Love And The Real Boy - Coming About, Book 2 (2 page)

Despite Rich’s totally misplaced feelings, he and Rory had quickly become fairly inseparable. Rory found a job teaching at the local high school—photography, of all things—and Rich had already worked his way up to junior exec at InVentiv Advertising.

Things were going well for Rich—too well. Whenever he experienced a modicum of success, of happiness, he knew to wait for the other shoe to drop. A pained groan coming from the living room announced that the wait was over.

Rory was sick again. He’d been sick off and on for the last few weeks, and Rich was starting to get really worried. He’d grown attached to the man—even if they’d only ever be friends—but history had shown that Rich’s attachments never ended well.

* * * *

December 1995

Ricky awoke to a sickening, rusty creaking sound, and he immediately knew how his mother’s date had gone. Well, “date” was a stretch. Her friend who’d been letting them crash had taken her to another friend’s house to get high. Ricky guessed he had that much to be thankful for at least—that she wasn’t doing it at home in front of John-Michael. She was still trying to maintain the illusion of sobriety, at least where her boys were concerned. John-Michael had never seen her doing lines or shooting up before, and Ricky wanted to keep it that way. There was still hope for John-Michael.

J-M wasn’t in the small spare bed with him, which meant he’d probably fallen asleep out on the couch watching Letterman. Ricky debated whether to go get him and bring him to bed, or to just let him sleep off his exhaustion right where he was. But the decision was taken out of Ricky’s hands.

The squeaking of the bed next door stopped abruptly, and was followed a few minutes later by heavy, uneven footfalls. Then silence pervaded—for so long that Ricky almost drifted back to sleep. A whisper of sound pulled him out of the twilight haze; a barely audible groan, then a louder whimper shortly after.

Springing out of bed, Ricky silently pulled on a hoodie and pajama bottoms. He might have only been thirteen, but he’d lived with more crap than most people dealt with in a lifetime. And there was no mistaking the fact that Ricky had been his little brother’s sole protector for quite some time. He was an old man in a teenager’s body, and fuck if he was letting either of them become a statistic.

Feeling around blindly under his bed, Ricky said a soundless prayer when his hand gripped cool metal. He pulled out the double-barrel twelve gauge he’d swiped from Chris’s closet—Chris being his mother’s flavor of the month. Ricky wasn’t stupid. With Bonnie using again, he’d known that he’d have to protect them from that jerk-off eventually.

Hoping to have the weight of surprise behind him, Ricky burst into the living room brandishing the shotgun. All three occupants of the room froze; Ricky with the shotgun sighted, John-Michael huddled on the couch with his eyes squeezed shut, and Chris in the process of trying to force the boy’s hand down his pants.

Chris blinked lazily, eyes dilated from the drugs, as if he was trying to figure out what the hell he was looking at. Then his eyes narrowed, and he leapt off the couch toward Ricky, John-Michael blessedly forgotten.

“You little shit!” he bellowed. “I’ll fuckin’ kill you!”

Ricky merely raised a brow at him—because was he
really
in the position to kill anyone?—and racked the shotgun with the cold efficiency of a soldier. And in a way, he was one. It didn’t matter at all what happened to him, so long as John-Michael was safe.

Chris froze at the sound of the shotgun being pumped, and he stood there glaring at Ricky. He pointed a gnarled, cigarette-stained finger at the shotgun. “You have to fuckin’ sleep sometime, you little faggot.”

Ricky laughed mirthlessly, because, yeah, now he knew what the word meant—and it was funny coming from the guy who was trying to get his rocks off with a ten-year-old boy.

“The hell is going on?” Bonnie yelled as she stumbled into the room in her ratty faux-silk slip. “Christ, Ricky, what the fuck are you doing with that?”

Ricky never took his eyes off Chris as he answered her. “It’s his gun. I took it because I knew he’d eventually come after one of us.”

Bonnie made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat and crossed skeletal arms over her chest. “Get a grip, Ricky,” she slurred.

“He had his hands on J-M, Mom. He was…doing things.” Ricky glanced over at his brother, who was hugging himself and crying silent tears.

“Ricky Lee Dalton, that is
enough!
You shut your filthy mouth!” Bonnie’s voice sounded desperate, and Ricky knew she was trying hard not to believe him…but she knew. It was in that moment that Rich made the split-second decision that would change their lives forever—for better or worse. He knew if the authorities came, they’d never let him and John-Michael stay with her.

Keeping the gun trained on Chris, he leveled a hollow stare at his mother, taking in her tangled, thinning hair and her sallow skin and feeling nothing but revulsion. “Call the cops, Mom.”

“Ricky, I—”

“Call them, or I will.”

Chapter Three

Rich heard the muted retching through the thin apartment walls before he was even fully awake. He threw off the covers and skidded into the bathroom in nothing but his boxers. There he found Rory looking miserable, leaning over the toilet and making a deposit of his last meager meal.

He retched until he had nothing left but dry heaves. They racked that enormous body along with vicious tremors.

“I don’t understand it,” Rory croaked. “It happens every time I eat anything more than a fucking salad…and sometimes even then.”

Rory shifted his weight until he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, propped up against the closed toilet bowl. His head hung limp on his shoulders, and his black hair was drenched with sweat and plastered to his skull.

“What did the doctor say again?” Rich asked.

Rory gave helpless shrug. “They’ve done all kinds of tests. They’ve found nothing; no ulcers, polyps, or lesions…Tested negative for Crohn’s, pancreatitis, and gall bladder problems. They can’t find anything obvious.”

Rich frowned. He’d never trusted doctors.

“On the scope, all they found was mild gastritis,” Rory continued, “which is just a glorified bellyache. It’s a symptom, not a cause.”

Rory’s symptoms and the doctor’s lack of findings set a tiny memory wiggling in the back of Rich’s brain. He felt like he’d seen something like this before, but he couldn’t quite grab hold of it.

“Come on, big guy, let’s get you off the floor,” Rich said. He clutched handfuls of Rory’s thick forearms and hauled him to his feet. He helped Rory into the living room and eased him down on the couch. The community space was closer to their shared bathroom than Rory’s bedroom.

Rory stretched out longways on the couch, and Rich threw an afghan over his legs, tucking it in around him. Rory gave him a sweet smile, and he melted a little.

“I’ll get you some water,” Rich said in a gruff whisper and retreated into the kitchen. As he filled a glass with water, he took several deep, cleansing breaths.

“Christ, Langston,” he said to himself, “you can
not
fall in love with a straight guy. That only ends up one way, and it ain’t happily ever after.”

After he finished giving himself a stern talking to, he took the water back out to Rory. The big guy was curled up, remote in hand, watching…

“The Little Mermaid? Dude.”

Rory shrugged and gave a weak laugh. “Whenever I was sick as a kid, Mom would keep me home from school and let me watch Disney movies all day. It’s tradition!”

Tradition. Rich really didn’t know what that was like. The only thing that came close was Friday night movies with John-Michael. They’d always snuggled up together on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn—if they could afford it—and watched whatever movie the foster-parents-
du-jour
had in their collection. They’d kept it up until they were finally separated.

“You all right, Man?” Rory’s voice cut into his musings like a butter knife.

“Hu—what?”

“You went pale as me there for a second. I hope you aren’t getting sick too.”

Rich gave himself a mental slap. He was usually much better than this at hiding from the memories. “No, I’m fine. Just thinking. Try’na figure out how to get your hairy ass well again.”

Rory laughed, then winced, and went back to the movie. Rich stared at the screen while the perky-breasted mermaid fell in love with a complete stranger, but he wasn’t really seeing it.

He was thinking back to one particular foster sister who’d suffered from almost identical symptoms as Rory for the better part of a year. He didn’t know if they had ever gotten a name for the condition, but they had cleared it up by changing her diet.

Rich had an idea. “Rory, I think I might be able to help you.”

Rory paused the movie and propped himself up on the throw pillows. “Yeah? More than you already have?”

“Yeah. But you’re gonna have to trust me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Of course I trust you. You’re my boy!” He said, thumping Rich on the shoulder, as if it was just that simple. Maybe it was.

“Cool,” Rich said, returning the fist-bump Rory had stuck his giant paw out for. “I’m going to cook all your meals for the next week. All of them, no cheating. At the end of it, you’ll either be better, or I’m taking you back to the doctor.”

“Hey, no arguments here,” Rory said. “You won’t see me passing up a home-cooked meal…Mom.”

Rich rolled his eyes and tossed a pillow at him. It smacked Rory in the face, and he cackled. He laughed until he turned white, then green. He clapped a hand over his mouth and ran for the bathroom.

Rich came in a moment later with a cold, wet washcloth and draped it over the back of Rory’s neck as he leaned over the toilet again. Rich rubbed his shoulders while he finished being sick.

Rich wondered at being here again, in this place of caretaker and protector of someone he loved but could never keep.

* * * *

November 1997

Bonnie Dalton died on Halloween that year. The policeman who came to talk to the boys’ foster mother had said it was a massive overdose—a lethal combination of meth, sleeping pills, and vodka. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have gone into such detail if he’d known Ricky was eavesdropping. Not that it mattered much to Ricky anymore anyway. He’d seen it coming from a mile offshore. He was numb to the pain by then. He briefly entertained the possibility of not telling John-Michael; he’d spare his little brother whatever anguish he could.

But he knew J-M would never open his mind to the possibility of adoption if he thought Mom was out there somewhere, trying to get them back. John-Michael was twelve, but he always seemed younger, innocent; he still had a ghost of a chance to find a nice family. And Ricky…well, who wanted to adopt a surly fifteen-year-old? As cruel as it sounded, Ricky needed J-M to forget about Bonnie—to let go—so that he could have a prayer of being adopted.

So one night he sat his brother down and told him the “PG-rated” version of the news. Then Ricky held onto him all night, long after the boy had cried himself to sleep.

“Ricky, let’s move,” whispered Elke Mendelhaussen, their latest foster mother.

Ricky blinked away dark thoughts of his mother and hopeful thoughts of John-Michael. Sometimes the hopeful ones were the very worst. He grabbed hold of J-M’s shoulder and shepherded the boy forward in the grocery line.

When it was their turn, Elke placed their meager selection on the belt and watched carefully while the cashier rang them up. After she was read the total, Elke handed the woman her WIC check—the insubstantial amount of money she received from the government to help take care of her five fosters.

The cashier narrowed her eyes at them, and Ricky knew what was coming.

“WIC doesn’t cover these,” she said, pushing a couple of items back toward Elke.

“No, I’m sure it does. I was very careful. Would you please double check?”

The cashier—Shelly—went to ask her manager while the other customers grumbled behind them. Elke stood very still, head held high, a placid expression on her homely face. She seemed to have infinite patience, even for bullshit. It was one of the reasons Ricky actually kind of liked her—for a foster mom.

Ricky heard a rustling of clothing behind him, a whispered conversation.

“…wish she’d get a real job.”

“My tax dollars…”

“Popping out babies…entitled to a handout.”

Ricky turned and glared at the biddies behind him, briefly considering throwing something, but Shelly had returned. The items were indeed covered by WIC, so she hurried through checking them out and sent them off with a glare.

As they left the store, Elke’s large, clunky cellular phone rang. She paused on the sidewalk to answer it. There was some hushed, excited chattering before she hung up. Her face was flushed with delight when she turned to face them.

“We’ll skip the drug store today. We have to head home—a potential adoptive family is on their way to meet all of you kids.”