Keeping Promise Rock (6 page)

‘Be good to Crick!’ Benny wasn’t going to let me out of her sight until they saw that you were asleep on the couch.” Crick would have rolled his eyes, but it hurt too much. “Benny’s smart,” he murmured. “If only she could control that mouth of hers.” Parish nodded sagely. “Yeah—she’s got a temper. I reckon her father has something to do with that.”

Crick’s mouth quirked. “I don’t know—I’m the one who just got his ass kicked in a fight.”

Parish turned Deacon’s intense green eyes on him. “Boy, not all the stuff that happens to you is your fault. Those girls came here without one word of worry about mom and dad—that says something bad about them and good about you. Your folks didn’t object—not once—to just turning their whole family over to people they claim to hate. That does the same.

And those boys—whatever was in their craw, you being you had nothing to do with it. You were handy. They had violence, and you looked like a good place to punch. It was not your fault.” Crick rubbed his eyes. Oh God, his head hurt. The ache was subsiding, but he had refused pain relievers, and now he wished he hadn’t.

Suddenly Parish’s hand was under nose with a couple of Tylenol and a glass of water, and Crick’s eyes filled with tears.

“You and Deacon are my best family,” he said, not sure if it was the concussion or being tired or the fact that Deacon’s father was the nicest person on the planet.

“Boy, we feel the same about you,” Parish told him, watching carefully as he downed the pills, and Crick felt tears overfill his eyes and drip a little down his cheeks.

“It wasn’t right, what the principal said about Deacon,” he murmured, because this had been weighing on him hard.

Parish grunted. “Deacon didn’t mention that part.” He could almost feel the painkillers working, and his eyes closed in a little bit of chemical bliss. “Deacon was amazing,” he murmured. “Deacon can take care of anything.”

“Yeah?”

Crick tried to give as clear account as he could, but what he said obviously hurt.

“That man… spent Deacon’s entire four years trying to get him to play more football for him. Now he’s graduated and has his own opinions, and he’s got to go and get nasty? Redneck… asshole gives rednecks a bad name.”

Crick was getting dreamy, but he didn’t care. The Tylenol had kicked in, he was still a little goofy from the head injury, and hiding his hero-worship was not going to happen. “Deacon gives ’em a good name,” he murmured. “Showed that fucker what for. Made him look like an ignorant doofus. He was like Superman, you know?” Parish’s voice sounded troubled. “Crick, Deacon’s only human. He’s got his weaknesses same as anybody else. You need to remember, he can only do so much, take so much on himself, okay?” Crick opened one eye to see Deacon’s father running his hand through his graying hair, and it suddenly occurred to him that Parish was over fifty. Sure, he looked hale and hearty and still worked as hard as any two under-aged stable-boys, but he wasn’t young. Deacon was his only child—and Parish looked worried about him.

“Don’t worry,” Crick said, trying to be the grownup he knew Deacon needed him to be. “I won’t ever do anything to hurt Deacon.” Keeping Promise Rock

Parish blew out a breath and worked the remote. “Go to sleep, boy,” he urged roughly. “People hurt each other all the time just by being. What matters is that when you hurt someone, you do what you can to make it right.”

Good advice, really. Too bad Crick wasn’t thinking about it the next night. His sisters stayed home the next night—Parish shamed Crick’s mom into taking some time off work to watch them, if she wasn’t going to put herself out for Crick. Crick was off coma-watch, but he was still woozy and sore, and mostly he spent most of the day plying the remote control and doing the dishes because he felt guilty for being an imposition.

When he was done or bored with all of that, he took to sketching in his sketchpad. The one teacher at Levee Oaks High that he
didn’t
hate had told him he was good at art, and he had a notebook to sketch anything and a notebook to sketch special things, and he wanted to practice, since he had time to sit.

And when he wasn’t doing that, he was seething.

Just seething.

Principal Arreguin—the guy hadn’t said two words to him his entire freshman year, and then he showed up to accuse Crick of starting something? He gave Deacon shit for sticking up for him? Fucking Levee Oaks. Redneck—sure as shit, Parish had fucking nailed it. Levee Oaks, redneck capital of the fucking world.

Crick’s eyes suddenly narrowed.

Boy, didn’t he wish the whole rest of the world knew about that.

The water tower was right in the center of town, right next to the community center and the bike trail and the four (count ’em!) feed stores and small grocery center that tided people over between bigger trips to Safeway and Wal-Mart, which were around ten miles away. But at nine o’clock at night, after Parish thought he’d gone to bed and before Deacon got home, they had already rolled up the sidewalks and put up “Do Not Disturb” signs on the main thoroughfare, so no one saw Crick climb up the damn tower with a bucket of red paint left over from the last time they’d painted the barn dangling from one hand.

By the time he was halfway up, he was convinced this was his worst idea ever. He wasn’t completely healed, his whole body trembled, and his head was pounding like it was going to blow brains all over the tower and the paint would be unnecessary.

By the time he got to the top and looked down, he was sort of hoping he’d fall on the ground, hit his head, and die, because it would hurt less than climbing back down.

But dammit, the guy had insulted Deacon, and it just couldn’t stand.

With grim, determined strokes, Crick started painting.

He hadn’t counted on the ambulance rolling through town around one a.m. and Deacon pounding out of the passenger side, swearing loud enough to wake Sheriff Cooper, who lived out by the levee too.

“God
dammit,
Crick!” Deacon took the rungs on the ladder two at a time, scrabbling up the side of the tower like a fucking spider, and Crick eyed him with the closest thing to dislike he could summon for a guy he’d loved since he was nine.

“Couldn’t say that, Deacon,” Crick mumbled. He let the paintbrush slide into the bucket, sat down heavily on the platform, leaned on the railing, and stared at his shoes. If he vomited from here, what sort of radius would it cover? He had a feeling he was going to find out. “Can’t let him say that to you.”

Deacon got to the top and shook his head, his face working between exasperation, pity, and humor. “Couldn’t let who say what to me?” Crick turned bleary face towards him and wondered why his head hadn’t fallen off his neck. “Principal. Bastard. No one talks that way to you.”

Deacon looked up at his handiwork and rubbed at his temples. “So you decided to paint ‘Rednek Captl o th Wurld’ to get him back.” Crick heard the inflection of the misspelled words and frowned, tilting his head on his shoulder to see. “My spelling was supposed to be better.” He’d made the letters a foot tall—it must have skewed his already blurry vision.

Deacon let a giggle escape him and put a tender hand on Crick’s head. He frowned and pulled it back. “Crick, you’ve got a fever,
and
you don’t have a coat. Fuck. Fuck this all to fucking shit. If the whole town wakes up and sees this, you will never go to school here again.
Jesus
,
why didn’t you say anything?”

Crick leaned his cheek against the cool bar of the railing. “You weren’t there, Deacon. I’m no good when you’re not there.” Keeping Promise Rock

“Boy, someday you’re going to move away from here and you’re going to have to learn how to be good. But not right now. I’d like to see you through school first.”

With an angry sigh, Deacon pulled out his cell phone. “Dad, yeah, we’ve found him. Is Patrick still there? Look, could you do me a favor and have Patrick run the portable air compressor and a gallon of that white paint we have in the garage out to the middle of town? No. You don’t want to know what he did. Maybe when he graduates from high school I’ll tell you, and you can have at him then.” Deacon’s voice dropped with concern. “No—he’s not all right. I think we can chalk a lot of this up to a smack on the head and a fever… and Crick just being Crick. Yeah, don’t worry. Patrick’ll see me when he gets here. I’ll be careful. Love you too.” Patrick had to stand behind Crick and hold on to the bars to walk him down the side of the water tower. Deacon stood up there and hooked up the air compressor, watching them anxiously until Patrick had escorted Crick into the ambulance. Deacon’s partner, Jake, worked two jobs to keep up on his alimony, and he was in the back on one of the gurneys, napping. Patrick settled Crick down, had Jake give him some more Tylenol, some water, and a blanket—it
was
early March—and left them both sleeping in the back of the bus while he helped Deacon.

Crick’s last fuzzy thought before he faded off to sleep was that he had somehow managed to fuck up the act of fucking up, but he couldn’t seem to put a finger on how.

By the time Deacon and Patrick had put the last coat of white over the red and crept down the ladder, dawn was a frosty hour away, and Crick’s teeth were chattering from a combination of fever and the cold of the still vehicle. He heard Deacon’s voice as the car started up and the heater came blessedly on, and then a heavenly warmth engulfed him, along with the smells of horse, spicy shaving cream, paint fumes, and clean male sweat.

“Mmmm…,” he murmured. “Smells like you, Deacon.”

“That’s because it’s my coat, jackass.”

Crick held it closer and rubbed his face against the fuzzy lining. It was Deacon’s paramedic’s parka, and the outside was slick nylon, but the inside was all soft and squishy and Deacon.

They got him to The Pulpit,
and Deacon had John drop him off and found a substitute for work the next night. Three days later, after Crick was conscious, no longer throwing up, and fever-free, there was an ass-40

reaming of epic proportions, but since he could barely sit up and was still overcome with remorse, he still had a little ass left when it was done.

But Deacon’s lecture and Parish’s exasperated, sorrowful face were never what he remembered about that night—or never what he remembered first, when he thought about it.

His clearest memory from the night he almost got expelled from Levee Oaks—the school
and
the town—was of Deacon sitting next to his bed as the sun came up, singing softly to him because he was whimpering with fever.

“I never knew you could sing,” Crick muttered, and Deacon’s soft laughter chased him into sleep, along with a soft, almost imperceptible kiss on his temple.

Ah, gods, hope. Our savior and our tormentor, the price and ferry pass for the dreams that carry us to the future.

The Cost of Breaking Promises

THE art room was absolutely empty at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, but the supply closet attached to the back of it was not.

Mrs. Thompson, the art teacher who had inspired Crick to draw, trusted Crick and Brian Carter to clean up, and they had. They wouldn’t betray that trust—they loved her. She was the one teacher who really understood them, believed in them, and who knew them for what they were and didn’t judge.

But that didn’t mean she’d be thrilled to know that after they’d cleaned up and the custodian had come by to sweep and mop, the two of them had sneaked into the supply closet to do what they were doing now.

They sat across from each other, their knees up in front of them in the cramped space, their pants around their ankles and their cocks in their hands. Crick’s head was thrown back against the row of tempura paints no one used, leaving a hair print in the dust, and he was thinking brokenly that calluses felt
wonderful
on the underside of his cockhead… especially that one… that kept catching… right…on that…fucking… spot….

“Crick,” Brian’s voice panted in the dark, hot silence, and Crick pulled back from what might have been a humdinger of a climax to see what Brian wanted.

“Crick… watch this.” Carefully, Brian took the hand he
wasn’t
masturbating with and popped his finger in his mouth, getting it good and wet. Then, with difficulty, because his body was quivering and he was fighting his own orgasm as hard as Crick was, he lowered that hand down between his legs. Crick’s hand slowed down, and he watched in 42

fascination as that finger traced a path between two testicles covered in wiry brown hair to the tickly place between Brian’s balls and his asshole… and then, as Brian struggled with the awkward position, it just… popped… in….

“Urrrgghhhhhh.” Brian’s orgasm was strangled, because they were trying to be quiet, but it was powerful nonetheless. Crick watched, wide-eyed, as the other boy’s cock erupted into a heavy ribbon of come, and another, and another, and then his own body shivered, and he closed his eyes and leaned his head back and—

And a hot, wet mouth engulfed him, strong young arms wrapped around his waist, and his entire body ran fire as he came.

And came and came and came.

Brian couldn’t swallow all of it—a sloppy trickle slid down Crick’s testicles and underneath, coating his crease and slithering by his hole, just to tease. Crick looked in shock at his friend, who grinned back at him.