Uncommon Passion (39 page)

wanted or didn’t want. What made us sad or happy, what we liked or didn’t like.” He shrugged. “I didn’t

need to talk, because Sam did.”

“It sounds sweet,” she said.

“
Sweet
landed me in a class for developmentally delayed kids when we started kindergarten,” he said. “I

talked in a hurry when I figured out I’d spend all day away from my brother.”

She laughed, and slipped her arm through his. Maybe she was cold. Maybe she was giving him comfort

in a completely nonsexual way. Either way, he kept talking.

“He was my mirror. Looking in one was always weird, because I saw me when I expected to see Sam.

He was always the quiet one, but he was my center. I knew what we would do, where we’d go, how we’d

play, but he knew what we thought, what we felt, right up until high school. Ninth grade, everything

changes.”

“When did you know he was gay?”

“I’ve always known, and never cared. Our father, on the other hand, was a homophobic, conservative

bigot.
Was
,” he emphasized. “Any signs of Sam being gay, he landed on him like a ton of bricks. He

threatened to send Sam away to a reeducation camp, and Sam started talking about running away. Just

pretend, I said. Stay until we graduate, then we can go wherever, together. But that’s not Sam’s way. It’s the

only thing we fought about. I wanted him to not take the risk. He just wanted to be Sam, and Dad made his

life a living hell for just being Sam. The weekend we turned sixteen he ran away. I woke up one morning

alone in our room, and I knew he was gone.”

The emptiness in Sam’s bed filled his soul with blame.

“Did your parents look for him?”

“No. My dad told me he was gone, and it was time for me to be a man.” He shrugged. “So I was a man.”

Rachel mused on this for a moment. “You lost your brother, your anchor in the world, and your trust in

your ability to take care of the one person you loved more than any other, all in the same day,” she said

quietly.

“I thought I drove him off, that what I said made it impossible for him to stay. I thought I failed him,

after he’d always been there for me.”

Rachel stopped. He didn’t want to lose her touch, so he stopped, too, his gaze flicking from the

streetlights to the corners to the shadowed doorways before settling on her face. Pained compassion

softened her eyes. “Ben,” she said gently. “You didn’t fail him.”

“That’s how I felt. And because I couldn’t admit how badly this gutted me, how badly I’d failed, I took

it out on my dad.”

She nodded, her eyes pools of compassion, golden, gleaming.

“By the time he showed up again, I was in college, and he was wrecked. I was so scared he’d leave

again, I never brought it up. But I never got over it.”

They’d reached her apartment complex, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He handed over her

bag, but she didn’t fish her keys from the interior pocket. Instead she let the bag drop to the floor, flattened

her palms alongside his face. The simple touch stopped his heart in his chest.

“You are a good man,” she said. “A
good
man.”

Then she kissed him. Her lips tasted of chai and honey, and he thought the surge of lust and love and

long-simmering desire might drop him to his knees right there in the hallway. She was kissing him like she

loved him. Like she’d walked into the worst of his life, into the self-destructiveness, the sex-like-a-

handshake, looked around, and somehow liked what she saw. She knew the dark, dangerous places, the

character flaws, and loved them anyway. He’d kissed Rachel through every nuance of passion and this was

different, a whole new world of kissing. This was kissing with hope, with a reckless optimism, with faith.

She kissed him with a faith that brought him to his knees.

Heat flared along his spine like flames along spilled fuel, then combusted. In his mind he hoisted her

into the wall and ground against her, his hands on her ass, his cock notched between her thighs. In reality,

he braced his forearms on the wall on either side of her head and kept his hips and chest a breath and a

heartbeat away from hers, close enough to feel her breasts shiver with every inhale. He kissed her, and only

kissed her, giving her the kiss she should have had the first night they were together. He infused it with

hope and optimism, an offer of his soul and his future, everything he had and was and did was hers and

hers alone. Because he could.

When she pulled back, she bit her swollen lip and looked up at him, the shock and wonder of tempered

passion in her eyes.

She deserved that. She should have had that from the beginning. Invitation warred with hesitation in

her eyes, so he stepped back. Put his hands on his hips. Took a deep breath.

“I’m not sorry about that,” he said.

“I’m not, either.”

He grinned at her, the new smile that was beginning to sit more comfortably on his face. “But we stop

there.”

Curiosity brightened her eyes. “Why? You know I go that far.”

Maybe his stopping was enough for her, but it wasn’t for him. He’d see pure, untempered want in her

eyes the next time he lay down with Rachel Hill. Nothing less. “Because I can. And because this is what you

deserve,” he said, then leaned forward to give her a very gentlemanly kiss on the lips. “Good night,

Rachel.”

He jogged back to the now-empty coffee shop parking lot to claim his truck. Along the way he dialed

Sam’s number. “I feel like we’re ready for our first public performance.”

“When?” Sam asked without hesitating.

“Next Tuesday. Open-mike night at Artistary.”

• • •

The first open-mike night of the season drew a big crowd. Artistary was packed on Tuesday night, and

thanks to a dog who ate the remnants of a tube of chemotherapy ointment, Rachel was late. She’d held the

cheerfully unconcerned canine while Dr. Weisen poured a charcoal solution into the dog’s stomach and

settled the animal overnight.

Then she took thirty precious minutes to shower and change so she didn’t walk into the coffee shop in

scrubs that smelled of dog. Instead, she walked into a packed house, every chair taken, people crammed

onto the padded benches under the big windows and lining the walls and shelves. Standing in the doorway

she scanned the room for a space, any space to watch even a few minutes, and found nothing. But then a

small boy wormed his way through the tables and lurched to a halt in front of her. “Hi, Miss Rachel,” he

said.

“Hi, Jonathan,” she said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Sam’s gonna sing!” he said. “We saved you a seat.”

She recognized Chris at a table in front of the cleared area that formed the stage, standing and waving

her over. Tucking her bag to her abdomen, she worked her way through the crowd to the table.

“We didn’t get properly introduced,” Chris said, offering his hand. “You make good cookies. Thank

you for being there for Jonathan.”

“It was my pleasure,” she said as she sat down in the seat he’d saved for her. “How’s Sam doing?”

“See for yourself,” he said with a smile.

Jonathan balanced on Chris’s knee, his attention focused on a stack of anime trading cards in his hand,

while Rachel scanned the crowd for Ben, because surely he wouldn’t miss his brother singing. The emcee

arranged two microphones and stools on the stage. Rachel’s heart stopped in her chest when Ben and Sam

walked out, both carrying guitars. Ben wore faded jeans, a western shirt, and the brown, scuffed boots.

Sam wore dark skinny jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt from a gay pride event over a waffle-weave undershirt,

and Keds, his hair spilling over his forehead. Sam waved at Jonathan and Chris, then gave her a quirky

smile. Ben focused on arranging the height of his stool and microphone, then hooked the heel of his boot in

the stool’s lowest rung and balanced his guitar on his thigh.

When he finally,
finally
looked at Rachel, she read everything in his face. Her heart crawled up to sit at

the back of her throat and flutter like a trapped bird. He was so handsome, shoulders straining the shirt’s

seams, the planes and angles of his face illuminated by the spotlight, his blue eyes brilliant against the

brown fabric backdrop with the coffee shop’s gold logo.

Then he smiled at her, slow and sweet as skin-warmed honey.

“Hey, y’all,” Sam said into the mike. The crowd quieted down. “I’m Sam Harris.” He hooked a thumb

over his shoulder at Ben. “I’ve never seen this dude before in my life but he was backstage with a guitar so

we thought we’d go on together.”

Laughter rippled through the crowd, and Ben shot Sam a clear, pure smile. Seeing them together like

this Rachel understood all the old phrases. Two sides of the same coin. Two halves of a whole. Blood

brothers. While they both had separate lives, being together clearly completed them in a way no one else

could understand. She glanced at Chris, wondering if he harbored any jealousy, but his face mirrored what

she felt inside. This was as it should be, healing and whole, Sam, Ben, the people who loved them,

everyone they touched directly or indirectly. This was family as it was meant to be.

Ben said something Rachel couldn’t hear to Sam that made him laugh. Sam adjusted his stool and

microphone. “Okay, that’s my brother, Ben. Bear with us, folks, ’cause we haven’t performed together in a

long, long time.”

A hushed silence fell. Without so much as a glance the brothers began to play. Rachel’s experience with

pop music was limited, so she didn’t recognize the song. The intensity and beat took up residence in her

chest. Ben and Sam weren’t playing gentle, sweet coffeehouse music. This was intense, driving, a demand

in notes and beat, and when Sam began to sing, she recognized the song for what it was.

Prayer.

Give me a word, give me a sign

Show me where to look and tell me what will I find.

Oh yes. Prayer. She knew prayer when she heard it, recognized a plea flung into the air from the very

depths of the human soul, and when Ben leaned forward and joined Sam’s voice for the chorus, she knew

she was right.

Neither man made eye contact with the audience. Sam’s eyes closed as he sang, clearly a more polished

performer than Ben, who’d somehow both disappeared into himself and shed what was left of the defenses

shielding him. Sam performed, but Ben
was
the guitar. Emotion streamed from him like light shining down.

In perfect unison they played a driving chord, then paused; in the split second of silence Rachel’s heart

thrummed in her ears. She’d never felt like this before, alive to the very surface of her skin, because
he’d

never felt like this before.

She was pinned to her seat, her muscles frozen, not even breathing, as Ben Harris laid his soul bare

before her.

They played the same series of chords, another silence. Not a cough or a shuffle or a whisper in the

coffee shop. Lyrics and guitar and voice blended into a throaty demand for presence, for mystery, for love.

When Sam sat back to watch Ben’s guitar solo, Rachel watched his abraded, reddened fingertips shift and

press on the guitar neck. The placket of his shirt opened, exposing his throat and collarbone as he curved

protectively around the instrument, calling vibrating notes and hushed, seductive nuance from the strings,

voicelessly saying everything Rachel never dreamed she’d hear from him.

She imagined him practicing for weeks in the hopes this moment would come, using time with his

brother to heal and to hope for the future. He’d excavated himself layer by layer from the strata of pain to

have something to offer her, his brother, himself.

The song finished almost abruptly, then Sam smoothed his hair back from his face and looked at Ben.

The smile they exchanged, exultant and secretive all at once, sent the tears building in Rachel’s eyes spilling

over.

There was a moment of stunned silence, then the crowd erupted into wild, stomping applause and

whoops. Rachel just sat there, one hand pressed to her throat, the other across her belly, tears slowly

trickling down her face. Ben’s gaze skimmed the crowd as he gave a single, short nod, then looked straight

at her. His blue eyes held a question.

Yes?

Yes. Oh yes. Always yes.

The applause had only begun to die down when Ben and Sam stood to make way for the next singer.

Ben slid the guitar into its case, then held out his hand to Rachel. Without thinking about the invisible

boundaries between stage and audience, men and women, her and Ben, she slid her hand into his and let

him lead her into the dark brick hallway.

The waiting performers around them applauded and called out their congratulations, but Ben kept

moving, down the hallway, to the left, and out a door that led to the alley. It was clearly marked Fire Door