Hanging the Stars

by Rhys Ford

  “I’m not going to lie to you. It’s still like that sometimes. I go piss at a restaurant or something, and it’s close to their back room, there’s this part of me screaming to grab rolls of toilet paper, forks, or hell, anything really.” It was harder than he thought to look back at who he’d been. Harder still peeling himself open for West to take a good look at what he had inside of him. “It’s what you do, and you don’t even think about it. And I knew it was wrong, even back then when I was a little kid, but how else were we going to get this stuff?”

  “You didn’t steal from my grandmother, right?” West asked quietly, his expressive face going suddenly still. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t take one damned thing from her. Promise,” he replied. “And it’s not to say my hands didn’t itch. Because they did. I ran from my dad and eventually ended up back here. One of the first people I ran into was your grandma, and she helped me out. No way was I going to break that trust. She was kooky and elegant. Kind of like you.”

  “She was… odd. Kind of like Lang-odd.” He smiled at Angel, a quirk of his mouth touched with fondness and melancholy. “He was her favorite. Don’t bother denying it. It’s okay. She loved me, but Lang, she needed to rescue him. Mostly from our father, but Grandma liked to rescue things, people. Hell, those damned cats of Lang’s are hers, remember?”

  “Yeah, the damned orange one bit my leg the first time I came over to mow her lawn.”

  “You mowed her lawn?”

  “Someone had to. The gardening guys she’d hired kept running over her flowers. Pissed her off. Then I started cooking sometimes because… Lang was kind of checked out, and the housekeeper kept leaving this foo-foo crap she didn’t want to eat.” Angel sighed. “I never told her about us. I mean, she knew we’d been hanging out together, but I didn’t tell her how we were. I didn’t know if you wanted people to find out. Actually, I kind of felt like you wanted to… forget you ever knew me. Your grandmother was just… she was nice to me, and I needed the money. She helped me get my shit together. It about killed me when she died. It wasn’t like I was family or anything, but I really liked her.”

  “I didn’t find out you were in Half Moon until… the motel. If I’d known you were close, I would have made sure you were at her funeral.”

  “Lang said that too, afterwards. He really was out of it back then. He didn’t know we were close until the will was read. Then he felt shitty because she left me some money to help with the bakery.” It’d been a long day at the bakery, and he’d come home to find West’s twin on his doorstep with the keys to his future and a face he could never get used to Lang wearing. “I think he was kind of pissed off I hadn’t said anything to him about going, but… not my place, you know?”

  “You wouldn’t have liked it anyway. Lots of brittle people pretending they knew her. Brittle, drunk, unhappy people.” West chuckled. “My family… you used to say you wished you had a family like mine, but Angel, I’ve got to be honest, if I’d known then what I know now, I would have taken everything I had, and we could have both left. God, I wish I’d stood up to that fucking bastard. Both those bastards. My dad and yours.

  “I didn’t hang up on you because I didn’t want you.” He exhaled, hard, then rubbed at his face. Years of worry surfaced in his weary expression, his mouth turning down as he spoke, softly as if he didn’t want to disturb the shadows lying between them. “Please believe me. I never, ever wanted to hurt you. If I could take back anything I’ve ever done, it was that phone call, those words.”

  “I was stupid, West. We were kids.” This time Angel was the one who reached out, his fingers ghosting over West’s arm. “Hell, I was an idiot to think you could help me out of that kind of shit. It’s one of those stupid wish-on-a-star things you do when you’re a kid, and you somehow convince yourself that it’s going to happen.

  “Teenagers are idiots. I’ve got an almost teen, and he does some stupid, asshole things. And when I ask him why, the best he can come up with is I don’t know.” Clasping West’s hand, Angel was relieved to feel West return the squeeze. “I hurt myself believing you had that kind of power. I know that. Even as pissed off as I am about you walking away from me, I get it. I do.”

  “If I could have saved you from that, I would have. If I’d known—I could have done something, Angel. A couple of hours before you called, my father overheard me telling Lang about… falling in love with a guy. I never told him who. I don’t think you two even met that summer, not really, but my father heard us, and… things were difficult. He wasn’t… pleased. Nothing like how your father reacted, but… he made it clear he wasn’t going to… he had plans for me, and me falling in love with you wasn’t acceptable.

  “I could have done something, Angel.” West’s eyes glistened, his mouth tightened down into a thin, dark line. “Like I should have done something sooner about… this stupid project with the motel. How the hell did I get here? Like this? There was nothing stopping me from coming to see you, just my damned pride. I was hurt when you didn’t call back because I never got a chance to explain. I never wanted you to get into your father’s van that day. I could have come up with something to have kept you safe back then—”

  “Did you miss the part where it wasn’t your job to save me, Harris?” Angel poked through West’s recriminations. “Not about back then. Now, I could use a little saving because you’ve sort of fucked up my life. We’ve got to come to an understanding about this crap about the bakery and the motel. I’m not handing it over. I can’t, West. You coming back here, showing up in my life to fuck me over with this plan you’ve got for the motel. I know you say it’s this guy Derry driving this, but tell me you didn’t know it was me here. Can you say that?”

  “No, I can’t. I didn’t want to. I shoved it all—and you—into a box and let Derry handle it because I didn’t think I could take seeing you again.” His raspy confession rubbed glass into Angel’s torn heart. “I kept telling myself it was business. The land—the opportunity here—is a hell of a lot bigger than what’s here now. Or at least on paper. That’s how I was looking at it. The money—it would take care of you. Because as we both know, I sure as hell haven’t.”

  “I’ve done some shitty things, dude. I’ll admit to them. Have already, really.” Angel sighed when West looked away. Pride clotted the air in the dining room, unsaid angry words and hurt feelings laying out a minefield Angel didn’t know if he could—much less wanted to—negotiate. “But I’ve never sold out. What you… and your guy, Derry… what you wanted me to do is hold my hand out and tell you it was okay to tear this place down. See, and I can’t.

  “Because you’re telling me to tear down the only four walls of home I’ve ever had. Yeah, this place might be crap to you, but it’s fucking everything to me.” Angel looked away, hating himself for slapping at West, but the sour in him bubbled, needing release. “As soon as I found out it was you trying to get me out of here, it was like you hanging up on me all over again, cutting me off from the one thing—the one place—I feel safe in. I can’t let you do that to me. Not again.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you. Shit, I wish I could blame everything on Derry, but I can’t. I own this mess, Ange. No one else.”

  West reached for him, and this time Angel let himself be pulled in.

  “I need you to trust me again. I can’t go back. We can’t go back, but I can make this right. Just… let me make this right. Give me that chance.”

  West’s mouth brushed over his, a delicate frosting of warm flesh and tentative need. Angel sucked in as West breathed out, pulling the taste of coffee, desire, and man. He closed his eyes, afraid of drowning in the temptation West was offering him, but Angel knew as soon as West’s fingers dappled a pattern over his jaw, he was lost.

  The angry clash of their bodies in the deep cold of a sea-kissed breeze was only a memory. This time their kiss was a banked flight, streaking toward the horizon in the hopes of finding somewhere safe to land. Angel couldn’t sto
p the tears in him from falling. They were too old, too ripe of a pain. The first splash of hot water flavored their kiss, salt and anguish stealing away the sweet of the moment.

  Angel shifted, breaking their contact for a brief instant. Then West’s fingers fisted into his hair, and he found himself pulled back in, opening up for West’s searching kiss. West shifted, swinging his leg over Angel’s until he straddled Angel’s hips, their tongues dipping in and out of the moist warmth of their joined mouths. West’s hair brushed over his face, a crow’s feather kiss of satin on his skin.

  He couldn’t fill his hands with enough of West’s body, didn’t have enough of West pressed into his, and Angel growled with growing frustration at the press of desire unspooling from his belly. Every inch of him was on fire, his cock tingling and growing heavy, milking at the soft heat of West’s ass pushing into him through his jeans.

  His breath stolen and his heart beating fast enough to become a steady thrum in his ears, Angel came up for air, mewling with the need for the man sitting across his lap. He knew better than to fall into West’s kiss. Every sane thought he had… might have had… became vapor under the intensity of West’s heat. He needed more than air. He needed space, time to think. Time to absorb how much he needed West and to figure out some way to shake off the addiction he had to the man’s kiss, his touch.

  Even as Angel’s mind scrambled, frantic for a way to escape the flame flickering in front of him, luring him in, he knew there would be no running away, not this time. This time he would cheerfully fly straight into the blaze, and he would dance as his wings caught fire, his world burning away around him as he gave in to the temptation of the man he’d always wanted to love.

  “West—”

  “Whatever you’re going to say, Angel, please just listen to me. Please.” West cupped Angel’s face and whispered into shadows lingering in the scant space between them. His husky, smooth voice as broken and jagged as his breathing, West pleaded softly, “Don’t… leave me alone. Give me another chance. Because I don’t think I could survive losing you. Not when you’ve made me feel again. Not… when I need you more than I’ve needed anyone before. Just… please, Angel. Please.”

  Nine

  “ANGEL!” A young boy’s voice blasted from the kitchen. Even with the door shut between the two spaces, West could clearly make out a stomping rush of feet on the floor and the scramble of bodies running toward the front of the bakery. “Where are you?”

  “We’ll… talk, okay? I’m not… we….” Angel whispered as West tried to pull away. His hands were fisted into West’s shirt, his arms barely straining to hold him still. It was like trying to break free from being chained to a rock, his liver and heart eaten away by ravenous birds, and he hadn’t even stolen fire from the Gods to deserve his punishment. Angel gripped him tighter, then forced West around to look him straight in the eye. “Do not walk away from this… from us. Just later. We can’t just… leave it like this. I don’t want to leave you like this.”

  He’d bled out onto Angel’s hands, his heart pouring out through their kiss and his tears. When Angel released him, West pushed himself off the couch, needing to put distance between them. He couldn’t breathe right, his lungs were origami cranes under his still bruised ribs, and every heave of air into his body crackled with a bristle of razors and heartache. Angel grabbed at his wrist, his fingers nearly white at the knuckles as he tightened his hand to hold on to West.

  “I can’t talk anymore, Angel,” West ground out, yanking himself loose. “What more do you want from me? What else can we take from each other? What you do with that… with me—”

  West was still close enough to feel Angel’s warmth, smell the man’s tanned skin, and his mouth watered at the thought of licking the stretch of his throat where his pulse beat frantically near a tiny flat white scar. His face hurt from the tightness of keeping his emotions in check long enough to get his words out, and his palms burned with the memory of Angel’s cheekbones pressed into them.

  The door closing off the front from the kitchen boomed when it hit the wall, rattling the room and throwing the artwork askew. What emerged from the warm kitchen was a squalid whirl of dark hair, flashing gray eyes, and a hydra of flailing limbs. His clothes were comfortably worn in, a size too big for his lanky frame, and his feet sported a pair of formerly gray sneakers mottled with mud splatters and something pink. He looked so much like the man at West’s side, the boy could have been Angel’s.

  Especially since they shared suspicious looks and hooded resentment shone out of the kid’s face, a wariness he’d only seen in Angel’s expressions.

  “Angel?” The kid jutted his chin out, amusingly aggressive considering he was a little more than a foot shorter than West. “Wait, you’re Lang’s brother, right? What’s he doing here?”

  “How’d you get home? That’s the bigger question,” Angel countered, getting up and edging around the table. “Where’s Justin? You guys were supposed to call me so I could come get you.”

  As if there were any question of the universe laughing its ass off at the pranks it pulled on West, his gut twisted into a Gordian knot when he heard Lang shouting at Zig to slow down. His hellspawn niece must have taken the door at a full run because it swung out in a quick whoosh, narrowly missing smacking the boy across his back. He jumped forward, jostling a counter display, and other than a soft hey of alarm, his attention remained fixed on West.

  “Hey, Uncle West!” Zig came around a glass case and coiled up, ready to launch herself at him, but a quick shake of his head and a jiggle of the cane stopped the young girl in her tracks. “Sh… crap. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, brat.” His face throbbed, eyes prickly with the heat of his tears, and West tasted an ocean of salt in his throat and mouth. “I take it Thing One and Two are around somewhere?”

  “One’s outside in the car. Dad Two didn’t come with. He’s working the store so Margie could bring Xiah to the movies with us.”

  She grinned up at him. Then West watched as her lips slowly drooped into a thin, judgmental line.

  His niece wasn’t stupid. She’d spent a good part of her early childhood surviving the tempers and mercurial shifts in mood in the people around her. Zig could spot tension a mile away, and no matter how hard West reined in his emotions, she dug through him with a cunning ease quick enough to frighten him.

  Her expression went sharp, and Zig tilted her head, staring up at him as he ducked down to grab at the phone he’d left on the table. “You okay, dude?”

  “I’m fine. Tired, but you know how that is when you’ve been rolled around in a car. I didn’t know you… all of you knew Angel and his brother.” Unless there was another reason for the boy to have Angel’s eyes, he was going to go with sibling over son. West smoothed over his awkwardness with a brief nod, then handed Zig the phone. “Please do me a favor, brat. Would you hang that up on the wall over there, please? My leg’s not bending very well right now, and this table is a bit hard to get around.”

  “I can move it,” Angel’s brother offered. “Zig and I—”

  “Rome, focus more on me and less on Zig. What the hell happened to Justin?” Angel tapped his brother on the shoulder, but the boy barely shifted his attention. “How’d you get home?”

  “We caught a ride with Zig ’cause her dad asked if we wanted a ride home, so he took us.”

  Roman’s chin rose up farther, and he sniffed dramatically, flaring his nostrils at West. He’d have laughed at the tiny bantam of a boy if West hadn’t heard the heartbreak in Angel’s words a few minutes before. Whatever their father’d done to Angel, West would have laid bets Roman suffered an equal or greater anguish.

  “Justin gave me the key so he could go grab a book for Deke from his place.”

  “Would it have killed you guys to call and let me know? Shit, suppose something happened?” Angel paced around the table until he was in front of his brother, towering over Roman. The boy broke and took a step back. “The back door was lock
ed. How’d you get in?”

  “You weren’t at home and the lights were on, so he told me to come look in here for you. Zig came inside because—”

  “Cupcakes.” She beamed at Angel, a blast of charisma and trouble bright enough to blind a sightless mole. “Rome said maybe you had some leftovers. And I could have some. Cupcakes.”

  “Which you shouldn’t beg for, baby girl. And not calling’s on me. Sorry,” Deacon growled from the doorway. “Hey, Ange. Didn’t know you knew the Evil One.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Deacon.” West didn’t have the energy to snipe back. His brain hurt along the curve of his skull, a flat gray spike of pain cutting across to jab at his temples. “I hope you all had a good time at the movies.”

  “You okay, West?” Deacon straightened, a frown forming across his face. “Want me to drop you off at the Hellmouth? Or is Charon circling his boat somewhere?”

  “Perfectly fine.” He steadied himself, refusing to give in to the tremors working through him. As hard as it was to talk, it was harder still to be standing near Angel and pretending as if they hadn’t scraped open the scabs on their souls a few moments before. “I was just leaving, so no, no need to take me anywhere. I’ll get Marzo to swing by shortly.”

  “If you say so,” Deacon replied slowly. “Okay, pack it up, Zig. Time to head out. Say good-bye to Rome so we can head home.”

  “Hey, Rome’s promised cupcakes, so take some with you before you go.” Angel cut off the kids’ whine before it could reach its peak. “Kid, grab a small box and pack some for them. I’ve got to finish up with West, and then we can close.”

  The smaller, darker-haired Angel clone didn’t look persuaded to do anything but glare at West. “But why’s—”

  “Now, Rome.”