Wild Raspberries (7 page)

Dan grinned self-consciously. “The new shorts itch; I’m going to have to wash them, I think. And I’d look dumb with them around my waist and these shorts around my —”

“Knees,” Tyler supplied, and sank a little deeper into the haven of the water. He could feel tight muscles loosening and the pain seeping out into the water. “True. You would.” He waved lazily at the door. “Thanks for not drowning me. I’ll yell if I need any help getting out.”

Dan didn’t move.

“I can scrub my back by myself.”

“I wasn’t offering.”

“Then why are you still here?”

Dan smiled, slow and sweet and dirty, a combination that made Tyler’s mouth go dry. “You got to see me up close and personal last night; I guess it’s my turn now.”

“Boy, I want to lie here and relax, and if you’re staring at me as if I’m a — a wildebeest and you’re a lion, I’m going to tense up again.”

“Is that how I look?” Dan gave that some consideration before shrugging. “Sounds about right, and you do look on the tasty side.”

“You need to work on your pick-up lines,” Tyler told him, more amused than anything now. Christ, how old was the kid? “Isn’t that what you told me? They lack finesse.”

“Me, I prefer direct,” Dan said. “I like what I see and I’d like to do more than look. After last night, I don’t think you’re going to freak out over me saying that, even if you’re not interested in me.”

Was that a smidgen of hurt under the indifference? Tyler spared Dan a sidelong look. Oh, yeah, for all the bravado of the words, the kid’s mouth was tight and his shoulders were rounded, making him look smaller.

“You’re on the young side, that’s all. Twenty. Shit, the only time I’ve fucked someone who was twenty, I was sixteen.” Tyler reached for the soap and washcloth with his good hand. “Don’t take it personally. These days, I’m not having sex with anyone.” He draped the washcloth over his knee and rubbed the soap across it, then watched the white lather on the green cloth, tiny bubbles forming and vanishing as he concentrated on getting the washcloth good and soapy.

“Why not?” Dan took a few steps and leaned against the sink, still too far away to touch. Tyler felt a quiver of unease at how vulnerable he was, naked, trapped in the bath… but Dan just didn’t seem dangerous somehow. “A body like yours, even with the whole back off, I bite attitude, you’re not going to get turned down.”

“No,” Tyler agreed placidly. “I don’t. Because I don’t offer. And if you think a small town like this is just full of men wanting to get their hands on me, well, hate to disappoint you, but it isn’t.”

Which didn’t mean he hadn’t had offers, because he had.

“You’d tell them no, anyway, same as you’re telling me, wouldn’t you?”

“Mm-hmm. I most likely would.” He set the soap down on the corner of the bath, where it was wide enough that the soap wouldn’t immediately fall into the water, and began to wash, one-handed.

“And I’m asking why again.”

“Ask away; you’re not getting an answer.” He gave Dan an exasperated look. “Why are you so goddamned interested in my sex life, anyway?”

“Because you don’t have one.”

Tyler held up his wet, soap-slicked hand. “Yeah, I do.”

“Jerking off doesn’t count.”

“It’s enough for me.” And if Dan ever left him alone, he might just prove that. The night before, he’d gotten no more than half-hard with Dan in his mouth, fucking it with an endearing, frustrating care, but pain, fatigue, and the need to make it all about Dan had been the reason for that. He hadn’t wanted to get hard; Dan would have felt the need to reciprocate at best; panic at worst, and that wasn’t what he’d done it for.

Today, though…oh, today he wanted to come, tease himself slowly up to a climax that would leave him warm and loose, a drowse in the sunlight, not a bolt of lightning, a languid, lazy rock into the cradle of his palm and fingers.

And now he was hard. Shit. He refused to do anything as pointless as draping the washcloth over the evidence; Dan watched his cock harden, and the only thing saving the boy was that he wasn’t smiling. Hard to do that with your mouth hanging open.

“
Now
, are you going to get on the other side of the door?” he inquired, expecting Dan to back away fast, his face as red as Tyler’s skin was getting, soaked in hot, hot water.

“Do you see me leaving?” Dan knelt by the side of the bath, at the tap end, and propped his arms on the side. “Go on then.”

“What?”

“You said jerking off was better than sex with me.” He hadn’t. He really hadn’t. “So I guess maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, or something, because I like it, God, yes, but it doesn’t feel better than being with someone else.” Dan’s gaze fixed itself on Tyler’s groin. “So I’ll watch what you do — I won’t touch, don’t worry — and I’ll maybe pick up some pointers.”

Dan wasn’t broken, was he? Anyone who could be this demurely innocent in voice and blatant, brazen with his eyes, after what he’d gone through, was going to make it. Tyler allowed himself a brief moment to be glad about that before he scooped up a handful of water and threw it into Dan’s face.

“Boy, you push me and I’ll push back.”

“Bring it on,” Dan said, not troubling to hide his grin as he shook back his wet hair. Droplets clung to his face, caught on the faint darkness of stubble. “Tyler, after last night, I’m not leaving until I’ve seen what you look like when you come. If you don’t want me involved, I’ll respect that, but I want to see.” He trailed his hand through the water, never quite touching skin. “And we both know you could have made me leave if you’d really wanted to.”

“Short of dynamite, I don’t see how.”

“You could try saying ‘please.’”

Tyler blew out an impatient breath. “Please would you leave so I can jerk off in peace?”

“Sure.” Dan didn’t move. He knew it wouldn’t be that easy. “You really want me to? Really? Because every time I look at your cock, it sort of twitches, like it knows I’m staring. You’re hard as fucking rock, man. You
like
me watching.” Dan furrowed his forehead. “You do this before? Circle jerks and all that?”

The memories had to be showing on his face so he didn’t bother denying it. “Sometimes. A long time ago. I was younger than you, though. A lot younger.”

“Me, too, except it was just Luke, and I guess two people don’t make a circle.” Dan looked briefly downcast, but then he brightened. “I always came first.”

“You would,” Tyler said austerely before asking, “Who’s Luke?”

“Huh?” Dan’s gaze dropped. “No one. A friend.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t.”

“Cuts both ways, boy,” Tyler told him with some satisfaction. “You poke and pry at me and I’ll do it back at you. Who is he?”

Dan stood up so fast he stumbled and had to grab at the sink to steady himself. “
No one
.”

The door slammed behind him, barely missing the T-shirt he’d grabbed as he passed it, clutched in his hand like a security blanket and dragging on the floor. Tyler stared up at the ceiling and let the water lap and slap at his waning erection, idly cupping his balls as he contemplated, not Dan’s retreat, which he’d expected, hell, forced, but the regret he’d felt as Dan had left.

The sun was burning the back of his neck, even through his hair, long enough now to brush the top of his shoulders, but Dan kept working with the bone-deep stubbornness he’d had since childhood driving him. The tomato patch was big when you considered that it was just for Tyler’s use; six rows, each twelve feet long, a mixture of cherry and plum tomatoes, most ripening to red but with a section that was growing some fancy yellow ones, bright, miniature fallen suns against the dry, baked earth.

He dragged the large plastic bucket a few feet along the row and started in on the next bush, his fingers deft and careful, because this was food, and you didn’t waste it, even if you did feel like taking the biggest, ripest one you could find and throwing it hard, so it splashed, seeds and juice going everywhere. Sometimes he pictured Tyler’s face as the target, sometimes his father’s, sometimes Luke’s.

The bucket filled quickly, and he set it down in the shade and got another from the shed. He wasn’t sure if they were what Tyler used to harvest, but they were clean and just the right size — too big and the tomatoes at the bottom would be crushed by the weight of the ones on top of them; too small and he’d be stopping to get another bucket too often.

He did the job properly; each tomato was checked over, and if it was squishy or split, it went into a second bucket for the rejects, Tyler might want to keep them for sauce. Each tomato was stripped of the stalk to save time later, and the stalks he saved in a third, baby-bear-sized tub, for the compost. He hadn’t found the compost pile yet, but he was sure Tyler had one.

Sweat stung his burned skin. He put his hand on the back of his neck and winced. Ow. Now that he’d stopped it struck him how thirsty he was, how his back ached from bending, how stained his fingers were with juice. He picked one more tomato and tossed it into the bucket before sitting down right there on the bare earth.

Stubbornness only took a man so far and he was there, at the point where he needed to rest. A shadow fell over him and he squinted up at Tyler, dressed now in faded denim shorts and a short-sleeved shirt of about the right shade of green to make Dan think of uniforms and guns.

“I made lunch, and you look like you need a break.”

“Just taking a breather.” It figured that Tyler would come out just when he set his ass down for a moment. “Still got three rows to do.”

“They can wait.” Tyler studied the buckets and then glanced over at the two filled ones in the shade. “You’re organized, I’ll give you that.”

“My daddy said there’s two ways to do a job and if you don’t pick the right one, you might as well not bother.”

“Sounds like you were brought up by someone with some firm ideas.”

“You can say that again.”

“Come and eat,” Tyler said in what Dan guessed was the closest he came to a coaxing voice. “I made sandwiches.”

“I could’ve done that,” Dan protested. He got to his feet, as it didn’t sound like Tyler was going to let him keep on being a martyr and his stomach was growling.

“Sure you could, Cinderella, but last time I looked, I still had the use of my hands.” Tyler held up his cut hand; the bandage had been replaced by a Band-Aid. “See?”

“No tomatoes on the sandwich?”

“Not a one,” Tyler promised. He stopped Dan with a hand on Dan’s arm, a hand that fell away as soon as Dan paused. “I’ll give you all the space you need, if you do the same for me.”

Dan felt awkward and a little ashamed of himself — telling the man he wanted to watch him jerk off? What the hell had he been thinking? Outside in the sunlight it seemed unthinkable, as it hadn’t in the bathroom with the steam curling up and Tyler naked and him close to it. He nodded without meeting Tyler’s eyes.

“But if there’s something you want to tell me —” Tyler grimaced. “Hell if I know how much good I’d be, but I’ll listen. And I can guarantee you won’t shock me.”

“You’d rather I broke your leg than cried on your shoulder, wouldn’t you?” Dan said, trying and failing to imagine Tyler in the role of therapist.

Tyler grinned without shame. “Hell, yes. And you start sniffling and I’ll probably break it myself to shut you up — but if you can tell me without the waterworks, I can probably take it for half an hour or so.”

“Right now, I just want to eat.” Dan flicked at a dangling tomato. “And finish picking these.” He raised his eyebrows. “Just what do you do with them, anyway?”

“Wash them, freeze them,” Tyler said as they began to walk to the kitchen door, the thud of Tyler’s cane a dull beat against the ground. “I don’t peel them or any of that shit. Just lay them on cookie sheets, freeze them, then bag them up the next day. There’s a big freezer in the shed behind the cabin.”

“It’s a lot of vegetables,” Dan said, The plot was laid out neatly, but there was nothing regimented about the crops; they grew in a wild riot of green leaves that earlier in the season would’ve been dotted with flowers — yellow for the tomatoes, red for the beans, white for the peas; pretty. Low to the ground were potatoes and onions; off to the side was an herb garden made with round and square earthenware pots, three-quarters buried. Dan recognized a few of the herbs, but not all of them. Mint and parsley, though; he knew them. Around the pots, the air was aromatic and busy with bees.

“In the winter it’s not always easy to get into town,” Tyler said. “You’d be surprised how little is left by spring.”

“You should sell some,” Dan said. “Put a little stall at the end of the drive.”

Tyler snorted. “Sit there all day for the sake of a few dollars? I don’t think so.”

Dan let it go. Put like that, he couldn’t really see it himself.

By evening, Dan was tired, but it was a good tiredness, a natural weariness that came with a glow of achievement. The tomatoes were harvested; there’d be more tomorrow, but right now there wasn’t a single one on the vine that was ready to eat. He and Tyler had worked until dusk cleaning and freezing them, Tyler sitting at the kitchen table, his ankle resting on a cushion-softened chair, an ice pack over it, twenty minutes on, twenty off, his hands busy. If his injuries were bothering him, he didn’t mention it.

After supper and a shower, Dan wandered into the main room. Tyler was sitting in the armchair by the empty fireplace, reading, the soft shush of the turning pages a counterpoint to the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece, his foot up on a stool. He’d changed into loose gray sweatpants and a blindingly white T-shirt that made the tanned arms, feathered with dark hair on the forearms, look even darker.

“No TV,” Dan said. Tyler smiled without raising his eyes from the book. “What do you
do
?”

“You can see what I do.” Tyler held up the book, but from where he was standing, Dan couldn’t see the title. “Sometimes I go online.”

“Can I?” Dan asked eagerly. No computer at home had made him appreciate any chance he got to use one. He’d been saving up, but…

“Nope.” Tyler slanted a gaze at him. “It’s password-protected, so don’t even try.”

“It’s in your room,” Dan pointed out. “I said I wouldn’t go in there.”

“So you did.” Another page was turned.

Dan sighed. “We could play cards?” he offered.

“I’d win.”

“Chess?”

“Ditto.”

“Thumb-wrestle?”

Tyler’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Boy, if you’re bored, just tell me.”

“I’m bored,” Dan confessed.

“Get a book.”

“I don’t read much.”

“Then I guess you’d better make friends with boredom.”

Dan sat on the couch and gave a gusty sigh.

“Keep doing that and I’ll make you stop.” Dan opened his mouth to do it again on principle, and Tyler added mildly, “Don’t.”

“Any jobs need doing?” It was a sign of how desperate he felt. “Or I could go for a walk if you don’t need me for anything. Head into town, maybe.”

“Sure. It’s going to rain in an hour or so, though. There’s a storm headed this way.”

Dan made an inarticulate sound of pure frustration but didn’t argue. Tyler was right; he’d smelled it coming as the hot, dry air turned humid, electric, seen the mackerel clouds red against the darkening sky. “I could take the truck?”

“No. Sorry. For an emergency, yeah, I could’ve sweet-talked the sheriff into turning a blind eye if he’d pulled us over yesterday, but just so you can get a drink and maybe flirt a little? I don’t see old Bill being sympathetic to you driving uninsured just for that.” Tyler put a scrap of paper into his book to mark his place and placed it on the small table beside him. “You about ready to move on, boy?”

“Thinking about it,” Dan admitted. “But, well… seems like I don’t really know where I’m going now that I’ve stopped and caught my breath. I lit out running, and since then I’ve just been headed north, and I can’t seem to think past that.”

“Canada. Why there?”

“I just… I don’t know.” The lie tasted as bitter as the memories.

“Go and get us both a beer,” Tyler said after a long moment.

Dan grabbed eagerly at the chance to change the subject. “So I can drink and flirt here, instead of in town?”

Tyler grinned. “Flirting is wasted on me, but a beer sounds good.”

“Should you? With the pills and all that?”

“I’m not taking them.” Tyler wiggled his toes. “Hurts, but not like it did yesterday. I’ll maybe take some at bedtime if I can’t get to sleep.”

The beer, cold and strong, slid into Dan’s belly and froze it up, then warmed it through. He drank and ate some popcorn he’d made in the microwave, greasy and light at the same time, the salt making him drink more and lick his fingers clean, craving the fix.

Tyler watched Dan, the light beside him the only one burning. The room was filled with the dim, chancy light of a summer night and the single pool of lamplight, and Dan sat on the couch, his bed, in the shadows and waited for Tyler to ask him questions.

When the popcorn had been reduced to a rattle of brown, unpopped kernels in the bottom of an oil-slicked bowl and they were three sips into their second beer, he realized Tyler wasn’t going to, no matter how long they sat there.

“You said you’d give me space.”

“Mm.” There was no interrogative lilt to the sound; it was agreement, no more.

“Suppose… suppose I wanted to know something about you.”

“Then I guess you’d have to trade me for it, truth for truth.” Tyler didn’t sound all that interested. “And I can’t promise I’d be all that honest when I answered.”

That much frankness was kind of shocking; Dan knew people who lied like they breathed, easy and often, but they usually pretended to be sincere. “Why would you lie?”

“Because I don’t really want to tell you anything.” Tyler gestured at the room, the cabin, and, Dan supposed, his life in general. “This look to you like I’m happy with sharing or talking?”

“No…” Dan ran a fingertip over the cold, slippery wetness of the bottle’s neck, making the glass hum and sing. “If I was to ask you anything, it’d be why that’s so, because it’s not the way it’s always been, has it?” He took a careful look at what he was about to say next and examined it from all angles before he spat it out. “Two years ago, right? That was when you —”

“Who is Luke?” Tyler’s face was angles and bone, sharp and painful.

“Oh, man…” Dan rubbed his thumb over the opening in the bottle and felt the edge dig into the pad of flesh, rounded and hard. “I knew you’d go there.”

“We don’t have to do this.” Tyler seemed relieved, as if the escape hatch he was offering was one he’d be using first.

“Tell me something else we can do,” Dan said. The beer was doing what beer always did to him — making him talkative, making him horny. Not that either of those qualities were totally missing when he was sober. “Tell me something I’d need to get naked for, and I’ll do it,” he added, wanting it clear what he meant.

“You don’t get your itch scratched every night, boy, and I’m still not interested.”

“Stop calling me that.” Dan slugged back a third of the bottle and lowered it to find Tyler’s cool, gray gaze turned on him. He felt irritated by the rejection, enough to make him realize that he’d been counting on a repeat performance, looking forward to it even. “Did I look like a boy last night? Like a kid? ‘Cause that’s kind of sick, if that’s what gets you —”

“Stop right there.” The warning was tangible; Dan felt hairs rise along his arms in a primitive response to a lurking danger about to pounce, rend, and shred.

“I’m sorry.” As apologies went for what he’d just said in spite and, yeah, disappointment, because he could have gone for that — Tyler’s mouth on him again — it was pitifully inadequate. Tyler must have thought so too, because all the niceness had gone when he replied, an electrical lead stripped down to bare wire, sharp, spiky, deadly.

“And, yeah, you did. You looked like a lost boy, like a little, lost fucking puppy. You want me to call you that instead? You want me to make you whine and yelp for sex and scraps? I could do that, and you’d let me, fucked up the way you are.”

Suffocating heat. He couldn’t breathe. A storm was coming, not just rain, saturating the air with wet and hot and he couldn’t —

“Even like this, I could do it.” The rage in Tyler’s voice crackled like the lightning would soon, but he wasn’t shouting. Wasn’t even leaning forward in his chair. “Stop pushing me,
Dan
. Stop throwing yourself at me when I said I don’t want you. Jesus, have some pride, won’t you —”

Dan got up from the couch, his bottle falling to strike a thick, braided rug, a foam and spill of beer pouring out as the bottle spun around. “Fuck you,” he said as distinctly as he could. “Just —”

Most of what he had was in his pack, too much, really; it was heavy and had been hard to fasten. Everything he owned, apart from the newly acquired toiletries, and Tyler had bought them, anyway. He shoved his feet into his boots, keeping Tyler in view all the time, because he wasn’t going to write the man off as no threat, even bruised and aching, and then walked over to his pack.

When it was on his back, and Tyler hadn’t said or done a single fucking thing to stop him leaving, Dan turned and gave Tyler a single finger by way of farewell, the crass, crude, ungrateful gesture shaming him even as he made it, and left the door open so that Tyler would have to get up to close it.