Eleven

THE SCREAMS were horrific. Shrill and terrifying, they carried through the neighborhood, a haunting, startling chorus almost loud enough to set off nearby car alarms. The scene was ghastly, and Rey wasn’t sure he could take much more of it. The worst of it was the donkey. God, the poor donkey, with its ass torn out and its shanks shredded by seemingly a thousand knives, yet none had found the mark.

“Jesus, how hard is it to pin a tail to a papier-mâché donkey?” Rey muttered under his breath from his relatively safe perch on his family’s back deck. He winced when his sister, Sarah, shrieked and danced when one of her blindfolded friends stabbed his pin into the creature’s flank.

“It’s a unicorn. And once someone gives it a tail, it’ll be a piñata,” his mother corrected. “It’s a unicorn party. Even if you won’t wear one of the horns.”

“All the cool kids are wearing them. Your sister insisted.” His stepfather tapped at the inflatable horn he had strapped to his forehead by a valiant piece of overstretched thin elastic. The three other parents who’d been conned into supervising their kids wore them as well, but Rey’d taken one look at the suggestive blow-up headpiece and passed. “And where’s your sidekick, Mace? Not like him to miss free food.”

“I tried to drag Mace with me, but he’s got some stuff to do with his brothers.” He’d gladly turned down the offer to help lay paving stones down at the house’s backyard but agreed to drop by once his sister’s party was done. “I’ll head over later. I’m sure they’ll be glad for any cake donations you might want to make. You know, to get it out of the house because Mom will have your head if you eat all the leftovers.”

His mother paused at the top of the deck stairs leading down to the sweep of green grass littered with confetti, discarded shoes, and cupcake wrappers. Rey knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. He knew the look on her face and the slight part of her lips before she poked at his life.

“They’re not really his brothers, are they? Not like Sarah’s your sister. I don’t understand why he keeps going back to that house when he’s not related to anyone there.” It was said without aggression but layered with a refusal to acknowledge Mason’s stitched-together family. Sarah’s shriek was soon joined by a loud burst of cheering and a slight Hispanic girl screaming as she was pounded on the back, her blindfold sliding down her nose.

“Donna,” his stepfather began. “Rey’s just as much my kid as Sarah is. I married you and got a son. Mace just… didn’t have to marry anyone to get his brothers.”

“It’s just odd. Marriage is one thing. You just can’t say someone’s your brother.” She snatched up the inflatable gold unicorn horn she’d left on one of the tables and slid its elastic over the back of her head. “Crap, they got the tail on. I’m going to get them in the pool. After that, we can do the piñata. You two don’t move until it’s time to get the burgers on the grill. Don’t wander into the house to play video games. You’ve got one job, and that’s to get meat on those buns.”

She hurried off, either not realizing or maybe even not minding that she’d kicked her son’s balls in with her careless words.

He wouldn’t confront her. It would have done no good. His mother adjusted her world by shifting words around until they felt comfortable. Mace was his best friend, a relationship she could box up and put on a shelf, understanding how he was connected to Rey, but once any of the brothers were tossed into the mix, she rejected their familial ties.

And sometimes Rey felt as if she was in some way rejecting him.

She hurt him with her negligence at times. Her dismissals were small, slight scrapes at his world, because she didn’t understand how a part of something she hadn’t given him stuck to who he was. Bear pulled her from a burning house, but his mother wouldn’t call Mace his brother. Instead he was Bear’s friend, even as she handed him a double-chocolate cupcake with chili-pecan frosting she’d made especially for him.

He’d never told her about his relationship with Gus, although Randy knew and she probably suspected. Rey wasn’t sure he could have handled it if she refused to acknowledge the family Gus wrapped himself in. At the time, Gus said it didn’t matter, but he’d felt dirty hiding Gus behind the word friend.

Next time—if Gus allowed there to be a next time—things would be different. Or, he thought, watching his mother making a game of cleaning up the backyard, he needed to make things different now.

“It’s chaos, that’s what it is.” His stepfather broke the tension building up inside of Rey with a loud whisper when his mother joined the kids on the lawn. “Who the hell in their right mind invites a herd of eight-year-old kids to a birthday party?”

“The guy with the pool and something to prove to the other parents at school?” Rey peered over the gaggle of shouting children, making sure the water was empty of partygoers. “Admit it, the only reason you wanted me here is because I know CPR and you don’t want anyone to drown.”

“That and you were picking up the big-assed swirly lollipops.” Randy saluted him with his bottle of diet root beer, slouching farther down in his lounge chair. “Because if this party needed anything, it was more sugar.”

They’d all come a long way since the fire, or at least he and his mom, Donna, had. A few years after Rey’s father tried to kill them, she’d fallen in love with Randy, the owner of an auto shop who’d helped her after one of her tires blew out on the freeway. Robust and generous, he’d not just swept her off her feet, he’d also helped her get back on them. He didn’t blink when he found out Rey was gay and rumbled with surprise when his wife returned from the doctor’s with the startling news of a late-in-life pregnancy.

Neither one of them had planned on children, but Sarah arrived anyway, as loud and expressive as her father. Randy dove into parenting as he did everything else, with good humor and an attitude of things happen. After the years of growing up with his own father, Rey hadn’t known what to make of the silver-bearded, laughing man who’d taken up so much space in their lives, but he liked Randy. Especially when Randy smiled at his wife and delight lit up her eyes.

“Yay, more sugar.” He glanced over at his stepfather. Randy was fit, a slab of muscle, Viking genes, and powerful laughs, but he’d trimmed down a bit, stopping every morning at a gym before going to work. “How’s the diet coming?”

“I miss bacon and cheese. Seriously, do you have any idea how many bacon cheeseburgers I ate during the week? Now it’s salads, grilled chicken, and steamed salmon.” Randy chuckled, patting his flat stomach. “But I’ve got a hot wife and a young daughter to keep up with, so sacrifices have to be made.”

“That’s my mom you’re talking about,” Rey scoffed. “No guy wants to hear their mom is hot.”

“She’s got good genes, and well, she had you when she was a kid. You think I pull over to the side of the road during a rainstorm for any woman with a flat tire?”

“Yeah, you do,” he pointed out. “It’s why she married you.”

“Okay, yeah, so only an asshole wouldn’t stop, but if a woman—or man—can catch your eye when you’re going fifty miles an hour down a freeway, she’s hot.” Randy sat up in his chair, scooting it back under the shade of the canvas overhang stretched over most of the broad deck. “I’m nearly sixty with an eight-year-old powerhouse daughter and a wife built like a bombshell who bakes cupcakes for a living. You don’t know how hard it is for a guy like me at soccer practice or dance class. All the other dads are your age or close to it, and I’ll be damned if some bearded hipster calls me Grandpa Santa when my little girl is kicking his kid’s ass on the field.”

“Really? Grandpa Santa?” He smirked at Randy, who shot back a rueful look.

“I’d let my beard grow out. Just to see how it would look,” he said, rubbing his hand over his tightly trimmed beard. “After that, no bacon and, well, a trip to that toy-stuffing place after Duckie drove the other team’s goalie into the ground.”

“And she’s still okay with being called Duckie? She’s eight now, you know.” Stretching out his legs, Rey rested against the chair’s arm, then shifted when its hard edge dug into the fading bruises on his side. “Almost an adult. Or so she told me. Then she started talking about getting her first bra and my brain shut down.”

“Women have bras, son,” Randy remarked. “You can’t stick your head under the sand every time they talk about their underwear.”

“Hey, if Mom wanted me to grab one for her from a store, I’d do it,” he admitted. “I’m just not ready to make a second trip for my kid sister. She still wears a panda onesie to bed.”

“Yeah, so does your mother, except hers is a hamster.” Randy’s laughter rolled over Rey’s choking fit. Setting his bottle down on the deck, he leaned over, then pounded the heel of his hand on the spot between Rey’s shoulder blades. “God, I love you. You’ve got to loosen up, kiddo.”

“You’re a dick,” he gasped, catching his breath. His back throbbed along with his ribs, pulsating with a low ache. “Jesus, Randy. Don’t kill the only guy at your pool party who knows how to resuscitate people.”

“You’ll be fine. Just breathe.” He rubbed at Rey’s spine. “And you won’t have to do CPR. Like anyone would risk your mom’s wrath by drowning during the unicorn party.”

They sat and watched the kids dance, wiggle, and shout their way to the pool. His mother stood at the deep end, chatting with another woman in tie-dye jeans who’d donned a blow-up horn on either side of her head. They were angled toward the water, eyes constantly moving over the churning pool. Randy was right. She’d held back any touch of time on her face and figure in the years since they’d had to start their lives over. After having him in high school, then struggling to make ends meet while his father self-destructed around them, his mother deserved to be happy. It was just ironic she’d found happiness making a new family while denying Mace his.

“She’ll come around one day,” Randy murmured, his voice low and consoling. “It takes her some time, and she might not always agree with me about things, but she tries. Your mom… tries. And she does love you.”

“I love her too.” He bit his lip, sitting up when his sister dove into the deep end of the pool, nearly hitting one of the other kids. “Jesus. How the hell do you not have a heart attack? It’s worse than cats. Gus is going to be a nervous wreck before Chris is five. Shit, Gus. Haven’t talked to you about him.”

Randy was silent for a while then he cleared his throat. “Who’s Chris?”

“Shit, okay. Let me tell you about Chris.” He sketched in a brief explanation, watching his mother police the pool with her dual-horned second-in-command. Leaving off the parts about talking to Gus about how he’d wanted to stitch their relationship back together, Rey explained about pulling Jules from the fire and how her mother brought Chris to meet his father for the first time at a social services office next to the hospital. “So that’s kind of where things are.”

“This little boy,” Randy started tentatively. “He’s—”

“Born a bit early, and yeah, she got pregnant the night I….” He stopped himself. “I keep thinking when we broke up when I pretty much just shut the door in his face. We talked about that. The other day—crap, five days ago—when he met Chris, I ended up catching them outside of their house, and fuck, I couldn’t have handled it any shittier than I did.

“I’ve seen him since then. Down at the shop or over at Bear’s for a long minute, but then he’s off before I can talk to him.” Rey sighed. “I’m trying like hell to build something back up but… maybe we don’t fit. Maybe I’m fooling myself with wanting him to give me another chance.”

“Want some advice?” His stepfather waved back at Sarah, who’d stopped long enough to grin at him. “From an old man who suddenly found himself with a wife and a kid when he least expected it?”

“Randy, you’re the closest thing to a dad I’ve got.” He saluted the man with his soft drink. “I will take anything you’re willing to dish out. Especially if it’s about my mom or how to handle my fuckups with Gus.”

“Okay, you and Gus are actually a lot like me and Donna.” He held up a hand when Rey snorted. “Hear me out on this. The situation is similar. There are things you share and like, but the differences sometimes seem too big to get around. See, kiddo, people are like three-dimensional puzzle pieces. Some people you fit with two sides, some three, and some… the assholes… none. Then there’s the people who fit nearly all of your sides, and those are the ones you keep. The ones you try to marry or maybe just call them brother. However it plays out, but then there’s those sides that don’t fit and seem too far away or maybe too hard to ignore. That’s when the work begins.”

“Yeah, I ran away from the work the last time. I didn’t do shit to meet him halfway. That’s where I fucked up,” Rey interjected. “Or at least, I think I did.”

“Then you probably did. You both have to decide if it’s worth going back in again. That’s the hard part now,” he continued. “Take your mom. I love her, but she doesn’t understand how Mace’s family works. She doesn’t hate them. She even likes a couple of the guys, but she doesn’t understand how deep their bond is. That they’re brothers. For her, if you’re not actually blood related, you’re not family, which is kind of silly considering you and I aren’t related but here we are, watching people we both love in the backyard of a house you didn’t grow up in. In my book, that makes you and me family. Right?”

“Yeah, it does.” He nodded at Sarah. “Even if you guys didn’t give me the brother I asked for when I was seven, but she’ll do.”

“I’m kind of fond of the Duckie myself.” Randy laughed. “I’m going to work on your mom understanding family means more than a marriage or a shared womb. She knows you’re gay. She gets that. But up until now, she’s not really had to deal with what that means to her, and she should. You’re going to be bringing home another man—maybe Gus, maybe not—but you’re going to get married, and you might want kids. Hell, Gus comes with one preinstalled. But your kids aren’t going to come from you both, and she’s going to have to wrap her head around having a grandkid she might not be related to. It might take her a bit, and she might screw it up a couple of times, but she’ll get it right. When it’s all said and done, your mom wants you to be happy, and that’s going to have to include loving everyone you love.”

“And Gus?” He tilted his head, giving his stepfather a quick glance. “What the hell do I do about him? I don’t know where to start.”

“You start by showing him how you fit together,” Randy said, reaching for his root beer. “And then you show him how you’re willing to compromise on the things where you don’t. Your mom and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. No one can, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to stick it out until death does us part. No one’s perfect. And if you sit around, waiting for that perfect puzzle piece, you’re going to die alone and without ever knowing the love you could have had. Gus, he’s not flawless, but he’s a good kid, someone you can depend on for the things that matter. He understands what family and love is, and you can’t ask for anything better than that.

“Now….” Randy stood and tossed Rey one of the horns. “Blow that up, put that on, and let’s feed these monsters before they eat your mom alive. Because if this doesn’t turn out to be the best damned unicorn party in the world, you and I are going to have to answer to our womenfolk over there.”

“WATCH THE hands! Watch the hands!” Ivo hissed at Gus, pulling his fingers out of the way when Gus plopped a couple of bricks into place on the grid. “I’ve got to work on someone tonight, and they’ve got loose skin.”

“They weren’t even close to you, asshole.” Gus shot his brother a disgusted look. “And like you’re the only one who’s going to be feeling someone up. Bear and I do a hell of a lot more loose skin than you do, ’cause you only like them young and tight.”

“That would sound so very wrong if someone didn’t know you.” Luke chuckled, rolling the sand-filled wheelbarrow over to where Gus and Ivo were laying the last of the pavers. Dumping the sand onto the tarp, Luke angled the basket around. “Ivo, quit messing with the edging and grab the shovel while I get another load of sand. We just have to fill in the spaces and tamp them down.”

“Like you know what you’re talking about,” their younger brother scoffed. “We’re doing this after watching a video.”

“I have The Book! Obey The Book!” Looming over them from the upper deck connected to the house, Bear held up a thick manual, its edges battered from years of wear. “And yes, we watched a video. Now shovel the damned sand, Ivo. Get this done and we can grill up those steaks.”

Bear’d spotted it in a used bookstore when they’d first gotten into the house, and it’d become their go-to source for everything from plumbing to leveling a doorframe. At some point, pages thirty-two and thirty-three got stuck together, but they weren’t looking to ever install another hot water heater. They’d found a how-to site online recently, which went a long way in cutting back on some of the mistakes they made, but The Book was still their house Bible.

It was just a pity the damned book didn’t have any advice on how to deal with an ex-something you still wanted in your life but weren’t sure you could handle it.

Late weekend afternoons on the winding streets of their neighborhood meant BBQs, a ball game played down by the school, and in the case of the brothers’ sometimes sagging house, a few hours spent propping the old girl up so she sat straight. With most of her drunken lean taken care of, Bear turned his eye toward other things, like finally tackling the sharp drop in the lawn near the fence they shared with a lesbian couple and their five snakes, including a rosy boa who’d taken a liking to one of Ivo’s metal garden sculptures when it escaped one morning.

The fruit trees they’d planted together hadn’t taken as well as the avocado pit Ivo shoved toothpicks into and nurtured on the kitchen sink. Luke finally convinced their youngest brother to either toss it or plant it after its plastic cup was knocked over one too many times. They’d thought the house and its overly shaded backyard was the wrong climate, wrong soil—wrong everything—for an avocado tree, but in typical Ivo fashion, the damned thing grabbed hold and refused to let go. Terracing the lower part of the lawn would give them another area to put seating, leaving a broad expanse of grass for Ivo’s hardy, stubborn tree.

When they’d started the project, a twenty by twelve foot stretch of leveled dirt sounded like a quick afternoon of work. In the two months since Bear first dragged them out back to work on his lower patio, they’d gotten most of it done and were determined to lay the final few feet of pavers down and cross the lower terrace off of their to-do list.

Standing up, Gus stretched his arms out over his head, exaggerating his height to make up for the inch Ivo’d somehow gained on him. His brother’s peacock-blue-and-purple hair hung down around his face, a trickle of lavender-tinted sweat staining the work shirt he’d stolen out of Gus’s clean-clothes pile. The T-shirt hung loose on Ivo’s arms but fit his shoulders as snugly on his brother as it did him. They were both mostly leg, and studying his baby brother, Gus wondered if he wasn’t also looking at Chris a few decades down the road.

The pavers forgotten, Gus stared at Ivo, a wave of sadness creeping over him. He never should have been the eldest of the original brothers. Puck’d taken that role very seriously, and when Bear’d stepped in afterward, Gus had been… relieved, but there was something—someone—still missing from their circle. His own face with a bit more naughty in it, or maybe that was just how he remembered things.

“You okay, man?” Ivo prodded Gus with his sneaker toe. “You look like a goose flew over your grave.”

“Can’t have.” He straightened up, pulling his sweaty, filthy younger brother into a one-armed hug. “I am the Goose, and I suck at flying, remember?”

“Dude, let go,” Ivo growled at him. “You’re like hugging a wet skink.”

“Coming through. Last load of sand. Move out of the way.” Luke trundled the barrow past them, nearly clipping Ivo. His shoulder bulged with the effort of maneuvering the heavy basket. “Sorry. I’m just going to set this down. No sense dumping it. Mace, bring the broom over.”

“Here, I’ll get the other shovel.” Mace shouldered past Gus, nudging him out of the way. “Go supervise with Bear on the deck. Luke can sweep.”

“I carried the sand!” Luke protested, blocking Gus in with the barrow’s tire. “How about if I shove—”

“Guys.” The deep, rolling river of bass from the deck should have sounded like a question, but the four men standing at the end of the paved lower terrace knew better. “Gus, go wash your hands so you can help me shuck the corn. And Ivo, who are you inking? Tonight’s supposed to be… us.”

“Mrs. Branson. Caught a deep ding on her upper arm from some orderly at the hospital a few weeks back. It needs a touch-up. Maybe an inch at the most. She bought me some rum to fix it.” Ivo leaned on his shovel, picking at a new tear in his jeans. “It’s across a geisha she got in Honolulu when Collins opened up his shop on Smith. Told her she should have you do it, but she didn’t want to bug you because it’s small. It’s good rum.”

“I take it that’s something special?” Mace drawled when Bear let out a low whistle. “The geisha. Not the rum.”

“Swear to God.” Gus rolled his eyes, not sure if Mace was teasing or dead serious. “Sometimes I just want to punch you in the face.”

“Sometimes?” Ivo slid in, then turned back to Bear. “Wanna come with? I’d rather you do her. I fuck that up and… dude, I’m not even sure I should do anything to it.”

“She’s about eighty? Thereabouts?” Bear chewed on his upper lip, staring out at the lawn, then glanced at Gus. “Shit… I go and I break the whole we’re supposed to be doing a night together.”

“Yeah, but you want to see it, and she’s what? Two hundred and twelve?” Gus teased, smirking at Mace’s muffled laugh. “Dude, go. You know you want to, and she probably wants you to. The three of us can clean up after. If Mace can still walk, because you know, he’s old and can’t do all this hard outside work anymore.”

“Fuck you, Goose,” Mason sneered. “Let’s see who—”

“Hell, I can hear you guys out on the street.” Rey ambled up the driveway, his foot catching at the unlatched gate before it swung back and hit him. Hefting a pair of anti-puke-pink bags with his mother’s cupcake logo on them, he stopped at the stairs leading to the deck. “Shit, I came to help. Mace said you guys would probably not get it done today.”

There was a God. Gus knew this for sure. A God who hated him, cursed his existence as if to remind him that he shouldn’t have been the one whose foot got caught, whose ankle shouldn’t bear a bracelet of scars, and it would be Puck who’d probably be the one aching to crawl down Rey’s mouth with a kiss, then drag him upstairs.

He’d come from his sister’s birthday party, that much Gus knew, tanned from an afternoon in the sun, with a bit of pink across his nose. By all accounts there was nothing exotic or blindingly gorgeous about Rey Montenegro. An attractive man with dark cocoa-brown eyes and tousled sienna-and-gold hair swept back from his strong face, Rey wasn’t hard on the eyes. He’d filled out a lot since they were kids, his chest and thighs thickened with muscle from his work.

Rey’d broken a few of his knuckles along the way to adulthood—his nose too—leaving them slightly off-kilter from a few brawls he’d probably fought at Mace’s shoulder. And as much as Gus loved the look and feel of Rey’s sensual mouth, he adored the skim of Rey’s massive hands on his body and the strength in his fingers when he dug them into Gus’s hips, gripping him tightly before pounding Gus apart in a long, hot, sweaty round of sex.

God, he missed the sex. Nearly as much as he missed them talking. And the cuddling under a thick layer of blankets while the cold crept through a cracked-open window because they’d been too lazy to close it.

“Cupcake?” Rey rattled a bag at Gus. “Mom loaded up on the devil’s food, but there’s a chocolate coconut one I snagged for you before Duckie ate all of them.”

“I can’t fucking believe you guys call her Duckie,” he muttered, wanting both the cupcakes and the man offering them.

“We call you Goose,” Bear reminded him, reaching over Gus’s shoulder and into the bag. Pulling out a clear plastic container with a chocolate-iced brown cupcake in it, he winked at Rey. Relieving Rey of the other bag, Bear headed down the steps. “Taking these to the other guys. How about if I pay for this with a steak.”

“Good deal, so long as you don’t burn it. I taste enough ash when I go to work. Let me put the rest inside where it’s cool.” Rey climbed the stairs, stopping when he reached Gus. When he leaned in close, Gus took a sharp inhale, drawing in the scent of coconut oil, soap, and root beer on Rey’s skin. Then Rey’s breath warmed his cheek and throat, stoking a fire Gus thought he’d doused nearly a week before. “Do you mind? Me staying? I can help you… cook, at least.”

The last was said with a long glance down Gus’s body, leaving him with no doubt about what the heat in Rey’s gaze meant or the promise in his low, dusky words.

“Yeah, you can stay. Why wouldn’t you stay? You’re Mace’s best friend,” he finally said, stepping back from the edge of the steps. “Come on, we’ve corn to shuck.”

“And you?” Gus felt the tug on his waistband when Rey caught one of his belt loops. “Friends? At least?”

“I don’t know, Rey, but whatever you are,” Gus said, nodding toward the bag his ex still held in his hand, “it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a cupcake to get past that.”