Chapter 48
In the morning, Sam felt surprisingly good.
Yes, his head still hurt, but not as much as he would have expected, if he’d actually been sober enough to expect anything.
He felt mildly hungover—Ian said it was probably from the “good drugs” and offered Sam more.
Sam turned them down. Ian told him to stay in bed and went off to make breakfast.
Then Nik, hungover for an entirely different reason, came into the room and flopped on the bed next to Sam with a groan.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, I’ll be fine.” Nik waved a lazy hand in the air. “We’re leaving soon, but I wanted to tell you about Miller.”
“All right” had been a bit of a white lie. Miller was still in the hospital, and he’d had emergency surgery for internal bleeding.
“He also has a couple broken ribs. I found this out from his parents.” Nik hugged his middle, staring at the wall. “They don’t seem okay with the possibility that Miller’s gay,” he added.
“Oh, no.”
Nik sighed. “Yeah.”
He and Jurgen left soon after that, and Sam ate breakfast in bed. By afternoon he felt better, almost normal. It turned out fighting did make one horny. When Ian came to lie down next to him, Sam had a few ideas in mind for working through that.
The look on Ian’s face stopped him from suggesting them. For the first time Sam could remember, Ian rolled over and backed into his body, silently asking to be held. Once Sam had his arms around Ian, he started talking about his family.
“My brothers are a lot older than me. They were six and seven when I was born, so when Mom died they were twenty-one and twenty-two. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was fourteen, and she didn’t even live a year after that.”
Sam squeezed Ian tighter to his chest, holding him with everything he had. His penis wanted in on the act, but Sam made it behave. Sort of.
“I didn’t even realize my dad was an asshole until after she died,” Ian was saying. “I mean, before Mom was diagnosed, I was more into my friends than my family. Then she got sick, and it was all about her, for me.”
Sam had been debating how to ask this, but he decided to be blunt. “Did he love your mother?”
Ian nodded immediately, tickling Sam’s nose with his hair. “Beth, Jurgen’s mom—she’s Dad’s youngest sister—she told me he fell in love with Mom the minute they met and never stopped loving her. Always looked that way to me.”
“I guess even assholes love,” Sam said philosophically.
Ian snorted. “Yeah, there’s plenty of evidence in the world to support that. My brothers seem to love their wives.”
“Your brothers are assholes, too?”
“Not really, I guess. They’re just too much like my dad.”
Sam kissed the back of Ian’s neck for encouragement. And then a couple more times.
“When I was little kid, I loved my mom, you know? But I thought my dad was a hero. He wanted us, me and my brothers, to think that. It was all about how he was a firefighter and he saved people and he had this perfect wife and this perfect life, and we were going to be clones of him. But then his wife died and his youngest son was gay and didn’t really want to be a firefighter. ”
Sam tightened his arm around Ian again. “He knows you’re gay?”
“I told him when I was about twenty-six, I guess. I’d known since I was nineteen, or at least I knew I was into guys. Dad was so fucking disappointed. Stupid thing is, I knew he would be. I went in there expecting it, but it still killed me. You know where I told him?”
Sam shook his head, even though he was pretty sure that was a rhetorical question. He relaxed again into the heat of Ian’s body and laid his palm over Ian’s heart. It was very close to his nipple.
“In his fucking office. He’d been the fire chief for about a year, and I got sick of trying to catch him someplace else. Only other place to catch him was drinking with his buddies. I don’t know if the dude ever slept at home after he became chief. Maybe they had a cot for him at the bar.”
“So he was a drinker, too?” Sam kissed the back of Ian’s neck some more, then gave it a little nibble.
“That started a while after Mom died. It didn’t get bad until I went off to college and he was in that house alone. I’m sure he’s an alcoholic now, but I don’t think it made any difference in my life when I was still at home.”
“He didn’t, like, disown you when he found out you were gay?”
Ian shrugged one shoulder. “No. I’d done what he wanted, I became a firefighter; he just asked me not to be out. And he asked me to be sure.”
“Like . . .?”
“Like, keep dating women. I thought it was more about wanting me to look straight for his buddies and the department. Wasn’t that big a department. There were a couple other gay guys I knew of, but nobody was really out. I was the only one who kept it a total secret.”
“So not even the other gay guys . . .?”
Ian shook his head before Sam finished the question.
“And you kept dating women,” Sam said, pressing harder on Ian’s heart.
Ian nodded. “Or at least I made it look like it.”
Sam squeezed him even tighter, until Ian grunted. “Careful, kiddo,” he said softly. “Those are my internal organs in there.”
Sam laughed and brushed his lips back and forth across Ian’s skin, burying his nose in his hair. Mmm, he loved that smell. Sam’s hips snugged themselves up to Ian’s butt without really asking permission, but he didn’t object.
“The thing is, even though I thought he was an asshole, and his opinions weren’t worth stressing out over .
. . somehow it sunk in. Not the part where no one would ever love me—he’s obsessed with me having someone to take care of me, whatever that means—but the part where I’d never have a relationship. ”
Sam lifted himself up so he could press his cheek on Ian’s ear, arms and leg wrapped around him.
Trying to smother him with reassurance without actually cutting off any major arteries or airways.
“You are in a relationship, and someone loves you.” And was getting hard for him. Was that inappropriate?
Ian dislodged him, rolling onto his back and looking up at him.
Sam kept his body loosely caging Ian’s, trying not to make his dick’s demands too obvious.
“That’s what my problem was Thursday,” he said so quietly his voice grated.
“I got out of there, you know? I started seeing a therapist after the accident as part of my rehab, but it turned into dealing with all of this stuff. I got out of that job and stopped doing what he wanted me to, and I started coming out. I left the state and I even got my, you know—” Ian’s eyes flicked away a second “—emotional stuff sort of worked out, and then he called and it got fucked up all over in my head. I was so sure, Sam.” He grabbed the back of Sam’s neck, pulling him slightly closer, so all Sam could focus on were Ian’s eyes.
“And then for a while after he called, I didn’t know if this was real or I was fooling myself.
Like, I lost faith or something. Am I making any sense? ”
Sam nodded earnestly. Mostly he was making sense enough to follow, but Sam had one question. “You didn’t know if we were real? Us?”
Ian swallowed and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you know now?” Sam held his breath. He thought he knew the answer, but there was still that sliver of doubt.
“Yeah. We’re real.” Ian pressed harder on the back of Sam’s neck, stretching up to kiss him. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”