Make a Right (31 page)

As Michael would have wanted it, he guessed. Tuck knew he wouldn’t tell anyone else Michael had been there. He’d have wanted that too—and he’d trusted Tuck with the choice.

Like Cade, coming back from the faraway places…

Not thinking, Tuck leaned on the post. On the roses wound through the fairy lights. A string of the blossoms, caught on his sleeve, twisted and tumbled free. Petals fell with it, sprinkling the ground at his feet. Damn. It’d get crushed if he didn’t rescue it.

Tuck shrugged one sleeve of his coat lower than the other to protect his hands and crouched, careful of the thorns.
Huh
. This one had been stripped clean, no sharp edges.

He hadn’t seen Thomas in the crowd. Tuck knew if he looked he wouldn’t find the man, no more than he’d find Michael now. They’d gone where quiet men went when they’d said their piece and made their stand, and that was a place Tuck figured he’d never be able to find.

Tuck turned the rose over, touching the smooth, pale green patches where the thorns had been shaved away. He’d been right, Tuck thought. Another time, another place, and they’d have been friends. But then there would have been no Cade. He wished things had turned out differently for Thomas but not enough to be sorry about Cade.

There’s no changing what was, he thought.
Only what can be.

He sensed the gaze fixed on him in the way of all such gazes, someone watching him and not turning aside. Still crouching, he searched up through the group—only he didn’t have to look far. Cade was there, kneeling beside him, reaching for the rose.

“I saw it fall,” Cade said. “And then I saw you.”

Tuck understood now. “You knew where I’d end up. All these have the thorns cut off, don’t they?” A quick check of the post proved him right. He shook his head at Cade. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

“I get by.” Cade sobered. He spread his hands. “Tuck—”

Tuck began to speak—

And women in white were at their sides, one each, swift and graceful as hawks and doves. Megan by Cade, Hannah by him, both pinker from standing in the sun, disheveled and teasing. “Come on,” Hannah said, pulling Tuck to his feet. “You promised.”

Tuck looked curiously at Cade.

Cade returned the same puzzled glance and added a confused shrug.

“Refresh my memory?” Tuck asked her.

Hannah tapped him on the back of his head and kissed his cheek. “The brother-sister dance, dummy. Will you do me the honor?”

Oh jeez. There went that lump in his throat again; Tuck had to cough around it. Beside him, Cade offered Megan his arm, same as they’d done escorting other ladies. An old-fashioned gesture in a brave new world, Tuck figured as he followed Cade’s example and did the same for Hannah.

* * *

It was a bare pavilion they walked into, all guests drifted to the perimeters. Everyone was silent. Waiting, watching.
Pops
and flashes of light from cameras made Tuck blink, and the silence before the music made his ears ring.

He flashed Cade a panic signal. Cade’s shoulders shook, and his grin was something fine to behold.

You had a good teacher
, Tuck lip-read him saying.

Cade sobered in a better way than ever before.
So did I.

Tuck swallowed hard. The knot went down this time and stayed down. Yeah. He knew how to do this, if he took the first step. Clasping Hannah’s hand, he placed it on his shoulder and rested his on her waist.

He didn’t know the song, but the steps were the same.

Hannah made a good partner, light on her feet—but not, he noticed with some surprise, half as light as Megan. Megan floated—unless that was Cade doing all the work.

“Cade taught you this?” Hannah asked him, not too soft and not too loud to disturb the song. “He didn’t do half bad.”

Tuck made a face at her. “I should put that on my tombstone. ‘Not half bad.’” He dodged her swipe. “I know, I know. I’m an idiot.”

“And I wouldn’t have you any other way, you know,” she said. “I’m not the only one either.”

“Oh, really now?”

“Yes, really.” Hannah pulled a little too hard in a turn.

“Jeez, woman. For someone who’s supposed to be following, you’re doing a damn good job of taking the lead.”

“I know,” she said, absolutely serene right up to the moment where Tuck jolted up against someone tall and strong. Cade, pressed back-to-back with him.

He heard a few giggles. God only knew what they had to look like, frozen in place. His eyes had to be wide as cartoon goggles. Hannah sure had to clap her hand over her mouth to hold her mirth in.

Megan’s hair brushed Tuck’s arm as she ducked around him without shame. “Took you long enough, babe.”

“You know the boys. They’re slow, but they get there in the end.” Hannah extended her hand for Megan to take.

Megan cocked her hip and tilted her head at Tuck. “Mind if I cut in? Fair warning, if you don’t say yes, I’ll be a rude bitch and do it anyway.”

Giggles became chuckles, rippling out. Tuck put up a damn good fight against them, though he suspected that to be a losing battle. “Go on.” He knuckled the top of her head—gently—and nudged her toward Hannah. “Go be happy.”

Not eloquent. But there weren’t many couples out there in the world, Tuck figured, who’d get better.

They’d come to the end of the first song, and the hush rose again. Waiting to see what they’d do.

Romeo really was kind of a moron, but six hundred years later, they were still talking about him. That had to be worth something.

If he told anyone in the audience, they’d think he was nuts.

Cade would understand.

The decision made itself for Tuck. Wasn’t something he could put into words, but it sat easier than he’d thought behind his breastbone, a spark of warmth. A coal waking up, impatient to burn.

Thomas had waited half his life for something he knew wasn’t going to happen, and he hadn’t tried to change it. Just lashed himself with his own thorns and stood back to suffer.

Father Michael had left his robe and rosary behind to go—well, who knew where?

Hannah and Megan had grown up.

That left just himself and Cade, Tuck thought. And in the end, it wasn’t that easy, no.

But it wasn’t that hard either. And it didn’t matter which way it happened. Only that it did.

Tuck hooked his thumbs in his pockets and grinned up at Cade, as cheeky as the seventeen-year-old boy he’d been when they first met. “Are you gonna dance with me now or what?”

Chapter Twenty-six

Cade tipped back his head and laughed, and be damned to anything else. He took Tuck’s hand, and Tuck took his. Just like the way they’d practiced. Different in the ways they hadn’t.

The music wasn’t quite the same, a new song starting. The tempo was slower and newer, not older. Tuck thought he heard a saxophone before a woman with a voice like honeyed whisky began to sing words he couldn’t make out but still understood from the way she sang them.

“Dancing” wasn’t what Tuck would call this. They moved, sure, but this was almost—almost—as if they were alone in the apartment, where everything had gone wrong, but that was different too.

Crowd be damned. Circled about so by Cade, leading him, Tuck could have closed his eyes and breathed in the smells of
home
, where things had never gone wrong and always right.

He could hear the creak of their apartment floorboards underfoot and knew if he took two steps in the wrong direction, he’d bump up against the edge of the bed and take Cade tumbling down with him.

“Look at me?” Cade stroked Tuck’s side, tickling where he would know it never failed to tease Tuck awake on the rare occasion when he did drift off. Same as Tuck knew where to caress Cade and coax him back to the real world.

Tomato sauce and wood floors shining with orange-scented polish. A bottle of red and a bottle of white, both left open, and a long-empty bottle of the best of the best between them, the candle fitted into its neck burned halfway down and sweet with beeswax.

Tuck looked at Cade. Always had. Always would.

“I missed this,” Cade said, turning him around with a real gentleman’s grace, even when he stumbled. “Six months ago, I tried to tell myself I didn’t.”

“But you were wrong.”

Each breath Cade took moved their chests together. Soft now, but he drew in a sharper pull of air with the jolt of sense memory that came hand in hand with the moment, recalling when they strove as hard for each draw as they pushed against each other in rumpled sheets washed soft as down.

To look at Cade was to want him. To be held by him was to crave more. Missing something this sharp and hard meant a man shouldn’t let it go. Wanting it as fierce as a fire would consume an open field, that meant more.

But…they’d changed. Both of them. In small ways and in larger shifts. When Cade bent to press his forehead to Tuck’s, he could tell Cade knew that too.

Only, one thing had changed
and
stayed the same. Them. Who they could make each other.

“You know it’s not gonna be easy,” Tuck said, tilting back to look Cade in the eye. “Some things have to be different. So this doesn’t happen again. You get that, right?”

“I do now,” Cade said. His lips were so close. He touched the tip of his tongue to the top of the bow of his mouth, too pretty for a man of his shape and angles but suiting him better than any other. “I wish I’d—”

Tuck touched his mouth to Cade’s to shut him up. One kiss, quickly there and gone, but sweet enough to make a lasting impression. “That’s one thing,” he said, steady and true. “The past stays in the past.”

Cade’s forehead wrinkled in confusion.

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve had enough of that.” Tuck took control for one turn around the small circle they’d made for themselves on the lawn. “We’ve talked it to death. Way I see it, we both know it by heart.”

Cade nodded, still a little puzzled but with a light dawning. “It’s action now.”

“Doing, not saying.” Tuck ignored the rules of the proper dance and put his arms around Cade’s waist to slow them down, almost stopping. “And not being stubborn asses about it either.”

Cade nearly laughed in the way he used to, the humor that had awakened over the years in his eyes, the softness of his lips. “Agreed.”

“Except there’s one more thing I need you to know.” Tuck stopped and gave Cade a shake, hard enough for Cade to know he meant this and easy enough not to hurt him. Never to hurt him again, in ignorance or on his way to the road paved full of good intentions that led to places not so good at all.

Cade listened to him, silent, but the way he held Tuck spoke of more. A hunger growing inside of him, finally loosed of its chains. Truth be told, that plus the dark light in his eyes burned its way inside Tuck and made him shiver.
So good
. “Then say it.”

Tuck held him fast. “I won’t give a damn about the past. I won’t. If you don’t. Takes two.” He made himself back up two steps, then one more, but not so far that he didn’t lose Cade’s hand. “Deal?”

Cade regarded him steadily, with the hunger not gone or satiated but purring in a lion’s rasp, deep as the sky soaring up above them. Deep as the darkness of a lover’s night. He drew Tuck back to him with the easiest of tugs, bringing them chest to chest, and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind Tuck’s ear. “All in,” he said. “Deal.”

His kiss tasted sweeter than honeyed wine and hot as raw whisky. Tuck barely even heard the wedding guests, neither their bringing their hands together in quiet clapping nor their small murmurs of delight at a piece of fairy tale unexpected. He had no ears for them. Only for Cade. And in Cade’s kiss, he couldn’t help but fall, as he always had, caught in Cade’s spell now and forevermore.

And
that
was as it should be, he thought. Finally.

Chapter Twenty-seven

That
was as it should have been.
This
was better.

With the curtains drawn in the guest bedroom, daylight dimmed to the next best thing to dusk. Even if the air did grow close and warm, as far as Tuck was concerned, that was all the better. Felt like New York on a summer night, where clothes were not necessary and best when cast aside to fall where they wanted.

Or maybe like that one July afternoon in August at St. Pius’s, when everyone else had gone on a day trip and they’d hidden behind, doing things that would have shocked the saints, and kissed for hours after, until their lips were numb and sore and neither of them sorry in the least.

As neither of them were sorry now. Finally.

Tuck stumbled into their borrowed bedroom as clumsily as the kid he’d been, laughing into each kiss when he could get the breath to.

“Something funny?” Cade asked, his mouth on the soft spot beneath Tuck’s ear, leaving marks from stubble and the graze of his teeth. Tuck drew in a sharp breath and angled up. He hooked one leg behind Cade’s. What did you know? Those dance lessons were good for more than one thing.

“It’s all funny,” Tuck said. “Everything. You. Me. Here.” He took Cade by the sides of his face, wishing to God his hair would hurry up and grow back—but not minding the shortness so much now—and kissed him with all the
want
burning within him. “I still think Romeo’s a moron. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

“What?”

“To be a fool for love.”

Cade groaned against Tuck’s skin, but he shook with amusement too, and that was more than good enough for Tuck. “I missed you,” he said. “Just so you know, I’m going to keep saying that.”

“Tonight you can. Not afterward.” Tuck reached for the buttons on Cade’s snow-white shirt. They were small and slippery, but his hands were steady. Each slipped through its hole and drew the body-warmed linen panels farther apart, baring skin he abruptly, absolutely had to taste.

Thought became action. Tuck bent, dropping to one knee, pressing his mouth to the salty-hot skin as he went. He stopped only when it was time to play, hooking two fingers beneath Cade’s belt. “Babe. Can I?”

“Don’t ever ask again,” Cade said. The words were one thing, their meaning another.
Don’t ask
meant
don’t have to ask.