Forever Promised (39 page)

“Jeffy,” he mumbled, washing himself off and disposing of the condom, “how come you keep stealing my clothes?”

“Because I like wearing you on my skin. Did you expect another answer?”

Collin chuckled weakly and was rewarded by his boxer shorts and a clean pair of Jeff’s sweats hitting him across the chest.

“Get dressed—I’ll go stir the soup.”

Collin mumbled in protest. He’d been going to set the table and make everything all formal, the way Jeff did when he was trying to make a big deal about a night in. Martin was coming for Christmas next week, and he was going to stay at Jeff and Collin’s for the last time. He’d been making polite noises about inviting Sweetie over to Jeff’s house, as well as singing “My Girl” on the phone whenever he talked about her, so Collin was counting on his and Jeff’s Christmas being relatively sex-free. When Martin came in the summer, he was moving into Collin’s old room above his mother’s house, and the thought was both happy and sad. Collin and Jeff could sacrifice some romance to have their kid brother/adopted son living under their roof for Christmas.

Jeff knew this, because he leaned over the bed and laid a sweet kiss on Collin’s lips. “Don’t worry about romance, baby,” he said, his brown eyes warm and his curly hair impossibly tousled. “After that performance, you haz it. I’d rather eat soup standing at the sink with you after sex than have the whole candlelight dinner without it any day. Hands down. No contest. Okay?”

Collin smiled and palmed the back of his head forward for another kiss.

The pasta would be glue by the time they got to the soup, but the taste wasn’t bad, and Jeff was right. Some things made eating soup standing up over the sink better than the full-court romance press.

Mostly Jeff made it that way. Collin made sure to tell him so—and Jeff made sure Collin was aware that he already knew.

Deacon
:
Calms and Storms

D
EACON
sat in the living room with the laptop balanced on his knees and Benny looking over his shoulder. They were all grateful Benny had been almost finished with her finals when she was put on bed rest; she’d been able to submit most of her work via computer, although Drew had needed to drive to Sac State and drop her paper off in the office of one holdout who thought pregnant women were faking it for the sympathy and computers were a passing fad.

The bad part was that although she’d dominated the computer for two weeks, she’d been too busy with schoolwork to do any Christmas shopping. With a two-week hard deadline on
that
project, Deacon was the one who thought to bring her the credit card so she could go to town.

Benny had asked for his input, the way she had from the very beginning when it had just been the two of them ordering for Jon and Amy, as well as Crick’s care package overseas.

Deacon had ordered for Benny on his own that year, and put Crick’s name on all the tags. Girl stuff—he remembered that. Girl stuff. Amy had given him suggestions—mostly things like mani-pedis, gift certificates to her favorite stores, beauty products. Girl stuff. It had been hard; he’d helped Crick raise her and her sisters, and he’d still remembered buying her things like Barbie dolls and Hello Kitty backpacks. But for that first Christmas, she’d been expecting a baby of her own. In the end, his best gift had been a teddy bear. He’d told her she could give it to Parry when she was born, but he’d seen both rooms after they’d been painted and redecorated for the two of them: Benny’s room had the teddy bear, propped up on the pillow. It was one of the more expensive ones, with the exquisitely soft fur and the old-fashioned face, sewn with darts and tiny beaded eyes. He’d even had a little vest and tie, and Deacon remembered Benny’s resignation when she had to get new clothes for the bear because Parry wouldn’t stop undressing him.

So this time, her on the couch, pregnant, ordering Christmas gifts, talking hesitantly about the future—this was déjà vu.

“Oh….” Benny’s whine hadn’t changed in the intervening seven years, either.

“I know, Shorty. I’m sorry.”

“But… but… oh, man! Look at that bike! It’s
perfect.
”

Deacon nodded. It was. Sturdy, with training wheels and a matching pink-and-blue helmet and pads, it was exactly the right size and skill level to teach Parry how to ride a bike.

“I don’t know how we’d give her anywhere to ride,” he said apologetically. “I can make it a project this summer, lay down a concrete driveway between here and the cottage—that should do it—but in the meantime….”

Benny humphed. “In the meantime, she’d have that awesome bike, and she’d have to wait on us to take her to the school on the weekends.”

Deacon shrugged. “Well, her birthday’s in February. Maybe we can lay down the concrete between now and then.”

Benny rolled her eyes and slugged him softly in the shoulder. “Maybe you’ve got better things to do with your time. When are you going to paint the baby’s room?”

Deacon colored. He and Crick had talked about this. A lot.

“Well, see,” he said, embarrassed as he always was about small intimacies, “Crick needs to decide on a color. I keep telling him he needs to, because he’s the one who gets the decorator credit, right? But he keeps telling me that he’s not feeling the color scheme.” Deacon frowned and squinted at her. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

Benny wrinkled her nose. “I think it means he doesn’t want to commit until he’s sure the baby’s going to be okay.”

Yup. “I was pretty sure that’s what it meant,” he confirmed. “Jesus, and
I’m
supposed to be the pessimist.”

Benny giggled and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Yeah, you are. Why aren’t you, by the way?”

Deacon looked away from her and studied the corner of the television. “I am,” he admitted. “I just don’t do it so much in front of you.”

Benny laughed softly. “That’s not all of it,” she said, because she knew him, and he shot her a quick grin.

“I was here the first time, remember?” he said, and her eyes got a little shiny.

“Duh, Deacon. It was my best Christmas at the time, and it was still shitty.”

He put his arm behind her shoulders and dropped a kiss on her soft hair. Sure, Crick said it was getting greasy with pregnancy, but Deacon didn’t see it that way. He thought she looked beautiful, spots and all.

“Yeah. But you have always been… I don’t know. Indomitable,” he said, liking the word. “I mean… it was like you just
decided,
and you were a grown-up. You’ve been a grown-up ever since.”

She laughed a little. “Yeah. But you were the one person in my life who ever let me be a kid. It was like I had permission to screw up, and that… I guess it made it so I wanted to try three times as hard not to screw up for you.”

He thought about that for a minute. “Parrish used to fuss about that,” he said slowly. “He used to tell me I was a good kid, but that didn’t mean I had to be perfect.” He found himself smiling softly, remembering a pair of fine brown eyes and a narrow little face looking at him from the bars of the practice ring. “And then Crick came along and he started screwing up enough for the both of us, so Parrish stopped his campaign to let me be a bad kid.”

Benny hmmed like she wasn’t saying everything on her mind.

“What?” he asked, irritated, because people did this to him all the time.

Her returning look was wry. “You forget sometimes,” she said quietly. “I know all your secrets, Deacon. I know about your mother.” The woman who drank herself to death in front of him. He’d read the psychology homework she’d given him, about how it was common for a child whose parent spun out of control to try to get a little of that back. “I know that you worked your whole life to be the good kid.”

Deacon swallowed, suddenly irritated with how much still bothered him. Didn’t passing thirty have its privileges? “Well, I blew that to hell, didn’t I?” he asked dryly, and Benny kissed his shoulder.

“Don’t you see?” she said, suddenly so serious he had to set the laptop on the coffee table as courtesy.

“See what? That we’re no closer to finding Parry a present than we were before?”

“Well, yeah.” She was as disheartened as he was—they wanted something
big
this year, something that said she was still going to be loved the same, even if Uncles Deacon and Crick had something else to occupy their time. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. Remember what you said? When I was pregnant?”

“Wasn’t it mostly ‘whine whine whine, Crick, why did you leave me?’”

She laughed and slugged him again. “Jesus, be serious. When I was looking for a name, we picked Parry for your dad and Angela for me—you said it was a way of seeing the best of me, remember?”

Of course he did. “Yeah.”

“So what are you going to name your baby, Deacon?”

“Do we really—”

“Yes.”

“You are damned bossy for someone who’s supposed to be weak and helpless.”

“You taught me to
never
be weak and helpless,” she said, trying to look stern. She wasn’t a stern parent. Parry was well behaved, but mostly because Benny tried to read her mind and figure out what was making her fractious before she got out of hand. Parry was the kid who had a snack and a juice box if she had to take a trip with Mama to the store, and the one who got enough sleep every night so she wouldn’t be too tired to operate in the morning. So Benny’s stern look didn’t really frighten Deacon, but just like Benny had said, knowing you could get away with something and
wanting
to get away with something were two different things.

“So I did,” he said. Crick was at the grocery store, and Deacon suddenly, irrationally, wanted him very much. During those two years apart, talking about small things like this had been lost. Every word coming out of their mouths had needed to be of utmost importance. Over the past five years, Deacon had gotten used to small moments, little jokes, being able to hassle Crick on the phone when he got too anal retentive with dinner, or being able to tell him how soccer practice or breaking a horse had gone. Suddenly he wanted
Crick
to have this conversation with, even though Crick had told him—verbatim—that if he was the type of guy to give a shit about names, he would have killed his mother in her sleep for naming her first daughter Bernice, and he would never have approved of a little girl named Parry Angel.

So it was up to Deacon. He actually already had sort of a plan.

“Well, I think we already decided on a boy’s name when you were pregnant with Parry,” he said apologetically, and her eyes widened.

“Carrick Parrish or Carrick Deacon?”

They both cringed.

“Carrick Parrish would be child abuse,” she conceded, and he nodded.

“How about James Deacon—JD for short,” Deacon told her, and now
she
was the one who looked like she remembered ancient history.

“Awesome. Now a girl’s name.”

Oh God. His mother’s name? Surely not. And as for naming her after anyone else?

“It would have to be….” He sighed and felt self-conscious. “All the strong women in my life,” he said seriously, “they’re going to do strong things. I don’t know if I could name a baby after Amy—for one thing, Crick would be jealous as hell—”

“And things are hard enough!”

“Amen, but for another, Amy will
always
be Amy to me. I don’t want another girl to take that place. I’d name her Bernice—”

“But I’d kill you.”

“And Crick would help,” he affirmed. “But it’s more than that. It’s that… that a baby named James wouldn’t ever be
Carrick
James. But a baby named Bernice would have no choice but to be just like you.” Oh God. This was convoluted and painful. “I guess all the girls in my life have just been fresh air, and we’d need a name that was like
that.
”

He looked sideways to see that Benny was looking at him avidly. “Go on!” She batted her big blue eyes at him, and he kissed her forehead.

“Daisy,” he said, thinking of the tiny wild ones and not the big domestic ones in gardens. “Daisy Sky. Something wild and perfect and… and able to live up to all the girls I know.”

Benny put a hand over her mouth. “Oh, dammit, Deacon! I don’t know which one I want it to be now!”

Deacon would never preen, but he did flush a little, pleased. “Well, if it’s a boy,” he said soberly, “you could keep Daisy Sky to name one of Drew’s children, right?”

She blinked then, slowly, and her eyes suddenly spilled over. “God,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her face. “I… I’d forgotten, you know?”

“Forgotten?”

“I’m… I’m so geared up to… to giving this baby away,” she said, her voice thick, “I’d forgotten. Drew and I… we’ll have children. I….” Suddenly she was full-tilt sobbing, and Deacon could only wrap his arms around her tighter.

She fell asleep soon after that, and when Crick got home, they had a quiet dinner. Drew had Parry Angel out seeing a kid’s movie, and Benny was staying the night on their couch. When Crick saw her curled up, still in her loosest pair of drawstring jammies to accommodate her tummy, and clutching the softest blanket they had to her chest, he kissed her forehead, which was something Deacon wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Crick do for his sister.