Chapter 9.

Jon took the weekend off sick, and if Connie thought there was more to it than a bout of flu she didn’t say anything.

“You’ve been working hard, raising a lot of money for us, organizing all these projects, doing a lot of good. Take care of yourself, sweetie. I’ll send one of the boys over with some food.”

Food was Connie’s answer to every problem.

He cleaned the apartment, and checked his phone messages every fifteen minutes for the first day, until it finally sank in that Ed wasn’t going to be calling to apologize for his brothers and tell him that he loved him, at least not any time soon. He resisted the impulse to leave the sheets on the bed and smelling of Ed, because he was too old for that nonsense. Anyway, doing lots of laundry was supposed to make you feel better. He washed everything, some things twice, and then he was sorry that he’d washed the sheets and they didn’t smell of Ed anymore.

He started cleaning again and found a cuff link under the bed, and sat on the floor staring at it for a long time, wanting to cry. This was what happened when you fell in love with a dream. You woke up and the guy was a jerk and you were alone again. Myrtle sat on his lap and rubbed against him and he thought that she was being sweet and sympathetic, until she grabbed the cuff-link off the palm of his hand and took off running. Cats and lovers. He should have known. You couldn’t change who they were.

He went down to the piers and ate fresh fish and chips from his favorite vendor, and it was tasteless. The seagulls enjoyed the chips and Myrtle and Vine would appreciate the fish, so at least it wouldn’t be wasted. He wondered when was the last time that his sweet Ed had sat on a dock eating fish and chips, and throwing scraps to seagulls. He was beginning to feel sorry for Ed, which didn’t help. The guy couldn’t help who he was, or who his brothers were, it was Jon who was the fool for falling for him. Falling in love with him?

Miguel dropped by his apartment with a large steaming dish that Connie had made, with a wonderful mix of rice and beans and some very spicy sausage. He tried to question the boy about what was happening with that group of teenagers at the Garden, the ones he was worried about, but Miguel wouldn’t talk, and he didn’t have enough energy to pursue the matter right then.

There was something going on, though, and he would be better off looking into that than moping around over a man who would believe that he was a gold-digger. What kind of a man would stand by and let anyone, brother or not, talk like that to someone he cared about? Obviously dream lover didn’t love him. He was, he finally decided, a total idiot, and went back to work, sadder but wiser.

Connie hugged him but didn’t say anything, and he managed to persuade himself that life would go on. It would, of course. All he had to do was look around him to know that the human spirit could survive much worse than being let down by a lover. While he was waiting for his heart to heal, he could garden. There was the better part of an acre of potatoes to be planted. At least the cheque from the Foundation had cleared the bank.

With a crowd of pre-school children helping and advising, in several languages, it took most of the week to get the potatoes in the ground, along with a border of corn and sunflowers. Everyone was pleased with the result, and the harvest would fill a lot of bellies over the winter. He wished Ed would be there to see it, but remembered that it would be moping to think like that. No moping.

The next big chunk of money they needed would build a community kitchen with an attached day care. Connie had been showing him plans for the building since the day they’d met. The plans were continually evolving as the Garden grew, and if the current version was anything to go by it was going to look wonderful when it eventually got built, and do a lot of good in the community. He had a feeling the money wouldn’t be coming from the Renfield Foundation, though. They’d find it from somewhere; Connie was a force to be reckoned with, and Jon had more than a few connections of his own.

He almost ran out of cat food, which would have been a major disaster, and got distracted at the pet food store by a pair of adorable calico kittens up for adoption. He wasn’t sure that Myrtle and Vine would forgive him, though, and it wasn’t a big enough apartment to house a four way running cat fight. He settled for just buying his two their usual organic cat food, some more catnip and a few more cat toys, and making a donation to the shelter the kittens had come from. They were cute, and someone would adopt them soon enough.

It wasn’t his job to take care of all the strays, even when the strays were tall dark haired men with sad eyes, back in his dreams now and begging for forgiveness. Sadly, the real lover apparently didn’t care enough to come around or even call, although some gifts arrived by courier. The cats opened theirs, but his went in the closet, except for the flowers, which he took down to Connie. Did Ed honestly think that flowers and a bottle of wine would fix things? Or was that his standard goodbye gift?

The apartment next to his, which had been empty for a while, came up for sale again, and once again he debated buying it. He’d thought about buying it before and knocking the two apartments together to make one large one, but this one had more than enough room for one man and two cats. Nothing had changed about that, and nothing probably ever would.

He tried to keep busy enough that he didn’t even have time to sleep, because every time he fell asleep there was a tall dark eyed man in his dreams. His dream lover ran his hands through Jon’s red hair, and kissed his neck, and murmured words of love to him.

In his dreams they were sitting on the sofa, and his lover’s arm came around his shoulders and pulled him in closer and then onto his lap, and firm lips came down to his, and he felt like he was drowning, sinking into warmth and love. He wrapped his arms around Ed’s neck and held him close as their mouths explored urgently, tongues battling back and forth, both of them winning this war.

He went over backwards with his man on top of him, and their bodies fit together like they had been lovers forever. He thought they had been, that they had been meant for each other, and in his dreams he could still pretend that. Chests pressing against each other, erections rubbing together against their bellies, arms and legs pulling each other closer, and it was everything he had ever wanted or needed.

His dream lover raised his head and smiled at him, and said, “I love you, even if you are a gold-digger.” And then he woke up, every time, trying not to cry. And then he went back to brooding about the collective Renfields.

He kept thinking about what the brothers had implied, but they had been wrong about him, and in his heart he knew they were wrong about Ed. They were playing some kind of power game, and he was caught in the middle. Ed wasn’t the kind of slut who had a different lover every weekend. But why were they doing this, and why hadn’t Ed called him? Should he call Ed? He hated games like this.