Keeping Promise Rock (46 page)

“What’d he say to that?”

“
Thank God
.”

Deacon let out a puff of air that might have been a laugh, the water spattering off his face and into the air in front of him. Crick’s arms came around his shoulders, and Deacon was being rocked softly as his body was made clean.

When the water ran cold, they dried off, and Deacon was in the middle of putting on briefs when Crick said, “Stop at underwear. Andrew and Patrick have it for the day. I declare today ‘Deacon’s day off’.”

“Yeah, oh mighty maker-of-laws—what are we going to do on

‘Deacon’s day off’?”

“My plan is to hang out in bed for a while and talk and sleep in. If we get
really—
and I mean
really—
ambitious, I’m thinking a trip to the swimming hole, with or without family. But right now, get in bed. I want to hold you when you’re not all sweaty and covered in man-sex.” They talked. And then Crick left and came back with sandwiches, and they talked some more. Deacon fell asleep, which surprised him as much as he thought it surprised Crick, and when he woke up, Crick was still there, head pillowed on the shiny skin of his outstretched upper arm, watching him with calm, dark eyes. Deacon blinked and smiled.

“You didn’t leave,” he murmured.

“I promised. I’ll keep it, Deacon, I swear.” A month later, Deacon stood at the prow of the blocky white ferry as it maneuvered smoothly around the San Juan Islands. The day was crystal July blue, and the waters of Puget Sound were a chill indigo.

In the end, he and Crick had decided to go see Lisa’s parents together. Deacon was no longer ragingly psychotic about a four day trip, but, well, the entire family—Benny, Jon, Amy, Patrick, Andrew and Crick—had all taken it upon themselves to send him on vacation before Amy had the baby.

“We want you here in thirty years, asshole!” had been Jon’s final word on the subject, and Deacon found that he didn’t have much fight left in him when it came to being separated from Crick.

So here they were, and Deacon couldn’t make himself be sorry.

Crick was getting coffee from the concession inside the ferry. He’d been working on his hand, and the fact that he could carry the little Styrofoam cup was a source of not-so-quiet pride.

Deacon’s heart wasn’t completely healed yet—and maybe it would be scarred his whole life, but then, Crick had been living with a scarred heart too, and they’d managed to survive the consequences of that. As it was, whenever the fragile thing started to bleed too much, Deacon would wrap their words from that day around it like clean gauze, and it would keep pumping and healing and keeping him healthy for a future with the guy who had broken it in the first place.

“Deacon?”

“Yeah?”

“What made you stop drinking? You never told me. Benny said you
were walking away from the liquor store in the first place. You never told
me why.”

“That letter you sent. The one where you asked me to write you
something real.” Deacon paused and swallowed, eyeing Crick warily from
his position on his stomach with his head pillowed in his crossed arms.

“The only real thing I had was that after I went to the liquor store, I’d get
to be home with a bottle. I couldn’t write you that. I had to make

‘something real’ something better.”

Crick reached out with his scarred left hand and stroked Deacon’s
hair out of his eyes. “You always seem so strong, Deacon. I swear, today
was the first time I’ve seen you really cry since your father died.”
Deacon reached out and captured his hand, stroking it gently.

“That’s because you didn’t see me about five minutes after you left me in
Georgia.”

“GERMANY,” Crick said into a lazy quiet.

Deacon’s eyes jerked open—he’d almost been asleep, his head
pillowed on Crick’s stomach, their hands laced together over Deacon’s
chest.

“Tibet,” he said randomly.

“No, idiot—I meant I want to talk about what happened in
Germany.”

Deacon scowled unhappily. “Yeah—‘Tibet’ wasn’t the right answer
the last time we had this conversation either.”
Crick flopped his scarred hand in a passable imitation of a smack on
the top of Deacon’s head. “Puhhleeeeze, Deacon? I tried to tell this story
to Lisa, but she was so mad at me for cheating on you that she wouldn’t
hear it. You’re the only person on the planet who will think this is as funny
as I do!”

“Lisa didn’t even know you when you were in Germany,” Deacon
muttered, and from his position on the pillow, Crick nodded.

“I’m telling you—just once I want a friend who isn’t crushing on
you, Deacon. She had it bad.”

“Jeff isn’t….”

“The hell he isn’t. Jon, Amy, Lisa, Jeff—hell, Officer Perkins was
crushing on you.”

“Officer Perkins is straight!”

“The hell he is. Believe me, Deacon—I’ve seen that look in people’s
eyes. A lot. Lisa took one look at my sketchbook and fell in love.”
Deacon pushed himself up to look at Crick with a puzzled frown.

“You have
got
to be making that up.”
Crick shook his head. “What can I say, baby—you’re a catch. Now
can I finish my story?”

“The one where you get laid by a complete stranger in Berlin? Yeah,
Crick—you go ahead.”

Crick did, of course, completely oblivious to Deacon’s sarcasm, and
he’d been right—Deacon was laughing by the end.

“He took one look at you and said, ‘Yeah, he’s lonely, I can see
that’? Damn, Crick—that’s almost as sad as ‘I love you, Crick’ when I
was blind drunk with Becca!”

“We’ll get to that later,” Crick threatened, “but yeah. And then I
spent half the night showing him your pictures and reading him your
letters.” He shook his head. “He told me to close my eyes and say your
name when he kissed me—and I did.”

Deacon turned to his stomach and scooted up the bed, propping
himself up on his elbows as he looked into Crick’s apologetic face. “Close
your eyes and say my name,” he whispered.

And Crick did.

About a half an hour later, after they’d put their underwear back on
and caught their breath, Crick said, “Oh yeah. And I topped.”
Deacon choked out a laugh. “And why in the
hell
would I want to
know that?”

Crick’s blush was a slow burn down his neck and across his
stomach. It stopped at the mottled scarring, but otherwise it was a
constant on his faintly brown-tinged skin. “I….” He swallowed and
smirked at himself and looked away. “I had this… you know. This weird
romantic notion, I guess, that my ass would always be yours.”
Deacon started a low chuckle that broke into a loud guffaw and
continued to work its way into a belly laugh. When he was done, he wiped
his eyes and looked unrepentantly into Crick’s offended scowl.

“Carrick James, that’s awfully damned sweet if you, but I’ve got to
tell you that if I’ve got to claim one of your body parts, that’s not the one
I’m after.”

“Okay,” Crick said, rolling his eyes. “I give. Which part of my body
is more interesting than my ass?”

Deacon rewarded his obtuseness with a smack to the head. “Your
heart, you fuckin’ moron. Man, I get about fifteen minutes a day max out
of your ass—it’s your heart I want twenty-four-seven. Jesus, Crick—stop
thinking in your pants!”

Crick turned a shining grin to him then and attacked him with a
happy, playful kiss, and they didn’t talk for another fifteen minutes at the
very least.

CRICK leaned forward to wipe the milk mustache off Deacon’s upper lip
with his thumb. Deacon put his glass of milk down on the end table,
balanced his sandwich plate on his lap, and waited patiently for him to be
done. Crick took the opportunity to rub his finger up the re-formed bridge
of Deacon’s nose.

“It’s bad enough that you grew three new chest hairs while I was
gone—you had to go and do this.”

Deacon scowled and put his plate on the end table next to the milk,
his desire for the barbecue sandwich gone. “Says the guy who got himself
blown halfway to Kuwait.”

“Yeah, but I put myself in harm’s way. You haven’t told me how you
did this yet.”

Deacon flushed, knowing that this might be the worst part of the rip-the-heart-open show-and-tell game they’d been playing. “Same way I did
Becca Anderson. I don’t fucking remember.”
Crick was honestly surprised. “Deacon!”
Deacon really wished he hadn’t eaten so much of that sandwich.

“I’m a blackout drunk, Crick. I don’t just drink to feel better—I drink until
the world ends. I woke up one morning, and there was a trail of blood
from the doorframe to the bed and all down my shirt, and in a puddle on
my pillow. My nose hurt like hell, but I could still breathe, so I assume I
set it myself on the way to bed.”

“Deacon—that sort of drinking… for as long as you say you did it—

how bad
was
detox?”

Okay. Okay. Look the monster in the face and say its name, and it
won’t have the power to harm you anymore—wasn’t that how the story
went?

“Patrick found me naked in the bathtub, covered in puke. If Jon
hadn’t gotten here with the Valium prescription, I probably would have
died.”

Crick had long ago finished his sandwich, and suddenly Deacon was
being embraced long and hard.

“I’m gonna kill Becca Anderson,” he choked, his face wet on
Deacon’s chest. “I’m gonna fucking walk into that bar and rip that
fucking cu—”

Deacon pulled back and grabbed his chin. “You stop that right now,
Carrick. I smelled the gin before I dumped it down my gullet. I could have
pulled back if I’d been strong enough....”

“No.” Crick shook his head. “No. I will never believe that was your
fault. A man walks into a bar and orders a soda, then he’s got a good
goddamned reason, and if you can’t respect that, you’re no better than the
puke he leaves on your shoes.”

Deacon shook his head. “You can’t do that—you can’t absolve me of
the whole damned thing, Crick—that’s not right….”

“You’re right—it wasn’t—but it wasn’t you who did the wrong.

Okay—you forgive me for Germany, and I’m grateful and I’m
overwhelmed, and I’ll love you forever for it. But you listen to me—I’ll say
it a thousand times a day, but we’ve got better things to do with our time.

You have done nothing to forgive in the matter of that woman, you
understand me? She spiked your drink, and that’s the end of it, okay?”
Crick was still in tears over it, so Deacon soothed him like he used to
when Crick was a boy. He fell asleep leaning against the pillows with
Crick cuddled against his chest.

A few minutes after Deacon woke up from his nap, as they were
playing with their laced hands in the sunlight coming in through the
window, Crick said, “Bob.”

Deacon said, “George.”

Crick said, “You keep trying to make that schtick funny and it’s not.

I’m being totally fucking serious here. You could have killed him.”
A puzzled shrug. “And that would have been bad because….”

“Because you would have ended up in prison, asshole! Next time,
just… I don’t know. Just walk away.”

Deacon thought about it long and hard. “No promises,” he said at
last. “I can promise to try, for you. But he hurt everyone I love—and he’s
dumb and he’s mean. I can promise not to look for trouble again.”
Crick looked away for a minute and brought Deacon’s knuckles to
his lips for a soft kiss. “You have to forgive him.”
Deacon jerked his hand away. “The
fuck
I do! I was
there
, Crick,
remember? Parish and I used to ice your bruises on the weekends because
no one was there for you on the weekdays. Do you know we called social
services? And you got beat harder and those people did shit, so we
316

stopped. I swear, if I’d known that all it would take to get you kicked out
was for you to out yourself, I would have kissed you on the front lawn
before I turned eighteen, just to get you out of their lives. Forgive him?

Forgive
him? I picked your sister up off the porch with a baby in her belly
and a
black fucking eye
. That man has been dicking with my
family
….”
He was ranting. He was
raging
… and Crick looked at him and
smiled faintly until he subsided.

“Deacon—what made you forgive me?”

Deacon stopped. “The day the levee broke,” he said after a moment,
and Crick raised his eyebrows. Another thing Deacon never talked about.

Deacon shrugged and pulled his knees up under his arms.

“There I was… I’d just shot your horse…. God, Crick. I still have
nightmares about shooting your horse… you don’t want to….” He
couldn’t finish that thought, because it was too awful, because Comet
wasn’t Comet in the dreams. Comet was never a horse when the dream
ended, and Crick was always dead, mutilated and bloody at his feet in the
pouring rain. “Anyway, I… I don’t know how long I spent, digging a
grave like an asshole. Jon told me I was missing for two hours, so
probably for an hour and a half or so. And I was screaming at the horse
for leaving me, and then I was screaming at you for leaving me, and then
God broke the fucking levee, right in front of me, and I was screaming at
God. And that water… Jesus, Crick. It came right up to my chest—my feet
almost left the fucking ground, and I was thinking ‘Is that all? Is that all
you got? You took Crick away from me and that’s all you fucking got?’