Sixteen

Seth

 

“Where have you been since the fire?” Sacha’s focus on Parker was intense, laser sharp. Seth wouldn’t last under that hard stare—or maybe he would; it was pretty hot.

Parker winced, his blond eyebrows coming together in a V. “I didn’t know there was a security camera at the marina. I was trying to save my life, not play ‘Unnamed Male Character, first to die in Bond movie.’ With all the fire trucks and other responders arriving on the scene it was chaos, and I managed to slip out. I freaked out because… you know…”

Sacha nodded.

“Yeah, so.” He paused to take a gulp of his beer. “When I saw on the news that a body had been discovered, I didn’t know what to do. I’m not a cop. After I finished freaking out, I went and took out as much cash as I could. Then I holed up at a motel for a while.”

Sacha snorted. “Only you would become an accountant, inadvertently find your first job with a firm fixing the books for a company claiming to be a nonprofit, and end up being a whistle-blower at the ripe age of twenty-five.”

“Really?” Seth looked back and forth between the two of them.

Parker answered, “Yeah, really, mad skills. Kind of why I’m not an accountant anymore and have a thing for cops, I guess. What else did Zeke have to say?”

Whatever Parker claimed had motivated him to leave his boyfriend, he wasn’t as done with this Zeke guy as he claimed. “You’ll have to talk to Mae,” Sacha taunted.

Parker grimaced.

“Anyway, I mostly laid low, waiting to see if the cops would catch the real criminals who did this and not some lowlife trespasser who’d been illegally staying on his ex-boyfriend’s boat.” He took another long gulp of his beer.

Night had fallen; the backyard was in complete darkness except for the light leaking onto the yard from the open kitchen door, but Seth didn’t need to see Parker’s expression to know he was lost and a little scared. Privately, Seth thought Parker should be more scared, but maybe it was the “Sacha effect.” “So, what are we going to do?” he asked.

Sacha narrowed his eyes. Seth felt a delightful shiver run down his spine. “Don’t you fucking dare. I take care of my own.”

“Dude, the lone cowboy thing is not going to fly. Seriously, call Adam.”

“Oh, wow. This is going to be awesome,” Parker breathed. “l want popcorn with my front-row seat.”

Seth chuckled. Parker was funny, and it was awesome to see Sacha flustered and protective.

“I can tell we’re going to get along.”

Sacha groaned, covering his face with his hands. Seth made eye contact with Parker, and they both snickered.

“Fine. I’ll call Adam, but for my own sanity I am waiting until tomorrow. I can’t handle any more of this crazy right now. For the rest of tonight we are pretending everything is normal.” He raised an eyebrow in Parker’s direction. “As normal as it can be, at any rate.”

Parker sputtered and muttered something about showing Sacha who was normal.

Taking pity on both of them, Seth handed Sacha another beer. At this rate someone was going to need to run to the store for more. Sacha snatched it from him, popped the cap, and guzzled half of it while Parker and Seth watched in silence. As he set the bottle down, a breeze finally mustered the strength to make itself felt, and the three of them sighed in relief. It wouldn’t be the heat that killed them tonight.

Relaxed Sacha was hilarious. He and Parker regaled Seth with stories from their childhood. Sacha steered clear of stories about being in the Marshals, but he did tell a couple pretty funny ones from when he’d been an MP.

“I was so green, not prepared for the on-base domestic calls. Most calls we got were for drunkenness or domestics. My favorite was when we stopped a woman for weaving all over the road. My partner leans in the window, ‘I need some ID, ma’am.’ She asks, ‘Which one?’ then opens her wallet and she has two different sets of military ID.” He snorted. “She was so drunk she forgot she was committing bigamy, married to a seaman and an airman. We laughed about that for months. Drunk driving and bigamy.”

“No way.”

“Yes, way.”

And so it went.

 

The weather broke later that night, or morning. Sometime around three a.m., before true light but long past midnight, clouds rolled in, blanketing the region and lowering the temperature significantly. With all the windows open, his house was freezing. Seth’d woken up shivering, the blankets on his bed long crumpled into a heap on his floor in favor of a single sheet. They’d all gone to sleep in separate beds, otherwise he would’ve wrapped himself around the warmth of Sacha’s body.

“Crud,” he muttered. He dragged himself up and searched groggily in the half-light for the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d taken off the night before. Stumbling out into the living room, he found Parker asleep, huddled under a throw blanket.

Quietly, Seth made his way around the house shutting windows, trying to stay as asleep as possible. He turned from the last window, the one over the kitchen sink, and slammed into a hard chest. Before he could cry out, lips came down on his, swallowing the sound. Sacha’s tongue licked his lips, requesting entrance. Of course he could come in. He could come anywhere he wanted.

He welcomed Sacha’s invasion, their tongues dancing together and against each other. It was heady; Seth was having a hard time remembering to breathe.

“I missed you in my bed, next to me.”

Seth’s stomach clenched. The things Sacha said messed with his resolve to keep things casual.

“Yes. But my bed, not that thing you are sleeping on,” Seth whispered back.

“Whatever you want,” Sacha growled before pushing him up against the counter and trapping him there with his long arms.

“My bed,” Seth repeated.

Sacha manhandled him across the kitchen and down the tiny hallway into his bedroom. Seth could have sworn he heard a snigger from the living room but chose to pretend he didn’t. It was incredible how Sacha changed when they were in the privacy of the bedroom, self-assured and comfortable with what they were about to do.

They fucked and weren’t quiet about it.

 

 

Parker glared at them when they emerged several hours later.

“What?” Sacha asked, as if he hadn’t gotten Seth so wound up and turned on that by the time he came it was doubtful the entire neighborhood didn’t know he was getting laid. The man had a very inventive imagination, which he put to good use on Seth’s body. He tried hiding his smile, but Parker spotted it.

“I don’t even know you anymore, but seriously? I am not old enough for all of what I heard going on in there. And you could have told me you were, you know, sexing it up already.”

“Ear plugs, Parker. Ear plugs,” Sacha teased.

Parker grumbled something under his breath and pulled the blanket closer around him. His hair was sticking up all over the place; he looked like a cartoon character.

“You could at least feed me. And I couldn’t find any coffee.” His eyes widened dramatically. “Please tell me you drink coffee,” he begged Seth. “You’re not some kind of healthy-living guy.”

Seth rummaged through his spices-and-other-stuff cabinet. “After all the beer we had last night? I don’t think so. I think I am out of coffee, though. Damn.”

“I’ll go. You two,” Sacha pointed a finger at both of them, “stay here.” He went into his room for a few minutes before coming back out dressed for public in shorts, a worn gray T-shirt emblazoned with “Property of US Marshals,” and an unzipped plain black hoodie. He jammed his bare feet into the shoes lying by the front door. “I mean it: stay here,” he said before shutting the door behind himself. The roar of the truck’s engine echoed across the neighborhood when he gunned it down the street. Damn, he was sexy.

“Jesus, I hate that truck.” Parker turned to look at Seth, who was standing between the kitchen and the living room. “So, you and Sacha. We need to talk.”

“Talk? About what?”

“About you and Sacha,” Parker repeated. “We may not be blood related, but he is my family.”

“I’m pretty sure Sacha and I are both adults. We can figure this out by ourselves.”

“Hmm.” Parker nodded. “You are both adults. But I don’t know you. I know Sacha.” He patted the cushion next to him.

God help him if Seth didn’t walk over and sit down as bidden.

“I’ve always suspected Sacha was gay, or bi, I guess.”

“Uh, okay.” Seth wasn’t sure where Parker was going with this or why it required sitting down on the couch.

“I was seven when he came to live with us.”

The ends of Seth’s fingers tingled. The nervous, anxious feeling fluttered in his gut.

“Okaaaay?”

Parker took a deep breath before continuing. “Look, we grew up in foster care. It wasn’t a nightmare; it wasn’t great. The family had their own agenda, and I guess, since we are still alive and none of us has had too much therapy, it wasn’t too bad. But Sacha, he’s a different kind of person. Like, he is wired to protect. But also, mmmmm—” another breath, “there’s no natural trust, right? You have to earn it. He’s always taken care of himself and a few very lucky other people.”

“You and your sister, Mae-Lin.”

“Yeah.” Parker narrowed his eyes. “And, I think, you.”

And damn if that didn’t make the nervous fluttering in his stomach intensify. Seth tried to choke it back, to swallow the swirling unease.

He hid it with a chuckle that probably sounded more like a whinny. “Nah, we’re pretty casual.”

“Casual.” Parker spat the word back at Seth. “I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to tell you. When Sacha decides he’s in, he goes all in. There’s no middle ground where he is concerned. We may not have talked much in the past few years, but I know he hasn’t changed. Lemme give you an example.”

He smoothed the blanket on his lap. “He was like a wild animal when they brought him to the house. He had nothing, not even a bag like the social workers normally hand out for kids’ belongings, only the clothes on his back. He spoke very little English and basically refused to acknowledge any of us.” Parker snorted when Seth rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that went on for a few weeks. We shared a room. At first I was scared of him, because he never spoke. That changed when Sacha was assigned to the same school as me. One day he was out during recess and saw me being bullied by some other kids. It was probably pretty harmless, but all I remember is him standing between me and them, yelling at them, protecting me.”

Parker looked at Seth, his blue eyes serious. “After that, I never worried about feeling safe. Poor guy, I bonded to him like a baby duck or something. But the thing is, I hadn’t felt safe since the fire that took my family… and suddenly somebody had my back. Sacha has never wavered from that. Even though he thinks he has been protecting me the past few years by staying away, see… he was still protecting me.”

He narrowed his eyes at Seth. “I see what’s happening. If you aren’t dead serious about Sacha, then you better back the fuck away, right now.”

“I, uh—” Seth stammered.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Asshole.”

“Hey!”

“Me and Mae have been worried about him being alone. But this is worse. If you fuck up… if you break him…”

“Are—are you threatening me?” Seth couldn’t believe this conversation, and before coffee too.

“I’m telling you to be careful. To think about what you are doing and what you intend.”

 

 

Avoiding Parker and his knowing gaze for the rest of the morning—an absolute necessity—proved to be easy. After coffee, Sacha took Parker to go find some new clothes to replace the ones that went up in flames with the marina. Seth spent the morning researching Theodore Garrison and Owen Penn. Owen proved to be elusive, although there was a Penn family that had lived in eastern Washington that might fit. For Theodore, the likeliest candidate seemed to be Theodore Garrison, Emeritus Professor of English at the large state university in Seattle.

The problem was—in Seth’s mind, anyway—Theodore was too young, his birth year recorded on the university website as 1922. Seth stared at the picture of the two men. It was impossible to tell their ages. The men in the picture could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty. They wore cocky grins like they had a secret. Or Seth could be projecting.

The grainy quality of the black-and-white photograph didn’t help. He stared at it for several minutes, until it swam out of focus, before sliding it back on top of the stack of documents. The postcards were no help, and the letters’ handwriting was too faded and spidery to read. Dammit. He knew the biggest clue was the battered book of poetry with the dedication on the title page. The words seemed bittersweet. Where had Theodore gone that he could only hope?

Sighing, Seth stretched, his shoulders and back popping from sitting too long at the table. Where were Sacha and Parker? It couldn’t possibly take this long to decide on clothing. In any case, he had clients to keep happy and an anemic bank account to bolster.

Sacha and Parker returned as he was headed out the door. They were in the middle of an argument. Seth couldn’t tell what it was about; he thought it was mostly that Parker liked to argue with whatever Sacha said, and Sacha had the whole bossy, in-control thing going on. Seth was glad for the excuse to leave them to it, because he suspected whatever was happening between Sacha and him pushed up against a personal boundary. One he wasn’t sure he was ever going to be prepared to move across.