joseph. I’ll take care of the kitchen.”
And with that he walked away, leaving Joseph alone with more questions than he knew how to answer.
* * *
WALLY DIDN’T RETURN TO JOSEPH’S bedroom until he knew his brother-in-law was asleep.
Odd, that he still thought of him that way. As his brother-in-law. As family, though they shared no blood between them save for one wonderful girl made up of both his family and Joseph’s. Somewhere, in the dust and mess of a home office he never touched, was hidden a large manila envelope, address written in Miriam’s swooping, showy hand, tucked between printouts of Wally’s tax returns for the dress shop and old faxes from his supplier in Guadalajara. Inside that envelope were the divorce papers. Miriam hadn’t even come to serve them herself; she’d simply mailed them to Wally with a note. He’d spent so long protecting Miriam as a little girl that sometimes, she still turned to him to shield her from the hard things in life—even if one of those hard things was telling the father of her daughter that she wanted nothing to do with him anymore, and was remarrying someone else.
Joseph had never seen those papers, even if he had to know; Miriam Gallifrey—once Miriam Armitage, for a brief and torrid time—was now Miriam West. That required certain legalities, whatever loopholes Miriam had had to jump through to make that happen without Joseph’s signature. Yet as long as he didn’t see those papers, it wasn’t quite real, wasn’t wholly true. And so Wally had withheld them. Against his better judgment, but Willow had begged.
Please, she’d said. Please. He’s having a bad week this week. New meds, and if we upset him…he’ll be so angry, Uncle…
In some ways, Willow and Miriam were just alike.
Wally could never tell either of them no.
He finished tidying up the kitchen, then slipped back into the bedroom and carefully eased the tray from Joseph’s lap. It was strange to look down at his sleeping face and see, in this moment of unguarded relaxation, the young man Wally had first met when Joseph and Miriam had been gadding about the circus, two young lovers so oblivious to anything but the fact that they were in love. The man he knew now bore little resemblance to that fresh-faced, eager young boy; pain and weariness, frustration and defeat, cynicism and loss had etched new lines and edges into his face to leave him a man made up of severe, rather handsome chisels and planes, tanned beneath the dark scruff of a deep chestnut beard shot through with silver. That boy had been a fool, but a darling fool. This older, wiser Joseph was no fool—but Wally wondered if broken cynicism was any better.
Yet beneath that cynicism, Joseph was fierce. Independent. More fierce and independent than Wally thought even Joseph knew, and underneath the hurt, the resentment, those ugly words flung at him all those years ago, Joseph’s voice snarling child-stealing faggot at him and leaving that pain branded on him for life…
Sometimes, Wally admired him.
Don’t even think about it, big brother. Miriam’s voice in his head, laughing gaily and so very young, a memory turned yellow and tattered about the edges, but still the phantom scent of crushed and wilted gladiolas haunted his senses. He’d been helping her pull the flowers from her hair, he remembered, while she peeled out of her leotard and into a bright summer slip, watching Joseph through the part of her dress tent the entire time. She’d licked her lips, sly as a cat spying a fat, sleek mouse. I saw him first.
Perhaps she had, Wally thought.
But it had been Walford who’d loved him last.
Yet he doubted even his simple admiration would ever be returned. To Joseph, Wally would always be the villain, even more so if he knew the secrets Wally kept from him. The divorce papers. The fact that it had been Miriam who had pushed Wally to try to take custody of Willow, though it had been his folly to go along with it because of that one word he could never say, either to Miriam or his bright-burning little niece. No. He supposed he was weak that way.
There was, too, what he knew of the man who had been in that car with Willow, on that traffic cam video. What he knew of where she might be now.
And why he couldn’t tell Joseph, when it would only make it harder for him to accept that she would never come home.
“Sweet child,” Wally murmured, and gently brushed Joseph’s hair back from his brow. “If the women of our family are a storm-tossed sea…I’m only sorry that they’ve thrown you about like so much flotsam.” He sighed. “We are not easy people to love, we Gallifreys. And even harder to be loved by.”
Joseph only stirred in his sleep with a low and restless murmur, and Wally pulled back and busied himself picking up the tray, nothing left of the cinnamon rolls but crumbs. He couldn’t help but smile. Joseph might hate him, but he’d always been a sucker for his cooking.
Best to let him rest, then, quiet and still among the demons sleeping between them.
CHAPTER THREE
JOSEPH DIDN’T REMEMBER FALLING ASLEEP—but he must have, when the last thing he remembered was a full, heavy stomach and the sluggishness of baking summer heat pouring through the window, weighing him down. A half-asleep recollection of the tray lifting off him, Wally’s murmuring voice, and then nothing until now and the cool, quiet darkness.
The clock on the nightstand ticked a few minutes past four a.m.; the taste on the air was about right, the same cool dryness as dust in a cold, abandoned room shut off from the sun, easing the sweltering temperature and promising summer would only have its hold for so much longer. With the heat gone his body belonged to him once more, his veins no longer filled with lead but pumping with blood, as if a dozen years had fallen away. He pushed himself up to sit against the head of the bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The house was quiet. If Maxi had come and gone again he’d slept through it, and at first he thought he was alone—until he dropped his hand from his eyes and stared at a lump of fabric that hadn’t been there before, heaped on the floor.
A lump of fabric, and gangly limbs.
In a corner of the room, a mess of blankets had been arranged into a nest; Joseph suspected they had once been laid out as a pallet, but the man tangled up in them had shifted and twisted so much in his sleep that he’d wound them into a mound. Wally had burrowed into the blanket nest until he nearly disappeared into the mess; sound asleep, he curled smaller than someone that tall should have been capable of, his ageless face relaxed in slumber and his pink lips parted. His hair spread over the blankets and spilled across the pillow he’d chosen not to sleep on, but to hug against his chest; a curl of salt and pepper fell across his brow. Every time he exhaled, his lips pursed slightly, and a tiny, breathy whistle rose from the back of his throat. Joseph tilted his head.
Huh.
He swung his legs out of bed, reaching for his crutches�
��then set one back against the wall. The flex of tendons and pull of muscles already told him this was a one-crutch day, though that might change later; he’d rather a no-crutch day, but lately those came fewer and farther between. One crutch was still more tolerable than two, an accessory instead of a dependency, and he fit his arm into the steel cuff—pausing to touch over the stitched padding Wally had made—before bracing the padded rubber tip of the cuff against the floor long enough to lever himself out of bed before he stood under his own power.
He’d thought the light thumping of the crutch against the floor would wake Wally, but the man remained sound asleep as Joseph limped closer, working the numbness and tingling out of his legs with every step until he could stand without the crutch. Joseph just looked at him; why was he even there? Curled up on the floor and playing the faithful puppy, when Joseph snarled at him every time they so much as caught each other’s eye. After the things they’d said to each other, things they’d done to each other, anyone else would have left the moment it was safe. Anyone else would have been content to know Maxi would check in on Joseph every now and then to make sure he’d not broken his neck, and would have joyfully fled the tension that had been bristling between them for nearly twenty years.
And yet here Wally was, with that little whistle escaping his lips and his cheeks turned luminous and pale in the shadows of the night.
Joseph thumped Wally’s arm with his crutch. “Walford.”
With a groan, Wally pulled a flap of blanket over his head and burrowed deeper, nothing left but a tuft of hair sticking out like a licorice sprinkle atop a mounded cone of soft-serve ice cream. Joseph sighed and thumped him again—he wasn’t sure where, only that he must have hit something vulnerable inside the tangle of blankets, because a muffled oof rose from the flannels and quilts.
“Walford. The floor is no place to sleep.”
One pale hand groped out from the nest, then pushed a layer of blankets back on a bleary-eyed, blinking face. Wally peered groggily at him, his eyes slightly crossed, and Joseph had to bite back a smile. Walford was a fucking asshole; he wasn’t adorable when he woke up.
He wasn’t.
“Nngh,” Wally slurred. “No. Coffee. What?” He struggled to sit a bit more upright, scrubbing one fist against his eye. He was still fully dressed, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck and the collar flipped half upward to frame his face, tangling in the hair at his nape. He squinted at Joseph, then yawned. “What time is it?”
“A little after four.”
“In the afternoon?”
Joseph only arched a brow, then looked pointedly toward the window. Wally’s gaze trailed his, before he blinked.
“Oh.” Then, “Oh,” as his eyes focused, clarity and awareness seeping into his dark gaze as it flew back to Joseph. “You’re up.” He tried to wring his hands, but only tangled himself more in the blankets’ snare. “I—should you be?”
“When I can, I do. When I can’t, I don’t.” Joseph shrugged. “That’s the long and short of it.”
Wally bit his lip and averted his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about—about how to—”
“How to what? Baby me?” Joseph snapped.
Wally’s face fell. “…how to be here for you.”
“Who says I want you to be?” Joseph flung the arm with the crutch out, jabbing at the air. “I can be left alone, Walford. I was alone when Willow went to college. I didn’t ask her to come back. I’d have handled fine without her. And I can handle fine without you. No one asked you to camp out on my floor like a fucking guard dog.”
Walford’s face crumpled like a child whose ice cream had just been taken away, smooth features collapsing into a flush of guilty misery. Wally bowed his head, his shoulders drooping as he disentangled himself from the blankets.
“I’ll go,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He stood, stepping out from the blankets and smoothing his hands awkwardly over his clothing. Joseph watched him until Wally stepped past him with his head down and his eyes fixed on the floor. God…damn it. He had to go and put on that hangdog look and then…then…
“No,” Joseph ground out. “No, I—” He snapped his crutch out and blocked Wally’s path, the metal rod resting against the other man’s stomach. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I get so frustrated with this that it’s hard to see honest care as anything other than pity.”
Wally stared down at his feet, his voice listless, quiet. “You are never the one who needs to apologize. Even if it seems as though we’ve had this conversation before.”
“Do you really want to go there?” Joseph said. “Do we really need to talk about that?”
Wally lifted his head, fixing Joseph with a searching, heavy look. A shadow darkened his eyes: a ghost of memory, a day Joseph remembered far too well and didn’t want to remember, to relive. Now it was his turn to avert his eyes, a tch behind his teeth as he dropped his gaze to the floor.
“Yes,” Wally murmured. “But not right now.”
Not ever, if Joseph had his way. He muttered under his breath and turned toward the door, leaning on his crutch to pivot before righting himself and walking unaided. “Go back to sleep,” he threw over his shoulder. “Use my bed, if you can’t stand Willow’s.”
Wally’s tongue clicked oddly, a noise rising from the back of his throat. “Where are you going at four in the morning?”
“I need to get out of the house.”
“Where?”
Away from you. Joseph stopped with a sigh and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. If he didn’t tell Wally something, the damnable man would drive himself crazy with worry. “Anywhere. A walk. I just need to not feel like I’m dying for a little while.”
“You’re not dying, Joseph. Don’t say that.”
“Maybe not. But I’ve been living as if I am for weeks.” He tilted his head back, staring up at the cracks worn into the doorframe, the paint peeling in slivers. “It’s not betraying Willow to need to feel alive.” He didn’t know who he was trying to convince, when in his deepest heart of hearts the words lacked conviction, lacked strength. He swallowed thickly. “It’s not.”
“No.” The sense of presence that was so very Wally drew closer—and then that long hand pressed to his back, resting between his shoulder blades just as it had that night, heat radiating against his skin. “No, it’s not.”
Joseph fought the urge to lean back into him. Somehow, somewhen, some small part of his brain had begun to associate that smooth palm with comfort, and he didn’t want that.
Even if the only reason why was a grudge so old he only wished he could forget how it began.
Wally lingered, his hesitation a living thing between them, before his hand curled, fingertips lightly brushing Joseph’s skin and leaving tingling trails behind; his loosely clenched fist settled between Joseph’s shoulder blades. He stepped closer—close enough for his breath to stir Joseph’s hair, a sighing rush that smelled of cinnamon rolls.
“Get dressed,” Wally murmured, and something about the edge in his voice—so close to Joseph’s ear, so rough it bordered on tactile—made Joseph’s fingers curl. “There’s somewhere I’d like to take you.”
Joseph pulled away. Walford didn’t need to be that close to him, sending chills down the back of his neck and warmth up his spine with his touch, with his voice in his ear. No one had been that close to him since Miriam, and he wasn’t about to start with Miriam’s brother.
“Where?” he asked.
Wally answered with a tired, pale laugh. “Let me have my little whimsies, darling dear, and let me surprise you.” Wally withdrew, too, only to circle to Joseph’s side, nothing but a sweeping figure bowing in his peripheral vision and gesturing for him to step back into his bedroom. “Come now, I’ll leave you to dress. I dare say as fetching as you are, you’d flatter a pair of trousers even better.”
“Huh?”
Joseph blinked at Wally; Wally’s gaze dipped low, then rose back to his face with an amused, exagger
ated loft of both brows into his hairline. Joseph looked down—and realized he still wore his boxer-briefs and nothing else, clinging against his skin in the remnants of sweat left over from the day. His cheeks flamed, and he scowled.
“Oh, shut up.”
Walford only grinned—but remained obligingly silent as he rose from his bow and nearly twirled from the room. Joseph stared after him in disgust. So much for going for a walk to get away from the damnable man.
At this rate, one of them would come back in a bodybag.
* * *
WALLY WAS IN THE BATHROOM less than five minutes—smoothing the wrinkles from his shirt with dampened fingertips and finger-combing his hair—before the crash came.
He’d splashed his cheeks with cold water to cool the flush in them. For a moment…just a moment he’d leaned in close enough to breathe in Joseph’s scent: a quiet thing like the salt of the sea soaked into driftwood, which he suspected was the remnants of aftershave but that he liked to imagine was some natural thing that exuded from Joseph’s pores and permeated him from head to toe. He was being a fool, he knew. He thought he’d buried this. Buried, forgotten, eroded with time and distance until it was but script on a weathered wooden sign: only flecks of paint forming the suggestions of thoughts and feelings, but nothing concrete.
Yet these last weeks with Joseph, now and then…
Now and then.
The way the light fell across his jaw. The pensive cast to deep brown eyes, far-seeing and thoughtful. The burn of his skin under Wally’s palm, and that certain mixture of coarseness and tightness that came from a half-forgotten life of hard labor. Even after over ten years off the job, tanned, sturdy muscle still corded Joseph’s body—no longer the trimly graceful youth he’d once been, but instead a solid mass of dense, powerful sinew at once his strength and his weakness, when sometimes those hard-hewn muscles betrayed him and left nothing but the silence, the jitter of his limbs, the audible grind of his teeth while he avoided Wally’s eyes with his mouth set in that familiar line of sheer, stubborn pride.
