Keeping Promise Rock (39 page)

“Only because it’s another thing I didn’t know about you when I thought I was seducing you,” Crick said. They were doing this at night.

Crick had gotten enough strength to move slowly about the house and help with the housework, and Benny was grateful. He couldn’t chase the baby—and certainly didn’t trust himself alone with her just yet—but she was getting good at sitting on his sound side and listening to a story (but never a song). He sounded tired and young and a little sad, and Deacon thought wearily of all he had left to do out in the stable after he put Crick to bed. He wasn’t sure he had the strength for more than being happy Crick was home.

“You say that like I have lots of secrets, Crick.” The thought was ludicrous. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a very simple guy.” Deacon felt a sudden thrill of dread, enough to make him peek around the shower curtain. “You’re not thinking of getting bored with me yet, are you?”

Crick grinned back at him, completely unashamed by his nakedness—or by his scars, at least now. “Never. I might get mad at you, frustrated, and absolutely convinced that you can’t answer a question with anything other than a crooked answer, but never bored.” Deacon shook his head, embarrassed again. “You just like things dramatic,” he muttered. “There’s no reason to get all excited about the fact that I’ve loved you in one way or another since you walked up to The Pulpit
when you were a kid.”

Crick lost his grin and became suddenly as open and as vulnerable as that kid Deacon remembered. “And you said
I
wrecked
you.
God
dammit
, Deacon—you have
got
to give a guy a warning before you make my heart beat like that.”

Deacon managed another grin as he turned off the water and offered a big, fresh towel to Crick as he hoisted himself to his feet. “Maybe you should just get used to taking a compliment, you think?” He engulfed Crick in the towel then, like he was taking care of a really big child, and let Crick lean on him while he got him back to the bed. With some maneuvering—and a lot of groping, at least on Crick’s part—Crick was clean, dressed, and in bed again, trying hard not to fall asleep.

“Are you coming to bed, Deacon?” he asked—and it was a legitimate question. Between the legal paperwork and the ranch work and the extra time spent tending to Crick, Deacon had gone to bed late and woken up early since Crick had returned.

“I’ve got some shit to do first. I’ll get here eventually.” He smiled again. It had been over a week since Crick had gotten back, but seeing his dark head on his pillow still filled him with a boiling joy.

But tonight, Crick was regarding him with a quiet, unsettling sort of intensity. “Deacon, you’re going to have to talk to me sometime, you know? The world is just not this busy.”

Deacon sighed and pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat down.

“It actually is—at least right now. But what did you want to talk about?” Crick shook his head against the pillows, his eyes closing in spite of his best efforts. “How about why you can’t seem to gain any weight.” Deacon looked down at himself—in fact, he had been doing pretty well on that score. The last family meeting (where this was getting to be ritual) had him at one-seventy, which was a little thin but not by much.

But that had been before they’d gotten the call from Germany about Crick—he seemed to have lost some more in the last few weeks.

“I guess I’ve been worried about you, dumbass. Maybe you don’t get yourself halfway blown to kingdom come, and I’ll start eating bacon, cheese, and shortbread cookies again.”

“Being underweight is rough on your heart, Deacon,” Crick said seriously. “You know—the same heart that Parish had?”
Ou-uch
. But Deacon knew where it was coming from too. They would never get over that whole “please don’t leave me” thing. Ever.

“My cholesterol’s good,” Deacon said mildly. “Look, Crick—we don’t have guarantees here. We just don’t. I’ll keep myself as healthy as I can, but I’m not going to promise nothing bad’s going to happen. Jesus, Keeping Promise Rock

after the last two years, about all I
can
promise is that NorCal seems to be off the map for a plague of locusts.”

Crick laughed a little, and his eyes closed completely. Deacon stood and kissed him—the shiny, scarred part of his face, because he loved it all—and then dropped a kiss on Crick’s lips. Crick’s mouth opened and let him in, and
oooh
… they hadn’t done this yet. Crick’s breath was minty, and his mouth was warm, and for a minute, just a minute, Deacon let himself fall into that kiss with closed eyes.

It reminded him of how long it had been since he’d been touched—

truly touched—all over his body. It reminded him of how badly he’d missed Crick, and of those two weeks they’d had together, when Deacon had wanted him so bad it made the muscles in his stomach taut and his cock hard just to
look
at Crick, just to know that the boy was his.

Crick gasped, completely awake now, and reached his arms up to wind them around Deacon’s neck, and Deacon wondered if he’d get a medal for pulling away.

“Ahhh… God, Carrick—I’ve
got
to go.”

“Dea- con!” Crick whined, and Deacon took pity on him. He used his thumb to smooth over Crick’s swollen mouth.

“How long ’til you get your shunts taken out?” he asked, although he knew almost to the hour.

“Three more days,” Crick said sulkily, and Deacon grinned.

“Well, that’ll give us a day to shoot for. I can’t promise it’ll rock your world—or even that we’ll hit a homerun, but I’ll pencil in some

‘Crick time’, okay?”

Crick glowered. “It’s not nice to mention ‘Crick time’ and ‘pencil’ in the same sentence, you know.”

Deacon laughed out loud and playfully peeked under the sheets. Sure enough, a larger-than-pencil-sized tent was popping up from Crick’s white boxers, and Deacon ducked his head under and gave it a kiss, the cotton soft and tasting like laundry detergent under his mouth. He was gone then, laughing out the door before Crick could do more than whimper and groan.

He sobered the minute he got to the stables.

He, Andrew, and Patrick had been working as long and as hard as they possibly could, and he still had an hour and a half of stall-mucking to do. He tried to keep it down—he’d promised Andrew that he’d leave it for 266

morning, but he couldn’t do that. He’d promised Jon two hours of paperwork and lawsuit filing the next morning, which was when he’d usually be doing the muckraking, and Andrew and Patrick had a full roster of their own.

Benny found him hours later, standing in the corner of the last stall, leaning on the pitchfork and asleep on his feet.

“Dammit, Deacon,” she swore, waking him up enough to make him drop the pitchfork and stumble, and she pulled her hooded sweatshirt tighter around her nightgown and picked her way across the stall carefully in her flip-flops. Deacon recovered the pitchfork, and she ripped it out of his hand.

“Benny—”

“Fuck off, Deacon. My brother came and got me because you put him to bed three hours ago and promised ‘It’ll only be a minute, Crick’.

Look at you—you were sleeping on your feet, dammit!” Deacon frowned. “Did you just tell me to fuck off?”

“I’m pissed!” she snarled. “Two years you’ve been pining away for my brother like a lost dog. Now that he’s here, you can hardly spend ten minutes in the same room!”

Deacon flinched guiltily, and maybe it was the sleep still pumping sluggishly through his brain, but he let slip something he’d been trying to keep close to his chest. “Well it’s not going to do Crick much good to be home if I lose it as soon as he gets here!” Benny stopped for a minute and took a deep breath, setting the pitchfork against the side of the stall with undue care. It was spring, so Shooting Star had been left out in the pasture for the night, which was a good thing, considering her temper.

“Deacon, you know, as much as we love this place, it’s not our home without you.”

Deacon flushed—it was truly one of the nicest things anyone had said to him. “I promised your brother he’d always have a place to come home to,” he said back, repaying the compliment with honesty. “I… I can’t let him down.”

Benny shook her head, looking too old for her age. “Well, why don’t you ask me to help—”

“Because you do enough around here!” he told her sharply. “You are not a full-time employee—you’re a girl, and a mother, and you get some down time!”

“What do you get, Deacon?” she asked at last, wearily.

“Your brother’s safe,” he said with a smile. And then he sighed. “I guess I’ll finish this tomorrow.”

“I’ll finish it tomorrow,” Andrew grumbled, coming into the stall wearing a pair of sleep pants and a T-shirt. His prosthetic foot was pale and bare next to his real, coffee-colored one, and Deacon didn’t miss Benny’s wide-eyed fascination with his feet.

“You’ve got a list of shit to do tomorrow,” Deacon muttered. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“I’m sorry too—go to bed.” He stopped and noticed Benny’s non-judgmental interest and said, “Was there something you wanted to know?” Benny grinned at him. “They couldn’t afford to make them match?” Andrew grinned back—he really did have an amazing, dark-eyed smile. “Everyone’s so busy not looking at it, I think they figured no one would notice.”

“I noticed,” she said impertinently, and he took a game step towards her to ruffle her hair.

“I’ll be sure to let the doctor know the next time I go in for a fitting.

Now both of you go inside and get some sleep—and Deacon?” Deacon blinked up at him—he’d been nodding off a little, even in the face of their flirting. “Mmm?”

“I’m feeding in the morning. Sleep in.”

And he couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t. “That sounds like a plan.”

It might have been, if Crick hadn’t been awake and pissed when he was finally showered and ready for bed.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered groggily, scared away from going to snuggle by Crick’s glower.

“Deacon! It’s past two in the morning—what were you doing?”

“Muckraking,” he muttered shortly, grabbing his corner of the covers and curling into a little ball.

“Deacon,” Crick said insistently—well, he’d had three hours of sleep, he could be insistent. “You’re working yourself into the ground.

You have all these meetings with Jon you won’t tell me about. We’re all living off of peanut butter and Top Ramen—isn’t it about time you told me how bad it really is?”

Deacon grunted. “The peanut butter and Top Ramen is Benny’s idea—I told her we’re not cutting into the food budget, but she seems to think that’s gonna help.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Deacon burrowed even tighter into his little cocoon. He could deal better with these questions with just a little bit of sleep.
Just a little,
Crick—please? Just a couple of hours, and then I’ll be honest when I’m on
my way out to save our asses?

“I don’t want to,” Deacon said bluntly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t in sooner….”

“Since when does muckraking take so long?” Crick was digging in his heels—Deacon knew the sound.

“Since I fell asleep doing it,” Deacon yawned, and Crick must have figured he wasn’t kidding, because there was some careful shifting on the bed, and then a bandaged arm came over Deacon’s arms and locked around his chest.

“Deacon, you keep trying to protect me, and I get that—but it’s starting to feel like you’re lying to me, and I hate it. I’m not a little kid.

When I get my bandages off, I can even help and everything!” That last bit sounded petulant, but Deacon couldn’t blame him. He was chafing at the bandages and chomping at the bit.

“When you’re up to it, I’ll tell you everything,” Deacon promised, feeling magnanimous. “Right now, we both need our sleep.”

“Well, neither of us are getting any until you’re honest with me.” Oh God, he was like a dog with a bone.

“About what?” Deacon snapped, finally out of patience.

“I don’t know, Deacon—how was detox?”

Deacon snapped upright as though he had been shot, the bandages from Crick’s arm catching on his chest as the arm slid down. “Godawful,” he muttered, simply stunned into brutal frankness. “How’d you know?” Crick’s dark eyes gleamed at him unhappily in the darkness. “I put some shit together—like the Valium in the cabinet and the fact that Benny and Andrew refused to have beer in the house. And boy, didn’t I feel Keeping Promise Rock

stupid, too—I mean, what did you write? ‘Let’s just say any alcohol is too much’?”

“What did they tell you?” Deacon asked, feeling panic rising in his throat like bile. They didn’t know that much, he thought dizzily. Benny knew he’d spent some time drunk—she knew he’d lost a lot of weight.

She didn’t know about him, naked in the bathtub in his own filth, begging Jon for a Valium so his body didn’t give out. She didn’t know about three days of the shakes, toned down with the V, and the fact that he’d barely been able to feed the damned horses for her first week living there.

“Benny told me you were a full-blown alcoholic—and that you were walking away from the liquor store empty-handed when she came to talk to you and you figured out she was pregnant.” Crick still sounded angry at Deacon for withholding, and Deacon breathed a sigh of relief.

“Not one of my finer moments,” he muttered. “Can I not live through it again tonight?”

“You still didn’t tell me about detox,” Crick muttered implacably, and Deacon pulled up his knees and scrubbed his face with his hands.

“It was a laugh riot, okay? Two weeks of happy-happy joy-joy fun the likes of which my body has never seen before and will, praise God, never see again. Please”—Deacon was surprised at how much his voice shook—“please, Carrick. Don’t make me tell you that story. You used to think I was something, okay? You used to look at me like I was special.

Don’t make me tell you about being a shaking puddle of puke —I couldn’t stand it if you looked at me like I was still that puddle. I can go sleep on the couch if you want… if you can’t deal with me the way I am, the way I was, I can sleep on the couch and you don’t have to worry about me coming to bed late, but….” Oh damn.
Pull it together, Deacon. You’ve got
too much shit to do, and it’s too late for that crap. Pull it. The fuck.