From the Ashes (9 page)

Jesse wrapped his arms and legs around him and held Tomas through it, whispering hot encouragement in his ear.

Despite the stickiness on their bellies, Tomas was pretty sure they’d managed to keep all the mess off the sheets. He’d have to remember to beat his mother to the laundry every morning. She hardly ever washed his sheets anymore, but he’d hate it if she found a mess like she had when he was a teenager.

“You’re a total asshole.” Jesse laughed.

Tomas lay on his back, trying to get his breathing under control. The paper towels were in the kitchen and that seemed like a long way away. “Why do you say that?”

“You can’t win every argument by getting me off.” Jesse reached to the floor and dug some tissues out of his backpack. He handed a couple to Tomas. “You’d better make me something good for dinner.” Jesse turned onto his side and gave Tomas a questioning look. “You’re not planning to sleep here, right?”

The fold-out couch was small, but Tomas was a little offended at being dismissed.

“No, I’ll go to my room.” Tomas leaned over and kissed him.

“Cool. I’m beat.” Jesse reached for his boxers and pulled them on.

“Goodnight.” Tomas mussed Jesse’s hair.

Jesse cocooned himself in the sheets. “Are you sure you’re up for driving me into town tomorrow? I looked up how to get there on public transit. It’s no big.” Jesse sounded nervous, and the fabric muffled his voice.

“I told you, I don’t mind. Six thirty, right?”

Jesse nodded, only the top half of his face visible above the covers.

“I promise,” Tomas said. “I’ll get you there.”

Chapter Eight

“Damn. Have you seen that guy over there?” Michael tilted his head at where Tomas was sitting.

Apparently, Sharon hadn’t trusted that Jesse would make it in that morning because she’d told Michael to come in as well. It had all worked out for the best though, since it was crazy busy for seven a.m. Jesse manned the register while Michael pulled coffee, and still the line snaked out the door.

“Yeah. He’s um…” Jesse turned away from Michael to take another customer’s order. He didn’t know how to describe Tomas. His sexy Latin lover? Some crazy guy who kept doing nice things for him for absolutely no reason? A closeted firefighter keeping him around for on-demand sexual favors?

Jesse ran the customer’s credit card and handed her a brown paper bag full of croissants. While the next costumer considered the menu, Jesse told Michael, “He’s my roommate. I mean, temporarily, while I figure out a new place to live.”

“Oh.” Michael went quiet and focused on steaming some milk.

“What?” Jesse turned to the man still trying to figure out his order. When Jesse had a spare minute, he whispered defensively, “He’s a nice guy.” That was the understatement of the year. Tomas was practically a saint as far as Jesse was concerned. “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing.” Michael put a couple drink orders on the counter and called out the names written on the cups. He always lifted his eyebrows when he did that, as if he was surprised that the customer could have had such poor taste. At a slender six feet tall and with icy blue eyes, Michael could have been good-looking, but he wore a perma-scowl that freaked a lot of people out. In fact, it had taken a couple weeks for Jesse to get over the thought that Michael hated him.

Michael pulled the filters back into the espresso machine and jutted his chin in Tomas’s direction. “You’re living with a straight guy?”

Jesse rolled his eyes, though he did it with his head down so Michael wouldn’t notice. Yeah, Michael meant well, but he had a tendency to be weirdly militant. He was active in all sorts of political stuff, which Jesse totally respected, but sometimes he acted like no one should be allowed to come into Speedy Coffee unless they were gay.

“What’s the problem with that?” Jesse added a fresh tray of muffins to the case under the counter. “It’s not like I have a lot of choices right now. Plus, his family has a yard where I can keep my dog. It’s a good setup.” He was selling his situation so hard, he was ready to buy it himself—to settle in with Tomas permanently and live with his crazy-ass family. It had only been a few days, and Jesse thought of Tomas’s house as home.

Michael lined up three espresso pitchers, twisted the filters into place and started the water. With a sputtering hiss, the machine cranked to life. “Yeah, and why is the dog your problem?”

Oh, for that Jesse wanted to smack him. “I
like
the dog. She’s a sweetheart and deserves a good home. With people who love her.” He didn’t know why he got so emo when he talked about Char, but his face heated. “I’m not going to ditch her just so I can find a place to live faster.”

A crush of customers pushed into the store, so Jesse and Michael fell into silence while they worked. Jesse was so busy filling orders and running cards that he didn’t notice Tomas had left his seat until Tomas was standing right next to the espresso machine.

“I have to go to work.” Tomas smiled and held up his empty paper cup. “Refill?”

Jesse checked the clock. Wow. It was almost eight already. To Michael, he said, “Take the register for a sec?”

Michael scowled, but Jesse didn’t care. He filled Tomas’s cup and, when Michael wasn’t looking, grabbed a chocolate muffin out of the refrigerator. At the edge of the counter, he handed both to Tomas.

“See you tomorrow?” Jesse didn’t envy the twenty-four-hour shifts of Tomas’s schedule. He hoped he didn’t disturb Tomas’s sleep cycle too much with them living together.

“Sure thing. I can meet you after your shift, and we can go to the pet store.” Tomas leaned across the counter, his eyes dark and full of suggestion.

“No way.” Jesse shook his head. “Go home and get some sleep when you’re done. You’ve got four days off, we can go some other time.”

Tomas caught his hand. He wove their fingers together. “Yeah, and four days is plenty of time to lay around and do nothing. It’s only a few hours between when I get off work and you’re free.”

Jesse narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Of course.” With a lascivious smile, Tomas lifted their clasped hands to his mouth and kissed Jesse’s knuckles. “I want to see you.”

Holy fuck.
Jesse glanced around to see if anyone was looking their direction. He was out as gay and had been since he got to Seattle, but he’d never been this obvious in public.

“Hey.” Jesse remembered his question from the night before. “Where’s your family from?”

Tomas tilted his head and smiled brightly, flashing those sexy teeth. “El Salvador. Thought I’d told you already.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten, but we only met the other day.” Jesse may have batted his eyelashes, but he wouldn’t have admitted it to Michael.

“How could I forget?” Tomas crowded him back against the counter. Right when Jesse thought Tomas would molest him in front of everyone, Tomas kissed him on the cheek. “See you later.”

Sexy bastard.

Jesse held on to the counter so his knees didn’t give out. He was blushing like crazy but managed to get himself together well enough to walk back to the espresso machine.

“Can I work the machine for a while?” Jesse had been dealing with customers since his shift started. It was his turn to zone out.

“Fine,” Michael snapped. His manner was so curt, the hippie girl at the front of the line flinched.

She mumbled she wanted a chai tea, and Jesse filled her reusable, eco-friendly cup while Michael took her money.

“What the hell?” Jesse’d seen Michael get all up in arms about things in the news or customers that had treated him badly, but he’d never seen Michael so grumpy for no reason. “Did I do something?”

Michael poured some beans into the grinder and flipped it on so the noise filled the coffee shop with a grating whir. The smell wafted strong enough to give customers a contact buzz, but Michael’s attitude was cold and dreary.

“So, your roommate is straight, huh?” He turned to help the next customer before Jesse could come up with an answer.

Well, no.
Obviously, Tomas wasn’t straight, but Jesse didn’t see why it was any of Michael’s business. “What do you care?”

“Listen…” Michael handed him some cups to fill and pretended to get something out of one of the cabinets so he could tell Jesse off. “I know you had the fire and things look rough, but you don’t need to turn into a rent boy. You can stay at my place if you want. You can’t bring the dog, but—”

“Hold on a sec.” Jesse grabbed Michael’s arm and pulled him a few feet away from the customers. “I am
not
sleeping with Tomas for a place to stay.” There was a whole list of things Jesse wanted to say to Michael about his situation with Tomas, but he saw the way Michael was looking at him—like he thought Jesse was deluded and he felt sorry for him.

Michael thought Jesse was a little country mouse who didn’t know about being a gay man in the city. Well,
fuck him
. Michael’s parents were covering the cost of his classes and part of his rent. He didn’t know the first thing about Jesse’s life.

“I’m going back to work.” Jesse walked up to the register. The guy at the front of the line wore a deep scowl at having been left waiting, but Jesse was happy to serve him. He was happy to do anything that would let him avoid Michael’s smug looks and his own niggling worry that some tiny piece of what Michael said was right.

The train sped alongside I-5, whisking Jesse south toward Tomas’s house. It was still light out, so Jesse didn’t really need the bag of takeout clutched in his fist, but he hadn’t wanted to get trapped down by the airport without anything to eat.

Unable to shake the fear that he’d get off at the wrong stop, Jesse held tight to the metal railing, standing as he rode, and watched to get a feel for his location.

“Next stop…” The pleasant, if disembodied, voice announced the station he’d mapped out on his smartphone.

He hesitated for only a second before stepping off the train. Dragging his hood up, he jogged down the stairs.

Jesse could have bussed it the half mile to Tomas’s house, but he decided to walk instead. Every time a car passed, he worried it would be Tomas’s brother pulling over to give Jesse a hard time.

It didn’t happen, though, and before Jesse could even work up a sweat, he was walking up Tomas’s driveway. Jesse picked through the keys Tomas had given him, trying to remember which one opened the lock. The dogs barked like crazy out back.

Eventually, his fumbling got the door open, and Jesse rushed into the house. He tossed his backpack in a corner and flopped down on the couch, feeling like he’d navigated his way through a jungle instead of south Seattle.

He had so much shit to do—schoolwork, walking the dog, making phone calls to search for a new apartment—but Jesse just wanted to fall asleep until he had to wake up for work the next morning.

Knocking broke through his haze of tiredness. Jesse must have nodded off, because as he lifted his head from the cushion to stare bleary-eyed at the back door, there was a trickle of saliva on his chin.

Gross.

He blinked. The figure at the door was female, but he couldn’t tell which Perez woman it was because the blinds blocked his view.

Yawning, Jesse pushed off the couch and trudged through the kitchenette. When he flicked open the blinds, he was glad to see that Tomas’s sister, not her similarly shaped mother, was standing on the back porch.

“Oh. Hey. Hi.” Jesse opened the door. He blocked the way so the dogs couldn’t get inside. Chardonnay and Sushi sniffed his knees, then his groin, maybe because they worried he wasn’t feeling awkward enough already.

“Hi.” Maria had thick dark hair like her brothers, though she wore it in a loose ponytail. “I wanted to know if you needed anything from the store. Milk? Soap?” She made a prissy face, staring past Jesse’s shoulder into Tomas’s apartment like she imagined there’d be a mess or a dead body inside. “I don’t know what Tomas keeps stocked in there when he’s not out running around.”

“Running around?” Jesse forced back an overeager Chardonnay and stepped out onto the landing. He eased the door shut behind him. “I got the feeling Tomas was kind of a homebody.” He didn’t know Tomas all that well, but that had been Jesse’s first impression.

“Tomas?” She laughed. “I don’t know. He comes over so Mom’ll feed him, but he works a lot.” She bit her lip, as if she wasn’t sure whether to say the next thing on her mind. “But, y’know…sometimes he kind of disappears.”

“Oh.” Not like Jesse had room to judge, but he hoped Tomas wasn’t involved in something bad, like drugs. He didn’t think Tomas was, though. Most likely, Tomas got tired of trying to pretend to be something he wasn’t.

“I don’t want you to think he was a slut or anything.” Maria held her hands palms up, advancing until Jesse backed up a step. Her face was the picture of earnestness. “I’m sure he really likes you. He wouldn’t mess around behind your back.”

“Um…” It was so weird having this conversation with Maria, considering Tomas wasn’t officially out. Jesse couldn’t help but wonder if Maria and Tomas ever spoke this frankly, or whether Maria saved her character assessments for strangers. “He seems very nice.”

“He is.” Maria nodded like a bobblehead. When she did that, her eyes wide and innocent, she looked really young. “I mean, he just gets lonely sometimes, right? Like he said at dinner.”