Whatever the Cost (50 page)

Setting that train of thought aside, Jacen resolves to deal with it later. He wants to ask how the meeting went. It had clearly meant a lot to Liam, the idea of renting out the spare apartment to a gay youth in need but with the potential to make something of his life. They’d discussed it a few days earlier over a dinner Jacen carefully, lovingly, prepared for them both. Liam was bashful; Jacen adored every minute of it.

Despair and resentment, which he’s been carrying around in spades since Della showed her sorry face in the bistro, anchor Jacen to the couch. Wanting so much to feel safe somehow, to be back at work, to apologize to Liam, Jacen just can’t get past that mental wall.

His phone rings. Eyeing it mistrustfully, he waits for the caller I.D. then answers.

“Joe.”

“You ready to come back to work yet? These idiots down here are giving me migraines with their impressive level of incompetence.”

This makes Jacen smile. He loosens up a little bit. “I’ve been thinking about it, to tell you the truth. I’m bored out of my mind. But Liam....” The bedroom door is still closed tight. Jacen stares at it, weighing his options.

Hearing the heavy silence on the other end of the line, Joe breaks it with a reassuring, “Whenever you’re ready. No rush. If things are still hairy over there, then....”

“No, it’s just—” Jacen flounders. “I mean, they are. Hairy. I guess. The apartment doesn’t exactly feel safe to us anymore, so that’s the biggest obstacle for us right now. Maybe if we were somewhere where I don’t have to worry about him being on his own all day, it would be different. They had pictures of him here. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

“Well that kind of brings me to the real reason I called,” Joe says, sounding sheepish. It’s unlike him. Jacen perks up, sits up straighter on the couch.

“What’s going on?”

“Hmm. Let’s see. Well, as a youngster yourself maybe you can commiserate a little, but when a girl works for her father at the family business, she gets kind of sick of him after spending day in and day out in his company. So the long and the short of it is that Lily’s got her own place now, downtown near the bistro. Nice little condo. Small but fancy. Anyway, she had been living in the guesthouse adjacent to my home. I’ve always been a big fan of safety and peace of mind myself, so I live in a gated community. I wouldn’t be able to afford it without the money from my inheritance. Damn impressive security going in and out, deluxe security system on the house itself, and the guest house....”

“Joe,” Jacen tries to interrupt, sensing where this is going.

Joe barrels on anyway. When he does, Jacen stands and walks slowly over to the bedroom door. “It isn’t a big place, but it’s all set up and just waiting for someone to use it. You and Liam should move in there. I don’t have anyone that might be visiting, it’s just going to waste, and maybe if I knew you were in a safer place I’d get some damn sleep at night. And I know you’re a man of pride—independent and all—and maybe it’s because I’m the same way that I understand that so well. But let me do this for you. Please.”

Taking hold of the bedroom door’s knob, Jacen starts to give it a turn, waiting for the lock to catch, certain that Liam has locked him out. But it turns freely enough. He opens the door slowly, and when it’s cracked an inch or two, what he sees makes his heart ache in his chest, his eyes pricking suddenly with tears. Liam is sitting, head bowed, on the side of the bed, the window with its new, thick bars, the curtains parted, casts stark shadows across his figure as he cries softly. Liam turns his head away, hiding his tear-streaked face from Jacen’s sight, and crosses his arms over his chest like he’s literally holding himself together.

Jacen wants to say no to Joe. He wants to do this on his own, and to not have to rely on anyone. Before, that’s the way it always worked. Look out for number one and to hell with the rest. No one was going to give a shit about Jacen but him, so it made him selfish and pig-headed. Seeing Liam weeping despondently on their bed, precious, newfound hope draining rapidly from his bright eyes, Jacen is given a hard, painful look at what his responsibilities now encompass. Now is not the time to be selfish or stupid. Now is the time to man-up and act like a husband.

“Jacen? You still there? Damn phone connection.”

“Yeah, Joe, I’m still here.”

Liam is listening, Jacen sees, even if he can’t raise his eyes or acknowledge his lover’s presence.

“Okay,” Jacen says, surrendering. Even saying the word, part of his heavy load is suddenly lifted from his shoulders. “Okay, I think we’ll take you up on that. As, you know, a temporary solution. And you can take our rent from my checks.”

“Rent?” Joe scoffs.

“Yeah, rent. And thank you. No one’s done so much for me in my whole life as you have. I owe you, big time.”

He chokes on the words, and wipes at his eyes. Distantly, he is aware of Liam standing and walking toward him, but it’s washed-out and blurred. The phone is taken from his hand and he hears Liam say, “Joe, can we call you right back? Thanks.”

And then Liam’s arms wrap Jacen in a tender hug full of forgiveness and apology alike, in which hope is born anew.

One season melts into the next, but since it’s southern California, the differences are not very great. The air remains warm. The presence of rain in the winter versus the dryness of summer marks the passing of time most noticeably. For Liam and Jacen, however, the differences are many. Four months have slipped by, too full of activity and busywork to be marked in clearly delineated days and weeks.

After enduring the harrowing initial move from Los Angeles to the motel room in San Luis Obispo, and then the move to the apartment building, their third move is not as much of a trial. With plenty of experience under their belts, though many more possessions to box and cart across town, it goes smoothly. And since Jacen is around to help Liam with the packing, it doesn’t take long at all.

Every truckload they transfer from the apartment to the guesthouse on Joe’s property lightens any lingering worries about their own safety; though now they are comforted by the knowledge that those worries are largely unfounded—force of habit rather than born from logic. Della is securely behind bars—and her goons as well, while The Company, or any of its representatives would be beyond foolish to come anywhere near Jacen and Liam, given the heat the organization is under from the authorities, and the federal government’s newfound familiarity with the two men. So, Jacen and Liam’s remaining worries are more a psychological need, a yearning for rebirth.

They leave their tension and cares behind on the day they lock up their top floor apartment, ready to be leased out to a new tenant of Liam’s choosing—someone with even more desperate need of it than they did. Aaron is already settled into the unit across the hall, and Liam and Jacen have just enough time to get him up to speed on the basics of building maintenance before taking their leave. With ample enthusiasm and a need to prove himself worthy of the generous trust Liam has bestowed upon him, Aaron seems to every one of them to be the perfect choice as the first candidate of Liam’s social welfare project.

One month after Joe offers him the guesthouse, Jacen resumes work at the bistro. Some days he gets a ride in from Joe, or even Lily. The new security on the restaurant and Joe’s reluctance to have Jacen venture out from the kitchen without acting as a personal bodyguard by his side works miracles on Jacen’s confidence. Each day that passes boosts his comfort level a little more until he surpasses the joy it had initially given him to be gainfully employed and he achieves a satisfaction with his professional life that he has never before experienced. Joe and Lily notice the change. Yasha, Valery and Clay do, too. Jacen becomes the man he should have been, if his childhood traumas had never happened. And Liam believes it goes beyond that. Thanks to his many trials, Jacen carries a strength in him that is like iron, unbending, unshakable. The things he was most afraid of have stared him in the face, and he has survived them all. They don’t have any power over him anymore. Not in the slightest.

And so Jacen
is
reborn. For so long he carried the burden of needing to be strong for Liam, or to be the provider, the protector, the martyr. With a new family, with support he never dreamed he could ever have—people who would risk their own lives without hesitation, for his sake alone, it renews his faith in the world, and what it might yet hold for them in the future.

There is no better way, in Liam’s humble opinion, to wake up on a Sunday morning, than with a good, hard, slow, passionate fuck. The deliriously happy smile it puts on his face lasts all through his chores as he first does some laundry, then cleans the pool for Joe—the pool’s maintenance being just one of the many small ways that Liam contributes in order to not only express his continued gratitude for Joe’s generosity, but as an extension of what has become an almost maniacal need to manage things with what some might say is an obscenely detailed eye.

Jacen once thought the management of their apartment building would be far too much for Liam to handle. But he was wrong. Not only has Liam flourished after witnessing the success of his outreach program for local gay youth, he has taken on the task of managing Joe’s property in addition to their own. There are many things Joe Barbara would rather be doing than tending to his grounds and the buildings that stand upon them. Before he had such enthusiastic and multi-talented tenants, he would typically hire help to take care of what needed to be done. Now there’s no need to even go that far, because there’s hardly a task that could need doing that Liam wouldn’t be willing to tackle. The pool, the landscaping, electrical and plumbing repairs, even a leak in the roof—that they did hire a roofing company to correct—are supervised by one Liam Timothy. Joe jokes to Jacen, when Liam is safely out of earshot, that this is what it must be like to have one of those battle-ax wives taking care of everything so he can spend his time off going hunting or sitting on his butt with a cold beer in hand. Jacen always laughs at this, noting the genuine respect and a little bit of healthy fear that Joe has developed for Liam.

It has been out of respect for Jacen’s feelings that Liam has abandoned the idea of getting a gun of his own. However, Jacen has consented to Liam joining Joe at the firing range, getting some target practice in. Baby steps, Liam tells himself. There are some things that will always send Jacen into a panic, even given the newfound safety they find themselves enjoying, and Liam with a firearm strapped to his side is one of them. So he takes what he can get.

One sunny, fall, California morning, Jacen is out on a run, and Liam goes inside their house to straighten the kitchen once the pool is skimmed and the chlorine levels checked. With the bistro closed until much later that afternoon, Joe is off on a drive down to a local vineyard to sample some possible additions to their wine list. Everything is quiet. Liam surveys their little home, contented. It’s just the right size for them, with most of the living space downstairs—the living room and eat-in kitchen, a bedroom and adjoining bathroom. There’s a small loft on the half-story above with some exercise equipment and a little office for Liam. Liam has painted the whole place from top to bottom in neutral but masculine tones, and has decorated it in a modern, classic, understated style. He’s proud of it, and there is nowhere else he’d rather be.

But then the stifling quiet and niggling loneliness begins to have the effect on Liam that it usually does. He gets an idea and changes into the black kilt and combat boots that he knows well that Jacen favors, forgoing a shirt entirely. He rings his eyes with smoky black eyeliner and dampens his hair, tousling it and twisting the ends with gel. The finishing touch is a hint of plum lipstick—just enough to give his lips a bruised, used look.

He hears Jacen return. The iron gate clangs. Joe’s huge mastiffs in the main house bark, and Jacen calls out to them in order to settle them back down. There’s a loud splash as Jacen dives into the cooling waters of the in-ground pool. When he enters the guesthouse a few minutes later, he’s already towel-dried off, with the towel wrapped around his waist.

Liam glances over a shoulder at his husband, rag in hand as he wipes off the counter in the kitchen, the morning light soft, hitting the house from the back, where the fewest windows are, so that most of it is in shadow. The expression on Jacen’s face says everything. Liam represses a pleased grin and waits.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Jacen crosses the living room, dropping the towel, peeling off his trunks.
To get a shower
, Liam tells himself.
He’s going to shower.