The Foster Family (30 page)

He shook his head. “This is bullshit.” Wrangling his keys out of his pocket, he got back into his car and sped down the drive after Charlie.

He ran into every red light that could possibly slow him down between his house and Charlie’s work. The gallery was open but the lot was empty when he parked. Inside, the young man sitting behind the front desk barely looked up from the magazine he was reading as Malcolm walked past. The front room was a series of glass shelving units arranged in varying sizes of square niches. Inside each niche was a bit of art or a knickknack for sale, tiny white price tags declaring their worth. The carpet underfoot was a warm brown sisal and the lighting showcased the one-of-a-kind crafts. It was almost cozy and reminded him of Charlie.

But as soon as he was in the gallery proper, all sense of cozy comfort vanished. The place had that faintly institutional echo that Serious Places had, and Malcolm curled a lip. The silence was distracting, and within minutes, he’d lost interest in the art neatly arranged on the walls at equal intervals.

He was about to go back to the front counter when the sound of raised voices drifted down from the upper level. There was no mistaking Charlie’s angry tone.

“Perfect.” Just what he needed was Charlie to go off already half-cocked and lose his shit all over his boss. On her best day, she was a she-dragon.

Hurrying up the steps two at a time, Malcolm hoped he’d make it. If there was anything left for Charlie to salvage from this, it would be best to get him out of there and calmed down before he burned any bridges.

“News flash, Leslie. You don’t actually own me or any part of me.”

“Neither does he, Charles.”

“You don’t know shit about it.”

“You thrive here!”

Malcolm reached the top of the stairs in time to witness Charlie slam something into a box. “You don’t know shit about that, either.”

“I know you’re the goddamn best assistant I’ve ever had.”

“I’m the only one who puts up with your BS, Leslie, and you know
it.”

“We’re a good team.”

“We aren’t a team.” Charlie dug something out of the box and shook it in her general direction. It was an ornate silver rectangle framing something Malcolm couldn’t see. “This is my
life
, Leslie. This?” He waved a hand around the room. “This is my fucking job, and you’ve made it so hellish I can’t function outside of it. This place is a soul-sucking nightmare and you are the thing that goes bump in the night.” He finished with a finger stabbing the air a foot from her face. “You are the thing that makes me want to tear holes in my life. I live on a fucking cliff, and some days, the thought of coming in here makes me feel fucking”—he held up his free hand, forefinger and thumb a hairsbreadth apart—“this close to the edge, I swear. I have a
life
! I have something I love, and fuck you if you are going to take one more second of that away from me!”

He clenched his fists and jammed the frame back in the box to the accompaniment of a brittle shattering sound.

Malcolm stopped at the threshold and said nothing. He almost wanted to duck around the corner and hide. He’d never heard Charlie talk like that to anyone. His affable, feather-smoothing Charlie didn’t talk that way to people. He threw things and he slammed things, but he didn’t shout and curse and call people names.

“If you quit, Charles, this gallery doesn’t owe you a thing.”

Charlie carefully placed a stapler, of all things, into the box and slammed the lid on. “You can stuff the entire fucking gallery up your wizened, dried-up old-bag cunt, Leslie. Fucked if I’ll take one more thing from you. Ev-er.” He picked up the box and turned on his heel.

Malcolm stepped back, loath to spoil his spectacular exit.

Charlie caught his eye, and the hesitation, the falter was oh so slight. Malcolm covered it by taking the box from his arms and nodding him past. He followed Charlie down the stairs and out the front door. The kid behind the desk didn’t even look up.

Charlie walked woodenly to Malcolm’s car and got into the passenger seat as Malcolm deposited his box in the trunk. When Malcolm joined him in the front they sat in silence for a long time.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Malcolm asked once the air between them had grown so brittle he was sure drawing another breath would make him bleed.

“Pretty much said everything there was to say,” Charlie mumbled. It was a dig, and it went deep enough to touch nerves, but Malcolm squared away the hurt and nodded.

“Then you’d best drive your car home. I’ll meet you there.”

Charlie stared at him, wounded, throbbing with silent, tightly held anger. “Shit,” he said finally. “I guess.” He didn’t move. “Shit,” he said again after a minute. “I left my keys up there.”

If he laughed, it might be the thing that set Charlie off, so Malcolm managed to keep his face neutral as he worked the extra set off his own key chain. “I’ll send Kerry to—”

Charlie’s wounded look bled a little more.

“I’ll come by and pick them up for you another time.” He handed over the spare keys. “Meet me at home.”

A huge sigh leaked out of Charlie. “Oh Master, my Master,” he muttered, curling his anger around the words.

“Or don’t,” Malcolm said. But not until after Charlie had gotten out of the car and closed the door behind him.

All the way home, Malcolm tried to imagine the scenario in which he got this thing between them back under control. He ran two red lights he was so distracted, and the second one, he had to step on the gas to get through before he was broadsided. He yanked the car to the side of the road and turned it off as a truck sped by, inches from his bumper. People blared their horns at him and shouted out their windows to tell him what a jackass he was. Like he needed the reminder.

He couldn’t even control himself. His own breathing or skyrocketing heart rate or the thoughts careening around in his head like so many windblown dead leaves from Charlie’s precious gardens. How the hell was he going to control Charlie or the lashing ends of their relationship enough to get things tied down again?

Time passed as he sat there, head against the steering wheel, hands clenching and unclenching around the vinyl-coated plastic. The repetitive motion was something to do with his hands, something to focus on, a safe place to be when the idea of cutting open something that would bleed and distract him loomed like tornado clouds on the horizon.

It started as it always did, with that hard tightening at the back of his throat. The steel bands twining around his windpipe, locking his jaw in place. The ache of it spread upward, wrapped around his skull, and squeezed, and down, through his chest, into his heart and through his lungs so breath came in small, hitched spasms that shook his whole body. The sting behind his lids shouldn’t have come as a surprise by that point, but it always did. Dry, heaving breath turned to soggy sobs, and the entire car shook with the force.

It was the safest place he could be for this to happen. Not a blade in sight, no way to do something stupid. No way to risk this time being the time Charlie gave up and decided he couldn’t deal anymore.

His phone ringing was what finally called him back to the present, and the way the car rocked every time a big truck whizzed by gave him new shivers of apprehension.

He fumbled the phone out of his pocket and glanced at it. Thirteen missed calls, and Charlie’s number flashing at him from the screen.

“Yeah.” He held the phone to his ear and managed a breath, then another with barely a sniffle between.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Um.” Malcolm looked around. The sky had gone from afternoon sunshine to evening gloom under a cloud-heavy sky. Lights flew past with the cars now, and he couldn’t remember which intersection he’d almost gotten creamed at. He glanced over his shoulder and the familiar silhouette of a box-store horizon oriented him. “Near the furniture place, I guess. The one with the bookstore and the Montana’s.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Um,” he said again.

“Mal?”

“Yeah.” He drew in a quivering breath. “I’m coming.” He reached down and started the car, and his hand barely shook at all. “Be home in ten minutes.” He hung up, tossed the phone on the seat next to him, and pulled carefully back into traffic. He drove with all his attention on the road and darkening sky and the beginnings of what promised to be a horrific thunderstorm. The thought flitted through his head to wonder if Kerry’s plane had gotten off the ground before this storm hit.

When he got there, it was pouring down rain, and he dashed from car to house and still ended up soaked for his effort. Charlie was there with the door held open for him and an arm around his shoulders, dragging him inside and slamming the door behind him.

He expected to follow his lover into the kitchen, but Charlie didn’t let him go. Instead, he found himself crushed against Charlie’s chest, soaking shirt and dripping hair and all.

“Where the hell were you?” Charlie’s voice cracked halfway through the question, and he held Malcolm tighter until Malcolm had to take shallower breaths and the smell of Charlie’s sweat and fear overcame the scent of fresh rain.

“Thinking,” he managed when Charlie loosened enough to give Malcolm breathing room.

“What the fuck were you thinking about that you took three hours to get home?”

“Please don’t—”

“Swear. I know.” Charlie hugged him again. “I know, baby. I’m sorry. It’s been a shitty day.”

Malcolm nodded against his chest. Something about the solidity of him, standing in the doorway, still holding a dripping Malcolm, his warmth seeping in through dampness and shivers, cracked Malcolm’s resolve.

He tried to speak and had to clear his throat. “Yeah, it has.”

“Come on.” Charlie guided him from the door not to the kitchen or living room, as he expected, but to the bedroom. Once there he placed Malcolm in the center of the room and proceeded to undress him one slowly unfastened button at a time.

“Charlie—”

“Shh.” Charlie turned his attention from the button he was undoing to Malcolm and cupped his face. “Do you trust me?”

“What?”

“Do you trust me?”

Malcolm swallowed around that ever-tightening binding holding the back of his tongue down and nodded.

Charlie searched his eyes, but there was no telling if he found what he was looking for there. “Really trust me, Mal.”

Malcolm nodded again. The pain in his throat was not going away. It was getting worse.

“We’ve never put a name on it. Not officially, but I’m not ashamed to say that for fifteen years you’ve been the dominant half, Mal. You taught me what you want. What you like.” He kissed Malcolm’s forehead so very tenderly. “What you need.”

On the off chance all that need was brimming over the edges and about to dampen his lashes, Malcolm closed his eyes and hoped Charlie might not notice.

Another kiss landed on the bridge of his nose. “If I take the lead, it isn’t because I don’t cherish that dynamic we’ve made between us, Mal. It’s because you’re spent, and I need to do this.” A kiss touched his lips, barely, briefly. “Trust me. I’ve only ever wanted to serve you the best I could, and that’s what this is, I promise.” Slowly, he trailed his hands off Malcolm’s face, down his chest, and back to his buttons.

“Now be still and let me do this.” His words were soft. His touch was soft. So why was that tightness growing again, squeezing mercilessly and refusing him the power of speech?

All he could do was stand there as Charlie unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders to the floor. There was no folding or putting away, and Malcolm made a noise intended to be a reminder.

Charlie touched his lips with his fingertips. “Shh. The shirt isn’t the point here.”

All Malcolm could do was stare at him, mute.

“Nod, Mal.”

He was losing the plot. What was the point if it was about Charlie serving him somehow but not following the rules?

“You need to trust me. All those times I put everything in your hands and never questioned, you need to do the same now and trust me that I know what you need from me right now.”

The tightness and the pressure in the back of his throat, creeping up the back of his scalp, churning down through his chest, laid claim to him, and he closed his eyes, kissed the tips of Charlie’s fingers, and waited.

“Good enough for now,” Charlie whispered, replacing his fingers with his lips, once more in only a very brief, very light kiss.

His hands never quite left Malcolm’s body at any time, so even with his eyes closed, Malcolm could feel his presence, know exactly where he was. The lifting of his undershirt didn’t come as a surprise, nor did the instruction to raise his arms.

Nothing in his life had ever felt as vulnerable to him as elevating his arms into the air, his eyes closed, and his shirt sliding off his body. It was more than being physically stripped, and the tightness in his throat spasmed and squeezed out a sound he didn’t recognize.

“Shh,” Charlie soothed again. More kisses landed on Malcolm’s forehead and cheeks and eyelids. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Everyone had the wrong end of the stick here.

And then Charlie circled an arm around his waist and pulled him close, and the kiss that lingered on his mouth was tender. Real. It evoked yet another unidentifiable sound and made that tightness quiver and the sting behind his closed lids brighten to fierce, burning pain, and he couldn’t breathe at all.

“There it is,” Charlie said softly, cupping Malcolm’s head and pushing his cheek against Charlie’s still-clothed chest. “That’s it.”

Malcolm heaved in a breath and tried to grapple with one single thought that made sense. All he had was that Charlie was a very solid block of heated reality, and all he could do was cling to the only thing that made sense while his breath hitched and caught and shuddered through his chest, ripping at that tight passage of his throat and tearing it open until the sounds coming out could only be sobs.

And for that, Charlie did not shush him. He held him close, kissed his hair, and waited for the storm to pass.