Double Blind (27 page)

He gave up, pushed off the machine, and stalked through a red rage toward the door.

When Mitch caught his arm, he tried to throw him off, then stilled when Mitch tightened his grip.

“I’ll drive you, Skeet,” he said. Then he paused and looked worriedly at Sam.

“I’m fine,” Sam called back. Mitch tried to linger, but Randy wasn’t interested in waiting and headed out to the garage. Mitch came out shortly thereafter, bearing the keys to Ethan’s car, and Randy had to wait while Mitch moved it. His fingernails had dug indentations into his palms by the time Mitch finally headed for the driver’s side door of the truck.

They rode in silence to the casino, and Mitch went twenty miles over the limit the whole way. He drove up to the side door and waited as Randy climbed out.

“You want me to come in, Skeet?” he asked.

“No,” Randy said, then hesitated, making himself acknowledge how much trouble he could get into, going to Crabtree with this much rage. “Yes.”

So he got back in, and waited more while Mitch found a parking spot. Then, finally, they were going upstairs.

Crabtree was gone. So was Billy. And nobody knew where either of them were.

“We could use you for prop, though, if you want an extra shift,” the floorman said, and Mitch dragged Randy back out before he could snarl at him.

They left in silence again, but this time Mitch drove a lot slower. Finally he asked, “Do you want me to go by his house?”

Randy shook his head woodenly. “He won’t be there. He won’t be anywhere we can find him.” He slammed his fist against the dashboard, cracking the plastic. Then he drew his throbbing hand back against his chest and sagged into the seat.

“It’s not your fault,” Mitch said, keeping his eyes on the road.

“Oh?” Randy snarled. “Whose fault do you figure it is? Who the fuck went to the bastard in the first place?”

“You were trying to help Sam. And I already called that lady on the card, and I think she’ll actually be good, as soon as I get Sam to go see her.” Mitch sighed. “And you know damn well he would have gotten himself involved as soon as he found out—” He stopped, catching himself. But Randy knew what he’d been about to say, and there wasn’t any point in bandying about, not anymore.

Randy snorted. “As soon as he found out I”—he reeled, just a second—“was falling in love with Slick?” Jesus fuck, but it was even scarier out loud than in his head. He shuddered, then buried his face in his hands and sank even deeper down into the seat.

It was oddly reassuring to have Mitch reach over and ruffle his hair. “It’s going to be all right, Skeet.”

“The fuck it will,” Randy shot back. “I saw the way you looked when you showed up with Sam that first time. Your heart has been fucking walking around outside of you ever since.” The words were still echoing in his head.
I’m in love with Ethan.
He shouldn’t have said it out loud, shouldn’t have admitted it. He felt hollow now, and raw, like somebody had split him open and pinned him to the wall. “Fucking hell, Mitch,” he whispered. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Calm the fuck down, for starters,” Mitch replied. He reached into his pocket and fished out a cigarette, lighting it before continuing. “For what it’s worth, I think the feeling is mutual.”

“He’s in flux,” Randy snapped. “It’s you and Sam all over again. I’m going to end up doing the Ethan-Randy equivalent of driving my rig back and forth between Omaha and Chicago for months while I wait for him to figure out where his life is headed. Which will head in a direction that does not include some fuck-by-night dipshit who plays poker and fixes engines for a living.”

“Nice to see you have this all figured out already,” Mitch said dryly.

“Fuck off,” Randy said, and curled up against the door.

“Look, Skeet,” Mitch said doggedly, “just be yourself with him. Don’t
just
be a dipshit. Be like you are with Sam and me. Especially how you are with Sam.”

Randy thought of what Ethan had figured out about how he felt about Sam, and he wondered if his little secret had ever really been a secret at all. It made him feel cold, and very vulnerable. Could this day get any fucking worse?

“I don’t want to be in love with anybody,” he said to the door handle.

“I know,” Mitch said.

He knew he should shut up, and a part of him was freaking out, a little Randy inside his head screaming at him,
What the fuck, guys don’t talk like this, not even gay guys!
And yet it was like he had an air leak, and it just all came out of him.

“I don’t want to lose anybody else again,” he said.

There was a long silence, and Randy suspected Mitch was having the same sort of war with his own internal filter. It lost too.

“You talkin’ about me, or your uncle?” Mitch asked.

That was a good fucking question. Randy had no idea. “Both?”

Mitch’s sigh was heavy. And guilty. “I’m sorry, Skeet.”

Randy shrugged. “You came back. Eventually.” But it reminded him that his uncle was never going to. And it made no sense, because it was so fucking long ago, and he understood now that it was just stupid, and that Uncle Gary had been stupid, too, that he had known better than to go out where he did when he did, but it hit him sometimes like it was now, like a punch in the gut, and it felt like Randy was losing him all over again. Like somebody had taken a sickle and sliced a huge crescent out of him, and when he let himself really remember, he knew that pain had never really gone away, that it never would. He’d felt a shade of that when Mitch had left, but it had been a different hurt because Randy had been an ass and had deserved it.

Something told him the pain of both Uncle Gary and Mitch combined wouldn’t even come close to what it would feel like to have Slick go, and that it would be eight times worse if he let him know. How? How the fuck had this happened? And in two fucking days? Two
fucking
days!

“I’ve circled the block twice,” Mitch said. “You want me to do another lap, or are you ready to head back?”

“Just drive me out to the Mojave and leave me for the scorpions,” he murmured, still curled sideways against the door.

“How about I take you back to the house and flush your idiot head in the toilet a few hundred times?” Mitch suggested instead.

“Whatever,” Randy said, and didn’t even move when Mitch reached over and slapped his ass.

He decided, as they pulled into the driveway, that he was going to make Slick dinner. They’d put in a movie, something stupid and funny, and they’d all hang out in the living room, and Ethan would play with his kitten, and Randy wouldn’t say anything about what was going to happen to his furniture or how the bathroom was going to smell like cat shit from this point on. If Slick perked up, they’d play some more poker, and Randy would rig it so he won but not enough that he’d figure it out. And then they’d have more sex, and he’d coax Ethan into sleeping, and he’d lie awake and hold him in his arms, just as he had for the past two nights. It would just be whatever it was. He’d enjoy it now, because it was here in front of him. And because Slick needed him. He was vulnerable and wounded, and yes, fucking hell, Randy loved him. If Slick were doing better, he’d distance himself a bit, make this more of a fun fuck, but Slick needed more right now, so he’d do it. And he’d just tell himself every other fucking minute that this was temporary, and that was fine, and he would just deal. If he knew it was going to end, it wouldn’t be so bad.

He hoped.

When he got out of the truck he headed for the door, feeling heavy, preparing himself to face a drunk, dejected Ethan. But when the door opened before he could put his hand on the knob, once a-fucking-gain nothing was even remotely the way he’d expected it to be. He found himself staring up at Ethan, freshly scrubbed, upright, and dressed to kill in a black button down and stylish blue blazer over a pair of artfully faded and torn jeans, he paused, feeling for a moment like he’d shown up at his house in the Twilight Zone dimension.

“Ethan?” he asked, just to make sure.

“You might want to get a shower,” Ethan said, buttoning his cuff. “The car will be by in half an hour.”

“Car?” Randy repeated, feeling stupid, but he was really lost now. He looked more closely at Ethan—his eyes were still bloodshot, and occasionally he listed a little, but it was as if he’d forced some sort of sobriety on himself, and he was doing a good fucking job of it.

Mitch came up behind Randy. “Everything okay?”

“We’re going out,” Ethan said, his voice clear, calm, and assertive. “In half an hour.”

“Out?” Randy repeated again, feeling like a fucking parrot.

“Yes,” Ethan said. His eyes were hard. “We are going out. On the town. I’ve hired a car. Tonight is on me.” His lips thinned. “Or Billy Herod, however you’d prefer to look at it.”

“Slick?” Randy said, and then Ethan leaned forward, rested a hand on his shoulder, and brushed a kiss against the skin just in front of his ear.

“Please, Randy,” he whispered, and Randy knew that was where the vulnerability was, shellacked under the resolve and temporary insanity that drove him to hire a car.

“I couldn’t stop him,” Sam called from the hallway. Randy looked over Ethan’s shoulder and saw that Peaches was half-dressed. “He just got like this all of a sudden, and if one of you can redirect him, go right ahead.”

Ethan’s hand tightened on Randy’s shoulder, and his lips pressed like a prayer against Randy’s temple.

Randy closed his eyes and gave in.

“All right, Slick,” he said. “We’ll go out on the town. All of us.”

Ethan kissed him again and squeezed once more. Then he drew away and walked—mostly in a straight line—back into the house. “Wear something sexy,” he called over his shoulder, then collapsed onto the couch, where Salomé leapt up immediately onto his lap.

Somehow
it both surprised Randy and it didn’t that Ethan had arranged for a babysitter for the cat. What blew him out of the water was to find that it was Mandy.

She shrugged when he said as much as he came out of the bathroom and found her standing there, Salomé curled against her chest. “He called the Nugget, and they called me with his number—which, incidentally, is also yours. He asked if I’d come sit with his new kitten, and I said yes.”

“He’s still gay,” Randy said, more defensively than he meant it to sound. Of course, it was less defensive-sounding than he actually felt.

“Yes, I know.” She smiled down at the kitten as it batted at her face. “But he agreed to take me out gambling sometime and be my stud so I can catch a handsome whale.”

Randy didn’t really like this either, but Slick appeared then, still looking so goddamn good it made Randy’s teeth ache, and he forgot every word of the English language he’d ever learned for several seconds. Ethan was looking a lot more stable, but he still swayed a bit every now and again, and he was constantly swilling water from a plastic bottle. He ran his eyes up and down Randy’s black jeans and black button-down shirt and smiled in approval.