Keeping Promise Rock (16 page)

“You blush all the way across your body,” Crick said in wonder. His slow smile held a whole other kind of magic. “I knew you did it during sex, but… wow. I made you blush all over!” Deacon caught his breath and blushed even harder, while Crick laughed delightedly. “Oh God!” He couldn’t recall ever in his life ever feeling so naked, and he sat up and pulled his knees up under the covers and buried his face in his hands.

Crick managed a kiss on the hair at his temple in spite of all that.

“It’s perfect,” he said softly. “It’s like a gift. I get to take it with me—I’m the only one in the world who knows.”

Deacon peered at him through his fingers.
Oh, Carrick, you’re the
only one in the world who’s ever known me. How could you doubt it?

Crick grinned and then threw on his boots and cast a panicked look at the clock. He was taking a bus back to Benning, and he was cutting the time close as it was. In moments, he’d thrown his duffel over his shoulder and was coming across the bed for a last kiss.

“Smile for me, Deacon—please? Let me take that with me too.” Keeping Promise Rock

Even in the awfulness of the next two years, Deacon often thought that smile was the bravest thing he’d ever done. “Love you.”

“Love you back.” And then there was a tender, bitter kiss and he was gone. Deacon listened to his footfalls disappear down the corridor and the slam of the door leading to the outside stairs.

Then he rolled over to where Crick’s warmth and smell were evaporating from the sheets and buried his face in them and howled sobs like an infant until he could barely breathe.

An Elephant Across the Ocean

YEAH—Crick had heard it, and it was the truth. A whole lot of being in the Army was hurry up and wait. He’d been there for three months, and he’d treated one helicopter crash, a whole lot of heatstroke, and a hat full (or, well, more than that) of dysentery and nary a bullet wound. He assumed this would change, but he wasn’t really looking to hasten it along any.

Saying Iraq was hot was like saying the sun was hot. It was such an understatement it needed to be said again and again and again with a whole lot of force just to believe that this much suckage was not in the imagination.

Crick was stationed near Farah, and he hadn’t the faintest fucking clue where that was in relationship to anything else in the whole rest of the world, and he told Deacon so in his first letter home.

Deacon’s reply back had been horrified.

Jesus Fucking Christ, kid—if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know what to expect!

That particular letter had come with a care package of snacks and books (Deacon sent two of these a month—it made Crick very popular with his unit), several general maps of the Persian Gulf, and CNN reports of where the latest fighting was.

And whether Deacon had planned to send it or not, it had also come with a fucking truckload of worry.

For all the shit he didn’t say in his letters, the shit he did say was gnawing at Crick’s stomach worse than the two-day-chili trots.

Forgive the writing. I broke my fucking hand again when Shooting Star threw me. I may have to ride your horse for a while if I can’t keep my goddamned seat.

Deacon’s horse, Shooting Star, was a prickly tempered mare, and Deacon was about the only one who really could ride her. But even so, Deacon hadn’t been thrown from a horse in Crick’s memory, and probably before—that horse all but rolled over and simpered for Deacon when she usually bit, kicked, or generally despised all the rest of the human race.

What in the hell was happening if Deacon couldn’t keep his seat? Of course, Crick’s favorite riding horse, Comet, was as sweet as they came, and Crick was glad his gelding was getting some attention, but still… it was troubling. But not as troubling as the letter that came a month later.

I tried visiting before your folks got home—Missy and Crystal told me they hadn’t seen Benny in a while. I think she’s been hanging out with the kids in front of the liquor store. I’ll see if I can’t hunt her down next time I’m there.

Okay. Two things there making Crick
very
uneasy. The first was that Benny was missing.

The second was the bit about the liquor store.

“So?” said Crick’s transport driver, Private Jimmy Davidovic.

Private Jimmy drove, Crick tended the casualties in the back, and together they got them back to the medical facilities outside of Farah. If the fighting—or the dysentery or the heatstroke—was really bad or any farther, Crick got to ride the Black Hawk, which on the one hand was seven shades of cool, but on the other scared the hell out of him, mostly because one of his first ops had been a helicopter crash, and it had looked like a year of Blood Alley all in one mangled knot of metal, body parts, and blood.

“So Deacon doesn’t drink,” Crick said as they were trudging across the camp to the chow tent. They had missed lunch doing a transpo.

Hopefully there was something they could grab that wouldn’t make them need medical attention themselves. Deacon’s letters tended to be very…

general. Crick didn’t mind on the one hand—it meant he could share letters from “his friend at home” without worrying about what the rest of the unit would think.

On the other hand, he was dying for something—anything—that would let him know Deacon was really okay, and, yes, really thinking about him. This “news from home” shit was starting to chafe Crick like wet underwear.

“What—so he had more than a beer a night and needed a refill?” Jimmy was saying, and Crick looked at him with all of his irritation in his scowl.

“He doesn’t drink, period,” Crick snapped, more worried than ever.

He didn’t drink. He hadn’t ever gotten drunk. As far as Crick knew.

Before he’d left Deacon all alone.

Fuck.

Jimmy looked at him and shrugged. “Jesus, Crick—how bad can it be? I mean, he’s still writing and still sending you cookies! That makes the guy better than half the wives here—he gets any more forthcoming, folks would suspect something between you two!”

Crick shot Jimmy a look of pure and honest disgust. He was starting to attribute the fact that the Army wasn’t picking up on his gayness more to the fact that people in general were dumber than camel shit than to anything else. If it walked like a soldier and talked like a soldier and dressed in fatigues, it wasn’t going to want to fuck another guy. Bullshit.

Crick had spotted three “like-minded” guys in his first month. The fact that they hadn’t started their own little club was probably because they had nothing in common besides the one thing they couldn’t talk about, but that didn’t mean that Crick didn’t want to just spit whenever Jimmy or someone else went off with the not-so-subtle innuendo.

“I’m telling you, Jimmy—the guy doesn’t drink.” They dropped it for the moment, but Crick couldn’t help be haunted by the last time they’d been joined together. Crick had been inside Deacon, liking the feeling but more interested in seeing if Deacon liked it.

He’d been watching Deacon’s face curiously, loving the shifting dark of his green eyes and the pouty concentration of that full lower lip. But Keeping Promise Rock

looking at Deacon’s face that day, he’d seen more than just passion. He’d seen… wonder. Surprise. A shy sort of ecstasy. Playfulness. The same starry-eyed, happy regard that Crick knew shone out of his eyes when he was looking at Deacon.

It had taken him three months to ask himself why he kept pulling that memory out like a crime scene photo to be looked at again and again.

It hadn’t been the best sex they’d ever had—Crick was uneasy as a top. He liked Deacon there just on general principal. But now, looking at Deacon’s last few letters, the ones that sounded the oldest, the most tired, the reason hit him.

Deacon had looked young then. He’d looked young because he
was
young. He was young and vulnerable and as new to their awakened love as Carrick was. And Deacon had the weight of The Pulpit
on his shoulders, and, he felt, the weight of Crick’s happiness. Crick had spent so much time looking up to the “older” Deacon that he’d forgotten that Deacon had never really had a youth himself.

Until he’d been lost in Crick’s arms.

Oh God. What in the hell was going on at home?

Deacon—

Nothing going here—after that helicopter crash in the first month it’s been all about the barf and the shit and the heat. Yanno, I used to think sliced bread was the bomb—now I’ve got a serious hard-on for the ice-packs that fit in our helmets. For the army, that’s some decent thinking right there.

Gotta tell you, buddy—I’m starting to worry a little. So far, you’ve fallen off your horse, broken your hand, gotten sick more in three months than you have in twelve years, and wrenched your shoulder doing something you didn’t want to explain. I know you said you’d save all the bad shit for when I get back, but I’m starting to worry that I’ll come through this with nothing worse than a tan and there’ll be nothing left of you to come home to.

Please Deacon, write me something real. I’ve got more worry here with radio silence than I’d have with the plain truth, even if the plain truth is something awful.

Crick

Something Real

THE truth—the plain truth was that the night Deacon got back from Fort Benning, Jon brought a bottle of Ketel One vodka to The Pulpit
and got Deacon drunk for the first time in his life. And Deacon stayed that way pretty much for the next three months.

He learned to play it smart. After his mare threw him when he downed two shots of tequila with a sandwich for lunch, he decided to take a lesson in how to be a functional alcoholic from his mother. He woke up, threw up, downed a handful of painkillers with a liter of water for the hangover, had crackers for lunch, some protein for dinner, and as much of whatever he had in the house as it took him to pass out for dessert. He didn’t even seem to be getting a beer-belly, which, if he’d been sober or thinking, he might have been sort of proud of. In fact, he seemed to be losing weight, which made his morning runs easier as well.

Patrick may have looked at him narrowly when he tossed his cookies behind the barn every so often, and Jon had been leaving increasingly frantic messages on the phone that Deacon hadn’t really wanted to return.

He’d broken his hand when he got thrown, wrenched his shoulder when he rode a horse into the side of the barn as a result of a hangover, and had developed a serious shake in his fingers if seven o’clock rolled around to find him sober. In spite of all that, he was starting to see the attraction.

Was there any price too high to pay for that long, lovely slide to oblivion when the house rang with silence like a cathedral rang with bells?

Write me something real.

Okay, well, shit, Deacon thought on the way to the liquor store, that might be too high a price to pay.

The liquor store was barely legal distance from the grade school, right along the main Levee Oaks drag of M street, and the first time he’d gone with the intention of buying enough alcohol to make him drunk for a week, he’d felt mildly guilty and a whole lot deviant—but not today.

Today, he stood in front of the liquor store for at least fifteen minutes, feeling his body starting to shake with just the proximity of all of that lovely alcohol. Deacon didn’t discriminate—if he had something spicy for dinner, he’d rather not drink tequila just because the rebound was a little more unpleasant, but other than that, he liked to switch it up. Jack was good, Stoli better, Tanqueray even better than that. He had no experience with mixers, but since the taste wasn’t the point, he didn’t think he should start now.

Write me something real.

His hands started to shake harder, and his forehead popped out in the cold sweats. The thought of telling Crick that he spent his days dreaming about clear poison was enough to keep him there, leaning on the hood of his car, for the rest of the night. Crick had asked for something real. If this was the only real he had, he had to fix it, because that was the shittiest reality he could burden Crick with, and he refused to do it.

“What’s the matter, Deacon? DTs so bad you can’t make it to the store?”