Keeping Promise Rock (43 page)

“Wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to take us with you?” Crick said softly.

Deacon closed his eyes and allowed Crick to touch him with reverence. The skin under Crick’s lips rippled, shuddered, and the sound Deacon made in the back of his throat sounded a little like pleading.

“I’d rather keep you right here, in your home,” he said softly, and Crick wrapped his arms around Deacon’s shoulders again and rested his cheek against Deacon’s back.

“It’s not home if you’re not here,” he said softly.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Deacon snuggled back into Crick’s embrace then, allowing himself to be comforted, allowing himself to relax. He closed his eyes for a moment and set his fairly reliable internal clock for a nap, and fell asleep in heaven, wrapped in Crick’s arms.

A few hours later, he woke up reluctantly. Crick had rolled over to his other side, and they were doing the butt-to-butt snuggle, which made it fairly easy for Deacon to pull on his sleep shorts, clean up the sex-toy, and go back to what he’d been doing before Crick called his name.

Crick found him there a half an hour later as he stared haplessly at a pile of bills.

“Deacon,” Crick huffed, pulling on his boxers with his good hand rubbing his eyes with the back of his left hand while yawning. “Sex isn’t relaxing if you don’t get to sleep afterwards—since when did bills take this long to pay?”

Deacon grinned at him all sleep-mussed and pretty because he was a damned sight better looking than the grim scenario on the desk in front of him. “Since we ran out of money to pay them. Here,” he said, surprising himself by the impulse to let Crick in on the torture. “Want to see how I’m doing this?”

Crick blinked, leaning eagerly over his shoulder, and Deacon felt some serious guilt. Crick was about the same age he’d been when he’d had to take over The Pulpit
—
it wasn’t like the guy couldn’t handle the details.

“I’ve got two major piles—I’ve got bills I need to pay and bills I can put off to next month. The trick is getting all the bills I need to pay out on about two-thirds the money we’re used to getting, and making sure I don’t put off the same bill twice in a row, because that fucks up your credit.” Crick started sorting through both piles on the table, blinking when he saw the one for the mortgage. “Isn’t this bigger than it used to be?” Deacon sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah—we had the old one through the local bank. Step-Bob and Melanie got home from Virginia and 290

opened their big traps about you and me setting up sodomy central, and the local bank tried to make us pay the whole damned mortgage in one month.”

“Oh my God!” Crick swore, and his hand—his left hand, which meant he’d been surprised out of self-consciousness—came down on Deacon’s shoulder. “That was right when I got home. You were dealing with that when you brought me home?
Deacon—
you should have said something!”

“You were sleeping, Crick. What was I going to do, wake you up and say, ‘By the way, the douche-bags who abused you are trying to spread the joy’?” Deacon chuckled a little, but Crick didn’t return the laugh. “Anyway, Jon and I moved all our shit to a different bank, and their mortgage interest was higher, so, well, bigger mortgage.” Crick didn’t respond—he was busy scanning the desk to try to get the lay of the land. Curiously, he reached for three unopened envelopes on the corner of the desk.

“Parry Angel’s getting mail?” he asked semi-facetiously. “No—wait.

This is a college account—I recognize the envelope. And one for Benny, too. And….” There was an angry silence as Crick tore into the third envelope.

“Deacon?” Crick said after a moment, his voice a dangerous level of quiet.

“What?” Deacon was trying to decide whether to pay the water bill or the trash bill and pretty much figuring they could haul their trash to the local landfill.

“This is my bank account.”

Deacon looked up. “Yeah—it’s got your college money, your muckraker money. It’s where we put your military checks and your disability. We had to move banks—it helped, by the way, being your executor—but all the info’s still the same. You remember. We set that up before you left.”

“Deacon, there’s six figures in this account.” Deacon blinked at him. He looked pissed off, and Deacon was beyond figuring out why. “Yeah, Crick—you’re pretty set up….” He was unprepared for Crick to rip the bank statement for The Pulpit

right out of his hand as he held it. Hands shaking—both of them—Crick picked up the phone handset next to the desk with his good hand and Keeping Promise Rock

awkwardly jabbed the twenty-four-hour banking number from the statement with his thumb, then followed the voice menu directions until he got a human being.

Deacon just looked at him, at a loss—he didn’t know what Crick was thinking, or even why he was so angry, and he especially didn’t know what he could possibly be doing with the two bank statements. And then Crick spoke, his voice terse and as pissed off as Deacon had ever heard him.

“Yeah—this is Carrick Francis—and I’d like to close out my account and have all the assets transferred to my executor’s account.” Deacon gaped, his vision going red and his face going pale and cold as Crick gave over the information that would take all of Crick’s dream money, all of his carefully hoarded college chances, all of the plans they’d made for his future, and dump them into the black whirling vortex of a money-pit that The Pulpit
had become.

“Don’t you dare!” he growled, as angry as Crick was, if not more so.

“Shut up, Deacon,” Crick snapped.

“It’s not going to make a damned bit of difference, you jackass!” Deacon shouted. “If we can’t make the damned thing pay for itself, all it’s going to do is put it off for another eight months!”

“Well then that’s eight months to figure out how to keep our home!” Crick yelled back. “What in the fuck is your mother’s maiden name?”

“Holmes! Oh, fuck—Crick don’t!” as Crick spoke the first part of password politely into the phone. “Well I’m not going to tell you the rest of fucking password!”

“You don’t have to, asshole.” Crick shifted his attention to the person on the other end of the phone. “You’re goddamned right I still want to do this, lady—don’t you hang up on me now. Yeah, I’ll punch it into the phone, just wait.”

Crick shifted the phone again and squinted at the little letters next to the numbers on the keypad. “I-M-I-S-S-C-R-I-C-K-2,” he muttered, and Deacon made a grab for the phone too late when he realized that Crick really did know the password.

“I knew you wouldn’t change it—you told me what it was when I was in Iraq, and I thought you were kidding,” Crick hissed, and Deacon turned around and threw his fist through the goddamned wall with a lungful of
“Fuck!”
as Crick finished the transaction.

Benny pounded into their room looking furious and scared, just as an angry, awkward silence fell over the echoes of Deacon’s fist punching through the drywall.

“What in the fuck?” she asked, glaring at the both of them. “You two idiots are going to wake the baby. Dammit, what are you fighting about?”

“Deacon, let me see,” Crick muttered, and Deacon held his bruised knuckles to his chest.

“It’s nothing,” Deacon grunted. “Just your brother throwing his goddamned future away….”

“Don’t be a stubborn asshole,” Crick snarled, grabbing his hand and dabbing at the blood with some tissue from the desk. Benny ducked out and came back in half a second with some gauze bandage and ointment. “I was throwing my money into our home.”

“You were throwing money into my problem!” Deacon snapped, his pride lacerated and bleeding at his feet.

“I was trying to keep you from killing yourself before you hit thirty, dammit! I just got here. I’d like to see you more than ten minutes a goddamned day!”

“Where’d you get the money?” Benny asked, wrapping Deacon’s hand like a pro.

“My college-slash-Army pay-slash-disability fund,” Crick grated, pitching Deacon a sour look. “Do you have any idea how much money he was sitting on while he was killing himself to make ends meet?”

“It wasn’t my money!” Deacon protested, too hurt to hide it.

“Cool!” Benny said practically. “Can I throw my college fund into the pot?”

Deacon and Crick both shouted “No!” at her, and she stepped away and glared at them.

“So Deacon, now you know what we’d do to protect you. And Crick? Tell me how that felt?”

“Bite me, little sister,” Crick growled, and Benny blew a raspberry at him.

“Thank you, Shorty,” Deacon said politely, and she threw her arms around him in a hug.

“His heart was in the right place, Deac—don’t ever doubt it.” Keeping Promise Rock

“I never have,” he muttered before she let him go and pattered down the hall.

Silently, Deacon pushed past Crick and went to sit down. All his checks were written, just waiting until he had the money to cover them.

Methodically, he began stuffing each envelope with the check and the receipt, and licking the envelope shut.

Crick watched him in the unnerving quiet, and after seeing what he was doing, began to help.

When they were done and each envelope had a stamp, Deacon stacked them neatly to put in the morning mail and turned around to go to bed. Crick followed him, turning off the light, and Deacon crawled into his side of the bed, grabbing the comforter in the early morning chill and wrapping his shoulders tight as a Christmas package on the edge of the bed.

He was unprepared for Crick to snuggle up behind him, almost exactly the way they’d fallen asleep earlier that night, wrapping his long, damaged arm around Deacon’s shoulders and kissing his neck. In spite of himself, Deacon began to relax against him—God, he’d forgiven him for Iraq, right?

Crick lifted his head and put his lips against Deacon’s ear and whispered, “Because of you, Deacon, I will
never
come home and find my shit on the lawn.”

Deacon’s body relaxed a little more. “Yeah,” he conceded.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure.”

Crick sighed in his ear again and held him tighter. “Every time you say that, it sounds more and more like a lie.” Deacon woke late the next morning and swore when he heard everybody out in the kitchen, including Crick. As quick as he could, he slid into yesterday’s jeans and brushed his teeth, hitting the kitchen just in time to hear the front door close as Benny and Andrew left for their morning at Amy’s. (Amy was getting pretty big these days—as soon as Crick was mobile, Benny had gone back to visiting at her house and helping her with her chores.)

“Dammit,” he muttered. “I wanted to tell Benny to get shampoo when she went to Wal-Mart.”

“She’s got a cell phone, Deacon,” Crick said from behind him, using both hands to sip coffee out of the mug he’d bought Parish for a long-ago Christmas.

Deacon looked outside the kitchen window, frowning. Someone had just made the turn into the driveway, and he didn’t recognize the old brown Ford.

“Yeah, but I always forget during the day, which is why we’ve been using hand soap for a week.” He risked a glance over his shoulder at Crick, not quite meeting his eyes. “You let me sleep in.”

“You needed it.” Crick put his coffee down deliberately and came to wrap his arms around Deacon’s waist, and Deacon actually breathed a sigh of relief and fell into him. He couldn’t be mad at Crick—it was like his entire body was hardwired against it. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be ready to apologize, but he wouldn’t expect Crick to, either.

“I’m sorry,” Crick said, and Deacon almost fell down.

“Why?” Deacon muttered, turning his head and searching Crick’s brown eyes. God, he was pretty. Growing up and into his height and size hadn’t changed his appealing, narrow-cheeked, big-eyed beauty, and Deacon had a minute to think muzzily that maybe it was just the way he saw Carrick and not what he actually looked like.

“I forget you have pride too…. You’re usually so good at being unassuming, Deacon—I forget how proud you are of us, you know?” Deacon was going to respond—he was truly on the verge of something intelligent about ‘Fuck pride, I have you’—but a shriek from Benny drew his attention, and he swore, even as he went tear-assing out the front door without a shirt or his shoes.

Melanie was driving the strange car, and Step-Bob was right there, on Deacon’s front lawn. He’d apparently knocked Andrew on his ass—

from behind, they later learned, by kicking his prosthetic leg out from under him—and he was pitched in a tug-of-war with Benny for Parry Angel.

“You keep your hands off my baby, asshole!” Benny was screaming, and then Deacon was there.

Bob didn’t see him, he was so intent on stealing the screaming little girl away from her mother. He sneered, “Ain’t no faggot niggers gonna raise my blood, you little whore!” while giving Parry a particularly vicious yank.

The words were damned ugly, but Deacon didn’t hear any more of them. His first punch stunned step-Bob enough to make him let go of the baby, and the second punch made the guy’s knees weak enough that he would have fallen if Deacon hadn’t grabbed him by the front of the shirt.

Deacon’s third punch broke the guy’s nose, and the blood spatter was fairly stupendous. That was when his vision went red, and he didn’t remember much more until Crick, Andrew, and Patrick pulled him off.