'Nother Sip of Gin

by Rhys Ford

  “Love, can you see Miki and Kane with a little one?” Con interjected. “They can barely keep the dog alive.”

  “I think you’ve got it backwards. Dude kept Miki alive,” he teased. “Pretty sure he’d forget to eat if he didn’t have to feed the dog every day. Kane’s just as bad.”

  “It’s just one more. It’s not like we don’t have the whole family to lean on when things get too much. Even Mick came by to help with the feedings, and that’s not a day I thought I’d ever see come up over the horizon,” Connor argued gently. “It’s just one more, and then, after this, we’re done.”

  Forest could feel himself cave in, the cracks forming in the hard wall he’d laid out. Sighing, he swore, using a bit of the Cantonese profanities Miki taught him while they’d been on tour, then shook his head, surrendering. “Fine. Fuck it. What’s one more? But this is it. Just one. She’s shit out of luck with us after this. She’s got eight kids. It’s about time the other seven adult up and do this.”

  “Ah, I knew you’d say yes.” Connor’s smile was as blinding as the lightning spearing the sky. “Told Mum you would. She bet me you’d make me wait until we got home before agreeing.”

  “Yeah, she doesn’t know the power of a cup of tea. But I’m serious, this is the last kitten.” Forest leaned his head back when Connor bent over, his mouth warmed further by Con’s hot kiss. Tempted to put the cup down, Forest knew he’d have to get some food into his belly before he dragged his husband’s clothes off and made love to him while the Irish storm raged outside. Reluctantly letting the kiss fade, he took another sip of the cooling brew and sighed, “And remember, we’re probably going to have a kid coming along the way in a bit. Last thing I want to do is raise more kittens while we’re trying to figure out what end of the kid the diaper goes on.”

  A Day at the Fair

  KANE MORGAN’S life changed the moment a surly, flashing-eyed musician opened the front door to his furious knock, then spat back a hot curl of deep-velvet ire at the accusations Kane flung his way. No, the dog wasn’t his, the too-damned-pretty man snarled, it was a mutt who’d moved in and never left, so Kane could just go fuck off with himself.

  The dog, of course, sat behind the man, long pink tongue pouring out of his open mouth, bronzed beige muzzle twisted up into a terrier smile. Kane could have sworn the fucking dog winked at him just as the heavy front door was slammed shut, the hard wood nearly smacking the tip of Kane’s nose.

  He’d been aroused by the lean bruised-soul man standing in the doorway, one hand gripping the frame while the other absently rubbed at a knee Kane later found out was as jacked up as Miki’s childhood. At the time, Kane remembered thinking the man knew exactly how he looked, a beautiful bit of masculinity laced with a flare of graceful elegance and spiced with a heavy hand of street. He knew nothing of the rock star or the musician or even the brother to an allegedly dead man. All Kane saw was a man who’d give as good as he got and maybe leave Kane wanting more.

  No, Kane knew he’d be left wanting more. It was stupid of him to think otherwise, and he’d walked away from the encounter more pissed off than he’d been when he followed that damned dog from his workshop to the warehouse next door, his cock hard against the rub of his jeans and his mouth parched from the need to taste the snarl on the man he’d left.

  The long-legged man with callused fingers and luminous hazel eyes shadowed Kane’s thoughts over the next few days, his mind drifting to the peeks of skin from the tears on the thighs and knees of his old jeans or even the succulent purse of his full mouth right before he laid into Kane with a profanity streak barbed hard enough to peel the flesh from Kane’s back. The next time Kane had a reason to walk back over to confront the dog’s owner—because the mutt definitely belonged to the sharp-tongued musician—Kane’s life tilted, and he’d fallen for Miki St. John in the worst and best possible ways.

  He’d fallen in love, then handed over his heart and soul for Miki to keep.

  Kane hadn’t regretted one second past the moment he placed his ring on Miki’s finger and spoke words in front of God, their family, and friends to declare he’d spend the rest of his life hoping to live up to the gift of Miki’s love.

  Of course, the sex was pretty awesome too, so it wasn’t like life with Miki St. John was ever going to be a hardship… so long as he didn’t eat anything Miki cooked.

  Or let him drive.

  The 1968 GTO they were in was a long-time-ago gift from Damie to Miki, a tantalizing dream car the guitarist hoped would lead his brother-in-all-but-blood to learn how to drive.

  It did not.

  It did, however, provide a canvas for a deranged killer to paint the car’s interior and exterior with body parts and blood from Miki’s childhood abuser and cemented in the first stone of the path Kane and Miki now walked. In a lot of ways, the car and the dog were their beginnings as well as symbols of Miki’s past, drenched in blood, loss, and pain. Kane wondered how the hell his rock star husband ever woke up sane every day, but Miki did. Sane, cynical, and fierce, ready to take on the day and everything else the world threw at him, because even when burdened by death and sorrow, he’d continued on. Trying to keep himself anchored and protect the legacies handed to him by the passing of his band.

  When Damie surfaced, alive and mostly whole, Kane worried at the edges of his relationship with Miki, but in true Sinjun fashion, Miki proved to be resilient and adaptive, expecting Damie and Kane to deal with any conflict on their own time and not involve him. It’d been pretty easy, all things considered, because sharing Miki wasn’t something either of them expected, but they’d both discovered a lot of common ground between them… namely the man tying them together.

  “Marry one and you get the second for free,” his cousin Sionn warned him. As Damie’s partner, he intimately knew how entangled the brothers were, often lending Kane his perspective but also his ear when Kane needed to talk something over. Of course, Sionn also followed up with, “But remember, fuck one of them over and never stop looking over your shoulder, because you know there’s no place you’d be able to hide. Damie will come for you if ever you hurt Miki, and I’m smart enough to know, of the two of them, Miki’s the one to be worried about. Damie will make you feel pain down to your bones, but your Miki? He’ll make me wish I’d died as soon as he’d gotten his hands on me.”

  Still, Kane wouldn’t have had anyone else sitting next to him as the vintage black GTO roared down the coast, eating up the miles in a growling purr not unlike its owner, who sat in a boneless sprawl in the passenger seat. They’d left San Francisco before the sun kissed the sky, curling bits of fog in their wake, the car’s headlights cutting through the milky air as it hunted for its path out of the city. They’d stopped for coffee and some food. Or at least Kane grabbed food. Miki, in true Sinjun mode, grabbed a dozen crispy hash brown patties and munched on them while Kane drove, dipping the pieces in a weird ketchup, minced green chilis, hot sauce, and mayo concoction he’d made in a short drink cup at the convenience store they’d stopped at.

  “It’s amazing you even have a stomach lining,” Kane muttered, shaking his head at the amount of sauce Miki coated on each piece. “I can smell how hot that is from here.”

  “That’s the garlic powder.” Miki chewed carefully, then grinned while offering a bit to Kane. “Want some?”

  “No, I’m driving, and that shit will give me a heart attack.” He gave his husband a quick glance, memorizing the easy smile on Miki’s face. The sunrise gilded the stretch of mountains behind Kane, but the golden light danced and played over Miki’s fine-boned features, a beautiful blend of Thai and Irish he’d gotten from his star-crossed parents. “Well, either what you eat or just looking at you will make my heart stop, so I’m going to keep my eyes on the road and my mouth clean of the toxic waste you mixed up back there. Just be sure not to burn your tongue off with that shit. It’ll be hard to kiss you without it.”

  “Pfah,” Miki spat back. “I’d be more worried about not being
able to sing. Need a tongue for that more than kissing. Be kind of cool if you could get a prosthetic octopus tentacle for a tongue, yeah? But only if the suckers worked. You could get all the Cheetos dust at the bottom of the bag without getting it all over the place.”

  Kane risked another glance at Miki, checking to see if his husband was pulling his leg. Nope, he decided, Miki was deadly serious, lost in the idea of a tentacle tongue. Shaking his head, he said, “A ghra, your mind takes you to some strange places.”

  “Hey, you wouldn’t be saying that if I had a tongue that could wrap around things,” he snorted. “Well, more than now. A chameleon tongue wouldn’t be too bad either. You could snake stuff out of other people’s ramen bowls, like shoyu egg or maybe a fishcake.”

  “And to think I thought a nice long car ride would be relaxing and romantic, yet somehow it’s become all about tentacles and sticky tongues.” From the corner of his eye, he caught a bit of a smirk on Miki’s mouth. “You like car rides. Hell, you agreed to come on this one.”

  “That’s ’cause you like long car rides, and I’ll go wherever you want and how you want to get there,” Miki pointed out. “You keep forgetting I spent a lot of my life on the road. You see Zen and chatting. I see looking for a place to piss that doesn’t have rattlesnakes and maybe someplace we can stop to eat something that won’t kill us. Driving is a journey for you. For me, it’s a destination. Life can’t go on until you’ve stopped and made some cash or made your fingers bleed.”

  “So not a good thing, then? Tours?” Kane prodded, pulling Miki along. His husband rarely talked about being on the road, only bits and pieces about bad food or screwed-up sound checks. There was a lot about Sinner’s Gin Kane had never heard about, and even though he was there for Crossroads’ formation, he was on the outside looking in. “Why’d you guys go on the road for the Absinthe tour? I know Damie was gung-ho but—”

  “Yeah, that tour went to shit and back, didn’t it?” Miki snorted. “More crap than usual, but really, it was about the same. Small hotel rooms, shitty food, assholes who give you shit about looking like a girl when you just want to grab a burger and stop moving for a while. That’s what a tour’s about. But Damie was right. We needed that shit. You can’t really play music with someone unless they’re fucking embedded into your life, under your skin. I mean, some people can. Maybe. I don’t know. D and I are tight. No breaking us, but if Rafe and Forest were going to get into it with us, they had to go in deep. That means being on the road, setting up, then breaking down your own shit and getting stuck in a van with someone for miles and miles until you want to kill them for breathing.”

  “Again, remind me why that’s something you want to do?” Kane teased. “Because I’ve known Rafe since we were little kids, and I’ve wanted to kill him just for breathing without spending twelve hours with him in a van.”

  The road rolled by them, a stretch of ocean on their right catching the sun’s light, silver coins tumbling over cresting waves. A bit of salt lingered in the air, ghosting through the GTO’s open windows, the wind catching at Miki’s dark hair and pushing it away from his face. His eyes were unfocused, blurred beneath long black lashes. Kane knew that look well. His husband was sifting through things, picking out memories and framing them into words with softened edges, nothing sharp to slice into Kane’s heart. Diplomacy wasn’t something Miki was good at. His tongue couldn’t seem to wrap itself around a white lie to save his life, but the truths he told were often hard-hitting, tiny explosive blasts of shrapnel and aching pain festered under years of neglect. Miki’s world was a fleeting bit of happiness amid rusted-through razors and glass shards, and no matter how much Kane longed to blunt those bloodied fragments Miki walked through every day, he knew he would never be able to find them all.

  And it hurt to know Miki fought to keep those edges from him, cautiously harvesting his words to blunt their cutting edges.

  “Being on the road forces you to compromise. Like, you can’t just blow up and walk off.” Miki cocked his head, contemplating the canyons or the horizon, Kane couldn’t tell which. “Well, you can, but you’d be out of the fucking band as soon as your foot hit the sidewalk. You’ve got to work through the shitty parts. Like remembering to say something nice instead of being an asshole during a sound check or not screaming at the front desk guy because you don’t have hot water. He doesn’t know you haven’t had hot water in the last five places you slept at, and he’s not going to give a shit either. You’ve got to keep your head down and focus. Because you’re on the road for the band. Not to kick someone’s drum kit in or slag the opening act. You’re there to get up on stage and do your shit. Then pack it all up and do your thing all over again somewhere else.

  “It’s fucking hard and shitty. You lose money on some gigs because the club rips you off or someone steals some of your gear, so you’re at each other’s throats because there’s no one else to blame. Then you keep saying, ‘We’ve just got to get to the next gig. We’ll have a big crowd. We can stop paying for food with quarters and whatever we find in the spare change cups next to the register when the counter guy isn’t looking.’” Miki’s grin grew, more wistful than happy, but there was something delectable in how it reached his eyes, lifting the shadows out of their depths. “Then you do get to the next gig and the shit’s flying. Everyone hits their notes and the crowd is fucking loving you, so it feels like you’re drinking lightning and getting drunk off of the thunder they throw at you. That’s when it’s all worth it. When someone in the crowd sings my words back at me or screams when they hear a drum roll and bass pickup or the humming noises they make during a guitar solo. It’s all there. That’s why you’re on the road. Because you and the guys hit something in someone else and made them sing, made them groove. That’s worth every fucking cold toilet seat and fart hot-boxed van ride through a tunnel.”

  “Makes me almost want to go on a road trip,” Kane mused. “Almost. I’ve got brothers. I can imagine what that van smelled like.”

  “Usually they reek. Someone’s always throwing up bean burritos or nuking gas bombs that stick to the carpet.” Miki snorted. “If you can survive a road tour without killing each other and keep your head on straight, you’ll make it. You might not be filling arenas, but you’ll be solid. Damie’s been the one who wanted to be a rock star. Me? I’m just along for the ride. I don’t care if we play in an old folk’s home so long as they know our music. It’s the closest I’d gotten to going to church, and all I’ve got to do to find God is preach and sing.”

  It was good to get Miki talking, especially about music. There was a lot of the mechanics of what Miki did Kane simply didn’t understand. Any musical genes he might have gotten from his Irish blood had slipped away. He could work the hell out of any piece of wood, finding shapes and form in the burls and grains with blades and chisels, but knitting together anything lyrical was beyond him. It amazed him to discover his brother Quinn understood the dynamics of drumming after walking into the warehouse’s studio to find the band and Quinn breaking down a pattern of beats with markers on a whiteboard. With a bit of salt, herbs, and a few well-placed candles, Kane figured they were summoning demons or angels, based on what was scribbled across the erasable surface. Even more surprising was his Miki tearing apart one section, tapping on the board in a rhythm complicated enough to make Kane’s head hurt but apparently brought the others to rapturous joy.

  He could strum a guitar and do a few chords, but anything past that, Kane knew he was hopeless. What Miki and the others pulled out of the universe’s gossamer was sheer magic, and the more he learned about music, the more respect he had for the four men who’d come together under the Crossroads Gin name.

  “You should know about living in everyone’s armpits,” Miki said, breaking through Kane’s wandering thoughts. “I mean, shit. You grew up with, like, a million people sharing one bathroom.”

  “Four bathrooms, not counting the guest space behind the garage,” Kane corrected. “Used to be three,
but Mum told Da if he didn’t turn the downstairs sunroom into a master suite with its own bathroom, she was going to kill us all off one by one until she didn’t have to worry about holding it because she had nowhere to pee. Apparently that becomes a problem after you have kids or carrying a kid. Either way, Da got that built and life was a hell of a lot easier.

  “And I didn’t start off having to share. I’m the second, love,” he reminded Miki. “There’s a bit of a gap between me, Con, and Quinn; then the next three hit. By that time, Da got the attic done and Con moved up there. We all shuffled around, and when Sionn’s gran got a bit too poorly, the guest place was built out and he moved in, so we shuffled the deck again. Not so bad. I think sometimes Da forgets which are his and which aren’t. Same with the Brigid. They’re used to strays wandering in.”

  “Like Rafe.”

  “Exactly like Rafe.” Nodding in agreement, Kane continued, “It was good for him to be with us. His mom… well, you’ve seen her. She’s not good for the soul, as Da says. He’s good with us, with all of you. It’s nice to see him with his feet under him. Quinn’s good for him, and he’s good for the magpie. They’re easy together. That’s hard for Quinn to do. He’s not always comfortable with easy.”

  “Could have used a road manager like Brigid when we were on the road,” Miki scoffed. “We’d have been fed, and if anyone tried to rip us off, we’d let her loose on them. Tiny Irish rottie in red heels, that’s what we needed. Okay, now I was just going to let you go on with this, but dude, I’ve been in this car for, like, four hours, and we’re still driving. Where the fuck are we actually going?”

  “Pomona,” he replied, falling into pace with a car in the right-hand lane, leaving the left side open for a group of motorcycles screaming up behind them.

  “Pomona?” Miki echoed, his face knitting into a frown. “Okay, I bite. What the fuck’s in Pomona?”