Keeping Promise Rock (13 page)

“Don’t worry about it, Carrick,” Deacon said gently, cupping his chin. God… barely any stubble at all. Twenty. Crick was twenty—what kind of damned fool would take his signature on a piece of paper signing his life away and think that he meant it?

“Deacon Parish Winters, do you think I’m going to worry about anything else in the next two years?” Crick asked bitterly, his lips twisting as he used Deacon’s full name.

“All I want you to worry about is coming back,” Deacon said with some force, and Crick looked at him sadly.

“Deacon, don’t you ever get mad at anything?” Deacon felt it then, the pressure of anger behind his lungs. It almost suffocated him, but he shoved it back into hiding, beat it back until it cowered, made it sick with itself, snarling and rabid.

“I’ll be mad when you’re gone.”

That night, Crick didn’t just lie next to him and touch. That night, Crick scooted forward and kissed him with the same passion and drive Deacon had kissed Crick with back at Promise Rock. Deacon was surprised—and then he wasn’t thinking much at all, because damned if the kid couldn’t still scramble all his synapses in one thrust of his tongue.

Deacon went from rubbing Crick’s chest with his good hand to sliding it down the back of his boxers, and Crick got even closer and did the same.

Crick hit a bruise—the one across Deacon’s abdomen—and Deacon sucked in his breath. Crick scooted under the covers and kissed it, and then one across his hip, and then Deacon’s boxers got shucked off entirely.

“How’re we going to do this?” Crick asked, nuzzling Deacon’s groin, and Deacon sucked in a breath when Crick opened his mouth and took him, partially erect, completely into his mouth.

“We’re doing fine,” Deacon panted, and Crick rolled over behind him and started rifling through the end table. “What the hell’s in there?”

“There’s a sex store on Auburn Boulevard,” Crick mumbled, popping his body back under the covers. Deacon rolled gingerly to his back and tried to see what Crick was doing, but by the time he maneuvered his cast around the blankets, Crick was done. He popped out of the blankets and got on his hands and knees, bending over Deacon’s Keeping Promise Rock

body with a long-limbed grace. He put his mouth back on Deacon’s cock and busied one hand behind his backside, and the other—now decidedly slippery—wrapped around Deacon and started a firm, manly handshake with Deacon’s firm, manly body.

“Gaaahhhh,” Deacon managed before his tongue shorted out. Crick started doing things with his tongue on the head of Deacon’s cock that made his entire body shiver, and then he started doing things with his fingers to Deacon’s shaft and his balls that made him grab Crick’s head with his good hand and start convulsing way sooner than he wanted to.

“Stop,” Deacon begged. “Gonna come.”

Crick stopped so abruptly Deacon flopped out of his mouth with wet smack. “No, no… can’t do that. I’ve got plans,” he ordered frantically. His hand went behind him again, and this time, Deacon saw his face contort into the fine lines of pleasure and pain as he moved. Crick’s entire body relaxed for a moment, and he dropped something on the end table and turned around, lying on his side so his backside was nestled against Deacon’s hard-on.

His ass was slippery, dripping with lube, and as Deacon’s fingers moved to position his cock, he realized that Crick’s hole was dilated too.

“What in the hell…?”

“Plug,” Crick gasped. “And now it’s out. And I need you in. Please, Deacon, please, please, please, please…
augh…
thank you thank you thank you thank you….”

Oh geez… the thought of Crick prepping himself…
pleasuring
himself that way, amped Deacon’s arousal up another six or so notches.

He thought of Crick on his hands and knees with his ass in the air as he sucked Deacon off and of that thing inside him, stretching him….

“Hold still, Crick,” he rasped. He was lying on his good arm, and he carefully put the cast on Crick’s hip to anchor him still. It only worked because Crick was so eager to keep Deacon’s flesh in his own body, but he managed to work his hips harder and faster, and Crick helped by slamming back into him with every thrust until their breath grew thicker and thicker in the dark.

“Grab yourself,” Deacon panted, because he couldn’t do it. “Grab it… hold it… stroke it… c’mon, Carrick, jack yourself off for me.”

“Nnnnnnggggggh….”

Oh. Damn. Was that hot. Carrick started to tremble, to convulse, to climax, and his hole spasmed around Deacon, and then Deacon let go 86

inside of him, burying his face in Crick’s shoulder and groaning as his body turned itself inside out in orgasm.

The quiet afterwards was sated and textured with the smell of their sex.

“Interesting trip you made there, Crick,” Deacon murmured, and Crick started to laugh.

“Not every idea I get into my pointy head is fucked up,” Crick murmured, and Deacon wrapped his arm—cast and all—around Crick’s chest and all but purred into his ear.

“I knew that, you know. In fact, Crick, I’m counting on it.” Two days before Crick left, they had Jon and Amy and Patrick and Crick’s little sisters to the house to see the newly painted living room (because Crick had a taste for it now and couldn’t seem to stop) and to have dinner and to wish Crick good fortune on his travels.

Jon was so angry you could have iced soda on his ass, and Amy wasn’t far behind.

“He did what?”

Deacon was outside feeding the animals while Crick and his sisters finished dinner. Deacon couldn’t begrudge them their time together—

Benny, especially, was looking like Crick’s absence would hurt. Benny had grown into a precocious young woman with brown hair dyed a rather spectacular shade of rabid cranberry, a terrible mouth, and a habit of sneaking cigarettes behind the stable. The fact that Crick needed Deacon as muscle to pick his sisters up to take them to the movies or the park once a week didn’t bode any better for their adolescence than it had for Carrick’s.

“You heard me,” Deacon muttered, adding some oats to Even Star’s mix. The stallion had won himself a pedigree, and now his only job was to stay fat, happy, and to get laid as often as possible. Sadly, it was usually with the mating dummy, but still, Deacon reckoned the horny bastard did his duty by them and earned his oats.

“We’re here to see him off because he joined the Army.” Amy repeated it again as though she hadn’t understood it the first time. Well, that was fair. Deacon hadn’t understood it either.

“Yes.” Well, that was everybody. Deacon turned to lead them out of the barn and go inside and smelled cigarette smoke. Damn. He’d have to hang out and make sure Benny didn’t burn the place down.

“Deacon,” Jon said patiently, as though Deacon hadn’t just seen the look he’d shared with his wife. “You crashed your car and Crick joined the Army. There has
got
to be more to it than that.” Deacon blushed. “There is,” he said quietly. “There was a conversation that zigged when it should have zagged, and all of Crick’s issues jumped in with two feet, and he thought I was telling him to piss off when I was telling him to go to school but come here on the weekends and see me, and, well, Crick being Crick….”

“He joined the Army.” Amy said it like it was finally making sense to her, but Jon was looking closely at Deacon in a way that made him uncomfortable.

“Deacon,” Jon said charitably, “which one of us do you want to stay and finish this conversation, and which one of us do you want to go escort Benny to the house and make her put out that butt?” Deacon’s blush took over his full body, and Amy kissed him on the cheek, saying, “That’s my cue to go ride herd on Benny,” before walking out of the barn with a wave.

Deacon watched her go with a sigh and turned to Jon with a small smile. “My life could have been so much easier if I’d followed you to school.”

Jon nodded and took a seat on a hay bale, and Deacon sat on the bale next to him. “I think Crick will make you happier….” He stopped and shook his head. “Or I think he would have. Or… whatever before this happened.”

They were lying in bed that morning, Crick with his head pillowed
on Deacon’s hard stomach and staring at the walls.

“I’m telling you, Deacon—kittens are the way to go. Fuzzy kittens—

it’ll be awesome.”

Deacon snorted. “Wouldn’t you prefer Impressionist paintings or a
hunk-of-the-month calendar? Because that would be a sure-fire way of
completely gaying out this room.”

Crick rolled over to his stomach and looked at Deacon wryly. “I
hate to break this to you, oh mighty testosterone bearer, but we
are
gay.”
Deacon raised an eyebrow. “Speak for yourself. I’m bi. You’re gay.”
He was met with rolled eyes and Crick’s outstretched tongue, which made
him laugh. “Okay, okay, okay… since I’m not having ‘bi sex’ with you, I’ll
concede. In this bed, with you, I am a living, breathing Easter parade, are
you happy?”

Crick blinked. “Right here and now?” he asked seriously, and
Deacon nodded. “I’ve never been happier in my life. But we still don’t
know what we’re going to put on the wall.”
Deacon lifted his good hand and stroked Crick’s hair out of his face,
knowing it wouldn’t be there much longer to do that. “When you get back,
draw me a picture—Lucy Star, Even Star, Comet Star—whichever one,
you know? Make it big… and I know you’ll put your whole heart in it.

We’ll hang it there, ’kay?”

Crick grimaced and looked away. “Talk about being gay, you big,
queer bastard—I swear you just made me all
verklempt.”

Well, that made two of them.

“He does make me happy,” Deacon said softly to Jon now. “When we are past this, I think he will make me seven kinds of happy.” Truth and a bitter lie, and Deacon couldn’t tell when one started and the other stopped.

Jon looked at him, and Deacon kept looking at the stable in front of them. It was three times the size of the house, clean and airy, with skylights and a neat, double-line of stalls. It smelled like hay and horse and very rarely like horseshit (at least in too great a quantity), and of carrots, since there was always a bag of them on the door to use as a treat.

Deacon had fond memories of watching Crick as a gangly kid in this barn.

He used to sing to the horses—he couldn’t hold a tune for shit, but he’d sing pop songs and rap to them as he was mucking out the stables, and sometimes he’d even tell them jokes.

In the here-and-now, Deacon hauled in a razor-blade breath as he realized where that goofy kid was going to be in a few days.

“It’s the getting through that’s going to suck,” Jon said with some sympathy, and Deacon shrugged stoically.

“I’ll manage.”

Jon put a hand on Deac’s shoulder and pulled him in, and Deacon found himself resting his head on his best friend’s shoulder in the quiet of the barn. “You promise me you’ll ask for help?” Jon asked quietly, and Deacon made a neutral sort of grunt. Jon sighed. “Yeah, asking for help isn’t your strong point. Don’t think I don’t know that, Deacon.”

“I do fine,” Deacon muttered, and Jon laughed without any humor at all.

“Mm-hmm… remember freshman year? You ended up in frickin’

Pre-Calculus, oh-mighty-genius? You stayed up until the wee hours of the Keeping Promise Rock

fucking morning to study, then you got up in the morning to work the horses, then you went to football practice, then you came home and fed, and then you stayed up into the wee hours to do it all over again. Do you remember the outcome? Hmmm?” Jon picked up hay straws and shredded them during this speech, and by the time he was done, he had a prickly yellow mess all over his dark wool work slacks and Deacon’s cast, which was resting between their bodies.

Deacon shrugged and tried a quick, fierce grin. “Yeah, but as far as I know, you can only get mono once. I was fine before school started up again.” He had just been getting better when Crick had walked up to The Pulpit
and made him think beyond his own misery and weakness.

Jon pushed Deacon’s head off his shoulder to stand up and kick the bale of hay. “That’s not my point and you know it. You’re here alone now, Deacon. Don’t think I don’t know that. You’re doing a dangerous job in an empty house, and I swear, if Crick hadn’t called me to figure out the insurance on the Chevy, you’d be trying to weld the axle together with a soldering iron and bubblegum.”

Deacon flushed. “I was waiting for a call back from the company,” he muttered, and Jon turned to him and swatted his head.

“You were waiting to be screwed by the world’s dumbest insurance company. God, Deacon—when are you going to learn that the world doesn’t have your sort of integrity? And that’s my point. You don’t know it, but Crick has been managing those sorts of details here….”

“Don’t think I don’t know it!” Because he did—he told Crick every day that he was grateful.

“Yeah, well the point is, you never ask for shit. Crick does it because he loves you, but you just hate to admit that Deacon Winters, God’s gift to quarterbacks and quarter horses, is not an island unto himself!” Deacon was still looking past him and into the barn itself. He actually really loved this barn. His father managed to build it a little before Deacon’s mother died—before that, the horses had stayed in a simple line of plywood stalls. But once the barn had gone up, their horses—and the horses boarded at The Pulpit
—
had one of the finest barns in the area, and one of the largest. It was big enough to house three tons of hay, twenty horses, and two hands, although Patrick only stayed over when the mares were in foal. It had also housed one lonely little boy, trying desperately to show the world that he was big enough not to need anyone, even when he was tired and hungry and lost.

And it had housed Crick. Clear as day
he could remember grooming the horses in one stall and hearing Crick singing—Green Day’s “Time Of Your Life”
was never going to be the same, that was for sure—but Deacon had loved hearing him anyway. The barn was suddenly not such a bastion, guarding him against loneliness, but a common room, where the people Deacon loved most visited.