Keeping Promise Rock (4 page)

Evening Star nickered and tried to change direction, almost yanking Crick’s arm out of its socket. He remembered that a two-ton stallion was still two tons of trouble if you ignored him and paid more attention to someone else’s business—but he still kept his ears as tuned as he could.

“Deacon… son… I promised your mom. I did. She wanted to see you go to school—she wanted everything for you that she never had.” Crick could almost see that grin. It was tight and fierce, just a teeny quirk of the full lips. It said that Deacon was fine—don’t worry about Deacon, he didn’t need a damned thing.

“Sorry, Dad—all I want is here at The Pulpit
.
I’m pretty sure that’s all Mom wanted, too, or she wouldn’t have stayed.” His voice dropped gently at the end, and Crick looked up blindly and saw Patrick. Parish’s employee and best friend was looking back at him from under a ball-cap hiding wild wisps of hair and sad gray eyes. Nobody mentioned Deacon’s mother. Crick had heard that she’d died when Deacon was around five or six—and here she was, as alive and as real between father and son as if she’d lived this whole time, loving Deacon with the same dedication and common sense as her husband.

Patrick jerked his head towards the horse, and Crick took the hint.

They were both worried—eavesdropping, worried, and working a stallion that seemed to be losing brain cells with every dusty footfall.

“God
dammit
Even—could you just stay to a fucking canter?” Crick swore under his breath and tried to make sure the lunge line didn’t go slack and confuse him again.

“Son,” Parish said after a horrible, fraught moment, “don’t you want to go off with your friends? Jon and Amy—they’re going away down south. Don’t you want that? You could play ball for another four years—I know you love it!”

Deacon murmured something too low for Crick could hear, and there was an electric heartbeat in which Even Star’s hooves sounded like the thunder of God.

Parish’s next words were—on the surface—still protesting. But his tone was resigned and Crick knew—hell, Even Star knew—that Parish had lost and Deacon had won.

“He’ll be here when you get back, son.”

“We may still lose him, Dad. You know that.” Parish’s voice choked, came as close to tears as Crick ever heard it.

“Deacon… please… you’re young—it may not be what you think it is.”

“Dad… please don’t.” Crick closed his eyes at the magic words, the words that meant Deacon had well and truly won. Deacon’s voice dropped too, and Crick wondered at the cost of victory. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

After the workout, Crick brushed out Even Star with blind eyes and lackluster strokes. The stallion nickered and almost knocked him against the side of the stall, and Crick pulled out a handful of carrots on instinct, barely saving his fingers from Even’s greedy teeth. When he escaped the stall—and a truly amorous horse—he saw that Deacon was standing outside the stable, waiting for him.

Crick couldn’t do anything but look at him.

“I don’t suppose you didn’t hear any of that,” Deacon started, a faint smile on his face. His head was ducked in a characteristic attempt to minimize or even acknowledge the sacrifice he was making for… for what? A stray he and his father had picked up? A muckraker with a chip on his shoulder? What a fucking waste of his time!

“You’ve got a chance to get out, Deacon,” Crick growled, feeling like shit. He wanted to throw himself on Deacon’s feet and cling, sobbing like his littlest sister, Missy.
Please don’t leave me, Deacon, please,
please, please
was at absolute war with
You dumb motherfucker, don’t
screw up your future for a loser like me.

“I never wanted out,” Deacon said quietly. “You can get out when it’s your turn.” He turned to leave then, fading out into the denim sky as quietly as he’d come. Crick was left gasping in his wake, wondering if this was when he took his balls in one hand and his heart in the other and told the truth.

All I ever wanted was you, Deacon.

But he didn’t say it. He was thirteen—what did he know about losing the love of his life?

Seniors pretty much got a free pass on the last week of school, but still, Crick was surprised when Deacon’s pick-up truck pulled up in front of the junior high and Deacon’s friends, Jon and Amy, unloaded to check Crick out of school.

“Shhh…,” Amy whispered to him when he was eyeing them in surprise in the attendance office. “Pretend we’re your aunt and uncle….” Crick grinned at her, and she flipped her straight, dark hair over her shoulder and gave him a perky grin. He’d made his peace with Amy Huerta, Deacon’s girlfriend, in the last two years. It helped that she was as pretty and as quiet as Deacon himself. It also helped that besides the dark hair, dark eyes, and café-au-lait complexion, she’d shown a genuine interest in Carrick as a person and not as some pesky little-brother-like-thing that went part and parcel with her boyfriend. He hated to admit it, but it also helped that she was going to UCLA in the fall and Deacon was very firmly enrolling in EMT training as his first step to becoming the perfectly contained ranching businessman.

But that was in the fall. At this moment, the front office secretary eyed the two teenagers with a gimlet eye—and then she took a look at Carrick’s hopeful face and sighed.

“Erm… Jon and Amy”—her eyes narrowed—“
Francis,
” she intoned acidly, “you are free to take your
nephew
out early today.” The woman rolled her eyes and shook her head. “And by all means tell Deacon ‘hi’ for me—did you think we wouldn’t remember you? It’s only been four years for Chrissakes!”

Jon turned a blindingly sweet smile to the woman—a rather round, kind-faced middle-aged mother of three, and bent down to kiss her cheek.

“Thank you, Ms. Lacey—you’re the greatest.” And with that, the three of them ran laughing for the truck. Jon and Crick hopped in the back and Amy took the front—illegal, yes, but they weren’t going far. Deacon stopped at a cattle gate and then took a barely-used service road down a scorched field that
hadn’t
been mowed. Crick looked around the field for landmarks and squinted against the hot wind at Jon, whose longish blonde hair was streaming behind him as he turned his nose to the wind like an oversized Golden Retriever.

“Where we going?” Crick called over the jouncing of the chassis and the roar of the wind.

“Same place we always go!” Jon called. “Promise Rock—best swimming hole short of Folsom Lake!” Folsom Lake was nearly thirty miles away—and not easy miles, either. A lot of town driving went on through Folsom, and the river had run fairly high this year, so Discovery Park was dangerous.

“What made you decide to get me?” Crick asked, but he let his grin show that he didn’t mind at the least.

“Deac’s idea!” Jon called back. Jon and Amy called him “Deac,” but Crick couldn’t make himself shorten the name. “He said if we were gonna go celebrate, you got to come too!”

There were sodas in an ice chest in the back of the truck, and B.B.Q.

beef sandwiches that Parish had made the night before. They’d even packed a pair of Deacon’s old swim trunks for Crick, and he was grateful.

They’d been out to Promise Rock a lot of times since Deacon had first brought Crick, and it still held the same breathless holiness that it had that first time. This time, the boys all changed in front of the truck while Amy waited patiently behind it. “I don’t know why you’re not changing with her,” Jon grumbled to Deacon. “It’s not like you haven’t seen all that before.”

Deacon had blushed under his baseball hat and agreed that yes, he had seen it before, but, “It’s only polite. Besides,” he muttered as he slipped on his trunks, “we’re breaking up in the fall anyway.” Crick’s heart had done a little summersault in a cheerleader outfit with pom-poms, but Jon had looked thoughtful.

“Why?” he asked, standing up and folding his clothes. Crick tried for a moment to admire his body—long, graceful, tan, and lovely—but next to Deacon’s broad chest and pale-marble perfection, Jon was really just decoration. “Why would you break up with her… you two… you really care about each other!”

Deacon nodded, his face pensive and honestly sad. “We do,” he agreed, casting that sad expression behind them to where Amy waited patiently, arms crossed, small brown face tilted towards the sun. “We do—

but she’s going off to be a lawyer, do big stuff.” He shrugged and blushed for no reason that Crick knew. “Be a political activist—that sort of thing.

My heart’s here—you know that.”

Deacon looked sideways at Jon, as though they’d talked about this before, and Jon passed the sideways look to Crick as though he should know what it was about. But Crick shrugged, because he was damned if he did, and Jon rolled his eyes and sighed.

“Well,” Jon said slowly, with so much forced casualness it was a wonder the word didn’t break, “I wouldn’t mind, um, looking out for her while we’re down there, if that’s okay?”

Crick blinked, and it was all he could do not to blurt,
What about
Becca?
Becca Anderson had been Jon’s girlfriend as long as Amy had been Deacon’s. Crick hadn’t particularly cared for Becca—she had long gold hair and a pretty face that she was exquisitely vain about. She’d also been less than sly about letting Deacon know that she’d be willing to take Amy’s place on any given day, and that had been a shitty thing to do to Amy, Deacon,
and
the guy she was supposedly dating.

Deacon smiled wisely at the boy who had been his best friend since kindergarten. “If you’d wait until you got down there before you made your move, I’d take that as a personal favor, okay?” Jon flushed and nodded gravely. He understood perfectly, and he seemed to be grateful for the honor.

“Are you guys done yet?” Amy called out cheerfully. “You don’t finish soon, and all that’s going to be left of me is a puddle of sweat!”

“I thought ladies perspired!” Jon called back, and Amy’s laughter was pretty enough to make even Crick’s heart break a little.

“That’s sweet that you think I’m a lady, darlin’—you don’t get your asses in gear, and I’m gonna be a raging bitch!” Keeping Promise Rock

Deacon threw back his head and laughed, and Crick found he had to love Jon and Amy because they loved Deacon, and how could you not love someone so goddamned beautiful that he stopped time itself?

The day was golden—one of those days that locked itself into a kid’s heart and promised never to leave or even to fade. They swam and played.

There was a tremendous water fight, pitting Crick and Jon against Deacon and Amy, which Crick managed to win by climbing up top of one of the boulders near the edge of the water and giving Deacon a full-out body tackle into the deepest part of the pool. Deacon came up sputtering and laughing, and Crick clung to those few brief seconds when their bodies had splayed together, muscle to muscle, Crick’s chest to Deacon’s waist, for long years before anything better came to take their place.

At the end of it, they sat quietly on the rock, Amy leaning back into Deacon’s chest, all of them watching the sunset and talking quietly about the future.

“So,” Jon murmured, drawing random patterns on Promise Rock with a stick, “EMT training first, animal husbandry second?” Deacon buried his nose in Amy’s hair for a moment and then looked up and nodded. “I think Parish is hoping that I’ll like doing something else
somewhere
else well enough to take one of those deferred scholarships and run with it.”

Amy risked a glance back at him. “You sure it won’t happen, Deac?

You can still….”

Deacon shook his head and rubbed his temple with Amy’s. Even Crick recognized the gesture as the beginning of farewell. “No, baby. My heart is here at the horse ranch. I’m sorry.” He tilted his head for a moment and rested his cheek on her head while she leaned closer and closed her eyes.

Jon tapped Crick’s leg and jerked his chin, and together the two of them quietly wandered off into the twilight.

“He’s staying here for you, you know.” Jon’s voice was unexpected, and Crick looked at him sharply. They were shoulder to shoulder now—

Crick had gotten his growth spurt in the last year. He’d grow another four inches, but for now, he was eye-level with Jon and Deacon—and they were six feet at the least.

“I know.” He’d heard the argument. “How am I supposed to be worth that?”

Jon stopped and put his face in the air. “I’m not gay—I wish I was, you know that?”

Crick blinked, completely out of his element—even when this
was
his element. “I don’t know why you’d wish that,” he said from the heart.

“I think I love Deacon more than I’ll ever love anyone—even Amy,” Jon confided. They hadn’t brought beer—as far as Crick knew, none of them drank. Deacon had often joked that they might as well be Mormon, but it just hadn’t been a thing that Deacon or his friends had ever embraced. Still, Crick was tempted to lean in to get a whiff of his breath, just for form. Jon saw his discomfort, and laughed.

“I’m going somewhere with this, Carrick, really. See, here’s the thing.” Jon dropped to the grasses and leaned back, tilting his face up at the stars. He made a pretty picture there—especially to Crick, who had learned the purpose of that thing between his legs and had been enjoying it immensely in the dark of his tiny room. But Crick didn’t get hard or shivery or aroused, even looking at this blond movie star under the moon.

“The thing?” Crick asked, plopping down next to him.

“The thing is, I would give anything to be everything to the guy—I’d marry him if my body could go that way, but it doesn’t and I can’t. Do you understand?” Jon looked at Crick miserably, and it hit Crick. For the first time in his life, he was exactly what someone he cared about needed to be.

And then it hit him that he could care about someone who wasn’t Deacon or Parish or his little sisters. It was an amazing discovery—but one he would table until later.

Right now, Jon really did need him.

“Deacon’s doesn’t either,” Crick reminded him, and Jon smiled gently at him, as though he didn’t get it.

“Deacon is one of those rare individuals,” Jon began, trying to sound jaunty and failing, “whose heart takes the lead before his desire, and not the other way around.”