Forever Promised (26 page)

“C’mere, Shorty,” he said, still grinning, and her smile at him was gold like September.

“Yeah?” she asked, nodding, and he nodded back.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

He picked her up and hugged her so tight he probably cut off her breath, and spun her in a circle while she laugh-cried on his shoulder. “
Yes! Yes!
Hot
damn
,
Benny, you, me, your brother, we’re gonna have a
baby!
”

That moment under the heartbreak of an autumn blue sky, Benny shrieking happily in his arms, was etched as cleanly as one of Crick’s sketches, as perfect as the day.

T
HE
moment he told Crick was not quite as poetic.

“Yeah? That worked?” Crick said, looking over the refrigerator at him.

“What do you mean it worked? You were there!”

Crick shook his head. “Well, yeah. But, you know. It was a thing up my sister’s hoo-ha.”

Deacon scowled. “Okay. For the rest of our lives together, you will never again utter that phrase. Ever. I need your word on it. This is a
baby. Our
baby. If you ever call it a thing up your sister’s hoo-ha again, I swear, I’ll never eat your cooking again.”

Crick straightened up over the refrigerator. “Take that back!” He looked seriously alarmed, but Deacon wasn’t backing down.

“I will not! This is important—this is our
baby
!”

Crick looked vaguely uncomfortable. “But, you know. She needs to see the doctor, and it may not take. It’s… you know. We’ve got nine months to go, Deacon. Maybe don’t celebrate just yet.”

Deacon swallowed hard against his disappointment. “Well, yeah. I’m not stupid. We talked about this. We’ve seen how this goes. I just thought….” He curled one corner of his lip in self-deprecation. “You know… we could be happy?”

The expression in Crick’s brown eyes was a painful mixture of hope and anxiety. “I want so badly for you to be happy,” he said, pulling the milk out of the door with a jerk. He was using his lame hand, which meant he was working all of his muscles extra hard just to hold it. Deacon wondered how many small chores he did like this to challenge himself, to help shore up the body that would, every now and then, up and betray him out of the blue. “I do.”

Deacon took his life in both hands and ventured past the invisible line in the kitchen that was marked by the table. Very gently he reached down and took the milk from Crick’s grasp and set it on the counter.

Crick watched him, one eyebrow cocked. He was actually almost docile when Deacon nudged him back so he could shut the refrigerator door. They were standing close, and Deacon had to smile when Crick grabbed his hips and pushed at him until Deacon was backed up against the counter and Crick was leaning against him.

“See,” Deacon said soberly, “here’s the thing.”

The thing was, Crick’s eyes were lit up inside, no matter how serious the occasion was, and the corners of his mouth were quirking up too. The thing was, Deacon was remembering for the thousandth time that day and the millionth time that week and the billionth time that month how much he loved this man and wanted to give him the world.

“Thrill me,” Crick said, and Deacon winked.

“Every night, I give it my best shot. But about the thing. When your sister came to live with me the first time, she’d been… well, she hadn’t been eating right, and she’d been sleeping on the street, and—yeah, we were worried. We took her to the doctor and got her extra supplements, and I swear, she drank about a gallon of milk a day, but… you know. One night I heard her crying, and I went in to see what was wrong.”

Crick was looking at him avidly, and Deacon realized this story hadn’t made it to his letters or phone calls. Benny wouldn’t have told Crick, and Deacon had been too busy trying to mask the aftermath of addiction and recovery. This was a gift. A tiny puzzle piece of the life Deacon and Benny had lived without Crick, that Deacon could gift him in a story.

“She was worried,” Deacon said bluntly. “This baby—it had become our project, you know? We were working on making
her
healthy and happy so the baby could be healthy and happy, and she was worried. Not just about the baby. She was worried that if she miscarried the baby, the two of us… well, we wouldn’t have anything to keep us together, you know?”

Crick nodded. “Yeah. I know. She wanted to belong—even
I
could figure that out from half a world away.”

Deacon leaned forward and traced the line of Crick’s jaw with his nose. Crick’s reaction was electric and immediate. He groaned and relaxed against Deacon a little further, and Deacon reached behind him to grab two healthy handfuls of Crick’s ass. Tight as usual, Deacon thought with another smile. The luxury of doing this every day was still not a thing Deacon took for granted, and the animal touch was comforting as he resumed his story.

“Yeah. But there I was, and I’ve got a terrified teenager on my hands, crying her eyes out, and most of her fear really was for her baby. So I tell her what the doctor said—that after the first three months, she had less of a chance of miscarriage—she knew this, right?”

Crick nodded, still listening. His dark hair fell into his eyes, and Deacon pushed it back.

“But you know how smart she is. She pointed out that late pregnancy miscarriages still happen, and then she pointed out that babies die during labor, and then that the boy babies especially get low blood sugar or infection, and then I remembered that toddlers have a tendency to escape and stick their fingers in light sockets or run into traffic or fall off of refrigerators, and then we both talked about all the damned stupid things you’d done as you’d grown up, and then… then it just hit us. You were in Iraq, and we worried about you every second of every day.”

Crick swallowed audibly. “This isn’t very reassuring, dickhead.”

Deacon felt that joy in him, the feeling that had welled up without hesitation in front of Benny. “That’s the point. Don’t you see? From the minute that swimmer found a home, we were going to worry. This ride gets faster and scarier and trickier, and the loops get higher, and there’s more of them, and the entire fucking roller coaster is just going to go zooming down the track at Mach fucking
twelve
,
and
that’s
parenthood. Taking Parry out to the soccer field and hoping she doesn’t get trampled searching for earthworms is scary. Putting her in the car is scary. There
is
no end to being the daddies, Crick. We enjoy the ride, or we spend every fucking second expecting to have our hearts ripped out of our chests. Dammit—I say we enjoy the fucking ride!”

Crick had closed his eyes near the end, and Deacon could see about six different emotions struggling to take over his face. The expression that won, though—that was Deacon’s favorite.

It was a lopsided smile so full of excitement it couldn’t bother to be straight.

“Hey, Deacon!”

“What?” But Deacon knew.

“We’re gonna be daddies!”

Deacon nodded. “We’re gonna be daddies.”

“We’re gonna be the fuckin’ daddies!”

“Yeah we are.”

Crick’s mouth came down on his, and Deacon opened and let him in. The kiss went on forever, through the kitchen, into the bedroom, where it became naked and sweaty and loud. An hour later, they emerged, freshly showered, and put the milk back in the refrigerator. Crick gave cooking a rest and microwaved some chicken breasts for sandwiches, which they ate sitting kitty-corner to each other at the table.

They didn’t stop smiling until they went to bed after television and fell asleep, Deacon in his place as big spoon, Crick holding Deacon’s hand to his chest, both of them conceding that sometimes, you just got to be happy, and worry could happen tomorrow.

B
Y
O
CTOBER
the weather had given them a bit of a break, and although Benny hadn’t quite begun to show, she had gotten (in her brother’s words) fatter.

Her middle finger was still elegant when extended. Drew had made a point to tell her that too, because her bird really was awesome. Especially given they were on the soccer field, cheering Parry Angel on in one of her last games when she flipped Crick off, and Deacon was a little embarrassed.

Then she kissed Drew right there on the sidelines, the kind of kiss that spurred other parents to go home and spawn other children, and Deacon’s embarrassment faded. He wasn’t going to begrudge them that, especially not because—

“Go, Angel, go!”

“Omigod, is that her? Does my baby have the ball?”

“Dammit, Parry, don’t stop now!” That last was from Crick, because if he wasn’t swearing he wasn’t living, but most of the other cheers were from, well, everybody. Jeff, Collin, Shane, Mikhail, Jon, Amy, Lucas, and Kimmy—all of whom had had shown up this night, because sometimes a crucial nexus just forms in the fabric of time and everybody gets to see that moment when—

“Really?” Collin said blankly, and the entire Pulpit group stopped jumping and cheering abruptly.

“Angel….” Deacon’s voice trailed off, and they all watched as Parry stopped in what was about to be a run for their first goal of the game and kicked the ball to the forward of the other team. On purpose. Because she was Parry’s friend at school.

Sherrilyn took the ball and ran hell for leather in the other direction, and Parry turned a smiling face at her entire family.

“See, Deacon! I shared!”

Deacon’s mouth fell slowly open, and all of the parents—every last one of them behind the sideline—made the time-honored sound of being helplessly cuted out. “Aw….”

Deacon pulled up a green smile, pleased that the torches and pitchforks were staying buried under the floorboards. “Nice job, Angel,” he said. “Maybe next time, Sherrilyn could share with you, do you think?”

“Not on your life, faggot!”

The voice was from one of the parents on the other side of the field, and as soon as they heard it, when all of the parents on Deacon’s team were still frozen in shock, the ref went stalking across the field.

“Oh my,” Collin said, and Deacon had to agree with him.

“That nice man went and got himself a red card.” Deacon’s mind boggled.

“Do you think they’re getting different training than when I was in school?” Collin asked, and Deacon heard Crick snort.

“Damned different than when
I
was in school,” he agreed.

“Different’s not bad,” Jon muttered, and the entire Pulpit contingent watched in awed silence as the seventeen-year-old ref gave the parent the red card and then patiently explained to the coach of the other team that hate speech would cause the team to forfeit the game.

“Didn’t say it was bad,” Crick said, his eyes, like all of theirs, glued to the little drama on the other side of the field. “Just weird.”

“Weird can be good,” Mikhail said, and Deacon heard the rumble of Shane clearing his throat. Mikhail’s voice softened. “Very, very good.”

The ref trotted out to the middle of the field then, assembled the players, and cautioned them all to play by the rules. Across the field, the offending parent was stalking off, muttering to himself and throwing his hands up in the air—but he was leaving. The ref double-checked to make sure, blew her whistle, and play resumed.

Deacon resumed his goal in coaching the group of little kids in how to accept a graceful defeat at the hands of a more bloodthirsty enemy. And then there was juice and cookies.

As Deacon gathered up the unbelievable amount of crap that went with this job—the banner, the wagonload of extra soccer balls, the duffel with the team roster and the first aid kit, the ice chest full of waters, and the giant pop-up shade Shane carried at his side like it wouldn’t usually take two men to do that—he heard a shrill voice. Benny was crouched down next to Parry Angel and assuring her that nobody was mad at her for sharing the ball. Deacon saw her stiffen and look around, wild-eyed, for where her mother was bobbing and weaving across the soccer field, wailing loudly.

Deacon and Drew met eyes. “Get them to the car.”

“Yes sir,” Drew said.

Deacon used to hate the way the young private deferred to him, but not right at this moment.

“Deacon…,” Crick said warningly, but Deacon wasn’t having it.

“Not here. Not now. You guys go. I’ll deal with her.”

“But she’s my—”

“She’s everyone’s problem, Crick. Get your sister and Parry out of here. Leave me the truck and we’ll meet at the ice cream place.”

Crick growled, but like Drew, he knew an order when he heard one.

Deacon finished grabbing his crap, giving a distracted nod to the parents who were congratulating him on the solid loss, all the while aware that Melanie Coats was getting closer by the scream. He looked up when he could no longer avoid her, and glanced apologetically at Megan.

“Hon, can I talk to you about the game in a few? I’ve got some ugly family business to attend to.”

Megan nodded. “I know—but if you let me stall her, you can get out of here too.”

Behind him, he heard Shane chortle, and that’s when he realized Drew and Crick had done what he’d asked and gotten the girls out of there, and Amy had joined them, but that everyone else had stayed.

He grinned at Megan then and nodded reassuringly at the other parents. “Your support is really wonderful, thank you. But don’t worry, we’ve got this.”

He swung the coach’s bag over his hip and walked up to talk to Crick’s mother.

“What do you want?”

Melanie looked around him almost desperately, and he didn’t blame her. He wasn’t sure they’d had a conversation in more than ten years that hadn’t resulted in an arrest or a hospitalization. Either Deacon or his father had been the protector of two of her children—the storm break between Crick and Benny and their parents that kept them safe from the crash of unstable people mired in their addictions instead of their family.

“I’m not talking to you.” She glared at him, her eyes red-rimmed, and he let out a sigh. He could guess.

“When’d he die?”

She sniffled, and he regarded her impassively. There was not enough pity in the world, not for him to feel any for her. She’d hurt Crick, she’d hurt Benny, and she’d hurt Parry. It might not make him a saint, but he wasn’t going to worry about sainthood—he was going to worry about his people.