Turkey in the Snow (4 page)

Hank was so disappointed it felt like he shrank.

“Here,” he said softly, “I’ll take her.”

Justin shook his head. “Let me put her down, Henry. Odds are better she won’t wake up that way.”

Hank didn’t protest that he wanted her to wake up, because that had happened once, when he’d gotten her from Mrs. Watson’s daycare
really
late, and at 1:00 a.m. that night, when she’d finally dropped off to sleep, he’d sworn never ever again.

He gestured Justin down the hall instead, turning on the hall light as Justin walked into what was obviously her bedroom, so Justin wouldn’t have to turn on the pink tiffany lamp that Hank had installed on the new white bookshelves. He slipped into the darkened room as Justin pulled back the comforter with his free hand, and then laid the limp little body down on the clean pink sheets. Justin was very careful then, taking off her shoes and her coat, and leaving her in her second set of clothes—stretch pants and a T-shirt, which were damned close to pajamas—before pulling the blankets up and tucking them under her chin.

Hank bent down and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek before she could wake up and then followed him out of the room into the hallway.

“Well, I—” Justin started to say, and then Hank said, “Thank you so much for—” and then they both stopped and looked at each other bashfully in the middle of the hallway. Finally Hank reminded himself that he was the older of the two of them, and it was his job to break the ice.

“We have real pizza,” he said hopefully. “And beer, that is, if you’re… uhm, you know. Twenty-one yet. And if not I’ve got milk. But, would you—”

Justin brightened while he was talking, like the light that made him Justin from the inside had been flipped on.

“I’d totally love to!” he said, keeping his voice quiet, even if his gestures started to get a little loud. “And don’t worry, Henry, I turned twenty-one in November, so you’re totally safe. Not corrupting a minor or anything.”

Hank had been leading him down the hall and he turned around and looked at him sharply over that. Justin returned the look cheekily, and Hank turned back around, resolute.

“Why ‘Henry’?” he asked as they got to the kitchen, and Justin didn’t miss a beat.

“Because Mr. Calder’s too formal, and that other guy called you ‘Henry’ and it pissed me off.”

Hank was in the kitchen by now, and he turned slightly, looking at Justin wryly. “Well, people do that when you’ve got history. The only two people to call me ‘Henry’ have been Alan and my mother.” And his sister, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

“And now me,” Justin said, waggling his eyebrows.

Hank had no choice but to laugh. He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out two microbrews. “I’ve got pizza, if you like. Slightly higher quality than Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Please?” Justin begged, holding his hands up like a puppy dog. “Please please please please
pleeeze!
I’m
dying
for something to wipe the taste of Chuck E. Cheese pizza outta my gullet… I’d mug your mother for a decent piece of pizza!”

Ah, gods, laughter, quiet laughter.  It really was a luxury. “Don’t mug my mother,” Hank said, the chuckles freeing something inside him. He handed Justin the plate with the last five pieces on it and added, “She never had money for pizza.”

“Now tha’s a cwyin shame,” Justin said through a full mouth. He closed his eyes for a blissful moment and chewed. After he swallowed he said, “Omigah—is that Mountain Mike’s? Us broke college students
never
eat at Mountain Mike’s!” He took another bite, his face lit up and happy in total ecstasy over the pizza. For a moment, Hank let himself bask in the pleasure of a completely happy human being.

“Come sit in the living room if you like,” Hank said. He moved across the little hallway and pulled the coffee table in front of the brown corduroy couch, getting two coasters and a placemat from the compartment underneath for the beers. He took the recliner and put his coaster on the end table next to it. He had one of those little organizers on the arm of the recliner, and had just pulled out the remote when Justin came in and settled down.

“No, no,” Justin said hurriedly. “Don’t turn the TV on. Let’s talk.”

Hank paused midclick and wondered what his expression must have been. He didn’t have to wonder long.

“
Ohmygah! Jeee
zus, Henry! I’m not going to torture you with tongs! I just get distracted by anything pretty, and I’m more in the mood to be distracted by you!”

Henry looked at him. “Because I’m not pretty?” It was more for clarification than because he was fishing for compliments, and he was unprepared for the adult, predatory look to cross Justin’s baby face.

“You’re plenty pretty, Hank. But right now, I’m more interested in your mind.”

Hank snorted. “That’s a switch.”

“We’re not all like your… whatever that was… Alan.”

“We’re?” Hank asked, flummoxed for a moment.

“Us drama queens,” Justin said with a wicked grin. “We’re not all like your friend, ex-friend… okay, what
is
he to you? Cause whatever it is, I don’t see it!”

Henry took a swig of his beer and swiveled the recliner so he could see Justin instead of the television. “He
was
my boyfriend. My first serious one, actually.” Sigh. “More serious for me than him I guess.”

“What makes you say that?” Justin took a dainty bite of his new slice of pizza, as if to make up for stuffing his face from the last one, and washed it down with a sip of beer.

“Finding him in bed with someone else,” Hank said. He was, he realized, walking a difficult balance between trying not to be a dick and trying not to spill his guts on the floor. Nobody liked guts with their pizza—talk about unappetizing!

“Nice. Did you really find him in bed? Because you hear that all the time, but you gotta think, like, sometimes, you just catch one guy walking out of the apartment, and then there’s confession time, or, you know, you see a kiss or—”

“Alan was in our bed, screaming ‘Fuck me harder with that thing!’ and Keith was behind him, doing what Alan said.” Hank had to admit, he did get a perverse pleasure out of watching Justin try very, very hard not to spit pizza out all over his plate. When Justin had mastered himself, and after he’d knocked back another swallow of beer, he cocked his head thoughtfully.

“That was a lot of drama,” he said, and Hank found himself looking into a pair of surprisingly intense blue eyes.

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen worse,” he admitted.

“Mm…” This time Justin was eating thoughtfully, and Hank supposed he was enjoying the hell out of just watching this guy eat. It was like every mouthful was a different mood. He swallowed, and Hank was sure another question was coming. He was wrong.

“My mom’s the dramatic one in my family,” Justin said, smiling. “She can turn any moment into a joke or a reason to laugh. My dad likes to play practical jokes—stupid ones, like pulling down your pants if you’re wearing them too low or playing hide and go seek when you’ve been reading and you’re not sure if anyone’s in the house. They do this haunted house every year for Halloween—it’s huge, and scary, and the louder the music the better. It always scares the hell out of the neighborhood kids, so my sister Brenna and I are the last two left at home, and we always have to go meet the little ones Josie’s age and take them by the hand and show them how it’s not as scary as they think.” Justin laughed softly. “There’s this one little girl on our block—red hair, blue eyes, freckles, cute as hell and a bossy little shit, too. This last year she left her older brother at the sidewalk with their mom and stalked up to our porch all resolute and everything—she’s like five, right? And she’s got her little pumpkin in front of her, and she’s a little witch with a black hat, and she’s frickin’ adorable, right?” Justin’s shoulders went back, and he clutched his pizza plate in front of him like a little girl clutching a handbag. He widened his eyes and pursed his mouth to a little girl’s kewpie doll pucker, right down to making his rather lush lower lip tremble, and Hank started to laugh.

Justin kept going. “Anyway, she gets almost up to us, and the lights start going and the ghost drops from the tree and the big cackle comes out of the sound effects machine, and she doesn’t scream, she just turns right around and stalks back to mom and her brother, saying, ‘I’m not old enough! I’m not old enough! I’m not old enough! You go!’” And now he mimicked her shoulders and her posture and Hank had this image of this pudgy five year old, being absolutely in control at the same time she was frightened to death.

By this time he was laughing so hard he could barely breathe, and as he wiped his eyes and calmed down his breathing, he saw that Justin was grinning wickedly, chuckling through another bite of pizza.

“That’s awesome,” Hank breathed, still coming down. “I can totally see her. How’d her older brother take it?”

Justin grinned some more. “Oh, Kaden’s all about the science of the thing. I swear, he’s like, eight, right, and he’s like, ‘Evelyn, I told you that at our age we’re too imaginative to confront a manifestation of our fears!’”

“Oh get out! No way an eight year old said that!”

“No, I swear! This kid is something else. Their mom just stands back and listens to them talk and crosses her eyes. She’s a trip—she’s perfectly willing to let them amuse the hell out of her. I love it!”

Hank sobered a little, still feeling the release of laughing so hard. “Yeah, kids are a trip. I always wanted them, you know? Alan wasn’t so excited, but I always knew I was going to have some someday.” And he remembered Josie, sleeping soundly down the hall. “I wasn’t exactly planning on it being quite so soon,” he said, his voice quiet and thoughtful. “I don’t regret it, but, well, it caught me off guard.”

Justin nodded, and set down the empty plate of pizza, then drained his beer. “What happened?”

“Would you like another beer?” Hank asked, making to stand up. “Here, I’ll get your plate for you and get us another round.”

“I’d mostly like for you to not dodge the question,” Justin said, and unlike when he was telling the story, his entire body was absolutely still, waiting, like Hank was a feral cat and Justin was going to gentle him into submission.

“Well, I’ll get us another beer anyway.” Hank stood up and took Justin’s plate as well as the placemat and everything else into the kitchen. “They’re the last two in the fridge. No, no, don’t get up. Get comfy, turn on the television—I’ll just be a moment.”

Justin sighed behind him. As he cleared the living room, he heard Justin on his cell phone, telling someone not to wait up for him. When Hank returned, after rinsing off the plate and wiping off the placemat and putting them in the rack to dry, Justin was sliding the phone back in his pocket.

“My mom,” Justin said, neither apologetic nor sheepish. “She worries if I don’t let her know I’m okay. She figured I’d be late. I told her we’d probably end up talking after I brought Josie back.”

Hank handed him the opened beer, surprised. “You knew we’d—”

“Well, I’ve been crushing on you for months, thinking you were straight. No way I was going to let you go without at least a little conversation!” Justin was smiling again, inviting Hank to share the joke, but Hank couldn’t. Months? Months, and Hank had just pushed him away, dismissed him, because he liked to move his hands a lot. It didn’t speak well of Hank, that was for—

“You’re feeling all guilty, aren’t you?” Justin asked, that wicked grin still in place.

“No!” Hank lied.

“Of course you are—look at you. Your house is totally neat; you do everything by the book. I mean, you had a placemat for pizza on the coffee table for Pete’s sake! Yup. Little bit of raging-queen-o-phobia, and you’re all freakin’ out on yourself for not being a better person. I can read the signs.”

Damn. And now Justin had made Hank smile again. Hank took a drink of his newly cold beer. He needed to change the subject.

“Do your parents know?” he asked randomly, and Justin blinked. Good. For once
he
was surprised.

“That I’m gay?”

“Yeah.”

Justin shook his head. “Nope!”

Hank snickered hard enough to spit out his beer. “The hell they don’t!”

Justin laughed. “Well, we haven’t officially had the talk, how’s that?”

Well, Hank hadn’t had “the talk” until college either. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess there’s no reason to yet. Nobody serious yet, no reason to rock their world.”

Hank nodded. “Yeah.”

“Did you have the talk?” Justin asked, and Hank looked despairingly at his beer. The beer was full, the pizza was cleaned up, and he hadn’t heard a peep out of Josie in the last hour. It wasn’t even like the memory was that bad.

“It was anticlimactic,” he said with another swig of his beer. “No drama, nothing to talk about.”

“Well, tell me anyway.” Justin toed off his trendy little lace-less sneakers and curled his feet up under his bottom, then leaned on the arm of the couch, propping his chin up on his hand. He looked sweet and defenseless sitting there, and Hank found that he trusted that complete lack of defense. For all his drama, there was nothing about Justin that Hank couldn’t see right in front of him.

“Okay,” Hank said, leaning forward moodily and resting his forearms on his knees, holding his beer between his palms. “Here’s the thing. Alan and I were going to move in together—find an apartment and everything—so we could stop having to listen to his roommate have sex when she thought we were gone. So I came home to tell my mom that I was gay, I was moving out, and all those sleepovers hadn’t been just to watch movies, and as we get there, my sister Amanda hauls ass out of the house screaming, ‘Because you’re a bitch and I hate you!’”

Justin squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again wide. “And you said there wasn’t going to be any drama.”

“Yeah, well not on our part. For once, Alan kept his mouth shut, and we go into the kitchen. Mom’s cracking open a new bottle of whiskey and pouring herself a giant glass, and she looks up at me and says, ‘Yeah, what?’”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Mom’s sort of formidable—big woman, wide shoulders, don’t-fuck-with-me jaw—and she scared the holy hell out of Alan, and he reached for my hand and I squeezed it to let him know it was all right. And Mom, she just raises her eyebrows, plonks down on the kitchen chair, and starts downing the whiskey like it was iced tea.”