From the Ashes (12 page)

“Tomas said your dog was cold.” Mr. Perez shrugged, as if building a doghouse for his son’s live-in lover was exactly the type of thing he would have been doing anyway on a Sunday.

“Really, I appreciate it so much.” Jesse peered around at the sawdust and the old leather tool case. “Do you want some help? I don’t really know anything about building.”

“You should study.” Tomas’s dad’s expression was serious. He pulled his glasses down over his eyes, hiding his expression.

Guilt twisted in Jesse’s stomach. He’d been planning on pissing away the morning sleeping when he could have been doing something productive. “I’ll do that, Mr. Perez.”

Tomas’s dad looked pleased. If he didn’t exactly smile, well—Jesse figured that must just be his personality.

Chapter Ten

“Don’t be a faggot.”

Tomas’s temper flared. “What the fuck did you call me?”

“Nothing, man.” Rick made a pissy face. “Just a figure of speech.” He went back to stacking adapters. “I’m only saying you should come out for a beer with us tonight. You’ve been totally MIA lately.”

“I’ve gotta pick up my roommate.” Tomas filled out the inventory form. The kitchen fire they’d been called out on had been nothing more than smoke. One guy with a fire extinguisher could have put out the thing. They’d rushed there after a hysterical call from the homeowner with a truck and seven guys. Lot of buildup, and a hell of a lot more busywork than action.

Maybe that’s why he felt so on edge about the slur. Sure, it was against station policy to use hate language, but the guys called each other queer, or gay or fags all the time, for everything from a full-out fight to joking around.

The messed-up thing was that the fire station was in Capitol Hill. Sure, all the guys he worked with lived outside the city, but Capitol Hill was the gayest part of Seattle.

“Where’s he work?” Rick asked.

Tomas didn’t talk much about Jesse at the station, but he’d mentioned his roommate a couple times. “He works at a coffee shop up on The Ave, but in the afternoon he has classes at UW.”

“You’ll drive from SeaTac to UW, but you can’t meet us for a beer?” Rick cocked his eyebrows like he thought Tomas was full of shit. Finished with stacking, he wiped his hands on a rag. “Have him take a bus, meet us all at the bar.”

“Um…” Tomas pulled his phone out of his back pocket and looked at it, buying a second to think. This was bound to happen eventually, at least if Jesse kept living at his house. “I’ll text and see if he wants to come.”

Tomas thumbed in a quick message. It was early, but Jesse was probably on his way to the coffee shop.

“You wanna go work out?” Rick led the way over to the lockers, where he pulled off his shirt. Rick was shorter then Tomas by an inch or two, but built thick and burly. Tomas had never found him attractive, but he wondered whether Rick would freak if he learned Tomas liked men.

Maybe Rick would think Tomas had been hitting on him all the time they pumped iron together.

“Yeah, sure.” Tomas needed to get all the adrenaline out of his system. Amped from the fire that wasn’t, his senses felt hyperaware. He couldn’t stop listening for the buzz of his phone. Tomas unfastened his belt and pulled off his shirt. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Rick looking at him. “What?”

“Oh, nothing.” Rick turned back to his locker, digging for his gym clothes. The top part of his back was red, but Tomas couldn’t tell if that was a blush or a sunburn. “You might want to tell your girl to go easy, man.”

Tomas blinked. “What?”

Rick laughed. His back was to Tomas while he pulled up his workout shorts and dragged on a tank top. “You got a few hickeys there, player.”

“Really?” Smiling, Tomas walked to the mirror and leaned forward to check his neck. He hadn’t seen any the previous day when he’d been getting dressed, but he and Jesse kept the apartment dim in the morning. Jesse always said that bright ceiling lights felt wrong when it was still dark outside.

Purple love bites marked his left side where his shoulder met his neck. They weren’t hickeys. Not like those big round things kids in high school liked to leave all over each other. On his dark skin, they were barely noticeable.

Still, looking at them made him remember how Jesse liked to suck on his neck and wrap his legs around Tomas’s back. Sometimes Jesse got a bit rough when he came.

His dick plumped in his underwear, so he shifted it to a different position and focused on getting it down. Man, he was lost on Jesse if just thinking about him got Tomas hard.

“You coming or what?” Rick slapped his locker shut.

“Yeah. Sure.” Tomas faced away from him to dress since his dick was still half-hard. Right when he was folding his jeans to put them in his locker, his cellphone buzzed in his back pocket.

“That your boyfriend?” Rick said gruffly. He was joking, but it cut too close to the marrow for Tomas’s comfort.

He gave Rick the finger as he checked Jesse’s message.

Sure. Meet at six? Text me where.

Tomas fixed his face so he didn’t smile too hard at his phone.

“So, he coming or what?” Rick asked.

“Yeah.” Tomas shut his locker and stepped into his sneakers. He refused to psyche himself out about Jesse meeting Rick and the guys. Jesse and he went places all the time together. This wasn’t any different. “We’ll both be there.”

“Cool, man.” Rick smiled in that way of his. He only ever grinned with one side of his mouth. The other side of his face stayed hard, as if even when he was happy he had to keep tough.

“Yeah.” Tomas walked past and grabbed the door to the gym. “Should be fun.”

The pub near the fire station played live music on the weekends, and despite being in Capitol Hill, the crowd was mostly straight.

It was early, so the pub was half-empty, and the soundtrack was on low enough that he and his pals could talk. From their booth, Tomas lifted his head, watching for when Jesse would walk in.

“So, this little faggot says to me—”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Tomas snapped at Zeke, who was halfway through a story about his brother-in-law. Zeke was constantly complaining about the guy, who was an orthodontist and apparently looked down on Zeke for his blue-collar job. Still, Tomas was sick of the way his friends threw around the word
fag
.

“What’s up your ass?” Zeke and Tomas had always been on good terms, but if it annoyed Tomas that the guys were talking shit like that, he knew it would make Jesse miserable.

“You douche bags are all ‘faggot’ this and ‘faggot’ that. Has it occurred to you that it’s messed up to say crap like that? Especially since we’re in a
gay
neighborhood?”

Zeke shrugged, trying to let it roll off his shoulders, but it was pretty obvious from the way he rubbed his face that he was embarrassed to have been called out. “I didn’t mean it in an
antigay
way.”

Next to him, Rick and Saul nodded their agreement. Rick piped in, “He’s just fucking around, man. When did you get all uptight?”

Right then, Jesse came around the corner of their booth. His cheeks were red and his breathing fast, as if he’d jogged from the bus stop. He carried a backpack on one shoulder, and looked young, and sweet and cute as hell. Unfortunately, he also looked pretty gay. Especially with the rainbow-flag pin attached to his backpack.

Tomas hadn’t thought much about that stupid pin when it had appeared a few days ago. Jesse mentioned his coffee-shop friend Michael had hassled him into wearing it. Now that Jesse was standing there in his skinny orange jeans and his tight shirt with his punky haircut, the effect of him was a lot stronger than Tomas had remembered. Jesse looked queer. Not just possibly queer, either. Really, obviously queer.

Rick, Saul and Zeke all stared intently at their beer mats. Rick’s eyes were wide and his face red.

Tomas didn’t know if it was because he was worried Jesse had overheard them saying
faggot
, or whether… Fuck. Tomas had no idea what Rick was thinking.

“Can I order from here, or should I get a drink at the bar?” Jesse pushed his backpack under the table next to Tomas. He avoided looking at Tomas’s friends as hard as they avoided looking at him.

“Jesse.” Tomas cleared his throat. He pointed at the guys around the booth. “Saul, Zeke, Rick.”

Jesse must have realized he was supposed to say hello, so he waved and greeted them, focusing right above their heads.

“Guys, this is Jesse. He’s been living at my place.” Tomas realized how lame that sounded. There was no reason for a kid like Jesse to be shacking up with a guy like him except for sex. Well, nothing except being broke. That’s when Tomas remembered the other reason he hadn’t been planning to tell his friends at the station about Jesse.

“Dude.” Saul leaned across the table when Jesse had gone to get a drink. “Is that the kid from the fire a few weeks ago?”

With all the other reasons he’d dreaded the guys meeting Jesse, breaches of protocol had been the last thing on Tomas’s mind. “Yeah.” He sighed. Tomas was going to need a second beer to get through this. He pulled out his phone and texted Jesse to grab him a drink from the bar. It was half so he didn’t have to stand up and half to keep Jesse out of their way for a minute. “He needed a place to stay, and I’d been looking for someone to split the rent with for a while, so—”

“You never told me you were looking for a roommate.” Saul scrunched his face up in anger. “I was almost out on my ass last month.”

Tomas raised his palm. “It came up all of a sudden,” he lied. But then he considered how Saul would get along with his family. He liked the guy well enough, but Saul was a partier, and a loud one at that. Tomas’s parents would have hated him. “I live next door to my mom and dad.” Tomas had never told his station buddies about his home life. He hadn’t ever wanted to. “Basically, my place is in their garage.”

“You live with your parents?” Saul snickered, the cruel edge of his personality coming out.

This is why Tomas didn’t get too close to the other firefighters. None of the guys he worked with were Latino, so they didn’t understand. Tomas had lived most of his life in America and understood that kids were supposed to move away from their parents, but his folks had grown up in El Salvador, where extended families lived in the same house or at least on the same block.

“I live in a converted garage.” He downed the last of his beer. “But my folks are around a lot.” Tomas looked over to where Jesse was paying the bartender. “Jesse’s a kid still. A student. My mom and dad can baby him.”

Now that he thought about it, it was amazing how well Jesse got along with his family. Jesse may have been uncomfortable around them, but they liked Jesse well enough.

Saul, on the other hand, was twenty-seven.

“You think you’d want my mom yelling at you for parking your truck in the wrong spot in the driveway? Or for throwing away old clothes instead of donating them or sewing up the holes?” That kind of thing would drive Saul nuts and lead to a shouting match within a week.

“Yeah, I see your point,” Saul grumbled. He’d ordered two beers right off and was halfway through his second. When Jesse got back to the table, Saul held out a ten. “Hey, you want to grab me another beer?”

Jesse glanced at Tomas, his eyes questioning. He set down the two drinks in his hands.

“He’s not your errand boy, go get it yourself.” Tomas hoped he came across as funny, not aggressive. He wouldn’t have cared if Saul had asked earlier, but Jesse had just been about to sit down.

“Whatever, man.” Saul gestured to the other guys to scoot out of the booth so he could get out.

“I could have gotten it,” Jesse mumbled. He sat next to Tomas and hid behind a swig of beer.

Tomas wished he could put an arm around Jesse. He wanted to protect Jesse from his buddies with a physical sign that he would go to blows in a second if any of them gave Jesse shit. Instead, he put enough space between them that his friends would see Jesse was deserving of equal respect.

“So, how you getting on after the fire?” Rick asked, with that half-smile of his.

“Pretty good.” Jesse drank fast, probably because he was nervous.

Tomas scanned for a waiter to get them some food. Jesse was a lightweight on an empty stomach.

“It’s been cool having a place to stay where I didn’t have to buy all new furniture or anything.”

Rick nodded. “Yeah, I bet.”

Silence settled over the table, with Zeke shooting nervous looks at Jesse as if he was scared of him.

After a long moment, Jesse took a deep breath. Tomas thought he was going to make some excuse to leave, but instead he said, “So. Haunted Trails starts tomorrow, huh?”

Zeke exhaled, his expression relieved. “Yeah. Me and Saul are volunteering the first couple nights with some guys from other stations. Rick and Tomas are on deck for Halloween.”

“Sounds like fun.” Jesse drank another third of his beer. He smiled, though he didn’t take his eyes off the beer’s label. “I bet it’s a blast. We had something like that where I grew up. They called it Haunted Hayfield.”

Saul got back to the table and shoved Rick out of the way so he could sit. “Oh, this is way better than those ones with hay bales. It’s at a state park, on hiking trails. The terrain is a little rough—with leaves and rocks and shit. So if the kids start freaking out and running, they trip all over each other.” His chuckle bordered on sadistic.