Double Blind (45 page)

Randy
heard the singing as he rounded the corner and headed to the River, the sound rising even over the din made by the slots, and he cringed. Goddamn it, it had been a sucky night, and he’d gotten three bad beats and had to deal with the sleazy asshole who alternated between racial slurs, sexist remarks, and blatant homophobia. All he wanted was a drink and some peace and quiet, but fuck no, not on karaoke night.

And then he stopped. “Boys, boys, boys!” someone shouted over the music.

Someone kind of familiar.

“Boys, boys, boys!” It came again, and this time Randy heard someone trying to sing something after that, something about drinks in bars. And then the
boys, boys, boys
bit came again, and then laugher, and then, as one, two voices warbled badly, “Whoah-oh-uhaoah,” and then there was even more laughter. Randy started to move a little faster.

He’d known it was Ethan, and he was pretty sure it was Sam, too, just from their voices, but when he saw them—

Whoah-oh-uhoah
was right.

There they were, the beautiful pair of them, Slick living up to his name, all in black, his shirt undone and a black tie dangling loose around his neck. They were both sweating and laughing, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their lungs, clearly having an absolutely wonderful time. So was everyone else in the bar, all of them crowded at the edge of the stage, cheering them on.

They saw Randy, fumbled their line as they cheered him forward, then picked up the song in time to chant, “We love them! We love them!” in eager, off-key chorus as they pointed at him and leered.

Randy smiled, waved at them, then went up to the bar, ordered a beer, and settled in to watch them. When they called out to him once again at the chorus, he saluted them with his longneck.

“Love you, too,” he said.

The
first few days after Mitch had gone were rough for Sam, but Randy was impressed with how well Peaches hung in there. If the therapy was part of that, it was worth it. And the second therapy appointment went a lot better, in Randy’s opinion, because they didn’t talk about him at all. In fact, the only one who really spoke was Sam, and he talked about his mom.

The session still upset Randy, though, and later that afternoon while Ethan and Sam were working on clicker-training the kittens while dinner finished simmering in the crock pot, he took a ride out into the desert to clear his head. But even that didn’t do it, and he ended up back at the Stratosphere again. He lucked out because the woman working the ticket counter knew him and his habit of going there, so she bent the rules and let him go up for free. Partly because of that and partly because he thought maybe some serious thrill would help get rid of his agitation, he bought a ticket for one of the rides.

Then he bought one for each of them.

He liked the Big Shot, where hydraulics shot riders up a tower like a rocket before stopping them from going off the top and bringing them gently back down. It was a ride popular in a lot of amusement parks these days, except this one was on top of a tower sitting more than sixteen-hundred feet above the Strip. X-Scream was billed as “a giant teeter-totter” on the edge of the tower: Essentially you sat in a small car and tried not to lose either your lunch or your mind as it appeared to shoot you over the edge of the building and then brought you back before repeating the process several times. The Insanity ride basically strapped you in, tilted you sideways, and spun you over the Strip.

Randy saved that one for last, because he really liked it. While he spun above the world and his fellow riders screamed and threatened to throw up, Randy let his mind go.

It bothered him that Sam had lost his mom. Right now it was bothering him a lot. He’d empathized when he’d heard the story when they’d first met, but it didn’t really register until he’d sat there and listened to Sam talk about how great she was. The woman had been nothing short of amazing. Battling a debilitating disease, she still managed to raise an intelligent, competent young man
and
beat off, from the sounds of it, any homophobia that came his way. She had been so strong, so supportive, so—shit, she was a fucking list of superlatives. It really, really got under Randy’s skin that she worked so hard and then got picked off by cancer. If this had been a movie, he’d have walked out and demanded his money back. It
sucked
. Even when he finished on the tower, even after he stood on the edge and tried to let the wind take his thoughts away, they clung to him. What happened to Sam and his mom was wrong. That’s all it was. Wrong. It made him itch just thinking about it.

What was fucking weird was how Sam didn’t seem to see that.

He did, in a creepy, abstract way. Like it was just some sad fact, and he teared up sometimes when the therapist pushed on the wrong spot, but it was nothing huge to him. His pain was just little tears that he wiped away, and then he tended to go stony until she redirected to a more comfortable subject. Randy didn’t want to tell her how to do her job, but the more he watched Sam not break down, the more agitated he got.

Finally, during the second week of sessions, he couldn’t stand it any more and spoke up.

“Look,” he said to Sam when he’d paused to retreat into that blank space again, “why don’t you just let it out, Sam, and be done with it?” He turned to the therapist. “With all respect to your training or whatever—I mean, shit, it can’t be good for him to keep all that in! When are you going to tell him to just spill it?”

“Spill what?” Sam was looking at him in total confusion. “Let what out?”

Randy had to choke back a laugh. “Seriously?
Seriously?
” He turned to the therapist. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

She gave him a thoughtful but otherwise unreadable look for a few seconds—the woman would be dangerous at a poker table—then spoke. “I’m not sure. What is it you see, Randy?”

There was a trap there. Randy was sure of it, and he regretted saying anything at all—until he looked at Sam. And there it was, so close to the surface he couldn’t bear it, and he gave up.

“Sam,” he said, trying to be gentle, but mostly being resigned, “just be sad already.”

The words might as well have been a switch, the way they made the walls go up. “Sad about what?” Sam asked tightly.

“Your mom, Peaches. Her dying, like that. You having to be alone.”

The temperature of the airspace around Sam probably went down at least ten degrees. “You don’t think I’ve been sad about that? You think I didn’t
feel
that?”

Randy opened his mouth to answer, then stopped, unsure. He glanced at the therapist for backup, but one of the plants would have given him more feedback.
Just shut up and don’t say anything
, he urged himself.
Just don’t say another damn word
. It was smart advice. He really wished he could take it.

He sighed and looked back at Sam. “No, Peaches. I don’t think you have. Or, if you have, then there’s something else. You’re worked up about something, and it’s making me crazy waiting for you to let it go.” He watched Sam’s emotions play a ping-pong match across his face, stormy to terrified and back again, then figured
what the hell
and kept on. “I think you have been really sad over your mom, yes. I think you bled like hell when she died. But I don’t think you’ve really, truly been sad over it, no. You’re weird when you talk about it, Sam. You talk about it almost like it happened to somebody else, like it’s just facts. Meanwhile, I’m sitting over here getting torn up inside at how unfair it was, and I want to turn to you and tell you I’m sorry, that I think it sucks, but you’re all wooden about it. Like this. Like you’re doing right now. Like if you turn to stone it won’t hurt you. But every night I watch you, and until that cricket chirps and your iPhone says Mitch is going to bed, no matter what time it is or where you are or what you’re doing, you can’t sleep. And I don’t know what the hell that has to do with your mom, but I swear to God it’s something. Or there’s something else. I don’t know. But there’s something. And you both do it too. You and Slick both do that, whenever you brush up against your demons. You just go all funny, and it creeps me out!”

“Who is Slick?” Laura asked.

Randy had almost forgotten she was there. “My—boyfriend.” Randy sighed. “His last… boyfriend was a jerk. Married, which he knew. They had a long-term affair, but the dickwad cashed in their joint savings to save his ‘real’ family.”

“I didn’t know that,” Sam said quietly.

Randy shrugged to cover his guilt. He probably shouldn’t have said that. But goddamn it, he wanted this sorted out! He turned back to the therapist. “Yes. He came down to Vegas to gamble away all his money, and then he was going to go out to his car and blow his brains out.” Sam gasped, but Randy ignored him. “Except I met him first. But God help you if you bring up the past. With either of these two.
Why
do they do that? Why do they go all stony? I just want to help them, but they don’t let me! Why? Do you know? Because it’s clear they aren’t fucking going to tell me!”

The therapist regarded Randy for a few minutes. When she leaned forward just a little, Randy could feel the danger coming even before she spoke.

“I don’t know, Randy. How do you handle your demons? Maybe—to help Sam—you could tell him about how you dealt with your uncle’s passing?”

Randy stared at her for a good half a minute, mocking himself because he’d gone rigid, because he was doing everything he’d just said he hated. If she’d have been a man, he’d have hit her. Except that was a lie. He wouldn’t have been able to then, either.

Because The Look wasn’t just during sex. This bitch was playing Dom. And she was really, really good. Because there it was. Right there.

Space. Safe, huge, protective space.

Twenty-two years is probably enough time to spend running. Don’t you think?

Randy gave his inner voice the finger, then settled back on the couch and surrendered.

“You have to understand,” he said, carefully, “that my family was all in the auto industry. Everyone. My dad, mom, aunts, uncles. We were all really blue-collar. Not so much with the smarts, either—not book smarts, anyway. And when the factories started to close, as everyone lost their jobs one by one, it really hurt. It hurt everybody’s pride more than anything, and it was like this cloud everybody pushed around. This big, black, fucking awful cloud.” He sighed. “A lot of it ended up on Uncle Gary.

“He was quiet, see. Big bear of a man, so he looked mean, but he couldn’t even kill a cricket. Big spiders he’d have me go after, but he felt bad even for them. And he was gay. I didn’t know that at the time. But he was gay, and that became important later.

“I assume he was having sex, but I never knew about it. That wasn’t something he would have considered appropriate for us to talk about. I liked to think, later, that he’d have helped me out when the time was right, that he knew how I was going to end up before I did, but maybe not. Maybe that’s just my fantasy. All I knew then was that he really seemed to understand me, and that he was really, really kind. Everyone else was always angry or shouting or crying, everyone else was stressed out, but Gary was always glad to see you. Me. He was really glad to see
me
. If my mom was on the warpath or my dad was drunk, I could go to Gary’s house, and he’d make me dinner and play poker with me or help me with my homework. He was the only one who asked about that stuff—homework. Everybody else just yelled when I failed something, but he asked if I had spelling words or math worksheets. Made me finish before we could play poker. Sometimes if I didn’t have homework he’d give me some: math. Always math. Told me math was the most important thing I’d ever learn. And he taught me about people: how to read them. How to ‘turn them your way’, he said, but that was just a nice way of saying how to manipulate them. He was good at it. Really, really good at it. He was a goddamn charmer, which was how he survived being a gay man in a working-class town full of unemployed assholes looking for someone to hit.

“Sometimes he’d have a friend or two over and we’d all play together. Those were the best nights. There I was, this skinny, ugly piece of shit, sitting at this big table with these big, tough-as-shit men. Which, of course, they weren’t. Well, they were, sort of. Bunch of bears, but they weren’t mean, just tame as all hell. Same as Gary, couldn’t hurt anybody. But I didn’t know, and I just knew that I was the biggest shit in third grade, sitting there playing Black Mariah with these big men. They gave me my nickname too. Which I loved. Made everybody call me Skeet, because I was a poker hand, and I was cool. Just like Gary. I was going to be just like Gary when I grew up.” He laughed, bitterly. “Mom would get so freaked out when I said that, and I’d get mad at her. ‘What the hell’s wrong with Uncle Gary?’ I wanted to know. Finally one day my brother said, ‘Because he’s a fag, that’s why!’ I had no idea what that meant, but I could tell it was bad, so I said he wasn’t and punched my brother in the face.”