Salvation (24 page)

“Oh wow,” I murmured.

Dante looked at me and asked, “You’ve
heard of him?”

I nodded. “He’s supposed to be
brilliant, a rising star in the culinary world. Where’s your restaurant?”

“On Chestnut in the Marina District.”

“You know,” Hunter chimed in, “Trevor doesn’t
talk about it much, but I suspect he has culinary aspirations that extend way
beyond catering. Maybe you could see if that chef would be willing to take on
an apprentice.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” I
muttered.

“I’m not joking,” Hunter said. “It could
be a great opportunity for you, Trevor.”

“He wouldn’t want someone with so little
experience,” I told him.

Dante said, “Remmy actually told me he
likes to work with young chefs and train them from the ground up to do things
his way. He has a lot of innovative ideas about how to run a kitchen. I’d be
more than happy to set up an interview for you, Trevor.”

“Thanks, Dante.” I pushed down the
excitement that had started to flare up in me. No way was I going to get my
hopes up.

Dmitri and Dante compared notes on
running a restaurant for a while as I sipped my drink and paid close attention.
After a while, Dmitri said, “The bar and grill will soon have our divided
attention, though.” He smiled at his husband and said, “Should we tell them our
news?” When Jamie grinned at him and nodded, Dmitri said, “We’ve decided it’s
time to start our family.”

“Holy shit, that’s huge!” Dante
exclaimed. “You sure you’re ready for that?”

Jamie said, “As ready as any couple is
when they decide to become parents, I suppose.”

“Will you adopt?” Charlie asked.

“We may later on, since we want several
kids. This first time though, we’ve decided to use an egg donor and a
surrogate. We’ve gotten that process started by visiting a few clinics and
interviewing candidates.”

“So, this may be a totally inappropriate
question,” Gianni chimed in, “but whose sperm do you use?”

“Both of ours,” Jamie said.

“Really? Like, mixed together into a
baby-making cocktail?” Gianni asked.

Dmitri grinned at that and told him,
“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Wow. Well, best of luck, you two,”
Gianni said. “You’re braver men than me for taking on something as huge as
parenthood.”

Charlie moved over to Jamie and grabbed
his ex-boyfriend in a big hug. “I’m so happy for you,” Charlie said. “I know
how much you want this, and I can’t imagine two better parents than you and
Dmitri.”

“Thank you, Charlie.” Jamie kissed his
cheek before Charlie let go of him and took his seat, and then Kieran grabbed
Jamie in a hug.

“I knew it was just a matter of time,
cousin. You’re going to be a great dad. Both of you are,” Kieran said, and then
he hugged Dmitri as well.

“What about you, bro?” Gianni asked
Dante. “Has the baby bug bitten you and your husband yet?”

Dante picked up Charlie’s hand and
looked in his husband’s eyes. “We’ve decided not to have children,” he said.
“We both did a lot of soul searching and reached the same conclusion. It’s just
not what either of us want.” He glanced at his friend Dmitri then and added
with a smile, “So, we’ll just have to spoil your kids rotten instead.”

Dmitri grinned at that. “You’ll have to
get in line behind all of our sisters. We haven’t told them yet by the way,
because they’re going to be a little too excited. Actually, you’re the first
people we’ve told.” Dmitri turned to me and said, “Jamie and I have eight
sisters between the two of us. Our kids are going to be inundated with aunts.”

“We’ll tell them when we’re a little
farther along in the process,” Jamie said. “My sisters will be at the wedding
by the way, so all of you please keep this under your hat for now. Once we tell
them, they’ll be calling us fifty times a day for updates.”

 “Fifty is a really low estimate,”
Dmitri said.

“That’s true, actually,” Jamie agreed.
He smiled at his husband, and then leaned in and kissed him softly.

Gianni got up and took my hand, saying,
“We’re out of Sangria. Come on, Trevor, be my booze buddy. We need to whip up
some more cocktails.” I let him pull me to my feet, then followed him into the
kitchen.

As he opened and closed cupboards,
searching for something, Gianni told me, “Wow, was that depressing! I really
had to get out of there for a minute.”

“What’s depressing?”

“All those happy couples. Nothing like
being around a bunch of newlywed, baby-making, totally-in-love people to make
you feel utterly and completely alone. Ah ha!” He pulled something from a
cupboard and changed the subject. “I feel like making Jell-O shots. Of course,
they’ll take a while to set up, so we’ll need something else in the meantime.
Something
potent
, to counteract all that lovey dovey stuff going on
outside.” He tossed five boxes of gelatin on the counter, then went back to
rummaging, this time in the lower cupboards. Eventually he pulled out a long
cellophane sleeve of little plastic cups and said, “Speaking of lovey dovey,
how serious is it between you and my brother, anyway?”

“Oh. Um, I’m not sure. I mean, it feels
really serious, because we just spent the past seventy-two hours together.” I
thought about it for a while, eyes on the granite countertop, then said,
“Actually though, I don’t know what happens now. We didn’t make plans for when
I return to San Francisco.”

“You really care about Vincent, don’t
you?” His tone was so gentle that I looked up at him.

“Yeah. I really do.”

“I hope he doesn’t fuck this up,” Gianni
said. “You’re probably his one and only shot at happiness. You know what I
mean, right? It’s like, Vincent lives in this dark prison inside himself. No
one ever has any idea what’s going on with him. If you’ve somehow managed to
kick down the door to his cell, then this thing between the two of you just has
to work out.”

“I didn’t kick it down at all. He flung
open the door willingly and turned on the light. You know, just to carry your
metaphor through. It’s not like he wants to be alone and isolated. I don’t
think anyone would ever want that.”

“Vinnie sure seemed like he did. He was
always so secretive, he’d never tell me or our brothers what was going on with
him. It was especially bad when he was a teen, but we found out later there was
a reason for that...which I probably shouldn’t go into now.” Gianni busied
himself by lining up row after row of little plastic cups on the kitchen
island.

“He already told me about his heroin
addiction,” I said.

Gianni stopped what he was doing and
blinked at me. “Oh. Wow, he really
has
opened up to you.”

“Not about everything,” I admitted. “He
won’t talk about whatever business he’s involved in.”

He considered that for a long moment,
then said, “Maybe that’s for the best,” before going back to the plastic cups.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, you must know about my family’s
mafia history, right? It’s not really a secret or anything. We’ve made a lot of
progress over the past couple decades, almost all of us have gone legit. But I
guess Vincent’s hanging on to the old ways. And the first rule of the mafia?
Don’t talk about the mafia.”

I grinned a little. “I thought that was
the first rule of Fight Club.”

Gianni smiled at me. “That too. And you
know why that rule exists, don’t you?”

“So you don’t get arrested?”

“Nope. It’s so you keep the people you
love safe. If you’re in the mafia, you don’t go home and tell your spouse and
kids all about your business over pot roast. Because if you do, that makes them
a target. If it’s understood that you don’t talk about your business, then nobody
has a reason to come after your loved ones. Usually.” His voice wavered a bit
on that last word, and I could tell that he’d inadvertently steered the
conversation into painful territory.

“Your grandmother told me about your
parents and sister,” I said gently. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Gianni.”

He looked up at me with a little smile.
“You must be close to Nana if she told you about that.” I nodded and he said,
“I’m really glad I came home early and got to meet you, Trevor. It sounds like
you’ve become a part of my family.”

“Well, not quite. Nana and Vincent are
both special to me, though.”

“So, while you were hanging around my
family, did my name come up?”

“Um....”

“That’s a yes. Can I ask what they told
you about me?”

“Well, I mean, I can tell they really
love you, Gianni....”

“Did they tell you I’m a prostitute? I’m
really not, you know. I just have kind of this odd need to be taken care of. I
know that sounds stupid, but it is what it is, I guess. I date men and women
that are a lot older than me, and I let them take care of me, in every sense of
the word. It makes them happy, and it makes me feel secure. To me, it’s a
win-win. But others just see this gold-digging slut when they look at me.”
Gianni sighed and said, “I know that was all completely oversharing, by the
way. But I don’t want you to think badly of me, Trevor.”

“I don’t. I never did. Not even when I
thought you were a gigolo, I never judged you for it.”

He burst out laughing. “Oh God, a
gigolo. That’s so retro, but I can see them calling me that.”

I watched him for a moment, then asked,
“Did your travel companion really send you home for having oral sex with some
waiters?”

“No. She sent me home because she found
a younger, prettier boy in Athens and didn’t want me anymore. Don’t repeat that
to my brothers, okay? It makes me sound like such a loser.”

I had to grin a little. “You’d rather
have them think you’re promiscuous?”

“They already think that, so I just
concocted an excuse that fits their image of me. Well, plus finally outing
myself as bisexual. I’d been trying to figure out the best way to do that for
some time, and finally decided to not make a big deal of it and just throw it
out there.”

After helping Gianni make a rainbow of
Jell-O shots, sticking them in the refrigerator, and mixing up a double batch
of tequila sunrises, we went back out to the pool. Only Hunter and Brian were
out there, making out wildly, their hands all over each other. “Woopsie,”
Gianni said when he saw them, and the couple broke apart embarrassedly. “We
didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No, it’s fine,” Hunter said, trying to
be subtle about adjusting the front of his orange and white swim trunks as he
climbed off his boyfriend.

“Where’d everybody go?” I asked, setting
down the pitcher of drinks I was carrying.

“Dante and Charlie ‘went for a walk,’
which I assume is code for going off to have sex on the beach, Christopher and
Kieran went upstairs to ‘lay down for a while,’ which is definitely code for
having sex in a bed, and Jamie and Dmitri went to ‘check out what’s in the pool
house,’ which presumably means having sex on some sort of floatation device,”
Hunter explained cheerfully.

“So, why didn’t you two sneak off and
have sex somewhere?” Gianni asked with a big smile.

“Well, everyone had cleared out, so we
just, um....” Brian began, but couldn’t quite make himself say any more.

Hunter finished for him, flashing an
embarrassed smile. “We just did it right here. We were going for round two when
you guys came back.”

“Well, don’t let us stop you,” Gianni
said with a playful wink, taking my hand. “My future brother-in-law and I can
just go play Parcheesi or something while you get back to it.”

“No, it’s okay,” Hunter said. “I refuse
to chase you away from your own pool. Come and sit down, and pour us some of
whatever’s in that pitcher.”

Gianni distributed new glasses and I
poured the drinks. When I settled onto the wide lounge chair beside the one
Hunter and Brian shared, Gianni flopped down on it with me and draped a leg
over mine. He had no concept of boundaries whatsoever, but since I liked him it
didn’t really bother me.

“So, did you get everything done in time
for Kieran and Christopher’s wedding surprise?” I asked.

“Yeah, just barely,” Brian said. “We
were working on it up until yesterday.”

I explained to Gianni in a hushed tone,
just in case the grooms returned, “Brian is giving his brother Kieran the house
they grew up in as a wedding present. They’d both inherited it when their
father passed.”

“It was pretty trashed, thanks to me,”
Brian said, “but we got it totally cleaned out. We also repainted it inside and
out, refinished the floors, and put in a little garden out front. I can’t wait
to see Kier’s face when he gets a look at it.” He smiled proudly.

“Wow, that’s a hell of a present,”
Gianni said. “You must really love your brother.”

“I not only love him, I owe him big-time
for taking care of me when I returned from Afghanistan. I came back pretty
destroyed, and put him through hell before I got my shit together. This is a
thank you gift as much as a wedding present,” Brian said.