Chapter Thirty-Five
After Rico had put Gina to bed at the end of a long Black Friday, he realized this would be the first time he and Franco had shared a bed in the house with Gina present. Funny that this wasn’t the thing preoccupying his mind right now.
All day, the memories had flooded back to him in an oddly detached way. He sat up in bed waiting for Franco, who was in the shower. Staring into the flames leaping in the master bedroom fireplace, his thoughts circled endlessly. Would he tell Franco? If so, what would he say? Truthfully, he wanted to tell him more. Rico wanted no secrets of this magnitude between them.
Which left the what.
He didn’t want things to get weird between them or for Franco to want to seek revenge. The issue had been handled to Rico’s satisfaction, and he had stuffed this shit away in the hole where evil belonged. He’d never let this event become a monumental before and after in his life’s timeline, and he didn’t intend to give it an ounce of power now.
But for Franco, this would be new information, and he would have to keep that in mind. No telling how he’d react, so it would be up to Rico to reassure him that it truly was ancient history.
When Rico had first heard the news of Matthew Shepard’s brutal attack in Wyoming, Rico had been proud of himself for having come out the year before and for standing up for gay rights around the homophobes at his school. But for some of his teammates, Shepard’s murder only emboldened them into thinking open season on gays had begun.
Franco entered the room, and Rico spoke while he was still in the doorway. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Franco nodded without a smile, as if expecting this conversation to come at any time. He shut the door, stripped to his briefs, and crawled in next to him. He cupped Rico’s face, his hand warm and comforting. “Talk to me, Baby,” he said in a gentle tone, stroking Rico’s cheek with his thumb.
Rico didn’t want to reveal anything too deep. As the silence stretched out between them, he simply blurted out, “I got roughed up by three members of the track team the weekend right after Matthew Shepard was attacked and left for dead.”
The openly gay college student had been brutally beaten, abused, and left for dead on a rural Wyoming road. “I guess they took a page from the playbook of those assholes in Laramie,” Rico added. Shepard hadn’t even been declared dead before Rico had been attacked.
Franco scowled as he searched his eyes. Rico glanced away. “What did they do to you?” The command in Franco’s voice couldn’t be ignored.
Rico stared into his eyes and took a deep breath. What happened back then no longer mattered to him, but he didn’t want to upset Franco about it.
“Some jerks with a little too much testosterone, beer, and hate inside them beat me up,” he said in one breath.
The silence in the room grew deafening, or perhaps that was the blood rushing through Rico’s head. Franco clenched his jaw as if barely able to control his rage. Rico had never seen the man lose his cool before and wondered if this would be that time.
But Franco blinked several times before his demeanor eased.
“Doug was the ringleader along with two of his ignorant goons. Like a pack of dogs. Alone, they didn’t scare me, but when they roamed the streets or campus together, watch out.”
“Those goddamned pricks.”
“Hold on. Nothing bad about pricks,” Rico tried to joke. “Or assholes. Why are all the derogatory terms words about the things I love most?” Rico gave a self-deprecating grin, but Franco didn’t appear to be charmed by Rico’s attempt to lighten the subject matter. “I will agree that all of them are shits,” Rico added.
Yeah, that word worked.
Franco took several slow, deep breaths before realization dawned on his face. “That’s why you quit the team sophomore year.”
Rico nodded. “I left it soon after the attack.” Quitter or not, Mama supported his decision that time, given that she’d almost lost him forever. “I missed several weeks of school to heal from the physical wounds. Even if I hadn’t taken that time off, I had no desire to be on the team after that.”
“Weeks? How badly did they beat you?”
Rico couldn’t look Franco in the face when he told him the ugly details, so he scooted down the bed and turned onto his side. Franco wrapped his arms around him and spooned him, holding him closer.
Safe.
Franco stroked Rico’s forearms with his thumbs in slow movements and waited.
Rico drew in a long breath, held it while he gathered his resolve, and let it out slowly. He began to spill some of his guts but didn’t intend to tell him everything. Nobody needed to know all the dirty details.
“It happened the Sunday before Columbus Day. I’d gotten off work at the grocery store and they surrounded me on the walk home. Doug carried a long stick.” More like a sawed-off broom handle. Rico shuddered, swallowing hard before continuing. “They…beat me with it.”
Among other things.
After he finished telling the story, Rico would bury it way down deep inside again. But first he needed to open up to Franco about some of it at least.
With Franco’s touch on his arm, he calmed down again. Rico tried to say in a flippant voice, “Suffice it to say, they worked me over pretty good. No broken bones, but I did have a bruised kidney—”
Franco’s hand stopped moving. “Good God! Were you taken to the hospital?”
Rico shook his head, derailed again from getting his sordid story over with. “Not at first, anyway. The shits ran off, and no one was around that late at night to find me. I don’t know how long I lay there, but I made it back home eventually. Don’t even recall how.” Given how his palms and knees were bloodied and raw, he assumed he’d crawled.
“Aunt Sophia and Michelle were visiting for the long weekend, thank goodness. Mama couldn’t handle the sight of blood or…anything bad happening to me. I think she was in worse shape psychologically than I was by the end of the night.”
He wished Mama hadn’t known. The attack and its aftermath had sent his mother into a downward spiral of severe depression she never really recovered from. She’d been admitted to a psychiatric unit within a month of the attack and many times over her remaining years. Rico still blamed those three shits for killing his mother.
But back to his sordid story. He wanted to get this over with.
“Aunt Sophia took me to the hospital in Breckenridge late Sunday night to get me checked out. The doctors told her what to watch for concerning the kidney, but I guess it was minor as kidney injuries go, because they sent me home.”
Rico remembered the searing pain when they’d swung the stick against his lower back. Nothing minor about that injury from his perspective.
“It was in the early hours of Columbus Day that I heard the hospital staff in the emergency department saying that Matthew hadn’t made it.” Rico paused before saying, “In that moment, I didn’t care if I lived or died.” His voice was a mere whisper, and Franco’s silence made Rico wonder if he’d heard what he said?
Franco held him closer, if that were possible. “Oh, Baby. Neither of you deserved that.” Franco’s chest and arms enveloped him. Franco whispered comforting words to him as he stroked Rico’s forearm.
Franco pulled Rico onto his back and placed a gentle kiss on Rico’s cheek then another on his lips. Franco didn’t appear to be ready to go off the deep end, thankfully.
“Matthew’s senseless death devastated me,” Rico continued. “He’d made so much more of his life, marching for gay rights and championing the LGBTQ community. What would he have accomplished if only…?”
“You were a sophomore in high school. Not many kids that age have made their mark on the world yet.”
Rico drew a breath and nodded before continuing. “I was going to pull through from my attack, despite having done nothing significant in my own life. It didn’t seem fair.”
“Neither of you would have been hurt if life had been fair.”
“True.”
“And if you hadn’t survived back then, where would Gina be now? And me? I don’t want to think about not having you in my life. You’ve definitely made our lives significantly better for having been in them.”
Rico hadn’t thought about it that way in all these years. Hell, he’d tried not to think about it all that much until today.
“By senior year,” Rico went on, hoping to wrap this up, “I decided I wouldn’t live in fear the way they wanted me to. And that I would try to do something to make my life worthwhile—for my family, my community.”
“You’ve more than achieved that goal.”
Rico sighed, knowing he wouldn’t stop giving back as long as his heart kept beating.
“How long did it take you to heal physically?”
Not wanting to dwell on this part of the story any longer than necessary, Rico gave him the short version of his recovery story.
“Poor Aunt Sophia had her hands full that weekend. Mama was always prone to depression after Papa died, and now I’d begun to feel pretty hopeless too. Mama’s shrink suggested Aunt Sophia have her admitted to the psychiatric unit Monday afternoon, which she did. Then my aunt focused on me, flying me to Chicago that night with her and Michelle. I didn’t go back to school until the beginning of November. I almost flunked out that semester, but Aunt Sophia helped me catch up on what I’d missed. Truth be told, she pretty much did most of the work. Grades didn’t matter much to me at the time.”
“I’d have helped if I’d known.”
Glancing away, Rico whispered, “At the time, I was too ashamed to tell anyone else what had happened.” Not that he’d kept up with Franco.
Placing a finger under Rico’s chin, Franco forced him to meet his gaze again. “What did you have to be ashamed of? You survived a vicious attack. They are the ones who ought to feel shame for what they did, not you.”
Still, the remaining high-school years had been a more subtle torture to endure. He’d been thrilled to put these petty-minded classmates behind him once and for all after graduation.
“It was a long time ago. I’m not the same person I was then, and they probably aren’t either.” Rico had taken away the power these shits once had over him and had banished them to the far recesses of his mind.
“For what it’s worth, Rico, I never liked Doug. Now I can see why. If I ever see him again, he’ll be sorry he was ever born.”
“Down, Tiger. I don’t want you going to jail or to give that asshole any more of my life than he already tried to take that night.”
Franco stroked Rico’s face. “He hurt someone I love. That makes him fair game for being on the receiving end of my fury.”
Hearing Franco say he loved him meant far more to him than lingering on his raw anger over something that happened more than seventeen years ago.
“This isn’t something I need or want you to fix, Stud Muffin. I had to do that myself.”
“And did you?”
“Hell, yeah. It took a couple years of therapy and a lot of work on my part, but the flashbacks and nightmares haven’t revisited. Not since high school.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you then, Baby.”
Rico grinned. “Your family was here for me when it mattered.”
His eyes opened wider. “Matteo?”
Rico wondered how he knew but nodded. “And Tony. Even Angie to some extent. I swore them to secrecy, though.”
“Don’t worry. I couldn’t get anything out of Matteo when I asked if he knew anything.”
Of course, he could trust the Giardano family when they made a promise to him.
“What did they do to Doug?”
“Oh, he was taken care of. I was there when Matt and Tony confronted Doug. Talk about satisfying. That piece of shit nearly crapped in his pants.”
“I’d loved to have seen that.”
“I rarely hear of Doug being back in town more than once a year, and even then, he still steers clear of me.”
“You were brave to stay here.”
Rico thought about that a moment. “You enjoy the anonymity of the big city, but I prefer being surrounded by people I know and love. Sure, sometimes that includes assholes like Doug and his goons, but I just deal with the good and the bad as they come along.”
“As I said—brave.” Was he saying he was a coward for leaving? If he’d come out and said it, Rico would have argued with him. He didn’t. “But I’m curious. How’d my brothers find out what happened to you?”
Rico sighed, tired of talking about this now. “I got close to Angie during a cooking class we shared. When I confided in her after she overheard Doug tormenting me my senior year, she told her brothers—well, the ones still at home.”
“Remind me to thank them next time I see them.”
“I’ve been showing my gratitude to them ever since. They made me feel like one of their brothers when they took up for me. And Angie always did treat me like another brother. I’ve tried to be there for her, in part to give back after what your brothers did for me.”
“Thank for you telling me. I want to know what your hurts are, what your joys are, and everything in between.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“That’s a request from your boyfriend, not your Dom.”
Rico stopped breathing momentarily.
Franco realized this was the first time he’d called him that. Was it too soon for Rico? Well, not for Franco. Their relationship had deepened this weekend, far beyond intimacy and friendship, although Franco had been thinking of Rico as his boyfriend for a while now.
“I like the sound of that,” Rico said with a smile.
“It’s how I feel about you, Sweet Cheeks. I’m also your confidant, protector, Dom, and lover. If anyone ever messes with you again, they’ll have to answer to me.”
Rico mimicked a roar. “Go get ’em, Stud Muffin.”
“I’m serious, Rico.”
“Well, I’m still trying to get used to the fact that we’re officially boyfriends now.”
Franco grinned. “If I’d known boyfriend status was so important to you, I’d have called you that weeks ago, after we promised to be exclusive to each other.”
“I’ve felt like you’ve been my boyfriend since that botched attempt at a scene in this house last month. For me, it’s about reaching a level of vulnerability and commitment to each other.”
Franco stared at him. “Today made me see how important you are to me on a much deeper level.” He framed Rico’s face before kissing him tenderly. When he pulled away, he added, “I’ve never experienced that before with any other man.”
Rico took a few seconds to digest those words. “I’ve never been that honest with anyone else before, other than my family and Angie. Couldn’t very well hide my injuries from family at the time. Regardless, no matter when we each realized how much the other meant, I’m glad it’s official now. I’m Franco’s boyfriend.” He smiled, every hint of the nightmare banished again. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to say those words. I fantasized about you just about every night during freshman year. Couldn’t really hide your…charms…in those tight shorts. Those are the memories I hung on to from high school.”
Franco hitched the corner of his mouth. “And I was too blind and closeted to notice. Now that’s a pity.”
Rico waved away those words. “The important thing is that you did get your head out of your ass and focused on mine.”
Franco rolled his eyes, but saw what Rico was doing. He preferred to keep things light, deflect the ugliness of the world. Then he surprised Franco by sobering quickly. “I do think it’s sweet that you want to defend me and be my superhero, though.”
What he’d learned about Rico’s past brought out every protective instinct in his body. That anyone would hurt this man brought him to a level of anger he’d never experienced before.
“As your Dom, I need to be aware of any triggers I need to avoid.”
“I assure you that nothing you could do would in any way trigger me.” He squeezed Franco’s thigh. “All I want is that hunky body of yours fucking deep inside me, making me come, making you come, and giving us both one hell of a ride.”
Franco gave him a half smile and cupped his cheek. “Remember, you always have your safe words. Stop me any time if something does trigger you.” Franco leaned in for a tender kiss.