Chapter 1 #2
He stared at his reflection in the oval mirror, hating what gazed back at him.
Not because he was hideous or had a terrible pillow crease on his cheek.
No, he knew better than to go out drinking after work, and then get so hammered he wasn’t completely clear on how he got home.
At least his bed was empty and his body felt unmolested.
Just the typical aches from hard dancing and the muscle fatigue of dehydration.
“You’re getting too old for this shit,” he told his unimpressed reflection. He was only thirty-four, but some days he felt eighty.
After flipping himself off, Iggy took a long shower, threw on whatever clean clothes he could scrounge off his rack—the studio apartment didn’t have a closet—and shuffled into the kitchenette to slug a sports drink.
He had half the fake-grape liquid in his sloshy stomach when he remembered his phone.
Two texts from work friends, plus the missed call and another voice mail alert.
He stared at the number, which had called him twice yesterday and left two other messages that Iggy had deleted without listening to.
He was not interested in buying life insurance, a new mattress, or communicating with anyone he might have been dumb enough to give his number to last weekend.
The persistence of this caller was both impressive and astonishingly annoying. He deleted the latest message, and he was about to block the number when his phone lit up again.
Same number that only said Baltimore, MD.
Still thirsty and hung over, Iggy flopped down on the bed as he accepted the call. “What do you want, Baltimore, Maryland?”
“Um, Iggy?”
The male voice was both familiar and unknown to him, deeper than he remembered but still airy enough to carry a hint of constant humor.
A voice that used to make his heart flutter simply by whispering his name in the dark.
A voice he hadn’t heard in seventeen years and had told himself he never wanted to hear again.
“Monte?”
“Yeah, hey.”
“Fuck.” Iggy hung up.
Then he gaped at his phone, stunned he’d done such a juvenile thing. Especially when his shocked brain reminded him that his high school boyfriend, his secret love of two years, had been trying to call him for two days now, and Iggy had just hung up on him like a petulant sixteen-year-old.
Why was Monte calling him, though? After half a lifetime?
Before Iggy could feed or ignore his curiosity, his phone lit up again. “Hey, sorry, um, bad connection.” So lame.
“Yeah, so it’s Monte. Um, Malcolm. Montgomery. From high school.”
“No shit. Uh, hi?” Iggy gaped at the blank wall across from his bed, his brain still trying to catch up with reality. He did not have Spontaneous Call From Ex Who Broke My Heart on this year’s bingo card.
“Hey, so yeah, I know you probably never wanted to hear from me again, but I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday when it happened, and now we know what’s wrong, and he wanted me to call you.”
The dizzying run-on sentence took a moment to compute. “What happened yesterday? Who wanted me to call you? I mean, you to call me?” God, he was an idiot around Monte then, and he was still an idiot now.
“Howie. He’s in the hospital. ICU.”
“Uncle Howie?” His heart dropped to the floor. Chills shrieked up and down his spine. A thousand questions hit him all at once, but he managed to force out, “What happened?”
“I found him at his house yesterday morning, real sick, so I drove him to the hospital, and after a bunch of tests and stuff, his doctor says he’s got botulism poisoning.”
Botulism. He’d learned about that in some of the food safety courses he’d taken over the years, when he’d been attempting to get into a good culinary school.
It was incredibly rare in the US nowadays, but it was also serious and potentially deadly.
Iggy stopped himself from asking how Uncle Howie got it—food, duh—and focused his racing thoughts. “How bad is he?”
“He’s pretty sick. Double vision, trouble talking, general weakness. He had some trouble breathing at first, but he hasn’t had to be intubated or put on a machine. They recognized the symptoms and were able to give him the antitoxin fast.”
“Right, to neutralize the botulinum toxin. What about managing his symptoms?”
“Breathing is apparently the biggest deal with this stuff, but he’s breathing good on his own. Mostly, he’s got some paralysis, and he’s really weak, but he’s not in any mortal danger.”
Iggy released a relieved breath, and a bit of his rioting anxiety started to settle. “Okay, good.”
“I gotta say, I’m impressed you know so much about botulism,” Monte said. “I spent an hour this morning on my phone, searching everything I could online.”
“I need to know about it for work.”
“Work?”
Iggy didn’t give in to the temptation to talk about his career of the last thirteen years, because it brushed up too close to the greatest tragedy of his adult life. So far.
He needed Uncle Howie to be okay. The man had been a godsend to Iggy for most of his life, but especially when Uncle Howie took in a fourteen-year-old Iggy as a permanent foster child. Uncle Howie had never officially adopted him, but he’d had full legal custody.
His parents hadn’t wanted him anymore.
Whatever. Ancient past.
“So, wait a second,” Iggy redirected. “You said you found Uncle Howie sick? How?”
“How? He hired me to hang a new ceiling fan in his trailer, and then to replace some broken fixtures in the saloon.”
He was glad he was still sitting down, or Iggy might have fractured his tailbone a second time by falling on his ass. “You’re in Chance?”
“Yeaaaaaah. Wait, fuck, Howie never told you I moved back two years ago?”
“Not that you moved back permanently, no. He told me about Tomás, though. I’m, um, sorry for your family.”
Uncle Howie was the only person left in Chance, Colorado, that Iggy cared about, and they’d kept in frequent contact over the years.
Calls on holidays and birthdays, the occasional chat to check in.
Uncle Howie followed his social media. He also loved and respected Iggy enough to let Iggy leave and forget the heartache of high school, and to never look back.
Uncle Howie told him when Melissa’s second husband died, leaving her a widow with four kids to raise on her own.
He’d even mentioned that Malcolm Montgomery had returned to help his sister for a while.
Nothing in the two years since about him putting down roots!
“Thanks,” Monte said. “Melissa and the kids are doing great now. Some days are harder than others, but that’s to be expected.”
“Then why are you still there?” Jesus, could Iggy sound more like a brat? He cleared his throat hard. “I mean, if she’s good now and all?”
“I grew up around here. I love being Uncle Malcolm. I get steady work in town and on the ranches. You’d really love Snow Creek Ranch now, and what they’re doing up there since Walter Barrett passed and left the place to his grandson. Stuff we’d have liked when we were teens.”
When we were teens. Iggy’s body went cold all over. Chilly grass tickled the naked skin of his back. His wrists ached from being bound. All he could smell was dung and dirt and old beer.
“We’re not talking about our past,” Iggy snarled. “I’m saving your number, and then I’m figuring out how to get to Chance as quickly as possible. Tell Uncle Howie I’m on my way. By tomorrow at the latest.”
“Okay. I’m sorry for bringing up—”
“I’ll text my flight plans. Thank you for calling me about this.”
Iggy stabbed at the red symbol, then stared at his dark phone screen.
Willed himself to wake up again, so this entire phone conversation was just a fucking nightmare.
His uncle wasn’t in the hospital, and the first man to ever steal and then break his heart hadn’t called him.
Wasn’t living near and working for his uncle.
In a town Iggy swore he’d never step foot in again.
And maybe he didn’t have to. The hospital was in Fort Collins, not in Chance. He’s stay in a hotel. Motel. Hell, he’d sleep in his rental car if he had to.
He’d walked out of that town seventeen years ago and sworn he’d never go back. He also owed Uncle Howie everything, and he’d do whatever was necessary to make sure the man made a full, stable recovery.
Even if it meant facing his ex.