Keeping Promise Rock (7 page)

Brian had shaggy blonde hair and an appealingly round face—

complete with apple cheeks sprinkled with freckles—and for a moment, Crick wanted to kiss him more than he wanted to do anything in the world.

He even lowered his head, a gentle, dreamy smile on his face, when he suddenly wondered what Deacon was doing just then. He stopped and jerked back and could have kicked himself when Brian turned away, hiding his hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Crick muttered, pulling his pants up because Brian was doing the same.

Brian tried to shrug like it was no big deal. “It’s okay. I just thought… you know….”

Well, of course he did. They’d been friends, they’d come out to each other in quiet conversation—for all Crick knew, they were the only two gay people in Levee Oaks, period. For most of Crick’s sophomore year, Brian had been giving him rides in his little red Toyota—hell, he’d even been out to The Pulpit
for dinner.

Deacon had told Crick that Brian was a nice young man.

And now, when things had progressed past the
I’ll show you mine if
you show me yours
stage, Crick was backing out.

“It’s not you,” Crick said softly, leaning forward to put his hand on Brian’s shoulder. He owed him that much. “I… I thought we could. I Keeping Promise Rock

thought… I thought I could feel that way about you, but I… guess I don’t.”

“So what—now we’re just friends?”

Crick hoped for the best and wrapped his arm around Brian’s chest from behind. Brian leaned against him, his shoulders stiff and stooped and miserable.

“Well…
yeah.
Dude, do you have
any
idea how important that is to me? Any idea at
all?”
He spoke with all his passion and the honesty Deacon had burdened him with, and Brian’s body relaxed just a little against him.

“Then why?”

Crick leaned his face into Brian’s hair, thinking about how wonderful it was to touch another human body like this and how horrible it was that this wasn’t quite the one he wanted.

“It’s stupid,” he mumbled. “
I’m
stupid. I’m… I’m sort of in love with someone else and I thought I didn’t have to be, but I just can’t make my body think it’s….”

But it was no use. As his words sank in, Brian’s whole posture stiffened, and he pulled away angrily.

“You’re right,” he snapped, pushing himself awkwardly from the dusty floor. “You’re stupid, and I’m even stupider—more stupid—totally fucking moronic—whatthefuckever.” He kept his back to Crick, but his hand rose to his face, and Crick could hear his voice break. Oh Christ.
No,
Jesus, Brian, don’t cry….

“Brian, I still care a lot about you.” Crick scrambled up, wishing he could salvage this somehow but pretty sure jacking off with a guy and then telling him you were in love with someone else equaled a classic Crick fuckup, times three. Oh God. He’d tried to get over his thing with Deacon, he really had, and Deacon had seemed to approve, but it wasn’t until he’d seen Brian’s face, beautiful, hopeful, but so not for Crick that he realized….

Hell. Realized that he was still just jack-fucking stupid.

“Save it,” Brian turned his head to the side and wiped his face across his shoulder. “I should have known—I thought you wanted a boyfriend, but seriously—who could ever be as good as Deacon-fucking-he’s-a-god-Winters!”

Crick closed his eyes—nice to know that being “honest as a horse” also meant being as easy to read as one as well. “I’m a total fool,” he muttered, wondering why he couldn’t seem to change that.

“Well I’m worse of a one, because I thought you could really love me,” Brian said sadly, and Crick reached out again. It would be good, he thought wretchedly, if they could just go back to where they were before they’d ended up in the art supply room. They’d been friends—he hadn’t been joking. He’d really loved having a friend.

“Brian….”

“Go to hell.” Brian never did turn around. He just stalked out of the little cupboard room, leaving Crick alone with the smell of acrylic paint, dust, and come.

“But Brian….” Crick took two steps out, and Brian let fall the curse of doom.

“And get your own fucking ride home!”

Crick sighed and watched him go. Well, shit. So much for getting home when the girls did—it was a good thing Benny was getting good at helping Missy and Crystal, because if he walked fast, he might make it home in time to get them dinner.

He did walk fast, but it was still a long walk, and he had time to wonder if he should call Parish and ask him for help. He decided against it for a couple of reasons. For one, Parish would want to know what happened, and Crick didn’t have it in him to spill the beans. For another, Parish would want to take care of the girls again, because ever since Crick got his head beat in, Parish had taken to dropping in on them and spoiling them rotten before step-Bob got home to drink. He also did it to give Crick a break of his own, for which Crick would love the man forever, but he was not up to explaining to his mother and step-Bob what Parish was doing there on this particular day.

But the final reason he didn’t call Parish was that he didn’t want to talk to Parish. He wanted to talk to Deacon—he
really
wanted to talk to Deacon.

Did something grow bigger in your chest because you didn’t let it out? He had to know. Maybe if he let this thing with Deacon out into the air, then it would get smaller, or weaker, or he could stomp on it and kill it or something, because right now it was wrecking him. There Brian had been, a perfectly good boyfriend with his
mouth on Crick’s cock,
and Keeping Promise Rock

Crick had driven him away for a pipe dream, a betraying hope that Deacon might someday love Crick the same way Crick had loved him forever and ever amen.

He really needed to tell Deacon and have Deacon tell him that he’d grow out of it so that maybe, he finally could.

That thought kept his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds and his stomach in a field full of butterflies for the whole trip home.

He got home, fed everybody, herded them into the bath, and dressed them. When he was done, he did a load of laundry so the girls would have clothes for the next day, cleaned the kitchen, and, just when his mother’s hand touched the knob of the front door, he retreated to his tiny room with a sandwich and his sketch book. It was his evening routine, and all the better to ignore her quiet whining about her job or the way her eyes would dart to the door in absolute fear of step-Bob.

It also kept him out of step-Bob’s way, so he didn’t have to duck shoes for the nightly drinking game of shit-on-the-Mex-kid.

So he sat in his room and opened his special sketchbook, the one he’d held to his heart for the last year, and told himself he was going to rip out every last picture and burn it.

But he couldn’t, because they were of Deacon, and they were his best work.

Deacon working a horse, his forehead a knot of concentration and irritation. Deacon leading a horse with a kid on its back, his face relaxed and soft, laughing without inhibition. Deacon, sitting under the oak trees at Promise Rock, the necklace of shell beads making his vulnerable young man’s shoulders seem to stand out just that more sharply. Deacon, giving that fierce, tight grin from under the bill of his ball cap, the shy smile that dared Crick to smile back at him.

Ah, gods. Crick closed the book with a hand that trembled and set it down on his end table, then turned off his light and lay down to think about sleep. He tried to concentrate on Brian’s expression as he’d jerked away, the better to make himself feel like shit, but the last thing behind his eyes as he drifted off was a fantasy of Deacon, turning his face up to Crick for their first kiss.

He woke up to a frenzied pounding on the front door and Deacon’s frantic voice, calling his name.

“Crick… Crick… dammit, Crick, if you’re in there, I just need to see you for a second!” Deacon’s voice was breaking and hurt, and Crick scrambled out of bed, tripped over six different things in the dark, and still got beat to the door by his step-Bob.

“Boy,” Bob sneered, his breath so foul that Deacon took a step back,

“I don’t know who taught you manners, but it’s three o’clock in the goddamned morning. Nobody sets foot in my house this fuckin’ early….”

“Stuff it,” Crick muttered, pushing past step-Bob and into the cool night air. The door slammed behind him, and he couldn’t give a shit because Deacon was embracing him tightly, reaching up a little because Crick had grown in this last year, and holding him like he’d never let him go.

“Oh God…” Deacon gasped. “Oh God. You’re okay. I saw that car… I did, and… Jesus….”

Crick frowned and backed up. Deacon was wearing his EMT

uniform, and the ambulance was parked on the curb. “What car?” he asked hazily, and Deacon wiped his cheek with the back of his hand like a little kid and tried to get a hold of himself.

Crick could see when it happened, because Deacon closed his eyes, grabbed Crick’s arms, and tilted his forehead to meet Crick’s, and for a moment, they just stood there, breathing steam into the cool spring night.

“I’m so sorry, Crick,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were in it. This last month if you haven’t been at The Pulpit
,
you’ve been in that red Toyota with Brian. And tonight, we….” He straightened and crushed Crick to him, and Crick went willingly, putting his head on Deacon’s chest because, oh God, oh God, he knew what was coming.

Brian, driving off in such a snit…. He hadn’t been a great driver anyway, and there were so many places on the levee for a car to go wrong….

“Brian,” he whispered.

Deacon sighed into his hair. “Yeah. They found his car about an hour after the wreck… he was already”—heartbeat—“dead. Crick, I’m so sorry….”

“Brian. Oh God.” Crick started to tremble. Brian, who had been pissed off and broken-hearted because Crick couldn’t even kiss him after he’d put his heart out on the line. Oh Jesus… Crick’s friend, Crick’s true friend who had let him copy off his math homework and worked English projects with him and helped Mrs. Thompson clean up after Art Club Keeping Promise Rock

and… “Brian… oh Deacon… it’s my fault. Oh God.” His chest was going to explode. It was going to flat-out disintegrate like fireworks on his front lawn. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe… oh God….

Deacon helped him sit down on the ground, the cold seeping through his sweats, but damned if he cared. He sat there with his head between his knees, breathing so hard he had spots in front of his eyes while Deacon rubbed slow, soothing circles on his back and told him not to talk until he could do it without sobbing.

It didn’t matter.

The whole awful story tumbled out, because this was Deacon, and Deacon loved him unconditionally, and God, sweet, dear God, Crick needed to know somebody still did.

When he was done sobbing and talking and sputtering through spit and snot and tears, Deacon leaned Crick’s head on his chest and rubbed his cheek on his hair.

“You have such a good heart,” he murmured. “God, Crick—you didn’t do anything wrong. You just tried to be honest, that’s all.

Sometimes people hurt each other, just by being. It’s not your fault.”

“I could have at least kissed him,” Crick murmured, seeing Brian’s happy, hopeful expression, the absolute sunshine of joy. He’d killed that.

He may not have killed Brian, but he’d killed that moment with his dumb, self-centered crush.

Deacon made a sympathetic sound. “Crick, you did your best. Man, sometimes that’s all you got. You were the best friend you knew how to be, but you weren’t ready to be lovers yet. Nobody can hold that against you.”

“I can,” Crick muttered against his chest, so glad, so infinitely grateful that Deacon was there, Deacon was alive, Deacon understood.

“Please don’t,” Deacon asked gravely, and Crick shivered. There it was. The words of finality from the hero he loved.

“I’ll do my best,” he promised, and he did.

But it was hard, damned hard. It was hard when Mrs. Thompson called him aside and asked him if he was all right, and hard when she asked if he knew what happened, why Brian had been alone. It was hard when step-Bob had grunted “Good riddance” when he returned home the next day after Deacon took him to The Pulpit
to spend the night with 48

Parish because nobody wanted him to have to go back inside and deal with step-Bob’s bullshit.

It was especially hard at the funeral, when Crick outed himself in front of half the goddamned town.

That hadn’t been his intention. His intention had been to go and pay his respects to the guy who used to goof off during lunch with him, and Deacon was at his elbow, just for good measure. He walked up to the coffin and saw the pallid, dead flesh doing a poor imitation of his friend and murmured, “I should have taken you up on that kiss, Brian,” just loud enough for Deacon to hear, but no one else. Deacon took his elbow then, and they turned around to find themselves face to face with Brian’s mother.

She looked half-crazed.

She was a licorice-thin woman with big blonde hair and a big bust line who had spent most of Brian’s life looking for a daddy to replace the one who hadn’t stepped up. Brian had thought she was beautiful, but she didn’t look that way that night, because people in pain, people grieving, often had red eyes, a red nose, big bags under their eyes from being sleepless, and an air about them that was more than a little bit insane.

Crick could respect that. He looked pretty much the same.

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Carter,” he mumbled, and her face twisted into something ugly.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me you and my boy weren’t… being all perverted this whole time. Tell me you weren’t riding around this town, doing the nasty behind my back! The whole town is saying it… tell me it isn’t true.”

Crick looked helplessly at Deacon, who gaped like a fish back. Of all things….

“Jesus, lady,” Deacon said. “Of all things to be worried about, this is what you grieve?”

“I ain’t talking to you, Deac!” she snapped with so much venom that Deacon blinked. “I’m asking this dirty little Mex kid if he touched my baby!”