Special Delivery: Special Delivery, Book 1 (21 page)

“Jesus.
Eight
?” Sam tried to remember himself at eight, and couldn’t. The only thing he could think of was crushing on David Duchovny while his mom watched
The X-Files
. He hadn’t worked out at eight that the tickle in his tummy when Mulder took off his shirt was a sexual response, but it didn’t stop him from holding his penis tight in his bed as he replayed the scenes in his mind. Other than this, though, he remembered eight years old as innocent and happy. Hell, he’d still believed in Santa, at eight. “That’s…young.”

“Fucked me up a bit, I’ll admit. Though I don’t remember being sad. Just hollow and confused. Was sure it was something I’d done, but she’d always been so nice to me, like she really loved me.” He rubbed at his mouth. “Don’t know why I said all that.”

“No.” Sam shifted in his seat to better look at Mitch. “I mean—I don’t know. It feels good, talking about my mom, and I like hearing about your past too.” He realized it might not be the same for Mitch and faltered. “But if you’d rather—”

“No, I want to hear about your mom. I want to hear any stories about you. It’s just, not many of my stories are good.”

“Oh. Well, if you don’t—”

“—but I don’t mind telling—” Mitch said at the same time. He stopped and tossed Sam a rueful smile. “If you don’t mind listening.”

“I enjoy listening. To whatever you want to tell me.”

They made their way through the foothills, taking turns sharing stories from their lives.

“My mom loved irises.” Sam slouched down in his seat and angled himself sideways so he could watch the mountains rising around the road. “She thought they were the most beautiful flowers, but my aunt hates them. Says they don’t bloom long enough and leave boring foliage. Well, all my mom ever wanted was a garden full of irises, but first we lived in a trailer next to guys who always trampled the tiny patch of green we had, and then we lived with Aunt Delia and Uncle Norm. So Mom never had her garden of irises.”

Mitch frowned. “That’s a bummer.”

Sam held up a finger. “I did the next best thing, though. The last year she was alive, I made her a mini one. I took a big plastic tub, those storage bins, you know? I filled one with dirt and iris rhizomes in the fall, watered it and prayed like hell until spring. I kept it behind the garage so my aunt wouldn’t find it, and by some miracle the flowers came up. So I dragged the tub over to the house and parked it under my mom’s window so she could watch them bloom.”

This made Mitch laugh. “Awesome.”

Sam grinned. “It was. She
loved
it. She cried and clapped her hands. She spent the whole month they bloomed, I swear, sitting at the window and looking at her flowers. My aunt went nuts, because they were eight or ten different colors, and here was this damn Rubbermaid in the middle of her yard, and the neighbors asked about it, and she didn’t know what to say without making herself look bad. Oh, God, she hated it. She hated
me
for it. But she left the tub until the blooms went away, and she promised Mom she’d plant them in a real garden in the fall.”

“Did she?”

Sam shook his head. “Mom was too sick to notice anything by then. I was going to plant the tub again anyway, but she—” Sam stopped and took a drink of tea. “I had some at her funeral, and they burned them up with her when they cremated her.”

“That’s the container you have in your pack, right? What you let go at the Platte River? That was sweet. You gonna do it the whole way?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. I had those in my hand because I spilled them and was cleaning up when you called me out. It seemed right, though.”

“Well, if you ever want to stop, say the word. I’ll keep my eye out for irises, for sure.”

The offer made Sam feel warm and eased some of the sadness speaking about the irises had brought up. “Thanks.”

Mitch cleared his throat. “So. Your uncle, was he sort of your dad? Didn’t you say you don’t know your real dad at all?”

“No idea who my dad is. I think my aunt might know, but she won’t tell me. But no, Uncle Norm really isn’t the dad type. Anyway, he’s not the dad I’d have wanted. He sat there reading the paper until they got high-speed, and he’s been on the computer ever since. Never asked about anything I was doing, only told me to pass the potatoes.”

Mitch grunted, but it was commentary enough.

Sam picked at the seam of his jeans. “I always wanted a dad like Emma’s. God, he took her everywhere. Still does. They go on
dates
, they call them. They head out together every week, and if money is tight, they take a walk. When she was a kid, he went with her to every Disney movie, every ball game. She rolls her eyes at that now, but I watched it growing up and ached. It wasn’t what they did together. It was the way he looked at her, as if everything she did was beautiful and amazing.”

Sam stopped picking at his jeans and rubbed his hands over them instead. “It’s not that my mom didn’t pay attention to me, or love me, or tell me I was great. And I don’t feel I was cheated because I didn’t have a dad. Okay, I do a little, but it’s deeper. Like, it would have been nice to have a guy to explain a wet dream. Somebody who actually knew.” He sighed. “I don’t know.”

They drove a few miles in silence. They were heading into the mountains proper now, always traveling on an incline, and Sam started to wonder if they would drive on a slope all the way to Cortez. Mitch had downshifted and went a lot slower now, and Old Blue worked harder. A few cars languished by the side of the road, steam billowing from beneath their hoods. Sam glanced at Old Blue’s nose worriedly, but the semi seemed fine, so far.

“My dad wasn’t Emma’s dad.” Mitch kept his eyes firmly on the road. “Or even your uncle. Mine was…pretty nasty.”

Sam didn’t know what to say to this, so he waited, watching as Mitch tapped his thumbs on the wheel.

Finally, Mitch reached for his Winstons. “Hit me a lot, especially after my mom left. But mostly he was good at making me feel like shit. Called me names—loved to call me faggot, which scared the shit out of me because I was starting to think maybe I was one, and I thought, shit, how does he know? So I worked damn hard not to be a faggot, which, to my shame, means I was terrible mean to boys I thought were gay.”

Sam had no idea what to say, so he said nothing.

Mitch put a cigarette between his lips. “There was this one guy. God, he was so sweet and shy. I wanted to kiss him and touch him. Scared the piss out of me, so I bullied him. I was such an ass to him. I think he dropped out of school because of me. I tried to find him later, when we were adults, but I couldn’t.” He lit the cigarette and took a long drag. “Pretty sure if I die and try to get to heaven, poor Gary Ingall will be standing in front of the gate, and I won’t be able to go in for my shame.” He smoked for a minute. “But all I knew was I had to make sure I didn’t drive my dad away too because he was all I had left. Eventually I grew enough brain cells to figure out he wasn’t worth killing myself over.”

Sam let this swim in his head and realized, had he and Mitch gone to high school together, Sam would have been the Gary Ingall. The thought was sobering. But they couldn’t have gone to school at the same time. “Thirty, you said you were?”

“Thirty-three.” Mitch grimaced. “Old man.”

“That isn’t old.” Though it was, Sam acknowledged, a significant difference to his age of twenty-one.

“Dead and buried in gay years.” Mitch patted his stomach and looked down at it in disgust. “Old, flabby and out to pasture. Still don’t know how the hell I caught you. You should have run off with Craig from last night. Or somebody even better.”

Sam balked. “I’m not running off with a guy I met for two hours in a bar.”

“But the trucker from the alley is fine, is he?” When Sam stammered, too embarrassed to reply properly, Mitch sighed, put his cigarette into—God, there it was—a Butt Bucket, and reached for another. “Sorry, Sunshine. I don’t know to quit when I’m ahead.”

But he’d put the bee in Sam’s bonnet, as his mother would say, and Sam sat for a few minutes trying to work out why it was okay to run off with Mitch but why he didn’t want to play around with Craig outside of the bar. “I wouldn’t have run off with you that day in the alley. It was so…unexpected. Then you returned my phone. I mean, it was nice. Really nice. You seem safe all around. But not in a boring way. And you bought me dinner, and—and—” His face was so red it was hot. He tucked his legs against his chest. “Oh, I don’t know.”

Mitch studied him thoughtfully, as much as he could while still driving. “So it wasn’t about how I look at all? I could have been bald and fat?”

“Well—I guess—I don’t know, honestly.” How did they get on this subject? How did he get out of it? “I
do
enjoy how you look.”
Big and strong.
“I—I guess it’s more how you look at
me
that attracts me.” He put his hands on his cheeks. They were searing. Sam tried to think of how to deflect this conversation. “What about you? What attracted you to me?”

Mitch drew on his cigarette before answering. “The way you were dancing.”

“Dancing? I wasn’t—” Sam stopped, remembering how he’d boogied down as he tossed the boxes into the dumpster. He blushed anew. “You liked
that
?”

“I did.” Mitch sounded serious. “You were so damn happy. And cute, sure, but mostly happy. And then you looked at me, and I could tell you wanted me—that glowing, happy, handsome guy wanted
me
.” He shook his head before drawing on his cigarette. “I didn’t stand a chance.”

Sam reveled in this for a moment, not quite knowing what to say. He remembered another of Mitch’s comments, and it cast a pallor Sam couldn’t ignore. “You said I reminded you of someone. Is it that guy you traveled with?” Mitch’s smile predictably faded, but Sam didn’t let himself back down. He wanted to know. “Did he make you happy too?”

Mitch was quiet for a few seconds. “Yeah. But in a different way, Sunshine.”

Tell me about him,
Sam thought but couldn’t say, because he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear. He was too afraid he’d find out he could never keep up. But it killed him, not knowing about this other guy. There was no denying he still affected Mitch. Sam only had to hint at him, and Mitch shut down.

Sam gave up. “Sorry.” He slumped in his seat. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mitch said, but he still sounded gruff to Sam.

“We can talk about something else.” Sam’s cheeks heated. “Or you can stop and get me a bucket of ice to stick my head in.”

“Sure thing.” Mitch started to angle the truck toward a small gas station on the side of the road.

Sam sat bolt upright in his seat. “I was kidding!”

Mitch grinned. “Getting diesel, honey.” He put out his second cigarette and nodded at the building. “You want anything to eat, now that your stomach is settled a bit? This place makes decent breakfast burritos. I could grab you one. Or do you want to come in and poke your head around?”

Mitch tensed even as he made the offer, and Sam remembered the last truck stop. But his legs were getting sore from sitting. “I’ll come.”

They were in a sort of basin surrounded by mountains, and the gas station, while clearly catering to truckers, was tiny when compared to the behemoths littering I-80. It was also much, much colder up here than in Denver, and Sam hurried inside to escape the wind. He used the restroom then met Mitch at a small counter where a polite woman served them breakfast burritos. She gave them no dirty looks whatsoever. Sam stuffed his burrito with sausage, egg and green pepper, whereas Mitch filled his with beans, meat, jalapenos and salsa, splashing hot sauce on top. They ate standing at the counter, Mitch surveying the magazines and notices.

A few truckers did give them odd glances, but Sam decided not to care. Mitch, he could see, did care, and hurried through the rest of his food.

“I gotta give Blue a systems check before we head on.” Mitch started toward the semi. “You want to stretch your legs some more, or hang out inside?”

Sam, already huddled against the wind, nodded to the cab. “I’ll go back to Blue.”

Was it Sam’s imagination, or did Mitch seem relieved? “TV might work, but the satellite’s iffy up here.” He glanced sidelong at Sam. “Course, there’s quite a video selection.”

“I could watch the twink video, sort of preview it and see if they’re kinky enough for you.”

“You do that.” Mitch slid up beside him and took a good, hard hold of Sam’s ass. “Be sure to give me a full report.”

Sam’s blood hummed from the exchange when he got in the truck, but he didn’t break out the porn. Instead he unplugged his phone, tucked himself into the corner of the bed and tried to find the Internet.

His signal was horrible, and there was no 3G, so he gave up reading his email and called Emma.

“Thank God,” she said when she answered. “So, are you coming home?”

Sam watched out the window as Mitch checked dipsticks and cables. “No.” He felt easier as the rightness of his answer permeated him.

“What? You’re not coming home
ever
?”

“I’m not coming home
yet
.” Sam toyed with the cord to the headphones. “I’ll come back eventually, Emma. I’m fine.” Mitch caught his eye and smiled, and Sam waved. “In fact, I’m really good.”

“You do sound better,” Emma acknowledged reluctantly. “God knows you deserve a vacation. Do you need money? Because I have some—”