Food for Thought (3 page)

Every time he left, he felt like clinging to them, weeping, and begging to be a part of them for just another second.

And he couldn’t stand, ever, to look next door to his and his father’s little house, which had always been so quiet, even when he and his dad were there, playing chess.

E
MMETT
’
S
PHONE
rang almost before he pulled into the driveway in his small Folsom home.

“You’re home,” Keegan crowed. “Movie?”

“Absolutely—is there anything good out?”

“There’s three movies with explosions and death that you can see with whatserface, and this really sweet indie romance that I know you’ve been saving just for me.”

“
Stars and Dust
?” Emmett put the car into park and turned off the ignition, hopping out before the merciless heat of the garage could turn the car into a convection oven.

“Don’t shut the garage door yet. I’m almost there.”

Emmett hit End Call and looked up, waiting for his next glimpse of Keegan.

He wasn’t disappointed.

Keegan managed one of the outlet stores on Iron Point Rd., and he dressed accordingly. Today, he wore a floral print tank top and shorts with mesh bottoms. Keegan went running in the mornings, even on the really hot days, and his thighs and calves were stringy and knotted, and his waist was probably twenty-eight inches even. He had long limbs, a slender jaw, and a knife-edged nose, with full lips and dark eyelashes that made his brown eyes especially flirty. He wore his dark hair cut close, parted on the side, and almost conservative—with only slightly long bangs to show that he had a closet full of bright and shiny brushed cotton suits all prebought for the fall season.

Emmett could watch Keegan prance across his driveway all day.

“So…” Keegan trilled, leaving room to fill in the blank. “How was it?”

Emmett smiled shyly at him. “It was great. It always is. Cooking, card games, revelry—you know. Family reunion stuff.” Emmett sidled past the front of the car in the tiny garage so he could claim his stuff from the passenger side. “Vinnie’s mom pried into my love life, and Vinnie took his cues. It was like I was twelve again.”

Keegan’s bright smile faded for a minute. “What did they say about your private life? C’mon, give—you promised details!”

Oh hell. “They weren’t really convinced about Christine,” Emmett mumbled, not wanting to hear it.

Keegan apparently didn’t give a damn—he wanted to say it. “Well
duh.
It’s good to know your people got your back!”

“What do
you
have against Chris—hello, what’s this?” He hadn’t eaten his sandwiches, and when he picked up the package, there was something underneath it.

“She’s a nice girl, but she’s not for you,” Keegan was saying, like he was bored of saying it. Good. Emmett was tired of hearing it. “What’s what?”

“This book. Vinnie’s mom tried to give it to me this afternoon. It’s, like, a family heirloom or something and I told her it should stay with her but….”

“It looks like she decided you were family,” Keegan said, his voice warm.

Emmett smiled at him distractedly. “But… but nobody opened my car. That’s weird. It’s like it followed me home.”

“Awesome. I know how it feels. Give me!” Keegan held out his hand imperiously, and Emmett handed it over, because he found it hard to deny Keegan anything. All of that attitude, and a heart of gold. Irresistible.

“Man, let’s get into the house and turn on the AC,” Emmett suggested. “Please tell me my cat is still in there.”

“George? Yeah, she’s there. But I think she’s been finding secret places to shit in your room, so, you know, there’s that.”

“If you’d stop chasing her, she’d stop retaliating,” Emmett said mildly, but the truth was, Keegan’s madcap chasing was the only exercise the big fat baby got.

“Just out of curiosity, why don’t you have the Chris-thing feed your precious cat?”

Emmett grimaced. “Cause, uhm, she and George don’t get along.”

George shredded every pair of hose Christine wore over. And puked on her shoes. And the one time Christine had managed to get Emmett to relax enough to neck on the couch, George had jumped from the back of the couch onto Christine’s head.

Yup. George the cockblocking tuxedo cat. Bless her black-and-white little heart.

“I
love
that fucking cat,” Keegan said with satisfaction, and then he shooed Emmett down the hallway with one hand while holding the book with the other. “Now go. Shower, change, embrace your furry fuckface, and then let’s move.”

“I thought we were going tonight?”

“It’s late afternoon—you don’t work until tomorrow. Let’s movie now, dinner later, and we’ve got television to catch up with when we’re done with that.”

“You didn’t watch any of our shows when I was gone?” Emmett looked over his shoulder, appalled. “I was hoping you’d catch me up!”

“Boyfriend, I don’t watch
any
shows without you. Now motor and change, me and
Granny B.
have some catching up to do.” He flicked Emmett down the hallway to his irritated cat with an elegant gesture of his wrist and fingers, and Emmett had to fight the urge to just stare at his long, pretty hands.

Everything about Keegan was long and pretty… or, well, as far as Emmett knew.

Emmett padded into his room and sniffed. Yup. Kitty done made a cat-cake somewhere. Ducking under the bed, Emmett was met with a pair of wide green eyes and a black paw, batting at him halfheartedly. And there, to the left, oh yeah. A nice pile, right on…

“Oh hell,” Emmett muttered.

“What?” Keegan called down the hall.

“Christine left some laundry here the last time we went out. She wanted to change into something nice to go dancing.”

“So?”

“The cat shit on her work shirt.” How had it even
gotten
down there?

“Hahahahahahahahaha….”

“You’re gonna blow something if you laugh that hard!” Emmett shouted back. Gingerly he pulled out the Disney’s Princesses T-shirt with the big steaming pile of George’s best in the middle. Hell. He was going to have to replace this. He glared at George. “You are a
bad
kitty!” he admonished. George showed her concern by licking her ass. “
Bad
kitty.”

Keegan was still laughing his own ass off in the living room when Emmett shoved the T-shirt in the trashcan and hopped in the shower. He came out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around his hips, and Keegan was sitting on his bed, bare feet propped up on the footboard, leafing through the cookbook.

“Boyfriend, you’ve got some serious shit in here,” Keegan said thoughtfully. “Food for courtship, food for thought—do they have anything in here about getting good straight boys out of the closet?”

Emmett had been rustling through his underwear drawer and he accidentally looked up. Keegan was looking at him appreciatively, challenge in his eyes.

“Uhm, I didn’t see anything,” he mumbled, looking away. “You’ve had more time to look than I have.”

“I see a shortbread recipe that maybe I couldn’t fuck up, and a recipe for something called beet porridge—”

Emmett suddenly forgot he was trying not to undress in front of Keegan any more than possible. “I saw that too. It said it was for—”

“Clarifying things,” Keegan said, a half smile on his face. “Yeah, I saw that. Why? You want things made clear?”

Emmett remembered his self-consciousness. He turned around, found his briefs, a pair of cargo shorts, and a tank Keegan had bought him wholesale when his store had turned the stock over. It was blue—Keegan was forever buying him blue things—because blue apparently made his eyes look bluer.

“Yeah,” Emmett mumbled. “You know, ever since my dad….”

“Yeah,” Keegan said quietly. “Your dad and Jordyn. I know, baby. No, don’t go into the bathroom and change. I promise, I won’t look, and even if I look, I won’t touch.”

Emmett kept his back turned and tried to squelch the little hope that Keegan would look. He probably wouldn’t. He was a nice guy.

After school, Emmett had gotten the job at Intel and taken the money he made from selling his father’s house to buy this one. About two weeks after he’d moved in, he’d had that first bad moment. He’d woken up, excited about telling his father about buying the house, because it was Sunday, and he visited his dad on Sundays, right? And it wasn’t until he’d been stumbling around the kitchen, making coffee, that he saw the coffeemaker, and remembered—oh yeah. It was the one he’d gotten for his dad two years ago. And he’d kept it after Dad passed away.

And it was Sunday, but Sunday eight months after Dad had died, and Emmett wasn’t going to go visit his dad anymore.

It had been like a freight train, a wrecking ball, an earthquake, or a tsunami. He hadn’t realized how staunchly he’d been keeping that pain at bay until it just snuck under the space-time continuum and chomped him on the ass. And he’d been standing, looking out over the kitchen sink through the window to the front porch, sobbing like Ira Gant had just died, when Keegan had shown up, a plate of cookies in his hand, welcoming Emmett to the neighborhood.

You’d think he would have run like the wind, right? New guy, having a nervous breakdown in his kitchen? Not a great introduction. But not Kee. Keegan Malloy had breezed right in, sat Emmett down with some peanut butter/chocolate cookies and a big glass of milk, and made Emmett tell him all about it.

Emmett hadn’t snot-cried that hard since Jordyn—hell, since before that. Since he’d been five and his mother had taken off. So when Keegan just sat and listened, and literally held his hand in the totally non-threatening, “I’m here for you” kind of way that Vinnie would have done, Emmett had been instantly smitten.

With friendship of course. Of course it was friendship.

It had been friendship that day, when Keegan had hung out with him for the rest of the day, introducing himself to Emmett’s adorable kitten (Who knew what would happen to George over the next year? Really? Who could predict that?) and searching through Emmett’s Netflix until they found old movies to watch. They bonded over peanut butter/chocolate cookies and
Silver Linings Playbook.
Keegan had cried unashamedly during that movie, and Emmett hadn’t held it against him.

He’d used the movie to finish his crying too.

So Keegan knew about Vinnie’s happy family, and about Emmett’s father. He even knew the same version of the Jordyn story that everyone else did. And Emmett couldn’t imagine not having Keegan, his neighbor, coming over to his house to talk or eat dinner or drag him to the movies a couple of times a week. It was… natural, having him there. (For one thing, Keegan roomed with three other guys—two of them straight—and Keegan refused to let Emmett come over. He claimed that his roommates were assholes and his house smelled like pit stink and feta cheese feet, and Emmett took him at his word.)

He’d rather spend time with Keegan than anybody else in the world, Vinnie and Christine included.

Which was good, because Keegan hated Christine with the same sociopathic irritation that George showed on her worst days.

And Emmett, who wanted family with pretty much everything in his soul, didn’t want to examine that, didn’t want to stop all of the flirting and the innuendos, didn’t want to tell Keegan that he was either nice to Emmett’s girlfriend or he couldn’t hang out.

Keegan was the only person on earth he could watch romance movies with. How could Emmett tell him to go away?

So Emmett trusted that Keegan wouldn’t look and got dressed. He turned around to see what Keegan was doing and found Keegan’s wide eyes focused on him. Keegan’s pink tongue protruded and he licked his lips like they’d suddenly gone dry.

“You said you wouldn’t look,” Emmett rasped, his own throat dry.

“I didn’t mean to,” Keegan said, but he didn’t sound particularly apologetic. “You’re still working out during lunch.”

“Uhm, yeah.” Emmett had been taking advantage of the company gym and workout instructors.

“You can tell.”

Heat swept Emmett’s cheeks. “Glad you approve,” he said quietly, and pulled the tank over his head. “Anything good in the cookbook?”

“Just the stuff written in the margins. Look at this one.” Keegan’s movements grew brisk, and he motioned Emmett over excitedly. “See? It’s for mushroom soup in the section called ‘Food for a Rainy Day.’ Now look, the recipe itself is sort of average: ‘Mushroom Soup,’ right? Except somebody added ‘for comfort’ next to it. And then there’s these notations here.”

Emmett squinted. “
Cly pdr if bored.
What the hell does that mean?”

“Well see? Nobody else knows either. So this person here—in pencil—wrote ‘Cumin? NO! CUMIN IS A BAD IDEA!’ All in caps, right? And this other person wrote—”

“‘Could it stand for clay? No. But it’s boring. What else should I put in it?’”

“Right, see? And this next one says—”

“‘
Chili powder, dumbasses! It’s perfect!
’” They both read the line together and laughed.

“Oh my God!” Emmett crowed. “That was awesome. Damn, if I didn’t have to work tomorrow, I’d totally—”

“Saturday?” Keegan asked excitedly. “You’re not doing anything with the Chris-thing, were y—?”

“Fuck!” Emmett rarely swore. “Chris! I was going to call her tonight!”

Keegan rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Call her after my movie, boyfriend. She’ll see you tomorrow.”

Emmett smiled at him. He really was looking forward to the movie and some time with Kee. “Yeah. Why not? Here, let me go comb my hair.”

Emmett was standing close to him on the bed so Emmett could stoop over and read over his shoulder. Keegan turned his head and grinned, putting their faces in proximity, and Emmett was struck by how pretty Keegan’s face was in silhouette, how graceful. Emmett smiled at him, just
liking
all of him, from his snarky humor to his smile. Keegan’s grin faded for a moment, and his expression became unaccountably sober.

“What?” Emmett whispered, wondering why they were both so quiet all of a sudden.