Forever Promised (32 page)

Looking at all the bottles—vodka, scotch, rum, bourbon, pinot noir, of all things—Jon felt a sudden, terrible acid sinking in the pit of his stomach.

He didn’t want to see where this trail of glass and despair led.

“Deacon?”

Jon barely heard the lecture on benzos and alcoholism that followed. Deacon was naked, skeletal, and crouching in a bathtub, covered in his own filth. He had bandages on his hand and his nose was swollen, and his lank hair was in his eyes, and he sat there and told Jon it wasn’t Jon’s fault—Jon had given him his first drink, and Deacon had just kept drinking.

And all Jon knew was that his friend—his perfect, beautiful, shy, and fragile friend—was a breath away from hell, and everyone in his life had left him. Deacon would rather they left him than see him like this.

Jon would rather see him like this than think of him alone.

J
ON
sat up in bed, breathing hard, sweating in the fine hotel sheets. He looked wildly around the room, trying to get his bearings, and he was relieved when Amy pushed her tangled dark hair back from her eyes and looked at him in the faint ambient light that came from under the hotel room door.

“Bad dream?” she murmured, and Jon folded himself over her. God, he loved how tiny she was, compact, but soft on the edges. Pregnancy had changed her body, but he hadn’t minded. He’d liked the changes—for some reason they made that worship in her eyes when she looked at him even sweeter. She’d had his children. She was sharing his life. Jon, the class-A fuckup, and Amy, the smart girl in class, and here they were holding hands like little kids and getting on a plane and starting a grand adventure.

But first he had to get past that bathroom door.

“Deacon,” he muttered. He’d had this dream before, and he didn’t hide anything from his wife.

“Me too,” she said softly.

Amy hadn’t seen the worst of it. Jon had cleaned a lot of that up before he’d called her, just so he could pull himself together while Deacon slept off the first Valium and the purging and the DTs. But she’d seen him afterward, hollow-eyed, ribs showing through his shirt, pants that wouldn’t stay up, the bruises on his face and arms from running into doorways bright and vivid on his pale skin. A little piece of both of them was going to be stuck in Parrish Winters’s house, cleaning up booze bottles and crying helpless tears, for maybe the rest of their lives.

“It’s stupid,” he said, hating himself. Every time he had that dream, had that fear, it seemed like betrayal of the worst sort. Deacon had needed help up twice in his life, and that had been the first time. He’d spent every moment after that proving to the world he was one of the strongest people Jon knew.

“It is,” she said softly. “It’s not fair.”

Jon let out a strangled laugh, relieved because she seemed to read his mind. “I want to dream about him healthy,” he said, meaning it. “I want
my heart
to remember that he’s happy, and we can leave him now, and we’re not deserting him, we’re just… just relocating. I mean, is that so much to ask? Whatdowegottado?”

Amy laughed for real by his side, and he was grateful the kids were sleeping at The Pulpit the last couple days before Thanksgiving, because that meant they could have this conversation and not be worried about being overheard.

“He’s going to be fine,” she said firmly.

“Yeah? Tell my stupid subconscious that,” he muttered.

She sighed and pushed herself up on her elbow. “You know, Jon, we don’t have any kids in this hotel room.”

Jon felt a reluctant smile start. “Distracting me with sex is absolutely shameless,” he told her.

“What’s the matter?” She pouted adorably. “Don’t you wanna?”

“Am I breathing?”

She put her hand to his groin to check. “Yes,” she said with a squeeze.

“Then I wanna.”

“Good.” She shifted on the bed and brushed her lips over his. “When we’re done,” she said soberly, “try to imagine him with a baby in his arms. It’ll help.”

Jon filed that away for later and opened his mouth, all the better to take advantage of the smartest stupid woman in the world. She was a brilliant attorney, of that there was no doubt, but he would forever wonder how she came to be stupid enough to marry
him.

T
HE
kids were used to sleeping at The Pulpit, which was awesome, because it meant they were nice and relaxed by the time Thanksgiving rolled around.

There hadn’t been enough room for Jon and Amy to stay, as much as Jon knew Deacon would have liked it, which is why they’d been in the hotel for the past couple of days. That meant that Thanksgiving night after dinner, they stayed in the living room, talking with the entire family and pretending like this wasn’t their last night in their hometown.

Jon and Amy tried to make light of it—they’d left for college, right? Six years? The two of them had spent a couple of years dating other people, and then Amy had cried on Jon’s shoulder for the last time and Jon had taken his courage in both hands and kissed his best friend’s girl.

And she’d been his girl ever since.

But the whole time they were in college, screwing around (Jon) or dating around (Amy), they came home during their breaks and spent their summers and their Christmases—and even some of their spring breaks and Thanksgivings—in Levee Oaks. And most of that time was spent with Deacon.

Amy had family she rarely spoke to, but she was at The Pulpit at least twice a week. Jon’s parents got Christmas dinner with Jon and his family, but Deacon’s family got Christmas Eve and the post-Santa Christmas brunch. Their daughter was named for Carrick’s friend who died in the service, and their son was Jonathan Parrish Levins.

The three of them had known each other since kindergarten.

No, Amy hadn’t been in their inner circle in kindergarten, but she’d loved Deacon since middle school. Jon had loved him forever.

So the two of them sat in the new living room—which was still hard to look at because Jon had loved the plaid furniture and ugly green carpet in the old living room—and listened to Deacon’s extended family talk about the past five years, and Jon and Amy laughed, but they didn’t participate all that much.

Part of it was that they were tired—they’d been quietly closing up their practice, closing up their lives, separating themselves from day care, school, family, and home. It was a lot of work, and even Amy, with her famous organizational skills, couldn’t get it all done in one swoop. They were content to sit, Jon on the recliner, his tiny wife in his lap, and let the conversation of the past five years of weddings and babies, of meetings and partings and fights and romances, wash over them.

Part of it was that the past five years had flown by—but Jon and Amy had older stories to tell. If Jon thought about it, he would have imagined this moment full of Jon himself, leading the party, telling the best stories, making all of his friends laugh, and giving them a glimpse of Deacon that maybe they hadn’t had.

But that was the other part.

Those memories, he was coming to realize, had become private.

Many of them involved Crick, but others did not. Many of them involved Amy, but some, a precious few, were his and Deacon’s and only his and Deacon’s, and suddenly he was clutching those memories with all the force of a child clutching a beloved stuffed rabbit.

Others might think that rabbit was a toy, meant to be discarded with the approach of adulthood, but Jon knew the truth: that toy was
real
, as nothing else in his life had ever been or would ever be again.

At the end of the evening, after Jeff and Collin left for pie and Shane and Mikhail left so they could make it back the next morning to help transport the luggage and people to the airport, Amy went back to kiss Jon-Jon, Lila, and Parry good night, and Jon hung out on the porch with the man who had taught him how to be a man.

There were not enough words.

They stood side by side and looked into the deep fog.

“Gotta be careful driving,” Deacon said. “Gonna suck out there.”

“Yeah.”

“Plane doesn’t leave until one, right? We’ll get you to the airport at eleven. Plenty of time for breakfast—Benny’s been planning it.”

“We gonna get presents?” Of course they were. Benny was the worst secret-keeper at Levee Oaks. Yeah, part of her time had gone to the baby blanket that pretty much boggled Jon with its delicacy, but he’d seen her working on a piecemeal project, and she’d lied unconvincingly that it was for Shane.

If it had been for Shane, it would have been green.

It was, instead, the colors of sand and sky, and everybody knew those were the colors both Jon and Amy loved the most.

“No,” Deacon said, seeming to ignore the chill wind that threatened to cut through the fog. “No one loves you, no one will miss you, and only good boys get presents. Go away and spoil your wife, she’s your only hope.”

“No,” Jon said quietly. “I would have been a cheating little scam artist who lost my wad on Wall Street if it wasn’t for you.”

The truth is so simple and so real. Deacon gaped at him.

“You remember me in grade school, Deacon?” Jon asked, and Deacon’s smile was sweet and, God help them both, young and soft.

“You were lazy,” Deacon said, laughing. “God, you copied my homework more than you copied the board.”

“Right?” It wasn’t the sort of sound that needed an answer. “And I was entitled. I was an entitled little fucker, and you didn’t once call me on it.”

Deacon shrugged and turned his face to the wind. You couldn’t see the pastureland from here—hell, visibility was so bad, you could barely see the barn—but Deacon probably knew where every horse and every fence and every blade of grass was, because he’d put his hands on all of them on this little spot of property, and made them his own.

“You were my friend. You know that’s all I ever wanted.”

Jon closed his eyes, remembering their one abortive kiss in junior high. Deacon’s hair had been longer then, but it was that same lovely dark blond, and his face had been thinner in adolescence, and his wrists and ankles skinnier too. It was two years before Crick Francis had come to watch Deacon work a horse, and five years before Amy and Deacon would finally go steady, breaking Jon’s heart just a little.

They had sat on Promise Rock after swimming, the spring sun hard and bright and heating the granite to the point where it stung to the touch. Jon had reached down to adjust himself because his swim trunks had made him hard.

Deacon saw him and rolled his eyes.

“God, I know health class says those things are supposed to wake up right about now, but seriously. Is yours as woke up as mine?”

Jon was so relieved
someone
was talking about this that he didn’t even bother with embarrassment.

“God, all the fucking time!” Swearing was new to them. They indulged in it a lot. “I am sporting wood
every minute
of
every day.
I swear, a girl so much as looks at me, and suddenly that thing is just all happy on its own.”

Deacon looked down at his hands as they dangled between his knees. “It doesn’t just happen with girls,” he confessed, and Jon’s eyes widened.

“Don’t tell that to anyone else but me,” he snapped, because they both knew the word “fag” and they both knew how hard life was for the kids who got called that word. Deacon didn’t hardly talk to the
teachers.
How hard would it be if he walked down the hallways and people shouted that word at him?

Deacon wasn’t surprised, though, and he scowled at Jon. “How stupid do you think I am?”

Even then, stupid and self-involved, Jon knew Deacon talked to two people in his life. One was his father, and the other was Jon.
Sometimes
he talked to Patrick, his father’s hired man, but mostly, it was Jon.

“It’s private,” Jon agreed and thought that his friend, the one who urged him to do his algebra and helped him with his spelling, was beautiful. He still had freckles, and his nose really was absurdly, adorably small. Jon could look at him for hours, because his lower lip was girl pretty, and here, in the sun, his eyelashes were blond and his green eyes were almost gray, and his smile was sweet like that Amy girl’s who’d had a crush on Deacon since forever.

It would be so much easier if Deacon were a girl.

“Boys?” Jon asked, suddenly curious. Jon liked
people, and he definitely
liked girls. But
God.
People obsessed over his family’s money all the fucking time.
Nice shirt, Jon-boy, Mommy buy that? Hey, Jonny, go buy a clue!
But not Deacon.

Deacon loved him (and Jon was young enough that he didn’t need to differentiate between loves) because Jon made him laugh and liked riding the horses and never asked him what happened to his mother or why he was living with his dad. (Jon couldn’t actually believe people asked that. Apparently there were some dads who didn’t stay. Jon had seen Parrish Winters with his son and it had never entered his mind.)

So, well, yeah. If Deacon was going to keep his thing for boys a secret, Jon was in. Why couldn’t they keep this secret together? Why couldn’t it be Jon’s secret too, and he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a girl or his wood going off at the wrong time? He wouldn’t have to worry about Deacon only liking him for his money, or about being laughed at, or about Deacon saying mean things behind his back.

Deacon
loved
him. Deacon was loyal. Deacon would
never
betray him.

Deacon was safe.

Wouldn’t it be great if Jon could have that calm and that comfort and that safety, all in the same person?

“Boys?” Jon said again. “Like… would you like me?”

Deacon flushed (a not uncommon occurrence, this was true) and looked at him sideways. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Jon flushed too—he wasn’t above being vain. “So, who else?”

“Amy Gonzalez,” Deacon said promptly. “She’s nice to us at lunch.”

Jon nodded. She was a little… uhm, sporty for him, almost a frightening bundle of energy, when Jon was rather proud of how perfect he was in his laziness. Besides, he
definitely
liked tits, and as of yet, Amy didn’t have any.