Forever Promised (33 page)

“Niceness counts,” Jon said. It was true. He wanted to say something funny, something bright, that would make Deacon laugh and take away this uncomfortable question between them. But he couldn’t. He could hear the horses they’d ridden out whuffling softly in the shade, and the burble of water, and the whoosh of a hot wind through the drying grasses of the pasturelands, but he couldn’t think of one funny thing to say.

“Counts for what?”

Oh great—there went his plan for laziness.

“The person you want to….” Jon blushed again. “You know. Get wood around. They have to be nice. It’s got to be someone you….” Oh geez. “You know. Someone you trust.” This made him sound like such a weenie, but he didn’t keep secrets from Deacon. Deacon had picked
him
out in kindergarten. Jon had been feeling lost and alone and forgotten—had, in fact, been crying in the boys’ room because he missed his parents—and Deacon had promised him
this place
if only he’d stop crying.

Deacon had made it sound like Disneyland, only better, and at first, Jon had been a little disappointed. Swim? That was all? Sit on the rocks? Read a book? The best part of the trip had been riding a horse in front of Parrish, while Deacon had gotten to ride his own. But then, as Parrish had played with them, splashed them with water, made sure they had buckets and shovels, Jon had become enmeshed in Deacon’s game of (what else?) cowboys and displaced Native Americans.

By the end of the day, Jon had been convinced that Promise Rock was the world’s most perfect place. There was sunshine and water, earth and sky, lunch and exercise, and people who wanted to hear
everything
Jon had to say.

Jon started to think of good things—the
best
things—so Deacon and Parrish would laugh for him. Deacon was a nice kid, but he was too serious. Jon wanted to make him less serious.

And he was certainly serious that day in middle school, sitting on a sun-heated rock and talking about boners that wouldn’t go away.

“Jon?” Deacon asked, uncertain, and Jon realized he was leaning close enough to see the brown speckles in Deacon’s green eyes.

“It would be great,” Jon said, hoping so hard. “We wouldn’t have to worry about girls or….” He swallowed. He was too young to throw out the word “rejection” and too old to say “getting hurt” without embarrassment.

Deacon leaned into the kiss then, and Jon closed his eyes and thought hard about tits, and Deacon’s lips moved over his, and then Deacon’s tongue swept inside, and Jon hoped, hoped so hard, and…

And he caught a strand of scent—warm boy, sweat—and he suddenly couldn’t kiss at all.

He pulled away slowly, not able to meet his friend’s eyes.

“You don’t feel it, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m sorry,” Jon whispered.

Deacon pulled back and shook his head. His smile was so gentle. For the rest of his life, Jon would remember that forgiving, accepting smile.

“It’s not your fault,” Deacon said. “If I had tits, I’m sure you’d be all over me.”

Jon nodded fervently. “I would,” he said, relieved. “I’d totally bang you in a hot second!” He had no idea what “banging” meant at that point in his life. Between a spotty health education in fifth grade, movies, and the word itself, he had some sort of hazy idea of getting naked with someone and having his dick explode—but everyone said it was better than that, so he had hope it wouldn’t get bloody.

Deacon laughed softly. “As long as you don’t care that I like boys too, I don’t care if you don’t.”

It took Jon a minute to figure out what that meant, and when he got it, he was a little shocked. “I will beat the shit out of anyone who picks on you for this,” he said soberly, and Deacon shrugged.

“No one will know,” he said. “It’s not anyone’s business.”

But it was Jon’s now. Jon would have taken that to his grave.

As he’d have also taken that faint, wistful stirring in his groin, before he’d realized that no amount of wishing would let him kiss Deacon the same way he wanted to kiss people with tits.

Jon opened his eyes as an adult in a cold gray November, and knew they were burning. “Our lives would have been so much easier if I’d been gay,” he said frankly, and Deacon snorted and shook his head.

“I’ve always been a stop on your way,” Deacon said quietly, and Jon hated him because he believed this. “You—you and Amy—I knew when you left for college that you were meant for something bigger than Levee Oaks. I….” He shrugged, and Jon remembered the cold sweats, the times he’d answered a question with perfect composure in class and then had a meltdown behind the school building, or even gotten sick, afterward. He remembered the time Deacon was scheduled to give a speech during an assembly and he’d actually
begged
Jon to pull the fire alarm so he didn’t have to. Jon had tried to pay someone to do it too (he knew he’d get caught—all his teachers looked at him first when something went wrong), but Deacon had felt bad then about asking him to get in trouble, and had given the speech anyway. They’d both played a football game that night, and Jon, Deacon, and Amy had gone on to the dance afterward. Jon and Amy had both been in the car on the drive home when Deacon—finally free of all the things he knew he was supposed to do—pulled over and got out of the car, then slid down the side, shaking so bad he bit his tongue.

It had always seemed so unfair—the smartest of them, the brightest and best, had been maimed and folded in a tiny box of his own fears. Jon had come home for Parrish Winters’s funeral. He’d seen Crick hovering over Deacon’s back, solicitous and protective, and he’d let out a sigh of relief.
Someone
had Deacon’s back when Jon was gone.

“It’s like God made you that way,” Jon said slowly now, “so you could stay here and make this place better, because no one else could have.”

Deacon rolled his eyes. “That’s the stupidest—”

“Please,” Jon said, suddenly not ashamed of how raw he felt inside, “don’t say it’s stupid. Let me make fantasies about you here. Let me fucking idolize you. Amy would have been fine without me, and she may even have been fine without you, but me? I would have been fucking useless. I’d be shoving my parents’ money up my nose right now, if I hadn’t killed myself by wrapping a car or a plane or a train around a tree before I even graduated from high school. I… I spent a lot of time worried about leaving you behind, and… and now that I’m about to leave you behind for real, it’s like… like finally hitting me, you know?”

Deacon quirked a corner of his mouth up, and Jon knew he was going to try to make a joke to talk Jon down. “That Levee Oaks is the most boring place on Earth?” he said, and Jon obliged him with a weak laugh.

“I knew that. You know what I didn’t realize? Don’t answer that”—because he saw that lip quirk again and he wanted to get this out. “I realized that I was just as worried about what would happen to me when I left you as I was worried about what would happen to you. You—you have
friends
in there, Deacon. You’ve got family. You’re going to be okay.” Jon felt tears threaten again, and he wiped them distractedly, because he knew of all people, even his wife, the one person he could cry in front of was Deacon. “But I’m not. Man, how am I supposed to go do something great without you there to keep me honest, how am I—”

Deacon hugged him. It was fast and hard, and Jon wrapped his arms around his friend’s shoulders and clung.

“You’re going to be fine,” Deacon told him, and Jon hung on to those words tightly. “You’re going to be better than fine. You’re going to be great. You and Amy—there’s no words for how good you’re going to be.”

“You bastard,” Jon whispered. “You’re not going to miss us at all.”

Deacon cuffed him upside the head and then resumed the hug. “I take that back. Amy’s going to be fine. You’re still the stupidest asshole on the planet.”

“You knew I was stupid,” Jon muttered, and suddenly it was okay. Deacon would miss him. Miss him and his wife and their family just as much as he would miss Deacon. He needed that. He needed to know that the one person who had known him all his life would still miss him, still know him, would never let him go.

D
EACON
didn’t
dream
about things, per se. No, he woke up in a pulse-pounding sweat about them, his worst nightmares actually flashing across his eyes as he was awake.

When Crick had been gone, right after Parry had been born, it had happened almost nightly, sometimes twice a night. He’d wake up gasping for air and think,
Crick’s dead, I’m drunk again, I dropped the baby, Benny’s on the streets, Jon left me, holy fuck
Crick’s dead!

It happened less often now, but it still happened.

Benny lost the baby, Jon left me, Mikhail left Shane, Jeff’s getting sick, holy fuck
Crick’s dead!

Or, this chilly November a.m.,
Jon left me, Jon left me, Jon left me, I failed I failed I failed I failed, oh holy fuck,
Crick’s dead!

Even as he sweated his anxieties out in the cold dark, Deacon was aware that some fears didn’t get any better, and they tended to repeat. This night, though, he could put the one about Crick away for a bit, because Crick was patting his knee and mumbling.

“Deacon… Deacon, calm down and get the phone.”

“The phone?”

“Yeah, man, it’s ringing on the charger.”

“Fuck….”

Deacon fumbled for it and turned it on without looking at the number. “You can’t sleep either?”

“I call it off. I’ll call the shipping company in the morning and we’ll stay here. I’ll buy another house for Shane’s kids. We can start up the practice again. It was a shitty idea. They don’t really want me. We’ll stay here, it’s fine—”

“Are you having a panic attack in a hotel bathroom?” Because Jon’s rant had a tinny, echoing sound to it, and Deacon couldn’t imagine him saying these things out loud to Amy.

“The hotel stairwell. We should have gotten a better hotel. I’m freezing my ass off!”

Deacon smiled. “If you’d wanted a good hotel, you would have gone farther than Levee Oaks. Get dressed. I’ll meet you in front. Is all your shit packed?”

“Yeah.” Jon sounded relieved to have it taken out of his hands.

“Good. I’ll have you back before Amy wakes up.”

Jon laughed. “Remember when I used to sneak over to your house in the middle of the night?”

Deacon made an affirmative grunt. It didn’t count as sneaking when his parents didn’t notice he was gone.

“It’ll be like that,” Jon said, and he sounded miserable and panicked, and if anyone could identify with that, it was Deacon.

“Whereyagoin’?” Crick slurred as Deacon got out of bed and turned on the lamp.

“Jon needs talking down.”

Crick sat up and squinted at him in the dim yellow light. “I
knew
he was too quiet tonight,” he muttered, and Deacon grunted in agreement. He hadn’t told Crick about the rather desperate hug before Amy had come out and they’d left for the evening.

“He did this before he left for college too,” he said, although he doubted Jon would remember. He and Amy had gotten hammered, and Deacon had driven them both back to The Pulpit that night. For the entire trip home, Jon had adamantly claimed he was going to live in Deacon’s stables for the rest of his life, and they wouldn’t be able to make him leave. He’d still been a little drunk the next morning when Deacon and Parrish had driven him to the airport. (Amy had been completely hungover by that time, and she’d claimed ever since that it was the last time she’d ever gotten
that
drunk, ever.)

He’d never told Deacon in so many words, but Deacon was pretty sure the reason he’d gotten on the plane was that Deacon promised him he could come home.

Deacon slid on his jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket. Benny and Crick kept trying to get him to wear a bigger, denser jacket, something with a lining—something that hadn’t been fashionable twenty, thirty years ago—but Deacon liked simple.

“Put on a scarf and gloves or I’m coming to nag you,” Crick said stubbornly, and Deacon grimaced. Of course, being married was never simple.

“No hat?” he sniped.

Crick narrowed his eyes. “It’s on top of your scarf on the dresser.” Crick had made them both, in sort of a sand/green combination that Deacon would have expected to see on Shane. “I figured you’d use your common sense.”

“But why do I need to when you’re so good at using it for me,” Deacon said sweetly, grabbing the stuff and putting it on. He snagged his wallet and keys from the nightstand and leaned over to kiss Crick.

Crick kissed him back, and for a moment, bed looked
really
tempting, but Deacon resisted. He turned off the lamp and paused at the doorway.

“Go to sleep, baby,” he said, his voice low and throaty. “It’s going to be an early morning.”

“You’re sure Jon will be there?”

“Yup.”

“’Kay.” Crick was snuggling under the covers as Deacon shut the door.

Deacon trotted to the mudroom for his tennis shoes and was down the steps and into the truck before even the dog knew he was gone. It occurred to him, as he was driving his father’s old Chevy pickup down the road, that pretty much any adventure he and Jon had survived had happened in this pickup truck. There was something to be said for a vehicle that lasted—even if it did look like a primered shoebox full of rubble.

Jon was waiting outside the hotel when he drove up, and Amy must not have woken up, because his head was bare and so were his hands.

That was okay. Crick had put an extra set of woolens on the front seat of the truck for when Deacon forgot. Deacon didn’t even think about laughing—every stitch of the wool fabric was a painful testament to Crick’s courage, and his love.

“Here,” Deacon grunted as Jon opened the door. “You’re going to freeze your ass off.”

Hooded sweatshirt, denim jacket, and tennis shoes. Jon could afford a better coat too.

“I have a real coat—you know it’s like twenty degrees in DC right now.” Jon was jamming the hat on over his ears and wrapping the scarf around his neck, though. The fingerless mittens too, although he tucked his fingers inside the mitt part. These were navy blue, as stolid as you could get—Crick had made them before the green set and had stuck with conservative colors until he knew Deacon would wear them.