Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (9 page)

Dan picked up a packet of brown sugar to give himself an excuse to stare at his hands as he fiddled with it. "Nothing much. Just stuff, you know?"

Their waitress, Sheila, came over, her yellow dress and white apron already looking limp. The Sunnyside opened at six a.m., and it was impossible to get a table without waiting until a few hours later. They didn't have much competition in the small town, but that wasn't the reason; the food was really good. Given a choice, Dan would opt for the Sunnyside's chicken souvlaki platter over the most expensive entrée any other place had to offer. Which might be because he hadn't been to many classy restaurants, but Tyler, who had, agreed with him. Not that Tyler had eaten out in weeks…

Sheila looked them over with a briskly impersonal smile. "What can I get you folks?" "Coffee, OJ, and your special," Anne said, smiling up at her like a woman prepared to forget that food came with calories attached. "Rye toast, scrambled eggs, and bacon."

"You got it, Doc." One penciled-in eyebrow lifted as Sheila turned to Dan. "How about you, honey?"

 

No way was he enduring the same breakfast twice in one hour. "I'll have pancakes and coffee, please."

 

Sheila nodded. "Coming right up."

The coffee arrived right away, in cheap but chip-free plain white mugs. Dan loaded his coffee with three of the small containers of creamer and the sugar he'd been playing with, and then took a sip. It was okay, but he'd gotten used to the way Tyler liked it, twice as strong as this. Tyler's coffee left him buzzed and wide awake.

"'Stuff'?" Anne asked, returning to their interrupted conversation without missing a beat. "What kind of stuff? If you're sick of the weather, you're not alone, but just hang in there. Spring's on its way according to the calendar, if not The Weather Channel."

"I am, but that's not it," Dan said. He was torn between the need to share and a loyalty Tyler might not deserve, but was still going to get. Anne was Tyler's friend first, too, and he didn't want to put her in the middle; it wouldn't be fair.

"Then it's relationship stuff," Anne said wisely. "Which makes it awkward because you and Tyler… I'm not going near that. Too easy to get you both mad at me."

 

Dan nodded, unsurprised that she'd clearly been thinking along the same lines that he had. "Yeah, I can see that."

"Which doesn't mean that I can't listen if you want to vent," Anne said. "Or is it more serious than that?" Her hazel eyes widened. "God, do you want to move on? Are you and Tyler through? Oh, Dan…"

"What? No!" Dan slammed his mug down, and sent a splatter of coffee over vintage yellow Formica. Anne's assumption was annoying; that option was one he always had in reserve if things didn't work out, but it didn't mean that he liked it being voiced. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

Anne tossed him a paper napkin, her closed-off expression telling Dan that he'd hurt her feelings with his final words. "Here. And, no, I wouldn't like it at all, because it'd break Tyler's heart, but it wouldn't be unexpected. You're young, and this town doesn't have a lot to offer--"

"Tyler doesn't know I'm there anymore," Dan said harshly. "He's working on something and it's like I don't fu -- like I don't exist. And the town might not have much going for it, but like I care about that. I grew up somewhere just like this; it's not like I'm not used to dead end and dull." He swiped the napkin over the spill and watched the liquid seep through the thin paper, staining it brown. "And it wasn't boring when things were okay between us," he muttered. "It was
fine
."

"I'm sorry," Anne said. "I -- look, Dan, I like you. I think you're intelligent, charming when you want to be, and you've got a lot going for you. But Tyler… He's older, and he's very… solitary. You've changed that to a certain extent, but people can only change so much. Force them past a certain point, and they break or snap back to where they were."

"You think he's snapped?" Dan said, putting air quotations around the last word and a sneer in his voice.

 

"Don't you?" Anne asked, too kindly for it to be bearable.

 

Dan shook his head. "No." He said it again, just to hear it spoken, and he still didn't know who was right.

The arrival of their food was a welcome distraction. Dan drenched a stack of pancakes with syrup, after slathering them with butter, and started to shovel them into his mouth, a sudden hunger hitting him at the sight and smell of food.

"What's this work he's doing?" Anne asked as she squeezed a dollop of ketchup next to her fried potatoes and dunked one crispy, salt-gritted cube into the red pool. Definitely an indulgence day; normally Anne ate the way she told her patients to -- low-fat, low-sodium, lots of fresh vegetables. "Could be it's just stress over that, and when it's finished he'll be back to normal -- for Tyler, anyway."

"Don't know exactly," Dan mumbled, using a mouthful of the strawberries that had come with his meal as an excuse for the brevity of his answer. He didn't want Anne to find out how in the dark he was about Tyler's project. "Research for an old friend."

"That doesn't seem like something--" Anne broke off and gave him a helpless, apologetic shrug. "Sorry. Look, Dan, I've seen him with you, and anyone can tell that he adores you." She frowned and corrected herself before Dan could do it for her. Adoration and Tyler went together the same way that ketchup and strawberries did, and Anne should have known that. "Okay, maybe that's not the right word. He cares about you. A lot. You matter to him, and my God, I wish I had someone in my life who was that caught up in me. Work or no work, I can't see that altering. Tyler's not the kind of man who changes his mind easily."

"But you think I am?" Dan stabbed his fork into a wedge of pancake and refused to be comforted. At this point, Tyler knowing he existed would be enough to make him happy. "Thanks."

"No," Anne said patiently. "I just think you're young enough to have a few relationships to go before you meet someone to settle down with. You've never told me much about your life before you arrived here, but you don't talk about past boyfriends. Have there been many? Serious ones, I mean?"

"Just one," Dan said, not really caring if Anne knew that much. He'd never asked, but he'd always assumed that Tyler had filled her in on most of it, from his fight with his father to the sex with truckers part. It would explain why she was so nice to him. "Luke. Not sure how serious he was, but at the time it felt that way. Apart from Luke, there wasn't anyone, not really."

"And you wonder why I worry about you moving on?"

 

"I guess I can see why you'd think that way," Dan said slowly, "but Tyler -- he's not someone you can just turn your back on. Maybe I just found my final partner early."

 

Anne spread raspberry jam lavishly across a triangle of toast and gave him a skeptical look. "Maybe you did."

"I'm not sixteen with a crush on someone in the football team," Dan said, feeling a familiar irritation. His father had acted this way when he'd discovered that Dan was gay. Just a phase. Too young to know what you want. You'll grow out of it.

Except he hadn’t and wouldn't. Once he'd met Tyler, his life had changed -
he'd
changed, and if he'd been clueless about what it really meant to love someone before, well, he wasn't now.

 

"No, but you don't have a lot of experience--" she began.

 

"Yeah, I do. A lot of experience with assholes who made me suck them before giving me a ride and then threw me out on the side of the road before their dicks were dry."

 

Anne dropped her fork onto her plate and leaned in close, her face flushed. "Keep your voice down," she hissed.

 

"Why?" Dan said, and felt a pleasant rush of blood to the head. He'd been quiet and wellbehaved for far too long "Am I shocking you?"

"No. I've come across far worse in my job, and Tyler told me about it the day he met you. I've always known what happened to you, and it doesn't change anything for me, but if you think it won't reflect badly on you and Tyler to most people in this town, you're wrong." She picked up her fork again. "But you know that already, don't you?"

Shit. He kept forgetting that what he did and said affected more than just him these days.

"I guess I do." He glanced around, his spurt of anger dying away. No one was close enough to have heard him, and the background music from the radio was loud enough to make most conversations private. "Sorry."
"Forget it. My fault." Anne reached over and patted his hand forgivingly. "You know, if you wanted to talk that period of your life over with someone qualified…"

His reaction was immediate and heartfelt, though he managed to censor himself to a certain extent. His father had held strong opinions about swearing in front of women, and he'd passed them on to Dan, reinforcing the lesson with a hard swat to the back of Dan's head from time to time. "No way in hell."

"Just think about it," Anne urged him. "A sympathetic therapist might be helpful."

"I'm not freaking out over it," Dan told her. He did still have nightmares, sour breath in his face, greedy hands not letting go of him, running, running...They weren't pleasant, but they were just dreams, and he was settled enough to know, even in the middle of the worst of them, that he was dreaming. Tyler had made him feel safe.

He just wished he could do as much for Tyler.

 

"Sometimes, we can bury a traumatic experience deep, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't continue to have an effect."

 

"Anne, it's your day off," Dan said wearily. "Stop talking like a doctor and let's just change the subject, okay? Or I'm going to leave you with a wall to stare at."

 

She sighed. "Fine. Just remember that if you -- or Tyler -- need me, you know where I am."

 

It was his turn to pat her hand. "We know."

Anne pushed her plate aside, empty of everything but a smear of ketchup and a piece of toast that Dan guessed she'd left so that later, when the guilt set in, she could tell herself she hadn't eaten
everything
. She gave him a smile, all dimples and mischief. "Want to come to the spa with me?"

Dan snorted. "Yeah, I can just see me getting a seaweed wrap or a facial."

 

"You don't need either at your age, with your skin," Anne said and pulled a face. "No wrinkles, no gray hair... I hate you."

 

Dan speared one last slice of strawberry, translucent with syrup, and ate it. "No, you don't."

 

"I suppose I don't," Anne agreed. She tilted her head questioningly. "So what plans
do
you have for today if Tyler's busy?"

 

I'm going to go back home, cuff Tyler to the bed so he can't reach his computer, and blow him 'til he's forgotten how to spell his own name.

 

He shrugged and gave her back a grin as mischievous as her own could be at times. "I'll think of something."
Chapter Six

Tyler stabbed at the keyboard dispiritedly. God, even his fingers hurt. Long hours at the computer, day after day, were leaving him with a headache that never quit and muscle spasms in his back -- and his forearms were burning as if he'd been lifting weights, not pushing a mouse around.

When this was over, he was giving serious thought to joining a gym. He might not need to be in perfect shape now that he wasn't risking his life on assignments, but it didn't mean that he had to get sloppy. Though no amount of training would make sitting in one position this long a comfortable or healthy thing to do.

Five weeks of work and he'd eliminated four of Cole's six suspects -- or found out enough about them to make it unlikely that they'd betray their country for money or idealism. During that time, Cole had lost another agent. Sue Jennings' death might have been unconnected to the investigation, since she'd been the victim of a hit and run, but it could have been a camouflaged hit.

Cole was as close to losing his cool as Tyler had ever seen him, but every avenue of investigation on the final two possibilities -- Drew Sturgis and Allison Mayer -- led to a dead end.

No debts, no unusual political affiliations, no scandal. Sturgis and Mayer both dated casually, but digging had turned up no disgruntled exes or security risks. They looked clean, but one of them was dirty, and he couldn't work out which. Maybe Cole could bring them both in for questioning and see who cracked…

He leaned back in his chair and felt his spine protest the change of position, cramped muscles screaming.

The investigation was a priority, and with a single-mindedness that had once been ingrained habit, he'd pushed aside everything once he'd committed himself to it. 'Everything' included Dan, and Tyler was as unhappy about that necessity as Dan clearly was.

Tyler had tried at the start to balance work with some time off to recharge, but the pressure had mushroomed. With the news of Sue Jennings' death, a woman he'd met once or twice and had liked for her dry humor, any time spent away from his computer had seemed like a criminal indulgence.

If finding the mole cost him Dan, he supposed that it would all have been worth it, difficult to accept though it would be. If he lost Dan and failed in his search, he wasn't sure how he would react, and he didn't want to find out. Success in both areas was beginning to look like a fantasy. It was scary how the possibility of losing Dan had become such a looming threat in such a short time. He'd thought that what they had was more solid than that, but Dan was so very young in some ways.

"Attention span of a grasshopper," Tyler muttered, and then sighed, recognizing that he was being unfair. Dan hadn't signed up to serve his country, and Dan didn't have a clue how important Tyler's work was. All he saw was a man who ignored him and shut him out, not for a few days, but week after week. Promising to make it up to him later wasn't cutting it anymore -not that Tyler had offered that sop recently. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd really spoken to Dan.

The argument at breakfast didn't count.

 

Tyler glanced at the computer clock. Dan had been gone for two hours, and Tyler didn't have a clue where he was or who he was with after months of living in each other's pockets.