Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (21 page)

Of course, Standard Seduction 101 insisted that if he wanted Jeff to help him out of his pain, he should be naked and hard and looking confident of getting serviced when Jeff returned from the bedroom. But then, Standard Seduction 101 never mentioned a surly teenager in the house who was already pissed off about sleeping with the cat.
Collin might have fallen asleep a little when Jeff got back. He had some cotton pajama pants, a glass of water, and some ibuprofen with him, and enough concern to help Collin into the pants after he'd washed down the ibuprofen and finished off the water.
Wrestling with the jeans proved fun, and Jeff muttered something about, “Jesus, kid, these pants are the only reason a man like me would have pliers in his junk drawer.”
When Collin snapped back, “
No
man should have pliers in his „junk' drawer,” Jeff had giggled for the rest of the awkward struggle out of the damned things.
“I'll give you that,” he said at last, out of breath and, unfortunately, no longer face-to-face with Collin's “junk.” Collin decided that laughter was a good start and that he wasn't going to push his luck. He pulled on the sleep-pants with only a little wobble and was about to sit down heavily on the couch when Jeff said, “No, no—stay standing for a sec.”
He left again and came back with a damned fine sheet and a nice, thick blanket and a real pillow. Everything was in green and rose, and Collin was glad he was already gay, because even this guy's
linens
had gay cooties, but as he settled down into the incredibly soft sheet and
very
snuggly pillow, he was grateful beyond words.
“Thanks, Jeffy,” Collin said. “You're a pain in the ass, but you're a really nice guy. You know, sometimes nice guys are worth it, don't you?”
He was rewarded with a kiss on the forehead and that fantastic, expensive smell. “I could say the same about you, Sparky. But next time, maybe skip the part where you almost get blown in a club bathroom, 'kay?”
“Worst almost-blow job of my life,” Collin told him, savoring the kiss and the smell and the sheets and the safety. He heard Jeff's quiet laughter down the hall, and then the alcohol took over and he was asleep.

W
HEN
he woke up, the drapes were closed over another foggy, gray day, there was something warm, vibrating, and hairy on his chest, and it was mercifully dark in Jeff's living room.

Oh shit.
Jeff's living room. He was in Jeff's living room.
“Awwwwwwwww….”
“It lives!” It wasn't Jeff's voice, and Collin squinted to see whose

voice it was. For a minute, all he saw was a very dark face over a blinding white T-shirt, and then he put two and two together.

“Martin,” he groaned. Oh good. Collin felt like shit, probably looked worse, and there he was. The elephant in the living room, eating what looked like a mixing bowl full of cold cereal with the force and verve of a backhoe at a landfill. “God. Don't you go somewhere in the day?”

“Uthullwy,” Martin said through a mouthful of something colorful and sugary. He swallowed, and the sound echoed in the tympani chamber of Collin's skull. “Jeff told me if I stayed here to make sure you were okay, you'd get me to Promise House on your way out so he could pick me up there.”

“Oh shit.” Collin's skull pounded with the logistics of cabs and his car parked at the club and getting this teenager back to Levee Oaks when it was in the exact opposite direction, but he needed to go to work anyway….

“Oh
fuck!
Work!” He tried to sit up, and the monster on his chest clawed him casually. Collin screamed like a girl, wrapped an arm around the—oolf—cat (was that really a cat? Jesus. When did cats weigh that much?), and tried to sit up and think.

At that moment, the pants next to the couch started buzzing from the cell phone in the pocket, and he didn't even think about dodging Joshua's call, even though he was pretty sure he was in for the asschewing of all time. The cat wriggled out of his one-armed grasp and landed on the floor with an honest-to-God floorboard-bending thump, and he reached for the phone.

He had to hold the phone away from his ear for a minute before Joshua calmed down enough for him to reply, and he glanced at Martin in embarrassment as they both got an earful of, “… cars backed up from here to China, you dumb asshole, get your lazy fucking ass in here and stop worrying the shit out of me and your mother!”

That was Collin's cue. “I'm sorry,” he said into the receiver, really feeling sorry. If Joshua had called his mother, they both knew he'd been out and probably remembered the dumbfuck kid he'd been and basically had a solid basis for thinking he'd done something amazingly stupid. He'd sworn he wasn't going to make people worry about him anymore, and this wasn't a very good way to keep that promise.

“You're sorry?” Joshua sounded disbelieving, and Collin sighed.

“Look, man, I'm sorry. I got drunk, took a cab to a… friend's house, and made an ass out of myself, okay? I've got to go back and get my car and get dressed—”

“And shower!” Martin interjected. “Man, you're rank—you smell like cigarettes, whiskey, and stale Axe.”
“And shower,” Collin muttered, rolling his eyes at Martin. “Anyway, an hour and a half on the outside. I'll stay late. Just take the cars, give a long estimate, and I'll get there and give you a break, okay?”
“You took a cab?” Joshua said suspiciously, and Collin had to laugh. They were still back at that.
“Yeah—took a cab.”
“To a friend's?” Joshua's voice rose at “friend,” and Collin would have smacked his forehead with his palm, but his whole head might have gone just rolling off his shoulders if he did that.
“To Jeff's,” Collin confessed, wincing, and got ready to pull the phone away from his ear again.
Joshua surprised him, though. “And you're still there?”
“I got a pity crash on his couch,” Collin confessed, and Martin made a snorting sound that seemed to spray milk and cereal back into that big-assed bowl.
“Promising,” Joshua said after a moment's consideration. “His part's in—do you want to tell him that, or should we wait until Monday?”
Collin smiled a little. Monday was a day off. “We should wait until Monday,” he said. “I think I could do something with that.”
“Right, Boss!” Joshua said crisply. “Now get your ass in here so we can make some fucking money, okay?”
“I hear you.” Collin ended the call (so much less satisfactory on the new iPhone than it used to be on his little flip phone) and slid back against the couch in pain.
“Jeff left you some water and aspirin,” Martin garbled, gesturing to the coffee table, and Collin blessed them both as he washed down some more ibuprofen and finished off the ginormous glass of water that was sitting on the edge of the table. Which led to his second order of the day.
“Bathroom?” he had to ask, wondering if he could actually make it to the head with his bladder as engorged as it felt.
“Down the hall,” Martin gestured. “Use the guest bathroom if you're smart. Jeff's bathroom smells like girl shit. It's all got boy's labels on it, right, but ain't none of it is Axe, so I'm staying the hell away.”
Collin had to laugh, liking the kid in spite of himself. “Point taken. You, uhm, know that I sort of like the way Jeff smells, don't you?”
Martin grimaced. “Yeah, yeah, but I don't figure you want to smell that way yourself. Anyway, stop hopping from one foot to the next and hit the head. If you want to jump in the shower, I'll bring you some clothes. Jeff bought me a crap load of jeans and shit to wear when I'm working at The Pulpit—you can have some of that. But you can wear his boxers, right? I don't want any of your shit flopping around in my drawers, and I don't reckon that'll be a problem for him.”
Collin's abdomen felt like it was going to explode. “Jesus, kid, stop making me laugh. Gay or no gay, we don't normally go commando in another man's fatigues, so the boxers are a nice touch. Thanks—I'm going to take you up on that shower now.”
“You want I should make you some coffee?” the kid asked, still from his cross-legged squat on Jeff's stuffed chair.
Collin actually felt his knees go weak. “Kid, you do that, and I'll take you for breakfast any place in the universe, as long as it's drivethru.” If nothing else, he could use the coffee to wash down his meds, kept conscientiously in a little container in the pocket of his suede blazer.
Martin brightened. “Seriously? 'Cause I ain't been to Mickey D's in a hella long time! Can we go? I'm
dying
for a double quarter-pounder with cheese!”
Oh crap. Collin's stomach was making
bad
noises at the thought of greasy food, so he nodded greenly and escaped to the bathroom, where he peed so long he thought he might piss his balls out the chute, because hey! Everything else was going, why wouldn't they?
The shower was a blessing, except, apparently Martin was a fan of Old Spice, and Collin never had been. It was okay—smelling like Old Spice was a small price to pay for pants that were a little loose around the hips and Jeff's cotton boxers. (Collin was
so
keeping those! Not that Jeff would want them back, really, but still!)

A
HALF
an hour later, Collin was nursing one of Jeff's thermos mugs in the back of a cab, and Martin was with him. The boy looked
thrilled
to be in a cab, and Collin had to laugh.

“Kid, you took a Greyhound bus cross-country and it's a
cab
that's flipping your switch?”

Martin's brows drew in together, and those big milk-chocolate eyes looked a little wounded. “Well yeah, but I've taken the bus all over Atlanta—I ain't never been in a cab!”

Collin laughed again over some positively
sublime
coffee (he was still young enough to take his with lots of sugar and milk, but that didn't mean he didn't know the good stuff when he had it) and decided that his first impression hadn't been wrong—he did like this kid. Once the hostility and confusion were gone, what was left was… sweet. The kid was sweet, without any of the cynicism or self-annihilation or just plain old pissy-assed bullshit that Collin had carried around like a stale candy shell.

“Well, kid, if you think this ride is sweet, you're going to
love
what we're going to pick up.”

A
H
,
THERE
she was, his baby, parked three blocks away from Gatsby's Nick in a little mom-and-pop store lot he'd remembered from the last time he'd been there. No parking meter, no parking ticket, and… look closely now, she
was
his baby… yup! No vandalism, either! Many thanks for small mercies, and canyagimmehalleluja, amen!

“Man, that's the one I saw at Deacon's!” Martin's eyes were huge. “She's amazing! Tell me about the engine—V8, four-twenty-seven supercharger, right? What's the horsepower? Top speed? Pickup? Are those trick rims, the ones that spin? I
love
those!” The kid's questions went on
forever
, but since he was talking Collin's favorite language, Collin had no problem answering them. She was, after all, his baby.

“She was the first car I got after I got my garage,” he said with some pride. “It took me six months to get her running because most of the parts are out of stock or had to be made custom, and because it's not my specialty, it took me a year to get the body where I felt right about the paint job.”

“You did the paint job, didn't you?” Martin said critically, running his hand over the door.
Collin sighed. Everybody had an opinion, didn't they? “Not my strength,” he admitted candidly, and then Martin surprised him.
“You should have Crick do the touch up,” Martin said as he got into the car and fastened the quick-release seat belt like a pro. “He did the freehand on Mikhail's van—he's really good.”
Collin perked up and started the engine, glad of another reason to get in good with the people at The Pulpit; then he deflated a little. “Crick has other things to worry about,” he said softly, and Martin's shoulders slumped.
“Yeah. Deacon's a good guy, you know? I hope he's going to be okay. It's weird, watching everyone get so upset about it. You forget, when your friends are talking shit about „they' and „them' and „those, uhm, guys'—you forget that „those… guys'—they've got people they love and shit. It's not just all about….” Suddenly Martin remembered who he was talking to and blushed, then threw his head back against the car seat with unnecessary vigor.
Collin felt a little bad for the kid as he pulled through the mostly empty streets of downtown Sacramento toward the freeway. “Yeah. The sex part squicks straight guys out,” Collin conceded. “It'll do that when all you think about is tab A and slot B, right? Suddenly, you're thinking about slot C, and all you know about slot C is that Mom told you not to play with what came out of there because it's dirty, but you've totally missed the point.”
Martin was staring at him with a mix of pure, unadulterated horror and fierce admiration. “Man, you are so totally grossing me out, but I hate to say it.”
“You're dying for the point, aren't you?” Collin asked, grinning because the kid was giving him a chance.
“You gonna stop at that McDonald's? You buy me a hamburger, and I'll take it on the chin!”
“Jesus, kid, do you ever stop eating?”
“Do you see me eating
now
?”
“Point taken.”
“Speaking of, don't you have one to get to?”
Collin was thoroughly enjoying this conversation. Hell, this kid was quick and completely unafraid. Collin thought that maybe losing his brother was the worst thing that had ever happened to him—until Martin lost Kevin all over again.
He pulled into the drive-thru and ordered the kid not one but two double quarter pounders with cheese, and then ordered himself a regular, because he still had a metabolism that wouldn't quit. He still had his coffee, but he got the kid a large shake, thinking that maybe that would keep him occupied until dinnertime, if it didn't make Martin throw up before then.
“So,” Martin said through a mouthful of truly appalling caloric intake, “that point?”
Collin sighed and took the onramp to I-80, positioning himself for I-5 and the off ramp to Levee Oaks. “The point is that there's two kinds of sex, and it's not het or gay, all right?”
Martin swallowed and then inhaled another quarter of the burger. “I'm listening.”
“There's poison-ivy sex—I have an itch, I want to scratch it, any orifice will do. You know what I'm talking about?”
Martin nodded and took a drink of his shake. He seemed to be doing okay.
“Then there's, „I like to touch this
person
'. And that's the end-all and be-all of it. It's all about that
person.
I mean, sometimes, with that person, there's the whole poison-ivy thing, but you keep it in your pants then and still save it for that one person. Now, for you, I'm betting that person's going to be a girl. It's what's going on in your brain, it's what's making blood flow to your johnson, and that's all good, right?”
Martin nodded enthusiastically, and Collin took a big deep breath because maybe this point wouldn't hurt as much as Collin had feared. “Now I can't speak for all the gays at The Pulpit, right? I don't know them that well, and some guys, they swing both ways, and that's their business. But for me, and for Jeff, well, the only person we ever looked at when we wanted our poison ivy scratched was another guy. And when we wanted
that person
involved, well, that was a guy too. I mean, the same parts work, and where you put 'em is your business, but what makes things perk up and get excited? That's sort of, I don't know, predestined. One day, you, Martin, woke up and looked at girls and went, „Hey—she's got
tits
, and they're
awesome
!' One day, I woke up and looked at a picture of David Beckham, the soccer star, and went, „
Ohmygod—I want me some!
'”
To Collin's immense relief, Martin didn't blow milkshake all over his leather interior.
“I think my brother had it bad for Viggo Mortensen,” Martin said instead, after a thoughtful moment. “We must have watched
Lord of the Rings
about a thousand times, and you have to believe me when I tell you those are
not
a black man's movies. Not in Atlanta, they're not.”
Collin digested this thoughtfully and took the I-5, grateful this was Saturday and not Friday, when traffic would be nucking futs. “I'll take your word for it. Just be glad it was that guy, and not one of the hobbits. That would have been….”
“Embarrassing,” Martin filled in, a little of his original attitude trying to come back.
Collin nodded his head and helped it along. “Gandalf would have been okay, though. He's one of us.”
Martin really did snort milkshake then, but he was laughing so hard that Collin handed him a napkin without comment and thought that maybe the car could take some milkshake in her upholstery if it meant Jeff's job was a little bit easier.
In the end, Martin turned out to be so much fun—and so much of a car nut—that Collin went the whole nine yards, got the kid an extra set of coveralls, and had him call up Shane and ask to stay and help out at the garage. There were safety protocols—Shane would have to come by with a checklist and some forms for Jeff to sign before Martin could do so much as change a tire—but in the meantime, he could deal with the customers, talk about the cars, and do some triage. He listened to a lot of squeaks, thunks, and women using big gestures and making really weird faces as they tried to mimic what their engines were doing. He got pretty good at saying things like, “Okay, ma'am, is it a Dodge Caravan? Then that's probably the belts.” Collin was so proud.
The day was nuts—just plain nuts—and they were behind from the start, but the kid, looking respectable and happy in his coveralls and being unfailingly polite to the people who walked in, turned out to be a real asset, and Collin told him so after a couple of hours.
“You were really awesome, today, kid. I'm not sure we could have done this without you.”
“You're just saying that because you want to get in Jeff's pants,” Martin laughed, and Collin laughed back.
“Naw, man. I'm saying it because when I was fourteen, I was pretty sure I was too big a fuckup to help anybody out. You're doing great. I just wanted you to know it.”
Right about the time Martin smiled a big hero-worship of a smile at Collin, Joshua walked up behind them and said, “Don't lie to the kid. You're still a fuckup, and we're still behind. Now get your ass in gear!”
Martin cracked up, which was as it should be, and Collin got back under a car, where he belonged. A couple of hours later, Martin walked into the garage with big bag full of paper containers with what looked to be more coffee and sandwiches.
“Some nice lady came over here with food for us all. She claimed to be your mother. I don't believe it—you're an asshole, and she's good people.”
Collin stuck his head around the wheels of the truck up on the lift and blew a raspberry. “If you're not nice to me, I'll let
her
take you home and you can see how good she is when she's bitching at you to make your bed. Did you talk to Jeff yet, to see when he's coming to get you?”
“Two hours,” Martin said. “I bet if you work your ass off, you can be respectable by then.”
Collin shook his head. “You have no subtlety, kid. You don't ask a guy out the night after you took a pity-crash on his couch—that's bad form.”
“Yeah? You got a plan?”
“I'm getting there. Now go away and let me work.”
“It better be a good plan,” Martin warned. “Jeff isn't stupid.”
“Hey!” Collin gestured to himself a few times until Martin laughed and conceded that Collin wasn't stupid either. It was enough. Collin worked steadily, past the hangover, past the anxiety, past the embarrassment.
When Jeff pulled his car into the garage, all Collin could feel was the same familiar lift he'd felt for the last year whenever he'd seen the blue Mini Cooper parked at the diner. His sweetheart was here. It was time for Collin to claim him.