Chapter 5
WE WERE sitting in the boarding area, and I was looking across the terminal at Landry as he stood in line at Starbuck’s. When Chris had appeared the following morning, Landry had given him the good news that we would go to Vegas with him. He had grabbed his brother and then me, repeating over and over how much he appreciated it. I told him that touching me a lot was not the way to endear himself to Landry. When Chris saw his face, the glare, the clenched jaw, the corded muscles in his neck, he understood. “Possessive” was an understatement where Landry was concerned.
I had called my friend Donna, who was a travel agent, and she did some wheeling and dealing and got the three of us coach seats together on the left side of a 747.
Landry packed because as OCD as he was, you could not ask for better. He never forgot anything. We could be lost at sea and be okay the way the man accounted for every possibility.
So early the following morning, right around five thirty, I was sitting in the chairs watching him stand in line to get drinks for the flight and fiddle with his iPod at the same time. As usual, Landry had surprised me. I had thought he’d be a mess, be scared or worried, but he wasn’t. He was a rock. His voice had changed to matter-of-fact, and he had politely refused his brother’s offer to buy our plane tickets, busting out his American Express and telling him that we would take care of it. And that was Landry. He could be a complete and utter basket case and then flip and become the epitome of a cool, calm yuppie businessman. Chris kept looking at him, waiting for some kind of psychotic break.
On the plane, I got the window because that was where Landry wanted me. He took the middle seat, and Chris got the aisle. Once we were in the air, Landry lifted the armrest between us and snuggled into my side, head on my shoulder, thigh wedged next to mine. I was still tired, so I succumbed fast, military cap down over my eyes, my fingers buried in Landry’s thick hair, massaging his head as I listened to his breath even out. I woke up two hours later when we hit some choppy air and the flight attendant wanted to check if Landry was buckled in. I moved the blanket so she could see and then showed her mine.
“Thank you so much,” she whispered to me, smiling. “Some people get so annoyed.”
“My Aunt Anita.” I smiled at her. “She’s a flight attendant at Continental. She tells me great stories all the time.”
She nodded. “Well thank you for understanding. Go back to sleep.”
I nodded.
“Your boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“He’s very handsome,” she told me.
And I agreed. I realized, after a minute, that Chris was gone, probably in the bathroom or something, but since I didn’t really care where he was, I went back to sleep.
The rest of the flight passed unnoticed, and I woke back up around nine thirty in the morning Detroit time, which meant that it was six thirty in the morning in Vegas. We had just another half an hour to go so I got up; since most everyone else was asleep, there was no wait to get into the bathroom. When I got back, I climbed over Chris, and when I sat down, Landry sat up, bleary, hair sticking up, looking confused.
“Morning, baby.” I smiled at him.
He squinted at me and tried to push Chris off of his shoulder.
“Quit that,” I chided, chuckling. “He’s asleep; that’s mean.”
“I don’t care. He has to get up anyway, and he’s fuckin’ drooling on me.” He squinted and put his finger on Chris’s forehead, pushing him away, moving as far into me as possible.
“You’re such an ass.”
He turned to look at me, and the smile was the one I really liked, wicked and confident, eyes glittering. He was beautiful.
“Leave him alone,” I said, taking my cap off, rubbing my buzzed to the scalp hair that I never let grow out, and smiling at him. “Gimme a kiss.”
“All these orders this morning.” He sighed and leaned in, his lips sliding over mine, fitting, as always, like they had been custom made for me.
“God, I gotta pee,” he said when he leaned back.
“By all means,” I teased him.
“Get up,” he snapped at his brother as he climbed over him.
Chris straightened in his seat, looking worse than both Landry and me. “Did you get up?”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess you weren’t, like, a total shit like he just was.”
I squinted at him.
After a few minutes he took a breath. “Sorry. I just… you can’t possibly understand, but this is huge for me, for my whole family. We’ve all been living without Landry for the past eight years, and every time we get happy or take a family picture or spend a holiday, it’s always not what it could be because he’s not there.”
I nodded.
“I was fourteen when he left,” he said, eyes on me, “and I missed him.”
It hit me then, what Chris was seeing when he looked at my boyfriend—a piece of his past.
“He was my older brother, and he was there my whole life, and then suddenly he wasn’t, and I remember asking my folks, ‘Where is he? When’s he coming back?’ And you know—” He swallowed hard. “—at first it was, ‘he’ll be back at the end of the summer’, and then when he wasn’t, they were certain they’d hear from him once school started.”
I stared at him, into his eyes, which were a piercing blue, pretty in their own right but not heart-stopping because they were missing the green that made me go weak in the knees.
“I guess my parents hired a private detective when he first left, so they knew where he was,” he told me. “They’ve always known, and they could have reached out, but they were mad, I guess, and so was he, and all this time, no one wrote or sent a Christmas card or anything. It’s just nuts, you know, and what started as, like, this small hurdle or whatever has become this fortified fuckin’ wall, and when I found out what really happened I—”
“What do you mean?”
He squinted at me. “What do you mean what do I mean?”
I leaned back in my seat, not sure what we were talking about. “Your folks threw Landry out because he was gay,” I told him.
“No,” he told me, “they didn’t.”
“What do you mean they didn’t?”
“They threw him out because of the drugs, because of the stealing and the lies. They threw him out because he was diagnosed as having a severe bipolar disorder, where he’s manic one day and severely depressed the next. He takes medicine, doesn’t he?”
And that fast my whole world flipped upside down, because somebody was lying.
“Trevan?”
I leaned back in my seat and just stared at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Your folks hate Landry because he’s gay.”
“No. They’ve known he was gay since he was, like, sixteen, maybe fifteen, why would they care if he was gay?”
Shit.
“Wait.” He was processing. “Is that why he—I mean, the other day when he said that my mother hated him I thought he just meant ’cause they’ve had no contact for the last eight years, but he doesn’t actually think that… he hasn’t actually convinced himself that they threw him out because he was gay, has he? That’s not what he really believes, is it?”
“That’s exactly what he believes.”
He exhaled fast, looking like I’d hit him. “No no no….” He put up a hand. “That… Trevan, he was supposed to go into this really good program and this private clinic in New York, and my mother rented this apartment in town so she could be close to him and… ohmygod….” He closed his eyes, face in his hands, just reeling. “Jesus Christ, he’s completely delusional.”
My eyes narrowed as I looked at him.
“Trevan,” he gasped, swallowing hard, his fingers raking through his hair. “You gotta believe me. My folks didn’t give a shit about Landry being gay. I mean, they found him in the stables with their best friend’s son, you know, and he, Will, got sent to some conversion therapy, reparative therapy, reorientation whatever place, and his parents made him go, but my folks, they never even considered that for Landry because who were they to tell him how to live his life. His orientation had nothing to do with them, but his illness… that was the problem, nothing else.”
There was nothing that led me to believe that he was lying to me. He seemed completely and utterly stunned.
“Ohmygod, I thought he was… I thought how he was acting, how angry he seems at me… I thought that was because I didn’t have the balls to look for him. I mean….” His eyes lifted to mine. “I’ve missed him…. I… my mother’s expecting him to be mad, but she’s not thinking that he didn’t get help. She figured he—”
“Not much of a detective your parents hired if they never knew that he never got help.”
“No. All they heard was where he was, that he was alive and well.”
Remembering two years ago, when he and I had just begun, I wondered what the private detective’s idea of “well” was. “So your folks just let Landry walk out of their lives even though he was sick?”
He cleared his throat. “You don’t know how it was. Just to have him gone for a while, it was such a relief. He stole from them—money, my mother’s jewelry, my father’s old coins. Did he tell you about his cocaine habit? Do you know about that?”
But how could that be? When I met him, there had been vices, addictions, but they had all been abandoned so quickly, so completely, so thoroughly, and never seen again. The man only drank socially, sometimes had wine or beer at home with me, but that was it. He never hid anything from me. I saw him every day, knew where he went and who he saw. There was more reason to doubt me.
“My folks think… I mean, I told them how good he looks, how amazing his business is, and all about you. They’re dying to meet you.”
I had not anticipated that.
“How is he?” he asked, and his breath was shaky. “I mean, how does he function?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, he used to go into these rages and just… he came at me with a knife once. We were in the kitchen and I said something, and our maid was cooking, and he grabbed the chef’s knife, and if my father hadn’t been there… I mean, he came at me, do you understand?”
I understood what he was saying, but Landry’s intent was lost to me since I hadn’t been there.
“I went into his room one time and he was slicing up his arm, and I remember screaming for my mother, and everyone came running and they took away the knife and held him down and just…. Trevan, if he’s never gotten any help, then you’re living on borrowed time.” He said it earnestly, willing me to believe him. “I swear to God he could hurt you… more than hurt you.”
The concern was there, real, on his face.
Yes, Landry could be volatile, but so was I. And Landry was the guy with the balanced life now; mine was the scary one.
“Hey.”
We both looked up, and there he was, yawning, eyes watering as he looked down at me and Chris.
“Can you move so I can sit?” he asked his brother.
“Sure,” Chris said, getting up so Landry could push by him to retake his seat next to me.
Once he was down, Landry put on his seatbelt and offered me either the chocolate chip granola bar or the Power Bar from where he had stuffed them into the pocket in front of his seat.
“I’m not hungry,” I assured him.
“You sure?”
I nodded, and he reached up and touched the ten gauge hammered steel plug in my right ear. “What?”
“I got those red jade ones for you for Valentine’s Day, but you never wear them.”
“That’s because they’re red.” I smiled at him. “What do I own that goes with red?”
He smiled at me. “You need to try something new.”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t like change.”
“I know,” he said, and I felt his fingers tracing over my eyebrow.
“I like all those bracelets you make,” Chris told Landry.
“I have one for you, but I don’t know if you want it.”
Silence.
“You made me one?”
“I picked you one. I didn’t have time to make one from scratch, but I have one that I think fits with your vibe.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have it? I mean… I’d love it.” Chris was breathless, and no matter what he thought of his brother, about his brother, Landry doing anything for him flipped him inside out.
“Here,” he said, and I didn’t open my eyes to see. It wasn’t that important to me. What was important was that Landry had done something for his brother.
“Oh shit, Lan, this is awesome,” he breathed out. He was in awe, and it was good to hear.
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Good. Now the amber is supposed to ground you so you don’t go crazy,” he told him. “Trev always tells me that I should be draped in it.”
Chris sucked in his breath, and I started chuckling.
Landry let out a snort of laughter before his lips pressed to my jaw, his fingers grazing my throat. “Let’s get drunk tonight, okay?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?” he asked, his voice almost a growl. “If I beg down on my knees, will you please tie me up?”
Sometimes Landry needed to be rendered completely helpless to allow his brain to just shut off. In the following moment of vulnerability, when there was no choice but to surrender to me and trust in me, everything could just stop. He was asking me now for the peace that only I could provide for him even as I recognized his desire for the reset even sooner.
“Yes,” I assured him.
He was instantly breathless. “Thank you.”
I could tell from the way his hands were clutching at me that he needed something else. The problem was that I had no idea what it was.
The landing, getting off the plane, getting our luggage, all of that was easy. It was when I told Chris that we were going to rent a car that he balked.
“My father sent our driver to pick us up; he’ll be at your disposal when we get home. You don’t need to get a car, Trevan.”
I cleared my throat. “We do.”
“I just—”
“If we need to leave, we need a car,” Landry said flatly, eyes leveled on his brother. “So let us rent the car or we’ll just get back on the plane. Your choice.”
Chris wasn’t happy. He told me, leaning in, whispering harshly over my shoulder, that he felt I was adding tension that had not even been necessary. I wasn’t going to argue; it was how I needed it to be. I had to have an escape route, and I was much too independent to ask for permission. If I wanted to go, I would go, and that was it.
“I’m starving,” Landry told me minutes later.
“I called Mom last night and told her when we would be in; she’s having breakfast catered this morning.”
I looked at Landry, surprised and a little intimidated. How rich was his family? Catered.
He shook his head, disgusted.
“What?”
“Typical.”
Typical?
Once we were in the silver Dodge Charger following the black Audi sedan, I asked what he meant.
“It’s just like I told you they were. They’re not like your mom or your aunts or your sister. Breakfast for me for the first time in eight years—catered.”
“It’s nice.” I shrugged. “I mean, this way no one has to get up. It’s like being at a restaurant, you can all just talk.”
He was quiet, and I reached out and took his hand, lacing my fingers into his.
“You know what I’d like?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’d like you to pull over so I can give you a blow job.”
I rolled my eyes. “Or, you can think about what you’re gonna say in the next half an hour.”
He sighed deeply and looked away from me.
I so wanted to ask him about what Chris had told me, but I really didn’t want to sound like I doubted his word. We would go with his recollection of the events until it was proven that he was wrong. If he was.
It took a lot longer than half an hour to get to Landry’s childhood home. We passed the strip and just kept going. I had never seen so many mansions, golf courses, and long private drives. The one that led to the Carter home was a mile in and tree lined, so it was like driving under an arbor the whole way. The grounds looked like a botanical garden. There was a man-made lake, and when we were almost to the house, we were suddenly driving over cobblestones. The house was huge—I couldn’t see anything else—and it looked like a giant white Spanish-tiled movie set.
“Holy fuck” was all I could think of to say as I leaned forward over the steering wheel and laughed. “Are you shitting me?”
“What?”
I turned and looked at him, chuckling.
“What?” He was starting to smile.
“Oh, c’mon,” I teased him, waggling my eyebrows at him. “Hey mister, can you keep me? Can I have a diamond car?”
“Ass,” he groused at me, smacking my shoulder.
I turned off the car and got out, closing the door gently, turning around, absolutely blown away by the display of wealth and privilege just from the damn driveway and what else I could see. The front door was under an archway, and the ground was covered in what looked like hand-painted tile. There were walls of water on both sides of the entranceway, all blue with mosaic tiles. I had never seen such opulence in my life. To say I was overwhelmed was an understatement.
“Fuck.” I shook my head, turning to look at my boyfriend over the roof of the car. “What are you doing hanging out with me?”
His eyes were locked on mine. “The only thing I see that’s real here is you.”
“That’s a good fuckin’ answer.” I smiled, waving him over.
He was pretty happy with himself and strutted around the car for good measure, diving at me when he was close, arms around my neck, kissing me happily, hungrily. I grabbed him tight, kissed him back, and when we parted he looked good, solid, content.
“Come on, you guys,” Chris called over to us, gesturing at his driver. “Juan will bring in the luggage, don’t worry.”
“Juan,” I called over to the driver, “we’ll get our own stuff, man, no worries.”
He nodded as I walked around to the trunk of the car.
Landry got his garment bag and his rolling suitcase—the man had brought enough clothes to stay for a week—and I grabbed my bag, whipped it over my back, and followed after him.
Once we went through the outer door, we entered a courtyard with a tile sort of path and a garden on each side, patio furniture, an outdoor fireplace, and what could only be called a grotto, complete with frescoes. Following Chris, we walked over a stone footbridge that crossed over water, and on the other side, there were wide steps covered in grass and wildflowers, and then it looked like you entered a cabana. The porch was huge, all wooden planked and carved and solid. There were chairs every five feet or so, and tables. You could have a party just on the front deck.
It was all windows, floor to ceiling, like the house was just made of them, and we walked into a huge space that was a living room, I guessed, but the doors were open on the other side, and there was the biggest pool I had ever seen in my life, a back deck, and stairs.
I trailed after Landry and Chris. Outside, the stairs descended to a bigger deck where there was a Jacuzzi and a covered area. Down those stairs was another pool, long and skinny, that emptied into a backyard that was lush green grass and tennis courts—two of them—and buildings that were probably for the servants. All I noticed, everywhere I looked, were huge trees. It was like a movie set; I expected dinosaurs at any second.
I did not belong there. I was uncomfortable, so far out of my comfort zone that I was seriously ready to bolt, and every drop of confidence I had just shriveled up and died. It was like a siren blaring in my brain. I was in way over my head.
“Landry!”
I looked, and there was an older woman, and you knew as soon as you looked at her that this was Landry’s mother.
Cece, short for Cecilia, Carter. Landry looked just like her. They had the same delicate, fragile features, same short little upturned nose, and the same dimples when they smiled. They also shared wide, symmetrical almond-shaped eyes that were almost but not quite the same color. Her hair was blonde; he had inherited the color from her, but the thickness and the waviness, he got from his father. Neil Carter had also gifted him with the breadth and strength of his shoulders, long legs, and a square jaw. His parents were both gorgeous, but that followed, since their son could stop traffic. Landry was like a perfect melding of both of them.
Other people hovered around, a couple and two men. As I followed after Landry, I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. I really wished I was still carrying my duffel, but Chris had had us leave the luggage beside the couch in the big room that we had walked through.
“Landry!” She bolted for him, the mother flying to her son, and he let out a breath and opened his arms to receive her.
I thought she was going to knock him down with how hard she hit him, but he absorbed it, holding her tight as her arms wrapped around his neck and she hugged the life out of him.
“My baby,” she chanted, kissing his cheek, hugging him, so happy, whimpering and whining, more kissing, squeezing him as tight as she could.
He patted her back, stroked her hair, told her he’d missed her, offered condolences on her illness and hoped she was better. And all the time he did, none of the kindness of his words or the smiling he was doing touched his eyes. They didn’t change. They didn’t soften. They didn’t warm. So I knew—and maybe I was the only one—that he wasn’t feeling any part of what he was showing them.
That was not to say that he was not genuinely sorry that his mother was ill. He was, but sorry in the same way he would feel if a coworker was sick, or a neighbor—it wasn’t special because it was her. If my mother was sick, God forbid, he would have been devastated and been her new shadow. This was different, and I saw the distance on him, all over him, from his posture to the furrowing of his brows to the smile that did nothing for his face. He didn’t light up, he didn’t glow—there was nothing. I was stunned, and even more so that I was the only one who even noticed.
“Yes, I am better,” his mother breathed out finally, bringing my attention from my boy back to her. I saw her hands on his shoulders, her eyes everywhere, absorbing his face, his clothes, his shoes, his hands—she missed nothing. “I’m in remission right now, but we just don’t know how long it will last. That’s why I reached out to you. I won’t miss this, I won’t miss reconnecting with you… I won’t.”
He nodded, forced another smile before turning to look at me. “I’d like you to meet Trevan.”
She turned her deep blue eyes to me.
I took off my cap and smiled. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
Her breath caught as she let go of her son and walked over to me, her arms open as she moved. “Trevan,” she gasped. “Please, call me Cece.”
Whatever I had expected, the reception she gave me was not it. The woman was on me, arms around my neck, kissing my cheek, pressed tight to me, thanking me over and over for coming because she knew sure as she was standing there that without me there was no hope.
“He would have never come without you,” she told me, her breath shaky as I heard the tears. “Oh darling, thank you… thank you so much.”
My eyes flicked to Landry as he walked over to us, putting his hand on the back of my neck, squeezing, massaging.
She let me go, stepping back to look at us, taking us in. “Well, don’t you two make a beautiful pair.”
Landry’s smile was instantly brilliant, all there, animating his features. She gasped, the understanding hitting her. Compliment me, make her son deliciously happy. She was observant, and that lesson was an easy one to learn.
“Come see everybody,” she commanded, taking Landry’s hand, tugging him after her.
He let go of my neck and grabbed my hand, and I took hold of it and held on so his mother ended up pulling a chain, first him, then me.
“Landry.”
His father, Neil Carter, held out his arms, and it was obvious that Landry was supposed to go to him, not the other way around. He moved after a second and they did the guy clench, but that was it. I was surprised at his father’s lack of emotion and warmth, but at least it was real. The handshake the man gave me, with the added squeeze of my bicep, seemed friendlier. At least it wasn’t just pleasant. He was really very pleased to meet me.
Landry’s brother Scott stepped in beside his father and gave Landry the same greeting, but the handshake I got could barely be called one. He didn’t want to touch me at all.
Jocelyn, Landry’s sister, was next, a female version of him, but smaller boned, like a bird, with flawless skin and sharp-angled model features. Her husband, Hugh, looked like he belonged in a magazine with her with his perfect smile, perfect hair, and perfect suit. She hugged her brother tight, leaned on him, and told him how much he’d been missed. Hugh shook his hand and told him how pleased he was to finally meet him. It didn’t feel real to me, but I was used to my loud “grab you tight and steal your breath” family.
When my father passed away, at the funeral, his parents, my grandparents, walked right up to my mother and begged her not to disappear from their lives. They wanted to make sure, even though my father was the youngest of six and they had plenty of other grandkids, that my sister and I would still be around. They didn’t want to miss out on seeing us grow up. My mother started bawling, and my grandfather wrapped her up in his strong arms. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe some of my mother’s hesitancy about waiting so long to date stemmed from how close she still was to my father’s family. It had been a blessing for me and my sister having so much family, so many people who kept tabs on us and cared. And we knew we were loved.
Either side you chose, my mom’s Cuban contingent or my dad’s African American camp, everybody hugged and kissed and force-fed you and held your hand and got up in your face if they had a question. I was loved, I knew I was, and there was no way to miss it. Seeing how quiet everyone was at Landry’s home, how subdued, I didn’t wonder why he so adored my family. The level of “showing” that Landry required, the physical demonstration, the verbal assurances, the ordering for him to come and sit his ass down and eat and talk—he knew he was loved to pieces in my world; he had to have floundered in his.
“I’d like you to meet my boyfriend,” he told his sister.
I leaned forward and shook her hand, shook Hugh’s, and smiled.
“Will,” Landry said then, and I realized that he was talking to the guy standing behind his sister.
“Your folks thought it would be nice for you to see an old friend,” he told him, walking forward, arms out. “And I was thrilled to hear that you were finally coming home.”
Landry took a step back and offered Will his hand instead of the hug the other man had obviously been expecting. “Thank you.”
Will was hurt; it was in his eyes even as he tried to smile and shook the hand that had been thrust at him. “I can’t wait for you to meet my family; I’m bringing them with me tonight to your welcome home party.”
Landry withdrew his hand. “Your family?”
“Yes, my wife and children.”
“You’re married?”
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?”
Landry nodded and reached for me.
I took the questing hand in mine and squeezed tight.
“This is my boyfriend, Trevan Bean. Trev, this is my old friend Will.”
“Oh.” He was very surprised, downright stunned to be looking at me. “Your boyfriend?”
“Yes,” was all Landry said.
“But I thought you—”
“What did you think?” Landry asked quietly. “That I did what you did?”
He was staring at Landry, trying to understand something.
“We were never the same,” my boyfriend said icily.
“No,” Will agreed, and I saw all the pain and all the longing on his face.
It made me uncomfortable, seeing another man utterly grieving for a lost love who was standing right in front of him. I offered him my hand to break the spell.
He didn’t take it; he just looked at me. He didn’t even lift his hand. It was very obvious that he had no intention of touching me at all.
“You must be starved,” Cece announced into the awkward silence as she walked back over to us, taking Landry’s hand, patting it. “Come sit down and eat. I want you to tell me everything.”
The table was big and round, so nobody was stuck sitting at one end or the other. It was also lavishly set like nothing I had ever seen. There were water goblets already filled and an orchard of fruit on each place setting. My mother would have loved it. Our idea of Sunday morning breakfast was a serve-yourself line in the kitchen where everyone piled on their own food and you got utensils and a napkin at the end. At my apartment, there was a paper towel roll instead.
There was a choice: strawberry crepes, eggs Benedict, or something else I couldn’t pronounce. I went with the crepes, wishing we had stopped somewhere. What I really wanted was steak and eggs and lots of salsa and pancakes and… just more.
I had never seen a waiter in a house, but there were two, bringing us a hot washcloth to wipe our hands on and then juice and coffee.
“Landry, darling, what do you do?”
As I sat there and listened and ate and drank the coffee that I would have died without, I realized again how different it was from what I had imagined. There was no tearful emotional scene. Landry did not attack his parents; they didn’t tell him how sorry they were. It was all so civil, so “Are the crepes to your liking?” “Oh yes, they’re lovely, thank you.” My stomach started to flutter with how fake it all was.
Landry explained about his business, and his sister, who was in pharmaceutical sales but had just launched her own Christmas ornament line on Etsy, was very interested to hear how he was doing. He gave her the web address so she could look him up and then passed her his phone so she could see the pictures of his gallery.
“Ohmygod, Lan.” She beamed over at him. “It’s beautiful, and your pieces are just gorgeous. I, uhm—” She cleared her throat. “—couldn’t get you to—”
“I brought something for you and Mom,” he told her, turning to get into his messenger bag, which was hanging on the back of his chair.
“You did?” Cece lit up, excited.
“Yeah, Chris already got his.”
“Let me see,” Jocelyn demanded.
Chris rolled up the sleeve of his cardigan and showed them all the triple-wrap amber bracelet. Jocelyn leaned over to examine it.
“You sew each one of these beads in. That’s amazing,” she told him.
“And his has a piece of carnelian beside the toggle clasp to ward off the evil eye.”
“I love this; where’s mine?”
He chuckled, turned, and passed his mother her gift bag, and then he stood to lean across the table to offer another to Jocelyn. They were drawstring bags, lightly beaded, a navy one for his sister and a maroon one for his mother. The velvet bags he put his jewelry in all had his logo and “Asil” in Parchment font stamped into a leather piece on one side.
“I love this bag.” Jocelyn smiled at him as she touched it. “It reminds me of a Middle Eastern bazaar or something.”
“Exactly,” he agreed and grinned at her.
“What does ‘Asil’ mean?” she asked him.
“It means pure in Arabic.”
“Oh, I just love stuff like this.”
He seemed very pleased at the compliment, but again, as he would be from a stranger in his store. When my aunts complimented him, he puddled into goo.
She leaned forward, still not even opening it. “Lan, your packaging is stunning and your place is just… your sense of style…. I’m so impressed and so happy for you.”
“Thanks.” He sighed. “I wanted to go green, you know, but the recycled boxes and bags just didn’t go, and so the brilliant man sitting at my right suggested we have bags that people can bring back or trade up—we have lined and unlined—and keep forever and use as jewelry bags.”
Her eyes flicked to me. “Brilliant.”
“I have my moments,” I told her.
“We have small sandalwood satchels with the Asil logo on it that we sell too.”
“To go with the idea of jewelry bag, scent a drawer or a box.” She nodded. “Of course.”
He shrugged in agreement that it was a no-brainer.
“I love everything about this.”
His hand went to my thigh and squeezed. He was nervous, and I had no idea why.
“Look at this,” his mother gasped.
All eyes were on her as she held up the hammered gold chain with green jade accents. It looked like it was five necklaces because the beads were different sizes and the chain itself was thick and thin in places. It looked rustic, and I knew it was one of his biggest sellers. He’d made many, but each one was breathtaking.
His mother was overwhelmed. “Oh, Landry, I adore it.”
“Ohmygod!” Jocelyn almost shrieked.
Hers was blue quartz and Tahitian freshwater pearl, and because it was a long piece, it could be worn either draped to her stomach or double-wrapped around her neck. Again, it was one of his best. It had been thoughtful, and his mother and sister were gushing. I was reminded of Christmas every year.
Family, friends, all the women who knew Landry waited in breathless anticipation for his gifts. My sister would scream and squeal and take pictures of herself and post them on Facebook and link them to his website the day after her birthday or Christmas. She loved his jewelry—everyone we knew did—and once I started sporting the wrap bracelets, my male cousins and even some of my uncles started wearing them. The difference was that Landry never handed out pre-made things to my family or to me. Every piece he made was lovingly crafted with us in mind. All my mother’s jewelry had some shade of purple in it because he knew it was her favorite. Everything I owned had a ruby on it somewhere because, supposedly, a ruby symbolized love. I had teased him once because my green jade leather wrap bracelet had no ruby on it and he had shown me the small, inconspicuous stone under the clasp.
“What are you thinking about?”
I came out of my thoughts to find him looking at me, his eyes worried for whatever reason. “You. I was thinking about you and how nuts the women in my family go every Christmas.”
He cackled evilly, waggling his eyebrows at me. “They do, don’t they?”
“Yeah.” I leaned sideways and kissed him because he was too cute, and the worry that had been behind his eyes poofed away, and he was oozing happy all of a sudden.
“So Landry, where did you go to school?” his father asked him.
“University of Michigan,” he explained. “I have a marketing degree, obviously.”
There were lots of questions after that, and I sat and listened, watching everyone, seeing Chris’s eyes flick over to me worriedly. He was concerned, I was sure, about what he’d said to me on the plane.
Jocelyn was really interested in Landry’s answers and pressed him for more and more. I could tell that she had really missed him. Her husband Hugh was very interested as well. I noticed Landry’s father watching him, studying him, and I wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for.
Landry’s mother explained about the leukemia and the hard road it had been and how the remission was a blessing.
“The party tonight,” she said, smiling at all of us, “is to welcome you home, Landry, and to celebrate my new lease on life.”
Everyone clapped, and he leaned against me.
“We have the rooftop of one of the best hotels rented out for the party,” his father explained. “And tomorrow we’ll have brunch here for us and a couple of close friends.”
I heard Landry catch his breath.
“Once you’re settled into the guest house, you’ll have to come back up and sit with us. We have over eight years to catch up on.”
Landry made a strangled noise in the back of his throat, and I understood that he needed to be alone with me to decompress, to breathe, maybe even to scream. “Okay,” he told them, and then he turned his head and caught me in his blue-green gaze, willing me to fix it, to make it stop.
“And where is the guest house?” I asked, standing, putting my leather bomber jacket back on. It was cut long, and I liked that. I pulled my scarf back on as well, concerned about leaving anything behind.
“There’s more than one but I know where they are,” Landry told me, standing up beside me. “We’ll be back.”
No one said anything, and it was just weird. If I hadn’t seen someone I loved for eight years, I would have been sitting on top of them until I got every one of my questions answered in rapid succession. At gunpoint, if necessary.
We walked first back up to the living room—showroom—retrieved our luggage, and then we went down another set of stairs and came out on the side by the trees. There was a cobblestone path that led to a small gate opening onto a huge rose garden. It looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
“Jesus.”
“Come on.”
“I need the tour map,” I said snidely. “Can I get one at the gift shop on our way back?”
He snorted out a laugh. “You’re funny.”
I grunted, but I was watching him. “Why wouldn’t you just lie to them, let them pay for school and be gay thousands of miles away?”
“Because I didn’t feel like lying about who I wanted to love for the rest of my life. It seemed counterproductive. My father said I could go to the same retreat as Will and he would still send me to school. I told him no.”
The blanks were starting to fill in.
“I thought you came out to your folks the night you graduated from high school?”
“No, my father found out the day he caught me—well, whatever, that’s a whole other story—but no, the day he and Will’s dad found us, that was the day my father found out.”
“And what happened to Will?” I asked, even though Chris had told me already.
“Will went into one of those programs where they un-gay you after we graduated, and I left for college.”
“Did your mother know what happened?”
“Of course.”
He was so calm.
I realized that I didn’t want to have the floodgate-opening talk right there in the open. I cleared my throat. “I had no idea you came from this kind of money.”
“It’s shit.”
“Spoken like a man who never had to go without anything.”
“Oh, fuck you,” he growled at me, stopping, rounding on me as I tilted my head and appraised him. “I’ve gone without quite a bit in my life.”
“But you didn’t have to; that was your choice.”
“And so that makes me what, spoiled? Stupid? What?”
I stared at him, at his clothes. He bought things cheap at consignment stores and Target and then paired them with extravagant pieces like the ankle boots he’d bought or his cashmere peacoat. He had scarves that looked like they came off the pages of GQ that in reality came from small ethnic stores in our neighborhood. He had a flare for fashion, for accessorizing, so he always looked like a million dollars walking down the street. But I knew, the platform boots from the night before notwithstanding, that normally, frugal was his middle name.
“Trev?”
I squinted at him. “You live on my bullshit budget and you don’t have to.”
He spun around and started stalking away from me.
I followed, trying to think of what I meant.
The guesthouse, and the walk down to it, reminded me of Greece when I had seen it on the Travel Channel. How white it was, the walls—all that was missing was the azure Aegean and we would have had a damn postcard. I needed to hurry up and get used to the luxury, because it was screwing with me.
The entrance was a sliding glass door, and the back opened out onto a little pier that had five steps down to the water. In the summer, it had to be beautiful, but now that it was slightly chilly, I had no desire to dive in.
He flung his luggage down in the living room and pivoted around to face me. I walked by him into the bedroom, put my duffel on the wingback chair, took off my jacket and scarf, draped both over that, and then dived into the bed.
“What are you doing?”
I lifted my leg. “Take off my shoe.”
“What?”
I grunted, letting it fall. “I’m being an idiot because this is fucking with me. I’m sorry, I know you’re on a budget because it’s not mine, it’s ours. We’re working on building our life together, and this belongs to your parents, not you. So we’ll visit for the next week, and then we’ll go back to our shitty little apartment until we can buy our tiny dream house and live happily ever after.”
He was shaking.
“Oh.” I grinned at him, sitting up to unlace my wingtips, ready to put my Nikes back on because my dress shoes scrunched my feet. “You wanna fight instead?”
“No.” He rushed over to the bed, swatting my hands away, sitting with my feet in his lap, working the laces himself. I noticed that he had dumped his scarf and peacoat in the outer room.
I cleared my throat. “Your brother says you didn’t leave because you were gay but because your parents thought you were crazy.”
He continued what he was doing, dropping first one shoe and then the other to the floor before he finally turned and looked at me. “And you think what about that, since you wanted me to see a shrink a while back?”
“I was going with you; I’m just as fucked up as you are.”
He went to move, but I pressed my legs down, making them heavy, trapping him beneath them.
“Lemme go.” He sounded disgusted.
“Uh-uh,” I said, moving fast, flipping around and putting him on his back under me on the bed. “I need to get laid.”
“Well I don’t need—oh.” He gasped as I bent and licked a long wet line up the side of his throat before biting his neck. It tasted and smelled so good, like Landry. When I inhaled deeply, he jolted under me.
“You need me,” I said flatly, noting the goose bumps, the flutter of his lashes, his hands fisted in my jacket.
“Yes,” he hissed, bowing up off the bed, trying to get closer.
I yanked his hands off me, which made his eyes spring open wide, all big and beautiful, and I attacked him, his belt, his zipper, rough with him because I was frantic to connect, to be reminded of who I was.
He whimpered and whined, and when I yanked down the thong he was wearing and his cock sprang free, I deep throated him in one decisive movement.
“Oh fuck!” he shouted, hands on my head, gripping my skull hard since there was no hair to pull and fist.
I held him tight with one hand on his hip, the other squeezing his ass as I sucked and stroked with my tongue and mouth, swallowing down precum, making him wet.
“I can’t… I’m too…,” he rasped, pumping in and out of my mouth, holding me tight against him, knowing that I had no gag reflex at all.
I took him down the back of my throat and swallowed around his engorged shaft as he babbled and made a litany of my name. “Trev! I don’t wanna come, I want you to fuck me!”
No. He wanted to come.
“Trevan!”
I made the suction too good, too strong, and he came hard, yelling my name, filling my mouth before I drank him down, gulping the hot, salty fluid.
He clutched at me, my shoulders, tried to move, but caught between me holding him down, his dress shoes, and his pants, he was at my mercy. I held him as his orgasm consumed him and he moaned loud and long. His convulsions made him buck against me and slam his spewing cock against the back of my throat.
Sometimes Landry needed to be reminded that I owned him body and soul.
“You’re an idiot!” he yelled at me.
I lifted up, allowing the spent, flaccid cock to slip from between my lips. Landry, seeing the long strand of saliva that connected my bottom lip to the flared head of his cock, groaned deep and hoarse. When I licked my lips, he shuddered.
“Jesus, you’re so fuckin’ hot,” he stammered. “But you don’t have to blow me for me to feel it—to know that I belong to you, for me to know that you’re all there is.”
Our eyes locked together. “Maybe I needed to be reminded of who I am. You ever think of that?”
He reached down and put his hands on my face. “Take everything off; take your damn clothes off. I wanna see you… your skin.”
I rose up over him, not listening to him at all, still fully clothed as I loomed above him, over my man who was now a study in debauched beauty.
His eyes were glazed, his hair was tousled, he was flushed and panting, and his stomach was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. The dress pants were shoved down to his knees, and his sweater was pushed up to his hard pecs. He was less muscular than I was, but his body was toned and hard. I bent to taste him.
“I want your clothes off.” His voice rose, commanding.
“No,” I told him, turning away, getting up off the bed so he couldn’t see my smile, just hear the tone of my voice. “We need to go back up and talk to your folks.”
“Trevan!” he yelled at me as I grinned and left the room.
“Better hurry up,” I called back over my shoulder.
“One!”
He was counting?
“Two!”
Oh, shit! I bolted back into the room to find the man I loved standing beside the bed completely naked, hands on his hips in such a stance of indignation that I burst out laughing.
“I am going to murder you if you do not get your ass in this bed!”
But it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was real and he was real, and the love between us was vibrant and alive and sometimes ugly, sometimes even mean, but it was there, and I could see it all over him. His eyes couldn’t lie, and they were full of me.
I darted around the bed and grabbed him, and after a whimper in the back of his throat, he wrapped his arms around me and molded his beautiful body to mine.
“I want to make you feel as good as you made me feel.”
“Oh, but I feel good.” I smiled into his hair, pulling back to brush my nose along his and close my eyes with the surge of feeling that swamped me. “I’m perfect.”
He grunted.
“I meant I feel perfect, ass, I didn’t mean I am perfect.”
His head turned, and he kissed a wet line up the side of my neck as I leaned my head over so he could reach all my skin.
“I love you,” he told me, nibbling under my chin as I let my head loll back on my shoulders. His lips were so soft, and between the pressure and the nibbling, I felt my body heat.
“Trev.” His breath was hot on my face.
“I love you, Landry Carter,” I said, smiling as I bent forward and nuzzled his adorable little nose before zeroing in on his mouth. “How ’bout I kiss you until you come again.”
“Oh God.”
I chuckled before I slanted my mouth down over his.
“Not fair,” he whispered even as he returned each kiss.
WE MADE the mistake of getting back on the bed, and when I saw his eyes fluttering, I pressed my advantage, grabbed him, and lay down with him in my arms. Head on my chest, listening to my heartbeat, the man passed out minutes later. I followed him into sleep and smiled when I thought how weird it would be if anyone walked in on us. I was still completely dressed except for my shoes, and he was naked. I patted his ass as I smiled.
The nap was good, and when we woke up, we headed up to see his parents. They sent us right back to the guest house to shower and change for dinner. We never ate at six, but since it was supposed to be a whole night of fun and partying, we did as we were asked.
I was done fast—showered and shaved, the cologne Landry had bought me for Christmas clinging to me as I waited for him in the living room. I had one suit and I was in it, my beige Armani that I was wearing with a white dress shirt underneath.
When Landry emerged, I almost swallowed my tongue he looked so good. The black Prada suit fit tight, and the red dress shirt underneath was very sexy.
“No velvet?” I teased him. “No leather?”
“It’s my parents,” he said flatly, and there was a shadow in his eyes. “They don’t find my eccentricity the lyrical thing that you do.”
“I find you lyrical?” I teased him.
“Yeah, you do.”
I chuckled, holding out my hand.
“You’re breathtaking, by the way,” he assured me as he laced his fingers with mine and we headed for the door.
“And you’re the only one who thinks that.” I grinned, kissing his ear loudly, wetly, making him giggle.
“Knock it off, I can’t wrinkle.”
I shook my head and he laughed, deep and loud. I liked it.
“Well don’t you two clean up well.” Cece beamed at Landry and me when we met them in the driveway. The limousine was there to take us to the party.
The two of us had neglected to wear ties, but when I asked Cece if we needed them, she said no. But all the other men had them on.
“It doesn’t matter,” she assured us.
“Of course it doesn’t,” Landry said under his breath so only I could hear. “Because she’s already stunned that we even had suits. You heard her: we clean up nice.”
“Which was a nice thing to say,” I assured him, pulling him closer to me so that his head leaned against mine.
“It was a backhanded compliment at best, and I hated it.”
“You’re overthinking, maybe?” I offered.
“No,” he said, hand on my thigh.
I hated ties, and it had never even crossed my mind to put one on. Neil, Chris, Scott, and Hugh did all look very polished, but it was a party in a hotel on the Vegas strip. Was it necessary?
“The necklace looks gorgeous on you,” I told Jocelyn, who had chosen a crushed silk, low neckline wrap dress to show off her gift from Landry. I loved that the first opportunity she had, she wore it. Landry’s mother had chosen a diamond necklace, like a long tennis bracelet that laid flat. I understood––it was stunning––but it was not Landry’s piece. And no, he had not made it specifically for her, but he had still chosen two of the best pieces from his collection and gifted them to his mother and sister. My opinion of his mother dropped quite a bit, while his sister’s stock rose.
“Oh I just love it,” she cooed, hand on the necklace, smiling at Landry.
He nodded and nestled closer to me.
As we neared the strip, Cece turned to Landry and asked how he and I had met.
“We met at a party,” he told her.
“Yes, but how? Did you walk over to him? Did he walk over to you?”
“He walked over to me,” he told her. “And that was it. I knew he’d never lie to me and I knew he’d keep me safe and I knew everything would be okay.”
“Safe?” She looked concerned.
He shook his head. “It’s old news.”
Her brows furrowed. “I have so many questions.”
“That are better left for tomorrow,” he told her. “Not for a fun night of celebration.”
“Exactly,” she agreed and smiled at him. “I planned the party early so everyone could walk the strip later, and I figured after your plane ride that breakfast and a nap and then dinner was the best bet.”
“Excellent plan,” Chris assured her.
She patted Landry’s hand happily.
The strip was clogged with people, and the limousine had a slow slog down the street to the front of Caesar’s Palace. A staff member met us out front and led us to the penthouse elevator. We then went up to the roof nightclub’s lounge, which, along with the terrace, had been rented out for the party. There were already people there, drinking, milling around, when we walked in.
It was gorgeous up there, the entire strip laid out. The nightclub was done in white, the warmth and luxury on display. For the second time that day, I was overwhelmed, and as I was passed a glass of Cristal champagne, Neil called for the first of many toasts of the night.
“To my beautiful wife, we are blessed with your presence, and to my dear son, welcome home.”
There was clapping and the clinking of glasses, and then Landry was basically rushed. I had to move out of the way; there were just too many people who wanted to get to him, talk to him. And he was smiling his dazzler, eyes glittering, face animated, hands going wild, as he was an expressive talker. It was fun to watch him hold court, and I moved to the edge of the terrace so I could see the world below me.
“Would you care to dance?”
I turned and Jocelyn was there, grinning at me.
“Are you sure?” I teased her. “I didn’t wear a tie.”
She rolled her eyes and grabbed my hand.
We had a good time, and after a while, some of her friends joined us, and it was me and all the beautiful women. I had to take my jacket off because I got hot, and because Jocelyn’s best friend, Daria, got cold, I gave it to her to wear. I led four women to the bar, and Jocelyn was surprised when she ordered a Midori sour and two cosmopolitans for her friends and I had bottled water.
“Not drinking?”
“Gotta be clearheaded,” I told her, inhaling.
“Hungry?”
“God yes, the food smells amazing.”
She was laughing as she took my hand and tugged me after her toward the buffet. I was watching for Landry, and every now and then when he looked up to scan the room, I waved so he’d see me. And I got the nod; he could see Jocelyn as well, and everything was fine.
“Boy, he keeps a close eye on you,” she remarked and smiled at me.
“It goes both ways,” I said, grabbing a napkin, turning to go.
“I thought you were going to sit with the girls,” she said, actually sounding sad.
“I am,” I smiled at her. “I just need to make sure he eats. If his blood sugar dips, he gets frantic, and he’ll start bouncing off the walls.”
She nodded, touched by that.
I carried the plate across the room and leaned into the circle, which included Landry’s brothers, Will, and others.
“Eat,” I ordered him, passing Chris a bottle of water. “Hold this for him.”
Chris nodded. “Yessir.”
Landry’s smile was huge. “Yes, dear.”
I grunted and left them and returned to the girls.
“Daria will be back,” Jocelyn said as I took a seat beside her. “I made her promise not to disappear with your suit jacket.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a patented move, you know,” she said with a chuckle, arching an eyebrow for me. “Steal a guy’s jacket and when the guy comes to get it, go home with the guy.”
“Huh.”
“I explained that she had the wrong equipment.”
“And the wrong face.”
“Mostly that.”
I nodded. “Most of all that.”
She cleared her throat. “So tell me, what kind of meds does Landry take now?”
It was meant to be just conversation, but it nearly killed me. “He doesn’t take anything.”
She scowled at me. “How is that possible?”
“Could you please just tell me the whole story, from the beginning?” I asked her. “I’m getting bits and pieces, and I don’t want to ask Landry for the whole explanation right now because I know he’s not ready.”
Her breath was shaky. “Trevan, I—”
“Please,” I pressed her.
“I’ll do my best, but you’d be better off to ask Mom or Dad.”
“I’d rather hear it from you.”
“Okay, well, as you know, Landry’s the son of a very rich man. We were all exposed to drugs very early, but in high school, Landry, with his crappy self-esteem and his need to fit in at any cost, he let it run right over him. I mean, we knew he was manic and then depressed, but until Mom and Dad gave us the diagnosis, that he was bipolar, we had no idea it was anything more than just the way he was.”
“And the drugs did what, made it worse?”
“Of course.” She sighed. “My parents were all freaked when they found cocaine, but really, that was the tip of the iceberg stuff; the meth was the real problem.”
But there was just no way.
He had quit the social drug use right after we met. I had told him I was clean and had to have a partner who was going to be the same way. He had told me it was no problem, it was only recreational so could be easily terminated. And it had been. He quit the day we had the talk. I had never known an addict who could do that without a relapse or withdrawal or anything. He could not have been a drug addict; there had to be another explanation.
“He stole money from my parents, took some of my mother’s jewelry for drugs, and all of it while they were trying, along with the doctors, to get his meds worked out—ohmygod, Trevan, you have no idea the horror it was. He became a completely different person.”
The question of why remained, however, and the only person who had answers was Landry himself.
“I don’t—oh.” She blanched.
“Jocelyn?” I questioned her because I had never seen anyone go completely white and their eyes get quite that big.
“Oh God… oh God….” She was starting to hyperventilate.
I took hold of her arms. “Honey?”
Her head snapped up, and I was faced with huge scared eyes as a woman stepped up beside us. She was tall and tan and stunning. She looked like a Barbie doll come to life.
“Who’s this, Jo, your next conquest? My husband not good enough?”
I noted her heavy-lidded eyes, the martini glass, and the combative stance. She was ready to fight, wanted it.
“He’s a little rough, isn’t he? This one might actually be too much man for you.” She was immaculately dressed.
“Who are you?” I snapped at her, annoyed over the change she was causing in Jocelyn.
Her eyes moved slowly over my body as she looked me up and down. “You first. Where did you come from?”
I squinted at her as a man joined us.
“Evie, please. Don’t make a scene.”
“Fuck you, Marc,” she told the man behind her, tipping her head sideways. “I’m talking to the boy toy here.”
“Who the fuck are you?” I demanded.
“Oh,” she said with a low chuckle, hand over her heart. “I’m Evelyn Tate, sweetheart, and this is my husband, Marc Tate, and this”—she pointed at Jocelyn—“is the woman he fucks around on me with, one of his reps, Jocelyn Collins. And you are?”
I squinted at her. “You should leave.”
“I was invited.”
“This is a party for Jocelyn’s mother and her brother. Do not drag your bullshit in here. This isn’t the time or the place.” I tipped my head at her husband. “Take your wife home.”
“I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but—”
“Please,” I asked her nicely.
“I—”
“Take her out of here,” I ordered Marc.
“Evie, please.”
“What the hell is going on?” Hugh shouted, charging up beside me, grabbing Jocelyn and whirling her around. “You couldn’t even deal with this shit for one fucking night?”
“Don’t manhandle her,” Marc barked at him, wrenching Hugh’s hand away from Jocelyn.
“Oh God.” Evelyn broke down, and I got why; it had to be hard to watch your husband defend his mistress right there in front of you.
Jocelyn’s friends came back, and I could tell right then and there that I was smack dab in the middle of a situation that had been simmering for God knew how long. Tempers flared. Words were spoken under breath and then erupted.
Evelyn started crying, Daria started yelling, Jocelyn tried to get everyone to calm down, and one of Evelyn’s friends called Jocelyn a whore. And then it got loud, at which point Hugh balled up his fist and hit Marc in the face really hard. I had to reassess my first impression of the man. He had looked like a GQ model to me, vapid, dull, with only plastic pretty going for him. But he was certainly possessive of his wife, as was evident from the way he picked Marc up off the floor and started pounding on him.
I had no idea rich people had Jerry Springer moments. It was illuminating.
No one was coming to break it up since it was supposed to be a very exclusive and elegant affair, so I ended up having to separate the two men. Getting in the middle of any fight is painful, so I was not surprised when Marc caught me in the face and split my lip. It was an accident. Hugh got me in the ribs, but that, too, was unintentional. It stung for a minute, but I’d been hit much harder before. What was problematic was the beer that got spilled on me, on my shirt, soaking through to my skin with all the jostling. I got pissed and grabbed Marc’s bicep and shoved him down into the closest chair.
“Do not get up,” I warned him.
He glowered at me but stayed there, and I shoved Hugh toward the cabanas and ordered Jocelyn to go with him.
“Who do you—”
“Shut up,” I told Evelyn, yanking her forward, my finger in her face. “I told you this was neither the time nor the place. So sit the fuck down and don’t move.”
She sat, silently.
I sent Daria to the bar for ice, sent another of the women for bottled water, and used one of the dinner napkins to stem the blood flowing from my lip. When Daria returned with an icepack and a bucket of ice, I sent her with the latter to Jocelyn and Hugh, and I made Marc lean back as I placed the pack on his face.
“Shit,” he groaned.
“Just don’t move,” I grumbled at him.
I went to check on Hugh, put some of the ice cubes in a napkin, and had him press it to his knuckles. Pushing back his head, I checked his eyes and his nose.
“Thank you, Trevan,” he said, his left hand closing on my wrist. “What you must think of me.”
“You?” I shook my head, untucking my shirt and unbuttoning it, not wanting to reek of alcohol anymore, yanking it off. “Who did you cheat on?”
He smiled sheepishly. “No one.”
“Well then.” I smiled at him, satisfied that he was fine. “You’re not in the wrong here.”
He cleared his throat. “We should run downstairs and get you another shirt.”
“I’ll run down myself. You and Jo need to get out of here before anyone sees you.”
“Nobody saw that?” He was astounded.
I shook my head.
“Are you sure?” Jocelyn finally found her voice.
“No, I think you’re good. Everyone else is way on the other side. Just leave now. You guys need to talk anyway.”
“Yes.” Jocelyn began weeping.
“Finally, yes.” Hugh sighed heavily, hand tightening on my forearm just for a moment. “Thank you.”
I nodded and walked back over to Evelyn and Marc. “You guys ready to go?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Just go home.” I was annoyed and certain it was in my voice as I walked over to Daria. “Sorry.” I smiled at her. “I need my jacket to go downstairs.”
Her eyes were all over me. “I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t need company. I just need my jacket.”
She drew closer, hand going to my chest. “I have a room; come with me.”
I moved her hand and reached for my jacket.
Quickly, she stepped away. “Baby, I can’t tell you the last time I saw a carved eight-pack… and all tatted up.” She bit her bottom lip. “Very nice.”
“Please,” I asked nicely. “Just—”
“Hey!” she yelled as the jacket was ripped from her hands as she clutched it around her.
“Oh back off, Daria,” a voice said, full of disgust, and we both turned to Landry’s friend William. “He doesn’t even like girls.”
“You’re fulla shit, Will,” she told him. “Run on back to your beard now before she realizes that you slipped and fell on another dick. How much gay porn does she have to find on your hard drive before she gets a clue that her marriage is all for show?”
“Fuck you, D,” he spat at her.
“No, fuck you, Will,” she hissed back, pointing. “You may have fooled your family with that bullshit conversion therapy, but your friends… we know you’re still fuckin’ rent boys because you didn’t have the balls to tell the whole wide world that you’re gay.”
“Go to hell.”
She made a show of looking around. “And where is the little woman tonight, Will? Did you even bring her? Where are the kiddies?”
“Since this is an adult party and Rose felt that—”
“Rose didn’t feel shit,” she scoffed at him. “You didn’t want her to meet Landry. She’d know her life is a fuckin’ sham if she saw you look at him just once.”
“You’re so full of—”
“I hope you’re not still pining for Lan,” she cackled. “I mean, I really hope not, ’cause it looks like someone got past white bread, huh? Someone goes for the dark meat now.”
I jerked my jacket from Will’s hands, leaving them to have their bitchfest alone as I pulled it on, wadded up my dress shirt, and fisted it in one hand as I headed for the elevator. Once I was in the lobby, I went directly to the John Varvatos store I had seen earlier, walked in, and told the sales clerk I needed a shirt.
He eyed me coolly, and I groaned. I got a smile after a second and a sarcastic, “Oh yeah?”
I appreciated sarcasm in all its many forms, and when I threw up my hands in defeat, he put out his hand for my soggy, beer-soaked shirt.
“It’s marinated in Heineken,” he observed. “I think it’s done.”
“I agree.”
“Let’s do a lightweight crew sweater at this point, huh?”
I nodded, let him pick what I needed, paid him, put it on, and then headed back to the elevator to return to the nightclub and the party. Maybe if I stretched it, my elapsed turnaround time was twenty minutes. When I got back up to the nightclub, though, as soon as I walked back in, I had a hand grabbing hold of my bicep.
“Where were you?” Chris gasped, looking terrified.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking around instantly for Landry.
“He’s looking for you,” Chris told me. “He’s upset and he’s getting loud and scaring my folks.”
“Where is he?”
“Someone thought they saw you toward the back, I think that’s where he went.”
I made my way across the enormous rooftop, and as soon as the crowd shifted and parted, I saw William. He moved fast to reach me.
“Where were you? Landry’s freaking out!”
But I doubted that. I was already getting the impression from his friends and family that what was huge to them was sort of a minor irritation for me and mine. What they considered a freak-out in their polite, everyone-is-civil world might simply be Landry being annoyed. My family, our friends, when Landry had a snit, we all just dealt with it. But if when Landry was growing up, they had responded to him with panic instead of calm…. I was starting to get the idea of what had gone on. “Where is he?”
“Daria told him you were over by the cabanas, so he’s looking there.”
“Thanks,” I said, turning to leave.
“So,” he said, keeping pace with me. “I’m the one Landry was caught with all those years ago in the stable.”
“I know,” I grunted, looking for my boyfriend.
“Did he tell you?”
“Chris did, he did, so yeah, I’ve been informed.”
“I went to a reparative therapy camp and he left home.”
“Maybe he got the better end of the deal, huh?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
He stopped me with a hand on my bicep, and I turned to face him.
“I love my wife and I love my children.”
“And I don’t doubt that, but you also cheat on your wife and your children,” I told him. “Right?”
He said nothing.
I waited.
“I cheat on my wife, yes,” he acquiesced.
I scowled at him. “Make no mistake, you cheat on your kids too.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “One day they’ll learn the truth, and they’ll know the whole damn thing was a lie.”
“What are you—”
“The marriage,” I told him. “One day your kids will find out it was bullshit, and then they’ll wonder, was anything he ever said real? If he didn’t really love her, does he really love me?”
“That’s ridic—”
“I know about lying. I’ve met a lot of liars, seen them doing their thing. You need to fix it now, make it right for everyone, plus you, and give your wife a shot at the happiness she deserves.”
“She’s happy!” he shouted at me, upset and defensive. “She has everything. Cars, a house—a mansion—jewelry. She’s not an idiot. She likes her life, and she’ll play along until the kids are grown, and then as long as I’m always discreet, she’ll give me my divorce and take the settlement I give her.”
I stared at his eyes and could see what Landry had found alluring. The man was blond and handsome, and his eyes were soft, and so was his mouth. “That’s so fuckin’ sad.”
“You’re not listening. You—”
“I’m listening,” I assured him. “But you’re talking out of your ass.”
“I—”
“No doubt you’ll be able to keep a boy who will be discreet, but what I’m saying is that you won’t be able to have a partner because no out and proud gay man will live his life in a closet. You will always have a boy who belongs to you but never a man who walks beside you and holds your hand.”
He took a shuddering breath. “And Landry’s life is, what, so much better than mine because of that?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Because you’re such a fuckin’ catch,” he scoffed.
“No, man, it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with how he is. He’s true to who he is, and he doesn’t hide, and he can walk in here and be gay and not give a damn if people care about that fact. He’s real.”
“I’m real too, and so is my family.”
“Listen, I have a lot of friends in the closet for one reason or another, but don’t stand there and tell me that you or them are living a real life. How can you be?”
“I will not stand here and defend my life to you!”
But he was standing there doing that exact thing.
“I’m happy!”
“Yeah, you look it.”
“You’re just trash, and that’s all that comes out of your mouth.”
I smiled slowly. “You’re gonna be dreaming about my mouth tonight, thinking of it sliding over your ex-boyfriend’s beautiful cock and what his face is gonna look like when I do it.” I sighed deeply because suddenly I felt really bad for him. He was obviously still very much in love with Landry Carter. “I feel so fuckin’ sorry for you.”
He backhanded me hard, and I took it because I’d pushed him and my last comment had been totally shitty and rude. Unfortunately, two things happened at the same time. First, my lip started bleeding again, and second, Landry saw him hit me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he roared, outraged and furious, coming fast.
I stepped around Will to intercept him.
“How dare you touch—what the fuck!”
“Baby,” I soothed him, hands on his face even as he tried to lunge by me at Will. “I’m fine. Come here.”
“You’re bleeding!” His face crumpled, but his eyes, his eyes were murderous.
“Not because of him,” I said softly, taking his hand, leading him away fast, down to the last cabana where it was quiet, pulling him after me inside.
“Who hurt…? Trevan, what the hell is going on? Where were you? What’re you wearing? Why…?” He swallowed hard. “Where did you go?”
I fell back on the chaise lounge, pulling him down on top of me to straddle my hips. His moan was loud as his hands went to my chest and he pushed forward over my groin.
“So these people are all nuts,” I told him flatly.
His eyes were all over my face as he winced. “Oh baby, I need to get you some ice. Jesus… who else hit you?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to kill them,” he said evenly.
I chuckled, pushing up against him, and smiled as he narrowed his eyes and bit his bottom lip. “It’s okay; this is me we’re talking about. And a split lip ain’t shit.”
He bent close, hands fisted back in my new pale blue sweater as he traced the tip of his tongue over the wound, tasting my blood so gently. My skin heated and I felt the tingly, prickly sensation wash over me as my cock twitched under my lover’s firm, round ass.
“I like the feel of this sweater,” he told me, bunching it in his hands, pushing it up so he had access to my torso. “But your skin is better.”
I arched up against him, and his fingers traced over the deep groove in my abdomen and then back up to the L over my heart. Slowly, he rocked down over my now-swollen groin, sliding his crease back and forth.
“Stop.”
He bent forward and sucked my nipple into his mouth, tongue swirling over the pebbled nub, biting gently.
“Landry,” I breathed his name into his hair.
He got up fast, walked to the covering, and yanked it down, grabbing the zipper pull, closing it fast, letting anyone who came near it know that we were not to be disturbed. But I would not let him be that guy in front of his parents.
And it hurt to move: I was hard and my body ached to be buried in his, but I got up and stood on the other side.
“Lay down,” he commanded me, taking off his jacket and tossing a packet of lube onto the chaise. He draped the jacket over the back of the small chair and started on his belt buckle.
“No, let’s go home.”
He shook his head. “I saw you dancing with those girls, their hands all over you.”
“No one had their hands on me,” I assured him, because I was very particular about my personal space, half because of me and half because I knew Landry hated it.
“Daria was wearing your jacket, and you smell like cheap perfume.”
There was nothing cheap about that girl. I might have smelled like expensive perfume, but not like low-priced anything. “So we’ll go back to the house and I’ll take a shower.”
“No.” He pointed at the end of the chaise. “Sit, put that lube on your cock. I wanna see you stroke yourself, and then I’m gonna ride you.”
“Lan—”
“Do what I say,” he snarled at me, and I saw it then, the fury, the jealous rage simmering right there below his satin-smooth surface.
I had been careful, but the dancing I thought had been benign had caused a rise in him, my disappearance had added fuel to the fire, and when he saw me get hit, the truth was that he wanted to be the one smacking me around.
“I deserve to be hit, don’t I?”
He nodded.
It was inevitable and I wanted it, so I tore my jacket off, threw it down behind me, and yanked the sweater off over my head. I unbuckled fast, unsnapped, unzipped, dragging my dress pants to my knees before I sat down and tore the lube packet open. It was warm from being in his pocket, so I squeezed the packet into my palm and grabbed my own cock tight and hard, pulling, twisting, tugging.
My head fell back and my breath caught.
“Stop,” he growled, smacking my hand away, grabbing my face, tilting it up, and bending at the same time to take raw possession of my mouth. The mauling hurt; I tasted blood, and then it didn’t matter, nothing mattered but his legs on either side of my waist.
I grabbed hold of his firm, tight ass, spread his cheeks, and tried not to come as he sank, slowly but without pause, down over my shaft, taking me all in, deep inside his body until he was fully, completely impaled.
“Jesus, Landry, you’re so fuckin’ hot.”
He lifted and drove back down, seating himself even deeper, pushing forward so I could feel the muscles clenching tight around me, rippling, the spasm milking my entire length.
“I love this.”
“I know,” he rasped. “Me too.”
My head, which had lolled back, came forward and my eyes met his. Normally they were glazed, clouded with passion, but that was not what I was seeing. There was dark, deadly intent there, and I should have been frightened.
“Mine,” he told me as I felt his hands dig into my chest and saw him lean forward, felt his teeth in my shoulder.
“What do you need?”
“I want you to throw up the covering, put me over the chaise, and I want you to fuck me while they all watch. I want them all to see your big fat cock sliding in and out of my ass.”
Why? Why would he need that? Why…?
Sometimes it took a minute. He felt like he was floating away. He needed grounding, to know where he belonged. He was terrified that I would leave him here with his family. That I would go home without him, cast him aside without care.
He felt so good, and as I grabbed hold of his hair, yanking his head back with a sharp jerk, the choked sob confirmed everything.
“Get up.”
No question. He rose fast, and I shoved him forward, standing and then dragging him by his hair to the back of the chaise, bending him over it as I smacked his ass hard enough to leave a handprint on his pale, smooth skin.
“Oh Trevan, please,” he whined, the ache, the wanting, all of it in the plea.
I grabbed his hips hard—my fingers would leave bruises—and slid my slick cock between the round cheeks at the same time he arched his back. I drove forward as he yelled my name.
“Don’t leave me here.”
Stupid man. Like that could ever happen.
I pounded into him steady and hard, watching my cock plunge deep, feeling the slippery heat and the suction, the velvet vise fist around me.
“Trevan!”
“Never fuckin’ leaving you… never!”
“Swear!”
“Baby, I fuckin’ swear,” I said, hammering into him as he frantically jerked himself off.
“Gonna come.” His voice cracked. “I need to come!”
“Now,” I ordered him.
His muscles clamped down on me, spasmed and clenched with the violent force of his orgasm. He was loud, my boy, a screamer, and this time was no exception. The volume combined with the pressure and the suction wrung my own climax from me. I emptied into him, deep inside, pumping him full until semen was rolling down the inside of his thighs and dripping off his balls to the floor.
I leaned forward and buried my face in his hair, pressing my nose to the nape of his neck, ready to pull out.
“Don’t.” He stopped me, one hand reaching behind him, grabbing at my hip. “I’m not ready yet.”
I never rushed him.