Keeping Promise Rock (40 page)

Together.
“Just don’t make me tell you about that, okay?” He was shaking. His bare chest and shoulders were shaking as he hugged his knees, and Crick was pulling himself clumsily up.

“I said I’d go sleep on the couch,” Deacon muttered, trying to swing his legs out of bed, and Crick’s voice was like a whipcrack.

“Don’t you dare get out of this bed, Deacon Winters.” Crick’s good arm looped over Deacon’s shoulders, pulling Deacon stiffly into his chest.

Deacon was reluctant to go, but Crick kissed him on the temple and murmured, “Please? Please, Deacon—don’t go away mad. Just talk to me.”

“Crick….” He was still shaking—he couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m fine, okay? I just need a little bit of sleep.”

“You’re not fine,” Crick muttered, lying down and pulling Deacon with him. “And you keep talking like I’m going to change my mind about you when I find out the worst—it feels like you don’t trust me to know you, Deacon, and that hurts.”

Ah, God. Crick felt good. He felt strong—strong enough maybe to take some of the weight off Deacon’s shoulders. “Don’t ever think I don’t trust you,” Deacon muttered. “I just don’t want to hurt you.” He was tired… so tired. And it felt good to lean on Crick for a minute. The shaking wasn’t all the way gone, but it was easing up with every breath.

“You don’t want to hurt me?”

“Mmm.” He was falling asleep on Crick, hypnotized by his warmth and the sweet feel of his breath in Deacon’s hair.

“Then once, just once, when I ask you how you are, admit that you’re not okay.”

Deacon groaned softly and turned against Crick’s hard body. “But I am okay,” he muttered. “Right now, I’m great.” And Crick must have taken pity on him, because that was the end of the conversation as Deacon remembered it.

Therapy

CRICK sat in the passenger’s seat of the pick-up, wondering why keeping Deacon good to his word made him feel like shit.

It was pretty fucking bad, Crick, what do you want me to say?

The stubborn asshole had told him about detox—sort of.

Patrick found me in the morning—I was sort of a mess. Jon brought
me the Valium and helped me clean up the house. Look—can we not talk
about this anymore?

Because it had been the end of another long night—this time, Crick had been the one to go out to the stables to find Deacon asleep on his feet, and this time, Deacon hadn’t been able to come right back in and go to bed. He’d showered and kissed Crick and had gone into the study to sign the paperwork Jon had faxed him while he was out at the stables.

Crick had pretty much broached the most painful of subjects to get him to put the paperwork away and come home to his arms.

Crick thought bitterly that what he should have done was rip out a shunt or something, just to get Deacon to relax and spend some time with him—and he believed Deacon when he said he wasn’t avoiding him too. It was hard not to believe him when he was treating a day taking Crick to the doctor like a day at the circus.

“So, you want to go get something real to eat on our way back?” he asked excitedly as they took the I-50 exit from I-5, and Crick grinned at him, completely unable to piss on his parade.

“Absolutely—steak, I’m dying here—and maybe we could go grocery shopping for Benny on the way back.” Deacon’s eyes got big. “Yeah… I wonder where she gets those cookies with the fudge in the middle—those are awesome.” Crick couldn’t help but laugh. That core of sweetness in the guy was absolutely untouchable. Getting to it might be a bit tricky, but the results were definitely worth it.

Deacon came with him in to see the doctor. He asked nicely, and since he’d been the one who’d been doing the bandage-changing, it made things easier. Crick sat there in his boxers, waiting for a clean bill of health, and was reassured when the paunchy, fifty-ish man with thinning hair looked at his shiny, pink scar tissue and nodded approvingly.

“Good—whoever’s been taking care of your dressing is doing a bang-up job there, Lieutenant Francis. We can leave the bandages off, unless your regular clothes start to chafe—”

“They don’t,” Crick said with some relief. The doctor had pulled the shunts out, and all that was left of what had felt to be head-to-toe swaddling were two little white gauze pads, turning a little bit pinkish from the trauma of the removal. If it weren’t for his arm and the ache in his hip, not having to deal with the bandages would have been almost like having his old body back.

His arm was hard to look at, though.

The skin was… twisted, was what it looked like. As though someone with red-hot hands had tried to give an Indian burn to a wax figurine. The muscles in his hand and arm felt as though they were on perma-flex, and his hand was pulled up into a hideous parody of a hand—more of a harpy’s claw, really, and he wanted the bandages back just to hide the shape of the thing.

He didn’t even want to think about using it on a set of reins yet.

The doctor didn’t seem particularly upset about it, though, and neither did Deacon. The doctor took his hand in that dry, practical grip that physicians had and extended his fingers, asked him to squeeze, prodded at the webbing between his fingers, and pronounced it all good.

“Okay, Lieutenant, it’s not as bad as it looks right now. Your musculature’s still good—it was torn, but they did a not-bad job stitching it together. What you need is some physical therapy. What I’m going to do is set you up. In fact”—the man turned towards his computer console and Keeping Promise Rock

typed for a minute—“in fact, I’ve got an appointment for you today. Jeff’s on site today and he’s got a space open in about forty-five minutes. Give you two a chance to get a soda or something and make your next appointment, and there you go. He’ll spend some time massaging your muscles and showing you strengthening exercises, and you’ll be seeing him at the out patient facility in Citrus Heights from now on, how’s that?” Deacon looked almost disappointed, and Crick winked at him.

“Don’t worry, Deacon—we can find other reasons to come to Sacramento, okay?”

Deacon flushed, which reminded Crick of something else he wanted to ask. “Hey, Deacon—can you give us a moment here?” Deacon looked surprised, but because he was Deacon, he left Crick to his privacy. Crick was pretty relieved—if Deacon heard this next part of the conversation, he wouldn’t stop blushing until Christmas, and then Crick would never get him naked.

“He did a good job nursing you,” the doctor said as Deacon left.

“Your brother, right?”

Crick grimaced. “So—you’re my doctor, right?” The doctor looked confused, but he nodded.

“So, you’re not obligated to tell the Army anything about me, right?” The doctor, still looking confused, nodded again. “As long as you’re not a danger to yourself or others, what you say here is privileged information, son. Why—what’s on your mind?” Crick gave a sigh of relief. “Okay—here’s the deal. That guy’s
not
my brother, and I like to be on bottom. Unless you give me a clean bill of health for that kind of sex, I am
never
going to get laid—so am I good?” Crick was unprepared for the guy’s eyes to bug out, nor for the five-minute fit of coughing that followed, but eventually he did have a doctor’s note that said Deacon could fuck him until he screamed for mercy (not in those exact words) and his delicate innards would in no way be damaged, harmed or traumatized. Given that little piece of paper, which he planned to produce at a strategic moment, he was in a decent frame of mind when he met his physical therapist.

His physical therapist, PA Jeff Beachum, was the gayest man Crick had ever met. He actually trilled when he talked and minced when he walked and eyed Deacon with such undisguised and fascinated lust that Deacon turned red and mumbled something about more soda before 274

turning around and running away, leaving Crick in the small room with a bed, a sonogram heat massager, and Jeff, the only man on the planet who could make Crick look straight, giggling hard enough to wet his pants.

“Thanks a lot,” Crick said, trying to appear stern. In reality, he was charmed and more than a little bit relieved. Besides Deacon, he was starting to feel like the only gay man on planet Earth—the Army and Levee Oaks would do that to a guy. “Who’s going to defend me from you now?”

Jeff flashed him a happy grin. “Oh babydoll, if you so much as whimper, that smoldering ball of testosterone will be back from the soda machine in no time. Now sit down here, take off your shirt and hold your arm out, will ya?”

Crick did as he was told, and Physician’s Assistant Beachum started doing the same things Crick’s doctor had, except with a little more passion and verve. Crick found himself gritting his teeth and keeping his whimpers to himself.

“So,” he rasped, “what gave him away? I didn’t figure it out until I was grown, and he had to tell me.”

Jeff laughed. “Okay—now spread your fingers. Wider. Wider, dammit, you’ll never get yourself off if you can’t wrap your hand around it, right?”

That last one surprised Crick, and he managed to half-uncramp the claw of his hand.

“See? Give a guy some motivation, and see what he can do? And to answer your question, it wasn’t your boyfriend—I wouldn’t have read him either. You’re the one who has ‘I’ll stick my ass in the air any day of the week and twice on Sundays for this man’ tattooed across your forehead.”

“Thank God,” Crick said with feeling—partly because Jeff let go of his hand, and partly because, “I thought my doctor texted the whole building!”

Jeff laughed some more—he seemed to do that a lot, but Crick couldn’t complain. Deacon liked to laugh quietly, but sometimes a little bit of relief from that sort of intensity was nice too. “Why, what’d you say to Herbert? He doesn’t shake easily, you know.” Crick repeated the conversation, and Jeff actually stopped torturing the tendons in his elbow long enough to put his hands between his knees and whoop happily. “Oh my God.
Tell
me I have permission to give him Keeping Promise Rock

shit about that! Please. Please. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty please with a cherry on top?”

Crick grinned wide enough to make Jeff put his hand on his chest dramatically. “That would depend on whose cherry,” he said with a smirk.

When Jeff was done laughing at that, Crick told him, “Go ahead, tell him—knock yourself out—I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“The big deal? The big deal is that he’s bombproof. He’s a legend.

The story is—and his son has come in to confirm it—that his son came out to Herbert when he was giving the kid the facts of life speech. Herbert was full into the song and dance about always using a condom—‘it protects against disease, it protects against pregnancy, it’s just generally a good idea’—when his kid goes, ‘Dad, I don’t have to worry about pregnancy—

I’m gay’. And Herbert—without missing a beat, mind you—says, ‘In that case, let me tell you about lubricant, because you’re going to want to know’. Honey, if you managed to rattle Herbert, you’re not just my kind of guy, you’re a by-golly act-of-God.”

Crick laughed a little and then sobered. “Yeah—I think Deacon would probably agree with you there.”

Jeff made sympathetic noises before he raised Crick’s arm over his head and almost made his vision black out. “Yeah? It must have been rough when you went away. Tell me about it, baby—I’m all ears.” By the time Crick’s PT session was done, he couldn’t remember when he’d laughed so much—or when his heart had been lighter. As Jeff had him put his shirt back on and let him sit down after a particularly grueling exercise, he said, “Wow, do they pay you double for the head shrink? I haven’t talked so much in ages.” Jeff inclined his tousled, salon-cut dark head modestly. “All part of the service, my boy.” He looked up, brown eyes twinkling. “Seriously—

most guys need to talk when they get back. I like to think it makes up for the pain I put you through.”

Crick nodded vigorously. There had been quite a bit of that, it was true. He tried flexing his hand some more, and it hurt, but it moved and he hadn’t thought it would actually do that. Jeff nodded approvingly.

“Good—you keep doing that. In fact, if you really want to see some improvement, get your little old lady on and take up knitting or spinning. I know of cases where your kind of damage has made almost a full recovery. It took a couple of years—and there was still pain—but there 276

wasn’t anything those women couldn’t do with their two good hands, you know? And one of them can knit one hell of a doily, too.” Crick rolled his eyes. “I don’t know about doilies—and I reckon my sister could teach me to knit, she’s been doing enough of it. What I’m really wondering about is stable mucking—can I do any of that?” Jeff widened his eyes and gestured for Crick to proceed. “It’s not every day someone’s PT goal includes shoveling horseshit, Lieutenant—

any particular reason that’s on the list?”

“Deacon needs help. I would give about anything to let the guy get more than four hours of sleep a night,” Crick said with a grimace, and Jeff pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows.

“That’s almost the most precious thing I’ve ever heard. You know what would
really
help that guy?” Crick held out his hands in a classic shrug. “Thrill me.”