Sidecar (28 page)

“I’m going to be seeking the parts in me that are good enough for you, Joe,” Casey said softly, his gray eyes growing bright. “If those parts are in there, then I’m pretty sure you and your parents are right, and there is a God. And you showed him to me. Does that make you a good Quaker?”

Oh God… he was so short, and so young, and Joe loved him so much. “Yeah, I think so, maybe.”

Casey laughed. “Good. Because I told Cheryl to kiss my naked gay ass last night, and I wanted to make sure I had a platform to stand on.”

Now Joe did laugh and wrap his arm around Casey’s shoulders, walking back in the shadowed blue trench he’d worn through the snow on his way through the yard the first time.

“What did she say that prompted
that
?” he asked, because Cheryl could be abrasive, but she usually tried not to piss people off quite that badly.

Casey shrugged, and Joe looked sideways at him, liking the way the rising sun turned his hair to fire and gold. “She cornered me in the kitchen,” Casey confessed, “and tried to tell me that the way you and I were living was counter to her faith.”

“Her words?” They didn’t sound like Casey’s, and Casey nodded.

“Yeah, dumbass—who do you
think
would say that?”

“Well, what did you say?”

Casey snaked an arm around his waist as tight as he could probably make it, and Joe caught his breath for form. “I told her that if she wanted something to give her faith, she should talk to you, because the only reason I had any faith at all was because I met you.”

Joe’s breath caught again, this time for real, and he pulled Casey in and dropped a kiss on his hair. “Me too,” Joe murmured, and Casey turned his head and caught Joe’s lips for a kiss.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that at the time.” Casey scowled. “She started talking about doctrines and the book of what the hell ever, and
that’s
when I told her—”

“To kiss your gay white ass,” Joe finished for him.

“Yeah. Sorry about that, Joe.”

“I’m not,” Joe said, his heart beating so rightly in his chest that he almost felt warm. “Because you’re right. Whatever else I’ll be seeking, Casey, I’ve found my faith with you.”

Something So Strong

~Casey

C
ASEY
sat on the little stone ledge in front of the iron woodstove and leaned carefully on the wrought iron cage that surrounded it. It nestled in the corner of the Daniels family room and was used to supplement the gas heater, but the farmhouse was old, and it was large, and no number of those little crocheted dolls with the obscenely splayed legs was going to stop the minus ten degree draft that crept in during the winter.

Of course the number of people in the room—sitting on couches, love seats, chairs dragged in from the dining room, and standing in corners—tended to warm the room up, and a lot of those people were kids, and their metabolisms heated up the room just when they breathed. On the whole, the last time Casey had seen this many people crammed into a room for a purely social occasion had been for his continuation school graduation, and since most of those folks were either juvenile delinquents or teen moms with kids in the audience, the “stay and chat” factor had been decidedly reduced.

This was… overwhelming. Fun, of course—everyone here loved each other, even Cheryl, who tended to make her siblings scatter like leaves in the wind. The fact that not one of the brothers ever turned around to her and said, “Fuck off, you bitch-stinking cow!” was proof that the family really did hang together from the sheer honoring of affection.

But that didn’t mean Casey was enjoying being an audience—even one in a child’s seat in front of the fire—to this particular conversation, either.

She’d carefully avoided Casey after the “kiss my gay white ass” incident, and that was fine with everyone involved, including Joe’s parents, who seemed to make an effort to corral Casey in another room whenever Cheryl was on a rampage.

And she
was
on a rampage. No, not always about the gay thing, but that was one of her favorite songs. Her entire playlist seemed to consist of things that other people were doing wrong: Peter worked too many hours and wasn’t spending enough time with his teenage son, otherwise Elijah would have better manners. David didn’t take his position at the hospital seriously enough, or he would have been chief resident by now. Paul was wasting his life as a history teacher, and didn’t he want to get his administrator’s credential and move up? And Josiah? Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe… a
nurse
and not a doctor? A house in the
foothills
and not the suburbs? Seeing a
man
and not a woman? From his mustache to his ponytail to his motorcycle; from his career to his residence to his quiet devotion to Casey—holy Christ on a shit-eating cracker, what was he
not
doing wrong?

And this was when Casey got to watch Joe and that quiet, steady patience of his truly shine.

They were standing, at the moment, in front of the stove, and if Casey had wanted, he could have reached out and slid his hand under Joe’s jeans and palmed the hairy skin of his calf. He was tempted, because the press of people having conversation this New Year’s Eve, 1992, seemed overwhelming, and he would have loved a little bit of contact, just to reassure himself that Joe was still there and still his.

He didn’t, though. For one thing, he didn’t want to see Cheryl’s half-frightened sneer, which was the expression on her face when she’d walked down the hallway Christmas Eve and found the two of them necking under the stairs. They’d gotten a furiously whispered earful about having some respect for the other people in the house. Joe’s reply of “Well, of course we do, Cheryl. That’s why we weren’t making out in the living room!” only served to make her more leery of seeing the two of them together.

Joe had gritted his teeth and borne it, though—as long as she didn’t say anything bad about Casey or to him, that is. Casey had forgotten the whole “take your boots off in the mudroom” rule of the house and had stomped snow in the kitchen one evening before supper, and Cheryl had snapped that he may use street-trash manners in Joe’s house, but she expected more. That had resulted in
Cheryl
getting hauled out of the kitchen by
her mother
,
and Casey had only heard a little bit of that conversation from the bottom of the stairwell, but Celia’s staunch support of him and Joe had made Casey as determined as Joe to keep the peace. It was funny. Casey had never backed down from a fight, had never backed down from flaunting his sexuality in someone’s face. In fact, he wasn’t known for backing down
period.
But he understood now why Joe both loved and feared his family. This many people, this many personalities, and you could love a person with all your heart and not stand to be in the same room with them either.

So no. Casey didn’t slide his hand down the back of Joe’s calf, and he didn’t stand up, wrap his arms around Joe’s waist, and stand on tip-top-toe so he could dig his chin into Joe’s shoulder. He contented himself with curling up like a cat in front of the fire and completely corrupting Cheryl’s one and only child.

“I’m surprised they let you into the nursery with that mustache, Joe. I mean, I’m surprised they let you work there at all. You’re a grown man, what are they thinking?”

“They’re thinking that I’m a grown man,” Joe said, keeping a straight face. “I think they’re also thinking that I can hold the little shits in one hand, test their blood gasses with the other, and that I make them feel incredibly safe.”

Casey looked up from the face-making contest he was having with Caleb and smiled.

“Does he really?” Caleb asked seriously, and Casey looked back at him.

“Really what?”

“Really make kids feel safe?”

Casey thought about it. “He’s the nicest person I know,” he said thoughtfully, even though he was only talking to a four-year-old. “He could be the only person
I’ve
felt safe with, so I think I’m going to call that a yes.”

Casey smiled and patted Joe absently on the thigh, in spite of his terrifying height. Joe looked down and smiled and sank to his haunches, and Caleb regarded his mustache with a singular terror.

“Do you want to yank on it?” Joe asked seriously, and the little boy’s eyes grew wide.

“Can I?”

“Yeah, sure—but be nice. It’s attached.”

So Caleb wrapped his pudgy little fingers around the long beard/mustache hairs next to Joe’s mouth and pulled.

“Ouch!” Joe said theatrically, and Caleb giggled and let go, put his hand in front of his mouth, and laughed even louder. Joe ruffled his straight sand-colored hair and stood up to talk to Cheryl again, and Casey looked at him in admiration. God, he was like that with
all
the kids, not just Caleb, and Casey started to hunger for him to have that baby that he would never admit he wanted.

“You’re right,” Caleb said, digging his finger inside his nose since his mother wasn’t paying attention to him. “He’s nice.”

Casey hid a smile and waited to see how big this booger was going to be. Ever since Paul and David’s story, he’d been looking for a record-breaker. So far, the kid had only managed garden-variety snot, and Casey was much disappointed.

“Joe, isn’t he going to want to go out and see the world when he graduates? What’s he getting his degree in, anyway?”

“Engineering, so far,” Joe said, surprising Casey. He was right, but Casey had never gone through the whole “soul searching” thing that some people (Alvin!) went through to declare a major. Casey just knew it had to be a living with math that didn’t include children, because while this one was nice and he liked Peter’s oldest, Elijah,
very
much (partly because he wrote Joe letters on a regular basis, and partly because, when Cheryl had gotten upset about this, the boy had replied, “You gave me underwear for Christmas last year, Aunt Cheryl. Joe sent me a radio-controlled monster truck. Of
course
I’m going to want to keep in touch!”), Casey was pretty sure he couldn’t handle a big batch of kids at the same time without killing one. Or many. Which meant teaching was right out.

But Josiah (which Casey was liking the sound of more and more as he heard Joe’s family use the long version of his name on an almost constant basis) was great with them. He taught them how to groom the horses and how to hook up the harness on the old-fashioned, honest-to-God sleigh in the garage for sleigh rides, and when the kids were “out playing,” there was a 70 percent chance that Joe was the supervising adult. (There was a 30 percent chance that it was Paul and David, in which case there was a 100 percent chance that
someone
would come in crying because the brothers had gotten too competitive.)

Casey got to see the driving engine that made Josiah Daniels, the man he’d loved and had been in love with forever, tick.

It didn’t change his mind in the least. In fact, it made him want to be a part of this engine with even more of his soul. But that didn’t mean he had any more patience for a woman like Cheryl, who was just
dying
to tell the world how it should be run.

“And look at him! He’s more comfortable talking to the kids than he is with the adults!”

Joe met Casey’s eyes in grim appreciation that “he” was still close enough to be heard.

“So am I,” he said mildly, and he met Caleb’s eyes and winked, then winced. Caleb had, at last, struck gold.

Casey turned and looked at the child and then felt his eyes bulge out like a cartoon character’s. Really? Really. And there the kid was, looking for a place to put it, that work of art just dangling off his finger. And there was his mother’s backside, replete in winter-white slacks, just a couple of feet away.

“Kid,” Casey said, catching Caleb’s eye, “do this.” He made the time-honored wipe-the-finger gesture while looking at Cheryl’s full and replete ass.

Caleb was not necessarily the brightest kid Casey had ever met. Forget that he was four; he tended to stand around with his mouth open a lot. Anyway, he walked right up to his mother and wiped that thing on her back pocket. Cheryl barely broke stride as she looked down and said, “Not now, sweetheart, Mommy’s talking,” and Casey gave the kid a toothy grin and a thumbs-up.

Joe’s face turned red with the effort to not laugh.

“But Joe, don’t you want him to have the same sort of things
you
had when you were that age?”

Joe looked affronted. “It wasn’t that long ago, Cheryl—and yes. Yes, I want him to backpack around Europe for a summer. Yes, I want him to open every door that looks pretty. But no. I’m not going to kick him out of my life because you or anyone else thinks it’s a wonderful idea!”

Cheryl opened her mouth to say something, but Joe looked down and offered Casey a hand up. “Casey, am I taking advantage of you and keeping you from doing the things you want with your life?” Joe asked, and he was, to Casey’s horror, partly serious.

“If you try to send me out of your life again, I’ll geld you,” Casey said, and he was
completely
serious.

Joe winced. “Gelding? Seriously? Like I’m going to play around on you?”

Casey reconsidered. “I’ll superglue your hands to your hair. We’ll have to shave you bald. It’ll be heinous.”

Joe laughed a little and wrapped his arm securely around Casey’s shoulders. Casey snuggled into him, more relieved than he could put words to that he wasn’t at the children’s hearth anymore. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Joe said softly. “You can go traveling anywhere you want, Casey, but you’ll always have a home with me.”

Casey looked at Cheryl from the sanctuary of Joe’s arms. “You should see our home,” he said seriously. “Joe doesn’t talk about it, but it was a mess five years ago. The carport was a death trap, the upstairs was down to bare boards—hell, I think Joe had even ripped out most of the drywall—”

“It was rotted,” Joe confirmed. He nodded at Paul and David, who had come to join the conversation. “The first thing I did, before Casey came to stay, was take care of the roof, because the upstairs had rotted out from all the leaks.”