Keeping Promise Rock (12 page)

“Oh Jesus,” he muttered. “You’re just like Bob—you’re going to send me away!”

Deacon was horrified and shocked, and he stood there, his mouth gaping, trying to summon up the magic words of “Oh Christ, no!” He managed them, but by that time, Crick was up on the damned horse and roaring across the field, and Deacon was running barefoot over the little bridge to throw on his clothes and go stop him. Whatever was going on in that jump-the-gun head of Crick’s could only make this whole shit storm worse.

He left it all there—blankets, ice chest, fucking AstroTurf and all—

and stopped barely long enough to pull on his jeans, T-shirt, and boots.

Apparently he left his common sense in the wreckage of Crick’s lost virginity, too, because he jumped in the Chevy and floored the fucking thing without even his seatbelt.

This was a problem when he hit the pothole in the shitty road, broke the axle, and got thrown headfirst into the windshield at twenty-five miles an hour.

Dreams Like Shattered Glass

DEACON came to in a hospital bed, feeling like at least six kinds of fool.

Carrick was right beside him, looking at him as though he’d grown a second head.

“It doesn’t mean we can’t be together.” Deacon’s mouth felt like gum and cotton balls, but he was pretty sure he said it right.

“Deacon—Jesus, are you okay? You scared the shit out of me! I thought you’d be home, and then you weren’t, and when I got back from town you weren’t there and then….”

Deacon focused his blurry eyes and scowled. “What’d you do in town?”

“You weren’t wearing a seatbelt!” Crick accused.

Deacon supposed he should be ashamed of this. “I guess I’m lucky to be here,” he said warily, but he didn’t feel lucky. Crick was looking like he had a three-hundred-pound horseshoe to drop on Deacon’s aching head.

“What did you say?” Crick asked, handing him some water in a cup.

Deacon took a sip and felt a little better. “I’m lucky to be here?” Crick wasn’t meeting his eyes. Oh fuck. How bad was it that Crick couldn’t meet his eyes?

“Before that, when you woke up.” Crick’s shoulder-length hair was stringy from running his hands through it, and Deacon tried and failed to figure out how much time had passed.

“I said you going to school doesn’t mean we can’t be together. Lots of visiting, lots of texting… hot weekends. It’s only San Francisco or L.A., it’s not the ends of the earth, you know?” Crick sat down heavily, and that shoe-dropping feeling turned into a nuclear-bomb-dropping feeling. “Yeah,” Crick said, his eyes glazing a little, and Deacon, with his aching head and the weakness in his arm (what
was
that anyway?) fought the urge to cry.

“Crick?” How bad was this going to be? Was this ‘I sold your favorite horse’ bad? Was this ‘I slept with someone else right after I crawled out of your bed’ bad? How bad was it?

“I probably should have stuck around long enough for you to say that, huh?” Crick said, and then he tried a smile like moldy cottage cheese.

“Crick….” Deacon tried to sit up, grunted in pain, and realized that his arm and shoulder were plastered. Must have broken the damned thing in the wreck. Shit. The truck. He’d have to get it repaired. Later. “What did you do?”

Carrick managed to meet Deacon’s eyes then, and his own were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “We’ll talk about it when you’re better…,” he tried lamely, and Deacon felt himself grow angrier.

“We’ll talk about it now!”

“We can’t change it,” Crick muttered. “They made me sign six kind of things that said I couldn’t change it.” Deacon’s worry actually started to outweigh his personal body discomfort, and given that his brains felt like they were running out his ears, that was saying something. “Jesus H. Christ—Carrick James Francis, what in the fuck did you do?”

Crick didn’t get mad at him back. He just sat there and stared at his hands with eyes so lost it was clear they didn’t quite believe what he’d done either.

“Iraq,” he said randomly.

Deacon had never felt so lost. “Tibet?” he tried, wondering if this was some sort of new awareness test for concussed patients.

“I’m going to Iraq, Deacon. I signed up at the recruiters’. That’s where I was in town.”

“You did what?” There was literally an ocean roaring in Deacon’s ears—he truly wasn’t certain he heard right.

Crick shrugged, the kind of shrug he used to use when Deacon asked how things were at school and they were pretty fucking shitty but Crick didn’t want to admit it. “I… I, um… you know. I figured if you wanted me to see the goddamned world, I’d see it. I… I didn’t know you were planning to be a part of that.” All of it was said without emotion. Matter-of-fact. Like an alien surgeon ripping out Deacon’s heart and analyzing it as it lay bleeding on the stainless steel tray.

Deacon’s vision turned the color of tarnished silverware, and he fell heavily back on the hospital bed. His lips went cold, and he started to shake.

“Jesus, Crick.”

“I’m so sorry, Deacon.”

“Why would you… why would you think….”

“I… you kept pushing me away, and then… I don’t know. I figured today was some sort of spectacular goodbye!” Deacon was upset enough to try to sit up again and hurt enough fight a spinning room when he did. “Goodbye? You dumbfuck kid! I was finally giving in! Why would you ever think I’d shove you out of my life like that?”

Carrick turned a few shades paler and said, “Because you’re the only one who hasn’t, Deacon. I guess I figured I was due.” Deacon had no answer to that. If Crick hadn’t trusted him after…

after four years of living like brothers, after most of a lifetime of Deacon being there to pick him up…. Iraq. People got killed in Iraq. Deacon couldn’t go there to bail him out—he’d be far away, unable to touch, like his mother or Parish or….

The wrenching, ripping sensation in his chest made him howl when a broken arm and broken collarbone and a concussion had barely made him blink. He tilted his head back and let out confusion and anger and pain, and when his throat was done making the noise, the echoes still pinged off the stainless steel bed frame and the beige tile and the taupe walls.

“Carrick… Jesus. What… what….” His voice was going to break, he knew it. “What have I ever done to you….” There it went, two octaves, and he wrenched it back under his control. “What have I ever done to you that you would hurt me like that?”

He didn’t wait for an answer—he couldn’t. He just turned his gaze blankly at the wall beside him as tears slipped helplessly down the creases of his eyes and wished the goddamned truck had been going ninety when Keeping Promise Rock

he’d hit that pothole. He’d worked enough shifts as an EMT to know what that looked like, and it was a damned sight prettier than how he felt now.

Oh God, was it only that morning that he thought his one dream, his one incorruptible dream of what he wanted in the whole world, was finally his with the glory of a stained glass window? And now here he was, broken, and that dream was shattered shrapnel, cutting the hell out of his heart.

He may have fallen asleep, just bleeding into the air like that, because Crick spoke, and he startled, and the hurt gnawed his chest just as fresh and as savage as it had been when it all sank in.

“Please, Deacon,” he said quietly. “Please?” Deacon almost didn’t turn, but eleven years of giving Crick what he needed was a hard habit to break. Crick was sitting with his head down, looking beat.

Shit.

He’d spent the last eleven years of his life telling Crick no fuck-up was too bad for Deacon Winters to love him. What kind of promise was it if it couldn’t stand up to this?

“What?” he asked quietly, and Crick reached out and gingerly wiped Deacon’s wet cheeks with his thumb, cupping his face with a long, callused hand as he did it.

“You promised you’d always be my home. I… I fucked up. I didn’t believe you today. Please don’t… please don’t kick me out now.” Oh God. “Crick, you’re….”

Crick nodded and rubbed his face on his shoulder. “I’m going away, I know. But I’ve got two weeks, and….” Finally, finally, Crick sounded as young as the thing he’d done. “I’m so scared. Please… please let me know I’ve still got a home when I get back.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Deacon sighed and wiped Crick’s cheek as Crick had wiped his.

“How long ’til I get out of here?” he asked, wondering about all that shit he should have wondered when he first woke up.

“You’ll be out tomorrow, and back in two days for a fiberglass cast.

I asked.”

Deacon nodded. It sounded about right. He was suddenly tired, and his whole body ached fiercely, not just his head. “On our way home 82

tomorrow, we’ll stop and get some paint and some bedding and shit. We can move into Parish’s room before you go.”

“I’ll get it,” Crick said hesitantly. “What do you want?” Deacon smiled a little, faintly, sadly, and with enough weariness to sink a ship. “It’s your room too, Crick. Pick out what you want.” Crick nodded, but he didn’t move. He seemed to be crying a little harder now, but then, so was Deacon. “Aren’t you going to be in there too?”

“Yeah,” Deacon said, closing his eyes because he had to. “But you’ll be gone. Make it remind me of you.”

A thick silence fell then, the kind with a lot of stuff that would be said later, and some stuff that might never be said. Crick eventually began to nod off. Deacon scooted to the side of the bed and reached out with his good hand and leaned him into the pillow. Crick put his arms under his head and regarded Deacon soberly.

“If you can love me after this, you can probably love me after anything,” he said softly, and Deacon grunted.

“It all hinges on whether you come back to me, Crick. I guess I’ll forgive you anything but dying.”

Two and a half weeks just flew by, and there was not a blessed thing Deacon could do to stop them.

For one thing, there was a lot to be done. Besides the normal stuff of making the ranch work, there was the process of Crick disengaging from his life in Levee Oaks and Deacon dealing with his damned foolishness and the car wreck. Crick worked hard to find a replacement for his ranch work, and they lucked out. One of Parish and Deacon’s former muckrakers was out of high school and looking for a job with flexible hours to get him through college.

Edgar was a good-looking kid, and Deacon thought Crick might have been a little jealous, but the boy was one-hundred percent devoted to his girlfriend, so he wasn’t.

They managed to paint and fix Parish’s room—or rather Crick did—

in the two days after Deacon got home from the hospital. Deacon supervised from his position of enforced rest. When Crick was done, Deacon looked around at the soothing tones of sage green, pale lavender, and ivory, and shook his head.

“You don’t like it?” Crick asked, the apprehension clear on his face, and Deacon turned a twisted look to the man who had slept next to him for Keeping Promise Rock

three nights straight. They hadn’t made love again, not when Deacon’s body was still a mess of bruises, but they had lain beside each other and touched softly. It was hard to do when every touch stung like goodbye.

“It’s awesome, Crick.” A smile broke free, but it was a broken smile.

“It’s just hard to believe you’ve got enough butch in you to cover for two years.”

Crick looked back at the room again with big eyes and covered his face with hands spattered in dry paint. “Oh Christ. I’m gonna get the shit beat out of me, aren’t I?”

Deacon stepped into him and started brushing that long hair back.

“Naw… once they cut your hair, you’ll fit in with the other grunts, I swear.”

Crick looked at him hopefully, brown eyes peeking out from between paint-spattered fingers. “You think?” Deacon shrugged a little. “It’s not like you’ll be wearing a pink Tshirt that says ‘I joined the Army to get away from my gay lover’!” Crick’s horrified expression was eloquent and pitiful. “Look, Deacon….”

Deacon blushed and made to turn away.

“No, dammit—Deacon, you can’t believe that.”

“Forget about it,” Deacon mumbled, embarrassed. It had been a joke, really, but Crick was reminding him that it felt like the truth.

Crick caught his shoulders in his long-fingered hands then, and suddenly they were both aware that Crick was taller than Deacon, and that yes, they had been lovers not more than four days ago.

“Deacon—what happened was me. Do you hear that? It was all me.

I’m a fuck-up—”

“No more than me!” The embarrassment of wrecking the truck was something he wasn’t sure he’d get over.

“You were provoked. I’ve been a fuck-up my whole life!”

“That’s a
lie
!”
God, Deacon felt this in the pit of his stomach.

Passionate? Yes. Impulsive? Yes. But a fuck-up? No. Crick was all potential, all amazing potential, from his art to his sense of responsibility to the way he seemed to love Deacon without reservation.

Crick looked at him wryly, and something in Deacon’s face made him shake his head. “Well the parts of me that aren’t are all because of you and your dad and the fact that you gave a big fat crap about me. I…

what I did, what I’m doing… it’s a piss-poor way of paying that all back, but it’s not you. It’s not your fault. I jumped the gun and ran out and did the most dumb-assed thing possible.” Crick swallowed and looked away, and Deacon was reminded—yet again—of how young he really was.