Sunset Park (28 page)

PUTTING THE
pieces together in one corner of the puzzle gave me an itch to fix up the rest of my mixed-up life, even if it meant going back on my decision to leave David the hell alone.

There were only so many ways I could explain that he’d infiltrated every nerve, pore, and vessel of my being before it started sounding like I was comparing my unrequited feelings to an infectious disease. But maybe that’s what it was.

I’d never been in love with anyone before, but I could recognize the signs. Watching Nunzio and Michael play make-believe for twenty years had given me enough ammo in that regard. But realizing I was in love with David was worthless since I was now just another poor sucker in a big pool of suckers who were wasting their time on someone they couldn’t have. There was only so much I could do to prove myself, and begging wasn’t one of those things.

Every day I made a promise to myself regarding David, and every day I found a reason to go back on it. I was starting to feel like some lying-ass presidential candidate with as much as I flip-flopped, and today was no exception.

Upon leaving the apartment I’d sworn that I wouldn’t mention my plans or my meeting with Rolly to David unless he asked. I would just make my moves without ceremony, and he could observe how much taller I was standing. And if not, to hell with him.

But already, that decision was slipping through my fingers as I tried to finagle a way to bring up Thanksgiving. I wasn’t necessarily determined to spend the day in Long Island with Rolly, but I sure as shit wanted to know if David would spend it with me. It was a test, pure and simple. How much did he want me, how much did he want to see me, how important was I in his busy, overcomplicated life.

At this point, I was afraid to find out the answers to those questions, but that wouldn’t stop me from trying. Masochism was legit.

I parked by Green-Wood Cemetery and made my way around patches of ice while walking down the hill to our building. I’d gone through several rehearsed conversations in my head, no matter how pathetic I knew it was, and was back to being resolved about keeping my mouth shut.

My resolve lasted for all of five minutes.

As soon as I walked upstairs, I could hear Caleb’s voice through the door.

My hands balled up, knuckles bulging through thin, scarred skin. Anger blanketed everything else, and it was easy to forget about mushy feelings and worry when there was a slick motherfucker using condescending tones inside of my apartment. While I angsted over David like a lovesick teenager, he was busy playing host to a dude I’d ineffectually tried to ban from my living space. Maybe David had misunderstood. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

The angel on my shoulder hissed to beat a hasty retreat, but the fire working up my spine and getting me wired could only lead to a throwdown. No matter how much my conscience told me to detach my hands from the sides of the door, the closer I leaned in. My ear brushed the metal.

“—going to end up anywhere positive for either of us. Someone’s going to get hurt,” David was saying.

They were close. Kitchen.

Caleb laughed at the back of his throat. “
Going
to get hurt? You’ve already set up the pathway, and it won’t be the first time.”

“This is different.”

“You’re right, it is different.” Caleb sounded like he was talking through a strained smile. “Instead of just sucking a stranger’s dick at four in the morning in a club, you’re centering your fascination for tough guys on your moronic roommate.”

I pulled out my keys.

“Where are you going to go when you get bored with filling in all the blanks of your conversations?” Caleb asked. “Or when he gets tired of fucking you? Maybe you’ll get lucky and it will happen at the same time, and then you’ll come running back to me the way you always do. Because you know I’m stupid enough to be there waiting.”

“Maybe,” David said softly. “But that’s my problem.”

I kicked the door shut behind me.
Forget being discreet.
The anger settling in so neatly left little room for good judgment calls.

“God damn it,” David hissed. “You need to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere until we finish this conversation.”

I stood in the archway to the kitchen, trying to focus on them through the haze of adrenaline that was eclipsing any dangling threads of calm and a now-forgotten resolution to not get emotional.

“You need to get out of my house.”

Caleb mustered up bravado from the depths of his slim-cut slacks and turned on me. “It’s David’s house as well, and I’m sure he more than covers his share of the rent.”

“How about you cover your mouth to keep from talking all that bullshit?” I tossed my keys on the counter, not looking away from his stony face. “Get out, or we’re gonna have a problem.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And what are you going to do?”

David could recognize me losing my cool. Teeth clenching and breathing like a pissed off dragon should have been a dead giveaway, but he put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder and that almost set me off faster.

“We’re talking about something, and then he’s going to go.”

“He goes now.”

David held up what he thought was a calming hand. “Trust me, this needs to be handled now.”

“Trust you?” The breadth of my fury widened, encompassing them both. “I told you not to bring this motherfucker into my house, and here he is. Here he is talking about me like I’m a lowlife, and there you are letting it happen.”

“That’s not what this is.” David was losing his patience with me right along with Mr. CFO. “Not everything is about you.”

“It sure as shit sounded like it was about me.”

Caleb eased away from his station by the sink, cool as a cucumber and voice not rising an octave. “Why don’t you take a walk and calm that temper of yours? I’ll be done with David shortly, and then he’s all yours for as long as you want him.”

There were so many reasons those sentences were wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint the exact one that transformed me into a coiling spring. My insides were heating up and burning my guts in a way that should have made me taste acid, but all I could do was tense my hands again.

“What are you trying to say?” I managed around the tightness in my throat.

“I didn’t think I was being subtle.”

“Caleb,
stop
,” David said, louder. “You’re going to turn this into a situation.”

“It’s already a situation,” Caleb returned. “I won’t be intimidated by him.”

“And you’re not going to stand here and talk to me like I’m some stupid spic.”

Caleb reddened and his lip curled. “Your ethnicity doesn’t have anything to do with it. You could be as lily-white as David, and my opinion of you would be the same.”

“Yeah?” I hated how breathless I was, but my ability to not escalate this situation was ragged, frayed. David moved in to put himself between us, but I pushed him aside without sparing a glance. “Why don’t you tell me about it? Tell me all about how lucky David is to have some condescending douche bag like you, and how your failure to fuck him properly makes you better than me.”

David went ashen.

“Do you think I’m afraid of you?” Caleb squared his shoulders, chin up. The tiny smirk was flagging, and his chest was heaving now. “You’re nothing to me, just like you will be nothing to him when he’s done getting his rocks off. You’re just the flavor of the month.”

Caleb’s words muffled in my ears. The air was suddenly stifling, and my skin was overheated. In my peripheral vision, I saw David’s head drop.

“David can’t be satisfied by just one man,” Caleb went on. “You’re not an exception just because he has a momentary taste for tough guys.”

“I’m done,” David snarled. “I’m not standing here and listening to this anymore.”

He grabbed my arm, but I shrugged him off again. The distance between me and Caleb closed, and I saw through all of his bullshit. He wanted to talk the talk and damage David as much as he could, but there was real hurt in his eyes. An awareness that he was going down a path that was collapsing behind him with each word he spat. That was the price he was willing to pay for pride.

“Say what you want about him,” I said, leaning close. “But you wouldn’t be in my face if you didn’t want him. And I can tell you do. So bad you can taste it.” I honed in on the way Caleb blanched, and twisted the knife with savage indifference to the damp gleam of his eyes. “But he doesn’t want you for nothing more than a cushion.”

“You have no idea what our relationship was like.” Caleb stepped closer. “I suggest sticking with what you do know—marijuana, video games, and unemployment. Yes, Raymond. I’m
really
sure you’re going to make it with David in the long run.”

My anger boiled over and exploded out of my mouth in a stream of pure hate.

“Maybe not, but we sure made it work while you were sleeping down the hall. He rode my fucking dick like a champ.”

I wasn’t ready for it when he hit me. The force of his punch caused me to stagger back against the wall. My jaw ached, but I didn’t touch it. I didn’t do anything other than stare at the wash of surprise on Caleb’s face. Like maybe he hadn’t planned to hit me. Or maybe understanding that he’d just increased things to a level that shouldn’t have been approached.

Beside me, David was yelling. It was incoherent. I couldn’t hear him. My ears were filled with the pounding of my pulse.

I almost laughed at how pathetic this was but launched myself across the kitchen instead.

The first punch caught him in the kidneys. He doubled over, and I cracked my fist into his face. I felt the crunch of cartilage against my knuckles.

More shouting, frantic now, but Caleb started putting up a fight.

He threw himself at me, slamming my lower back into the counter, and took me down to the floor in a tumble of limbs. The guy was punch-drunk and strung out with emotion but made a valiant effort to knock my lights out. Each blow he landed amped me up until I lapsed into a rage blackout, and several minutes went by in a roar of blind anger.

Our scuffle ended just as abruptly as it had begun when David ripped me away from Caleb and pinned me against the wall.

“Stop,” he panted in my ear. “You’ll hurt him.”

I started to push him away, but reality filtered back one sliver at a time.

The kitchen was destroyed, and so was Caleb’s face. Blood-smeared and swollen, and definitely worse off than I was, but the guy still had his phone clutched in one shaking hand.

Shit.

Figured he’d be a damned snitch.

David

TIME SPENT
in a hospital emergency room always felt like it took three times as long as reality. The oppressive atmosphere wasn’t helping.

The longer I stared at the rust-colored stain dried into the linoleum, the less I wanted to know what it was. I’d heard my students decry their neighborhood hospital often enough to have expected it to be less than stellar, but it surpassed my brain’s worst machinations.

“This is ridiculous.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked everywhere but at Caleb, as I’d done for the past couple of hours. One glance in his direction brought back his angry words and the mental image of him calling the cops with shaking hands.

The cops.

Just the very notion of Raymond being arrested was sickening. Especially over a fight he hadn’t started. All he’d done was defend himself, and now he had an arrest record. It was enough to drive me out of the filthy waiting room with the screaming infants, snarling patients, and disinterested staff, and to the precinct where he was probably waiting for an arraignment. I ached to be there with him even if there was nothing I could do to change the situation, but there was no way I was leaving Caleb’s side until he promised not to press charges. If he contacted his rich family or a lawyer, they would talk him into going the full nine yards.

“I should have just gone to my doctor tomorrow.”

“You should have,” I agreed sharply. “You shouldn’t have called the police at all.”

Caleb didn’t reply, and for the first time since we’d arrived at the hospital, I looked straight at him. He looked nothing like the Caleb I had met three years ago. That Caleb had been flawless in an unnecessarily formal three-piece suit, distractingly handsome when he smiled, and with his light brown hair prematurely streaked with silver, he had looked mature and distinguished. This Caleb was disheveled and miserable—skin ashen, eyes bruised and red-rimmed, and starched shirt stained with drops of blood. The proud posture I’d come to correlate with his sophistication and self-assuredness was sagging, and Caleb’s gaze was glued to the floor.

“Are you in pain?”

“Yes.” Caleb shifted on his cot. “Does that make you happy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It makes me really fucking ecstatic that you got yourself beaten up and Raymond thrown in jail.”

Caleb’s brows drew together. “I didn’t plan for this to happen.”

“Then why did you call the police?” I was already shouting, which was a bad sign. I struggled to hold the reins on my temper, but my voice still came out thick with loathing. “You hit him first. You started this. And now he has an arrest for assault on his record.”

“I’m not going to press charges. I know that’s why you’re staying here so, rest assured, your precious Raymond will be free soon enough.”

Relief nearly bowled me over, but my anger didn’t cool. “That’s great, but you can still look up an arrest record!”

Caleb wilted further, his shoulders slumping. “I didn’t know that.” He bowed his head, and I tilted mine backward.

“Why the hell did you call at all?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better come up with something better than that,” I hissed. “And you better not press charges.”

“I already said I wouldn’t.”

“So you admit this was ridiculous?”

“Yes. Obviously I am goddamn ridiculous, David.”

I huffed out a breath. “Then why the hell did you make the call? Why didn’t you tell them—”

“
David
,” he interrupted. “I was angry, I was humiliated by a twenty-five-year-old fuckwit in front of the person I loved, and now you are trying to find rational motivation for an irrational action. Just stop.”