Love Him Steady

by E M Lindsey

  “That’s not the worst life in the world,” Raphael pointed out. “Some might say it’s the life I’m living.”

  “I just, I never had any passion. Rocco over-compensated for the years we spent barely above poor, and Pietro followed in his footsteps when he started making his own cash.”

  “Sounds like it was a gift.”

  “Yes,” Lorenzo said, “but I didn’t do anything with it. I bought expensive cars and clothes, and I invested, and I tried to pretend like I understood art and culture. I was that douche on reality TV who doesn’t do anything with his life but has a platinum card with no limit while my siblings went out and made something of themselves.”

  “And you think you’re going to find the answers to why you were lazy here in Cherry Creek?” Raphael asked, and there was laughter in his tone—a bit mocking, but not entirely cruel. “Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m somewhere that made a difference for my brother,” Lorenzo defended.

  Raphael sighed and shifted over, laying his hand on his arm and holding tight. “I don’t think it was Cherry Creek. I think it was Rocco being ready for whatever change he needed. I’m not convinced you’re there yet.”

  Lorenzo’s entire body sagged, and suddenly he felt closer to tears than ever. It felt like Raphael was ripping away his one chance to find something that made his life feel like it mattered. “He should have let me go home.” His voice was a soft whisper, and he couldn’t even bring himself to say Wilder’s name. Wilder, the man who was indulging him in his fucking madness tomorrow morning.

  “I disagree.” Raphael gently pulled his hand back, then took a long drink from his bottle. “I think you decided something real, for the first time in your life, and right now you need to learn patience.”

  Lorenzo scoffed, but only because the truth hurt, and he wasn’t sure his wounded pride could take anymore blows for the day. “Thank you.”

  Raphael laughed. “I’m sure you don’t mean that.”

  Lorenzo did though, and he sat up straight and looked him in the eyes. “Yeah, I do. No one ever told me what I needed to hear. They just blew smoke up my ass so I’d keep them swimming in pocket money and booze. That life sucked, and I need to maybe be uncomfortable for a while. So, thank you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Raphael said softly.

  Lorenzo rubbed at his eyes, the ache still there, but they were dry. “I wish I could invite you up.”

  “Well, for the record, I can go upstairs. I have cerebral palsy, and most of the time I prefer my wheelchair because my legs are very stiff and spastic. But I can go up and down stairs on my crutches when I need to. But it has to be worth my time, and I meant what I said when I told you I don’t want you to fall for me.”

  “For the record,” Lorenzo shot back, though his tone was softer and defeated, “I wasn’t inviting you up for that reason. A new friend just told me I need to make changes, so I’m trying this new thing where I don’t use my money or blow jobs to get people to stick around. I make a really good marinara sauce though, so I thought you might want to come up for dinner one night.”

  “I fucking love pasta,” Raphael said, and maybe there was something in his voice just humoring Lorenzo, but there was also something a bit more. “I can’t have carbs though. I have to manage my seizures with keto.”

  “Give me ten minutes on google,” Lorenzo swore, because he was feeling a little bit desperate to hang on to the one solid thing he’d built in that last day. “I can make it work.”

  Raphael bit his lip, then he smiled. “Okay. I trust you. But if you have questions, promise to ask first.”

  “I swear. Later this week?”

  Raphael’s grin softened, and he nodded. “I’ll bring the wine.”

  Chapter Six

  Wilder woke with an all-too familiar pressure in his ears—a rushing sound like water rising and rising until it fell with a roar like a waterfall. And the entire room went silent. He lifted his hand, rubbing his middle finger and thumb together by the shell of his ear, and he could hear something—faint and far off. Which meant he knew what was coming next.

  Rolling onto his side, the world swam, but instead of correcting itself, the room began to rock like he was on a boat over stormy waters. Side to side, then around. And around. Logically, he knew it was his eyes dancing, shaking from side to side, which threw off his entire equilibrium. It meant more of the cochlea was dying, another bout of rushing white noise took with it a decibel of his hearing. Another collection of sounds gone.

  He remembered the day he lost the birds. He had already moved to Cherry Creek, and it was a morning a lot like this one, with spinning rooms and shaking eyes, and eventually a bout of nausea that took forty-five minutes to clear up. His hearing returned in small bursts until he could hear the percolator brewing as he stood next to his coffee, and he could hear the sound of his bare feet tapping along the wood floors.

  He didn’t think much of it, until he was outside with Theo on the bench in the town square—both of them drinking some of Levi’s intensely sweet Israeli coffee. “God, do the birds really have to be this loud?”

  And for a moment, Wilder thought he was joking, until he looked over at a group of finches fighting over what looked like an old pile of kettle corn someone had abandoned at the market. They must have been loud—they must have been obnoxious, and Wilder had lost them. He waited a while—a few days, straining his ears every time he set foot outside, but there was nothing left of them except the movement in the trees, and the way they begged at his feet in the alley for cake crumbs.

  He mourned those small losses—in his own private way. He’d never wanted to complain about it, never wanted to admit that there were things he didn’t want to give up. People already looked at him with pity, and admitting that there were things he wished he didn’t have to live without seemed validated every time a hearing person would tell him, ‘I love music so much that if I ever went deaf, I’d probably kill myself.’

  He never did have a response to that. It was hard to decide what to say when a person said death was preferable to the way he existed. So, he’d smile, and he’d walk away, and he wouldn’t talk about how much he wished he could put on his old nineties playlist and let the lyrics of his angsting teenage soul remind him that things were better now.

  Things had settled after the birds, but he couldn’t help wondering what he was going to lose next as he laid there, watching the ceiling spin alongside the fan. His stomach twisted, but he breathed through the nausea, then shifted to the end of the bed and placed his feet flat on the floor.

  The vertigo eased a little as he threw his arm over his eyes and regulated his breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth. It rarely lasted over an hour. He’d be late, but he’d still have time for Lorenzo, though he honestly would be surprised if Lorenzo hadn’t talked himself out of the excursion by now.

  He knew Collin’s little ranch wasn’t going to give that man anything. The animals didn’t hold the secrets to the universe. At best, Robert was hiding a bit of sociopathic tendencies and a thirst for human blood—but even that was generally curbed by a handful of cut apples and a sugar cube or two. Lorenzo was searching for something that didn’t exist in Cherry Creek.

  Wilder normally wouldn’t involve himself, but something in Lorenzo’s face compelled him to help. Maybe it was just that he was the lost man once. He was the one who had wandered into Cherry Creek without any fucking clue what to do with himself, and now he was this. He had integrated into something like a family—far better and kinder than his own had ever been. And the least he could do was pay it forward.

  And he certainly didn’t mind looking while he did it.

  Lorenzo was a disaster, but a gorgeous one.

  Taking another breath, Wilder peeled his arm away and saw that the room had mostly righted itself. His ears didn’t feel as full, and he could hear himself walk as he stood up from the bed and made his careful way into the bathroom. A hot shower usually got him
the rest of the way there, and as he stood under the spray, he let the warmth ease him into a state of relaxation.

  His cock stiffened a little, and he dragged the heel of his palm over his length, drawing it the rest of the way hard. It had been years—seven, to be exact—since anyone had touched him. He’d been twenty-five the night Scott had put his hands on Wilder for the last time, and before that, it had been so long since he felt any pleasure from anyone.

  It hadn’t been that way at first, but by the time Scott was being carted off to jail, Wilder had lost all sense of what it was like for a partner to want him to feel pleasure. He liked taking care of himself, though. He liked wrapping his hand around his cock and stroking because he knew himself. He spent years recovering from his wounds—physical and mental—and he refused to lose his own sexual awareness to the monster that Scott had become.

  He was no stranger to toys now and no stranger to pleasure. He knew how hard to hold himself, how fast to move his hand. He pressed the side of his head to the wall, bracing himself on his shoulder, then used his other hand to gently cup his balls and roll them in his palm. His temperature rose, and his lips parted with a soft gasp he could feel but not hear.

  The water drowned out most of what noise was left to him, but he didn’t care. It was warm, it was comfort. He liked the man he was, and that was erotic in itself. His hand moved faster, his eyes squeezed shut, and just before his orgasm lifted and crested, Lorenzo’s image flashed behind his eyelids.

  Just a quick moment of him there, cheeks pink from the sun, head bowed, long fingers peeling away at a cupcake wrapper.

  Wilder came with a soft cry rippling along his throat as his come painted the walls, and he took a startled step back at what he’d done. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come to the vision of anyone else. He had carefully trained himself to enjoy sensation—refusing to let his mind be occupied with another body, because that was where Scott had taken advantage. He’d become Wilder’s entire world, and Wilder had worked his ass off to make sure that never happened again. It meant cutting off sexual desire from other people, and it had worked.

  Until now.

  Until it hadn’t.

  His fingers shook as he washed himself, then the wall, and he stepped out of the shower and wrapped in a towel like it could shield him from the sudden world-shaking thought. He might like Lorenzo. Maybe not as a person—the man was a mess, and he didn’t know what was behind all of that chaos. But he was good looking enough that Wilder had been dragged out of his self-imposed sexual isolation long enough to notice.

  It was terrifying and dangerous. He should probably text and cancel, except…

  That was the last thing he wanted.

  Dressing in jeans and a t-shirt, he sprayed himself with sun block, ran a comb through his hair, then snagged his phone and moved to the kitchen for coffee. His adrenaline had settled into something softer and more manageable as he set the mug under the pod stream, then he flicked on his phone screen, and his heart twisted in his chest.

  He kept in bare contact with his father and a bit more than that with his sister—but when she texted, it was either that she was in trouble or there was drama.

  Willow: Dad in for MRI, feel sick

  Wilder: What did they say?

  Willow: no result yet text soon

  Wilder: Keep me posted.

  He set the phone down and tried not to feel the old urge to panic and abandon ship, rushing back to their sides because his mother had trained him to respond when she needed a link to the hearing world. But he was done with them now. He had shed their bonds and reclaimed his life for himself apart from her claws and Scott’s hands, and he wasn’t going to give that up now.

  His parents were older. Older parents got sick. If his dad was at the hospital, it was the right place for him to be. It was not his job to care anymore—and over the years, they hadn’t bothered to even try and earn his help.

  He knew the guilt would eat at him, but it was something he’d been working toward for years. The last time he’d even engaged his mother was when the farm flooded. She had been beside herself with worry, trying to force Wilder to leave his bakery and handle the mess. When he refused, he’d dealt with strings of texts that went from begging to telling him she hoped he’d never come home again, but he didn’t give in. Eventually, she managed the insurance papers on her own, and it was tacit proof for both her and Wilder that he wasn’t really needed. He could move on, and no one’s life would fall apart.

  And one day, he swore, he would stop letting her have any control over his emotional state. One day, there would be true and actual silence between himself and his family, and he would be able to breathe easy. But for now, relying on his own strength was enough.

  Wilder finished getting ready, then sent a text to Lorenzo letting him know he was on his way. He waited a bit, to see if the other man was going to cancel, but he got a thumb’s up emoji in response, so he shot a text to Collin that he was leaving, then jumped in his car and headed over.

  Wilder pulled up next to the sporty little ride that he knew belonged to the only man in town who bothered to bring a convertible to Cherry Creek, and he shook his head with a grin as he let himself in the main doors. The Hopewell gift shop at the end of the hall was still dark and closed, but the salon doors were open, and he saw Raphael behind the desk, bent over picking something up off the ground.

  He waited until the other man sat back up, then smiled. “Morning.”

  Raphael, set his elbow on the desk and laid his chin on his curled knuckles. “Dragging our guest out kicking and screaming?”

  Wilder couldn’t help a laugh. “He’s not that bad, is he?”

  Raphael shrugged. “I think there’s promise—he just needs to figure himself out on his own. Not that I can judge. I think people gave me more of a pass because the wheelchair.”

  Wilder wrinkled his nose, but he had a feeling it was true. The longer-term residents of Cherry Creek meant well, but they fell on the side of over-compensation. None of them bothered to learn ASL, but Rene had set up a captions screen for the Fourth of July show the year before that attempted to auto describe the fireworks sounds. The teenagers found the gibberish hilarious, and Wilder felt both singled out and touched all at the same time.

  They were better about it now, but he knew why Lorenzo wasn’t getting a pass from most of the residents. “Well, maybe today will change his mind.”

  “You mean if Robert doesn’t murder him?” Raphael asked with his brows lifted.

  Wilder chuckled. “Something like that.”

  Raphael drummed his fingers on the desk, then met Wilder’s gaze. “Are you trying to convince him to go or to stay?”

  “I—” And then he stopped, because before his shower that morning, he knew the answer. He didn’t think Lorenzo was going to find what he was looking for in Cherry Creek, but maybe the distance between his old life and now could help him find what he was looking for in himself. Or, at the very least, give the poor man some direction.

  But now…

  He wasn’t sure, because he didn’t know what he wanted out of it. And although small, Lorenzo felt like a threat to the carefully crafted bubble Wilder had built to protect himself from ever being at risk again.

  “He’s fragile,” Raphael said, so softly Wilder mostly had to read it off his lips, which was more difficult than most people, thanks to his accent. “He’s a good person, I think. Deep down.”

  Wilder nodded, but he wasn’t sure he needed that sort of convincing. “I’m not going to hurt him. I think he just needs a dose of reality.”

  “Well, I can’t argue there,” Raphael said with a smirk. “You text me if things go very wrong.”

  Wilder laughed and rapped his knuckles on the top of the counter, then backed up and headed for the stairs. When he got to the landing, he saw the door to the main room cracked open, so he knocked and pushed in a little more, poking his head around the side.

  He’d never been in
Hopewell Manor, except for the shops downstairs, and he was surprised to find the place had been gutted and remade into something that really did resemble a little apartment. There was a kitchenette, something like a living room, and in the back, a bedroom that he could see through the open door.

  Lorenzo was there, bent over at the table tapping on his laptop, and he glanced over his shoulder with a slight flush. ‘One minute,’ he signed with his hand before resuming typing.

  Wilder had forgotten the sheer comfort of having someone around him who spoke his language more fluently than Theo’s fumbling attempts to learn through Wilder, YouTube, and osmosis. Wilder loved it about his friend—the effort he put into it, but Theo’s brain wasn’t wired for languages that way, and often it was more of a struggle than anything else.

  The way Lorenzo’s fingers flicked through the air, the effortless sign like he was just using it, not trying to make it something specifically for Wilder—it left something warm in his chest. He’d avoided the Deaf community for years, still struggling with his right to belong after hearing for most of his life. But he felt a connection now, through Lorenzo who had given space to Rocco in their hearing family to be Deaf. Lorenzo was a reminder that not everyone was like his mother. That there was space for him, even amongst all the hearing people of Cherry Creek.

  Wilder breathed through those thoughts, pushing them aside, then his gaze roamed over the kitchen which was a mess. It smelled a little stale and sour—like old dishes and tomatoes that were starting to rot, and there were sauce stains on the small stove, and a couple of half-eaten plates of dinner shoved to the side.

  “You have a maid, don’t you?”

  Lorenzo looked up, his eyes wide and startled. ‘No,’ he signed, then flushed and shrugged. “They’re called housekeepers, and yeah, but not here. I know how to clean my own mess.”

  Wilder glanced back at the mess, then at him again. “Do you?”