Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (6 page)

Unsatisfied but obviously unable to come up with another retort, the kid let go of the letter and shoveled in another bite of fried steak, potatoes, and gravy.
There were only two tables left in the diner after the rush, one of them belonging to Jeff's friends and the other belonging to Jeff. Collin didn't feel self-conscious in the least about watching Jeff read the letter in his shaking hands, because
everybody
in the restaurant was watching him read the letter, even the kid, who, as Jeff started to wipe his eyes unobtrusively with the backs of his hands, actually stopped eating.
“Oh God,” he said when he got to the end. “Oh Kevin… Jesus. No….” Suddenly he looked up at Lucas, his face twisted with pain.
“Did you know?” he asked, and Lucas looked away.
“I guessed,” he said. “I… awww… fuckitall….” Suddenly Lucas was wiping his eyes too. “Goddammit, Kevin. Godfuckingdammit!”
“Is it true?” Martin asked, and he looked from one man to the other. “Did my brother kill himself? Did you give him AIDS, you assfucker, so he had to kill himself?”
The kid came out of his seat and across the table, and Collin acted on instinct, grabbing him around the middle and crashing to the ground in a full tackle. The kid's chair went shooting across the room into Lucas, and there was a sudden silence after the clatter, broken by the kid shouting, “Get off me, motherfucker, just get the fuck
off me
!” He swung his elbow back and it connected solidly with Collin's nose, and for a moment, all Collin could focus on were stars and stars and the fact that,
oh fuck
, he was pouring blood down his shirt.
Collin stood quickly, holding his head back and looking from the corner of his eye for a napkin dispenser, and the kid scrambled up in a tangle of knees and elbows and reached in to help. Collin held out a hand and called, “Mo—mmmm! We neeb cween-ub oub hewr, stat!”
He heard his mother shout, and then the kid looked around at all of the stunned faces, Jeff's included.
Collin knew the exact moment the kid decided to flee—Collin had probably had the same expression on his own face when he couldn't face the mess he'd made too.
“Awwww, fuck this shit!” And Martin was gone, crashing out into the concrete-colored afternoon, leaving complete chaos in his wake. For a moment, the door swung open, and they could hear him pounding down the pavement in his Converse sneakers, dodging out of the way of cars as they came.
“I'll get him!” Lucas called, and Kimmy was out the door behind him.
Crick said, “Aww, fuck—someone's got to tell law enforcement he hasn't done anything. In this town they'll have his ass just for being black!” And then he and Mikhail went sprinting out the door, leaving their knitting behind them.
Jeff stood for a second and watched the herd of people disappear in search of one lost, confused kid, and then cocked his head a little as Collin staunched the blood from his nose. Calmly and collectedly, Jeff pulled a pair of purple steri-gloves from his back pocket—or out of his ass, for all Collin knew—and grabbed another handful of napkins and the pitcher of ice water from the other vacant table. Before Collin knew it, the sweetheart of his big-alpha dreams was telling him very competently to tilt his head and sit down, dammit, sit down!
Collin's mother came bustling in with a mop and a pair of rubber gloves that were standard practice when cleaning and gave a little
tsk
.
“It's not his fault,” Jeff said with a hard swallow. “He was trying to keep the peace.” Jeff sent him a rather huffy eye-roll, though. “I
can
take a punch, Collin. I may be flaming, but I'm not fragile!” He pronounced it “frag
aisle!
” with a little trill on the end, and Collin wished his nose would stop bleeding (damned cocktail—he was pretty sure there was something in this go-around that was messing with his coagulation, because he'd had a hangnail the week before that had barely healed) so he could smolder at the guy and make him blush. But no, here was Collin, god of sex, with his nose in the air, trying to keep his mother from getting too close while he HIVed all over the place.

Oh holy shit and wait just a cotton-fucking-minute.
“You rebeber be?”
Jeff's shook his head and rolled those expressive brown eyes again.

“Wow, boyfriend, you're quick! You keep picking up speed and next time, maybe you won't let the terrified teenager bolt out the door!” “He bwoke by noze!” Collin protested, feeling as though he really were not being seen at his best here.

Jeff huffed and softly manipulated Collin's tender tissue. It hurt—it hurt like a sonovabitch, and the cool, impersonal touch was just that— cool and not sweaty or blushy or hot or any of the things that Collin had dreamed about. Jeff was holding himself back, too, so that their faces weren't that close, and he was looking Collin in the nose and not the eyes—ouch! Collin winced, because dammit, that hurt!

“Yeah, sweet thing, I know it hurts, but I don't think it's broken. An ice pack, a change of a shirt, and you'll be ready for date night, right?”

Ah-ha! An opening. “You buyin'?” Collin tried to make his eyebrow waggle as grown-up as he was feeling these days, but Jeff actually had the
nerve
to tousle his hair.

“Oh, baby, you
are
precious. Can't you see I'm waiting for a backlog of emotional luggage to clear customs? Dinner plans are
so
not in my future. Here, Ms. Collin's Mom, let me get that, okay?” Carefully, Jeff took the ice pack away from Natalie, who looked at her son with wide eyes and a bemused smile.

Collin found himself batting Jeff's hands away and taking the ice pack, putting it firmly against the bridge of his nose. “Sit, Momb, I beed to go change.” He had to—you just didn't wander around in a bloody shirt when you were infected, now did you? “Web be cwean ub, firtht, 'kay?”

Jeff patted his shoulder and sighed. “I'll clean up, big guy. You were trying to do the knight in shining armor bit, the least you could let the gay-man-in-distress do is pick up the wreckage.”

Collin tried to protest, but Jeff waved him off, his eyes getting wearier as he did so. “Go, Galahad, go. I need something to do while I wait for them anyway.”

Collin trotted across the field/parking space to his garage next door, where he had a big sink with stiff scrub brushes and lots of industrial strength hand-cleaner, as well as a couple of changes of clothes. For a minute, he was reassured—the smells of hot engine oil and concrete were home to him, and his manhood reasserted itself. A pat on the head? Like a little kid? Oh
hell
no! Jeff, the guy Collin had been thinking about (stalking) for the last year was finally talking to him—there was no
way
he was going to let it go at that!

Josh was underneath the hood of a much-abused family minivan as Collin ran in, and still underneath it as he ran out. The car was on the hydraulic lift just far enough for Josh to lie underneath and his feet were sticking out. Collin skidded to a halt, though, as he was trotting through the practically pristine garage bay, and turned around to say something.

“Christ on a cracker, Joshua, how long does it take to replace a fucking blower in the A/C unit?”
Joshua startled, because Collin heard his head thump on something, and something else clattered down through the car's engine to bang on the concrete below. “Goddammit, Boss, do you think the blower's the only fucking thing wrong on this piece of shit? The blower's done, but they've paid for an hour, and I'd like to see this thing vaguely improved by the time they get it back, that okay with you?”
Collin grinned. Joshua was like a national treasure or something. Fully straight, a grandfather of four, Joshua had been bored to tears in retirement from a job in middle management until he'd seen Collin open the garage. Apparently, cars had always been Joshua's secret passion. He'd hung around constantly as Collin had set up, offering advice, giving orders, and even hauling stock and setting up equipment, until Collin had finally said, “Goddammit, old man, if you want a job, you're going to have to wait for me to get some fucking customers!”
Joshua had looked around the garage appreciatively. “Customers I think you'll get, but if you don't mind, I'd prefer they do their fucking someplace else.”
“I can't pay you squat!”
“Don't want squat. Give me some fucking cash when you can afford it, and we'll be just goddamned fine.”
Collin had started out paying him minimum wage, cutting the check apologetically and feeling like shit when he calculated the taxes. Now, though, he paid Joshua a full mechanic's salary, which Joshua used to take his wife on cruises and spoil his grandchildren rotten. Underneath the hood of that family crap-mobile was the grizzled-headed, pottymouthed, god-fucking-damned salt of the fucking earth.
The first time Collin had flirted with a man in Joshua's presence, the old man had raised his eyebrows. Collin had looked at him challengingly. “You got a problem with that, old man?”
“Got a problem with your pick-up lines, asshole. You couldn't pick up a picnic basket with that bullshit. Just because you're pretty doesn't mean men are going to swoon at your feet, you know. Men got better sense than that!”
Collin had laughed. “And women?”
Joshua had harrumphed and repositioned his red ball cap on his bird's nest of iron-gray hair. “Women humor us into thinking we're worth something. You probably got the right idea, hotshot. You go after men, at least they know we're all frauds with a pecker, so you're on a level playing field. Now go away. I want to finish this tune-up so I can go home and be fooled by my wife some more.”
Collin had left that day, but not before realizing that he may grow to love this old man with most of his cynical black heart.
Today, Joshua would work on this car until he liked its chances of running for a while before it came back. If they'd had other cars waiting, he would have done them first and then gotten back to the minivan in the interim, but they didn't, and the old man just liked working on cars. Collin got the feeling that the garage was the same for him as it was for Collin: refuge, sanctuary, and home.
And he could swear like a trucker there, and nobody would think twice about it. Collin was pretty sure that was a plus in the old man's book too.
But right now, Joshua's extensive four-letter vocabulary was not what Collin wanted to hear about. Right now, he wanted to hear about Jeff and what had made him look a thousand years sad.
When he got back to the diner, coming in from the door closest to the street, none of Jeff's friends had returned, but the mess had been cleaned up, the table had been set right, and all of the dishes had been bussed to the kitchen. The other table sat vacant, the knitting still on it, but most of the cups had been taken away and the leftovers neatly boxed. Collin made a frustrated sound, wondering, because Jeff's little blue Mini Cooper was still out in the front, but Jeff was nowhere to be found. “Mom…?”
Natalie looked around the corner, her dyed red hair pulled back into a fuzzy ponytail and her lightly lined oval of a face still serene and dear. “He's out back, sneaking a cigarette. Turn down the libido for this one, okay, Collin? Whatever that little scene was all about, I think he just got a solid kick to the balls.”
“Mom, I've loved this guy for five years—believe me, I'm not gonna rush things now!”
“Loved?”
Collin didn't want to deal with his mother's shock or her questions or any of the crap he knew she could throw his way, so he just sprinted through the restaurant to exit out the back door. Sure enough, the sweet smell of desperate tobacco was there to remind him that he hadn't had his “daily” cigarette in about a week.
He tried to slow down as he took his first step, so as not to startle his quarry now that it had finally gone to ground, but Jeff, it appeared, was beyond being startled.
He was leaning back against the brick wall, one foot propped up behind him, staring into space as he deliberately inhaled and slowly exhaled into the grayness of high-clouded November.
“Get all changed and bag your clothes, Skippy?”
Collin bit back a scream of frustration. Old men, young men, he'd surely bagged his share, but none of them had made him feel like a little kid with such a few short words.
“You find your runaway homophobic teenager?” he asked, hoping his voice was back to normal. The ice pack had helped, and a few Motrin had relieved the swelling, so that, at least, didn't suck.
Jeff sighed and inhaled again, blowing out a thin stream of smoke in silence. “Nope, not yet. I'm hoping Kimmy and Lucas find him first— they're less likely to freak him out.”
Collin nodded, and decided to go for the fifty-thousand dollar question with the bonus set of steak knives and the new dinette set. “So, um, who's Kevin?”
Jeff looked at him sideways. “You have to know me better to know who Kevin is,” he said flatly, and Collin fought back a snarl.
“Well, you know who I am, right?”
Jeff's shoulders curled a little, and that insouciant,
the worst has happened and I'm still alive
posture lost some of its spine. “Yeah,” he said softly, looking at Collin from underneath dark lashes. “I remember. I'm glad to see you stuck around.”
Collin warmed himself in that soft, almost shy look. “You really saved my life that day, you know?”
Jeff shrugged, and his spine straightened. “You saved your own, kid. I just gave you an ear.”
Sudden shaft of brilliance. “Everyone needs an ear, Jeff. Even you.” Ooh… Collin, who usually scrubbed people raw with his Brillo personality, was damned proud of that one.
Jeff flicked the cigarette to the ground glumly. “You think I haven't told everyone chasing down my problem?” he asked, and there was no sign of a trill, no sign of the flamboyant flirt that Collin had seen coming into his mother's restaurant for the last year. There was just a tired man who seemed to be a little lost.
“Yeah, but you haven't told them what was in that letter that made that kid run.”
Jeff sucked in a hard breath and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. He grimaced and reached into his pocket for a small bottle of extra-spiffy hand sanitizer.
Collin wrinkled his nose. “Holy God—I can smell that shit from here. What in the hell is
that
?”
Jeff sent him an affronted look. “White Citrus, from Bath and Body Works. Jeez, kid, not everyone gets off on grease-cutter and dish soap.”
Collin rolled his eyes. “Excuse the fuck out of me if I try to keep the „man' in „gay man', okay? Now are you going to tell me or not?”
Jeff's pocket buzzed, and he pulled his phone out and sighed. “Fuck. The kid's dis-a-fucking-peared. Goddammit. I gotta call Shane. He'll have some buddies who can look for him.” Jeff turned around to go inside, and Collin wanted to smack his head against the brick wall. He had him. He
had him
, right here, and he couldn't seem to get any closer than he had been in five years.
“Jeff!” he called, right as Jeff grabbed the swinging glass door. Jeff looked up, and Collin took a risk.
“Last time we did this, you gave me a hug that saved my life. Um, can I return the favor?”
The look on Jeff's face was… almost peaceful. It was like hugs were his language, and he finally had a chance to communicate. He barely bothered to roll his eyes as he opened his arms and gave the little wrist-flipping gesture to get Collin to come closer.
Collin was eye-level, and that obviously surprised Jeff, but Collin wasn't going to wait around for Jeff to be surprised. In one step, Collin was inside those long, angular arms, wrapping his bulky biceps around Jeff's shoulders and holding him with hard, purposeful security.
Jeff looked surprised for a moment, and then he must have seen Collin's intent as he moved his face closer, holding his hand to the back of Jeff's head as he barreled in for a kiss.