Keeping Promise Rock (37 page)

He stumbled out of the bed and into the bathroom, and a voice from the other side of the bedroom said, “Crick? Is that you?” Crick grunted and peed, his eyes crossing it felt so good, and then took stock of his fragile body. It hurt—no lie—but he was so glad to be 250

pissing in his own house that he was glad he’d told Deacon to take him home now instead of waiting like the doctors had suggested a few days after Deacon got there.

“Sort of,” he said belatedly to the question. “Jon? What’re you doing in the study?”

“Waiting for a fax from the ACLU,” came the sober, no-nonsense reply. Crick tried to wrap his head around that and opened the medicine cabinet for his pain meds. He was pretty sure it had been long enough—he was starting to know the all-encompassing ache that went with the loss of his chemical shield. The small, mostly-full bottle caught his attention, and he looked at it and frowned.

He took his own pills and staggered out of the bathroom, eager for his own bed again. “Jon?” he called, pretty sure he hadn’t heard the fax machine beep.

“Yeah?”

“Did Deacon see a shrink while I was gone?”

“If only. Why?” Jon came out of the study as Crick positioned himself on the side of the bed where Deacon had put the absorbent pads in case his bandages wept through.

“There was a bottle of Valium in there, dated September two years ago.”

Jon grunted. “How much was left?”

Crick would have shrugged, but that would have meant moving.

“Most of it.”

Jon let out a humorless laugh. “That figures. Go to sleep, Crick.” Crick’s eyes were closing, but something about Jon’s tone bothered him. “What was it for? He didn’t mention anything in his letters….” Jon muttered an oath. “Crick—no offense, because I’m really glad you’re back, okay? I’m really glad you’re okay, and I seriously missed you, right? But you’re going to have to ask Deacon about this, because it’s pissing me off all over again and I can’t talk about it.” Ask Deacon—okay. “Yeah, because Deacon’s so forthcoming about himself,” Crick said dryly, and Jon’s laugh was a little less bitter this time.

“You got me there.”

“Where is he, anyway?”

He heard a yawning and a stretching and the general restless sound of Jon working the kinks out of his body and wished his own body worked that well. “Outside, doing horse ranch shit—feeding and mucking and giving carrots to all the orphaned horses of the world and telling Even he’s the world’s biggest stud and all the shit that makes the barn his favorite place and dealing with reality his least favorite place.”

“He’s ducking out on you?” That didn’t sound like Deacon at all.

“God, I wish! No, ducking out on me would mean that for one lousy nanosecond he didn’t try to take on every responsibility like it was life or death. Ducking out on me would be an improvement.” Jon sighed and gave up and sat down next to Crick’s legs. Crick felt the bed depress and wished that Deacon were there instead.

“He looks so tired,” Crick muttered, not wanting to make Jon mad at him again but needing someone to talk to.

“Yeah,” Jon sighed, apparently deciding that Crick’s voice in the dark wasn’t too irritating. “We had an easy year there—after the baby was born, you know, things went pretty smooth. And then everybody got sick… Christ, that was bad.”

“I couldn’t get them to tell me how long he was in the hospital that time,” Crick told him plaintively, and Jon laughed—again, that curious, dry, humorless laugh that said he’d aged quite a bit in the last two years as well.

“About as long as you were.”

Crick sucked in a breath. “I would have come back,” he said seriously, feeling a hideous smack of retro-panic hit his chest. “I would have gone AWOL and come back.”

“And spent the next few years in military prison. Which is one of the reasons we all contributed to the conspiracy of silence.” Jon rubbed his hands through his hair—still long enough to be sexy—and blew out another breath. When he spoke again, his voice was almost dreamy with weariness and with worry.

“I wanted to write you—God, Crick, I wanted to write you twice a day and unload. I wanted to tell you what he looked like and how worried we were. I wanted you to know everything so bad—and what can I say?

You ended up in Iraq because you… you just don’t think sometimes. I actually wrote an entire letter to you once, right after Benny came here to live. I told you everything—stuff I don’t even want to say out loud, you 252

know? And there was the letter, on the table, with a stamp, ready to go out in the morning, and I woke up in a cold fucking sweat, because I dreamed that you got the damned thing, went AWOL, and then got hauled away and we had to live through that whole separation thing all over again.” A short bark of bitterness in the semi-dark. The light from the study illuminated Jon’s profile, and he was still as beautiful as a soap opera star, but now he looked more real. Worry had made him that way.

“I woke up the next morning and ripped the damned thing to shreds.

Buddy, that’s one letter you will
never
get.” Jon’s hand as he patted Crick’s good knee was gentle. “And I’ve got all that in my chest right now. Seeing you hurt—man, it makes me remember all those times in high school when Deacon and I just worried about you. It makes me remember his letters to me when I was away at school, reassuring me that you were okay. You were my family too, and I love you, and I’m glad you’re back.

But you hurt him so bad…. I’m going to be pissed at you for a while, you know?”

Crick sighed. His chemical shield was up again, and he was tired, and his body felt so far away. “I love you too,” he mumbled. “I’m pissed at myself too. But I miss Deacon… where’s Deacon?” His eyes closed before Jon could answer the question.

Sometime in the night, he felt a kiss on his temple and breath stirring his hair. “Deacon?”

“Mmmm… be right to bed.”

There was a reassuring warmth then, and Crick felt him, right there on his un-bandaged side. Deacon’s chin nuzzled his shoulder, and his warm, rough hand spanned Crick’s middle under his T-shirt. Crick grunted and turned his head so he could kiss Deacon’s forehead, and then sleep slammed down on him, and the moment was gone.

There was movement in the morning—a fresh-smelling, showered Deacon was moving him off the peri-pad again and then stripping his bandages and giving him a quick sponge bath with warm water and some soap that smelled exclusively Deacon. There was antibiotic cream and a brisk, impersonal physician’s sort of touch, and Crick barely managed to focus his vision.

“Deacon,” he mumbled, sure this was urgent, “why is there Valium in our medicine cabinet?”

Deacon laughed a little, and in the sharp morning light streaming in from the window by the mirror, the lines at his eyes seemed deeper than Crick remembered them, even as his quick, tight grin asserted itself.

“Why—you want some for yourself? You’re on a pretty spiffy cocktail already!”

Crick grunted, the cloudiness of the last sixteen hours clearing a little. “I didn’t feel this stoned in the hospital. Do you think they made the take-home shit stronger?”

“I think flying ’bout knocked you senseless,” Deacon told him back.

“I told you, we could have come back for you and let you recoup there.” His hard, capable hands were busy taping up a bandage over the shunt that came out between Crick’s ribs, and Crick carefully put out a hand to cover them before they could move off again.

“I couldn’t spend one more moment away from you,” he said, knowing it was maudlin but not caring. “I don’t ever want to have to take a leak to have to hug you again.”

Deacon smiled then, and Crick’s breath lurched in his throat. It was
his
smile.

“The last time I saw that smile, I made you strip naked in front of the camera,” Crick said in awe, and Deacon blushed again.

“Yeah, that was fun,” he muttered. He went to move his hands, but Crick wouldn’t let him.

“You never, ever have to be embarrassed in front of me,” he said, feeling stronger than he had in two weeks. “Please, Deacon—keep the smile for me, but, you know… lose the shyness.” Deacon rolled his eyes. “Always been there, Crick. You just didn’t know to look. Now Amy’s coming by around nine. The doc okayed some travel as long as she stays on the couch here, so you two get to veg around and watch Oprah or whatever. I’ll be out and about—Benny’s got my cell phone. I guess the social worker’s supposed to be here around eleven….”

“Social worker?” Crick felt so lost. This was a different house than the one he’d left, even if their room was still the one he’d painted. His grip on Deacon’s hands loosened, and they went busily about their tasks on Crick’s body.

“Yeah, step-Bob and Melanie were busy talking while you were in Virginia. She’s got to come by to make sure we’re not dressed in bondage 254

equipment and having sex on the table when the baby’s in there with us.” Deacon’s sigh was long-suffering—he’d done this before.

“Deacon, did they really say that?”

Deacon shrugged. “She’s not a bad lady, really—she just acts like she’s got a four-by-four up her ass. I don’t think she was really all that excited about taking Crystal and Missy away in March, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think I’m some sort of sexual deviant, but she’s got to do her job, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” Crick muttered numbly. “How could anyone think you were a sexual deviant, Deacon? I don’t understand….” Deacon’s tight, busy grin got pretty wicked this time. “I don’t know, Carrick—I’ve had my hands all over your body for two days now when you’ve been fast asleep, and I’ve liked it. Doesn’t that give me some pervert points right there?”

Crick’s shoulders hitched a little, and he managed a laugh. His hand came up, bandages and all, and he rubbed his fingers through the back of Deacon’s hair as the man grinned down at him, weight of the world on his shoulders and all.

“You only get pervert points if I didn’t like it,” he said softly, wondering if Deacon had dreamed of even a tenth of the things Crick had in the last two years.

“You weren’t conscious—didn’t count.” Deacon shrugged, that wicked little grin not easing up in the least.

“You’ll have to do it again when I’m awake,” Crick told him, his eyes as serious as he could make them.

Deacon stood, done with the bandages, and bent and kissed him softly, careful for the new, shiny skin at his temple and cheek, which was still red and tender.

“We’ll have to wait until your body’s up to that one, Crick. Right now, it really does look like growing your hair out’s going to be the first thing you do when you get back.”

“Dea—con,” Crick whined. “Aren’t you horny at
all?”
Deacon’s grin became positively diabolical. “You know, I have to admit that when you were gone, not so much. I talked about it to make you feel better, but honestly, it was like I was a neutered cat or something—

just wasn’t on the menu. But now?” He reached down and brushed Crick’s Keeping Promise Rock

lips with his thumb. “Now, yeah. I’m horny. Hurry up and get better, baby—that thing’ll come.”

And then he was striding out into the morning. Crick heard his sister in the next room and the baby’s happy gurgle and felt like a seven-ton slug as his eyes closed and he fell right back asleep.

He awoke a couple of hours later, feeling so much better it was almost like he had a new body. A quick brush of the teeth and wash of the face and, with a lot of assistance from walls and doorframes, he was able to limp out to the front room. He came to a halt when he saw Amy there, sitting in a little upholstered wooden rocking chair that he’d never seen before. She had a tiny, perfectly round bump in the center of her stomach under her pretty peach maternity shirt.

“That’s new,” he said with a smile, sitting down tentatively on the worn plaid couch.

“So’s me not getting a hug or something, Crick,” Amy complained, and Crick turned his full wattage smile on her and pushed himself back up to do just that.

“I was afraid you were another member of the ‘everybody hates Crick’ club,” he confessed as she reached up to hug him, and she grunted negative as she held on tight.

When he’d sat back down, she said, “Deacon’s forgiven you completely, sweetheart—that’s good enough for me.” Crick eyed his sister warily as she walked into the room with a bowl of spiced oatmeal for him. “Thank you—but did you hear that?”

“Deacon and Amy are nicer than I am,” she sniffed, going to turn on the television. The baby, who had been busy toddling from one end of the room to the other, flopped her bottom in front of it and squealed.

“Oh yay!” Benny said dryly, “Spongebob!”

“Hush your mouth,” Amy replied, taking up the knitting that she’d set down when Crick walked in. “It’s the one with Squidward and the claw machine—I’m a fan.”

“Oh geez… I actually remember this one from high school.” In spite of the changes to his world and the two missing years in an alien desert, Crick was suddenly lost in the normalcy of it, of the women knitting and the baby bouncing excitedly on her bottom—all of it tied together with the familiar cartoon.

It was a nice moment—and it was completely killed by the stentorian knock on the door.

“I’ve got it,” Benny said tightly, putting down her knitting. Crick squinted, trying to remember who this could possibly be.

He didn’t count on a dead ringer for Nurse Ratchet from
One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
in a polyester pantsuit.

“Mizz Abernathy, come on in,” Benny said, her voice as neutral as she could make it. Crick watched the woman walk into the room and set her briefcase down on the kitchen table with a proprietary air and grimaced. Who was this stranger, and why did she look like she was weighing the house and finding it lacking?

“Would you like to come into the living room? It’s sort of the walking wounded in here, you know.” Benny was trying to crack a joke—

and Crick was suddenly very, very wary of this person and more than a little bit angry.

“So I see,” Ms. Abernathy said, and Benny gestured that she should sit down on the stuffed chair, kitty-corner to Crick on the couch. Her face softened a little when she saw Crick’s scars and his bandages, and he extended his right hand in greeting.