Bitter Taffy (2 page)

A
RTIE
K
ELLERMAN
’
S
button eyes twinkled from puffy lids and what generally looked like laugh lines framed his bulldog’s face.

He only laughed for clients. When he wasn’t laughing, he looked pig-mean.

“Get out,” he growled.

Rico nodded and started packing his briefcase. In his head, he was making the plans for disengaging his lease, packing his things, and buying the plane ticket home.

“Rico?” Ezra said helplessly, and for a moment—just a moment—Rico dared to hope.

“You could come with me,” he said, smiling hesitantly. “I’ve got connections in Sac—we could make a life there.”

He’d just been outed in front of his entire office, but he couldn’t think about that—not now. He could only look hopefully at Ezra, and hope… hope….
Oh, please, Ezra. Haven’t the last four months in your bed been enough? Don’t we have enough between us to make a go of it?

Old Man Kellerman grabbed Ezra’s arm—hard enough to bruise—and shook him. “Ezra, you’ll go to my office. You’re to have nothing to do with—”

“Shouldn’t he answer?” Rico asked, wondering where the brave man in Rico’s best knockoff Gucci loafers had come from. “I asked him. Shouldn’t he—”

Ezra was looking bitterly at his father. “Just go, Rico. Just go. I’ll take care of your lease. I know you’re worried.”

“I’m worried about
you
—”

“
Just go
!”

The shout came from both Ezra and his father, and Rico had no choice.

“You know where to find me,” he said.

He got to his loft—another converted warehouse on lower Broadway—and put on a pair of cotton sweats to work in the apartment. When he realized he was wearing Ezra’s clothes, he left them on…

Because.

He went on the Internet and started looking for plane tickets, but he put off purchasing…

Because.

Then he started to pack.

He pulled Ezra’s shirts out of his dresser, stared straight ahead, and folded them in with his own things. He should separate them, he thought dully. Separate. They weren’t living together. Ezra had his own apartment on the Upper East Side—separate.

But Rico
lived
here on lower Broadway. For the past four and a half months, he’d walked to Kellerman’s Fine Fabrics every workday and some Saturdays, and Ezra had walked from his apartment to the same place. It was important, Ezra said, that they didn’t look like they were together. That they looked like they were…

Separate.

Oh God.

He was actually grateful for the knock on the door, because the entire afternoon, from getting his box of things from his cubicle to the twenty-block walk back alone, had been like that pause between slicing off your finger and screaming bloody murder.

He was waiting… waiting… waiting… for the wound to hurt.

He opened the door to find Ezra, face stained with tears, flanked by Mario, Kellerman’s driver.

Ezra shoved an envelope in his hand. “Plane tickets,” he said gruffly. “For first class, at the end of the week. And a voucher for the moving company—they come in three days. And a hotel for the days in between.”

Rico gaped, because in his analogy, he’d never guessed he’d be the severed finger, that he’d be thrown on a plane cross-country and shipped away from the body of his relationship while it screamed. “You could come with—”

“He’d come get me,” Ezra said. “And besides….” He shook his head and looked away. “You pegged me when you got here, Rico. I’m spoiled. And I’ve lived with Daddy’s money for too long. Go back home, brown boy.” Oh, how the pet name seemed to wreck him. His voice grew thick, the words broken. “I’ll… you… you were the best moment I’ve ever had.”

And with that he thrust the paperwork at Rico and turned away, Mario’s paw on his arm to make sure he made it where he was supposed to go.

“I love you, pretty boy!” Rico called, shocked that he had no shame.

“Me too—”

Mario shoved him in the elevator and that last part was cut off.

Like Rico’s relationship. Like his career. Like his life.

T
HREE
THOUSAND
miles away, Darrin, proprietor of Candy Heaven and Rico’s cousin’s boss, broke off in the middle of his lover’s best kiss and said, “Oh!”

“Oh? Oh what?” Ro looked around, microbraids swinging around his broad, open, handsome face. Ro kissed with enthusiasm and verve, and Darrin really
must
have been dreaming not to follow through on that kiss.

“Who is that man?” Darrin asked him, perplexed.

Ro’s eyes grew huge, and he looked around Darrin’s small apartment even more wildly. “
What man
?”

“No, no.” Darrin stood up (what a shame—Ro was a good kisser) and walked the two steps to the overstuffed brocade chair and then the two steps back to the comfortable corduroy couch. “Not a man outside my apartment—a man inside my head!”

Ro raised his eyebrows and thrust out a cherry-chocolate-colored lip. “You’ve got another man in your head in the middle of my best kiss?”

Darrin patted his cheek. “Not
that
kind of man, sweetie.”

“So the man in your head is straight?”

Darrin shook his head. “Not recently, no. But he did look awfully familiar. I think I’m going to meet him soon….” Darrin tapped a finger against his cheek. “I wonder who I know who looks like him….”

“Sweetheart,” Ro said patiently.

Darrin shook his head. “Yes, yes, of course. Sorry, hon. You know, visions come and visions go—”

“But good sex waits for no man,” Ro said seriously.

That seriousness about kissing was one of the things Darrin loved best about him.

“Then let’s get busy,” he replied, equally serious. Ah, the taste of someone who loved him.

Almost as sweet as candy.

B
Y
THE
time Rico walked off the plane and caught the cab to downtown Sac, he was so tired he could barely focus.

In his entire life, nobody had ever told him how exhausting heartbreak could be.

He’d started crying when he’d gone back into the apartment after Ezra had left, and as far as he could fathom, he’d been crying every moment alone after that.

Not even when he was a kid and he’d broken his leg at the beginning of baseball season had he cried as much as he had in the past five days.

And he’d had a crush on his first baseman then, too.

This felt like more than a crush.

It felt like he was
being
crushed.

He’d been planning to come out for this guy. He
had
come out to Adam, his cousin, who hadn’t held his silence against him, not once. But he hadn’t come out to his mother and father, or to his grandmother, or anyone else in his rather awful family, and now he wondered if he would be locked in the closet forever.

The only one with the keys to that thing is you.

Not his words, actually. Adam’s words. He’d texted them not a month ago, when Rico had confessed that if it hadn’t been for Ezra and his beautiful, needy eyes, Rico might have stayed locked up in his own heart forever.

God, his cousin. For a guy who’d been told he was a loser again and again, Adam was probably the smartest guy Rico knew.

Oh God! His cousin!

It wasn’t until the cab made that last corner onto F Street, a few Victorian houses down from where Dorothea Puente had become famous for being one crazy serial-killing old bat, that Rico remembered one really important thing he
hadn’t
done in the past five days.

He hadn’t told Adam he was coming home a month and a half early, and Adam was living in Rico’s apartment with his boyfriend.

Oh crap.

Rico grabbed a suitcase in each hand after the cab driver pulled away, and managed to tiptoe up the stairs of the old apartment house fairly lightly. He got to his front door and stopped to listen. It was eleven thirty, but he didn’t hear any telltale sounds of, uhm, personal business going on, so he pulled out his copy of the key and let himself in.

His giant, silver-furred scary freak-of-nature dog didn’t even woof.

He
did
,
however, trot across the kitchen floor in the dark and sniff Rico’s crotch.

“Clopper,” Rico crooned, comforted beyond words to have his big cow-dog there to pet. “How you doin’, guy?”

Clopper sat down on his haunches, regarding Rico patiently, as though Rico were the one who had some explaining to do. Rico squatted and rubbed Clopper’s ruff to see if the big doofus would forgive him for leaving four months ago. It was looking like the answer was “maybe” when a skinny white blur wielding Rico’s favorite bat came screaming down the hallway at the top of its lungs.

Rico stood up in a hurry and backed into the kitchen so fast he tripped and landed on his ass. Clopper started jumping around excitedly and barking, and something grabbed the white blur abruptly around the waist, saving Rico’s head from a
very
uncomfortable meeting with a Louisville Slugger.

“Hey, hey, hey, Finn, calm
down
, man! It’s okay! It’s Rico! Otherwise Clopper woulda eaten him!”

“You
knew
that?” Finn rounded on Adam, bat held easily in one hand. Now that he wasn’t hauling ass down the hallway, Rico could see that Finn wasn’t skinny, just slightly built and not as tall as Rico’s freakishly tall cousin.

“Well, not until I saw him,” Adam answered in his typically terse way. “And he let his hair grow out.” Adam looked up at Rico. “If you were going to come home two months early, the least you could have fucking done was tell me you had hair.”

Rico let out a short laugh and, for the first time in five days, realized he could do something besides cry.

And that made his eyes burn again. God
dammit
.

“Well,” he said, his voice broken, “it’s been sort of a weird week.”

Adam grunted, and Rico saw the unmistakable tenderness of his hand on his boyfriend’s waist. “Finn, baby, you maybe want to go into the other room, get some sleep? You got class tomorrow.”

Finn made an indeterminate sound and looked suspiciously from Rico to Adam, then back to Rico. “I could make soup,” he said, seemingly out of the air.

Adam smiled—something Rico hadn’t ever seen him do as a kid—and kissed Finn’s temple. “Tomorrow night you can make soup. I have the feeling Rico’s gonna be sleeping on the couch until we can find our own place.”

“Oh.” Finn looked back at Rico and grimaced. “Sorry, Rico. This was….” He shook his head, and for the first time Rico saw that he was a young man, not much younger than him and Adam, and not a boy. “You’re Adam’s only family, and this was
not
the kind of impression I wanted to make.”

Rico shrugged and smiled. “Yeah, me neither. But it’s nice to meet you. I’ll, uh, see you in the morning.”

Finn stood on his tiptoes, pretty and lithe in his briefs, and kissed Adam’s cheek. “Don’t talk too long. You’ve got work in the morning.”

Adam turned his head, caught his lips briefly, and then smiled. “I hear you. Night.”

They both watched Finn pad down the hallway, Clopper at his heels, and Rico saw Adam grimace as bedsprings creaked
way
too loudly for just that one slightly built man.

“Are you letting my dog sleep on the
bed
?” Rico asked, scandalized. “I’m gone for four months and you ruin my dog? And wasn’t there supposed to be a cat?”

Adam grunted. “Why do you think the dog’s on the bed? The cat’s there. Dog wants to sleep with cat. Adam isn’t in the way. Finn’s a pushover. You can have your dog back when I go back to bed.”

Rico smiled in spite of himself. God, it was just so… warm. So friendly. That time in Manhattan, the only thing
really
warm had been Ezra. “I still say you ruined my dog.”

“Yeah, well, you kept telling me I couldn’t fuck him up too badly. You have only yourself to blame. Now sit. I’ll make coffee.
And
heat up the soup. You look like shit. Let’s talk.”

God. Their grandmother and Adam’s mother had pretty much acid-blasted all of the small talk and confidence out of Adam when he was a kid. But apparently
nothing
could take away the sweetness that had always appealed to Rico. Adam had always been the best playmate because he was never mean. He’d been willing to take direction, but he always had good ideas of his own.

And he’d always thought Rico walked on water, and Rico had to admit, that sort of guileless admiration had given him all sorts of fucking courage when they’d been growing up. He could run for student body president because Adam thought he was a god. He could apply to the big colleges because Adam looked at him like he could do anything. It wasn’t until Rico went away to college—Adam’s gift of a peacoat insulating him from the Bay Area chill—that Rico had the distance to see that Adam’s adulation had come at a terrible
price to Adam.

Rico had been the golden boy, the oldest legitimate son, the one with two parents—however distant—and the one everybody had the expectations for.

Adam had been the kid crying under the bed while his mother and grandmother screamed about how much
nobody
wanted him around.

Rico wanted him around. Rico had been
so
relieved when Adam had quit the service and come home. When he’d walked into Easter dinner and said, “You all might want to put away my table setting. I’m gay and I know how much you hate that,” Rico had wanted to stand up and cheer, because in their entire childhood, he’d
never
seen Adam stand up for himself.

Adam’s reward for standing up for himself had been getting thrown out on his ear.

When Adam’s VA grant got pulled because he missed one class (and the draconian justice of
that
made Rico bristle all over again), Rico had been
so
happy to give Adam a break. Just one break—
God
,
that was all Rico’s cousin had ever asked for from life.