Make a Right (3 page)

“You’re worth looking at,” Tuck said.

Cade’s cheeks warmed to a pale rose. He said nothing.

Tuck shrugged and propped his elbow on the outer rail, resting his head on his hand. The cheeky grin he knew always got under Cade’s skin popped out at the last, too quick to stop it. “I am what I am.” He uncapped his own treat with a twist of the wrist they’d both learned a long time ago in misspent youths sipping illicit beers. “Mazel tov.”

Cade bit his lip, shook his head sharply, and took a sip probably meant to be polite before the taste hit him as well as a good old-fashioned thirst. He tipped the bottle back to drink deeply, eyes closed in pleasure.

Worth looking at, he’d said? Yes, and then some. A droplet of sweat slid down to disappear beneath the collar of Cade’s T-shirt; Tuck watched it go and only just managed not to let his breath out in a long, slow sigh.

He’d have walked across coals to catch that salty droplet on his tongue. To feather his lips over the warm arch of Cade’s neck and tap the tip of his tongue in time with the beating pulse in the soft hollow between Cade’s jaw and ear. Rest his hand on Cade’s chest to feel the beat of his troubled heart and let Cade know he wasn’t alone.

Cade finished the bottle without letting go, tapping the glass to get every last drop. Sugar and fluid did him half a world’s worth of good. Only half, though. Tuck knew this for sure when Cade said only, “Thank you,” the politeness stiff and awkward on his tongue.

Why’s it gotta be like this, Cade
? Tuck wanted more than anything to ask.
Just take my hand. Tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it.

Cade’s thoughts remained a mystery. It’d be easier to get a read on the marble statues Cade seemed to imitate at times like these. Statues couldn’t be argued with or hurt or moved. They were safe.

Tuck understood, even if he didn’t like it. Even less did he like how this didn’t bode well. Their first conversation in six months, Cade refusing to take his calls from day one, and it had to be this way, huh? “You want to know why I’m really here, don’t you?”

“I didn’t think it was just to bring me a soda and pass the time of day,” Cade said.

“I’d have done that already if you’d let me.”

Cade would know that to be true. It made him tougher to crack. “Either tell me why you came, or I turn around and start walking now.”

“I came to give you this.” Tuck slipped the heavy envelope from his pocket and offered it to Cade, held between forefinger and index finger.

Cade’s frown was instant and obvious. “What’s this?” He checked the seal and glanced at Tuck in a silent query when he found it already opened.

“It was addressed to both of us,” Tuck said. “At our—my place.” Man, he’d never get used to the sound of those words. That apartment was
theirs
; it had never been meant to be “mine.”

“And you opened it without asking me first?”

“I noticed it’d been mailed over a month ago. The zip code is wrong, and the post office took their sweet time forwarding. I figured it’d be better to see what it was before making a big deal. Could have been nothing.” He cleared his throat, uncomfortable. “Besides, I didn’t think you’d be coming around to pick up any stray mail anytime soon.”

Cade—almost—winced, but he took that shot like a man and simply nodded.

“It’s a good thing I did too,” Tuck said. “It’s from Megan and Hannah. They’re getting married.”

The envelope slipped sideways in Cade’s hand. He caught it, barely, before it fell and blew away off the bridge. Tuck watched him stare at the swirling sepia calligraphy that somehow matched the bronze and iron scrollwork on the bridge.

His throat moved with a jerk when he swallowed. “Oh.”

Shit. Tuck hadn’t expected Cade to go whiter than a bleached sheet, and he moved on automatic pilot to help hold him steady. “Christ. Easy, babe, easy.”

Cade started to move toward him. He had the instincts too. But he didn’t follow through. He took a step back, away from Tuck. “Give me a minute.” He lowered his voice. “Please.”

Easier said than done
. Tuck jittered with the need to move, to act, to do
something
. Anything. The shifting weight of keys in his pocket sparked an idea. “Look, I’ve got the taxi down there. Let me drive you to the park. Somewhere with benches where we can sit without better than average odds of falling. You can think it over on the way there.”

Cade shook his head in silence. He fingered the edges of the envelope without saying anything, but Tuck could tell when that sharper brain of his was whirring away. The dimple in his chin tightened when he did that. In the lowering sunlight, Tuck could see the faint brown dusting of five o’clock shadow that darkened Cade’s cheeks. It’d feel rough and soft against the back of his hand if he touched…

“Mailed to both of us,” Cade said. He handed the envelope back without looking inside. “They don’t know.”

Tuck’s throat tightened. “Not yet.”

Most of the kids who were sent there passed in and out of St. Pius’s grounds without leaving so much as an echo behind. Megan and Hannah were different. Megan had already been caught up in a gang; Hannah’s stepdad pimped her out. Still. Underneath all that, there was enough left to call out for help. They needed to be taken under someone’s wings if they were going to survive. He and Cade, they’d been the ones to answer, and the girls had become not quite daughters but something very like sisters.

Tuck could see the struggle warring within Cade. Hard not to.

“Why don’t they know?” Cade asked.

“Truth?”

“Truth,” Cade said, though he looked none too sure.

“I didn’t want to tell them.”

Cade scoffed softly.

“You asked. Don’t blame me if you don’t like what you heard, and don’t throw stones, because you didn’t tell them either, did you?” Tuck slipped off the railing and stood on his own two feet to face Cade. “You’ve left me. This is true. But I haven’t left you.” He knuckled his chest, just over his breastbone. “Not where it counts. Miles don’t make much difference there. I couldn’t tell them it was over, because for me? It isn’t.”

Cade turned away from the sunset to prop his hip against the dangerous edge of the bridge, the one facing the street and not the safety of the sidewalk. “They weren’t even together the last time we spoke to them.”

“It’s been a couple of years. Too long,” Tuck said, wondering why he’d let that much time go by. He’d never meant to. “A lot can happen in two minutes, let alone two years.”

“How can they be old enough?”

It was a rhetorical question but one Tuck answered anyway. “I passed twenty-nine last week.” It’d been a bitch spending his birthday alone too. He nudged in a little closer and rested his elbows on the bridge rail, almost close enough to touch Cade’s. “That’d make you just a year short of thirty yourself, old man.”

Cade grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

Tuck wanted to nudge him in the shin, just lightly, a love tap. “Anyone say there was something wrong with thirty? It’s a good year.”

Cade glanced sidelong at Tuck and offered him that half smile, wry as ever. “So you say.” He shook his head. “Let me see the envelope again.” As soon as he had it in his hands, Cade slid the bent cardstock free of the envelope at last and read it, lips moving in a habit he’d never quite broken himself of.

“It’s cute, how you do that,” Tuck said without thinking. Well, why not? It was true.

Cade didn’t like hearing it, though. “It’s not cute. It’s childish.”

“Cute,” Tuck said, as stubborn as Cade when he wanted to be. “Try changing my mind. It won’t work.”

“I know,” Cade said, soft as a breath of wind. “You never were the kind.”

“I am who I am. When I love, I love for life.” Tuck took a chance and, breath momentarily stilled, lifted his hand to brush the backs of his knuckles across the line of Cade’s cheekbone. “I miss it, you know? All of it. The little things. The big things.”

“That doesn’t mean you can change the past.” Cade tucked the invitation away, as carefully and precisely as if he were being graded on performance. “If you’d told me about the freelancing from the beginning, I wonder if we’d be here now.”

“I wanted it to be a surprise. Christ, Cade. I know why you come up here where it’s not so crowded and you can see a real horizon. You need to breathe, like we did at St. Pius. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Cade couldn’t and didn’t.

Tuck spread his hands in a “well, there you go” gesture. “All I wanted was to earn enough to buy us a real house. I wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise,” Cade said with a snort. He wouldn’t look at Tuck. Again. Why? Hiding, angry, or both? “You managed that part.”

Tuck studied his knuckles, pressing them tightly against the others until the pressure of blood and bone turned them white.

“If I could do it over again, differently, I would. Believe that.”

“It’s not that easy.”

Tuck could feel his temper starting to prickle. “You think I don’t know that by now?”

“You stopped talking about work. Then you didn’t answer phone calls. You started not coming home at all sometimes. I believed you at first. Because I wanted to. But how many flat tires can a driver have? How many out-of-state fares and cell coverage problems and…” He’d knotted his fists in frustrated anger. “For weeks that went on. What was I supposed to think? What was I supposed to do?”

“Not have me followed by some Dick Tracy wannabe,” Tuck retorted. “Where did you even find that guy? In a fifth-floor walkup on the lower east side, smoking a cigarette behind a plate glass window with a few bullet holes?”

Cade’s jaw hardened. “He wasn’t top-drawer, but it took you long enough to know he was following you.”

Tuck made a
pfft
noise. “Are you kidding me? I knew from the word go. I thought he was after…” Tuck gestured uselessly, unable to come up with any better description than, “The ladies.”

He wasn’t ashamed of the kind of work he’d found. Escorts and ladies of the evening needed a ride they could count on as much as or more than anyone else. They liked someone who they could be sure would stay hands-off, too. Only thing was, once he’d gotten a rep, he’d gotten more business, and more… Before he knew it, he was so near his goal of the down payment on a house he could taste it.

And then, this had happened.

“I never even dreamed you’d think I was cheating on you. You know me better.”

Cade didn’t move. “I thought I did. Some of those pictures weren’t of you with…” He didn’t like the word either, but he liked the alternatives less. “Ladies. Some were men.”

Tuck’s nails were going to pierce his palm soon. Not that it hadn’t happened before; he’d end up with a set of crescent-shaped scars. It didn’t help tamp down his rising temper. “Yeah. The guys that hired them. And none of them ever touched me. Ever. You know what pisses me off the most? You thinking I wasn’t just cheating, but that I’d started peddling my ass like a five-dollar hooker. Fuck.” Tuck snorted. “I wasn’t that desperate when I lived on the streets. Man, I’d have starved before I fell that low.”

“Right. You’re better than that. I know,” Cade said. Said it with a venom that Tuck didn’t understand and never had. A blind man could tell those escorts made Cade’s skin crawl, but let one guy say something against them and
boom
. Was he for them or against them? Why did it
matter
this much?

Cade turned away when Tuck had no response. “If that’s all you have to say, we’re done here.”

Oh, fuck this
. Tuck advanced on Cade, not letting him back down and knowing he couldn’t back away without flipping off the bridge. “What really happened between us, you and me? Don’t tell me it was the job. I’m not as smart as you, but I’m not that stupid. Ten years doesn’t just snap its fingers and vanish over a
job
. And don’t tell me it was because I tried to surprise you. I hid birthday presents before.”

Cade favored Tuck with the kind of long, flat look that promised the splintered flash of lightning and a roll of thunder not far off. “If you think you can compare the two—”

“No. I know I should have done it different. I got caught up. I was stupid.”

“Yes. You were.” Cade turned his back on Tuck. He spoke softly but not so much so that Tuck didn’t hear him say, “And so was I.”

See? It was things like that. Bits and pieces escaping Cade that kept Tuck hoping. If Cade had those things tucked away in his heart, then it couldn’t be as over for him as he wanted Tuck to believe.

Or maybe Romeo just hadn’t gotten any brighter over the years. Who knew?

All Tuck could be was himself. That meant taking chances. Gambling on a prayer.

And so, without letting himself question the move, he covered Cade’s hand with his and held tight. “I miss you.”

Cade drew in a deep, slow breath and let it out. His hunched shoulders broadened as he pushed himself up off the rail and looked away at some fixed point a thousand yards away that Tuck couldn’t see. Retreating inside himself to some place where Tuck couldn’t follow him. “It’s not that easy.”

“Then tell me why not,” Tuck pressed. “How can I believe you when you won’t explain what that means? And I don’t, you know,” he said, sure of it even as he said it out loud for the first time in months. “I don’t believe you.”

Cade’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” Tuck turned Cade around to face him once more. He palmed Cade’s cheek as gently as he could. Felt so good, that warm skin beneath his touch. So right. “And you know how I know?”

Cade swallowed, the long smooth line of his throat working. Tuck could see the question in his eyes, and the wish he wouldn’t let himself make.

Tuck pushed closer still, pressing into the inch of personal space Cade had left, lining their bodies one against the other. He feathered his thumb over the pulse in Cade’s wrist.

Cade watched him with the same sort of wary fear as a cat trapped in a corner, in the back of an alley.

Tuck didn’t ease up. This mattered too much to back down now. These were things Cade needed to hear. To feel. “This. This is how I can be sure.” He laid his hand on Cade’s chest, over his heart, just the way he used to, and felt how fast it beat. He felt Cade’s body reacting to him being this close too; that, he let that pass. For now. “I know because I know you.”