Double Blind (58 page)

How? How had he ended up here after all this time of trying not to, of working so fucking hard not to get involved—and how the fuck had it happened so fast? He hadn’t hurt like this when Mitch left him, and he’d thought that was bad. Now he was so torn up inside he could hardly stand upright—and Slick was still here!

What the fuck was going to happen to him when Ethan was gone?

You’ll go on,
a quiet voice inside him said. He didn’t know what it was, almost didn’t recognize it. He worried, briefly, that he was going crazy on top of everything else, but he was too tired, too miserable to worry.

So he listened to it.

You’ll go on,
the voice said again.
If he leaves you, you’ll go on. You’ll hurt, but you’ll survive. You’ll bleed a while, and then you’ll rebuild yourself—just like he did. Because you’re strong, too, Skeet. You’re strong too.

There was pressure building at the back of Randy’s eyes, a pressure that pinching his nose wasn’t going to stop. Fucking hell. He was not going to start fucking crying on the fucking observation deck. He fucking was not.

But he was. Silently, discreetly, he was crying, and it was nothing compared to what he was doing inside. It was all this fucking therapy shit. All this digging up the past, all this
feeling.
He didn’t want to feel this. He didn’t want any of this. He wanted to go back to where he was strong and cocky and piss-on-the-world, I-don’t-need-it Randy Fucking Jansen, everybody’s favorite bastard. He
did not fucking want this
. He didn’t want this, because this was what happened when you let yourself want stupid shit like having somebody forever. It was a fucking impossible bet. There weren’t even any odds. You never get anybody forever, period. He knew that. He’d known that since the day he’d come home from school and found out Uncle Gary was gone. He was never going to go through that again.

Except he was, and he was doing it right now. He’d fallen in love with Ethan, and nothing he could do would change that. When he left it was going to hurt. It was really, really, really going to fucking cut him open.

And fucking hell, but he was more afraid of that than he was of anything. But there wasn’t anything he could do to get away from it. Not anymore.

So he stood there at the railing of the observation deck, the wind whipping up around him, the screams of the riders and the murmur of the tourists surrounding him, and he hurt. He tried to feel the hurt in advance for what he knew would happen with Ethan, but that was like a ghost, so he tried for something else—thinking of therapy, he tried for Uncle Gary. Tried to feel that hurt again, thinking maybe it was like a valve he thought he’d cleared out but hadn’t. But that wasn’t the place, either. It wasn’t tidy, this pain. There was no one person or place that caused it, no demon to exorcise, not by a single name. There was just pain, all thirty-some years of it, piled on in flakes and dust and bricks on top of itself, for aches remembered and wounds forgotten, at least by source. They were just there, all the things that had hurt him that he’d been too tough to let get through, the Great Fucking Wall of Randy that didn’t let any fucking shit get through, God fucking damn it.

Or anybody, either
.

Except for Ethan.

And Sam.

And Old Man Mitch.

And even the cats, the cute little fuckers.

Ethan had started it—letting that crack happen was bringing in everything now, he could see that, and he’d just have to deal with it. It fucking scared the piss out of him. He opened his eyes, blinked out the wet and salt and looked out onto the city and thought, fucking hell, but jumping would be a fucking lot easier than dealing with all that shit. Because he only had to jump once. This crap would just come back, over and over and over and fucking over again.

But sometimes it wouldn’t be crap.

He wasn’t yet willing to say that it might even be good most of the time. It was Slick’s goddamn fucking wheel. Red, black, with some green thrown in to fuck you up. Or craps, where a seven could happen at any time. The odds were always going to favor the house, though. There was no getting around that.

But maybe, maybe if he wasn’t hauling around this stupid wall, maybe if he could muck out some of this pain—maybe the game wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe Ethan would be there to play awhile with him, and maybe not.

Maybe sometimes it would be fun to let fate play it out, to feel the rush when, sometimes, the wheel and the dice and the cards went your way, not because you were smart or clever or because you knew how to bluff. Maybe it would be fun to show up with nothing and leave a king.

Or at least to have fun trying for it.

Maybe. It was going to take some fucking hard work to get into that headspace, though. Randy laughed softly and wiped at his eyes. Well, he knew where to find the fucking therapist, didn’t he? And this time Sam could go along and hold his hand for a change.

He could do this. It felt dangerous to say, and he’d feel safer climbing up to the top of the tower’s antenna and trying to balance on one foot in a gale, but he was going to do it, and he was going to try. And he was going to love Slick as long as he was here. And Sam. And Mitch. And the cats. And probably fucking everybody, at the rate he was going.

He would survive. Because, yeah. He was strong. Because that’s how Uncle Gary had raised him.

Randy opened his eyes, looked out over the city, which was leaving the rosy glow of dusk and taking on the full mantle of night, and he tried out a smile.

“
Randy.
”

He turned, surprised, and somehow not surprised at all to see Ethan coming out of the doors and onto the platform, his heart written all over his face as he rushed toward Randy. Randy tried, for half a second, to be cocky and casual, but he knew he couldn’t hold the bluff, and anyway, he didn’t want to.

He just smiled, weakly, wiped at his eyes as discreetly as he could and said, “Hey, Slick. Aren’t you supposed to be running a casino?”

Ethan, white-faced still, took Randy in his arms and crushed him desperately to his chest. “I thought you were going to jump,” he whispered, his voice shaking. Fuck, his whole body was shaking. “Sam said you’d be up here, and all I could think of was that I couldn’t get here fast enough, and you’d jump.”

And the words, stupid as they were, were sweet and like a balm over the open wounds of Randy’s heart. He kissed Ethan’s cheek and pulled back, giving him a hard look. “Come on, baby. You knew better than that.
You’re
the drama queen, not me. Besides, they’ve got a rim for just that reason. By the time anybody got out there, security would be on their ass. No jumping here, Slick.”

But Ethan was caught up in his own terror now, and Randy, no stranger to this ride, took hold of Ethan’s hands and held them hard so he didn’t spiral off into orbit.

“I thought I’d be too late,” Ethan said. “I thought either you’d jump, or Sam would be wrong, and you’d be somewhere else, somewhere I couldn’t find you, and I couldn’t stand it. I should have told you. I should have told you every time I thought it, and I kept dying over and over again in that fucking elevator, thinking I wouldn’t get to!”

“Whoa,” Randy said, gentling him. “Slow down, baby. Easy, easy. I’m here. See? Right here. Not jumping, not running, ready to listen. What is it you need to tell me?”

“That I love you,” Ethan said, in a desperate rush.

Oh, Randy knew he was a
sap
, because those words made him fly every time. Well, fine. He could be a sap. Randy squeezed Ethan’s hands. “Baby, you’ve said that already. And I love you too.”

“No,” Ethan said, winding up again, or, since he had yet to land, higher. “No, not like I need to, because there’s more. There’s everything I feel when I look at you, everything that gets caught in my throat—I need to tell you, because it’s more important than anything, more important than that fucking casino, than what Crabtree will do to me for leaving in the middle of his game. I need to tell you, Randy, that I—” He paused for breath, looked absolutely terrified for a moment, then rushed on. “That I
need
you, Randy. I really, really need you. Obviously I can physically live without you, and probably emotionally, too, but I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I keep trying to be strong without you, to show you, but it’s not the same, and I don’t want to try anymore.”

Were they still standing on the deck, or had they floated up into the sky? Randy didn’t dare look away from Ethan’s beautiful, terrified face to check. He reached out and touched his cheek. “Ethan Ellison, you
are
strong. You’re strong in a way that has nothing to do with me.”

“I don’t care! I want to be strong with you, then—and I have to tell you, because I fucked it up in the limo, saying I needed you for now, and then you told me not to go that night we got high—Randy! I don’t
want
to go! I wanted to be strong because—” He lost himself a second, floundering, but he surfaced again before Randy could gather himself enough to swoop in for a rescue. “Okay, because I didn’t want to be dependent again. Because I wanted to do it right this time, and I wanted it to be real, and I wanted you to see that you didn’t have to carry me, that I wouldn’t fuck up again and bet on black and get carried away by fantasy—but I can’t. Not yet. Maybe never. And no matter if I ever learn, it won’t be as good as it is with you.” He pulled his hands out of Randy’s and closed them desperately around Randy’s face. “I don’t want Nick. I don’t want the casino. I don’t want anything but you. I won’t kill myself if you don’t want me back forever, but”—tears came up out of nowhere, filling his eyes, and one rolled down his cheek—“but I’m going to want you, Randy. Until I die.”

And in that moment, that beautiful, amazing moment, the round observation deck of the Stratosphere tower was not just a tower, but a wheel, spinning and spinning on the bright blue ball of the earth, with odds that should make you run away, but that Randy had been helpless not to play, and this time—this
fucking time
the ball just didn’t land on black. It landed right on his goddamned fucking number. Because he looked at Ethan, standing there, loving him all-in, and he knew in his bones that he had won in a way he never would again and would never need to.

And how the fuck do you say that? How the fuck are you supposed to say that, especially when there’s pressure behind your eyes again, not to mention your throat and your chest and your whole fucking body, for that matter? The answer, Randy knew, was that you didn’t. You just took the beautiful man in front of you into your arms, bent him backward over the rail, and you kissed the living shit out of him. Which was exactly what he did.

And it was fucking glorious.

When they broke apart, finally, Randy grinned down at Ethan, who grinned back, breathless, bracing himself against the edge of the rail.

“That was
my
fantasy, you know,” Randy told him, and pressed his hips a little harder into Ethan’s. “So, thanks.”

Ethan tilted his head to the side and gave him a funny look. “To have me run up here like an idiot and babble incoherently?”

Yeah, actually. That too.
But he didn’t want to prick Slick’s delicate pride. “To have a big-old hot, romantic kiss on the rail of the observation deck. I think about it every time I come up here, in fact.” He grinned. “Except now I won’t wish. I’ll remember.”

He let Ethan up then, but they didn’t pull apart, just stood at the rail, the wind whipping in their hair, enjoying the moment.