Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (13 page)

“It started right after I left,” Jeff said with a sigh, and Collin didn't pry to see when that had been. “She has good days and bad days, and I'm not sure how much she'll remember. I'm not actually going up to see her—I'm going up so I
can
see her. They may not even let us in.”
Collin tried really hard to take that in stride. Tried, but couldn't. “Why wouldn't they let us in? And who is „they'?”
Jeff blew out a sigh, and Collin realized that this was the discussion he'd hoped to avoid by not having anyone help him. He didn't want a soul to know this—more pain to tuck under his belt and pretend didn't exist.
“„They' is my father. He cut me out of the family when I came out, but mom and I kept in touch.” Collin gasped, but Jeff kept going, his voice very carefully leeched of all animation, anger, bitterness—life. “When this”—hand gestures to indicate the awfulness of age and disease—“started happening, I had to sneak around to talk to her. I've been bribing the nurse for the last couple of years, and we get our phone call once a week, but the nurse just got fired—”
“For taking bribes?”
“For taking it up the ass in the supply closet,” Jeff retorted, the first bit of emotion creeping into his voice. Of course—humor. “And quite frankly, I think if you work a job like that one, you should get your own room and complimentary porn, just to take the edge off. But it doesn't matter. Becky's gone, and now I've got to go and try and beg to see my own mother.”
“Is your father as stubborn as you are?” Collin asked, and almost ducked from Jeff's fulminating look. “I'm just asking! Maybe you can reason with him!”
Collin couldn't fathom a world in which his family simply turned away. It had taken him eighteen years to finally get it through his thick head, but he now realized to the soles of his feet that his father wouldn't have left him voluntarily, and certainly not while driving Collin in the back of the car. He lived in the garage apartment not because he couldn't afford a home of his own—he'd actually bought a small house. Then he'd fixed it up and sold it. His mother liked knowing where he was; it made her happy to know he was safe. He figured he'd caused her enough anxiety when he was growing up that he owed her a little bit of ego and independence to ease her mind now.
The idea that Jeff's father just… just wouldn't
want
him. It was ludicrous. Nobody did that anymore, did they?
“Is my father as stubborn as I am?” Jeff muttered. “The man has barred me from seeing my mother for over a decade, Collin. Claims I'm morally corrupt. He's the family fucking patriarch, too, so there goes my brother, my cousins, and every damned soul I grew up with. Is he as stubborn as I am? Who gives a fuck? Seriously—I don't even give a shit anymore. I just want to talk to my mom once a week, okay? It's not much—it's not dinner at The Pulpit, or the right to call up Crick and Deacon and cry on their couch. It's not buying dresses for the little girls—”
“Girls? There was only one at dinner.”
“Deacon's best friend's baby, Lila. It's not spoiling the little girls rotten, and being called Uncle Jeff, or getting to plan Shane and Mikhail's wedding, or sending care packages to Crick's sister at school. It's not any of that shit, but it's the one thing left from a happy childhood, dammit, and I'm not going to roll over and go tits-up just so that bastard can take it from me, you hear?”
“Yeah,” Collin said thoughtfully. “I hear.” He heard a core of steel in the man's voice, that was what he heard. He heard why maybe Jeff wouldn't want to hear a thing about The Pulpit that wasn't shiny and bright, and he heard why maybe he put so much effort into keeping his funny-man mask on for a group of people who were maybe not fooled for a minute, but who loved him too much to let on otherwise.
Jeff was quiet for a minute, and he tilted his head back again, like he was trying to ease an ache in his neck.
“I've got some ibuprofen in the glove box,” Collin offered helpfully, and Jeff shook his head.
“Thanks, but no. Rips up my stomach like nothing else.” Jeff kept his head tilted back and his eyes closed, and Collin heard the weariness in his voice, like a lead weight hitting the bottom of an icy ocean.
What to do? What to do, what to do…. Collin wasn't great at comforting. He was pretty good at being there through the rough stuff— his last boyfriend had lost his sister in a car wreck while they were together, and Collin had hung in there through the funeral and the grieving and the pain. In the end, though, Luis had needed to move on, and Collin had been ready to let him go. So Collin could drive Jeff to this horrible family confrontation and could probably hold him up if he fell down—and that was what Collin had wanted to do from the very beginning.
But he was at sort of a loss as to what to do for a tired man with a headache and what seemed to be the world on his shoulders.
But he couldn't just do nothing.
Tentatively, he reached out and put his hand on Jeff's knee. He was surprised—and a little bit humbled—when those long, well-manicured fingers laced with his and squeezed hard.
Collin pulled his arm back, keeping Jeff's fingers laced with his, and managed to drive one-handed most of the way up Highway 50 until he had to take the exit that got them to what was, apparently, Jeff's hometown.

Jeff: The Frosty Cold Tip of the Big Fucking Iceberg

J
EFF
wasn't sure which part of his day sucked worse: waking up to Becky's quietly remorseful phone call, the wreck of the Titanic that had been his counseling appointment with Martin, or finding that he was weak enough to let Collin take charge of his life and give him a ride to what promised to be a complete Hoover suck-fest that would vacuum what was left of his life-force out a gauge eighteen needle at mach six.

Add that to his odd conversation with Crick the night before, which had left Jeff with the vague feeling that something big and bad and out of his control was going down right in front of his eyes… well, shit. When Collin's touch, his simple, human touch, entwined with Jeff's cold, sweating, clenching fingers, Jeff thought he might very well have to hold on for forever, and even maybe longer.

He clenched Collin's hand and kept his eyes closed, and relived the dagger-most-fine points of his conversation with Kevin's little brother echoing in his head.

“Yeah, you loved my brother so goddamned much you gave him
AIDS
, didn't you!”
Ouch. Just fucking ouch. Jeff looked at the kid, hands on his hips, elbows out, and stopped himself from asking how Martin's parents managed not to drown him at birth. “The goddamned rubber broke, kid. Do I have to draw you a picture, or have I already strained your little squirrel brain with TMI?”
Martin's eyes grew big and round, and his skin grew sallow and white in the pink part of his lips. “That's all it takes?” he asked, horrified. “One broken condom?”
“Theoretically, yes,” Jeff snapped, thinking,
Please don't go there, please don't go there, please don't go there….
“Theoretically?” Martin looked at him with incredible suspicion.
Jeff peered around the little counseling room with misery. All he saw was a bunch of teenager art, some concert prints, a little coffee table, some cheap chairs, and Kimmy, Martin's safe person, looking back at him with incredible compassion in her eyes. Jeff looked back at her and tried to be bitchy about it, but he couldn't. Kimmy had moments like this from her own life, he was sure. Moments her judgment had been piss poor or motivated by weird, internal twistings instead of sane, rational thought. One did not have all your brother's gay friends gather together to save one from an abusive ex-boyfriend and a bowlful of nonconsensual cocaine if your life-choices were all sunshine and lollipops, did one? No. If anyone knew how badly personal evisceration was going to sit with Jeff, it was probably Kimmy, but that didn't make it any easier.
God, this whole steaming pile of funky dog shit would be so much easier to bear if he could hate her.
“I don't know if it was just the once,” Jeff said quietly. “We just ditched the whole condom thing altogether after that.”
“Oh for Christ's sake!” Kimmy snapped.
Jeff looked at her dryly. He was much happier now that she'd done something wrong than when she was the model of emotional and professional health. “Did we skip the class on tact, Kim, or do I want to see your grade on that one?”
“Seriously,” Martin muttered, sharing an incredulous look with Kimmy. “Even I know that's a fucked-up idea!”
Jeff sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands. How did he put it into words?
For starters, Kevin had been going off to war, and Jeff might not ever see him again. Jeff wanted his touch all over his body—it was that simple. He didn't want anything between them, not a thought, not a fear, not a rubber.
And, as bullshit starry-eyed romantic as even that had been, it didn't even compete with the other reason.
He was going into this gig HIV-free—about as pristine as he'd been when he'd lost his virginity to Troy Wilkins in the locker room after swim practice in the eleventh grade. (Troy had known what the hell he'd been doing too—he fucked like a god, and, yes, had a pocket full of rubbers, because that boy had plans. Last Jeff had heard, he had a law degree from Stanford, and good for him. He also had a wife and kids, which Jeff wasn't so sure about, but, well, to each his own.)
So if Kevin had just given him HIV with one broken rubber, Jeff didn't want to be pissed at him for it. Jeff didn't want Kevin going off to war thinking that Jeff would never forgive him for an ass full of AIDS. Jeff had been the one to ditch the protection, and Kevin, embarrassed and guilt-ridden, had gone along with him. This way, Kevin had said, it wouldn't be some dumbassed accident, it would be their own dumbassery instead.
World's worst fucking idea. Jeff had known it when he'd done it. But he'd sworn—sworn!—he'd never look back at their time together and regret a moment, or a breath, or a dumbassed decision. And he hadn't. Until now. When he had to explain to Martin the convoluted thinking of two men who were not thinking at all but feeling, heart full, into a marriage without a wedding, a life of “I do” that had come way too abruptly to “'Til death do us part.”
“It's complicated,” Jeff said lamely into the expectant silence, and Martin had turned away in disgust, and that, boys and girls, was the end of the goddamned session.
Clutching Collin's hand now felt like thievery. He had no intention of giving this kid the time of day, and he was a complete and total fraud.
As he surfaced from that conversation with Martin, relived his and Kevin's optimism, remembered that heady, fuck-it-all, freight-train love that had just pinned them to the tracks, he felt, deep in his bones, the weary certainty that he couldn't do that again. His heart wasn't ready for it. He was beyond that now. No love for Jeffy. It hurt too much. Jeffy was strong, Jeffy was wise, and Jeffy couldn't survive another heart shattering—he couldn't do it. The same things that made this kid
so
attractive—the big-dick car, the big-dick walk, the snarky humor, the big-dick attitude—those were the things that were risky. Those were the things that led to disaster.
Jeff needed to not give him any hope. No promises. Not even a held hand in a quiet car. (
Sort of
quiet—the damned thing had an engine that would wake James Marshall, founder of Coloma, and that guy had been dead for a century and a half!)
But even that was a lie, because Jeff couldn't seem to make himself let go of that rough-knuckled, strong-boned hand.
But he had to give the guy
something.
Jeff may be the selfacknowledged fairy-Jeff-father of gay men, but that didn't mean he didn't have a sense of honor like any other alpha male on the planet, did it?
God, give the kid some truth, one truth, one truth at all, so Collin wouldn't regret holding hands with an old 'mo who had too much emotional baggage for a summer fling, much less a long-haul winter shack-up of a relationship.
“Your age,” Jeff said, as he felt Collin shift his body before he took the turn off to Highway 49. He sat up and looked around, feeling refreshed, as though he'd been napping or meditating instead of dwelling on an emotional Hoover of a morning. God, as much as the next few hours were going to suck, fall in the Gold Country was something special. The grass was green instead of brown, the oak and pine trees were a dark holly color, and the maples and mulberries were spectacular and flaming as they gave their leaf-shedding swan song.
“My what?” Collin was peering at the signs and, after a glance at his gas gauge, took the left and pulled immediately into the gas-'n-sip to fuel up. Well, a monster of a car like this would probably guzzle fuel without mercy or repentance, wouldn't it?
“Your age,” Jeff said, as Collin turned the engine off. His voice sounded abnormally loud in the sudden silence.
Collin turned toward him, and as the chill of the altitude seeped past the windows, Jeff was aware that Collin's body radiated heat like some sort of high-octane furnace. God, the kid really was just like his car: muscles, heart, and a slick exterior—heaven help poor Jeffy, who hadn't gotten him some in too long a time.
“What about my age?” he asked softly.
“The problem is….” Jeff looked sideways and frontways and anywhere but at those perceptive golden eyes. “The problem is, you really grew up in a hurry, kid. And you're—Christ, you're way more grown-up than I am at this point. I'm going to keep calling you Sparky or rookie or what-the-fuck-ever, to remind myself that I've got”—he fought the urge to giggle—“baggage. Issues. God, like a luggage store, hanging out in my psyche, right? And you—you're young, and you've obviously got your shit together, and you don't need me crapping it up. I shouldn't have taken your help, okay? But I did, and I'm sorry, and I'm going to keep calling you Sparky, just so you remember that you've got other options and this whole crush thing should be something you hurdle over, or it's going to fall on your head.”
“Why don't you let me decide about that?”
Jeff couldn't even look at him. “Nobody should have to wrestle my demons, Collin,” he said softly. “I at least got to be young, okay?”
Collin's gentle hand on his chin forced Jeff to meet his eyes, and Jeff's heart started to beat a little bit faster when he saw the slow, smug smile on the kid's face.
“Oh, Jesus, that was a mistake!” he muttered. Whatever he'd said, it had given the boy hope. “What was it? I'm trying to scare the shit out of you, dammit—how'd I fail?”
“You called me „Collin'.” The whisper of those lean lips against Jeff's scowl was enough to close Jeff's eyes, and he even leaned forward before that terrific, radiating heat backed off, and the fingers on Jeff's chin with it.
“Can I get you a soda, Jeffy?” Collin asked, his eyes crinkled with the insufferable knowledge that yes, for half a second, Jeff had let himself want.
“Coffee, Sparky,” Jeff snapped. “Grown-ups drink coffee. And I'll get my own, thank you. I've got to hit the head.”
“Get me a soda, would you?” Collin called smugly as he got out of the car and ran his card through at the pump. “I prefer diet lime or lemon or something, okay?”
“Anything you want, Sparky!” Jeff called back with the kind of salute that left only the middle finger extended. He could hear Collin's strong laugh echoing off the concrete of the gas station until the door of the mini-mart closed behind him.