Rainbow Blues (23 page)

“Pete, you’re going to get me all dirty.”

“Yeah, and?”

Luke had to look away, Peter’s husky tone and Scotty’s smug little smile only painful reminders of what he was missing. He started pulling food containers from the bag.

“Scotty? You didn’t have to do this. I was going to order some pizza.”

“Not a problem. They’re leftovers from a swank corporate retirement party last night. No sense in them going to waste, and it’s the only help I can offer this weekend, because I’ve got two more weddings to get through.”

Luke thought he might tear up. Jimmy’s emotional nature was apparently rubbing off on him.

“Thanks, I really appreciate this.”

While they set out the food, the other guys filed in, dusty as all hell, the RB guys shirtless and sweaty, chests streaked with dirt.

Since Luke and Peter were the oldest guys there, and everyone was in good shape, he wondered if Graham had been totally joking about the strip-o-grams.

Ryan and Zach were the last to arrive, and Ryan’s eyes bugged out as he took in the expanse of man chest. He didn’t know where to look, and his gaze kept skipping from one man to the other, completely oblivious to the food on the table.

And there was so much food, beautiful and bountiful. Luke snapped several more pictures and sent them off.

Look what Scotty brought for lunch!

This time, Luke had to wait several minutes for a response.

I HATE YOU. How dare you taunt me with food porn when all I can eat is plywood and wallpaper paste?!?

Luke snickered. He’d forgotten for a moment about Jimmy’s draconic diet. He hated that anyone thought Jimmy was less than perfect, but he guessed he had to accept Jimmy’s assertion it was a Hollywood thing.

Sorry! Love you!

Pfft. I’m not so sure now ;) XOXO

Luke was tempted to start scrolling through his pictures of Jimmy, but last night Jimmy had sent him one, his head partially cut off, but his dick hard and ready. He knew damn well he shouldn’t be looking at that in public, but if he started looking for pictures, he wasn’t sure he could make himself avoid that one.

With great fortitude, he pocketed his phone and turned his attention back to grabbing himself some food.

After lunch, Luke pulled Ryan aside. “Kid, you know I think you need to come clean with Zach, and I also know how hard it can be. But if you keep ogling the guys, Zach isn’t going to need you to say one word. Don’t you get enough half-naked guys at the clubs?” Luke had only been to gay clubs a few times before deciding they weren’t for him, but he’d been enough times to know half the guys seemed to be allergic to fabric.

He wasn’t expecting Ryan’s full-on fire-engine flush and the way his gaze dropped. Luke started to get an unwelcome suspicion that Ryan was maybe a little more innocent and virginal than either he or Jimmy suspected. Damn it. Now he was going to worry. Maybe Peter wouldn’t mind if Luke brought Ryan to Rainbow Blues as a guest. At least he could meet some guys without Zach around.

“Sorry, LJ.”

“Don’t be sorry, kid, just be aware that if you don’t intend to out yourself today, you’d better be careful.”

He’d wait until Jimmy got home, though, so they could discuss it before Luke made things worse by coming between Ryan and Zach.

Luke went back to work, excited by the progress they’d made so far.

O
F
ALL
the scenes they’d filmed so far, none of them in order, the nude one had been the weirdest. Not that Jimmy wanted to get turned on in front of all those people, but he’d never been less turned on in his life. Mostly nude, in bed with a mostly nude Aaron Young, and he’d never felt less like having sex.

The only good thing about the nude scene was that they finished early. Jimmy pulled into the palm-tree-lined parking for his building while it was still light out. Amazing.

Inside his apartment, he glanced at the clock and made the time zone calculation. Shit. Luke might still be awake.

He pulled out his phone and pulled up Luke’s name.

“Jimmy?”

Jimmy sank down on the bed, the sound of his partner’s voice soothing the jagged edges of his nerves.

“Hey, Luke.”

“It’s so good to hear your voice.” Luke’s voice was low and husky.

“Did I wake you up?” Jimmy wasn’t sure he cared, because he needed this touchpoint so badly.

“Nah, I was just watching TV. Are you doing okay?”

Jimmy tried to imagine Luke on their couch, watching TV in their home, but it was hard with only a few texted photos as a reference.

“The shoot today was difficult. It was the naked scene.”

Luke cleared his throat. Jimmy had tried to prepare him, but neither of them had been looking forward to that scene, for different reasons.

“Oh? Is it something you want to talk about?” Tension threaded through Luke’s voice like a tightly wound guitar string.

Jimmy huffed out a laugh. “Oh, it’s not what you’re thinking, believe me. I told you how we repeat stuff over and over? It’s like that, except naked and freezing. It must be like having sex in the penguin enclosure at a zoo as part of a breeding program, except no one’s got an erection.”

“No one?” There was a hint of relief in Luke’s tone.

God, he loved this man, who always did his best to give Jimmy the benefit of the doubt.

“Nope. Not unless it belonged to that sadist of a director. At least he had the decency to close the set, but there were still a number of people there, and it was the least sexy thing I’ve done in my life.”

Luke chuckled. “Is it okay that I’m glad?”

“I’m glad, too. But Aaron warned me the naked shoots often get leaked to the Internet, so you might see some suggestive shots tomorrow.”

“I’ll live. I hope. I trust you, implicitly, but it still might not be easy seeing you with another guy.”

“You know I love you, and it means nothing, right?”

“I know. I love you, too.” Funny, Jimmy had never thought about being able to hear a smile in someone’s voice, but he heard one in Luke’s right now. Probably more obvious because he didn’t have any visual cues to work from.

“So… what does he look like naked?”

“About what you’d expect. Remember in that last one we watched before I left,
Model Revenge
? He wore that tiny bathing suit that left nothing to the imagination. Well, there wasn’t much more to see. We wear these little socks over our dicks, so there’s no dick-to-dick contact.”

A relieved sigh gusted out of Luke. “I’m glad. I want to be your only source of dick-to-dick contact.”

“Mmm. I wish you were serving up some dick-to-dick contact right now.”

The sound Luke made was nothing more than an aroused purr. Jimmy shucked his clothes off one-handed and lay back down on the bed, ready to enjoy some much needed phone sex with the love of his life.

L
UKE
SLUNK
through the grocery store, hunched over his cart like he needed it to prop him up. The muggy heat of the summer outside made his T-shirt cling to him, but the aggressive chill inside made him cold and clammy. Jimmy had been away almost two months now, and Luke missed him more every day. He had no idea what to do with himself. The rest of the day stretched out endlessly. He’d already done everything to the house he could do without Jimmy’s input. As much as he appreciated his friends’ help—and appreciated that he had friends to help him—the upgrades to the house had gone far more quickly than he’d anticipated. He had nothing, absolutely nothing to distract him. Even work, which always meant longer days in the summer, didn’t do enough to distract him. All it made him do was resent how much it interfered with him getting on a plane and going to visit his partner.

God. This was worse than after his divorce. After his divorce, he’d been lonely, but he hadn’t realized that loving someone who wasn’t around was a much more painful version of loneliness. Crime and forensic dramas weren’t nearly interesting enough to distract him from how empty the house felt. He missed Jimmy’s presence like the ache of a missing limb. He missed making dinner for him, planning nights out, discussing their day. Even when Jimmy had a bad day, he was always enthusiastic about something, and he never failed to brighten Luke’s day. Now, his life had plunged back into shadow, and he was more acutely aware of how miserable he’d been before he met Jimmy. The only bright spots were the frequent texts and the occasional phone calls. The calls were so difficult to squeeze in, and Luke hated it.

Even if he was able to schedule a few days off, enough to make it worthwhile to fly all the way to the West Coast, how much time would he spend in Jimmy’s sublet apartment, waiting for him to finish filming for the day?

Without Jimmy, cooking had become dull and pointless again, so it was no surprise Luke found himself in the frozen food aisle, his standard fare since his divorce. The wall of identical cardboard boxes shook him. He didn’t want to go back to where he’d been. Shaking off this depressing funk entirely might not be possible until Jimmy got home, but he could at least avoid falling back into his lonely rut. He missed Jimmy about a hundred times more than he missed Kelly after their divorce, but this time he had friends to help him through it, and he ought to take advantage of that.

An alert sounded on his phone. Another listing for James Alexander had popped up. Most times he was eager to click on Internet news about Jimmy. He was so fucking proud of his partner, who seemed poised to take Hollywood by storm. But ever since the smuggled stills of the nude scene had been posted online, as Jimmy had warned him, he was also apprehensive about clicking those links. Jimmy was a good actor, and some of his facial expressions in those shots, while he was all up close and personal with Aaron Young’s naked body, were a little too similar to ones Luke had seen at home in their bed. No matter how much he believed Jimmy and knew in his heart they weren’t real, it was hard not to feel pain that Aaron was holding the man he missed more than his left arm.

With trepidation, he clicked on the link. And immediately left the site. It was yet another version of the ones he’d already seen. He didn’t really need to see them again, nor did he need to risk someone noticing he had two naked men on his phone while standing by the ice cream. Last thing he needed was someone thinking he was some sort of pervert.

He was going to obsess about this all fucking night if he didn’t do something. He pulled up his contact list.

“Bennett, you want to catch dinner and a movie?”

“You okay?”

“Just another naked picture.”

“Shit. I can’t even imagine. Must suck.”

Luke sighed. “Yeah. So, are you free tonight?”

“Sure, but I think you need a beer or three, not a movie. Let’s go to the pub. I’ll call Graham and Hector. We’ll make a night of it.”

“Okay, sounds good.”

He noticed Bennett didn’t offer to call Peter. Peter was a great guy, but he almost never went anywhere without Scotty. Who was also a great guy, but Bennett sensed that seeing a happy couple together would only make Luke more lonely for his own partner.

“I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours, okay?”

A couple of hours would give Luke plenty of time to get home, shower, and change.

“You don’t have to go out of your way. I can drive.”

“Oh, Luke, you need more beer than you’ll be able to drive home on.”

That could be true. “You’re probably right. See you soon.”

Luke grabbed a few essentials that didn’t include frozen dinners before heading home to get ready for a night out with his single friends, a mini Rainbow Blues gathering.

W
ITH
ANY
luck, this would be the last day of filming. Two months had been like two consecutive eternities, and Jimmy was still expected to spend another two months in California. He never got used to the different pace, never became comfortable with the changes he had to make for filming to work. But here, on the last day, the end in fucking sight, Jimmy realized something important.

All this time Jimmy had thought he was an attention whore, and now he’d come to realize he was actually an energy vampire. The movie set was dead. No energy from an appreciative audience, no ego boost from the applause, no tears shed or sniffles. No laughter. The challenge of doing scene after scene, repeating lines of dialogue over and over to ensure the cameras could be moved and catch the right cut… that wasn’t a challenge that fired his blood. Doing an entire play from memory, with few to no flubs, in front of an audience? That was a challenge he thrived on.

There was nothing on this set that gave him the energy he craved. He’d always thought it was the most glamorous job ever, but each day was a chore, and the restrictive food and exercise only annoyed him more. Even seeing the dailies didn’t spur any excitement. Not like the last minute preparations backstage at the playhouse, accompanied by the hum of an eager audience settling into seats.

Like sunshine breaking through the clouds, the shackles of the “lost dream” fell away. He didn’t want to be a film actor, and this was the last film he was ever going to do. As soon as he could, he was getting the fuck out of Hollywood and heading back to Luke and the playhouse. Hell, he even preferred the sullen energy of the kids in his classroom to this overprocessed repetition.