Out of the Blues (6 page)

I had a flashback to Cody sitting stoned on the Oriental rug telling me that I was going to be a big star one day. “No,” was all I said about that.

“You’d be good,” he said and then nothing else while I drove. The lights from town were closer than I remembered and we drove past a gas station that wasn’t there the last time I was out this way.

“I’m just going to drive around and see what has changed. If you need to stop anywhere, just holler.”

I could see his face now and that smile of his that lit up his face came back and I nearly ran off the road because I was looking at him and not watching what I was doing.

“I’ll do that, Mason. Keep your eyes on the road.”

“Sorry, I was…”

“Don’t sweat it, man, we’re good. But if you see anything you like…pull over, and I’ll see about making you holler, how’s that sound.”

Fuck me.

He laughed. And maybe I might have said that out loud. Just…fuck…me.

Chapter Eight

Kilby gets the grand tour.

The town was about the same size as the one near my place outside Nashville. Way outside Nashville. Mason drove around pointing out the places of interest: The high school, the football stadium, the late night food places, and the places that didn’t care if you were underage.

“Are you hungry? I could stop and get something. A milkshake or something?” he’d asked when the silence in the car became deafening. “There’s not much here. And we’re a couple of hours from any city with anything in it worth going to.”

“It’s fine. I like small towns. Never been much for clubs or hanging out,” I admitted when he circled the main streets one more time. He seemed restless. It was after eleven and my body was already screaming for bed but I didn’t want to go back to the hotel because the bed I’d be sleeping in would smell like Mason and sex. Not something I was proud of.

“Yeah, me either,” he said but he seemed distant. He turned down a street we’d not been on before and left town in the direction we hadn’t come.

Dark engulfed the car. I could see his face illuminated from the dashboard. He looked sad. I didn’t say anything. I was enjoying the night air on my face and the smell of the woods as we drove deeper into the dark.

About six miles out of town he turned off the main highway onto a dirt road that was overgrown with weeds. The mailbox on the corner hung on the post, the lid missing. “Someone bashed the box. Fuckers.” There was real anger in his voice.

The road was about a mile long. I could see the moon through the trees. When he finally stopped, the headlights shone on a derelict of an old two-story farmhouse. I heard him grind his teeth. “She didn’t do a thing to keep it up.”

I waited for him to turn the car off but he didn’t. We sat there idling for about five minutes before I reached over and turned the key. “Want to tell me where we are?”

He leaned over the steering wheel to look out at the silver washed house. “Our house. Harper and I sort of grew up here. If you can call the four years of high school growing up…anyway, it was never great, but now…” He sounded like a little boy who’d lost something precious to him.

“It’s not that bad,” I told him, but I couldn’t see much more than the front porch. One window was broken and the shrubs had overgrown the porch. That’s about all I could tell from the dark.

“She promised to keep the place the same as it was.” His voice held a touch of petulance. “I wouldn’t have given her my half if I’d known she’d…” he stopped and sighed. “Doesn’t matter, does it? I could have bought her out and kept the place up myself. I’m just as much to blame.”

I was confused. “Your mother?” I had to ask because this sure as hell didn’t look like some place Arden Monroe would live much less own.

“Harper. But it was Mother’s family home. She didn’t want it so Harper and I took some of the money Cody had left us and bought it from her. Harper never…” he sighed again and shook his head. I could feel the sorrow rolling off him in waves.

“Does she still own the place?” I needed to know in case someone came out of that house with a double barrel or a pit bull.

“She better. I told her to give me the right of first refusal if she ever thought about selling.” He looked over at me and cocked his head. “You want to go inside?”

“Better than sitting out here freezing our asses off.” I wasn’t cold but he didn’t need to know that.

“Close your window jackass and you won’t freeze.”

He was out of the car before I could close my window. I followed him. My boots crunched on the dried leaves and broken shells that made up the dirt drive. “The moon is bright tonight,” he said when I joined him at the bottom step.

“It is,” I agreed, casting a glance at him. I had to catch my breath. Mason Foxworth might be a spoiled brat of a man, but he was fucking beautiful. Too beautiful. Especially standing there with the moonlight caressing him. “Beautiful.”

He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I waited for him to make some smart ass comment about being compared to the moon. He didn’t. “I don’t have a key. I don’t know if Harper left the spare on the back porch.”

Was he that oblivious to how he affected me? Earlier this evening wasn’t a clue? I had to wonder if maybe I was seeing something that I shouldn’t be seeing…like his ass in those jeans that looked like they cost a fortune. I shivered. Maybe it was just me. Maybe I’d been single and alone too fucking long that I was letting some straight overgrown twink dredge up my past to the point that I was sitting on the ground trying not to freak the hell out.

I could hear him even now. He’d call me at night when we were stationed in the states. ‘
Come over. I need to see you. Come over.
’

That fucking song had come out the year after he died and I couldn’t listen to it. And this puppy of a man was nothing like Jonathon. He was ten years younger than Jon would be now. He was tall and slim and graceful. His hands were soft. His smile reached his eyes.

I couldn’t remember the last time Jon had smiled. Years before he killed himself, maybe.

I should have seen it. I should have known he wouldn’t let me see him past what he wanted me to see.

Four years later and I was still fucked up over how he did it. He left the note to me. ‘
I’m sorry. I loved you.
’

Loved.

I always wondered if the period had been an afterthought. If he’d meant to leave it out. ‘
I’m sorry I loved you.
’

The letter was just vague enough to cost me everything.

“Are you coming?” Mason shouted from a dozen yards away. I was still standing in the driveway watching him with sightless eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, ashamed to be caught twice with my mind gone back there.

I shouldn’t have come here. I should pack up and go home. I’d make it by morning if I left now.

“Come on, Kilby, I know you fucking Marines don’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain, but fuck man, it’s really starting to rain and it’s getting colder.” His voice carried through the jungle of landscape left to fend for itself.

I looked at the sky, the moon was not yet covered by the storm cloud moving in. Somehow that felt ominous. Maybe Mason was the moon and I was the storm cloud.

Why not? I tainted everything I touched. Why not…him.

I wanted him. I wanted him like a starving man wanted a cheeseburger. I wanted to consume him.

Rain splashed my face. I felt the tiny pinpricks of icy chill run down my spine and I followed him down the broken brick path between the dead primrose beds.

* * * * *

Mason revisits his awkward phase.

The key wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Not that I expected it to be where I’d left it more than seven years ago. It was dark on the porch and the moon was rapidly disappearing behind the rain clouds. I searched along the porch eave and found nothing but spider webs.

“Come on, Harper, where the hell did you hide the key?” I was rattled. The Marine unnerved me. Besides just his very presence, when he’d zoned out on me back in the drive, yeah, nothing creepy about that at all.

A bright light spilled onto the wood planked floor and I looked up to see Kilby holding his cell phone out on flashlight setting. He’d probably have a huge Maglite or something in his truck. Too bad we weren’t here in the penis-on-wheels.

Just the word penis running through my head was enough to make me cast a glance in his direction. At his midsection area. Where his would be. I hastily jerked my gaze back to the floor in front of me and the slowly moving beam of light. “Thanks,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I’d just checked out his dick in the dark.

How does one sound when they’re thinking about dick? Does one sound differently than when they’re thinking about pussy? What the hell was I thinking about sex for at a time like this?

I had to pee. And I was getting wood.

From having to pee.

Sounded logical.

“You ever had someone piss on you?” I asked for no goddamned reason than I was out of my fucking mind. “I mean…”

He laughed. I liked his laugh. I didn’t really care that he was laughing at me, if it kept him from zoning out in that serial killer kind of way.

“Once.” His face was hidden in the dark. The beam of light was blinding and I couldn’t see anything but that light when I looked at him. “He didn’t give me any warning, fucked me then, well piss in the asshole is a strange fucking feeling.”

I think I stood like a deer in the one beam headlight and he laughed again. “Really?” I squeaked the word out.

“No, Mason, I’m fucking with you,” he said and his voice was indeed teasing.

“So, no golden showers in the corps then?” I kicked a flower pot with a fake daisy inside and something rattled.

“Not sexually at any rate, no. I have been pissed on, puked on, shit on, and bled on. And that was just my friends. Won’t even go into what combatants did to me if they got the chance.”

I nodded. I don’t know if he saw me nod. I think I freaked out at the thought of blood. I don’t even like my own blood. It’s why I didn’t go to medical school when I thought I’d make a great Doc McDreamy. I picked up the pot and pulled the dancing flower out. It was one of those plastic motion sensor things. I remembered having one a million years ago but I don’t remember putting it outside. Underneath the fake flower pot inside the real flower pot was a key. Not exactly a great hiding place but I had a key.

“Let’s see if she kept the power and water on. I have seriously got to pee.” I set the pot on the porch rail and went over to the door. His light and his laughter followed me.

“Is that why you asked if anyone ever pissed on me? You were thinking about trying out some serious kinky shit on the gay dude?” he asked and I was so fucking glad it was dark because my face would be bright enough to guide Santa’s sleigh on a snowy night.

“Well, no.” I fit the key in the doorknob and jiggled like we always had to do to get the key to work and it worked. The knob turned. “I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting inside to use the toilet…and my brain went to a weird ass place…shut up…it was a valid question.”

His laughter boomed around the small porch and I felt like a fool. A silly stupid fool.

“You know, you could have just hung it off the porch and pissed in the flower bed. I wouldn’t have minded.”

I stared at him like he’d lost his damned mind.

“You have never taken a piss outside, have you?”

He was serious, disbelievingly serious. Like I was raised in the fucking backwoods or something.

“Jesus, Mason, how is it I’m the gay one when you’re a walking stereotype?”

I found the switch and flooded the kitchen and the back porch with light. He was looking at me in a way that made me wonder if I was safe with him. My life or my ass virginity.

“I don’t know.” I was back to the person I was this morning when he sat down at my table at Starbucks. Monosyllabic, brain-dead, unable to say boo to a goose. “Why would anyone say boo to a goose, anyway?”

“Hell if I know. Can we go inside? Or are we going to take a piss off the porch and then make a run through the rain for the car and drive back to the hotel…because right now, man, one or the other. Let’s just do something.”

I couldn’t fault that logic. Plus he’d ignored my stammering craziness. I opened the door and walked into a memory.

Chapter Nine

Kilby makes himself at home.

The kitchen was something straight out of another century. The last one, mid-century if I had to lay odds on it. The white round top fridge hummed along merrily in the corner. The table was one of those aluminum and Formica deals that I grew up seeing in old people’s houses. Not that I minded. I actually liked the tables. If they didn’t cost a fortune and were easier to find I’d have gotten one for my apartment when I was enlisted. I didn't need one now. The farmhouse had everything. This one didn’t have everything, but it had what I expected to find in an old place left to time.

“Wonder if there’s anything in the fridge?” Mason walked into the place slowly. He was looking around as much as I was. Maybe I should question whether or not he was supposed to be here. Maybe I should wonder if the sheriff’s department would be rolling up outside after we tripped some hidden alarm system.

The fridge rattled when he opened it. “Beer, soda, water, but no food.” He took out a beer and looked at the label. “From a year ago. Probably horse piss by now.”

“Probably.” I took the bottle from him and hooked the top on the old bottle opener screwed into the wall beside the fridge. It was flat, but I didn’t care.

He took a cola and did the same. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said looking around at the dust on the counters. “Seems like a strange place for a rich kid to grow up.”

“It was,” he said, a smile playing across his lips. “I hated being here the first six months or so after Arden dumped us all and ran off. Cody was hiding out from something and…Cody Gillette, he was our stepfather. Hell, he wasn’t but around twenty years older than we were and he was probably the only real adult in our lives…anyway, he stayed so we’d have something normal I guess. He never said much about it all, either way.”