Chapter Two
AS THE WEEKEND of his arrival in Iowa unfolded, Randy Jansen digested the depth of quiet misery his friends had sunk into.
Only a little of Sam and Mitch’s despair was because of work, school, and wedding stress, no matter how they tried to pass it off as such. Most of it was the acute torture that came with living in a small town. They could pretend they liked living here, that they had assimilated, but the truth was, they hadn’t, and they weren’t happy. And that made Randy unhappy.
They were sure pigheaded about the topic, though. When Randy tried to bring up the idea that perhaps this was not the perfect place for them after all, that maybe they should acknowledge Iowa’s flaws, Mitch only said Middleton couldn’t hold a candle to his hometown of McAllen, Texas, which, while true, didn’t mean shit. Hell came in an assortment of shapes and sizes, most of it hating the fuck out of a rainbow.
It was clear, too, from watching Sam in the grocery store and at his favorite Mexican restaurant, that the carefree young man Randy knew in Las Vegas and on the road was someone else entirely in Middleton. Randy didn’t care for this Sam: nervous, embarrassed of himself in a way that made it abundantly clear why he’d been so hesitant about his kink. Mitch wasn’t as affected, but it was clear he too felt the pressure of a small town. Head down, out of the way, don’t invite trouble.
Fuck. That.
Randy saw Mitch off on Sunday night, watched some bad TV with Peaches, and snuggled him in bed—without sex.
“I know he said it was okay to fool around without him here, but it feels like cheating to me.” Sam blushed as he said this and looked up guiltily at Randy. “I’m sorry.”
Randy kissed his forehead and held him tight enough to let them feel each other’s erections. “That’s all right. I don’t mind.”
Sam sighed, settling into Randy’s embrace. “Well, I think Mitch will. He wanted pictures. And don’t forget he said point-blank on the way out the door he wanted some marks on my ass when he got back.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to let me bully you into baring your ass, won’t you, and sending some naughty pics that don’t involve me touching you. And I’ll have to put the marks on you with a crop.”
Sam shivered. “We don’t have a crop, though. Mitch always uses his hands, because that’s how I like it.”
“I brought a crop and a cane in my carry-on.” He pinched Sam’s ass. “Mmm, that’s going to make a nice picture. You with your pants down, the crop in your mouth. Looking up at the camera all desperate, your cock swinging.”
Sam squirmed. “Randy.”
They did take exactly that picture, which Randy sent to Mitch with the added comment, I also brought my cane.
Mitch replied within fifteen minutes. Pic with that next.
Randy sent Mitch several more pictures that night, and a video of him using the cane over Sam’s jeans—then one last pic of Sam’s reddened ass when they were done. Once Mitch got to a rest stop, Sam shooed Randy away and had a private Skype session with his fiancé, one that Randy could hear even when he went to stand on the balcony. He went to bed blue-balled beside a sore but sated Sam.
He didn’t mind. He told himself he’d channel his sexual frustration into keeping his mind sharp, planning his attack.
He launched into it Monday morning, in total stealth. He fixed Sam breakfast and made jokes about sack lunches coming as soon as he could get to the store. Then he dropped Sam off at community college, waving and promising to pick him up at four thirty.
Once his charge was safely tucked away at school, Randy set off to unpack the nasty little town full of good people who liked to judge kinky boys.
He started with a self-guided tour, which didn’t take long. The town was not much more than a postage stamp. Randy went through the downtown then followed the highway north to the high school. He drove out to Cherry Hill, which he knew from Sam was where his aunt and uncle lived. He scoped out the mini-mall, the farm implement store. When he spied the grocery, he parked and went inside, emerging forty-five minutes later with five cloth bags full of food. After a stop at the apartment to put everything away, he set an alarm to make sure he didn’t miss Sam, and then he locked up the apartment and went, on foot, into the belly of the beast.
Downtown Middleton was, as far as Randy could tell, Mayberry. It was the sort of cute village he’d pined for as a kid until he got old enough to spy the cancer lurking beneath such places. The streets were tidy, the storefronts homey, but lift the lid and you found mold right away. Which was sad because there was real color and all kinds of potential in the town. Middleton was about fifteen thousand people, the county seat and a metropolitan hub for the stream of microscopic towns surrounding it. It had two high schools, public and private (Catholic), a community college, and a vibrant amateur theater. It had a coffee shop that whispered of hippies and book clubs.
The residents were, to Randy’s surprise, not entirely white, but also Latino and a small representation of African-Americans. The ethnic groups didn’t mix with each other, instead living in weird parallel versions of the town. Different neighborhoods, different streets for their businesses, different groups of kids loitering around parked cars or walking down the street.
The white people, no surprise, were the source of most of Middleton’s skunkiness. They did their best to pretend it was 1950 or at least a world without competitive commerce: there was a furniture store where everything was overpriced as hell, a clothing store which was more of the same, and four kitschy antique stores. The proprietors regarded Randy suspiciously as he browsed their merchandise, though that was nothing compared to the tension when a person of color drifted inside. Smiles were reserved for Caucasians and people who could be in Tea Party ads. Which meant the shop owners rarely smiled, because these patrons were few and far between.
Down side streets, however, were Latino stores that thrived. Randy discovered a Mexican grocery and a bakery, both overflowing with happy customers of all races chattering in Spanish and English. A Mexican general store with every sign in the window in Spanish clearly did brisk business as well. There were several Mexican restaurants and a bar, and the Latino businesses had young, aggressive shopkeepers welcoming anyone with money to spend.
The hub for angry old white people was the Middleton Cafe, which was retro-chic only because it hadn’t once been updated, only the prices on the menus increasing. Randy spent an hour there reading The Des Moines Register and The Middleton Herald Leader as well as the PennySaver while he had an early lunch and eavesdropped. He heard an almost perfect robotic rehashing of the latest conservative talking points from one table, and some idealistic garbage from a pack of retired do-gooding liberals in a booth behind him. The whole room was nothing but theory and wishes about what was wrong with the world and how things could be fixed if people would only do this, that, or the other thing, or if so-and-so would die/get out of the way. The local newspaper was more of the same, and for that matter the opinion pages of The Register weren’t much better. Everybody practiced armchair governance and revolution.
There wasn’t a local Spanish paper, but the general store manager brightened when Randy spoke to him in Spanish and happily sold him a roaster for his Thanksgiving turkey, and the Mexican grocery provided him with some much-appreciated culinary comforts. Nobody talked about politics, though there were a few flyers for immigration rights lawyers and rallies.
Randy took note of the posters in the white stores too: most of them were school oriented, the rest from churches. He stopped by the two white bars on Main Street, where at the first one he had bad beer and deliberately lost three rounds of pool to a local retired vet missing his two front teeth and most of the buttons on his shirt. At the second pub, he pretended to give a shit about a talking-heads sports show and bought a round for the four third-shift meat-packing-plant workers decorating the stools. He eyeballed that establishment’s flyers on the way out the door—local bands, mostly country, a veterans benefit, a fireman’s pancake breakfast.
Yes, Middleton, Iowa, was pretty much what Randy had expected it to be. There was one place, though, he hadn’t explored, and in many ways it was the most important recon yet. With several new friends and a significant lay of the land, Randy crossed the street to Biehl Drug, the store Sam’s aunt and uncle owned.
It was small.
Randy hadn’t expected the pharmacy to be a sprawling retail giant, and yet as he came through the door, the bell above his head tinkling to announce his arrival, all he could think of was that the place was tiny. Little, and so throwback it was almost creepy. A makeup counter—seriously, a makeup counter—stood to his right, and what had once been a soda fountain was on his left, now a display for electric razors, hairdryers, and curling irons. A glance at their stickers confirmed they were twice the price they would be at Walmart or any other store.
“May I help you?”
The woman who’d appeared at Randy’s elbow was decidedly not Sam’s famously sour-faced aunt Delia. The female next to him was young, bright-eyed, and smiling. Randy smiled back as he caught a glance at her name tag. “Emma. Yes, you most certainly can. I’m looking for some condoms.”
She blinked, her smile not falling but growing more guarded. “Sure. I’ll be happy to show you, sir.”
Emma led him to the back of the store, and Randy took inventory as they walked. The floor squeaked under their feet, thin planks of polished wood that had to have been laid over one hundred years ago. Above his head suspended fluorescent fixtures buzzed, casting the narrow aisles in a sick yellow glow. A pungent bouquet of staleness and detergent assailed him, like a nursing home without the bodies. Silence rang about his ears, crowding out the hum of the bulbs. Ahead of him he saw the pharmacy counter, a raised dais walled off with fiberglass except for a narrow delivery/counseling station, filled with towering, crowded shelves and bathed in an even harsher, brighter set of overhead lights.
He tried to imagine Sam working here and shuddered.
The condoms were in a locked cabinet on the shelf just beneath the counter, and Emma had to ask the balding, white-coated man at the computer terminal to pass her a key. This would be Sam’s uncle Norman, without question.
Emma unlocked the cabinet and pushed open the glass door. “Go ahead and help yourself.”
The selection was paltry, and after watching Emma perform the dance of the lock, Randy assumed the pharmacy didn’t sell condoms very often. How many people were brave enough to ask for prophylactics? Probably the only reason Biehl Drug carried them at all was because the single thing worse than having to sell condoms would be discovery as a less-than-full-service pharmacy.
Finding a brand and size that were adequate and rolling his eyes inwardly at the price markup, Randy slipped three packages off the metal peg. “Rather sad display of lubricants, Emma.”
It was kind of fun, though depressing, how his essentially basic request for sexual paraphernalia flustered her. Wasn’t Emma supposed to be Sam’s designated fruit fly?
She glanced around the case as if seeing it for the first time. “Well, there’s that tube of KY. Oh no. It’s out of date. I’m sorry. I wonder if we have more in the back.”
“That’s all right. I’m not looking for her pleasure anyway. And while I’m giving you a critique of your sexual supplies, they’re not always family planning aids.” He pointed to the peeling label on the cabinet’s rim.
She wasn’t simply flustered now, she was awkward, clearly wishing Randy would go away and end her torment. “Um, sorry. I just work here.”
This—this—was the woman who’d applauded Sam’s alley fuck? Though as Randy recalled Sam’s retelling of his journey from Middleton to Vegas, he remembered Emma was the friend who had tried, repeatedly, to call Sam home.
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, trying to decide if he should explain who he was and give her a chance to defend herself. Except Randy started to wonder if Sam had even told Emma about him.
She smiled, the stretch of her lips declaring her someone who seriously wanted this confrontation over. “Is there anything else you needed, or should I ring you up?”
“Nope, pile of condoms ought to do it.”
As she checked him out, Randy scanned her one more time, taking in the last few details that were her tell, and they made him sad. She wasn’t a prude, and she had the trappings to let go and have fun, but she was, in so many ways, a symbol of all that held Sam back. As she totaled his purchases, engagement ring glinting in the overhead light, Randy could feel the hint of wildness before him taming under the weight of bridal catalogs and the promise of a house in a nice development, possibly with a whirlpool tub.
This, he reminded himself, was what Sam’s wedding juxtaposed. This was the version of himself Sam couldn’t have. Never mind Sam shouldn’t want it. Emma didn’t really want it either—but she wanted to belong. She wanted security and safety and solidity.
So long as Sam wanted to take it up the ass with another dick in his mouth instead of politely pounding a pussy, he couldn’t belong. Not here. Not ever. Any wedding Sam planned in this environment wouldn’t just be an also-ran. It would be nothing short of a total disaster.
“Emma, when you’re finished with the customer, I need to see you in my office.”
Randy turned toward the back of the pharmacy and saw a thin, pinch-faced woman with severe hair and cold, dead eyes looking back at him. She raked her gaze over Randy, mouth flattening in a line of disapproval.
Randy bit back a laugh. Sam’s aunt, in the flesh. Oh, Delia Biehl, it’s lovely to meet you.
He winked at Emma and picked up the brown paper bag—seriously, a stapled brown paper bag—with a flourish. “Thanks, sugar. I’d say I’ll think of you when I use them, but you’re seriously not my type. Catch you around.”
A ray of hope bloomed in him as Emma narrowed her eyes, dropping her reserve and studying him as if he were under a microscope. “Wait. Do I know you?”
“No, but we share a friend. I’ll give Sam your love.” He waved at the back of the pharmacy. “Stay sexy, Deils.”
Randy strode out of the pharmacy, smiling as Delia sputtered indignantly behind him. He ambled up the street to the apartment, letting a plan unfold in his mind.
Sam and Mitch wanted to get married. Sam—hell, both of them—wanted to belong, but nobody could truly belong here. Middleton, Iowa, was a quiet anvil pressing slowly but effectively in the center of his best friends’ chests, crushing out their joy.
But Sam had to get married in Iowa. Even if Nevada had marriage equality, Randy acknowledged that getting hitched in Sam’s home state was a symbol for Sam, a kind of stepping stone before he bloomed in a brighter future.
It was going to take some research. It was going to take some time, and more than a little creativity. And it required one more minor yet crucial element.
Randy backtracked to the Mexican general store and stuck his head in, waving as the owner greeted him with a smile. “Hello again, sir. What can I do for you?”
Randy nodded at the bulletin board beside the cash register. “Do you happen to know of anybody looking to sell a car?”