Drawn Together (22 page)

come home, you may look forward to it. Does Yamane like spicy food?

All my love, my darling boy,

Your Loving Grandmère.

130

Z. A. Maxfield

Chapter Twenty

Yamane awoke to find a freshly showered Rory bathed in the light of his laptop. He was laughing softly and drinking a beer. The rain still came down outside; however, the thunder and lightning had subsided for the time being.

“What is it?” said Yamane. “I didn’t think you were supposed to use a computer during a storm.”

“Oh, this one’s using battery power. I wouldn’t plug it in. My grandmère sent me an email. She wishes me to warn you against friends like Amelia.”

“Really?” said Yamane. “Me? How odd.”

“She thinks Amelia must be your friend, because she’s not really my type, and Grandmère is trying to figure her out. Grandmère has her number, though. I hope she doesn’t try to run her off before we get home. I don’t like to think what Amelia would do…”

“She’ll wait for us. It wouldn’t be any fun for her to do anything to your grandparents unless you were there to see it. It’s just how she is. I thank God every day all I had was a dog.”

“Ah, cher.” Rory held out his arm for Yamane.

“So,” said Yamane, sitting down on Rory’s lap and taking a sip of his beer. “What is your type?”

“Let’s see, I like them super tall,” Rory lied, “with really, really big breasts. I mean, like out to here.” He gestured wildly.

“Then…what are you doing?”

“What do you mean? I’m teasing you.”

“No, I mean, what are you doing with me?”

“I’m with you because I love you. What do you mean?” Drawn Together

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Yamane struggled out of Rory’s arms. “You’re a tourist. I have to keep telling myself that. I’m just another roadside attraction. Aren’t you the one who likes novelty? The biggest ball of twine, the largest cob of corn?”

“People aren’t tourist attractions, Yamane. People love each other for all different reasons. Just because I’m fond of seeing what’s around the next bend on the road doesn’t mean --”

“Shut up, you’re only making it worse,” Yamane said, walking to the bathroom. He turned on the shower. “I’m so stupid.” He stepped in, letting the water sluice down his chest, enjoying the way it warmed him.

“Yamane?” Rory pulled the shower curtain aside and got in behind him.

“It’s hard for me to trust this,” Yamane admitted.

“You want to tell me why?”

Yamane rested his head against Rory’s chest. “I think you’re going to break my heart.

And it’s going to hurt like hell when you do.”

“Any guy might break your heart. What’s your point?”

“I love you, Rory. You might be ambisexual or bicoastal or whatever, but I’m gay. I’ve known I’m gay forever. It didn’t take a kiss from a frog prince or a big adventure to wake me up to that.”

“Maybe I’m not the same. But I’m not a tourist either.” He pulled Yamane under the spray with him until they were wet and sliding against one another, their cocks hard and heavy in Rory’s big hand and he stroked them off together.

“Oh, shit.” Yamane leaned back against the wall and put his hands over Rory’s as Rory twisted his hand around their dicks.

“Have a little faith in me, Yamane, please.” Rory leaned in to kiss Yamane as he felt the first splash of cum hit their hands. “Love you.”

* * * * *

Later in the darkness, spooned up to Yamane between the sheets, Rory worried that Yamane really believed what he was saying. It wouldn’t matter how much Rory loved him if Yamane didn’t believe it. It almost made him laugh. Almost. Rory wondered if hiding the truth so completely -- even from himself -- was about to come back and bite him the ass, and not in a good way. Yamane was acting very strange. Even for Yamane.

* * * * *

“That woman makes me look perfectly sane,” Amelia was saying about Euphonia. “It’s a wonder she isn’t locked up somewhere for boring people to death.” 132

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Ethan allowed himself a brief smile because he was facing away from Amelia pouring her a glass of Chardonnay.

“Where the hell could Delaplaines be? He has to bring Yamane to me, and the sooner the better. I know I gave him until Saturday, but what is taking him so long?”

“Well, if he was in California where he was last using his credit cards” -- Ethan handed her the glass -- “it would take him, what, three days at least to get here, right?”

“So now you think he was in California?”

Ethan sipped his own wine. “I can’t think where else he might’ve been,” he said carefully. “He could, of course, be anywhere now.” Like Omaha.

“His grandparents are yokels, and they think the sun rises and sets on him.”

“If you do anything to his grandparents, he doesn’t have to come back, and he never will. You will have lost everything. Are you prepared to give up Yamane and your revenge?”

“Listen, have you found out anything about the sheriff in this place? He seems to be interested in the Delaplaines. I’ve seen him parked outside their house twice already, and I don’t want him interfering in my plans. Find out what it will take. He’s probably a joke.” Ethan had already checked on the sheriff. He disagreed. Sheriff Rene Chanfreau was competent and well liked. He had a reputation for upholding the law with a light hand, for letting people mind their own business. He looked the other way, for instance, while Claude Delaplaines grew marijuana for the cancer survivor group, and tended to turn a blind eye when they all got together on nights like tonight and sparked up. Chanfreau had also been a Navy SEAL, which no one in this small town thought about much, but to Ethan, that fact commanded a respect that little else would.

“It would be better not to underestimate local law enforcement.”

“Law enforcement,” Amelia sneered. “Barney Fife is probably just eating some of Miss Euphonia’s chicken-fried steak as we speak.”

Ethan was content to let her rant. If it weren’t for the bulk twins and the slow-witted Jeff, who had become a kind of liability for Ethan as he got to know them, he would be gone.

His “team,” as he had begun to think of them in Vegas, had started in uncomfortable silence, but as soon as Amelia had stabbed the doctor, there had been a pronounced shift in their behavior.

Bill and Matt, the two men hired to be muscle, had been completely poleaxed by Amelia’s attack on what they thought of as a noncombatant and were now too frightened by her crazy rages to quit. Jeff, who simply didn’t have the capacity anymore to tell how insane she was, simply did what she told him like a puppy, took her abuse too personally, and lapped up her occasional moments of kindness like ice cream. The whole thing sickened Ethan and he was frozen in indecision. How best to get out of it? How to get the boys, as he had begun to think of them, out of it?

* * * * *

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“You take the first driving shift,” said Rory. “I’ll show you on the map where we need to go from here.” He unfolded a map of the US on the small table. He’d marked out their destination and pointed to Omaha, the closest major city to where they were. “We just keep on east from here on the I-80 till we get to Des Moines, then down I-35. No surprises.” He put away his laptop and did one last check of the motel room. “Fine, we’re out of here.” The sun was beginning to heat up the ground, and the damp earth gave off an eerie vaporous steam. “At least the storm is over,” said Yamane, getting behind the wheel of their new truck. “For now, anyway.”

“I have the radio tuned to the Weather Channel. You can listen and find out what’s up ahead.” He reclined his seat as far as it would go and put a T-shirt over his face, effectively blocking Yamane and the world out. In no time, Nebraska was disappearing from their rearview mirror and Rory was dreaming of home.

Rory knew he was asleep; he felt the awareness of the truck, the road, and Yamane slip away from him, and into their place came his grandparents’ home, not the shiny, new manufactured home sitting on the land now, but the old house, with its wide screened-in porch.

The porch swing hung at one end, and two or three wooden chairs, one of which rocked, sat around a small table that was always covered with books and games or frosty cold glasses of lemonade. Whenever Rory came to that home from his parents’ house in the city, he always found his grandmère on that porch, waiting. No matter how hard he tried to surprise her, she had a sixth sense where he was concerned or someone in the town called her, because he’d never once shown up when she didn’t know he was coming.

Now he dreamed that he came home and no one was there to greet him. He wandered the deserted house; all the things he knew and loved were in place, but his grandparents were nowhere to be found. He searched outside and all over the property, but everywhere he looked was devoid of human life. Even in the town, there was no one in the drugstore, the market, or the movie theater. No cars filled the parking spaces, and no customers waited outside the A&W.

In his dream, Rory felt the first fat droplets of rain fall from a darkening sky, and as they fell, all the buildings melted away as though they were made of sugar icing. When the rain in Rory’s dream fell in earnest, the entire town of St. Antoine’s Parish disappeared completely as if it had never existed, and with it the sum total of all the real love Rory had ever felt from other human beings in his life.

Rory clawed his way out from under the T-shirt covering his face and rose up from his sleep, taking deep breaths. For a time, he didn’t know where he was. A gentle hand came out of nowhere to stroke the side of his face. Yamane.

“You were dreaming. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” lied Rory. “It was just a dream.” He felt wetness on his face but wiped it off with the shirt he still held in his hands. “How long have I been asleep?” 134

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“A couple of hours.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re coming up on Des Moines.”

The events of the previous night were coming back to Rory, squeezing him like a band around his heart. He’d always hoped that when he fell in love, real love, it would feel like home to him. He tried to give that to Yamane, who either couldn’t or wouldn’t believe in it.

Now, with Amelia threatening his grandparents and Yamane as different and distant from him as the sun, he wondered if he’d ever feel home again.

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Chapter Twentyone

Rene Chanfreau looked out the window of his squad car. He felt like he was on a slow amusement park ride, on a track, motoring around tiny St. Antoine’s Parish. He took the familiar route, hardly feeling as though he needed to even steer the car himself, he had done it so often. He’d agreed to do the job because his daddy had done it, and his father before him. Often, people talked to him as though he were his dad, or even his grandfather, referring to things that happened when he was in the Navy, or before he was even born.

Young people left St. Antoine’s; they didn’t stay there. Like Rory Delaplaines, they came back during the summer to get some vacation booty and run amok. Chanfreau liked Rory more than most. He was a decent, respectable boy. He’d been on Chanfreau’s mind lately for some reason, and the sheriff had been out more than once to see the boy’s grandparents.

Lately he’d seen a few people in and out of their house that he didn’t recognize, and one of them, the man Euphonia called Ethan, made him wonder. Chanfreau made careful mental notes. He’d seen a woman, a dark-haired, overdone, sharp kind of female, who looked to be about his age, early thirties. She had two men with her who looked like hired muscle, which set alarm bells ringing in Rene’s head. There had also been a slow-looking, younger man with them who trailed along like a pet. All these people had never been here before. They drove rental cars, all in the name of Ethan Calderon, a onetime cop from New Jersey.

From the look of things, one of the Delaplaines family had bitten off more than he could chew, and he was putting his money on Claude, St. Antoine’s own kingpin of the senior center drug trade. Chanfreau hated to admit it, but he really liked Claude and had looked the other way more than once. If Claude had stepped on dope-selling toes from one of the other, larger parishes, he’d have to put a stop to the whole thing.

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Chanfreau drove by the motel where he knew the outsiders were staying, and he saw something move behind one of the strips of vertical blinds in an upstairs room. Chanfreau had the creepy feeling that Calderon was keeping his eye on him, even as he was keeping his eye on Calderon. So far in St. Antoine’s, current population 873, Rene’s biggest case had been the emergency removal of a huge hive of bees from the inside of a terrified woman’s chimney. He hardly had to drive around, except to get some dirt on his patrol car so his deputy could wash it off once a week. Rene sighed and turned the corner of Center Street, heading to the drugstore. Yancy, the pharmacist, was a sharp-eyed, intelligent man. If the strangers had put even a foot out of line in town, he’d know it.

* * * * *

Rory drove the seemingly endless interstate as darkness fell on Wednesday. Yamane slept beside him, looking strained, even in sleep. They’d been guarded and distantly polite to one another all day; nothing like the sweet, erotically charged day right after Vegas. For his part, Rory didn’t know what words to say to Yamane, so he said nothing. How could he explain what he didn’t understand?

According to the news, there was some foul weather coming up from the south into Missouri and Iowa. Yamane would no doubt be disappointed to hear it. As the first rain spattered down around Kansas City, Rory decided they’d driven enough and pulled into a Comfort Inn with a Denny’s right next door. He touched Yamane’s shoulder to let him know it was time to wake up.

“Rory?” Yamane rubbed his eyes. “Are we stopping for the night?”

“Yeah. There’s a Denny’s next door to the motel.”

“Let’s get something and eat in the room. I just want to sleep. You go on ahead; I’m going to smoke.” Yamane turned away.

“Okay.” Rory went into the office to secure a room. He watched Yamane smoke from the inside where he could see him without being seen. Yamane looked so tired. For the first time since they’d met, Rory thought Yamane might have looked his age. He was still beautiful, but in a haunted kind of way that made him seem translucent. His dark eyes were shadowed with concern as he took a drag on his cigarette, the beautiful hands holding his cigarette and lighter as though he didn’t know what they were.